Getting away with it - the 'Author's Alibi'

E’en Homer nods, as someone said*; or at least he may seem to nod. But an author can often claim an excuse for slips of the quill. When P.G.Wodehouse writes of a certain Harold, a page-boy, the words he uses are “He’s practically circular, and every time I’ve seen him he’s been leaning up against something half asleep”.

* quoting the Latin of the Roman poet Horace; “Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus’. ‘I feel uncomfortable whenever good old Homer nods off’.

We all know, do we not, and are glad to have the opportunity to point out, are we not, that circular means round in two dimensions, but three-dimensional roundness is correctly described as spherical.

“You and I are certainly aware of that”, P. G .W. might reply, “but you will notice that I have put these words in the mouth of Bertie Wooster, whose grasp of linguistic correctness is far from perfect.”

“Of course, of course, how silly of us”, we mutter, and wish we had kept our mouths shut. You see, P.G.W. is exercising the Author’s Alibi.

That’s why Agatha Christie can get away with writing “Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your action”. Not only is the punctuation a bit ambiguous and dodgy (the first of the four commas might be better as a colon, and the last one shouldn’t be there at all) but the singular verb ‘is’ cannot be right. But it’s not Christie's mistake: it’s Poirot speaking, and he, poor chap, is a Belgian and it is unfair to expect him to speak impeccable English. Mind you, that hardly explains the punctuation, but perhaps Christie can blame that on a dozy typesetter.

Emily Bronte’s character Isabella Heathcliff, speaking of her awful husband, remarks “His forehead, that once I thought so manly, and that now I think so diabolical, was shaded with a heavy cloud . . .” Here we seem to have a pair of wicked ‘thats’ that should have been ‘whiches’. But Isabella was under great stress on this occasion, and it would have been very bad manners for Nell Dean (only a housekeeper, even though her speech was nearly always very posh and proper) to correct her. Emily B. can plead that she is merely representing Isabella as somewhat distraught.

And what of this passage from Max Beerbohm ? “I might have said, ‘Going to the Play,’ which was a familiar phrase in the Victorian and Edvardian <sic> eras. . . Going to what play ? There was always more than one. . .” Now the punctuation might be improved (note the comma within the phrase ‘Going to the Play,’ when it would be more logical after it): but a severer quibble concerns the statement ‘There was always more than one’. Surely ‘more than one’ implies two or more, and so needs the plural verb ‘were’ before it.

Max’s defence might easily be that his words were uttered in an informal BBC broadcast in 1945. His style is certainly literary, but relaxed literary. Even the most correct of pedants should know when it’s acceptable, even desirable, to slip into casual mode. But if pushed he might have agreed that however spontaneous he wanted his little radio chat to sound, the text was in fact very carefully crafted: and that ‘There were always . . .’ doesn’t really sound any more formal than ‘There was always . . .”

Getting away with it - the 'Author’s Alibi'