Which isn’t to say that Merle did not have some peculiar ideas. Here was a woman who turned first to the last page of a book and read that to see whether she felt like tackling the whole thing. It was abnormal. When she suggested that the four of us go to the symphony to celebrate Mevrouw Bonsma’s fifty-eighth, I followed Spilkin’s lead and made short shrift of the idea. There was no point in throwing the rules and regulations overboard.
So the two of them went on their own.
*
Proofreading, properly done, is an art. It demands great reserves of skill, experience and application. It is also a responsibility; and while not all responsibilities are onerous, never mind what the newspapers say, this one deserves the adjective. Only when an eye has scrutinized every word in a text may it truly be said to have been read. And the fact is that more often than not, the only eye that looks at every word and at the spaces in between them, at the folios, the running heads, every last entry in an index, every full stop and comma, every hyphen and parenthesis — the only eye that does all these things belongs neither to the author, nor the editor, nor even the most assiduous reader, but to the proofreader. The proofreader is a trailblazer and a minesweeper. The readers who follow him may take any path with confidence, may go down any passage and cross any border, and never lose their bearings.
Getting things right is not just a matter of form (although that is important enough in itself), but of necessity. Dotting one i might be regarded as a mere punctilio, and failing to do so dismissed as a trifle. But all the dots left off all the i’s accumulate, they build up, they pack together like a cloud over a field of stubbly iotas. Soon there is a haze of them in every hollow, and the finer distinctions begin to evade us. In the end, the veil of uncertainty grows so thick that everything is obscured. As for the crosses left off the t’s, who do you suppose shall bear them?
It is one of the ironies of the art that the better it is practised, the fewer traces of it remain. The world remembers a handful of proofreading blunders — the Breeches Bible, the Printers’ Bible, the Unrighteous Bible of 1652 (see Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, at Bible) and a few ghost words in the dictionaries — gravy, abacot, Dord. But the world knows nothing of the successes.
Standards of proofreading have been declining steadily since the nineteen-sixties, when the permissive attitude to life first gained ground, and so have standards of morality, conduct in public life, personal hygiene and medical care, the standard of living, and so on. All these are symptoms of a more general malaise. Decline with a capital D. Perhaps it goes back to the War. While I myself was working in the field, I did not have time to devote to proselytizing; I had my own garden to tend. Once retired, I began to pursue that most genteel form of activism, the letter to the editor. Nevertheless, I had always felt that the solution to the problem of declining standards lay with the individual, in the revivification of outmoded notions of personal responsibility, and so I turned from tending my garden to ‘cleaning up my own backyard’, as the expression goes (in point of fact, I don’t have a backyard at all). I am no Dictionary-thumper and I try to be tactful, but my patience was often tested. Take the Haifa débâcle.
The speciality of the Haifa Hebrew Restaurant was not, as one might have expected, traditional delicacies such as smoked salmon or gefilte fish (chopped fish mixed with crumbs, eggs and seasonings), which I had come across before on hotel menus, but things called schwarmas, composed primarily of grilled lamb. A special device had been installed for their manufacture. The lamb, piled up into a tower on an electric spit, was suffered to gyrate crazily before red-hot elements, while a singed onion and a deflating tomato, skewered at the top of the tower, dribbled their juices down its length. (These juices, dispelled in aromatic vapour, often made mouths water in the Café Europa up above.) I had peered into the smoky interior of the restaurant several times in passing and mistaken the translucent orb at the top for a sheep’s eye: the discovery that it was something more palatable was the immediate reward of my first venture across the threshold. A sign picked out in plastic lettering on an illuminated glass panel of Mediterranean blue informed the paying public that the lamb now rotating would be served in a so-called pita, with tehini, which sounded merely laughable, or humus, which sounded truly nauseating. It was that infelicitous ‘humus’, glimpsed from the doorway a few days earlier, which had brought me here in defiance of the threat of bomb blasts that hung in those days over fast-food establishments. I have no special knowledge of the Hebrew tongue, but I had done my homework in the greatest school of all, the Oxford English Dictionary, and came equipped for battle. Although this was a professional visit, I did not want to appear ill-mannered, and so I ordered one of the schwarmas, and while the chef was carving my portion with a machete, introduced myself to the manager, a certain Shlomo.
‘Forgive me if I speak frankly,’ I said after the pleasantries, ‘but you do not want to put “humus” on the mutton.’
‘Hey? What you?’ and so forth.
‘“Humus” is in the ground. Decomposing vegetable matter in the soil. Leaves, peelings, biodegradable stuff. What you want is “hummus”. Two m’s.’
‘Two humus fifty cent extra,’ said Shlomo, whose intellectual apparatus really did seem to be in slow motion, going to talk with his lady friend at the other end of the counter.
I pursued him with the dictionary. The seventh edition of the Concise was the first to record ‘hummus’ and I had brought it along purposely to show him the entry. ‘Look — two m’s. Em-em.’
‘English not so good,’ he said with a sympathetic grin, which made me suspect that he was referring to mine! Then I noticed the derivation: from the Turkish humus. An awkward moment. A version with one m could only cloud the issue. I put the dictionary away and resorted to some schoolboy dactylology and the mouthing of duo and tuo and twain, hoping to hit on something that would approximate the Hebrew. ‘Bi, bi,’ I said.
‘Bye-bye,’ chirruped the lady friend and pointed at my head with her Craven A. Some days before, I had scratched my salient excrescence — cranial, high noon — on an overhanging branch at Pullinger Kop, and it was still inflamed. I retired self-consciously to a dimmer corner of the counter.
To my surprise, the schwarma was quite tasty, and the double helping of hummus did no harm — in fact, I have preferred it that way ever since. Instead of the customary plate, there was an ingenious little aluminium stand like a letter-rack for propping the schwarma in, and as the pita itself was rather like an envelope of unleavened bread with enclosures of lettuce and lamb, it suited very well. I resolved there and then to become more cosmopolitan in my eating habits, even as I set about the big ‘clean-up’.
Alas, all my attempts to alert the shopkeepers of Hillbrow to the errors of their ways met with the same inarticulate incomprehension I had encountered at the Haifa. After half an hour of fruitless argumentation, the manager of the Restless Supermarket — he had introduced himself as Stan, although the badge on his lapel clearly said Stelios — showed me into his little office, a mezzanine cubicle with pegboard walls and gunmetal furniture. In the top drawer of the desk I saw lying a stapler, a bottle of Liquid Paper (God help us), and a revolver. When I had seen the stationery, he pushed the drawer shut with his thigh and offered me a drink, which I accepted out of politeness. He said: