Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
The Queen’s
English and a Strong WiFi Signal
When I was young I was curious about the cover of my big
brother’s high school English book. On it was a color photograph of a young
woman whom I knew to be the Queen of England (you mustn’t say “England” now;
you must say “Britain”). She was very small in the picture and was visually overwhelmed
by the throne and by a huge assemblage of red tapestries that took up most of
the picture.
Eisenhower was our president, the United States was the bestest
nation in the world, God was a Methodist, and children were taught that the
English were the baddies (you may still use “English” and “baddies” in the same
sentence) from whose oppressive rule we (although I had nothing to do with it) had
rightfully freed ourselves.
And yet here was an American high school literature book with
a picture of the Queen on its cover and entitled Adventures in English
Literature. What was all that about?
Although I was a wide reader from the third grade I was
never a disciplined one and read any book that appealed to me: Robin Hood,
Christopher Columbus, Assignment in Space with Rip Foster, all the
Robert A. Heinlein boys’ books, Zane Grey, King Arthur, all the Tarzan yarns, hot
rod stories, hunting and camping tales, Walden, Kipling, Hemingway, J.
Frank Dobie, Nordhoff and Hall’s sea stories, pirate stories, The Red Badge
of Courage, and other books once commonly read by American boys.
I would not have touched poetry with a ten-syllable line
of blank verse. The twelve-year-old-me would have disapproved of the
cough-cough-old me and my fondness for Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Yevtushenko, but, hey, old men are boring.
And I still like the adventure yarns of my youth.
I did not care about national origins, identity politics,
gender-obsession, or neo-post-whatever-colonialism, and I still cringe at any
obsession with Deeper Meaning, even when it’s there. I liked a good story, and
still do.
Yet here was (and is; I have a copy) a book of poems,
essays, short stories, biographies, hymns, excerpts from the King James Bible,
excerpts from novels, ballads, sermons, speeches, letters, and plays (Macbeth,
Pygmalion, Riders to the Sea, and The Old Lady Shows her Medals).
All of this book’s contents are in some way English.
Although there are selections from Scotland, Africa, Wales, Ireland, and India,
everything centers on England. People of English ancestry were never a majority
in what would come to be the United States, but English organically became the
Ur-culture for the first two centuries of our history. Because of the Empire (shall
we pause for an Orwellian two minutes’ hate?) English literature was an
academic and popular culture core in the U.S.A., Canada, India, Kenya,
Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, and wherever else the sun famously never
set.
All civilizations fail, but the collapse of England /
Britain within a generation was stunning. With the failure of power came the
failure of influence, and though the Beatles and James Bond briefly made England
cool, that’s mostly over. The Anglo-centric world is in decline everywhere. “With inky
blots and rotten parchment bonds / That England that was wont to conquer
others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself” (Richard II). Adventures
in English Literature was published in America for some three decades, and
now it is merely a historical curiosity.
For all its flaws, some real but most merely perceived,
English literature was a unifier. If a man from Zimbabwe was seated next to a
woman from New Zealand and topics of conversation lapsed they could always talk
about whether modern readings of Henry II’s Band of Brothers speech are literal
or ironic. Now they probably would discuss only whether the plane had WiFi
access.
The Soviets meant for the Russian language to be successor
world language, which didn’t work, and now Xi and his un-merry men are re-colonizing
Africa and planning for Mandarin to be the world language.
Domestically, language and literature have become politicized,
weaponized, and even demonized, and one dare not write even a brief note on the
InterGossip (“Stop by the store for a gallon of milk on your way home.”)
without vetting it carefully for fear that even a grocery list will someday subject
its author to prosecution for some offense against sensitivity, inclusiveness,
and the rights of Holsteins to sustainable grass.
We might miss that picture of the Queen.
-30-
