Letter to Rebecca #24-11

Effective responses, forgotten authors, what words mean, and persiflage

May 22, 2024

In which Terry talks about a good response to criticism, an important difference between the American meaning of a word and the British one, and an author who was even more prolific than he is.

This is the latest letter in my regular, informal correspondence with Substacker and fellow Brit Rebecca Holden, in which we take turns every other Wednesday to delve into the things that British people talk about the most. So that you can explore these unashamed clichés for yourself we’re inviting you to read our letters over our shoulders.

Dear Rebecca

Thank you for your recent letter. I'm glad you found my apostophised sentence useful, which I reproduce here from your rendering of my original formulation (please try to keep up at the back).

By the way, that way of deflecting criticism is something I learnt from a conference speaker some years ago. She announced, in her talk, that she had invented a new way of doing X . I emailed her privately to say that the government had done that 25 years ago. I knew that because I was involved in its implementation. She also announced that she'd invented Y, which was a surprise to me because I'd done that in 1978, at least a decade before she'd been born.

I enlightened her on these matters partly because I find it irritating the way some people seem to think we were all just bumbling along groping in the dark before they came to save the day. But I also did it for altruistic reasons, to save her making a fool of herself by making such claims. She replied to say she was glad I found her talk useful. Eh? When did I say that?

Still, full marks for chutzpah1. It reminded me of Arthur C. Clarke's standard reply when anyone wrote to him with some crackpot idea about contacting aliens and so on: "There may be something in what you say." A brilliant response, because it makes the person feel good while effectively discouraging any further correspondence.

I know you think that scathing book reviews are mean, but assuming they're honest, mean to whom? Do you not think that the reviewer owes more to the would-be reader than the author?

Lucian Freud's response seemed unnecessarily rude to me, without the saving grace of wit, but then I don't know the wider context. Perhaps he receives approaches like that all the time. At least scathing book reviews tend to be humorous - as was the letter sent by a firm of solicitors to the solicitors company I was working for at the time:

Dear Sir, Is your firm still in existence as there appears to be a one-way traffic of correspondence on this case? I remain, sir, your humble and obedient servant

etc

(Incidentally, we visited the Freud Museum in London, today. Pics and information to be included in a future Start the Week. Lucian Freud was Sigmund’s nephew. The photo at the top of this letter is a teaser: it shows Sigmund Freud’s study, and the chairs used by Virginia and Leonard Woolf when they visited Freud to discuss the publication of his next book through Hogarth Press. )

On the subject of solicitors, when I first went to Los Angeles, every shop door had a notice reading No Soliciting, which in the UK means no approaching people to offer them sex. I didn't think it was that kind of area. But a shopkeeper told me that in the USA it means No Salespeople. It’s quite interesting how American English and British English are so different, as Oscar Wilde noted and which I wrote about in an article about language.

Regarding potholes, you should start the Pothole Prevention Society, or PPS. I myself have recently started two campaign groups, both to do with music. You may be aware that in a music score, some notes are above or below the ledger lines:

Well, we at the Society Against Ledger lines (SALL) believe that there is no need for any piece of music to use notes that cannot be fitted into the standard stave of 5 lines and 4 spaces.

My other concern is about chord inversion. For example, the chord of C comprises the notes C, E, and G. But some composers invert the chord, for example G, E and C. I think that for relative beginners like myself, this makes life unduly complicated. Therefore I have started a campaign called Save Our Chords, or SOCs. Our aim is to get rid of chord inversions, and to use chords as they were originally meant to be used. I look forward to receiving your support in the near future.

I am currently reading The Book of Forgotten Authors, which I encountered in the British Library bookshop last year, and which I have now borrowed from my local library.

Some of the entries are surprising, to me at any rate. For example, Leslie Charteris. He wrote The Saint novels, which I read avidly in my early teens. The author comments that Roger Moore, who played the Saint on TV, moved so stiffly he looked as if he had an ironing board stuck up his jacket.

Another entry is Edgar Wallace, who apparently churned out 18 novels a year- and I thought I was prolific. A joke at the time was that if someone phoned Edgar Wallace and was told he couldn’t come to the phone because he was writing a book, the caller would reply "Don't worry, I'll wait"! He quaffed between thirty and forty cups of tea a day, which I think puts the likes of us into the shade.

Thank you for your crossword clue, which I solved to your satisfaction privately. Now try this for size. It was in The Times a few weeks ago:

Bow Road tube station (7)

Well, that’s it from me for now, Rebecca. I look forward to reading your chortlefest of a reply next week.

All the best

😎

To anyone reading this missive, you can see the whole archive here. Rebecca should reply next Wednesday, so make sure you don’t miss that by subscribing to hers.

Thanks for reading!

Defined by Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish as that quality enshrined in a person who murders his parents and then asks the court for mercy on the grounds that he’s an orphan.