A Mouthful of Air

"Burgess, to me, is a remarkable polymath. One of the problems is that he wrote so much that there’s almost too much to grapple with. His amazing capacity for being apparently a master of so many disciplines led some people to say he was “a jack of all trades, a master of none”. I certainly think his shares have declined since his death. I suppose one of the things which links together the books I’ve talked about – with the exception of the Pinker and maybe the Ostler – is that they are written by people outside academia. But these writers actually have the finest minds you could possibly imagine. A Mouthful of Air is a very weird and wonderful book about language in general, not just about English. About half the book is specifically about English, but the first half is called “Language and languages” and there’s stuff in it about Latin, Russian and Japanese – and music as well. It’s very wide-ranging and, as you’d expect from Burgess, it’s a quirky book, dense with factual insights and wry opinions. There’s a bit that sticks in my mind – which goes back to what we were talking about earlier – where he says the ability to speak three or four foreign languages with even moderate proficiency is regarded in Britain and America as either the property of head waiters and hotel concierges or as the mark of genius. But his point is that we all ought to be able to do this. He was a tremendous linguist who had a good command of something like 10 languages. That seems to have sharpened his appreciation of English and given him a quite sophisticated sense of how English relates to other languages. There is a pernicious tendency to see English in isolation from other languages – in a sort of majestic isolation. But English is a tremendous magpie language which has assimilated huge numbers of things from elsewhere, and actually our awareness of that gives us a much richer awareness of the past. One of the things people tend to complain about with Anthony Burgess is that when he’s in more of a scholarly mode, the details are a bit wonky. But you can’t help but be impressed by his erudition, voraciousness and the way he breathes life into linguistics. There’s a sense of someone who finds language rich, dense, prickly, rewarding and succulent, and that’s what I look for in writing about language. I think that’s completely bonkers. But I do think that a lot of the attitudes we have to punctuation are narrow-minded and highbrow. I have written quite a bit about attitudes to apostrophes. I choose to use apostrophes in a conventional way. But it seems to me today that apostrophes are so frequently misused that we are reaching the stage where it might almost be better not to use them at all, because their misuse is far more confusing than their absence. You can be accused of surrendering, but I’m not convinced the apostrophe is worth fighting for. I think there are other things that are worth fighting for, but you can’t fight for all things. There are punctuation vigilantes who go around amending film posters and so on, which is a mixture of cute and alarming. Burgess doesn’t just say what I’m saying – that apostrophes are a kind of precarious orthographic squiggle. He pretty much says that all punctuation is ridiculous. That’s the sort of thing Burgess is always saying. He makes very bold statements, yet he has the intellectual capacity and the knowledge to if not convince you, then certainly make a very appealing case. It’s an informed book with a lot of scholarship in it but he’s constantly tying his scholarly writing to a personal appreciation of language and its resources. Of course, as a prolific novelist his sense of the resources of language had to be very sharp. So you could almost say this book is helpful as a guide to his entire philosophy of creativity."