Mortal syntax

MORTAL SYNTAX

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, edited by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1,860 pages. $150.

Jim Lewis

The coeditors of this enormous, deluxe, and inestimable volume have spent, between them, some sixteen years putting it together and traveled sixteen thousand miles along the way. Professor Huddleston began his career in Scotland and now lives and teaches in Queensland, Australia. Professor Pullum started at University College London and wound up at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Itinerant and intrepid fellows, for linguists, anyway, and I suspect the travel has been hard on them, but more of that in a moment.

First, the book in its intents. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is not a guide, like Fowler's Modern English Usage or the beloved-by-editors, hated-by-writers-especially-me Chicago Manual of Style. You'll find no commandments on split infinitives nor advice on how to avoid confusing extent and extant. A sentence like "Each student opened their book" bothers Huddleston and Pullum not at all. Pullum and Huddleston, the tireless and worldly two: They do not care. Their book is purely descriptive and dry as dust, an album of English as it happens to be used, broken down into chapters of linguistic morphology: "Clause Type and Illocutionary Force," "Relative Constructions and Unbounded Dependencies," "Deixis and Anaphora"-that sort of thing. Hardly an ample entertainment for a cold winter's night, unless sheer taxonomy is your pleasure.

And yet there's a certain air of tragedy about The Cambridge Grammar, a combination of laconic noir, adventure, and defeat. It is a book of ruin, a history of hidden motives and heartless actions, a ruthless and demonic book, and the reader opens it at his or her own risk.

It begins innocently enough, with properly affectionate acknowledgments and a chapter titled, abruptly but not rudely, "Preliminaries." There follows an "Overview," and then right away we are presented with "The Verb." The authors, it seems, have learned something from the movies: There's a credit sequence, and then we launch immediately into the action.

But from the beginning there seems to be a darkness over their story. Many of the authors' earliest examples are fittingly uninflected: Under "Truth Conditions and Entailment," for instance, we find, "The UK is a monarchy"; under "Conventional Implicature," "She is flying up there and taking the train back." We hear that "Jill seems quite friendly' and "Liz bought a watch." Oh, so restrained; but there are intimations of a faltering beneath it all. Thus, under "Modifiers, Complements, and the Category of the Nominal" we-find a pair of fragmentary forebodings: "his fear of the dark" and "quite the worst solution"; under "Syncretism" we're given remarks like "She was ill."

And then the suspense redoubles. The proximate cause is "Participle as Verb-Form vs. Participial Adjective," and the reader too blithe to notice the conflict inherent in that vs. may be unprepared for the tension to come: "It was broken deliberately, out of spite"; "It is important [to be always on your guard]"; "He was [very frightened]/ [too frightened to move]." It is all one can do to keep turning the pages.

But turn you must, compelled and trembling; turn, and turn some more. There are some 1,750 pages left to go in this book, time enough for an investigation into the dark hollows of the human psyche so grueling, so exhausting, so twisted and drawn out, that the reader may well finish The Cambridge Grammar vowing to swear off the English language altogether.

There are depths of romantic longing that would make Keats blush. Thus, under the heading "The Gerund-Participle" we're told "I regret destroying the files." Well and good. We all appreciate a little contrition. But Huddleston and Pullum aren't satisfied. Under "Subject-Auxiliary Inversion" we hear such tearful confessions as "What a fool I have been!" and "How hard she tried!" It was around here that I started thinking of the authors as, collectively, Puddlesome.

Scattered within the puddles we find recurring characters, human motifs presented as natural history. We meet a woman named Kim, for example, who has married a man named Pat-though it may be that Kim is a man and Pat a woman or, Puddlesome being a daring pair, that both are men or both are women. In any event, Kim seems to be a mixed bag, at first; she (let us call her she) has her skills, having "scored [(the) most; runs]"-and her failings, among them the fact that she "isn't [much of an actor]." In time we learn that Kim "is [an intellectual]," surprisingly enough, given that run-scoring business; but on the next page we're told that "There were two pieces left and Kim, as always, chose [the larger]," which sounds more like the sort of thing the intellectuals I know would do.

Bookish she may be, our Kim, but not some passive bluestocking, and Puddlesome have a few surprises to spring. On page 443 ("Semantic Roles of Complements Depend on the Head Noun") we are told, quite suddenly and with discomfiting effect, that "Kim shot Pat"-Why? It is perhaps the deepest puzzle put forth in this deeply puzzling book, and we shall have to wait another thousand or so pages for its solution, suffering, in the meantime, all the moral paradoxes of modern life: "Sam is good. Pat is better than Sam. Kim is the best of the three." Unless this is a kind of savage irony, not out of keeping with the authors' efforts thus far, such that we should take "best" to mean "best shot."

For side stories there's an apparently unfortunate Mary, whose heartbreak is suggested by the linked pair of ominous sentences, "I love you" and "Tell Mary I want to see her." There are spoiled children, a king who somehow hurts himself, a nude photo of the mayor, racketeering contractors, and a rather dull fellow unambiguously named Ed. Greed, grandeur, romance, family drama, political intrigue: Nothing escapes the wicked pens of Professors Huddleston and Pullum.

The reader, too, is dragooned into the story and then assaulted by sentences of all sorts, in an astounding shattering of the linguistic fourth wall. Berated, cajoled, browbeaten, guilt-tripped, and arbitrarily bullied: "Look at me"; "Don't look at me"; "Not all people have had the opportunities you have had"; "That is no way to behave." And the plaintive "How come you like her so much?", so evocative of Mary's unhappy betrayal, as outlined above.

Yet always The Cambridge Grammarturns its back on the possibility of empathy and returns to brute violence, to suspicion and suffering, to an inescapable malevolence. "He was dripping blood. " "Let the prisoners be brought in." "She kept thinking what a fool she'd been to trust them." "The child's parents were constantly quarreling." "No one [treats me like that and gets away with it]." "It had rained all week and we were short of food." "She loved her husband but betrayed him. He was [rich but very mean]." And-shades of a psychotic Doctor Seuss-"Kim beat Max and Pat beat Bob."

It all culminates in one of the most riveting stanzas in all of modern literature, the solution at last to the mystery broached when Kim first shot her husband. The stated topic is "Equivalence at Different Levels," but then, Whistler titled the portrait of his mother Arrangement in Grey and Black. Imagine:

Young Kim, no more than a child, stumbles upon some primal scene, a fearsome tableau, which plagues her throughout her lifetime, inducing relentless involuntary memories and finally psychosis, the cause of which is captured in a terrifying quatrain of inverted-pyramid iteration:

They shot her father and they shot her mother.

They shot her father and shot her mother.

They shot her father and her mother.

They shot her father and mother.

Well. No wonder, and poor Kim. The question remains, whence Huddleston and Pullum's relentless paranoia, their cynicism and despair? Maybe it's the strain of exile telling on our two guides; Santa Cruz, one imagines, might have such an effect on anyone, especially a Brit: all that sunshine, coupled with good old-fashioned American violence, the depredations of the twenty-first century played out with the Pacific in the backyard, and no Western frontier to turn to for freedom. And while Queensland registers less sinisterly, one must remember that Australia was founded as a penal colony.

Or perhaps it's not what they've found that's scarred them so, but what they brought with them: a certain cynicism that caused them to be banished from Great Britain in the first place. We may never know, furtive and mysterious as they are, Huddleston and Pullum, hiding behind their fellowships and awards, their distinguished teaching positions, and the formidable redoubt of the Cambridge University Press. We have only the book itself to go on, its examples and ideas.

Death stalks this ostensibly artless Grammar; death and destruction, betrayal, failure, confusion, fear. Huddleston and Pullum have written one of the most pitiless and pessimistic books I've ever had occasion to read, fraught, on almost every page, with examples of terror and criminality, all wrapped up in a package of willful avant-garde obscurity and echt-modernist misdirection. It is, I would argue, a triumph of desolation and hopelessness that makes Celine's misanthropy look like the mewlings of a piker. Not that Puddlesome care what I think. For, buried on page 838, there lies a supreme example of the authors' blunt and uncompromising aesthetic belligerence. The heading is "Overt and Covert Conditionals," and the example given-God strike me dead if I'm making this up-is, "I would read your review, Lf I gave damn about your opinion."*

[Author Affiliation]

Jim Lewis is the author of novels Sister (Graywolf, 1993) and Why the Tree Loves the Ax (Crown, 1998). His new novel The King Is Dead will be published by Knopf in 2003.