Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

Vicissitudes

Thanks to Natsuko I learned some new words yesterday, including:

• haggler (huckster, cadger)
• wold (formerly-wooded hilly tracts in certain regions of England)
• lath (a thin flat strip of wood)
• black-pot (a beer mug, a toper; though I suspect, in this context, a kind of food, perhaps leftovers; no, as Language Hat explains in his comment, it’s black pudding i.e. congealed pig’s blood in a length of intestine)
• chitterling (fried smaller intestines of a pig)
• vamp (to make one’s way on foot; to tramp or trudge).

Natusko comes to my place for breakfast most Saturday mornings, then borrows the car for the rest of the day. It was her idea that we should help each other with our reading—hers in English, mine in Japanese—after I asked her last week to explain a sentence construction in an Akutagawa story called Hana (Nose). I had known Akutagawa only as the author of the stories upon which Kurosawa’s film Rashomon was based. But Natsuko was, of course, familiar with Akutagawa’s story of a priest with an excessively long nose, who is delighted to have it shortened only to be then disappointed by the negative response to his good fortune.

We’d agreed to start with English, which is how, once I’d cleared away the breakfast dishes, I came to be sitting at the living room table with my own copy of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles as Natsuko, comfortably ensconced on the sofa, read from hers.

“Then what might your meaning be in calling me ‘Sir John’ these different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield, the haggler.” Natsuko paused. “What’s haggler?”

“It’s normally a customer who argues to get the price of something reduced but that doesn’t make sense here.” I went to my study and came back with the dictionary, which revealed that an older meaning is ‘huckster’ or ‘cadger’.

“What’s huckster and cadger?” Natsuko asked.

I flipped through the “H” section, from ‘haggler’ to ‘huckster’, thankful that twenty-five years ago I’d bought a copy of the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles.

“A huckster can mean someone who bargains or haggles but it can also mean a small trader… now, this is better. A cadger is a carrier who travels between town and country with butter, eggs, and shop-wares or someone who sells things in the street. That makes sense because Jack Durbeyfield is carrying an empty egg basket when he meets the parson.”

Natsuko continued reading. I explained the meanings of “whim”, “antiquary”, “direct lineal representative”, “Knights Hospitallers”, and “baronetcy”.

“I’m wondering why you chose this book,” I told her, as I was looking up “wold”.

“Well, you know I’m trying to save money,” she replied. “I already had a copy on my shelf and classics are cheaper than contemporary books because there’s no royalty to pay the author. The one I bought for you was only $7.95 at Kinokuniya but a modern book would cost about $20. Why do you ask that?”

“To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it until we struck all these words I’d never heard of. I suppose I was thinking that a more modern book might be easier to start with.”

(Although my ambition is to read Kafū and Tanizaki in Japanese, at the rate my Japanese reading skills are improving I’ll be thrilled if I can finish the Japanese translation of an Agatha Christie novel.)

“But I like this author,” she said. “When I was living in Seattle, I read Far from the Madding Crowd and it made me cry. Reading Thomas Hardy gives me the same feelings I used to have when I read Yamamoto Shūgorō as a teenager.”

Natsuko wasn’t surprised that I’d never heard of Yamamoto Shūgorō.

“You only know about literary writers,” she said, a trace impatiently, “like Kawabata and Tanizaki and Enchi Fumiko. Yamamoto Shūgorō was a taishū writer. He wrote all kinds of books—frequently about the common people but also detective and samurai stories as well as jidai-mono.”

Taishū （大衆） means “general public” and taishū bungaku is popular literature (though I imagine that Yamamoto Shūgorō is a cut or two above Agatha Christie). Jidai-mono are historical novels.

“In any case,” Natsuko added, “I think it’s better to read a classic novel. If you can understand the classics, then you can understand contemporary books. But not the other way round.”

She was right, of course. You won’t encounter too many “lath-like striplings” in a John Grisham novel. Natsuko started reading again.

“The clergyman explained that, as far as he was aware, it had quite died out of knowledge, and could hardly be said to be known at all. His own investigations had begun on a day in the preceding spring when, having been engaged in tracing the vicissitudes of the D’Urberville family, he had observed Durbeyfield’s name on his waggon, and had thereupon been led to make inquiries, till he had no doubt on the subject.”

I’d expected her to stumble over “vicissitudes” as she had over a number of other uncommon words; but, to my delight, she pronounced it perfectly.

“What is this ‘vicissitudes’?” she asked.

“It means that someone’s situation changes,” I explained, “often in an unexpected or unpleasant way. They might be doing well and then things turn bad… people often talk about ‘life’s vicissitudes’, meaning life’s ups and downs.”

Natsuko thought for a while, then said: “Like ‘the vicissitudes of George Bush’? He barely won the election, then after September the 11th he became very popular but now, with the problems in Iraq, his popularity is falling.”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“I like this word, ‘vicissitudes’,” she said. “If I use words like this, people will think I’m educated.”

“People can already tell you are educated,” I told her, “whether or not you use words like ‘vicissitudes’.”

How strange, I thought to myself, that I’d read almost all of the eighteenth and nineteenth century classic English novels but nothing by Thomas Hardy. I haven’t even seen Polanski’s movie, Tess.

Natsuko reached the end of the first chapter, put down the book, and picked up the photocopy I’d made of Akutagawa’s story—Kinokuniya hadn’t had any copies of Dondon yomeru: iro-iro na hanashi (Selected Stories for Steadily Improving Your Reading).

“Now it’s your turn,” she said.

“OK,” I replied, “Here we go… Ike-no-o no hitotachi wa, minna naigu no hana no koto o shitte ita. Sono hana wa, nagasa jū hachi senchi kurai de, sōsēji no yō na katachi o shite, kao no mannaka ni burasaggate ita.”

(“Everyone in Ike-no-o knew about the distinguished priest’s nose. About eighteen centimeters long and shaped like a sausage, it dangled down the center of his face…”)

Natsuko interrupted, saying “Interesting that you chose this story, isn’t it? About the vicissitudes of a monk with a long nose.”

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