Monday, September 09, 2024

'Learning Is Not Defunct in the Republic'

“As you probably don’t read National Review, I enclose proof that learning is not defunct in the Republic. Buckley had printed a note . . . praising Waugh’s delightful whimsy in coining a nonsense phrase like tohu bohu. Catholics tend not to have read a word of Holy Writ.” 

I know that’s not true. So did Guy Davenport, who is writing on September 9, 1997 to his friend and publisher James Laughlin. Tohu bohu stumped me too when I first encountered it in the eighth stanza of Auden’s “In Sickness and in Health” (1940), an epithalamion for his friends Maurice and Gwen Mandelbaum:

 

“Beloved, we are always in the wrong,

Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,

Suffering too little or too long,

Too careful even in our selfish loves:

The decorative manias we obey

Die in grimaces round us every day,

Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice

Which utters an absurd command – Rejoice.”

 

Admittedly, tohu-bohu sounds like the name of the island in the South Pacific where Melville jumped ship. It’s a compound of two Hebrew words meaning, respectively, “formlessness” and “emptiness,” and it’s used in Genesis 1:2 – “without form and void.” That is, the primordial “stuff” that existed before creation – a notion readily understood by physicists and the faithful.

 

The OED defines tohu-bohu as “that which is empty and formless; chaos; utter confusion.” The earliest citation dates from 1613, and the Dictionary cites four more uses from the seventeenth century, no more until the nineteenth (Gladstone, Browning, L.S. Houghton), and none at all after that. I’m speculating but the word was probably most often used during the centuries when educated writers of English were most likely to possess some familiarity with the original Hebrew – particularly the second sentence of the Bible.

 

Can anyone tell me where Waugh uses tohu-bohu?

 

[Davenport’s letter can be found in Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (W.W. Norton, 2007).]

5 comments:

  1. I have heard "tohu-bohu" used in a homily a few years ago, and mistranslated, by a young man who was since ordained. (He did not seem that grateful for my suggestion that he had it wrong, but we remained on good terms.) I have no idea where Waugh committed it to print, unfortunately. Nor do I have any idea where I'd have seen the word in print.

    The rules established since Vatican II rotate readings on a three-year cycle, so that Catholic ears are that much more familiar with Scripture. But Ronald Knox, in On Englishing the Bible thought that English-speaking Catholics tended to do relatively little extended reading in the Bible.

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  2. He uses it in a letter to an Archbishop Heenan, from Jan. 3, 1965. He writes, "I do not know how things are in Westminster. In the provinces they are tohu bohu (if you will forgive a quotation from a language otherwise unknown to me)."

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  3. I should have added that you can find this letter in the 2011 book "A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes", published by Ignatius Press, which is always putting out interesting works.

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  4. For once in my life I can supplement the OED's learning: the 20th Century American humorist S. J. Perelman used "tohu-bohu," more than once if I remember correctly.

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  5. The word tohu-bohu sounds like it belongs in the Hawaii Pidgeon English Bible translation of Genesis 1:1-2a. "Da time wen eryting wen start, God make da sky an da world. An da world was "tohu-bohu".....

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