'Spirit, Mettle; Courage, Pluck'

“It happened to me last year to lose my home with all contents in a night of that phenomenon that we oddly called blitz, though why we should use the German for lightning for attack by bombs I do not know, unless to appease by euphemism, like calling the Furies Eumenides.” 

Perhaps it’s that Churchillian obstinance of the people of England during World War II. More than bravery it’s defiance, a quality summed up in such words as spunk and grit – tough little monosyllables, hard as rocks. The writer is Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), the perennially forgotten and quite wonderful novelist (The Towers of Trebizond) and superb writer of nonfiction. I’ve written before about her essay “Book-Building after a Blitz,” published in the June 6, 1942 issue of the Saturday Review of Literature.

 

Macaulay had returned to London on May 13, 1941, to find that her flat in Marylebone and its contents had been destroyed during a German bombing raid three nights earlier. The Blitz started on September 7, 1940. For fifty-six of the following fifty-seven days, the Luftwaffe bombed the city. The day-and-night raids lasted until May 11, 1941. Some 37,000 civilians would eventually be killed in Great Britain.

 

Macaulay writes without self-pity or any suggestion of having been singled out for misfortune. She recounts the titles of books lost with sadness but also with a sort of actuarial coolness. She knows what she has lost and will never recover, and writing about it is an act of homage to her books, some of which were originally her father’s. Her literary taste is impeccable, and her library is one any respectable reader or writer would envy. Among her “indispensables” are Browne, Burton, Boswell, Johnson and Gibbon – the cream of English prose.

 

Now I’ve learned a happy coda of sorts. In his essay “The Pleasures of Rose Macaulay,” J. V. Guerinot writes

 

“When her library was totally destroyed in the bombing of London, the first volumes she replaced were the OED. There are those who like their novelists (and such novelists greatly abound) shirts off, muscles rippling, and those who think that the only muscles a novelist may hint at possessing are those needed to take down the wanted volume of the OED from its accustomed shelf.”

 

Our glory as a species is language and the OED is the crown. Its first editor, James Murray (1837-1915), once said when addressing the Philological Society: “I feel that in many respects I and my assistants are simply pioneers, pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest, where no white man's axe has been before us.” I highly recommend Caught in the Web of Words: James A.H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1977), written by his granddaughter, K.M. Elizabeth Murray.

 

Some of us don’t merely consult the OED. We read it. Take those words mentioned above. Spunk: “Spirit, mettle; courage, pluck.” Grit: “Strength of character; courage and resolve; endurance, stamina.”

[Guerinot’s essay is published in the Spring 1987 issue of Twentieth Century Literature.]