Talking the Shifting Talk / Features / Untitled Books

We thought the words themselves might leave a stain in our mouths, on our tongues, like Blackjacks or well-sucked gobstoppers.

Talking the Shifting Talk

Language is one of the few realms we have jurisdiction over as children, and where we first learn to test the limits and lengths of our power, finds poet and novelist JACOB POLLEY

During childhood one of the things we learn, or fail to learn, is to ‘move between various dialects and levels of “correctness”’.

I remember having close friends when I was a boy. They were invariably other boys, and our friendships were usually based on poking around together, either in barns and woods, with bales and machines and animals, or in alleys and arcades, with money and booze, even with language itself. I remember swearing with a friend of mine as we walked through the fields, all the swear words we knew. Together we wondered what it meant to be using 'blue' language. We thought the words themselves might leave a stain in our mouths, on our tongues, like Blackjacks or well-sucked gobstoppers. That wasn't the kind of play, and those weren't the kind of thoughts, that I would have had on my own: I think it's often only in a friendship that you define your intention to transgress, and then go ahead and transgress, in order to decide between yourselves on the arbitrary nature, or not, of customs and rules.

For childhood has its own rules, rules that often run contrary to those that govern the adult world. Childhood is made up of lots of little societies, each with their own codes of acceptance and special ways of talking. Michel de Montaigne writes in his essay 'On Friendship' that 'our free will produces nothing that is more properly its own than affection and friendship'. This might be the case in the adult realm, but in the kingdom of childhood I'm not so sure. I might even go so far as to say that, as kids, we're only just learning to exercise free will, and that most of the friendships of childhood are allegiances, born out of the enforced situation of school and the necessities of having to do what we have to do, in the places we have to be, with the quirks of family dress and habit and accent about which we can, in the short term, do very little.

Shakespeare, with his typical genius, both explores and subverts something of this idea in the two parts of Henry IV. Hal's friendship with Falstaff, full of menacing play, name-calling and exaggeration, is both an substitute father/son relationship and a close allegiance that could only be forged in an alternative kingdom, below that of the responsible adult realm, a kingdom complete with its own language, ceremonies and priorities, and with Falstaff as king of the child-like ragamuffins, tapsters and bawds. Yet Hal is shown slowly and surely binding himself to the necessary duties of kingship: in time he must do what he has to do, in the place he has to be, with the quirks of family dress (robes, a crown), habit and accent that he has, in the wildly-lived short term, thrown off, only in order to put them on again with greater authority. At the end of Henry IV Part 2, Falstaff approaches Henry, crying "My King! My Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!" "I know thee not old man", says the King, and goes on

         How ill white hairs becomes a fool or jester!
         I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
        So surfeit-swell'd, so old, and so profane;
         But being awak'd I do despise my dream.

Ouch. His loving friend, and the dream of adulthood spent in a realm of games, is banished, and King Henry does the banishing in the language of a statesman and superior, a role he must play as if it were the role he was born into. Which it was. Though we must wonder about both the ruthless use to which Hal has put his identity-shifting allegiances and the cost to himself when he banishes a friendship that is, as plump Jack Falstaff says, 'all the world'.

The pleasure we take in Falstaff is in his linguistic inventiveness, something kids seem to possess naturally. I should own up now, rather late in the proceedings, to the fact that I've written a book, the themes of which are pretty much what I'm discussing here: childhood, friendship and special ways of talking. While I was writing the book I took great pleasure in making lists of the peculiar derivations and slang words that I remembered from my childhood, words that I've since discovered had their source in the navy, or in Romany, or in Cumbrian hill farming or, alternatively, were simply the pure, unadulterated invention of the kids I chose to kick about with. It was only when I'd nearly finished writing the book that I read David Foster Wallace's extraordinary essay 'Authority and American Usage', collected in Consider the Lobster. In the essay, which is essentially a richly digressive review of a dictionary, he describes the punishments meted out to a SNOOTlet, a class of little kid whom he describes as 'wildly, precociously fluent in SWE [Standard White English]...the sorts of six-to-twelve-year-olds who use whom correctly and whose response to striking out in T-ball is to shout "How incalculably dreadful!"' Foster Wallace tells us that what his peers, with 'monstrous quadruple Wedgies', are punishing the SNOOTlet for is not his ability to learn, but precisely the opposite. For the SNOOTlet 'has only one dialect...[and] cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for "peer rapport", which is just a fancy academic term for being accepted by the second-most-important Group in the little kid's life.'

When David Foster Wallace puts it like this it's blindingly obvious: during childhood one of the things we learn, or fail to learn, is to 'move between various dialects and levels of "correctness"'. As a child, this learning is, if not a matter of life and death, then certainly deadly serious, with consequences for any failure to learn running from emotionally painful social exclusion to gentle ribbing to outright violence. And the authenticity of such consequences are usually far below the understanding of adults, for as adults we are utterly banished from childhood and a pane, as if of soundproof glass, stands between us and any real, experiential understanding of childhood's hierarchies or of those who broker power in such a kingdom.

Where does this leave us as adults? It might be, as in the poem 'On the Death of Friends in Childhood' by Donald Justice, that we can only find our lost childhood friends '...in the schoolyard at twilight, / Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands / In games whose very names we have forgotten.' But we are also, to use a favourite Shakespearean term, 'translated' from childhood to adulthood, and the socialisation we go through in childhood is in preparedness for the rigid, codified arrangements of the grown-up world. Just as Hal learns something of the fluidity of his own identity in the Boar's Head tavern, talking the shifting talk with Falstaff, only to be translated - with all the loss attendant upon such a translation - into the fixed role of King, so we are translated into adulthood's rigidities. We learn as children that the necessities of having to do what we have to do, in the places we have to be, with what quirks of family dress and habit and accent we have, can be mitigated by the contrary rules, inventive talk and free play we might learn to enjoy in the myriad little societies that make up childhood's kingdom. What we discover in our own translation, a translation that happens without us noticing, is that the adulthood into which we are translated is exactly the same, but for the fact that we can no longer be the originators and inventors of customs, rules and ways of talking: we must instead show that we can follow and use already established customs, rules and ways of talking supremely well. Not only that, but we must also police the establishments to which we have, without even noticing, become affiliated.

I read Helen Garner's novel The Spare Room recently. It's a book about friendship in extremis, for the narrator, Helen, is caring for a friend who's dying. The story really explores what it means to see the qualities of a friend become alloyed with dire circumstances, when the very qualities that may have made the person a friend are rendered inadequate, or even rather less than admirable. This is true of both Nicola, the dying friend, whose insistence on various quack remedies and her denial of what is really happening to her begin to eat into the heart of the narrator, and of the narrator herself, who must face her own corrosive feelings of suspicion, frustration and anger towards Nicola. The book is plainly, firmly, resonantly powerful, but I gathered from a cursory browse around the internet that there's been some debate about the status of the book as a 'novel'. A whiff of this debate got me thinking about books and what it might mean to monitor and police the forms our books or poems or stories take. As adults we seem pretty keen to enforce the rigidities of category we find ourselves presented with, or inheriting, or temperamentally inclined towards. I reckon we should, my friends, be wary of this, and remember something of both the fluidity and the menace of childhood's categories and special ways of talking.

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Talk of the Town is published by Picador.

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Monday, 20 July, 2009