Guest review by Graeme Fife: GOD'S SECRETARIES - the Making of the King James Bible, by Adam Nicolson

 

"Nicolson relates the arguments dispassionately with perception, in lively writing: deft portraits of characters, strengths, quirks and all."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

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tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. (Lucretius De rerum natura)

‘I have glorified God in Greek and Latin, the consecrated languages spoken by the Lord on Earth’: Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno)

Many of us grew up with the sonorities of the King James Bible attuning our ear to the glories of the English language. Nicolson tells a story not only of the remarkable process of rendering the original Greek and Hebrew in what was, effectively, an entirely new language, he broadens his canvas to create a sharp portrait of the England into which James I of Scotland came as successor to Elizabeth I, under whose aegis the turbulence of religious division and factional rivalry had extended a reign of terror, the vicious excesses of extremism visited on the people of a nation subject to the caprices of a succession of bigoted monarchs dealing with vicissitudes of creed and the challenge of external enemies beholden to a different faith and pretended universal church.

The James Bible was not the first vernacular edition of the sacred text and many former translators had suffered vicious intolerance for their desire to make the Bible available to all God’s children, releasing it from the stranglehold of Latin. James, his childhood blighted by neglect and the persecution visited on his mother, was an awkward, socially inept man but a man of books, quick in temper but studious in manner. Under his immediate supervision, a gathering of groups of scholars set about rendering the Bible in a language which would make scripture available to be read in church and intelligible to every listener. Nicolson’s account of how this highly complex operation evolved and succeeded is riveting. He explores not only the process of translation per se, but the interaction of scholars in all their egocentricities, vanities, personal likes and dislikes. How to coordinate the work of teams of Translators – the approving capital was added at the time – to produce an integral work? It was a fiendishly difficult task and I quote one example only of many to illustrate how beautifully they succeeded in evincing a melodious and accurate translation based on ‘heard rhythm’ the majesty of a new English matching the majesty of the sentiment enshrined in scripture itself, but also a plain simplicity and directness, which delivered to the people as a whole a call to and retaining their attention. ‘Behold: I tell you a mystery…’

James came to a country riven with faction and disagreement, himself very shortly the target of a group of Catholic fanatics who wished to restore their faith to the land and its people: the gunpowder conspirators. The new King sought peace and consensus, to be, as it were, the sun that shone on all as against the effect of other faiths which kept people in ‘ignorance and darkness’.

Studied reference was made to those versions which had preceded this new rendition and I don’t quote the Tyndale here, let Nicolson make his own assessment, but the new reading delivers what he calls ‘a pace of deliberate and magisterial slowness … as solemn and orderly as the beginning of a steady and majestic march’. These are word written to be heard, remember, for their simplicity of effect and for their emotional power: ‘and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’

Now, in the Hebrew the word means ‘surface’ but at the time in English that meant ‘the superficies or upper part’ and thereby drains any sense of the deep force of the creative power deployed by the Demiurge and ‘face’ has, as Nicolson nicely stresses ‘a rich plain Englishness to it’. That is, above all, the beauty of this Bible, the move away from the denser, often tangled diction of the contemporary dramatists to the language which would, later, inform so much of the homespun diction of the American founding fathers and on to the work of a novelist like Melville, a glorious, heartfelt simplicity which gives, for example, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address such emotional strength, even its melodious sway. Moreover, punctuation used as a sort of musical notation, rests and pauses to increase the dramatic effect in recital.

There are anecdotes aplenty and I particularly enjoyed the tale of one of the Translators, Miles Smith, Bishop of Gloucester – and most were, as well as eminent scholars and linguists, in holy orders - being so bored by a sermon that he walked out and made for the ale-house. Some were insufferable bores and pedants themselves but, in sum, they produced an astonishingly fine work which no other version rivals. T S Eliot said of the New English Bible (yawn) that it ‘astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic’. It’s flat and entirely lacks the sensitive concentration on words that any true translation absolutely requires; it also lacks soul and musicality, both of which inform the James Bible. As a clarion for peace in a quarrelsome, fissile realm, what better?

There were objectors – this was religion - and Nicolson relates the arguments dispassionately with perception, in lively writing: deft portraits of characters, strengths, quirks and all. As for James, a man of books himself – he once said that he would be glad to be held captive along with the other chained prisoners in a library of protected books – his inspiration and authority unleashed a work of English in what some regard to be its apogee of style.

God's Secretaries is published by Harper Perennial

More of Graeme's choices:

The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters, also by Adam Nicolson

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Go-Between by L P Hartley

Guest review by Graeme Fife: THE MIGHTY DEAD - WHY HOMER MATTERS by Adam Nicolson

 

"Nicolson, in this enthralling book, introduces Homer in a way entirely apt to the invention and broad sweep of the original."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

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ēmos d’ērigeneia phanē rhododaktulos eōs ... When rosy-fingered dawn, child of the morning, appeared in the east…

This, one of a number of lines repeated in the epic poems of Homer, resting places for the oral composer of the stories, I had by heart even before I read the Greek. In those poems I discovered a world recognised from childhood, peopled with heroes, monsters, deadly adventures, last-gasp escape from peril, in a strange landscape replete with all those elements which fired my burgeoning imagination, the signposts of curiosity which linger still.

Nicolson, in this enthralling book, introduces Homer in a way entirely apt to the invention and broad sweep of the original. Goethe, he says, ‘thought that had Europe considered Homer and not the books of the Bible as its holy scripture, the whole of history would have been different, and better’. The ancient Greeks would have agreed for Homer formed the guiding agency of their own moral nurture. Concur or not, this book will help you decide and it’s an issue worth pondering.

Here Nicolson explores the all-important context of the composition of the poems, not written down and thereby, to a degree, fixed for centuries after their appearance as stories embellished, changed, developed, passed on, in the same way as the Gaelic bards and those of the Balkans told their own sagas as a way of charging the imagination of their audience, giving them souvenir of a way of life and action long gone, which they might emulate and by which be inspired. A modern audience will protest, perhaps that this is an androcentric world where women pay a secondary role and the charge is valid. However, Homer’s women present a side of the female spirit which, albeit not of apparent influence on the central landscape of the poems, the battlefield, save in the guise of the goddesses who intervene on human affairs and failings, their heroic exploits, their brutal death, nevertheless underpins all they do and contend for.

Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, remains in the kingdom of Ithaca in the lord’s absence, in the Trojan expedition and thus obliged to preserve the kingdom against his eventual return. Beset by a mob of brawling suitors eager to bed her and claim lordship, she outwits them by guile and, in Nicolson’s emphasis, displays what Homer calls her euēgēsia ‘good command’, nicely glossed by Nicolson as ‘the inner citadel of virtue and value’. I needn’t rehearse the story of her tapestry, woven by day, unpicked by night, her redoubtable patience in the task imposed on her. One example, only, in Homer’s exploration of the indomitable strength of the so-called weaker sex: the wiles of the sorceress Circe, mellifluous Calypso, the cave-bound monster Scylla, and Charybdis, the whirlpool into which a boat may be sucked. Sirens, uttering their seductive calls to give up, surrender, and we see, through Homer’s rich invention, the contrarieties of the sexual balance of power, between men who wield sword and spear in the forum of blood and women who control by subtler means. The female of the species more deadly than the male…? What upset that has caused in the virile heart and mind. So listen up, you men. Homer speaks.

There is much in this book to entice and inform not only in how Homer weaves his magic but in the way that fiction, stories told at bedtime to children or grown-ups later, plant the nurture of our own discovery of how life veers, its vicissitudes; the courage to outface, the spirit to persist, as Odysseus, time and again, puts his hand to the tiller and sails on after yet another confrontation with what had seemed insuperable odds. Invoking ‘the ability to regard all aspects of human life’ and from that understanding keep on, never yielding.

The very allure of Nicolson’s account of what Homer means to us, as he has meant to those generations which, in Keats’s phrase, ‘have trod’, is underlined by the fact that he has sailed treacherous waters in a small boat and knows, dry-mouthed, the conflict of tide and current, of wind and squall, the danger of the ‘unharvested sea’, that briny desert where survival rests always on a gunwale’s edge. He has sat in a grove on Ithaca at night, reading the account of the return of Odysseus to his home - the Odyssey is one of a number of nostoi, voyages home, whence our ‘nostalgia’ - and the ensuing bloodbath of vengeance on those who would have raped his queen and usurped his place as king, sat there even as the nightingale sang its tearful – oiktista - song. Read how Nicolson brings to vivid colour the evening when Keats read the vibrant translation of Chapman. ‘Here at last…was the moment, when, cresting a rise, a new and deeper, ineffably broad landscape had opened in front of him.’

Horace referred to Homer when he speaks of the difficulties of writing, the challenges sometimes beyond us to surmount in words, despite the poems which Nicolson with penetrating insight investigates and honours. Horace wrote:

et idem

indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus

[Ars Poetica 358-9]

‘And yet, I mustn’t be hard on myself when even good Homer nods off’.

I’ve made furniture and was thrilled by Nicolson’s loving account of how Odysseus fashioned the raft which might carry him to safety, every peg and joint, every shaping and fitting.

The Mighty Dead is published by William Collins

FIRST ANNIVERSARY - reading pile roundup: Linda Newbery

A side-effect of hosting WRITERS REVIEW is that my to-be-read pile (both virtual and actual) is out of control, with new additions almost every week. I have two overcrowded shelves of books-in-waiting: charity shop bargains rubbing shoulders with overdue library books, loans from friends, occasional advance proofs, impulse buys and the next choice for Reading Group. Inevitably, some books wait there for a very long time, as others jump the queue - and that's without including the titles lined up on my Kindle. At least I shall never be short of a good read. 

One that will go straight to the front is Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair, due in October. I particularly enjoyed his most recent novel, The Stranger's Child, and this one - beginning in Oxford in the Blitz and following three generations to the present-day - promises everything Hollinghurst is known for: elegance of style, insights into social mores and changing times, a focus on art and architecture. 

Time Will Darken It, by William Maxwell, is the book I've chosen for my Reading Group. I have yet to read anything by Maxwell, but his reputation gives me high expectations. Tom Cox, of the New York Times, listed it as an underrated classic of American literature, a "quiet, mid-career masterpiece". ("Quiet" is the kiss of death to marketing departments these days, making me wonder if the novel would even find a publisher today.) Nicholas Lezard, whose Paperback of the Week feature in the Guardian has sadly come to an end but was such a reliable source of books otherwise at risk of being overlooked, said of it: "This is such a good novel that I'm still shaking thinking about it ... A novel not to be recommended to people but to be pressed on them, urgently." So I am pressing it on my Reading Group, for September.

Longbourn, by Jo Baker, unaccountably had a long wait on the shelf before I started it this week. Such a clever idea: Pride and Prejudice from the viewpoint of the family servants - a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead set in Jane Austen's world, or at least the long hours and repetitive toil behind the scenes which allow her main players to lead their lives of comfort and leisure. Of course the servants have their own secrets and desires, and in one case a background that takes us far beyond the confines of Longbourn. I'm already hooked, by the writing as well as by the premise. Jo Baker is certainly a striking talent; far from imitating Jane Austen she has found a distinctive style of her own, and a sense of wild landscape in some of the scenes which is more reminiscent of Charlotte Bronte. 

There's usually some nature writing on my waiting pile. Currently heading that section is The Seabird's Cry  by Adam Nicholson, from which I expect eloquent writing on marine ecosystems, the lives of birds and how we're casually destroying the environment.

I enjoyed Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,  was even more impressed by The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, and am looking forward to her new novel, The Music Shop. She has a wonderful way of combining simplicity and profundity in writing about unexceptional lives. For a taster, catch it on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime last week and this.


What are you looking forward to reading? Please tell us in the comments!