Spinning the webs of words

He wanted to be a literary figure but ended up being the chief superintendent of the 20th-century language police. D.J. TAYLOR reviews a recent biography of H.W. Fowler.

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HENRY WATSON FOWLER died as recently as 1933. Somehow the world in which he moved seems a great deal older; a quaint if somewhat arid landscape made up of battling lexicographers and furious set-tos over minor points of grammar, its relaxations consisting of bouts of healthy exercise and whimsical poetry. The photograph of Fowler in his early forties, watching the Ten Mile Race at Sedbergh, is entirely characteristic. Stern, bearded, intent, he looks eager to join in, or perhaps only to wander off and write a sonnet to his cat.

The Warden of English: The Life of H. W. Fowler, written by the current archivist of the Oxford English Dictionaries project, has been produced with an eye to the anniversary market; three- quarters of a century have elapsed, it turns out, since the arrival of Fowler's Modern English Usage to provide such welcome ammunition to newspaper correspondents the world over (anyone who doubts the passions "Fowler" is capable of stirring should read the conversation between Anthony Powell and Kingsley Amis in the latter's Memoirs (1991), apropos a Powell formulation stigmatised as "legerdemain in both senses"). Yet, dictionaries aside, Fowler emerges as a thoroughly representative minor literary figure of his time. Without The King's English (1906) and the other lexicographical triumphs, it seems fair to say that his destiny would have been a three-line footnote in The Rise and Fall of the English Man of Letters by John Gross (1969). As it was, he ended up a household name. The gap between what Fowler wanted to be (an essayist of the Augustine Birrell school) and what he ended up (chief superintendent of the 20th-century language police) is not one that his biographer Jenny McMorris explores with any depth, but in some ways this is the career of a man who, for all his undoubted satisfactions, has in the last resort settled for second-best. If Fowler's non-lexicographical interest - the magazine causerie, the sentimental verses - were archetypal for their time, then so, too, were his origins. He was born in 1858, the eldest of the multitudinous brood of a self-made mathematician who spent the latter part of his life teaching at an army crammer. Rugby School was followed by Balliol College, great things were expected, but already the constraint of "natural shyness" seems to have been making itself felt.

He emerged from Oxford with a double second in classics to pursue the life of a schoolmaster, briefly at Fettes, then at the grim northern fastness of Sedbergh, where he remained for 19 years. If there is a joker in the pack here among the manly chats to his charges (later the inspiration for a somewhat forbidding-sounding essay collection, Between Boy and Man), it was the inability to conceal his lack of religious belief. An unwillingness to prepare boys for Confirmation looks to have been one of the flashpoints that led him to abandon teaching for the literary life. The anti- Christian strain stayed with him to the end, and there is an odd little poem about his deceased, churchgoing wife, "buried near/ The bells she loved and does not hear".

As a literary freelance, now resident in semi-bohemian Chelsea, Fowler's forte was the light essay. A promising career as a contributor to the Spectator fizzled out, however, when Fowler took characteristic exception to the Editor's reluctance to print a commissioned piece. Some gleanings from this period were collected in a poorly received collection, More Popular Fallacies. It was only when he relocated to Guernsey, the home of his younger brother Frank, that the real business of his life began to take shape. Deciding that their ends would be best served by collaborative work, the Fowler team - a unit in which Henry quickly assumed the role of senior partner - approached the Oxford University Press (OUP) with a proposal to translate the work of the Second-century A.D. Greek writer Lucian.

Those, as McMorris points out, were good times to be employed by the OUP. Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, later rechristened the Oxford English Dictionary, was in full swing - if that is a phrase that can be applied to a project, which took 50 years to complete. There was money to be made from lexicography. Charles Cannan, exacting Secretary to the Delegates, liked the Fowlers and, keen to encourage them, approved Henry's scheme to produce "a sort of English composition manual from the negative point of view for journalists and amateur writers". The King's English, which this became, was a huge success - wide-ranging in its appeal and sufficiently controversial (there was an almighty row about Americanisms) to generate column inches. The Fowlers were made. Thereafter the patterns of Fowler's professional life were set in stone.

Effectively, he remained an employee of the Press for the rest of his life, wondering at the bonuses that the firm (rather shamefaced about the money they made out of him) remitted each Christmas and briskly declining all emoluments he considered beyond his due. Relative affluence encouraged him to publish his essays at his own expense (Si Mihi, reflections on the theme of "If I Had", was published under the pseudonym of "Egomet"). Publication of the Concise Oxford Dictionary in 1911 nearly coincided with his marriage to Jessie Wills, a former nurse, and the subject of some fond and excruciating bits of light verse. By this stage the brothers were at work on the 15-year stint - Frank, who died in 1918, did not live to see it - that produced the Oxford Pocket Dictionary.

Giving some coherence to the shadowy figure who lurks behind these webs of words was always going to be a difficult task, and Jenny McMorris has laboured hard to produce something human from the painstaking correspondences that flowed back and forth between Guernsey, Walton Street, Oxford, and the OUP's London office. Fowler, it scarcely needs saying by this stage, was an odd character; obstinate (he contrived to get himself sent to the Front in 1914 and chafed at the menial duties available to men in their late fifties), inflexible, sentimental. The passion he incubated for language - and it certainly was a passion - is always kept a little to one side. Reading Humphrey Carpenter's account of J.R.R. Tolkien's early life (J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 1977), the reader is immediately struck by the thought of a man to whom "language" offered an almost magical stimulus. With Fowler, the mental atmosphere is infinitely drier, a kind of brittle jocularity that can sometimes seem faintly sinister. "I had some quadruped wandering over me in the night", he wrote back from France; "other people called it a rat, but I prefer to suppose it a harmless, necessary cat."a

Laid low by glaucoma, which required an operation to remove one of his eyes ("Moriturus oculus te salutat" - "the eye about to die salutes you" - he wrote to Kenneth Sisam at the Press), and his wife's long-drawn-out cancer (Jessie died in 1930), he survived to produce the coping-stone of his oeuvre, Modern English Usage, in 1926. His death, on Boxing Day 1933, was marked by the usual absence of fuss; only his younger brother Arthur and his nurse attended the funeral. The Warden of English is full of absorbing detail, and a cast of striking minor characters - notably Henry's sister Edith, who explored some of the wilder fringes of the Oxford Movement before her death, by suicide, in 1914. But, rather like the life it re-creates, it can sometimes be hard going.

The Warden of English: The Life of H. W. Fowler, Jenny McMorris, p.242, Oxford University Press, £19.99. TLS £17.99. 0 19 866254 s8.

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