Paul Johnson

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Noisome

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SOURCE: “Noisome,” in New Statesman, August 2, 1985, pp. 25–26.

[In the following review, Jones objects to the numerous typographical and spelling errors found in The Pick of Paul Johnson, which he attributes to poor copyediting rather than authorial oversight.]

Reading this book [The Pick of Paul Johnson] has been a tormenting experience. I don't say this because of any antipathy to the writer; I enjoy being at the receiving end of Paul Johnson's prose, in spite of—or quite often because of—his violent prejudices and his bizarre view of the world. He expresses himself with impeccable clarity, eschews jargon and is precise and thoughtful in his choice of words; few writers with a large and regular output can claim these merits. Admittedly, reading these collected pieces at a stretch can become tedious, but that isn't Paul Johnson's fault, since they were written to be read as they appeared in the Spectator or the Daily Telegraph.

The blame for the torment rests solely with the publisher, who has produced the book in a form that can only be called disgraceful. The paper is grey. The layout of the pages is mean and ugly, with narrow margins and the minimum of space at the top and bottom. The type is nasty, and pervaded by oddities such as the use of acute accents for quotation marks. The whole effect recalls the appearance of books in the wartime and early post-war years, when there was an acute paper shortage. In those days, however, at least they got the actual words right.

The words that have not been got right in this production, noted as I went through my suffering, make up a formidable list. Affrontery, beedy-eyed, accolate, wordly (for ‘worldly', the context indicates), gallaxy, scintilating, umbillical, harrassed, portentious, metalurgy, computor, critized, wrily, subpoened, laudible, gaity, innoculated, preventitive, dediction (apparently for ‘dedication', not ‘deduction’), squalour, ephermeral, double-died, absorbtion, solitarity (apparently for ‘solitary', not ‘solidarity’), decrepid, noisesome, prophesy (as a noun), plebian, womenly, harrangue, distintegration, reitterate and majoram. Also these names of people or places: Westminister, Churchil, Ebeneezer, Aubery Singer, Clancy Segal, Saltzburg, Sienna, Peacocke, Spezzia, Helas, Montherland, Woolfit, Anapolis and Van Dyke.

It's possible that some of these errors originated with the writer (though, as I remember his vigilant scrutiny of New Statesman page proofs, not many). Writing to a deadline, he may have forgotten, for instance, the unusual spelling of Clancy Sigal's name. But, in book publishing, such lapses are supposed to be corrected by a person called the copy editor. It's the copy editor, not the writer, who is required to possess no other skill and perform no other duty than that of ensuring accuracy, and is paid considerably more than a teacher or a nurse for doing so. Traditionally, when books are replete with blunders, reviewers sternly rebuke the author for failing to read the proofs. Nowadays, even if a writer reads the proof with scrupulous care (in unpaid time, of course), nobody in the production department takes any notice.

Indeed, it's worse than that. The evidence indicates that many of the errors are not merely overlooked, but inserted, by copy editors. An example in my list is the word ‘noisesome’. There is no such word in the dictionary, but there is such a word as ‘noisome’. It means ‘harmful’; it derives from the Norman-French noy, which is also the root of the verb ‘to annoy’; and it has nothing to do with noise. I'm pretty sure that Paul Johnson wrote ‘noisome', since he was referring to the heart of a dead man, a silent object if ever there was one. ‘Noisesome’ can only be the creation of an officious, ignorant copy editor, too lazy to think about the sense of the passage, make a phone call to the writer or consult the dictionary.

This book was designed, typeset and printed in Britain. Books which are a pleasure to read, increasingly and by now almost invariably, are produced in Hong Kong. I hope that the agreement between Mrs Thatcher and Deng Xiao-Ping includes a provision for this system to continue when the place passes into the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China. Otherwise, I don't know what we shall do.

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