Soft Furnishings and Split Infinitives...
Charles Moore reviews Gwynne’s Grammar at Selfridges.
Selfridges on Oxford Street, where Gwynne's Grammar was held Photo: GETTY
05 Mar 2012
Last Wednesday afternoon, I pushed open the heavy main doors of Selfridges, Oxford Street, hurried through the pong of the scent department, down the escalator, past the café, and into the Ultralounge.
Also, I was impressed to note, did Alannah Weston, the famous shop’s creative director.
There was even a rumor the Prince of Wales had sent a spy.
We joined a miscellaneous crowd of the general public, aged from 11 to 70-something, and composed of most known ethnicities.
We had all come to hear a thin, white-haired man, in a subfusc three-piece suit, who stood in front of an old-fashioned blackboard.
Both he and the blackboard looked incongruous in a groovy room, in which sofas are disposed about the place like a bookish version of Starbucks.
This was the grand finale of his series of classes, and word of them had spread.
“Are you sitting comfortably?” asks the speaker.
“Yes,” we say.
“That is NOT the right answer!” he shouts.
“I don’t want you going to sleep.
"I want your undivided attention.”
What we were about to hear, he went on, was the most important thing in the life of civilization.
“We cannot think, without words…
"We think in sentences…
"All our thoughts can only be properly expressed in a complete sentence.”
Then he is off, starting with the four types of sentence – sentence, command, wish, and question.
He is teaching English grammar, and teaching as if our lives depend on it – which, he insists, they do.
N M Gwynne, as he is introduced in these two-hour talks, is a septuagenarian who used to be a successful businessman, but got fed up, and started to teach, instead.
He taught the children of a Silicon Valley millionaire by Skype, at their “home school”.
This led to other forms of “remote” teaching.
One of his beliefs is, if you are well educated in the classics, you can teach pretty much anything.
It makes you a better teacher to do so.
Gwynne taught English, Latin, Greek, French, German, arithmetic, scripture, algebra, and history.
His youngest Latin pupil, he says, was two years old, and loved reciting “Amo, amas, amat”, by heart.
The Gwynne style is half-evangelical, half-pedagogic.
One moment he makes bold, general statements – “Grammar is a science, like physics, though Richard Dawkins denies it”; the next, he makes his class learn and repeat precepts – “A noun is the name of a person, place, or thing.”
He gaily embraces the pedantry of the grammarian: “I will split as many hairs as I can!”
He also offers illustrative examples.
“At Selfridges,” he writes on the blackboard, “we learn grammar, which is very unusual.”
If he had omitted the comma after “grammar”, he points out, the meaning of the sentence would have changed: grammar, itself, would be unusual, rather than the fact of learning it, at Selfridges.
He offers another sentence, in which the word “either” appears first as a pronoun, then as an adjective, finally, as an adverb.
Beside Gwynne, who, in his excitement, knocks over and breaks his glass of water, and loses his spectacles among his notes, is a pile of books.
“Here,” he exclaims, waving one about, “is the Cambridge Latin Course – beautifully produced, but IMPOSSIBLE to learn from, because all they do is encourage you to guess.
"Here are the only three books you need – Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, Hillard and Botting’s Elementary Latin Translation, and Hillard and Botting’s Elementary Latin Exercises.
"I promise you, I can teach people more Latin in half an hour than the Cambridge Latin Course can manage in 18 months.”
You can try him and see, by emailing him at nmgwynne@eircom.net.
You might imagine all this is a sort of comic turn.
In a way, it is.
But performance is a part of all good teaching, and Gwynne is perfectly serious, behind it all.
To my slight surprise, was (were?) the audience.
Gwynne encourages people to interrupt if they have a doubt, many do.
It is clear they were trying to learn, and enjoying doing so.
To me, nearly 20 years younger than Gwynne, his world is familiar from schooldays (the words, “Hillard and Botting” had a Proustian power of recall).
To most of those present, I suspect it was thrillingly exotic.
Grammar has been hidden for half a century, yet, it is how words work.
To uncover it is like being the archaeologist of a lost world, then discovering the lost world is really our own world after all.
Selfridges (shouldn’t they bring back their apostrophe in honor of Gwynne?), who tour literary festivals in search of things for their books department, sensibly realized the hidden demand for grammatical knowledge.
They engage the services of the Idler academy, set up as a bookshop, coffeehouse, and informal education provider, in Westbourne Park Road, London W2, last year.
The Idler, in turn, produced Gwynne.
Gwynne produced Gwynne’s Grammar, a booklet the Idler prints and sells.
I leave you with what Gwynne considers the most perfectly accomplished grammatical sentence of the 20th century.
It is by P G Wodehouse: “With the feeling, which was his constant companion nowadays, for the wedding was fixed for the fifth of July and it was already the 10th of June, if anyone cared to describe him as some wild thing taken in a trap, which sees the trapper coming through the woods, it would be alright with him, he threw a moody banana skin at the loudest of the sparrows, and went back into the room.”
One comma in the wrong place, and that sentence collapses.
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The Idler Academy
Bookseller. Coffeehouse. School.
"Competence is the foundation of happiness", William Cobbett.
Address81 Westbourne Park Road
LONDON W2 5QH
0845 250 1281
Opening Hours
Tuesday — Saturday: 10am - 6.30pm
Sunday: 11am - 5pm
Monday: Closed
New, in the shop: Gwynne’s Grammar
We’re delighted to have taken delivery of the first edition of 200 copies of Gwynne’s Grammar, a hand-made booklet, by N. M. Gwynne, outlining the parts of speech and principle elements of English grammar.This is an essential and handy guide for anyone who would like to improve their English, and is made all the more useful because it is beautiful as well: it has been typeset by Brett, who also hand-sews each copy.
The cover is letterpress.
The specs: 210mm x 138mm, 32 pages, digitally printed on Mohawk 118gsm acid free paper.
Hand sewn binding, in 185gsm black card cover, with letterpress printed Zerkall Ingres eggshell blue wrapper.
Gwynne's Grammar.
Hand sewn by Mr Brett.
Ltd ed of 200 copies.
It’s an absolute bargain at £8.95.
You can buy mail order, come into the shop, or call us on 0207 221 5908.
TH
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