In a recent (subscription only) review of Thomas Harris's new novel, Philip Hensher wielded the knife with deadly glee. The killer blow was that Harris appeared not to know the meaning of the word "oblivious". If I were Mr Harris, I would currently be hiding under my kitchen table, refusing to answer the telephone.
Literary mistakes hold a peculiar horror for writers. The leader of the free world might stride about mangling the language without shame ("don't misunderestimate those Grecians") and Dostoevsky may insist that through error you come to the truth, but the memory of a linguistic or grammatical faux pas reduces most writers to cringing wrecks.
Writers don't have objective credentials; thus, there is the enduring suspicion that we are somehow fraudulent, about to be found out, and people will laugh and point. The only way we can establish any heft is in our use of language.
I have lurid flashbacks to the time I used the word inimical twice in a fifth draft when I meant inimitable. That still induces cold sweats and sets my heart racing, 10 years on. (I am also haunted by the hoots of derisive laughter that greeted me when I muddled up Mesopotamia and Persia in public; not to mention the time I thought Flannery O'Connor was a man. But those are other stories.)
Spelling is the crucible of this - the simple fact that I have to think quite hard before writing the word privilege convinces me that I must be a phoney. And yet there is an honourable pedigree here. Agatha Christie freely admitted she was "an extraordinarily bad speller", but her books sell more copies than anything except the Bible. Virginia Woolf was a dodgy speller and Jane Austen famously spelt scissors as scissars.
F Scott Fitzgerald, too, was cavalier when it came to spelling and punctuation, so much so that Edmund Wilson described This Side of Paradise as "one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published". Hemingway said of the errors in Tender Is The Night: "None of the above is important unless everything is important in writing," which sounds forgiving, but may have been a bitch-slap if you bear in mind his relationship with Fitzgerald.
If even Yeats had trouble with spelling, can it make much difference? I think Tom Stoppard is right: "Words are sacred. They deserve respect."
Time is in short supply. Writers are asking readers to give up precious hours, so we'd damn well better know what oblivious means. If you can reach the soaring beauty of The Great Gatsby you can get away with pretty much anything, but the rest of us drones should be able to spell privilege with our eyes shut. We should recognise a dangling modifier at 40 paces and dance the fandango with the semicolon. It's not just a pedantic, nannyish tic; those books on grammar and spelling are more than finger-wagging exercises. The English language is a beautiful and various thing: honour is due.
