Stylish Misquotation

 At one point in his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism—in the course of making some point about modern alienation and anomie—the social theorist Daniel Bell quotes the line: "man stands 'alone and afraid in a world [he] never made.'" 

Bell does not cite a source for this observation—probably because it has long been held to be the preferred stylistic practice—whenever one is quoting a line of poetry specifically—not to name one's source; but rather to leave it to one's readers to either recognize the line instantly or feel embarrassed with themselves for not doing so. 

This one I did recognize. How could I not? It was obviously a reference to one of my favorite poems of all time—A.E. Housman's "The Laws of God, The Laws of Man"—his heroic, stirring defense of nonconformity—which I'd recognize anywhere. 

Except that Housman doesn't use this phrase, exactly. He says, instead: "I am a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made." 

I thought I had one up on Bell here—I, at least, remembered that the line talked about being a "stranger"—nothing in there about being "alone," per se. 

But Bell may have been making a subtler stylistic maneuver than I realized. After all, by slightly misquoting the line—he was showing that he knew the poem by heart; that he was so familiar with it—and trusted his literate in-group audience to be so as well—that he hardly needed to be right on the details—let alone to even tell us which poem the line came from. 

As Anthony Grafton tells us in his book about the history of footnotes—this is apparently a scholarly practice of long standing. "[I]n ancient literary prose," he observes, it was considered unnecessary—or even ungainly and pedantic—to cite one's source, "since the well-educated author cited texts from memory, not from books[.]" 

And indeed—the desire to underline the fact that the authors were so familiar with their texts that they were quoting from memory—often even led them to "introduc[e] a slight change [in the quoted text] to show that he had done so." 

Well, maybe that's what Bell was doing, then. Maybe he scored a social and intellectual triumph over me—ironically, in the very act by which I at first believed I had caught him in an error. 

But I am not to be outdone so easily. After writing the paragraph above—in which I quote from Housman's poem—I went to double-check my memory against the original. It turns out that I'm slightly wrong too. The real line apparently reads: "I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made." 

There's no "am." 

I colored red with embarrassment, and thought briefly of correcting my lines above. 

But then I realized—no, wait; this is perfect. This is exactly what I'm supposed to do. 

And so I left in my own slight misquotation as proof that I too was quoting from memory. 

I don't have the heart—however—to follow the truly polished stylist into the practice of not even dropping a reference to my source. I am not one of those who will simply attribute a line of verse to "the poet"—as the standard practice in literate culture used to be—as if we all knew already who "the poet" was. 

If I were writing in a literary monoculture—where "the poet" was bound to be Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Swinburne or Browning, say—I might feel I could get away with it. 

If I were writing in Germany—where, as Gottfried Benn once put it—"the professors" never "have a thought / without thinking of a line of Schiller to encapsulate it"—then I might be able to get away with simply dropping in a line in inverted commas without specifying where it comes from (since it would almost certainly come from either Schiller or Goethe). 

(Wait a minute; I just went back to the Benn original to double-check that I had remembered this line correctly—and it turns out, it was Hölderlin he referenced in the original, not Schiller! Oh well, I'm leaving my misquotation in—for the above-stated reasons.)

But I am not writing in a literary monoculture. Unless it be a monoculture with only one member. 

When I quote from someone it probably comes from Hopkins or Housman or MacDiarmid or Millay or Roque Dalton or Brecht or any of my other personal favorites—a Josh's Garden of Verses—limited in its stock, to be sure; but nonetheless unique enough to me, that I would have no hope that others would recognize the line. 

Judging from the Goodreads page, for instance, I think I'm currently the only person living to have read Hugh MacDiarmid's The Battle Continues, say. And yet I quote from it all the time. Do I really want to leave people floundering as to my source by just attributing the lines to "the poet"—or, still worse, to simply leave it standing alone in inverted commas ("alone and afraid, in a world it never made"?)

Generally, of course, I am not quoting from memory. If I quote a whole stanza or so of poetry, I probably had to look up the precise wording before doing so—which means that you can count on the text being accurate in my rendition, if the passage I'm citing is of any considerable length. 

But if I'm quoting a phrase or two—a mere snatch of poetry—then I will often rely the first time through on my memory alone. 

Even these, though—the merest nuggets—I often find afterward, to my dismay, are slightly inaccurate. 

In my post about Cinderella a couple weeks ago, for instance, I wrote about how the heroine of Disney's 1950 animated classic "builds a Heaven in Hell's despite." 

This was a quotation from Blake—or so I felt certain. Yet, when I went to look up the original poem, I find to my horror that this precise phrase does not anywhere exactly appear. The poem includes a reference to "build[ing] a Hell in Heaven's despite" and to "build[ing] a Heaven in Hell's despair"—but the slight remixing of the elements I came up with does not appear in Blake's original. 

Having discovered this, I briefly considered "correcting" my quotation in the Cinderella post to say something about her "building a Heaven in Hell's despair." But the line is just not as good. It doesn't work as well as my remix did. So, I left in my own misquotation. 

I was ashamed to do so at the time—particularly after a friend complimented me on the aptness of the quotation; which I now felt was slightly unmerited praise. Stolen valor. 

But now—having read Anthony Grafton—I realize that I actually made the right call in leaving my error in the post. I was just following an ancient literary practice I didn't even know existed. 

I could multiply examples. Part of my brain is still convinced—and always will be—that Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote "all life ends in death," in his "No worst, there is none"—when in reality what he wrote is the more (to my ears) jerky and ungainly phrase: "all / Life death does end" (maybe that's "sprung rhythm" for you). 

So too, I'm still convinced that John Davidson wrote—in "Thirty Bob a Week"—that "daily the thing is done / By many and many a one"—but the real passage actually has no line break, and the "daily" is in a different place: "But the thing is daily done by many and many a one."

Davidson's original is probably better meter than my mental recreation. But I guess my brain wants there to be a burst of even more ferocious trochaic energy at the start of that line to really set it apart: "DAIly the thing..." etc. 

In the past, having spotted my mistakes after quoting Hopkins or Davidson—I've always gone back to fix my error. 

But now perhaps I know that it's the better part of stylistic valor to leave my misquotations in their place. They may be wrong; but for that very reason, they serve as a kind of proof: I have at least tried to make these beloved poems my own...