It's a slim book that had a powerful impact in this country and beyond as the world hovered on the edge of war in 1939. Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther began as a collection of newspaper columns in the Times of London about the daily life of an suburban English household. Then it became a popular novel, and eventually a classic movie starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon.
The 1942 movie was soon recognized by both British and American leaders--Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill--as an invaluable aid in mobilizing American opinion in favor of entering the war on the Allies' side. With its scenes of daily domestic life, it allowed Americans to identify with a middle-class English family that, like all of Britain, would soon be in a battle for its survival. And it would have to fight alone till the rest of the world woke up.
On rereading the book so many years later, what stands out are the ordinary words that are no longer ordinary, or even used today, certainly not with the same meaning. Consider this phrase Mrs. Miniver uses to describe her feeling when, on the way to a weekend in the country, she notices almost with a premonition what a fine spring it was in 1939: "It was being a lavishly lovely spring, almost frightening in its perfection, as though for some reason it was meant to be a final performance." She is surprised when, mentioning the thought to her husband, who replies only: "But that's what I feel every spring."
Here they'd been married for some 17 years, Mrs. Miniver realizes, but she'd never known that about him before. For how well do married couples even of long standing really know each other? After all their time together, the Minivers could still surprise each other in ways small and large. That detail about his response to spring had escaped her notice, she thinks, in the midst of "the devastating intimacy of a happy marriage." It's a happy phrase, but what now strikes the eye, and the mind, is the use of the word intimacy in that context. For in our coarser time, intimacy has long since been reduced to a euphemism for only sexual relations. ("How long have you been intimate with the accused?" asks the prosecuting attorney.)
It's a little book, but it's full of phrases that can no longer be used in their once accepted way. If we dare use them at all. Words like gay and adult are now so freighted with other meanings--Court Approves Gay Marriages, Adult Movies--that we may hesitate before daring to employ them in the old accepted sense. We lose more words that way, along with the more genteel world they were part of.
To "ignite a firestorm" no longer refers to London during the Blitz or Dresden as the Third Reich collapsed but, in our politically super-charged times to partisan political infighting at home. Our vocabulary, like our vision, seems to have collapsed on itself. Arkansas' Newspaper may be full of terms that resonate only politically these more provincial days. As our world shrinks, so has our vision, our idea of what is acceptable in polite society and our horizons in general. There is a wholesomeness that once set literary standards that seems gone forever. Today's unbuttoned society, in which inhibitions are made to be shed, seems a sad step back from Mrs. Miniver's. Dare turn on television, radio's successor, and what might have shocked once upon a time has lost its shock value through mere repetition. No wonder some of us would prefer to just curl up with a good book.
To lose any word is to lose a whole world, or at least worldview. Think of how long it's been since any political leader referred to posterity, as in the Preamble to the Constitution ("... and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.") It is a rare writer, like Flannery O'Connor, who could bring a word like posterity to life again, as when she said that "God and posterity are only served by well-made objects." Which ought to serve as every newspaper columnist's credo.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 06/14/2017