ARTS
Crime and punishment
Nit-picking often stems from loathing, not from a passion for accuracy, warns Michael Tanner There used to be a game of conjugating `irregular' verbs along the lines of 'I am sensitive, you are irritable, he is touchy'. One I don't recall circulating, but which I have been forced to conjugate recently, runs 'I am a precisionist, you are a pedant, he is a nit-picker'.
I have been thinking about nit-picking because it is so very annoying, yet also so difficult to distinguish from the virtue of accuracy. I have come across two things in particular which have made me try to find some general criteria for making the dis- tinction. One was a letter complaining about a Spectator article of mine, in which I got the forenames of an anti-Wagnerian scholar the wrong way round, and also said that a television programme in which he appeared was one in a series of eight, when I should have said seven. The complainer wondered how 'this sort of slovenliness and factual inaccuracy' could help The Spectator's sales or 'encourage constructive controversy'.
I have mixed feelings about that. I was vexed with myself for getting those things wrong, especially since both would have been easy to check — it was just that I had felt confident that I had got them right. But I wonder how much my inaccuracies either warped the judgment of readers or, if they spotted them, made them feel that The Spectator is a useless rag.
The other experience which made me think about nit-picking was going, a few days ago, to Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, with its extraordinarily inward por- trayal of A.E. Housman. He was, of course, one of the great nit-pickers of scholarship, deliberately choosing very minor writers to edit because there was more hope of get- ting them exactly right; and composing those notorious prefaces in which previous editors are torn to shreds for their misread- ings. That is the gospel of scholarship, a self-sustaining discipline which is not justi- fied by any results other than an allegedly perfect text which hardly anyone could wish to read.
Auden, in his sonnet on Housman, has as the first four lines of the sestet,
In savage footnotes on unjust editions He timidly attacked the life he led.
And put the money of his feelings on The uncritical relations of the dead.
Which seems to me as acute a commentary on the psychology of nit-picking as we are likely to get: the huge displacement involved, so that the true source of misery and rage is treated in a quite different way from the trivial slips which occasion the furious outbursts; and the implicit notion, in the first two of the quoted lines, that Housman despised what he was doing so much that he did it to perfection; that is a profound insight of Auden's. Perhaps what justifies an ascription of nit-picking as opposed to a passion for precision is that the amount of emotional energy expound- ed is grotesquely out of proportion to the alleged offence; indeed, and what makes Housman so exemplary, it is the very minuteness of the cause which gives the thrill to the violence of denunciation. It is the explosion itself which is what's needed, and if there were adequate grounds for it the required relief wouldn't be forthcom- ing.
That, at least, is my conjecture about the causation of nit-picking. Samuel Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare, has others, and expresses them immortally: 'It is not easy to discover from what cause the acri- mony of a scholiast can naturally proceed ...The various readings of copies, and dif- ferent interpretations of a passage, seem to be questions that might exercise the wit without engaging the passions ... Perhaps the lightness of the matter may conduce to the vehemence of the agency; when the truth to be investigated is so near to inexis- tence, as to escape attention, its bulk is to be enlarged by rage and exclamation ... A commentator has indeed great temptations to supply by turbulence what he wants of dignity, to beat his little gold to a spacious surface, to work that to foam which no art or diligence can exalt to spirit.' As usual, I take it your idea is pretty good.' mordant words before which one quakes.
For anyone who engages in academic and critical pursuits, if he isn't a cynic, is bound to find himself attributing to what he is doing an importance which is proba- bly for outsiders in absurd dislocation to its bearing on issues of general interest. And he may well resort to a question that is all too plausible, supposing that he is criticised for being obsessional, vindictive and so forth: how can one tell in advance where an apparently minute investigation may lead, or what damage a seemingly wholly insignificant mistake may make?
In some areas that question is not only plausible but crucial. But in the areas where I have most often come across extreme rancour, it is clear that not much difference to anyone or anything, save the combatants' amour propre, is going to be made whatever the outcome. That the hos- tility is a reactive matter is easily shown: I think no one, in areas where tempers are quickly lost and manners abandoned, ever gets the discussion off to a furious start, though passion may be in the offing. It is in rebuttal that things get nasty, that tiny points are seized on with malignant delight, that, to put it in the way that can't be avoided, for all its triteness, things get per- sonal. The strange quality of Housman's denunciations comes not only, or even mainly, from the fact that he is dealing with matters that are terribly 'near to inexis- tence', but that he is using an amount of emotional energy to attack people who are long dead, and have, so far as he knew, no living descendants.
So I have a suggestion which is not startling but may be useful when you next encounter a couple of academics or jour- nalists or men of letters trying to annihilate one another with contempt, expressed by pointing out the errors that have so lamentably escaped the attention etc., etc. How much of the energy feels as if it is directed to the issue in hand, and how much towards the opponent as such? Of course a very crafty nit-picker will take pains to cover his tracks, seeming to be focusing in the best Arnoldian vein on the thing as in itself it really is. But nit-pickers, who are not people to be envied, at some point or other rather like plagiarists, give themselves away where they least need to. They may, of course, be making a perfectly valid point which in someone else's hands we wouldn't even consider nit-picking. It is an activity which is indulged in because there is so much loathing, generalised or personal, around, and not a passion for accuracy and truth. It is very difficult con- sistently to hide the difference between the two.
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