Lexicographer

H. W. FOWLER --G. G. Coulton -- Society for Pure English Tract No. XLIII-- Oxford University Press ($1.25).

Since death stilled the booming Samuel Johnson, lexicographers generally have preserved an antlike silence, an antlike industry. The late Henry Watson Fowler was no exception. Known on both sides of the Atlantic to scholars of all degrees as the author of Modern English Usage, most useful and authoritative of argument-settlers, and as an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, he was so personally retiring, "so shadowy to the public that even at the Clarendon Press there were only two persons who had just once seen his face and heard his voice." This pamphlet-biography (60 pp.) by his life-long friend, George Gordon Coulton, is a little British masterpiece, a Goodbye, Mr. Chips come true.

Eldest of eight children, whose father was a successful tutor, Henry Watson Fowler had a solid, no-nonsense British education at Rugby and Balliol, settled down to spend his days as a schoolmaster at Sedbergh School, in Yorkshire. There he stayed for 17 years, leaving in friendly, dignified disagreement with the Head because he would not consider preparing boys for confirmation. A master of unbendingly upright character, a pipe-puffer, he was called "Joey Stinker" because he always smelled of tobacco. In a hard-working staff he set the pace, averaged ten hours work a day in term-time, including Sundays. Though he did not feel qualified to be a spiritual mentor, he was religious in the British sense, never missed his daily exercise.

When he went to London to support himself by scholarly journalism he carried on his Spartan regime, started the day, whatever the weather, by a run and a swim in the Serpentine. In one Christmas-Day swimming race his chest was severely cut by the ice. He bought his eggs by the week, turned them over each morning like so many hour-glasses, so that the yolk would not settle to the edge, start rotting. After three years of London, Fowler joined his brother Frank on the island of Guernsey, lived in hermit-like sociability, 50 yards away from him, until the War. Fowler liked to work sitting in the door of his cottage, dressed in football jersey and shorts. At 50 Fowler quietly married a middle-aged hospital superintendent, as garrulous as he was taciturn. Their marriage was childless, happy, Darby-&-Joanish.

When the War broke out, the Fowler brothers lied about their ages (H. W. was 57, Frank 45), were accepted for service. After a short tour of duty in the trenches their deception was discovered and they were sent to the rear to heave coal, wash dishes. But the Fowler brothers were no ordinary soldiers: they addressed a strong and lucid complaint to the authorities in which they suggested "that such conversion of persons who undertook purely from patriotic motives the duties of soldiers on active service into unwilling menials or servants is an incredibly ungenerous policy on the part of the military authorities, especially when the victims are advanced in years and of a class unused to the kind of work imposed on them, and that such ungenerous treatment must, when it becomes generally known at the end of the war, bring grave discredit on those responsible for it." They got their discharge.

Fowler settled down again to his morning run-and-dip, his pipe, his work, his wife. As she grew older, both knew she was dying of cancer: neither ever mentioned the subject to the other. They lived in a cottage all their lives, never kept a servant. When she died (1930) he tried manfully to go on with his old-bachelor ways, but he was an old man himself by then. His morning run became a walk, then a snooze by the fire. Three years later, at the age of 75. Lexicographer Fowler quietly joined his lady.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.