The power of the Word

Jim Naughtie hams it up over the Bible.

By Antonia Quirke Published 13 January 2011

"Let's set the scene, Lucy, as the darkness falls over Hampton Court on this rainy evening." It's James Naughtie in the first of his programmes about the King James Bible (3 January, 9am). Lucy, an academic with an attractive speech impediment (her Ys are Ws, like Shirley Temple) raised her hand and pointed to the gates. "There's a blockage," she intoned. "The weoman of the guard would say, 'Nope, you're not coming through.'" A direct quotation? Naughtie was silent for a moment, breathing it all in. "It's impossible to not stand and think of all the things that happened here," he said, as the pair paused in a gallery that he noted was "haunted by the ghost of Katherine Howard".

“Yes," said Lucy, "she ran down here begging Henry for her life." (Tennessee Williams: "Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick . . .") How Naughtie was loving this! I've never heard him so furtive. Now, a new sense of urgency. "I can see some of our colleagues waiting for us quietly in their pews," he said suddenly, and advanced down some stairs to join them. There was a lot of Walking Off in this programme. Just as BBC TV is rich with presenters delivering lines, varying from the mildly portentous ("The citizens of Pompeii were never to see the light of day again . . .") to the completely innocuous ("And it all probably happened on a Wednesday"), and then walking inexplicably and immediately out of shot, so it was here.

Downstairs, the pews were rammed with prize guests. Fellows in Renaissance Catholicism, curators of palaces - experts of all kinds huddling into their collars against a netherworld chill, as though at a seance. Naughtie took centre stage. "Here in the Great Watching Chamber, the atmosphere is quite tense." Is, or was? Possibly Naughtie was channelling the original event on our behalf. "Bishops in silks, the Puritans in their plain black gowns - like merchants with nightcaps." And one could sense the multitudes of the long-dead throng, crushed together with the living, tutting as though at Euston during a delay. "The air must have been thick with tension, with anxiety. And the book they produced was to become a literary masterpiece." Sound of Walking Off.

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1 comment

Sun, 2011-01-16 16:54 — Keir

The book was to be called a literary masterpiece, true, almost always by people who conspicuously failed to accept its true purpose, which was not literary at all. It is described as poetic by people who have no love for or knowledge of poetry at all, including American fundamentalists, who are often spooked even by a simple metaphor!

Now, though most are unaware of it, Thomas Hardy was as much poet as novelist, and of supreme skill in both genres. Here is what he had to say about this book:

"By the will of God some men are born poetical. Of these some make themselves practical poets, others are made poets by lapse of time who were hardly recognized as such. Particularly has this been the case with the translators of the Bible. They translated into the language of their age; then the years began to corrupt that language as spoken, and to add grey lichen to the translation; until the moderns who use the corrupted tongue marvel at the poetry of the old words. When new they were not more than half so poetical. So that Coverdale, Tyndale and the rest of them are as ghosts what they never were in the flesh."