Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog Read online

  By 1860, he had been the principal of Cortland Academy in Homer, New York, for eight years. His first wife had died of consumption in 1849, and he had married Clarissa, his second, just a year later. And after testing his concepts on the captive student audience at the academy, and having been repeatedly “solicited” by the teachers there, he wrote the book that revolutionized the teaching of grammar and “with diffidence” submitted it for publication. Until then, parsing—identifying the grammatical function of the elements in a sentence, as in Miss Peckham’s class—was the accepted way of teaching grammar. Not a lot of fun. But then along came Clark with his balloons!

  With an edifying reference to Quintillian, Clark begins the book by comparing grammar to both geometry (“an abstract truth made tangible”) and architecture (“like the foundation of a building … although out of sight and not always properly valued by those most interested in its condition”).6 He ends it with a strange little Appendix containing some orthographic trivia, the rules of capitalization, and a list of handy abbreviations like B.D. (Bachelor of Divinity) and L.S. (Place of the Seal7). But in between, Clark invented a system of crazy-looking constructions that look like those dachshunds fashioned from balloons at parties for toddlers—or elaborate systems of propane storage tanks—or possibly invading hordes of Goodyear blimps or giant hamburger rolls or, if you’re in the right mood, a fleet of flying saucers. For Clark, the sentence Time slept on flowers and lent his glass to Hope—whatever it may mean—was best visualized as:

  Clark asserts, “It is confidently believed that the Method of teaching Grammar herein suggested, is the true method.” This was written before Strunk and White, among others, cautioned against the passive voice and the convoluted sentence—and probably the diffident Clark was too modest a man to come right out with a statement like “I confidently believe my method is the best.” He was also thirty years too early for Twain’s tongue-in-cheek advice—in his Fenimore Cooper essay—to “eschew surplusage.” Clark goes on to say, in his preface to the fifteenth edition, “The diagrams are made to render the Analysis of Sentences more perspicuous,” which I think means that the diagrams make it easier to analyze the sentences.

  Despite his stilted prose, Clark has a poetic soul and is given to elaborate sentiments lifted from his vast store of learning. He provides wacky balloon versions of sentences like The Lord uplifts his awful hand and chains you to the shore and Our proper bliss depends on what we blame and Satyrs and Sylvan Boys were seen Peeping from forth their alleys green. (As I said, it doesn’t matter what a sentence says, as long as it’s diagrammable.) Clark also had a gloomy side: The lame, the blind, and the aged repose in hospitals, he reminds us—but, put into balloons, this idea looks quite cheerful. In fact, it looks hilarious.

  A few years later, Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg took the balloons and ran with them, but they straightened them out into lines and angles that were certainly easier to draw and maybe aroused less mirth in the classroom.

  Both men were important pedagogues with plenty of experience trying to cram grammar into the heads of unenthusiastic students. When they wrote their book, Brainerd Kellogg was a professor at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. He has a sober, respectable, impressively moustachioed face; it’s easy to imagine him as a Miss Peckham-ish stickler for not only proper English but good behavior. But he taught at the Poly for 39 years and was apparently a well-loved teacher. Kellogg was the very model of the high-minded, cultured, poetry-spouting, civic-minded professor. He was mentioned in the newspapers every couple of weeks for giving a reading of patriotic poems like “Barbara Fritchie” and “Paul Revere’s Ride” at the YMCA, or supervising a debate at the Poly on the topic “Resolved: That Canada Should be Annexed to the US,” or enlightening an overflow crowd at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences (now the Brooklyn Museum of Art) on some highfalutin subject like “The Mission of Poetry” or “The English Language Philologically Considered.” (If his nickname was “Brainy,” it was apt indeed.) On the strength of his achievements, Kellogg was appointed to ever-higher positions at the Polytechnic: eventually, he would be elected president of the department of Philology (modern-day linguistics) and then elevated to dean.

  By the time Brainy Kellogg retired from the institute in 1907, he was not only Dean of Faculty there, but also head of the departments of philology and English at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences. He is memorialized fondly, facial hair and all, on the website of today’s Polytechnic.

  His co-diagrammer, Alonzo Reed, apparently devoted his life to teaching (he became a teacher at age 16 in the little Catskills town where he was born) and writing grammar books. These included not only his landmark collaborations with Brainerd Kellogg (as far as I can figure out, the two of them wrote six books together), but also texts like Reed’s Word Lessons: A Complete Speller (1890), whose subtitle promises not only to teach spelling, pronunciation, and definitions of common words, but to “awaken new interest in the study of synonyms and of word-analysis.” Reed also published a grammar book based on fables, among them “Two Wise Goats,” which I found myself longing to read—goats are famous in pop legend not for being wise but for being wise guys, eating tin cans and other inappropriate objects—but about which I could find no information anywhere.

  Brainerd “Brainy” Kellogg

  Reed’s dedication to the cause of grammar, spelling, synonyms, and word analysis is especially admirable because he seems to have been a wealthy gentleman of leisure—or, at least, he lived like one. Whether his riches came from his grammar books or from another source is unknown, though a newspaper account of the time notes that Reed & Kellogg’s books “have reached the enormous annual sale of about a half million copies.” A copy sold for about fifty cents, so on an annual sale of $250,000, if Reed and Kellogg split a 10% royalty, each netted more than $10,000 a year per book—and multiplied by half a dozen books, that was a hefty income in those days. That figure, however, didn’t include his real estate: Reed owned property in Brooklyn and a grand country estate, Seatuck Lodge, overlooking the water in what we now call the Hamptons. The house was so immense that after his death it was turned into a private club, and though his widow sold the place, she continued to live well, and donated an immense and grandiose bronze plaque in her husband’s honor to the local Presbyterian Church where he had been an elder.

  Alonzo Reed and his wife in front of Seatuck Lodge.

  Alonzo Reed, at first glance, is an odd mix of a name—one half Spanish or Italian, the other half about as solidly Anglo-Saxon as you can get, like a shot of tequila on the menu of a prim Boston tea shop. But amid the fashion of the time for all things Greek and Roman—in everything from architecture to hair-dos to rhetorical styles to city names like Rome, Troy, and Ithaca in upstate New York (including my own nearby Syracuse)—exotic-sounding monikers came into vogue, especially for boys, displacing some of the stolid Johns and Williams. Names like Alonzo were far from rare: amazingly enough, Brainerd Kellogg’s own brother was named Sylvester Alonzo!

  I’ve often wondered how Reed and Kellogg became acquainted, and how they decided to collaborate on their books. Knowing the coincidence of the two names provides a break in the cloud of unknowing. I imagine Reed and Kellogg encountering each other for the first time, one of those historic meetings when the heavens shook. Where it took place is irrelevant: a faculty meeting (Reed taught at the Poly for seventeen years before retiring to his country estate), a thé dansant to which they were dragged by their wives, a lecture given on, say, Emerson and the Transcendentalists—a hot topic of the day. They are introduced: Mr. Alonzo Reed, meet Professor Brainerd Kellogg.

  “How do you do, sir.”

  “How do you do. Fascinating lecture, was it not? And—I say, my good man—I can’t help but find the coincidence interesting in an Emersonian sense—meaning, of course, in its transcendental aspect, the notion that it goes beyond the conventions of reality as we experience it—that your name is the same as that of my e
steemed younger brother, who was christened Sylvester Alonzo Kellogg, but who—perhaps understandably, considering the nobility of that particular praenomen—prefers to be known as Alonzo.”

  “A beguiling fact indeed, Professor Kellogg! For, while I am aware that this goodly earth does in fact bear its fair share of Alonzos, it is perennially a delight to me when I actually encounter one—or, I should say, so long as we are speaking transcendentally—when I encounter a fraternal connection to one.”

  (Laughter, followed by a couple of drinks, followed by—yes!—Higher Lessons in English and all its progeny.)

  In their book, the authors give generous credit to their fellow instructors: like Clark’s balloons, the diagrams apparently grew out of the suggestions of their colleagues at the Poly. It’s entertaining to imagine animated debates in the faculty rooms at these places about where to place the various parts of speech and what on earth to do about interjections. Whoever came up with the slanting line that indicates a predicate noun or adjective should be immortalized:

  And, as for interjections, here are a few of their gloomy examples:

  Alas! All hope has fled.

  Oh! We shall certainly drown.

  Zounds! Stop pinching!

  Thanks to the wonders of eBay, I have before me not only Clark’s pioneering volume (on which some bored student has done a perfect rubbing of a 1932 Indian Head penny in the back, just after the Appendix), but also a well-thumbed version (there were many) of the Reed-Kellogg book, a pretty little Revised Edition, in a size that would fit handily into a pocket.

  The book is of its time in many ways, from its fancy cloth cover and a section on letter-writing printed in elegant 19th-century calligraphy, to its suggestions for sentences to diagram. Like Clark’s book, Reed and Kellogg’s also sheds some light on the concerns and customs of the late nineteenth century, a time very different from our own—probably closer to life in the mid-1950s when Sister B’s dog barked, though I don’t know what her sixth graders would have thought of such sentences as

  All men must die.

  In old age our senses fail.

  Little Arthur was murdered.

  Or, my personal favorite, an Arab / Berber / Moroccan / Sanskrit proverb

  Death is the black camel which stands at every man’s gate.

  I suspect we would have been thrilled but a little shocked: at our school, we were as familiar with the Requiem Mass as we were with “Jingle Bells,” but we had been taught to view death not as a camel but as a smiling asexual blonde angel who would lead us to our heavenly reward. At any rate, this kind of memento mori aimed at eleven-year-olds had pretty much gone out of fashion by the time I learned diagramming.

  What’s also worth noting is that, in a book designed for public-school students and written by two professors at the obviously secular Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, the separation of church and state is glaringly overlooked. Prayer leads the heart to God, and he always listens. I know that my Redeemer liveth. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. The immense quantity of matter in the universe presents a most striking display of Almighty power.

  Along with most other educators of the time (maybe arithmetic books were spared, though I somehow doubt it), Reed and Kellogg felt compelled to instruct students not only in grammar but in general knowledge—what we might call trivia. So their book is also full of interesting facts about, for example, nature. The “immense quantity of matter in the universe” included not only cats and dogs, who could be depended on for tame and down-home sentences à la Sister B, but much more exotic non-pets: The toad spends the winter in a dormant state. The lion belongs to the cat tribe, but he cannot climb a tree. An ostrich outruns an Arab’s horse.

  And Reed and Kellogg (or the guys around the faculty room coffee urn), though associated with an urban institute of higher learning, were not unacquainted with the simpler lives of farmers. In their book, the sheaves are gathered and the plough-boy plods homeward. They dip instructively into history, too, from the simple and incontrovertible subject/predicate/object kind of fact (Caesar crossed the Rubicon and, later, Brutus stabbed Caesar) to more complex sentences like:

  Aaron Burr was a man who had fascinating manners.8

  Nor were Reed and Kellogg above some statements that would not fly in a later age:

  * The Germans do their work with the most patience and deliberation.

  * Alexandria, the capital of Lower Egypt, is an ill-looking city.

  * He ran forward and kissed him.

  * The laurels of the warrior must at all times be dyed in blood.

  * The fairies were called together.

  These and other examples wouldn’t be allowable today in a world where educators’ exaggerated respect for the sensitivities of students has tried to plug up the juices of literature in favor of a dubious “political correctness.”

  Not only are words like “brotherhood” and “mankind” no longer to be found in textbooks or on standardized tests—maybe a case could be made for such excisions—but in one famous example, a reference to mountain climbing was eliminated from a test passage because test-takers who don’t live near mountains might feel unjustly deprived and upset, and therefore be at a disadvantage on the test. In a paragraph about the ancient Sumerians, the fact that in 2000 B.C. or so they kept slaves was deleted. Handicaps can’t be mentioned—and handicaps include chubbiness, foreign birth, gray hair, and living on a farm. And, needless to say, older people cannot under any circumstances walk with canes or sit in rocking chairs.

  Reed and Kellogg lived in a more innocent, less self-conscious, more homogeneous time. They were cool enough, though, to anticipate the words of Bob Dylan in an illustration of the proper placement of an adverb:

  * * *

  6 Reaching for a simile a hundred years later, E.B. White likened grammar to baseball: “No ball game [is] anything but chaotic if it lacks a mound, a box, bases, and foul lines.”

  7 This has, alas, nothing to do with ice floes in the Arctic Ocean. It’s from Latin—locus sigilli—and the term goes back to sealing-wax days when one’s personal seal had to be affixed to a legal document.

  8 We were taught in school that he was a traitor and a murderer: his manners would seem beside the point. Maybe Reed and Kellogg were closet anti-Hamiltonians.

  chapter 3

  GENERAL RULES

  Trying to stuff the complexities of the English language into flat visual structures is a bit like trying to force a cat into the carrier for a trip to the vet, and coming up with the idea in the first place seems comparable to the boldness and daring of cracking open the first oyster and deciding it looked like lunch. We’ll never know what inspired Clark to pick up his quill pen and draw his set of balloons, but it’s surprising that they were such a hit.

  The balloons could be useful when they dealt with simple sentences: that barking dog looks comprehensible enough when he’s turned into a balloon dog—it even has the look of an actual cartoon dachshund, albeit legless and with its tongue hanging out:

  But when Clark needed to indicate a more complicated structure, he ran into trouble. His system allowed only for the adding of more soap bubbles, and more, and yet more—making for wheels-within-wheels drawings that require not only a degree of artistic skill but also the kind of mental capabilities that seem far beyond most pre-teens, even mid-nineteenth-century ones. Early in his book, Clark lays down the “General Rules” for diagrams, beginning with this:

  and moving on to the twelve rules for drawing them, of which Rule 7 is:

  If the adjunct is a Sentence, it is attached by a line to the Word which the Adjunct Sentence limits; as, the Adjunct Sentence within the dotted line (6), is attached by the line from (2) to (9), A, and (6 to 19 inclusive) is attached to (1), B.

  Let’s say the hapless student masters the rules and, hunched over his slate in the Cortland Academy in Homer, New York, or a one-room schoolhouse in Centerville, Kansas, he’s ready to draw some balloons. Very soon, he’s going to run in
to more trouble. Just one page after he hits us with the rules, Clark offers this easy-seeming sentence (cribbed from Sir Walter Scott):

  I thank thee, Roderick, for the word.

  Properly ballooned, it looks like this:

  The trouble here is that it’s impossible to tell from the diagram whether the sentence should be read as Scott wrote it, or as “I thank thee for the word Roderick” (as opposed to the word Dilbert). It’s a quandary that comes up regularly in Clark’s brave and admirable book: once the parts of the sentence are transformed into zeppelins, confusion reigns:

  He that getteth wisdom loveth his own soul.

  Scaling yonder peak I saw an eagle wheeling near its brow.

  Can storied urn or animated bust back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

  To which our scholarly young friend with the chalk and the slate might respond, “Huh?”

  By comparison, Reed and Kellogg are models of clarity. Those twenty-plus years between A Practical Grammar and Higher Lessons in English were the Dark Ages of diagramming, during which an entire generation of schoolchildren sweated over bloated ovoids filled with quotations from the masters. When Reed and Kellogg transformed the blimps into roadmaps, life must have improved enormously.