M.F.K. Fisher on soup

M.F.K. Fisher, With Bold Knife and Fork, 1968, pp. 43ff.

Any half-decent approach to maturity in the use of words is as mysterious as that of sex initiation into a Congolese tribe, but slower. Of course I can only judge at first hand by the former, but books tell me that it is apparently much easier to learn marital protocol in a jungle clearing southwest of Lambarene than it is to accept reasons for some of the sounds we use in communications.

My first hint of puzzlement ahead came long before I could spell or read, when I felt bothered, irked, perhaps slightly wounded by the rhyme scheme of:

I love little Pussy! Her coat is so warm!
And if I don't hurt her, she'll do me no harm.

Since then, I have listened to several kinds of accents tackle this, and never have they coped with the basic problem.

About a decade later in my semantic — or, at least, phonetic — education, after I had survived the hazards of "Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear" and suchlike hymns I could sing without reading, I met a professionally mad Basque, really a nice, mild Spanish aristocrat raised in Paris, who shocked me almost silly by prattling persuasively at my first grown-up dinner party about the pity of wasting the word "iodine" on a foul medicament."Correctly pronounced," he cried, "it would grace any lovely woman! If I should ever have a daughter, I would call her Yo-deen!"

I have never recovered from this part of the initiation, and I still transfer common sounds into real or imaginary languages, even subconsciously. Once, in a repaired attic room in Aix-en-Provence, I awoke to the Matins from St. Jean-de-Malte, which rang a few dozen feet from me, and I was saying aloud, "Avocado . . . ah-vo-caa-doh." It was beautiful. I was making progress. (It lasts, so that now deep bells sound very softly when I see the fruit or taste it.) My teachers were leading me from the jungle. Sometimes what they showed me was clear, as with Yo-deen, but why the Matins in the cool morning sounded avocado "ah-vo-caa-doh" to me I do not yet understand.

One of the last teachers was an Algerian with a bright eye and ear. "What," he asked me with a subtle air of impudent challenge, for he was politically wary and liked to ascribe this wariness to cultural gaps (mine, not his), "is a beautiful sentence to you — a perfect phrase?" Without any thought, I answered, "Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup." We were astounded, both of us, if for different reasons. We talked about it, and I have often pondered it since then. Basically, it can be left alone, like a fragment of Etruscan pottery, and the Algerian had no real need to point out to me, as he did very skillfully, how dull it would be in translation. (Italian and Spanish sounded better than French.)

Of course it was the Mock Turtle, singing for Alice when she was in Wonderland, who gave me the phrase. The peevish Gryphon had maliciously suggested the subject to the poor creature who represented soup itself in those Victorian days, and it was a kind of melancholy wail, a musical moan, he managed to produce. But it still sounds in my ears, "more and more faintly . . . carried on the breeze":

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two p
Ennyworth only of beautiful soup?
..............................................................
Soo-oop of the e-e-evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!