In August 1936, Time magazine published an article about the research of Miller McClintock, the first person ever awarded a doctorate in traffic. With the rise of automobiles came the rise of traffic accidents. Analyzing what factors led in 1935, for instance, to 37,000 deaths and property loss equal to more than $1.5 billion was the job of McClintock and his traffic bureau, which were funded by the Automobile Manufacturers Association.1
Almost 100 percent of accidents, reported Time, were caused by 15 percent of drivers, a group the magazine described colloquially as “speed maniacs, psychopaths, drunks, or morons.” Expecting these folks to shape up and become safer drivers was unrealistic, according to McClintock and other “experts.” Instead, “the driver must be externally restrained from killing himself.”
McClintock classified accidents into four types: head-on collisions; collisions at intersections; those “generated by road shoulders, abrupt curves, faulty banking . . . trees, parked vehicles or pedestrians”; and rear-end collisions. These four he called, respectively, “medial,” “intersectional,” “marginal,” and “internal-stream.”
The solution was to build better roads. McClintock envisioned a now-familiar system for highways, with a clear division between opposing streams of traffic; three lanes in each direction, including one for passing and one for one slower driving; and finally, cloverleaf turnoffs. The aim, said McClintock, was to channel automobiles “in a sealed conduit past all conflicting eddies.”
There was something so funny about jargon and its pseudoscientific rhetoric, thought Philip Gove, who was still teaching composition at NYU, where witnessing the forced march of students through the constant writing of class papers had made him an authority on insincere prose. The article in Time with its overdressed categories and suspiciously credentialed expert moved him to mock.
“Sirs,” he wrote in a letter to the editor, “From my unpublished thesis on bicycle accidents I give the following digest. There are five principal kinds: vectorial (when two vehicles coming from different directions alter each other’s subsequent position); intervenient (sudden appearance of immovable obstacles); interplanetary (leaving the road, as when riding off a bridge or an embankment); subcutaneous (loss of concentration caused by bees, dogs, etc.); and exhibitionist (passenger on handle bars, standing on head, etc.). Consequently, build one-way, one-wheel, walled-in alleyways for one cyclist at a time: when he exits, green light flashes, and entrance gates admit cyclist No. 2, etc. Please to give me an honorary LL.D. and two columns in TIME (with cut). . . .”2
Gove was indeed working on a dissertation, but its real subject was a subgenre of English fictional narrative he called “imaginary voyages,” such as those Gulliver undertakes in Jonathan Swift’s classic. It was a bibliographic work involving little to no literary interpretation. Bright enough but not exactly an academic star in the making, Gove struck one colleague as being under the impression that his career would be advanced by the excellence of his classroom teaching, which was not only mistaken but naïve.3 Yet in the late 1930s he got smart and focused his efforts on projects that would lead to his degree and to publications.
It was important that he figure these things out. He had married Grace, the pretty young woman he had met while trying to improve the quality of correspondence at AT&T. And they had two children, Norwood and Susan.
Another area of eighteenth-century literature that interested Gove was Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. But this work, which represents a milestone in both the history of dictionaries and the history of English literature, had already been the subject of extensive scholarship, so Gove turned his eye to various subtle, underexplored aspects. One was how the serialization of Johnson’s dictionary, begun two months after its original publication as a single volume, inspired the almost simultaneous serialization of Nathan Bailey’s much older dictionary, which had been updated using Johnson’s dictionary and was now competing with it.
The second question that interested Gove was how the bank of citations Johnson relied on to write his dictionary reflected Johnson’s own mind and affected the literary views of his dictionary. To know Johnson’s dictionary better, it would help to know more about the exact authors he had read and the exact editions he had read them in.
These were both highly technical areas of research, requiring detailed knowledge of the book business of Johnson’s time and the precise contents of Johnson’s library. The first reflected a surprising interest in competition among dictionaries (a potentially nasty business, all in all), and the second an important but only partial truth: that a dictionary comes down to the evidence collected by the lexicographer, those countless little passages copied out from countless, usually unseen, sources. While there is much to be said for it, this view tends to underrate the influence of the lexicographer, who, like any editor, must finally insist on what goes in and what stays out, whether for good intellectual reasons or practical necessity or to anticipate the desires of the marketplace or in deference to the prejudices of the age. The impetus for Gove’s project emphasized the purity of process at the expense of editorial prerogative—such as that exercised by Johnson himself and, in Gove’s own day, the Editorial Board of Merriam-Webster.
In early 1939, Gove defended his dissertation but was not ready to deposit the required seventy-five copies in the Columbia University library in order to receive his doctorate. He wished to travel to France and England to expand his painstaking catalog of all known examples of imaginary voyages between 1700 and 1800. A fellowship worth two thousand dollars came through, which Gove would use to put finishing touches on his dissertation and, while he was at it, perform research for a book he was planning on Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Disappointed to learn that NYU had rejected his request for a sabbatical at half pay—an unpaid leave was his only option—he decided to go abroad with his family all the same.4
Philip spent the summer in London, while Grace and the children made do, lonesome, far away in Cornwall, on the southern tip of England. The family stayed in touch by letter, these messages intensely affectionate and always yearning. Grace recounts how Norwood “came in from meeting the postman at the gate with a letter and three packages. He said, ‘This is a day, isn’t it?’ Susie was proud that she had a possession to share, and she and Nod became such good fellows over their game of dominoes that when Nod left to get the milk she insisted on coming with him even though it was raining.”5
Gove busied himself with research, getting to know London, and getting to know Johnson scholars and lexicographers. At the end of the summer, he rejoined his family, and, after placing the children in a school, he and Grace “spent a few quiet days in a bungalow on the banks of the English river Looe, surrounded by the calm green tops of Cornwall hills.”6 Years later Gove recalled the details of these weeks in a poignant memoir.
The bungalow owner’s son was an Air Raid Precautions warden who liked to regale his guests with stories about local preparations for war. “The gas squad, urgently called out to assist the Plymouth fire squad in the practice burning of slum quarters, had themselves been so overcome by mere woodsmoke that it was necessary to call out the first aid squad to carry them off on emergency stretchers.” Gove savored the grim humor of these practice episodes: “One ‘casualty,’ assigned to be badly wounded, having given up all hope after interminable wait, left a note on his spot, reading, ‘Have bled to death and gone home to bed.’ ”
In late August, Philip and Grace set out for London, learning at the nearby train station that, in fact, the city was being evacuated. The next day, September 1, the poet Auden noted “the clever hopes expire of a low dishonest decade.” With their luggage and gas masks from Her Majesty’s government, the Goves bought tickets to go as far as Reading. “The train was crowded. People seemed uneasy, apprehensive, and uncommonly concerned about soldiers and sailors who filled the station platforms.”
A day later they visited the city, “impelled by curiosity.” Philip and Grace hoped to encounter American acquaintances, someone with information on what was really going on. Like hapless tourists, they made their way to the American Embassy, which was thronged. “I do not know why such a visit seemed desirable,” recalled Gove, “or what we would have said even if we could have talked to Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy himself. I think what we both wanted was for someone—anyone at all—to tell us to run along, and not worry.”
They joined the evacuation of London, heading back to Reading, and then on to Oxford the next day. The morning of Sunday, September 3, Grace and Philip took a walk “along Iffley Road to look at a Norman church with its dogtooth carving and the yew trees in the churchyard.” Their stroll led into fields where children were playing. The married couple admired the town’s “neat rows of brick houses, garden plots bright in the sunlight, and cheerful-looking people.” When they returned to their boardinghouse, the landlady greeted them. “ ‘Did you have a nice walk? And see the church? Well, we are at war.’ ”
The Goves stayed abroad nonetheless, and it was a productive year for Philip, who published four journal articles on Johnson. In reviewing the competition between Bailey’s serialized dictionary and Johnson’s, he noted that Bailey’s updaters had relied more than a little on Johnson’s newer dictionary, borrowings that struck the modern eye as dubious: Wrote Gove, “A glance at any page of Bailey will reveal that line after line is rankly plagiarized” from Johnson.7
This argument drew interest from other Johnsonians, mainly for its lack of context: Copying among lexicographers had been more common in the eighteenth century, and even Johnson could be shown to have borrowed from Bailey’s original dictionary. On the bicentennial of Johnson’s dictionary, the American scholars James Sledd and Gwin J. Kolb returned to the issue, quoting Gove and commenting that “indignation at a lexicographer’s raids on his predecessors is a little utopian.”
The problem with Gove’s very earnest argument was that it expected too much originality, and even integrity, from a mere dictionary, that repository of traditions, including the minor tradition of imitating one’s predecessors. On the upside, his career was showing signs of life and his work was finally winning some attention.