The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. a Life of John O'hara

Current Books that formed the basis of the ever-expanding THE MEANING OF EVERYTHING: work in progress. One set of slips, aban- The Story of the Oxford doned by a contributor, eventually turned English Dictionary. up in a stable in County Cavan, Ireland; By Simon Winchester. Oxford Univ. another was found in a villa in Tuscany. Press. 360 pp. $25 The advent of Murray, one of those near- Admirers of Simon Winchester’s work will mythical polymaths of a lost era, proved the know that he has ventured onto this terrain turning point. The son of a linen draper, he before. In The Professor and the Madman was working as a schoolmaster when formally (1998), known to British readers as The Sur- appointed editor in 1879. It was not long geon of Crowthorne, he achieved bestseller- before he brought the chaotic venture back on dom with an account of the peculiar working track. Even so, he was not to live to see it to relationship between John Murray, editor of fruition; he died in 1915, 13 years before the final the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, pages were handed to the printers. and William Chester Minor, a conscientious lex- Although Oxford University Press is the icographer who also happened to be an inmate publisher of Winchester’s book, the firm’s rep- of the asylum for the criminally insane at utation does not emerge unscathed. After sign- Broadmoor. Having told that very odd tale, ing up for the dictionary around the time of Winchester now turns his attention to the mak- Murray’s arrival, the company adopted a stingy ing of the OED itself. approach to the finances. It took Murray enor- Ever since the success of Dava Sobel’s nav- mous effort to convince the Victorian bean igational history Longitude (1995), the pub- counters that the dictionary should be treated lishing world has been awash with all manner as a monument for the ages. of ripping nonfiction yarns. It can’t be long Even then, the relationship between pub- before some lucky author lands a million-dol- lisher and editor was frequently uneasy. During lar deal to write @: The Symbol That Built the one moment of frustration, Murray considered Internet. But Winchester’s unobtrusive erudition resigning and taking up one of the many pro- and droll turn of phrase set him apart from the fessorships being dangled before him by Amer- rest of the journalistic pack. ican universities. There was, as Winchester Like Longitude, The Meaning of Everything dryly notes, a certain prescience to Murray’s is a story of extraordinary endurance. When the observation: “The future of English scholar- idea of compiling a definitive survey of the Eng- ship lies in the United States. The language is lish language was first mooted at a meeting of studied with an enthusiasm unknown here.” the Philological Society in 1857, nobody can —Clive Davis have realized quite how taxing an endeavor it would become. Even by the all-conquering standards of the Victorian era, the multivolume THE ART OF BURNING BRIDGES: work would be a colossal project. Seventy years A Life of John O’Hara. would pass before it was complete. By Geoffrey Wolff. Knopf. 373 pp. $30 After all the optimism of the inaugural The epitaph on the gravestone of novelist speeches, the researchers soon became John O’Hara was a postmortem provocation to mired in the Sisyphean task of collating his critics: “Better than anyone else, he told the what Murray later termed “the multitudi- truth about his time. He was a professional. He nous ramifications of meaning.” (As Win- wrote honestly and well.” It didn’t help that the chester makes clear in his crisp overview of words were his own. the dictionary maker’s art, it was no coinci- O’Hara (1905–70) was the son of a promi- dence that Dr. Johnson defined a lexicogra- nent Irish physician in the coal-wealthy pher as “a harmless drudge.”) In spite of the town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania (Gibbsville in prodigious energy of the early overseers, the his fiction). He was raised Catholic when project soon fell far behind schedule. The Protestant was the socially preferable thing to staff—who were eventually augmented by be. A change in the family’s fortunes kept him volunteer readers around the globe—struggled from attending Yale, and he never got over the to keep track of the thousands of paper slips exclusion. And he was a sucker all his life for the 120 Wilson Quarterly.

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