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Recently, reading Jennifer Egan’s ambitious historical novel, Manhattan Beach, I found myself irritated by what I thought was a series of forced attempts to sound old-fashioned. The book is set in the years before and during the Second World War. Repeatedly in dialogue, and occasionally in narration, Egan writes lines like the following:
“Have you any brothers?” Tabatha asked.
“Say, have you time for a drive to meet an old friend of mine?” he asked.
“You’ve no idea what Mr. Styles thought.”
“Men who’ve grown up rich haven’t the first idea how to fight.”
He’d small pink hands, thinning white hair, was well tailored (Brooks Brothers), but not as well as he might have been (Savile Row).
She’d not had enough champagne to quash the sudden dull sadness.
Oh, please, I thought whenever I ran across these locutions. People didn’t really speak this way, and you’re not a narrator from 1941 anyhow. Why not write, “Do you have any brothers?” or “He had small pink hands”? I loved the book despite the minor gratings of have you a … and hadn’t he time to … , but I resolved, were I write a book set in the first four decades of this century, not to follow Egan’s idiomatic model.
Then I reread The Sun Also Rises, which I just finished teaching in Paris. And yup, you guessed it, Egan is right. Hemingway, not trying in any way to write affected speech — quite the opposite — lards his book with such expressions:
“You’ve a hell of a biblical name, Jake.”
“So he said: What medals have you, sir?’”
“I’ve no money,” Mike said.
“He’s his name stencilled on all the capes and muletas,” she said.
Cut me a big slice of humble pie. I guess they did talk that way, at least in the 1920s, and perhaps through mid-century. My study goes no farther than these two books, several fruitless Google searches, and an N-grams result for Haven’t a and Don’t have a that shows the popularity of the terms crossing in 1940, with Don’t have a gaining swiftly in ascendance after that.
The have expressions we now use, at least in American English (I defer to experts like my colleague Ben Yagoda on Britishisms), are wordier. We say, “Don’t you have any brothers?”; “I haven’t got any money”; “You’ve got a hell of a biblical name” or “You have a hell of a biblical name.” Plenty of languages toss in extra words, of course; when I ask, here in Paris, “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” I am more or less asking “What is it that this is as that?” But no one seems to shorten it to the perfectly grammatical “Quel est-ce?” I suppose that these inefficient constructions are an example of pleonasm, though before I started focusing on Egan and Hemingway I confined my understanding of that term to redundant expressions like tuna fish or safe haven.
Some 1930s parlance lingers. I’ll say, for instance, “I haven’t a clue,” though I’m aware that it sounds affected. What I accept in The Sun Also Rises but need to work to accept in Manhattan Beach is that it didn’t use to sound affected — that Egan’s gangsters and Hemingway’s drifters were using, simply, the language of their time. I can’t give Hemingway particular kudos for reproducing what he heard, but I have revised my opinion of Manhattan Beach and say brava, Jennifer Egan: You’ve a hell of a good ear.