The Earwicker Graves in Sidlesham

The main character in Finnegans Wake goes by many names, usually with the initials HCE (Howth Castle and Environs, Here Comes Everybody, Haveth Childers Everywhere, Haroun Childeric Eggeberth, He'll Cheat E'erawan, human erring and condonable, Handiman the Chomp, Esquoro etc). But his primary name is Earwicker. 

Chapter two begins with a discussion of how he came by this unusual surname.

Now...concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden’s occupational agnomen...and discarding once for all those theories from older sources which would link him back with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys, the Northeasts, the Ankers and the Earwickers of Sidlesham in the Hundred of Manhood...

Sidlesham, pronounced Sid-lesham, is a village in Sussex. It lies south of Chichester, in the Manhood Peninsula, also called the 'Hundred of Manhood' (A 'hundred' is an ancient administrative district).  The name probably comes from the Anglo-Saxon maene-wudu meaning 'men's wood' or 'common wood.'  Joyce would have discovered Sidlesham, and the name Earwicker, when he was on holiday in neighbouring Bognor Regis, in the summer of 1923. 

In 1961, Clive Hart visited Sidlesham and found several tombstones in the churchyard with the name 'Earwicker' on them. After making enquiries, he learned that there were still three elderly Earwickers living locally. He quotes this touching letter from Miss Gertrude Earwicker:

William Earwicker is the first one that we have known of coming to live in Sidlesham, some time in the 17 century, he died here in 1793, as a headstone in the Churchyard shows. His sons were William, John, & George, John being our grandfather, he passed on before we were born, so we did not know him. Our father Charles William used to tell us of their school days etc, he died in 1922. Our grandfather (John) bought a small farm, and built a house in 1858 Redgate Farm, the one that we sold in September, our father, and us were all born there, I had no other home, but as we are getting to our seventies, we could not carry on, and our brother Arthur has no children to carry on either. Our great uncle had a little school for the boys of Sidlesham at his cottage, he had been in the Army, in the 52nd Foot Regiment, educated himself in his travels, I believe taught them quite well in reading, writing, and arithematic, there was not a school here then, afterwards they walked daily to Chichester, (five miles) to finish their education, our father, and his brother Thomas, and John were among the boys. Our grandfather (John) used to sound the note on the pipe for the singing in the Church, (no organ) We were told that he was accidentally shut in the Church one night, he had gone into the belfry to look for an owl that was lodging there. Not knowing how to get out he rang the bells furiously, which soon brought someone to his rescue ... Earwickers now in Sidlesham, are myself Gertrude my sister Nellie Law, (widow) and my brother Arthur Earwicker.

quoted by Clive Hart, 'The Earwickers of Sidlesham' A Wake Digest, 1968 

Hart suggested that Joyce had found the name Earwicker when visiting the churchyard. However, Peter Timmerman later discovered that Joyce had used a written source, A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Bognor, 1923, which has this sentence:

Sidlesham Church is an Early English structure worthy of notice, and an examination of the surrounding tombstones should not be omitted if any interest is felt in deciphering curious names, striking examples being Earwicker, Glue, Gravy, Boniface, Anker, and Northeast.
                'The First Guide to Finnegans Wake', A Wake Newslitter,  June 1979

By chance, my sister Sarah and her husband Ben have just bought a coastguard's cottage in Selsey, which is only a short distance from Sidlesham. Going to visit for the first time this Saturday, Lisa and I arranged to meet them in the churchyard, to look for Earwickers, Glues, Gravys, Ankers and Northeasts.

We got the bus from Chichester to Sidlesham, a picture postcard village, of thatched white-painted flint and pebble houses.

This is Church Lane, which led us to the Church of St Mary, where the Earwickers are buried.





 Here's the church, which is mostly thirteenth century.

Lisa and I got to the Church first, and started inspecting the gravestones. After a few minutes, I heard Lisa shout, 'I've found an Earwicker!' 

By chance, it was the grave of Gertrude Earwicker, author of the letter to Clive Hart, who died in 1976, aged 86.

A few feet away, we found Gertrude's younger brother Arthur - perhaps the last of the Sidlesham Earwickers, though flowers are still placed on the grave.

 We discovered that they had had an older brother, William, who died aged just 16 in 1900.

  

There was yet another brother, Charles, 'called from this life' in 1961, aged 68.

 

The War Memorial in the Churchyard has a Glue and a Boniface among the names

 

 

We were now joined by Sarah, Ben and their daughter Anna, and I got them hunting for Earwickers, Glues, Gravys, Northeasts and Ankers. 

Lisa, Sarah, Ben and Anna

The only one of us who had any luck was Lisa, who has a newfound skill in deciphering gravestones. Next she found George Earwicker (1802-89), the brother of Gertrude's grandfather.

This was followed by her discovery of the 1881 grave of Isaac Glue!

Lisa then disappeared round the back of the Church, where she found the very first Earwicker grave, belonging to William, who died in 1793.

We didn't find any Gravys, Ankers or Northeasts, though we did come across a whole row of tombstones of several generations of men, all called 'Barzulai Porder'.

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce tells us that Earwicker is his hero's 'occupational agnomen', a surname which began as a nickname. He gives us a shaggy dog story about HCE receiving the name from a visiting king, who comes across him carrying a flowerpot on a pole, used for trapping earwigs. The longsighted king mistakes this for a lobster pot, and asks him what bait he's using:

On his majesty, who was, or often feigned to be, noticeably longsighted from green youth and had been meaning to inquire what, in effect, had caused yon causeway to be thus potholed, asking substitutionally to be put wise as to whether paternoster and silver doctors were not now more fancied bait for lobstertrapping honest blunt Haromphreyld answered in no uncertain tones very similarly with a fearless forehead: Naw, yer maggers, aw war jist a cotchin on thon bluggy earwuggers. 31.03-11

I wonder if HCE's reply is in a Sussex accent?  

Peter Timmerman discovered that the lobstertrapping and paternosters both come from the Guide to Bognor:

At the entrance to the Pier, and at other spots on the Parade, are numbers of the Wicker Traps, or ‘Pots,’ in which lobsters, crabs and prawns are taken. These traps are made by the fishermen. The withes are cut just before, or just after, Christmas, and are bought from neighbouring farmers … In shape, they much resemble the old-fashioned bee-hives. At the top is an entrance for the victim.

Fishing with ‘Paternoster’ is recommended from the Pier, as various depths of the bait will suit the habits of different fish.

The king then makes an incomprehensible joke to his attendants:

Holybones of Saint Hubert how our red brother of Pouringrainia would audibly fume did he know that we have for surtrusty bailiwick a turnpiker who is by turns a pikebailer no seldomer than an earwigger.  

So that's how he came to be called Earwicker!

Sending the piece to his patron, Joyce called it an 'extract of earwigs':

'I hope my extract of earwigs may give you some mildly comic relief.'

Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 10 September 1923 (British Library Weaver papers)

According to Ellman's biography, Joyce talked about earwigs with Mrs Myron Nutting:

He and Mrs Nutting talked then about the earwig, which he associated with his hero, Earwicker; she recalled that a Yorkshire name for earwig is 'twitchbell'. 'Will you give me that?' said Joyce, much pleased. He remarked that an old legend recounted that Cain got the idea of burial from watching an earwig beside his dead brother Abel.

At this point, there's a footnote on earwigs: 

Joyce investigated the earwig carefuly, even to the point of writing the entomological laboratory of the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle for papers on forficula. He liked the French word  for earwig, perce-oreille, and quickly assiciated it with Percy O'Reilly, a famous player from West Meath in the All Ireland Polo Club in 1905. Then he wrote 'The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly' (FW 44-6) 

And here's a memory of Joyce at the end of his life from Alexis Leon, son of Joyce's assistant and friend Paul Leon:

'The last memory I have comes from St Gérand-le-Puy during the exodus from Paris. I remember my father and Mr Joyce sitting or taking walks, very often without talking, just like that.
   Once, while I was dashing around on a bicycle, I found them sitting on a tree trunk looking at something. Joyce pointed to an earwig that was coming out of a log and he said 'Ah, here's HCE, here comes HCE' – H.C. Earwicker, one of the characters of Finnegans Wake. They were both watching it and they truly thought it was a sign.
  That is my last memory of Joyce. He then went back to Zurich and my father and I left for Paris. The war did its work and both men died. But I have never forgotten those three or four years, when I came close to someone who left his mark on this century.'

'Arm in Arm With A Literary Legend', The Observer, 13 January 1991

I've gone into this earwig business at length to explain my astonishment at another Wakean synchronicity. After looking around the churchyard, we went inside the Church, and found a beautifully drawn map of the parish. 

Look at the names of two of the local fields!











For Joyce, there was much more to this name than earwig business. He owned a copy of Ernest Weekley's The Romance of Names, 1922, which has a chapter on the development of Anglo-Saxon names. It includes an entry for 'Eoforwacer, now Earwaker'.

J.S.Atherton pointed out that Eoforwacer is 'Ever-Waker, the man who never goes to sleep...The name may also mean, of course, the man who is always present at the Wake, or the man who is always, in the Irish sense of waking, celebrating a funeral.' 

A Wake Newslitter, August 1965

Leaving the church, we noticed a strange carving of a man's head above the door. His eyes are closed as if he's asleep.  I imagined him as the dreamer of Finnegans Wake, or maybe Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker himself!

Paris Memoirs: Robert McAlmon

The most vivid and entertaining character in Memoirs of Montparnasse is Robert McAlmon. After finishing Glassco's book, I got hold of McAlmon's own memoir, which has the characteristically witty and self-confident title, Being Geniuses Together.  It was originally published by Secker and Warburg in 1938. 
 

Robert McAlmon is almost forgotten now, but he was a key figure in 1920s Paris. He wrote short stories and poems and founded Contact Editions, publishing Hemingway's first book, among many others. He was James Joyce's financial supporter, occasional typist and regular drinking companion.   
 

'He attracted people, and I knew few who did as much....Somehow he dominated whatever group he was in. Whatever café or bar McAlmon patronized at the moment was the one where you saw everybody....His talents made him one of the most interesting personalities of the twenties. His ample means, unique in the Bohemian world, contributed not a little to his popularity. The drinks were always on him, and alas! often in him.'

 Sylvia Beach,  Shakespeare and Company

 

Bryher and McAlmon

McAlmon's 'ample means' came from an extraordinary piece of good luck. In 1920, while working as a nude model for Cooper Union art classes in New York, he met the poet Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the richest man in England. According to the terms of a will, Bryher needed a husband in order to get her inheritance. McAlmon agreed to an arranged marriage, which allowed Bryher to escape from her strict parents and live abroad with her true love, the poet Hilda Doolittle. In return for a generous allowance, all McAlmon had to do was visit the Ellermans a few times a year with Bryher, keeping up the pretence that they were living together in Paris. After their divorce, in 1927, he received a big settlement from Sir John, which led Hemingway to nickname him 'Robert McAlimony'. (Hemingway hated McAlmon, describing him in a letter to F.Scott Fitzgerald as 'a son of a bitch with a mind like an ingrowing toenail'. McAlmon thought Hemingway was a big phony).

McAlmon's first publication was his own book of short stories, based on his childhood in Dakota. The title was suggested by Joyce, according to McAlmon 'because he found my American use of language racy.' It's more likely that it was because the stories looked like they were written in haste! Joyce told the writer, Morley Callaghan, 'He has a talent, a real talent; but it is a disorganized talent.' 

You can see how disorganized he was in his own account of typing the Penelope episode of Ulysses for Joyce:

'He gave me the handwritten script, and his handwriting is minute and hen-scrawly; very difficult to decipher. With the script, he gave me four notebooks, and throughout the script were marks in red, yellow, blue, purple, and green, referring to phrases which must be inserted from one of the notebooks. For about three pages I was painstaking, and actually retyped one page to get the insertions in the right place. After that I thought, 'Molly might just as well think this or that a page or two later, or not at all.' and made the insertions wherever I happened to be typing. Years later, I asked Joyce if he'd noticed the mystic arrangement of Molly's thought, and he said he had, but agreed with my viewpoint. Molly's thoughts were irregular in several ways at least.'

Here's McAlmon's opinion of Ulysses:

'The book is dull. It takes a person highly curious about life and letters, one of those supermorons, an intellectual, to read it through.' 

Here he is on Work in Progress (Finnegans Wake):

'Work in Progress went beyond the beyond. It was nice to hear him read it in that soothing Irish tenor, but to read pages of that punning, sentimental-remembering, meandering-wondering about life-death-birth, naughty jokings and flippant obscenities, was quite beyond my capacity.'

Even so, McAlmon agreed to write an article about the book for transition:

'Having been urged to write the article by Sylvia Beach and Joyce, I read it to Joyce to see if he would mind it. The wily Mr Joyce saw that all the 'he hopes he has done this' or 'he endeavours to' phrases were legpulling.' 

There's the same irreverent attitude in this description of the 1931 reading of the French translation of the Anna Livia Plurabelle passage in Adrienne Monnier's bookshop:

He had a profile like John Barrymore's

'It is indeed a ghastly thing to observe the ghouls, the frustrated old maids of various sexes, the dandruffy young men, and the badly dressed young women who clutter up literary gatherings....The whole crew sat about with expressions painted on their faces that made one feel one was in Madame Tussaud's waxwork museum....We were packed in. It was impossible to escape. Seeing the worshipful, masklike  faces, I lifted my hands for a second in a gesture of prayer....An old man rushed across the room and slapped me in the face. I was naturally disconcerted, but decided that if the old man felt that holy about the session it was his right....
  It was not until the next day that I learned who the old man  was....It was Monsieur Dujardin, an aged French author who is supposed to have originated the inetrior monologue....But it was not because of my lack of reverence for the reading that he slapped me. It appears that his wife has very thick ankles, and the old man is touchy about that matter. He thought I had looked down at her feet and put my hands up in mock horror.'

The book is especially valuable for the revealingly human portrait of Joyce, who used formal manners as a defence in most situations, but let his guard down with McAlmon. There are many descriptions of drinking sessions.

'It was impressive to observe how everything was grist to his mill. He was constantly leaping upon phrases and bits of slang which came naturally from my American lips, and one night, when he was slightly spiffed, he wept a bit while explaining his love or infatuation for words, mere words....
  Almost every night Joyce and I met for aperitifs, and...at least one night a week he was ready to stay out all night, and those nights he was never ready to go home at any hour. We talked of the way a free mind can understand the possibility of all things: necrophilia and other weird rites. We agreed in disliking mysticism, particularly the fake and sugared mysticism of many poets and writers. We spoke of what a strange man Robert Burton must have been to have compiled his Anatomy of Melancholy, and he didn't know in the end a bit more about it than we did. Sir Thomas Browne, not to speak of Ezra Pound and Eliot and Moore and Shaw we discussed, but sooner or later Mr Joyce began reciting Dante in sonorous Italian. When that misty and intent look came upon his face and into his eyes I knew that friend Joyce wasn't going home till early morning....

  The Gypsy Bar was usually our late night hangout. The patron and the 'girls' knew us well, and knew that we would drink freely and surely stay till four or five in the morning. The girls of the place collected at the table and indulged in their Burgundian and Rabelaisian humors....Joyce watching, would be so amused, but inevitably there came a time when drink so moved his spirit that he began quoting from his own work or reciting long passages of Dante in rolling sonorous Italian....Lewis sometimes came through with recitations of Verlaine, but he did not get the owl eyes and mesmerising expression upon his face which was automatically Joyce's. Amid the clink of glasses, jazz music played badly by a French orchestra, the chatter and laughter of the whores, Joyce went on reciting Dante....

  In those days, and for some three years later, I didn't have hangovers. Only once, after a particularly mad assortment of drinks, I had to struggle to a lamppost and relieve myself, and Joyce said solicitously, 'I say McAlmon, your health is rather delicate. Maybe they'll be saying I'm a bad example to you.''

Being Geniuses Together, 1938

The Gypsy, long gone, was in Rue Cujas in Montparnasse.  There's a memory of Joyce and McAlmon's drunken nights there in Finnegans Wake, where a drunk Shem is boasting to a fellow writer 'he used to pal around with... in the porch way of a gipsy's bar...that he was avoopf (part me!) aware of no other shaggspick, other Shakhisbeard....as what he fancied or guessed the same as he was himself...and that...he would wipe alley English snooker....off the face of the erse.' 178.20-179.07

On several occasions, McAlmon had to carry a drunk Joyce home to the long-suffering Nora.

''Jim, you've been doin' this for twenty years, and I'm tellin' you it's the end. Do you understand? You've been bringin' your drunken companions to me too long, and now you've started McAlmon in the same way.' '

Here's a story McAlmon heard from the publisher Bill Bird, about the end of an all-night drinking session at Fouquet's:

Bill Bird, who carried Joyce up five flights

'At about five in the morning Bird had managed to get Joyce into a taxi and they drove to Joyce's apartment. The apartment was five flights up and the elevator was not working. When helped out of the taxi, Joyce flopped (I know that one too.) Bird, who is by no means a hefty individual, and who was a bit of a wreck from work and worry, carried him up the five flights and felt weak and trembling at the top. Once there however, Joyce could stand up. He could even unlock the door of his apartment and enter. Once inside, he went into the bathroom, locked the door, and sulkily refused to come out.
  Just before closing the bathroom door, however, he turned to Bird and said, 'You see how it is, Bird. I have brought them through the war and now they threaten to leave me.'....Nora pled; Bill argued and cajoled, but it was a quarter of an hour before Joyce would come out of the bathroom. 'Mr Bird, what are you to do with such a man?'  said Nora. 'And to think I have put up with him like this for all these years. What a damn fool his admirers would think me if they knew it all! He may be a genius to them, but look at him, what is he to me?''

Here he describes a St Patrick's Day party at the Trianon: 

'Joyce sang songs...and I broke loose with my 'Chinese Opera'. Joyce wanted me to sing it, and I did. It is the corncrake and the calliope wail of a Chinese virgin in a snowstorm, not understanding where she got her newborn babe, and the neighbour's son claims it is not his inasmuch as he never saw her before. This is a performance that has had me thrown out of several bars and most respectable households and the police of various stations know it well.
  Later, when we left, Joyce wanted to climb up the lamppost. He fancied himself various kinds of dancers, tap, Russian, and belly. Nora was there however, and protest as Mr Joyce might, she got him into a taxi, and, despite his bitter wailings and protestations, drove him home. '

McAlmon was so thick-skinned that he did not suspect that Joyce would mind being written about like this. He even read the manuscript to Joyce over several afternoons, expecting him to like it!  Joyce, who had always protected his respectable public image, was mortified, though he hid his feelings in front of McAlmon. According to Ellmann, he told his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver (who already strongly disapproved of his drinking), that the book made him feel 'actionable'.  

He read the work to Joyce, who mistook his honesty for maliciousness and called it an 'office boy's revenge'.
            Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company

Joyce's response to the book is in Gorman's authorised biography, which you can read about here.

Paris Memoirs: John Glassco

Seeing Midnight in Paris got me reading memoirs of the Lost Generation, the American writers who settled in Paris in the 1920s. I started with John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970).

Here's the cravat-wearing 'Buffy' Glassco, holding a martini. What an image of an aesthete! What a splendid author shot!

Glassco, a Canadian poet, was just eighteen when he arrived in Paris in 1928. He got to meet all the leading writers there, including James Joyce. More than thirty years later, he wrote this book, which he pretended he'd written at the time. Glassco was something of a trickster, and the book is partly fiction.

As a picture of bohemia, it reminded me of Julian McLaren-Ross's Memoirs of the Forties and Daniel Farsen's Soho in the Fifties. As an imaginative recreation of a writer's youth, it's as good as Patrick Leigh-Fermor's A Time of Gifts. Like Leigh-Fermor, Glassco makes his teenage self more erudite and sophisticated than he could possibly have been.

The result is a great book about being young, carefree and promiscuous, in what was then the world's most exciting city. Glassco, who also wrote pornographic novels, has lots of sexual encounters, with men and women. In the lesbian Gypsy Bar ('a little foul smelling boite on the boulevard Edgar Quinet'), he meets 'Daphne Berners' (Gwen Le Galienne) and 'Angela Martin' (Yvette Ledoux), who take him back to their studio, where they play records and make love.

Our amours, which were rather outré, were accompanied by an astonishing variety of music, from the happy melodies of Offenbach to the nasal breathy voice of Rudy Vallee and the silver snarling trumpet of Purcell. We all fell asleep soon after midnight, with the stove glowing softly and the stained moonllght silvering the high wall of the garden outside.

Robert McAlmon, Glassco and Graeme Taylor

In the Coupole, Glassco and his best friend, Graeme Taylor, are picked up by the charismatic bisexual writer, Robert McAlmon. Then Ernest Hemingway arrives.

A burly, moonfaced man, dressed in baggy tweeds and with his necktie clewed by a gold pin...came noisily into the bar and greeted our table with a loud, 'Well, Bob, up to your old tricks again?'

  McAlmon's sallow face turned pink. 'If it isn't Ernest, the fabulous phony! How are the bulls?'

 'And how is North America McAlmon, the unfinished Poem?' He leaned over and pummelled McAlmon in the ribs, grinning and blowing beery breath over the table....

  'It's only Hemingway,' said Bob loudly to both of us. 'Pay no attention and he may go away.'

 .... I found (Hemingway) almost as unattractive as his short stories – those studies in tight-lipped emotionalism and volcanic sentimentality that, with their absurd plots and dialogue, give me the effect of a gutless Prometheus who has tied himself up with string. 

Glassco is equally unimpressed by Gertrude Stein, whom he encounters while gatecrashing her party: 

Gertrude Stein projected a remarkable power, possibly due to the atmosphere of adulation that surrounded her. A rhomboidal woman dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap, she gave the impression of absolute irrefragability; her ankles, almost concealed by the hieratic folds of her dress, were like the pillars of a temple: it was impossible to conceive of her lying down.

At Stein's party, Glassco gets into a lively discussion about Jane Austen. 

I was suddenly aware that our hostess had advanced and was looking at me with piercing eyes.

 'Do I know you?' she said. 'No. I suppose you are just one of those silly young men who admire Jane Austen.'

 .... Already uncomfortable at being an uninvited guest, I found the calculated insolence of her tone intolerable and lost my temper.

  'Yes I am,' I said. 'And I suppose you are just one of those silly old women who don't.'

  The fat Buddha-like face did not move. Miss Stein merely turned, like a gun revolving on its turret, and moved imperturbably away.

  

McAlmon and Glassco in Nice

In another scene, McAlmon, Joyce's closest friend in Paris, takes Glassco to visit him:

One day he suggested we go and see James Joyce. 'He's all alone and there's some kind of eye operation coming up, so the old Irish tenor's not feeling his oats. He said to bring along anyone I wanted. But don't talk about his work; we'll just get a little stinko together. Now's the time, when Nora's not there....And whatever you do, don't ask him what he's going to call his Work in Progress. He has a bee in his bonnet that he'll never finish it if he tells anyone what it's called.'

  'I can't make head or tail of it anyway.'

 'Good, tell him that if you get a chance. He'll like it.' 

 'What do you think of it yourself?'

 'If he thinks it's good, it's good enough for me.' 

Here's Glassco's first sight of the great man:

He was almost as distinguished looking as in his posed portraits; but the thin twisted mouth was now little more than a slit, the bibulous nose was pitted with holes like a piece of red-coloured cork, and the little goatee looked affected and out of place; his eyes were almost invisible behind thick glasses.... he was reserved, charming, gracious, and his voice was music. He had a good figure for clothes but was wearing a very badly cut suit.  

  The chilled wine was a coarse Niersteiner – light, dry and aromatic. Joyce sipped it with gormandise.

  'I'm getting on well with the oeuvre grandissime,' he said. 'You'll be seeing another piece of it in Mr Jolas's little magazine soon. Tell me now, McAlmon, do you still like it?'

  Bob jerked himself around in his chair. 'It's great, sir, simply great. It has got a wonderful flowing quality of Molly Bloom's thoughts, only it's got more variety. In a few years nobody'll be able to write a book in English any more, the words will be out of date.'

 Joyce shrugged deprecatingly. 'Oh no.'

A wide ranging conversation follows, covering puns, schoolteachers, nuns, the English novelist Richardson (described by Joyce as 'a remorselessly cruel spider') and Madame Bovary.  

    

As we went home I told Bob I had never thought of Joyce as an original critic.

 'Oh the old Irish tenor's got sides to him that don't show in his writing,' he said. 'Too bad he's gone off the deep end with language.'   

I loved this book so much that I bought several more copies to give to friends and family.