A Voice Still Heard

by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)

  For the American Jewish poets, whom I have largely ignored here, things may yet turn out more favorably. Once milieu and memory are exhausted, Jewishness can take on the strangeness of a fresh myth, or at least myth rediscovered; that myth need have no precise location, no street name or number; and the Bible may lose its tyranny of closeness and become a site to be ransacked. Something of the sort has happened in the last few decades among Yiddish writers, the novelists and storytellers among them finding it more and more difficult to locate their fictions in a recognizable place, while precisely an awareness of this dilemma has yielded the poets a rich subject.

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  But now I must retrace my steps and make things a little more complicated. For if I’ve been talking about the pressures that kept us at a certain distance from American literature, it must surely be remembered that there were other pressures driving us, sometimes feverishly, toward it.

  With time we discovered something strange about the writing of Americans: that even as we came to it feeling ourselves to be strangers, a number of the most notable writers, especially Whitman and Melville, had also regarded themselves as strangers, though not quite in the blunt and deprived way that we did. Whitman saw himself as a poet-prophet who necessarily had to keep a certain distance from his culture—a stranger in the sense proposed by Georg Simmel, that is, a potential wanderer who “has not quite lost the freedom of coming and going,” so that even when “fixed within a particular spatial group . . . his position in this group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it. . . .” The Whitman who has often been seen as “furtive,” the wanderer of the streets who comes into touch with everyone but remains close to no one, is a stranger, making of that condition the metaphysical coloring of his persona.

  In the early years of the immigrant culture, Whitman was the most popular American writer (except perhaps Poe) among Yiddish readers and writers; there are odes addressed to him in Yiddish and some rough translations of his shorter poems. One reason for this affection was that to the Yiddish-speaking immigrant intelligentsia Whitman seemed really to mean it when he invited everyone to make himself at home in the New World. They detected in Whitman an innocence of soul which touched their own innocence; they heard in his voice strains of loneliness which linked with their own loneliness; they saw him as the American who was what Americans ought to be, rather than what they usually turned out to be. They may have been misreading him, but, for their purposes, very usefully.

  By the time our turn came—I mean, those of us who would be writing in English—Whitman had lost some of his charm and come to seem portentous, airy, without roots in the griefs of the city, not really a “modern” sensibility. In 1936 “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” might not speak very strongly to a boy in the slums, even one who had often crossed on the Staten Island ferry on Saturday nights; it would take several decades before the poem could reveal itself in its grandeur, this time to the aging man that boy had become. But probably not until the late thirties or early forties did there come into our awareness another American writer who seemed to speak to us as comrade to comrade, stranger to stranger. Herman Melville was a “thicker” writer than Whitman, “thicker” with the pain of existence and the outrage of society, a cousin across the boundaries of nationality and religion who seemed the archetypal young man confronting a world entirely prepared to do him in. Had we known Redburn in time, we might have seen Melville as the tenderfoot only a step or two away from the greenhorn, and we would have been enchanted by the great rhetorical outpouring in that book where Melville welcomes immigrants, all peoples, to the American fraternity. We would have seen the young Melville as a fellow who had to work in a ship—I was about to say, in a shop—where he was hooted at because he wanted to keep some of the signs of his delicate youth. And we would have seen him as a writer who bore the hopes, or illusions, that we were bearing about the redemptive possibilities of “the people.”

  But the Melville book that we knew was, of course, Moby-Dick, quite enough to convince us of a true kinship. Melville was a man who had worked—perhaps the only authentic proletarian writer this country has ever known—and who had identified himself consciously with the downtrodden plebs. Melville was a writer who took Whitman’s democratic affirmations and made them into a wonderfully concrete and fraternal poetry. If he had been willing to welcome Indians, South Sea cannibals, Africans, and Parsees (we were not quite sure who Parsees were!), he might have been prepared to admit a Jew or two onto the Pequod if he had happened to think of it.

  The closeness one felt toward Melville I can only suggest by saying that when he begins with those utterly thrilling words, “Call me Ishmael,” we knew immediately that this meant he was not Ishmael, he was really Isaac. He was the son who had taken the blessing and then, in order to set out for the forbidden world, had also taken his brother’s unblessed name. We knew that this Isaac-cum-Ishmael was a mama’s boy trying to slide or swagger into the world of power; that he took the job because he had to earn a living, because he wanted to fraternize with workers, and because he needed to prove himself in the chill of the world. When he had told mother Sarah that he was leaving, oh, what a tearful scene that was! “Isaac,” she had said, “Isaac, be careful,” and so careful did he turn out to be that in order to pass in the Gentile world he said, “Call me Ishmael.” And we too would ask the world to call us Ishmael, both the political world and the literary world, in whose chill we also wanted to prove ourselves while expecting that finally we would still be recognized as Isaacs.

  The stranger who wore Redburn’s hunting jacket and subjected himself to trials of initiation on Ahab’s ship, this stranger seemed “one of us,” as we could never quite suppose the heroes of Cooper or Twain or Hawthorne were “one of us.” These remained alien writers, wonderful but distant, while Melville was our brother, a loose-fish as we were loose-fish.

  To be a loose-fish seemed admirable. Alienation was a badge we carried with pride, and our partial deracination—roots loosened in Jewish soil but still not torn out, roots lowered into American soil but still not fixed—gave us a range of possibilities. Some we seized. The American Jewish writers began developing styles that were new to American literature. That we should regard ourselves as partisans of modernism, defenders of the European experimentalists against middlebrow sluggards and know-nothing nativists—this followed a pattern already established in America. Decades earlier the first struggling painters to escape from the immigrant Jewish milieu, figures like Abraham Walkowitz and Max Weber, had leapt across their worthy American contemporaries in order to become pupils at the School of Paris. That, simultaneously, we should respond with pleasure and draw upon the styles of the popular Jewish entertainers, from Fanny Brice to the Marx Brothers, from Willie and Eugene Howard to S. J. Perelman—this too was made possible by the freedom of our partial deracination.

  Not fixed into a coherent style, we could imitate many. Not bound by an enclosing tradition, we could draw upon many. It was a remarkable feat for Alfred Kazin, still under thirty and living in Brooklyn, to write a book called On Native Grounds, in which he commandeered the whole of American prose fiction. It was a canny self-insight for Paul Goodman to declare his cousinship with Emerson and his American patriotism as a sign of anarchist desire, even though most of his friends, including me, were not quite sure what he was up to. And it was a display of sheer virtuosity, the virtuosity of a savored freedom, for Saul Bellow to write in Henderson the Rain King a pure Emersonian fiction, quite as if he had finally wrenched loose from Napoleon Street and the Hotel Ansonia.

  Imitation could not always be distinguished from improvisation. If I ask myself, where did the style of the Partisan Review essay come from, I think I know a few of the sources. The early Van Wyck Brooks may be one, Edmund Wilson another, and some Continental writers too. But I want also to add that we made it up, or, rather, the writers of a decade earlier, those who started out in
the middle thirties, dreamed it out of their visions or fantasies of what a cosmopolitan style should be. They drew upon Eliot and Trotsky, perhaps also Baudelaire and Valéry, but finally they made it up: a pastiche, brilliant, aggressive, unstable.

  It remains, then, an interesting question why it was that while the first literary passions of the American Jewish intellectuals were directed toward modernism, there was rather little modernist experimentation among the American Jewish writers of fiction. I have a few simple answers. In their imaginations these writers were drawn to Eliot and Joyce, Kafka and Brecht, but the stories most of them composed had little to do with the styles or methods of modernism. Modernism had come to America a decade earlier, in the twenties, with Hemingway and Faulkner, Eliot and Stevens, Crane and Williams. By the thirties, when the generation of Schwartz and Bellow began to write, experimentalism no longer seemed so very experimental; it was something one rushed to defend but also, perhaps, with some inner uneasiness. To the revolution of modernism we were latecomers.

  But more. Reaching American literature with heads full of European writing yet also still held by the narrowness of experience in the cities, the American Jewish writers turned inevitably and compulsively to their own past, or to that feverish turf of the imagination they declared to be their past. It was the one area of American life they knew closely and could handle authoritatively, no more able to abandon it in memory than bear it in actuality. The sense of place is as overpowering in their work as, say, in the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor; it soon becomes a sense of fate: hovering, lowering, confining, lingering, utterly imperious.

  In the end, as we like to say, it was upon language that the American Jewish writers left their mark. Just as the blacks left theirs upon the vocabulary of American music, so the Jews brought to the language of fiction turnings of voice, feats of irony, and tempos of delivery that helped create a new American style—probably a short-lived style and brought to fulfillment in the work of a mere handful of writers, but a new style nonetheless. Style speaks of sensibility, slant, vision; speaks here of a certain high excitability, a rich pumping of blood, which the Jews brought with their baggage, a grating mixture of the sardonic and sentimental, a mishmash of gutter wisdom and graduate-school learning. I think it no exaggeration to say that since Faulkner and Hemingway the one major innovation in American prose style has been the yoking of street raciness and high-culture mandarin which we associate with American Jewish writers.

  Not, to be sure, all of them. There really is no single style that is shared by these writers, and some—Delmore Schwartz in the artifice of his antirhetoric, Michael Seide in the mild purity of his diction, Tillie Olsen in her own passionate idiom—clearly challenge the generalizations I shall nevertheless make. For what I want to assert is that the dominant American Jewish style is the one brought to a pitch by Saul Bellow and imitated and modified by a good many others.

  In the growth of this style one can see reenacted a pattern through which our nineteenth-century writers created the major American styles. Cooper and Hawthorne, though fresh in their matter, still employed versions of formal Augustan prose; even as they were doing so, however, a language of native storytellers and folkloristic colloquialism was being forged by the humorists of the Old Southwest and the Western frontier; and then, to complete a much-too-neat triad, Twain and Melville blended formal prose with native speech, the heritage from England with the improvisations of American regions, into a style that in Twain might be called “purified demotic” and in Melville “democratic extravagance.”

  A similar development, on a much smaller scale, has been at work in the fiction of the American Jewish writers. The first collection of stories by Abraham Cahan, Yekl, is written in a baneful dialect so naturalistically faithful, or intent upon being faithful, to the immigrant moment that it now seems about as exotic and inaccessible as the argot of Sut Lovingood. Cahan’s major novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, employs, by contrast, a flavorless standard English, the prose of an earnest but somewhat tone-deaf student worried about proper usage. More interesting for its mythic narrative line than for verbal detail, this novel shows Cahan to be not quite in possession of any language, either English or Yiddish, a condition that was common enough among the immigrants, and in the case of their occasionally talented sons would become the shifting ground upon which to build a shifty new style. The problem foreshadowed in Cahan’s work is: How can the Yiddishisms of East Side street talk and an ill-absorbed “correct” prose painfully acquired in night school be fused into some higher stylistic enterprise?

  One answer, still the most brilliant, came in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, a major novel blending a Joyce roughened to the tonalities of New York and deprived of his Irish lilt with a Yiddish oddly transposed into a pure and lyrical English but with its rhythms slightly askew, as if to reveal immigrant origins. In Roth’s novel the children speak a ghastly mutilated sort of English, whereas the main adult characters talk in Yiddish, which Roth renders as a high poetic, somewhat offbeat, English. Thus, the mother tells her little boy: “Aren’t you just a pair of eyes and ears! You see, you hear, you remember, but when will you know? . . . And no kisses? . . . There! Savory, thrifty lips!” The last phrase may seem a bit too “poetic” in English speech, but if you translate it into Yiddish—Na! geshmake, karge lipelakh!—it rings exactly right, beautifully idiomatic. Roth is here continuing the tradition of Jewish bilingualism, in the past a coexistence of Hebrew as sacred and Yiddish or Ladino as demotic language; but he does this in an oddly surreptitious way, by making of English, in effect, two languages, or by writing portions of this book in one language and expecting that some readers will be able to hear it in another.

  Yet, so far as I can tell, Roth has not been a major stylistic influence upon later American Jewish writers, perhaps because his work seems so self-contained there is nothing much to do with it except admire. Perhaps a more useful precursor is Daniel Fuchs, a lovely and neglected writer, especially in his second novel, Homage to Blenholt, where one begins to hear a new music, a new tempo, as if to echo the beat of the slums.

  This American Jewish style, which comes to fulfillment and perhaps terminus with Bellow, I would describe in a few desperate phrases:

  A forced yoking of opposites: gutter vividness and university refinement, street energy and high-culture rhetoric.

  A strong infusion of Yiddish, not so much through the occasional use of a phrase or word as through an importation of ironic twistings that transform the whole of language, so to say, into a corkscrew of questions.

  A rapid, nervous, breathless tempo, like the hurry of a garment salesman trying to con a buyer or a highbrow lecturer trying to dazzle an audience.

  A deliberate loosening of syntax, as if to mock those niceties of Correct English which Gore Vidal and other untainted Americans hold dear, so that in consequence there is much greater weight upon transitory patches of color than upon sentences in repose or paragraphs in composure.

  A deliberate play with the phrasings of plebeian speech, but often the kind that vibrates with cultural ambition, seeking to zoom into the regions of higher thought.

  In short, the linguistic tokens of writers who must hurry into articulateness if they are to be heard at all, indeed, who must scrape together a language. This style reflects a demotic upsurge, the effort to give literary scale to the speech of immigrant streets, or put another way, to create a “third language,” richer and less stuffy, out of the fusion of English and Yiddish that had already occurred spontaneously in those streets. Our writers did not, of course, create a new language, and in the encounter between English and Yiddish, the first has survived far better than the second; but still, we have left our scar, tiny though it be, on their map.

  The other day a gentile friend of mine remarked that in getting from City College in uptown Manhattan to the City University’s Graduate Center at Forty-Second Street she had had a long shlep. She used this word without a trace of self-consciou
sness, and she was right, for what she had experienced was not quite an inconvenience nor even a drag; it was a shlep. The word in Yiddish bears a multitude of burdens, as if to take a New York subway comes, as indeed it does, to taking on the weight of the world. Shlep is becoming part of the American language and in the hard days ahead it can only help.

  But there is more. There is the shlepper, in whom the qualities of shlepping have become a condition of character. There is a shleppenish, an experience that exhausts the spirit and wearies the body. And as virtual apotheosis there is shlepperei, which raises the burdens of shlepping into a statement about the nature of the world. Starbuck unable to resist Ahab was a bit of a shlepper; Prufrock afraid to eat his peach made his life into a shleppenish; Herzog ground down by his impossible women transformed all of existence into sheer shlepperei.

  Of such uncouth elements is the American language made and remade. Upon such renewals does the American experience thrive. And if indeed our dream of a New World paradise is ever to be realized, this time beyond mere innocence, how can we ever expect to get there except through the clubfoot certainties of shlepping?