by Floyd Skloot
At fifteen, I’d auditioned for a summer camp production of West Side Story and was cast as A-Rab, one of the Jets. At our first read-through, the director gathered her Jets stage right and said she’d cast each of us because, of all who’d tried out and could sing and dance, we sounded the most like kids who could be in a New York street gang. Our accents were perfect for hoodlums. “Doan get fancy on me, awright? Just tawk duh way you tawk.”
Her remark, and the way she continued to harp on our diction, made me hyperaware of how I sounded, with all that implied. And I began to pay attention to speech. Well, sometimes I paid attention, but the only model I had for correction was the cockamamie medley of accents in my mother’s repertoire. So I would say things like I doan wanna loin howta dahhnce. As George Bernard Shaw had warned those lacking a scientific approach, this particular aspirant’s state was getting worse than before he tried to fix it. Clearly, I needed professional help.
I remember my first senior speech class vividly, nearly fifty years after it met. In her yearbook photograph, Mrs. Sherman had looked a bit bobbed and Betty Crockerish, with short hair waved high in front like a pompadour and carefully curled at the sides. Very 1950s. So the first surprise was how elegant and au courant she appeared, dressed in a dark V-neck outfit, white piping at the neck and pockets, her black hair in a top-heavy mop. She stood in front of her desk and leaned comfortably back against it, smiling at us. Closer than if she were behind the desk, but still formal and very much in control of the room, just by her glance. When she spoke, she sounded exactly like what she was: a former dramatic arts major at New York University, with some television and radio work in her background.
I felt immediately relaxed as she told us about the four or five speeches we would give and about the sounds she wanted us to become aware of. The man can have an apple. She scanned the room, smiled, then found me and stopped everything.
“Stand up,” Mrs. Sherman said. Then she asked my name and nodded when she found it in her gradebook. “Get rid of your gum, Mr. Skloot.” I had been chewing my Juicy Fruit with such minimal jaw movements that I was astounded to be caught. As I walked toward the garbage can, she spoke to the class. “Gum chewing marks you every bit as much as an accent does.”
It’s difficult to hear your own accent. Most of us are seldom conscious of our voices as we speak, of pronunciation, the actual sound of language. That’s why it’s so shocking to hear our recorded voices on the telephone answering machine or on radio. We’re usually not aware of our facial expressions or gestures either, the sorts of character-defining communication business that actors pay attention to. We just talk.
Until we’re forced to stop and listen. Brenda Maddox, the Massachusetts-born biographer of James Joyce’s wife, Nora, William Butler Yeats and his wife, Georgie, and D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, has devoted most of her professional life to the subject of intimate communications. Married to the physicist and science writer Sir John Maddox, she has lived in London since the early 1960s and, fed up with being mistaken for a tourist and wanting to feel more deeply connected to her community, she actively sought to lose her American accent. In a 1999 article about that experience for the New Statesman, Maddox says that after hiring a voice coach, her greatest challenge was learning to hear properly. “Quite soon I learnt that I had been deaf all these years. I thought I was adapting to native speech simply by saying ‘GARage’ instead of ‘garAGE’ and ‘tewlips’ instead of ‘toolips.’” Unlike Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, Maddox never does fool the locals or shed her outsiderness, though her own family back in Massachusetts “thinks I sound like the Queen.” Perhaps she lacks the essential criterion noted by Professor Higgins, who says he can help Eliza lose her accent quickly only “if she has a good ear.”
The New York “accent reduction” teacher Alan Kennedy, interviewed for a Columbia University News Service article, confirms the necessity for a good ear. “The first step,” Kennedy says, “is to help students hear the English words they’re saying that sound un-American.” He’s referring to students of English as a second language. But it makes sense to me that the same you-have-to-hear-it-first principle would apply to heavily accented native English speakers, whose accents can deviate from the norm nearly as much as a foreigner’s does. If Standard American English—the sound of the Great American Nowhere, the accentless speech of network news broadcasters—is that norm, then the sound pattern of my childhood New York speech was pretty close to a foreign accent. Wud’nit?
When Mrs. Sherman’s class began in 1964, I was already conscious of the way I sounded, was motivated to change, and had a good enough ear that I could mimic my grandparents’ accents, get a laugh with my Irish brogue, imitate a Russian spymaster, and had sung my portion of “Gee, Officer Krupke” in West Side Story using the German accent required by the script. But I hadn’t put together the notion that such mimicry might be a key to clearing up my accent. And I still lacked a steady model to mimic.
“Feel your mouth work,” Mrs. Sherman told us. The cat sat on a ramp and ate carrots. “Look at the person sitting next to you, watch the mouth.” Rownd. “Break it down: ahh-ooo equals the sound in round.”
More than mimicry was involved, though. Because at age seventeen, learning to speak differently was like learning a foreign language. We were coming to the challenge a little late in our development. Young children pick up second languages, including appropriate accents, with astonishing facility. But, as Steven Pinker says, it’s hard for most adults to master a foreign language, and the phonology is especially hard because speech development “often fossilizes into permanent error patterns.” The key factor in learning to speak a new language properly is a person’s age. “People who immigrate after puberty provide some of the most compelling examples.” Pinker cites Henry Kissinger, who came to America as a teenager, learned English grammar very well, but still speaks with a heavy German accent. His younger brother, however, has no accent. Vladimir Nabokov is a similar example, a late arrival to English who became a brilliant stylist of the written language but spoke with a strong Russian accent. Pinker notes Nabokov’s own assessment: “I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”
As late teens, our speech pattern as we entered Mrs. Sherman’s class was already hardwired in our brains, so the accent-cleansing process had a significant neurological component. We needed to reprogram speech centers having entrenched neurochemical pathways. Eliza Doolittle says learning to speak properly “was just like learning to dance in the fashionable way.” Others have compared it to changing eating habits to lose weight and keep it off, or learning to hit a baseball when all you’ve played since your teenage years was basketball, or mastering martial arts at middle age. What these comparisons all suggest is that changing an accent is very much a physical activity as well as a mental one. The effort is to make the new way become second nature. It requires concentration and repetition, and it isn’t easy. We’ve all seen our share of bad dancers / failed dieters / lousy hitters / awkward kung-fu practitioners.
Mrs. Sherman, using what linguist William Labov calls “the mechanism of imitation and hypercorrection,” was seeking to unnewyork us. To pull a Professor Higgins on us. The movie version of My Fair Lady came out during the Christmas holiday of 1964 and reinforced what Mrs. Sherman was teaching. Maybe we wouldn’t pass for dukes and duchesses, but we might be able to climb out of that sink of negative prestige.
When Francie Nolan, the main character in Betty Smith’s 1943 novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is thinking about attending Columbia University in Manhattan or Long Island’s Adelphi University, both near home, a family friend says she should “go far off to college—she might get rid of her Brooklyn accent that way.” But Francie is not so sure that’s a good idea. She “didn’t want to get rid of it any more than she wanted to get rid of her name” because “it meant that she belonged some place. She was a Brooklyn girl with a Brooklyn name and a Brooklyn accent. She didn’t want to change into a
bit of this and a bit of that.”
Brooklyn-born folk singer Arlo Guthrie also resisted efforts to eradicate his accent. According to Arlo’s sister, Nora, in Michael W. Robbins’s Brooklyn: A State of Mind, their mother hired a British drama and speech teacher to correct their accents. She remembers her brothers “riding in the car on the Belt Parkway, saying ‘Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!’ sometimes in a Brooklyn accent and sometimes not.” Their father, Woody, spoke and sang with an Okie twang, and Arlo liked his own Brooklyn accent. “Even now, when you listen to Arlo’s records, you can hear this accent,” Nora says. “The way he pronounces the words is pure Brooklyn.”
According to David Crystal, “accents exist to express your identity. They tell people where you are from.” They “identify communities.” As Crystal notes, Professor Higgins in Pygmalion claims that just by hearing someone speak he “can place a man within six miles” of his community. “Within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.”
There’s a flip side to the various sociological, economic, cultural arguments in favor of losing an accent. While Mrs. Sherman wished “to improve everybody’s speech, so they sounded like well-educated people” and help us “gain respect,” and while William Labov writes about “the pressures toward conformity with middle class norms of speech” and finds that New Yorkers “would be complimented if someone told them they did not sound like New Yorkers,” there is Francie Nolan’s legitimate desire to retain her accent and with it retain her sense of belonging, her sense of home. She connects her accent with a kind of integrity of being, and fears that moving away and losing her distinctive speech would begin a process of fragmentation, of “change into a bit of this and a bit of that.” Arlo Guthrie, too, sought to retain his community link and, probably, to further separate his voice from his father’s Okie sound. I suppose, too, that holding on to a strong accent like Francie’s or Guthrie’s, like mine, would have been a statement of allegiance to place and to the past, to origins.
But I wanted the opposite. Escape, that was my obsession. Dis-allegiance. I refused to attend nearby Hofstra University, where my mother wanted me to go, applying only to out-of-state schools, and bought in completely to Mrs. Sherman’s philosophy. I believed that cleaned-up speech would liberate me. And I was beginning to grasp that sounding “normal” in how I said something might shift more attention onto what I said. I became a passionate convert.
We were assigned to give a five-minute speech that taught our classmates how to do something—paint a watercolor flower, shoot free throws, change a flat tire—about which we felt expert. I spoke about cooking a ham and cheese omelet, and, ever my mother’s son, spent the last minute in a detailed account of the best technique for scouring the pan and stovetop afterward. We were required to sit across the desk from Mrs. Sherman, shake her hand, and undergo a practice college interview during which we were scored both for what we said and how we enunciated it. Assigned to give a speech about something that moved us, I spoke publicly, for the first time, about my father’s death three years earlier, using as my prop a medal he’d won as a high school track star. I remember rushing back to my seat, face suffused with heat, refusing to look up, trying not to cry but also furious with myself because I knew the only serious mistake I’d made was with the speech’s final word. Fawddah. I was, I think, becoming a seriously conscious speaker.
In the fall of 2008, I spent a month trying to find Selma Sherman again. Google was little help, especially since I couldn’t remember her first name or decipher her signature in my yearbook. At the school district offices, no one knew who I was talking about, and said that if they had known, they wouldn’t be able to give me information about her anyway. They did provide an e-mail address for the current principal of the high school, and I wrote to explain what I was looking for. He didn’t reply, but a couple of weeks later I heard from Mrs. Sherman’s daughter, Ronda, who wrote that her mother not only was alive and living in Florida, but was about to arrive in New York for a Thanksgiving family visit. Ronda, following her mother’s footsteps, had taught at Long Beach High School for many years. She had also, a few years after me, taken her mother’s senior speech class. Mrs. Sherman—Selma—was eighty-six, in good health, and would be glad to talk with me.
I loved interviewing her. She said she’d taught until 1975, ten years after I last saw her. She’d remarried and wanted to travel. Teaching had been something she got into accidentally, a job she took upon moving to Long Beach with her first husband in the mid-1950s. “I loved working with sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds,” she said. “They were people already.”
We were, and that made her task harder because our language habits had solidified. At the same time, the teenage years are about inventing or reinventing yourself, shaping an adult identity. It’s a fluid period perfect for taking senior speech, when the goals of the course and the goals of the student—some of them, at least—are in harmony. Change speech and change destiny.
Near the end of our recent conversation, Selma said, “You know, Floyd, you speak without any trace of an accent now.” It felt like the moment I got my real grade from her.
But I lapse sometimes. Id’nat sump’n? It happens when I talk to my daughter’s boyfriend, David Prete, who’s from Yonkers. He’s a trained actor, having graduated from the New Actors Workshop in New York where he studied with Mike Nichols, and his New York accent has been scrubbed too. But together, we fall into our old speech patterns. Hahya dooin? when we see each other, or Wairs duh sawlt? when we’re cooking together. At first, it’s a joke, a performance. It’s play. But then it starts to take hold, and I need to concentrate in order to sound like myself again. Or it happens when I’m in New York, especially in shops or restaurants and coffee shops, places where things start to get pushy and urgent. It also happens when I’m with my cousins, six or seven Skloots in a Manhattan living room cackling over Joe Pesci’s Brooklyn accent in the 1992 movie My Cousin Vinny: D’ja heah him sayin “deez yutes” steada “these youths”? Sometimes, even here in laid-back Oregon, it happens when I drive in heavy traffic. Ay! Watch whutcha dooin, joik-wad! It even happens, for no discernible reason, maybe just a glitch of aging or failure of attention, as when I said to Beverly over dinner last night, dis chicken tastes good, dud’nit?
So my work on the accent is still in progress. Just writing this essay, never mind reading it aloud, could set my speaking back fawty/fitty yeeuz.
3
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BEEP BEEP
My mother called me on a Wednesday night and told me to take the Friday afternoon train home. It would leave Lancaster, Pennsylvania, late enough so I wouldn’t miss classes, but would arrive in New York early enough for dinner. We need to talk.
Almost five decades later, I still remember the tempered, level tone of her voice when she said that. There was no theatrical command that I get home NOW, no customary blend of accents. Even the concept that we would talk rather than that I would shut up and listen was strange. So I asked if she felt all right. She told me Don’t be stupid and then, instead of good-bye, took a deep breath, added Get a one-way ticket, and hung up.
That one-way-ticket business was alarming. I was eighteen, a freshman at Franklin and Marshall College, finally not living at home, and there was no way I wasn’t coming back to campus on Sunday night. And traveling by train. Because there was also no way I’d agree to a three-and-a-half-hour Sunday drive to Lancaster with my mother and her new boyfriend, Julius. If necessary, I was prepared to walk the 144 miles.
I met them, as agreed, outside Penn Station. Hunched in her mink coat, a Chesterfield pinched in her raised left hand, my mother frowned as she opened the passenger door and leaned forward so I could squeeze into the back seat of Julius’s eleven-year-old Nash Rambler, which looked like an aardvark. The windows were closed against the winter air and the hot interior was dense with smoke. After quick hellos, no one spoke until we cleared the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Then, as he drove toward Long Island in lightly swirlin
g snow, Julius started turning around to make polite, quick eye contact with me as he uttered each phrase: There’s something. I need. To ask you. Okay?
This was even more uncharacteristic than my mother’s subdued tone on the phone. The few times I’d been together with them, Julius had barely spoken. And when he had, my mother archly silenced him. Or made fun of his elocution and hesitant manner. His name’s not F-fwoyd, you silly man. Now she was not only letting him talk, she wasn’t criticizing him for failing to keep his eyes on the road.
I’d been sure my mother planned to demand, yet again, that I transfer to a college near home. And since I couldn’t imagine her convincing this kindly man, whom she’d met only three months earlier, to serve as an intermediary, I was confused about what was going on, what he might be permitted to ask me. He couldn’t be after my opinion about having Chinese food for dinner because my mother made all restaurant decisions without input. Maybe he wanted to know the quickest way to Long Beach, where my mother lived. But, grave and unsmiling, his thick glasses flashing light, the gentle sixty-three-year-old postal service manager then proceeded to ask me for her hand in marriage. We want your blessing.
The idea, so formal and correct, old-fashioned, respectful of me and my mother and of marriage, must have been Julius’s. I noticed that he’d dressed in a suit and tie. It may have been the winter of The Sounds of Silence and “19th Nervous Breakdown,” at the heart of the 1960s, but Julius was creating a Frank Sinatra, Tommy Dorsey Band, 1940s scene there in the Rambler.
