Metaphor and Memory

by Cynthia Ozick

  In this way I was, at an early age, effectively made over. Like a multitude of other graduates of my high school, I now own a sort of robot’s speech—it has no obvious native county. At least not to most ears, though a well-tutored listener will hear that the vowels hang on, and the cadence of every sentence has a certain laggardly northeast Bronx drag. Brooklyn, by contrast, is divided between very fast and very slow. Irish New York has its own sound, Italian New York another; and a refined ear can distinguish between Bronx and Brooklyn Irish and Bronx and Brooklyn Jewish: four separate accents, with the differences to be found not simply in vowels and consonants, but in speed and inflection. Nor is it so much a matter of ancestry as of neighborhood. If, instead of clinging to the green-fronded edge of Pelham Bay Park, my family had settled three miles west, in a denser “section” called Pelham Parkway, I would have spoken Bronx Jewish. Encountering City Island, Bronx Jewish said Ciddy Oilen. In Pelham Bay, where Bronx Irish was almost exclusively spoken in those days, it was Ciddy Allen. When Terence Cooke became cardinal of New York, my heart leaped up: Throggs Neck! I had assimilated those sounds long ago on a pebbly beach. No one had ever put the cardinal into the wringer of speech repair. I knew him through and through. He was my childhood’s brother, and restored my orphaned ear.

  Effectively made over: these noises that come out of me are not an overlay. They do not vanish during the free play of dreams or screams. I do not, cannot, “revert.” This may be because Trolander, Davis, and Papp caught me early; or because I was so passionate a devotee of their dogma.

  Years later I tried to figure it all out. What did these women have up their sleeves? An aesthetic ideal, perhaps: Standard American English. But behind the ideal—and Trolander, Davis, and Papp were the strictest and most indefatigable idealists—there must have been an ideology; and behind the ideology, whatever form it might take, a repugnance. The speech of New York streets and households soiled them: you could see it in their proud pained meticulous frowns. They were intent on our elevation. Though they were dead set on annihilating Yiddish-derived “dentalization,” they could not be said to be anti-Semites, since they were just as set on erasing the tumbling consonants of Virginia Greene’s Alexander Avenue Irish Bronx; and besides, in our different styles, we all dentalized. Was it, then, the Melting Pot that inspired Trolander, Davis, and Papp? But not one of us was an “immigrant”; we were all fully Americanized, and our parents before us, except for the handful of foreign-born “German refugees.” These were marched off to a special Speech Clinic for segregated training; their r’s drew Mrs. Davis’s eyes toward heaven, and I privately recognized that the refugees were almost all of them hopeless cases. A girl named Hedwig said she didn’t care, which made me conclude that she was frivolous, trivialized, not serious; wasn’t it ignominious enough (like a kind of cheese) to be called “Hedwig”?

  Only the refugees were bona fide foreigners. The rest of us were garden-variety subway-riding New Yorkers. Trolander, Davis, and Papp saw us nevertheless as tainted with foreignness, and it was the remnants of that foreignness they meant to wipe away: the last stages of the great turn-of-the-century alien flood. Or perhaps they intended that, like Shaw’s Eliza, we should have the wherewithal to rise to a higher station. Yet, looking back on their dress and manner, I do not think Trolander, Davis, and Papp at all sought out or even understood “class”; they were reliably American, and class was nothing they were capable of believing in.

  What, then, did these ferrywomen imagine we would find on the farther shore, once we left behind, through artifice and practice, our native speech? Was it a kind of “manners,” was it what they might have called “breeding”? They thought of themselves as democratic noblewomen (nor did they suppose this to be a contradiction in terms), and they expected of us, if not the same, then at least a recognition of the category. They trusted in the power of models. They gave us the astonishing maneuvers of their teeth, their tongues, their lungs, and drilled us in imitation of those maneuvers. In the process, they managed—this was their highest feat—to break down embarrassment, to deny the shaming theatricality of the ludicrous. We lost every delicacy and dignity in acting like freaks or fools while trying out the new accent. Contrived consonants began freely to address feigned vowels: a world of parroting and parody. And what came of it all?

  What came of it was that they caused us—and here was a category they had no recognition of—they caused us to exchange one regionalism for another. New York gave way to Midwest. We were cured of Atlantic Seaboard, a disease that encompassed north, middle, and south; and yet only the middle, and of that middle only New York, was considered to be on the critical list. It was New York that carried the hottest and sickest inflammation. In no other hollow of the country was such an effort mounted, on such a scale, to eliminate regionalism. The South might have specialized in Elocution, but the South was not ashamed of its idiosyncratic vowels; neither was New England; and no one sent missionaries.

  Of course this was exactly what our democratic noblewomen were: missionaries. They restored, if not our souls, then surely and emphatically our r’s—those r’s that are missing in the end syllables of New Yorkers, who call themselves Noo Yawkizz and nowadays worry about muggizz. From Boston to New York to Atlanta, the Easterner is an Eastinna, his mother is a mutha, his father a fahtha, and the most difficult stretch of anything is the hahd paht; and so fawth. But only in New York is the absent r—i.e., the absent aw—an offense to good mannizz. To be sure, our missionaries did not dream that they imposed a parochialism of their own. And perhaps they were right not to dream it, since by the forties of this century the radio was having its leveling effect, and Midwest speech, colonizing by means of “announcers,” had ascended to the rank of standard speech.

  Still, only forty years earlier, Henry James, visiting from England after a considerable period away, was freshly noticing and acidly deploring the pervasively conquering r:

  . . . the letter, I grant, gets terribly little rest among those great masses of our population that strike us, in the boundless West especially, as, under some strange impulse received toward consonantal recovery of balance, making it present even in words from which it is absent, bringing it in everywhere as with the small vulgar effect of a sort of morose grinding of the back teeth. There are, you see, sounds of a mysterious intrinsic meanness, and there are sounds of a mysterious intrinsic frankness and sweetness; and I think the recurrent note I have indicated—fatherr and motherr and otherr, waterr and matterr and scatterr, harrd and barrd, parrt, starrt, and (dreadful to say) arrt (the repetition it is that drives home the ugliness), are signal specimens of what becomes of a custom of utterance out of which the principle of taste has dropped.

  In 1905, to drop the r was to drop, for the cultivated ear, a principle of taste; but for our democratic noblewomen four decades on, exactly the reverse was true. James’s New York/Boston expectations, reinforced by southern England, assumed that Eastern American speech, tied as it was to the cultural reign of London, had a right to rule and to rule out. The history and sociolinguistics governing this reversal is less pressing to examine than the question of “standard speech” itself. James thought that “the voice plus the way it is employed” determined “positively the history of the national character, almost the history of the people.” His views on all this, his alarms and anxieties, he compressed into a fluid little talk (“The Question of Our Speech”) he gave at the Bryn Mawr College commencement of June 8, 1905—exactly one year and two days before my mother, nine years old, having passed through Castle Garden, stood on the corner of Battery Park, waiting to board the horsecar for Madison Street on the Lower East Side.

  James was in great fear of the child waiting for the horsecar. “Keep in sight,” he warned, “the so interesting historical truth that no language, so far back as our acquaintance with history goes, has known any such ordeal, any such stress or strain, as was to await the English in this huge new community it was to help, at first, to father and mo
ther. It came over, as the phrase is, came over originally without fear and without guile—but to find itself transplanted to spaces it had never dreamed, in its comparative humility, of covering, to conditions it had never dreamed, in its comparative innocence, of meeting.” He spoke of English as an “unfriended heroine,” “our transported medium, our unrescued Andromeda, our medium of utterance, . . . disjoined from all the associations, the other presences, that had attended her, that had watched for her and with her, that had helped to form her manners and her voice, her taste and her genius.”

  And if English, orphaned as it was and cut off from its “ancestral circle,” did not have enough to contend with in its own immigrant situation, arriving “without fear and without guile” only to be ambushed by “a social and political order that was both without previous precedent and example and incalculably expansive,” including also the expansiveness of a diligent public school network and “the mighty maniac” of journalism—if all this was not threatening enough, there was the special danger my nine-year-old mother posed. She represented an unstable new ingredient. She represented violation, a kind of linguistic Armageddon. She stood for disorder and promiscuity. “I am perfectly aware,” James said at Bryn Mawr,

  that the common school and the newspaper are influences that shall often have been named to you, exactly, as favorable, as positively and actively contributive, to the prosperity of our idiom; the answer to which is that the matter depends, distinctively, on what is meant by prosperity. It is prosperity, of a sort, that a hundred million people, a few years hence, will be unanimously, loudly—above all loudly, I think!—speaking it, and that, moreover, many of these millions will have been artfully wooed and weaned from the Dutch, from the Spanish, from the German, from the Italian, from the Norse, from the Finnish, from the Yiddish even, strange to say, and (stranger still to say), even from the English, for the sweet sake, or the sublime consciousness, as we may perhaps put it, of speaking, of talking, for the first time in their lives, really at their ease. There are many things our now so profusely important and, as is claimed, quickly assimilated foreign brothers and sisters may do at their ease in this country, and at two minutes’ notice, and without asking any one else’s leave or taking any circumstance whatever into account—any save an infinite uplifting sense of freedom and facility; but the thing they may best do is play, to their heart’s content, with the English language, or, in other words, dump their mountain of promiscuous material into the foundation of the American.

  “All the while we sleep,” he continued, “the vast contingent of aliens whom we make welcome, and whose main contention, as I say, is that, from the moment of their arrival, they have just as much property in our speech as we have, and just as good a right to do what they choose with it. . . . all the while we sleep the innumerable aliens are sitting up (they don’t sleep!) to work their will on their new inheritance.” And he compared the immigrants’ use of English to oilcloth—“highly convenient. . . durable, tough, cheap.”

  James’s thesis in his address to his audience of young aristocrats was not precisely focused. On the one hand, in describing the depredations of the innumerable sleepless aliens, in protesting “the common schools and the ‘daily paper,’” he appeared to admit defeat—“the forces of looseness are in possession of the field.” Yet in asking the graduates to see to the perfection of their own speech, he had, he confessed, no models to offer them. Imitate, he advised—but whom? Parents and teachers were themselves not watchful. “I am at a loss to name you particular and unmistakable, edifying and illuminating groups or classes,” he said, and recommended, in the most general way, the hope of “encountering, blessedly, here and there, articulate individuals, torch-bearers, as we may rightly describe them, guardians of the sacred flame.”

  As it turned out, James not only had no solution; he had not even put the right question. These young women of good family whom he was exhorting to excellence were well situated in society to do exactly what James had described the immigrants as doing: speaking “really at their ease,” playing, “to their heart’s content, with the English language” in “an infinite uplifting sense of freedom and facility.” Whereas the “aliens,” hard-pressed by the scramblings of poverty and cultural confusions, had no notion at all of linguistic “freedom and facility,” took no witting license with the English tongue, and felt no remotest ownership in the language they hoped merely to earn their wretched bread by. If they did not sleep, it was because of long hours in the sweatshops and similar places of employment; they were no more in a position to “play” with English than they were to acquire bona fide Mayflower ancestry. Ease, content, facility—these were not the lot of the unsleeping aliens.

  To the young people of Bryn Mawr James could offer nothing more sanguine, nothing less gossamer, than the merest metaphor—“guardians of the sacred flame.” Whom then should they imitate but himself, the most “articulate individual” of them all? We have no record of the graduates’ response to James’s extravagant “later style” as profusely exhibited in this address: whatever it was, they could not have accepted it for standard American. James’s English had become, by this time, an invention of his own fashioning, so shaded, so leafy, so imbricated, so brachiate, so filigreed, as to cast a thousand momentary ornamental obscurities, like the effect of the drill-holes in the spiraled stone hair of an imperial Roman portrait bust. He was the most eminent torchbearer in sight, the purest of all possible guardians of the flame—but a model he could not have been for anyone’s everyday speech, no more than the Romans talked like the Odes of Horace. Not that he failed to recognize the exigencies of an active language, “a living organism, fed by the very breath of those who employ it, whoever these may happen to be,” a language able “to respond, from its core, to the constant appeal of time, perpetually demanding new tricks, new experiments, new amusements.” He saw American English as the flexible servant “of those who carry it with them, on their long road, as their specific experience grows larger and more complex, and who need it to help them to meet this expansion.” And at the same time he excluded from these widened possibilities its slangy young native speakers and the very immigrants whose educated children would enrich and reanimate the American language (eight decades later we may judge how vividly), as well as master and augment its literature.

  Its literature. It is striking beyond anything that James left out, in the course of this lecture, any reference to reading. Certainly it was not overtly his subject. He was concerned with enunciation and with idiom, with syllables, with vowels and consonants, with tone and inflection, with sound—but he linked the American voice to such “underlying things” as “proprieties and values, perfect possessions of the educated spirit, clear humanities,” as well as “the imparting of a coherent culture.” Implicit was his conviction that speech affects literature, as, in the case of native speakers, it inevitably does: naturalism in the dialogue of a novel, say, is itself always a kind of dialect of a particular place and time. But in a newly roiling society of immigrant speakers, James could not see ahead (and why should he have seen ahead? Castle Garden was unprecedented in all of human history) to the idea that a national literature can create a national speech. The immigrants who learned to read learned to speak. Those who only learned to speak did not, in effect, learn to speak.

  In supposing the overriding opposite—that quality of speech creates culture, rather than culture quality of speech—James in “The Question of Our Speech” slighted the one formulation most pertinent to his complaints: the uses of literature. Pressing for “civility of utterance,” warning against “influences round about us that make for. . . . the confused, the ugly, the flat, the thin, the mean, the helpless, that reduce articulation to an easy and ignoble minimum, and so keep it as little distinct as possible from the grunting, the squealing, the barking or roaring of animals,” James thought it overwhelmingly an issue of the imitation of oral models, an issue of “the influence of observation,” above all an is
sue of manners—“for that,” he insisted, “is indissolubly involved.” How like Mrs. Olive Birch Davis he is when, at Bryn Mawr, he hopes to inflame his listeners to aspiration! “At first dimly, but then more and more distinctly, you will find yourselves noting, comparing, preferring, at last positively emulating and imitating.” Bryn Mawr, of course, was the knowing occasion, not the guilty target, of this admonition—he was speaking of the young voices he had been hearing in the street and in the parlors of friends, and he ended with a sacred charge for the graduates themselves: “you may, sounding the clearer note of intercourse as only women can, become yourselves models and missionaries [sic], perhaps even a little martyrs, of the good cause.”

  But why did he address himself to this thesis exclusively in America? Could he not, even more emphatically, have made the same declarations, uttered the same dooms, in his adopted England? No doubt it would not have been seemly; no doubt he would have condemned any appearance of ingratitude toward his welcoming hosts. All true, but this was hardly the reason the lecture at Bryn Mawr would not have done for Girton College. In Britain, regionalisms are the soul of ordinary English speech, and in James’s time more than in our own. Even now one can move from hamlet to hamlet and hear the vowels chime charmingly with a different tone in each village. Hull, England, is a city farther from London in speech—though in distance only 140 miles to the north—than Hull, Massachusetts, is from San Francisco, 3,000 miles to the west. Of England, it is clear, James had only the expectations of class, and a single class set the standard for cultivated speech. Back home in America, diversity was without enchantment, and James demanded a uniform sound. He would not have dreamed of requiring a uniform British sound: English diversity was English diversity, earned, native, beaten out over generations of the “ancestral circle”—while American diversity meant a proliferating concatenation of the innumerable sleepless aliens and the half-educated slangy young. With regard to England, James knew whence the standard derived. It was a quality—an emanation, even—of those who, for generations, had been privileged in their education. As Virginia Woolf acknowledged in connection with another complaint, the standard was Oxbridge. To raise the question of “our” speech in England would have been a superfluity: both the question and the answer were self-evident. In England the question, if anyone bothered to put it at all, was: Who sets the standard? And the answer, if anyone bothered to give it at all, was: Those who have been through the great public schools, those who have been through either of the great pair of ancient universities—in short, those who run things.