Metaphor and Memory

Cynthia Ozick

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781786491107
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

From the author of The Messiah of Stockholm and Art and Ardor comes this collection of supple, provocative, and intellectually dazzling essays. In Metaphor ### Memory, Cynthia Ozick writes about Saul Bellow and Henry James, William Gaddis and Primo Levi. She observes the tug-of-war between written and spoken language and the complex relation between art's contrivances and its moral truths. She has given us an exceptional book that demonstrates the possibilities of literature even as it explores them.

The Question of Our Speech: The Return to Aural Culture

When I was a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, a trio of women from the provinces took up, relentlessly and extravagantly, the question of my speech. Their names were Miss Evangeline Trolander, Mrs. Olive Birch Davis, and Mrs. Ruby S. Papp (pronounced pop). It was Mrs. Papp’s specialty to explain how to “breathe from the diaphragm.” She would place her fingers tip-to-tip on the unyielding hard shell of her midriff, hugely inhaling: how astonishing then to see how the mighty action of her lungs caused her fingertips to spring apart! This demonstration was for the repair of the New York voice. What the New York voice, situated notoriously “in the throat,” required above everything was to descend, pumping air, to this nether site, so that “Young Lochinvar came out of the west” might come bellowing out of the pubescent breast.

The New York palate, meanwhile, was consonantally in neglect. T’s, d’s, and l’s were being beaten out against the teeth, European-fashion—this was called “dentalization”—while the homeless r and n went wandering in the perilous trough behind the front incisors. There were corrective exercises for these transgressions, the chief one being a liturgical recitation of “Tillie the Toiler took Tommy Tucker to tea,” with the tongue anxiously flying up above the teeth to strike precisely on the lower ridge of the upper palate.

The diaphragm; the upper palate; and finally the arena in the cave of the mouth where the vowels were prepared. A New Yorker could not say a proper a, as in “paper”—this indispensable vibration was manufactured somewhere back near the nasal passage, whereas civility demanded the a to emerge frontally, directly from the lips’ vestibule. The New York i was worst of all: how Mrs. Davis, Mrs. Papp, and Miss Trolander mimicked and ridiculed the New York i! “Oi loik oice cream,” they mocked.

All these emendations, as it happened, were being applied to the entire population of a high school for girls in a modest Gothic pile on East Sixty-eighth Street in the 1940s, and no one who emerged from that pile after four years of daily speech training ever sounded the same again. On the eve of graduation, Mrs. Olive Birch Davis turned to Mrs. Ruby S. Papp and said: “Do you remember the ugliness of her diction when she came to us?” She meant me; I was about to deliver the Class Speech. I had not yet encountered Shaw’s Pygmalion, and its popular recrudescence in the form of My Fair Lady was still to occur; all the same, that night, rehearsing for commencement, I caught in Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Papp something of Professor Higgins’s victory, and in myself something of Eliza’s humiliation.

Our teachers had, like young Lochinvar, come out of the West, but I had come out of the northeast Bronx. Called on to enunciate publicly for the first time, I responded with the diffidence of secret pleasure; I liked to read out loud, and thought myself not bad at it. Instead, I was marked down as a malfeasance in need of overhaul. The revisions and transformations that followed were not unlike an evangelical conversion. One had to be willing to be born again; one had to be willing to repudiate wholesale one’s former defective self. It could not be accomplished without faith and shame: faith in what one might newly become, shame in the degrading process itself— the dedicated repetition of mantras. “Tillie the Toiler took Tommy Tucker to tea,” “Oh! young lochinvar has come out of the west, Through all the wide border his steed was the best.” All the while pneumatically shooting out one’s diaphragm, and keeping one’s eye (never one’s oi) peeled for the niggardly approval of Miss Evangeline Trolander.

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 mother. 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 ev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Forewarning
• Cyril Connolly and the Groans of Success
• William Gaddis and the Scion of Darkness
• Italo Calvino: Bringing Stories to Their Senses
• The Sister Melons of J. M. Coetzee
• Primo Levi’s Suicide Note
• What Drives Saul Bellow
• Henry James’s Unborn Child
• Emerging Dreiser
• George Steiner’s Either/Or
• O Spilling Rapture! O Happy Stoup!
• A Short Note on “Chekhovian”
• Crocodiled Moats in the Kingdom of Letters
• Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character
• On Permission to Write
• The Seam of the Snail
• Pear Tree and Polar Bear: A Word on Life and Art
• Washington Square, 1946
• The Function of the Small Press
• Of Basilisks and Barometzes
• The Apprentice’s Pillar
• The Muse, Postmodern and Homeless
• North
• The Shock of Teapots
• The Question of Our Speech: The Return to Aural Culture
• Sholem Aleichem’s Revolution
• A Translator’s Monologue
• S. Y. Agnon and the First Religion
• Bialik’s Hint
• Ruth
• Metaphor and Memory
• Permissions Acknowledgments