You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  Howard came back and sat down. “It was the contrast,” said Howard, adding that he, too, via the kid, he said, had seen something for the first time. That all of us who reflexively cringe (and just as reflexively hide it) at the stumbling ineloquence of these black men are not alone. That our children can sense, too, this vast difference. The great divide had opened for Sam for the first time, and they—Daniel and Howard—had witnessed the boy’s learning at the Los Angeles Forum that we are not all equal. Howard sighed.

  Tell me about it, said Daniel. They didn’t know how to speak, how to walk, for God’s sake, look at them, either strutting like peacocks or shuffling like convicts—and you were supposed to hire them? One of the philanthropic projects he’d recently funded was the Harlem Educational Activities Fund. It tutored bright Harlem junior high students and then supported them in high school with mentoring and special trips, and in college with a special HEAF 800 number they could use, and money to come home on holidays—and, he said, it was a great program, if he did say so himself. But. He’d just been at a HEAF awards ceremony, and, Jesus, you just watch these kids, he meant the way they moved with tentative, awkward embarrassment, how the hell are they going to look at their Harvard interview, at their Goldman Sachs interview? They didn’t know how to act, said Daniel.

  I said that, in that case, he should be providing them with acting lessons.

  Daniel gave me a look.

  Socialization is acting, I said. You needn’t change the person, you simply need to change the façade they present others. We spend our entire lives acting, Daniel.

  Daniel gave me a different look. He looked at Howard. Howard said, “Sounds right to me.”

  (My eyes rest on Amy Slotnick, seated in my garden. She’s carefully following my answer to her question.)

  Daniel went back to New York and called Juilliard, and Juilliard talked to one of their voice coaches, Denise Woods, a black woman, and Daniel wrote a check, and the teacher created a class called “Express Yourself!” and they started enrolling kids. Daniel called me and said, “Come,” and so I wrote a check to HEAF, which Howard and I copied to our accountant as a charitable deduction, and HEAF bought me a ticket out of that amount, and I flew to New York and met the teacher. Denise was a delight. She had been raised at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge on the Lower East Side. “I used ta tawk like dis,” she told me, “I kid you not.”

  We argued out every aspect of the program. I sat in on a class. I watched her illustrate different accents to the students, acting out texts with her assistant, Justin Diaz, a Juilliard drama major she’d borrowed. Justin was smooth and very serious and good-looking (he was rather conscious of this). I assumed a dash of Quechua blood had added exotic to his handsome. She used me as an exhibit. She said, “Everyone, this is upper-class English, listen to the vowels,” and pushed me into the middle of the room and said “Speak.” Twenty-five underclass black and Hispanic kids all turned their eyes to me and waited, expressionless.

  I spoke, about Samuel. What my son liked to do after school, who his friends were. I clipped my Ts with positive cruelty. I selected words of no more than three syllables, simplified my structures, was chary with relative pronouns (but did insist on the subjunctive), intentionally used a predicate nominative, referenced Tennyson, which I pronounced tenisin, as one used to at Oxbridge. I made it a point to sound in all ways like the unreconstructed, pre-Regionalist BBC. I modeled for them an impressive façade. I elocuted and circumlocuted and shan’t’ed and cahn’t’ed. I even—twenty-five years in America, and you feel that it’s overkill, but—pronounced “opening” as two syllables. I loved it. I was absolutely passionate. They were my children, and I treated them as I treated Sam. One is not, I suppose, supposed to touch students nowadays, but I did, put my hand on their warm skin, patted their backs. It is like putting one’s hand on something electrical, or a wild bird. One feels so much startled life inside those small bodies.

  A light-skinned girl asked, What use is all this? Her tone was calculating, slightly hostile.

  I said: Wealth. Power. Social standing. Success. Access. Money talks, I said. Speak its language.

  Denise shot me a look; she agreed completely with me—her point was simply that to them, I was sounding glib. Hm. I looked back at the girl, estimated her at around fourteen. I said to her: The phone rings at my house. (This is two weeks ago.) I answer, cover the receiver. “They’re inviting us to go sailing,” I say to Howard.

  “Sailing!” cries Howard, then adds suspiciously, “On a boat?”

  I confirm that the sailing will take place on a boat.

  He says, “‘To mew me in a Ship is to inthrall Mee in a prison / Long voyages are long consumptions / And ships are carts for executions.’” John Donne. Howard hates boats.

  I uncover the receiver and say I am terribly sorry, but it turns out we have lunch plans that weekend.

  I hang up. Howard says approvingly, “You sound so English when you lie.” I say yes, an English accent is marvelously effective for lying. People buy it much more readily even when they don’t believe a word. I said to the light-skinned girl: This is a matter of culture. British culture assumes duplicity for the conveying of manners to a much greater degree than American, and it also more highly values privacy, which is guarded by manners, and sees this kind of duplicity not in moralistic terms (the American reaction) but in terms of simply making things flow better. Hypocrisy saves you trouble; your interlocutor accepts this because he shares your culture. The accent—the expression of words and thoughts in this particular manner—is a finely tuned tool, and you use it to get what you want in life.

  “I can see that,” the girl said approvingly, and I saw her eyeing the cut of my clothing, taking my measure, and plotting a new persona. I thought I detected her planning to steal wholesale this exterior I have developed. I hoped she would. It is, for all its defects, one I’ve always found useful. You children, I said to them, you need weapons, yes, but you also need protection; the personae you’ve developed for survival on the sidewalks of Malcolm X Boulevard don’t work in fortieth-floor conference rooms in offices on East 57th or the sleek lofts of SoHo where their dinner parties are held.

  “You will breathe deeply from the ribs and not the chest,” the teacher told them. “Now, what are the sounds?” She turned to me.

  The rain, I said, in Spain stays mainly in the plain. In Hartford, Herriford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen. (I look at Amy Slotnick. It takes her only an instant to put the connection together and see, before anyone else, that I have just given her the answer to her question. “Ah…” she says, smiling.)

  A jet-black girl repeats this. In Hartford, Herriford, and Hampshire. I appraise her.

  “Where are you from?” she asked. She carefully included the predicate. You could see her doing what the teacher had taught them, you could see her turning her three-word sentence into four.

  I was raised in London.

  “They all talk like that?”

  Yes, they all talk like this. Excuse me, some of them talk like this. It depends on which part of the city and which social class. (This they understood implicitly.)

  The teacher directed me. “Hah!” I said. “Hah-tfuhd. Herriford. Hampshire.”

  The teacher looked at them a trifle narrowly. She spoke with a street accent. “Y’all gone get up an leave here. They gone be stan’in’ aroun’, drink malt liquor from a can, ‘Yo, mami! ’nuthin’ gone change, see?” And continuing in Standard English, “So do not think you’re going to use this sound on 131st Street. You will use it when you need to adapt to different circumstances.”

  She turned to me, and I added (I deeply enjoyed the rhythm of this with her, our collaborative performance in the conveying of these ideas), Yes, let’s be very clear about something: This sound is the mark of a specific culture with that culture’s history and values (symbolic and real), and that culture will claim you when you use the sound. You will metamorphose, you will be, to the deg
ree you choose, a different person. I mentioned the accent of a famous large black opera singer from Georgia who had created a regal, refined accent for herself so she could fit into her new international world. Affectation is an ugly word. Transformation, on the other hand, is self-improvement. It is the business of living.

  Build vocal graciousness, I said, standing before the assembled. Not ax but asks, not mumfs but months—T H, months.

  The teacher handed me the book I’d brought from L.A. I gave them a very brief historical and phonetic lecture on Cockney, a few biographical words on George Bernard Shaw, found my page in Pygmalion, and, recalling Howard’s coaching on how to do this (“Sell ’em, put your body into it, make eye contact”), I read with Justin Diaz, as we’d practiced. He turned out to be quite the professional and did the male parts expertly.

  HIGGINS [BRUSQUELY]: Why, this is the girl I jotted down last night. Shes no use.

  THE FLOWER GIRL: Dont you be so saucy. You aint heard what I come for yet.

  PICKERING [GENTLY]: What is it you want, my girl?

  THE FLOWER GIRL: I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of selling at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. But they wont take me unless I can talk more genteel.

  Now, in the garden, I looked up from the Shaw (it was the same copy I’d read from at Juilliard a decade ago; I still have it). I saw the same intensely quiet expressions I’d seen in the children as they’d listened carefully. I turned some pages. Shaw’s introduction to the play, I said, 1912. Ah, here we are:

  “Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl is neither impossible nor uncommon. The modern concierge’s daughter who fulfils her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Théâtre Français is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done scientifically.”

  As I left, I had the incantatory experience of hearing a roomful of black American teenagers from Harlem repeating exquisite, crystalline phonemes with fierce concentration, breathing deeply from the ribs and not the chest, as if choristers preparing an offertory canticle for Edward V in a cool, pristine, echoing marbled Wren nave.

  Daniel sent us daylilies and baby’s breath, which I put in our bedroom.

  On this lovely Los Angeles evening, I pick up a card with my note jotted down on it. William Blake, I say to them.

  I must create a system

  Or be enslaved by another man’s.

  Blake’s truth was what Shaw illustrated, I tell them. Shaw showed the adoption and mastery of the system—culture, which is simply a system, its accent being merely the face it presents—and portrayed that as the key to all the wealth and power of the world. Becoming a lady in a flower shop. And that is why Pygmalion is the single most important work of literature of the twentieth century.

  When I go back inside I find Howard is already home. He’s putting his clubs in his golf bag. He kisses me. “They liked it?”

  They seemed to love it, actually.

  He frowns at me, curious.

  What’s the matter?

  He returns to the golf bag. “You’re lit up,” he says.

  Oh, honestly. I put the back of a hand to my forehead. It is, in fact, slightly warm. I say, We’re discussing things that matter to me. I suppose it’s that. I turn and smile at him.

  “How many tonight?”

  Eighteen. Believe it or not. I ate with them, by the way; what would you say to your and Sam’s going to pick up Chinese tonight?

  He shrugs his acceptance. “By the way,” he adds, “next week you’ll have six more.”

  Howard! Six.

  “Paul’s got someone from Heel and Toe and might show up himself. Steve Zaillian made some comment to Fred Weintraub, apparently repeating an opinion of yours on Cervantes.” He looks suspicious. “I thought you weren’t big on Cervantes.”

  I’m trying to warm to him, I say.

  He’s eyeing me. “It was a pitch meeting at Imagine apparently. Neal Moritz was there and called me. Neal asked if he could come with Lou Friedman. And two women from a production company on the Universal lot. I said OK on your behalf.” He smiles. “So?”

  So, I say. And then, Well. Fine. Steve had run an idea by me, and I’d gone and gotten Don Quixote and after some searching found the passage I’d been thinking of, which he loved. Imagine was the perfect place for it, and Cervantes fit Steve’s pitch like a glove.

  The Chinese menus are in the drawer there, I say to Howard. Sam likes the Hunan place.

  “You enjoying it?”

  Yes. For the moment it’s fun. Actually, I say, drawing a breath, it’s rather wonderful.

  “Sam-oh!” yells Howard. “C’mere!” He sticks a hand in the drawer and automatically says, “Anne, the menus aren’t in here.”

  Look, I say very patiently.

  ONE EVENING I SAID TO them—it was a comment entirely in passing—that I questioned whether one could claim, ultimately, that any body of literature belongs to any particular culture. I had read somewhere that Heinrich Heine, the great German-Jewish poet of the mid-1800s’ late Romanticism, wrote that he carried his patriotism on the soles of his shoes.

  I stopped short; this appeared to bother a location scout slightly. He put the question to me, very directly. Here in L.A., did I feel at home? Did I ever miss England?

  It’s a question I think about, of course. My son has a thoroughly American sound and speaks differently than I do, and every so often I find myself startled. I replied to the scout’s question this way.

  It was many years before, we were just out of college. We’d been walking down a freezing Sixth Avenue on a wintry afternoon when Howard had asked from behind his muffler, what would I think of taking a U.S. passport? “It’s more practical. Here, let me carry that.”

  Thank you.

  “Christ, it’s cold.”

  How is it more practical?

  “So we don’t have to do two lines at passport control anymore,” said Howard. “When the kids start arriving, four or five of them,” he grinned, “or six, or seven, hanging on us.” We’d been arguing it, I wanted three, maybe four children, Howard was rather serious about a string quintet. “Obviously the passport’s your decision.”

  Four, I said.

  “Agreed,” said Howard. “After the fourth, we can negotiate.”

  I told them I had thought of W. H. Auden. It allowed me to become whatever it is I’ve become here.

  At some benefit dinner in New York—at the NYPL on Fifth, I believe—Nicholas Jenkins once said to me it seemed likely to him that Auden would turn out to be the only poet of world stature born in England in the last hundred years. I said to Nick that this struck me as harsh (for England), but the “born in” was certainly crucial in his case. The soles of Auden’s feet took him from England, where he was born, to New York City, where he started the process of getting an American passport. Auden’s former countrymen did not understand this movement. He was attacked in Parliament. Philip Larkin declared that when he renounced his English citizenship, he “lost his key subject and emotion…and abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns.”

  Nick put it directly: They felt Auden had betrayed them. Despite his essential Britishness—someone called him “a communist with an intense love for England,” and he produced sensuous, devoted, longing portraits of England’s mines, millscapes, her Lake District, diagnosed her prewar phase with a chilling and pitiless eye clearer than any other’s, “this country of ours where nobody is well”—despite all of this, the British never forgave him. Most British critics feel he was never as great, once quit of England.

  Auden, I said to them, didn’t care. He was a contemporary of the traitors/spies Burgess, Blunt, Philby, and Maclean, and in the 1950s he told a friend, “I know exactly why Guy Burgess went to Moscow. It wasn’t
enough to be a queer and a drunk. He had to revolt still more to break away from it all. That’s just what I’ve done by becoming an American citizen.”

  But as for me, I was not a queer and I was not a drunk, so those were not my reasons.

  And so, years ago, Howard and I walked out of the State Department office, blinking in the winter sun. I was holding my bright new American passport in a gloved left hand. “Now,” said Howard, “you’re officially home.”

  I pulled away from him at this, turned and said rather loudly, “I am officially on the corner of Varick and Houston.” I was about to cry.

  “OK,” said Howard, gently.

  My British passport I planned to turn in to the Foreign Ministry. When they demanded of Auden, angrily, resentfully, now that he had left his nation, What Then Was He?, he replied that he might have given up “English” but he had not—please note—taken “American.” Auden was, he said, a citizen of a polyglot world of transients, misfits, rootless and chaotically blending souls, placing themselves as they wished, or as they were driven, jealously guarding old identities in order to furiously stomp them out, cooperatively and energetically defiant. He was, in short, “a New Yorker.”

  So, then, the question: Did I feel at home? Well. Auden had a concept of home, and it wasn’t a particular place. He had transcended physical location. He had made a choice. His leaving Britain, for whatever reason, did not necessarily reflect poorly on Britain. I would say the same thing for myself. Howard and I talked about it, of course. Perhaps because Howard never changed passports, or because he encountered the Robert Frost lines first, in high school, Howard sees it Frost’s way:

  Home is the place where

  When you have to go there

  They have to take you in.

  It reflected Howard’s experience, of course, I said. After marrying me, for example. The place where they had to take you in.