Metaphor and Memory

by Cynthia Ozick

  This was perhaps what led James, in his American reflections, to trip over the issues, and to miss getting at the better question, the right and pertinent question: the question, in fact, concerning American speech. In Britain, and in the smaller America of his boyhood that strained to be a mirror of the cousinly English culture, it remained to the point to ask who sets the standard. And the rejoinder was simple enough: the people at the top. To risk the identical question in the America of 1905, with my mother about to emerge from Castle Garden to stand waiting for the horsecar on the corner of Battery Park, was unavoidably to hurtle to the very answer James most dreaded and then desperately conceded: the people at the bottom.

  The right and pertinent question for America was something else. If, in politics, America’s Enlightenment cry before the world was to be “a nation of laws, not of men,” then it was natural for culture to apply in its own jurisdiction the same measure: unassailable institutions are preferable to models or heroes. To look for aristocratic models for common speech in the America of 1905 was to end exactly where James did end: “I am at a loss to name you particular and unmistakably edifying and illuminating groups or classes.” It could not be done. As long as James believed—together with Trolander, Davis, and Papp, his immediate though paradoxical heirs: paradoxical because their ideal was democratic and his was the-people-at-the-top—as long as he believed in the premise of “edifying and illuminating” models, his analysis could go nowhere. Or, rather, it could go only into the rhapsody of vaporous hope that is the conclusion of “The Question of Our Speech”—“become yourselves models and missionaries, even a little martyrs, of the good cause.” Holy and resplendent words I recognize on the instant, having learned them—especially the injunction to martyrdom—at the feet of Trolander, Davis, and Papp.

  No, it was the wrong question for America, this emphasis on who; the wrong note for a campus (however homogeneous, however elite) just outside Philadelphia, that Enlightenment citadel, whose cracked though mighty Bell was engraved with a rendering of the majestic Hebrew word dror: a word my nine-year-old mother, on her way to Madison Street, would have been able to read in the original, though presumably James could not—a deprivation of literacy my mother might have marked him down for. “All life,” James asserted on that brilliant June day (my mother’s life was that day still under the yoke of the Czar; the Kishinev pogrom, with its massacre and its maimings, had occurred only two years earlier), “all life comes back to the question of our speech, the medium through which we communicate with each other; for all life comes back to the question of our relations with each other.” And: “A care for tone is part of a care for many things besides; for the fact, for the value, of good breeding, above all, as to which tone unites with various other personal, social signs to bear testimony. The idea of good breeding . . . is one of the most precious conquests of civilization, the very core of our social heritage.”

  Speech, then, was who; it was breeding; it was “relations”; it was manners; and manners, in this view, make culture. As a novelist, and particularly as a celebrated practitioner of “the novel of manners” (though to reduce James merely to this is to diminish him radically as a recorder of evil and to silence his full moral genius), it was requisite, it was the soul of vitality itself, for James to analyze in the mode of who. But for a social theorist— and in his lecture social theory was what James was pressing toward— it was a failing and an error. The absence of models was not simply an embarrassment; it should have been a hint. It should have hinted at the necessary relinquishment of who in favor of what: not who appoints the national speech, but what creates the standard.

  If, still sticking to his formulation, James had dared to give his private answer, he might have announced: “Young women, I, Henry James, am that august Who who fixes the firmament of our national speech. Follow me, and you follow excellence.” But how had this vast substantial Who that was Henry James come to be fashioned? It was no Who he followed. It was instead a great cumulative corporeal What, the voluminous and manifold heritage of Literature he had been saturated in since childhood. In short, he read: he was a reader, he had always read, reading was not so much his passion or his possession as it was his bread, and not so much his bread as it was the primordial fountain of his life. Ludicrous it is to say of Henry James that he read, he was a reader! As much say of Vesuvius that it erupted, or of Olympus that it kept the gods. But reading—just that, what is read—is the whole, the intricate, secret of his exemplum.

  The vulgarity of the low press James could see for himself. On the other hand, he had never set foot in an American public school (his education was, to say the least, Americanly untypical), and he had no inkling of any representative curriculum. Nevertheless it was this public but meticulous curriculum that was to set the standard; and it was a curriculum not far different from what James might have found for himself, exploring on his own among his father’s shelves.

  A year or so after my mother stepped off the horsecar into Madison Street, she was given Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake” to read as a school assignment. She never forgot it. She spoke of it all her life. Mastering it was the triumph of her childhood, and though, like every little girl of her generation, she read Pollyanna, and in the last months of her eighty-third year every word of Willa Cather, it was “The Lady of the Lake” that enduringly typified achievement, education, culture.

  Some seventy-odd years after my mother studied it at P. S. 131 on the Lower East Side, I open “The Lady of the Lake” and take in lines I have never looked on before:

  Not thus, in ancient days of Caledon,

  Was thy voice mute amid the festal crowd,

  When lay of hopeless love, or glory won,

  Aroused the fearful, or subdued the proud.

  At each according pause was heard aloud

  Thine ardent symphony sublime and high!

  Fair dames and crested chiefs attention bowed;

  For still the burden of thy minstrelsy

  Was Knighthood’s dauntless deed, and Beauty’s matchless eye.

  O wake once more! how rude soe’er the hand

  That ventures o’er thy magic maze to stray;

  O wake once more! though scarce my skill command

  Some feeble echoing of thine earlier lay;

  Though harsh and faint, and soon to die away,

  And all unworthy of thy nobler strain,

  Yet if one heart throb higher at its sway,

  The wizard note has not been touched in vain.

  Then silent be no more! Enchantress, wake again!

  My mother was an immigrant child, the poorest of the poor. She had come in steerage; she knew not a word of English when she stepped off the horsecar into Madison Street; she was one of the innumerable unsleeping aliens. Her teachers were the entirely ordinary daughters of the Irish immigration (as my own teachers still were, a generation on), and had no special genius, and assuredly no special training (a certain Miss Walsh was in fact ferociously hostile), for the initiation of a Russian Jewish child into the astoundingly distant and incomprehensible premises of such poetry. And yet it was accomplished, and within the briefest period after the voyage in steerage.

  What was accomplished was not merely that my mother “learned” this sort of poetry—i.e., could read and understand it. She learned what it represented in the widest sense—not only the legendary heritage implicit in each and every word and phrase (to a child from Hlusk, where the wooden sidewalks sank into mud and the peasants carried water buckets dangling from shoulder yokes, what was “minstrelsy,” what was “Knighthood’s dauntless deed,” what on earth was a “wizard note”?), but what it represented in the American social and tribal code. The quickest means of stitching all this down is to say that what “The Lady of the Lake” stood for, in the robes and tapestries of its particular English, was the received tradition exemplified by Bryn Mawr in 1905, including James’s presence there as commencement speaker.

  The American s
tandard derived from an American institution: the public school, free, democratic, open, urgent, pressing on the young a program of reading not so much for its “literary value,” though this counted too, as for the stamp of Heritage. All this James overlooked. He had no firsthand sense of it. He was himself the grandson of an ambitiously money-making Irish immigrant; but his father, arranging his affluent life as a metaphysician, had separated himself from public institutions—from any practical idea, in fact, of institutions per se—and dunked his numerous children in and out of school on two continents, like a nomad in search of the wettest oasis of all. It was hardly a wonder that James, raised in a self-enclosed clan, asserted the ascendancy of manners over institutions, or that he ascribed to personal speech “positively the history of the national character, almost the history of the people,” or that he spoke of the “ancestral circle” as if kinship were the only means to transmit that national character and history.

  It was as if James, who could imagine nearly everything, had in this instance neglected imagination itself: kinship as construct and covenant, kinship imagined—and what are institutions if not invented kinship circles: society as contract? In the self-generating Enlightenment society of the American founding philosophers, it was uniquely the power of institutions to imagine, to create, kinship and community. The Constitution, itself a kind of covenant or imaginatively established “ancestral circle,” created peoplehood out of an idea, and the public schools, begotten and proliferated by that idea, implemented the Constitution; and more than the Constitution. They implemented and transmitted the old cultural mesh. Where there was so much diversity, the institution substituted for the clan, and discovered—through a kind of civic magnetism—that it could transmit, almost as effectively as the kinship clan itself, “the very core of our social heritage.”

  To name all this the principle of the Melting Pot is not quite right, and overwhelmingly insufficient. The Melting Pot called for imitation. Imagination, which is at the heart of institutionalized covenants, promotes what is intrinsic. I find on my shelves two old textbooks used widely in the “common schools” James deplored. The first is A Practical English Grammar, dated 1880, the work of one Albert N. Raub, A.M., Ph.D. (“Author of ‘Raub’s Readers,’ ‘Raub’s Arithmetics,’ ‘Plain Educational Talks, Etc’”). It is a relentless volume, thorough, determined, with no loopholes; every permutation of the language is scrutinized, analyzed, accounted for. It is also a commonplace book replete with morally instructive quotations, some splendidly familiar. Each explanatory chapter is followed by “Remarks,” “Cautions,” and “Exercises,” and every Exercise includes a high-minded hoard of literary Remarks and Cautions. For instance, under Personal Pronouns:

  Though the mills of God grind slowly,

  yet they grind exceedingly small;

  Though with patience He stands waiting,

  with exactness grinds He all.

  This above all, to thine own self be true,

  And it must follow, as the night the day,

  Thou canst not then be false to any man.

  These are thy glorious works, Parent of good,

  Almighty! Thine this universal frame.

  Alas! they had been friends in youth,

  But whispering tongues can poison truth;

  And constancy lives in realms above,

  And life is thorny, and youth is vain;

  And to be wroth with one we love

  Doth work like madness on the brain.

  So much for Longfellow, Shakespeare, Milton, and Coleridge. But also Addison, Cowper, Pope, Ossian, Scott, Ruskin, Thomson, Wordsworth, Trollope, Gray, Byron, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Moore, Collins, Hood, Goldsmith, Bryant, Dickens, Bacon, Franklin, Locke, the Bible—these appear throughout, in the form of addenda to Participles, Parsing, Irregular Verbs, and the rule of the Nominative Independent; in addition, a handful of lost presences: Bushnell, H. Wise, Wayland, Dwight, Blair, Mrs. Welby (nearly the only woman in the lot), and Anon. The content of this volume is not its subject matter, neither its syntactic lesson nor its poetic maxims. It is the voice of a language; rather, of language itself, language as texture, gesture, innateness. To read from beginning to end of a schoolbook of this sort is to recognize at once that James had it backwards and upside down: it is not that manners lead culture; it is culture that leads manners. What shapes culture—this is not a tautology or a redundancy—is culture. “Who makes the country?” was the latent question James was prodding and poking, all gingerly; and it was the wrong—because unanswerable—one. “What kind of country shall we have?” was Albert N. Raub’s question, and it was answerable. The answer lay in the reading given to the children in the schoolhouses: the institutionalization, so to say, of our common speech at its noblest.

  My second text is even more striking: The Etymological Reader, edited by Epes Sargent and Amasa May, dated 1872. “We here offer to the schools of the United States,” begins the Preface, “the first systematic attempt to associate the study of etymology with exercises in reading.” What follows is a blitz of “vocabulary,” Latin roots, Saxon roots, prefixes, and suffixes, but these quickly subside, and nine tenths of this inventive book is an anthology engaging in its richness, range, and ambition. “Lochinvar” is here; so are the Declaration of Independence and selections from Shakespeare; so is Shelley’s “To a Skylark”; so is the whole “Star-Spangled Banner.” But also: “Description of a Bee Hunt,” “Creation a Continuous Work,” “The Sahara,” “Anglo-Saxon and Norman French,” “Conversation,” “Progress of Civilization,” “Effects of Machinery,” “On the Choice of Books,” “Our Indebtedness to the Greeks,” “Animal Heat,” “Corruptions of Language,” “Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives,” “On the Act of Habeas Corpus,” “Individual Character,” “Going Up in a Balloon,” and dozens of other essays. Among the writers: Dickens, Macaulay, Wordsworth, Irving, Mark Twain, Emerson, Channing, John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, De Quincey, Tennyson, Mirabeau, and so on and so on.

  It would be foolish to consider The Etymological Reader merely charming, a period piece, “Americana”—it is too immediately useful, too uncompromising, and, for the most part, too enduring to be dismissed with condescension.

  It was one of those heads which Guido has often painted—mild, pale, penetrating, free from all commonplace ideas of fat, contented ignorance, looking downward upon the earth; it looked forward, but looked as if it looked at something beyond this world. How one of his order came by it, Heaven above, who let it fall upon a monk’s shoulders, best knows; but it would have suited a Brahmin, and had I met it upon the plains of Hindostan, I had reverenced it.

  To come upon Sterne, just like this, all of a sudden, for the first time, pressed between Southey’s sigh (“How beautiful is night!”) and Byron’s “And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, / Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord”—to come upon Sterne, just like that, is to come upon an unexpected human fact. Such textbooks filled vessels more fundamental than the Melting Pot—blood vessels, one might venture. Virtuous, elevated, striving and stirring, the best that has been thought and said: thus the voice of the common schools. A fraction of their offerings had a heroic, or monumental, quality, on the style perhaps of George Washington’s head. They stood for the power of civics. But the rest were the purest belleslettres: and it was belles-lettres that were expected to be the fountainhead of American civilization, including civility. Belles-lettres provided style, vocabulary, speech itself; and also the themes of Victorian seriousness: conscience and work. Elevated literature was the model for an educated tongue. Sentences, like conscience and work, were demanding.

  What did these demanding sentences do in and for society? First, they demanded to be studied. Second, they demanded sharpness and cadence in writing. They promoted, in short, literacy—and not merely literacy, but a vigorous and manifold recognition of literature as a force. They promoted an educated class. Not a hereditarily educated class, but one that had been introduced to the
initiating and shaping texts early in life, almost like the hereditarily educated class itself.

  All that, we know, is gone. Where once the Odyssey was read in the schools, in a jeweled and mandarin translation, Holden Caulfield takes his stand. He is winning and truthful, but he is not demanding. His sentences reach no higher than his gaze. The idea of belles-lettres, when we knock our unaccustomed knees against it, looks archaic and bizarre: rusted away, like an old car chassis. The content of belles-lettres is the property of a segregated caste or the dissipated recollections of the very old.