You or Someone Like You (12 page)

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 degree 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.

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:

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.

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:

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

But Auden's view, I said to them, is a bit different from Frost's. And I myself hear Auden's voice more clearly because it involves choice and emptiness without faith. Which is to say, it would be emptiness
but for
faith—or (much better) “trust,” Auden's word. Auden, Nick observed, had gone from one mental place to another and discovered in going there that he had arrived nowhere in particular. That he had shed everything and constructed something nameless.

When I read this to Howard, I said that I didn't know if there was any better synonym for “New Yorker” than Nameless. Free, if you prefer. Liberated from the old ologies. Howard disputed it, but he didn't understand what Auden meant. He meant you shed the old names and assume new ones, and the new names mean what you want them to. In 1942, just three years after he arrived in his new home, Auden wrote that home is—the meter alone makes me weep—

Auden remarked to Benjamin Britten that New York was one “grand hotel in a world so destabilized that everyone had become a traveler.” I am a traveler, and that my son does not share my accent bothers me in the end not at all. I was and am that thing Auden described, feared, and in the end loved more than anything. I was—I am—nameless.

 

SOME JEWS, SPEAKING TO HOWARD
under what they considered the right circumstances—they were friends of his family, they had his best interests at heart, they knew him from Brooklyn,
they had gone through it with his mother when he married me—asked him gravely whether he considered Sam Jewish. They wanted to know how Howard was “going to deal with this.”

Howard would change the subject. I didn't really understand why. It seemed an odd reaction. Just answer them.

“I don't want to answer them,” he said. “It's not their business.”

I agree, but you can still answer them.

“It doesn't concern them,” he said, which was not exactly what he meant. Obviously it did concern them. In any case, I didn't give it much thought.

At the time I thought I knew what Howard's answer to them was. I thought I knew because of what he'd said to his mother, often, including in front of company a few times. (She was less bothered by what was said in front of me. I got very, very good at not betraying the pounding heart, the reflex of my throat to swallow with anger.) When he told his parents about me, Howard's father had enumerated the standard arguments: the perpetuation of the Jewish people after the Holocaust, the continuance of Jewish culture. He had even, if without much confidence in the stratagem, proposed that it was Howard's being ashamed of being Jewish—“Give me a goddamn break, Dad” said Howard and burst out laughing. When that didn't work, just once his father had tried the word
God
and the word
faith
, in the theological sense; Howard's reaction to this, on the other hand, had been so blistering that his father went immediately back to cultural justifications. But it was his mother who had pressed him. It was she who asked. Why? Why? Why her? (I stood, my hands folded in front of me, outside in the hall, staring at nothing.)