Life Philosophies and Language

Related in disparate and not so disparate ways.

From a student's observation of a photograph and her answer to question 6 (What would your life be like if you lived here? For example, what language or languages might you speak? How would you dress? What kinds of jobs would people have? Why?): "My life would be alot of boring in it and just about farming and no shopping and I would speak country alot."

From Mavis Gallant's fabulous preface to her collected stories, 1996: "Journalism was a life I liked, but not the one I wanted."

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Mavis Gallant also talks about Quebec, culture, language, learning the alphabet, her relationships to French and English and what they mean to her when it comes to reading and writing and speaking and memory--all of which ties in to a novel I recently finished, Amy Bloom's Away, the story of a young woman moving from Russia to New York in the 1920's, so much about place and identity and language [AND the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue which has been a recent fascination!]. Someone suggests that our heroine, Lillian, get herself not only a dictionary but a thesaurus, which becomes an important minor character in the story. In an early scene, Lillian describes the wedding she doesn't want, "...all of it costing serious money that Lillian can imagine much better spent on things a person really needs (requires, demands, claims, and also covets, craves, desires; Lillian's thesaurus is now her constant companion). The bookman sold her Webster's dictionary, fine and useful for what it is, and Roget's thesaurus, which has a little story for every word. This is like this, Roget tells her; this is related to this other; people on the street might say this like so; and then there is the antonym, introduced in 1867 by Mr. C.J. Smith, which is, sharply, exactly, and also completely not anything like that first word. Comfort: gladden, brighten, relieve, refresh, renew; idiomatically: to give a lift to. On the other hand: distress, perturb, bother, agitate, grieve."

The thesaurus and its clues about subtleties of language are also essential elements of Lillian's Americanization: "She'd told herself, A young woman in America would have breakfast now. She would have tea. A young woman hoping to see her boyfriend (her swain, her young man, and also her sheik, her crush) would wear this, would say that, would put her lipstick on like so. Lillian's life in Turov hadn't been a performance. She was a daughter, she was a wife, she was a mother. She was not acting like an anything then."

All wrapping back to my sixth graders, now in Brooklyn but not born here and not of here in any way that they've chosen for themselves (and at fourteen, they're an age to start fighting to make some kind of choices for themselves) with their two languages and their jarring connections to so much that is Nueva York, and what we are confronted with is the alphabet. There's an alphabet in Spanish and an alphabet in English, and maybe neither is all 26 letters to these guys because different letters are pronounced the same in different languages so how are you supposed to know which letter? Not like they ever learned the alphabet all that well in either language. And it's one more thing to make you different: you don't speak English and the words you say you don't say right, and the books mean something to them that they don't mean to you. And it's all them and you, in both directions: them and us.

Another experience my students don't have that means so much to me: I love when suddenly in a book is something about something you've been living with and watching up close, and you never ever saw it in a book before (except maybe you did but it wouldn't have stood out before now, because now is when it's foregrounded for you). Again, Gallant's preface:

"I was taught the alphabet three times. The first . . . I remember nothing about. The second time, the letters were written in lacy capitals on a blackboard--pretty-looking, decorative; nuns' handwriting of the time. Rows of little girls in black, hands folded on a desk, feet together, sang the letters and then, in a rising scale, the five vowels. The third time was at the Protestant school, in Chateauguay. The schoolhouse had only two rooms, four grades to each. I was eight: It had been noticed that I was beginning to pronounce English proper nouns with French vowel sounds. (I do it to this day, thinking "Neek' for 'Nike,' 'Raybok' for 'Reebok.' The first time I saw Ribena, a fruit drink, advertised in the London Underground, I said, 'What is Reebayna?' It is the only trace of that lacy, pretty, sung alphabet.) At my new school it was taken for granted that French and Catholic teaching had left me enslaved to superstition and wholly ignorant. I was placed with the six-year-olds and told to recite the alphabet. I pronounced G with its French vowel sound, something like an English J. Our teacher pulled down over the blackboard a large, illustrated alphabet, like a wide window blind. I stood in front of the blind and was shown the letter G. Above it a large painted hand held a tipped water jug, to which clung, suspended, a single drop. The sound of G was the noise the drop would make in a water glass: it would say gug.

"'The sound of G is gug. Say it after me. Gug.'

"'Gug.'

"'Everyone, now. Gug, gug, gug.'

"'Gug, gug, gug.'

"'What letter is it?'

"'G.'

"'What does it say?'

"'Gug.'

"'Don't forget it, now.'

"Whatever it was, it could never be sung."