Many mornings lately, I’ve come to the desk with, at best, one little topic. (It’s a difficult season for writing, too, because of all the running around and seeing people.) This morning, though, I have two topics, and I can’t decide which one to go with. There’s “Learning to Speak American,” Tim Parks’s very just complaint about the provinciality of American editors when it comes to editing the work of other Anglophones. And there’s “The American Boy,” Daniel Mendelsohn’s virtuoso memoir of his correspondence with the late novelist Mary Renault.

Tim Parks, an Englishman who has lived in Italy for decades, was commissioned, he tells us, to write “a book that explores the Italian national character through an account of thirty years’ commuting and travelin on the country’s rail network.” I know that I’ve read some piece of this book already, whether or not it was written before the commission, and I think about it often, especially the observation (as I recall it) that the cheapest of Italy’s three rail services is designed to assure that everyone in the country can get home to mamma on the weekends, even students in Milan who come from Palermo. Ordinarily, I’d be sure of buying the book when it came out, but now I wonder. I would without question order the book from Amazuke, as I do almost all British and Irish books, at least in part to avoid the muddle that Parks writes about. But will here be an English edition of this book? I certainly wouldn’t want to read an American edition. An American edition would make it sound as though Italy is just an outlying province of the United States, with twelve hour clocks and distances in miles. And, as Parks complains, his own Englishness might well be effaced. Words that he would never use, that would never occur to him as he wrote, would lodge like foreign objects in the publisher’s all-but-translated text.

What was the publisher thinking? One thing the publisher was not thinking about was actual words, evidently. Why would you commission an Englishman to write an American book? And who, who among the population of readers interested in a provocatively oblique examination of “the Italian national character,” would be at all discomfited by Tim Parks’s English accent? Wouldn’t such readers know that “flyover” is how they say “overpass” over there, &c &c? I can understand translating the Harry Potter books (although I’d had no idea that they had been “thoroughly Americanized”). Harry Potter is for children, and children are by nature unsophisticated readers (as readers, I mean). As an adult, I read in order to engage with minds other than my own — minds that think other thoughts, and that think them, sometimes, in a language that is not altogether familiar. Since this is what I want to do when I read, I willingly pay the price, and extend my vocabulary whenever I bump up against a limitation. (When I was reading Trollope, back in the Seventies, I could not even find an Englishman capable of explaining “the Chiltern Hundreds.” But the Internet has made light work of continuing education.) My ear stretches to catch different rhythms, the odd inversion of phrases. And I’m talking here only of reading in English.

Tim Parks winds up,

Is it simply the publisher’s anxiety that his readers are weak, ready to put their books down at the slightest obstacle, and hence must be reassured by a homogeneity of usage that more or less makes language invisible? Or could it be that the long American hegemony has bred an assumption that American formulations are inevitably global currency and should be universally imposed?

Rome can’t fall fast enough.

***

Regular readers will know that I treat these entries, probably to a greater degree than is prudent, as language experiments. Because I read at least as much British English as American English (a great deal more, where history and fiction are concerned), British usages have more than seeped into my writing, and I no longer try to discourage their appearance. I’m also more willing, these days, to let in some Yankee vernacular. I hope never to be jarring, except to good effect (that is, to make a reader think). When I have time, I try to clear out the clumps of on-the-fly syntax that are perhaps too original to be readily readable.

Earlier in this entry, I wrote, “Words that he would never use, that would never occur to him as he wrote.” In another mood, I might compress this, to, “Words that he would never think to use.” I’m fairly certain that that’s English. You might say that I’m working against the tendency to develop a house style. This tendency can never be defeated by an individual writer with any real gift, because that is what “voice” comes down to. Tim Parks is right to worry about it as an editorial principal, though.

This whole question may seem a quite different matter from the contrast between Americans Americanizing and Europeans accepting Americanisms, but the truth is that house style is a much more common occurrence in the US and more aggressively enforced, to the point that when one rereads work one has written for The New Yorker it no longer seems like your voice at all.

Although I wonder if the happiest New Yorker writers aren’t the ones who know how to play the style — as no one does better than Englishman Anthony Lane. And what would you say about that last-minute shift in person, from “one” to “your,” which is all the more salient because “one” appears twice? I approve it heartily, because the “one” who writes is not quite the same person as the “you” who is wounded to have found your voice suppressed.

I’m reminded of the style sheet that George Saunders worked out for The Tenth of December with his editors at Random House.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013 at 12:03 pm.