A Lang Digression

“Dialect words those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel” --Thomas Hardy

My origins are far from "genteel." If my strivings run that way, it is only natural. It's true, I've always distrusted dialect, as written, but not for reasons rightwing or blue-stocking. I grew up, as it were, all in the demotic, speaking an almost unique dialect of Scots/Irish origin, isolated by the Allegheny and Ohio stretch of the Appalachian Mountain Range. Neither hillbilly nor "Picksburgh," the sound of my ancestral patch of Pennsylvania features one of the more "hissing and unmusical dialects of men," to invert Emerson, "whether there be any who understand it or not." Even, as a youth, I struggled manfully to lose the accent and pronunciations that I felt placed me as a "hick," I understood that class and place-of-origin did not determine my worth, but did limit the possibilities of being heard out in the wider world. Had my native sound traveled better, I might have kept it without much thought, but, being so narrowly local, I knew, never hearing it, for instance, on television, that if I was to escape the locality, I must learn to speak otherwise. And so I did. There are words that survive, if not in my regular conversation, then certainly in my head and on the phone with family back "ta home." For example, I still see a messy room as being in need of being "red up" rather than straightened or cleaned. But if I never heard my parents' speech on television, I likewise never read it on the page. When I did encounter other American or English dialects reproduced in fiction, I had the provincial's distrustful assumption that someone was being mocked. (Turns out, that distrust is well founded.)

Joel Chandler Harris, for all I understand of his intentions, might have been a good enough man, even an exceptional one, but I can't say the good he did in retelling the stories he heard on a Georgia plantation outweighs the harm he did in, if not creating certainly, then in helping to revive and perpetuate the single most poisonous myth in all our history, and he did it in dialect. Whatever their value as anthropology or literature, it is the language he invented for his stories that he has to answer for, and it is that that makes them unreadable, at least for me. He did not simply reproduce the speech in which his stories were told him, he codified that speech, set not only the spelling of it, but the meanings, bent the morals of it to a false and vile purpose and used the stories of slaves to justify and extend their bondage well beyond their emancipation and the war fought, ultimately, to deny the right of people such as the author to dictate, unchecked and without consequence, the whole fate of people whose wit, grace and humanity he admired, even celebrated, even as he insisted on their inferiority to himself. Of all the shameful literature of our brief history, I can think of few books that had a more pernicious and lasting effect, teaching, as his books did, generations of children, black and white, that slaves tell stories to some purpose other than to save their souls in the midst of bondage, that when they laugh, sing, exercise their wits, tell stories older than their own memories, they do so harmlessly, in something less than the language of their masters, and without intended consequence to their masters or themselves. Joel Chandler Harris told a lie. He was believed as much because of the sound of it as for saying something his white listeners wanted to hear.

But then, dialect almost always serves a similar purpose: it allows the privileged reader to slum, be it among the contented slaves on a Georgia plantation, or among contented rustics in the bucolic English countryside owned by an only slightly less brutal and capricious class of supposedly benevolent bastards; Lords and Ladies though they might have more legitimately been than their self styled "American cousins." There is condescension in almost every missing syllable, dropped "h" and apostrophized exclamation uttered in English literature before Hardy, Dickens and George Eliot not excluded, though they at least meant well.

But dialect can also subvert. It took me a good while, being a bumpkin myself, to hear the difference.

The great benefit of working in a college bookstore -- well, one of them anyway -- is having regular, if brief, contact with students. For all the frustrations inherent in such encounters, it can be great fun, particularly when the student is a surprise. Usually they arrive in New & Used Books more by accident than not, having missed the stairs down to textbooks. But not infrequently, they are in the department they intended, usually with a list, looking for books not require, but "recommended." (Trans: not ordered by their instructors.) Seldom, if ever, are the books on such lists actually in the bookstore. Seldom, if ever, are the books "recommended" by professors in any bookstore, but let that pass. A few years ago, I was helping a student with just such a list of poetry. By the rarest of chances, we happened to have at least a few of the out-of-print titles he'd been sent to hunt. These books, though hardly rare in booksellers' terms, were just unfamiliar enough to need looking for, but happily familiar enough, for having recently come across the Used Books Desk, that I remembered them and was able to find them and price the one that hadn't yet made it into stock. We chatted a bit as we reviewed the list. Hearing this boy's accent, I made him a bargain: for my help, he had to read me a poem.

He demurred, "but I dunna have the right accent!"

Right or wrong, his Scots accent sounded better, reading Robert Burns, than I ever will. Having bullied him long enough, he finally agreed and, blushing furiously, read:

"O, my Luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my Luve's like a melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune..."

And then I made him read aloud another.

Robert Burns was not a poet I could read for most of my life, try as I might. I knew just the barest bones of his biography, knew the few poems that might have found me in America as familiar songs. For whatever reason though, perhaps, again because of Auden's tuition and the little study I'd finally done of the Romantics, Burns proved to be unavoidable. And once I'd finally understood something of just what the man did in his poetry, for his people and for his language, suddenly he ceased, for me, to be either Guy Lombardo's pokey New Year's Eve rendition of "Auld Lang Syne," or a comic Harry Lauder song, and spoke. Here was another language, as well as English in a dialect, in both of which I somehow at last could hear the music, if not always the literal sense, though that, I've found, can be had easily enough in this age of computer reference. When I'd finally bought The Poems of Robert Burns in the Oxford Standard Authors edition, for all of $8.50, I found page upon page, poem upon poem to give me great pleasure; move and delight me, make me smile, blush and laugh.

Robert Burns in a wonder: romantic, dog, bard, wit, radical, revolutionary, and hero. He is the national poet of Scotland and the equal of any in our common language.

And he taught me that dialect can be the means of liberation as much as a tool of oppression. Bless him.

ON A FRIEND

An honest man here lies at rest,
As e'er God with his image blest:
The friend of man, the friend of truth,
The friend of age, and guide of youth:
Few hearts like his, with virtue warm'd,
Few heads with knowledge so inform'd:
If there's another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this.

by Robert Burns, (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796)