CYNTHIA OZICK
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 to be no more! Enchantress, wake again!
763
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 horse-car into Madison Street; she was one of the in–
numerable unsleeping aliens. Her teachers were the entirely or–
dinary 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 hos–
tile), 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 heri–
tage 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 ex–
emplified by Bryn Mawr in 1905, including James's presence there
as commencement speaker.
The American standard 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 thisjames
overlooked. He had no first-hand 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
