CYNTHIA OZICK
769
But James, in the remoteness of post-Victorian technology,
spoke unshadowed by these threatened disintegrations among the com–
munity of the literate; he spoke in the very interior of what seemed
then to be a permanently post-aural culture. He read from a manu–
script; his talk was not recorded until later that year when Hough–
ton Mifflin bound it in one volume together with another lecture,
this one far more famous, "The Lesson of Balzac." We cannot hear
his voice on a phonograph record, as we can hear his fellow self-exile
T. S. Eliot's; and this, it might be said, is another kind of loss.
If
we
cherish photographs of Henry James's extraordinarily striking head
with its lantern eyes, we can regret the loss of a filmed interview of
the kind that nowadays captures and delivers into the future Nor–
man Mailer and john Updike. The return to an aural culture is, ob–
viously, not
all
a question of loss; only of the most significant loss of
all: the widespread nurture by portable print; print as water, and
sometimes wine. It was, in its small heyday (we must now begin to
say
was),
the most glorious work of the eye-linked brain.
And in the heyday of that glorious work, James made a false
analysis. In asking for living models, his analysis belonged to the
old aural culture, and he did not imagine its risks. In the old aural
culture, speech
was
manner, manner
was
manners, manners
did
teach the tone of the civilized world. In the new aural culture, speech
remains manner, manner becomes manners, manners go on teach–
ing the tone of the world. The difference is that the new aural cul–
ture, based, as james urged, on emulation, is governed from below.
Emulation as a principle cannot control its sources. To seize on only
two blatancies: the guerrilla toy of the urban underclass, the huge
and hugely loud portable radio- the "ghetto blaster"- is adopted by
affluent middle-class white adolescents; so is the locution "Hey,
man," which now crosses both class and gender. James worried
about the replacement in America of"Yes" by "Yeah" (and further by
the comedic "Yep"); its source was the drawl endemic to the gilt-and–
plush parlors of the upper middle class. "Yeah" did not come out of
the street; it went into the street. But it is also fairly certain that the
"Yeah"-sayers, whatever their place in society, could not have been
strong readers, even given the fissure that lies between reading and
the style of one's talk. The more attached one is to the community of
readers, the narrower the fissure. In a society where belles-lettres
are central to education of the young, what controls speech is the
degree of absorption in print. Reading governs speech, governs
tone, governs manner and manners and civilization. "It is easier to
overlook any question of speech than to trouble about it," James
