Dictation
In Dictation: A Quartet, Cynthia Ozick presents four long stories, three of them previously published: “Dictation,” “Actors,” “At Fumicaro,” and “What Happened to the Baby?” An admirer of Henry James’s work in her early years, Ozick later freed herself from his influence. The title story, “Dictation,” is an exuberantly witty exercise in imagination in which James, his spoken words mimicking his elaborately constructed prose, discusses literary matters with the young Joseph Conrad, the apprentice novelist. James and Conrad were acquaintedthat much is history. The rest of the story is the author’s invention.
Conrad, visiting the master in his country home, learns that James, his hands crippled by years of gripping his pen, has hired an amanuensis to type his dictated words on a newfangled invention, the Remington. Conrad worries: Might the intervention of the typist and her machine break the sacred relationship between the brain and the pen?
Nine years later, after Conrad has achieved success, he meets James again in London. However, Conrad’s hands have been crippled by gout; he, too, has hired a secretary with a Remington. Conrad and James debate weighty literary questions, such as whether a writer’s fiction reveals the dark secrets of his inner self, as Conrad believes, or masks his true identity, as James believes. The comedy turns on the ironic irrelevance of this debate when the two amanuenses, portrayed under their real names, take matters into their own hands and conspire to interfere with the texts of their employers.
Theodora Bosanquit, James’s secretary, is a schemer who sets out to seduce Lilian Hollowes, Conrad’s shy, awkward secretary who is secretly in love with her employer. Conrad has hoped to prevent a meeting between the two women, fearing that his secrets would be revealed. Nevertheless, Theodora outmaneuvers him and introduces herself to Lilian, taking her to tea and ferreting out personal details of her life.
Having failed to seduce her, Theodora plays upon Lilian’s secret worship of her employer and her jealousy of Conrad’s wife. Lilian agrees, albeit reluctantly, to Theodora’s plot. The scheme is intriguing: Is it possible for each typist to copy a passage from her employer’s text and have the other insert it into her writer’s manuscript without being detected? Certainly, says Theodora; the artistic ego, believing in its own genius, will assume that the substituted passage is of his own brilliant invention. The two supposedly altered stories are James’s “The Jolly Corner” and Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.”
Ozick revels in linguistic play and, with an unerring gift for dialogue, mimics James’s pretentious diction and Conrad’s passionate outpourings. She even hints at a liaison between Theodora and a young Virginia Woolf, identified only as Ginny. Should anyone detect anachronisms, Ozick assures readers, in an impish footnote, that this is, after all, just fiction.
Perhaps this is a diabolical instance of feminist revenge against the great men who treat their secretaries as inferiors. Certainly the story poses an intriguing literary puzzle: If the amanuenses, mere employees in the service of genius, succeed in their scheme, who can claim ownership of a literary text?
In “Actors,” Matt Sorley, the stage name of Mose Sadacca, is nearly sixty, an unemployed actor who prides himself on the wit and subtlety of his work. He pretends to attend auditions, rejecting the “geezer” roles that he is offered, and he disdains his occasional stereotyped roles in television series. Frances, his long-suffering wife, resents having to support them both by creating crossword puzzles. Her arcane vocabulary is the source of much of the humor in the story.
To the rescue comes Ted Silkowicz, a trendy young director...
(This entire section contains 1930 words.)
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who offers Sorley a role he cannot refuse: the lead in an updated version of William Shakespeare’sKing Lear (1608), a revival of the bygone Yiddish melodrama. There is one condition; Sorley must agree to meet with the deceased playwright’s father, Eli Miller, a retired actor living in a Jewish home for the elderly. This visit, with Frances along for support, is a masterpiece of comic misunderstanding. Is Miller hovering over the edge of sanity or uttering artistic truth about the greatness of Yiddish theater?
After first dismissing the play as “The Lear of Ellis Island,” Sorley begins to inhabit the role. Abandoning all subtlety, he howls and gestures in an excess of melodramatic emotion. The success of the play will depend upon the audience’s willingness to accept as tragedy the unfamiliar style from the past.
On opening night, Sorley, believing that an unannounced guest in the audience is a director whom he hates, delivers an over-the-top performance in the first act. The second act is interrupted by the guest, Miller, who has escaped from the institution and thunders down the center aisle in outrage against the travesty of a performance: “Liars, thieves, corruption! In the mother tongue, with sincerity, not from a charlatan like this!” The audience loves it and roars with laughter, sending Sorley into the wings in defeat and humiliation. Well schooled in theatrical tradition, Ozick poses the question: Does artistic truth lie with the trendy young director, the old Yiddish actor, or Sorley, who struggles vainly to maintain his own integrity against the incongruities of competing theatrical visions?
In “At Fumicaro,” Frank Castle has anticipated with pleasure his invitation to a conference for Roman Catholic intellectuals who will debate the role of the Church in the world. Three dozen men will meet daily for Mass and for discussion of current church issues at the Villa Garibaldi on Lake Como. Frank, unmarried at the age of thirty-five, has practiced celibacy for six months, preparing for a transport of religious enlightenment.
His spiritual aspirations are abruptly interrupted by his lust for Viviana, a pregnant teenage chambermaid he first encounters as she is vomiting into the toilet in the bathroom she is supposed to be cleaning. Instantlyand incongruouslysmitten with love, Frank promises to marry her and take her home to New York.
Frank alternates visions of lust with moments of common sense (these perhaps more believable than his unbridled passion) during which he fears that Viviana is exploiting him and intends to steal his money. Viviana, however, has the peasant instinct for survival, and she is wise in the ways of men. She understands the fate that awaits her as the mother of an out-of-wedlock child in Italy’s conservative society.
Viviana’s promiscuous mother Caterina refuses to believe the truth: Her daughter has been impregnated in an unwilling encounter with one of her own lovers. She is baffled by Frank’s willingness to marry Viviana, but she happily supports the marriage that will rescue her daughter from her predicament. Percy Nightingale, a cynical latecomer to the conference, offers another point of view, denouncing Frank as a fool for planning to elope with a chambermaid. The conference quickly degenerates into chaos, with the pretentious intellectuals falling asleep over the debris of their food.
Viviana is deeply religious, with a primitive faith that impels her to worship an ancient stone figure that Frank knows is a pagan artifact. Her superstitions become even more evident when she falls down in prayer before museum figures of the Virgin and Christ Child. Frank foresees the embarrassment that she will cause him in the pretentiously sophisticated world of his New York peers. Still, consumed by lust and his Catholic sense of guilt, he marries her, envisioning himself as the rescuer of his young bride. She will be both his penance and his salvation. Although “At Fumicaro” has received mixed reviews, it is an example of the author’s fascination with the comic possibilities of opposing forces, here the superstitious peasant and the self-torturing intellectual who find each other in an incongruous match.
“What Happened to the Baby?” is a dark satire on the consequences of lying and deception, narrated by Phyllis, a college student at New York University. Phyllis, whose parents have moved to Arizona, resents her mother’s request to take care of “Uncle” Simon, her mother’s cousin. Phyllis recalls unpleasant childhood experiences at Uncle Simon’s meetings. Simon has invented GNU, an artificial language designed to replace Esperanto. Phyllis’s mother, despite her husband’s protests, believes in Simon’s genius and donates money to his cause. She blames Simon’s wife Essie for the mysterious death of their baby years ago. At Simon’s meetings, Essie, with theatrical ardor, entertains the audience by performing chants and poems in GNU. However, these gatherings, initially successful, always end in chaos, with shrieking and ridicule bordering on violence.
Improbability and deception follow relentlessly as the narrative turns to Phyllis’s college years. Simon and Essie have divorced; he lives in a filthy apartment with a refrigerator full of rotting food. He has a new set of followers, led by Phyllis’s roommate Annette, who is collecting money for the cause but pocketing it. Phyllis spends the money sent by her mother for Simon on herself and lies to her mother, telling her that Simon’s language has gained acceptance. In the meantime, Phyllis’s mother has become a wealthy entrepreneur by selling fake Native American artifacts in her gift shop in Arizona.
Edging toward death, Simon evokes Phyllis’s pity. She supports him with the money her mother now sends for Phyllis. Hoping that Simon and Essie will reconcile in their old age, Phyllis visits Essie in their old apartment where she, too, lives in squalor. Here the comedy takes a darker turn as Phyllis learns the story of the baby’s death.
Pregnant by another man, Essie had tricked Simon into marrying her. One day, as a cruel joke, she told him that he was not the baby’s father. The events of the narrative mount in improbability. The young couple had rented a summer cottage in the Catskills where Simon, a habitual philanderer, fell in love with their neighbor Bella, a devotee of Esperanto. Baby Retta died one night when Essie, who was caring for Bella’s baby son, put both children into the same crib. When the boy became ill during the night, Essie sent Simon for the doctor. Instead, he spent the night with Bella. When the doctor arrived in the morning, the boy had recovered, but Baby Retta, apparently smothered, was dead.
Consumed with guilt, Simon rebelled against Esperanto with the mad scheme to create his own language. Essie blamed Simon for the baby’s death and wreaked her revenge by pretending to encourage his followers, then inviting the Esperantists to disrupt his meetings and humiliate him. The trips abroad to research language were a lie; Simon and Essie spent their summers in the Catskills, where Simon mourned at Retta’s grave.
The final words of the story echo the tirade of Miller in “Actors,” suggesting a motif that links the four stories in this collection. Essie’s words slide seamlessly into the thoughts of Phyllis to become the perception of the author herself: “Lie, illusion, deception. . . was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?”
The collected stories, dating over a period of twenty-five years, represent constant themes in Ozick’s work: the witty playfulness of language, the juxtaposition of opposites, and unexpected plot reversals. Her stories are a darkly satiric view of the all-too-human weakness for self-deception and lying and the consequences that follow, her characters getting what they deserve. Critics have described Ozick’s fiction variously as fantasy, farce, allegory, or tragicomedy. Her work is highly regarded for its intellectual complexity and mastery of the nuances of language.
Bibliography
Booklist 104, no. 11 (February 1, 2008): 5.
The Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 2008, p. 16.
Commentary 126, no. 2 (September, 2008): 68-72.
Kirkus Reviews 76, no. 3 (February 1, 2008): 111-112.
Library Journal 133, no. 5 (March 15, 2008): 66-67.
Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2008, p. R4.
The New York Times Book Review, April 20, 2008, p. 11.
Publishers Weekly 255, no. 2 (January 14, 2008): 37.
The Washington Post, April 13, 2008, p. T10.