here and now

HERE AND NOW

An Essay On Some Influences

I Have Had About My Canadian

English Accent And My Attempts

At Imitating Great Writers.

By Izzy Ess Of Unexpectedness

In 1970, I was invited to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to present my research findings concerning the effect of quinidine on the transmembrane action potential of living cardiac fibres.  The conference was OK, and except for a power failure which meant I couldn’t show my slides, the presentation went well.  What sticks in my memory is that on the way there in an American Airlines Boeing 707, from Chicago to New York, during which I read two books, Ira Levin’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” on the way there, and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Marouska,” translated from Russian as “Mary,” on the way back.

There was another memorable moment that involved accents.  I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and spoke Yiddish as my first language, at home.  When my parents didn’t want me to understand what they were discussing, they spoke Polish.  I learned “street English,” on the street in my impoverished neighbourhood, and I learned “school English,” at Hess Street Public School, about three blocks from my house on Caroline Street.  The accents that were immediately present for me to learn, on the street, were “Italian English,” “Afro-Canadian English,” Afro-American English,” “Native Canadian English,” “Canadian-Yiddish English,” and “Japanese-Canadian English.”  In high school, I learned “Parisian French,” “Berliner German,” “Classic Greek,” and “Classic Roman Catholic Latin.”  At the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, I learned “Scientific English,” and “Scottish English,” “British English,” and “Irish English.”  In Denver, Colorado, I was exposed to “Southwestern American English,” and in Chicago, Illinois, I learned “Geetchy English,” an “African-American-Chicago Ghetto English,” “Hispanic-Chicago-Mexican English,” and a “Midwestern American English.”  In Switzerland, I learned and used, “Italian Classic and Swiss-Dialect-Italian,” “French-Swiss-Dialect-German,” and “German-Swiss-Dialect-French,” along with all the other foreigners that lived in Switzerland who spoke “Swiss-Dialect-British-English,” to get by.  My best “teachers” where the Swiss Medical Students who often asked me to their Salami-Beer-Chess parties for an evening, as well as the staff of the Physiology Institute of the University of Berne, Switzerland, who liked to challenge me by speaking to me in Bernese Swiss-German, “Bern Du’tsch,”

After my presentation in New Jersey of my experimental findings about quinidine and transmembrane electrophysiology, a Professor Kay from Philadelphia approached me to ask a question.  He said, as I recall, “I didn’t understand a word you said but I loved the way you said it.”  I understood him to mean he liked my accent.  I asked, “So, where do you think I learned to speak English?” thinking that he would never recognize my original English, since I was exposed to so many Englishes, he said, imitating me, “You’re from Hamilton, Ontario, eh?”  I asked how he picked it out and he said, “I have a niece from Hamilton who speaks English the same way you do!”

George Bernard Shaw’s play, “Pygmalion,” had a lot to do with British accents and how one can be fooled by them when deliberately changed to change the way people react to hearing certain accents.  My dear reader, a phrase I learned from Nabokov’s “Lolita,” I apologize for being so wordy.  I was trying to emphasize how I deluded myself in thinking that my English had hidden my humble origins and there it was, an unmasking by a dialectical genius.  I’m fair at picking out accents and their origins while this Kay professor hit mine bang on.  He must have taken lessons from the fictional Professor ‘Enry ‘Iggins, eh?  who could tell what street in London one lived on from his accent.

Nabokov’s original novel, “Mary,” left me dumb-founded, literally open-mouthed speechless.  I re-read the last page more than ten times before I was sure that I hadn’t misread something or missed a detail that would have given me a clue to the mysterious ending of the novel.  That the train didn’t stop was extremely dramatic.  I already knew of my aspirations to become an author, even a published author, but I realized that I didn’t come close to the drama that Nabokov had created in a single short novel.  I could guess that Nabokov had a really good feel for a foreign language, in that he was Russian and writing in German, the new country for him.  He was later to become an American and in all his novels, he succeeded in manipulating English and American English for his own dramatic ends.  In my mind he used the words and phrases extremely artfully to communicate his philosophies of life.

In “Ada,” a full-length novel of the love affair between a step-brother and his step-sister, Nabokov wrote a prologue with his explanations which make a lot of sense to me.  He wrote, accurately, I hope, there is no other time except “now!” and there is no other place except, “here!”  The past has forever disappeared and the future is a fantasy.  The novel was written and gave the feelings that the time and place of all the events of the relationship described, were insignificant, otherwise, except for “here” and “now.”  Stephen King and Ray Bradbury write with a similar philosophy, it seems to me.  The events of their novels are, seemingly, always surprising and unexpected, similar to the way Nabokov’s novel’s events are.

I believe that Russian writers, and others from other countries, tap into the evil, manipulative aspects of one’s own psyche to show that one’s greatest enemy is oneself and one’s insecurities are one’s own downfall.  The authors who come to mind are Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Sartre, de Sade, Kafka, Huxley, Orwell, King and Levin.  In “Rosemary’s Baby,” Rosemary’s husband deliberately talks her into having sex with the Devil, himself, in order to become pregnant with a male child who would have become the “Son of Lucifer,” the Antichrist, in the same allegorical manner of Gabriel supplying “the Virgin Mary,” with the “Holy Ghost’s” genetic semen to make Jesus the Son of God.  The dramatic and surprising movie version was well acted by Mia Farrow as Rosemary, the ingénue, and by John Cassavettes as her evil conniving husband, the Devil’s emissary and his co-conspirator.

Well, dear reader, I apologize in advance for having made any errors in names and places, so, here and now, this is

THE END

© izzy sommers, md

Welland, Canada

December 12, 2013