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.I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way.Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had.And for a while, that’s how it was: at home, during the holidays, I spoke with my old voice, and in the old voice seemed to feel and speak things that I couldn’t express in college, and vice versa.I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing.Like being alive twice.But flexibility is something that requires work if it is to be maintained.Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world into which my work has led me.Willesden was a big, color ful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle.This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose—now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not.I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth.They were both a part of me.But how the culture warns against it! As George Bernard Shaw delicately put it in his preface to the play Pygmalion, “many thousands of [British] men and women.have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue.” Few, though, will admit to it.Voice adaptation is still the original British sin.Monitoring and exposing such citizens is a national pastime, as popular as sex scandals and libel cases.If you lean toward the Atlantic with your high-rising terminals, you’re a sellout; if you pronounce borrowed European words in their original style—even if you try something as innocent as parmigiano for parmesan—you’re a fraud.If you go (metaphorically speaking) down the British class scale, you’ve gone from Cockney to “mockney” and can expect a public tarring and feathering; to go the other way is to perform an unforgivable act of class betrayal.Voices are meant to be unchanging and singular.There’s no quicker way to insult an expat Scotsman in London than to tell him he’s lost his accent.We feel that our voices are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls.Whoever changes their voice takes on, in Britain, a queerly tragic dimension.They have betrayed that puzzling dictum “To thine own self be true,” so often quoted approvingly as if it represented the wisdom of Shakespeare rather than the hot air of Polonius.“What’s to become of me? What’s to become of me?” wails Eliza Doolittle, realizing her middling dilemma.With a voice too posh for the flower girls and yet too redolent of the gutter for the ladies in Mrs.Higgins’s drawing room.But Eliza—patron saint of the tragically double-voiced—is worthy of closer inspection.The first thing to note is that both Eliza and Pygmalion are entirely didactic, as Shaw meant them to be.“I delight,” he wrote, “in throwing [Pygmalion] at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic.It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.” He was determined to tell the unambiguous tale of a girl who changes her voice and loses her self.And so she arrives like this:Don’t you be so saucy.You ain’t heard what I come for yet.Did you tell him I come in a taxi?.Oh, we are proud! He ain’t above giving lessons, not him: I heard him say so.Well, I ain’t come here to ask for any compliment; and if my money’s not good enough I can go elsewhere.Now you know, don’t you? I’m come to have lessons, I am.And to pay for em too: make no mistake.I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of selling at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.But they wont take me unlessI can talk more genteel.And she leaves like this:I can’t.I could have done it once; but now I can’t go back to it.Last night, when I was wandering about, a girl spoke to me; and I tried to get back into the old way with her; but it was no use [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]