Lesser - The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongue

The original idea for The Genius of Language was given to me by an editor, Alice van Straalen. Why not find a dozen or more writers who now write in English but who originally spoke another language, she suggested, and get them to write essays on the differences between their two languages? Normally I am against accepting ideas from editors, but this one struck me as such a good one I couldn't resist. It is an appealing notionthat there is some hidden ur-language seeping into or shaping or otherwise influencing the language in which the writer now writes. Perhaps even monolingual writers have this feeling; that may explain why one friend of mine, a poet whose sole language has always been English, heard the idea for the book and exclaimed, Oh, I want to be in it!

When I invited the fifteen writers included here to participate in the project, I urged them to be as autobiographical as they wished. The story of original languages, I suspected, would make itself felt not just on the linguistic or literary level, but also in the way people felt about their lives. And because those lives involved a moveoften a forced movefrom one country or family culture to another, these stories might well tell us something about the larger historical or political issues of our time.

But that was secondary. What mattered most to me, at the beginning, was to uncover the sources of writing in writers I admired, to burrow in behind the acquired layers and get at the inherent nature, the native quality, the genius of the work. Of course, what I expected and what I eventually got were not identical. Writers are like cats: you can't herd them. Life (and editing) would be far more boring if you could.

The minute you consider the categorywriters who came to English after first speaking another languagethe name Joseph Conrad invariably springs to mind. He is the great ancestor, the supervisory ghost, in a book like this. (Some people would add Vladimir Nabokov's name as well, but to my mind Conrad is the far greater writer: I am convinced that Lord Jim and Chance and The Secret Agent will be read long after Lolita and Pale Fire have bit the dust.) Since the essays in the present collection were commissioned especially for the book, I was, for obvious reasons, unable to secure a contribution from Conrad. So I am sneaking him in the back door by quoting him up front.

At the beginning of the 1919 edition of his autobiographical A Personal Record, Conrad takes great pains to dispel the impression that he chose to write in English. His first language, of course, was Polish, and his father, a well-known Polish patriot who died when Conrad was twelve, was apparently an acknowledged master of the language. Growing up in Poland, Conrad knew French, as he says, fairly well and was familiar with it from infancy. Yet when he came to write fiction, it was the English language that seized his imagination:

The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English for me was neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoptionwell, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of the stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idioms I truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character.