Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (9 page)

T
hat’s the catch: it’s always the illusion, never the real thing. Or so I thought until last year. George and I have two children now, and our adventures are closer to home. When our daughter was four, she took her copy of
Eloise
to tea at the Plaza Hotel. Macaulay never fought at Thrasymenus. I never ran the Colorado River. Rut Susannah has
actually
hidden behind the red velvet curtains in the Grand Ballroom, slomped down the hallway on the fifteenth floor, and gotten dizzy in the revolving door with the
on it. When we got to the Palm Court, Susannah opened her book to page 40. Her eyes skittered back and forth between the plate of Gugelhopfen on the triple-tiered table in the picture and the plate of Gugelhopfen on the triple-tiered table in front of her. She didn’t say a word. I knew what she was thinking. She was there.

 T
H E
 H
I S ‘ E R
 P
R O B L E M
 

W
hen I was nineteen, William Shawn interviewed me for a summer job at
The New Yorker
. To grasp the full import of what follows, you should know that I considered
The New Yorker
a cathedral and Mr. Shawn a figure so godlike that I expected a faint nimbus to emanate from his ruddy head. During the course of our conversation, he asked me what other magazines I hoped to write for.

“Um,
Esquire
, the
Saturday Review
, and—”

I wanted to say “
Ms
.,” but my lips had already butted against the
M
—too late for a politic retreat—when I realized I had no idea how to pronounce it. Lest you conclude that I had been raised in Ulan Bator, I might remind you that in 1973, when I met Mr. Shawn,
Ms
. magazine had been published for scarcely a year, and most people, including me, had never heard the word
Ms
. used as a term of address. (Mr. Shawn had called me Miss Fadiman.
He
was so venerated by his writers that “Mister” had virtually become part of his name.) Its pronunciation, reflexive now, was not as obvious as you might think. After all,
Mr
. is not pronounced “Mir,” and
Mrs
. is not pronounced “Mirz.” Was it “Mzzzzz”? “Miz”? “Muz”?

In that apocalyptic split second, I somehow alighted on “Em Ess,” which I knew to be the correct pronunciation of
ms
., or manuscript.

Mr. Shawn didn’t blink. He gave no indication that I had said anything untoward. In fact, he calmly proceeded to discuss the new feminist magazine—its history, its merits, its demerits, the opportunities it might offer a young writer like myself—for four or five minutes
without ever mentioning its name
.

Since that time, whenever I have heard anyone talk about civility, I have thought of Mr. Shawn, a man so civil that, in order to spare me embarrassment, he succeeded in crossing an entire minefield of potential
M
s.’s without detonating a single one. I consider his feat comparable to that of Georges Perec, the experimental French writer who composed a 311 -page novel without using the letter
e
. After I left the building, I called a friend. (“How do you say that new little word? … Oh my God, no!”) That was a terrible moment, but as Mr. Shawn had surmised, wanting to die in a telephone booth was greatly preferable to wanting to die in his office.

In twenty-three years—an eyeblink in our linguistic history—the new little word has evolved from a cryptic buzz to an automatism. From the beginning, I saw its logic and fairness. Why should people instantly know if a woman, but not a man, was married? Why should they care? The need for
Ms
. was indisputable. The hitch was feeling comfortable
saying
it. It sounded too much like a lawn mower. Gradually, my ear retuned. Now, although it’s probably a moot point—everyone except telephone solicitors calls me Anne—I am, by process of elimination, Ms. Fadiman. I can’t be Miss Fadiman because I’m married. I can’t be Mrs. Fadiman because my husband is Mr. Colt. I can’t be Mrs. Colt because my name is still Fadiman. I am, to my surprise, the very woman for whom
Ms
. was invented.

On the sanguinary fields of gender politics,
Ms
. has scored a clear victory. I wish I could say the same of, say, the United Church of Christ’s new “inclusive” hymnal, in which “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind” has been replaced by “Dear God, Embracing Humankind.” The end is estimable; it’s the means that chafe. I’m not sure I want to be embraced by an Almighty with so little feeling for poetry. Yet, having heard the new version, I can’t say I feel entirely happy with the old one either. As is all too often the case these days, I find my peace as a reader and writer rent by a war between two opposing semantic selves, one feminist and one reactionary. Most people who have written about questions of gender bias in language have belonged to one camp or the other. Either they want to change everything, or they don’t see what all the fuss is about. Am I the only one who feels torn?

Verbally speaking, as in other areas, my feminist self was born of a simple desire for parity. The use of gender-neutral terms like
flight attendant, firefighter
, and
police officer
seems to me an unambiguous step forward, part of the same process that has euthanized such terminal patients as
authoress
and
sculptress
—good riddance!—and is even now working on the gaggingly adorable
-ette
words: usherettes are being promoted to
ushers, suffragettes
to
suffragists
. (I have been particularly sensitive to words that make women sound little and cute ever since the day my college roommates and I sat around discussing which animals we all resembled. I’d hoped for something majestic—an eland, perhaps, or a great horned owl—but was unanimously declared a gopher. Given that history, it’s a wonder no one has ever called me an authorette.)

My reactionary self, however, prevails when I hear someone attempt to purge the bias from “to each his own” by substituting “to each their own.” The disagreement between pronoun and antecedent is more than I can bear. To understand how I feel about grammar, you need to remember that I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say
hoi polloi
, never “the
hoi polloi
,” because
hoi
meant “the,” and two “the’s” were redundant—indeed something only hoi polloi would say. (Why any ten-year-old would say
hoi polloi
in the first place is another, more pathological matter, but we won’t go into that here.)

I
call the “to each his own” quandary the His’er Problem, after a solution originally proposed by Chicago school superintendent Ella Young in 1912: “To each his’er own.” I’m sorry. I just can’t. My reactionary self has aesthetic as well as grammatical standards, and
his’er
is hideous. Unlike
Ms., his’er
could never become reflexive. (I might interject here that when I posed the His’er Problem to my brother, who was raised in the same grammatical hothouse as I, he surprised me by saying, “I won’t say
his’er
. That would be a capitulation to barbarism. But I would be willing to consider a more rhythmically acceptable neologism such as
hyr
or
hes
, which would be preferable to having to avoid
his
by plotting each sentence in advance like a military campaign.” My brother clearly doesn’t warm to the same challenges as Messrs. Shawn and Perec.)

What about “to each his or her own”? I do resort to that construction occasionally, but I find the double pronoun an ungainly burden. More frequently I recast the entire sentence in the plural, although “to all their own” is slightly off pitch. Even a phrase that is not stylistically disfigured—for example, “all writers worth their salt,” which is only marginally more lumpish than “every writer worth his salt”—loses its specificity, that fleeting moment in which the reader conjures up an individual writer (Isaiah Berlin in one mind’s eye, Robert James Waller in another) instead of a faceless throng.

But I can’t go back. I said “to each his own” until about five years ago, believing what my sixth-grade grammar textbook,
Easy English Exercises
, had told me: that “or her” was “understood,” just as womankind was understood to be lurking somewhere within “mankind.” I no longer understand. The other day I came across the following sentence by my beloved role model, E. B. White: “There is one thing the essayist cannot do—he cannot indulge himself in deceit or concealment, for he will be found out in no time.” I felt the door slamming in my face so fast I could feel the wind against my cheek. “But he
meant
to include you!” some of you may be murmuring. “It was understood!”

I don’t think so. Long ago, my father wrote something similar: “The best essays [do not] develop original themes. They develop original men, their composers.” Since my father, unlike E. B. White, is still around to testify, I called him up last night and said, “Be honest. What was really in your mind when you wrote those sentences?” He replied, “Males. I was thinking about males. I viewed the world of literature—indeed, the entire world of artistic creation—as a world of males, and so did most writers. Any writer of fifty years ago who denies that is lying. Any male writer, I mean.”

I believe that although my father and E. B. White were not misogynists, they didn’t really
see
women, and their language reflected and reinforced that blind spot. Our invisibility was brought home to me fifteen years ago, after
Thunder Out of China
, a 1946 best-seller about China’s role in the Second World War, was reissued in paperback. Its co-authors were Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, my mother. In his foreword to the new edition, Harrison Salisbury mentioned White nineteen times and my mother once. His first sentence was “There is, in the end, no substitute for the right man in the right place at the right moment.” I wrote to Salisbury, suggesting that sometimes—for example, in half of
Thunder Out of China
—there is no substitute for the right woman in the right place at the right moment. To his credit, he responded with the following mea culpa: “Oh, oh, oh! You are totally right. I am entirely guilty. You are the second person who has pointed that out to me. What can I say? It is just one of those totally dumb things which I do sometimes.” I believe that Salisbury was motivated by neither malice nor premeditated sexism; my mother, by being a woman, just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment.

For as long as anyone can remember, my father has called every woman who is more than ten years his junior a girl. Since he is now ninety-one, that covers a lot of women. He would never call a man over the age of eighteen a boy. I have tried to persuade him to mend his ways, but the word is ingrained, and he means it gallantly. He truly believes that inside every stout, white-haired woman of eighty there is the glimmer of that fresh and lissome thing, a girl.

If my father were still writing essays, every full-grown “girl” would probably be transformed by an editor’s pencil into a “woman.” The same thing would happen to E. B. White. In an essay called “The Sea and the Wind That Blows,” White described a small sailing craft as “shaped less like a box than like a fish or a bird or a girl.”
I don’t think he meant a ten-year-old girl. I think he meant a girl old enough to be called a woman. But if he had compared that boat to a woman, his slim little craft, as well as his sentence, would have been forever slowed.