Dictation: A Quartet

Christopher Benfey

In "What Happened to the Baby?"…Uncle Simon (the story is told from his niece's point of view) is the creator of "GNU, the future language of all mankind." Scornful of Esperanto and its creator, the "false messiah" Dr. Zamenhof, Simon wants to push his own universal language "beyond European roots." He has "traveled all over the world, picking up roots and discarding the less common vowels." He has also picked up girls, as his niece discovers. Gradually, she also learns the real reason for Simon's lifelong quarrel with Esperanto, and in doing so she comes to a realization about what unites us all as language-bearers. "Lie, illusion, deception," she asks herself—was that "truly, the universal language we all speak?" She might have given this all-encompassing language a different, more Jamesian name. Call it the "art of fiction," in which Cynthia Ozick, in Dictation: A Quartet, reveals herself a master.
—The New York Times

Michael Dirda

Dictation shows that Ozick continues to command her usual mastery of voices and tones…Winter is finally past and with it the season of heavy tomes. As it happens, Cynthia Ozick's slender volume slips nicely into a briefcase or pocketbook. So even if you're not a stenographer, you can take Dictation wherever you go. You'll want to, since it'll be hard to stop reading once you start.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

A carefully honed, sharply intelligent new collection of four stories shows Ozick (The Heir to the Glimmering World) at the height of her stylistic powers. The title story, by far the strongest tale, follows the female secretaries of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, both of whom take dictation from the two egoist titans. When the authors meet in London, their two amanuenses collude to make their own mark on their masters' work; in so doing, they exalt, with an undeniably sexual glee, that they will thus attain immortality. "Actors" looks on wryly as TV character actor Matt Sorley, né Mose Sadacca and nearing 60, reluctantly takes a role that will either cap his career or defeat him. "At Fumicaro" follows an American Catholic literary critic in Mussolini's Italy as he falls head over heels in love with a pregnant 16-year-old peasant girl: "She was more hospitable to God than anyone who hoped to find God in books." The exuberant "What Happened to the Baby?" follows a young college student and her eccentric Esperanto-spouting uncle to his mid-20th-century meetings of the League for a Unified Humanity. Ozick's stories ingeniously put scholarship in the service of human flowerings. (Apr.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Library Journal

In her elegant new collection, Ozick (Heir to the Glimmering World) examines with characteristic humor the passions that motivate the human heart and the human foibles that often lead to self-deception and misery. In the wonderfully witty and biting opening novella, "Dictation," Miss Bosanquet and Miss Hallowes, the respective amanuenses of Henry James and Jospeh Conrad at the height of their careers, concoct a marvelous scheme to write themselves into posterity. This novella alone is worth the price of the book for its detailed portrayals of characters and its careful construction of story. "Actors" follows the fortunes of Matt Sorley as he searches for work in New York and eventually is tapped to play Lear in an adaptation of the play that features Lear as a Jewish emigrant. Sorley's production is interrupted by a real Lear-an elderly and quite mad Jewish actor who had performed this role originally many years ago. In "At Fumicaro," an art critic attempts to marry his Italian maid only to realize that she has strung him along to rob him. Finally, in "What Happened to the Baby?" a young girl rehearses the story of her uncle's infidelity and her aunt's Medea-like revenge. Ozick is at the top of her form in these splendid stories, and every library will want a copy. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ2/15/07.]
—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Kirkus Reviews

Deceptions and obsessions drive this elegant collection of four stories, three of which have been published in magazines. The fitful friendship of Henry James and Joseph Conrad is the context for the title story, previously unpublished. Their hands cramping, James and Conrad have been forced to dictate their work to stenographers. The stenographers, Theodora Bosanquet (employed by James) and Lilian Hallowes (employed by Conrad), meet by chance at a London club one day in 1910. Theodora, the aggressive one, suggests tea before introducing a bold scheme. Uncommonly well plumped out, the story is a literary jape with a revenge element. Revenge also figures in the contemporary "Actors." Matt Sorley is an elderly New York actor portraying a latter-day Lear in a play. Over the course of the story, he is humiliatingly upstaged by an obsessed figure. "At Fumicaro" is a complete change of pace. Another New Yorker, 35-year-old Frank Castle, bachelor, well-known critic and ardent Catholic, travels to Mussolini's Italy for a conference near Lake Como, and on his fourth day marries a chambermaid. We learn of the marriage upfront; Ozick (Heir to the Glimmering World, 2004, etc.) uses her storyteller's magic to keep us guessing how this "inflamed" bachelor will manage his passion. The last story, "What Happened to the Baby?," is the best, an intricately plotted portrait of a Depression-era married couple in the Bronx who are engaged in a bitter marital struggle. Playful, teasing, provocative fare from this most accomplished of ironists. Agent: Melanie Jackson/Melanie Jackson Agency

The Barnes & Noble Review

History, wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages that separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and, above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent.

In the mischievously witty title story, Ozick imagines a literary conspiracy engineered by Bosanquet and Joseph Conrad's typist Lillian Hallowes. Thrusting these bit players to center stage, she has fashioned a wry meditation on posterity and its discontents. Of Bosanquet, much is known. Her celebrated pamphlet "Henry James at Work" was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. Of Hallowes, a good deal less is known, and although there is no record of their having met, this hasn't stopped Ozick from having her fun. (In a note addressing historical inaccuracies, Ozick declares: "Never mind, says Fiction; what fun, laughs Transgression; so what? mocks Dream.")

And so, it's on a rainy night in January 1910 that the two women meet in the shadow of their masters, as Bosanquet retrieves a forgotten umbrella. ("The forgotten umbrella! Worn device, venerable ruse!" nudges Ozick, echoing both Howards End and James's penchant for melodrama.) Bosanquet convinces a reluctant Hallowes to join her for tea, and the two ladies compare notes. Bosanquet is voluble, rapturous, extolling James's greatness even as she nurses her own ambitions:

We have too much in common. We are in an extraordinary position. Mr. James and Mr. Conrad are men of genius and posterity, and posterity will honor us for being the conduits of genius.

In contrast, the modest Hallowes's devotion to Conrad is animated by a more prosaic motive: Love. A wallflower who lives alone and nurses her invalid mother, Hallowes is a steadfast, long-suffering servant to greatness. It takes patient cultivation for Bosanquet to enlist her reluctant accomplice in her scheme, which calls for each to take a sentence from the stories their masters are presently writing and exchange them, placing each seamlessly in the other's -- the literary equivalent of engraving "Kilroy was here."

Bosanquet finally succeeds, preying on Hallowes's jealousy toward Mrs. Conrad, and thus do "Theodora and Lillian humanly, mindfully, with exacting intent, dictate the outcome of their desires." In the process, Ozick enjoys a double joke -- by the act of writing Dictation she grants these women the posterity that has eluded them, even as Bosanquet's alleged handiwork cannot be easily disproved, as an examination of Conrad's "The Secret Sharer" and James's "The Jolly Corner" attests.

If "Dictation" is the collection's fiery head, "Actors" is its expansive yet elegiac heart, a Borscht Belt tragedy that grieves for lost worlds and laments the inability of language to hold on to the past. Matt Sorley is an aging, out-of-work character actor, more interested in "studying" people than working for them, to the consternation of his wife, Frances, who supports them by creating crossword puzzles. Matt gets a break when he's invited to star in an updated version of King Lear directed by a jeans-and-sweatshirt-wearing wunderkind named Ted Silkowitz, though there's a catch -- the writer has just died and the script is "raw." But that suits Silkowitz's intentions, as he wants to point the title role toward the recesses of the past, evoking the oversized style of Yiddish theatre, a move the less-is-more realist Matt resists. (Ozick is at her Woody Allen funniest in these cross-generational exchanges.) But a visit to the playwright's elderly father -- himself a giant of the Yiddish stage -- unhinges something in Matt. Before long, Matt is "teaching himself to howl," and his heartbreakingly comic apotheosis leaves us with the spectacle of a lost world as foreign to the opening-night audience as the marvelous scratchings -- "metamerism," "oribi," "glyptic" -- that populate Frances's puzzles. Who, Ozick seems to ask, will remain to bear witness to this lost tradition? Who will understand this language?

That question of sustaining tradition also informs "At Fumicaro," the most challenging of the four pieces, in which Ozick turns from her familiar Jewish milieu to Catholic symbolism. Frank Castle, an American Catholic scholar arrives in fascist Italy as part of a conference on "The Church and How It Is Known." In his quarters, Castle finds his chambermaid, Viviana, vomiting violently. Her English is broken: "No belief!" she mutters repeatedly. Despite the difficulty communicating, Castle is drawn to her vulnerability and, to his surprise, he quickly succumbs to temptation:

In less than two hours Frank Castle had become the lover of a child. He had carried her into his bed and coaxed her story from her, beginning with his little finger's trip across her forehead.

Castle learns that Viviana has been impregnated by one of her mother's lovers, and he resolves to marry her and bring her to America. "It was his obeisance. It was what brought him to Italy.... Her tragedy was a commonplace. She was a noisy aria in an eternal opera."

But first Castle must present his paper on evil, on "men and women who had caught sight of demons." And when the conference's last speaker, Percy Nightingale (names do some heavy lifting in this tale), turns up, Castle wonders if he's met evil and is left, aptly, to battle his demons -- coming to understand the nature of his "penance" only at the end of this complex and sometimes opaque tale.

In the final story, "What Happened to the Baby?" -- a sharp and often amusing portrait of la vie de bohème in Greenwich Village -- Ozick again ponders languages and how they separate even those struggling to share meaning. Phyllis, her first-person narrator, sets about unraveling the family mystery surrounding her uncle Simon, the founder and champion of a new language called GNU, conceived in response to Esperanto. Simon is now living in squalor, and Phyllis, newly arrived at NYU, is charged with looking after him, during which time she learns what happened to Simon's long-deceased infant daughter, Retta. What she discovers undermines everything she has been raised to believe about her uncle and his work:

This was the start of Simon's grand scheme -- the letters, the outcries, the feverish heaps of philological papers and books with queer foreign alphabets on their spines. Yet in practice, it was not grand at all; it was extraordinarily simple to execute. Obscure lives inspire no inquisitiveness.

"What Happened to the Baby?" feels like the slightest of the four tales presented here, but that might be merely an accident of juxtaposition, its domestic dramas diminished by the long shadows of the lost worlds evoked by its predecessors. Yet in all four tales, Ozick focuses her abiding intelligence on the limits of understanding and the fungible relationship between words and truth, and so the closing of "What Happened to the Baby?" serves as an effective coda to this meditation on the double edges of language, as Simon's wronged wife inquires, "Lie, illusion, deception, she said -- was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?" --Mark Sarvas

Mark Sarvas's debut novel, Harry, Revised, has been sold in a dozen countries around the world. He is host of the literary blog The Elegant Variation and a member of the National Book Critics Circle.