Has Sontag Gone Soft?

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 20, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 032001np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Interview With Lennard Davis
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

BARBARA BOGAEV, GUEST HOST: From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is FRESH AIR.

I'm Barbara Bogaev, in for Terry Gross.

On today's FRESH AIR, growing up hearing when your parents are deaf. We talk with Lennard Davis, author of a new memoir called "My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood With Deafness." Davis is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

As a child, Davis would act as a go-between and interpreter of the hearing world for his hearing-impaired parents. He'll talk about his childhood in the Bronx and his complex and sometimes difficult relationship with his deaf working-class Jewish immigrant parents.

And book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "In America," the new novel by writer and theorist Susan Sontag.

That's all coming up on FRESH AIR.

First, the news.

(BREAK)

BOGAEV: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev, in for Terry Gross.

My guest, Lennard Davis, grew up in two worlds. One was the world of a kid from a working-class Jewish immigrant family in the South Bronx in the '50s. The other was the world of his parents, who were both deaf.

In his new memoir, "My Sense of Silence," he describes what it was like to live between sound and silence. He writes eloquently of sign language, which he considers his native tongue. He says it's like speech set to dance, which can be crisp and clear or lilting and poetic. And he evokes the not-quite-silent atmosphere of his family household, the sound of his father and mother's distinctive voices and vocalizations, the furious slapping of hands as his parents had a fight in sign language in the next room.

But his parents' deafness also cast a darker shadow across Davis's childhood. He says that when he lay in bed at night, he didn't experience what most children feel, that sense of security and comfort, because his parents could never hear his cries.

Lennard Davis is a professor and graduate director of English at State University of New York, Binghamton.

Here he reads from his new book, "My Sense of Silence."

LENNARD DAVIS, "MY SENSE OF SILENCE": "A child of the deaf may become hypervigilant. This is a word I heard used on the radio to describe soldiers returning home from war. They lie in their beds at night, hypervigilant. They wait for the bomb to drop, a shell to explode, the friend to drag his limbless torso into the trench.

"That was my experience of childhood. I listened for the burglars that my parents could not hear, for the robbers, the monsters, the flash fire, the crackling sounds of a ceiling collapsing. I was the guard, and it was all war.

"Last night, I lay in bed listening to the mice running through a farmhouse where I'm vacationing. The lights were off; my wife was asleep. I lay in rigid awareness. When I hear sounds in the night, I still panic. My heart pounds. I never wake my wife, and I never woke my parents. I lie now, as then, in silent terror."

BOGAEV: Lennard Davis, welcome to FRESH AIR.

DAVIS: Well, thank you.

BOGAEV: And thank you for reading.

You know, as a first-time parent, I think my most terrifying thought was that I would sleep so soundly at night I wouldn't be able to hear my baby cry. Do you have those memories from your earliest childhood of your parents not being able to hear you cry?

DAVIS: I don't have specific memories, but I have kind of what Proust calls "memoires involuntaires," that is, like, I have bodily memories. And then I have even to this day a fear of being cold at night. I take extreme precautions so that I won't be cold at night, and I have, you know, endless number of blankets that I keep around the bottom so I can pull up to cover me. And I have this sort of horror, sort of dread of death and separation even now when I turn the light out to go to bed.

So I do have some memories, and I actually begin the memoir with a kind of memory of lying in this -- because I was in the same bedroom as my parents, you know, inches away from them, without being able to in some sense communicate with them as soon as the lights went out. I have a -- the memoir begins with a kind of my scene of my parents making love, and I'm crying in bed, and I'm separate from them, and together -- yet together in a strange sort of way.

BOGAEV: When you got a little older, though, did you work out methods for them to hear you -- for them to know that you were in distress, like banging on the floor, so something that would make a vibration that they could feel?

DAVIS: When I was in bed, I actually had my brother at that point -- we were -- later on we were sleeping in the same bedroom together, and he was 10 years older, but he was a pretty good teenager, so he could sleep through almost anything. Once I became ambulatory, I could just go to -- go over to them.

But I'll tell you one thing that's funny. Once when I was sick -- I think I had the measles or something and I was in bed for a really long time -- I devised this kind of Rube Goldberg thing that I could call my mother in the kitchen, which was (inaudible) it was a one-bedroom apartment, and I was at least two rooms away from her, the bedroom, then the living room, and then the kitchen. And I set up a series of strings that I kind of roped through ver -- through the doorways and doorknobs and so on that would -- I could pull the string, and it would turn a light switch on in the kitchen.

BOGAEV: Did that work?

DAVIS: Not very well.

BOGAEV: (laughs)

DAVIS: But it was better than nothing. I think that was sort of the summary, better than nothing.

BOGAEV: Do you remember realizing when you were young that you could hear and your parents couldn't?

DAVIS: I don't have a specific memory of it because I -- growing up in a deaf family, deafness is not unusual, as it would be in any -- almost any family with a disability or even any quirks in the family. So I wasn't really aware of it until I began to see other people's reactions to my parents. I think that's -- that was my sense of the beginning of a sense of difference.

For example, when I would ride on the subway with my parents, and they would talk to each other in sign language, everyone on the subway would stare at them. And at a very early age, maybe 3 or 4, I developed this sort of obsessive system of staring at -- down each person on the subway, working my way from one part of the car to the other, until they would stop looking. And then I would just begin at the top of the car again and start staring at them.

So that kind of thing -- well, my friend's older brother said my father talked like an Indian, and I tried to attack him, but it was useless because he was about five times as big as me.

BOGAEV: Now, you translated your parents' sign language. Were they eloquent talkers in sign?

DAVIS: In sign -- well, I interpreted, yes, and they were -- sure, they were as -- in -- they spoke sign language the way any (inaudible) -- the way that any normal person and hearing person would speak English. I mean, they -- in fact, they were eloquent in a way that I didn't even realize, because later, after my father died, I found letters that they wrote, and they were really beautifully written.

And my father actually was -- he was a correspondent for a national deaf newspaper. He was a pretty good writer in English. And in sign, they were -- you know, they could say great things. (laughs)

BOGAEV: But did they have their own style? I mean, everyone has a different style of speech, and some of us are better talkers than others.

DAVIS: Sure. My mother was probably more direct as a signer, and my father probably was more elaborate. Also they were British, and -- both British, and so they came to America, and their signing was a sort of combination of British sign language and American sign language. So even now for me when I speak sign language, I'm always sort of saying the wrong thing, because I'm -- I have their sort of -- kind of amalgam language.

BOGAEV: (laughs) You mean...

DAVIS: Well, I speak the...

BOGAEV: ... calling the bathroom the loo, or (inaudible)...

DAVIS: Exactly, that would be the equivalent, that's right.

BOGAEV: You write that because your parents were deaf, there was a giant dictionary of sounds for which you had no names. What kind of sounds (inaudible)?

DAVIS: Well, the one I write about particularly was -- well, something very simple, actually, which I didn't actually -- I don't think I mention in the book, is pigeons cooing. I had no idea what that was. For years I couldn't figure that out. You'd walk away (ph) building, and there was this weird sound that came out of the building, sort of off the roof level. I had absolutely no idea what it was. It took me at least four or five years to figure that one out.

And there -- when I would go to sleep at night, there were these, you know, cats -- I -- I -- in the alleyway, because I slept over the alleyway where there's -- where the garbage was kept. And there'd be constant cat fights. And I had -- didn't know what those were, particularly the sound of kind of like caterwauling yowl, which I thought was an old lady who lived around the corner, and would -- you know, to me, kind of like a witchlike lady, and I would, you know, listen to that, and then I'd look at her the next day and think, Were you outside my window yelling that way?

Things like that were confusing. Also, another extremely confusing thing was the Mr. Softee truck, which has a kind of little musical chime. I don't know if you have to grow up in New York, but there's this kind of little musical chime. And they started Mr. Softee when I had the measles, and I was in bed for two weeks. And so all of a sudden, I began hearing a music box, just -- out the window at various hours, and I had no idea what it was. And I thought I was -- thought this was kind of sent -- supernatural or something.

BOGAEV: You must have thought...

DAVIS: And I couldn't -- I...

BOGAEV: ... you were mad.

DAVIS: Well, I thought that quite a few times.

BOGAEV: (laughs) Did you talk to your parents in sign language?

DAVIS: My parents used what they call total communication, so they both spoke and signed at the same time, and so did I. So kind of articulated and signed at the same point. My wife actually noticed something when she -- when a -- when she first met me, and I was -- my father was still alive. And when I used to speak with him, she said, "You know, you speak in a British Liverpudlian accent when you speak to your father." And I sound like a deaf British person, which I don't think I sound like normally.

BOGAEV: So that's because your mother wasn't -- she wasn't born deaf, she had spinal meningitis, and she was the one with the Liverpool accent...

DAVIS: (inaudible), right.

BOGAEV: ... that she retained when she...

DAVIS: That's right.

BOGAEV: ... when she spoke, after she lost her hearing?

DAVIS: Yes, she became deaf at 7. She had meningitis. And so she was one of those things that linguists are always looking for, you know, she was born in 1911, so she -- her -- the language of a kind of working-class Liverpudlian woman of that particular age is a preserved -- it was preserved in her speech, because it hadn't changed since she came to America.

BOGAEV: Now, what kind of signer were you? Were you a good one?

DAVIS: Probably not. My parents -- you know, this is common for children of deaf adults. It's something that we talk about at the conferences that we have. Some parents don't want their children to learn sign language at all. They want them just to be part of the hearing world. Others are -- let them learn sign language quite adequately. My parents were sort of in between, and so I learned sign language, and my father certainly corrected me a lot, but I -- when I speak now, I can speak sign language, I can understand it, but I don't think I'm anywhere near as fluent in it as -- or comfortable in it as a lot of other folks I know.

BOGAEV: And they didn't want -- they were ambivalent about it because they wanted you very much to be part of a hearing culture, and not...

DAVIS: Yes.

BOGAEV: ... the deaf culture?

DAVIS: Yes. There's some -- there are lots of deaf people who are very much -- and my parents were very much part of the New York deaf Jewish community. But my father was -- had a little difference. He was a race walker. He was -- held the unofficial record for the 25 miles, the American record. And he was a member of the 92nd Street Y team, and was actually -- there are banner headlines in "The New York Times" from the 1930s that -- of the races that he won.

So he kind of always fancied that he was more part of the hearing world than a lot of deaf people were, and he had hearing friends, all -- but -- so there was a way in which they really pushed me into the hearing world and said, That's your world, that's where you belong. This is -- you know, the deaf world is our world, and you can be part of it, but you're really hearing.

BOGAEV: I would think this being between two cultures, though, must be pretty bewildering, especially since it has to -- it's so integral to -- something so integral to yourself, your language.

DAVIS: Yes. It's -- it is bewildering, and I think that there are lots of people like myself who don't know whether they're deaf or hearing, and in fact we tend to think of ourselves as bicultural. I think I pretty much adapted a persona, anyway, in the hearing world, until about maybe 10 years ago.

And that's when I went to my first CODA conference, that's Children of Deaf Adults, and began to realize, no, there's this whole other side of me that I sort of suppressed in the effort to become a professor and in -- you know, in -- you know, somebody in the hearing world that uses English in a particular way, and that's when I began to realize how much of myself was really deaf, and what that means to me.

Deaf people have a -- there are certain ways that deaf culture works. And one thing is that deaf people are very face-to-face, very one-on-one with each other. When they talk, they look in each other's eyes, they look at each other's faces. Hearing people tend to look away when they talk. Deaf people touch a lot. They get intimate very quickly.

This can be misconstrued by people who don't understand this. And I -- and it certainly was the case with me. People often thought I was -- you know, what -- badly behaved or too forward or too blunt, and I think I still get that to a certain degree.

BOGAEV: It sounds also as if, in an effort to communicate, they bring more of their senses into the experience.

DAVIS: I don't know that that's the case. I mean, I think that's the perception that hearing people have about deaf people, because when you look at deaf people, they seem so mobile and animated. But they're just doing what their bodies what people do -- what hearing people do with their voices. In other words, if I -- I can say "yes" 10 different ways, and if I'm going to use sign language, I have to convey that "yes" in a different kind of way with my body, with my face, with my gestures.

BOGAEV: When you sign, do you sign the way your parents did, make the same gestures or those facial expressions, or the sounds that your parents did?

DAVIS: Absolutely. And in fact, even when I don't sign, some -- one of the things my wife -- it took her a while to figure this out, and my daughter is always pointing this out -- is that when I'm angry or when I'm -- when I don't like the way something tastes or what (inaudible) have -- I get a look -- I get a very exaggerated look on my face of disdain or anger, which I have to explain. It took me a long time to explain to my wife, I'm not really overreacting. That's simply the way I do it. And you just have to know that that's the way a deaf person might show something on their face.

BOGAEV: I'm talking with Lennard Davis. He's a professor of English at State University of New York at Binghamton. He's just published his memoir about growing up the son of deaf parents in the South Bronx in the '50s. It's called "My Sense of Silence."

Lennard, we're going to take a break now, and then we're going to talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

BOGAEV: Back with Lennard Davis. His new memoir, "My Sense of Silence," is about growing up the son of deaf parents in the South Bronx in the '50s.

Was your first word in sign language, or verbal?

DAVIS: My first word was in sign language, and it was the word for milk. And it -- my parents say that I had my little hands through the crib asking for milk.

BOGAEV: What is that sign?

DAVIS: It's this. (laughs)

BOGAEV: Can you describe it?

DAVIS: Yes. Yes, radio's not very good for the deaf. It's -- actually, the way I do it is wrong. I mean, it's the sign language in my family. It's as if you were milking a cow, two hands going up and down, squeezing a little bit. But I think the actual method is -- in America is one hand just kind of squeezing together and unsqueezing.

BOGAEV: Do you think, then, of signing as your native language? I mean, are there things that you can only say with your hands?

DAVIS: Well, let me put it this way. I'm a very verbal person, and I live in language, I write. Words are very important to me. I'm an English professor. I teach how to interpret texts. So I'm very -- that's a world I'm really comfortable in.

But sign language is a whole other world, and there are ways it intersects and there are ways are -- it doesn't. But when I sign -- they sit (ph) -- and if I sign the word for milk, I feel more milky. You know, if I say the word for love, which is your hands crossed against your chest, and you kind of push in and give yourself a hug, it feels more like love than just the word "love."

So there's a kind of intensity and there's a kind of childhood connectedness to these sort of primal words in sign language. And I often speak to myself in sign language. A lot of times when I'm driving, which is pretty dangerous, but I do a lot of driving, and I'll start chal -- or I'll translate the -- I'll translate what I hear on the radio, you know, "All Things Considered," or music, into sign language.

BOGAEV: You write about the normal voices of the deaf. These are your words, how they're "soothing, like whale sounds, cooing and arcing under the surface of the deep, too low for birds." I thought that was a really beautiful description. What were your parents voices like, like that?

DAVIS: Well, you know, there is a kind of deaf sound. My mother -- my mother had this Liverpudlian accent, and she'd say things like, "coo-kie" and "poonch" and "loonch." She sounded like the Beatles, but with a slightly distorted sound. And I -- the way I kind of describe it is like if you leave your hand in water for too long and, you know, (inaudible) this -- the flesh begins to slowly change, and I think if you know a language and then you become deaf, things start to change a little bit.

But she had a kind of high-pitched kind of silvery sound to hear voice, and I always found it very irresistible. She'd call me from the apartment building, and it was like this lasso, silver lasso thrown out to be playing stickball or something, and I would just immediately come.

Course, I couldn't not come, because I couldn't call and say no. But my father was much more gruff. He had a deep voice. He was gruff. He was kind of more of a gruff person, and he had a kind of scary voice to some people, and he -- and very scary to us when he was angry. But it was that sort of low, grumbling voice that is -- would be difficult for a lot of hearing people to understand.

BOGAEV: Now, your parents went to a social club for the deaf and often took you and your brother with them. What did it sound like there?

DAVIS: (laughs) Oh, it was wonderful. Lots of sounds. There'd be kind of -- you know, you could hear people -- there were all kinds of grunts and groans and you'd hear people's false teeth chattering. (laughs) There -- it -- there was just about as many different sounds as a human being can make without -- and then sometimes they'd be very quiet, and you'd just see a million people standing around speaking in sign language, and not much sound.

We loved it, and we used to run around and we used to yell out loud and nobody could hear us. It was great.

BOGAEV: (laughs) I would imagine, though, growing up, you know, in the '50s, it wasn't a great time for understanding or acknowledgment even of disabilities. Did you think of sign language, I guess, as a poor substitute for spoken English? I mean, did it cause you to adopt some -- perhaps some of the discriminatory or prejudicial ideas people had about your parents that they had, they were less intelligent, that they were, you know, quote-unquote, "deaf and dumb"?

DAVIS: Well, you know, there's been a lot of work on sign language in the last 10, 15 years to show that it's a complete language, is complete and capacious and commodious as any language around. But yes, in the 1950s, there was not a lot of understanding, there was no Marlee Matlin, there was no National Theater of the Deaf, there were no TTYs, there was no captioning. I mean, being deaf was just kind of crummy from the point of view of accessibility and resources.

And my parents were poor, and so they never went to Gallaudet, which was a college at the time, and their education stopped at sixth grade. So -- and most deaf people, I think, did consider their language not really as good as English. But that, of course, you know, if you look at the history of English, you find out that in the 17th century, people didn't consider English as good as Latin.

So that was sort of at that stage. And I thought of it as gestural. I think I thought of it as kind of a substitute pidgen, not really a language. And that's why I was so interested in this other really burnished language that was -- that there was poetry and theater and drama. And I didn't understand, as I do now, that there's wonderful theater and great poetry in sign language. And I think that's been the wonderful, remarkable discoveries of the last 10 or 15 years.

BOGAEV: You mentioned people staring at you on the subway. Kids can be really cruel. Did they give you -- did kids, your peers, give you a hard time about your parents?

DAVIS: You know, except for the kid who said my father talked like a Native American, not really. I mean, I grew up in a pretty working-class neighborhood. Everybody knew my parents. I mean, they -- you know, it wasn't like -- they didn't treat my parents particularly different, and (inaudible) you know, it's the kind of neighborhood you kind of ignored the parents, and you just kind of went with the kids.

And I actually spent a lot of time teaching all my friends how to do finger spelling, so that sort of made me feel kind of special.

Aside from when, like, my mother would come to school, there wasn't really a lot of interaction. My parents pretty much stayed up -- stayed to themselves and let me have a lot of freedom, which was good and bad.

BOGAEV: Lennard Davis's new memoir is "My Sense of Silence." We'll continue our conversation in the second half of the show.

I'm Barbara Bogaev, and this is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

BOGAEV: Coming up, a deaf father's obsession with television. We continue our conversation with Lennard Davis about his book "My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood With Deafness."

And Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel by Susan Sontag called "In America."

(BREAK)

BOGAEV: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev.

Let's continue our interview with Lennard Davis. Davis is a professor of English at State University of New York at Binghamton. His new memoir, "My Sense of Silence," is about growing up the son of deaf parents in the South Bronx in the '50s. His parents were working-class Jews who emigrated from England.

Now, your parents came over in the '20s, right, or at least your father came in the '20s. What brought them to America?

DAVIS: Well, his father had come before. What brought his father is a little unclear. I mean, we have several stories, one of which was that he killed a man in the boxing ring, and my grandfather was a boxer, and that was one story. The other story, which I think is probably more accurate, was that he was in debt and also didn't particularly like his wife, so he left, he just went -- he was kind of a wanderer anyway. He'd come from Russia, he came to England, and then eventually to America and ended up as a barker in Sea World in California.

He was quite a character. But he -- so I think that he kind of left, and then one by one, each of his children followed him. So that's why my father came.

BOGAEV: How did your father and your mother support the family?

DAVIS: Oh, my father was a sewing machine operator in the garment district, and my mother was an alteration hand. She used -- when I was a kid, she took in -- people came to our house and she fixed their clothing. She altered them, she made clothing. And my father was a seasonal worker, so he was -- he wasn't working for about half the year, and most of the time he was home sort of grumpy and, you know, reading "The Daily News" and criticizing everybody and falling asleep on the couch.

And my mother was -- it was kind of odd for me, because there was a steady stream of women who would come into our living room and take their clothes off, and then, you know, my mother would sort of tend to their -- get on her knees and sort of fix their clothing. I found this kind of interesting, actually.

BOGAEV: I bet.

(LAUGHTER)

BOGAEV: Was tailoring a common occupation for deaf people? I can't imagine there were all that many occupations open to them.

DAVIS: Well, yes, tailoring was one, particularly the sewing machine operators were good, because they weren't disturbed by the noise. The classic deaf occupation was a linotyper, because you could work for the newspapers and you could have this deafening noise, and it wouldn't bother you. And you -- you know, your reading skills and so on were not involved with your deafness.

But my father always to be -- get into, like, linotype or the un -- plumbers' union or something. But he ended up, he ended up always being this, you know, sewing machine operator. And it was kind of -- he was sort of proud about his work. But I think on some level, he would have liked to have done better.

BOGAEV: You write in your memoir that television was just this towering presence in your house, that your father was extremely controlling about the use of and the treatment of and the handling of the television. What were some of his rules about it?

DAVIS: Oh, the TV, we -- the deal in my house, it was sort of a Hobson's choice that was given to my brother, and my father -- my parents said, Do you want a brother, or do you want a TV set? This was in 1949. My brother, to his credit, said he wanted a brother. But, you know, soon as I showed up, it was -- I turned out to be rather boring in the beginning, so he wanted a TV set. So they got one in 1950. And it -- this was this wonderful Emerson console, you know, this kind of mahogany monolith, and it stood in our living room. And my father was -- instantly became a devotee. And it was like he -- this thing was like his god.

And he -- of course he -- he loved watching baseball, which he could do without hearing. And the TV set was -- he was so terrified, it was also breaking all the time. So we had all these rules, like, you know, you were never allowed to touch the little box in the front of it that had the horizontal and vertical controls, and you have to -- every time you turned the channel, you had to take your hand off, so that the TV would have a chance to rest.

I mean, these were kind of invented things, but -- to placate the god of the television. But he was very insistent about it. And also, you -- if you turned the TV set off, you had to wait 10 minutes before you turned it on again, so that it wouldn't get upset.

And, of course, I ended up doing all the things I wasn't supposed to do and breaking the TV set and constantly having to have it shipped off. So any time the TV set broke, it was my fault, by definition.

BOGAEV: Because you were the youngest.

DAVIS: I was the youngest and therefore the least likely to follow orders.

BOGAEV: Now, not to play armchair pop psychologist, but do you have theories about his controlling behavior? Was it not just the TV, but was he controlling in many areas of your domestic life?

DAVIS: Yes, he was. I don't know, it may have been just his personality. He -- I mean, he -- he had the emotional age of about a 12-year-old, and that's not because he was deaf. I think that's probably just because who he was. But he was -- you know, he -- the house was his home, and he wanted it to be the way he wanted it. He was born in 1898, you know, so he was from another world. He was an Edwardian, and he just wanted, you know, us to operate like sort of little automatons and be good two -- you know, good boys, and do what he said.

And that's a pretty hard -- that's a pretty tall order. I think it's also partly because he was frustrated with the world, and he was in some sense -- had to fight against it, and the world wasn't very nice to him. And so I think in some ways he wanted to -- he turned that feeling, you know, of -- onto us, and wanted to control us if he couldn't control the world.

BOGAEV: You had an older brother who was 10 years older than you, quite an age difference. And usually in these situations where you have a really controlling parent and especially with, I think, immigrant parents when you're translating for them and you're called to be adults or more responsible in some ways, usually the siblings really band together and -- in this situation. But it doesn't sound like that was the case in your family.

DAVIS: No. My brother was -- you know, had my parents' exclusive attention for 10 years, which is kind of a curse in a way, I think, initially. But -- and then I came along and sort of dethroned him. And I think he never quite got over that. And he was very, you know, mean to me, bordering on sadistic. And the thing was odd about that was that he would do it in kind of routinized ways that weren't very more -- you know, he wasn't angry at me. He never appeared to be angry at me. But he would sort of systematically, you know, torture me in various ways.

And that was very painful, although as a kid, I think I just accepted it, like I accepted everything else. You know, it was probably much later on I began to realize that he would have been a tremendous help to me had he been able to do that.

But he couldn't do that, so -- And I think the other thing is that he had -- he himself had become kind of emotionally turned off, and I was this kind of wonderful thing that he could have at home, that -- like, if you punched it, it would cry, and you tickled it, it would laugh, and, you know, if you did things to it, it reacted. And I think he was kind of fascinated by that, and sort of used me as a kind of way to understand what feelings were.

BOGAEV: What were some of his ritual tortures?

DAVIS: Oh, well, of course there were the noogies. I mean, you know, everybody's brother did that. But he did it on a very regular basis. I mean, he would do things like take me out to deep water and try to drown me, and he would hold me in front of oncoming cars. And -- but the thing that (inaudible) how emblematic for me was that he made me eat a blanket once, cor -- part of a blanket, and swallow it.

And, you know, he would wrap me up and sit on my head, and I was terrified of claus -- I was claustrophobic, so these were things that were kind of routine.

BOGAEV: Did you confront your brother about it later, later in life?

DAVIS: Oh, yes, and many times. And actually the nice story about this is that having written this book, my brother has read it, and really likes it, and has read it more than once, and his -- you know, and he doesn't have any memory, really, of our childhood, so this has become his version. And he's seeing what he did through my eyes, and for the first time, he was really able to apologize to me in a way that meant something to me.

And that's meant a lot. We're a lot closer now.

BOGAEV: Lennard Davis's book is "My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood With Deafness." We'll continue our conversation after the break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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BOGAEV: My guest is Lennard Davis. He's just published his memoir about growing up the son of deaf parents. It's called "My Sense of Silence." He's also the editor of a book of his parents' courtship letters. It's called "Shall I Say Kiss?"

Lennard, when you edited these letters, that was from a period of courtship when your mother was still in England and your father was already in America and they were separated for two years, how did you get access to the letters?

DAVIS: Well, when my father died, I went to his apartment and I found them. And there this neat little package of letters. And it was one of these things that, you know, you see in the movies where somebody opens up this little package and you read the first letter. And I got completely sucked into it.

They were in absolutely in order. They were mostly my mother's letters to him from the period of 1936 to '38. And I -- it was fascinating. I literally entered into this courtship that they were having with each other when they were, you know, younger than I was when I read it now at that point. And -- or at least my mother was.

And it was a kind of page-turner. I mean, and periodically they would break up and they'd have fights, and I -- and suddenly I would begin to feel myself sort of disappearing, you know, the -- it was sort of the "Back to the Future" moment, where my moth -- I began to get faint every time that they would fight with each other.

But -- and the last letter is my mother saying, you know, "I'm coming -- I'm getting on the boat, I'm coming over," and that was the last letter.

BOGAEV: What did you learn from them, from the letters, about your parents that you hadn't known, or you couldn't have known as a kid?

DAVIS: Well, the thing that I think was the most dramatic for me was that my mother -- when I was growing up, my mother was kind of this quiet sort of -- you could say depressed, you could say Zen kind of presence in the house. I mean, she was sort of the submissive wife, and occasionally she'd fight with my father, but, you know, usually he would win. And it was -- she was kind of quiet. He was always supposed to be the great writer. You know, he wrote -- he had this column in the deaf newspaper, and he wrote plays and things.

And my mother was supposed to be sort of the less-educated one. Well, you look at the letters, she writes these fabulous letters, very strong, very powerful, a woman who really knows what she wants. I mean, my father -- they had only met each other three or four times when my father had to leave England because his visa ran out. And he -- (inaudible) right at the third or fourth time, he said he wanted to -- he wanted her to come to America, he wanted to marry her. And the letters are all about her saying, Well, I don't know who you are, and what is this all about? And I do love you, but this is a big jump, and, you know, How can you say such things?

And there was just this kind of well-written, clear, direct writing. That was a big surprise for me about my mother.

And my father was this kind of, like, you know, on his knees kind of wooer, you know, just totally crazy about her, and begging her to do all these kind of things that seemed pretty impulsive.

BOGAEV: So and both those things seemed so out of character for them.

DAVIS: Well, my father always was in love with my mother, but just to see him as this sort of, you know, you know, lovestruck guy, that was kind of interesting too.

BOGAEV: You are involved with an organization called Children of Deaf Adults, CODA. And at a meeting of CODA, you once hired actors to read from the letters, and you invited your brother to attend and to hear this. I can't imagine what that must be like, to hear -- to have both of you hear your parents really given voice. Did it ring true to you, or was it jarring?

DAVIS: Oh, no, it was incredible. It was one of the most amazing experiences. The two actors were themselves CODAs, and then there -- they -- we set it up the way that "Love Letters" play is, so they were sitting at a table. And behind them were two people who would be signing what they were actually voicing. So you had both signing and voicing. And we -- you know, we made the letters have a kind of structure to them. And it was incredible. The audience reacted. There were about 300 or 400 people in the audience, and they just reacted so positively, and they were so interested in it, that it was an amazing vindication for me.

Because my parents were, you know, they were working-class deaf people. I mean, what -- who could be lower on the totem pole? And here was this occasion where their letters were being performed, and people were really thinking of it, and there's a kind of a -- you know, interesting story, well written. And even the fact that the letters were published by Gallaudet University Press, and the letters are now in -- going to be in the archive of that library, it would have been such an honor for them.

Plus they also would have been completely mystified. May -- I'm sure if they were alive, they wouldn't have wanted the letters to be published.

BOGAEV: When you do think of your parents, do you hear them talking to you, or do you see them signing to you?

DAVIS: Both.

BOGAEV: And talking in their original voices, or in voices of more fluency that you've internalized in your...

DAVIS: No, no, I kind of feel that in the original voice. I wish I had recordings of them. I mean, you wouldn't necessarily think you'd want to record a deaf person, but I would love to hear their voices now. I do miss them. They're both dead.

BOGAEV: I thought it was interesting that in translating their signing or their speech, and your signing in this book, "My Sense of Silence," that you didn't turn the words -- the language into English, that you left out connecting words, like articles. In deaf culture, is there an accepted etiquette to how you're supposed to translate signing, not to English, a fayat (ph), or -- I don't know, make it more verbal?

DAVIS: Yes, yes. Well, that's a good point, good question. And when I first started writing about it, I was talking to somebody who was an interpreter. And they said, Please, don't do this thing where you make them come across as sounding illiterate, because, you know, if they were speaking in sign language, they wouldn't be illiterate, they would -- it would be flowing.

But I felt that the -- to really capture them, since they also did speak, I had to give this sort of way that they spoke. I had to try to characterize the way that they spoke. And, I mean, there's a book that somebody recently wrote called "Train Go, Sorry," which is a literal translation of an expression in sign language, which means, like, "You missed the boat."

But to say "You missed the boat" would miss the nice way that that is formed, Train go, sorry, you know. And there's also something called CODA talk, which developed spontaneously in the CODA conferences. And a lot of people talk that way to each other in the conference, just to sort of -- because sign language belongs to the deaf, and English belongs to the hearing, let's say, spoken English, and so we, CODAs, don't have a language. And so CODA talk came out about as a kind of vin -- a language that we could express ourselves in. And people actually write poems in it.

BOGAEV: Now, you became an academic. You're also a writer of cultural criticism. You teach English. And all of these jobs are a form of translation in some way, of interpreting culture, interpreting books, interpreting books for your students, helping them. Do you see a continuity between the role you played for your parents and your chosen profession?

DAVIS: Oh, absolutely. Although I didn't see it right away. In fact, the funny thing was that for me, going -- I mean, I was a poor kid from the Bronx, I got a scholarship from my parents' union and also from Columbia, and I went to Columbia College and I went to Columbia University and I studied with all these sort of famous people. And I thought, Ah, I'm going to move into this world of refined language and, you know, I'm going to be doing something about as different as I possibly could from growing up in a deaf family in the Bronx.

And then it hit me at some point that actually what I'm doing is, I'm an interpreter of texts, and I'm interpreting from -- and even as a writer, you know, you're interpreting your ideas, you're putting them in the best possible language, you're thinking about how to say this in the right way.

So in some sense, it's what I've always been doing, and I'm pretty comfortable doing it.

BOGAEV: Did you avoid writing out issues of disability in culture?

DAVIS: Initially I -- my goal as a kid was to really get away from the Bronx, to get away from my parents, to get away from everything. I left home at 16, and I really never went back. And I think that some people who grow up in deaf families do that. And, you know, I mean, I saw my parents, but I was, like -- my life had to be completely separate. I -- and this was such a -- you know, a powerful part of my life, and one that I felt was overwhelming, so I wanted to get away from it.

And -- but ironically, after I became involved with CODA, I went back, I started doing research in disability and deafness, and I've written a lot of books on the subject, and I've done a lot of stuff. My whole career now at this point, a large part of my career, is devoted to that.

So it's actually kind of exciting, and I've just turned 50, to have your -- in the middle of your life, to realize that where you started out was actually where you are now in a kind of positive way. It -- what's very exciting to me is, I can go -- I recently was just at the University of Rochester, and I was giving a seminar, and I realized that I was able to easily move from the issues and the subjects and literature to my own life and back, and there was no firewall any more that I had -- I had constructed a firewall earlier on between my early experiences and my life as an academic, and that firewall's gone.

BOGAEV: Your father is dead, your mo -- both your parents are dead, but your father did live long enough to see you established in your career, right?

DAVIS: Mm-hm.

BOGAEV: Your mother died, though, I think, when you were in college...

DAVIS: Yes.

BOGAEV: ... in a car accident?

DAVIS: Well, she -- this -- she died what I consider the death of a deaf person. I mean, she was coming from the deaf club on 14th Street, and she could -- you know, was going to get a sandwich. It was about 6:00 at night, and she crossed the street. And the light changed, and some car came barreling along and honked, assuming that the -- that she would hear, and she didn't, and she was killed.

I was 22. It was pretty traumatic.

BOGAEV: And that's common, I guess.

DAVIS: Well, I -- you know, you -- deafness is an invisible disability. You wouldn't assume that people walking along the street are deaf if you were driving your car and you honked.

BOGAEV: Right.

DAVIS: But maybe you should.

BOGAEV: You have two children, right?

DAVIS: Mm-hm.

BOGAEV: Did you teach them sign language?

DAVIS: Well, I did teach them a little bit of sign language when they were young, and they know some words. But, you know, it's kind of like the third generation. I mean, they sort of know a little bit. My daughter actually -- Francesca -- wants -- you know, keeps saying to me, "Why don't you talk to me in sign language all the time now? Because I really want to learn." So we're actually doing some stuff right now.

And -- but they know, they know sort of key words, and they know sort of jokes in our family, you know, like my father's famous phrase, which I can't say to you in sign language because nobody will see it, but he always used to -- every meal he used to say, "Must have potatoes." So, you know, they know how to say, "Must have potatoes." (laughs)

BOGAEV: I'm curious if silence is important for you in your life, that you somehow absorbed some of your parents' silence, although it doesn't sound like they were very silent, but I imagine there were hours and there were days when there was much more silence in your house than in others.

DAVIS: Well, you know, one thing to just clear up is that a lot of people think that to be deaf is to be silent. But deaf people are pretty -- fill up -- they fill up the space, not only with sign language but also with even noises, and there are deaf noises that are sort of communicative in a way, and slapping hands and, you know, other kinds of sound.

But yes, I spent a lot of time with complete silence. My father used to watch the TV with the sound off, and I -- that sound -- I don't know if you're aware of the -- what a TV sounds like with the sound off, but there's this kind of high-pitched hum, which I really got to like as a kid. And -- but that's almost kind of a sound of silence. And I spend a lot of time thinking about silence even now, and kind of find myself wanting to be in a completely quiet environment, and then also sort of hating it at -- you know, so I'm ambivalent, I guess, and -- but I haven't figured out silence yet. I'm still working on it.

BOGAEV: Lennard David, I want to thank you very much for talking with us today.

DAVIS: Oh, I'm delighted to talk to you.

BOGAEV: Lennard Davis's memoir is "My Sense of Silence."

Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews the new Susan Sontag novel.

This is FRESH AIR.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Lennard Davis
High: Lennard Davis talks about his new memoir "My Sense of Silence: Memoirs of a Childhood With Deafness," about Davis's experiences, growing up a hearing child with deaf parents. He'll talk about his complex and sometimes difficult relationship with his deaf, working-class Jewish immigrant parents. Davis is a professor and Graduate Director of the English department at State University of New York, Binghamton. He has written several books and published essays in The Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other publications. He also published "Shall I Say a Kiss: The Courtship Letters of a Deaf Couple," a compilation of his parents love letters.
Spec: Lennard Davis; Diasabilities; "My Sense of Silence"

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 2000 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 2000 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Interview With Lennard Davis

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 20, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 032002NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Maureen Corrigan Reviews 'In America'
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:52

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

BARBARA BOGAEV, HOST: Has Susan Sontag gone soft? Book critic Maureen Corrigan says Sontag's new novel, "In America," is great fun to read, but a little mushy.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BOOK CRITIC: One side effect of reading Susan Sontag's latest novel, "In America," is that I'm a little less afraid of her than I used to be. My fear has been well grounded. After all, she's such a formidable intellectual presence, all those awards, including the MacArthur genius award, all those books.

And then there's the way she looks. For years she maintained that trademark lightning bolt of white hair shooting through her black mane. Now, as the book jacket photo for "In America" shows, she's gone all white, like Zeus.

But those appraising X-ray eyes of hers are the same. I watched those eyes in action a few years ago at a bookstore. Sontag was reading from her last novel, "The Volcano Lover," and entertaining questions from an awed crowd. Nonetheless, she wasn't nice. Whenever anybody asked her a simplistic question about the novel, those eyes would flick away in boredom, publicly cutting off the supplicant's life support.

So who would have guessed that deep inside that massive, overactive brain of Sontag's lurked the plot for a beautifully written old-fashioned historical novel, complete with a somewhat retro moral? For "In America" is about a woman, an actress, who chooses work over love. She's adored by theater audiences, but at the end of the evening, she's alone, and she wonders wistfully about the price she's paid for fame.

"In America" is cleverly elusive and, of course, drenched in insightful historical detail. But maybe what's most endearing about this novel is that consciously or not, it's indebted to that classic tear-jerker of the American cinema, "A Star Is Born."

For the first 50 or so pages of "In America," I did think that instead of historical melodrama, I was going to have to grapple with a weighty novel of ideas. The story is set in the 1870s and focuses on a group of Polish artists and intellectuals who've resolved to emigrate to America and live on an agrarian commune modeled on the principles of the socialist Utopian, Charles Fourier.

The charismatic center of this group is a beautiful woman in her 30s named Marina Zalezowska, then Poland's greatest actress. Here's how Marina, who, of course, loves to self-dramatize, describes herself to a companion.

"I am not quick, not clever, just a little above mediocre. But I've always understood that I can triumph by sheer stubbornness, by applying myself harder than anyone else." That she does. When the group settles on a ramshackle grape farm near Anaheim, California, Marina throws herself into swabbing down the farmhouse and cooking. And when the commune predictably crumbles, Marina works to master English so she can conquer the American stage.

She triumphs in Shakespeare plays from San Francisco to Scranton. Her Camille is the toast of Kalamazoo. Along the way, Marina meets Henry James, Edwin Booth, and her rival, Sarah Bernhardt. She also cheats on her selfless husband, whom we learn is gay. She has a torrid affair with Richard, the young journalist who worships her.

But because Marina is a capricious creature, living most fully in the transitory world of the stage, she decides to cut Richard loose and warm herself only on the memory of their love.

The image of a woman who defies 19th century strictures and becomes the mistress of her own fate obviously fascinates Sontag. In addition to Marina, we meet a roving female photographer, as well as a female saloon keeper. In the prologue, Sontag explicitly imagines herself entering the world of the novel as an observer and makes reference to that ideal of 19th century independent womanhood, George Eliot.

But "In America" is quite unlike those philosophy-laden fictions Eliot churned out. Marina's reason for instigating the commune in the first place turns out to be more therapeutic than ideological. She yearns to lose herself in the vacancy of the American landscape, its deserts and oceans and night sky. "I'm thriving," Marina says at one point. "I'm being stripped of almost all that makes me distinctive, to others and myself."

And in "In America," Sontag seems to want to lose herself in vivid set pieces about immigrant New York, the Philadelphia centennial exhibition, and the primeval California countryside, as well as the dangerous terrain of romantic infatuation.

Which was all fine by me. I was quite happy here to go along for what turned out to be an entertaining, but surprisingly not a terribly taxing, ride.

BOGAEV: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "In America" by Susan Sontag.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Today's senior producer is Roberta Shorrock. Our interviews and reviews are produced by Amy Salit, Naomi Person, Phyllis Myers, and Monique Nazareth, with Patty Leswing. Our engineer is Audrey Bentham. Ann Marie Baldonado directed the show.

For Terry Gross, I'm Barbara Bogaev.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Barbara Bogaev, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Maureen Corrigan
High: Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel by Susan Sontag called "In America."
Spec: Entertainment; "In America"; Susan Sontag

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 2000 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 2000 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Maureen Corrigan Reviews 'In America'
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.