Try to Tell the Story by David Thomson

Author:David Thomson [Thomson, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-27133-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

16

What did Sally mean about Dunson and Garth being hardly able to look at each other ? I saw the film, and I had found the Red River on maps, so I had an inkling of “where” it happened. I had a favorite book, a history of the Wild West, in which a strange ghost boy took a couple of living boys on a tour of great moments in Western history I imagined myself as part of the trail crew in that dawn before Dunson set off, with Wayne riding down from the ranch house in the early light and saying, “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt.” I said, “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt,” over and over again, and I suppose I was working on an American accent.

At Rosemead, there was an elocution class so that we might all lose that lazy South London accent (the way I talked in the streets and in the bombed houses) that sounds like a whine and drops its g‘s. So I had thought about voice and speaking “properly.” It was the first suggestion I ever had that you could alter your own voice. “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt,” as if Missouri were right around the corner and not a thousand miles away. There was the soft stress on the name. People in films, I found, used names more often than people in life, and in my England hardly a real name was used. Everyone had diminutive nicknames, knocking them down to size. “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matthew.” You could go that way, by formal, or biblical, names. And not using the name “Garth” confers responsibility—after all, Matthew will, literally, take the herd away from Dunson. “Take ‘em,” as if it were going to be no great problem, or nothing that men like these would ever rate as a problem. “Take ‘em,” as in ride along with them. Just show them the way.

And the peaceful, half-sleepy way in which Wayne spoke. Wayne was an extraordinary actor, working at his craft while the world had no inkling of its existence— “Take ‘em to Missouri, Matt,” as if all the huge effort and turmoil of the journey were like a dream, and just as smooth. And as if Dunson were in no mood to wake the cattle too soon—let the great rousing cries follow him.

I won't say the line again, but you may smile to learn that I have a son called Mathew Moreover, I have English children and American children, and they both feel that I speak with a peculiar accent. But I was raised in a generation of mid-Atlantic voices, from Cary Grant and Bob Hope to Alistair Cooke, and already in the late ‘40s I had found Cooke's exquisite Letter from America on BBC radio, a steady report in which love or skepticism never got quite the upper hand. (That show began in 1946, but it only took on Letter from America as its title in 1950.) What else does love need to be

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