Received Accents
Peter Robinson, 20 February 1986
Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short time he was Percy Lubbock’s secretary at a villa near Lerici. In ‘Class’, he says he tried to pronounce the ‘ah’ of received English, but couldn’t and, because ‘I too visibly shredded his fineness,’ was released from the post. The version of this incident in Some Americans indicates that his encounter with ‘the author of The Craft of Fiction’ left a wound. The poem is more openly dismissive of his one-time employer:
