an essay on the importance of voice and the dangers of style

8/6/2019 An Essay on the Importance of Voice and the Dangers of Style

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An Essay on theImportance of Voice and

the Dangers of Style

byJW Rogers

Clipper Press
http://www.drmstream.com/http://www.drmstream.com/


2/18

Sitting in the second story of a two-story row house in Brooklyn'sSouth Slope, I searched for the voice that would tell my 21-year olddaughter Becky something about living.

She's laid up with a broken foot that's keeping her from working atthe micro-distillery where she found a job after coming back fromLouisiana, where she'd fallen in love with a Cajun wanderer who she'd

been living with for a month after abandoning her cross-country trek infrigid San Antonio, even though she hadn't been home for six monthssince leaving for Spain. She took a year off from college a couple of years

ago. She's living life right now and a broken foot is more of a cash-flowcatastrophe than a minor inconvenience.

The broken foot wasn't the reason that I was in her apartment for thefirst time. She'd been drunk dialing me for about a week. We'd finallyconnected near midnight on Friday. Her boyfriend had gone back toLouisiana to be with a girl he'd gotten pregnant. Becky had beendrinking. She was in a club. The noise was loud. She kept saying, over

and over, "What the fuck? I mean, what the fuck." She was trying to betough, but it sounded hollow.

I got out to Brooklyn on Monday.

*

When you come up to something important that you want to say,when you experience that sudden click of your neurological fasteners andrealize that you have walked into a moment of breathtaking clarity, you

want to have your voice right there at your side, practiced and ready. Youwant to point your voice to the place of clarity, have it rush in and fix theidea into clear and simple words that encompass its every dimension.

Its a chancy proposition. Clarity is fleeting, and the more importantthe idea is, the more it shifts and reforms as you try to express it. Say a

word and a swarm of others swirl about, and the idea re-shapes, a new

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question is expressed, the failure of one word creating the opportunity ofthe next. Even, the truest voice can fall to its knees in frustration.

You dont just stumble over your true voice. To find it, youve got tobe inside yourself, listening really hard. You have to say a thing that staystrue in that moment that you say it. You have to be able to hear the soundof your voice linger in the atmosphere, wait for the meaning to detachitself and evaporate, and not feel the limpid anxiety of someone whoknows they are wrong.

Even as an adult, your child still hurts like little child. You don't haveaccess to the same things that you could do when they were little to makethem feel better. Even when you hold them and tell them that it will be allright, wipe the tears away from their eyes, will the warmth and sturdinessfrom your being into theres, you know that they are too aware of thecomplexity and the messiness of real life. You can't sweep a big hurtunder the rug. You can't tell them that they aren't going to feel scars, and

you can't pretend that the hurt they are experiencing isn't ripping apart

old scar tissue that they thought was long gone.The same time that your child is faced with the impossibility of living

an orderly life, you are faced with the hard truth that you can't go back. If you want to help them, you will have to find the language of an adult. What you realize at that moment is that we're not very practiced attalking about the language of the heart with other adults. Most of ourdiscourse reduces life to truisms and inspirations that are designed todeflect the most uncomfortable truths about living.

When I get to Brooklyn and sit down with Becky, I don't know whatI'm going to say. I just know I want to be able to speak with a true voice.The stark truth that Life defies even the loosest of our plans in the mostunlikely ways had smacked my daughter right in the face. I could tell hersomething about that. But I needed to say it with a voice that she could

hear.

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*

"I mean, I don't believe this shit, but I'm starting to think thatthere's a plan, you know. I mean, there's fate or something. Why don't

we even get to have a chance! I mean, fuck. Like, fuck. This is juststupid."

We're drinking some Yuenling beer out of the cans. She's set herselfat a kitchen chair. When I got there she limped around and moved a fewthings around. She lives with two boys that she went to school with acouple of years ago. They are musicians. They have the larger rooms and

pay more rent. They're finishing up college. The apartment is disorderlyand cluttered, but it's not the untended squalor that says people don'tfunction here, they just get wrecked and don't think about things that

bother them.

Becky's cast juts out from under the table. She broke her fifthmetatarsal. The cast goes up to her knee. She's on disability. She can'trun. And she'd been left helpless in love. That's a megaton blast in

anyone's life.I have her walk me through what happened. The boy, Matt, had

moved up from Louisiana at the beginning of February. He had been in New York for a month or so last summer, but things had ended badly.They had gotten drunk and fought. He'd ridden his dirt bike back downsouth. They were broken up. Becky had gone to visit him in December.He had bought a ticket north the day after she left. They were going to

give it a go. They wanted to be with each other. They knew that they'dmade mistakes before, but figured they had learned from them.

Then, a couple of days after he got to New York, he told Becky thathe'd slept with a girl before he'd come north. Her name was Brooke.

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Finally, the voices won. I stopped writing. I didn't write for nearly 15years.

*

When Becky was a little girl, she started writing. She liked words andstories came easy to her. Like any budding writer, she read everything shecould get her hands on. She was drawn to the stories that happenedaround the edge of experience, on the outside of the day-to-day, the

people who were moving through life without leaving much imprint.Kerouac, Burroughs, Flannery O'Connor.

I didn't write much after Becky was born. I got divorced from hermother when Becky was three. When I left, her mother told me that I hadkept her from writing. "You intimidated me," she said. I had no idea

what she was talking about. As Becky got older, her mother told her threethings, over and over: "You are just like your father;" "You will leave mesomeday, just like your father;" "Your father is a sell-out."

I never explained why I stopped writing, except to say that I couldn't

write what I wanted to write, so I finally gave up. I had no clue that I wastoo frightened to write. You might think that unlikely, but all I can tell

you is that I was completely convinced that I didn't have what it took to bea writer. One thing I believed about life is that you shouldn't bang your

head against a wall. That's how I explained it to myself.

So Becky grew up with a Dad who had BEEN a writer, but didn't write anymore. Her Dad loved to read and tell stories, turned her on to

books that were always a little to hard for her, laughed at her comic talesand cherished the little sparks of talent that flew around her.

By the time she was in high school, she had all the accessories that Iremembered from getting started in the writing trade: a notebook, dog-eared books, lots of half-finished stories in folders on her computer, and,most critically, the implicit recognition from everyone around her thatshe had a gift and they were getting to experience it.

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*

When I started out as a writer I wanted to be able to write like this.

Uruguay, my native land, is held as fleetingly in my head

as the demotic Spanish I once unconsciously spoke. I retainan image of a wide brown river with trees clustered on the

far bank as dense as broccoli florets. On this river, there isa narrow boat with a single person sitting in the stern. A

small outboard motor scratches a dwindling, creamy wakeon the turbid surface of the river as the boat movesdownstream, the ripple of its progress causing the reeds at

the water's edge to sway and nod and then grow still again

as the boat passes on. Am I the person in the boat or am Ithe observer on the bank? Is this the view of a stretch of the

Rio Negro where I used to fish as a child? Or is it a vision

of the individual soul's journey through time, a passage as

transient as a boat's wake on flowing water. I can't claim itas my first reliable, datable memory, alas. That award

goes to the sight of my tutor Roderick Poole's short and

stubby circumcised penis, observed by my overly curious

eyes as he emerged naked from the Atlantic surf at Puntadel Este, where we two had gone for a summer picnic one

June day in 1914. I was eight years old and Roderick

Poole had come to Montevideo from England to prepare

me for St. Alfred's, my English prep school. Always swimnaked when you can, Logan, was the advice he gave to me

that day, and I have tried to adhere to it ever since.Anyway, Roderick was circumcised and I was not -- which

explains why I was paying such close attention, I suppose,but doesn't account for that particularly day of all others

being the one that sticks in my mind. Up until that precise

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moment the distant past of my earlier years is all vague

swirling images, unified by time and place. I wish I could

offer up something more telling, more poetic, something more thematically pertinent to the life that was to follow,

but I can't -- and I must be honest, here of all places.

The excerpt is from the first pages ofAny Human Heart, by WilliamBoyd. We're just meeting Logan Mountstuart, a Englishman who comesto age as the Empire begins its decline, a man of compromised bloodlinesand easy passions, an eloquent bumbler, and above all a writer who

followed an eruption of early success with decades of starting novels andnever getting beyond the first page. Mountstuart wrote, though, througheach great transition in his life, keeping an intimate journal that was oneman's attempt to present his unvarnished truth.

Im struck by this early passage in the book. Its words and the imagesare rich and stately. Ruminations on the nature of the soul are juxtaposed

with a public school admonition whimsy , illustrating Mountstuarts

poetics and conformity.Boyd doesnt leave Mountstuarts voice to chance, however. The

subtle use of style and technique build the foundation of a key theme ofMountstuart's life. Its done through the artful choice of words. Here --

Fleetingly

Unconsciously

dwindling

turbid

ripple

sway and nod

passage

transient

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it. Sometimes it's going to resonate with people. Sometimes it won't.But it doesn't matter what you know or don't know. You write because

you can and you want to. You write for yourself.

I said those things a few different ways. She listened passively. Shepushed back with her dissatisfaction and her uncertainty. Her doubt waslike a fog that had settled in the room. I couldn't show her the way. She

was too disoriented.

And the person who was talking with her wasn't a writer or an artist.It was her dad, the man who had BEEN a writer. What could he say that

would be credible?

*

What Becky didn't know was that I was writing again.

The catalyst was a seemingly simple question posed to me by atherapist.

I was seeing the therapist to help me develop strategies for managing

my time and energy better. She was a woman who my wife and I hadconsulted at the suggestion of a casual acquaintance to help us workthrough the issues of blending our families together when we married.During the conversations with the therapist, I'd become fascinated with

her approach to the discipline of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.When we'd wound down the sessions related to our family, I set off on myown exploration.

At the end of one session, the therapist asked me, "What is yourpurpose in life?"

That was a question that I thought would be easy to answer. When Itried to articulate the things that came to mind -- raising my children,

helping people find ways to do things that they didn't think they coulddo, being stimulated and excited about the things that I worked on -- Ifumbled. When I was done, she looked at me and said, "Those things

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aren't your purpose. Maybe you should ask yourself why you stoppedwriting."

I've got pages and pages of notes in the first notebook that I'd startedin 15 years from the sessions that followed. I quickly realized that when I

put my explanations for why I didn't write up to the light, they all lookedpretty flimsy. When I cringed at the term "writer's block," the therapistexplained to me that I was suffering from a phobia. I was afraid of how Ifelt when I wrote. That gave me a place to go. How did I feel? Wh did itstop me? And then, what did I need to say to myself to immunize myself

from the pain of that fear.

There's a page in the notebook that's covered with looping scribbles.I was taking notes quickly. The therapist was on a roll. In the middle ofthe page there's a couple of inches of scribbles that are framed by a boxdrawn in bold strokes. This was the key that I needed, a simple statementthat I could use to break my way out of the bind of the fear.

Treat yourself like a child, she said. Be kind to yourself. Let yourself

play. When the voice says that you're not good enough, or you are doingsomething worthless, admonish it, "Be nice. Leave the child alone."

Now I could write. And I did. The shell of fifteen years softened andcracked. I started to work on the craft again. I wrote stories. I wroteexercises. I reflected. I went in search of my voice. I was so happy.

But I didn't tell anyone except my wife. I wasn't strong enough. Iknew that if I opened myself up to the expectations, the examinations, the

commentary of people around me that I'd lose the conviction to be gentleand generous with myself. I kept my recovery secret. It was mine.

That doesn't explain why I didn't tell my kids. I should have. Theyneeded to know that their father was't a has-been writer, but that he was aright-now writer, and that he understood that the joy and pleasure thatcame with creating outstripped any of the pressure and constraint that the

judgments of others -- either good or bad -- could possibly place on him.

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*

When I started writing again, I needed to go back and find my voice. Ididn't know what it would sound like nor how I would recognize it. But Ineeded to go in search of it.

I got into the habit of waking up early and doing a writing exercise: amorning meditation. I sat at my laptop and started to type whatever cameto mind.

I used a technique that I had learned from Transcendental Meditation

to empty my mind. I didn't focus on any one thing, and let the words fallone after another. I was stringing beads, word by word, and building atherapeutic train. Every sentence that I finished, every page that I turned,every day that I wrote was one more instance of turning aside the fear that

had paralyzed me for so long.

When I did these exercises, I listened. What did I hear in those places in my mind where the thoughts were emptying out. That waswhere I would find my voice, I thought. I just had to hear it.

While I searched, I doubted myself. Maybe the voice that I waslooking for wasn't going to be a good enough voice. Maybe I needed to

buckle down, dig into the words, build unique metaphors, tight andwinding sentences like Boyd writes. If I was going to be a writer I neededto have a writer's voice.

Around that time I came across Orhan Pamuk's speech accepting theNobel Prize in Literature. He talks of a briefcase his father left with him

full of his writing. The work wasn't good and the father had always kept it private. But it was his work, the writing that he had done, and the veryexistence of the work was a commentary on how valid the need to write

was.

If I wanted to find my voice, it had to be one that I could live with,because I intended to be listening to it for a very long time.

I wrote about the path to that voice in one of my morning exercises.

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Not really.

Thats too bad.I keep looking at what Im doing and it sucks. And I go back and

look at the things that I wrote and maybe half of it is any good and the restIm looking at wondering why anyone would think that it was any good. Idont know.

Listen, that doesnt have anything to do with whether you write ornot. Those are just voices. They dont have anything to do with it. Youfelt good when you wrote.

Its how your wired.

Dont listen to voicesthat tell you that what youre doing isnt any good.

*

Six months after I started writing again I finished my first story inalmost 15 years. I gave it to my wife to read.

I came out to help her unload the car when she came home thatafternoon. There was something about the way that she looked at me thatsent shivers down my spine. The look was different.

She told me that she had read the story.

I panicked.

She knew something that I didnt want her to know. I had made aworld come alive with words. Id written into a place that I didnt knowhad existed until I went to look for it. I found the soft, sorrowful center ofa man who had lost his way. The story was good. She knew I could write.

I couldnt handle it.

Dont expect anything from me, I wanted to say. I cant handle youexpecting anything from me.

I stopped writing. I had to start at the beginning again. It tookanother year, but I made my way back.

I'm a writer again.

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*

I offered to bring Becky home for a couple of days. She deferred.There are a lot of stairs in the house and she'd be all alone. She was allright. Her friends were taking care of her.

I walked down the street to where I parked my car. I wondered aboutthe things that I had said to her, whether they would help her, whethershe would make any changes in what she was doing, whether she wouldstart writing more and more freely. My pride wanted that, the pride that

you feel when you've made a difference as a parent, the pride that you feelwhen you tell someone something that they hold on to and mull over.

The thing is that that pride is rooted in the conviction that things arefixed, that there is a set of principles that apply to any circumstance, andthat once you've mastered the principles you're home free.

Even as I indulge in the fleeting hopes of pride, I know that it'sassumption is wrong.

Language isn't fixed. It isn't unified. It isn't universal. It shifts andchanges, it bends and warps, it holds and it releases. Every time that I sitdown to write I fix a set of words in that moment, I give a story shape, Imake people come into being. I do this by reducing the dimensions,fixing time, cementing words, unifying the world into something thatcoheres and resonates.

Then I move on to more words. Even if I tell the same story, itchanges. The illusion of art is that it has captured something when all

that it has done is create a pause.

Life doesn't stop for a young woman whose boyfriend has left her togo back to the deep South so he can be a father to his unborn child by awoman he barely knows. Life doesn't stop to let her father find his voice,say his piece, steer her back on track. Each of us is destined to wadethrough the uncertain currents of our experience. Maybe one of us willfind the words to tell it, have the strength to bear it and be able to make

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an essay on the importance of voice and the dangers of style

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