… as I read Christopher Hitchens on having lost his voice.

… I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so. And timing is everything: the exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that. Now, if I want to enter a conversation, I have to attract attention in some other way, and live with the awful fact that people are then listening “sympathetically.” At least they don’t have to pay attention for long: I can’t keep it up and anyway can’t stand to.

[I have always been able to sing. ‘Twas in the genes. My father was in the Johns Hopkins Glee Club, and had a marvelous voice. My mother sang light opera and spirituals very prettily. They were always singing. We were all – my parents, their four children – musical, the house vibrating with guitars and pianos and recorders. I’d take my nylon string guitar into the bathroom and sit on the hamper and sing Joan Baez-style English ballads.

Last night, in my quiet house – my husband in Saudi Arabia, my daughter in Ireland – I took out my ratty, forty-year-old copy of the Joan Baez Songbook and sang, with the book’s simple piano accompaniments, all of the Lyrics and Laments, the Child and the Broadside Ballads, until my voice ran out of steam.  All of the songs I sang with the nylon string guitar when I was fifteen.

That was a pleasant losing of the voice, a losing that happened after it had been used to generate deep and happy memories.   After it confirmed that my fifteen-year-old voice and its ballads were still in there.]

… I owe a vast debt to Simon Hoggart of The Guardian (son of the author of The Uses of Literacy), who about 35 years ago informed me that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write “more like the way that you talk.” At the time, I was near speechless at the charge of being boring and never thanked him properly, but in time I appreciated that my fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun was its own form of indulgence… If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

[My fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun.  Yes.  When you teach writing to smart and sensitive undergraduates, you’re torn between championing to them the personal pronoun and worrying about their being self-indulgent with it.  And yet over the years I’ve seen that self-indulgence rarely.  One of the best papers I received, just now, in my Novels of Don DeLillo course, took issue with DeLillo’s characterization of Phoenix and the American desert in Underworld.  Its main character was displaced to Arizona from Brooklyn, and in the novel Brooklyn was all about authenticity and roots and identity, Phoenix about white noisy drift and vacancy.  But my depth, wrote my student, resides in the desert; and this is why…]

The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn’t precisely one of the things that engage you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder. Indeed, I don’t know of any really good writer who was deaf, either. How could one ever come, even with the clever signage of the good Abbé de l’Épée, to appreciate the miniscule twinges and ecstasies of nuance that the well-tuned voice imparts? Henry James and Joseph Conrad actually dictated their later novels—which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time, even though they might have benefited from hearing some passages read back to them—and Saul Bellow dictated much of Humboldt’s Gift. Without our corresponding feeling for the idiolect, the stamp on the way an individual actually talks, and therefore writes, we would be deprived of a whole continent of human sympathy, and of its minor-key pleasures such as mimicry and parody.

… It’s in engagements like this, in competition and comparison with others, that one can hope to hit upon the elusive, magical mot juste. For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.

[And of course Humboldt’s gift was precisely – like Ravelstein’s gift – his self, his nuance, his idiolect, his stamp.

And if, in finally allowing yourself to hear the actual human voice, what you hear is what DeLillo’s character, James Axton, at the Parthenon, hears –

I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embedded in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice which is our own.

– then, well, what did you expect? What do our most well-tuned voices tell us? Why does Wayne Koestenbaum love the voice of Maria Callas? “The steel and the wobble announced a predicament; [I] loved the mistakes, because they seemed autobiographical, because without mediation or guile they wrote a naked heart’s wound.” The gift Humboldt and Ravelstein carry is the high-level articulation of their woundedness.  Precisely Christopher Hitchens’ current gift.]