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Why must I complicate the simple distinction between voice and no voice by introducing a third category, real voice? It's because I think there are some pieces of writing with the liveliness and energy of voice -- and in this respect they have a great advantage over writing without voice -- yet they lack the power and resonance of the Medawar and the Cheever.

It always kills me when I see somebody who can take an old toothbrush, a used toilet roll, and a ball of twine, and in ten minutes can whip up a sculpture to rival the beauty of any Da Vinci. Personally I am about as creative as Richard Nixon's joke writer. Something as simple as "Three Dozen Ways with Nylon Net" just flies right over my head. I mean, what would I use nylon net for anyway? To catch praying mantises in my dorm room? Line a shirt with it and wear it when I feel masochistic? Why must I complicate the simple distinction between voice and no voice by introducing a third category, real voice? It's because I think there are some pieces of writing with the liveliness and energy of voice -- and in this respect they have a great advantage over writing without voice -- yet they lack the power and resonance of the Medawar and the Cheever. The following excerpt is an example (written by a student): It always kills me when I see somebody who can take an old toothbrush, a used toilet roll, and a ball of twine, and in ten minutes can whip up a sculpture to rival the beauty of any Da Vinci. Personally I am about as creative as Richard Nixon's joke writer. Something as simple as "Three Dozen Ways with Nylon Net" just flies right over my head. I mean, what would I use nylon net for anyway? To catch praying mantises in my dorm room? Line a shirt with it and wear it when I feel masochistic? Maybe I'm just frustrated. I just got back from my community kitchen, where my next-door neighbor, Alice Artistic, was cutting partridge-shaped seals from foil Sucrets wrappers to put on the back of her homemade envelopes in which she plans to mail her homemade Christmas cards. My Christmas cards consist of eight-cent postcards with "Noel" written on them in red Bic pen. I knew I had no artistic talent when my fourth-grade class made maps of Washington out of oatmeal and plywood. I colored mine with pink food coloring, spelled out "Wash" in the middle of it in silver cake-decorating balls and brought it home. My dog ate it for dinner. This writing has the lively sound of speech. It has good timing. The words seem to issue naturally from a stance and personality. But what strikes me is how little I can feel the reality of any person in these words. I experience this as a lack of any deeper resonance. These words don't give off a solid thump that I can trust. Consider the speech of certain hyped-up radio or television announcers or slick salesmen or over-earnest preachers: speech that is fluent and without hesitation, full of liveliness and energy, "full of expression" as we say -- and yet its voice is blatantly fake. These people are doing some kind of imitation or unconscious parody of how an "expression-filled" voice is supposed to sound. The speech of such announcers, salesmen, and preachers is merely an extreme example of voice-but-not-real-voice. It serves to illustrate blatantly what everyone sometimes does: adopt a voice in order to face an audience. Since their whole vocation consists of trying to sway an audience with their vocal chords, they are more likely to get trapped in some of these voices: the stakes are higher for them and they are more likely to try too hard and then gradually begin to stop hearing the fakeness. Actors, too, occasionally end up without a solid authenticity in their speech when they are off-stage, though they are usually more subtle than the heavyhanded salesman. They have spent so much time trying to control their voice that they no longer have the knack of just leaving it alone to be itself. But we all adopt less than authentic voices quite often, especially when the demands of a situation are great or our resources seem insufficent. If nervousness doesn't deaden and remove all voice it may make us giddy, talkative, or silly (such as at a party), or we may start sounding solemn and pompous (such as at a job interview). These nervous ways of speaking may have voice: fluency, energy, even individuality. They are gears: we don't have to stop and choose words consciously and pause for decisions. But we can easily see that these nervous voices are not real by a simple observation: if we finally become comfortable at that party or job interview, we stop sounding so giddy or pompous and start sounding like our real self. Real self. Real voice. I am on slippery ground here. There are layers and layers. For example, if I am teaching a class and feel very insecure or shaky, I am liable to compensate without even thinking about it and adopt a very confident and assured tone of voice. A student who knows me well might sense something fishy in my voice. And if, perhaps, things go so badly that I finally decide to stop in the middle of something I am trying to explain or some activity I am trying to make happen -- I explain that I can't really concentrate on what I'm doing and say that I am just going to sit on the sidelines of the discussion -- that student might say, "Oh, I see now why lie sounded fake, now he sounds more like Peter Elbow." But if I kept up that voice or stance or role for very long -- class after class -- a student who knew me well personally would be able to say, and correctly too, "Oh, Peter's fallen into his helpless, stuck gear again; that's not him, that's a tiresome habit. He's not daring to be as opinionated and stubborn and pushy as he really is." Most people make use of various voices as they go through life to deal with particular audiences and situations. Many people speak with artificial sweetness to little children. Many teachers, administrators, doctors and judges adopt a confident, fatherly, competent tone of voice to express their authority or responsi bility. If we only know them at work we might say, "That's just what John sounds like," but if he started talking that way at home his wife might say, "Come off it, John, you're not at work now; don't talk to me like I'm one of your clients." But can I really say that some voices are more "real" than others? What if that really does sound like John. That is, perhaps he used to sound different at home and at the office, but gradually over the years his professional tone of voice came to take over all his home talk, too. Or perhaps John was one of those children who talked like a college professor in kindergarten. Certainly some sociologists interested in role theory would simply insist that we all have a variety of roles at our disposal and that's that. If some "sound realer" than others, it's just that we're better at using those -- we have practiced and learned them better. This sophisticated relativist approach may fit the whole range of intermediate voices we use moderately well in our living -- the gears or roles we have easily available. But because I'm interested in the extreme cases -- the obviously fake voice and especially the rare powerful voice that is somehow deeply authentic or resonant -- I cannot stop thinking in terms of real voice. I'm not content to say a real voice is nothing but a well-learned role because when I see people starting to use their real voice I see it is usually not well learned. Often it is rusty and halting and they use it badly. And I see that when people start using their real voice, it tends to start them on a train of growth and empowerment in their way of using words -- empowerment even in relating to people. Our less than real voices usually help us to deal with pressures we feel from some audiences and situations, and protect the deeper layers of self. It's no accident that the greatest number of fake-sounding people are in professions where they must constantly meet and impress an audience: salesmen, announcers, politicians, preachers. (Teachers, too.) The pressure of an audience increases our need for privacy. Gears and roles permit us to achieve privacy in public, on the job. I'm not saying people are wicked if they keep their real voice a secret, but they are neglecting a great source of power. Most of us, even though we don't sound as false as slick salesmen and hypedup announcers, neglect this power of real voice. Our speech may be lively and fluent and sound just like us; we don't lack voice (not in our speaking, anyway, though we probably lack it badly in our writing). But we seldom use the power of our real voice, and we know it because of the surprising difference we feel on the few occasions when we do -- when we get power into our words. Sometimes it takes a kind of crisis situation for us to take the wraps off our power: perhaps we are backed into a corner and have to speak out to save our self-respect; perhaps it is an important letter; often the words come out late at night or under some other circumstance when the inhibitions of "normal reality" carry less weight. We notice the surprising impact of our words on the listener or reader. For once our words work. Often it is startling or even frightening when other people actually feel the full weight of our words: it so seldom happens. Sometimes they are frightened, too. They look at us wide-eyed with surprise and a look that says, "I like you better the regular, ineffectual way." It may sound as though I'm describing a case where someone finally screams or has a tantrum. Perhaps. But sometimes that frightening power comes when a habitual screamer adopts a quiet whisper. Sometimes, that is, a scream is the sound of someone coming out from hiding, but often words from the center are quiet. Their power comes from inner resonance. Some examples. I find real voice in the Medawar and Cheever pieces, above. Here is another piece of fiction -- a passage from Section I, "The Window," of Virginia Woolf To The Lighthouse: The room (she looked round it) was very shabby. There was no beauty anywhere. She forebore to look at Mr. Tansley. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself the little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking -- one, two, three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a newspaper. And so then, she concluded, addressing herself by bending silently in his direction to William Bankes -- poor man! who had no wife, and no children and dined alone in lodgings except for tonight; and in pity for him, life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea. "Did you find your letters? I told them to put them in the hall for you," she said to William Bankes. Here are four other pieces of writing I have chosen to illustrate real voice. To Be Carved on a Tower at Thoor Ballylee I the poet William Yeats
With old mill boards and sea-green slates
And smithy work from the Gort forge
Restored this tower for my wife George.
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS This poem illustrates how words can have real voice without being at all talky or personal. One feels him saying something deeply felt, but it is rather a public, on-stage voice. He is writing, in a sense, through a megaphone. I went on the job. My father took me. People was very nice. I like them, they like me. I work for a long long time. I used to cook. Lady didn't tell me but I want to learn. So she let me. I cook like I want, eat like I want, and cook for all. There was two other children older than the baby. I was doing fine until my boss' mother came to visit. Then she try to take over. I would cook or help cook and my boss mother fix my breakfast, my lunch and my dinner on a plate with two biscuit. I took that for a day or so, then I had my clothes packed. Say to my madam that I was leaving. She want to know why. I say my father have plenty food home and I can eat and drink all I want. I say that lady fix my plate. I am used to fixing my own plate. Nobody know my stomach and how much I can eat. My madam say she didn't know that was what she was doing. "I will tell her to stop it." So the lady stop fixing my plate. Then I stay. ESTELLE JONES, part of unpublished autobiography I choose this excerpt to illustrate that I sometimes hear real voice in language that violates some of the patterns of speech. One feels lots of "speech" in it, yet it does not exactly resemble the author's actual speech or anyone else's. Roses One day I woke up
and looked out my window
And there were roses all around,
Pink ones and red ones,
I went out and feeled them and feeled them,
And they were nice and soft
Like my sister's velvet dress,
And they smelled like a birthday cake
And like I would be in the woods'
When I am walking.
[I have lost the citation for this poem,
by a child, which appeared in a teachers' magazine.] I sometimes hear real voice even in words that are themselves vague and trite (for example "and they were nice and soft") when those words somehow manage to be in the right relationship to the writer. I'm not saying, "Isn't it clever considering a child wrote it." And I'm not saying, "Isn't he sincere." The poem is not particularly distinguished on either of those counts. I'm saying, "Look how he could let tired, overused words issue from the center and thereby give them power." The Perfectibility of Man! Ah heaven, what a dreary theme! The perfectibility of the Ford car! Which of them are you going to perfect? I am not a mechanical contrivance. Education! Which of the various me's do you propose to educate, and which do you propose to suppress? Anyhow I defy you. I defy you, oh society, to educate me or to suppress me, according to your dummy standards. The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln? The ideal man! Roosevelt or Porfirio Diaz? There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. What am I doing, playing the patient ass in a tweed jacket? Who am I talking to? Who are you, at the other end of this patience? Who are you? How many selves have you? And which of these selves do you want to be? Is Yale College going to educate the self that is in the dark of you, or Harvard College? The ideal self! Oh, but I have a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf or a coyote under the ideal windows. See his red eyes in the dark? This is the self who is coming into his own. The perfectibility of man, dear God! When every man as long as he remains alive is in himself a multitude of conflicting men. VVbich of these do you choose to perfect, at the expense of every other? Old Daddy Franklin will tell you. He'll rig him up for you, the pattern American. Oh, Franklin was the first downright American. He knew what he was about, the sharp little man. He set up the first dummy American. D. H. LAWRENCE, Studies in Classic American LiteratureI sometimes hear real voice in words that are not fully sincere. Lawrence is being kooky and mannered more than earnest and authentic." Or rather he's turning up the "this-is-really-important" dial so far that it's a bit silly and he knows it. He's fooling around and having fun doing cartwheels and letting on that he knows that we know he looks a bit silly puffing out his chest so far and being so intense. I hear resonance, that is, even in a faint irony which boils down to a certain absence of self in the literal meaning. Thus, even in this borderline, tricky case, I would point to the central characteristic of real voice: the words somehow issue from the writer's center -- even if in a slippery way -- and produce resonance which gets the words more powerfully to a reader's center. The distinction between voice and real voice helps us understand the tricky relationship between verbal fluency and verbal power. Sometimes they go together but sometimes they are opposed. That is, on the one hand, sometimes fluency is a sign of power: a truly good speaker is never at a loss for words because she has found the door to her best insights and her convictions. But sometimes, on the other hand, we distrust fluent people and call them glib: they speak with lively fluency but they are somehow too smooth. "She spoke so expressively and well but you know I didn't really believe her." Such people are good at finding a gear and generating words that fit the situation and the audience; they are never at a loss for words. But somehow all these words -however lively and fluent -- don't give us any sense of making contact with the speaker or any sense of knowing her real feelings, attitudes or point of view. Yet some of those other people who often are at a loss for words -- those Billy Budd characters who are tongue-tied and halting in speech, who are always stopping and changing their minds in mid-sentence or breaking off speech'as they question what they are engaged in saying -- often these very people on certain occasions reveal a gift for speaking with the deepest sort of power and honesty. On the occasions when they actually speak out, they seem to achieve a deeper resonance and authenticity than fluent speakers. Some fluent speakers even find it hard to know their real convictions. In some oral cultures, such as some Native American tribes, copiousness itself is distrusted when it comes to speech. There is a sense that authenticity somehow gets dissipated through too many words. Power in speech is rooted in the silence from which it grows. To summarize, writing without voice is wooden or dead because it lacks sound, rhythm, energy, and individuality. Most people's writing lacks voice because they stop so often in mid-sentence and ponder, worry, or change their minds about which word to use or which direction to go in. A few people even speak without voice. Writing with voice is writing into which someone has breathed. It has that fluency, rhythm, and liveliness that exist naturally in the speech of most people when they are enjoying a conversation. Some people who write frequently, copiously, and with confidence manage to get voice into their writing. Writing with real voice has the power to make you pay attention and understand -- the words go deep. I don't know the objective characteristics that distinguish writing with real voice from writing with mere voice. For me it is a matter of hearing resonance rather than being able to point to things on the page. I want to say that it has nothing to do with the words on the page, only with the relationship of the words to the writer -- and therefore that the same words could have real voice when written by one person and lack it when written by someone else. That highlights the mystery, but presumably it is going too far. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that words contain not just an explicit message ("the sun glints down a pathway of ripples"), but also some kind of implicit message about the condition of the writer (e.g., "I'm curious about that sight" or "I have other things on my mind" or "The sun on the water terrifies me" or "There's no part of me that doesn't see those glints, even the part of me that hates light"). Perhaps when the implicit message reinforces the explicit one in some right way, we get resonance or power. When the implicit message contradicts the main one we get no resonance. But I don't know how to point to these implicit messages on the page and therefore I find it easier to talk about whether the voice "sounds real" or whether the words come in some sense or other "from the center." I believe, then, that any kind of writing can have real voice or lack it -- any style, tone, mood, or syntax. The only way we can locate or identify the presence of real voice is through the sensibility of good readers. Since there are no objective criteria, there is no way to verify the judgment of any particular reader. Some people will be better than others at identifying real voice, but in any given instance they may be wrong, no matter how certain they feel. They will hear resonance, but it will be resonance between the words and themselves, not between the words and the writer; or they will hear no resonance, but the interference will come from themselves, not from the writer. It seems to be no easier to attain real voice in speaking than in writing. In fact some people get real voice in their writing who seldom get it in their speech: powerful writers who talk without power. It is often easier to invest ourselves more deeply and accurately in our words when we are alone with a piece of paper than we can when face to face with an audience.

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