(1994)
READING
Reading Aloud
A few years ago I did my first reading. It was at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, under a tent. Several others read, too; we all sat on independent sections of a biomorphic orange modular couch, our heads bowed as we listened, or half listened, to each other. Eventually my turn came, and the words that I had written in silence (an earplug-enhanced silence, as a matter of fact, that amplified the fleeting Chiclety contact of upper and lower incisors, and made audible the inner squirt of an eyeball when I rubbed it roughly, and called to my attention the muffled roar of eyelid muscles when my eyes were squeezed shut in an effort to see, using the infrared of prose, whatever it was that I most wanted at that moment to describe) — these formerly silent words unfolded themselves like lawn chairs in my mouth and emerged one by one wearing large Siberian hats of consonants and long erminous vowels and landed softly, without visible damage, here and there in the audience, and I thought, Gosh, I’m reading aloud, from Chapter Seven!
Things went pretty well until I got to a place near the middle of the last paragraph, where I began to feel that I was going to cry. I wouldn’t have minded crying, or at least pausing to swallow down a discreet silent sob, if what I’d been reading had been in any obvious way sad. When people on TV documentaries tell their stories, and they come to the part where the tragedy happens and they have to say over again what, in silent form, they adjusted to years earlier, and they choke up, that’s fine, they should choke up. And I’ve heard writers read autobiographical accounts of painful childhood events and quaver a little here and there — that’s perfectly justifiable, even desirable. But the sentence that was giving me difficulty was a description of a woman enclosing a breakfast muffin in bakery tissue, placing it in a small bag, and sprinkling it with coffee stirrers and sugar packets and pre-portioned pats of butter. Where was the pathos? And yet by the time I delivered the words “plastic stirrers” to the audience, I was in serious trouble, and I noticed a listening head or two look up with sudden curiosity: Hah, this is interesting, this American is going to weep openly and copiously for us now.
Why that sentence, though? Why did that image of a succession of small white shapes, more stirrers and sugar packets and butter pats than I needed, and in that sense ceremonial and semi-decorative rather than functional, falling, falling over my terrestrial breakfast, grab at my grief-lapels? There were a number of reasons. In college I had once competed for a prize in what was called the “Articulation of the English Language,” for which the contestants had to read aloud from set passages of Milton and Joyce and others. I got to the auditorium late, having bicycled there while drinking proudly from a shot bottle of Smirnoff vodka that I’d bought on an airplane, and, as planned, I read the Milton in a booming fake English accent and read the Joyce excerpt — which was the last paragraph of “The Dead”—first in a broad bad Southern accent, then in a Puerto Rican accent, and then in the Southern accent again, and to my surprise I’d found that the Joyce suddenly seemed, in my amateur TV-actor drawl, extremely moving, so that the last phrase, about the snow “faintly falling … upon all the living and the dead,” was tragic enough to make it unclear whether my rhetorical tremor was genuine or not — and my voice box may have remembered this boozy Joycean precipitation from college as I read aloud from my own sugar-packet snowfall.
Also, a version of the chapter I was reading in Edinburgh had appeared in The New Yorker, and I’d had a slight disagreement, a friendly disagreement, with a fact checker there over the phrase “tissue-protected muffin.” She’d held that the word “tissue” implied something like Kleenex, and that it should be a “paper-wrapped muffin,” and I’d said I didn’t think so. On the way home from work the next day I’d stopped in a bakery and spotted a blue box of the little squares in question and I’d seen the words “bakery tissue” in capital letters on the side; and, exulting, I’d called the manager of the store over, a Greek man who barely spoke English, and offered to buy the entire box, which he sold me for nine dollars, and I called my editor the next day and said, “It’s tissue, it is tissue,” and as a compromise it became in their version a “tissue-wrapped muffin”—but now, reading it aloud in Scotland, I could turn it into a “tissue-protected muffin” all over again; right or wrong, I was able in the end to shield the original wordless memory from alien breakfast guests with this fragile shroud of my own preferred words. It had turned out all right in the end. And that might have been enough to make me cry.
But it wasn’t just that. It was also that this tiny piece of a paragraph had never been one that I’d thought of proudly when I thought over my book after it was published. I’d forgotten it, after writing it down, and now that my orating tongue forced me to pay attention to it I was amazed and moved that it had hung in there for all those months, in fact years, unrewarded but unimpaired, holding its small visual charge without any further encouragement from me, and, like the deaf and dumb kid in rags who, though reviled by the other children, ends up saving his village from some catastrophe, it had become the tearjerker moment that would force me, out of pity for its very unmemorableness, to dissolve in grief right in the midst of all my intended ironies. That was a big part of it.
Contrition, too. Contrition made its contribution to the brimming bowl — for these Edinburgh audience members didn’t know how much pure mean-spirited contempt I had felt back in my rejection-letter days for writers who “gave readings,” how self-congratulatorily neo-primitivist I’d thought it was to repudiate the divine economy of the published page and to require people to gather to hear a reticent man or woman reiterate what had long since been set in type. Ideally, I’d felt, the republic of letters was inhabited by solitary readers in bed with their Itty Bitty Book Lights glowing over their privately owned and operated pages, like the ornate personal lamps that covertly illuminate every music stand in opera pits while the crudest sort of public melodrama rages in heavy makeup overhead. There was something a bit too Pre-Raphaelite about the regression to an audience — I thought of those reaction shots in early Spielberg movies, of family members gazing with softly awestruck faces at the pale-green glow of the beneficent UFO while John Williams flogged yet more Strauss from his string section. And there were the suspect intonation patterns, the I’m-reading-aloud patterns — especially at poetry readings, where talented and untalented alike, understandably wishing in the absence of rhyme to give an audible analogue for the ragged right and left margins in their typed or printed original, resorted to syllable-punching rhythms and studiously unresolved final cadences adapted from Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens, overlaid with Walter Cronkite and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. These handy tonal templates could make anything lyricaclass="underline"
This — is a Dover — edition—
Designed — for years — of use—
Sturdy stackable — beechwood — bookshelves—
At a price you’d expect — to pay — for plastic—
And yet, despite all this sort of easy, Glenn-Gouldy contempt in my background, there I was physically in Edinburgh, under that tent, among strangers, finishing up my own first reading, and, far from feeling dismissive and contemptuous before my turn came, I’d been simply and sincerely nervous, exceedingly nervous, and now I was almost finished, and I hadn’t done anything too humiliating, and the audience had innocently listened, unaware of my prior disapproval, and they had even tolerantly laughed once or twice — and all this was too much: I was like a crippled unbeliever wheeled in and made whole with a sudden palm blow to the forehead by a preaching charlatan. I’m reading aloud! I’m reading aloud! I was saying, my face streaming with tears — I was cripple and charlatan simultaneously. Evidently I was going to cry, out of pure gratitude to myself for having gotten almost to the end without crying.