creative nonfiction 135.302: how many of you can really talk?

There comes that time, in advance of teaching semesters, that I sit apart from machines and noise and dwell.  That time is now.  My work at the University of Pennsylvania begins on Tuesday.  I'll retreat to a familiar room and wait for the students to find me. 

In preparing for that class today, I came across a page I'd torn from a June 2011 issue of Vanity Fair.  Christopher Hitchens was well advanced in his trial with malignant cancer by then, his physical voice nearly gone.  But he was still wrestling with ideas, still persistently, insistently promulgating them.  It seems just right to open this year's class with his words:

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write.  Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake:  "How many people in this class, would you say, can talk?  I mean really talk?"  That had its duly woeful effect.  I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend.  The rules are much the same:  Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions.  Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro.  If something is worth hearing or listening to, it's very probably worth reading.  So, this above all:  Find your own voice." 

Rest in peace, Christopher Hitchens.

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Find your own voice

Diagnosed with a cancer that has virulently attacked his vocal cords, Christopher Hitchens continues to provoke, instruct, and elevate with his pieces, especially those he writes for Vanity Fair. In the June issue, in a piece entitled "Unspoken Truths," Hitchens reflects on the physical loss of his voice and the ineffable craft that is the making of a writer's voice. I teach writerly voice. I care about it. I read, then, with great interest.

The whole is so worth reading. Here's a part:

To a great degree, in public and private, I "was" my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in my younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me. I have never been able to sing, but I could 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.

 

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An autobiography is only to be trusted when...

I had this photo, but I had no supporting quote, no supporting anything, until I discovered these words just now in Dwight Garner's New York Times review of Christopher Hitchen's new book, Hitch-22.

The photo (this dog, so done up, so seemingly gentlemanly), the words (so possibly true, so cautionary):  they seemed an inevitable pairing:

“An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful,” George Orwell, one of Mr. Hitchens’s literary touchstones, wrote. “A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

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