Will & I
Page 13
Ah! you know not how my heart is rent,
Nor the pity I feel, nor the pain.
After all the sorrowful hours we’ve spent
I would still see him free again!
In 1723 Handel wrote Matilda’s aria specially for the English contralto Anastasia Robinson, who hadn’t liked the role when first presented with it. She asked for something more subdued, more suited to her gifts. Handel agreed, a sign of the esteem in which he held her voice, and wrote “Ah! Tu Non Sai” for her. A curious thing about Anastasia Robinson is that she started her career as an alto, but contracted smallpox, evidently around 1719. The disease damaged her voice in a way that limited its range, and when she reemerged, it was different, lower. Handel wrote “Ah! Tu Non Sai” for her second, damaged voice. I don’t know if Dewin knew this when he decided to have me sing it.
A benefit born of necessity, in working with Dewin, is that I’ve picked up a rudimentary knowledge of reading music. Still, I have trouble with the actual singing, particularly when there’s an abrupt shift in registers. But now there are moments when I find myself experiencing the song as an organic unit, one composed of separate parts, and not as a series of parts lined up in a row. That subtle shift in feeling has marked a huge step for me. There’s a letter John Irving sent to Kurt Vonnegut in 1982. “Your books always create the perfect illusion,” Irving wrote, “that you know exactly all those parts of the story as you are telling us just one of the parts, and that simply makes everything sound true. You have to be a writer to feel that.” I think the same is true of singing.
At first, when I couldn’t get all the way through a certain section, when I didn’t think I had the breath, Dewin would play a kind of trick on me: he would have me silently mouth the words, proceeding note by note, “just to get the coordination down.” It was clever, on his part—by forcing me to keep moving my mouth, beyond what I’d assumed was the limit of my breath, he showed me that in fact I had more air than I knew.
“Notice how many times we come back to E,” Dewin said, when we got to the song’s middle section. “Let that be your base.”
Something was wrong. I was reaching the notes in time, but the sound wasn’t right. I would open my mouth, and the notes … it wasn’t that they would get cut off, so much as that they would never start, while the background music kept running.
“What am I doing?” I asked in frustration.
“Your voice is wanting to shut down when you close around the consonants,” Dewin answered. “It’s saying, ‘That’s it, we’re done.’ But you’ve got to keep the sound open, to keep the flow going.”
We tried just those words a few more times.
“It’s still not sounding right,” I told him. “When I try to imitate you, it doesn’t even sound like the same song.”
Dewin smiled. “You’re not being vulnerable,” he said. “This person’s heart is broken … You’ve heard your dogs whine? That ‘mmh, mmh, mmh.’ That’s…”
“Yeah, like when they dream?”
“Yeah, that’s sincere vulnerability. That’s how you sing. If you sing properly, the acoustics … it’s so natural you’re only involved in letting it take your body. People associate the emotional impact of singing because they hear that connectivity.”
A few years earlier, I might have pointed out to him that this was an example of faith, but not of the sort we usually mean by that word. It was the kind of faith that is so basic, life isn’t possible without it. I almost said that. But it’s like the Zen master Chokei once told a monk, outside their temple. The monk had said, “Right here is the peak of the mystic mountain. Is not this Reality?”
“So it is,” Chokei replied, “but what a pity to say so.”
I knew afterward, driving home, that this had been one of my better lessons. My voice felt strong and full of potential—I was learning to count on it when I opened my mouth, and no longer had to use all my strength just to make it heard. I felt a pleasant surprise when speaking to a cashier, in feeling the words come out with effort to spare, even if I was winded.
When I got home, the phone was ringing. I had to walk all the way across the “barn” room to get it. It was my sister, and I could tell by the way she said “Hey!”—vaguely caught off guard but not enough to pursue the matter—that she’d assumed, from how I’d answered, that I was Will. She started talking about Betsy and the girls, saying something about their school, which her daughter also attended at the time. She asked a few simple questions that didn’t require more than a yes or a no, or if one did, I would carefully say, “I don’t know,” and she would go on. I was only half-listening at that point. I wondered how long it would be before she figured out who I really was.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my agent and fellow Sewanee alum, Amy Hughes, for taking this on, and Emily Bell at FSG for the same, as well as everyone else I’ve worked with at FSG, specifically Donna Cheng for the cover design. Blanche Fields, Nancy Allen, Trae and Colton Hawkins, Dewin Tibbs, Betsy Byars, Frank and Laurie Jones, Charles Clayton, Katherine Berdy, Brother Phillips, Jay Dismukes, Parker Evans, James Hollingsworth, Grey Ingram, Charles Crommelin, Stephen Walker, Jay Spencer, David Bowman, Brys and Zoë Stephens, Serena Vann, Barbara Major, Stephen Jackson, Mimi Bittick, Emily Chenoweth, Chip and Elizabeth Brantley, Milo Ryan, John Boyd, Jack Strifling, Winslow Hastie, Hampton Logan, B. T. Thomas, Edward Carlos, George Stevenson, Andrew McCalla, Jim Johnston, Tommy Kendrick, Caroline Reynolds, Jane Cooper, Amy Dillard, Priscilla Stokes, Michael Seale, Stutts and Jill Everette, Tracy Thomas, Casey Whiting, and Jennifer Desiderio have also all been instrumental in one way or another, as has David Kline. Special thanks to Lathrop Smith and family, Sarah Brolyes, Will Minton, Brett Connor, Michael Croft, Michael Terrell, Matt Murphree, Michael O’Rorke, and to everyone at the Sewanee School of Letters, especially John Grammer, Meg Binnicker, April Alvarez, Ellen Slezak, Elizabeth Skomp, Andrew Hudgins, Chris Bachelder, and Holly Goddard Jones, as well as to my doctors and therapists at Spain and Lakeshore rehabs. Special thanks also to Robert Pearigen and Paul Engsberg. Finally, I am eternally grateful for my work and friendship with Wyatt Prunty, Tom Jenks, and John Jeremiah Sullivan, without whom this book wouldn’t exist. Special thanks to Joel Finsel and John’s family as well.
A Note About the Author
Clay Byars attended the Sewanee School of Letters in Tennessee and is an assistant editor of Narrative Magazine. He lives with his two dogs on a farm outside Birmingham, Alabama. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2016 by Clay Byars
All rights reserved
First edition, 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Byars, Clay.
&nb
sp; Title: Will & I: a memoir / Clay Byars.
Other titles: Will and I
Description: First edition.|New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015041607|ISBN 9780374290283 (pbk.)|ISBN 9780374714833 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Byars, Clay.|Cerebrovascular disease—Patients—United States—Biography|Cerebrovascular disease—Patients—Rehabilitation.|Traffic accident victims—Biography.|Twins.
Classification: LCC RC388.5 .B93 2016|DDC 616.8/10092—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041607
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