Fortunately, she did – the words that told her she was well again convinced as fully as the ones that had disturbed her. Somewhere, as I rolled on to my conclusion, I was aware that: a) I never find positive words as convincing as negative ones myself, and b) I needed significant public liability insurance. What if I proved that language is indeed hugely influential by getting myself sued, courtesy of an audience member, plagued by a phantom molar?
Inoutbreathing. If my problem is partly a story, a narrative of fears and accidents – fall from a horse, ill-advised lifting, the stresses of self-employment, the stresses of stress – then how can its physical symptoms be cured? What if I can’t find the story to talk myself out of my box?
After the toothache comes the metaphorical sugar. The audience is asked to imagine somebody they love, the details of what and why they love, why they smile when they think of their love. They are asked to tell themselves the story of their love. And, simply because they have been asked to, they do so. How remarkable this is – a room moving, because you have made noises at it. Then, together, we write i love you on the air with our fingers – sounds corny – is corny – but it works. And means that I get to look up at a house full of smiles: in Toronto, Richmond Virginia, Galway, Bath, Hebden Bridge . . . all those smiles. And one afternoon in Edinburgh a couple imagine, write and then look at each other, link their respective fingers, smile again. They were in the same story, each telling the other.
This is a version of an exercise I sometimes use in workshops. Think of your love, focus and then write i love you. Feel the pleasant impact of that in your body, your arm, your hand, your face. Now look at the words. To you, they may be a distillation of everything, the sum of your best joys. To your reader, they are a cliché. One of your principal problems as a writer is how to give your reader their version of that pleasant impact using only words – no meeting, no touching, only those little lines of marks.
Inoutbreathing and Ros talking me through my part in this and hers – the story of where we are, our here and now. She lifts my legs by the ankles as I try to be limp, to be soft and easy – inoutbreathing – and she shakes me looser.
I am aware of the weight transferring down to my pelvis, of the energy there, the fact that a part of the voice is from the hips, in the way that our movement comes from the hips: where a boxer’s punch would start from, or a dancer’s step. And this is a sexual energy, something which shouldn’t be absent from voice, ashamed, locked in, locked out.
One of my principal problems as a person: I have never been able to say, ‘I love you.’ I was in my forties before I could write it, if it contained any personal meaning. Love – a word too horribly itself: starts with a push, your tongue pressing forward into everywhere that’s not yourself – it’s only your teeth that save you – and then a sudden opening, openness, the shape of surprise, shadow of a kiss, softness, plumbing the depth of yourself from your lips to the pit of your stomach (the soles of your feet if you’d like, if you can manage) and then the gentlest of endings, your mouth tensed around a final sound, this kind of close-by-the-ear and private thrum.
L - O - V - E
I know the theory.
But I never said it. Not to relatives, friends, not for the sake of an emotion that should perhaps be shouted, painted on hoardings, turned into operas and neon and fireworks and banners dragged out behind biplanes in the traditional manner. The more important it was that I should mention my affection, the quieter I became.
So I never told my grandmother I loved her, not even when she would rage at nothing, batter out insults and strange, urgent anxieties and end by yelling at the room – wiry little woman, fierce – ‘You don’t love me! None of you love me!’ At these times none of us, myself included, would do the simple thing, the proper thing and say, ‘I love you. You’re loved. Of course you’re loved. You’re prickly and crazy, all temperament and elbows, but you are loved.’ My grandmother, who was addicted to chocolate Brazil nuts and True Romance magazines: the doctors and nurses and star-crossed youngsters and troubled but noble souls finding each other and declaring declarations of startling and voluminous devotion. My grandmother, who could Charleston and Black Bottom – not prettily, but with enough style to fill any room. My grandmother who’d sit in bed reading happy endings, while my grandpop quietly brought her a hot-water bottle and tea, kissed her, both of them aware that her first husband stayed in her dreams for the whole of her life, a comforting torment. And her daughter and granddaughter lived far away in Scotland and she was only really happy when we were back in the same room – so she could shout at us all at once.
She was always scared that her second husband would slip away on her like the first and leave her alone. He didn’t. She was the one who left first; suffering a massive stroke one night, she dropped rapidly into a coma, unspeaking. Grandpop had been trained in first aid. He knew what was wrong, but when he called my mother he just said, ‘I can’t wake her up.’ In our family, we never do tell each other much.
My eyes have been closed until this point, I have been bobbing somewhere inside myself, but this is when – inoutbreathing – I have to come back, roll on to my side and tuck briefly, gently, into a foetal curl, eyes opening before I roll again, tuck my feet under myself and slowly stand, unwind upwards in a slow curve: set the hips in place, the small of the back, and higher and higher still and the shoulders – widen the shoulders, imagine them broad and opening and – inoutbreathing – the neck and head last, the heaviest and worriedest thing left till last. Imagine your skull rising on its vertebrae and a sense of it floating, aspiring beyond itself.
Strangers have been uncoiling me into a standing position ever since my ill-fated total of two sessions at Music and Movement – another attempt to fit me into a confident shape: one leotard amongst many in a chilly Scottish church hall. And I actually was asked to be a tree. I never have wanted to be a tree.
I’ve never told my mother I love her – my truly wonderful, dancing mother. I am sure she knows I do, but she’s never heard it.
Almost forty years later and for the first time, I do want to be me. I want to be me standing. It’s all right for me to do that, to take up space.
Be myself, have my voice, see how that goes. I want to say what I have to, when I have to. This is about more than just writing, this is about my whole life.
I never told my grandfather I loved him. Not even when I was almost certain I was seeing him for the last time, when I was saying goodbye at the end of our last time. I write ‘almost certain’ because it will make me feel better – as if a small doubt prevented me from being decently expressive. In fact, I knew: say it now or you’ll never be able to. I didn’t.
But I loved him. I loved all of him and perhaps not especially his voice, but certainly I very much loved his voice. For many years I would only see him for two weeks in each year and the rest of the time we’d make do with telephone calls: a chat with Gran and the receiver handed over to Grandpop: a relatively shy and taciturn man. All the same, the sound of him would feel like sitting on his lap with my ear at his chest – this is the dent where the cannonball hit me – and listening to his beautiful, big lies. And he told me the truths of him, too: what he got up to and when, bits of philosophy, self-defence tips, tales from wild days in London when he slept with a knife under his pillow, boxed and fought dirty, took dancing lessons for his footwork. If you’re scared, they don’t beat you – you beat yourself. Even now, the thought of his voice can bring me close inside the smell of Lifebuoy soap and Swarfega – that’s him fresh in from work and washed. He was a chargehand tool-setter and the workshop’s Safety Man. And he favoured powerful aftershaves: Old Spice, or Hai Karate, the taste of Player’s Navy Cut under that and the sharp tang of the workshop – metal and ingenuity and dangers. I’d drink him in – inoutbreathing – and listen to his heart beat. He was a soft-hearted man, that’s what failed him in the end. And I’d be lost in his baritone and tender purring. He had a quiet Black Country a
ccent – not Brummy, not the same in any way. It’s an eccentric and playful way of speaking, it savours vowels and is fancifully gentle. And, when he was happy, he’d purr.
Late on Saturday nights we would sit together – my grandmother gone to bed – lights off and some harmless old horror movie on the telly. He would be in his big leather recliner and I would be perched on a cushion between his slippered feet. I’d hook my arms up, one over each of his knees, and lean my back against his chair. And we would be fine and soft and easy and he would purr enough for both of us: big man, muscular, former card-sharp, former middleweight and quite possibly bare-knuckle boxer, featherlight dancer, hair Brylcreemed back like a gangster, knew how to pose with a cigarette in a photograph, make that classic 1950s movie-star shape. And he was mine, my safest place, my best place. And I never said.
Too late now.
He never said he loved me, either. He wasn’t the type. But I knew that he did. It was certain as holding our hands together and putting them both in his overcoat pocket: as warm and comfortable as that. And as wonderful as him calling me Tiger. Nobody calls me Tiger, why would they? And no one will say it in his voice.
Standing. Upright. Breathing as if I never have and arms wheeling in the manner suggested. It’s oddly tiring and also intoxicating to breathe at your full tilt. The first time I did this I was eventually unable to stop myself laughing. Facing a professor and laughing, giddy. Ros didn’t mind, she understood.
She moves us on to the next stage of the process: the move from interior to exterior, breathing as if for observers, an audience, reaching towards the people I want to . . . what? Touch? Change? Contact? All these possibilities.
I recall again the passage from Last Words of the Executed by Robert K. Elder, which describes a mass execution of Native Americans: thirty-eight men singing and dancing to comfort each other before the end, trying to hold hands and shouting out their names and ‘I’m here! I’m here!’ Proof of life.
Alfred Wolfsohn was born in Berlin in 1896. He was a loner whose mother sang to him. A law student, he was conscripted into the German army and fought in the trenches during World War One. He was both horrified and changed by the sounds of men in agony around him, human beings screaming their last. The life in their cries was extraordinary to him – that the dying should sound more alive than the living seemed somehow wrong. He returned home in some ways broken and then healed oddly – he gave up the law and began to study singing. Dissatisfaction with his teachers led him to begin shaping his own theory of voice – at its heart the belief that we should express ourselves fully, physically and emotionally, throughout life, rather than only becoming entirely ourselves when we are dying, beyond help. Wolfsohn began to teach, blending inspirations from literature, art, psychology and horror. When Hitler’s National Socialists came to power, they brought in new horrors with hideously effective propaganda – distorted voices, lying voices, sounds of the not-quite-living to summon up pandemic death. Wolfsohn, a Jew, fled Germany for London and devoted his energies to uncovering another way of speaking and of being. He continued his teaching until only days before he died in 1962, working with singers and actors, including Roy Hart.
Hart was a South African loner and fee-free student at RADA. He felt his life and career were transformed by meeting and working with Wolfsohn, although RADA didn’t exactly smile on Wolfsohn’s influence. Hart became Wolfsohn’s most passionate supporter, acting and teaching himself, working with psychiatrists, actors and singers. Hart went on to found the Roy Hart Theatre and, although he died in a car crash in 1975, the theatre continues to explore Wolfsohn’s ideas. Roy Hart’s diary says of Wolfsohn, ‘He accepted me just the way I was.’
An original member of the Roy Hart Theatre, Nadine George, went on to found the Voice Studio International, which is based in London. Ros Steen has been deeply influenced by working with Nadine George.
Which is a long way of saying the faith that a voice can, and should, do good to its owner and to the wider world is now, as far as I can make it, a part of how I breathe. I owe this to three generations of work and thinking. This fits well with the blurry suspicion I have always had that if my written voice gets me attention, then I should write at least some of the time to focus that attention on harms that should be prevented, or undone. I play with my shoes off and get paid for it, I’m allowed to be heard. Part of being heard should, I feel, be about speaking for the silenced. Not that fiction doesn’t do that, too – it is a sustaining and world-shifting thing itself – but sometimes it’s necessary to point out that it’s hard to enjoy a story when there’s screaming going on.
This is where we pause. I sit. I sip water. Ros asks me if I want to talk about anything. Sometimes I can articulate what’s going on: physical sensations, thoughts, feelings, flashbacks, how the process seems to be feeding back into the novel, or the show. Sometimes there’s simply this joy.
Here I am.
It is often remarkable to fnd a joy in that.
We’ll go through to the piano next.
Not the least unsettling sentence – ‘And now we’ll go through to the piano.’
But it’s okay. I don’t mind. It’ll be fine.
I remember our initial session – awing and oohing and ahing – and it seemed that the top of my head would fly off, that I’d fall over, that some great big something was waking up inside my chest.
Who’d have thought.
Alfred Wolfsohn, for one. Ros, for another.
It is 2001. I’m in Canada and waiting to do a reading as part of a Canadian literary festival. I enjoy readings and I am amongst friends. The only person I don’t know here is Michael David Kwan, author of Things That Must Not Be Forgotten, an autobiography based on his childhood during the Japanese occupation of China. He is the first reader, slightly nervous. We are all looking forward to dinner after the event, getting to know Michael. He seems a delicate, courteous man, a gentle presence. Michael is introduced and walks out beyond the curtain into the pleasant little theatre in Victoria, Vancouver Island. We other readers sit on the stage, but behind the curtain in a warm, muzzy dark. We listen. Michael tells the audience that he’s nervous and they make a small, sympathetic murmur. They sound nice. He begins to read a passage where he is playing in a tree and a Japanese soldier spots him. It is suddenly clear that the soldier may mistake him for a spy and shoot him. He may never get to tell us the story of a long, full life. He feels the wings of death flutter over him. And here Michael breaks off, says that he isn’t well and then we hear him fall and his head crack off the wood of the stage.
There are doctors in the audience who rush down as we hear Michael give a last breath, ragged and awful. We have never heard anyone die before, but we all know what this is, what this means. This is dying.
We listen through the curtain. There is nothing we can do, we can’t even seem to leave. The doctors perform CPR and fresh breath rushes in. Michael gasps like a man rescued from water.
Then he sinks again, is brought back, sinks . . . We hear Michael David Kwan die twice and come back to life three times.
Once he’s stable, he is rushed out past us to the hospital, where he will later die and no coming back, only gone and silent.
At the piano, I sing scales.
Singing scales seems to suggest something irrelevant, indulgent: crinolines and embroidery next.
But our scales are to do with not being gone and not being silent.
We start with the scale of C Major as a kind of support. The sound live and different every time.
The reading was, of course, cancelled. All of us, audience and writers milling in the foyer, thinking of people we’d like to call, to be with, picturing their frailty and our own.
We work according to a division of the voice into four qualities – two ‘male’ and two ‘female’, the deep and the high. Intellectually, these make minimal sense to me, but while I’m singing they feel completely identifiable, suggest wholly different ways of telling stories in them
selves and in combination with each other. I’m forty-six and clearly I know very little about myself or anyone else, about how we might sing and what would be lost if we were gone. And we will be gone. We all go.
Dying. Grandpop always called it shortness of breath. ‘Know what he died of? Shortness of breath.’
I wasn’t there when my grandfather died. I was too late. My plane landed at about the time he left me. He was lying in a hospital bed with his brother beside him. He knew I was on my way.
The night before I’d been sitting in a restaurant – business dinner – and suddenly the room had swayed and I had smelt his perfumes, been rocked. I don’t believe in supernatural phenomena, but if I’d had any sense I’d have gone to the airport then, there might have been a flight.
But I think I was also afraid to face him, worried that I wouldn’t know what I should say.
Inexcusable.
Now the singing will focus on one quality, will initially draw my voice up higher than I can reach, into my head and then beyond me, into high air. Then we’ll turn and descend through squeaks, to horrible sharps and then into my range and lower and lower and finally down to the place where I’m exhaling from the depth of me, no music left.
The first time I did this – me emptying my lungs – I thought of Michael David Kwan and the sound of his death. I knew I was listening to the way that I would die, the first sound that I wouldn’t hear, the end of my breath. I didn’t feel sad, more lonely and maybe tired.
All my life, I have seen and felt and heard words as they have rehearsed and defined and conjured the energies that save and illuminate lives. They have saved mine. Over and over. I had a good education, I had a huge well-stocked library I could walk to when I was a kid, a house full of books, a mother who taught me how to read before I even got to school. Child of a single working mother, I was able to attend university because I received a grant.
Now I live in a country where mastery of language will become increasingly difficult to attain. Education is constricting, libraries are closing, the paths into words are being blockaded on all sides. There may never be book-burnings in Britain – if you’ve stolen the books already, there’ll be no need for public bonfires. For many it will be harder, if not impossible, to break open the codes that tell our story to ourselves, that march out, letter after letter, to speak in our absence, record us, translate us, claim our rights, celebrate our joys. Slipping into the minds and mouths and hearts of others may soon be something only certain people are allowed to do.
On Writing Page 30