On Finding Your Voice

and How Crushing that Can Be

Let’s start with some Ancient History.

Surely relevant to no-one.

On the 15^th December 1964, the BBC Television programme Monitor broadcast the episode ‘Philip Larkin Meets John Betjeman’.

Two poets who, even in their day, were seen as terribly old-fashioned.

What could they possibly have to say — in comfortable armchairs, in black and white, inhaling nicotine — that is still worth listening to?

Well, quite a lot, actually.

JOHN BETJEMAN:

What sort of attitude do you take to adverse criticism?

PHILIP LARKIN:

Well, I don’t know [if] you feel this, but I feel it very strongly – I read that, you know, I’m a miserable sort of fellow, writing a sort of Welfare State sub-poetry; doing it well, perhaps, but it isn’t really what poetry is and it isn’t really the sort of poetry we want; but I wonder whether it ever occurs to the writer of criticism like that that really one agrees with them but what one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, and the kind of environment one’s had, and has now, that one doesn’t really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write or can write.

If you would like an update, speaking of prose not poetry, but saying the exact same thing here is George Saunders from A Swim in a Pond in The Rain, first published in 2021.

I won’t give you the whole beautiful anecdote — which is on pages 105-106 — but here are the edited highlights. Forgive the dots.

In my early thirties I saw myself as a Hemingwayesque realist. My material: the time I’d spent working in the oil fields in Asia. I wrote story after story out of that material, and everything I wrote was minimal and strict and efficient and lifeless and humor-free,...

I had chosen what to write, but I couldn’t seem to make it live.

One day, serving as a note taker on a conference call at the environmental engineering company where I was working, I started, out of boredom, writing these dark little Seussian poems. When I finished one, I’d draw a cartoon to go along with it. By the end of the call, I had around ten of these poem-and-cartoon pairs, and because they weren’t my “real” writing, I almost threw them out as I left work that day. But something stopped me. I brought them home, dropped them on the table, went off to see the kids. And then I heard, from back at the table, the sound of genuine laughter, from my wife, as she read those stupid little poems.

This was, I realized with a start, the first time in years that anyone had reacted to my writing with pleasure…

A switch got thrown in my head, and the next day I started writing a story in that new mode — allowing myself to be entertaining…

In this mode, I found, I had stronger opinions than when I was trying to be Hemingway. If something wasn’t working, I knew what to do about it…

When I finished the story [“The Wavemaker Falters”] I could see that it was the best thing I’d ever written… The story was oddly made, slightly embarrassing — it exposed my actual taste… I held that story up against the stories I loved… and felt I’d let the form down.

So, this moment of supposed triumph (I’d “found my voice”) was also sad.

It was as if I’d sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across a meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant and it had brought back, let’s say, the lower half of a Barbie doll.

Larkin wanted to be W.B. Yeats or W.H. Auden.

Saunders wanted to be Hemingway.

All of us tend to start of wanting to be someone we’re not.

Constantly wanting to be somebody we’re not is one of the basic characteristics of a writer.

But it’s worst of all when one hasn’t yet really become oneself.

Who did you want to be? Sylvia Plath? Charles Bukowski?

In the beginning, I wanted to be J.R.R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Herman Hesse and then John Keats.

Or, at least, I wanted to have written what they’d written, and to have lived in their invented worlds, and to be very famous for it.

Later on, I wanted to be Yeats, Auden, Hemingway, Joyce, and most of all Beckett.

I still regret not being Beckett — though less so, having read James Knowlson’s Damned to Fame.

Unlike George Saunders, I don’t have a memory of discovering — in one moment —the writer I was.

When I look back, I think it was about the time I wrote a story called ‘Trains’.

This was August 1992. I’d just moved back from Prague, into an end-of-terrace, ground floor flat in Southfields. It backed on to a railway track.

In my diary I wrote —

Slept fairly well. The trains that go along past the bottom of the garden are quite get-used-to-able. It’s not a sudden noise; it builds quite gently, surges past not too loud and then diminishes. Their passing during the day gives a sort of onward rhythm to things. Quartering the hours.

Some time in the next couple of weeks this turned into the first thing I think of as mine.

Trains

When they first moved in they spent a lot of time not mentioning the trains: the trains that went by at the bottom of the garden. Their bedroom looked out, through some large French windows, onto the garden. The trains were about ten feet away. The frequency of their passing, as is usual with trains, varied according to the hours of the day and the requirements of the commuter. It was trains that, by their intensity, woke them up in the morning and trains, likewise, by their diffusion, that allowed them to go to sleep at night. There was a trick they soon learnt by which they could make sure that the swell and pass and lull of a late-night train did not bring them back from almost-sleep. The trick was to treat the rush and clack as surfers treat waves — either one let it lift one up and over, or one dove down deep underneath it. The mistake was trying to go through the face of the wave, the sound. They slept badly for the first few nights, but would not admit it. They became tired and argued about other things, but were each determined not to mention and not to blame the trains. Each considered themself to be coping with the trains better than the other one. Things improved, though. After a week or so, they started to notice only the trains which had gone by without their noticing them. They slept better. They made up. And a few days later, they noticed, rather strangely, that they were still noticing, now and again, the occasional train. It was only left for their first visitor to remark disconcertedly how remarkably quiet the trains were, for them to know that the home was truly their own.

Not bleak, not extreme, not uncompromising, not near-obliterated.

Definitely not Beckett.