"He Do the Police in Different Voices": Voice in Memoir
How to vary voice while remaining authentic
(I found this draft on substack on Mon Sept 5. I think it was an early draft of “Voice in Memoir” from August 8. - At any rate, here it is….more about voice in memoir.)
The initial proposed title for T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was He Do the Police in Different Voices, which is a quote from a Charles Dickens’ novel, Our Mutual Friend.
The Waste Land is as much about the different voices that Eliot evokes and uses as it is about anything else. Those voices come from many literary sources and periods and appear in many languages.
I’ve hitched my wagon to The Waste Land, welded the chain to the hitch, bonded it with the strongest alloy known to man. To separate my work from The Waste Land would be to write something else entirely. The Waste Land is the scaffold upon which I layer my story, the mannequin I clothe.
Each of the parts of my book is named after the sections of The Waste Land. With a few notable exceptions, most chapter titles are quotations from Eliot’s poem, imbued with meaning.
Different Sections, Difference Voices
Each section of Eliot’s poem and of my own memoir requires different voices. There is not one voice in The Waste Land, nor is there one voice in my memoir, not even within a particular section. I was conscious not to copy Eliot’s voices, but I quoted from his poem frequently to evoke mood with the rhythms of his poetic language.
In her book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, Sue William Silverman writes about voice. She says, “what I also discovered is that memoir, like fiction, offers a range of possible voices from which to choose. A voice that sounds harmonious in one of your memoirs might sound off-key in another. Not only that, but each memoir itself implements more than one voice.”
My voice in my memoir is often detached, a calculated distance to emphasize the trauma or as a way to let the scenes and dialogue speak for themselves.
There are characters in my memoir just as in Eliot’s poem. There is a Tiresias character, a Madame Sosostris, a young man carbuncular, the Thames river daughters, the Hyacinth girl. There is a Fisher King and a “mad again(e)” Hieronymo. These are not exact analogues, but their allusions and metaphorical implications are clearly established.
My memoir is not as voice-driven as so many. The books on memoir craft I read laud voice as the end-all be-all of memoir. But I think with my memoir, it’s not the case of a single voice, especially with the pervasive influence of The Waste Land. Thinking about voice for each section is more helpful than thinking of a singular voice, like a Humbert Humbert or a Holden Caulfield, or the Invisible Man, or a Huck Finn. Those iconic voices help the reader fully see that one characters’ world.
Maybe that’s what makes The Waste Land larger in scope than those works (not “better” - each of those works as well as The Waste Land are works of genius and cannot be ranked one above the other). Because The Waste Land uses voice to speak to many different themes, the work is broadened and can be applied to our understanding of humanity with a wider sweep of our hands:
“Look on the world, ye mighty, and despair!”
I’ll be curious to see what others have to say about the voices in my memoir.
Stay safe out there. Summer is in full swing. In less than 2 months, I will be moving to the Pacific Northwest. I can’t wait to escape this heat.
Until then, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
Love this one!