In praise of full-throated authors

The multifaceted man of letters A. Alvarez begins “The Writer’s Voice” with a question as simple as it is profound: “What happens when you sit down with a book? Why do you do it? What’s the pleasure in it?”

The kind of reading he’s talking about, as he explains, is very different from what we do when we scan a newspaper, textbook or website in pursuit of information: “Real literature is about something else entirely.... [I]t’s not about information, although you may gather information along the way. It’s not even about storytelling, although sometimes that is one of its greatest pleasures. Imaginative literature is about listening to a voice. When you read a novel the voice is telling you a story; when you read a poem it’s usually talking about what its owner is feeling; but neither the medium nor the message is the point. The point is that the voice is unlike any other voice you have ever heard and it is speaking directly to you.”

In this elegantly plain-spoken book based on lectures given at the New York Public Library, Alvarez examines the question of voice from three perspectives. First, what is a writer’s voice and how does a writer find his or her particular one? Second, what should readers be listening for, and what is it that attentive listening enables us to hear? And finally, what is the difference between a writer’s authentic voice speaking into the reader’s private ear and a writer playing the public role of cult figure or marketable personality?

Describing what he means by voice, Alvarez cites Philip Roth’s definition: “something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head.” “Voice,” Alvarez declares, “is the vehicle by which a writer expresses his aliveness, and Roth himself is all voice.”

There is an urgency, a truthfulness in a writer’s authentic voice, a sense that what’s being communicated really matters. Although Alvarez clearly prefers the ascetic, pared-down prose of Roth, Kipling or Hemingway to the roundabout hesitations and elaborations of Henry James, he recognizes an authentic voice in each of these. Nor are authentic voices to be found only in highbrow literature, he notes: “Anita Loos and Elmore Leonard have voices that are as true and uniquely their own as those of Virginia Woolf or Mark Twain.”

Ford Madox Ford, Isaac Babel, Alice Munro, W.B. Yeats, John Donne, T.E. Hulme, Sylvia Plath and Sigmund Freud (a literary figure in spite of himself) are among the many writers who come into his lively and stimulating discussion of the mysteries of the writer’s quest. Alvarez compares the quest to find one’s voice with the Freudian quest for self-discovery, and he also shows readers what to “listen for” in literature, illustrating his discussion with a rich variety of examples, from Shakespeare, Donne, Thomas Wyatt and Andrew Marvell to Yeats, Cole Porter, D.H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys. Comparing and contrasting literature with music, he gets into the fascinating subject of rhythm -- not mere rhyme and meter, but the far subtler rhythm, “deeper than words,” that Virginia Woolf called “a wave in the mind.”

His concluding essay looks at the ways in which a writer’s voice can become coarsened, distorted or made into a caricature in the process of being marketed to the public. The problem has become especially severe of late, in this age of shameless self-promotion (not for nothing did Norman Mailer title one of his books “Advertisements for Myself”). Having come of age in the 1950s, well-versed in the high aesthetic creeds of Modernism and the New Criticism, Alvarez is able to recall a time, “half a century ago, when judgment mattered ... and belonging to an intellectual elite had nothing to do with politics or privilege and everything to do with how you used your education.”

“So where did it all go wrong?” he asks.

Attempting to answer this very large question, Alvarez offers a crisp, incisive account of recent cultural history, in which he makes no bones about locating the ultimate source of the problem in the anti-intellectualism of the Beats, notably Allen Ginsberg: “They were know-nothings in revolt against know-alls, and in their war against their highbrow enemies, dope was the perfect weapon.” Alvarez, who made his name with “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide” and as a champion of poets like Plath, John Berryman and Robert Lowell, is well-qualified to explain what happens when extreme forms of behavior end up becoming an end in themselves.

Alvarez not only refines our notion of the writer’s voice, but also reminds us of the vital difference between hard-won authenticity and disposable celebrity.

Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.