John Keene's Hidden Soundtrack

In the ninth in a series of posts on 2015 books entered for The Story Prize, John Keene, author of Counternarratives (New Directions), discusses the music his stories evoke.

If you were to place any book against your ear, what would you hear? Unless it were an audiobook, very likely nothing behind the sound of paper on skin, along with background ambient sound. One aspect of my collection Counternarratives that surprises me when I reread it, however, is that each story's prose contains an internal music and rhythmicality specific to that text, and both function in complementary, productive ways in relation to the stories' narration. I find myself surprised because when I was writing the stories, I was not consciously considering this element of my prose, yet somewhere in my subconscious, I apparently was scoring and setting pitches. Additionally, among the thirteen stories in the collection, only two specifically explore the lives of musicians, and in only one of these, "Cold," which recounts the final day in the life of the minstrel composer and performer Bob Cole, was I intentionally attempting to convey what the composer's music might have sounded like.

Degas' "Miss LaLa at the Cirque Fernando"

To give some examples of this unanticipated music—by which I mean the combination of sound, syntax, and rhythm—in the opening story "Mannahatta," the music materializes as soon as one reads by eye or aloud. Just as the character Juan Rodríguez is imagining the creation of a new life on the island of Manhattan after deciding not to return to the Jonge Tobias, the merchant ship on which he works, so too do the story's words, its sentences, unfold as if in a rhythm of assembly, fitting together sonically, rhetorically, and rhythmically, to create the scene in which the action occurs. Similarly, in "Acrobatique," the narrative's sonic movement reflects the high-wire-like thought and movement of a late 19th-century black acrobat whom Edgar Degas famously depicted in his 1879 painting "Miss LaLa at the Cirque Fernando." Olga "Miss LaLa" Kaira ascends and descends the circus's interior spaces but also swings, as if on a trapeze, back and forward through time and through the complex social spaces of her era, maintaining her poise and the breath of her storytelling, balancing everything in one long and continuous sentence, almost like a theme with multiple yet non-repeating variations.

In some of the longer stories, the music and rhythms are less obvious yet still surprise me. For example, in "The Aeronauts," which is set during the early years of the U.S .Civil War, the main character, Theodore King, recounts the entire story in retrospect to amuse a group of close friends and loved ones. His narration, in a realist mode, mixes verbal registers, from the vernacular to the technical language of ballooning, and has the pace of a story told in intimate company but that also could be—and is—written down. The music here, by which I mean his cadence of narration, is by turns prosaic and rollicking, and upon rereading the story it impressed upon me how much as I was writing I was hearing Theodore's voice, and not simply my own. Moreover, the rhythms of his narration track his movement geographically and in time, from Philadelphia to the theater of war in Washington, D.C,. and northern Virginia.

A final example exists in "Rivers," which tells the story of the character Jim, from Mark Twain's famous novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, roughly two decades after that book's events took place. In my story, Jim's perspective is preponderant, and comes even later in time, when he is much older and has been invited by a young reporter to recount his experiences in the U.S. Civil War. The reporter begins by asking about his river journey with Huckleberry, but Jim—now James Alton Rivers—decides he will only say a little bit about his former raft mate, and the rhetorical device of praeteritio becomes key. When I was writing the story I was not conscious of how this withholding of information from characters in the story but not the reader established a particular kind of music and rhythm of narration, but on rereading it, they gave me a sense of who Jim—James Alton Rivers—was and is beyond the story's specific facts, and suggested that he might have needed to keep secrets in order to survive, but that he was going to share with the reporter, and with the reader, a few unforgettable stories about his post-raft encounters with Huckleberry Finn. The music of his silence and non-silence, like the book's other subtle tunes, provides another path into the collection's narratives.

Creston Lea on Making Music, Making Guitars, and Making Stories

Lea's Wild Punch and a Creston guitar

In the ninth in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Creston Lea, author of Wild Punch (Turtle Point Press), writes about the relationship between guitars, music, and his stories.   

      I wrote the stories in my book, Wild Punch, over the course of sixteen years, during which time just about everything in my life changed. Among other things, I fell accidentally into making electric guitars for a living (www.crestonguitars.com). Guitar playing had always represented distraction, the false path, when I was younger and earnestly trying to write and write and write. But by my mid-twenties, I found myself playing fifty-plus shows a year with a bunch of different outfits, some ambitious, some lazy. Sooner or later, I started making guitars in my basement, and then in my garage, and then in the brick building I still occupy near the old barge canal and Superfund site in my adopted city of Burlington, Vermont. It took me a long time to make peace with myself, but eventually I faced up to the fact that I liked playing guitars, liked making guitars, and didn’t care any less about reading books and writing stories as a result. You can serve two masters, it seems.

Writing fiction and making electric guitars have nothing whatsoever to do with each other as far as I’m concerned. But I like music a lot, have always cared a little too much about it – something I could cling to, even early on when other kids were learning how to play sports or study. I’ll be 39 in December. I’ve written a lot of stories and played a lot of music but have never written a song. From my vantage, right next to music but having never written any of it, the shape of a song is intriguing and exciting to me and sometimes plays out in the shapes of my short stories.

I like those songs that depart from themselves entirely toward the end. Everybody likes the song “Seven And Seven Is” by Arthur Lee and Love, but how do you explain that quiet, guitar outtro – I suppose it’s a coda – after all the crashing and smashing of the song itself? Or the rousing, thematic, Memphis-y tail end of the otherwise quiet, painful, beautiful, live version of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” as sung by Nina Simone? That’s probably exit music for the singer herself – you can hear the surge of applause as she, a safe guess, comes out from the wings for another bow. But as a piece of music removed from the live taping, heard and not seen, it’s a change of direction that furthers everything that came before it.

“Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” was written by Sandy Denny, who died at 31 after falling down some stairs. She sang the 17th-century English ballad “Matty Groves” with Fairport Convention, the recorded version of which proceeds through the story of the song in a straightforward, quietly tense way. The story is good! A Lady seduces a young fellow at church while her husband is out in the far cornfields, bringing the yearlings home. The Lord catches wind of the affair and zips home, wakes them up, there’s a sword fight, young Matty Groves is killed and so is the cheating wife. The Lord calls for "a grave to put these lovers in. But bury my lady at the top for she was of noble kin." It sounds sort of Hobbity on the page, but listen: Adultery! Class warfare! Agrarian life! After four minutes of chorus-less music, the band takes off on an equally long, winding instrumental that bears nothing melodically to the sung verses—all the tension of the lyric and the steady, chugging arrangement that urged the story along with such restraint quickly explodes into a freewheeling fiddle-and-electric guitar escapade which, for all I know, is based on some other traditional English music. It’s different than what came before it but takes the listener deeper into the story by striking out in a new direction. That feels like life to me. A writing teacher once told me you may learn a lot from the funny pages. He referenced Little Lulu. I feel the same way about the music on the radio.

The linked stories in Wild Punch are my own look back at the place where I grew up on the Connecticut River, which divides New Hampshire and Vermont, and the people there. But the shape of the stories—where they start, where they go—is enormously informed by the music I was hearing at the time, none of which comes from northern New England except maybe for Dick Curless or Clarence White. It’s hard not to steal from the writers you love whether you mean to or not. But it feels less directly corrupt to take guidance from the music of Doug Sahm (specifically “She’s Huggin’ You, But She’s Lookin’ At Me”) which I do at least once in my book. I confess.

The top half of the front cover of Wild Punch shows a detail photograph of a guitar I made for a local musician a couple of years ago. He plays two hundred dates a year with it.