Alvarez compares the search for ones voice to the relationship between a patient and his psychotherapist who listens “to the overtones and undertones, alert to the false notes…distinguishing between the genuine emotions and the fake.” (20) He maintains that the immature author takes years to perfect style before he can start looking for his own voice. Sometimes he advises writers to strip back prose to its most straightforward simplicity in order to build his voice. Alvarez points to T. E Hulme’s essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ where Hulme admits, “Real communication is so very rare, for plain speech is unconvincing. It is in this rare fact of communication that you get the root of aesthetic pleasure.” (37)

Alvarez also explores how voice affects the reader. Writing outstanding prose and poetry has much to do with how the writer’s words are presented to the reader — something the reader can listen to and be moved by. Alvarez does not believe that the writer has to present what he calls the “grand emotions aspired to, but the altogether subtler sense of being emotionally awakened — are expressed less in the imagery than in movement, in the inner rhythm of language. When a poet is genuinely aroused, you can hear it in the way the lines move.” (53) He goes on to compare poetry to dance — “it has bodily dimension, a kind of muscular depth that moves both the poet and the reader in ways they are not quite aware of.” (57) Thus voice is the important bond between the writer and the reader. It is something “the eye doesn’t easily take in — in some unexpected hesitation or cunning adverb or barely audible inflection that makes you sit up and take notice.” (75)

Alvarez finally shows how the literary movements over the last two centuries have affected literature. Perhaps it’s too difficult to create a voice that demonstrates intelligence, emotions, and originality. In the Modernist Movement, the use of the writer’s private tragedies, cult fame, or drug-induced muse does not inspire Alvarez. He writes, “The truth is, great tragic poems are not necessarily inspired by great tragedies. On the contrary, they can be precipitated, like pearls by smallest irritants, provided the poet’s secret, internal world is rich enough.” (112) Alvarez repeats that finding both style and voice takes discipline and years of study and hard work. He says, “Art is a quest for order and sanity undertaken by people who are themselves often disorderly, none too sane, and rarely loveable. Mercifully, art itself is greater than the sum of the artist.” (120)

Discovering one’s voice is not something that can be directed easily. We cannot all follow the same steps and are all somehow influenced or “tainted” by the era in which we live. Alvarez’s book, sometimes pedantic and often sounding like the critic that he has been, is important for an aspiring writer to read and, if necessary, read more than once. Writing, and art in general, is what we leave for future generations. And making inroads in our quest for good art is more important than the riches we accumulate today.

Coralie Hughes Jensen is a full-time professional writer and author of six novels. Two of her short stories received honorable mention in the Writer’s Digest 2000 Writing Competition, which attracted over 19,000 entries. Her book reviews have appeared regularly in Bibliophilos and her fiction in Bibliophilos, QWF, Vermeer and Nostalgia. She was interviewed by Rembrandt Publishing as an “up and coming” writer in 2005. She is author of six novels. A Canadian company epublished her novel, ‘Friends of the Earth’ and accepted her collection of stories, ‘Cape Ann Mysteries’. A local radio station interviewed her live for a non-fiction project involving the court system. She is currently speaking in front of book clubs and attending signings at bookstores in the States and in Canada for literary novel, ‘Passup Point’. A graduate of University of California at Berkeley, Coralie has lived and worked in the Netherlands and trained employees in high tech systems in Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea. She has also lived in Texas, New Mexico, Oregon, California, and Massachusetts.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.