On *Songs from a Voice* by Baron Wormser

Anyone who knows me as a poet also knows how indebted I am to Baron Wormser, my teacher, my mentor, my dear friend. Poetry is the closest thing in my life to church, and Baron was the person who took me to the river and washed me in the water. So with that history between us, I can make no pretense of writing about his work dispassionately. Still, having read nearly every book he’s published—poetry collections, teaching texts, memoir, essays, novels—I’ve entered into a particular relationship with his canon. To a notable degree, his writings share not only an abiding authorial tone but also a deep concern with the unfolding of a mind. Sometimes the mind under study is Baron’s own; more often, it’s a student’s or a character’s or a historical figure’s. As each new book appears, I’m struck, again, by the consistency of this quest even as Baron shifts among genres and intended audience.

His most recent book, Songs from a Voice, fits into this pattern; but as its cover makes clear, Baron is also deliberately complicating matters. The book is labeled “A Novel,” but its subtitle—Being the Recollections, Stanzas, and Observations of Abe Runyan, Song Writer and Performer—feels like the sort of explanatory phrase an eighteenth-century man of letters might compose: Samuel Johnson, say, or Laurence Sterne. To my mind, its stylistic oddity instantly evokes notions about the history of the novel—the genre’s forms and conventions, certainly, but, even more importantly, its didactic roots. Plot as we know it today isn’t much of a concern in Rasselas or Tristram Shandy. Yes, characters show up, things happen, and time passes, but the driving interest lies in the narrator’s solid conviction that he’s got thoughts about a few important subjects, and you, the reader, had better pay attention to them.

Baron intensifies this already looming historical shadow by choosing a narrator who is himself a shadow: Abe Runyan is a fictional character, and the novel “evokes the circumstances of an imagination,” but “the terrain of this imagination hearkens to Bob Dylan, and Abe “traces Dylan’s roots and early arc.” Thus, we have a double blurring: a character who is and is not a facsimile of an actual human being, and a novel that seems to be addressing the definition and purpose of its own genre.

Didacticism gets a bad rap these days. I think many of us tend to confuse it with polemic or dogma, and few humanists want to be told what or how to think. In truth, though, the didactic urge tends to arise from an overwhelming desire to explain, or at least come to terms with, ambiguity, faith, the private journeys of the self. This is certainly the urge that the character of Abe Runyan reveals, from beginning to end of the novel.

Songs from a Voice makes no pretense of having a plot. Instead, Baron has created a text that serves as Abe’s public outlet for emotional memory, a place to relive his discovery of himself. Public is a key word here: these are not private musings, though they do muse about private matters. Imagined Abe is speaking to an imagined audience that has preexisting notions about him. It’s a celebrity memoir in which the celebrity traces not his rise to fame but his rise into art. “People would say what they would say, but the skein of my circumstances was my particular skein.”

The prose is packed with this sort of casual epigram. In the midst of an early memory of his mother’s singing, Abe inserts, “If you go about bent on hearing and overhearing, you can lose yourself.” At the end of a section about the people who frequented the local pool hall, he warns, “You better watch out what you pity.” The you in Abe’s chronicle is, by turns, his audience, his fellow artists, young men, a generalized humanity, and himself, but it nonetheless enhances the sense of the text as instruction. Just as often, though, these directives bleed into intricate descriptions of moments of change or discovery, as in: “I started to be inside the music and not outside it. Every artist understands how this works, how there comes a time when you begin to feel how you are part of what you are learning and how it makes sense to you, a sense that is yours and not the teacher’s.”

These moments are notable, and not just because they trigger recognition in any artist who may be reading them. For me, they helped clarify why Baron chose to run with a didactic tone that, in other contexts, might become irritating. Importantly, a central element of Songs from a Voice is its emphasis on the vitality, and the validity, of artistic arrogance. Baron doesn’t shy away from the truth that being faithful to one’s art involves a ruthlessness of purpose. Like Gulley Jimson, the painter–con man in Joyce Cary’s 1944 novel The Horse’s Mouth, Abe leaves detritus in his wake: lovers, wives, children, parents; sometimes even reality. And here’s where, I think, the Dylan shadow becomes particularly interesting: if Abe is an imaginative exploration of the kind of mind that might be Bob’s, then we are presented with the possibility that the persona of a great artist is more closely linked to the art than to actual existence in the world. In Abe’s terms: “the songs may be solid, but the person who made the songs is not. . . . You could say the songs are about that conflict: our trying to be solid and all the not-solid stuff that goes with life, beginning with love.” From the point of view of the detritus (the lovers, wives, children, parents, and such), this is a pretty aggravating excuse for being unreliable and self-absorbed. But arrogance and a certain hidebound indifference are the dance partners of obsession.

Not once in this putative novel about a great songwriter and musician does Baron discuss the actual work of learning to make music. He does include snippets of lyrics, and Abe offers some general comments about guitars and practicing alone in his bedroom, but we learn nothing about the physical training that, in real life, is the backbone of a musician’s days. I expect this is partly because Baron isn’t a musician himself, but also it’s not the point of the book. There’s an analogy here to the way in which apprentice writers can find themselves distracted by craft talks. The fact is that almost any would-be poet can analyze the bits and pieces of the sonnet form and enact a version of her own. A great artist’s absorption of form—as Keats, for instance, did: transforming structure into the sublime—is another matter entirely. The sublime is what Baron is tracing in this novel; and as Abe says, “You’re bound to be consumed and subsumed.”

Songs from a Voice by Baron Wormser
Woodhall Press, 2019