So, here we go, he said, pointing me to an overstuffed lounge chair as he turned and went over and sat in the swivel chair at his writing desk and began turning the pages of his manuscript, humming quietly to himself until he found the sequence he was looking for. Then he said, Let’s see how this comes across without any introduction.
But then as he put on his reading glasses he smiled shaking his head and said, Look, I have just one restriction. I really want to know what you make of all this stuff. So I’m open to cross-examination. Except for one point. Man, don’t ask me why I’m trying to do whatever this stuff is about. With a pencil and a typewriter and not with valves and keys.
Stipulated, my good fellow, I said, remembering my old roommate again, Stipulated. Then I said, But I must say this. What I remember about you down there on the campus I am surprised that you seem to have put that horn down altogether, but I’m not at all surprised that you are this serious about writing. After all, I was always more impressed with your interest in literature than with your special status as a scholarship student in the School of Music.
Then I went on to point out that I had always remembered seeing him in the library more often than I could recall seeing him go to and from the School of Music or the band cottage. I also knew that he was an outstanding enough member of the band to be the student assistant who tuned the band for the bandmaster and who led the band when they played for the cheerleaders during football games in Alumni Bowl. But I didn’t mention that I couldn’t remember how he actually sounded on the trumpet. Nor could I remember whether he was a regular member of either of the two student dance bands. However, I did remember that he played with the chapel orchestra.
On the other hand, however, I could also have pointed out that I had always thought of him as being more involved with becoming a composer and conductor than with becoming an instrumental performer as such. Because that was what had always come to mind when I had remembered seeing him in the main reading room of the library when he was not on duty at the circulation desk. Because he would always be sitting at a table all by himself doing copy work of sheets of music.
When he began reading that night, it was very much as if I were back down on the campus in central Alabama with my old roommate again. Because it was during that first autumn term that he said what he said about tune in the head and voice on the page. He was not talking to me, he was talking to himself, and he said it twice. We were sitting across the room at our individual desks with our backs to each and we were working on our first assignment in English Composition 101. You could supply your own title, but the theme was first-person singular. And the objective was to introduce yourself to your classmates. So we did not discuss what we were going to write about ourselves, and I did not ask him what he was chuckling to himself about from time to time.
But when his paper turned out to be the one Mr. Carlton Poindexter chose to read aloud to the class as the best example of what the assignment was supposed to do, I was not surprised. And I could still hear my roommate’s voice on the page even as Mr. Carlton Poindexter was reading it in his own voice. And when I said what I said about it when we were back in the dormitory that night, my roommate said, Tune in the head, voice on the page applied even when the narration was in the third person. Because even when it was in the first person or even the second person it was not really your ordinary, everyday voice. It was your yarn-spinning, lie-swapping, tell-me tale and so your storybook-time voice.
And so, while I sat listening for his tune in the head as Taft Edison went on reading, I also found myself remembering how I became aware of the narrative voices on the pages of the list of novels I began reading on my own during that first fall term, starting with the voice of Henry Fielding, the author of The History of Tom Jones, the Foundling, among the academic classics and that of Ernest Hemingway among the serious contemporaries because part of his current novel in progress was being published in current issues of the leading fashion magazine for men in those days.
Before that fall I could identify some authors with books and short stories but only because I remembered what and/or who they wrote about, not how they wrote, although I was very much aware of the fact that some were considered to be serious and important, and some were popular but not important, although sometimes sophisticated and dismissed as pulp cheap trash. But beginning with my roommate’s paper for Mr. Carlton Poindexter’s first assignment I became aware of the function of literary craftsmanship as never before.
So as I sat back in the deep, overstuffed armchair that night that many years later listening to Taft Edison read from the typescript of what was to become his first novel, it was as if my old roommate and I were in Atelier 359 once more. And when Taft Edison paused at the end of his first excerpt, took off his glasses, and I said what I said about how it already sounded and about tune in the head and voice on the page, he said, The problem as I see it with this stuff is how to get our old down-home kind
