Quote:When I speak I st
st
. stammer
It's like trying to peel an apple
With a chisel and a hammer
Thoughts flow faster
When written down
With no fist in my throat
Gripping back the words
Choking off the sounds
I had a neighbor, when I lived in Durham, North Carolina, who wrote for a small but great newspaper published in Durham. He was a political writer-this newspaper had a liberal bent towards and reported both local and national politics as well as reviews and articles on the arts, etc. (The Durham/Chapel Hill area in NC is kind of this small liberal island in the sea of conservatism,which is the majority of North Carolina- a southern state in the bible belt of the US).
Forgive me if you already know this stuff- but it's pertinent- and I don't want to assume that you do. The newspaper he wrote for, along with the
Spectator , (in terms of the arts), are kind of like the bibles of that area in terms of finding out what's going on, etc.
Anyway, this guy is an awesome, awesome writer and I knew his stuff, (I had gone to University in Chapel Hill and continued to live in the area afterward) because I'd been reading him for years. So imagine how delighted I was when I found out that I had moved into a house that was next door to his, when I moved from Chapel Hill to Durham.
He came over to welcome me to the neighborhood, which was a custom back then among some of the friendlier people in the US (I hope it still is...). He'd left a little bouquet of black-eyed susans in water in a mason jar on my porch when I wasn't home the evening before, with a note telling me it was from him and that he lived next door.
NC is a very beautiful state in a lot of ways-despite being extremely conservative
- from the coastline to the mountains in the west- it's just stunning and in the spring and summer-full of flowers- and some of the people have retained a very nice sense of southern charm and actually still do things like this.
So, when the next night he came by, I was home. I recognized him from the picture that sometimes ran with his by-line in the newspaper as he walked up the path. He held out his hand to introduce himself, and literally took a full minute to pronounce his name.
I had had no idea that he stammered (or stuttered, as some say in the US), but he had probably the most severe stammer in an adult that I'd ever heard. I knew (from my work) how to listen in a way that would be helpful instead of flustering to him- and over the time that I lived there (he still lives there) we became great friends.
He told me he became a writer because he had so much to say, but it took him so much longer to say it than write it-that he decided just to spend his life writing. And boy, was that a great decision, in terms of using his talent, and for those of us who benefitted from reading him- but I know his stammer caused him great emotional pain socially- he had tried (all the various methods that had been advertised and had worked for others) but had never been able to overcome it.
In his particular case, he attributed it to the fact that he was gay, and as a child growing up in NC- knowing that he was gay and knowing that it would be a source of humiliation for his parents caused him great emotional stress and shame and turmoil- the outward manifestation of which was this stammer. Maybe if he'd been born somewhere else-it wouldn't have been such an issue, but he continued to live there as an adult and write to try to combat the close-mindedness that had such a negative effect on his life, in hopes that he could change the situation for some other child someday (by writing to try to open peoples' minds).
The really interesting thing was that the only time he didn't stammer was when he talked to his dog-but of course that makes sense-no possibility of judgment or censure there-so the turmoil and stress were alleviated.
Thanks for posting this poem Endy-I always love thinking about this guy (he's still writing-I can find some of his stuff on the internet sometimes-but I haven't looked in a while and this has prompted me to think about it).
