{"id":15043,"date":"2014-07-26T09:02:46","date_gmt":"2014-07-26T15:02:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=15043"},"modified":"2018-03-07T16:22:06","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T22:22:06","slug":"ars-voces-howard-bahr-the-convergence-of-style-and-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/ars-voces-howard-bahr-the-convergence-of-style-and-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Ars Voces: Howard Bahr\u2014The Convergence of Style and Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared in <\/em>The Local Voice #208. <\/em>
\nTo download a PDF of this issue, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

–<\/p>\n

\"JesseYancyColumnHeader\"<\/a>When I called Howard and asked him to write an introductory bio for this, he said, \u201cOh, get off your butt and do it yourself!\u201d That put me in the position of carrying coals to Newcastle, since Howard is very well known in Oxford. A curator of Rowan Oak for fourteen years, a teacher, writer and musician, Howard wears many hats, but he is best known as an award-winning historical novelist for works such as The Black Flower<\/em> and The Judas Field<\/em>. Howard lives in Jackson, where he teaches at Belhaven University. -Jesse Yancy<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

When I was a little kid, I\u2019d write stories and my mother would type them up on her Royal Standard typewriter. Writing those stories, I never supposed I\u2019d become serious. I used to use a manual typewriter, my own 1953 Royal standard, a beautiful machine that I loved dearly. Then I got a computer, and I use that now. The thing about the computer is that it makes it so easy to revise. Stepping off into the blank page is scary, and it\u2019s much easier to go back and revise what you\u2019ve already written than to make up something new, so I have to watch myself with that. I only work at night; drink beer, smoke my pipe, and try to write a couple of pages. It\u2019s kind of a ritual.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"HowardBahr2\"<\/a>When I first became really interested in writing, when I was working on the railroad, my friend Frank Smith introduced me to William Faulkner.\u00a0I\u2019d heard of Faulkner, but I had never read him. Frank and I were talking about writing, thinking, sort of coming out of ourselves and finding out things. When he gave me some Faulkner books to read, I became just totally involved in Faulkner\u2019s world. It was a world I thought I would have loved to have lived in; the 1890s, the turn of the century, the South of the 1920s. I was fascinated by his style, so I began to unconsciously imitate it. If I had any of my early writings, you would see that I was a very poor copier of William Faulkner, but an imitator nevertheless.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Parenthetically, Shelby Foote did the same thing, you read Foote\u2019s early novels and they are a poor imitation of Faulkner\u2019s style. Then I read Joseph Conrad, and I began to imitate him, his cadences, then I read Scott Fitzgerald and I tried to imitate his beautiful, musical lines. Every person I read, I would imitate. Many years later, when I read\u00a0Lonesome Dove<\/em>,\u00a0that book put echoes in my head. Out of all that came my own style.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s how I learned to write, by reading other writers, imitating and finding my own voice, and that\u2019s what I recommend for any writer, to not be afraid to imitate a number of writers, because eventually you\u2019ll find your own style. That\u2019s what Faulkner himself did; he imitated A.E. Housman, a number of stylists until he came up with his own. By the time I came to Rowan Oak as a caretaker, I was sick and tired of William Faulkner, I was sick of his baroque sentences, he had begun to annoy me with his coy, almost willful obscurity, so I lost interest in his writing for that reason. Oddly enough, the presence of William Faulkner at Rowan Oak was very small. The boys who worked with me there I think would agree. We all wrote stories and wrote things in the house, but there was no inspiration or magical breath that came down the stairs. It was like writing in a hotel room. Although we talked about him, kept the house as he and his family had, the house really had a life of its own. To us, it was always the house that was more alive to us than Faulkner. Wherever Mr. Faulkner\u2019s ghost is, it is at rest.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"HowardBahr1\"<\/a>I never go to a lecture unless I\u2019m giving it. I say that kind of tongue-in-cheek, but there\u2019s also some truth in it, too. I go to a writers\u2019 conference to speak or read, and I look out over the auditorium and they\u2019ve all got their pads and their pencils are poised to write down The Secret as if there must be some secret to this. They would be better off spending that time reading other writers and writing for themselves. Edgar Allan Poe never went to a writers\u2019 conference; William Faulkner never attended classes at Bread Loaf. The great writers learn to write by reading and imitating and by working their asses off day and night. You\u2019ve always got to be working on something, whether it\u2019s going to amount to anything or not. You can ask any writer if he is working on anything now, and he will say yes. He may be staring at the blank page, but he\u2019s still working.<\/span><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t preach. You want to write a story. Faulkner said, and I think he\u2019s quite right, that a writer should not have an agenda, that he should not preach; his business is to tell the story of the human heart, to tell it well in all of its lights and shadows, and out of that telling, if you do it true enough and honest enough, if you don\u2019t make fun of your characters and create a real world that your reader can move around in, if you do all that and tell the story, then the meaning, the preaching, whatever you\u2019re trying to say will come out.\u00a0The Black Flower<\/em>\u00a0is not about North versus South; it\u2019s not about the Yankees and the Rebels; it\u2019s about how horrible and unspeakable war is. That\u2019s what it preaches about, not through the voice of the author but through the actions and reactions of the characters and the things they see in the world around them. The reader gets the message without being button-holed. What is wrong with preaching is that you begin to move away from the story, away from the work, and into the writer. And the writer doesn\u2019t matter. If the writer has a message, it needs to come out in the work.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think that my course has run as a writer. I don\u2019t think that I\u2019ll be publishing any more books. I think that the time has come for me to be a teacher of writing. But having said that, I still write all the time, I\u2019m still paying attention. The literary world is a landscape that I don\u2019t recognize any more, I don\u2019t understand it; I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on. I don\u2019t think anyone would be interested in publishing anything else I write, but if I ever finish something, I\u2019ll send it in and see what happens.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article originally appeared in The Local Voice #208. To download a PDF of this issue, click here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":242,"featured_media":15044,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11901],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jesse-yancy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/HowardBahrFeat.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/242"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}