My Partners In Conversation

I write to speak when my partners in conversation are not with me. My voice won't carry that far, so I write to them. They are many, in truth. Some are still around, and some have left the planet. I'm not sure how far back to go in assembling these people. As Jerry Garcia sings in Morning Dew, “Where have all the people gone, my honey? Where have all the people gone, today?” “There's no need for you to be worryin' about all those people. You never see those people, anyway.”

Yes. I never see those people anyway. I'm speaking of the ones who are truly gone. They live as an audience of beloved ghosts, both shadowy and close, when I write. Lillian Young was my high school English teacher in Los Angeles. Short of stature and stylish in her way, she commanded great respect from her students, whom she addressed as “friends.” “Friends, what is Roethke's language doing in the first two stanzas of this poem?” “Friends, how do we make sense of the difference between Ellison's naive protagonist in this scene with the trustee and Bledsoe and the tone of the narration of the scene?” I write for Mrs. Young, in the vain hope that she's still reading my stuff and offering her trenchant comments in the margins, and is still teaching somewhere, somehow.

There are others who lurk in that ghostly backroom offstage, such as my father, who didn't read a lick, by which I don't mean he was illiterate, only that he had no interest in what I had to say. He couldn't muster the desire to listen well. As sometimes happens with those who don't listen well, we might care especially intensely that they would.

Most of us have such assemblages of people we have loved and with whom we still speak, if only in our heads and at times on pieces of paper or, more commonly now, on computer screens. For me they form, together, a kind of ideal audience, that group that live in the shadows because they are dead, with whom, therefore, I can have the kind of timeless conversations that populate my dreams: usually h