Stealing rather than making something: "The History of Sound" by Ben Shattuck

Early on in "The History of Sound" by Ben Shattuck, we learn that Lionel, the narrator, has perfect musical pitch and that he sees and even tastes sound. He can't not know what note a cough is, or what key a waterfall's roar is in. Which is why he doesn't really feel like the music he sings is his, even though he's such a excellent singer, he's enrolled in an elite conservatory in Boston. He confesses that, "I've always felt as if what came from my throat and lips was not mine, like I was stealing rather than making something." Rather than the music coming from inside him, it seems to Lionel like the music is just lying around freely all over creation, and he's picking it up. It's hard for Lionel to understand that everyone doesn't hear music like him, so it feels like he's taking what ought to be common property.

It's appropriate for our thieving narrator, then, that he takes a job one summer as a musical ethnographer, roaming Maine to collect folk songs. It's a field that often takes criticism for stealing, using the word we often use for the kind of intellectual theft that's too general to result in a copyright infringement case: appropriation. While ethnomusicologists themselves believe their work helps to further human knowledge and to preserve the traditions of communities, some see their work as stealing and benefiting from the theft, as the ethnographers are often the ones paid for what they find, not those from whom they learn about the folk music.

Lionel is, perhaps, exactly the kind of person who might be guilty of this kind of profiteering. He tends to be distracted by whatever shiny object he sees. As a child, his parents were often vexed by how easily he forgot about objects he was responsible for, or even gave them away without thinking. He calls himself a "magpie" at one point, and describes the Baroque music he fell in love with at the conservatory "a coldly glittering piece of jewelry," the kind of shining bauble that would catch the attention of the easily distracted. He's the sort of person who might care about folk songs while he's collecting them, but then forgets afterwards, especially about the people. And he did, as a mater of fact, benefit commercially from writing musical ethnographies in the 50s, decades after his work in Maine.

It's no wonder the one scene we get of Lionel and his partner interacting with a local shows them completely missing the tragedy the man they're interviewing has gone through, and also the man mistrusting them. The man might be right to do so.

Lionel's fickle personality is likely the reason he's never had a long-lasting relationship in his life. The only time he's really been in love was with David, the young man with whom he went on his music cataloging trip in 1919, right after David returned from the war. (Lionel did not go because of his poor eyesight.) Lionel had already met David earlier at the conservatory, and they had a brief affair before the war, so when David wrote to Lionel asking Lionel to join him for the trip, sponsored by David's college, Lionel left his mother's farm immediately, not caring that all the fruit on the trees would rot, because when Lionel is distracted by something, he tends not to care about the costs, and he traveled to Maine to be with David.

The two have a brief idyll together, full of sex and blueberries and naked swimming in waterfalls. Lionel, who ends up being bi-sexual in his relationships in his life, doesn't feel any guilt about being with David, the way some people might have back then, But it's maybe not a lack of guilt to be admired. Just as Lionel simply hears music, he simply doesn't feel guilt. It's just not in him. It's one thing to own who you are in spite of what society tries to tell you, but to be unable to feel guilt at all seems nearly pathological. And probably not a great qualification for someone who will be entrusted with handling the cultural treasures of others responsibly.

It turns out that David made up the whole trip. He lied when he told Lionel that Bowdoin College had commissioned their study. And David was actually engaged to a woman while on the trip with Lionel. David, seemingly mentally scarred from the war, dies a few months after the end of his music cataloging trip with Lionel, one presumes from suicide. Lionel moves on to his life of short-term relationships and making use of his incredible voice. When his voice gives out on him decades later, he takes to writing, which is how someone eventually finds him and returns to him the wax recordings of songs he and David made that summer. They were sitting in an attic.

The story itself somewhat resembles its narrator. It has musical ability, but the music seems to simply be plucked from the environment, not coming from any white-hot interior. I realize it takes more than belly fire if you want to be the next Baryshnikov, but there ought to be some belly fire in the story. Instead, in spite of its technical mastery, the story feels assembled from what was lying around.

It's not just that there was a movie twenty years ago about a musical ethnographer (Songcatcher). Nor is it just because "A History of ____" is a ubiquitous title formula. (In fact, A Something of Something is a fairly well-worn title formula.) It's not like making one story about a thing means nobody can ever make stories about that thing again, or else who would ever write about anything? It's that this story seems to keep an emotional distance from its own heart.

There are many attempts to bridge this gap by way of lyrical passages:

"Thinking of it now reminds me of the summer's white moths flitting around the lantern on our porch in Kentucky, of my brother and me lying on our backs, hands on our stomachs, feeling the vibration as Dad's foot stomped out the slow rhythm--the scratch of his boot on the wood. Katydids in the trees, stitching the night together."

Or

"Of all the recordings that summer of 1917, I felt like we were missing the best sounds. I wanted an audio journal of the days between our work sessions. The sound of a windstorm coming up a valley. The sound of the pines’ broomed limbs brushing overhead. The kapock-kipp-koopof eight children’s wooden spoons hitting wooden plates down a table south of Augusta; the crackling lard around a side of meat burning in a skillet. I wanted to record David’s whispering, “Holy Jesus,” when we first came to a field glowing with fireflies in Dog Hill; the scrape of a snapping turtle’s claws across a table in Lincoln; the preamble in Cowper, when Nora Tettle and her three daughters, each so eager to have their songs recorded, singing at once entirely separate songs, each Tettle trying to outdo the others until David had to quiet them by knocking two cooking pans together. Love Williams in Southwick, seated in the middle of her kitchen, singing a modal tune while I tried to fix the phonograph, her six children and five stepchildren all sitting around her, quiet, until Love came to the second refrain, when the children couldn’t restrain themselves and one by one joined their mother. Twelve singers, four harmonies."

There's music here, but somehow it feels like the music is just being collected, not welling up from inside the soul of the story. I didn't feel a real gut-punch from any of this. It felt like music well played by a competent musician who was playing because it was his job to play, and the next night, he'd pack up and go play somewhere else. Or more to the point, it felt like a story a writer wrote in the way stories are supposed to be written because he writes stories for a living, not because he would just bust if he didn't tell it.

Maybe the story succeeds too much at reflecting its own narrator's interior life, at stealing music rather than creating it, at having difficulty emotionally connecting with the world until it's too late. Lionel's grandfather muses at one point that "happiness isn't a story," and maybe this story is just working out that hypothesis throughout. Determining whether the story succeeds might be like an assessment of a story with a bleak worldview in which the story mirrors theme by being painful to get through. Is it a success when a story is painful to read, if it's about how life is also painful to get through?

This story is in that nebulous territory for me. It's about the dangers of treating beauty without respect, and in the process, the story feels to me like it flirts with treating itself too cynically. Or maybe too sincerely, which, in spite of being the opposite, ends up feeling like much the same thing. I can see why it was considered strong enough to be in a best-of collection, but for me, the story felt a little like Baroque music: a lot of head but not enough heart.
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Karen Carlson, The Blogger Laureate of Maine, was a lot more certain than I was that she liked this story. Her take on it is over here.