Moon River: The Genius of the Parent

By
Hilton Als
– April 9, 2013

DionneWhen I was a little boy, I loved to sing. I don’t think I associated it with being a performer; singing was an extension of the music I loved, and words, and the singers I loved–Dionne Warwick, that kind of thing. Dionne on Scepter Records, all those 45s stacked up on the record player in my cousin’s bedroom, Dionne didn’t want to be made over. In addition to all that–my first lesson in philosophy–Dionne knew the difference between a house and a home. The Dionne album cover I stared at and stared at in my sister’s collection was 1964’s “Make Way for Dionne Warwick.” I was as fascinated by the sequence of photographs on the cover as I was by the music; each still showed a different Dionne mood; her body was a series of gestures, and sparkles, and legs, and a wig. No living woman had hair like that but Dionne convinced us that that hair was possible–she could convince you of anything–because of her voice, which not only told stories so convincingly, especially the abstract ones–a house was not a home, did I know the way to San Jose?, things long to be close to you when the longing lover perceives it as such–because of her nuance and tone, which was not inseparable from what she said and how she said it. Dionne’s tone was always calm. Her emotional drama on those records was just beneath the surface, though, which made her storytelling all the more real. No one–unless they are crazy or desperate for attention–sounds dramatic all the time; Dionne sounded like the adult women I knew growing up. Their voices said things had been bad but they could be worse–or better. One non-Dionne song I loved growing up was “Moon River.” It said so many things and filled me up in ways I can’t explain even now. (I don’t remember how I first heard the song. Did a teacher choose it for me?) A school recital was to take place, and I was asked or asked to sing “Moon River.” I practiced and practiced and felt no embarrassment as I practiced: “Moon River,” would be me, just as “Make Way for Dionne Warwick,” was Dionne Warwick. On the day of the recital, I stood on that stage, my parents in the audience. I had on a white shirt, and tie. (Ties were mandatory at elementary school back then.) How old was I? Five? Six? I can’t remember, but if I close my eyes now I can feel my little chest and heart beating against that white shirt, and my voice rising up: “Moon river/Wider than a mile/I’m crossing you in style, one day.” Music took a lot. You had to push out to get your voice out, all the while dealing with cadence and that magical element: tone. What was the world feeling as I sang that song? Where was the world? As I sang the world receded, and there was just my voice and my vibrating chest, and my white shirt. After I’d finished: applause. But that meant less to me than the feeling of the song–it had filled me up with its own meaning. (Years after this happened the singer Rickie Lee Jones told me that singers loved to sing sad songs in particular because of the way those songs filled you up.) I left the stage. My mother rushed up to me. “You were wonderful!,” she said, embracing me, while my father stood by, out of reach or out of my reach. “I couldn’t hear you,” he said. Years passed, and, except for a brief stint in a small musical group made up of a number of friends I haven’t seen for years, I never sang again.

Life went on and things happened. Someone I was very close to in college and after college–he died in 1992; AIDS–said once: “You know, you should sing what you write.” And when I protested with, But I don’t know how to sing! He said: “Dylan doesn’t know how to sing!” It’s a conversation that always comes to mind when I get into a cab in New York these days. More often than not the Middle Eastern men, or Latin men, who pick me up in taxis when they pick me up at all, ask, after hearing me speak,  if I’m a singer. I can’t hear my own voice, but I’m always moved when people react to it, and it occurs to me now that my father–who couldn’t bond with either of his sons–knew, in an instinctive way, the intuitive way of the resentful parent, that I had a voice, and if people responded to it, I would exist in ways he did not feel he existed, and  if he shut me up I would be more like him, or no better than him. But my father didn’t count on me becoming a writer, and, in a way, my writing has become a kind of long form singing, particularly when I read aloud. I feel the words filling me up, and isn’t it amazing how children who are given a “You were wonderful!” boost can take another parent’s hatred and make it something else? Another friend told me once: “You were lucky to have your father,” and I didn’t know what he meant for a long time until I thought about it, and realized that what my friend was saying was this: A negative parent can help create a determined child. A parent who is unwilling to praise a child, or look at them with love, may help produce his or her worse nightmare: a child who can sing. Did my father want to sing? No. He wanted to be involved with words, though; he was an obsessive reader of newspapers, of the specious truth. When I was first starting out as a writer, I worked at a newspaper, but I was incapable of making my voice conform to the editorial voice; various editors tried to make me do so, aggressively, resentfully, but, in the end, they would have to take what I said and how I said it, or leave it, even after they tried to marginalize my voice by saying: I can’t hear you. Say it this way. Speak this way. But it was already too late. Dionne Warwick and my father had said otherwise.