filed in What Gets Me Through the Day
What We Do When We’re Misunderstood
Here’s a beautiful story about stuttering from John Updike, whose birthday is today:
“My first memory of the sensation is associated with our Shillington neighbor Eddie Pritchard, a somewhat larger boy whom I was trying, on the sidewalk in front of our houses, to scream into submission. I think he was calling me ‘Ostrich,’ a nickname I did not think I deserved, and a fear of being mistook or misunderstood accompanies the impediment ever since. There seems so much about me to explain — all of it subsumable under the heading of ‘I am not an ostrich’ — that when freshly encountering, say, a bored and hurried electrician over the telephone, my voice tends to seize up. If the electrician has already been to the house, the seizing up is less dramatic, and if I encounter not his voice but that of his maternal- and amused-sounding secretary, I become quite vocal — indeed, something of a virtuoso of the spoken language. For there is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam. […] Viewing myself on taped television, I see the repulsive symptoms of an approaching stammer take possession of my face — an electronically rapid flutter of the eyelashes, a distortion of the mouth as of a leather purse being cinched, a terrified hardening of the upper lip, a fatal tensing and lifting of the voice. And through it all a detestable coyness and craven willingness to please, to assure my talk-show host and his millions of viewers that I am not, appearances to the contrary, an ostrich.”
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