Townie Essay: Shifting Emotional Output From Violence to Art

Hailing from Haverill, the Massachusetts native and author Andre Dubus III published a novel quite different from what he had published in the past, pushing a non-fiction retelling of his own life from his own perspective entitled Townie: A Memoir to shelves in 2011. While his works had mostly encompassed fiction, Dubus began writing about his experience as a baseball coach for his son’s team despite knowing no baseball, and later this developed into what he realized could be a good book in and of itself. He found himself reaching further and further into his own past, and these recollections formed the basis of the book: A reflection on many events of his own life, and an analysis of what threads sewed himself together, what makes Andre Dubus III who he is. One of the key threads is one that changed constantly throughout the book, yet remained one of the most influential contributors of his life. This thread is violence, which for much of Dubus’s life, could be equated to an art form. Violence was how Dubus transformed his emotion into an art, one that would later manifest itself as writing.

Violence, to Andre, began as an answer. It was the answer to many questions, questions involving the pain and suffering of both him and his family. And this became his best answer, the one he decided to jump to when any conflict arose. This became evident more and more, one instance being the Tommy J. incident. After Tommy J. beat up Andre’s brother and called his mother a whore, Andre turned entirely to training. In hi own words, as seen on page 79, “Was I really this weak? Yes, I was. And small. And afraid. And a coward.” The line in his mind draws a connection between power and physical strength, and here, it becomes evident how this manifest in his ideals, where Dubus claims that, “These words about myself were not new, but today they felt less like the end and more like a beginning” (Dubus 79). In this choice of words, Dubus makes it clear: his new sense of training exceeded standard rationale; his fear was not a hindrance, it was the fuel to begin a new stage of his life, a stage that depended on his own physical strength, one where he can transform his emotions into violence. And while he had a number of opportunities to cause damage with his violence since he transformed his body into a powerhouse, he instead chose to act on his emotions a different way: boxing.

Despite initially wandering into the boxing gym while looking for a gym to body-build in, Andre grew to appreciate it for what it’s for. Becoming a boxer was what, in a sense, legitimatized his pent up anger into violence, allowing a way for him to vent his emotions through both training and fights. As seen on page 118 in the book, Andre envisioned the bag to be the faces of the people he despised, who were the face of Tommy J. and others, including “the kid who threw the Molotov cocktail into [Andre’s] mother’s car, or Dennis Murphy right after he slapped the pine into that old woman’s face, or Clay Whelan just before he started pushing [Andre] to the ground to whale on [Andre’s] face and head, or Doucette stabbing Jimmy Quinn, or any of the boys and men from the avenues lounging around in our rented house, smoking and drinking and listening to the stereo Bruce bought” (Dubus 118). He churned these feelings of hatred into a way to express his emotions, a way to use his emotions into a technique to better himself as a person from a physical standpoint, improving his strength and physical fitness. His sights were set to achieve a level of strength that he could scare away anybody he needed to, or wanted to, looking to bodybuilding magazines for examples. To Andre, power was strength, nothing else. However, this changes throughout the course of his life.

By the time he was an adult, his perception on power was that it was necessary to enforce what his interpretation of justice was, an ideal heavily supported by when his sister’s new husband, Keith, punched her. Upon hearing news regarding the incident, his first instinct was to exact punishment on his own accord. This is evident from page 211, where while his father planned on hiring a man to break Keith’s legs, Andre stepped in and proposed the idea to “Let’s just fly out there and do it ourselves, Pop. Let’s just fuckin’ do it ourselves” (Dubus 211). He even points out that “for weeks afterwards, I imagined shooting him, then digging a deep hole and rolling his body into it, filling it back up with dirt and broken rock and the roots I’d had to sever from any tree close to me.” (Dubus 212) While he realizes the truth of violence and the pain it causes, he lost the grasp on the reigns of his emotions and wanted to revert to violence as he once would. This happens at another point in the book, where Andre witnesses a woman being beaten on the street, and while the thoughts “Don’t hurt anyone. Don’t hurt anyone,” “Just get him off her”, and “Just hold him so she can get away,” were running through his head, he lost control, and before he realized it, “touching him did something to [Andre], his body healthy and unhurt while hers was not, and so when he swung around to see who had interrupted him, [Andre] planted [his] feet and tore through that membrane that separated [them], and he soon became far bloodier than she was” (Dubus 339). He regretted this, and was able to acknowledge the issue with this, but was unable to control his emotions here. However, this perpetuates one of the biggest changes in his life, which is when he was able to substitute violence for words, altering how he handled situations.

While for a large part of his life, violence was an answer to Andre Dubus, he came to a revelation and grew to accept writing and words as a more thought-provoking means of expression. In his shift from fighting as a boxer and working as an author, Andre learned the true value of expressing through writing, something he suppressed for years since his father was a writer. Part of this suppression came from the fact that oftentimes, such as after Suzanne was beaten, he believed his father told stories that weren’t his own to tell, claiming that “It felt like thievery to me. Like he had just stolen Suzanne’s experience and made it his own, and meanwhile Keith was still walking the earth untouched, unpunished, his in-laws’ warnings some distant echo in his head. And now this story for strangers to read. How did this help my sister? What good did this do?” (213). But there was a turning point in Andre’s life, one where he was able to accept words as a more suitable alternative to violence, and it’s when he was on the train in the U.K. He was stopping unsavory figures from continuing through the train, where they were scaring young children trying to sleep with their appearance and language, and a number of them threatened him. However, rather than fight them, as they were threatening, he talked calmly to them. The last time this happened, when he was confronted with the thug in charge of the others, and it was a turning point in Andre’s life where he could noticeably pin the feeling of a shift in ideals, recalling the following:

“While I talked he’d crossed his arms over his chest. He leaned against the wall and scrutinized me. In the pale fluorescence from the cars, with his long hair and sideburns, the narrow face and deep eyes, he was every street-tough I’d ever known: he was Cody Perkins about to knock out Sully; he was Clay Whelan just before he chased me down; he was Kenny V. punching me while Ricky J. beat on Cleary; he was Dennis Murphy slapping the old lady with the thin branch; he was Tommy J. walking away from my bleeding brother, and he was Steve Lynch the second before I threw my first punch. Except now I wasn’t going to throw a punch, even if the dealer was to step away from the wall and square off to shut me up; I wasn’t going to fight him either, and it was as if, in my explanation to him, I had stood between those trains and taken off all my clothes, then began to pull away every muscle I’d ever built: I ripped off the plate of my pectorals, dropping them at my feet. I reached up to each shoulder and unhooked both deltoids and let them fall, too; then I reached around for the muscles of my upper back, the first to show up years earlier, and dropped them at the feet of the dark dealer, speaking to him all along as if I’d never learned to do anything but talk, as if this armor I’d forged had never been needed because I could trust the humanity of the other to show itself. Trust. I was going to trust this stranger, this man who had entered my train car and not to talk. I was going to trust him to see and to listen and to do the right thing” (Dubus 357).

Andre dropped all reliance on violence and gave up on his shield of power he had built, opting instead to talk and trust, two things that were missing from many parts of his life. After this, he was able to be at peace with himself, no longer feeling like he needed to protect himself by looking like a bodybuilder and fighting those who oppose him. And as Andre mentioned at his talk at UMass Lowell on December 2^nd, 2015, he believes this realization and the ability to express his emotion through words is what saved his life and prevented him from winding up like many people in his life, where his reflections on his childhood reveal just how many of his acquaintances from his earlier life are either in jail or dead due to their violent ways. And as a result, he forgives everyone in his life, with the exception of the man who raped his sister.

Another local story with that mirrors this one in a number of ways is the story of Micky Ward, a boxer from Lowell who also underwent questionable upbringing. He, too, had violent tendencies and turned to boxing, similar to Andre, and more importantly, similar to his brother, Dicky Eklund. However, his brother’s path to a crack addiction and his family’s manipulation caused Micky to turn further to boxing, altering it from just a means of violence to a means of art, in a sense, as all sports are. He crafted himself to become a sportsman, similar to how Andre turned to writing, and was able to shift his emotional output to good use.

Andre Dubus III documented his life in Townie, opening himself to strangers, and ultimately telling the tale of how he was able to turn to creating art rather than violence with his emotion, a far more creative output that doubles in being good for the world. Dubus puts his life out there for the world so that he can be an example, and not just an example for people who wind up like him, but for people who come from any struggle and rise from it better people, people like Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund, people like Wes Moore and Kendrick Lamar and many, many undocumented stories that never will be documented, simply because they may not be “notable” enough. Dubus wrote out of his comfort zone to remind us that while violence may appear to be an answer, there are always more options to better the world, as he has done himself, as have many others before him, as will many after.