THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 29

Seriousness Without Solemnity

I was standing somewhere behind the action, dressed as a Roman who had somehow wandered through two thousand years of history and emerged as a private detective. The toga did little for my authority, although it may have disguised the fact that I was considerably more nervous than Flavius Maximus was supposed to be. Somewhere beyond the curtain were people with whom I worked, people who knew me as the accountant who could be relied upon to understand the numbers, meet the deadline and remain reasonably composed while everybody else developed an urgent need to panic. In a few moments, I would walk out in front of them and attempt to solve the murder of Julius Caesar with a collection of puns, misdirections and evidence that had been available to every schoolchild who had ever heard the words, “Et tu, Brute?”

There was an extra discomfort in performing before people who knew me. A room full of strangers could accept whatever character appeared through the curtain because they had no competing version against which to measure him, but workmates already knew the quieter man who sat at the desk and did serious things with figures. They knew the Jeff who was expected to have an answer, or at least to be capable of finding one without dressing himself in a bedsheet and calling for a chariot. I cannot remember everything that passed through my mind before I went onstage, and memory may now be arranging the nervousness into something more coherent than it was. I do remember that the performance felt like a greater exposure than merely forgetting a line, because it allowed people who knew one Jeff to see another one escape.

Flavius Maximus belonged to Rinse the Blood Off My Toga,¹ the Wayne and Shuster parody that turned the assassination of Caesar into a hard-boiled detective story. He was a private Roman eye wandering through history after the crime had already been solved by Shakespeare, schoolteachers and almost everyone in the audience. That did not discourage him, because confidence has never required possession of the facts when possession of the manner will do. He questioned suspects, pursued clues and moved with the assurance of a man who knew the whole Roman Empire was waiting for his conclusion, although the name Brutus may have reduced the necessary investigative workload.

The language was gloriously ridiculous because it took the conventions of authority seriously enough to turn them sideways. A single drink became a “martinus” because asking for a martini might imply a plural, and a railway station became a “ferrarium” because Latin apparently had to be dragged into the modern world whether it wished to come or not. The humour relied upon intelligence, but it did not stand at the front of the room announcing how clever it was. It invited the audience to recognise the construction, arrive at the joke and enjoy the moment of discovery. Nobody needed to be given a lecture on Roman grammar before being permitted to laugh.

That was the part of Flavius I understood instinctively, even before I understood why. He did not reject knowledge, and the sketch could not have worked without a reasonable acquaintance with Shakespeare, Rome, detective fiction and the human willingness to accept nonsense when it is delivered with sufficient authority. The comedy came from knowing the rules well enough to bend them without breaking the connection with the audience. It made serious material approachable without pretending the material itself had become unimportant. Caesar was still dead, Brutus was still implicated and Flavius was still investigating, but solemnity had been removed from the premises for the evening.

When I walked onto that stage, I was not thinking about a future accounting practice or a philosophy of communication. I was thinking about getting the words out in the correct order, finding the timing and not tripping over the costume while people from the office watched me make a Roman fool of myself. Yet the performance taught me something I would use repeatedly, even if I did not recognise the lesson at the time. An audience does not surrender its attention merely because the speaker has information. It listens when the speaker finds a way to make that information enter the room in a form human beings are prepared to receive.

There is a difference between knowing something and making another person want to listen to it. I have met many technically knowledgeable people who appeared to regard understanding as a reward that should be withheld from anyone unwilling to complete the same training they had endured. They could recite the rule, quote the section and display the professional vocabulary, but the person sitting opposite them often left knowing less than when the conversation began. That may have been because the explanation was poor, although sometimes I suspected the confusion was part of the performance. A professional can appear very important when everybody else is frightened to admit they have no idea what he has just said.

Accounting has traditionally provided abundant ceremonial fog. It has balance sheets whose balances do not necessarily represent money available in the bank, profits that do not always mean cash and losses that may not mean the business is about to collapse. It has debits placed on the side that seems wrong to anyone encountering them for the first time, credits that can be good or bad depending upon where they appear, and depreciation that reduces a profit without causing the relevant amount to leave the bank account. None of those concepts is impossible to explain, but they can be made to sound impossible when the explanation is intended to display the accountant rather than assist the client. The language becomes a professional toga, worn not because it helps with the work but because it identifies who is permitted to enter the temple.

Taxation adds further layers to the costume. Legislation is written to deal with complexity, exceptions, avoidance, administration and every inventive person who has previously found a gap between what Parliament meant and what Parliament actually wrote. The result is language that may be necessary inside the law but becomes destructive when carried unchanged into a conversation with somebody trying to run a small business. A client does not usually need the tax manual recited across the desk. The client needs to know what the rule means, what choices remain available, what could go wrong and what must happen next.

That sounds obvious when expressed plainly, which may be why so many professions resist expressing it plainly. If the client understands the issue, the professional loses the mysterious authority that comes from being the only person in the room capable of interpreting the smoke. Clarity can appear to reduce the value of the adviser because the answer, once translated, may seem simple. What disappears in that calculation is the knowledge required to make it simple without making it wrong. The achievement is not in leaving the client impressed by the difficulty of the subject; it is in allowing the client to leave capable of making a better decision.

I did not always explain matters as clearly as I later learned to do. Like most young accountants, I had spent years learning the language of the profession and naturally assumed that using it demonstrated competence. There was comfort in the vocabulary because it provided structure, and structure was one of the places in which the analytical Jeff felt safest. A technical phrase could contain a rule, several exceptions and a history of judicial irritation, while an ordinary sentence sometimes seemed dangerously imprecise. The problem was that the person on the other side of the desk was not sitting an accounting examination and had no particular reason to be impressed that I appeared to be conducting one.

Experience gradually taught me to watch faces rather than merely listen to my own explanation. Confusion has a look, although polite clients become skilled at hiding it because they do not want to appear foolish in front of the person they are paying for advice. They nod at approximately the right moments, repeat a phrase they have just heard and promise to deal with something later. Then they return months afterwards with the same problem, sometimes enlarged by penalties, interest and the passage of time. It is easy for the accountant to conclude that the client refused to listen, but less comfortable to ask whether the accountant ever said anything the client could carry away.

That question mattered because I had spent much of my own life feeling the distance between what I understood and what I could safely say. The intelligent child learns quickly that demonstrating too much knowledge can make a room uncomfortable, particularly when the room is organised around age, status or an existing certainty. He learns to reduce an idea, disguise a conclusion or remain silent until somebody with recognised authority eventually says something similar. Later, the professional world reverses the demand and rewards him for making simple matters sound complex. Somewhere between those two pressures, it is possible to lose the ability to speak in a voice that belongs to you.

Flavius Maximus did not lose his voice. He entered a world of senators, emperors and classical importance, then spoke like a detective who had taken the wrong turn out of a black-and-white crime film. He did not ask permission from Shakespeare before making the language his own, although Wayne and Shuster were careful enough with the original material to know precisely what they were disturbing. The authority of Rome remained visible, which made its collision with the private eye more effective. Flavius was funny because he understood the room and refused to be subdued by it.

I suspect that was one of the reasons I enjoyed playing him. The character could say absurd things with complete confidence, and the audience’s laughter confirmed that the absurdity had reached them exactly as intended. There was no need to reduce the intelligence behind the joke because the joke carried it without demanding applause for the construction. For someone who had spent years adjusting himself to the room, that was liberating. Flavius did not dumb himself down; he translated the world into a language in which more people could participate.

Translation later became one of the most important parts of my work. I was not merely moving words from accounting into English, because the client’s language had to travel in the other direction as well. A client might describe being busy, exhausted, worried about tax, unable to understand where the money had gone or convinced that one more sale would repair everything. Those statements had to be translated into margins, cash flow, debtors, drawings, tax liabilities, capacity and risk without stripping the human being out of the story. The numbers did not replace what the client felt; they helped explain why the feeling had arrived.

That required more than simplifying terminology. There is a form of professional condescension that replaces every complex word with a smaller one and then delivers the result in the tone used to explain shoelaces to a child. People recognise when they are being talked down to, even when every individual sentence is technically easy to understand. Speaking in somebody’s language means respecting the intelligence contained within their experience, not assuming that formal education owns the entire supply. A person who has kept a business alive for twenty years may not know the accounting name for what he does, but that does not mean he has learned nothing worth hearing.

The best conversations occurred when neither party had to pretend. I could bring technical knowledge, pattern recognition and the experience of watching many businesses succeed, struggle or quietly bleed to death. The client could bring the reality of the industry, the people, the customers and the compromises that never appeared in a set of accounts. Somewhere between those two bodies of knowledge, an answer might become possible. The accountant’s task was not to win the conversation but to make sure the important parts of it were understood before the decision was made.

Humour helped because fear occupies space. A person worried about tax, debt or the survival of a business does not necessarily absorb information merely because the adviser delivers it slowly and with professional concern. Sometimes the seriousness of the room becomes another obstacle, and a small piece of humour allows everybody to breathe without pretending the danger has disappeared. The joke is not the answer, but it can open enough room for the answer to enter. Flavius knew that a murder could be investigated while the language misbehaved around it.

There were limits, and I did not always recognise them. Humour can invite another person into the conversation, but it can also allow the speaker to leave before the conversation reaches him. I could use a line to puncture pomposity, relieve tension or make an uncomfortable truth easier to hear. I could also use it to avoid remaining exposed after saying something that mattered. The audience laughed, the moment moved on and whatever the human Jeff had almost revealed was returned to storage before anybody could ask a second question.

That possibility complicates my affection for Flavius. The costume gave me freedom because it was clearly a costume, but professional identity can become a costume without announcing itself as one. The capable accountant, the adviser with the answer and the man who could make the client laugh were all genuine parts of me. They were also useful places to hide because usefulness attracts questions about what should be done, not questions about how the useful person is travelling. A room can know a great deal about the performance while knowing very little about the performer.

“Not Your Ordinary Accountant” eventually gave that performance a name. The phrase came from Jon Dale, who saw something in the way I worked and described it before I had fully turned it into a public identity. It was a useful distinction because I did not want to be the accountant who appeared once a year, explained what had already happened and sent an invoice for recording the death. I wanted to be involved before the decision, while the alternatives still existed and advice could do more than place correct numbers beside an avoidable consequence. Ordinary accounting, as I had too often seen it practised, was technically respectable but humanly late.

The name also contained a challenge that I had to continue earning. Calling myself unordinary did not automatically make the advice better, the language clearer or the relationship more useful. It could have become another ceremonial title, no different in principle from the professional fog I claimed to oppose. The only justification was in the experience of the person sitting opposite me. If the client still felt frightened to ask a question, then the words on the letterhead were merely advertising.

I wanted people to leave my office understanding what we had discussed. That did not mean they would always like the answer, because clarity can be less comfortable than confusion once the consequences are visible. A business may not be making enough money, a tax debt may not disappear through optimism, and a long-delayed compliance problem does not become harmless because the owner is a decent person. Speaking in the client’s language could not mean telling the client only what he wanted to hear. Flavius might have been investigating a crime through puns, but Caesar remained inconveniently dead.

This is where seriousness without solemnity differs from making light of serious things. I have never believed that humour removes responsibility or that a friendly explanation changes the underlying law. The tax return must still be correct, the debt must still be addressed and the business must still produce enough cash to survive. A relaxed conversation is not permission to avoid the hard conclusion. It is a way of reaching the conclusion without requiring the people involved to surrender their dignity along the way.

There were times when anger sat beneath my determination to make matters clear. I had watched systems hide behind language, institutions send letters that seemed designed to intimidate and professionals protect their status by ensuring nobody outside the profession could confidently challenge them. I had also watched business owners avoid advice, ignore warnings and arrive later expecting someone to manufacture a rescue from the consequences. Both sides could use complexity as an excuse. One used it to dominate, while the other used it to delay.

My anger was not entirely noble. Clarity allowed me to demonstrate that I had seen what others had missed, and there was satisfaction in being the person who could cut through the fog. The analytical Jeff enjoyed the moment when the numbers revealed the answer, particularly if somebody else had previously declared the problem too complicated to explain. That satisfaction could become another form of superiority if left unexamined. Translating complexity should make the listener larger, not provide the translator with a taller platform.

The distinction was sometimes difficult because competence carries its own theatre. People want confidence from an adviser, especially when the subject involves money, failure or fear. They do not want the accountant to stare thoughtfully at the ceiling and announce that existence is mysterious, although there were days when that may have been the most accurate professional conclusion available. They need someone willing to form a view and explain the basis for it. The danger begins when confidence stops being a tool and becomes the character one is compelled to play in every room.

Flavius was confident because the sketch required him to be. The private eye cannot spend the investigation admitting that the audience already knows more about the crime than he does, or the parody collapses before the first clue. My professional confidence had a more complicated foundation because people were making decisions that could alter businesses, families and futures. I needed to sound certain when certainty was justified and remain honest when it was not. The hardest translation was sometimes turning “I do not yet know” into a sentence that preserved trust without pretending knowledge had already arrived.

The profession did not always reward that honesty. Authority often prefers a complete answer delivered promptly, even when the complete answer is wrong. A qualification can be mistaken for weakness, while an impressive stream of technical language can conceal how little has actually been decided. I had to learn that clarity includes the boundaries of what is known. Telling someone where uncertainty remains is not abandoning expertise; it is refusing to counterfeit it.

That principle travelled beyond accounting. When I began writing, I discovered that the same ceremonial fog waits for anyone who wants to sound like an author. There are sentences that appear to have been dressed for a literary function and paragraphs that walk importantly across the page without carrying anything. A writer can hide behind abstraction as effectively as an accountant can hide behind legislation. The words may be elegant, but the reader still leaves wondering what happened and why it mattered.

My own voice did not emerge because I discarded everything I had borrowed. It emerged because the poems, songs, roles, business conversations and private arguments inside my head gradually stopped requiring me to imitate their form. Horatius could lend me courage without requiring me to stand on a bridge in full Roman armour. Hamlet could lend me the question without requiring every uncertainty to be spoken in iambic pentameter. Flavius could lend me irreverence without requiring a toga every time a balance sheet needed explaining.

The borrowed words gave me permission to test different ways of being heard. Onstage, the character carried the risk because any foolishness belonged to Flavius Maximus until the applause confirmed otherwise. In business, Not Your Ordinary Accountant carried some of the risk because the phrase announced that the conversation might not follow the established script. In writing, there is less protection because the voice on the page is recognisably mine, even when a song or character has opened the door. The costume has become thinner as the words have become more honest.

I still value the joke. I value it because life contains absurdities that solemn language often fails to expose, and because seriousness can become self-important when nobody is permitted to laugh at the costume. I value it because people listen differently after laughter has reduced the distance between them and the person speaking. I also value it because it sounds like me. Removing humour from my voice would not make the truth purer; it would merely make the speaker less recognisable.

Yet humour must remain in the room when the truth arrives. That may be the principle Flavius could not teach me because his investigation ended when the sketch ended and the curtain closed. Real conversations continue after the clever line, particularly when the client must return home to explain a problem to a partner or decide whether a business can keep employing people. Real depression does not disappear because it has been given a witty description, and retirement does not become uncomplicated because I can make a joke about the distance between the recliner and the office. The line may open the door, but somebody still has to walk through it.

For much of my life, usefulness gave me a reason to remain in the room. If there was a problem to solve, a system to repair or a person requiring a shoulder, I understood the part I was expected to play. Speaking clearly became another form of usefulness because I could take something frightening and give it edges that could be examined. The risk was that I would continue translating everybody else’s difficulty while leaving my own in a language nobody had been invited to learn. The accountant could explain the client’s numbers, but the man behind him sometimes remained an untranslated document.

Writing has forced a different kind of clarity. I cannot rely upon tone of voice, timing or the expression that tells another person the joke is not the whole answer. The words must carry the movement from humour into hurt and from analysis into uncertainty without an audience watching my face. That has made the old Flavius discipline more important rather than less. The reader must be respected enough to recognise the connection, but not abandoned inside language intended mainly to prove that the writer can construct it.

Perhaps that is what speaking in my own voice finally means. It is not the discovery of a completely original vocabulary untouched by everything I have read, heard or performed. It is the ability to use what remained without disappearing inside it. The poems can still echo, the songs can still arrive before dawn and the old characters can still wander onto the page, but they no longer have to speak for me. They have become part of the language through which I speak.

Flavius Maximus therefore returns near the end of this book not as a nostalgic theatrical role but as an early version of a principle I spent decades refining. He knew that authority could survive a joke, that intelligence did not need to humiliate the audience and that a serious investigation could proceed without everybody adopting the voice of a marble statue. He also offered a warning, although I heard that part much later. A character who keeps the room laughing can become so successful that nobody notices what he has not said.

I no longer want ceremonial fog, whether it comes from accountants, institutions, authors or me. Serious matters deserve language that allows people to see where they are standing, what choices remain and what consequences may follow. They deserve humour when humour opens the conversation, anger when anger identifies something that should not be accepted and uncertainty when certainty would be dishonest. Above all, they deserve clarity that does not make the listener feel smaller for having needed the explanation.

The toga has long since been put away, although Flavius has proved more difficult to retire. He remains in the timing of a sentence, the suspicion of unnecessary authority and the impulse to translate a difficult idea before it can frighten somebody out of asking the next question. He remains in Not Your Ordinary Accountant, but he also remains in the writer who now understands that seriousness and solemnity were never the same thing. I can speak about the things that matter without dressing every sentence for a funeral, and I can allow the joke to enter without letting it carry me out of the room before the truth arrives.

Notes

1. Rinse the Blood Off My Toga was written by Canadian comedy partners Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster. First performed on CBC Radio in 1954 and televised the following year, the sketch reimagines the assassination of Julius Caesar as a hard-boiled detective story featuring Johnny Wayne as the “private Roman eye” Flavius Maximus; later versions included its 1958 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
2. Julius Caesar and the circumstances of his assassination are dramatised in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, generally dated to 1599. Wayne and Shuster’s sketch draws upon the play, Roman history and the conventions of twentieth-century detective fiction to create its parody.