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The Sound and the Fury

March 21

There is a belief among some literary folk that you should never meet your favourite author, for fear of the fantasy it will dispel. Some argue that much loved playwright William Shakespeare, for example, was a fantastic git but thankfully you’ll never know for sure.

If you haven’t met them, or read their interviews, an author remains largely a blank page. We know them through their stories, their style, the characters they write. On top of this we assume auto-biographical undertones, impose our own inflection, accents and pitch. We imagine that their speaking voice should mirror their written one. Generally speaking though, this is not so.

Last year, the British Library released two CDs of rare author recordings (one American and one British), mostly taken from BBC radio archives. Brief snippets reveal voices vastly different (in a good and bad way) to what you might expect. Virginia Woolf is prim and almost stuffy, with clipped vowels and a tone as dry as English gin. Vladamir Nabokov is wonderfully theatrical when asked if writing is pleasure or drudgery, sounding grand, melancholy and almost tortured. According to Richard Fairman, who produced the CDs, this stilted speech may have been a product of early broadcasting: ‘They tended to be prepared talks, and the person would sit down — and no doubt dressed up very smartly — in front of a microphone and they would read off the page.’

Andrew O’Hagan, who reviewed the compilation for the London Review of Books, writes that Author Conan Doyle, ‘whom one expects to sound like Basil Rathbon’ in face sounds ‘like Gordon Brown’. Equally, ‘James Baldwin tells us he’s a blues singer but he sounds like Prince Charles. Raymond Chandler sounds like someone who had recently downed a quart of bourbon (he had) and Saul Bellow’s voice is nearly musical (in the way of an advertising jingle) with self-belief.’

You can hear a brief snippet of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf and Vladamir Nabokov here. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96030704 (After hearing Nabokov speak, try to imagine him reading the first line of Lolita in such a way: ‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.’ It’s rather entertaining).


 

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