Books: The Spoken Word

(2 of 3)

The poor poets—with a few towering exceptions—have forgotten how to wrap their tongues around a sausage, let alone a juicy adjective; and the professional actors gnaw the lily they were only meant to sniff. But the dozens of poetry selections provide a laurel bush full of singing birds: Lucretius, Chaucer, Poe, Rimbaud, Millay, Lorca, Auden, MacLeish, etc.

Private Lives. Easily the strongest section on the spoken shelf is autobiography. The voices of more than 100 famous men and women are there for the hearing, and in the voices there is often more to be read about the speakers' lives than in many fat biographies.

In the Columbia Literary Series—an ambitious, elegant, $100 set of readings by twelve authors and poets—William Saroyan barrels through Jim Dandy, Fat Man in a Famine. He recorded it over and under the weather in his place at Malibu Beach, while whoffling through his cigar and snapping his lips like suspenders, muttering, slamming doors, and slurping a liquid that may not have been sarsaparilla.

Then there is one perfect Gothic moment of François Mauriac (Period; $3.98), who reads in a hoarse whisper from which the voice seems somehow to have been extracted — as indeed it has been, by laryngeal surgery. With his voix brisée, as he calls it bitterly, he sounds like a man perishing of thirst in a dungeon, reciting a poem at his only patch of sky.

Bernard Shaw (Heritage; $3.98) in the voice sounds somehow warmer than one would have expected—until, of course, he warms to his subject: war. "Kill one another, my children," he chortles. "Kill one another to your heart's content. There are plenty more where you came from." Sir Max Beerbohm (Angel; $4.98) chirps and tinkles along like an exquisite old porcelain music box with gold works, belonging at least to a dowager empress. Steinbeck (Columbia Literary Series) sounds logy; he swigged beer all through the recording session.

Sean O'Casey (Caedmon; $5.95), the cranky old Communist, sits to his hearth in Devon, and while a train hoots in the distance he mutters and mumbles, whines and mewls inconsecutively. What it all has to do with Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well may never be known, but why he did it came out later. He thought that the enterprising Caedmon company, which was started on a shoestring by two young girls just out of college, was actually a vast, corporate octopus of the worst capitalistic kind. If he had only known, he tenderly told his employers afterward, he would have done a more "friendly" job.

The Tops. Some of the spoken records deserve to be lovingly preserved. The pride (not forgetting Dylan Thomas) of the pack:

¶ COLETTE (Caedmon; $5.95). In ancient, blowsy, absinthe accents, as she lies abed during the last year of her life, the gay old grandmother of modern French letters reads in French from her famous love stories, Chéri and Gigi.

¶ T. S. ELIOT (Harvard Vocarium; $6.50). The poet reads some of his finest works—Prufrock, Gerontion, The Hollow Men, Journey of the Magi—in the precise, Sabbatarian drone of an old and seldom dusted curate.