The Spoken Word

Put the record on. Turn the volume up. Close the door. Listen.

Now as I was young and easy under the

apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as

the grass was green . . . And green and golden, I was huntsman

and herdsman, the calves Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills

barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams . . .

The Sabbath rings out grandly on the record, as if tolled by some huge bronze tongue within a spire, and the room fills with a sweet Welsh tumult.

. . . Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

The voice is a voice from the tomb.

Dylan Thomas died a year ago last November. Like all good poets, he lives in his lines. Like none before the 20th century, he lives also in his own reading of those lines. The success of Caedmon's Dylan Thomas disks (25,000 copies sold in three years) is only part of a current boom in "speaking records." The idea itself is as old as the phonograph.* But recently, literature for listening rather than reading--"the book that talks"--has won a major place on U.S. bookshelves.

Kinsey & Sanskrit. The first clear sign that the U.S. had again caught the recitation bug was the smash success of the First Drama Quartette (Agnes Moorehead, Charles Laughton, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Charles Boyer) in Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell, later superbly recorded by Columbia ($11.90). Then the three volumes of I Can Hear It Now . . . (Columbia; $5.95 each), Edward R. Murrow's playback of headlines and speeches from 1919 to 1949, sold a total of 500,000 sets. More than two dozen companies put tons of Vinylite at the disposal of almost anyone who would talk at it. Now the counters offer everything from Laugh of the Party to Rail Dynamics and Parakeet Lessons ("Salty Sailor & Romantic

Phrases"), Milady, Your Figure!, Relaxation by Suggestive Therapy, and a discussion of the Kinsey Report. Folkways recorded a part of the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit; Audio Book Co. recorded all 27 books of the New Testament on 26 seven-inch disks, which can be played in a mere 23 hours 30 minutes (price: $20).

Antiques & Poetry. A couple of producers dug into the trunks and brought forth some spectacular antiques. Audio Rarities offered Golden Age of the Theater ($5.95), a horror of prehistoric recording in which the voices of the great dead can occasionally be distinguished. Among them: Sarah Bernhardt, who sounds like a harp seraphic tuned to the emotional level of Mother Machree; E. H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe, who coo as ponderously as a pair of 200-lb. doves. In "If I'm Elected . . ." ($4.98), Heritage caught a tumult of political echoes in what appears to have been an ear trumpet. Teddy Roosevelt is here with his high-keyed whinny, and William Jennings Bryan with the sound of a tired old tuba as he bup-bups his famous last words of the "Cross of Gold" speech.

More than 60 plays in four languages can be had on records--Calderon to Christopher Fry, Congreve to Chekhov to Shakespeare. A few of the recorded productions, e.g., Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer (Esoteric; $4.98), live beneath the needle as they never did under the lights.

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 Franc,ois 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 brisee, 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:

P: 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, Cheri and Gigi.

P: 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.

P: THE COCKTAIL PARTY (Decca; $9.98) and MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL (Angel; $9.98). Eliot's two best plays: the first in a prancing recitation by the original New York cast (Alec Guinness, Cathleen Nesbitt, Robert Flemyng, Eileen Peel); the second read with less than majesty but more than dignity by Robert Donat and the Old Vic company.

P: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (Angel; $9.98). Dame Edith Evans, Sir John Gielgud, Pamela Brown and Celia Johnson give Wilde's farce a reading that may never be matched.

P: EDITH SITWELL (Columbia Literary Series; Caedmon,$5.95). In a voice like a medieval lute from which she plucks dainty abstractions, the English poetess reads, in the first record, excerpts from A Poet's Notebook and An Old Woman; in the second, to be released in May, excerpts from The Canticle of the Rose and Facade.

P: PLEASURE DOME (Columbia; $5.95). Thoughtful selections, some from the Library of Congress recording of 20th Century Poetry in English: T. S. Eliot. Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams and others, reading from their own works.

P: JAMES JOYCE SOCIETY MEETING (Folkways; $11.90). Set in the midst of a windy "Meeting of the Joyce Society" is a perfect Eden of recitation: James Joyce reads the closing pages of Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegans Wake. Though the recording was made long before the days of hifi. Joyce's voice is so subtle, takes cadence and grades pitch with such finesse, that only a good record player can keep within an Irish mile of him.

Under the lovely searching of his voice, the whole wild farrago ("Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher's gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late") pacifies into meanings felt if not altogether known. The passage is a rueful promise of what might have been if Joyce had lived to read the whole of his titanic rune.

* The first recorded sound (1877) was the voice of Thomas A. Edison, saying: "Mary had a little lamb." Most popular in the early days were such novelties as No News; or, What Killed the Dog and My Celebrated Liver Cure.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.