November 25, 2005
The Writer’s Voice Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST Part of my problem with the Gettysburg Address may be that I can’t imagine it vividly enough, since I don’t know what Lincoln sounded like—what sort of voice he had, whether he shouted or whispered, how often he paused, and so on. This can make a huge difference. The first time I attempted Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, I couldn’t finish it; it seemed like the most god-awful drivel I had ever read. Then I heard a recording of Kerouac reading some of his poetry, and suddenly it clicked. The author’s literal voice—a soft, earnest murmur with a slight lisp and a stop-start approach—showed me the way to interpret his literary voice, and suddenly I knew how to read him. (Though if Kerouac had lived longer, I suspect he would eventually have sounded much different. When you listen to a 1950s recording of his Beat colleague Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl,” he is quiet but intense, seeming to feel every single word as it spills out. By the 1980s, Ginsberg was reciting his sturdy masterpiece way you would read to a three-year-old, with lots of swoops and shouts and bells and whistles, as if the words themselves were not enough. That’s what happens when you’ve performed the same thing hundreds of times—like Bob Dylan rearranging his songs when he gets bored with them.) Anyway, without hearing a speaker’s voice, the words alone can give a misleading impression of how they were delivered. When I first read Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, having no experience with religious sermons of any kind, I imagined him reading it as the grown-ups I knew would have done: Serious, even-toned, yet impassioned, with the voice occasionally swelling to a near-shout for the most important phrases. I envisioned the entire audience of 250,000 hushed and straining to catch every word. Imagine my surprise when I heard a recording of excerpts from that speech, which King delivered with all the cadences and flourishes of the traditional Southern preacher. The only place I had encountered that sort of oratory before was on The Flip Wilson Show, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. I didn’t mean any disrespect to Dr. King, but the speech just sounded so completely different from what I had imagined. After I got used to his speaking style, I went back and reread the speech with a new understanding of what hearing it must have been like. I forget whether current literary theory says that the text is paramount and what we know about the author is a distraction, or vice versa. But I do know that hearing how somebody talks can be either an aid or an obstacle in grasping the essence of his or her work. On the other hand, sometimes it’s neither. I can remember when Mario Cuomo addressed the 1984 Democratic convention, and the next morning everyone was praising his speech to the hills. This made me curious to see what he had said, so I read the speech in the paper. It left me baffled, coming across as a boilerplate recital of the standard Democratic campaign themes. Then I watched several minutes of a tape of Cuomo speaking, and I still didn’t get it. So maybe I’m just a sourpuss.
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