The Author’s Voice

Want to listen to Ian Fleming or Arthur Conan Doyle? Well,now you can
We will never know what Shakespeare sounded like when he spoke. He lived 300 years before the advent of sound recordings. Still,there is something irresistible about hearing the cadences and tone,accent and pitch,of our favorite authors. The voice of Arthur Conan Doyle,for instance,has a husky Scottish twang—more akin to Sean Connery than to Doyle’s clipped,upper-class character Sherlock Holmes. In the only known recording of his voice,Doyle seems exasperated by his creation: “To many he seems to be a real person,” he says.

Doyle died just two months after the recording was made in 1930. He is just one of the literary greats included on The Spoken Word: British Writers,a compendium of largely unheard tapes released on CD by the British Library and the BBC. The radio broadcasts will bring to life writers from E.M. Forster to Ian Fleming. “Before 1900 there was almost nothing recorded,” says the British Library’s Richard Fairman,who has spent the past 18 months on the project. “The broadcasts were all live. They went out and they were gone.” Early radio was a formal affair,and some of the recordings reflect it. During the 1930s,men on air at the BBC had to don black tie before taking the microphone. Virginia Woolf’s musings on language—the only surviving tape of her voice—appear here,spirited but starchy: “Only after the writer is dead do his words¿ become disinfected,purified of the accidents of the living body,” she says.

To the modern ear the vintage style can be disappointing. James Bond’s creator,Ian Fleming,is distant and short; he claims the only reason he started writing novels is because he failed at almost every other profession. Even John le Carre is dry and elusive,discussing the “small tragedies of institutional life” from his time at the British Foreign Office.

But in the best cases,the recordings add nuance and depth to the authors’ work. The novelist Graham Greene confesses to playing Russian roulette with a loaded pistol as a young man “for excitement,to get away from the boredom.” He confides that he often felt hunted “like a rabbit”—a recurring motif in his work—and was plagued by self-doubt. “I find in nearly all my books there’s a dead point: a character that doesn’t come alive,” he says.
Fairman says his next project will be a similar kind of poetry compendium. The British Library’s sound collection holds about one million discs and 200,000 tapes—including some buried gems,like an incredible recording of Tennyson reciting The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1890.
_SOPHIE GROVE,Newsweek