The British Library has just released an anthology of recorded interviews with famous 20th-century American and British writers that bears a telling title: "The Spoken Word." As much as the authors here carry on about the perennial writerly subjects--getting paid, obtuse critics, and, especially, other writers--time and again they return to the mysterious power of words themselves.
Virginia Woolf, speaking in a spectral drawing-room drawl, fancifully endows words with lives of their own: "Words, English words, are full of echoes, memories, associations naturally," she declares. "They've been out and about on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries." She imagines words as being altered by "famous marriages in the past," familiar usages of words that tint and flavor them forever after. Yet by 1962 Doris Lessing would lament that she had become "preoccupied by a feeling that words are too thin for our experience."
Most of the recordings, divided into two sets by nationality, are interviews drawn from the archives of the BBC, but not all; a few of the earlier tracks (including Virginia Woolf's) are prepared statements or speeches. Addressing a group of visiting Canadian authors in London, a chipper Rudyard Kipling proclaims, "It is only words, nothing but words that live to show the present--how men lived, how men worked and thought in the past. And we do not know whose words they will be."
"The Spoken Word" is a well-considered effort to populate a pantheon for the 20th century, within the limits of who was willing to sit down in front of a microphone--and, no doubt, whose heirs were willing to grant permission to use the recordings. It would be misleading to enumerate a list of the most famous authors who speak on these CDs, for some of the most interesting listening comes from minor writers. Baroness Orczy, the Hungarian-born author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, a royalist swashbuckler in the style of Dumas père, addresses a preposterous, fey monologue to her character, "the inimitable, the exquisite, the dashing and gallant Scarlet Pimpernel, who came to me on that dreary, dismal afternoon in November, out of the London fog and the fumes of the Underground railway."
The oldest recording captures the voice of Arthur Conan Doyle, sounding very much like Dr. Watson in a blunt, plain-spoken account of how he created Sherlock Holmes. The last-born author is the playwright Joe Orton who says, in an interview broadcast just days before he was murdered, "A really good playwright's career is very short." There are a few thrilling dramatic passages: F. Scott Fitzgerald reciting speeches from Othello, Eugene O'Neill reading from A Long Day's Journey into Night in a gloomy growl.
In the spontaneous interviews that dominate the discs, it's more surprising than it ought to be how much writers sound like their books. No one who has read a page of Gertrude Stein could fail to identify her as the speaker here, denying that her writing style is difficult: "Everybody has their own English and it is only a matter of anybody getting used to an English, anybody's English, and then it's all right." Vladimir Nabokov rattles away in complex, ornate, perfect sentences, couched in the exquisite mock-heroic irony of his best novels. He describes the initial joy of "unpacking the radiant, beautiful, plump advance copy" of a new book, which eventually ripens to "a kind of amused tenderness, as a man regards not his son, but rather the young wife of his son."
One of the principal virtues of "The Spoken Word" is that the excerpts are long enough (most are over 5 minutes, and many are 10 minutes or longer) to give a vivid sense of the writer's personality. Eudora Welty at first seems shy and self-effacing, but when she twice turns the reviewer's question back on him, asking him his own opinion, the listener realizes that she isn't lacking in self-confidence at all but is rather an indefatigable student of humanity: She really wants to know what he thinks. Nancy Mitford is exasperating when she trills in a plumy voice, "Nobody knows less about etiquette and social behavior than I do," but the false modesty is quickly softened by a girlish giggle.
What communicates powerfully in nearly every selection is the principled seriousness of these writers. They're not trying to make themselves sound interesting; they are struggling to express ideas--truths--that matter to them. That doesn't mean that they're pompous or ponderous--though a few are, particularly a turgid, grumpy Evelyn Waugh. When the earnest interviewer asks Tennessee Williams what the moral message of his plays is, after a moment's thought he has an answer, delivered with a chuckle: "The moral message of my plays is that people shouldn't be so damn beastly to each other."
A few of the writers hide behind masses of words and reveal little of themselves, but some of the most eloquent and self-revealing responses are those of four words. When the interviewer asks Nabokov, "Could you say how important your wife has been as a collaborator?" he gallantly replies, "No, I could not." Tennessee Williams, asked if he likes working in the movies, answers, "No, I hate it." And when the interviewer enquires of Gore Vidal whether there is anything in modern society that gives him hope, he responds, with his usual good cheer, "No, nothing at all."
Jamie James is the author of The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge.