Books: The Spoken Word

Some reading is best done with closed eyes. That, at any rate, is the contention of the record industry, which this season has pressed the largest number of disks in history dedicated to ” the “books that talk.” The spoken word most effectively fires the powder train of the imagination in excerpts from such classics as Shakespeare and the Bible, but confirmed audiles can find plenty of esoteric items, ranging from a cozy chat with a prostitute (“It’s no kind of life for anybody”) in Cast the First Stone (Dolphin) to the singsong incantations of drugged natives (“Chjon nka sikjane-nia tso”) in the Mushroom Ceremony of the Mazatec Indians of Mexico (Folkways).

In the flood of good, bad and mediocre disks, there are some surprising disappointments. Siobhan McKenna’s reading of Molly Bloom’s sensuous soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses lacks both the virago drive and the Lilith languors of that Protean whore; Dame Peggy Ashcroft sounds too much the maidenly elocutionist for the passionate verses in her assorted Poetry Readings (London). London’s Sherlock Holmes disk goes to the other extreme as three mighty hams—Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson. Orson Welles—rant and thunder through Dr. Watson Meets Sherlock Holmes and The Final Problem, in a tatter-tearing passion that would never have been tolerated at 221B Baker Street.

The best disks have majesty and force enough to lift the listener from his chair. Centuries of reading aloud have not yet dimmed the Elizabethan magnificence of the great King James Bible passages, and James Mason brings sonority and good sense to his declamation of Ecclesiastes (Caedmon), making the nameless narrator sound as contemporary as an existentialist in Paris, as ancient as a Pharisee. The sound track of the movie Oedipus Rex (Caedmon, 2 LPs), starring Douglas Campbell and Canada’s Shakespearean Festival Players, transports listeners inside the towering walls of seven-gated Thebes for the bloody working out of man’s greatest tragedy. Caedmon’s The Red Badge of Courage fills the mind with battle flags, drum beats and the roll of musketry as Hollywood’s Edmond O’Brien gives a reading as sharp as a battle cry to one of the great U.S. war novels. Judith Anderson’s deep-chested, bottom-of-the-well voice proves just right for the romping rhythms of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (Caedmon).

Other notable disks of the season:

Hamlet (RCA Victor, 2 LPs). Sir John Gielgud, as a pensive, polished Dane, takes up arms against a sea of troubles with the able help of London’s Old Vic Company, which is always impressive, if sometimes too elegant-sounding and static. In contrast to Sir Laurence Olivier’s brasher, more youthful performance in 1948, Gielgud’s version is resigned, traditional, declamatory; but it emerges as a memorable reading. All in all, from the creepy wind sighings and distant bells on the battlements of Elsinore in the first scene to the swordplay and slaughter of the last act, this is a stirring and commendably complete production.

Four Quartets (Angel). In his best vestryman’s voice, T. S. Eliot restates his cultured disenchantment with the wartime world and condoles with humanity, shivering in “the cold wind That blows before and after time.” Impressive, despite the poet’s air of withdrawal.

The Merchant of Venice (Caedmon, 2 LPs), is a rousing production containing Michael Redgrave’s controversial Shylock, who demands his pound of flesh from Antonio in a thick and rather phony Jewish accent that is neither gefüllte fish nor fowl.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Riverside, 4 LPs) appeals both to ear and eye by accompanying its long-playing records with a facsimile volume of the first edition of Lewis Carroll’s book. The reading, by Cyril Ritchard, is at times too arch and patronizing; Alec Wilder’s original musical score is pleasant.

A Treasury of Ribaldry (Riverside) carries a long foreword by Editor Louis Untermeyer defending the record, and the book from which it is drawn, from a nonexistent attack by outraged moralists. Britain’s Savoyard Martyn Green gives a chirruping reading of selected passages from Ovid’s Art of Love, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Benjamin Franklin’s Advice on the Choice of a Mistress, as well as a clutch of risque limericks.

The Heroic Soul: Poems of Patriotism (Decca). One of the “Parnassus” series on such primary emotions as love, faith, humor and patriotism. This record tempers its heroics with taste, especially in Arnold Moss’s reading of Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d and Longfellow’s The Building of the Ship.

Robert Frost (Caedmon) proves a happy exception to the rule that poets cannot read their own works as well as actors. Frost’s cracked voice often sounds like that of the first progenitor of mankind, and his lucid verse sings of subjects appropriate to that early time — the whisper of a scythe in grass, the stumbling of a spindle-legged calf, the rains of autumn.

Robert Graves (Caedmon) reads his prose (from The White Goddess) with passion and his poetry with clean detachment, but both in the measured tones of a man setting the world straight. For lovers of magic and the Moon Goddess.

Juno and the Paycock (Angel, 2 LPs). With a foreword by Playwright Sean O’Casey, one of the century’s great tragicomedies boils up again from the Dublin slums. Siobhan McKenna, as Juno, has in her voice all the ache and sorrow of Cathleen Ni Houlihan; Seamus Kavanagh makes his Captain a lovable buffoon for most of three acts and — at the right moment — turns him into a villain; Cyril Cusack whines and wheedles his way magnificently into the role of Joxer Daly.

The Canterbury Tales, Vol. I (The Spoken Word, 4 LPs) were written in the 14th century by Geoffrey Chaucer to be read aloud, but to an audience with lots of time on its hands. Long, lovingly detailed, filled with philosophic asides, many of the tales proved too stupefying even for the resolutely highbrow listeners of the BBC’s Third Programme, where these dramatizations were originally heard. Tightly edited, translated into modern English by Nevill Coghill (TIME, Aug. 11, 1952), this first album contains the roll call of the Pilgrims in the Prologue, and the tales of the Monk, the Nun’s Priest, the Reve, the Manciple and the Man of Law—a cross section of stories gay and gloomy, garrulous and risqué. A fine item for a long winter’s night.