Books: The Thinking Man’s CB

On the road with Churchill, the Bard and Plimpton

Barbara Bush, wife of the Vice President, is a subscriber. Copies are regularly ordered by Photographer Ansel Adams and Comedian Steve Allen. A minister in Maine claims he is addicted to them, and a Kentucky undertaker listens to them in his hearse. Pilots at Mather Air Force Base at Sacramento tune in while on alert status. Today, thousands of American commuters, determined to put the down time of driving to better use, are discovering the pleasures of loud literature: books transcribed on cassette tapes. A widening range of fiction, poetry, history, biography, language courses and self-help texts is now available for the expressway bibliophile with a tape deck. In enlightened circles (and cloverleafs), the numbing AM-FM parade of screaming newsbreaks, “easy listening” and top-ten programming is being replaced with Chaucer and Cheever, Tennyson and Updike. Many freeway jockeys, as well as joggers, cooks, hobbyists and workers whose hands and eyes are otherwise engaged, are trying the best nonprescription tranquilizer available: Thoreau’s Walden.

That prescription is surprisingly new. Back in 1975 few full-length recordings of books were available. Then, as now, only the blind and handicapped could borrow from the Library of Congress’s several thousand titles on tape. But that year, Duvall Hecht, 51, an Orange County, Calif., commuter, helped found Books on Tape to counteract the cerebral atrophy he felt during his daily two hours at the wheel. Beginning with George Plimpton’s Paper Lion on ten one-hour cassettes, Hecht’s mail-order firm grew to represent 500 titles and adds 100 new works each year. Although the cassettes can be purchased, most of the company’s 30,000 subscribers rent them at $6.50 to $16.50 for 30 days, then return the copies in postpaid cartons. The most requested books: Winston Chur chill’s six-volume The Second World War, (148.5 hours, 99 cassettes; $116.50), Irving Stone’s The Origin (30 hours, 20 tapes; $21) and the novels of Somerset Maugham, along with such current thrillers as Triple and Free Fall in Crimson.

Hecht’s business, which grossed $1.5 million in 1981, is not without its perils. Recalls Hecht: “A woman in Kansas ordered Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys, thinking it must be about a church picnic. She soon let us know what she thought about the language and sex.” B.O.T.’s catalogue now gives an XX rating for tapes of Anaïs Nin’s Delta of Venus and The Hite Report. But even the lustiest prose is underplayed. Actor Dan Lazar reads My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Errol Flynn’s spicy autobiography, in the vocal equivalent of Muzak. Says Hecht: “We don’t mind a slight inflection at tense or emotional moments, but the listener will find his own excitement in the words just as he does when he reads a novel.”

Caedmon, the largest spoken-word recording producer in the nation, tapes on a different track. Famous for its early renditions of literary giants and its 33 Shakespeare plays, the 30-year-old company sold one tape for every ten records in 1971. Now the ratio is 1 to 1 for its nearly 1,000 titles. Caedmon rarely offers complete books, but concentrates on authors reading in their own voices: William Faulkner rushing over the magnificent rhythms of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in a high, fast drawl; Robert Lowell stridently brave in poems about his mental illness; Ernest Hemingway growling Across the River and into the Trees like a Midwestern newsman with too many years at the anchor desk; and John Dos Passes lending The Forty-Second Parallel a hoarse intensity. Like some book publishers, Caedmon has noticed a surprising interest in the short story. Among its new bestsellers are Eudora Welly’s warm rendition of Powerhouse and John Cheever’s wry, precise delivery of The Swimmer.

The tones of American authors cannot hold a vowel to the loquacious Irish. In 1924 Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, took James Joyce to the studio of “His Master’s Voice” to record the Aeolus episode of Ulysses. Although extremely nervous, Joyce delivered an impassioned reading. The result was a disappointment: the poor quality of the master disc overpowers the author. Later in England, Joyce read the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake with much better equipment. His eyesight failing, he read from a huge typescript, although he must have known the famous passage by heart. Here, his voice lilts and trips in a lively evocation of his Irish washerwoman. If Finnegans Wake seems impenetrable without guidebooks and glosses, its music is a revelation on the tongue of its creator: “Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you, every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it.” That phrase might serve as an epigram for all taped literature. Caedmon presents Joyce, along with readers E.G. Marshall, Siobhan McKenna and Cyril Cusack in its James Joyce Soundbook, a boxed, four-cassette package ($29.95) with Pomes Penyeach and excerpts from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, among others. Other Soundbooks offer Dylan Thomas and J.R.R. Tolkien in resonant audio versions.

The zany and offbeat are also well represented on tape. British Comic Terry-Thomas is ideally cast as the reader of two “Jeeves” tales by P.G. Wodehouse (Caedmon; $12.95). Ariel, a new label, offers, among others, Humphrey Bogart as Hotspur in Henry IV on its two-volume Shakespeare in Hollywood set. And for those who cannot break the information habit, Books on Tape offers Newstrack, a bimonthly 90-minute talking magazine—garnered from the pages of TIME and other publications—for $195 per year.

Some purists insist that a book is a book is a book, a physical object that must be pored over, reread, held in the hand as well as the head. Tape addicts have a historic reply. The idea of printed literature is comparatively recent. Before the invention of writing 5,000 years ago, all stories were oral: for a long time most knew the ancient epics by ear. Even in more recent times, books were designed for listening. Victorians delighted in hearing Dickens read aloud, a delight books on tape are helping to revive.

Still, every new invention brings new problems. Robert Brusic, a New Haven, Conn., minister, often finds himself tardy at meetings. Says he: “One mystery was so good that I sat out in the parking lot until I finished a chapter.” Drivers immersed in more earthy authors like Anaïs Nin report a tendency to roar past their exits while the sound track unspools: “The atmosphere was dark, slumberous. They shared Mathilde among them. The opium made them more voluptuous than sensual. They could spend hours caressing her legs.”

By the end of the road, even critics agree that the most redeeming feature of Dolby-enhanced literature is the release it offers from the ennui of travel. As H.L. Mencken observed in an interview (now also on cassette), “[The super highway] represents the American lust for the hideous, the delight in ugliness for its own sake.” These days that way stretches from coast to coast, more than enough driving time to hear some Churchill, the Bard, Dickens, Conrad, Pushkin, Mann—and just a chapter or two of The Sensuous Woman. —By J.D.Reed