Books: Words in Rotation

Unlike fine wines, books rarely improve with rotation. Nevertheless, the record industry has set the stateliest periods of English poetry and prose to spinning on thousands of U.S. phonographs at 33-1/3 r.p.m. Sampling the newer releases, the auditory reader can pass his evenings with anything from a spoken history of baseball (Columbia) to Physicist Edward Teller’s richly Magyar dissertation for Spoken Arts on the “thee-ory of relateevity” (“it weel sound to you crazy”).

Surprisingly, the poets seem to be least at ease while draped in their own literary garlands, e. e. cummings wanders through selections from his Him and Santa Claus (Caedmon) with the air of a sleepwalker groping in a murky crypt; John Masefield sibilates waveringly through his The Story of Ossian (Argo) in a reading that does nothing to relieve the poem’s turgid dramatic flow. The opposite failing—a tendency to rhetoric where mere passion would do—mars Sir Ralph Richardson’s swooning reading of The Poetry of Keats (Caedmon), and turns Carl Sandburg’s A Lincoln Album (Caedmon) into an uneasy collection of pieties at odds with the vigor of Lincoln’s own prose. Cyril Cusack, trying to milk every drop from the “dense and driven” poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Caedmon), lingers with such lip-smacking satisfaction over Hopkins’ sprung rhythms, internal rhymes and clashing dissonances—”lush-kept plush-capped sloe”—that the effect is a little like a gold-threaded, jewel-bedecked gown that dazzles the eye but numbs the senses.

The most successful fusion of spoken and unspoken words occurs in the craggy uplands of literature, where a talented ham can jump and shout without trampling the daisies. James Mason smacks and snuffles his way through the fevered minds of Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi and the tomb-haunted bishop in Poetry of Browning (Caedmon) in a reading that can illuminate a character with a sigh.

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Spoken Word, 3 LPs) gets a fine new production by the players of the Dublin Gate Theatre, with Michael MacLiammoir as Malvolio, “sick of self-love,” posturing his priggish way with timeless vulgarity. London is also out with a spate of Shakespeare—Coriolamis, Othello, Julius Caesar, Richard II—in a series of journeyman readings by the Marlowe Society players, who eventually will press all the plays. One of the most majestically read of the talking books is MGM’s Joseph Conrad, in which Sir Ralph Richardson whittles Youth and Heart of Darkness to half-hour slices while preserving their familiarly sea-wallowing cadences: “And on the luster of the great calm waters, the Judea glided imperceptibly, enveloped in languid and unclean vapors . . .”

Other notable recordings:

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND DEATH OF DR. FAUSTUS (Caedmon). A rousing reading of Christopher Marlowe’s curdled dramatic tale, with Frank Silvera particularly powerful as a Faustus who displays glimpses of the vile body peeping through the scholar’s gown.

THE GOLDEN TREASURY OF JOHN BETJEMAN (Spoken Arfs). In a series of dry and witty poems, read with impeccable comic pitch, the author (TIME, Feb. 2) recalls an England of “retired schoolmasters, retired colonels and handsome, healthy children” with bodies “bursting into teens.” In “amatory” mood, he sings his passion for a tennis partner:

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness

of joy, The speed of a swallow, the grace of

a boy, With carefidlest carelessness, gaily you

won, I am weak from your loveliness, Joan

Hunter Dunn.

DYLAN THOMAS READING “A VISIT TO AMERICA” AND POEMS (Caedmon). The persistent bestseller among the pressed poets introduces his fourth posthumous album by biting the fans that fed him, with an assault on the “culture vultures” who lie in wait for traveling English poets. That chore out of the way, he sets to reading Walter de la Mare, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy in the familiar, tumult-ringing style that makes every poet who ever lived sound like Dylan Thomas.

AGES OF MAN (Columbia). Sir John Gielgud’s Shakespeare sampler is presented at roughly half the length at which it was seen last season on Broadway. Gielgud’s voice is never a particularly impressive instrument, and when the going requires full bellows, it seems in danger of failing him altogether. But it still possesses what it demonstrated so triumphantly onstage—the ability to roll out some of the most famous lines in the language in a green-gaged glow of surprise.

WILLIAM FAULKNER (MGM) reads selections from his novels—The Sound and the Fury, Light in August—in a voice as dry and fragile as a wisteria pod. The interest here is not in the pitch of line or phrase but in the incantatory plod of the Faulknerian periods, straddling page after page in the exhortation of meanings more felt than heard.

THE RELUCTANT DRAGON (Caedmon) tells of a poetry-loving dragon forced against his will into fighting St. George at 6-4 odds. Except when he becomes too coyly patronizing, Boris Karloff spins his tale with wit, makes it as appealing to adult listeners as its author’s far more famous yarn, The Wind in the Willows.

FINNEGANS WAKE (Caedmon) has Cyril Cusack and Siobhan McKenna mounting their bisexcycles and wheeling through Joyce’s dream landscape with a flair and gusto few readers bring to the book. Cusack’s ramble through “Shem the Penman.” with its miragelike puns and softly melting sentences, is a triumph of rhythm, sound and suggestion.