The Wall Street Journal has an article by Terry Teachout about the British Library Sound Archives’ “Spoken Word” series of CD releases, “Hearing is Believing: The Vanished Glories of Spoken-Word Recordings” (2 August 2008: W14). Teachout argues that to talk about an author’s ‘voice’ is not the same as talking about an author’s ’style,’ although the two are often confused. The implicit point he is making is that readers, in their heads, often imagine an authorial voice, an aural voice, that seems appropriate for the writing style, but that there is no necessary connection between this imagined authorial voice and the actual voice of the author.
Teachout uses the example of hard-boiled detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler, whose voice sounds nothing like what one might imagine his character Sam Spade would sound like: less like Humphrey Bogart and more like Elmer Fudd (although here, Teachout conflates a character’s style of speaking with the narrative voice, which aren’t the same).
Teachout theorizes that Sam Spade was a form of wish-fulfillment for the Fuddesque Chandler, but there is a simpler explanation: Chandler was writing within a genre that had a certain style, and the fact that he is one of the defining masters of the hard-boiled detective genre shows Chandler’s greatness as a writer, in that he was able to imaginatively project himself into a milieu that was far removed from his everyday experience.
Regarding performative speaking, Chandler’s writing career contrasts interestingly with two other writers mentioned by Teachout: George Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm. Teachout finds that their actual voices do meet expectations of what they should sound like, based on their writing.
I think this is due to the fact that both men cultivated a public authorial persona that was integrally related to their writing. Shaw (whose voice I found surprisingly high and reedy when I first heard it) often spoke publically at meetings on political and social issues, and being hectored by him at a public meeting must have been very similar to the hectoring the reader receives as she/he reads the prefaces to his plays. And then one gets hectored in dramatic form in a tone of voice that differs little from the voice of the prefaces. It’s Shavian through and through, something which irritated Beerbohm to no end.
For Beerbohm, it was very much the same, although he was not as strident as Shaw. A gently ironical, gently satirical, always self-possessed dandy, caricaturist and writer, there is a continuity of voice, or style, in his fictions, his dramatic criticism, and in his radio broadcasts (collected together and published as Mainly on the Air [1946; enlarged edition 1957]). Neither of these men were confessional writers, but their fictional writing style — their ‘voice’ — was synonymous with the performative speaking of their public personae, either as public speakers, or dramatic critics/journalists, or radio broadcasters. It is a type of fiction writer you don’t often see very much today: one who writes from a public, performative sense of speech-based style, and in this case, ’style’ is synonymous with ‘voice.’
(Thanks to Katherine Parrish via Carolyn Black for alerting me to Teachout’s article.)
