Styling a voice, voicing a style

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.

Creating the ‘pure voice’ of poetry

Here’s a recent piece of scholarship concerning recitation:

“Performing the Pure Voice: Poetry and Drama, Elocution, Verse Recitation, and Modernist Poetry in Prewar London.”

It forms Chapter 2 (pages 54-83, notes 223-9) of:

Morrison, Mark S. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2001.

Morrison’s chapter focuses on how proponents of Georgian/modernist poetry adopted the ideas of the late Victorian and Edwardian verse recitation movement concerning the recitation and dissemination of poetry.

Organizations like the Poetry Recital Society (later the Poetry Society), founded in London in February 1909 by Galloway Kyle, as well as offshoots like the Poetic Drama Society, attempted to naturalize ‘proper’ (i.e. middle/upper class) patterns of speaking, or what Morrison terms the “pure voice” (58-9). Morrison points to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914) (also known, in its musical version, as My Fair Lady), as an example of this naturalization, where Professor Henry Higgins transforms the Cockney parlance of flower-girl Eliza Doolittle into the exacting pronunciation and diction befitting a duchess:

“As do the voice handbooks I have discussed, Higgins naturalizes an abstracted ideal of middle-class diction as ‘the divine gift of articulate speech’ — the pure voice, and thereby portrays lower class dialects as a sort of blight on the language” (62)

The Poetry Society (still in existence) not only contributed to the professionalization of elocution by certifying teachers of elocution (67) and advocating for the recitation of poetry in schools (it formed a “Junior Order” to “introduc[e] the work of the Society in public and private secondary schools” [68]), but it distanced itself from the theatre, advocating a repression of theatricality and of the reciter’s personality so that the reciter could direct all his or her powers to becoming a conduit for the poem’s meaning (rather than the poem becoming subjected to the performance).

It was this emphasis on the poem that encouraged people like Harold Munro, editor of the Poetry Review (1912-13) and of Poetry and Drama (1913-14), to open the Poetry Bookshop in January 1913, a place to buy and hear Georgian/modernist poets reciting their poetry (he called them “poetry squashes” [77]), thus formalizing the author-led readings we know today. Morrison writes:

“Munro saw the oral presence of the poet himself or herself…as necessary to the public reception of modernist poetry” (76)

“It was his historical vision of the movement of poetry from oral public reception to print-based private reception and aesthetic autonomy that lead many writers of the period to see oral performance as reinvesting poetry with contemporary social significance” (79).