TT: Hearing is believing

Only one recording of Raymond Chandler’s speaking voice survives, a BBC interview conducted with Chandler in 1958 by none other than Ian Fleming. You can listen to it by going here. If you do so, you’ll be staggered to learn that the creator of Philip Marlowe sounds…well, wimpy.
I mention this fact because I’ve long been fascinated by recordings of the voices of famous writers and other artists, many of which I find to be personally revealing in ways that no other documentary evidence can equal. The BBC has a vast archive of recordings as rare and illuminating as the Chandler interview, but until recently it sat firmly on them. Now the British Library Sound Archive has started releasing a series of spoken-word CDs drawn from the BBC archives, the first five volumes of which are devoted to W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, and H.G. Wells.
Yep, you guessed it: I’ve written a “Sightings” column for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal about the great spoken-word recordings of the twentieth century, only a handful of which have made it to CD. I suspect you’ll find the column frustrating, since I devote most of it to telling you about amazing things that you can’t hear unless you go to a very well-stocked record library, but I think it’ll interest you anyway.
If you’re curious, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.