Archives for November 25, 2008

A few months ago I wrote a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal called “Hearing Is Believing” in which I took note of the release by the British Library of a series of CDs devoted to talks by and interviews with W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, and H.G. Wells that were originally broadcast over the BBC. Now comes a pair of three-disc samplers devoted to archival recordings of broadcasts by other writers, most of whom who didn’t make it into the studio often enough to fill up a full CD.
The Spoken Word: American Writers contains recordings by James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Pearl Buck, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Ralph Ellison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lillian Hellman, Patricia Highsmith, Sinclair Lewis, Anita Loos, Mary McCarthy, James Michener, Arthur Miller, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene O’Neill, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, William Styron, James Thurber, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and Thornton Wilder.
The Spoken Word: British Writers contains recordings by J.G. Ballard, Algernon Blackwood, Anthony Burgess, John le Carré, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Noël Coward, Ian Fleming, E.M. Forster, William Golding, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Rudyard Kipling, Doris Lessing, Arthur Machen (who he?), Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, Nancy Mitford, the Baroness Orczy (she wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel), Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, J.B. Priestley, C.P. Snow, Muriel Spark, J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Angus Wilson, P.G. Wodehouse, and Virginia Woolf.
Two questions:
(1) Where the hell is Max Beerbohm?
(2) What are you waiting for? Place your order!
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Incidentally, iTunes offers downloads of some interesting spoken-word recordings by famous writers of the past:
• For Kingsley Amis, search for “A Song of Experience/Nocturne.”
• For John Betjeman, search for “The Church’s Restoration/The Olympic Girl.”
• For G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Leo Tolstoy, and W.B. Yeats, search for “The Very Best Historic Voices.” (This album also contains a counterfeit recording that purports to be the voice of Oscar Wilde.)
• For T.S. Eliot, search for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
• For Robert Frost, search for “Robert Frost Two Poems.”
• For Rudyard Kipling, search for “Reflections on War.”
• For Philip Larkin, search for “An Arundel Tomb/Mr. Bleaney.”
• For George Bernard Shaw, search for “Public Address on His Ninetieth Birthday.”

A reader writes:

You have written eloquently and movingly about Nancy LaMott, but I never really had a chance to hear her sing. Just now, sitting in my office, with Pandora Radio in the background, Johnny Mercer’s “When October Goes” came on. It was the most incredible singing I have ever heard. It absolutely blew me away. It’s as if her very soul was pouring out
through the song. Rare are the moments when you hear a song and you
just know that it can never–ever–be done any better. You should
remind your readers what a gift she was–and is.

My friend Nancy died thirteen years ago next month, but her voice is still with us, and I’m glad to see that people are still discovering it. That particular song is on Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer, my favorite of her albums. Give it to someone you love for Christmas.

The video and audio modules of the right-hand column have been sorely in need of updating for several months–many of the links have gone dead–so I have pulled them off the site in order to do the necessary work. This may take quite some time. Apologies in advance, and please be patient!

“Our family talked a lot at table, and only two subjects were taboo: politics and personal troubles. The first was sternly avoided because Father ran a nonpartisan daily in a small town, with some success, and did not wish to express his own opinions in public, even when in private.”
M.F.K. Fisher, Cook’s and Diner’s Dictionary