Chapter 191: Hearing Voices
A voice can be telling, in more ways than one.
Over the course of reporting several articles on deceased writers, people I spoke to about them recounted hearing their voices. Though the subjects of our conversations were no longer present, no one was hallucinating. Rather, recordings had been made of the authors, to which the interviewees had, over time, chosen to listen. It was an experience significant enough that they mentioned it, and hearing it repeated across interviews drew my attention. Most often, the recordings were of the writers reading their own work, which the interviewees were usually well acquainted with. Hearing the texts read by their creators, I was told, was a completely different experience. Emotions aside –and that’s no small matter– it was hard to put a finger on why that was.
Much is made of a writer’s voice, or of finding one’s voice, and other catchphrases. That rarely refers to how voices actually sound out loud. Maybe, having invented a narrator’s voice as we read, there is something to be learned from hearing the “original.” But what is it that we are listening for?
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What’s in a voice?
There’s a reason Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, sent one all the way to Russia in 1908, so that Tolstoy could record himself “conveying to the people of the world some thoughts that would tend to their moral and social advancement.” This same desire for posterity explains why you’ll find numerous articles and threads lamenting the loss of any trace of George Orwell’s voice, despite his frequent appearances on the BBC.
What is it about a voice, then, about a writer’s voice? You could argue that their intimacy with the work will be revealing: the voice is a living thing, which endows what’s written with a tone, a cadence, an intonation that can’t be found in syntax or punctuation of the page. Even in texts made for print, it can be rewarding to listen to the way an author intends them to be read, or understands his own text: Juan Rulfo’s voice, weather-beaten and full of gravel, leaves no doubt that he infused his short stories with it.
One element is given by Elizabeth Harwick. The essayist shows us that, if hearing a voice can change the way we understand a text, sometimes what we end up hearing is the change in the voice itself.
Hardwick points to a striking transformation when she compares two recorded readings by Sylvia Plath, one from 1958, in Massachusetts, and the other from 1962, in England, the year before her death. In the span of a few years, Plath’s manner has changed, as has her accent, as have her poems, and, you suspect, the woman from whom they emanate.
“I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath’s reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems – ‘Daddy,’ ‘Lady Lazarus,’ ‘The Applicant,’ ‘Fever I03°’ – were ‘beautifully’ read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased.”
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What’s in a voice?
You’ll find many willful essays pointing to speech, to one’s supposed voice, as the model for writing. The 19th-century critic Sainte-Beuve said, “You should write as much as possible the way you speak, and not speak too much the way you write.” Perusing the haughty Sainte-Beuve makes you shudder at what he might have written if he weren’t advising against pomposity.
There is one notorious example of a classic novel that was spoken as much as it was written, where the voice seems to take over, feverish and exalted. If Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler positively carries you along in his addiction, despite all its quirks of style and story, it’s in part because it was dictated. Ruined by gambling debt, the writer had made one final roll of the dice: he signed a dreadful contract with an editor, granting him the royalties to his work for nine years, unless he gave him a novel by 1 November 1866. With less than a month left, and only written notes, he hired Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, a stenographer, and voiced the novel to her in a mere twenty-six days. The delirious speed of the novel, the urgency of the text, and its nervous tension are very much that of a man desperately reciting his salvation. He turned it in, in the nick of time, and married Anna a year later.
It’s easy to conflate how people express themselves in speaking and in writing. When the latter proves challenging, we can often wish things came out as easily as when we talk. As Jules Renard said: “Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.” It’s slightly more complicated if the goal is to be readable. How many good talkers do we wish could write just like they spin a yarn? And time and time again, after recording a great interview, the actual transcription is far removed from the spellbinding chat we just had. There always needs to be a degree of editing or artifice. Or as Hemingway put it, “Good writing is good conversation, only more so”, and “Good dialogue is not real speech-it’s the illusion of real speech.”
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What’s in a voice?
Sometimes it’s not really about the voice of the author, or not only. What we listen for, as they listened to themselves, is the voice of the text.
The poet Seamus Heaney shares a telling example of finding the voice that brings a poem to life. While working on his translation of the epic of Beowulf from Anglo-Saxon, Heaney notes his need for the right voice and how he found it.
“It is one thing to find lexical meanings for the words and to have some feel for how the metre might go, but it is quite another thing to find the tuning fork that will give you the note and pitch for the overall music of the work. Without some melody sensed or promised, it is simply impossible for a poet to establish the translator’s right of way into and through a text. I was therefore lucky to hear this enabling note almost straight away, a familiar local voice, one that had belonged to relatives of my father…And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of those relatives. I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices.”
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What’s in a voice?
It might not be a matter of speaking, but of listening. Do we hear what the text, or the voice, is saying? What can it tell us? That voice, after all, has often been there throughout the writing process.
Spending time with writers, you’ll notice that some people mumble when they write, some need to be heard out, and latch onto their closest colleague to bounce off a paragraph; some, notoriously, will scream their whole book to one in particular (more on that later). Reading out loud can make the text sound more real. It brings it to life and helps to test out its cadence to hear if it sounds right.
That practice is a matter of course in many writing professions, whether speechwriter, writing screenplays, or poet: you play it by ear, to rehearse, to feel how the text should be spoken. In doing so, the text can vary, be adjusted, and reinterpreted. The voice that speaks the text aloud knows something about it that isn’t apparent in rereading or writing.
I recently heard this happen live, during a podcast conversation. Early on in the talk, the travel writer Sylvain Tesson is asked to read a passage of his latest adventure. The passage is somewhat lackluster, and made all the more so by how unenthused the author sounds by what he is reading. Afterward, the host tells him, “You read it as if you weren’t happy with that paragraph.”
Tesson, to his credit, is scathing with the work he’s supposedly promoting: “That’s because I find it wordy, and as I was reading it, I thought to myself, if we were to do the exercise of the gueuloir that many writers do, which consists of reading their book aloud to detect inaccuracies or rough edges, we would have to cross out a lot of things here.”
The gueuloir he refers to can be translated as to bellow or scream, and suggests a place where it occurs. It was coined by Gustave Flaubert, the author of Madame Bovary. A manic perfectionist, Flaubert spent five years on his masterpiece and is said to have once searched for the right word for six weeks. Even amid those obsessive methods, the ultimate test for every page he wrote was the voice: blaring out each passage, shouting all of his work, until it sounded right. “I only know a sentence is good”, he wrote, “after I’ve run it through my gueuloir.”
As his friend, the writer Guy de Maupassant, tells us: “Every few moments, he would rise from his desk, take his sheet of paper, raise it to eye level, and, leaning on his elbow, recite in a sharp, loud voice. He listened to the rhythm of his prose, paused to capture a fleeting sound, combined tones, removed assonances, and carefully placed commas, like stops along a long journey.”
Applied drastically to every phrase of his long novels, the procedure led to some comical excesses, as he himself attested. “It’s 1 a.m. I don’t know how my chest isn’t broken, since I’ve been screaming nonstop for four hours,” he writes to one friend.
To another, he confesses, “My head is spinning and my throat is burning from searching, poring over, digging, turning over, rummaging and shouting, in a hundred thousand different ways, for a sentence that has finally come to an end. It’s a good one, I can assure you, but it wasn’t easy.”
Starting from Flaubert’s peculiar example, the essayist Paul Bourget developed the idea that, just as his phrases could be screamed, some writers’ phrases should be sighed, others should be sung, so that there is an underlying diction for every variant of voice that we can listen to, or intuit, when we discover the work of authors present or past. It’s that timbre, all their own, this voice inside the voice, that the people I interviewed kept on hinting at when they spoke of the recordings, of hearing them anew in the writer’s voices, of rediscovering texts they had long known.
Flaubert’s wailing “with the windows open,” in his shirt sleeves, “in the silence of the office, like a madman,” has sadly not been recorded for posterity. The work, however, speaks for itself: Flaubert’s method proved effective. He had found the right pitch at which to make his writing heard, to himself first of all.
And though no one else should make themselves hoarse by trying it, what the text is telling us should not fall on deaf ears.
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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.
It is seldom, if ever, the case that one writer’s problem or question is their’s alone.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.
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