Article about Virginia Woolf: Robert Fullford

Who's ever heard Virginia Woolf?

New compilation highlights dead British writers

Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Tuesday, December 02, 2008

James Joyce was triumphantly clannish in his speech. Agence France-Presse File PhotoJames Joyce was triumphantly clannish in his speech.

Hearing the voice of a long-dead writer adds another dimension to a reader's connection with an author's work, not profound, but intimate. It can also be surprising. Many years ago, I was jolted by a record of James Joyce reading a delirious passage from Finnegans Wake, an often incomprehensible but nevertheless enchanting experiment.

Until then, Joyce had existed for me only as words on the page. He was disembodied, the pure spirit of the English language at one of its greater moments. I was therefore astonished to hear him speaking much like a stage Irishman, rather in the style of Barry Fitzgerald, who played a series of lovable priests and cops in Hollywood films. Joyce's accent made it clear that even late in life he remained intensely grounded in Dublin, the city he escaped before unfolding his genius. That subtly changed my feelings about him. It made him more local, more obviously the magnificent product of one particular time and place. "All talent is clannish," said Isaac Bashevis Singer. Joyce was triumphantly clannish, and never more than in his speech.

For those of us who enjoy this kind of contact, Richard Fairman of the British Library has been rooting through his sound archives to make collections of authorial speech, most recently in a three-CD set, The Spoken Word: British Writers ( www.bl.uk/catalogues/sound.html),an assortment of utterances by 30 writers. Today, when every interesting author gets recorded often, it's surprising to learn from Fairman that there is exactly one known recording of Arthur Conan Doyle's voice extant, and also only one of Virginia Woolf's. They both lived well into the age of sound recording (Conan Doyle died in 1930, Woolf in 1941) but the idea of preserving voices hadn't yet taken hold among broadcasters and librarians.

People simply didn't keep radio broadcasts. As Fairman says, "They went out on the air and that was it. They were lost forever." Woolf spoke on the BBC several times, but on only one occasion did someone think it a good idea to save part of a talk she gave. The piece included in The Spoken Word: British Writers runs only eight minutes, but it's a revelation. Heard in 2008, she sounds like a vicious parody of an English intellectual. I had to listen three times before I could get past her mannerisms and absorb what she was saying.

Under the title Words Fail Me, she discussed the way every interesting word carries echoes, memories and associations. Words have been "out and about" for centuries, which makes them hard to use. They carry so many meanings. "They have contracted so many famous marriages in the past." I love the part about famous marriages and the phrase "out and about."

Her contribution is much more engaging than Conan Doyle's. He talks for about two minutes about Sherlock Holmes and then spends six minutes describing the virtues of spiritualism, a subject on which no one (not even Conan Doyle) has ever been interesting. As a subject, spiritualism suffers from the fact that dead people are always boring. Not one word spoken from beyond the grave holds any interest. ("I saw your mother?" "How is she?" "She's fine.") Conan Doyle says he's had fascinating and enriching conversations with the dead, but gives no examples. He insists, though, that spiritualism is "the great question of the future."

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