‘I’m just thinking of what to say next; I’m sorry to keep you waiting’ and became silent once more. [Finally] he finished the speech in style, remaining imperturbable throughout the ordeal.
Unhesitatingly, I say bravo!
When I was a child I was taken to an all-negro (as we said then) movie called Green Pastures. Much of it took place in Heaven, with an awesome God dressed in a black frock coat like an evangelical preacher. There were many Bible scenes. In one of them, I was fascinated to observe, Moses stammered dramatically, and, lucky him, his brother Aaron spoke for him. Marc Shell — a daring fellow — wonders if God stuttered, because at the burning bush He asks Moses to speak for Him. Shell is curious: ‘Moses is not a person who speaks well. Presumably, an omnipotent God could cure Moses of his speech impediment.’ After all, he observes, the Bible is full of such cures. Shell is also ingenious: ‘God, as a ventriloquist, needed a spokesman because He was unable to speak directly to the people.’ Now comes a spectacular Shell-riff:
When the stutterer Moses hints that God should find Himself another dummy, the ventriloquist God, Himself something of a stutterer, suggests that Moses become a ventriloquist and find himself a dummy of his own. Enter the Hebrew-speaking Aaron.
This is the origin of the term Lord-keeper. Charles I had one. He admitted, ‘I am unfit for speaking. I mean to have my Lord-keeper speak for me in most things.’
Seven per cent of zebra finches, whose parents don’t do this, repeat syllables in their song several times, ‘altering syllables, deleting them, or inserting new syllables’. These individual songs are not learned, Shell says, and he shows us sonograms exhibiting the normal songs of zebra finches and those of the stutterers. As he fabulously adds, ‘Stutterers such as myself immediately underst-underst-underst barely recognise such stratagems when we hear them in the field But the sonograms are clear.’
But while stuttering may be a burden and an agony, as Shell underscores it has its compensations. Many stutterers, Darwin, Henry James, Malraux, Updike, Maugham, Drabble, and Marc Shell himself, became writers. So did I. You could say we found our voices.
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