Seven per cent of zebra finches stutter. So did Moses, Demosthen- es, Aesop, Churchill, Darwin, Nietzsche, André Malraux, Marilyn Monroe, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Charles I, George VI, and Lewis Carrroll. So do Margaret Drabble and Marc Shell, the author of this comprehensive, learned, even playful book. And so, declaring an interest, do I. Many stutterers are left-handed, they don’t stutter when they sing (although Monroe pretended to), make love, or, usually, when they speak another language (I do in Chinese). Stutterers try to disguise their handicaps, hemming and hawing like James, speaking slowly and thickly like Darwin. Some speak extra fast. Some are often silent, others gabble away. As with death, non-stutterers rarely mention stuttering to stutterers. Few stutterers are women. There are 50 million stutterers worldwide, three per cent of all children and one per cent of adults. Stutterers often see a difficult word or sound looming and sideslip to a tactically different one; this doesn’t always work, although it’s useful to have a big vocabulary. There are heaps of theories about why people stutter and there have been many ‘cures’, including tongue-slicing and, in my school, slipping your hand into your trouser pocket and writing the damnable word on your leg with your finger. Many of them, us, wonder whether we are basically just stutterers or people who stutter.
The creator of this Aladdin’s cave of stuttering, Marc Shell, professor of comparative literature at Harvard, appears on the cover of his book, a vulnerable little boy wearing a cowboy outfit and recovering from polio. He says near the end, ‘What is all but unique about the stutterer’s world is the individual loneliness and non-communal aspects of his contingent, unpredictable and anxiety-producing inability to talk fluently.’ He points out that unlike another group with a communication handicap, the deaf, stutterers do not have a language of their own. Deaf people, he adds, do not need to use spoken language in order to express themselves; stutterers do.
He quotes another stuttering authority on stuttering: ‘I am obliged to speak. It is not what is to be said that makes the stutterer hesitate, but that it must be said.’ Wallop! After over 70 years of stuttering, although much less than 55 years ago (once a stutterer, always a stutterer), that hits the bull’s-eye: having to say something when, unlike being under arrest, you have no right to silence.
Shell is endearing, as his photograph shows, and like all stutterers he is hawk-eyed and dog-eared, ever on the alert for that slight slip of the tongue, that tiny hesitation that betrays a fellow-sufferer-stutterer. When he was a child he heard Marilyn Monroe singing on the radio and guessed that she stuttered. She didn’t actually stammer when singing, but she imitated it so well that he rumbled her. Later he heard her singing in the movies and saw that she ‘emphasises two habitual strategies of the stutterer. Both tricks are written up in stutter manuals of the period.’ That is, she substituted an easier word for the obstacle she sensed coming at her; and when she spoke, she glided into a breathy singsong, that oh-so-seductive voice that knocked you flat, for example, in Some Like It Hot. Arthur Miller confirmed to Shell that his ex-wife stuttered.
Somerset Maugham, a stupendous stutterer, was also, like Marc Shell (I suspect) and me, a fluent speaker; his stratagem when the awful moment loomed was to ‘stop midsentence, showing no externally detectable signs of inner conflict’. One astounded listener noticed that the great man stood still, with only his fingers trembling. Then he said:
‘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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