The Spoken Word: Short Stories, Volume II – review

Largely unheard since their original performances or BBC broadcasts between 1939 and 2011, these readings of 12 short stories by their authors are a treasure trove. *

E.M.Forster’s 1948 reading definitely conjures up a past era. His philosophical debate in ‘Mr Andrews’ concerning two souls in ‘interspace’ — of a righteous Englishman and a Turk who has slain his enemy ‘whilst fighting the infidel’ — is as academic as the 70-year-old author’s voice.

Similarly the irresistible opening to Osbert Sitwell’s ‘The Staggered Stay’ immediately takes us back to the Forties: ‘Miss Mumsford always put her aunt away upstairs, even in summer, before she came down to dinner…’ Sitwell’s delivery, crisp and aristocratic with his ‘lorst’ and ‘acrorss’, is delightfully animated — unlike Somerset Maugham’s. In the latter’s neat traveller’s tale, ‘The Wash Tub’, the first ever story read by its author, broadcast by the BBC in 1951, the speakers in the dialogue are difficult to distinguish because he fails to characterise even his American protagonist. However, authors don’t necessarily make the best readers — and Maugham was 77 at the time of the recordings.

Curiously, stories read in regional accents do not date in the same way: Alan Sillitoe’s vigorous 1959 Nottinghamshire delivery of his tough story of suicide, ‘On Saturday Afternoon’, could have been made yesterday. Similarly, Seán Ó’Faoláin’s ‘One True Friend’, recorded in 1939 and recalling Joyce’s Dubliners, is a splendid piece of Irish theatre both in its content and fresh narration.

It’s not until the 1990s, however, that the readings are clearly in our present era. Beryl Bainbridge (whose 101-volume archive is held by the British Library) was an actor before she became a writer, evident in the beautifully modulated voice, and her ear for idiolect, accent and pace in her dramatic tale of deception and counter deception, ‘Kiss Me Hardy’.