On Readings
YESTERDAY EVENING, IN the course of accepting the Enoch Pratt Award,1 I delivered myself of a few remarks about the pros and cons of literary prizes in general. This evening, before reading to you a short section from the nearly-finished “millennium” novel that I’ve been at work upon since 1995,2 I want to make a few remarks about Public Readings in general.
What prompts me this evening is an observation by my distinguished fellow fictioneer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., as quoted some few weeks ago in the “Today” section of the Baltimore Sun: Mr. Vonnegut allowed as how he gives “talks” here and there from time to time (indeed, he has done so as our guest in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, for example), but “I’ve never done a reading,” he declared, and then added: “It’s the lowest art form imaginable.”
Well, now. This sentiment echoes that of some other notable writers I’ve heard on the subject: I think, e.g., of Mr. Mark Helprin, who voiced a similar opinion to his audience up at Hopkins (in fact, Mr. Helprin devoted his whole allotted public hour with us to explaining why he wasn’t going to give a reading). I think of Gore Vidal’s remark somewhere that public readings by authors, especially on the campus circuit, are “just a form of show biz.” And Baltimore’s own Anne Tyler, who once did a well-received reading for us from her then-new novel Morgan’s Passing, decided subsequently that fiction-readings are a bad idea, and although she visited our Writing Seminars again thereafter, she confined herself to chatting with a roomful of apprentice writers.
In certain cases, I suspect, a writer’s disinclination to public readings may stem from simple platform-shyness or the circumstance of that writer’s not happening to be an effective public reader of his or her work. (Neither of those factors, let me say at once, applies to Ms. Tyler, whose presentation was confident and capable, a pleasure to attend.) But some more general objections to public readings are worth considering apart from those circumstances, and I’d like to review them before I myself descend to this “lowest form of art.”
It is a matter that I feel reasonably qualified to address. For one thing, in my years of professoring at Penn State, State University of New York at Buffalo, and especially Johns Hopkins — where my job-description included inviting writers to visit the campus, confer with our students, and give public presentations — I have heard every sort of delivery: from the masterful to the inept, from the histrionic to the eye-glazingly monotonous, from the exhilarating to the embarrassing, or the intoxicating to the intoxicated, and including the over-long, the inaudible, and the all but unintelligible, whether owing to the speaker’s accent, the room’s acoustics, the nature of the material, or possibly some foreign substance in the lectern water-pitcher. Moreover, I confess to being guilty myself, over 40-plus years as a publishing writer, of 400-plus public readings from my output, whether of work already published, or of work “finished” but not yet published, or (as is the case with tonight’s material) of work not-yet-even-quite-finished but close enough thereto to risk reading from it without tempting the muses to strike, or to go on strike. What’s more, I have almost invariably found the experience agreeable, despite the occasional fouled-up airline connection and the occasionally disappointing, disappointed, or less than entirely comprehending audience — as in, say, Tokyo or Tangier.
Part of my pleasure in reading publicly from my fiction (or from other folks’ fiction, as I’ve done in homages to Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and other of my heroes) has nothing to do with the pros and cons of readings as an art-form but rather with the biographical circumstance that I happen to be a once-upon-a-time jazz drummer and orchestrator who still enjoys the opportunity of trying selected riffs on a live audience instead of a merely living one, as is the normal case with writers and their readers. What’s more, aside from affording me the occasional change of scene and a modest supplement to what for most of my academic history was a fairly modest teaching salary and what remains, in the nature of my literary case, a blushingly modest royalty income, these reading/lecture sorties have brought me quite unexpected other boons as well, of which I will mention only the most blessed and life-altering one: On a snowy night in February 30 years ago, after a hairy flight from my Buffalo campus to Boston to do an evening gig at Boston College — a reading that I started at least half an hour late, on an empty stomach, because of snow delays at the airports and on the streets of Boston — it was my extraordinary good fortune to re-meet and renew my acquaintance with a former student from Penn State days who had loyally shlepped across town through the snowstorm to hear her old teach’s spiel, and who subsequently became and to this hour remains my bride, my keenest-eyed reader, and my editor of first resort.
BUT THAT’S ANOTHER story, which — like the circumstance of one’s happening to be a good, bad, or middling public reader — has nothing to do with the pros and cons of “readings” themselves as a form of art and entertainment. Let me quickly review those pros and cons, offer my own opinions themupon, then read my reading, and then, I hope, respond to your questions or comments on this or any other reasonably pertinent subject.
First, the Cons: The printed word can reasonably be argued to be meant for the silent eye, not for the ear: a private, “privileged” transaction between author and individual readers, not a communal experience like theater, or like the oral tale-telling tradition out of which written and eventually printed fiction evolved. The reader of print proceeds at his/her own pace — lingering, considering; perhaps rereading a particularly striking or puzzling passage before going on; perhaps skimming a bit to cut to the chase, so to speak, or to cut out the chase if one so chooses; perhaps peeking ahead to check the distance to the next space-break or chapter-division (what might be called “chasing to the cut”); perhaps leafing back to remind oneself where a particular character or image last appeared, and reading neither more nor fewer minutesworth of pages than one has the time and motivation to ingest at a given sitting. In short, the medium of print is interruptible, referable, and pace-adjustable by the individual reader, as theater and film are not (setting aside the function-buttons on videocassette players), and as the oral tale-telling tradition was not (unless you were the king ordering Homer to do a high-speed encore of his Catalogue of Ships, I suppose, or a grandkid begging Grandma to do the wolf-in-the-bed scene one more time). Interruptibility, Referability, and Pace-Adjustability: three terrific virtues of the print medium, and of course they’re lost in public readings.
Lost too is the absence of the possibly distracting physical presence of the Author, along with our imagination of the narrative “voice” and the voices of the several characters. We often speak of a writer’s having a distinctive voice—languid, eloquent, restrained, jazzed-up, tender, forceful, whatever — but the voice we’re speaking of is a figurative, not a literal one. And the narrative voice that so moved and/or entertained us on the silent page may turn out in authorial person to be bothersomely lisping, or hesitant, or strident, or perhaps female baritone or male soprano when it’s doing dialogue. In the same way, we may have an agreeable image of the author of our pleasure and then find ourselves disappointed if not altogether turned off by his/her actual speaking presence. And finally, of course, we can go read the thing for ourselves, if not immediately then whenever it hits the stands, in the medium for which it was presumably designed; so why bother hauling out to watch and hear its perpetrator perp a portion of it in person?