Storytelling

1

WHY back in the late twenties at the Haymarket Theatre in London I was rehearsing a play which was called Mr. Pickwick, founded on Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. We were rehearsing the famous Christmas scene at Dingley Dell farm — the scene of the mistletoe and the wassail and the old lady and the fat boy and the blazing log fire and the dancing — and I found that I and it were dull and spiritless. Over the week-end I went to visit my home town and during the train ride to Scarborough and back I reread Dickens’s book, and the language jigged and swirled and was breathless and peaceful by turns, and I remember thinking, even t hat long ago, that Dickens’s text was complete of itself and that the mistake of our play was that it could not be transferred to any other medium without taking away its excitement. And I remember thinking then that I would like to work on this passage and read it aloud many times so that I could convey to people what Dickens’s text did to me.

About that time, too, I had a beautiful little book of Hans Andersen’s story “The Nightingale” (it had illustrations by Edmund Dulac and I have never been able to find the edition since) and I remember thinking that I would like to spend months learning how to tell that story to large numbers of people, as if I were the author inventing the story for the first time. I knew very clearly that it would be a long hard process. I knew that the smallest part of the labor would be the learning ol these stories by heart.

I met Norman Corwin. My wife Elsa Lanchester and I did two shows with him on a program which he had in New York then, “The Pursuit of Happiness.” One program was a condensation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Bodg; the of her was extracts from the work of Thomas Wolfe. Again with Norman I did a program of Sandburg, one of Wolfe, one of Walt Whitman; and I found the old ambition raging.

During the recent war I was in Hollywood. I not actively in the war and I was restless. I had a heavy contract at a movie studio, and apparently I was behaving badly around the house. Klsa, who understands me only too well, said, “You’re an out-of-work man and a nuisance around the house; get out of here and work.”I was angry —very angry—but as usual, after two or three days I knew she was right. I was being paid a lot of money, but movie acting is no complete job. To a year it will absorb only four to five months of your time, and a tenth of a man’s energy. I was in a still department one day, up at Universal, I think. There were two wounded men from Birmingham Hospital and I asked what the fellows did of an evening. They said, “Nothing,” and I asked them if they would be interested in anybody’s coming and reading to them a couple of times a week for two hours or so. They said they would, so I had a full occupation.

I read Dickens, Aesop, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Maupassant, James Thurber, Hans Andersen, Washington Irving, and what all. One day I picked up a Bible, and they protested. They did not want to hear anything from a dull book. The Bible was not dull to me, but I had to prove to them that it was not dull to me, and I used every trick that I had learned and they liked it and asked for more. We had a pleasant time. There is something about reading aloud to a group of people, however scarred, that turns them into children. They would sit and listen to fairy stories. They found a reflection of their sufferings, which they had thought to be unique, in the tragedies of Shakespeare, and fell belter. I lost my actor’s nerves. I taught dozens of them how to read aloud to their wives and children. The whole affair is one of the good memories of my life.

One evening when I went home to Elsa I said that I believed people want this thing that I am doing; we are all disturbed and unsettled, and they seem to like sitting down and hearing about the same things that have happened to people in the past which have been set down by great, writers. I found that they all had — contrary to what. I had been told in the entertainment industry—a common shy hunger for knowledge. I found that when I went home after one of these sessions I slept like a log — I am not normally a sound sleeper. I then began to read about reading aloud. I read of two famous tours of Charles Dickens; of Fanny Kemble and of the Chautauqua circuit; and learned that I had invented nothing, but was carrying on an American tradition.

It is a friendly thing to read from great books to large numbers of people. I have always been a nervous actor and scared of appearing before audiences. I have never yet been scared when I have had a bundle of books under my arm.

I have been asked which of the great authors people seem to like best. I have read to audiences varying in size from several hundred to six thousand or so, and the main impression that I have taken away is that people have just liked hearing things out of real books. Sometimes they have said, “I liked Dickens best” (it may have been snowing outside — it was in Detroit); sometimes James Thurber (they wanted to laugh together); sometimes a Psalm (they wanted to be solemn together); and sometimes Shakespeare’s magic wood from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (they were indulging in magic together). There has been no preference. I have been moved by their acceptance of things particularly loved. And that is an interesting thing about people in theatres—doing things together. That is the beauty of being in a theatre. That we all — fifteen hundred or so of us in a big room — do the same thing together at the same moment—laugh or wonder or pity — and we feel good and safe because the people around us are the same as we are.

I have thought about this a lot—what theatre is—and I think this is a good part of what it is. And when we agree, as we mostly do, that a play is a good or a bad play, what we are saying is that it had the truth or it did not have the truth to fuse us then and there. And the communion that happens in a theatre is one of the best things we have in life.

2

I HAVE been asked about the techniques of reading aloud. I had better tell you something of my experiences in the hospitals when the men came to me and asked me to teach them to read love poems to their wives or Mother Goose stories to their children. They would first of all start by imitating my English accent. I had to get them back to speaking in the accents of the place they came from. People always speak most beautifully in the accents of their home towns — I, by the way, do not think that standard speech is the most alive speech. Then they would go downtown to some store and make recordings of their voices and I would have to tell them they had to learn to tell stories or poems to another person and that if they wanted to learn to read aloud well they must learn to seek the response in somebody else’s eyes as they read; and so I would get them reading to each other. After that, it’s a question of practice; a lot of practice. There are laws, to obey the rhythms laid down by the poet. The verse of Shakespeare has always made nonsense to me unless one follows strictly his iambic pentameter: de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum; but the whole thing is bound up in wanting to communicate something you like to others and have them like it too.

I know that some people could be angry about the remark about standard speech. I know someone who is a friend of mine who may be disappointed that I have made it. Her name is Margaret Pendergast McClean. She is a speech teacher and she has taught our Shakespeare class about the control of our voices. I know that standard speech is necessary in professional acting; otherwise in great centers such as New York and Chicago no plays could be put together if all the actors were speaking in the several accents of their home towns, but still I would like to hear Julius Caesar in Iowa in the speech of the Middle West, which is strong. And Julius Caesar in Oregon in the speech of the Far West, and Julius Caesar in New Orleans in the soft and lovely speech of the South. This would not work if your point of view is that Julius Caesar is chiefly about Ancient Pome, but I think Julius Caesar is more about man as a political animal in the town in which it is being played in that year and at that moment. I hope Mrs. McClean will understand this, and will know that we are not ungrateful for what she has so usefully and patiently taught us.

I find myself objecting every time I either say or hear the phrase “reading aloud.” Stories were told and retold for hundreds of years before they were set down and these are the best stories, the stories which were told before they were written, and not written before they were read. This is so of the stories in the Bible. As an actor, it is easy for me to understand that they are for the voice. There are places to go loud and places to go soft and places to go fast and places to go slow. And any good actor is likely to go loud and soft and last and slow in the same places all by himself. That is what I want to be a storyteller. I would like to be the man who knows all the stories, who has on his back a bag full of stories, as bottomless as Santa Claus’s bag of toys. But that can never be, because no man could ever know all the stories even if he were to live to be a thousand years old. I shall never even know all the stories in that way that I like best — but it is a good thing to want to go on living longer than possible. It is better than wishing you were dead.