Books

Books That Talk to the Blind

Biographer and editor whose roots go back to Bristol, Rhode Island, MARK ANTONY DEWOLFE HOWE is the oldest and dearest of Atlantic contributors, having made his first appearance in our columns sixty-three years ago last spring. Mr. Howe published his autobiography, A Venture in Remembrance, at the age of seventy-seven. Then as the light began to fail he was more and more confined to his apartment on Louisburg Square; here he has continued to write his poems and his essays, and, when blindness made reading impossible, he has enjoyed the companionship of Talking Books.

By M. A. DeWolfe Howe

by M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE

1

I SHOULD like to tell something of the service science and art, in the form of literature, have combined to create for the blind, and I tell the story largely in the hope that the knowledge of this service and its availability may extend its beneficent use.
In November of 1950 I lost completely the sight of one eye. On the other a cataract had begun an advance which has continued, but not yet far enough to justify an operation. The result has been a progressive inability to read. Up to the time of losing my sight I had known only vaguely about that blessed instance of the welfare state, the Talking Books for the blind. Now it was imperative to learn what could be done to avail myself of this service. I asked my oculist to inform the Massachusetts Division of the Blind that my eyesight was so impaired as to qualify me for use of the Talking Books. This was followed by a prompt call from a representative of the Division, who brought with him one of the Division’s special phonographs and a 188-page catalogue of its library of records. I have also received three supplementary catalogues describing new accessions to the library. I was advised to send to the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, the local distributing library of books for the adult blind, a list of twenty-five or thirty books that I should like to receive. In operation I have found that by telephoning the Perkins School in the morning of one day I receive on the next the records of a book or two, delivered free of charge, like everything else in the service, by parcel post. I should add that state agencies and distributing libraries like those in Massachusetts are operating under a regional system which spans the forty-eight states and the territories.
A condensed list of the general subjects covered by the library will suggest its scope: philosophy, religion, the social sciences, languages, pure science,
literature (including poetry and drama), history, biography, fiction (in most libraries the largest offering of all). Here lay a challenge even to one who, like Bacon, would take all knowledge to be his province. Others will surely have found in other fields than those I have explored abundant food for their appetites. In the six years between my eightysixth and ninety-second birthdays (1950-56) I
have listened to approximately one hundred and fifty books chiefly in the fields of history, biography, poetry, and fiction. It would be absurd to enumerate the classics of which I wished to refresh my memory, and other classics somehow missed in the past. Fortunately books of recent years, if not of the immediate present, are also available. The following paragraph may give some idea of their range and value: —
From Paradise Lost (which I never before read entire and continuously) to the poetry of Emily Dickinson; from the novels of Dostoevsky and Turgenev to those of Dickens, Hardy, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather (including Trilby, Peter Ibbetson, and Huckleberry Finn); in biography and autobiography from David Cecil’s Melbourne to R. S. Aldrich’s Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs. A, Hesketh Pearson’s G.B.S., Samuel Eliot Morison’s Christopher Columbus, Mariner, and Helen Keller’s self-portrayals; from Trevelyan’s Garibaldi and the Making of Italy through the war volumes of Winston Churchill to the admirable Civil War books by Bruce Catton; from much happiness with William James to less of the same with Santayana; the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare, after which one asks, “Why listen to anything else when nothing else is so good?”
From a sumptuous banquet these are merely samples of the dishes offered for tasting.
It may ill become me to quote at this point from myself— the first of several stanzas of verse, “On Listening to Benét’s John Brown’s Body Read as a Talking Book for the Blind.” The few lines that follow bear so close an application to what I am now trying to say that I venture to insert them here:—
He that hath ears to hear, now let him see!
For there is still a vision of the mind
That spreads before the seeing and the blind
An equal pageant of reality.
My friends often ask me about the quality of the reading—is it as good as it ought to be? My answer is that the average is high. Nothing is invariably at its best. Here, I should say, the English readers, whether on imported discs or on the many made in the United States by readers of English origin, are better than the American.

Is it perhaps because there is something more of Nancy Mitford’s Uspeech among the English and of her non-Uon American lips? My leaning toward U-speech is natural to a New Englander; a chance railroad seat-mate once remarked, “Tell me, are you an Englishman or a certain sort of Bostonian?” It may be observed that American speech, as heard both on the radio and in Talking Books, is becoming standardized in a clear, direct form. It is distressing when an American reader of an English novel in which a daughter frequently addresses her father as “Papá” pronounces it “Poppa.” So too one bridles when a reader, probably once an actor, forgets that he is not on the stage and dramatizes a character in the story by dropping, with raised or lowered voice, into dialect — cockney or what not—with confusing sounds. He should remember that he is now a reader, not an actor.

The beginner at Talking Books should note one thing: there is to be no skipping. Many excellent books contain pages, even chapters, not necessary to the reader’s salvation. A glance ahead will tell the expert quickly what he can spare. Not so with a Talking Book. If you move your needle forward or turn to the next disc, you may be missing the very best thing in the whole book. You have enlisted for the duration; it is a matter of start to finish. “It’s dogged as does it.”

The reservations here expressed are indeed of negligible moment in comparison with all the pleasure and profit derived from my six years of intimacy with the Talking Books. I sometimes think that if I could continue that intimacy for a few years longer I might, apart from all enjoyment, become a reasonably cultivated person.

2

THUS us far I have drawn almost wholly upon my own knowledge and experience. It is now time to turn from the personal to the general.

In any review of the Age of Electrification the phonograph must of course be mentioned. More specifically in relation to Talking Books it must receive still further mention. After Edison had invented the phonograph he wrote an article for the May—June, 1878, issue of the North American Review in which he said: “Books may be read by the charitably inclined professional reader, or by such other reader especially employed for that purpose, and the record of such book used in the asylums for the blind.”

This nineteenth-century prophecy had to wait fulfillment until our own century came of age, and then it came about not so much through the “charitably inclined" as through the libraries of the country, especially the Library of Congress and privately supported organizations devoted to the welfare of the blind, notably the American Foundation for the Blind, in New York, and the American Printing House for the Blind, in Louisville, Kentucky. It is especially to the Library of Congress and the Printing House that I am indebted for much of the information employed here, information rendered usable with the help of other eyes than my own.

Since these words are written in Boston, it may be appropriate to note that the Boston Public Library, having acquired a small collection of books in embossed type, established a department for the blind in 1868 in coöperation with the Howe Press of the Perkins School. Many libraries in other American cities, following this example, did likewise. It was in Boston that Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe performed his miracle of liberating Laura Bridgman from the darkness and silence to which she had seemed condemned. This occurred at the Perkins School for the Blind, the very institution at which Anne Sullivan, who became the “teacher” of Helen Keller, was taught to perform her still greater miracle.

From about 1830 the blind in both Europe and America had been learning to read the embossed type of books in Braille. Shortly before 1900 the Library of Congress had turned its attention to special provision for the blind, and was soon effecting participation in this work with many public libraries throughout the country and with the private agencies already mentioned, besides the American Library Association and the Red Cross, It was seen as the work went on, at first with Braille only, and then through the addition of Talking Books initiated under the leadership of the American Foundation for the Blind, that more of the totally and partially blind could profit from books on phonograph records than from Braille, with its demand for special training. Thus the idea of producing Talking Books in quantity came into being.

The first necessities were for funds and the organization of a national plan to deal with the project in its larger aspects, by inducing libraries throughout the country to coöperate with the Library of Congress. The first provision of public funds was made by the passage of the Price-Smoot bill on March 3, 1931. This legislation was recommended by President F. D. Roosevelt as one of the WPA measures to give employment to the unemployed by other means than the organized raking of leaves. The bill was implemented by an appropriation of $100,000 for the first year. President Roosevelt’s interest in the project continued, and in 1935 he requested, successfully, the transfer of $211,500 from the Emergency Appropriation Act to the Library of Congress “for the construction of talking book machines.” The annual appropriations by Congress have continued to grow, and within the past decade they have reached the total of $1,000,000 a year.

The extent of the work done by the Library of Congress in organizing the coöperation of other libraries, now more than thirty in number and in many states of the Union, may well be imagined.

The actual production of the Talking Books — their selection and manufacturing—begins with a special committee in the Library of Congress alert for promising titles old and new, chosen from publishers’ lists and current reviews. The committee receives help also from readers, blind and seeing, outside the Library. The lists so formed are submitted quarterly to the Librarian of Congress for approval. When this is given, the titles are sent, let us say, to the American Printing House for the Blind, with exact instructions for recording. The consent of authors and publishers must be obtained. Readers must be chosen. Volunteers are found to lack that constancy at an exacting job found in paid professionals, preferably those with radio or stage experience. The reader’s pronunciation is checked from the best of American and English dictionaries, such as Webster and the Shorter Oxford. For certain books it is important that he can speak foreign languages, especially French, as they should be spoken. The job requires both capacity and taste.

When it is remembered that more than 43,000 Talking Book equipments are now enjoyed in America under the conditions here set forth, all without a penny of cost to any beneficiary, it is impossible not to imagine the waves of gratitude that must constantly be flowing towards the Library of Congress and the government behind it.

One of many expressions of this feeling came from an author, after listening to the talking of a book of his own, who wrote to the American Printing House for the Blind: “Just want to tell you what a fine job I think you did with my story. . . . No melodramatics, no shouting, just damn decent reading with subtle differences of style to fit each piece. Just right.”

And surely speaking as many others might have spoken, a retired general wrote these words to the Library of Congress: “While submitting a list herewith of desired Talking Books let me state that in the dark watches of each night when ‘old age’ prevents sleep and dimming eyesight prevents reading, I bless you and your staff and the producers of Talking Books for the assistance they all give to me toward passing the hours. There is never a night that I do not think of you all with thanksgiving.”

May the number of those who derive such comfort continue to increase!