This lecture was delivered on October 18, 2001, in the Gulbenkian Lecture Hall in Oxford, at the invitation of the Oxford English Faculty.
© Margaret Drabble, reprinted with permission.
This lecture could begin in many places. It could begin with a quotation from Nietzche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, about the shepherd with the serpent hanging from his throat. Or it could begin with the unexpected trials of King George the Sixth. (A royal anecdote still has much to recommend it in any public lecture.) Or it could begin with the story of the first Writers' Conference at the sixteenth Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1962. With deference to the fact that this lecture is by a writer, and sponsored by the English Faculty of Oxford, it seems best to begin with the writers in Edinburgh. For that is my most literary opening, and that is where much of the trouble began.
One of my themes this evening is the changing status of the writer during the past four decades, and, coincidentally, during my own writing and publishing career. Most of you here will have observed the way in which, during this period, writers have been transformed into public performers. They appear at festivals, in bookshops, on book tours, on radio and TV programmes, in schools and universities. They complain if their publicists urge them to appear, and they complain if their publicists fail to urge them to appear. (That very word, publicist, is new- we didn't have them when I began to publish.) The press regularly carries items about older writers - often but not always male- deploring the proliferation of photogenic and histrionic younger writers- usually but not always female. We have become accustomed to this kind of rivalry, which the media and the publishing industries promote for their own ends. But not many of us are old enough to cast our minds back to the quiet world before this situation arose. Let us, briefly, look backwards into the recent past, before returning to Edinburgh.
In the nineteenth century and the first half of this century, many successful and much-admired authors were unknown to the general public and to their readers- unknown in the sense that their appearance, their personalities, their habits, and their private lives were indeed private. Some, like Jane Austen and the Brontës, lived towards the extremity of privacy, anonymity, or pseudonymity, both geographical and personal, and others, like George Eliot and Thomas Hardy and Tennyson, might have been recognised in the streets of London, but did not actively seek a public platform with a public face. Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, T.S.Eliot and Graham Greene were not household faces, though ironically Woolf was posthumously to become one of the icons of our age. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule, which will be springing irritably into your minds even as I speak- I do know that Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw were all great showmen, all of whom knew how to play the lecture circuit. An excessive love of performance was more or less the death of Dickens, and Wilde, fatally, could not resist public speech in the form of repartee. Nevertheless, the general statement stands. The reasons are not far to seek- the age of mass communication and mechanical reproduction was dawning, but slowly, and it was still easy for the shy, retiring, fastidious or superior writer to avoid the masses.
Time here for a quick aside about that dawning age. In the short stories of Edith Wharton we find a characteristically shrewd analysis of the trend as heralded in America, the land of advertising. In 'Expiation' (1903) novice novelist Paula Fetherel, having been mildly chastised and faintly praised by reviewers, shoots to fame as a result of being denounced from the pulpit by her uncle the bishop: when she sees her 'New Edition with Author's Portrait (Hundred and Fiftieth Thousand)' emblazoned on the station bookstall she cries out that 'they've no right to use my picture as a poster!'. But it is too late to return to private life now. And in 'The Descent of Man' entomologist Professor Linyard of Hillbridge University is wryly astonished when his own production, 'The Vital Thing', becomes a huge commercial success, snapped up eagerly by readers who do not notice that its intention is satiric. For him, the ultimate accolade and/or disgrace will be the boxed set of "the 'Vital Thing' series", and the appearance of his face upon a hundred and fifty thousand biscuit tins.
The biscuit tin as a means of publication and publicity preceded the Edinburgh Festival by some sixty years. At the first Writers' Conference in 1962, organised by publisher John Calder and George Orwell's widow Sonia Orwell, a glittering array of writers appeared. Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Lawrence Durrell, Kingsley Amis, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Spark, Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, Alexander Trocchi and Angus Wilson were all there, along with many others from Europe and further afield. The ringmaster of the circus was Malcolm Muggeridge: Neal Ascherson reported upon it, and interviews based on it were broadcast on the Third Programme. The atmosphere was heady. Heroin and homosexuality were widely and very publicly debated, and Rebecca West wept at finding herself sharing the platform with a pornographer. This was the beginning of the 1960s, and the end of the dull post-war rationed sober claustrophobic insular fifties. Writers, buttoned up through the war, and harnessed to patriotic causes, were sniffing the air for new freedoms- the end of censorship, sexual freedom, homosexual law reform, flower power, cheap air travel, and invitations to literary festivals all over the world. (Feminism was not yet on the agenda, but that is another issue.) Writers were beginning to enjoy themselves, and to flaunt themselves in public before audiences of thousands. Edinburgh then or now would not have been George Orwell's scene at all, and elder statesman J.B.Priestley, though by no means averse to publicity on his own terms, had given the whole affair a wide berth, and congratulated himself on having done so.
The success of this Edinburgh literary event was followed by other Edinburgh literary occasions, at one of which a naked lady was wheeled across the stage in a wheelbarrow- an event considered shocking in its day as Puppetry of the Penis was the year before last- and by the proliferation of festivals round the land and the world- in Cheltenham, Hay-on-Wye, Toronto, Adelaide, Ewell and Ilkley. (Cheltenham in fact pre-dated Edinburgh, but began as a more genteel and smaller scale affair.) Performance poetry, pioneered in this country by the entrepreneurial Oxford-educated poet Michael Horovitz, achieved mass recognition at the celebrated occasion in June 1965 when poets and their listeners filled the Albert Hall to capacity. Underground poets, jazz poets, Liverpool poets, and protest poets were swept along on a powerful tide of publicity in the wake of the Beatles. Some poets demurred- Philip Larkin, for reasons we may explore later, preferred the silence and shelter of the library to the public arena- but most seized avidly upon the chance of expanding income, sales and territory. Poets were tired of staying politely at home in discreet unmoving Movement bedsitting rooms and basement flats. They wanted a bit of the action, and so they created it for themselves. By the 1970s, poetry readings were no longer inward-looking, minority, semi-private occasions- they had become part of the job of being a poet. Poets were expected by their publishers to tour, and most of them hit the trail with enthusiasm. They developed public personae and public performance skills. They chanted and wailed and intoned, and eventually they took to dread, beat and blood. They wrote poems for incantation, they got to know their audiences, they played to the gallery. And where poets went, the novelists were soon to follow.
I blame my hero Angus Wilson for what happened next. He had been a willing and enthusiastic part of the Edinburgh circus, flamboyantly dressed in striped shirt and turquoise tie, and he began to see all sorts of opportunities for writers in a wider world than that of the British Museum Reading Room where he had begun his own literary career- though he had managed to make himself quite noticeable there. (For a librarian, he had been very noisy: he did not seem to consider that the Rule of Silence in the Reading Room applied to him.) In 1968 he became Chair of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council, and the following year, at the suggestion of panellist, novelist, playwright and wit Julian Mitchell, he initiated the scheme of Writers' Tours, which took small groups of mixed writers to the regions, where they entertained local audiences and one another with public readings and discussions.
This, as far as I can recall, was the first organised attempt to put prose writers on the road, and I amongst others welcomed it as I embarked on the first tour to icy North Wales in March 1969. Such a tour paid one a small and very welcome fee, it took one out of the house for five days, it provided agreeable intellectual company for five days (and in my case introduced me to a true and lifelong friend). It gave one a chance to see a new part of the country, it introduced one to potential readers and new material, and it gave one a snapshot of the educational structure of a whole region. Some writers hated these excursions- Shiva Naipaul for one was appalled by life in the provinces and what seems to have been his first encounter with suburbia- but most found them revealing and convivial. The Writers' Tour was not, one should emphasise, a marketing exercise. These tours were not primarily intended to sell books. Writers did not travel with boxes of books, and tours were not tied to the promotion of new titles. Those were innocent days, when we believed in education and cultural diffusion. And, significantly, these tours had, as I remember, a group spirit, a sense of group commitment. Writers were not vying then, as they tend to do now, for centre stage, or for top billing. There was no star system in operation- indeed, one of the original intentions was to compose a travelling group of varied and complementary rather than of conflicting or rival talents.
It was not Angus's fault that his laudable desire to provide contact points between reader and writer should have encouraged the development of the travelling salesman approach to literature and literary festivals. But, ironically, I believe it did.
Angus Wilson himself was renowned as a witty speaker both off stage and on stage. He was a brilliant lecturer, with, as one of his admirers on a British Council tour of India exclaimed, 'the true gift of the gab'. Listening to him when I was younger, I always thought that the wit was effortless. He preferred to lecture from notes rather than from a written text, and would risk this even in high profile occasions with vast audiences- in 1961 he had given the Northcliffe lectures, a series of four lectures on the subject of 'Evil in the Novel' at London University, to immense acclaim and an overflowing auditorium, and when asked by his publisher Fred Warburg for a typescript, with a view to book publication, he replied 'What typescript? I have no typescript'. Which was true. (He had already run into difficulties with the text of his largely autobiographical and ground-breaking Ewing lectures, delivered with panache in California in October 1960- he was dismayed to learn that these had to be published, and it took him some time to produce the text of The Wild Garden, eventually published in 1963.)
I had thought, as I said, that Angus Wilson enjoyed lecturing, and I think, at times, he did. But I learned, when writing his biography, that he also found it intensely stressful and exhausting. Friends tended to make fun of him when he said that he found public speaking and being entertaining to strangers very tiring, but he was speaking no less than the truth. One of the saddest notes in his life came towards the end, when he and his partner Tony Garrett were living at St Rémy in the South of France; Angus, now in his seventies, and with insufficient financial security to retire comfortably, was suffering from hydrocephalus and other disabling disorders. Tony says that Angus would sometimes start up from his bed at night and collect a pile of papers, saying he had to 'go to give a lecture'. Tony would reassure him that there was no need, that there was no lecture waiting to be delivered, and Angus would eventually settle back to sleep.
This story has haunted me, and must affect all of those who lecture and have lecture nightmares- and can there be any who lecture who do not? I could even say that this story of Tony's accounts for why this will be my last lecture. I cannot go on living with these recurrent nightmares in which I arrive in a university town, usually in the USA, to be told I am billed to lecture on something quite unexpected- The Electra Syndrome in the Novels of Jane Austen was one of the more recent of these, and I had, in my sleep, composed several stirring, desperate and almost applicable sentences before I woke from my horror, and remembered that my real title was Jane Austen and My father: Paternal Authority in the Novels of Jane Austen, and that I had already written it, and that it wasn't too bad. After this final address, I hope to sleep more peacefully.
This edges me towards the next aspect of my theme: and this is the challenge of public speaking and giving public readings for those who have speech- or indeed, I am told, hearing- difficulties. I do realise that I am jumbling up here many aspects of speaking under the general heading of 'Public Speech'- poetry readings, prose readings, and bookshop readings are a very different matter from the delivering of the Northcliffe lectures, or the Romanes lectures, or the Gifford lectures, or the Reith lectures, and make very different demands on the speaker. And I realise that no writer is obliged to do any public speaking at all- indeed, is lucky ever to be asked. I do know that. Nevertheless, the ability to speak fluently is a great asset in a literary career, and one much prized by publishers and publicists. Nevertheless, many of us find ourselves pressured or flattered or cajoled into making speeches against our better judgement, and may have found ourselves in the position of Iris Murdoch, who said to me once that she wished she'd never agreed to give the Gifford lectures- she was at that time trying to write them and she said she had found she had absolutely nothing new to say. No doubt she triumphantly overcome this mood of despondency, but I believe we all know that mood. And if we do not, maybe we are the less for it. One of the problems connected with the growth of the literary circuit and the expansion of the book tour is that writers have become disorientated, like the protagonists of recent novels by Amis and Ishiguro. We no longer know where we are or what is expected of us. Are we intellectuals, jesters, stand-up comics, artists, artistes? Are we meant to be giving an update on the reputation of Derrida, or to be making people laugh? (Only the most brilliant, like the late Malcom Bradbury, could do both at once.) Such random invitations come our way- we may find ourselves sandwiched between a sports star and a duchess at a literary lunch, or stranded alone behind a podium in a three-quarters empty auditorium , or speaking to a select audience of three ladies and a dog in a friendly bookshop. We are offered fees ranging from 'zero and bring your own refreshments', through fifty pounds and five hundred pounds to five thousand pounds and more- no wonder most of us hate letters of invitation saying 'State your Fee'. We are not Mrs Thatcher nor Bill Clinton, nor Nick Leason, nor were meant to be. We do not know what we owe our publishers, and are frightened to say no. For some, the circus element has replaced the central activity- in a fleeting visit to one of the best funded creative writing schools in the world I met young people who seriously discussed how they would stand up to the stress of a book tour before they had even written a book, let alone had one accepted for publication. In Canada this spring- yes, at a festival- I met a successful young writer who had been completely confused by the demands of her publicist. Her first novel involved an undertaker, and she had been asked to pose as a corpse in a coffin. Should she have said no? Was it demeaning to agree to go for the photo opportunity? As I tried to assure her in my elder statesman way that she had the right to say no, I recalled that a press photographer once long ago asked me to jump off the top of a heaped pile of copies of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. And I did it. Moreover, it was rather a good photo- I was laughing wildly as I jumped, and the expression on my face summed up the happy relief of having finished- at least temporarily- with that demanding volume.
Speaking is worse than being photographed. I was not cut out by my natural talents to be a lecturer or a public speaker. From an early age - the age of three, I am told- I suffered from a stammer, at times severe, though now very episodic and temperamental. So I could take the line that both Arnold Bennett and Somerset Maugham took when asked to speak in public, at after-dinner gatherings, or to literary societies. Both were severe stammerers, and both insisted that they didn't speak, they wrote. I could argue, though disingenuously, that my objections to the modern commercial literary circus spring from the fact that I entered it with a handicap, and that I feel that, as a writer, that I am being expected to display skills or abilities that I do not possess.
This is where King George the Sixth comes back into the story. He, as you know, inherited the throne in 1936 because of the abdication of his older brother Edward- just as, coincidentally, King Charles the First, another royal stammerer, became king through the death of his older brother Henry. George the Sixth was not born to the crown, he had the crown and the burden of public broadcasting unexpectedly thrust upon him. Bertie, as George the Sixth was known, is recorded to have stammered from the age of six, and his biographer Robert Lacey relates that 'His brothers and sister were allowed to make fun of his stammer, ragging him without mercy after the style set by his father's quarter-deck chaff, and he withdrew still more tightly into himself.' (Centuries earlier Prince Henry, we are told, had mocked his little brother Prince Charles.) As a child Bertie was prone to bouts of self-pity and fits of explosive rage: he was also bottom of the class. And he was naturally left handed- what is known as 'a misplaced sinister'- was this, some speculated, according to a current theory, the cause of his problem? Unlike a writer, he was not allowed to choose public silence. He had to speak. He struggled bravely, but, despite the help of an Australian-born speech therapist called Lionel Logue, he never overcame his dislike of public speaking, and especially of broadcasting. He rehearsed everything with Logue and dreaded last minute alterations to his text: the Sovereign's Speech afforded him an added difficulty as it had to be delivered sitting, not standing. Occasionally, he was able to be pleased with his efforts: in 1940, his diary records that his he was very pleased with the way he delivered his speech on Empire Day- 'it was easily my best effort. How I hate broadcasting.'
Why did he find it easier to speak standing than sitting? Why do some situations make stammerers worse? Why do more men stammer than women? Why does anyone stammer at all? Why does nobody know the answers to these questions?
I don't think anyone has ever done a study of speech difficulties specific to writers, though I do have a correspondent who collects books by writers who stammer, and about characters who stammer. The list of orally challenged writers is distinguished and includes, arguably, Demosthenes and Virgil and Claudius and Caedmon, and with more verification, Camille Desmoulins, Charles Lamb, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Larkin, and John Updike. Several interesting questions arise, at least to my mind. Did any of these take to texte because of their difficulties with parole? Was their literary style affected by the nature of their impediment? Why did or do some of them avoid public situations, while others seek them? Do writers stammer more when they speak in bad faith, or when they speak with sincerity, and does the self-knowledge imparted by these warning signals affect what they write and how they write it? Or what they think, and how they think it? Are you more or less likely to think in the words you cannot speak?
Doris Lessing's protagonist Anna Wulf, in The Golden Notebook, gives up lecturing on art for the Communist Party because she finds herself in bad faith: her set lecture takes a Marxist line about the individual and group consciousness, and she says 'About three months ago, in the middle of this lecture, I began to stammer and couldn't finish. I have not given any more lectures. I know what that stammer means.' (The Blue Notebook, p. 299 ) Real-life habitual stammerers may be less clear about what their stammer means, in general, or in its specific manifestations. John Updike has written in his Memoirs (Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, 1989: Chapter iii, 'Getting the Words Out') with much feeling about his own impediment, to which he bravely adopts the 'blessing-in-disguise' attitude- it has saved him, he says, from many unwanted public engagements. But not from all- 'It happens when I feel myself in a false position. My worst recent public collapse, that I can bear to remember, came at a May meeting of the august American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, when I tried to read a number of award citations- hefty and bloated, as citations tend to be- that I had not written. I could scarcely push and batter my way through the politic words, and a woman in the audience loudly laughed, as if I were doing 'an act'.
This incident might seem to endorse Anna Wulf's 'Bad Faith' self- interpretation, but Updike also offers apparently contradictory interpretations- he says that fear, even of al electrician on the telephone, activates the defect in his speech, but that anger tends to cancel it. He says 'some hasty wish to please' often betrays his flow of speech- yet claims that his speech eases 'when I feel I am already somewhat known and forgiven.' 'I stutter', he says, 'when I am "in the wrong"'- but he puts the phrase "in the wrong" in inverted commas. Conclusively, he claims that 'The paralysis of stuttering stems from the dead center of one's being, a deep doubt there.'
Fear, bad faith, doubt, a sense of social inferiority? All these he suggests as possible interpretations.
Billy Budd was killed not by insincerity or uncertainty but by a fatal inborn hesitation, followed by a fatal impulse.
Speaking for myself, on a more frivolous level, I know that my broadcasting and lecturing style, if not my prose style, has been curiously affected by my choice of vocabulary. Like most stammerers, I know that there are some words with which I am almost certain to have difficulty. On innumerable occasions I have substituted the phrase 'US' for 'America' or 'TV' for 'television'. This is clumsy and inelegant, but not disastrous. More problematic is the need to say 'lady' instead of 'woman'- this understandably causes offence and lands one in a pit of political incorrectness. Then there is the problem, when broadcasting- to confess to one's producer, or not to confess? To conceal and to remain in denial, or to tell all in advance? When doing Desert Island Discs recently, Sue Lawley was trying to corner me into saying that I had been introduced listening to my chosen Brahms serenade while in Venice, as she knew perfectly well from her researcher's notes that I had, but I simply couldn't get that beautiful word out. Circumlocution followed circumlocution-' in Italy, by the canal, in the home of the Doges, in the Bruges of the South, in Toni Ballerin's great aunt's flat'- these substitute phrases all sprang to mind and to my lips- and of course in reality it didn't matter what a mess I made of the word, because the BBC can always edit the tape, cut off the hesitations and stumblings, and make it sound fine. As the BBC could have done, now, on most occasions, for George the Sixth. (Though there is a moral dilemma here- is it right to adjust and mechanically to perfect one's defective speech? Is it an act of denial, an act of betrayal? Is it worse than airbrushing out one's wrinkles?)
Henry James was a master of circumlocution and elaboration and paraphrase. Did his baroque speech infect his prose, or was it the other way round? I don't know the answer to that.
Live speaking on or off the air is different from broadcasting from a studio with a technical safety net. One might assume, from what I have been saying, that people like myself should avoid live public speech at all costs- but this brings me to one of the most surprising aspects of this whole tangled speech business. And this is the fact that many people who stammer seem actively drawn to public speech, and some of them are very good at it. When I first started planning this lecture, many months ago, I think I was going to try to take a self-pitying line, so that you would all feel sorry for me and let me go- 'how long have I struggled, and how bravely', this would have been my line. But last summer I met someone who undermined the possibility of this feeble approach. In June, I taught for two weeks on the island of Skyros, in a holistic health and holiday centre established twenty years ago by Dina Glouberman, whom I met there for the first time. Dina also stammers, and had clearly, as a therapist, thought deeply about the issue. In July, she sent me an email full of interesting suggestions, which contained this key passage: 'Stammerers tend to have high expectations and do jobs that require them to speak in public, which you would have thought they'd have avoided- also they tend to have a strong Hurry Up driver inside .I remember a description of a stammerer driving, and getting nervous about the person in the back and wanting to go faster, and so getting in a mess and finally causing an accident.'
Yes, I thought, yes. Dina Glouberman is right. We are not all passive victims who have public speaking thrust upon us by a maniacally fluent Angus Wilson hero figure- some of us actively and somewhat perversely seek situations which we know will create difficulties for us. There are some powerful illustrations of this. Hilary Mantel, in her fine novel of the French revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, gives an impressive portrait of the journalist, orator and demagogue, Camille Desmoulins, who, according to her suggestion, may have needed to reach a certain pitch of excitement before he became fluent. His handicap spurred him on- to his death, you could argue. In this passage, Danton reflects on his friend Camille's speech pattern; 'In the old days, [Camille] claimed that his stutter was a complete obstacle to successful pleading. Of course, when one is used to it, it might discomfit, irritate or embarrass. But Hérault has pointed out that Camille has wrung some extraordinary verdicts from distraught judges. Certainly I have observed that Camille's stutter comes and goes. It goes when he is angry or wishes forcibly to make a point; it comes when he feels put upon, and when he wishes to show people that he is in fact a nice person who is really not quite able to cope...''(p.402) And here is Camille himself, at the Jacobins: 'When the time come he will make his way slowly towards the tribune, because patriots will step out of their places to embrace him, and from the dark parts of the gallery where the sansculottes gather there will be applause and coarse shouts of encouragement. Then silence; and as he begins, thinking carefully ahead so that he can control any tendency to stutter, so that he can circumvent words and pluck them out and slot in others, he will be thinking, no wonder this business is such a bloody mess, no one ever knows what anyone else is saying. No one knew at Versailles; no one knows now; when we are dead and a few years have passed they will grow tired of trying to hear us, they will say, what does it matter? We have elected our own place in the silences of history, with out weak lungs and our speech impediments and our rooms that were designed for something else.' (p.651-2) Nearer home, and less dramatically, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, (who could not pronounce the word 'Mother', her own mother having died when she was thirteen), nevertheless loved the telephone, which many stammerers avoid, and enjoyed lecturing for the British Council and the BBC on milder subjects such as landscape and literature. The British Council in an internal memo (1950) described her as 'a most successful lecturer with a most successful stammer' 'not at all disturbing …endearing rather than distracting' (V. Glendinning, 1977). Those were gentle days.
A more energetic example of wilful speaking may be found in the form of Jonathan Miller, one of the best, most fluent, wittiest and most sought after public speakers of our time. He is a dazzling performer, after the Cambridge manner- he tends to end each lecture not with a conclusion but with a query or even with an unfinished sentence, as Dr Leavis used to do. His technique is superb, but how much of his eloquence springs from avoidance? When a bad word looms, find twenty other better ones to take its place- that seems to be his highly successful solution. Yet even he can get into difficulties. He admits to being forced on occasion to omit from certain discourses names or titles which would illustrate his point because they begin, inconveniently, with impossible consonants. You can't improvise or substitute a name- or only up to a point. (Jonathan, I might add, is, like me, a co-patron of the British Stammering Association, which is represented here this evening.) Interestingly, Jonathan Miller seems to be much happier with parole than with text- he has published a fair amount of text in his time, but most of it is image or speech related, and his books tend to be heavily illustrated. My final example of a writer who at least initially sought an apparently unsuitable occupation is that of Mrs Elizabeth Inchbald, novelist, playwright, translator, adapter and editor of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. She wanted to be an actress, and clearly had talent as well as beauty, but some kind of rather vaguely documented speech impediment (as well as some amorous complications) checked her professional advancement, and she took, instead, to a highly successful career as a lady of letters. Her good-natured comedies, in which the foolishly generous tend to redeem the mean, show a sweetness of spirit, and her novels are still in print and still readable. But what was it that drew her, in the first place, to the stage? Was it her beauty? Was it her wit? Was it simply a passionate desire to get out of Stanningfield in Suffolk, and to escape from the restrictions of her life as one of the many children of a farmer? She was something of an adventurer, before she settled down to a life of hard working and respectable author: she would make a good subject for a historical novelist.
And what made her stammer in the first place? What makes anyone stammer? Left-handedness falsely corrected, overweening ambition, muddled brain hemispheres, stress, or a weakness in the speech production mechanism? I repeat, nobody knows. Stammering has reasonably been called 'the most complex disorganisation of functioning in the field of medicine and psychiatry'. When I asked an analyst for suggestions as to causes, she said that maybe it was a way of drawing attention to myself and to what I had to say. Oh yes, came my immediate (though silent) angry reaction- like a club foot, or a hare lip, or an unsightly birthmark are ways of drawing attention to one's appearance? The last thing a stammerer wants to do is to stammer, and Somerset Maugham quite legitimately, in Of Human Bondage, handicapped his hero Philip with a clubfoot instead of a stammer. (Though it has to be said that clubfeet are more romantic and Byronic than speech impediments.)
On cooler reflection, however, I very reluctantly concede that this analyst may have had some kind of a point. A stammer is not a physical disability, nor even a motor disfunction, and that is that. All those cruel experiments with vocal cords and the slitting of tongues and the binding of left hands were a total waste of time. The nice elocution lessons I went to as a child in Sheffield were largely a waste of time, though I did learn some good poetry through them. The problem - and it is a problem, not a blessing in disguise, for most of us- remains a mystery. Maybe there is, in some of us, a deep confusion between the need for attention, and the means of obtaining it. A birthmark is a physical accident, and we carry it from birth, and from before birth. But speech is learned, and we do not stammer in the womb.
I have mentioned the British Stammering Association, which campaigns to improve awareness of speech difficulties in schools and in the work place, and would like to conclude by drawing our attention to the current expectations of fluency in the National Curriculum- expectations which, if articulated, would certainly have made life even more taxing for a child like myself. Of course it is desirable for children to be able to express themselves with confidence and fluency, but, for some, this is simply not a realisable goal. Those who place 'an unthinking emphasis on oracy'- I borrow that phrase from Cherry Hughes, the Education Officer of the BSA- simply do not know and cannot imagine what it is like to open your mouth, and not to know what, if any, sound will issue forth. One may long to be able to speak fluently- one may even long to be asked to read aloud in class- but one may not be able to do it. There are many horror stories of children in school being bullied not by fellow pupils only, but by teachers- 'pull yourself together, speak clearly, don't mumble' are not very helpful injunctions to a small child, and they would not have been very helpful to the adult George the Sixth. Children suffer torments through their disability, and employ immense ingenuity in trying to outwit themselves. Some speak better standing, some sitting: some are more fluent if they slow down, whereas others need to get a running jump at words they dislike. Some achieve a measure of security by rehearsing endlessly, others are better if taken by surprise by words on the page. Some substitute, some avoid, some deny, some improvise. All would be daunted the Key Stage Three speaking requirements of the National Curriculum, which are listed thus:
The teacher should ensure that pupils can speak fluently and appropriately in different contexts, adapting their talk for a range of purposes and audiences, including the more formal. To this end, pupils should be taught to
A. structure their talk clearly, using markers so that their listeners can follow the line of thought
B. use illustrations, evidence and anecdote to enrich and explain their ideas
C. use gesture, tone, pace and rhetorical devices for emphasis
D. use visual aids and images to enhance communication
E. vary word choices, including technical vocabulary, and sentence structure for different audiences
F. use spoken standard English fluently in different contexts
G. evaluate the effectiveness of their speech and consider how to adapt it to a range of situations.
And all this, one is meant to achieve by the age of fourteen.
This speaking by numbers or letters would have been beyond me then, and is beyond me now. I have been struggling for more than forty years to express myself, and I am secretly hoping that this public declaration of public silence will unlock my throat, so that, at least in private, I will be safe at last- but if it doesn't, who cares? I have nothing to lose. Never again will I have to worry about lecture titles, or interactive sound systems, or microphones, or missing aeroplanes, or missing audiences, or the lack of visual aids or literary jokes to enhance my argument.
I intend to end this lecture with a quotation- with a striking, portentous, pretentious, and somewhat mystifying quotation from Nietzsche. It is always a good idea to know how to end a lecture- unless, of course, one is Jonathan Miller. And a quotation makes a good ending. One of the ironies of my speaking life is that I actually speak better- as did Angus Wilson- from notes, without a text, but as I have grown older, the anxiety of doing this has increased, and has made me speak worse. Hence this text, and this concluding quotation.
I found this quotation in a very good little book from the BSA library, by the prolific writer David Compton, who says his attention was directed to it by a friend in Devon. I hand it on, in turn. (Stammering: Its Nature, History, Causes and Cures. 1993) Compton says that although Nietzsche presents this episode as a riddle- it seems to have been associated with the death of his father- any stammerer will know what he means by it. Here it is. It is from Thus Spake Zarathustra, in the translation by Alexander Tille:
And verily, the sight I saw, its like I had never seen. I saw a young Shepherd, writhing, choking, quivering, with face distorted, from whose mouth a black and heavy snake hung down. Saw I ever so much loathing and wan horror in one face? My hand tore at the serpent and tore- in vain! I could not tear the serpent from his throat. Then a voice within me cried: Bite! Bite! Bite off its head! Bite!- thus cried the voice of my horror, my hate, my loathing, my pity, all the good and evil in me cried out.Â… The Shepherd bit, as my cry counselled him: he bit with all his strength! He spat the snake's head far from him- then sprang up, no longer a shepherd, no longer a man, but one transfigured, light-encompassed, one that laughed!
Copyright Margaret Drabble, October 2001