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February 27, 2006
TT: Reassurance
As I prepare for a follow-up visit to my cardiologist tomorrow, I find in my mailbox this message from a reader:Cheer up! There's an obituary in today's Los Angeles Times for a woman who died of congestive heart failure--at the age of 115!
Born on September 13, 1890 in Mississippi; married for 72 (!) years (1922-1994); never hospitalized in her life until she was 106 (gallstones); could still read the newspaper and sign her name at 114; survived by her 96-year-old son.
Let's see: Hilary Hahn will be 27 this year. So, if you live to be 115, you could review a concert of hers in 2071--when she's 91!
(Of course, there's several "ifs" included in that last sentence.)
Er, there sure are. And of course I'm anxious to hear what the doctor says--how could I not be? Nevertheless, I'm feeling pretty optimistic, not least because I've now lost thirty-one pounds since congestive heart failure sent me to the hospital a little more than two months ago, and have also changed my life in countless other beneficial ways.
All of which reminds me that I never cease to be amazed by the long list of important people born well over a century ago who lived long enough to have their voices recorded for posterity. (Yes, I know where I'm going with this--wait for it.) A few of these recordings have been released on CD in recent years, and these are three of the best collections currently in print:
- About a Hundred Years: A History of Sound Recording (Symposium) contains spoken-word and musical recordings by Sarah Bernhardt, Johannes Brahms, Winston Churchill, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Edison, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Joachim, Scott Joplin, Lenin, John Philip Sousa, and Leo Tolstoy, plus a battlefield recording of a World War I gas bombardment made in 1918.
- Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath (Sourcebooks, three CDs and an accompanying book) contains recordings by forty-two poets, including Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and W.B. Yeats.
- In Their Own Voices: The U.S. Presidential Elections of 1908 and 1912 (Marston Records, two CDs) contains recordings by William Jennings Bryan, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.
Alas, precious few record companies have thought it worth their while to transfer historic spoken-word recordings to CD--which is where the Web comes in. The BBC, for instance, has a page on its Web site containing links to interviews from its vast archives to which anyone can listen via streaming audio. The selection is spotty, even erratic, but it does include a handful of celebrated figures of the relatively distant past, including Yeats, Gandhi, Le Corbusier, Noël Coward, Walter Gropius, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Speer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf.
For the rest, you have to go searching for yourself, and it takes patience. Most of the time you'll come up empty-handed, but every once in a while you hit the jackpot, as I did on Friday. For once I had a free evening--no plays, no concerts, nothing but an early dinner with a friend. I decided to spend part of my night off trolling the Web for sonic curiosities, and I found two spectacular ones.
The first was a 1923 recording by Rudyard Kipling. He's reading an excerpt from a poem called "France," and though the poem itself is an occasional piece of no great interest, I was struck by how cultivated his voice sounded. I suppose I must have been expecting something more closely suited to the plebeian cadences of "Danny Deever."
Even more astonishing, though, was an aircheck of the brief speech Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., gave at the end of a radio tribute broadcast live by CBS on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. Holmes was still sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1931--he retired the following year--and so far as I know, this was the one and only time he went before a microphone.
Justice Holmes was the most eloquent jurist this country has yet produced, and it goes without saying that he rose to the near-final occasion (he died in 1935) with infinite grace:
In this symposium my part is only to sit in silence. To express one's feelings as the end draws nigh is too intimate a task.
But I may mention one thought that comes to me as a listener-in. The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and to say to oneself: "The work is done."
But just as one says that, the answer comes: "The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains."
The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is to living.
And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago:
"Death plucks my ear and says, Live--I am coming."
G. Edmund White describes the broadcast in detail in the first chapter of his new brief life of Holmes:
The old man sat in his favorite chair in his study. He had a shock of white hair, a long white mustache that flared up at the ends, and piercing eyes that gave him a fierce expression. The year was 1931, and most men favored collars with the ends folded down, but he wore an old-fashioned type with the ends turned up and the tie visible, wrapped around his neck. He also wore an outmoded long coat with a vest. He had gotten dressed up to speak on the radio....
Then he quotes from the first-person account of Harold Laski, a friend whom Holmes had invited to watch him speak that night:
As I looked at him, his eyes seemed far away, and the swift realization that I was watching the face of a very old man, very greatly moved, kept me silent....I saw a new light come into those blue-gray eyes, and then a gay smile that played over all his features. The words he spoke as that smile met the flash of those vivid eyes are as living today in my ears as they were almost seventeen years ago. "When I came back from the Civil War," Holmes said, "my father asked me what I was going to do, and I told him I was going to the Harvard Law School. ‘Pooh!' said my father. ‘What's the use of going to the Harvard Law School? A lawyer cannot be a great man.'" Then there came into his voice an almost wistful tenderness. "I wish," he continued, "that my father could have listened tonight for ony two or three minutes. Then I could have thumbed my nose at him."
Merely to read what Holmes said on that long-ago night is to be stirred to the core. But to actually hear the broadcast--to hear the tremulous yet unexpectedly firm voice of a man who fought in the Civil War, then spent the best part of three decades sitting on the Supreme Court--is an experience of another order altogether. I can't describe it better than I did in the review of About a Hundred Years that I wrote for Fi in 1997:
To hear these ancient records, flawed though they are, is an intensely moving experience. The battered shellac sputters and crackles angrily, and you wonder for a moment what all the fuss could possibly be about--but then the curtain parts and the nineteenth century comes into view for a minute or two, sometimes through a glass darkly, sometimes with the near-hallucinatory sharpness of a Mathew Brady photograph.
How miraculous that such brief glimpses of the fast-receding past have survived into the unsure present--and how wonderful that the Web is now putting them at our fingertips. And how good it is, now that death has plucked my own ear, to be reminded by the electronic ghost of a very great man that the only possible answer to death is life, lived to the hilt.
I'm working on it.
Posted February 27, 2006 12:00 PM
