The British Library’s ‘Spoken Word’ series, drawing heavily on the BBC archives, has already shown quite a range — from Tennyson’s famously crackly reading of ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ to Scott Fitzgerald declaiming a speech from Othello. Now, it moves on to the short story and, despite the curious decision to include two tales apiece from Somerset Maugham and Algernon Blackwood (none of them especially overwhelming), once again nobody is likely to complain about a lack of variety.
The three discs are kicked off by Maugham’s chatty reading of ‘Salvatore’, a story in praise of a lithe young Italian fisherman. According to the final lines, this is a plucky attempt to hold our attention with a portrait of simple goodness. More sceptical readers might recall the aphorism quoted by P. J. O’Rourke about the Kennedys: ‘It’s always tempting to impute/ Unlikely virtues to the cute.’
Next comes Frank O’Connor’s wonderfully funny ‘The Idealist’, where an Irish boy tries to put into practice the lessons he’s learned from English public-school stories. Needless to say, his efforts end in failure, but both the Irish and English are beautifully skewered along the way. Third is Phyllis Bentley with ‘Beckermonds’, the first of several ghost stories on offer — but also the creakiest. While it’s always interesting to hear from largely forgotten writers (one of the main attractions, after all, of an anthology like this) the neglect of Bentley doesn’t feel like a terrible injustice.
From there, the mix of well-known and more obscure writers continues — and so, on the whole, does the sense that the well-known are better. Disc One ends on a high note, with V. S. Pritchett’s ‘The Fly in the Ointment’, a superbly awkward picture of a grown-up son and his still-domineering father.
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