Stalling at the starting line

Seven per cent of zebra finches stutter. So did Moses, Demosthen- es, Aesop, Churchill, Darwin, Nietzsche, André Malraux, Marilyn Monroe, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Charles I, George VI, and Lewis Carrroll. So do Margaret Drabble and Marc Shell, the author of this comprehensive, learned, even playful book. And so, declaring an interest, do I. Many stutterers are left-handed, they don’t stutter when they sing (although Monroe pretended to), make love, or, usually, when they speak another language (I do in Chinese). Stutterers try to disguise their handicaps, hemming and hawing like James, speaking slowly and thickly like Darwin. Some speak extra fast. Some are often silent, others gabble away. As with death, non-stutterers rarely mention stuttering to stutterers. Few stutterers are women. There are 50 million stutterers worldwide, three per cent of all children and one per cent of adults. Stutterers often see a difficult word or sound looming and sideslip to a tactically different one; this doesn’t always work, although it’s useful to have a big vocabulary. There are heaps of theories about why people stutter and there have been many ‘cures’, including tongue-slicing and, in my school, slipping your hand into your trouser pocket and writing the damnable word on your leg with your finger. Many of them, us, wonder whether we are basically just stutterers or people who stutter.

The creator of this Aladdin’s cave of stuttering, Marc Shell, professor of comparative literature at Harvard, appears on the cover of his book, a vulnerable little boy wearing a cowboy outfit and recovering from polio. He says near the end, ‘What is all but unique about the stutterer’s world is the individual loneliness and non-communal aspects of his contingent, unpredictable and anxiety-producing inability to talk fluently.’ He points out that unlike another group with a communication handicap, the deaf, stutterers do not have a language of their own.