The patrician American voice: poets and others
I recently read Savage Beauty, a biography of American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. There are several passages in the book that describe the power of Millay’s voice and its remarkable ability to transfix and even seduce (in Millay’s case, the word was not an exaggeration) by the force of her public readings. That made me wonder whether YouTube (ah, magical YouTube!) has samples of her reciting her poetry—and sure enough, it does.
But I was surprised when I listened. Millay became famous during the early part of the 20th century, and fashions in voices seem to have changed since then. And if you don’t think there are fashions in voices, just listen for yourself:
One surprise was that it does not sound at all like the voice of a petite person, although Millay was very small and slender. There was also something vaguely British in her voice, something I’ve heard in other Americans of the time such as, for example, FDR and Eleanor, something that modern listeners hear as an affectation but that might have been more common then, especially among the upper classes and those who hobnobbed with them (Millay was well-educated at uppity Vassar, but she had a hardscrabble family past in Camden, Maine).
Here’s Eleanor Roosevelt, with that slight touch of Britain similar to Millay’s, but a higher pitch:
And finally there’s my guy Frost. A bit older than Millay, he sounds more modern to my ear, although there’s still an infinitesimal smidgen of that British quality, especially at the end when he gets to reciting a fragment of a poem. Like Millay, Frost was a New Englander (from the age of eleven, anyway). In Frost’s speech—and the quality of his humor—you can hear something close to a voice that still exists in rural New England today:
It’s not difficult to see why Frost was exceptionally popular on the lecture circuit.
As for Millay, her voice seemed merely odd when I first listened to it. But in preparing for this post I listened to the clip a few times, and after a while I found a change coming over me. On about the fifth go-round Millay’s voice seemed to take on an archaic power and I shivered listening to it, as though it were a declamation from some ancient sybil speaking to us across a divide of thousands of years.
[NOTE: This Levi’s commercial uses what is apparently the only recording of the poet Walt Whitman, reading a few lines from his poem “America.” He sounds remarkably contemporary, does he not?]
In a famous Nichols and May sketch, a Marilyn Monroe type starlet is playing Gertrude Stein in a movie. Her interviewer is confused, “I thought they had cast Spencer Tracy!” Gertrude Stein may have looked like Tracy, but, according to my brother, she sounded more like Margaret Dumont.
You be the judge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJEIAGULmPQ
Peter, thanks for the video. Even a poetry-hater like myself- the result of English teachers who wanted to turn students into junior literary critics- delighted in the rhythm and word play of that poem. Apparently poetry is meant to be heard, not listened, which hearkens back to its pre-literate roots.
Apparently the British accent schtick to sound wordly and intelligent is still in vogue among Americans with a flair for snobbishness. I think Madonna sometimes can’t help herself. One of the more humorous examples had to be John Walker Lindh from Maryland using it in tv interviews after capture by the Taliban.
So do the British try to sound like Tom Brokaw when they pull the same trick? Hmmm
Dang…why don’t y’all wanna sound lak us Texans??
I noticed this too when someone came up with an audio from Oliver Wendell Holmes a year ago –
I couldn’t believe how… British he sounded. Then I went on youtube and caught an audio of Woodrow Wilson speaking… I can’t remember if it sounded Scottish or Irish, but it was damn thick.
There’s something cool about this, though, because it’s like you can hear the old roots of the immigrants who brought us all here from the Old World lingering in their accents. It has this mongrel quality to it as well that sounds both aesthetically rough and gritty, literally as though the accents were forged or constructed from a hodgepodge.
Elizabeathan English! Still present in the New England hinterlands. Knock around Maine espicially and you’ll hear it. Travel in Central Asia and you’ll hear it too, as many of the English language teachers are from Britain. Lindh had no idea who he was. But many of his Talb cohorts learned the Kings English from British school masters. The accent sticks to you like the anceint dust of Mazar-e-Sharief. Millay, Frost and Whitman; poets unafraid of the greasy, bloody, brilliant strength of America. Thanks for sharing the reminder Neo!
Seems like i recall reading how the British sounded more American during the colonial days. More a story of them that having changed their dialect rather than us.
> [NOTE: This Levi’s commercial uses what is apparently the only recording of the poet Walt Whitman, reading a few lines from his poem “America.” He sounds remarkably contemporary, does he not?]
He wrote to us, too, with a cautionary:
“There is no week, nor day, nor hour, when tyranny may not enter upon this
country, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves – and lose
their roughness and spirit of defiance.”
– Walt Whitman –
This is at the heart of postmodern liberalism — to destroy that spirit of defiance. It comes in the Mommy State, the Multiculti “everything is equal except AngloSaxon culture and freedom and individuality”…
The “national malaise” that Carter spoke of and had no answer for (but Reagan did!)… It lurks just around the corner in every generation.
Kolnai, here is an audio of Woodrow Wilson. It definitely doesn’t sound like his native Virginia. The difference I see between his accent and contemporary accents is that his is more staccato. Otherwise, it sounds to me like fairly mainstream NE.
Well, y’all have to hear this: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Edison wax cylinder, 1890. (Expand the view below the window; the poem is posted in full.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOga1LxgdEw&feature=related
It raises the hair on the back of your neck. We don’t do the grand, declamatory style anymore, but this poem demands it. Like Neo said, it’s an echo of a more ancient time.
As far as the British accents go, well, we were a colony of England originally, so it’s only natural that traces would linger in our speech. My own niece, who was reared largely in Cleveland and Albuquerque (Air Force brat) remarked that our family sounds “more English than Southern”: she associates “Southern” with “redneck,” alas. But we don’t think of ourselves as sounding English, so it’s interesting that she would pick up on that trace element. (Haute bourgeoisie, here….) IOW, it’s not an affectation, at least not for us WASPs.
Putting aside her affectation of a faint British accent, I found Edna St. Vincent Millay’s voice thrilling.
Of course she’s reading her own poetry in an incantatory spirit, but it’s wonderful to hear a woman use her whole voice.
Speaking of fashions in voices, have you all noticed what has happened to young womens’ voices in recent years? They’re all talking in a false high register, and quacking! I guess this is partly a holdover from the Valley Girl era, but that was a long time ago. Why are women talking in this almost parodically hyper-feminine way after 40 years of feminism? Is it some kind of unconscious backlash?
You’ll hear traces of this in the women lead characters in many movies from the beginning of talkies into the Fifties. Ditto some of the voiceovers from old documentaries. I figured the movie stars had to be taught it, to fake some sort of class, subliminally caught by the viewers.
Seemed to hint at a not-quite-mapable place between Boston, New York, and Philadelphia where the people had money and breeding. The women wore white gloves and could smoke elegantly, walk and sit with great posture, wore hats with veils and, in one way or another were WAY above the common folks.
One of the best places in the USA to hear a bit of the old strains of english and scottish is in Appalachia; especially eastern KY & TN and western areas of WVA, VA, & NC. Most of the people there come from generations of families that moved into those areas in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Many are still relatively isolated today (except for what TV signals can reach them in the “hills and hollers”).
If you’ve ever been to the UK you will discover that what we tend to think of as the english accent is actually that of the upper, more educated classes. Try understanding a cockney cab driver. 🙂
mizpants Says:
February 7th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
I know exactly what you mean. And it seemed to happen suddenly, since the 1980s. To me it sounds like their voices are all choked up in their throats, rather than coming from the diaphragm.
The Frank/Moon Unit Zappa song “Valley Girl” was a big hit in the mid-80s, but it was making fun of spoiled, shallow teenagers in southern California. It was never intended to be a role model! Yet somehow, today it seems that most young girls and even adult women talk that way, wherever they come from.
To me it doesn’t sound hyper-feminine, but rather adolescent. It’s OK for a 15 year old girl to sound like that, but not an adult woman.
There is the rising intonation at the end of a declarative sentence. The lenghtening of certain vowels. “Fast” becomes “faaaaahst”, and “desk” “dusk”.
And words like “that” no longer end in a dental, nor even a glottal stop, but simply run out. “thaaa…”.
Most of those are in younger women.
What makes grownups of both sexes seem childish and nasal is the substitution of “een” for “ing”.
“huntin'” is an acceptable form of “hunting”. But “hunteen” is not. Unfortunately, it’s ubiquitous.
My goodness, the clip of Mrs. Roosevelt reminds me of Queen Elizabeth’s annual address to her subjects… although Mrs. R smiles a lot more.
Come to think of it, on Friday night I traveled to a meeting of a Tea Party group about 50 miles away, because Oleg Atbashian (“Comrade Red Square”) of The People’s Cube was the guest speaker.
Still, it was the monthly business meeting of the group, so there was the usual parliamentary stuff. The treasurer gave her report. She was about fortyish, small, slender, and kind of nerdy looking. I was kind of taken aback by her powerful, confident voice. I didn’t find her visually attractive, but her voice was a pleasant surprise.
I wonder if what you are hearing in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s voice is an early form of the dialect referred to as American Theater Standard or (perhaps more accurately) Mid Atlantic English (or Boarding School English, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_English). This form of somewhat-British somewhat-American English was a deliberate construction that was popular in the 30’s and 40’s among actors and many of the “upper crust” Americans of the time. Edna St. Vincent Millay seems a little early to have been schooled in what is traditionally called Mid-Atlantic English… but maybe she was exposed to an early form of it? Given the timing of the recordings you embedded, Eleanor Roosevelt and Frost were much more likely to have been taught (or adopted) Mid Atlantic (as Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, et. al. were).
clay.
I thought so. Was this completely an artifact, or was there actually someplace where many of the adults talked like this, even when you woke them from a sound sleep?
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When I was in graduate school (studying English), a friend of mine remarked that far too many of today’s poets read with what she called the “Iowa” lilt, a reference to the University of Iowa writer’s workshop. You can hear it in Jorie Graham reading. Frankly, I find it a rather tedious way of reading. Rita Dove is also an alumna of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and you can hear the Iowa lilt in the readings here from 1987, but her time as poet laureate gave her a lot more exposure and practice presenting her poetry to a wide variety of audiences, and so in this much more recent sample, she is a much more engaging presenter, as well.
Gringo –
I listened to it, and you’re right. It sounds nothing like what I remembered; I must have misremembered Wilson for someone else I listened to.
I could have sworn it was Wilson, but…facts is facts.