Last week, Warwick University’s Writers at Warwick Audio Archive went live. Containing more than 200 recordings of poets, critics, playwrights, journalists, novelists, academics and musicians reading from, and answering questions about, their work, it represents the digital realisation of over 30 years of collaboration and conversation. Researchers will be able to listen to, say, a 1979 recording of Allen Ginsberg (reading with Peter Orlovsky and Tom Pickard at the young Warwick Arts Centre), or a 1975 recording of Seamus Heaney, a mere ten years into his career.
All but a very small number of the archive recordings can be accessed by anybody free of charge (provided they are used for educational or research purposes only). And more than a few of them will be of particular interest to New Statesman readers. Take the list of “Red Reads: 50 Books That Will Change Your Life” that we compiled over the summer: recordings (in some cases, multiple) of Linton Kwesi Johnson (number 11 on the list), Tony Harrison (number 22) and Jonathan Coe (number 49) reading and in conversation are all available for listening.
Some of their comments are, inevitably, as entertaining as they are illuminating. Here’s Harrison, for example, talking in 1999 about reconciling Greek myth with his own dialect:
You’ll find in Prometheus the central character is an ex-miner, an ex-shop steward, an inveterate smoker who has emphysema but still smokes 70 a day — you’ll find that he speaks Yorkshire all the way through. He has big speeches — becomes identified with the great Promethean hero — but he speaks Yorkshire all the way through. Whereas the representative of the gods, who’s like a Peter Mandelson of Zeus, speaks very RP.
And here’s Coe discussing the extent to which some of the odious Winshaws in his novel What a Carve Up! are based on real-life individuals:
One of my favourite characters — although I hate all of these figures and have them killed off in various unpleasant ways towards the end — one of my favourite characters is the tabloid journalist, whose name is Hilary. People often ask me who she’s based on — it’s very dangerous to give an answer to that question really. There’s no disclaimer at the beginning of this book saying that “all the characters in this book are fictitious” and that “any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental” — but she’s a compound, really, of people who will be familiar to you if, for some perverse reason of your own, you take the Sunday Express or the Sun or something like this. She’s also a novelist, Hilary, because of course no tabloid columnist these days’ career is complete unless they’ve knocked off some novel and sold it for a six-figure sum to some cynical publisher.
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What else will New Statesman readers be especially drawn to? Germaine Greer interviewing her namesake, Griffin-slaying Bonnie, reveals a great deal about a figure not many people were too familiar with before that Question Time (not least Greer’s and Greer’s occasionally slightly sickening admiration for one another and the “great deal” they see themselves as having in common). Potentially most recommendable of all, though, are the performances (and that really is the only way to describe them) of the New Statesman columnist Will Self in 2002 and 2007. Here he is responding to a question about, of all things, the perineum:
Perineum? What, the area between the base of the testicles and the anus? Or between the vagina and the anus of a woman. Aren’t we all fascinated with that? I mean, it’s just that some people don’t know the name for it. And more fool them. It seems to me that — well, you could just as well as saying the “perennial issue” say the “perineum issue” is, well, really at the base of it all. I mean, when Eliot writes, “Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,/Sweeney knows the temperament of women/And wipes the suds around his face,” I think that Eliot is thinking: perineum. I think Alain de Botton, the contemporary popular philosopher, I can never hear his name without thinking: perineum. But that’s just me. Or maybe it isn’t.
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