I have fairly mixed feelings about audiobooks. At their best, unabridged and read by an author who knows about reading aloud (John le Carré springs to mind) they can be distillations of pure magic; a lovely window on the author's intentions. Read badly, or over-read by an out-of-work actor and horribly abridged, they can do a book a great disservice. Obviously, with a tape or a CD, the reader also loses some autonomy: it's much more difficult to skip.
Yet I know that for the blind and the elderly they are a lifeline, as well as providing welcome relief from long, dull car journeys. I remember that before she died Martha Gellhorn, whose eyesight was badly impaired, took real pleasure in the Naxos and Chivers tapes sent her by admirers. Martha used to rail, with some justice, at what she regarded as the treacheries of the abridgers.
But that was in the last century. Nowadays, audiobooks sell and sell, representing a genuine growth area in a difficult market. When I was literary editor of the Observer I always insisted on audiobook reviews because a) we were lucky enough to have Rachel Redford as our reviewer and b) it was only too obvious our readers were grateful for the service.
Recorded poetry is something else. And recorded poetry by an actual poet practised in the art of reading aloud to an audience is something else again, a shared intimacy of rare enchantment. Last week I was sent a little jewel: Philip Larkin reading from The North Ship, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows on a CD entitled The Sunday Sessions.
This rather austere recording (few notes, no introductory comments, not a single aside, even less the rustle of folios) consists of the contents of two tapes recorded by Larkin in Hull in February 1980. It's said that he did these on successive Sundays, after lunch with John Weeks, a colleague at Hull University, and a sound engineer, who set up his equipment in a garage to create a makeshift studio.
The tapes contain poems from all Larkin's best-known collections, and were lost for two decades, apparently lying on a shelf in the garage where they were first recorded.
Some poetry recordings can convey a peculiar, even offputting, impression that lingers powerfully. Yeats, for instance, almost chanting "Innisfree" and Eliot, reading "The Waste Land", almost droning. But this is a golden disc. Larkin is a revelation, almost animated, and decidedly relaxed (after a good lunch, perhaps?) Gone is the middle-aged man in the dirty mac and the pebble glasses. Instead we almost get an ironic boulevardier, parodying the English upper class in "Vers de Société" and mimicking his landlady with saucy precision in "Mr Bleaney".
Yes, the poems are about the loss of youth and innocence, the trials of middle age, and the approach of death (and he doesn't read "This Be the Verse"), but they have a mundane zest and a matter-of-fact clarity of observation that's exhilarating. I love that line from "Trees" about "coming into leaf,/ Like something almost being said". And at the end of "An Arundel Tomb" that haunting, melodic envoi: "What will survive of us is love". The poet delivers that quite coolly, but he must have known it was a zinger.
All in all, there's nothing lugubrious or "Larkinesque" here. He sounds much younger than his nearly 60 years.
Apropos recorded texts, Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, a protégé of Larkin's, has devoted an extraordinary effort to launching the Poetry Archive. Listening to The Sunday Sessions you can see why. How wonderful it would be to have access to the voices of Wordsworth, Byron or Coleridge on tape. But future generations will be able to know the sound of Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Simon Armitage, Paul Muldoon, and no doubt other poets across the English-speaking world, from Tasmania to Toronto.
Whatever we make of it, this media revolution, which includes, tapes, CDs and downloads, is sponsoring a once and future golden age of English literature.
