For That Matter, "Hurtle"

Is a Good-Sounding Word

Do you ever relish reading just purely for the sound?

I don’t mean only evocative of sound. James Joyce’s description of his wife Nora Barnacle’s farts, as “Quick little merry cracks,” is certainly onomatopoeic, but with that merry in there (welcome as it does arrive), the passage (so to speak) is more marital romance than pure audio-love.

When you read about some occasions, they make you long to have been there to hear the voices. Welsh, for instance, and organically histrionic, and then edged, in this story from Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, by Donald Hall:

“When Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Smith College, they visited the [Archibald] MacLeishes’ Uphill Farm for a weekend; Burton’s brother, whose name was Jenkins, accompanied them, and the two Welshmen recited poems they knew by heart. Learning that MacLeish was unaware of the poems of R. S. Thomas, the brothers outdid each other reciting lyrics by the contemporary Welsh parson. Then Burton and Jenkins quarreled over Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan.’ Jenkins said it was a bad poem: disgusting, awful. Burton praised it: magnificent, superb. Jenkins repeated that it was nothing at all, whereupon Burton commanded silence and spoke the whole poem, perfect from first syllable to last. MacLeish told me that Burton’s recitation was a great performance, and when he ended, drawing the last syllable out, the still air shook with the memory and mystery of his speaking. Then, into the silence, brother Jenkins spoke his word of critical reason: ‘See?‘”