Courtesy of Amazon
Last week I listened to the audiobook of Jill Lepore’s This America: The Case for the Nation, which was read by the author. I tweeted about this less than enjoyable experience, writing “Am listening to the audiobook version of Jill Lepore’s This America: The Case for the Nation. It should be a lesson to historians: don’t read your own books. She both mispronounces many names and uses a glib voice for a lot of her quotations. She and the book are undermined.”
The tweet received quite a bit of pushback, notably from two distinguished historians who have read their own audiobooks—Keri Leigh Merritt and Joanne Freeman. A number of other responses pointed to the pervasive bias among listeners against women’s voices, a bias that technology design contributes to, unfortunately.[1] I certainly should have been cognizant of how my comment fit into that pattern of bias, and how my words could be read as a gesture of annoyance at having to listen to a woman reading her own book (the gall!).
I bring this up not to try to let myself off the hook for that lapse of judgment, but because I think the question of whether historians should read their own book raises some interesting questions about how we think about authorship, and about how we see ourselves as authors.
One issue that came up in many responses praising author-read audiobooks was the added authenticity. The author who wrote the words would know best, they argued, how to inflect them; even more, their performance would allow for a closer connection between the listener/reader and the author’s intentions. (There is also the important issue of compensation—reading one’s own book, as Merritt pointed out, means that a much larger share of the revenue from audiobook sales goes to the person who wrote the book.)
Finally, there is, I would say, a powerful urge on the part of some readers to feel a kind of intimacy with the author, an intimacy or sense of connection which is possible either through the printed page or through a live reading (such as at a book tour event). The audiobook experience only can replicate that connection if the listener feels that they “know” the performer, if they can visualize the performer and get a sense of their own personality. Because most professional audiobook readers are not well known, it is quite understandable that such a listener would feel a sense of alienation—not knowing anything about the performer, they would find it difficult to visualize them, or to get a sense of how they are reading the text.
I have to say that I am not the kind of person attracted to live readings; honestly, I prefer the sterility of cold print to any other reading experience. So that preference no doubt shapes my aversive reaction to the question of whether historians should read their own work. However, because I do listen to a lot of audiobooks (doing housework and walking to campus are where I try to fit them in), I have listened to author-read audiobooks and enjoyed them. Sarah Smarsh read her own memoir Heartland, and I thought it was absolutely perfect; I switched back and forth between the audiobook and my printed copy, but greatly preferred to hear her performance.
I think, however, that memoirs and histories are different. While I was far too absolute in my tweet (I didn’t actually expect anyone to think I was an authority), I would say that there are some reasons specific to historians that should cause them to think carefully about whether they want to commit their voice to tape.
The reasons I found Lepore’s reading deficient are also more general snares for the historian. Lepore mispronounced a number of names—including of living historians[2]—and I do not think that is actually a minor issue. In his review of Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States, Richard White noted that Lepore frequently made small—and perhaps individually trivial—errors of fact. “Mistakes in a work of this scale are inevitable,” he writes, “but in a book intent on examining why the United States has evolved as it has, the Gilded Age mistakes seem particularly cavalier. They are the result of uncharacteristically sloppy writing and inattention.”
There is, as I think we have noted at the blog before, a kind of class politics to the correct pronunciation of proper names and ten-cent words, and I want to be clear that I am not singling out these pronunciation errors as a way to look down at Lepore for some kind of provinciality. The problem is not, in fact, that I think Lepore has never heard these names said out loud before—the trouble is that I’m sure she has, and that she hasn’t bothered to correct her internal glossary. Cavalier, sloppy, inattentive—it is difficult, therefore, not to extend the same charges to Lepore’s pronunciation errors as White attributes to her slips on the page.
I don’t want to pretend that I always fix my mispronunciations or even that I necessarily can: the French ‘r’ is my bête noire, and I would not want to have a recording extant of my attempting a French surname for love or money. And that is why it may be more prudent for historians to let someone else take not the fall but the burden of pronouncing difficult or unfamiliar names. As an example: I have no doubt that Daniel Immerwahr is a very fluent speaker, but the reader of his audiobook for How to Hide an Empire was Luis Moreno, and given the prevalence of Spanish names in the book, that was a brilliant choice. Moreno’s reading is terrific.
Additionally, it is more likely that if a book has a professional reader rather than the author, the author will be asked to provide a list of pronunciations for difficult words or unfamiliar names. This check will probably cause the historian to look up ones that they do not know—a valuable step that may not be common if the author (who is presumed to know) is also the performer.
Lepore’s reading of quotations highlighted another area where a professional reader probably has an edge over most historians: changing one’s voice to adopt different personae. Lepore actually mimics the voice of Donald Trump surprisingly effectively when she quotes him, but her other attempts at varying her tone from its normal register come off as both hammy and sarcastic, as if she’s doing a Jacob Rees-Mogg voice, but without the accent: plummy and pompous. In some cases, a cutting tone is called for—there are plenty of stuffy pronunciamientos from the eighteenth and nineteenth century included in the text that could use some irony to take the starch out of them. But Lepore uses this tone indiscriminately, even for quotations that her text seems to be building on rather than undercutting. It is her inability to modulate and vary her “acting” voice that seems to me to be problematic: because so many quotes get the snark, her reading just comes off as glib.
Are most historians well-trained in voice work? Probably not. And the alternative isn’t really satisfactory, either—to read quotations in basically the same tone as one’s own expository prose. A monotone is obviously no good. And how many of us have time to really “find” the right voices, or to do take after take until we get something good on tape?
Of course, I should note that this problem—whether to read one’s own audiobook—is a delightful one to have, and the fact that it is one that more historians seem to be facing at the moment is a good sign for the profession. Audiobooks are a powerful way to reach a wider audience, and there are many historians who are working incredibly hard to do just that. That is obviously something worth cheering on and celebrating.
Notes
[1] My thanks to Carole Emberton for pointing to this article.
[2] The example I’m thinking of here is Michael Kazin, whose surname she pronounces KAZZen multiple times.
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Thanks for your post Andy. Quick question: how do you pronounce Kazin? I just realized I’ve never heard it said aloud before and have been pronouncing it as “KAZZen” in my head.
Hi Scott,
Well, KAZZen is a lot more reasonable than the way I first pronounced it (and was corrected by my thesis advisor)–I thought it was pronounced like the French film critic André Bazin.
Here’s Michael Kazin introducing himself, so I guess it must be correct! KAYzin
Three things: on the errors themselves, on the focus on the errors, and on norms and expectations.
On the errors themselves…I’m a big believer in pronouncing people’s names as they wish them to be pronounced.
That said, I’m not so sure that Lepore saying “KAZZin” instead of “KAYzin” rises to the level of even a minor scandal, or that mispronunciations in general are anything to get too excited about. (I say that as someone whose last name is CONTINUOUSLY mispronounced by Texans, even after I say, “Like Carol Burnett,” because there’s a Burnet county in Texas that is pronounced BURN-it.)
I saw some of the replies to your tweet when the conversation was unfolding, and if I recall correctly, one or more of the respondents pointed out that even when they gave professional readers a pronunciation guide for names/words in their manuscript, some of those words were still mispronounced.
So perhaps it would be fair to conclude that, unless you and your producer catch every error AND are willing to re-read whole paragraphs multiple times for the sake of a single word, a mistake here and there will slip through, whether you are a professional voice actor or an author reading your own prose.
I don’t listen to audiobooks (or podcasts, for that matter), but my guess is that mispronunciations are like typos. You don’t want any of them, but there are bound to be a few.
As to Lepore’s lack of range as a voice actor — I can well believe it. Where is the Renaissance Woman or Man among us who can do it all with equal panache? But at this point in my academic career I have heard innumerable professional historians read innumerable papers at innumerable conferences, and I would give my eye teeth to hear the occasional presenter even try to alter their voice to indicate that they were reading someone else’s words, rather than saying “quote” at the beginning of a quoted passage and “end quote” at the end. I mean, I am no June Foray, but I do aim to give a sense of voices other than my own speaking from the page, and I wish more people would take a crack at it. However, I think people — or perhaps just historians — would rather be thought boring than thought foolish. Having no tweedy dignity to lose in the first place, I’m happy to give it a shot.
On the focus on the errors…
Only those who know better in every instance will catch every instance. That may mean all professional historians, or it may mean all intellectual historians — but it may just mean a small subset of people familiar with all the references Lepore invokes and/or who know how to say All the Things as they are said in academe.
Well, speaking of Spanish place names, how should you say Amarillo, Texas? Los Banos, California? Hornitos? The latter two are commonly pronounced with the same hayseed gringo imprecision that anglo Texans use for “Amarillo.” (Loss BANnus and WhoreNEETus, if you’re wondering, and that is not how one would say them in Spanish.)
As to everyday pronunciations, presumably Lepore distinguishes “pen” from “pin,” as Easterners tend to do — but millions of Americans (including yours truly) pronounce them exactly alike, and to some people that sounds ignorant, or so I was informed when I went to college. Whatever.
I guess I tend to lean to the descriptive rather than the prescriptive when it comes to pronunciation, because nobody in my life growing up had a vocabulary anywhere near as varied or extensive as the vocabulary I encountered through reading. I picked up so many words from the page that I’ve always pronounced one way in my head, only to hear them spoken a different way. And some of those head-canon pronunciations are never going to go away. I’m always going to have to catch myself so that I don’t say the “b” in “subtle,” and for all that I quote Thomas Haskell, I have no damn idea what to do with the “e” in the middle of “ascetic.” Is it long or short? et or eet? I have looked it up before, and then I always forget it the next time I come across the word and have to say it aloud. Every single time. But I know well enough what it means, and I assume anyone who has encountered the word on the page knows what I’m trying to say.
It may be that there are thousands upon thousands of people who say every word Lepore “mispronounces” exactly as she does. It might sound funny to you, or to me, but it won’t to them. Will someone at Harvard be scandalized by her apparent verbal missteps? Oh well.
I’m just baffled that the big takeaway here from Jill Lepore reading her own work is that her vocal performance undermines her credibility as a historian. Maybe it would to historians who say all the words the right way all the time. Do such people exist anywhere in nature?
But who knows? Maybe the very timbre of Lepore’s voice would send me right up the wall and I’d shut her out entirely. I don’t know — I guess I could just listen to a clip of her reading, but now I’m kind of happy living with the mystery. Maybe her voice is nasal and squawky. Maybe it’s in the higher registers when I’d prefer a mellow contralto or a husky alto. Maybe it sounds too soft, or too loud. Maybe she speaks in that clipped chirpy twittering murmuration of an accent incubated in New England prep schools and country clubs and the Ivy League, an American English of pursed lips and delicate sensibilities and droll people who begin every spoken utterance with “So…” That would drive me up the freakin’ wall for sure. I mean, Elizabeth Warren does that a lot — a lot — but that blessed Oklahoma twang always saves her from sounding glib to my ears, despite all her responses and observations that begin with “So,” a verbal tic that usually sounds supercilious and affected AF to me. But I would not mistake myself for a standard-setter here.
Whatever Jill Lepore’s voice sounds like, the woman writes, more often than not, like an earthward-bound angel whose wings have caught fire. It must be hard to muster a speaking voice to match that style. Apparently she’s not Greer Garson or Joan Plowright or Kathleen Turner (or John Huston, or Boris Karloff, or James Earl Jones, for that matter.) But, honestly? I’m kind of awed that Lepore, who apparently churns out prose like a dynamo, took the trouble to read her own book (even a short book) herself, with whatever studio time / hours in a booth / retakes / hot teas that might entail. Maybe she found it to be a steep learning curve, or gained new insights about writing. Maybe that experience will make her next book all the better.
Or maybe she just thought, If someone is going to give audible voice to my words on the page, it might as well be me.
I am concerned not by incidental mistakes (which everyone makes), but by what Richard White identified in his review as a pattern of haste and sloppiness. I view Lepore’s mispronunciations in that context.
I’m 100 percent on board with LD’s reply. I live in glass houses when it comes to diction, style, and pronunciation. I have some ability, but am aware of its fragility.
I also see, however, why one might, at least, want to consult with a historian (or someone who knows them) about whom you are writing and will explicitly name in an audiobook production. It’s one thing to mispronounce someone’s name in a conference paper, which is draft scholarship, or in front of one’s students, and another to mispronounce their names in a for-profit project. Then again, if it’s your FIRST audiobook, you might not guess how many people will actually listen. You might not know the reach, and the potential for insult or perceived sloppiness.
Otherwise, on acting various parts in our stories, at conferences or otherwise, I’m with LD here: “I think people — or perhaps just historians — would rather be thought boring than thought foolish.” – TL
A minor side point but perhaps not out of place here: Michael Kazin is the son of Alfred Kazin (20th cent literary critic; 1915 – 1998). So if you know how the father’s name was pronounced, you know the son’s. My guess is that Lepore knew this but, as Andy surmised in the post, neglected to correct her internal glossary. (And as Andy also suggested, it only matters if it’s part of a pattern, and I’m not in a good position to judge that.) I do admire anyone who writes as much as Lepore does and engages a broad audience and gets her readers to think, whether they end up agreeing or not.
Criticizing Jill Lepore for her audio reading of her own book is petty, and reflects the bias of many academics for “form” over meaningful communication. I love her reading of “These Rights”, enough to get her audio reading her very short book, “This America,” to again have the pleasure of her reading. Enunciation errors are so minor, compared to the serious communicative value of the author’s own voice reading her own work.