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OSCAR
FAVOURITE DAY-LEWIS WAXES LYRICAL
 While
Gangs of New York
has divided critics and audiences like few movies in recent cinema,
there’s been virtual unanimity in praise of Day-Lewis’s barnstorming turn
as Bill ‘The Butcher’ Poole, knife-wielding uber-boss of Manhattan’s
blood-spattered mid-19th-century gangland. But though Bill
is happiest carving up opponents and/or slabs of meat, Day-Lewis himself
says he’s “loath to dismember the corpse” by revealing what went into
his work “because it’s part of the illusion.” This illusion seems sufficiently
strong, however, to withstand a little analysis – especially as doing
so sheds light one of world literature’s most remarkable relics.
Summing up
his Oscar predictions in the Chicago Sun-Times last week, America’s
most prominent film critic Roger Ebert mentioned that Day-Lewis had largely
based Bill’s accent on “a wax cylinder recording” of Walt Whitman, the
19th century poet known as ‘America’s Bard’. The Butcher’s
“ominously flat” accent is one of the most memorable aspects of the movie
– especially alongside the inspid and erratically “Leprechaun tones” of
nominal co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz.
“A strange
Noo Yawk accent thick with East River mud,” is how Salon magazine
described it. The New York Daily News suggested that the pathologically
‘nativist’ Bill was semi-consciously attempting to “invent the New York
accent” as a rebuff to the ‘invading’ Oirish hordes. Many observers have
presumed that, given the film’s chronological setting and inevitable absence
of survivors from the period, the accents had to be “made up and guessed
at.” In Day-Lewis’s case, however, this doesn’t seem to be so.
Exact details
remain hazy, but Whitman scholars know Thomas Edison was keen to record
the poet’s voice for posterity on his then-new-fangled ‘phonograph’ device
– other existing cylinders feature the eminent likes of Phineas T Barnum
and Lord Tennyson. And Whitman was always such a relentless self-publicist
(he wrote and circulated glowing, anonymous reviews of his own work) it’s
most unlikely he would have rejected the offer. The recording has been
dated to 1890, when Whitman would have been 71 and living just across
the river from Edison’s recording studios in Philadelphia. The voice takes
just under 39 seconds to read out the first four lines of his six-line
1888 poem ‘America.’
The only known,
slightly damaged, copy of the cylinder ended up in the possession of a
Manhattan lift-operator, Roscoe Haley, as part of his vast hoard of bizarre
Americana. Haley made the recording available to a 1951 NBC radio programme
entitled ‘Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow’, and while the cylinder itself
has since been lost, Whitman scholars were tantalised by rumours that
the radio show had been taped. One such tape was eventually unearthed
in an obscure university library in the 1980s by Larry Griffin, a Professor
of English who used the recording in his poetry classes for several years.
 But
it was only in 1992 – the centenary of Whitman’s death – that Griffin
brought the tape’s existence to wider public knowledge when he mentioned
it in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. This resulted in what
Griffin now remembers as a “a crazy media blitz,” with his office besieged
by newspapers and TV crews. The recording has since been widely anthologised
in audio collections of poetry, and Griffin hypothesises that Day-Lewis
may have stumbled across it when listening to one such tape that also
included a reading by his own father, the former Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis.
The Whitman
recording is played in the museum at the poet’s birthplace in Huntington,
Long Island, just across the river from Manhattan, and the voice can also
be heard, in a rather eerily anachronistic context, via a download from
several academic websites.* It even crops up on an acclaimed CD of folk
music by Tom Russell, The Man From God Knows Where. But some scholars,
alarmed at the lack of authentication materials, have cast doubt on the
recording – many comment that the voice is suspiciously clear for such
a relatively ancient technology. Griffin cheerfully rebuts this claim:
“The wax-cylinder method is regarded by audio experts as a superior way
of recording the human voice than 78s or even some early 33rpm discs.”
And, even if the voice is not Whitman himself, accent experts reckon that
it’s very close to how they believe a Long Island resident of the early-to-mid-19th
century would have spoken. “And why would anybody want to fake it?” asks
Griffin. “ ‘America’ isn’t a well-known work by any means, and it’s not
like anyone could make any money from it. There’s never been any money
at all in poetry”, he says ruefully: “and I should know, I’m a poet myself.”
19th
March, 2003
*www.iath.virginia.edu/whitman/audio/audiomain.html
by Neil
Young
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