Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling University of North Carolina Press, 2016

Excerpt

As described by Ovid, Echo was a wood nymph who loved the sound of her own voice. More precisely, she was a chatterbox. As described by Sophocles, she was “the girl with no door on her mouth.”  Echo still had a body then, Ovid says, and was not merely a voice, as she would later become after an ill-fated encounter with Narcissus, the delicate youth who shunned all would-be lovers. “nothing could have been worse / than falling in love / with Narcissus,” writes the poet Allison Funk, “Unless they’d had children.”  In Greek, Echo (Ēkhō) means “sound.” 

Like Scheherazade who diverted the misogynistic King from cruelty against women, entertaining him night after night with distracting stories, Echo employed similar skills to divert Juno, the Queen of the gods, while Jove played fast and loose with other nymphs. (Ironically, in popular adaptations of The Arabian Nights, Scheherazade is often absent, essentially silenced—or Echo-ed.) When Juno discovered this trickery, she punished the garrulous Echo by taking away her voice, allowing her only the smallest ability to speak. All Echo could do, being so cursed, was repeat the sound of another. Said Juno: “You shall forfeit the use of that tongue with which you have cheated me, except for that one purpose you are so fond of—reply. You shall still have the last word, but no power to speak first.”  No longer able to initiate speech, Echo loses control over her own voice, while being excluded from language.  She tried her best to woo Narcissus but could only produce fragments of his own speech (“Who is here,” “Here!”). Scorned, Echo wandered in shame among the trees, hid in lonely caves, her sad body wasting away. Only her bones and the sound of her voice survived, Ovid writes. 

In Ovid’s cruel irony, Echo was disciplined for speaking too much, as if she had crossed some measurable threshold of female verbosity. No longer able to compose a thought, or to start or finish a sentence that is her own, Echo has suffered a kind of stroke, falling into the grip of a profound neurological disorder that cripples her linguistic abilities. That Juno should sentence Echo to a form of aphasia dooms the chatty nymph to an eternal servitude in which she is bound to the speech of others. Echo is in effect turned into a dummy for someone else’s ventriloquism. In Ovid’s story, it is Narcissus who plays the role of Edgar Berman. His speech is copied comically by Echo, as if she were making fun of his vanity. She can only utter fragments of his discourse. He spurns her not only out of pride but also from suspicion that she is mocking him in mimicry of his simple language (“Any one here?” “Here!”). Why didn’t Jove offer the hapless nymph some kind of compensatory gift? Discursive deviance, it would seem, is an unpardonable transgression.

The sad story of Echo has served contemporary theory well, especially as a metaphor of the problem of the speaking woman.  Echo’s cruel fate, as Adriana Cavarero has suggested, is the tale of women’s own devocalization and disembodiment by patriarchy and the symbolic order.  The legacy of Echo is evident throughout the history of film and broadcast radio, especially in those cases where the voices of women are strictly forbidden. During radio’s so-called golden years, most broadcast roles were reserved for men. Dorothy Thompson was a nationally syndicated commentator, but she was an exception to the rule. Mary Marvin Breckinridge, who worked for Edward R. Murrow as a foreign correspondent, aired stories from Europe for CBS during the war; but she had a deep voice, went by her middle name, and was wealthy. The networks subscribed to the usual gender inequities, but prejudices against the female voice ran high even among radio listeners. Unlike the male voice, which was deemed to be “well modulated,” the female voice was thought to be “aggravating” and “monotonous.” It was full of “personality” and “enthusiasm,” listeners complained, and therefore unsuitable for “maintaining the necessary reserve and objectivity” demanded by radio’s more serious tasks. Women were essentially banned from speaking on air in non-performing roles.  

The brief radio career of Betty Wason, a CBS foreign correspondent, is an illuminating case in point. Though not a member of his inner circle, Betty Wason worked for Murrow during the war years in Europe and was regarded by many as a good writer and capable reporter.  She had a knack for breaking timely stories and finding out where the action was. In one of her early reports from Stockholm, in April of 1940, Wason went live with a report about women spies in Norway. Her report immediately raised concerns with CBS back in New York, not because of its content but because CBS was unhappy with the sound of Wason’s voice. It wasn’t forceful enough. Explained Wason: “I received a call saying my voice wasn’t coming through, that it was too young and feminine for war news and that the public was objecting to it.”  Wason wasn’t a child. At twenty-eight, she was certainly older than twenty-one-year-old Russell Hill whose Berlin broadcasts provoked no grumbling.

The network instructed Wason to find a male proxy and forbade her from speaking on her own. Reaching Athens just in time for the Italian invasion of Greece, Wason ignored the embargo on her voice and went on air with breaking news, but was once again scolded by CBS officials in New York who suggested that she find a man to speak for her. She needed a voice dummy.  Betty Wason had been to the front lines, had even survived to tell the tale.  She escaped border guards, hitched rides across mountain passes, hid in the woods, and outlived air raids. But all that listeners back home heard, she feared, was a voice that was “frail and feminine.” Said Betty: “It was frustrating because other people were quoting me.” Radio was no place for the female voice. On some level, Wason’s loss of enunciation was little different from the curse of Echo. Wason too was a kind of chatterbox. She refused to keep silent and coveted the last word—holding forth at least twice without authorization—until network bosses banned her voice outright.  

Reviews

"Porter has brilliantly filled the huge gap on radio's greatest contributions to twentieth-century American culture by offering the strongest argument to date that the first electronic mass medium brought something of genuine significance to the nation’s literary canon. Lost Sound is thorough and timely, and the narrative is lucid and consequential. I'm pleased and thrilled that there will now exist--at long last--a definitive work on the subject."
--Michael C. Keith, Boston College

“Lost Sound shows that in our phonophobic culture, we have forgotten  to attend to radio’s literary past, preferring to see our precious written word as the primary source of literary expression. As Jeff Porter reveals, however, sound technologies such as radio offer powerful and alternative modes of artistic production. Writing with real beauty, energy, and verve, he has made a significant contribution to our critical understanding of this important medium.
--Kathy M. Newman, Carnegie Mellon University

“Porter takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the heyday of radio storytelling in the 1930s and 1940s United States. This intriguing, amply researched analysis certainly brings a fine addition to the existing literature on radio history.”
--European Journal of Communication

"Cogently and authoritatively written, Lost Sound is an exciting read for literary, sound, and communications studies enthusiasts alike, a tour de force that invites us to reconsider the relationship between literature and radio.” 
--Canadian Journal of Communication

“A fascinating perspective on broadcasting history, written in clear, often captivating, prose.”
--Journal of American Folklore

“Provides a much-appreciated and needed work of solid, well-written scholarship on a subject that has too long been overlooked and underprized.” 
--Theatre Journal

“A valuable addition to literary, radio, sound and gender studies, at whose intersection it is located.”
--parallax

Lost Sound is an erudite and evocative exploration of several moments of literary and sonic innovation in radio broadcasting in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. It is a welcome addition to the growing literature on radio aesthetics and to the broader field of radio history. 

-- Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media