There doesn’t seem to be a single, definitive way to describe the type of books this reading list is made up of.
People sometimes refer to anything of this sort by the catch-all term ‘oral history,’ but the proper oral historians tend to disagree (they don’t believe in editing or cutting or re-ordering their transcripts, nor taking out the questions, none of which is very scientific). I thought I’d come across a categorisation of ‘direct, reported speech’, but I’ve never been able to work out where I came across it.
So really, what we’re talking about is books based on transcripts of real people talking. Which doesn’t sound very glamorous put like that, but just about covers it in a rather dowdy way. And, in fact, some of the power of the form lies exactly in its combination of perceived worthiness, or everydayness, with the intimate, personal shock of feeling directly addressed. It’s quite hard to walk away when someone is talking to you and you alone . . .
London Labour and the London Poor
Henry Mayhew
The granddaddy of transcript-based non-fiction, Mayhew started off writing about ‘the poor’ for the Morning Chronicle newspaper, bashing out ten to fifteen thousand words a week.
No surprise, then, that he quickly developed a technique where he transformed his interviews with rat-catchers, costermongers, watercress-sellers etc. into long monologues in which these real people seem to jump out of the page in three dimensions. He’s a bit too fond of statistics, but if you skip Mayhew’s own parts, and focus on his channelling of other voices, the sense of someone talking to you from another age is remarkably vivid, a bit like seeing colourised prints of old film footage.
Studs Terkel: A Life In Words
Tony Parker
Perhaps the other remarkable thing about Mayhew is that he pre-empts recording technology by the best part of seventy five years.
Recording using tape only really took off in the years after World War II, and portable tape recorders weren’t available to everyday consumers till the mid-sixties. It should perhaps be no surprise, then, that Studs Terkel started off as a radio DJ, as this gave him access to the equipment he would need to start on a project which grew and expanded over the next few decades into a kind of post-war oral history of America.
I’ve cheated here, in that Tony Parker (the author of the wonderful The People of Providence, amongst many others, and described by Duncan Campbell as ‘the maestro of the tape-recorded interview’) uses Terkel’s own methods on him.
Voices from Chernobyl
Svetlana Alexievich
The Belorussian Nobel Prize-winner is patterning an unequalled history of the post-Soviet empire and I choose this book only because it’s where I started reading her. The way that she links and moves between her contributors is unparalleled, and she shapes her narratives so well. The flap on Voices from Chernobyl contains this quote from Alexievich:
‘This is the way I see and hear the world: through voices, through details of everyday life. This genre – capturing human voices, confessions, testimonies – allows me to use all of my potential, because one has to be at the same time a writer, a journalist, a sociologist, a psychologist, and a priest.’
Talk
Linda Rosenkrantz
It’s summer 1965 and Linda Rosenkrantz has taken her new recorder with her to the beach . . .
Sold on publication as a novel, Rosenkrantz recorded herself (as ‘Marsha’) talking to her two best friends, named Emily and Vincent in the book, then edited the transcripts down into these tight, quirky, funny scripts. Their conversations are some of the freshest, most natural, and funniest evocations of the sixties you’ll ever read. They’re also a fantastic rejoinder to anyone who thinks that anything to do with ‘oral history’ is in some way worthy or dull. So alive and immediate you can feel the sand stuck between your toes.
Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper
Laurie & Art Pepper
I’ve put Laurie’s name first in contrast to how the book is sold, because it was her who tape-recorded, transcribed and edited the stories of her husband, Art. A beautiful, delicate alto sax player from California, Art Pepper was also abused as a child and went on to fully embrace the heroin culture that hung around modern jazz in the post-war years. As a result, his recollections fully justify that often over-used tag, ‘eye-popping’.
A: A Novel
Andy Warhol
In Warhol’s own words:
‘A friend had written me a note saying that everybody we knew was writing a book, so that made me want to keep up and do one too. So I bought that tape recorder and I taped the most interesting person I knew at the time, Ondine, for a whole day.’
A is borderline unreadable but it does capture something of how radical Warhol’s Factory was in the mid-sixties. Bonus points are awarded because Moe Tucker, the drummer with the Velvet Underground, was one of the people Warhol employed to transcribe the tapes. Apparently Moe didn’t approve of swearing so she blanked out all the curse words . . .
Jeff, One Lonely Guy
Jeff Ragsdale, David Shields & Michael Logan
David Shields, the author of the classic Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, describes One Lonely Guy as ‘Notes from Underground told by and for and in the digital age’. Basically, Jeff Ragsdale put up posters saying he was lonely and asking people to call him. Photos of the signs then made it online and went viral. The book is made up of transcripts of what people said to him on the phone or texted to him. Fractured, mad, inspired and, in the end, quite moving.
You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You are Raoul Moat]
Andrew Hankinson
Hankinson’s superb book about Raoul Moat (who shot his ex-girlfriend, her new boyfriend and a policeman, before going on the run) is something of an outlier on this list. It’s described by his publishers as a ‘re-telling’ of ‘Moat’s story using Moat’s words, and those of the state services which engaged with him’ – in particular, his letters and writing and the extensive tape recordings he made while he was a fugitive. Written in the second person (‘you’), the book is unsettling and intimate, a fantastic technical piece of work. First published in 2016, I can’t help thinking that it’s also one of the definitive books on Brexit, even though it’s never mentioned.
The Employees
Olga Ravn
Perhaps even more of an outlier, this is a work of fiction, but could also be described as an oral history of the future. Ravn’s tale of the employees of a space ship in a far away galaxy is told solely in transcripts of the de-briefs carried out by their employers, reminding us of the power relations playing out in the background of any interview. Short, sharp and affectless, it’s also a profound study of what it is to be human.
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An original and profound portrait of contemporary Britain told through the testimonies of its inhabitants.
About the Author
Will Ashon is the author of two novels and two works of non-fiction, Strange Labyrinth and the critically acclaimed Chamber Music: About the Wu-Tang (in 36 Pieces). Ashon also founded the independent record label Big Dada, which he ran for over fifteen years. He lives in London.
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