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Now on CD: British Library's treasure trove of authorial voices

Rare recordings of some of the last century's greatest writers are to be released for the first time - from F Scott Fitzgerald reciting Othello to Tennessee Williams lambasting critics and Raymond Chandler drunkenly slurring his way through an interview with Ian Fleming.

The British Library CDs are a literary goldmine, with recordings of 30 British writers and 27 from the US, most of whom are being heard for the first time since they were in front of the microphone. They include the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf, the sole recording of Arthur Conan Doyle, battily explaining the importance of spiritualism and the existence of telepathy, and Gertrude Stein incomprehensibly explaining how she writes.

"We have opened up a real treasure trove," said Richard Fairman, of the library's sound archive. "The reason people love hearing the CDs is because we read these authors and we feel we know them through reading their work. But when we hear them speak it's like meeting them in person. It's not quite as good as having them walk up to you, but it's not bad."

If you were to meet Vladimir Nabokov, it would be an alarming experience, on the basis of his broadcast. The author of Lolita answers questions in the style of a ham actor reciting poetry. He is asked if writing is a pleasure or drudgery: "Pleasure and agony while composing the book in my mind. Harrowing irritation when strolling with my tools and viscera, the pencil that needs resharpening, the bladder that has to be drained, the word that I always mis-spell and always have to look up."

Tennessee Williams, on the other hand, sounds as you might expect, with a wonderful, warm southern drawl. In the 1959 edition of the BBC's Frankly Speaking he says people have taken advantage of him. "I'm an extremely malleable person. Almost anybody can twist me round their finger. And I've been twisted around so many fingers that I feel like a multiple pretzel."

He concedes critics can kill a play. "It's a very humiliating experience and an unfair one because, if a play on which you've worked say two years or three years or even, in the case of Orpheus Descending, 17 years off and on, its fate can be decided in a couple of hours of reflection."

One of the most poignant recordings is Joe Orton, a week before he was murdered by his lover Kenneth Halliwell. He explains he has done well out of Loot but wants to save his money "because I shan't always be young and I don't want to do anything grand with it, because there's nothing I particularly want to do, but I would like to sort of put it away so that when I'm not writing any more ... I shall be able to go away and do something else."

He adds: "I only have so much inspiration. I think any playwright does. It's like a boxer, a really good playwright's career is quite short. A boxer's career is usually 10 years and then they start to get punchy, which I think playwrights do as well. Shakespeare's career was pretty short ... probably 15 years. And he wrote some pretty rum plays at the beginning of his life. I hope I've never written anything as bad as the early Shakespeares."

One of the jolliest interviewees is PG Wodehouse, in conversation with Alistair Cooke in 1963. They talk jocularly about a new theory that automation is going to throw so many people out of work that by the year 2000 every middle-class family will need four servants to keep people employed.

The drunkest interviewee is Raymond Chandler, who had been at the whisky before his 1958 interview with his friend Ian Fleming.

The British Library CDs are the latest in its series of historic recordings. Fairman said there were still gaps in the sound archive, and if anybody had recordings of DH Lawrence, John Galsworthy and George Orwell they should get in touch.

The Spoken Word: British Writers and American Writers is released tomorrow by the British Library, price £19.95 eachRare recordings of some of the last century's greatest writers are to be released for the first time - from F Scott... more

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