Speed Reading

Hard listening and slow reading: I suppose that sums up my artistic credo from a consumer's perspective. So why was it that yesterday found me reading a whole bunch of poems by Wilfred Owen at very high speed indeed? The answer lies within the remit of the Toad, work, though this work was of the fairly enjoyable variety, at least initially.

I was proof-reading a booklet we're putting out for students of a little collection of Owen's work, for the purposes of one of our programmes. This is a sort of 'improved' version of a previous effort in that we've decided to expand the collection a little to include a wider selection of the work to give a fuller picture of the great War Poet (or Great War poet, I suppose.) Specifically we've gone for a couple of pieces of his juvenilia - fairly awful ones, in my eyes, at least. He was under the then highly conventional, and very dangerous, spell of Keats as a youth, and it took the grim reality of the war to break that spell.

Anyway, I read the whole lot quite closely, alert for errors, in something under half-an-hour, or thereabouts. And the effect was extraordinary. The sense of enormous unrelenting anarchic energy emanating from the body of the verse was palpable - partly exaggerated by the sheer speed of Owen's development into greatness in such an incredibly short period of time - roughly a year and a half. I've got a feeling my pulse rate shot up during the exercise. And then there was the terrific sense of guilt involved. I somehow felt like one of those whom Owen so savagely criticises, safely at home whilst the flower of English manhood is being put through the meat grinder in the awful front line, and doing absolutely nothing about it. This went well beyond being made to feel the Pity of War. I was actually relieved when I'd completed Strange Meeting (our version of which had somehow acquired a couple of extra lines at the end which I was able to edit out, so I was at least still capable of doing my job) and I really didn't want to read any more, for then, at least.

I can remember reading somewhere about the RSC, I think it was, doing some sort of deliberately high speed mechanical reading of Oedipus Rex (I think - some incandescent sort of tragedy anyway) under the direction of Peter Brooks, in order to freshen their performances by forcing them out of the habitual readings they'd developed. it seems that the performers were unexpectedly overwhelmed by the exercise-cum-performance, with some of the cast actually fainting. The poet Ted Hughes, who was working with them at the time, tells the story somewhere. I reckon I tasted a little something of the same kind of experience.