Unstressed Syllables: Jim Dale Reads Harry Potter, Paul Newman Reads Tom Sawyer

What Jim Dale does with the name of the main shopping drag in the Harry Potter books is something an American would probably never do. The street is "Diagon Alley," which Dale?in the versions of the books he's recorded for the Listening Library imprint of Random House Audio Publishing?somehow manages to pronounce with the emphasis on either the middle syllable or on the first two. That's tough to do unless you're an ancient Greek or unless, like the English, you've routinely gone through life anglicizing two-syllable words of French origin like garage and beret and chalet so as to turn them into trochees ("GAR-age," "BER-et," and "CHAL-et") or trochaic spondees (these defy typography). An American would tend to accent such words iambically. An American would tend to pronounce the word "Diagon" like amazon or paragon, accenting the first syllable or perhaps the first and the last. Or course, "Diagon" being essentially a made-up word, who is to say how it should be pronounced? And, indeed, it isn't so much a question of right or wrong as of what happens to the phrase "Diagon Alley" when you pronounce it the way Jim Dale does. It sounds an awful lot like "diagonally"?which is how J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, seems to think a lot of important things (like invisible railway platforms and adolescence) should be approached.

The art of accenting a word's penultimate and ante-penultimate syllables both in a single breath is not the only thing to be learned from Dale's performance of the Potter books. The recordings are revelatory?albeit in a small way, and mostly of things having to do with English and non-English values. Example: Scars in the Potter books (even "psychic" ones) are essentially something to jest at; they're either useful or funny, but you might not be assured of this without hearing the stoic solemnity with which Dale introduces a description of some of the pains of a "wizarding" childhood ("Harry was no stranger to pain?"), like losing all the bones from an arm and having to regrow them in a single night, or plunging 50 feet from an airborne broomstick. This is a fundamentally English attitude toward suffering.

Also integral to the books but fundamentally un-English is the notion of self-determination, that who you are should be a function of what you do and say. From time immemorial, the premise underlying most British social attitudes has been the notion that who you were was determined by what you had been born being, in terms of everything?race, class, or national?and that this, in turn, affected the way you talked. One of the most interesting things about Dale's performance of the Harry Potter books is that no one in them speaks the "King's English"?least of all Harry and his friends. This is a big deal when you consider the degree to which, until recently, BBC English has dominated the spoken word in the UK, even when it came to the recording of other "watershed" or significantly class-conscious works. (Even the Welsh-bred actor Richard Burton was forced to adopt a poncey stage accent when he played Jimmy Porter, John Osborne's famously lower-middle-class provincial hero, in the film version of Look Back in Anger.)

In Dale's performance no two characters seem to speak in precisely the same voice or accent. Moreover, there's something ineffably right about allotment of voices. Dale lampoons stereotypical attitudes with slightly exaggerated stereotypical voices. But since his own judgment of the characters is entirely dependent on textual evidence?what they do and say?the recordings could be said to approach social satire in a way that the books themselves don't readily appear to, at least not to an American audience.

In the case of the last volume, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, up this week for a Grammy in the little-known category of Best Spoken Word Album for Children, Dale wasn't even given the entire book to read before going into the studio. So secret was the process surrounding the book's publication that he was fed each installment on the night before it was recorded.

Given Dale's tour de force performance (and the universal popularity of the series), you'd think Goblet of Fire would be a shoo-in for the Grammy. Apparently, though, Dale has been nominated before. The first volume of Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, was up for a Grammy last year and lost out to a story anthology produced by Wynton Marsalis. This year, in a tense conflict that may have escaped notice (even on the part of the participants), Dale is up against the veteran actor Paul Newman for his performance of an abridged version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The latter is something of a family concern, produced in cooperation with Simon & Schuster Audio, by Newman's daughter, Susan Kendall Newman, in a series of abridged classics for children partially designed to benefit a nonprofit literacy program.

I was interested in the Newman recording primarily because it represents such a completely different approach to spoken arts recording for children from the one adopted by Dale. Newman's performance belongs to the school of nonintrusive acting. He reads every character straight?in his own voice, no antics, no funny stuff. There's no falsetto for Aunt Polly or Becky, no "characterizing" Injun Joe. This is an approach that says to the child, "I'm not going to let the fact that I'm an actor get between you and this book." The Harry Potter recordings belong to the tradition of recordings?like Cyril Ritchard's incomparable performance of the Alice books on the Wonderland label, made for Riverside Records in the 1960s?in which an actor uses his vocal dexterity and range to differentiate the characters while using his own voice to perform narration.

This is a very different thing from the kind of loose-cannon "acting" that Julie Harris did in the 1965 recording of E.B. White's Stuart Little, which so angered and distressed the author that ever after (during his lifetime) he insisted on performing the recorded versions of his books himself. White's publishers couldn't understand what the problem was?Julie Harris was a distinguished and acclaimed actress?but anyone who has ever tried to listen to the performance would know what White was on about. It's one of those recordings in which arbitrary words are emphasized by an actor for no better reason than to establish the fact that he or she is an actor and because that (presumably) is what actors do. White hated that. He'd written the words he'd written to do their own work. How justifiably incensed he must have been at the meaningless stress Harris puts on a word like "window-shade" just to keep the tots from falling asleep.

To this day, you can still hear the influence of that kind of thinking in recorded books for grownups as well as for children: actors who should know better, and who probably do, putting weird emphasis on a word here or there simply because some publishing executive turned record producer has told them that recording books is different from reading aloud. But recording literature isn't different from reading aloud. Or it needn't be. It depends entirely on what kind of recording you're trying to produce. The versions of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass that Riverside produced on the Wonderland label were urtext, the words as Lewis Carroll wrote them. The only other aspect of the production besides Ritchard's performance was the gorgeous suite of contemporary music that Alec Wilder composed for both recordings. But Riverside did adaptations, too, the most charming among them a series of recorded versions of Beatrix Potter that had the aging Vivien Leigh narrating. These were small-scale adaptations, with actors and musical numbers.

Riverside was primarily a jazz label. Bill Grauer, who owned and ran it, was interested in nurturing contemporary artists; my guess is that the sideline of producing children's records was born of two impulses: to create an alternate esthetic to the Disney notion that was fast growing up, and to give artists work. (He was probably just as interested in commissioning work from Alec Wilder as he was in producing the definitive recording of the Alice books, which is what those productions are.)

The trouble with what's happened to the recorded-book industry, now that it's become big business with the invention of the car stereo and the Stairmaster, is that the idea of a science of spoken arts (as it used to be called) has all but disappeared. Now they match a publishing product up with a celebrity, or hire an actor to read a work with which the public loosely associates him, thanks to some movie or theatrical production. Attempting to record what will be, for that particular moment in time, the definitive performance of a work (the Jim Dale approach), or simply the act of marrying two such familiar and beloved voices as Newman's and Twain's, has lost legitimacy.

But maybe that two such tasteful examples as these have been nominated for the Grammy will win some of it back. It sure would be pretty to think so.