"He's Going to Sound": Radio Adaptations of Melville's Works and the Waves between Highbrow and Popular Cultures

“He’s Going to Sound”: Radio Adaptations of Melville’s Works and the Waves between Highbrow and Popular Cultures TIM PRCHAL Oklahoma State University T wo factors established Herman Melville’s place in the “Golden Age” of American radio during the 1930s and 1940s. First, in the two decades prior to this period, Melville’s status began to rise from that of a notable contributor to the not especially notable genre of travel literature to that of a fiction writer whose novels, novellas, and short stories exhibited the complexities and innovations worthy of the literary canon. Moby-Dick stood out among this body of fiction, its reputation soaring so high that, in 1946, Orson Welles described it as “certainly the greatest novel ever written in America” when introducing his own radio performance as Captain Ahab.1 The second factor involves radio itself and, specifically, efforts to merge the idealistic hopes that many social leaders had envisioned for wireless broadcasting with the realities it faced as a primarily capitalistic, mass-market medium. On the one hand, some anticipated that radio would be a boon to efforts to uplift the nation, a means to make the citizenry more sophisticated in regard to the arts and more educated all around. On the other hand, producers felt the drive to earn profits by coaxing advertisers into sponsoring programs that promised huge audiences. In that some of Melville’s fiction was amenable to both highbrow and popular cultures, his works offered the perfect material for adaptation to radio. In fact, the expansive middle ground between “highbrow” and “pop” is a prime place to locate Melville’s public image as it was created during the heyday of radio drama. This is not to say that Melville was a name heard often on the air during this formative period. After several years of searching, I have been able to discover radio adaptations of only three of his works: “Bartleby the Scrivener,” C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 The Mercury Summer Theater of the Air, CBS, 30 Aug. 1946. Welles also notes that the script was first used for a record album version that starred Charles Laughton as Ahab. Laughton’s role as the captain recalls his Oscar-nominated performance as Captain Bligh in the Oscar-winning Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Decades later, Patrick Stewart would follow suit by playing Ahab in a television version of Moby-Dick (USA Network, 15-16 March 1998) after he had gained fame playing Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise, in Star Trek: The Next Generation. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 45 T I M P R C H A L “The Bell-Tower,” and Moby-Dick. (A radio dramatization of Billy Budd was aired in the U.S. during the early 1960s, well after television had eclipsed radio drama in popularity.2 ) In contrast, I have found adaptations of seventeen works by Edgar Allan Poe. Of course, there are various ways to explain the imbalance in this admittedly random sample. Poe’s works tend to be shorter than Melville’s and, thus, better lend themselves to half-hour shows. Also, Melville’s works might not be as aural as Poe’s beating tell-tale heart, meowing black cat, and Gothic scenes tailor-made for gasps and screams. Regardless of the reasons, the impression is that Melville was given less microphone time than authors such as Poe, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain. However, like these authors, Melville was able to sustain the interest of both highbrow and popular audiences in the twentieth century. No doubt, this broad appeal was at least partly due to the “Melville revival” that had begun about the same time as the birth of radio. As Andrew Delbanco explains, Melville stirred only brief glimmers of critical excitement in the decades following his death. But by 1920, when Moby-Dick was reissued as part of the Oxford World’s Classics series, the author’s reputation...