Dreams of Speaking (11 page)

Let me tell you,
wrote Mr Sakamoto
, about Alexander Graham Bell.

I have spent almost eight years now, contemplating this splendid fellow, composing his story, tracking with biographical monomania all the flaunted public events and hidden private emotions, the chronology, the secrets, the lies, the loves, the disasters, the eventual, astonishing fame. It is folly, my project. The more facts one accumulates, the more one doubts. And the more one adores the subject, the more he seems capricious, external, gone. I was attracted to Bell because he invented the telephone, and it was an invention borne not purely of technical know-how and electromechanical challenge, but because, above all, he loved the human voice. The voice, above all. He was a teacher of voice, as were his father and grandfather before him. The telephone is the blessing and completion of speech. It drags from nowhere and everywhere utterances great and small; it secures connections; it knits emotions. It conveys the tiniest sigh – the wind of one single person, yearning, alone – to the ear of a lover, waiting, in another country. I see you now, dear Alice, raising your eyebrow, but my
wish is to persuade you that the telephone is in the end munificent. I write not of ringing the plumber, or making a dental appointment, but the realm of exclamation, confession, poetry, love. Everyone has experienced this: a moment in conversation that equals to standing naked before strangers and feeling undiminished and wholly alive.

Alexander's grandfather, also Alexander Bell, began as an actor in Scotland, but left the stage to teach elocution and correct stammering in children. His wife had a scandalous affair with the rector of Dundee, so he divorced her and moved to London with his small son, Alexander (my Alexander's father). There he published
The Practical Elocutionist
and a book on stammering, and met with a small degree of fame as a master of the tongue. Indeed, odd as it sounds, among his publications is ‘The Tongue', 1232 lines of blank verse proclaiming the beauty of elocution. The next Alexander followed his father into the business of speech, and set himself up as a ‘Professor of Elocution' and a public performer of the works of Charles Dickens. (He was reputed to read Dickens better than the author himself.) He also published a book,
The Standard Elocutionist
. More importantly, he fell in love with Eliza Symonds, a painter of miniatures, a woman ten years older than himself and almost entirely deaf, though she could detect sound very faintly with the assistance of a speaking tube. This loving couple settled in Edinburgh, and Eliza bore three sons, Melville (Melly), Alexander (Alec, my Alexander Bell, in 1847) and Edward (Ted).

Of all the childhood stories I have encountered, there are three, in particular, I wish to share with you.

Alec experienced the usual trials and tribulations – a nasty bout, for example, of scarlet fever, which kept him alone in an isolated and darkened room
–but one
event of distress strikes me as predictive and symbolic. On a family excursion to Ferny Hill, Alec became lost in a wheat field. He lay down, out of fear, and all he saw was the iron sky and the bars of millions of trembling wheat stalks. He was a small frightened boy, separated from his family, and trapped in a sour-smelling wheat field with the sky pressing down. Then Alec heard his father's voice calling his name: ‘Alec! Alec!' and by tracking the voice he was returned and saw before him his father, who now appeared gigantic, standing with open arms and moist bleary eyes. The name that connected them in generations was also an occasion of rescuing sound, and Alec learned then, in this space of almost biblical resonance, that speech and hearing were also his vocation.

The second story concerns his mother, Eliza. Although as an adult he would not budge from staunch agnosticism, Alec was a devout believer as a child and attended church each Sunday with his mother and brothers. Eliza could not hear the minister, so the three brothers took turns at the speaking tube, in order that she might follow the service. Alec discovered that he could bypass the tube altogether and communicate with his mother by talking in a very low voice, with his lips positioned close, almost touching, at her forehead. In this intimate way he conveyed divine service; at a lover's proximity he retold the sermon and directed her to biblical passages and the order of hymns. He had seen his mother play the piano by placing the mouthpiece
of her speaking tube directly on the sounding board, and knew that there existed a near realm of sympathetic vibration. Eliza played duets with her husband on the flute, while Ted, the most musically gifted of the sons, sang in accompaniment. And since his father had created an alphabet of ‘Visible Speech', symbols of a universal representation of sound in almost every language, Alec knew that the tissue that separated visibility and invisibility, sound and silence, was unusually permeable. As he practised Urdu and Arabic and a dozen European languages, he knew too that the mystery of speech is as much metaphysical as physical – it had to do with design, as well as will, with the heart, as well as the larynx. With his lips almost touching his mother's head, Alec understood that some forms of communication are essentially loving, and carry within them esteem, closeness, solicitation.

The third story I must tell you is about Alec and his dog, a stray Skye terrier that turned up one day at their house, wagging his tail and pleading implicitly, as dogs always do, for immediate friendship. The boys named it Trouve. Alec embarked on a lunatic programme to teach Trouve to speak. Over weeks he trained the dog to growl on cue and to produce a particular sequence of sounds: ‘ow, ah, ooh, ga, ma, ma', which he claimed resembled - and in fact it did – ‘How are you grandmama?' The family was enchanted. Poor Trouve was doomed to repeat his trick, but was also, as dogs are, patiently compliant. With his brother Melly, Alec went on to try to construct an actual speaking machine using – since Melly, also a speech man, nevertheless fancied himself an anatomist – the fleshy larynx extracted from a dead cat. It was a grisly
failure. So Alec contented himself with his dog's obliging simulation.

I love the child Alexander, but it is his losses, I think, that most move and engage me. When he was twenty years old his younger brother, Ted, by then eighteen, strikingly handsome, and well over six feet tall, died of tuberculosis. Alec and Melly also suffered severe bouts of illness, and their parents grew fearful and overprotective. Three years later Melly, to whom Alec was closest, also died of the disease. The brothers had made a pact that whomever died first, the other would try, by all means possible, to establish spirit communication. Alec attended seance after seance, but Melly did not speak. He watched his parents weep together, holding their hands in a knot. They embraced and leaned compassionately in each other's direction, expressing in tears the solidarity of grief. But Alec felt alone, and guilty, and saved for no purpose. He experienced periods of migraine and began working on experiments late at night: for the rest of his life, he went to bed at 4 a.m. We could say, perhaps, that darkness entered him. Grief made more sense in the middle of the night, when he could imagine, for small periods, that he was deaf like his mother, or that he had entered the antechamber of the dead – this still, deep dark, this brotherless otherworld. In the daytime Alec attended to Melly's speech clients, concentrating on one he especially liked, a young Australian man with the dual afflictions of bad skin and an embarrassing lisp.

At length Alec left Trouve and his parents behind and moved to America to become a teacher of speech to the deaf. He worked in Boston, at a school for thirty
deaf boys and girls, and after that, at the age of twenty-four, began lecturing and accepting small numbers of private students. He took up the Chair of Vocal Physiology and Elocution in the School of Oratory at Boston University, and in the meantime had fallen in love with one of his students – pretty Mabel Hubbard, a girl struck deaf in early childhood by an episode of scarlet fever. She was sixteen years old and incompetent at vowels. She was spirited and had the habit of chewing on her curls. Her manner was lively, her pink smile was a charm. Alec was smitten. After two long years of persuasion, her parents agreed to a betrothal on Mabel's eighteenth birthday. Mabel announced that she was not in love with Alexander Bell, but neither did she dislike him. For Alec, this was enough.

He had already taken out his patent for the electric speech device. After a series of experiments, which included the electrical stimulation of a dead man's ear, the success he had in 1875 would prove to be legendary. Recorded for posterity are his ordinary words to his friend, ‘Mr Watson come here; I want to see you' and the fact that Watson, beyond earshot, then repeated the words. They had filtered to him, precisely, through this gadget that by means invisible wed faraway voices. On the strength of his invention Bell at last married, and returned to Scotland. There he began to transform; he began to consume. He ate the foods of his childhood – porridge, eggs, slabs of thick bread – in mountainous quantities. Perhaps the memory of his skeletal brothers pursued and haunted him; perhaps he was trying to take into his body whatever it was he had lost. In any case, Alec ate and ate until he changed shape entirely, and
became a barrel of a man, someone others found imposing. Mabel was critical of her husband's expanding girth, but to no avail. And then her body also expanded: in time she give birth to two daughters, Elsie May and Marion.

What had he created? Some technologies are coercive, some seductive. The telephone lassoed floating desires and pulled them in: it offered the satisfactions of tacit connection, indulgent expression and the fantasy of a limitless, out-reaching voice. Beyond its practical applications, it offered subtler pleasures. The eroticism of entering, weightless and irresponsible, someone else's bedroom in the middle of the night. The exchange of the complaints and pleasures that are the texture of the everyday. The delight of a small child's halting communication, full of serious silences and bursts of random information. Whispered endearments and outright invitations. Deals. Agreements. Negotiations. Extended monologues. Cross-planetary greetings. Affectionate hellos.

Bodies fell away and speakers entered voice-time. The space between them squeezed open and shut like an accordion. Mere dialling was a thrill. The sound of ringing far off, and the conjuring-up of a distant, unseen room. The efficient stiff click as the receiver was lifted. The initial enquiry. ‘Yes?' The relaxation into dialogue. The visionless, undivided exchange. It was not a new alienation, but a new return, a creation of selves reconnected by breathing words into a black bulb of moulded plastic.

At its inception Alexander Bell was engaged in
ludicrous acts of publicity. The telephone was demonstrated in the depths of a Newcastle coal mine, then beneath the Thames, between quizzical divers. A private demonstration was arranged for Queen Victoria, for which – since ordinary talk was considered unroyal – a woman was hired to sing ‘Kathleen Mavourneen' into the mouthpiece. She did so superbly. Queen Victoria was amused. Alec posed smiling in numerous photographs with august politicians. His fat Spanish-looking face, with its impressive fanned beard, adorned the covers of magazines and the flimsy pages of newspapers. The Bell family subsequently moved back to America. They became millionaires, bought a huge estate, and began a series of worldwide journeys that betrayed the inner restlessness of Alec's spirit. He continued relentlessly to invent, and to work late into the nights, so that he maintained against the insistent clamorousness of fame his alternative world of dark and silence.

Two other significant losses burdened Alexander Bell. In 1881, a son, Edward, was born, but died in infancy, unable to fill his tiny lungs with life. For his son Bell invented a ‘vacuum jacket', designed to create artificial respiration. It was an airtight iron cylinder, fitted up to the neck, which reduced air pressure around the body and so forced air in through the mouth – an anticipation of the iron-lung device. But little Edward's life was not to be saved; the vacuum jacket was a fitted coffin. Alec saw his son encased in his failure. As a distraction from grief, Alec and Mabel once again resumed travelling; they took their young daughters on a swift trip to Paris. There, and in secret, Alec commissioned a French artist to paint a portrait
of his dead son (after a sketch made at home) resting, as though asleep, in his satin-lined casket. He showed no one this painting, but kept it to himself, like guilt. And when he mourned, he gazed upon it to increase his mournfulness to its full measure of profundity.

Two years later, the Bells lost their second son, Robert, also in infancy. It was a devastating repetition. Alec grieved for his lost sons all his life. He was not reconciled and he did not believe in God's will. He believed in the invention of electrical devices to alleviate the suffering of humanity.

Of his later career as the world-famous inventor of the telephone, Alec was ambivalent. He consistently cited his occupation as ‘teacher of voice to the deaf' and his most complex relationship was with the blind-deaf woman Helen Keller, in a silent film of whose remarkable life he later made a cameo appearance, starring as himself. In her company, Alec sought again what rested beyond speech, what meanings became pronounced in detachment, what value might be given to enclosed states of being. Sometimes, late at night, he felt a kinship with Helen Keller beyond any reason. He stared at the black night sky and imagined himself absorbed; he listened to the silence behind the sigh of the wind, and the creaking of floorboards and all the minute unseeable night-time things that existed in murmurs and ticks and barely audible scamperings. Helen had touched his hands with articulate signs and expressed the spiritual rewards of her unchosen isolation. Alec felt that he understood. That there was a sympathy between them. An unremarked vibration. And as the night passed over his head, like the drawing of a heavy cloak that disguised his human shape, he
almost fancied he heard the voices of Melly and Ted, and the strained feeble breathing of his dying sons, soft and close and enticing as death.

Worldly considerations at length reclaimed Alexander Graham Bell. He experimented with the breeding of sheep and the mechanisms of flight; he investigated underwater foghorns and radiophonic possibilities. When, in 1881, the President, James Garfield, was shot in the back as he walked through the Washington railway station, Alec arrived at the White House with a metal detector of his own devising, in order to locate the hidden bullet. This was another of his failures, and the President, lying on a mattress reinforced by many coiled metal springs, died, aged forty-nine, with the missile undetected and still lodged fatally in his body.

There were court cases, money matters, business dealings, grandchildren, more and more money. Alexander Bell moved into ultra-celebrity. When he died at seventy-five, in 1922, he had read the
Encyclopædia Britannica from end to end, had invented dozens of
contraptions beside the telephone, and was a man still privately wedded to hush, to dark, to sign, to grief. His overlarge body, swollen with dense Scottish food, was deposited by his weeping family and everywhere eulogised. Wee images of his face appeared on postage stamps across the world. No one could quite remember the sound of his voice.