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Try Family Reading

By CHARLES LAUGHTON

This is the story of how a great actor found new pleasures when he began to read aloud—first to service men in World War II; later to audiences all over the country. Some of his favorite selections were collected in a book: "Tell Me a Story, Tales to be Read and Told," selected by Charles Laughton, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1957, $5.00. In this short article he urges every­one to try family reading.

Some years ago, in This Week Magazine, I urged you to discover the joys of reading aloud. Since then such reading has flowered in a great revival. Theater readings have been very successful, recordings by poets like Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell reading their own works have been selling in large numbers. My own recording of Bible reading has been purchased by a gratifyingly large number of people.

Recordings of more than 60 plays — from Shakespeare to Christopher Fry — are now available. You can hear William Saroyan bulldozing through "Jim Dandy" and "Fat Man In A Famine," Bernard Shaw discoursing on war and peace, or Sean O'Casey, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce reading their own works. Hundreds of reading clubs have been organized in cities where our group read "Don Juan In Hell."

But of all reading pleasures, I assure you nothing will top the enjoyment you can get from reading out loud with your own family. If you have not yet discovered this for yourself, I want to urge you again, in light of the great reading revival now in progress, to reap these rewards:

1. It is grand fun.
   
   
2. It is  a shared experience  that  draws  families  and friends closer together.
   
   
3. It puts your child in a reading atmosphere and encourages him to learn to read and to love books.

During the past 10 years, I have discovered that people everywhere in this country have a common, shy hunger for literature. The entertainment industry used to say that the public's mental age was 12 years, but I suspected that was repeated by men who were afraid to believe anything else. Well over half a million Americans came to hear us read "Don Juan."

The fact is that Americans have always been great ones for readings. When Charles Dickens toured, reading his own works, he had his greatest success in this country, not his native England.

And back in the golden days of the Chautauqua circuit, William Jennings Bryan was able to draw "forty acres of parked Fords" anywhere he went. But the rise of radio, movies and television conspired to lure Americans away from the pleasures of reading and listening; and what reading they did fell prey to that terrible predator, the condensation.

However, in recent years the pleasures of reading aloud are being discovered all over again, and recordings by poets like Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell reading their own works have been selling in large numbers.

I wholeheartedly agree with the distinguished novelist, John Hersey, who wrote recently in "Life" magazine: "We believe that parents should create in the home an atmosphere that is conducive to reading. They should have good books and magazines at hand. Parents should read to children. They should try to entertain them with reading and make reading a pleasure as television is a pleasure. If school is where learning to read belongs, home is where happiness in reading belongs."

There was no such reading in my home when I was a boy, and I have regretted it. My parents ran a hotel in Scarborough, a resort town on the east coast of England, and innkeeping being the demanding task it is, they had no time for leisurely gatherings with my two brothers and me for reading books out loud.

In fact, I did not "discover" books until I was going to college. The discovery was overpowering. I rushed from book to book like a child with its first Christmas toys, and many a hapless fellow student was backed into a corner and read to until he could negotiate his escape.

After graduation from Stonyhurst I concentrated on act­ing in plays and movies, and it was not until World War II that I found out that my enthusiasm for reading aloud was in reality a universal one. Like other Hollywood actors, I had been asked to entertain at military hospitals, but I couldn't sing folk songs or play an accordion or do much with the interpretive dance.

Now I had always enjoyed reading the Bible and other great literature out loud; my wife and I had often spent our evenings that way, but I wondered how hospitalized GI's would react to it. I decided to give it a try—but I don't mind admitting that I approached my first reading with great trepidation.
 
An audience of GI patients had gathered at Birmingham General Hospital and I'm sure they expected me to be Captain Bligh and Henry VIII in the grand manner of a night-club mimic. In fact, when I announced that I was going to read from some of the books I was carrying, there was a mass groan.

As an icebreaker I had chosen James Thurber's hilarious revision of "Little Red Riding Hood" ("little girls are a lot harder to fool these days," observes Mr. Thurber), went on to Andrew Marvell's splendid early verse, "To His Coy Mistress." Then, feeling my way, I read passages from classics I had always loved — Shakespeare, Dickens, Aesop, Thomas Wolfe — and as a finale, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

My audience was enthusiastically appreciative, and after­ward a corporal said to me, "Mr. Laughton, I never thought I'd get such a lift just from words."

It was a touching thing to say, and in reply I said never to speak of words as if they were minor weapons. Words have accomplished more than all the bombs ever dropped.

After that initial experience I visited Army hospitals regularly. When the war ended, I was sure that a lot of Americans wanted more than television and comic books for entertainment. I began reading the Bible before audiences in cities all over the country.

I was once invited to read the Bible to an audience of ministers at Occidental College. Afterward, one of the minis­ters told me, "You know, we ministers make a fetish of the Bible. You turn it into a dramatic, earthy tale of real people."

I assure you that you can do the same thing if you will try reading the Bible out loud in your own living room, just as our ancestors used to do in their daily Bible readings. On the next page is listed a set of rules that will help you get the most out of family reading.

Take turns reading. If you find it difficult to select mate­rial for this first session, I think you can get a good start withthe 139th Psalm, anything of James Thurber, Mark Twain or 0. Henry.

The important thing is to give it a try. Don't forget that great literature was intended for the ear as well as the eye. Indeed, it originated with early storytellers who spun their tales in the glow of campfires. It is inspirational music that has stood the test of time and it is yours, all yours, just for the asking.

Charles Laughton's Heading Tips

1. Make It Fun. When you startgetting tired, stop — you don't have to finish your reading in one session.  If a story is dull, drop it immediately. Experiment. Try a short story, a chapter from a novel, a poem.
   
   
2. Talk in Your Natural Voice. You're not running for office or trying out for The Old Vic. Use the voice you always use.
   
   
3. Don't   Go  Arty.    If you choose a book you think you ought to like, rather than one you really like, both you and your listeners are bound to be bored.
   
   
4. Don't Molest Your Listeners. If  hey want to knit or sew or whittle, that's fine. Don't require rapt attention and there­ by make listening an unpleasant duty.
   
   
5. When You Stop Reading, Start Talking. Sharing the reading of a book is a fine family experience, .but it becomes especially rewarding when you share the  ideas  that  come  from  it. That is its greatest reward.

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