| Friday, May 23, 2008 6:25AM | | | | Inflating a Dog Audio Book (2) | Posted By: Eric Kraft
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Behind the Recording of It
Part Two
As soon as Kraft has finished a book, he reads it to his ideal auditor, who happens also to be his ideal reader, one chapter a night, until he has read it all. The anticipation of that reading has given him a way of knowing when his work on a book is finished. How does he know when he has finished a book? He knows that the book is done when it seems “good enough to read to Mad.”
When Kraft was first invited to read his work to a larger audience, to give a public reading, he tried practicing in private. [The occasion was the Boston Globe Book Festival in, probably, 1982. MD] The more he practiced, the worse he got. He was almost as bad as Marcel Proust in Jean Cocteau’s description of him in The Difficulty of Being:
Lying stiffly and askew Marcel Proust would read to us, each night, Du Côté de Chez Swann. Proust would start anywhere, would mistake the page, confuse the passage, repeat himself, begin again, break off to explain that the lifting of a hat in the first chapter would reveal its significance in the last volume, and he would titter behind his gloved hand, with a laugh that he smeared all over his beard and cheeks. “It’s too silly,” he kept saying, “no . . . I won’t read any more. It’s too silly.” His voice . . . became a distant plaint, a tearful music of apologies, of courtesies, of remorse. . . . And when we had persuaded him to continue, he would stretch out his arm, pull no matter what page out of his scrawl and we would fall headlong into the Guermantes or the Verdurins household. After fifty lines he would begin his performance all over again. He would groan, titter, apologize for reading so badly. Sometimes he would . . . go into a closet, where the livid light was recessed into the wall. There one would catch sight of him standing up, in his shirt sleeves, . . . holding a plate in one hand, a fork in the other, eating noodles.
With the exception of the noodles, that is much the way Kraft felt about the quality of his own reading. He thought of backing out of the festival. “I’m a writer, not a performer,” he told his publisher.
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