Immortality in the third dimension

I’m not in the mood to write about myself these days so I’m going to tell you a true enough story I find enchanting. That’s a shallow cut for the You’ve Got Mail fans.

In early 1950s New York, a fever dream of a place from what I’ve read in books and watched on small and big screens, two young women with degrees in Greek decide to set up a publishing business. When you're young, it is easy to see yourself at the centre of an empire. You don’t question your place breaking ground with a sharp brisk shovel. It is your right. The world is a meal.

These two young women are named Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney. The company is to focus on spoken word, books on records. Shiny, the opposite of dust. It takes it name from Caedmon, the first English poet to write in English. Before that, Latin ruled. You pronounce the company’s name cad-mohn.

When we meet Barbara and Marianne properly, it is 5am on a 1952 Spring morning and they are trying to put a call through to Dylan Thomas’ room at the Chelsea Hotel. The Welsh poet is touring the United States and drawing masses to lecture halls on campuses and in arts centers. This is his second of four tours. He will die at the start of the fourth. At the moment he is a bonafide celebrity poet. His voice is an instrument. People love hearing him speak. That is why the two young women want to capture it and trap it in plastic.

Barbara and Marianne tried to speak to Dylan earlier in the week at an event in New York. No dice. They left a note. No reply. They call his hotel during the day. No answer. They, like many others in the literary scene, know Dylan is a drinker. His unkemptness is a trademark. They suspect that he stays up late, choosing alcohol over slumber. Maybe they’ve been going about this all wrong. Old fashioned like. So the two women decide to be brash. They disrupt the near dawn and call at an ungodly hour. He answers the phone and agrees to meet them for lunch at the restaurant attached to his hotel, the Little Shrimp. He assents to giving them his voice. He even picks up the bill, which if you know anything about Dylan Thomas you would say is an impossibility. 

They eventually get him in the studio, lay down some poems, but need a B-side. Dylan says he has an essay that was in Harper’s Bazaar, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’. That’ll do. It becomes an immediate hit. Barbara and Marianne’s first gamble is a win. 

Two women with degrees in Greek designed and executed their own myth. Even the Caedmon tagline, ‘A third dimension for the printed page’, echoes. Caedmon went on record T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound. They recorded Colette weeks before her death. Actors such as Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner read science fiction stories. Irish actress Siobhán McKenna counts among their repeat performers. They sold the business in the 1970s and have been credited with founding the audiobook industry.

To this day, at Christmastime around the world, people read and listen to Dylan’s memory story. You can too. I hope you have a lovely holiday, if you can.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Further reading

• ‘Audiobooks before Audiobooks’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2013. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/audiobooks-before-audiobooks/ 

• ‘Caedmon Records Audiobooks, 1967 – 1984’, We Are The Mutants, 2017 https://wearethemutants.com/2017/11/07/caedmon-records-audiobooks-1967-1984/ 

• ‘The Little Shrimp’, The Paris Review, 2017. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/10/27/the-little-shrimp/ 

• Four part blog series with stunning use of extracts on Dylan Thomas’ North American tours. https://www.dylanthomas.com/blog/dylan-thomas-travels-to-america-part-1/#:~:text=From%20February%201950%20until%20his,always%20arriving%20in%20New%20York. 

• ‘Caedmon: Recreating the Moment of Inspiration’, NPR, 2002. https://www.npr.org/2002/12/05/866406/caedmon-recreating-the-moment-of-inspiration