NONFICTION
“Let Me Clear My Throat: Essays”
Elena Passarello
Sarabande Books, $15.95, 242 pages
Ever wonder what kind of scream a man would make as he was being eaten alive by an alligator?
If you’ve seen the right movies — including “THEM!” “A Star Is Born,” “Raiders of the Lost Arc” or “Aladdin” — you’ve heard it on many occasions. Known as the Wilhelm Scream, it’s a stock sound effect used more than 200 times since its recording in 1951.
It’s also the subject of one of the 14 essays in Elena Passarello’s “Let Me Clear My Throat,” an eclectic collection that explores the many uses, abuses and celebrations of the human voice.
According to Passarello, the Wilhelm Scream “scrambles up the … throat in an emasculating glissando, then slides back down the scale to land on a dejected ‘unh.’ Equal parts yelp, belch and exhale, the scream is as dire as it is goofy, a buffet of all five falsetto vowels crashing into one another, then falling down a flight of stairs.”
An actor and writer, Passarello should know what it takes to scream for help. In 2011, she became the first woman to win the Stella Screaming contest held annually in New Orleans, where contestants vie for who can most faithfully reproduce Brando’s classic bellow from the movie, “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
It’s possible that her fascination with the power of speech began with her mother, “one of the loudest people I have known in my life,” says Passarello, who was born in Charleston, S.C., and grew up in Snellville. In “Harpy,” she explains that her “sonic education” came from a daily exposure to her mother’s voice, which, in anger mode, could “move furniture.”
In each essay, Passarello takes us on rambling, but carefully controlled walks that duck into alleys, wind through backstreets, beckon us into little mazes of looping associations, and often end up far from where they began. In “Hey Big Spender,” we set out with the effort required to attain High C (“nearly twice the air pressure used to inflate an automobile tire”), find ourselves submerged in Italian history, then make a visit to Atlanta in 1915, when Helen Keller visits operatic tenor Enrico Caruso to touch his throat between performances.
“And Your Bird Can Sing” begins with how early humans may have imitated birdsong to learn to sing, moves to the crows in Passarello’s wintry back yard, expands to include pop vs. rock vocalists, and ends several pages later with the reappearance of spring songbirds. Brief monologues — from a phone psychic, an auctioneer, an Elvis impersonator, and a laryngectomy patient, among others — offer breathers between the longer pieces.
Some of these sidesteps lead to irresistible anecdotes, from the reason Frank Sinatra’s vocal coach was fired from the Met; to the secrets of Judy Garland’s surprising warm-up exercise (R-rated); to how parents of castrati in 18th century Italy concealed profitable but illegal operations by claiming that their kids met with farm accidents: “[I]t was most fashionable for gelded choirs to blame their injuries on swan bites, or, in Farinelli’s case, a horse-kick to the groin. In the 1750s, every last one of the soprani in the Sistine Chapel was an alleged victim of a wild pig attack.”
In “Rebel Yell,” she explains that no adequate record of the allegedly terrifying Confederate scream exists. But when she reconstructs the scene at Bull Run, one odd detail is more frightening than any audio file: “Imagine watching Jackson’s men emerge from the smoke [of battle], zooming toward you as if pulled on dollies. Their mouths and teeth are black from biting off the tops of their gunpowder cartridges, and those smeared black mouths are wet and open.”
Her keen eye for the particular dovetails with an uncanny ear for the journey a sound takes, producing sensuous and noisy sonic portraiture. Among them:
Marlon Brando: "…a half-dressed mass of wet sinew and moxie…rolled his voice toward his molars, where it slumped over his epiglottis like a delinquent schoolboy at the back of a bus."
Judy Garland: "She builds little dwellings — caves, tents, awnings — in the bulges of the song…"
Howard Dean: In his campaign-wrecking yell, "the 'b' and 'y' of Dean's scream are a flat F in the 5th octave — the same lofty pitch Robert Plant finds at 2:09 and 2:11 of 'Communication Breakdown.'"
Fay Wray: "I love the little points of her dozen poison-dart screams (in "King Kong"), as if she were dancing over her giant ape in a pair of stilettos."
The last essay in “Let Me Clear My Throat” is a tongue-in-cheek one-act play about a ventriloquist’s dummy who learns to find and shape its own voice into “the unique snowflake it deserves to be.” It seems a fitting end for this bedazzling hullabaloo of a book, whose silent pages are anything but.
Listen to Passarello read one of her essays from “Let Me Clear My Throat” at bettermagazine.org/001/elenapassarello.html.
