The Deep, Dark Answer.

This is pretty silly, but it amused me, and it will perhaps amuse the Persons of Welshness among us. From Frances Wilson’s NYRB review (March 21, 2024; archived) of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis: Lewis finds Burton in his voice, which Burton himself described as “the deep, dark answer” to the Welsh valleys. “I think our voices were born with coal-dust and rain and some sort of authentic mystery from those dark and tortured valleys,” he told an interviewer in 1974. For Lewis, Burton’s voice is “one of the twentieth century’s great noises,” roaring, swelling, delicate and bombastic by turns, the articulation and diction very precise—and it’s what I hold most dear, what I find most engaging, about him, too, the inflections, nuances, elaborations and grain of his voice, the fire and the flint of things spoken. Everything one would want to know with Burton is present in the voice, which was rich and artificial, carrying a sense of…