TUNING IN TO QUALITY CLASSICS ON CASSETTES AND CD

I wouldn’t expect passions to run high among audiocassette users. A gentler and more passive pursuit can hardly be imagined. But passions there are, roused by the question of listening to full and unabridged texts versus abridgements that cut chapters to paragraphs and pages to sentences in the cause of brevity.

The purists will have nothing--I mean absolute zero--to do with abridged texts, which they regard as a sacrilege graver than mixing Scotch and root beer or sloshing ketchup on chateaubriand.

When I recently praised some readings of books in digested form, I received letters that were a mixture of scorn, pity and correction. Several readers remarked that if I wanted a real listening experience I should get hold of the unabridged “Moby Dick” from Books on Tape in Newport Beach.

Dennis Stanfill, the former head of 20th Century Fox who is now a private-venture capitalist and who was a Rhodes scholar in his youth, wrote (in neither scorn nor pity) that he had just spent a glorious month hearing out Melville’s masterwork and recommended it unreservedly.

I got hold of the Books on Tape “Moby Dick” and I do hear what the purists mean. I’d read “Moby Dick” as a classroom assignment; it’s hard for English majors to avoid. I had slogged through the didactic material on whales and whaling, grateful for the relieving beauty of the Rockwell Kent illustrations in my Modern Library edition, as I waited for Melville to get on with Captain Ahab’s mono-maniacal quest for the whale.

It is a monumental listen as it was a monumental read: 18 cassettes of 90 minutes each, 27 hours with the man who says, “Call me Ishmael,” in one of literature’s most famous opening sentences.

Yet I wanted it never to end, and it seemed to me that the book, playing on the mind’s ear, registered now with a clarity and a power that had escaped my reading eyes. The theater of the imagination, as they said of radio, never had such spectacular events to place in motion.

The book’s 135 chapters (plus epilogue) gather momentum, very slowly indeed but finally crashing along like a tidal wave, before the final, ghostly silence. The meticulous descriptions of the way whalers live and work, which Melville sets forth with such teacherly precision, at last make the reader/listener an informed observer, prepared by all that has gone before for the Pequod’s last, devastating confrontation with Moby Dick.

The book is read by Walter Zimmerman, although it would be fairer to call what he does a dramatic recitation, delivered in a voice angular and efficient rather than mellifluous. Zimmerman does a variety of characters, the grunting monosyllables of Queequeg and the other native harpooners, the messianic thunder of Ahab, the Nantucket twangs of the mates Stubb and Starbuck, the various accents of British and French sailors.

Not less admirably, Zimmerman as Ishmael the narrator wends an effortless way through Melville’s ornate and complex sentences and his frequent flights of rhetoric. With equal and unstressed ease, his reading catches Melville’s frequent sly humor and nice irony. Melville’s prose in fact has more stops than a cathedral organ, and Zimmerman works them all in turn. It is a high and formidable achievement.

Books on Tape, which is a decade old and boasts 40,000-plus customers, is primarily a rental outfit, although all its titles are also for sale. “Moby Dick,” for example, is divided into two books of nine cassettes each; each rents for $15.50 a month (a quarter a day for overtime), or $31 to hear the whole volume, $144 to buy the lot.

The unabridged works do demand a commitment of time. Like the vistas the Michelin guides say are worth seeing but not worth going to see, some books are briefer pleasures, useful to have a taste of but not requiring word-for-word attention unless you spend a whole lot of time in SigAlerts.

But I understand the unabashed passion of the unabridged enthusiasts. I see in the catalogue that Zimmerman has also read, among other titles, “Madame Bovary” and “Crime and Punishment.” There goes my winter.

Information: Books on Tape, Box 7900, Newport Beach 92660.