Cruising Speed

by Cruising Speed- A Documentary (epub)

  But he did demand as a minimal expiation for the broken confidence that I agree to lunch with him, inasmuch as he desired to elucidate matters he had raised in his letter. Okay, I said, and a date was set in New York, which I was required at the last minute to break. Frances told me that Herbert had expressed considerable dismay when she gave him the news, because a) he had bought a brand-new suit to wear at our lunch, and b) he had rather looked forward to visiting New York, which he had never laid eyes on, notwithstanding that he was born and brought up in Maryland, where he teaches, near Baltimore. So Frances proposed that he lunch with me in Baltimore on my way up from Chapel Hill, before my talk at the University of Maryland the following Thursday.

  It was arranged, and he arrived at my hotel suite with a talkative, highly informed Catholic, also a teacher. We spent two hours together, Herbert in his mid-twenties, large, crewcutted, homely, acutely intelligent, listening,

  for the most part, to his friend’s diligent interrogations.

  After Herbert and his friend left, I prepared for the speech concerning which he now has written me. A hectic prelude. A column to write. Then down to meet Garry Wills, who had come to fetch me in the lobby. He drove me to his home, where we listened to his super hi-fi, and then ate early. Garry, whose book Nixon Agonistes has shaken his old conservative friends, said grace before we attacked the fondue Bourguignonne, and he and Natalie and I, the children segregated to the corner of the kitchen, drowned out their talk and laughter with our own, which springs from ancient and trans-ideological affections. The head of the lecture series, a young man of enormous self-possession, arrived, dismayingly punctual but apprehensive about the hour, with two companions, to drive me faster than I have ever driven, to College Park, to a teeming auditorium, hot and tense, on the same campus that had conducted earlier this year an ugly strike during the Cambodian business. The overflow was packed into an adjacent lounge, there was a no-nonsense feel to the whole thing. After five minutes I had to take off my jacket and even then I had to rub my eyes every minute or so to blot up the sweat that made the text swim before my eyes...

  Along with Herbert’s letter about the speech, another letter, from a young historian, who gives his impressions of the event, gently reinforcing my own opinion of my shortcomings as a public speaker.

  Arriving from Washington only half an hour before you were scheduled to appear, I found the hall outside the auditorium crammed with an overflow crowd. The interesting thing about them was not so much their number as their diversity. Few of them were cast in the mold of YAF [Young Americans for Freedom], but your name and personality had attracted hundreds of them, ideologically uncommitted or left-leaning, and there was a genuine air of expectation. They stood patiently in line and then, when it became obvious that there was no more room in the auditorium, filled the corridors of the Student Center to listen to you over the public address system.

  And they were really listening. I say this because I ended up in the midst of the great unwashed, and made a point of observing their reactions. It was the first time I have seen that many college students pay rapt attention to the unaccompanied spoken word in quite some time. What struck me about it was their obvious thirst for a coherent set of ideas and, even more important to them, ideals. Their own much-vaunted liberal “life-style” is devoid of both, and this is something they seemed to realize by their presence.

  Probably wisely, you kept the tone of your remarks rather low-key. No ostentatious exhorting of the faithful or calling to the colors. Yet I was left with the suspicion that a little more prodding might have turned an interesting evening into a real turning point for quite a few of them. [The old complaint: the failure of the exegete who does not deign —perhaps because he cannot?—to lead.]

  As it was, they were very impressed with William Buckley but he was still the exception to the rule for them—an exotic, interesting visitor from another world. You drew them in, captured their attention, and planted a few misgivings about government collectivism coupled with individual license. [I had delivered what I have here designated as my Number 2 speech.] But, for most of them, the whole thing will be put back into its “proper” perspective by faculty, friends, media and intellectual pace-setters in the months ahead. Perhaps this is inevitable, but it does seem a damn shame, and one could wish that after you had made initial contact there were some kind of systematic follow-through beyond the sincere but necessarily limited efforts of local YAF chapters. Whether there is anything more you could have done I do not know. As conservatives I suppose we share a distaste for appeals based on emotionalism. But I am more and more convinced that underlying any deep commitment to conservatism, there is an element of passionate belief (I happen to associate it with certain spiritual values too—hence my revulsion for the Ayn Rand brigade). Can this feeling for basic values be articulated before a large, mixed group? I am uncertain, but it has been this sort of shared emotional commitment, admittedly wan at times, that has kept Western civilization going, but seems to be guttering at the moment.

  My misgivings were reinforced by a conversation I had with a local YAFer whom I knew from membership in a military history group a few years back. He is now a sophomore at Maryland and, being a student, and about six years my junior, could paint a clearer picture of student life today. The dimensions of the drug situation (he told me that everyone in his dorm was able to buy any type of hard or soft drug they wanted, and usually did) seem to be cancerous. Since most of the people in this dorm were engineering and business majors, it is not just a problem with the flakier elements in the philosophy and literature departments. Both authorities and parents are either ignorant of the mess or unwilling to recognize its existence. All very somber.

  Still, it was a most interesting evening, and after returning home and putting Handel’s Messiah on, while adding the finishing touches to a Revolutionary War piece for History Today, some of the uneasiness dispersed.

  I acknowledge the letter, and go down: Peter Starr and the directors are here.

  We have business to transact, a lot of legal this-and-that to pass over, and one or two questions to discuss concerning prospective remuneration for directors, several of whom travel great distances for the board meetings and do the homework hard. They attend because they were, somewhere along the line, caught by the ray of Peter’s excitement, and they throb with the energy of the management, and want to be in on it. We are acquiring a television station in Tennessee, five million dollars, an intricate financing in a seasick market, the banks and insurance companies and the personal underwriters at last lined up, as also the SEC, the FCC, Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. and, it would not surprise me to hear, the New York Times. It is a long meeting, and finally, at seven, I offer them drinks, and they prepare to fan back across the country. At seven-thirty I go up to dress. Because Pat and I will have dinner with Rosalyn Tureck.

  I hadn’t seen Rosalyn, to talk to, since the Firing Line broadcast. She had invited me (always by hand, always delivered by messenger to 73rd) to dine with her after each one of her three concerts, but I had declined, because I had guests at all three whom I wouldn’t have ditched, and because I was uncomfortable at the prospect of dining with a super-star after a strenuous performance: What can you talk about? In Rosalyn’s case, safely, about the magnificence of her performance. But after that, one drifts into other subjects, while feeling, somehow, that the great artist who has to listen to talk other than about her performance, while the applause still rings in the ear, is somehow let down. She gave a fourth date, and because it was she, and because we could not say No a fourth time, Pat and I resolved to break our rule, usually sacrosanct, that Friday nights we spend in the country.

  She is there, at the Laurent, with three friends—an English painter, and her New York lawyer and his wife— and the evening proceeds rapturously. We talk about everything (except politics), dine wonderfully, everyone enjoying everyone, and Rosalyn tells me that the note I sent her, likening Bach’s E-minor Partita to Ki
ng Lear was right on, that she had played the partita a thousand times, but always treated it with awe because she could not know what it would say to her this time around, even as Lear cannot be tuned by stroboscope. I mention that a professor of music history at Yale, raw-boned, tall as Kenneth Galbraith, shy but culturally cocksure, had whispered to me once that that partita was It, and that I had come to its mystery and majesty quickly, ardently, had heard it played a hundred times, but never better done than by her at the first of her series, which as a matter of fact was the truth, and she is glad, particularly because the Times had given perfunctory notice to her series. We glow together, and she asks her guests would we care for a liqueur, and I suggest we should have one at 7Srd Street, wink noisily at Rosalyn, and suggest that who knows, the liqueur might just conceivably give her a hard case of cacoethes pianoitis, she giggles her aristocratic warm giggle, leans over and whispers that she will play me the saraband she knows I love, and I have to avoid Pat’s horrified stare, because Pat thinks that to ask an artist casually to play for you is like asking Picasso to please come on home and do your portrait, and she thereupon turns the situation uproarious, as is her special skill, into a scenario wherein Rosalyn’s lawyer is there and then to draw me up a bill, but Rosalyn and I just coo, and walk into the car. We get home, and I fetch the liqueurs, snapping shut conversational spontaneities, lest Rosalyn should lose her resolution, and nudge her quietly but decisively towards the piano. At which point, just as she sits down and pulls out that talismanic handkerchief, the fondling of which precedes the contact of her numinous fingers with the keyboard, Horrible Foo gets into the act by, I gather, sinking his fangs deep into the forearm of the painter, causing Pat to make all kinds of motions simultaneously, rushing to get blood plasma or whatever, remonstrating with Foo, persuading the lawyer that it is really unprofitable to sue dog-owners, fetching extra brandy for the dazed painter; during all of which, or so Pat claims (oh, she would make a good story out of it), I am attempting to exact total silence from the room, so that Rosalyn might proceed; and in due course, Foo having been exiled, the tourniquet applied, the glasses filled, the excitement damped down, Rosalyn plays, and my cup runs over. I hope that on ending the saraband, she will decide that she wants to play more and more and more. But she rises, whether because she does not want to play more, or because she resists instinctively the an-evening-with-Gershwin-is-a-Gershwin-evening temptation, I do not know. So there is general babble, and soon I find myself saying, Rosalyn, I shall play for you. I sit down, and stumble my way through the saraband from the First Partita, after which I breathlessly ask her if she is familiar with Anatole France’s Our Lady’s Juggler, which to my dismay she is not; so I tell her about the monk—the ex-circus hand—who, having no relevant skills, and having observed the artful oblations rendered by his gifted brothers on the Feast Day of the Virgin, was spotted, late that night, standing before her statue juggling his five weather-beaten circus balls; and she gets the point.

  (Sunday, at the lunch to which Pat invited the painter, in exiguous expiation for the blood Foo had shed, he said to me that it was not until the next morning that he had completely focused on the spectacle of my playing the piano for Tureck; and we laughed, I more nervously than he, struggling, through the hoots of the company, to make the subtle but steadfast point that what I did was only excusable in the light of the utter awfulness of my piano-playing. I recently showed one of my paintings to Marc Chagall, something I would never have done to a freshman art-instructor.)

  We laugh on, and after a while I invite Rosalyn to my upstairs study, sit her down, and play her, on my brand-new Sony, a recording of the English Suites done by her, and we adore it together. Then I put on another record, done by another artist, of the same music, and we wince together, in which we are joined, presently, by the painter, the lawyer and his wife, and my wife, all of us crowded into the little room. I make one more pass at Rosalyn, hoping to seduce her one more time to the piano, but this time I fail. We giggle down the staircase, collect the coats, and tuck our guests into Rosalyn’s waiting limousine. A wonderful evening. Worth the hell Pat gives me, made tolerable only because late though it is, vinous though our condition, I can still draw foggily on the resources of the debater, which I do by haughtily, and indeed just a little sadly, reminding her that Horrible Foo has, as, Catonically, I had always warned her he would, proved to be a wicked, wicked dog.

  Saturday. Very unusual, a Saturday morning in New York. We sleep late, and send out for the New York Times, which is not delivered to 73rd on weekends. I make my way through it, without any sense of pressure, patting Foo ostentatiously under Pat’s glare; and then to my study, and correspondence.

  A gentleman from my home town of Stamford is cross, reacting against my defense of Jim, which was written in the form of a letter to the New York Post a day or two before the election, and attempted to answer the attack on him by Pete Hamill.

  I note that you often use an expression such as “he doesn’t really suppose he thinks he exists” [I hope I have never used such an expression] or something to that ridiculous effect and I suppose you think that that is the epitome of sarcastic wit but you are mistaken because in reality it is you who do not exist because you are a phony from top to bottom hence why you are so distasteful to so many people besides the “liberals”. Your politics—plain, old, ugly reactionary politics, just what do you think is so new about that, it’s the oldest politics in the world. Your life style—a mick masquerading as to what you probably fantacize [sic—and hencefoward, sic] as being how an upper class Englishman lives. I have lived in England and Europe and believe you’re just as upper class as Spiro Agnew, in spite of your frilly facade. Your pretence to religiosity—hypocritical something you have in common with that other phony Richard Nixon. . . . And as to your observation on knee-jerk liberals, you should talk, what are you but a knee-jerk reactionary with the emphasis on jerk. . . . Your frantic anti-communism is part of this knee-jerk reaction, you despise communist dictatorships, but the fascist ones are perfectly all right, also standard thinking to a right winger. Why you have been described as brilliant is really beyond me, you fit the pattern of any right wing group that has ever existed in this world. As to my earlier reference as to your masquerading as an upper class Englishman, I am not an anglophile by any means but an original is always preferable to the fake, always. The people who lick your boots are frightened, people who do not have the intelligence nor the comprehension to see through your facade of good manners, affected vocabulary, and pretences to see you for what you really are, but as Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people [the balance of the quotation was accurate].” That should give even such a brilliant wit such as yourself pause for thought.

  Well, that is an ice-breaker, as Wilfrid Sheed once commented when I told him that on first meeting Ayn Rand she had looked me square in the eyes and said, “You ahrr too intelligent to beleef in Gott!” On the whole though, routine, except for the English bit. That comes up from time to time.

  ... I remember as a junior at Yale visiting in Omaha with my prospective brother-in-law Brent Bozell, whose home was there, and stopping at a roadside stand to buy a kite, only to find, when we attempted to fly it, that the package contained a mere 50 feet of string, which I thought unreasonable. So I drove back to the vendor, and made my complaint in what I thought a perfectly straightforward way, to which the proprietress replied, “Why don’t you get out of here with your phony British accent?” I wish I had rolled off one of those nice squelchers that begin with “Madame,” but I was simply flustered, to Brent’s huge delight, and comforted myself that no one who knew England could confuse my “accent” with a British accent, although whatever it is that I do do when I speak is, apparently, slightly different. Yet here is a correspondent who has lived in England who thinks my elocution British. In the Army, at basic training in Georgia, I was simply thought of as Yankee, but even so, I found myself worrying then, at age 18, about the possibility of
affectation in speech, and I wonder now why it is that my sister Jane, immediately older, and Trish, immediately younger, are never reviled by kite-vendors, or correspondents-at-large. We should have come out sounding alike; we had identical experience as children.

  Years ago I wrote on the general subject of word-slurring—without reference to my own peculiarities. I recalled that I had recently spent the better part of a day with a college student who had much on his mind to tell me, which I looked forward to hearing. But after an hour or so I gave up. It wasn’t that his thinking was diffuse, or his sentences badly organized. It was simply that I could not understand his words. When they reached my ear they sounded as faint as though they had been forced through the wall of a soundproofed room, as garbled as though they had been fed through one of those scrambling devices of the Signal Corps.