Cruising Speed

by Cruising Speed- A Documentary (epub)

  “Somi iggi prufes tometugo seem thaffernun.”

  “What was that?”

  (Trying hard) “So me iggi prufes tometugo seem THAafternuun.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t quite get it.”

  (Impatiently): “so my english professor told me to go see him that afternoon.” And on with the story, by which time, let us face it, the narrative has become a little constipated; and soon I gave up. My responses became feigned, and I was reduced to harmonizing the expression on my face with the inflection of his rhetoric. It had become not a dialogue but a soliloquy, and the conversation dribbled off.

  It isn’t a purely contemporary problem. Two generations ago Professor William Strunk Jr. of Cornell was advising his student E. B. White to speak clearly—and to speak even more clearly if he did not know what he was saying. “He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong,” White reminisces in his introduction to The Elements of Style. “Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?”

  I remember when I was growing up, sitting with my brothers and sisters at the dining room table in Sharon and making those animal sounds which are understood only by children of the same age, who communicate primarily through inflection. One day my father announced, after what must have been a singularly trying dinner, that exactly four years had gone by (hyperbole was his specialty) since he had been able to understand a single word uttered by any one of his ten children, and that the indicated solution was to send us all to England—“where they respect the English language and teach you to open your mouths.” We put this down as one of Father’s periodic aberrations until, six weeks later, the entire younger half of the family found itself on an ocean liner headed for English boarding schools.

  Mumbling was a lifelong complaint of my father, and he demanded of his children, but never got, unconditional surrender. He once wrote to the headmistress of the Ethel Walker School, “I have intended for some time to write or speak to you about Maureen’s speech. She does not speak distinctly and has a tendency, in beginning a sentence, to utter any number of words almost simultaneously. Anything the school can do to improve this condition would be greatly appreciated by us. I have always had a feeling [here Father was really laying it on, for the benefit of his children, all of whom received copies of his letter] that there was some physical obstruction that caused this, but doctors say there is not.”

  Frustrated by the advent of the Second World War and the necessity of recalling his children from England before they had learned completely to open their mouths, my father hired an elocution teacher and scheduled two hours of classes every afternoon. She greeted her resentful students (it was during summer vacation!) at the initial class with the announcement that her elocution was so precise, and her breathing technique so highly developed, that anyone sitting in the top row of the balcony at Carnegie Hall could easily hear her softest whisper uttered onstage. Like a trained chorus—sitting a few feet away—we reacted: “What did you say? Speak up!” we did not get on. But after a while, I guess we did start to open our mouths.

  No doubt about it, it is a widespread malady—like a bad hand, only worse, because we cannot carry around with us a little machine that will do for our voices what a typewriter does for our penmanship. The malady is one part laziness, one part a perverted shyness. Perverted because its inarticulate premise is that it is socially less obtrusive to speak your thoughts in such a way as to require the person addressed to ask you to repeat what it was you said. A palpable irrationality, as E. B. White suggests. If you have to ask someone three times what did he say, and then, after deciphering it, you come upon Hope’s diamond, you will have the glow of pleasure that comes from knowing that the effort was worth the tribulation. But if at the end of the mine shaft you are merely made privy to the intelligence that the English professor set up a meeting for that afternoon, you are entitled to resent that so humdrum a detail got buried in an elocutionary gobbledygook which required a pick and shovel to unearth.

  But all that is to sidestep the animadversion of my correspondent, whose complaint isn’t against elocutionary clarity, but against a pseudo-English pronunciation. Or are they, in some people’s minds, fused? Anyway, John Kennedy, with his very very broad a’s, diminished the utility of “an English accent” used as a pejorative. It happens to be true that I learned to speak English in England, six years before Father sent us back there for more of the same. In 1932 my father moved his family from Paris to London. I arrived, age 7, speaking only Spanish, and a little French. But the tribal instinct quickly took hold, and I felt ashamed. I remember that the very first sentences I was rehearsed in at Blessed Sir (now St.) Thomas More’s grammar school in London, were, “Oh Toby, don’t roll on the road!”, and, “How now, brown cowl”, the mimicry of my earnest rendering of which, in a morganatic blend of low Spanish and high English, greatly amused my older brothers and sisters, and greatly pained me. Very soon after, we were back in Connecticut, and I strained to speak like Mortimer Snerd, so as to disguise from my friends the ignominy of my foreign experiences. The fashion is to comment on the hauteur of my diction. “After a late-show television appearance, an emcee may importune [David] Frye to reveal the man inside, and he always retreats into an impersonation,” a current magazine story reports. “The eyes brighten and he becomes a serenely confident William F. Buckley Jr., darting out his tongue and wheeling his eyes and speaking in that tone of exquisite aristocratic dismay: ‘Ahh, Mayor Daley, is, of course, the kind of guy I’d be proud, ahh, to call Daddy.’ Frye comes over perfectly as Buckley and in the general delight generated by this fast act the search for the real Frye is forgotten.” . . . To say nothing of the real Buckley.

  John Leo, a few years back, when I was running for mayor of New York, did a New York Times Magazine piece on me and brushed up against the subject. I told him that I thought the hauteur so often remarked was probably a defensive intonation (adduced against an intellectual community I had come across first at Yale and have wrestled with ever after) which proceeded on the assumption that “conservatives” were simply, well, simpletons. I don’t know, the reasoning is a posteriori, but the explanation is, even then, plausible. And of course its effects can be devastating. Ten years ago the publishers decided to bring out a new printing of McCarthy and His Enemies, which I had written, with Brent Bozell, during the general excitement of the McCarthy years, and I was asked to do a fresh introduction. I took the occasion to reminisce about the original edition, and the dour reception it received. “Mr. Dwight Macdonald, with his characteristic bounce, wished away our research [in Partisan Review] with the amusing comment that this book gives ‘the general effect of a brief by Cadwalader Wickersham and Taft on behalf of a pickpocket.’ Like that of most of McCarthy’s critics, here and abroad, Mr. Macdonald’s position on McCarthy reduced to, ‘I say it’s spinach and the hell with it.’ Not for years had there been a more sundering political controversy. Friendships were shattered—including, incidentally, mine with Macdonald. Six years went by before we met again, having been brought nervously together by a common friend. The lunch went well and through three courses the matter did not come up. But Macdonald could never turn his back for very long on Gomorrah, and abruptly he turned on me: ‘You know, you never understood the real evil of McCarthy.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I never did.’ He laughed! That is a good sign, isn’t it?” . . . Teddy White, assigned by Life to the task of doing a piece on the great practical-intellectual thought leaders of America, asked to see me, not because he thought to include me among them, but because he wondered what a “conservative’s” observations on the subject would be. So I told him (this was in 1966) that American conservatives were, very simply, unused to winning any practical-theoretical battles, thus we had nominated Goldwater, and Goldwater had lost triumphantly; that therefore our psychological posture tended to a resigned condescension towards the victors, whose political-intellectual dominance we protest only in the way that an embattled but philosophically secure opposition registers its p
rotests against the intrenched mismanagers of the common destiny, impassionately, every now and then, when great events challenge us; but, rather than not at all, perfunctorily, resignedly. I remember being told about the weatherbeaten reactionary congressman, grown prematurely old by the fiscal prodigalities of the New Deal, semi-paralyzed by the Hundred Days, who did nothing at all during his long career except to rise, a dozen times during each session of Congress, to make, wearily, the single observation, just prior to the passage of yet another expensive bill, “Gentlemen, where are we going to get the money?” It is the redeeming end to the story that toward the end of his life he rose, creakily, demanding the recognition to which the parliamentary rules entitled him, even though it was very late at night, at the point when a fatigued House of Representatives was prepared after days and nights of debate to pass the Lend-Lease Bill. The exhausted legislators groaned as the Speaker recognized him, just after midnight on the first of April, 1940. “Gentlemen,” he said, “April Fool!” Just so, if conservatives ever actually take power—say as unexpectedly as Jim took the senator’s seat in New York—they will have a great deal to worry about in the area of recovering their practical self-assurance. Meanwhile, they will be dismissed as simpletons; or, as haughty, or aristocratic; or, if they complain too loudly in the outskirts of Omaha, as phony Englishmen.

  I do not answer my correspondent from Stamford. I think at first to do so, but the pile of mail is high, and in any case I don’t see in his abusive letter either one of the two things I do not resist—a trace of a) geniality, or b) wit ... A dentist from California writes to congratulate me on defeating John Kenneth Galbraith in the debate at the Cambridge Union, televised in America a week or so ago. “It must be very gratifying to have had the Union side with your arguments. It’s somewhat like having the zoology, geology, and paleontology departments of the University of California give a resounding endorsement to the first few chapters of the book of Genesis.” I like that, though I wince at the importance now given to the technical victory I won, recalling that James Baldwin had won a technical victory—and by a much greater margin than my own against Galbraith—only a few years ago . . . It had been a lively evening, a few weeks ago. I had devoted many hours (by my standards) to studying Ken’s The New Industrial State, and the academic criticisms of it. I met him at his quarters (he is sojourning at Cambridge as a teaching fellow), and as we walked together through the spectacular courtyard of Trinity College he told me that he had made the mistake of preparing industriously, a year earlier, for a debate with Enoch Powell. Why the mistake? I asked, and he replied that Enoch Powell had been a pushover in debate, a contention I vigorously challenged (twice, I have exchanged opinions with Mr. Powell), while wondering, amusedly, and intensively, what could J. K. Galbraith be up to, revealing these thoughts as we approached the abattoir? Was he saying that he had not made the same mistake tonight— of thoroughly preparing his case? Because I would be twice the pushover he had found Powell to be? Actually, Galbraith is strangely guileless. And by the time we reached the reception room, crammed with Union officials, guests, sherry, and tobacco smoke, I had concluded that he meant no psychological maneuver at all; that it boiled down to nothing much more than that he had not prepared an opening oratorio, on the theme “Resolved, The market is a snare and a delusion,” a resolution which, as a matter of fact, he had dictated to the authorities of the Cambridge Union, to which I assented.

  ... A second letter on the debate, from Maine, interests me more, however vexing. “I thought that you were absolutely brilliant and I would like to tell you why.” I smell Ambrose Bierce’s definition of Admiration—the polite recognition of another’s resemblance to oneself.

  First, I must admit, I consider myself a libertarian rather than a conservative and what I heard sounded like straight libertarianism to me. But it was you that I really couldn’t believe. Gone was the usual flippant attitude. Gone was the usual leering smile. Gone were the immaterial cutting remarks. In other words, gone was the accent on style and in its place was a truly wonderful accent on content. You really looked like you meant what you were saying rather than merely putting on a show. You won that debate because you made the value of freedom real to many of the people who were there. “This is important” was written all over your face. The only thing I could say when you were through was “wow!”

  Think about it Mr. Buckley, what is it you are known as? Is it as a defender of the freedom philosophy? I think not. Let me quote from remarks on the paperback edition of your The Unmaking of a Mayor: “The most engaging, enraging, controversial, political personality in America today!”; “Buckley is superbly his sardonic, sneering self . . . Personable, elegant, flaunting intellect with a whiplash tongue . . .”; “The one-man show that threatened to establish the imperial attitude as a national virtue”; or, “sardonic, witty, irreverent.” I know that [these quotes] would not have appeared there if you had not wanted it so. [Wrong. I was not shown the jacket copy.] Your reputation, of course, follows your actions. There is not one person that I know who truly values freedom that thought of you as a leader prior to your debate this week. What did they think of you? They thought you were intelligent, controversial, witty, sardonic, irreverent, and entirely irrelevant to the advancement of any kind of a freedom philosophy.

  After watching the debate I no longer think that was your goal. If you continue to accent the content of your beliefs rather than the style with which you express them I’m sure that others will come to see you as a person who is truly concerned with freedom also.

  I wonder. If I had not in fact won the debate against Galbraith, won it in the formal sense, to wit, a few dozen more sophomores voting for me than for him, would my libertarian correspondent have written this letter? It is safe to conjecture: no. Why did he resent the jacket copy of The Unmaking of a Mayor, when what he might have commented upon was—the book, in which what he calls the libertarian case is in fact the current that the entire book plugs into? There were as many cracks-per-homily at the Cambridge Union debate as there were in the book: more, probably (indeed some television critics dismissed it as a showmen’s conflict); and the inconsistencies dissolve. The writer likes it that I won. That is what matters. Altogether American. If you wink, you are not serious. Would I have won, at Cambridge, if I had been less sardonic, leering, etc. I don’t know. It is very hard for me to appeal, without protective covering, directly to an audience, because the audience might turn me down; and, as a conservative grown up in the knowledge that victories are not for us, I must not give the audience the power to believe that its verdict matters to me. There is my failure, as a public figure; and my strength.

  From the Bronx, sustenance. “What I would like to say ... if I may, is that [your brother’s] winning this election is in great part [she means in some part, but hyperbole is inescapable in letters thus constructed] due to your integrity.” . . . And a letter from Tennessee, from a correspondent whose name I do not remember having seen before, though I have apparently written to him; such a letter as brings so much into focus, one’s conceits especially:

  Surveying the new crop of elected officials, I wonder, quite wistfully, if any of them will recall, as did Reagan in his first inaugural, the words of Benjamin Franklin—that “if any man could rise to public office and bring to that office the teachings and the precepts of the Prince of Peace, he would revolutionize the world and men would remember him for a thousand years.” It is a magnificent remark. I have hopes for Senator-elect Buckley, knowing of his personal commitment to Our Lord Jesus Christ (although he is a Catholic, I a Protestant, I do not presume to rule him out of the Kingdom, as do some of my brethren). Only time will tell. I only hope and pray that your brother, and Governor Reagan, and other Christians recently elected or re-elected, will remember that their first loyalty is to Him, and that conservatism is only a secondary crusade. At one time, totally ignorant of true Christianity as presented in the Bible, I thought that conservative principles, faithfully follow
ed by elected officials, could in and of themselves revolutionize the world. I now realize, to my chagrin, that this belief—held by so many of my conservative friends—is just as much a thought towards the “immanentizing of the eschaton” as is any dictum passed down from the ivory towers of doctrinaire liberalism. As [Whittaker] Chambers so lucidly said, “Charity minus the Crucifixion is liberalism.” In the same sense, conservatism minus the Gospel is unjustified bravado and plastic courage. Which leads to self-righteousness of a kind not seen since the Pharisees—as witness a certain lady [Ayn Rand] whose “philosophy” was devastated by Chambers in the pages of your magazine, and whom I fanatically followed before meeting the Living Lord ...

  Mr. Buckley, you have been extremely kind to me in the past, in giving me encouragement when I needed it, and in giving me love when I had finally seen the light of Calvary. Your letters meant more to me than you will ever know. At present, my activities include a good deal of writing for Christian magazines, and a good deal of work on high school and college campuses with Campus Crusade for Christ. However, a very great portion of my day is spent in prayer (I have found it necessary for survival), and my prayers are often with you. I no longer see you as “William F. Buckley, the Hope of Intellectual Conservatism, the Heir to Burke’s Throne.” No, I see you now as a fellow-Christian, and a man—with all the frailties of dust, but who, according to the Bible, was made “a little lower than the angels.” Should you lose your gift of eloquence, renounce conservatism, and man the barricades, my feelings for you will not have changed—because my own Saviour had you in mind when He hung naked and flayed on the Cross. My prayers are with you, no matter what transpires, and you have my love, whether you are ever aware of it or not.