Q & A

by M. Allen Cunningham

  Ernestine: Oh, but was Shakespeare ever a religion?

  Laughter.

  George: For some of us he still is.

  Dad: Ernestine has a point, Kip. Are you talking about Marxism or money or religion or literature?

  Kip: All of the above! And also attention—the faculty of attention.

  Dad: Go on, now. Elucidate. Gravy?

  Kip: Mm, thank you. What I’m saying is—(to Emily) oh incidentally, these potatoes are simply delicious.

  Mom: You have Maynard to thank, not me.

  George: They’re Dad’s specialty.

  Kip: Well done, Maynard. How do you get them so silky?

  Maynard: Secretly, I’m afraid.

  Kip: And my compliments on the pork, Emily. Perfectly succulent. … Now what was I saying?

  George: The faculty of attention…

  Dad: Yes, and you have the attention of the faculty. (Waves his fork to acknowledge Kenny and George).

  Kip: Good, good. So, attention. Most of us, don’t you think, want to be part of contemporary history, but what if contemporary history doesn’t demand any rigor in how we control and direct our attention? Won’t we let our attention decline? Or won’t we simply fix it on money, or on those objects that most interest the majority, which by the way is the same thing as decline.

  George: Objects such as…

  Kip: Spectator sports, pulp fictions, picture magazines, gadgets and machines, movies, television. Non-rigorous things.

  Dad: As opposed to…

  Kip: Well, as opposed to Hamlet, or Socrates, or Aquinas, or Voltaire.

  Kenyon: Rigorous things.

  Dad: Oh, but are those rigorous, Kip?

  Kip: Comparatively, yes. It depends on how one brings oneself, which is my point.

  George: But those first things you mentioned, sports and magazines and television, don’t those also require attention for anyone to enjoy them?

  Kip: They attract attention, George, that we know. I wouldn’t say they engage it. That is, they communicate to and stimulate the audience, but we can’t say there’s any real connection made or much benefit provided. The stimulus is immediately forgotten.

  Ernestine: As a matter of fact, Mister Fadiman, there are hundreds of people every week who feel such a connection to Kenyon from watching him on television that they write him the most personal letters imaginable.

  Kenyon: Ernestine answers them on my behalf.

  Ernestine: Girls propose marriage, teachers praise him, young men ask his advice—

  Kenyon: She handles them all so graciously.

  Ernestine: What do you make of that, Mister Fadiman? Doesn’t it mean they’re paying attention? Isn’t that a connection?

  Kip: I suppose it would be. Except that it can’t, because it is never intimate. I’m sure you do an admirable job, Ernestine, but you’re the one writing back. Not Kenyon. So whatever connection these viewers may feel—and I’d never blame them for feeling it—it is incomplete. It is illusory. And even if Kenyon were to answer them directly—

  Kenyon: Sometimes I do.

  Kip: Oh, well I commend that, Kenyon, but I’m afraid it can’t change the nature of the correspondence—I mean its basis. What the viewers have responded to is not an actual connection, but a stimulation.

  George: (Nudges Kenyon) Mister stimulator.

  Kip: Or simulation, we might say.

  George: (Nudges again) Mister simulacrum.

  Emily: But what about you, Kip? You’ve hosted your own share of programs. You’ve always made a fine impression on the audience yourself.

  Kip: I see your point, Emily, and impression is the key term. What the audience sees is always a representation, hardly ever the real thing. And the audience—as a matter of fact there is no audience, not in reality.

  Emily: How do you mean?

  Kip: Well, I mean, it’s the nature of the medium, whether radio or television. Take television: for those watching, it’s not at all like going to the theater or to a concert, is it? They are not a unified audience in that sense. They are a viewership, which is different. They are only some millions of groups in millions of living rooms, and through the courtesy of the television networks these groups each feel themselves to be in contact with the performers. They have not made contact at all, only gathered an impression, usually a false one.

  Dad: In fact that’s nothing new, Kip. False impressions have been a stock in trade forever. Montaigne said it four hundred years ago: Dissimulation is one of the most notable qualities of this century.

  George: But back to the faculty of attention. This audience, whatever form it takes—these viewers, they’re still paying attention of a kind.

  Kip: Perhaps, but it’s very unlike actual attention. It may be honestly felt, but it has none of the virtues of attentive reflection or of grappling with abstract ideas. It’s a passive and disempowering attention, really an act of amused consumption. Wouldn’t you say so, Kenny? You’ve spent weeks on television now. Wouldn’t you agree?

  Kenyon: Certainly a quiz show and Thomas Aquinus—I mean viewing and reading—are very different. And it’s true that it’s become a real challenge for me—to make sense of my work in education alongside this role on television. Can the two ever be integrated? I don’t know. …

  George: And you’re always stuck in that horrid booth!

  Dad: And that’s no breeze, let me tell you! I’ve tried the booth myself. Almost fainted! I don’t know how you do it, Kenny.

  Kip: I remember the first time I hosted What’s My Line—how it surprised me to learn that we were to rehearse the whole thing beforehand. You must rehearse quite a bit, Kenny, on the quiz program.

  Kenyon is taken aback.

  Kenyon: Pardon me?

  Kip: I mean, the show always runs so smoothly. Mustn’t you rehearse each week?

  Kenyon: Rehearse? Why, not at all, Kip, no. We don’t rehearse.

  Ernestine: But Kenyon, you do have your meeting with Mister Lacky every Monday…

  Kenyon: We have production meetings, that’s true—

  Ernestine: They’re very detailed meetings, I always assumed…

  Kip: All that clever banter before and after each program—you don’t rehearse any of that?

  Kenyon: Oh, that. Yes, of course. That part we rehearse.

  Kip: Did you think I meant the answers? Forgive me. I wouldn’t question that archival brain of yours. (Smiles.)

  Pause. Clank of dinnerware. Kenyon drinks from his water glass.

  Dad: No, no. Kenny’s a natural. A naturally marvelous answerer. I believe it’s because he’s always respected the value of knowledge. Like my father, the country doctor—everything interested him. Nothing was unimportant. Kenny was always that way too. Did I tell you, Kenny, I heard from Hector, my cousin out in Illinois. He wrote to say he watches you every week. When your turn comes he closes his eyes and listens to your voice and says he can just see your grandfather talking.

  Kenyon: My goodness.

  Dad: But Kip, I think what you’re saying is that television, sports, and these things—they do influence our ways of thinking, our behaviors. In the end they hold up a mirror to us all.

  Kip: To our powers of attention or lack of them, yes.

  Dad: They’re nothing in themselves but a reflection.

  Kenyon: Whereas a book, or a seminar …

  Dad: Whereas a book, for instance—a book can also be a mirror, of course. But the truly great book, as we all know, is never simply that.

  Ernestine: No? What, then?

  Dad: The truly great book is—

  Kenyon and Dad: (In unison)—a window.

  Kenyon: (To Ernestine) Dad taught us this a long time ago. Me and George. Didn’t he, George?

  Dad: The truly great book, unlike the mirror, will never isolate you.
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br />   Kip: And never render you passive! Profoundly true, yes, profoundly.

  George: Let me help you with the plates, Mom.

  Kip: I’m afraid I’ve been talking all this time, and we haven’t learned anything at all about Ernestine.

  Ernestine: Oh, don’t worry about me.

  Kenyon: Ernestine is a gem. A brilliantly sensitive soul. I can tell you that about Ernestine.

  Kip: Ernestine, you ought to come next month to the Town Hall. I’ve asked Maynard to join me in speaking there one evening, for a radio broadcast. Bring Kenyon along.

  Ernestine: What will your topic be, Mister Saint Claire?

  Dad: Don Quixote’s profession.

  Kenny: That’s the subject of Dad’s new book.

  Ernestine: You’ll talk about knighthood then?

  Dad: Well, in a sense. As I see it, Don Quixote is neither madman nor knight. What he is, is an actor—although not in the way that we’ve come to understand the word. He’s an actor because he strives with all his heart and soul to act as if he’s noble, as if he’s virtuous, as if he’s perfectly heroic. Whatever the actual circumstances may say about him, whatever abuse he faces, he never stops acting the highest role, and so he becomes it.

  Ernestine: There’s an inspiring thought. We’ll have to go, won’t we, Kenyon?

  Kenny: (Blushes) Sure. Wouldn’t miss it, Dad.

  George: Mother wants to know, who’ll have some ice cream?

  KENYON

  Outside, the moon is large above the old house. In the icy dark the leafless trees look stony as columns. Only a few birds call. Kenyon walks out with Dad along a freshly mowed path through the field, the scattered hay a refulgent blue. Dad loves getting up on the tractor to cut these causeways over the grass, perched high in the seat in his overalls, duffel jacket, and red hunting cap, the engine’s stovepipe spurting exhaust in florets of gratifying black. Dad’s a farmer at heart, though with no trace-horses or even chickens to speak of. The local foxes charm instead of vex him and he indulges an unkempt verdancy in all corners. He wears his hunting cap now, the flaps down to warm his ears. He and Kenyon are heading to the property line to watch the neighbor’s cows. In that farmer’s heart of his there’s a special place for the sight of bovine breath steaming in the dark. A vestige from his rural boyhood in Illinois, maybe. He puffs an after-supper pipe as they go.

  “Good old Kip,” he says, “was every bit himself tonight, wasn’t he?”

  Ice cream eaten, cigarettes smoked, fireside yarns exchanged, Fadiman has taken his leave for the night. Kenyon and Dad watched his taillights diminish from the drive. George had retired upstairs and Ernestine was snug in the parlor listening to Mom at the upright. The music carries faintly into the field even now.

  “It was good to see him,” says Kenyon. “It’d been some time.”

  “Had it? You know, if you should ever need anything, he’s very close to you in the city. Kip would never fail you.”

  “I know it. I’ve been so tied up these last few months.”

  “Well, keep him in mind.”

  Their feet rustle in the mowed clippings, little piles of hay kicked ahead with every step. Even in the night freeze, the smell is rich and fruitful.

  “You know, Kenny, I don’t like seeing you tied up. You can do anything you want, son. I wonder if you realize that.”

  Kenyon burrows deeper into the coil of his scarf, the cold seeping through his jacket. “Dad?”

  “I’ve never asked—this television business—I’ve never asked you about it. I’ve wondered though, Mother and I both, whether it’s good for a man like you—or the kind of man we think you are.”

  Kenyon’s heart sinks. The kind of man we think you are. “Well,” he says, “there’s so much opportunity in it. NBC wants to put me on a salary—when I’m done with the quiz show—did I tell you? I’d be a consultant for their public service programming, an educational position. And Life Magazine has asked me for an article.” Pointlessly he adds: “There’s always the money to consider.”

  “A tremendous amount, I know,” says Dad. “And I know how tempting that is. I understand that completely.”

  Dad stops in his paces. Kenyon slows and turns. The old man’s face glows golden in the flare of a match, the light cupped in his hands over the pipe. Drawing deep, Dad looks up at the moon as if making a wish. “I just hope you’ll always do the right thing, Kenny. The thing that will make you the happiest. You can do that, you see. Whatever the circumstances.”

  A quick sting in Kenyon’s sinuses now, and something welling in his chest. “I want to, Dad. It’s all been pretty confusing, I admit.”

  “Well, if there’s anything about this business making you unhappy, maybe it’s time to stop.”

  “I don’t know. Do I seem unhappy?”

  “You seem … put upon.”

  Helplessly now the corners of Kenyon’s eyes go cold with tears. What is this sudden emotion? Dad sees it.

  “You must be under an awful lot of pressure, Kenny.”

  “Everything happened at once. I never had much time to think.”

  “Mm. Just don’t forget that you can stop—if that’s what seems right. You can…” Dad extends an arm sideways, his pipe sweeping the air. “…wipe the slate clean.”

  “You think the slate’s dirty?”

  “Oh, it’s none of my business. In any case, I’m not sure what ‘dirty’ would mean.”

  “I’m doing my best, Dad. Yes, I’ve been confused, but just stopping—it’s not so simple.”

  “No? What do you mean?”

  What do you mean, Kenyon? What do you mean? How to say it? How put into words the futility, the sense of loss despite your accumulated winnings, the sense that the moment of surrender has long since passed?

  It’s shame. That’s what this feeling is. Shame. And now Kenyon sees it clearly. All this time he’s been lying outright: to the cameras, to the amorphous television audience, to the people who stop him in the street. But never until tonight has he lied outright to his family. While talking with his parents these last few months, he’s been all evasion—roundabout answers, changing the subject. Tonight, though, is different. Tonight came his first bold-faced lie, spoken in front of everyone at the table. We don’t rehearse. And such awkwardness in that moment of lying, and Dad had smoothed it over—but the old man knows. He knows.

  With a fullness in his throat now, Kenyon blurts it out: “What chance is there, Dad? I mean, the things Kip was saying at dinner—television, attention, all that—”

  “Oh, I don’t think he meant to chastise you, Kenny—”

  “I know, but—”

  “He’s spent so much time on television himself—”

  “But he’s right,” says Kenyon. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? We all know he’s right. And we never had a chance, did we? Those of us who would live another way, teach another way. I see that now.”

  Even with the moonlight at the old man’s back, Kenyon can see the fall of Dad’s shadowed face as he listens. This troubles Kenyon profoundly, down on some deep level where a father’s authority is supposed to last forever. Still, in the hopelessness of the moment he says it again. “There never was a chance, Dad, was there? For people like us—to make a difference.”

  They start forward again, slowly, shoes rustling the grass. Kenyon sleeves the wetness from his face before it can crystallize in the cold. They’ve almost reached the fence line, shoulders of heifers coming into view, secretly, black against black—and the plumes of their breathing, dark gray until caught in bluing moonlight.

  Dad’s large hand comes to rest on Kenyon’s shoulder.

  “Oh, son,” he says, and breathes, breathes. “What can I tell you?” His own smoke mirrors the breathing of the gentle beasts out there. “I’ve never been absolutely sure you wanted to live my life over again.”r />
  “No, no, that’s not what I’m saying, Dad…” But Kenyon feels so far gone now, so adrift in misunderstanding, that he falls silent.

  “You know,” says Dad. “I may as well admit, I don’t completely regret my coming retirement.”

  Beyond the fence in the moonlight of the neighboring field the large dark bodies, made anxious by their presence, are turning and turning in circles.

  “Ernestine is lovely,” says Dad.

  “Yes. She is.”

  KENYON, et al.

  fix. v.tr—1a. To place securely; make stable or firm. b. To secure to another, attach. 2a. To put into a stable or unalterable form. b. To make (a chemical) nonvolatile or stable. c. To kill and preserve (a specimen) intact for microscopic study.

  In the dark of the narrow shaft, in the illumined booth of the elevator car rocking on its cables, Kenyon Saint Claire flies upward…

  The Detroit News

  Feb. 18, 1957

  By Russell Harris, Staff Correspondent

  Boyish-looking Kenyon Saint Claire, who happens to be television’s biggest money winner as well as a pretty fair blackjack player, would like to duck from under TV’s horn of plenty before he owns the network itself and his sponsor’s tonic factory. The a-little-gawky, self-described “shy” teacher is doubtful about his ability to helm NBC. As for the tonic, he says in judicial fairness: “I imagine it does a good job. Has alcohol in it.”

  Mr. Bigler awaits him in the reception area on the 30th floor, greets him with outstretched hand as soon as the doors slide open. “Kenyon. Thanks so much for coming up.”

  His tie-clip is a tiny silver television set glinting against brown and yellow houndstooth.

  “This is Miss Gray, my secretary. She’s prepared the paperwork.”

  Together they proceed across the 30th floor, stopping along the way at several desks and office doors to allow people to shake Kenyon’s hand.

  Although Saint Claire’s winnings total $122,000, he does not get a nickel from the program until he either quits or loses. It seems unimaginable that he should lose, but will he quit?