Cruising Speed

by Cruising Speed- A Documentary (epub)

  I have with me a black folder, and in it I have seven speeches, three of which are current and last about 45 minutes each. Of these three, I composed one three years ago, the second two years ago, the third this spring. Nowadays when I am asked for the topic of my lecture, my agent says always the same thing, “Reflections on the Current Disorder.” I can run any one of my three speeches under that title; and anyway, nobody ever cares what title you give your speech. I have been having trouble with my Number Three speech (the most current), and am unhappy about it. It must be that it is over-analytical, and contains too many quotations from people like Jefferson and Hamilton—“and other racists,” as one student will complain, tomorrow, at Bridgeport. I do not like to give extemporaneous speeches, or even to speak only from notes, because I discovered years ago that my performances are too erratic. I traveled to a debate at Madison, Wisconsin, with Norman Cousins a decade ago (we would take opposite sides on the proposed suspension of nuclear testing), and he told me that he began his lecture career from a full text, traveled through notes-only, down to one 3x5 card; and now he uses nothing at all. During approximately the same period, I have traveled in exactly the opposite direction, and that is notwithstanding a natural glibness. I remember a few years ago, at the University of Washington, a questioner who, having heard my answer to some question or other, rose again, this time to protest that I had anticipated his question and read my answer from a prepared text, requiring me to lift all the papers from the podium and deposit them ceremoniously at the chairman’s table, to prove that I was not cheating during my exam. On the other hand I am incapable of memorizing. One of the speeches in my black binder I have delivered maybe fifty times, and I could not recite from memory two consecutive sentences from it. I do not know why my memory is so bad, or for that matter why I read so slowly. Isabel Paterson was able to tell me why, even as she knew how to crack all the riddles of the universe, in the well-tempered and irascible prose that made her, for so many years, the principal attraction of the Herald Tribune Book Review. She wrote me that my two difficulties had the same cause, namely that I had been taught too late how to read, the right age being three, or four at the latest, whereas I was illiterate until six or seven. Who knows, she may be right.

  I scribble a note or two, attempting an introduction that will take into account the situation as I can deduce it from the correspondence of young Harding Jones, the conservative huckster who, at age 19 (how do they do it?), appears to be managing an extraordinary share of the major events at Princeton University. We approach the appointed building, and I draw a deep breath, fumble finally with my clipboard, inserting everything there I might conceivably need. The next five hours (it averages five hours at colleges) will be exacting, but whenever I veer towards self-pity I think of the extreme on one side: the matador, say, who does not know confidently that he will survive his performance (although the odds are with him). But then, because I also loathe the opposite of self-pity, I think of musicians. How wonderful to make one’s living by playing music. Granted the drudgery of scales and arpeggios, when Rosalyn Tureck goes to Carnegie Hall she is first greeted not by the promoters, or the trustees, or the president of Carnegie Hall Inc., or by apprentice pianists; but by the audience. A bow, and she sits down, fusses with the bench, dabs the handkerchief on her palm, brings her hands down slowly, and then begins: what, to be sure, she may have played before ten times fifty times, but does one get tired of hearing the music one plays, as a lecturer gets tired of hearing again a speech he has delivered so often? Inconceivable.

  There are maybe two hundred people crowding the room. I am given sherry, and introduced to them. They approach me, and the astonishing Mr. Jones knows almost all of them by name, managing even to whisper to me, in some cases, the salient point about the boy, or the girl, or the professor, he is about to introduce me to. Harding does not like it when I tarry too long with one person, which of course I would not do if by so doing it looked as if I were holding up the line, but since the line at college functions of this sort is spontaneous and amorphous (one part natural courtesy; one the unwillingness of the student to appear as though his desire to meet you, at best a velleity, justifies the indignity of standing in line, which you do only to buy a ticket for The Grateful Dead, and even then, only because you promised to take your girl), it easily decomposes, if you should happen to pause overlong to talk to someone. I listen hard, and though there isn’t much cross-talk that is investigatory in nature, there is an awful lot of the kind of thing that needs parrying. Not many Mr.-Buckley-why-do-you-oppose-the-Family-Assistance-Plan? but quite a few Mr.-Buckley-how-can-you-defend-Agnew? There is absolutely no net impression that distinguishes Princeton. The girls are pretty and ugly, the boys shy and extrovert, the faculty distant and warm. There is no Incident; there very seldom is. The Incident-Makers either stay away, most of them, or else they decide, on these occasions, simply to observe, and to play the game. Mostly, the Incident-Makers prefer anonymous, institutional confrontations, and I think that that is an uncelebrated datum.

  . . . Last June I sat preparing to deliver the Commencement Address at the University of California at Riverside, while the black student president went on and on and on, in his address preceding my own, about wars fascism and imperialism. And then, while I was being introduced by the chancellor, two students approached and presented me with a live pig. Cheers and applause came from a hundred or so students, out of three or four thousand in the crowd. After it was all over, the student body president approached me, with a wonderful combination of diffidence and bumptiousness, to say that he disapproved of the pig-bit, but that I was not to mistake this for approval of anything I had said, presumably not even the passage in my speech in which I deplored race prejudice.

  Two weeks ago, in St. Paul, a young assistant to the rabbi at whose synagogue I had just finished speaking was asked in the crush in the hall as we were dispersing, did he want to meet me, to which he whispered hell no, even as the gentleman on my left, unaware of the reply, propelled me towards him, so that, perforce, we shook hands. “Congratulations,” he said grimly. “You certainly succeeded in snowing the audience.” “How?” I asked. “Well, for instance, by saying that we aren’t spending a greater percentage of our gross national product on the military than we were under Truman, when in fact the important thing is that in absolute terms we are spending maybe three times as much.” I answered with the measured, sleep-inducing matter-of-factness that is useful in defusing tense situations, as if I had not heard the words he uttered to the rabbi, but the exchange was lost in the general bustle. As we drove away my host, a doctor, one of the types from whose view nothing escapes, lightly probed me, and of course I told him the truth, that I had heard it all. He apologized for the social dislocation, and explained that the young man’s father was a legislator in the New York Assembly, who last April reversed himself and cast the deciding vote to relax the abortion law, in punishment for which he had failed of re-election, and the son was for that reason overwrought, particularly against conservative Catholics, but that he, the doctor, speaking for the rabbi and all the sponsors of the event, was nevertheless appalled by the boy’s rudeness. I dismissed it as utterly inconsequential, totally understandable, infinitely excusable, etc., etc., even though the sting punctured, and one of these days I will perhaps know enough about myself, though I do not spend much time in conscious introspection—this journal being a spectacular exception—to know whether such hurts are an offense pure and simple against my vanity, or whether, as I would prefer to think, they offend me as ruptures of the membrane of social affections (Garry Wills’s term) that makes it possible for people to live together, people by definition being people who disagree on questions trivial and substantial.

  There is none of that at the reception at Princeton, and finally I am led into a very large dining room, the tables splendidly appointed for the hundred insiders involved in the evening’s enterprise, and I am seated, Harding on my left, a confederate of hi
s on my right, and to his right, the President of Princeton University, Mr. Goheen, whose hand I shook at the reception, wondering even then what had got him there, putting down his appearance as another tribute to Harding’s manipulative genius. But dinner? (I cannot imagine a college president going out for dinner, except as a matter of duty.) I looked over the other diners, and deduced that the portlier members, sprinkled among the boys and girls, were: Influential Alumni. During the whole of dinner I am engaged in conversation left and right, and do not exchange a word with President Goheen, which begins to strike me as a little unnatural, but it isn’t easy to do something about it, i.e., to lean over the student situated between us; and anyway, I also begin to wonder whether the president would not just as soon have it that way. Harding, as the meat is being served, asked would I mind saying just a few words to the dinner guests before we go on to the auditorium, to which of course the only answer you can make, unless you are Evelyn Waugh or Edmund Wilson, is well, okay, and a sharp host will interpret, by the length of time you spend slurring the word “well,” just how disconcertedly you accept the call to extra duty. Then you get down to thinking.

  One of my disabilities is that I cannot think at all without a pen in my hand, and a sheet of paper in front of me; any pen, any paper. Or, if I am being questioned, or grilled; then I can think . . . Willmoore Kendall, the finest teacher I knew at Yale, the most difficult human being I have ever known, at Yale or elsewhere, found himself during one summer in the course of his eccentric career ferrying building materials from Washington, D.C., where he was temporarily working for a think-tank, to New Haven, where he was building a house on property he owned adjacent to the property of his old friend Cleanth Brooks, with whom he was on speaking terms in odd months of the year, or in even years—I forget; Willmoore’s calendar was inscrutable, the only givens being that he must not be on speaking terms with more than three people at any one time. I asked him one night—he often paused at Stamford—how was it worth his time himself to drive two or three times a week in his jeep station wagon over so long a distance, merely to save the freight, which after all was not that expensive; and he replied that whatever he was engaged in, even driving a jeep station wagon, he was also thinking, and that he found it just as easy to think while turning the wheel of an automobile and applying pressure to the pedals as while sitting in his study. And indeed, when he was ready to write, he would do so in the fabled manner of those who simply transcribe what their thought has worked up for them, down to the dotted i’s. John C. Calhoun, we are told, used to like to plow his farm because after doing so he could then sit down and write out, as quickly as he could move his pen, the speech or essay that his thoughts had constructed for him.

  Think, then—I grab my clipboard, and brandish my pen. One tries to think first, in such a situation, of a funny story or two that are appropriate to the occasion. I have one for the speaker-who-has-just-been-asked-to-speak-unprepared. It never fails, and if the priest who in due course will give me extreme unction should happen to ask me if I have anything I wish to say, I shall regale him with that same funny story. After that, if possible, recount something that relates to the local situation. Well, here I am, separated from Mr. Goheen, and the students must have thought about that, and I recall the vexations I and my associates encountered on the Yale Daily News, having organized our annual dinner around the retirement of the then-President of Yale, Charles Seymour. I had extended invitations to all the presidents of the Ivy League Colleges, and got acceptances from all of them (a careful operation: first we got General Eisenhower of Columbia to accept, and that way we could say to James Conant of Harvard: General Eisenhower has already accepted . . .). The matter of seating arose, and we decided that the presidents should fan out from the center of the table, beginning with the man who had the longest tenure, which suggested a line beginning with Conant, and ending with Stassen of Pennsylvania. All very well and good until we consulted Who’s Who and discovered that both Conant and Dodds of Princeton listed June 1933 as the date of their election to the presidency of their universities. I called a 19-year-old heeler, which is what they call the servile class at Yale who are competing for election to one of the extra-curricular organizations, and gave him the task of discovering what day in June Conant and Dodds had been elected. He came back what seemed like weeks later, hollow-eyed, to report that it was very complicated. Conant had been elected one week, by one of Harvard’s two governing bodies (subject to ratification by the second body, two weeks later). One week later (you guessed it), Dodds was named by Princeton’s only governing body. I asked the heeler whether the acquiescence of the second of Harvard’s governing bodies was by tradition automatic—in which case we could assume that the first election was authoritative. But the question made him cry. So we decided to assume it was so, and put Conant first . . . Well, that story would be good for a minute or two. The boys would obviously like me to tease Goheen a bit, since they are conservative, and he is liberal, so I thank him for endorsing the Princeton Plan, according to which students were let out during the two weeks before election, that they might have themselves a little participatory democracy. The categorical assumption was that they would proceed, a body militant, to be Clean for Gene or whoever was that season’s cutting edge for liberalism. I announce that the psephologists have just completed a study that reveals that the participation of Princeton volunteers was the very thing that brought my brother over the edge to victory. The boys love that, and Mr. Goheen smiles, rather like St. Sebastian at the executioner.

  Probably not more than four minutes, and you cannot get away with much less than that, particularly when you see that in anticipation, the audience has moved back their chairs, the older members of it lighting up their cigars.

  The formal dinner breaks up, a few minutes of questions, during which I try to grope my way toward Mr. Goheen, whom I feel at this point I am coming close to seriously neglecting, but a graduate student wants to know about something National Review said and shouldn’t have said in the current issue, or else something National Review didn’t say but should have said. I ask Harding if he can fetch me up a brandy, which miraculously he does, so that when we march off to the abattoir, I am in a moderate state of equilibrium.

  I have decided to give my Number Three speech, though it is a little bit difficult, and as I am being introduced I wonder how I might communicate this to the audience, so that it will not be too disappointed, after the initial roll, at being made to listen to something other than the Ride of the Valkyries—and so, after the pleasantries, I find myself saying that what I will proceed to say is historical and analytical, but that it will repay the close attention of the audience, whether right-or left-minded, because the speech is “exquisitely wrought.” The reaction is sharply interesting, because it brings howls of both appreciative and derisive laughter, followed—or am I imagining it?—by a quite preternatural silence which is not broken during the ensuing 45 minutes.

  “I have been following your career closely for the past several years,” I will hear from a stranger a few days later, “and believe that I have never seen an article that was as unfair to you as the enclosed, which should make it some sort of collector’s item. It is from the December 4 copy of the Trentonian, one of the two daily newspapers that service (?) Trenton, N.J.” How unfair is it, I wonder after reading it...

  princeton—The small band of campus conservatives at Princeton University assembled at Dillon Gym Wednesday night to see and hear the man they call “The Godfather.” For the conservatives, the event took on the quality of a ritualistic reaffirmation of the faith. Many arrived with dates for the big event, dressed to the nines as if for the junior prom, walking ostentatiously down the long center aisle to the section of seats at the front of the gym closest to the great man and marked off with orange-and-black crepe paper ribbons and signs saying “Reserved.”

  It takes guts to be a conservative at Princeton University. If you are one you’ve got to flaunt it, to show
machismo like a member of a street gang walking through alien turf. But the conservatives who came to experience William F. Buckley Jr. were outnumbered perhaps 10 to one by the liberals and radicals who came for other reasons—perhaps to be shocked or outraged or entertained. Buckley was not shocking or outrageous. The sneering enfant terrible of the right who wrote “God and Man at Yale” is no more. Buckley cannot yet manage a real smile (the closest he gets to one is a convulsive baring of his upper teeth) but nonetheless he has mellowed.