Cultural Amnesia (16 page)

From North Korea in its nightmare heyday, the writings of Kim Il Sung were exported to the West in
container ships, but not even our most fervent advocates of an alternative to capitalism could generate within themselves a demand to match the supply. They should have taken a look: it would
have been a useful education, although very painful. Our broadsheet newspapers frequently ran, as a paid advertisement, a full-page prospectus of the collected writings, quoting examples of
Kim’s thoughts, or Thought. The prospectus was probably enough to make the fans postpone their enjoyment. The luckless inhabitants of North Korea, however, had no choice: they had to stay
abreast of a stream of prose that flowed faster than they could read. Not a paragraph of it was of any interest whatsoever, except as an awe-inspiring demonstration of the great leader’s
prerogative to bore his people rigid, like the Chinese terracotta army he inspected on his tour of Shaanxi province in 1982. He must have thought that he had seen those glazed eyes before.

Examples from the Communist regimes could be multiplied—her
rhetoric was the other reason that
Camus might not have relished an evening with Mrs. Ceauşescu—but the exercise would be without merit. The fascist leaders present a more problematic, and therefore more important,
case. Mussolini was held to be an exciting speaker, but on any objective estimate you had to be an enthusiast to think so. Ezra Pound, who was otherwise such a fine judge of poetry that T. S.
Eliot sought and accepted his suggestions for trimming
The Waste Land
, compared the spare shapeliness of a Mussolini speech to a sculpture by Brancuşi.
It is permissible to suspect, however, that Pound’s demented politics (Mussolini’s measures against the Jews were never enough to suit Pound, just as Pétain’s were never
enough to suit Céline) had affected his aesthetic judgement. Even at the time, there were plenty of native Italians capable of realizing that what was coming out of Mussolini’s bag
was wind, and later on, during the long hangover after the Fascist binge, dispassionate philologists subjected his rhetoric to a rigorous linguistic analysis, laying bare how he had worked his
tricks. In the case of Hitler, German-speaking critics had identified his speeches as concerted trickery long before he came to power. (In pre-
Anschluß
Vienna, the coffee-house wit Anton Kuh published a persuasive dissection of Hitler’s rhetorical hoopla, thus earning himself a high place on the
Nazi death list.)

For the performance art of both Hitler and Mussolini—both of whom the young Camus heard regularly on the
radio—the most you can say is that it was exciting stuff if you believed it, and abject tub-thumping if you did not. As a writer, Mussolini when young could turn out a reasonably rousing
socialist polemic. Hitler as a writer gave us
Mein Kampf
, which is worse than boring: Rudolf Hess, who transcribed it as it poured from his hero’s
lips, would have been driven mad if he had not already been that way anyway. Had
Mein Kampf
been even halfway readable, more people would have actually read
it, and the world would have been warned earlier. In their off-duty moments—their down-time, as it was never then called—Mussolini and Hitler were very different creatures. Mussolini,
though he brooked no contradiction, could be entertaining because he could be entertained: an admirer of Fats Waller could never be entirely without bonhomie. But Hitler was boredom incarnate. A
typical oratorical effort was his broadcast on the eve of the
Anschluß
: it lasted a full three hours. And if
listening to him was
hard work in public, it was living hell in private. As we have it in transcribed form, his table talk makes us long for Goebbels. In the salon of the Berghof, for hours after midnight, Hitler
would keep his punch-drunk guests from their beds with an interminable monologue about his early struggles and the shining Nazi future: a
Ring
cycle minus
the music. Secretaries who worshipped him fell asleep trying to write it all down, while amputee officers reporting to him from the eastern front longed to get back to the comparatively
spontaneous entertainment provided by the Red Army’s massed artillery.

Hitler had the con man’s insight into other people’s reactions and must have been well aware
of what he was doing. He was proving himself. Or rather he was proving his position: proving his power. Tyrants always do, and Camus spotted it. If Mussolini strikes us as a partial exception, it
was because he was a partial tyrant. In Fascist Italy, the idea of individuality never quite died among the people. The true political monster insists that, apart from a few hand-picked satraps,
there shall be no individuals except himself. Everyone must be reminded, all the time, that solitude is all there is: solitude in the sense of helpless loneliness, awaiting its instructions from
the leader’s voice. It was probably Camus’s own innate loneliness that permitted him the insight. For a would-be athlete with weak lungs, there was no amount of success that could
detach him from his primal knowledge of what it feels like to be without power. It was a knowledge that helped to make him a great writer. The Gods poured success on him but it could only darken
his trench coat: it never soaked him to the skin.

DICK CAVETT

Dick Cavett was born in 1937 in Nebraska. In high school he was a state gymnastics champion and
trained himself as a magician. After Yale, he began his television career as a writer for Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, and subsequently ruled as the small screen’s most sophisticated
talk show host from the early 1970s onwards. In America, the talk show format depends on a comic monologue at the top of the show, perhaps a few sketches, and then the star interviews.
Cavett’s format dissolved the humour into the interviews, and much of his wit was unscripted. The idea that one man could be both playful and serious was never deemed to be quite
natural on American television and Cavett was regarded as something of a freak even at the time. Eventually he paid the penalty for being
sui generis
in
a medium that likes its categories to be clearly marked. I should say for the record that his interview with me was one of the least amusing he ever did, and it was my fault. But I learned a
lot from him and never forgot him. The book
Cavett
(1974), which carries on its title page both his own name and that of his friend and amanuensis
Christopher Porterfield, is cast mainly in the form of a long interview with the star. One of the best books about show business ever
published, there is nothing quite like
it, just as there has never been anyone quite like him.

Howya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve
seen the farm?

—DICK CAVETT, QUOTING ABE
BURROWS

D
ICK CAVETT
may have
heard this line from someone else and stored it away for future use, but was certainly capable of thinking it up for himself and delivering it on the spot. In lofty retrospect, the trick of the
line seems obvious enough to rank as one of those
trouvailles
waiting to glorify whoever gets to it first. Abe Burrows merely got lucky. (Abe Burrows also
shared the credit for the superb libretto of
Guys and Dolls
, which was scarcely a matter of mere luck; but that’s by the way.) As a true sophisticate
with a daunting intellectual range, Cavett was the most distinguished talk show host in America, if sophistication and an intellecutual range were what you wanted. Johnny Carson was an even
bigger celebrity, but Carson was a comedian first and foremost. Cavett’s mental life was so rich that he could do comedy as a sideline. The only persona that he bothered to, or needed to,
develop for working to the camera was of a boy from Nebraska dazzled by the bright lights of New York. To fit that persona, he would freely help himself to ideas from his range of influences
stretching back to W. C. Fields and beyond. But he also had the capacity to make up great new stuff at terrific speed. He began as a writer for the established hosts and he could write for
anybody, matching not only their themes but their tone of voice. When he finally appeared on screen as himself, he had to match his own tone of voice. He found that harder, but soon got awesomely
good at it. By the time he got to me, in 1974, he had already interviewed almost every household name in the country, and was ready for the more difficult challenge of interviewing someone whose
name wasn’t known at all, and of making something out of that. We were on air, I had hummed and hedged about my reasons for leaving Australia, and he suavely sailed in with his own
explanation, which I reproduce above. The throwaway speed of it impressed me: if he had used the line before, he knew just how to make it sound as if he hadn’t.
A small,
handsome man with an incongruously deep voice, Cavett was deadpan in the sense that he had no special face to signify a funny remark. He just said it, the way that the best conversational wits
always do. In conversation, “joke” is a deadly word: anyone who relishes improvised humour will duck for cover if he hears a prepared joke coming. Whether in private or in public,
Cavett’s style posed no such danger. He was by far the wittiest of the American talk show television hosts, most of whom have always been dependent on their writers. There is no shame in
that: in Britain and Australia, most of the talk shows go on the air once a week for a limited season. In America it is more like once a day forever. The host’s huge salary is his
compensation for never being free to spend it. The schedule is crushing, and the top-of-the-show monologue, if the host were to write it on his own, would need a full day’s work, with no
time left over for all the other preparation he has to do. Before the American host sits down with his first guest, he must first be a stand-up comedian: a joke teller. Cavett, having started as
a writer, understood that condition well. But in his career on camera he was always more interested in the stuff that came after the monologue: the conversation with the guest. In this he was
different from Carson and anyone else who has followed in Carson’s tradition, right up to the present day. Even Jon Stewart, who deserves his billing as a rare bird, is more like Carson
than like Cavett.

Carson was most at home doing his annual, high-earning stand-up stint in Las Vegas. Sitting down on his show, he could be
spontaneously funny if the guest opened an opportunity—the clumsier the guest, the more opportunities there were—but it was strictly counterpunching. When the guest provided no
suitable stimuli, Carson’s grovelling feed-man, Ed McMahon, chipped in and Carson counterpunched against him. Carson’s successor on
The Tonight
Show
, Jay Leno, does without the stooge but works essentially the same way: the core of his technique is stand-up joke telling, and he keeps in shape by taking cabaret dates all over
America. (When he was my guest in London, Leno was in his element, firing off jokes one after the other. When I was his guest in Los Angeles, he did the same thing. I did my best to come back at
him, but it wasn’t a conversation: more like mouth-to-mouth assassination.) Of the star hosts currently operating, David Letterman comes closest to Cavett’s easy-seeming urbanity, but
Letterman, for all his
quickness of reflex, needs, or anyway takes, a lot of time to tell a story—at the top of the show, he can take ten minutes to get two things said,
with much eye-popping and many an audience-milking “Whoo!,” “Hey!” and “Uh-
huh
!” Nor does Letterman really enjoy it when
the guest threatens to be capable of completing a paragraph unassisted, and an eloquent woman races his motor to a frenzy: instead of interrupting after every sentence, he interrupts
during
the sentence. The interruptions can be very funny, and they increase our opportunities to admire him: but they reduce our opportunities to admire the guest.
Among the current bunch, Conan O’Brien gave you, when he was starting out, the best idea of what Cavett’s unemphatic poise used to be like; but O’Brien, as he completes his
climb to stardom, gives himself an ever-increasing ration of havin’-fun hollerin’. It’s an imperative of the business, and Cavett defied it at his peril. Cavett never mugged,
never whooped it up for the audience, rarely told a formally constructed joke, and listened to the guest. To put it briefly, his style did not suit an American mass audience, and in the course of
time a position that had never been firm in the first place was fatally eroded.