Post
by John F » Fri Nov 12, 2010 12:12 pm
The reason I quoted that bit was the delicious description of Sarah Palin seeming to have no first language. Only Dick Cavett would think to say such a thing. And he mentions the anti-intellectual vein in the American public at large, which might be worth discussing - I've brought it up now and then in the Pub, but only I seem to find it interesting, let alone troubling. What I didn't expect was that the same old stuff about Sarah Palin would be trotted out yet another time, ignoring the subject of this thread altogether.
The "Sunday Morning" reporter insisted on labeling Cavett himself as an intellectual, which he always bridles at and courteously declined to agree with. The point about Cavett was that he was unafraid, indeed eager, to bring intellectuals, literary writers, and more-than-show-biz performers into his various shows, a rarity in American commercial TV then and now, and to converse intelligently but noncompetitively with them - even to face up to them when necessary, as in his sharp and hilarious rejoinder to a tipsy and pugnacious Norman Mailer while Gore Vidal sat in the other chair and managed not to laugh out loud.
Just naming those names is enough to support my point, but I'll name two more from Cavett's half-hour PBS show. It was he who made me aware of the Australian-British critic Clive James, while James was still reviewing British TV with unequalled style and humor before he became something of a TV celebrity himself. And it was Cavett who spent a fascinating half an hour with John Gielgud, and at one point got him to recite A.E. Housman's "Bredon Hill" from "A Shropshire Lad." The poem wasn't familiar to me and moved me to tears - and also Gielgud himself, as it happened. If anything of the kind occurred in all those years of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, I never saw it.
Come to think of it, I'll emulate Cavett and make a space for the poem, though unfortunately without the extraordinary eloquence of Gielgud's voice and style:
Bredon Hill
In summertime on Bredon
The bells they sound so clear;
Round both the shires they ring them
In steeples far and near,
A happy noise to hear.
Here of a Sunday morning
My love and I would lie,
And see the coloured counties,
And hear the larks so high
About us in the sky.
The bells would ring to call her
In valleys miles away:
"Come all to church, good people;
Good people, come and pray."
But here my love would stay.
And I would turn and answer
Among the springing thyme,
"Oh, peal upon our wedding,
And we will hear the chime,
And come to church in time."
But when the snows at Christmas
On Bredon top were strown,
My love rose up so early
And stole out unbeknown
And went to church alone.
They tolled the one bell only,
Groom there was none to see,
The mourners followed after,
And so to church went she,
And would not wait for me.
The bells they sound on Bredon
And still the steeples hum.
"Come all to church, good people,"—
Oh, noisy bells, be dumb;
I hear you, I will come.
John Francis
