Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
EVERY now and then, some organisation or other in- vites me to come and lec- ture to them. I always re- fuse. There are various reasons for this lazy, dis- courteous, cowardly, se1-
4..i. fish reaction — and high among them are laziness, rudeness, cowardice and selfishness. But the ex-
planation I usually give is a rotten public speaker. Of all means of conveying information from one mind to another, the speech from the platform seems to me the most inefficient and the most primitive. The invention of writing should have made this person-to-person spouting obsolete centuries ago except to audiences of illiterates or children. And probably no .intelligent person ever really expects to be enlightened or educated by an hour or more spent sitting on a bottom-squaring seat In an ugly hall staring up the nostrils and count- ing; the fillings of some long-winded fellow, or stirring up the skirt and counting the stifled yawns of. the long-winded fellow's wife. One of the first lhin&s I learned at Oxford was that it was pos- sible, to increase your reading speed but that no One could quicken his listening speed. I preferred tolie in bed all morning, watching the steam die on the surface of my shaving water and hearing the, chimes of the chapel clock warning me that I should soon be too late for lunch in Hall, confi- dent that I could mug up in one afternoon at the Radcliffe Camera the collected lectures of a don's lifetime. Those who do develop an appetite for joining audiences only pretend to theniselves that they are feeding their brains. If they are under- graduates, they may imagine that the spoken word, has somehow more muzzle velocity than the written word and will lodge itself painlessly in, their memory without having to be understood. Attending a lecture becomes a kind of magical 'estnnony, a tribal ritual, during which the group unconscious can be fertilised while the group is
that I am such actually unconscious. Sleep-learning has been practised at our older universities for many generations before the Russian psychologists be- gan teaching pupils by putting them to bed with earphones on.
What is being sought is reassurance that you are keeping up with the herd. And this is true too of political rallies and conventions—even the Anarchists are in the majority, and safely lined up with orthodoxy, for the duration of their meeting. There is something pathetic, and even touching, in the hungry desire of the conference delegates to be aroused, excited, inflamed, intoxi- cated, by the glacier flow of prefabricated plati- tudes, clumsily welded into paragraphs, from the dull speakers on the platform. And those con- ference jokes which always sound at first like a mis-reading of the script, feeble Spoonerisms and Pooterish puns, delivered with that arthritig stiffening of the shoulders, retraction of the head, and wave of the arm as if it were in a splint, which marks the amateur actor afraid he is about to get the bird. How ,the listeners long to laugh from ihe solar plexus with a sudden painful sur- prise (instead of snickering dryly from the sinus with calculated approval, sometimes even announcing at dictation speed, 'Ha. Ha. Ha. HA') as they would at even a familiar jest from a halfway competent comedian.
I have heard it argued by old conference hands that the aim of these gatherings is to allow the supporters to plug in to the godhead of the Leader, to syphon off the charisma (last year's political vogue-word) and take back to the con- stituency that essence of Wilsonian ideal or Heathian nectar which can be crystallised into enough ideological honey to feed the faithful during the long winter months. What they yearn for in their hearts, so the theory runs, is a Nuremberg Rally with a dash of HP sauce or a whiff of old pheasant. (By the way, I see from the bottle in front of me that HP is another taste which the Queen shares with her Prime Minister.) If this is true, then a second conference, like a second marriage, must be a triumph of hope over experience. And the regulars must content themselves with the annual proof that their apostles actually do exist, are real people with genuine dandruff, dyed hair, head colds, whisky
breath, twisted seams, and hollow smiles, and not just totem figures• manufactured in newspaper darkrooms or impersonated by John Bird in party, political broadcasts. This may be some comfort to the faithful. It is a sight and sound calculated to unnerve more fickle supporters who have been brought to support the party by a belief in its principles. There may not be much entertainment value in reading the official party document. But it seems like a comic novel compared with the strain of listening to a string of spokesmen read- ing the document aloud as a serial.
Even less can any .literary society, university club or amateur dramatic group expect a journalistic guest to be more intelligent, thought- ful, witty and fluent on their stage than on his own page. Whether conscious or not, their aim seems to me to be .to capture him in some way by dragging him from the safety of the printed paper into the exposed, open arena of their meeting-place. They assume that there is some secret quality, some hidden weakness or strength, that only breathing the same air can reveal. Often, no doubt, they are right if he turns out to be in the flesh an obvious drunk or half-caste or homosexual or psychopath. When the madam chairwoman said to Daniel George, 'That's odd —1 always thought of you as a hunchback,' she was only blurting out the kind of unspoken assumption made by local clubbers about the authors they pretend to admire for their intellects.
It is so long now since I allowed my vanity to set me exhibiting myself at such gatherings that I have almost forgotten how hopeless I am at pub- lic speaking. When I am forced to see other people performing, it all comes back to me. The awful feeling that you have sprouted like a giraffe so far from the speaker's table that you would have to get on your knees to read your notes. The moment when you realise that you are caught on a. sort of verbal merry-go-round and have three times returned to the same phrase. The failure of the professional speaker's advice to settle on one member of the audience and talk to him when you find your chosen listener is obviously either insane or ill and about to throw some kind of fit. I sympathise with them: Per- haps they have to speak in public. I do not. And when I start, I shall know the rot is setting in.
Previous page
