Cultural Amnesia (17 page)

Perhaps he was too cultivated. His Upper East Side brownstone was full of good books, which the range of reference in his
conversation proved that he had read. (At Yale he had been an erratic student, but one of those erratic students who somehow end up reading the whole of Henry James, probably because somebody
advised him not to.) Though temperamentally a nervous wreck by nature, he seemed as much at ease among his civilized surroundings as Jay Leno seems at ease among his classic cars and motorcycles.
I was in New York to promote my book
Unreliable Memoirs
, which I suspected at the start would have little chance of securing an American audience. It was
just too hard to classify: most of the first wave of American reviewers had convicted it of trying to be truthful and fanciful at the same time. Since I had clearly had no other aim in mind, I
read these indictments with sad bewilderment. The most powerful reviewer, in
The New York Review of Books
, had seized on my incidental remark “Rilke
was a prick” in order to instruct me that Rilke was, on the contrary, an important German poet. These portents were not good. But Cavett had been so nice about the book on air that I
allowed myself to imagine he had actually read it, so here was one American reader already in the bag. He asked me to
lunch at the Algonquin, where he was delightfully fast and
funny; and then later in the week he asked me home for drinks, where he was even better, because he was ready to talk his business instead of mine. I learned a lot from him in a tearing hurry.
Discussing his disasters on air (self-deprecation was one of his charms) he put on a tape of an old show and fast-forwarded to an illustrative moment. I can’t remember who the guests were
or what they were doing—it could have been Truman Capote attacking Sonny Liston with a handkerchief—but I can remember exactly the question Cavett asked me. “Why did my voice
get louder just then?” When I hazarded that it was because the sound engineer had racked up the level, Cavett rewound a minute of the tape and showed me the moment again. “It
didn’t get louder,” he said. “The director cut to the close shot.” Then he played me an example of a line getting lost because his director cut to the wide shot. Suddenly
I saw it all: the closeness of the shot varies the volume. I had already done years of television without figuring that one out for myself. That was the night I learned to wait for the red light
on my camera before launching a would-be zinger. The red light meant go. In later years, isolated individual tapes (called iso-tapes in the trade) did away with the problem, but at the time it
was vital information. Cavett, who did a minimum of four shows a week, knew everything about talking in vision.

It made him famous. He was never as famous as Carson, but he was famous enough not to be able to go out except in
disguise. With a fishing hat pulled down over his ears he walked me along to Fifth Avenue so I could hail a cab. In that area the sidewalks had just been relaid with a sprinkling of metal dust in
the concrete so that they would sparkle under the streetlights. We were walking on a night sky. Years later I did his show again. He was just as welcoming but he had even less time to spare. His
show was fighting for renewal. The network executives thought he was finished and they might have been right. Those hundreds of shows a year had worn him out. The joke-telling machines can take
that kind of schedule because nothing troubles them in their interior lives except the problem of finding time to spend the money. Cavett’s interior life was more complicated. For too long
he had been questioning the value of what he did for a living. I think he really wanted to be a writer, but couldn’t face the risk of failing at it. The idea that he was born for television
secretly appalled him. One of his many
on-air comments about his lack of inches—“Sony are making people”—had a bitter tinge.

But born for television he was. Even if he had never hosted a talk show, his comedy specials would have
been enough to establish him as one of the most original small-screen talents since Ernie Kovacs. I particularly treasure the blissful moment when Cavett was being loomed over by a luscious
six-foot blonde. Sheltering under her magnificent bosom, Cavett addressed the audience. “Allow me to present,” he said, “Admiral Harvey Q. Beeswanger USN, master of
disguise.” He had the wit’s gift of making the language the hero—the gift of playful seriousness. In America, however, play and seriousness make uneasy bedfellows. Even a
supposedly urbane magazine or culture supplement will contract a severe case of editorial nerves if a contributor cracks wise on a serious theme, and in the general run of show business the two
elements, as time goes on, grow more and more separate instead of closer together.

It might be said that the United States is the first known case of a civilization developing through disintegration. It
might
be said, but you wouldn’t want to say it on an entertainment talk show. A licensed iconoclast like Gore Vidal could perhaps get way with it, but
no host would dare try—or even, alas, be capable of thinking such a thing. There are special talk shows for that sort of stuff. Charlie Rose has the seriousness business all sewn up. There
will be no Dick Cavett of the future. We should count ourselves lucky that there was one in the past. I count myself blessed that I knew him when he was still a small but seductive part of the
American landscape. Eventually the American landscape seemed to change its mind about wanting to include him, but it is possible that he had the idea first. At one point, towards the end, he was
scheduled to do a set of programmes in England, for later transmission in America. Booked as a guest and champing at the bit, I was one of the many admirers looking forward to his arrival: but he
never showed up. Apparently he boarded the Concorde at Kennedy, had a breakdown before the plane took off, and was taken home. I never found out what happened to him afterwards, and have never
tried to find out. He would always have been a melancholic if he had given himself time, and perhaps he finally had time. (At the Algonquin he had given me a copy of his marvellous book,
Cavett,
and on the contents page he wrote
“More in Seurat than in Ingres.”) A man looking for oblivion should be allowed to
have it. Like Dick Diver at the end of
Tender Is the Night
, Dick Cavett sank back into America. He had already taught me my biggest lesson about television,
far bigger than the one about the light on the camera: doing television can be wonderfully rewarding in every sense, but if there is nothing else in your life, watch out.

PAUL CELAN

Paul Celan was born in 1920 in Romania and committed suicide in Paris in 1970. A thumbnail sketch
of his life would include two main facts: he was a slave labourer under the Nazis, and he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, “
Todesfuge
” (Death Fugue). A more detailed account of his life opens up into one paradox after another. Anybody can understand “
Todesfuge
,” but to become acquainted with the bulk of his other poetry is a much harder task, even though there are admirers who say that the difficulties
have been exaggerated, and that he is hard to understand only because he understood so much. But there are times in his work when a purportedly deep penetration of reality looks exactly like
taking refuge in obscurity. Though the truth can’t always be told by sales figures, it is interesting that his first collection of poems,
Der Sand aus
den Urnen
(The Sand from the Urns), published in 1948, sold twenty copies in three years. If one of the poems in it, “
Todesfuge
,”
hadn’t eventually caught on, the world might have heard much less of him: and one of the reasons it caught on was surely that it was, for him, so unusually direct. He himself loathed
the idea that his most famous poem had become a media event. He thought that too
many Germans were using it to ritualize guilt. On the other hand he had time for
Heidegger, who saw no cause for guilt about his own conduct under the Nazis. There is an excellent critical biography by Celan’s chief translator John Felstiner, called
Paul Celan
:
Poet, Survivor, Jew
. There is also a question, however, to be asked about that word “survivor.” If we
can conclude that the only way he had not to be mad was to be dead, can he truly be said to have survived? He certainly survives as a poet, but one does not necessarily belittle him by saying
that it all depended on one poem. Mervyn Peake, who was present for the liberation of Belsen, wrote a courtly love poem to one of its dying girls. The discrepancy between subject and
vocabulary worked its ironic trick, but finally the properties and cadences of the nineteenth-century romantic heritage obtruded. Celan wrote a twentieth-century poem. He found a way of
injecting the inescapable sweetness of the musically constructed poem with the necessary bitterness to fit the time in which it was written, thereby obeying the following instruction to
himself.

Number me among the almonds.

—PAUL CELAN, QUOTED IN JOHN
FELSTINER’S
Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew
, P. 79

A
T THE TIME
I noted this
instruction down, I couldn’t resist the unwritten addition: “And call me a nut.” But I knew that a mental defence mechanism was at work to fend off the sense of being
under-rehearsed that one is bound to have when reading about someone upon whom history came down with its full weight, thereby justifying any amount of eccentric behaviour later on. Celan’s
example will always be daunting to other poets. For one thing, it included suicide, which critics understandably tend to regard as a mark of seriousness. They would have thought him serious
anyway, because most of the time his work was almost impossible to make sense of. It courts philistinism to say that Celan’s best poem, “
Todesfuge
,” is also his most accessible, but
there is no way around the risk. Celan’s usual hermeticism, his obliquity that amounts to
an insoluble encryption, was a necessity for the poet, not the poetry: there was never any reason poetry written in the dark light of the Holocaust should be indecipherable, and he wrote at least
one poem to prove it. In “
Todesfuge
” you can tell exactly what is going on. He is titrating the language of the
visione amorosa
against the imagery of the
giudizio universale
. The poem is an amorous vision of the Last Judgement. To put it
more simply, it is a love song from hell. When we pick its entwined melodies apart, which the poem demands that we do, we find that there are two kinds of amorous vision: one the exultant vision
of the perpetrator, the other the anguished vision of the slave. Hence the fugue. Scholarship (but only scholarship: not the poem itself) tells us that the fugue started as a tango. In Majdanek
the camp’s pitiable tango orchestra was forced to play endlessly while the doomed prisoners were selected for the various ways in which they would be worked to death. The German masters
were rather partial to the tango, perhaps because it was the smart music of the socially pretentious: Hitler and Goebbels were both entertained by a tango orchestra in 1941. Celan would have
heard about the death-camp tango. He would have heard about it, but he would not have actually heard it. We should remember that he was never in Majdanek or in any
Vernichtungslager
as such, although as a forced labourer in Romania he might as well have been. Majdanek was liberated by the Russians in 1944 and Celan probably heard
about its sinister tango immediately afterwards. After he had the idea for the two contesting visions of love, however, it had to be a fugue.