Listeners English and American
I
WHEN I read the article ‘Hands across the Sea’ in the April issue of this magazine, I could not help wondering how many English authors, actors, preachers, and teachers were dreaming at that moment of making easy money by exploiting the great American public in precisely the manner described by ‘A Yankee.’ In this essay, I propose to give him the retort courteous by explaining to my would-be fellow lecturers who have not yet crossed the Atlantic that, though there is certainly money to be made by lecturing in the United States, no English man or woman need expect to make it both easily and legitimately.
My own tour last autumn was a comparatively modest affair. I did not attempt to emulate the two hundred orchidaceous lectures once delivered in a single season by Oscar Wilde, nor to spread such limited eloquence as I possess from coast to coast, nor to shake hands with such national celebrities as President Roosevelt, Charlie Chaplin, Upton Sinclair, or Aimee Semple McPherson. Nevertheless, even the unspectacular performance of fortyfive lectures and broadcasts in nine weeks through eighteen states, and the continuous transport of myself and my baggage across a mere twenty thousand miles of unfamiliar territory, have convinced me that lecturing in England is a simple, amiable, and amateurish proposition, which need deceive no English speaker into imagining that success upon the platforms of his own country in itself qualifies him to appear before the exacting, critical, and experienced audiences of the United States.
The contrast between England and America, as lecture fields, lies chiefly in the psychology of these listeners, which accounts for the widely different status of lecturing in the two countries. It also presents an insufficiently considered problem to English lecturers, who can now only hope to recapture the traditional welcome which they are in danger of losing by dispossessing themselves as they leave Southampton of the curious illusion that American audiences will gather together in large numbers for the doubtful privilege of hearing an Oxford accent.
II
In England, lecturing is a semi-professional job, incidental to other jobs, for which the lecturer is lucky if he or she receives a fee which even partially compensates for the time and trouble involved. Apart from a limited group of audiences, such as women’s luncheon clubs and the wealthier nonconformist chapels, which are easily covered by one or two lecture agencies, the line between professional and amateur speaking is almost indecipherable. As soon as anyone becomes known as a lecturer, constant pressure is put upon him by political and social organizations to make him feel a moral obligation to speak for them, usually for his expenses only, but sometimes without the offer even of these.
When my English agent arranges commercial lectures for me in provincial towns, voluntary societies from the same cities besiege me with invitations to extend my visit in order to address them gratis. This is not because I am in any way a remarkable speaker, but because the prospect of getting something at the expense of another organization is irresistible to minority groups with limited resources. The free lectures demanded include talks to schools, colleges, religious brotherhoods, welfare centres, and political bodies.
Recently, at a large seaport town, I found myself involved in the arrangements for a midnight supper which was to follow an exacting lecture to a big chapel audience. No mention of a speech was made in the original invitation, which came from a group unconnected with the organizers of the lecture, but at the last moment, with an early train to catch in the morning and a further series of engagements to follow, I was abruptly notified that a half-hour speech was expected of me after two other speeches at the close of the meal. If the tired worm turns — as this worm did on that occasion — he risks unpopularity, the hostility of the local press, and the loss of subsequent professional engagements. Nowhere in America did I encounter the same naïve impression that an overworked lecturer is highly honored by invitations to address obscure groups for nothing.
Curiously enough, the sponsoring organizations — unlike their American counterparts, whose commercial exclusiveness is usually a welcome protection — seldom raise any objection to this method of exploiting both themselves and their speakers. At the end of the year the English lecturer — unless he teaches himself to disregard criticism and grows impervious to the national dislike of giving offense — usually finds that his voluntary lectures have vastly outnumbered the paid variety, and that his platform eloquence, far from being a financial asset, is a source of constant interruption and considerable expense.
No doubt it is because we regard lecturing as a free amateur entertainment rather than a serious economic proposition that English audiences are seldom either intimidating or critical. Most members of the British lecture-going public — which, in comparison with American listeners, is an extremely small proportion of the whole population — are themselves accustomed to get up and ‘say a few words’ at informal dinners, ‘old school’ gatherings, athletic clubs, women’s institutes, or local government committees. They prefer to feel that they and the lecturer are informally discussing a subject together rather than that a ‘celebrity’ or an ‘expert’ is telling them what they ought to know.
With some English audiences it is almost a solecism for the lecturer to be too efficient. In the older universities, those traditional homes of sweetness and light, the members of the senior common rooms are moved by really eloquent lecturing to an antagonism which approaches contempt. The ringing voice, the dramatic gesture, savor to them of an exhibitionism incompatible with pure scholarship — as though the quest for truth somehow acquired greater integrity by being presented without charm or skill. The English academic world seldom awards its highest prizes to its most successful lecturers. Their lecture halls may remain full while the audiences of the mumbling scholars melt rapidly away, but the appreciation of students does not count in England to the extent that it counts in America. Sometimes, when I was an undergraduate myself, it seemed to me that the very inability of a university lecturer to hold his audience appeared to his eminent contemporaries as a matter for congratulation. Had the enthusiasm of his listeners been greater, his colleagues’ faith in his scholarship would certainly have been less.
III
It is difficult for an English lecturer, accustomed to the tradition of goodhumored, semiskilled amateurishness so congenial to the English spirit, — which expects something, but not a great deal, for nothing, — to realize the hard, exacting, and rigidly commercial standards to which he will be expected to conform when he crosses the Atlantic. Much of the failure of English lecturers in America is due to the happy belief that American audiences are delighted to pay the immense fees only merited by an outstanding professional performance for the same inept, unskilled exhibitions of public speaking which are offered gratis to English listeners.
The sooner it is realized that this comfortable notion is even riper for discard than Interallied debts for cancellation, the better it will be for Anglo-American relations. Should some nightmare future ever produce a war between the United States and the British Empire, the historians — if any — who record the subsequent Dark Ages will certainly have to include among the causes of conflict the long tale of inordinately remunerated ’high-hattings,’ unprepared improvisations, social chitchats, and political gossipings meted out to American audiences as shoddy substitutes for the carefully reasoned addresses to which they justly believe that their high fees entitle them.
So habitual has this letting-down process become that American organizers are apt to show pathetic gratitude for any signs of industry on the part of English lecturers. I am told that Mr. Winston Churchill won high approval by recognizing the responsibility involved in his large guarantee and preparing a series of lectures worthy of the sum offered. Last spring Miss Phyllis Bentley, though less brilliant and dramatic than many English speakers, delighted her audiences by the obvious perseverance and skill with which she had collected and arranged her material. No remark of mine on American platforms was better received than the statement that a particular lecture had taken nearly a month to prepare.
American lecture agents would do well to explain more carefully to their prospective clients the standards of intelligence, eloquence, and (in the case of women lecturers) external decoration which the average American audience expects. If I was fortunate enough in my own tour to avoid some of the more egregious blunders characteristic of English visitors, I owe my good luck entirely to the vigorous and uncompromising realism with which the head of my New York publishing firm expounded the technique of the lecture business.
‘Lecturing,’ he had already warned me before I sailed from England, ‘is a game which must be played by definite rules, for it is more affected by rules of thumb than most anything one could do.’
These rules, and the infinite possibilities of breaking them inadvertently, present his first problem to the English speaker, who has never conducted a lecture campaign with the same formality, never been hedged about with so many regulations as those stipulated in his contract (itself an alarming document with which no British lecture agent would trouble his lecturers), and finally, and most formidably, never been the centre of so many conflicting interests.
The first essential for a lecturer — especially if he or she is an author — who desires a successful tour is not a fascinating personality, nor a resonant voice, nor a syllabus of arresting lecture titles, nor even the ‘name’ which originally attracted the interest of both agent and audiences; it is a training in diplomacy. Somehow or other the visiting author-lecturer, if he is not to return home a lugubrious failure, has to please his agent, his publisher, the organizers of the individual lectures, the audiences which gather to hear them, the press which reports them, and the principal bookstores in the city where the lecture is held. It would be a hard enough task to satisfy all these individuals if their interests were the same; but they seldom are. The agent is concerned with pleasing his organizers and the organizers with contenting their audiences; the press wants a ‘story’ which may be anything but the right type of publicity for the lecturer or his listeners; while the publisher — whose support is extremely valuable to the lecturing author — is interested in selling his books to the bookstores, and the bookstores in persuading the public to buy them.
Occasionally an agreeable coöperation does exist between the representatives of all these interests — in which happy and unusual event the lecturer heaves a sigh of relief, thanks God that hard work is so much less exhausting than diplomacy, and gives himself up to an orgy of handshaking, question answering, book autographing, and interviewing, When this coöperation is not forthcoming, his sense of being a bone between several contending dogs quickens until it fills him with dismay. In those disturbing situations in which the lecture organizer regards the bookautographing demands of the local bookstore as an unwarranted encroachment upon the time of the lecturerauthor for which organizer and audience have paid, the bewildered source of conflict is at his wit’s end to know how to do justice to both his agent and his publisher.
It is seldom possible to foresee which of these alternative situations will develop, since organizers vary enormously in their demands upon the lecturer. Some regard the lecture itself as fulfilling his financial obligation to those who have promoted it, and are exceedingly generous in their estimate of the amount of time (which cannot possibly be exaggerated) that he requires for correspondence, bookstore visits, meals, packing, and telephone conversations. Others apparently consider themselves entitled to purchase the lecturer, body, soul, and spirit, from the time that he enters a city until the moment that he leaves it — usually by a midnight train after lecturing for one hour, answering questions for another, and autographing his books for a third.
IV
I am, of course, aware that diplomacy of this kind is a quality required by American as well as by English lecturers — though to a lesser degree, because errors of judgment are always more conspicuous in a foreigner. The English lecturer has, in addition, certain difficulties to face which arise from the mere fact of being English, and hence unfamiliar not only with the rules of the game, but with the varying psychology of audiences in different parts of the United States. In some regions, and especially, I found, in the Middle West, many listeners have an antiEnglish bias which they conceal with infinite care and cordiality, but which subsequently gives itself away in the expressions of relief and gratitude which are forthcoming if the English lecturer avoids offending them in the way that they expect.
Once or twice, in spite of gracious words and welcoming faces, I have felt waves of hostility coming towards me from an audience before I have even begun to speak, and have discovered these to be due, not to a narrow Monroe-Doctrinism or to a stubborn Main Street psychology, but to errors of tact (to give them no worse a name) on the part of previous English lecturers.
It is, of course, possible that some temporary economic aberration may have overcome the charming speaker who had her hair shampooed in the beauty parlor of a Middle-Western woman’s club and then charged the fee to the account of her entertainers who had extended to her the courtesy of their premises. But no such charitable explanation seems to fit the political lecturer who announced his anxiety to acquaint himself with the amenities of American home life, only to treat his locally distinguished hostess and his fellow guests with such condescending discourtesy that in at least one American city no private household will ever again run the formidable risk of offering hospitality to English lecturers.
How many other unhappy ‘incidents’ are due less to British gauchcrie than to unexpected areas of American oversensitiveness it is difficult for an alien to estimate; I only know from several periods of residence in the United States that even after long acquaintance the possibility of saying or doing the wrong thing still remains terrifying. I had some bad moments recently when I left America without receiving a farewell letter or message from my lecture agent. This silence, I felt, was undoubtedly sinister. Which of the customary blunders had I unintentionally made? Was I guilty of the suggestion that some treasured piece of architecture, old in the eyes of a young country, was new according to the standards of our ancient and shabby little island? Had I made some tactless reference to Interallied debts, or been too insistent on the subject of the League of Nations? It was a real relief when the agent’s letter — forwarded from my publisher’s office the day after I sailed — followed me to England with indications that I had apparently avoided those particular solecisms.
Perhaps, even by my fellow speakers, I may be forgiven for offering in the Atlantic one or two suggestions which might prevent that loss of habitual good manners which seems so inexplicably to have befallen one or two English lecturers in America. A first lecture tour might be preceded, for instance, by a visit to Washington, with its austere monuments to the great, and its long record of the illustrious dead in Arlington Cemetery. No one who has stood in the Lee house at Arlington, or has read the extracts from Lincoln’s speeches on the marble walls of his memorial, could continue to regard America as a land of barbarians with no history worthy of the name.
A trial course of lecturing in England might also indicate at least some of the pitfalls of public speaking to those who have never lectured anywhere, yet who imagine that a fortune can be made in America by some trivial anecdotes or a few shallow witticisms if coupled with an ancient name, a military title, or a political ancestry. Sometimes I marvel at the patience and tolerance of American listeners who continue to invite English speakers to address them after the sorry treatment that they have often received at our hands, but I shall never cease to fear them for their critical judgment, their exacting standards, and the formality which regulates the whole process of American lecturing. Its very terminology suggests how formidable it is. In England a lecturer just turns up, but in America he is always ‘presented,’ while the informal questions put by an English audience at the close of an address are elevated, by American listeners, to the dignity of a ‘forum.’
V
No aspects of American lecturing are more intimidating to English visitors than the size of both auditoriums and audiences, and the enormous distances which have to be covered by speakers who are accustomed to regard the fourhour run from London to Manchester as a long and tiring journey.
The immensity of American auditoriums seems to me yet another example of that national Sehnsucht for grandeur and enlargement which puts up a building of fifty stories in the midst of a hundred square miles of undeveloped prairie, and gives such a name as ‘Grand Rapids’ to an insignificant stream with a very small dam over which used to float the logs required for the local furniture-making industry. Only the other day, in New York, someone suggested to me that if we knew what lay behind the desire to build skyscrapers we should understand the fundamental fact of American psychology. It is, I suppose, this ‘desire of the moth for the star’ which makes America appear, to those Europeans who appreciate her zest for self-improvement, a Renaissance country alive with the experimental audacity of fifteenth-century Italy. Whenever I approach New York from the sea I am reminded of Leonardo da Vinci’s symbolic prophecy: ‘Man shall spread his wings and fly away like a mighty swan,’ and I am physically in love with its climbing towers, its blue skies unobscured by the smoke and grime of resigned industrial England, its palpable and almost tangible vitality, its temples to those pagan deities of speed and human efficiency which have ousted the old conventional gods of the chapels and churches.
For the same reason I am still able, for all my alarm, to feel a sense of admiration when I find in some little Midwestern town a Masonic temple, capable of accommodating a regiment, which looks forward to the day when that small settlement will be a large and flourishing city. The fact remains that English eyes, accustomed to the dimly lit soberness of provincial town halls and suburban Wesleyan chapels, are liable to be dazzled by the brilliance of American auditoriums, and English voices to be defeated by the effort of making the last row of listeners hear even the substance of the lecture.
The further the English lecturer penetrates into the resistant heart of the Middle West, the greater this problem of intonation and vocabulary becomes. Speakers who never receive complaints of inaudibility at home may well be forewarned of the disappointment they will suffer when from some huge Middle-Western audience which has apparently received a lecture with vociferous enthusiasm the criticism eventually comes that the lecturer could not be heard. Usually this does not really mean that his voice was inaudible, but that his unfamiliar pronunciation and choice of words were not understood. I realized how this could happen when I listened from the gallery of St. Thomas’s Church in New York last November to ex-Governor Whitman giving his Armistice Day address with its eloquent plea for peace. Nothing could have been clearer than that deep, insistent voice, yet some quality in it defeated my English ears and I had continually to ask my companion for enlightenment.
This experience helped me to recover my vanishing sense of humor when a St. Louis newspaper described my normal university English as ‘a pronounced accent’ — a criticism which would have rankled the more had I not immediately recalled our own patronizing habit of talking to American visitors about their ‘accent’ when they come to our shores. As Professor Gilbert Murray has commented in his recent International Letter to Rabindranath Tagore:‘ The first step towards international understanding must be a recognition that our own national habits are not the unfailing canon by which those of other peoples must be judged, and that the beginning of all improvement must be a certain reasonable humility.’
His injunction is one which British lecturers in America would do well to bear in mind. However pure one’s English, it is useless to be vain about it amongst the listeners of the Middle West, for no standard of purity avails when the language itself is becoming an alien tongue, and will one day, perhaps, sound as strange in American ears as the Anglo-Saxon from which our own speech is descended has become to modern England.
I never felt so much of a foreigner in the United States as on the October day when I discovered in Terre Haute, Indiana, a Labor Temple dedicated to the memory of the great Socialist, Eugene Debs, whose political education had been obtained in that small colliery town. Feeling that the origin and purpose of this building might well have interest for a member of the English Labor Party, I went in to make inquiries of the two local citizens whom I found in charge of the office. I put my questions and my fellow Socialists made replies to what they believed these inquiries to have been, but five minutes failed to enlighten them on the purpose of my visit, or myself on the origin of the temple. We parted with gestures of friendship and esteem, but, had they or I been speaking Hungarian, our mutual understanding would have been no less.
VI
The intimidating distances to be covered throughout the whole vast territory between New York and San Francisco, and the conditions of living which so much traveling entails, explain a good deal of the disappointment felt by American listeners in English lecturers. Nearly all English speakers who are unfamiliar with the United States appear on American platforms at their worst instead of their best. Accustomed as they have been to short journeys, small halls, slow, benevolent audiences, and above all to frequent returns home to repack suitcases and answer correspondence, the perpetual driving activity of an American tour brings many of them before their hearers impaired by travel, fatigued by social functions, and nerve-racked after sleepless nights on long-distance trains.
I still shudder when I recall a fifteenhour journey which concluded with a five-hour shaking up in a one-car train, with a temperature raised by the steam pipes to boiling point in sublime disregard of the fact that we were traveling across the sun-blasted Iowa prairies at the height of an October heat wave. After I had squirmed miserably for the first hour or so upon a burning red plush seat which suggested the presence of an open volcano immediately beneath, a characteristic Middle-Western dust storm blew up, filling the train with so much black grit that everything I was wearing had to go next day to the cleaners. From the junction at which I alighted, hot, late and dirty, I had to drive ten miles in a car to my destination, eat a hasty lunch, and appear on the lecture platform without having had a moment in which to change my traveling dress or get rid of the grit filling eyes, nose, mouth, and hair. Blind with dust, heat, and fatigue, I delivered the lecture as one in a nightmare and hardly realized what replies I gave to the numerous questions from the audience composed of the local woman’s club and a number of college students. My listeners, who had never before had an English lecturer, can hardly have derived from my grubby and exhausted person a favorable impression of the British race as a whole, but I suspect that even an English audience would have found me neither intelligent nor intelligible after such a journey. I envy many American lecturers their apparent ability to thrive under such conditions; the exploits of some of them must leave American lecture agents with a poor opinion of British powers of endurance. I doubt if the most impervious Englishman could rival the stalwart philosopher who, according to his gratified agent, gave eleven lectures a week for five months and made forty thousand dollars. These figures as I write them still seem to me incredible, but I believe that I recall them correctly.
VII
In retrospect the inexhaustible hospitality that I received in America — the interrogative luncheons, the crowded teas, the dinners, drives, visits, and conversations, the long reception lines before lectures and the frequent political questionings which succeeded them and often extended far into the night — comes back to me as a triumphant kaleidoscope gay with spectacular colors, not one of which I should now wish to forgo. But my correspondence to friends at home during that period reveals a constant apprehension lest I should fail to deliver an adequate lecture after the expenditure of so much vitality upon other activities. The rôle of cinema star, however temporary, can only, I suspect, be effectively maintained after a long period of intensive training. And cinema stars, unlike most authors, can afford to travel with secretaries who will dispose of the enormous correspondence which even on a short tour perpetually threatens to overwhelm the foreign lecturer who has no opportunity to return at intervals to his base.
Only second to the demands of ‘fan mail’ is the constant unpacking and repacking of suitcases, especially for a woman lecturer who is endeavoring to modify in her listeners the excusable American belief that all English women are homely and dowdy, addicted to heavy tweeds, large brogues, and thick woolen stockings. Since we are not all as drab as we are painted, it is worth while to dispel this illusion, but the endeavor to do so places on the traveling English woman who has not only to be the star performer, but her own maid, laundress, and secretary as well, a burden heavier than that of a man lecturer, and one seldom allowed for by listeners. I cannot recall how often on my recent tour I longed, almost with tears, for a traveling companion who would unpack the dress, shoes, and hat which had usually to be found and flung on — after a hasty steaming in the bathroom to eliminate the worst creases made by packing — immediately on arrival in each new city.
At the risk of being numbered with other transgressors from my country, I venture to doubt whether the amount of entertainment which normally accompanies lecture tours is the best policy when the lecturer is English. It is valuable, perhaps, in so far as it makes upon the lecturer that impression of gayety, kindness, and exuberant vitality which causes England to seem, by comparison, as flat as the plains of Illinois and not half so amusing. Personal contacts may be, in themselves, better worth while and more conducive to Anglo-American friendship than the most successful lectures, but they do not always produce the best results from the address as such. I remember the strange amnesia that once seized me when I arrived at a university college after a sleepless night to find myself booked up for a series of interviews, a luncheon, a motor drive, a tea during which I stood, tealess, in a reception line for one and a half hours, a dinner, the lecture itself, and a press interrogation afterwards. The lecture passed off without mishap, but during the forum which followed I was asked a simple question about the Saar Valley and the probable outcome of the plebiscite. On this occasion the word ‘Saar’ awakened no responsive chord in my mind, although I had often heard the problem discussed at Geneva, and had once spent several days in Saarbrücken, where I interviewed the Governing Commission and was taken all over the Valley in one of its cars. I was obliged to reply to my questioner, lamely and inaccurately, that the Saar was not a subject I had studied. Never since the viva-voce which followed my finals at Oxford had I fallen victim to such a strange lapse of memory. The moral appears to be that most English lecturers are vulnerable creatures, the products of an old, slow civilization, for whose fragile equilibrium the vitality of American listeners at times proves overwhelming.
VIII
‘A Yankee’ suggests, as a solution of this lecture problem, the limitation of America’s annual quota of English celebrities. I would certainly endorse the wisdom of such an expedient, which could easily be accomplished by automatically eliminating after their first visits the inept, the cantankerous, the ‘high-hatters,’ the gold-digging orators without professional qualifications, and the qualified specialists without platform technique. But I’d do more, and limit as well the extraneous demands made upon their lecturers by American listeners.
A few of us, after all, really do want to deliver the goods. We object to taking American money on false pretenses, and are anxious to give our lectures with zest and vitality, to marshal our prepared facts with intelligence, and to speak in voices audible to the back row of the gallery in the mammoth auditoriums of the remotest MiddleWestern cities. But vitality and intelligence and audibility are qualities which demand a reasonable measure of physical fitness from the speaker, and physical fitness is difficult to maintain when the alien traveler’s nerves are on edge from curtailed sleep and his unfamiliar voice is hoarse from incessant conversation.
For reasons which I have suggested here, I suspect that complete success in America is impossible for any English lecturer, but we should get nearer to giving our money’s worth if our listeners had more mercy on our national limitations and remembered that we are but British.