Michael Schulman asks Dick Cavett at the end of "Dick Cavett Takes a Few Questions The legendary television host talks about his friendships with Muhammad Ali and Groucho Marx, interviewing Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis, and finding a new audience on YouTube" (The New Yorker).
Cavett answers:
Often I would do it very badly. I would rush it, hadn’t saved enough time. I almost called a guest by the wrong name but caught it, thank God, or whatever gods may be. What’s that from? “I thank whatever gods may be.” It’s a poem that’s often recommended as good religious thinking. “I thank whatever gods may be for my indomitable soul”? Hmm.
Should I Google it? “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley.
“Invictus”! Of course.
“I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.”
“Unconquerable”! Yeah. What’s the first line?
“Out of the night that covers me, / Black as the pit from pole to pole, / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul.”
It’s an un-God poem, but it’s used as one. Funny about that. For some reason, I remembered the other day my great, great philosophy professor Paul Weiss. God, he was brilliant. He taught Socratically: “Come on, ask me anything.” He was on my show with James Baldwin. It was as close to knowing Socrates as you’re going to get.... Smartasses would sometimes try to surprise him or corner him, and one time I said, changing the subject rudely, “Mr. Weiss, can you name any act that would be completely immoral?” And Weiss thought for a second or two and said, “You can’t use a man to stuff a hole.” I’ll never forget it.
"Taught Socratically" got my attention — me, a former law professor. And then that "Come on, ask me anything"... I plunged into a lengthy fantasy about teaching a law school class by beginning "Come on, ask me anything." What crazy hell would have ensued!
Of course, Paul Weiss the professor is not to be confused with Paul, Weiss the law firm. From the Wikipedia entry for Paul Weiss the philosopher:
In a June 13, 1968, guest appearance on the nationally televised The Dick Cavett Show, Weiss argued that fellow guest James Baldwin was excessively focused on the Black experience. The exchange was featured in Raoul Peck's documentary I Am Not Your Negro, and described by media reviewer A. O. Scott as the "initial spectacle of mediocrity condescending to genius is painful, but the subsequent triumph of [Baldwin's] self-taught brilliance over credentialed ignorance is thrilling to witness."
But Cavett is now saying "God, he was brilliant" about Weiss and only mentions James Baldwin in passing.
Judge for yourself. Here are the 3 men on the show in 1968:
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As regards the transforming of the negative command into an attitudinal positive, William Ernest Henley's overly confident "Invictus" is an obvious illustration, beginning even with the title. "Out of the night," a negative ground, the poet thanks God for his 'unconquerable soul." He has "not winced nor cried aloud." He is, and will remain, "unafraid." If the road is narrow, "it matters not." Nor will he worry that he may be "charged with punishments." For, he concludes,
"I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."
One need not be in the literary business long to detect a considerable amount of whistling in the dark here. We don't know the facts of the case, but we shouldn't be surprised to learn that, about this time, the poet had been scaring himself intensely...
- Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, p.444
I didn't recognize the woman sitting on the far left. I wonder why she was not invited to join in the discussion. I would have liked to hear her opinion. She had nice legs.
It's Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine.
From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.
"I didn't recognize the woman sitting on the far left. I wonder why she was not invited to join in the discussion."
It's Phyllis Newman.
Her seating position indicates that she was the first guest. She already had top billing. In the old days, the guests stayed on the show and moved down the sofa. That's why Baldwin is where he is. He was the second guest. Clearly, Weiss was brought on the show to engage Baldwin in a discussion and I'm sure Baldwin expected it and was prepared and they both knew what the disagreement would be and planned to handle it well and be civil and intelligent about it, which they were. People watching it today just think like A.O. Scott, and it must trouble Cavett deeply, since he truly loves Weiss.
Anyway, Newman could chime in if she wanted. Compare Little Richard, sitting all the way to the left, when "Love Story" author Erich Segal comes on as the 3rd guest. It's hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz6bo0WxjzU
How things have changed - and stayed the same - since 1968!
Imagine smoking on TV today!
Weiss predicted the whole identity politics philosophy of today’s Dems.
The decline of the Black family is much worse today because in 1968 the drug culture was just starting.
Dick Cavett went to Yale from Lincoln High School. Today. LHS is a failure.
Weiss destroyed Baldwin.
Paraphrasing James Baldwin: We have black Christian churches and we have white Christian churches. Sunday at noon (in the churches) is the most segregated time in this country.
Our Evangelical church is just the opposite. I would think most, maybe not all, but most Evangelical churches are heading the same direction.
Notice how Baldwin demonized Ronald Reagan? Today, one of the major objectives of the Left is to demonize Trump.
Dick Cavett, one of these full-of-himself guys who is still around who should never have been on the air in the first place.
Kramer was a better interviewer anyway,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eTLRr5NKqA
I wrote my 6:35 AM comment before watching the last 3 minutes or so.
Baldwin does decisively win the exchange, perhaps because Weiss knows that to try to win wouldn't work. Baldwin is saying he has to suspect that white people are deliberately subordinating black people, so to allow him to win is a silent statement of declining to suppress him.
I think Weiss's style was honed in the Ivy League classroom, where his grumpy withholding fired up students who, over time, would appreciate what he was doing, drawing them out.
The argument I thought Weiss would make, that I thought he was setting up in the beginning, and that I think had value then and today is that even if it is true that groups are discriminated against, isn't it still better for members of groups to think of themselves as individuals and concentrate on what they can do for themselves. Weiss was at the beginning telling Baldwin that he had achieved so much as an individual, but he didn't complete the argument and concede all the discrimination but contend that in spite of that and because of that, the best approach for each person to take is to visualize himself as an individual and not as a member of a group.
Ironically, Baldwin was the more active and empowered ego and Weiss was more selfless, not caring how he looked. Just the difference in their posture is telling.
Key moment, setting the tone: the instant Weiss takes the seat, Baldwin reaches over in front of him to grab the ashtray. Weiss seems nonplussed.
After that, Baldwin, like a skilled actor, is visually fascinating, with his long expressive hands and his cigarette stage business. He's winning the argument even if you turn off the sound. Weiss is slumped back in his chair and inert.
I grew up watching Cavett do interviews. He was and is one of the very best at it.
You must not kill a sacred cow. You must let it roam freely.
Ann:
Doesn’t the space of 50 years show you how wrong Baldwin was?
That “slave name” business was so lame. Just like Malcom X; also from Nebraska.
Get over yourself Baldwin!
AA: "He's winning the argument even if you turn off the sound. Weiss is slumped back in his chair and inert."
Really? One can win a debate with one's posture? I disagree. I thought Weiss won the argument with one simple line: "Being black didn't prevent you from being a writer".
Weiss was also on William F. Buckley's show several times. He may have been Buckley's philosophy teacher as well as Cavett's.
I had enough of Cavett watching clips of him with Mailer and Vidal last month. Speaking of Mailer and Vidal, just who won their exchange, or Buckley and Vidal's, or other famous TV exchanges, very much depends on who's doing the judging. Sometimes the best answer is nobody. When it comes to verbal sparring, the matches we remember are often those that get personal and get out of hand -- and with Mailer at least, physical and violent.
At first glance it seems possible that Cavett raised the talk show to become something with cultural and intellectual substance, but when you look further into it maybe the writers and intellectuals who appeared on his show just lowered themselves to television level.
Wiki,”In 1944 Baldwin met Marlon Brando, whom he was also attracted to, at a theater class in The New School.”
Brando was from Omaha. Bob Kerrey, from Lincoln, was the President of The New School.
In the 1950s, Baldwin understood what Weiss was saying and would have agreed with him. He'd risen in the world through his own self-cultivation and self-education. Then he got caught up in the Civil Rights movement and race and politics became more important to him.
The "debate" sounds a bit like a dialogue of the deaf. Baldwin and Weiss are each saying things that have some validity -- self-development and political activity are both necessary -- but because Baldwin and Weiss put such emphasis on one side or on the other their views can't be synthesized.
It's more like a father and son arguing than the representatives of different parties or races. More is at stake for each of them than is usually the case in arguments between strangers. If Baldwin won, it's because he could bring passion and reference to real-life experience to the argument -- and passion isn't the best guide in public policy or in life.
We had to learn the Henley poem in junior high. If you can remember the Swinburne poem, it's impressive. If Henley cribbed from Swinburne, then Henley's less impressive.
At the 1:35 mark, Baldwin exhales smoke from his nose in what looked like a power move while Paul Weiss was setting up his argument. Baldwin maintains an aggressive posture the entire time, while Weiss looks relaxed, merely making pointed observations and hurling compliments at Baldwin.
That's a fascinating discussion, not because Baldwin or Weiss won the debate, but because we all lost since a debate like that is inconceivable in our current environment.
I find James Baldwin's mannerisms off putting. He seems like a relic of the 60's while Weiss's diction and tone are still around today.
I find it interesting that Baldwin seems to lean on his family and the future generations for his arguments, but has no posterity. Broken branch.
The first thing that strikes me is that Professor Weiss does not seem like he's listening. He's jumping in too fast, cutting off his listening to form his retort before Mr. Baldwin has even finished his thought. If the Professor did that in his class, and I suspect he did, it would not be much of a discussion. It would be a lecture. A lecture fed by his students questions. (making the Professor's job easier?).
In a sense, both men were correct. Weiss had the correct LARGE argument about the importance of each developing his or her own individual being. But Baldwin correctly pointed out the NARROW argument that the Black man- still at that time- had more to overcome just to even begin working on their individual being. The key is this: while we need to think of ourselves as individual beings, unique and talented each in our own ways, we cannot control the masses who mostly do live via the rules of collectivism. You/we are all part of some tribe, which can be further drawn down to a smaller grouping, getting more and more specific with each draw down until you finally get to the smallest group of all, the individual. We cannot control the currents and flows of the collectives around us. And as such, even as some of us strive to grow as individuals, and try to approach the world as a collection of individuals, if that world is coming at you as a collective tribe, with a tribe mentality and tribe actions, you have to react accordingly.
As a Jew, Prof. Weiss should have known and acknowledged it. As I suspect his own family probably came over from Germany or Eastern Europe for a reason. Some...collective actions over there against his tribe.
I thought Baldwin was clear and on target. Though his mind was muddled by some basic bullshit lefty stuff. Somehow using the word 'Reagan' as if to be an understood stand-in word for All Things Bad.
PS- a great selection of posts today. Thank you!
And Weiss thought for a second or two and said, “You can’t use a man to stuff a hole.”
An unimportant aside. Has anyone else read "Gentlemen, Be Seated?" Heinlein proved Weiss wrong.
What a fantastic show and a couple great guests. Watch from the beginning of the Baldwin interview before Weiss joins.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aPyqfPnpAj0
A man with a toothache thinks everyone in the world without a toothache is happy even when he walks by the oncology ward. Baldwin has fair reason to think that there was bigotry in America and that such bigotry made his life difficult. It's quite a stretch though for him or for any late twentieth century American to make too much of their difficulties. While growing up he perhaps had to endure the indignity of separate water fountains. At about that time, the peasants in the Ukraine were swapping their dead children with the dead children of other peasants to use as meat. The urban intellectuals of their era, people like Baldwin, Weiss and Cavett, considered Ukrainian peasants superstitious and ignorant and not much attention was paid to their plight. The collectivization program was a crime committed on them by the urban intellectuals. More sympathy was extended to victims of Stalin's show trials than to the many millions of peasants he starved.
I came across the Swinburne poem as a teenager when it was quoted in "Martin Eden", Jack London's autobiographical novel. I felt quite clever to notice that the protagonist's initials spelled "ME".
The very quote Nancy identified is used in the intro to one of Heinlein's short stories, forget which. I memorized it long ago and, funny thing, no matter how many times I look it up to check, I still want to say "home" to sea instead of "safe" to sea.
A older high school friend was much inspired by Cavett (as was I) and arriving at UT somehow convinced the local PBS station (run out of UT at the time) to let him do a Cavett style talk show. My senior year of H.S. I was part of his research staff. Looked great on my college transcript, but after the initial excitement, bored me silly. If the intellectual wasn't in a field of interest I did a lousy job in support of the interview. Probably helped direct me away from UT where I was registered in Speech and Theater into Engineering at Vandy. Dick Caveat changed my life.
The quote also introduces a Heinlein short story.
I'm sympathetic to what Baldwin was saying, but Weiss' argument makes more sense to me. The only experience anyone can ever have is that person's OWN experience. The problem with "centering" race (or any other trait) in defining one's experience is exactly what Weiss was saying: you're trying to claim some other unique individual's experience as your own, which is literally impossible. If you're a black man in 2022 and you think that your experience has anything to do with slavery, you're simply wrong. That was someone else's life, not yours.
Professional Talking is much like Professional Wrestling - You never intentionally hurt or show up the other guy. After all we've all got to make a living out here.
Cavett was and is an unctuous jerk.
But it was an interesting show.
The king of self-referential.
When I check his old shows now, and only because of a specific guest, I find him to be such an ass.
Say good night, Dick.
Ann Althouse says...
"The argument I thought Weiss would make, that I thought he was setting up in the beginning, and that I think had value then and today is that even if it is true that groups are discriminated against, isn't it still better for members of groups to think of themselves as individuals and concentrate on what they can do for themselves. Weiss was at the beginning telling Baldwin that he had achieved so much as an individual, but he didn't complete the argument and concede all the discrimination but contend that in spite of that and because of that, the best approach for each person to take is to visualize himself as an individual and not as a member of a group."
Weiss was really weak, just reiterating in a purely theoretical sense that every individual had their accumulated challenges, and it is up to those individuals to overcome the challenges and succeed. "ALONE" Weiss says forcibly, which is a surprisingly extreme, since even the most rugged individualist would thank her mom or dad or cousin or friend or someone. Then he points to Baldwin as proof.
Baldwin, trying to show Weiss a different way to look at the world, comes back with data. From his family, where most of 9 siblings did not survive. From segregated schools and housing, policy brutality, literal laws that prevented basic rights of black people.
Weiss asks the classic: So every individual is racist then? Baldwin answers the classic, I don't know what's in their heart, I just know what's in the law and what the institutions do. Strange question from Weiss too, just two decades after the challenges a bootstrapping, capable young Jew in Europe faced included genocide.
Back to data, and this discussion, in American politics that are two big camps that happen with the observation that Black people are systematically doing worse. One is that laws and history and practice, if not individual outright racism, add up to massive ongoing burden on success. And the second is that Black people are just inferior.
Ann writes:
"Clearly, Weiss was brought on the show to engage Baldwin in a discussion and I'm sure Baldwin expected it and was prepared and they both knew what the disagreement would be and planned to handle it well and be civil and intelligent about it."
So, 40 years after this discussion, Ta-Nehasi Coates talked about working with Andrew Sullivan in the mid 2000s at the Atlantic, and being required to have a polite, civil, rational discussion about whether he (Coates) was genetically inferior.
Well put Temujin -- I should have read down the board first! Interesting that we had such similar responses.
After Weiss "retired" from Yale, he was somehow snagged for an emeritus position by the School of Philosophy at Catholic University in Washington, DC. bringing along with him the prestigious journal, The Review of Metaphysics. He was teaching there when I showed up in 1979.
I never took any courses from him. In all honesty, the dean steered their new grad students away from his classes, but they certainly wouldn't have pushed back if a grad student said s/he really wanted to take his courses. Even some of the other faculty (e.g. my thesis advisor) knew of his illustrious career and sat in on his courses. But, from a grad student point of view, his courses weren't Weiss on Kant, Weiss on Spinoza, etc. His courses were Weiss on Weiss, and that had to be your interest.
He was a very spry 79 at the time. Once, I saw him sprint up a flight of stairs between courses and I told a buddy that I hope I can still move that fast when I'm 80! But, his age became a problem between him and the school: he was 90 and still teaching and the school wanted him retired. He fought back and won his age discrimination lawsuit, but voluntarily retired two years later at 93!
I saw Weiss often at lectures & philosophy dept get-togethers, as he was quite a gregarious guy. He still had the air of the ethnic Jewish blue collar boy from the Lower East Side about him, as illustrious as he was. He joked about being surrounded by Catholics, and made ethnic jokes about the various other Catholic ethnics around him. He was what he was, and they were what they were, and each was secure in their identity. He, in my experience, was never snide or condescending to me or any of the other grad students in my orbit who engaged with him at these events. Once again, he was what he was, and had no need to prove anything to anyone.
Nobody was more amused by Cavett than Cavett himself.
Yes, Cavett is still alive (just turned 86).
I read once that Robert Lewis Stevenson was a friend of William Henley and made Long John Silver have a peg leg like Henley had (Henley's leg was amputated when he was younger and he wrote Invictus while recovering in the hospital). Not sure if that's true, but it's memorable!
I still associate the poem with Timothy McVeigh - I believe he cited it in some sort of dying statement? Possibly unfair to the poem.
LOL. Every time I think about Cavett's interviews, I remember the Waylon Jennings interview that wasn't. He played FAFO with Waylon, who was in no mood to be shortchanged of what was offered, and a flabbergasted Cavett could not believe that Waylon just got up and walked out after waiting for 15 minutes past the scheduled time for his interview, which would have only left 5 minutes or so for his segment. It is on Youtube, check it out if you want to see someone who thought he was a big deal getting brought back to earth.
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