The Priest and the Song and Dance Man

Jack Foley

Dear Tom,

Once again, many thanks for the Ong tape. My wife Adelle and I listened to the whole thing last night. It was wonderful to hear. Ong's speaking style is breathtaking--and the sound quality is for the most part quite good.

You may not remember the name, George M. Cohan (1878-1942): he is somewhat forgotten these days, though people do remember the biographical movie starring James Cagney. Cohan was an extraordinary figure in the American theater: a songwriter ("Yankee Doodle Dandy," "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Give My Regards to Broadway"), a playwright, a dancer, an actor, a producer. My father, who was a tap dancer in his early life, worked for Cohan and always admired him, so I have had an interest in him since childhood. I have a recording of a wonderful speech he made to the Catholic Actors Guild in 1938. Cohan begins by stating that an occasion of this sort demands some sort of substantial speech, "but that's asking a great deal of a song and dance man." He modestly announces that the tribute is really a tribute to his father rather than to himself. He then tells stories from his long life in the theater and concludes with a favorite speech from his playThe Tavern (1920). You should know that at the time Cohan addressed the Catholic Actors Guild, his career as a playwright was pretty much over, though he continued to write plays and have them produced: one failure followed another! As an actor, however, performing in plays other people had written (Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness, for example), he was a great success. The speech from The Tavern< was delivered partly as an affirmation of what he had accomplished as a writer--and it was delivered at a time when he was no longer being very much recognized as a writer. In The Tavern the character who is given the speech turns out to be a madman escaped from an asylum, so while Cohan obviously felt the speech deeply, he also ironized it to some degree. This is the speech:

"I don't know who I am and if I did I'd be the most miserable man on earth, for my greatest happiness lies in the fact that I occupy a most unique position--that of not having been cast for a part in the great world drama of life. (Slight pause) I am a lonely, single- handed spectator sitting back looking on and laughing at the monkey-shines of the great all-star company of several billions of men and women who are unknowingly playing the piece for me-- they're playing the piece for me. I am the audience, but a good audience, withal, for I laugh I am the audience, and if I may say so, a highly intellectual audience, for in all the changing scenes of this ever-beginning, never-ending plotless plot, I recognize the spiritual hand of a great director, a master director, who has so skillfully staged this tightly woven, disconnected, tightly knitted spectacle of tragic nonsense, and so I am amused, and I laugh, and I applaud. (Applauds) And if I'm any critic, it's a bully good show, and I hope some day to meet the author, and compliment him upon his marvelous entertainment. Alas, I have no one with whom I may discuss the merits of the play, for all the rest are on the stage. I'm sitting out in front, alone, all alone. Do you follow me, your Excellency?"

It's fascinating to compare Ong's style of speaking with Cohan's. Ong is agonistic, challenging, used to asking questions, easily sliding over into questioning his audience about various matters, often asking questions and answering them himself. ("Did they do this? Of course not!"). He's a man used to debating, comfortable with it--and he speaks extremely quickly: the speed with which he speaks is fascinating. Come on, you'll have to catch up with me if you expect to understand or get pleasure from this lecture! It was interesting to discover passages I've read silently--often in the exact words I remember--show up in his speech; they have something of the effect of Classical formulae: Ong's version of "wine-dark sea" or "rosy-fingered dawn"! * Cohan's speech ends by asserting a mystery, a kind of riddle: "Do you follow me, your Excellency?" He himself doesn't really know why he feels the way he does--all that loneliness-- yet he feels it. Ong's speech, at least here, is utterly assured, public He is a man used to talking to other men and his speech tends towards clarity, towards making something known: This is the way things are, the way an intelligent person can find out things to be. Cohan's pace is leisurely, slightly ironic, more poetical, more metaphorical--not challenging but charming his audience with his wit, his stories, and then with the very poetic speech from The Tavern: "I don't know who I am...." One feels that Ong knows exactly who he is and who his audience is; he constantly asserts. Cohan suggests rather than asserts, draws back, assumes a more "modest" pose: this is the way I feel about it--others might feel differently; to make a speech "is asking a great deal of a song and dance man." Ong, as someone remarked about him, "knows everything about everything." He is perhaps a song and dance man of ideas...

* Thomas J. Farrell writes me, "As I recall, Ong, after making some preliminary remarks, turned to reading aloud from a prepared text. As I recall, he read from two essays. I believe that one of them was published in 1975 as ‘The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction' and then reprinted in 1977 in Interfaces of the Word. As a matter of fact, both of the essays that he read from may have been reprinted in Interfaces of the Word." This explains why the formulations were exactly as I remembered them. Since he was present, Farrell could probably see when Ong was reading from the texts, but listening to the tape it is impossible to differentiate between moments when Ong is speaking extemporaneously and when he is reading, so seamlessly does he weave the two together.

Jack Foley