Great American Political Debates: James Wechsler versus Jack Kerouac
James Wechsler‘s recollections found here.
Having listened to a recording of the evening’s proceedings and pondered a transcript, I still find myself largely out of Kerouac’s reach. I am, admittedly, eight years older than he-forty-three to his thirty-five the night of the symposium at Hunter-but such a gap is not normally considered prohibitive among adults. I was on speaking terms with a lot of men some years younger than Kerouac. Moreover I brought no instinctive hostility to the occasion (toward the end, in one of his most coherent thrusts, lie cried, “You came here prepared to attack me,” but in fact I had come, as previously indicated, utterly unprepared, period).
There were times when he sounded like a jaded traveling salesman telling obscene bedtime stories to the young; there were others when the melancholy of his cadences achieved a mildly hypnotic effect, so that one listened to it as if hearing an obscure but appealing fragment of music. There were also many intervals that can only be described as gibberish. Thus at one point he was chanting (and I quote from the transcript):
In fact here is a poem I’ve written about Harpo Marx: […]
Without questioning the place of Harpo Marxism in history, I find little rhyme or reason in these observations, and the Leader drooped to the dimensions of ham. The totality of his performance, brightened as it was by flashes of imagery, was a union of madness and sadness; by the end the occasional vivid or moving phrase seemed like an isolated line of poetry surrounded by vulgar ramblings on a latrine wall.
Did we ever establish any communication? I think we did; at least there is no other way I can explain the furious feeling he exhibited in the exchange that took place after the allegedly prepared recitals had occurred.
KEROUAC:…James Wechsler…Who’s James Wechsler? Right over there. James Wechsler, you believe in the destruction of America, don’t you?
WECHSLER: No. (The transcript added “laughter.”)
KEROUAC: What do you believe in, come here, come here and tell me what you believe in …You told me what you don’t believe in. I want to know what you do believe in. (Cries from the audience: “That’s right.”) This is a university, we’ve got to learn . . . I believe in love, I vote for love (applause).
It was rather difficult to avoid a pretentious reply:
WECHSLER: I believe in the capacity of the human intelligence to create a world in which there is love, compassion, justice and freedom. I believe in fighting for that kind of world. I think what you are doing is to try to destroy anybody’s instinct to care about this world.
KEROUAC: I believe, I believe in the dove of peace.
WECHSLER: So do I.
KEROUAC: No you don’t. You’re fighting with me for the dove of peace. You came here prepared to attack me.
It went on for a little while longer and then the chairman mercifully explained that it was very late, and in truth it was a few minutes after ten.
There is no point in indefinitely prolonging the reportorial agony. This was hardly a debate in which anyone could have scored the points; I was grappling with a man in outer space, and it was only for the briefest of intervals that we even seemed to occupy the same mat. I shall never quite understand why he assumed I had come there with a plot, or even why he responded so angrily to a minor quip I made at President Eisenhower’s expense, this being a time when even Republican newspapers were ceasing to regard Eisenhower as above criticism.
Kerouac had observed, if that is the proper term:
Well, Mr. Wechsler, I was sitting under a tangerine tree in Florida one afternoon and I was trying to translate the Diamond Sutra from Sanskrit to English and I said shall I call it a personal god or an impersonal god, and at that moment a little tangerine dropped out of the tree and they only drop out of a tree about once every six weeks and landed right square in the middle of my head. Right, boing; I said, okay, personal god.
Somewhat testily I interjected:
I just want to say, Mr. Kerouac, that as an editor I have to write about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s press conference every week–
KEROUAC (interrupting): He’s very witty—
WECHSLER:–and it’s possible to reduce life to an area of so little sense that there would hardly be any reason for all these people to have come here tonight, or for us to be here. I don’t think we render any service by doing that—
KEROUAC: Education is education.
WECHSLER: Well, as Eisenhower would say government is government.
KEROUAC: And as Dulles would say, statesmanship is statesmanship.
For that small moment we seemed like two quarreling editorial writers occupying the same planet.
Dr. Joseph Kauffman, the soft-voiced moderator, gently interpolated that “the point which Mr. Wechsler makes is one which is fairly commonly held among people who are considered activists in the sense of social and political action.”
In what I must characterize as a growl Kerouac responded: “Don’t give me that stuff. I’m going out of this atmosphere.”
In a sense, that is the last I saw of him.