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| (This article was last modified, February 2008) THIS IS TEXT FROM AN OPEN LETTER, dated February 16, 2005, to Mr. Lloyd Wright, President of WFYI, from David Gaus. WFYI is the Indianapolis PBS station. Barbara Lewis West, who was mentioned in the letter, presented, in 2008, the program Sound Medicine on WFYI which is being produced with help from the IU Med Center. The original letter has been edited, with material added, as indicated in red, for greater clarity and to update the situation being described. Mr. Wright didn't respond to the letter, just as Mrs. West hadn't responded to the earlier e-mail. But Mr. Wright, Mrs. Lewis-West, and anyone else wanting to offer comments or corrections can phone David Gaus at (317) 523 6943 or send an e-mail to: dave@davidgaus.com |
| Dear Mr. Wright:
Over the past few months I’ve been listening to the BCC News on WFYI. I enjoy the news not only because of the excellent content but also because of the concise, apt phrasing that’s characteristic of English as spoken by those who are actually English. That expression is interesting in itself, regardless of content. This letter, unfortunately, will be by me, an American writer who does try, but who may not always write or speak in the very best way. About fifty years ago, people who seem to have been actors from the BBC were involved in a bloodless, but nevertheless damaging, psychological war with Mr. Evelyn Waugh, the great novelist. I’ve had experiences similar to Waugh’s myself, but over a much longer period of time. My experiences have primarily been with actors and other individuals employed by the commercial networks in America and by local affiliate stations. But two of the people who have been involved in my situation, Barbara Lewis and Mr. Kevin Rader, are currently doing some work for your station. An e-mail about my problem [was] sent to Barbara Lewis in the summer of 2003 . . . . [I've also e-mailed and phoned Mr. Rader more than once.] Fortunately for me, Mr. Waugh has given, as part of his widely-admired literary legacy, some implicit advice about how to deal with a problem such as his. I should preface this by saying that in his day the term “improvisational theater” wasn’t used as much as it is now. I suspect that the term may not have been known to Waugh at all. Actors then were mostly expected to stick to the script. Waugh was travelling in a single-occupancy cabin on a cruise ship when he began to hear voices. Were the voices something--perhaps from an adjacent cabin--something that he wasn't meant to hear? That's what he thought at first. Later he began to think he might be experiencing hallucinations. In fact, though, he seems to have been the target of an elaborate joke, a series of improvasational "sketches," funny, but such as could be mistaken for real life. In one "sketch" Waugh thought he was hearing a jazz band rehearsing somewhere below his cabin. He overhears the leader, who proposes experimenting with a "three-eight rhythym" supposedly discovered by the Gestapo. The band leader states that the rhythym was used to drive prisioners "stark, staring mad." These events occured not too long after World War II in which Waugh had participated. Stranger things had happened during the war and, in fact, he'd written about some of them in one of his novels. Then he indeed did begin to overhear a band beginning to play. The music did not have a soothing quality. To get to sleep he had to take medication. So what Waugh was experiencing was funny in a way, but also abusive. In another "sketch" Waugh was made to overhear a supposed evangelical worship service. After the service someone named "Billy" talked to the preacher about his sexual problems in an embarassing conversation which, seemingly, wasn't meant to be overheard. Waugh's book is availlable, worldwide I suppose, in libraries and for purchase on the Internet. I think anyone reading the work today will agree that both of the "sketches" described above had a Saturday Night Live quaility to them. They were funny, but with the elements of both crudity and cruelity which characterize SNL. Waugh took them as real, however, and when he was talking to people on board the ship, people who weren't part of the joke, his conversation had odd references to events that no one else was aware of. That confusion was funny to his tormentors who then incorporated his reactions into their later improvisations. They were passengers themselves, but Waugh couldn't tell them from other passengers who had nothing to do with the joke. Thus his confusion increased. The apparent motive for the way he was being treated was that he'd recently been competing with a group of actors or other radio performers for air time on the BBC. His interview with the BBC is described early in the book. He was also a social critic, sometimes quite caustic, and there were those who didn't like him much. In Protestant England, he was Catholic. Click to continue article |