Exclusive Interviewer

Pendrid Chatworth, hero and narrator of Wilfrid Sheed’s seventh novel, TRANSATLANTIC BLUES (Dutton, $9.95), is an international TV celebrity with a problem rare among his kind: he’s completely unillusioned about himself. Owing to accidents of birth and education, he can pass regularly for what he’s not, but, owing to native shrewdness and a habit of self-watching, he’s aware at every instant of the precise measure of untruth in the passings. And, worse, his deceits trouble him. What to do? Chatworth tries escaping through self-objectification—assembling an indictment so particularized and damning that nobody acquainted with it will ever again take him straight. The result is the saving confessional addressed to a tape recorder (Father Sony) that’s printed in the book at hand.

The work begins with the accidents of birth and education. English-born, Chatworth spent the second world war in America at a fifth-rate boarding school, returned to the homeland for Oxford, and quickly discovered he was a virtuoso of accents. Back in America, job-hunting, he exploits the virtuosity in a career that leads from obscurity as a Fresno disc jockey to David Frostian riches and eminence as transatlantic interviewer. His pitch is perfect (the right touch of American-ness for the English viewer and vice versa); so too is his knowledge of how he’s perceived.

Not more so, though, to repeat, than his knowledge of what, in fact, he is. There’s class, for instance. By American eyes he can’t be seen as other than an aristocrat. Broke now, the Chatworths were descended from “an old Catholic family in the north of England,” furnished with estates, private chapels, and the like. The hero’s parents were “prominent socialites before the war, in the fast Catholic set”; his father, determined to spare his lad too early an exposure to grubbiness, impoverished himself by setting an undergraduate allowance high enough to support a rich man’s Oxford—trips to the Continent, decent rations of wine and women, lazy punting noons. Nothing more inevitable than that Americans would be impressed with Chatworth’s manners, prepared to pronounce him “the first gentleman of television.” Yet Chatworth himself isn’t fooled. En route to fame he has endured a hundred hustler’s humiliations on camera and off—insults that true pride would never have borne. And, since wherever such scars aren’t universal they’re noticeable, he suffers many rejections, imagined and real, by people theoretically no more than his peers. “You don’t belong here, said the first Earl of Chatworth from the apse, you belong in a studio. Rubbishy feller from the BBC. He’s not English. He’s not even Cah-tholic.” The right labels for Chatworth are shortersyllabled than aristocrat, and Chatworth knows the right labels cold.

The same sure knowledge prevails when it comes to the state of the hero’s religious and ethical being. Audiences perceive him as godly and he cultivates—through “specials” on famine and flood—a reputation for compassion. But actually religiosity, not faith, is his number. A sense of sin ravages him throughout an undergraduate affair with the one woman who succeeds in putting him in touch with his feelings. He seals himself off intermittently, playing ascetic, in an improbable monastic retreat in New Jersey. The agent of his vision of renewal at the end is a “pious Catholic,” a “New Nun” whom he has made pregnant. But it’s always clear that he is less a believer than a person simultaneously longing for belief and “spitting on [his] faith.” Into the Sony: “I am a Catholic, I am a Catholic. I am a man saying he is a Catholic.” And, here again, nobody knows the hypocrisy better than he.

No illusions, in sum. No mysterious spontaneous inner movements of the heart: “. . . I couldn’t even be generous, because I would know I was being generous, and that would constitute a fuss. . . .” No belief in the redeeming qualities perceived by outsiders: “. . . as for [my] modesty: it’s like a bit of business you pick up in vaudeville playing the Palace in Sheboygan.” No relief from the reductive afterthought, and the pertinent anthropological abstraction: “I silently scream a last wild prayer for guidance, knowing that it’s typically American to pray for guidance.” Pendrid Chatworth understands himself to be a man obsessed with selfvariation (“Nobody ever . . . tried on so many styles”), ruled at every moment by self-conscious greed:

. . . the worm in the apple: my desire to have everything, even Englishness. I go to the London music halls and recognize another source of my wit. I am au fond a Cockney comedian. Gott in Himmel, I would be a French Apache and a Swiss yodeler if they’d let me. Once one has mastered the art of assimilation there is no stopping it. I enter everyone like the curse of the body snatchers.

And there’s no evidence whatever in his confession on which to challenge his judgment.

Myth has it that self-consciousness on the Chatworth scale has been a norm in letters since Stendhal. But in reality things are more complicated. What we have become used to isn’t total self-consciousness but, instead, artfully managed combinations of self-revelation and evasiveness. The well-loved heroes and heroines emerge early on in their books as figures who are genuinely different from those around them—yet they’re oddly unconscious of the difference, disposed not to explain it but to ignore it. They describe their doings, disclose some of their thoughts, but about their uniqueness they’re unflappably enigmatic. Myself I take for granted. Alone in his class Turgenev’s aristocrat-hunter in A Sportsman’s Sketches spends days listening to peasants. Alone in the bond house Nick Carraway sees Gatsby as a hero rather than a freak. Alone on the Mississippi Huck accepts Jim as a human being. And it’s up to us to explain why. Across the board, from Pnin to Catcher in the Rye to Fear of Flying, the story is roughly the same—in place of perfected self-scrutiny and self-understanding, silences. The silences become readers’ territory, a space for entry. We enter, look about, begin to guess. Working with frail clues—word choices, speech rhythms, gestures, less—we imagine ahead and around the heroes, enjoying the pleasures of attachment, closeness, intimacy.

These are exactly the pleasures not to be looked for in books like Transatlantic Blues. But in imaginative letters, as on earth, there are other pleasures. A detailed confessional from someone whose self-knowledge is without gaps may stand readers off, withholding camaraderie. But if the confessor has wit, intelligence, and broad acquaintance with his chosen world, if his mind is the kind upon which no fatuity is lost, he can offer alternative satisfactions.

And the hero of Transatlantic Blues is nothing if not witty and intelligent. After being interviewed by Monty Chatworth (California abolishes “Pendrid” on the ground that “Monty” sounds more English), a Catholic actress remarks, happily, that the program felt like a confessional to her. “It’s funny,” she says, “if the people won’t go to confession, perhaps we must bring confession to them. That might be the interviewer’s calling these days.” Chatworth is instantly on to this piece of unwitting wit. It has been a theme of his, before meeting the woman, that the marketplace ought to provide “nondenominational confession to go with your exorcism kit.” His acerbity has entertained the commercial possibilities of “a string of confessionals across the country, like Fred Astaire dance studios, where you can speak your piece to genuine Monty Chatworth priests. . . .” It has even occurred to him that “Maybe we could bring back the great staging, the upended coffin with someone like Vincent Price inside, growling in Latin.” Give Chatworth a fatuity, in other words, and he can run with it—build a travesty, show forth a hitherto neglected dimension of a contemporary institution, and, in the bargain, make a reader laugh out loud.

A frequent target in the book, as might be guessed, is the Vatican Council: “The Church had lost its gravity. By expressing ancient beliefs in modern terms it had removed all their weight. That is the whole point with modern terms.” But it’s as an inventory of fools and media do-gooders (fund-raisers who are all heart) that Transatlantic Blues is most pleasing. I especially liked Chatworth’s characterization of himself as a resident media intellectual — “TV’s Amazing Thinking Man who speaks in little bite-sized paragraphs.” And he’s equally good on students, both Yanks abroad and limeys at home. The affected loutishness of Oxford workingclass meritocrats bothers him, but not more than the dimness of certain visiting Americans:

The ones at Oxford are just the kind the English despise: their minds move like heavy machinery, and their tongues can barely keep up with their minds. They stare at you solemnly for a minute after you have spoken, and then the answer rumbles out as from a cave. They are stoodents and I am ashamed of them.

The hit at Rhodes scholars—they’re placed as “absolutely average in looks, mind, and bodily hygiene” —is, according to my observation, direct.

Now and then the author forgets the rules that prohibit—in this form —vulnerability and tenderness. There’s an embarrassment in the ending, for example, as Mr. Sheed attempts to persuade himself that, while Chatworth describes his savior as “Sister Rip Van Winkle,” and plainly regards her as naive, he’s nevertheless deeply moved by her.

But for most of its length the book understands its nature as thoroughly as the hero understands his. A decorous tartness is maintained, as it should be in satire; readers are discouraged from looking for pen pals among the cast, and the center of interest remains the display of analytical wit. Other works by Wilfrid Sheed—most notably People Will Always Be Kind (1973)—welcome would-be collaborative creators who enjoy filling out “real people” to whom real events are happening in real worlds. They’re kinder items than Transatlantic Blues, but much less keen.

Richard Stern’s NATURAL SHOCKS (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, $8.95) is about another interviewercelebrity, Fred Wursup by name, who’s prompted to look hard at his own life and work. But in this instance overweening self-consciousness isn’t the prompter. A John Gunther-like print journalist who is between books, Wursup accepts a magazine assignment to probe the meaning of the contemporary “death fad” (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, etc.). He interviews a beautiful eighteen-year-old cancer patient, and a disorientingly lyric impulse—closer to love than to pity—draws him into her life and her family’s, directing him to study himself.

But at one moment toward the end of Natural Shocks—we’re in Intensive Care, and a patient is dying—these failings are immaterial. All caring is focused outward, as Fred Wursup attends with whole absorption to the unfathomable event before him. There is no thought, no understanding, no assessing in process, as it seems. No mental continuities. As he reads the Monitron, watches in suspension the bleeping beady lights, feels the decline in the digits as though numbers were life, we’re in his space. Suddenly the breath goes and self absolutely vanishes—we are his space. The effect is riveting.