Louis Roney: Speaking of speakers

Harvard professor of classics John Finley was master of Eliot House in 1967, when he spoke to our class of 1942 at our 25th reunion. I flew over from France to combine singing as a soloist with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, and celebrating with classmates and friends in Boston.

John Finley’s impromptu oration that June day remains to this day as one of the most brilliant extemporaneous utterances I have ever heard. A torrent of classical references flowed from the library of Finley’s mind, and dazzled us to the degree that we were still talking about his performance 45 years later at our 70th reunion. Finley humorously remarked to us, “My self-esteem may seem to be ego, but honestly, I haven’t lived a life that allows me to be modest about things.”

John Silber was president of Boston University when I met him in New Smyrna at an Atlantic Center for the Arts symposium in which I took part in the early 1980s. Silber was then the highest paid university prexy in the U.S.

The subject was “arts in education.” Silber rose from the table and spoke, following interesting talks by playwright Edward Albee (“Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) and noted cynic and Vermont governor, Madeleine Kunin.

When Silber spoke, the other speakers were soon eclipsed, even forgotten. Texan Silber’s easy disarming delivery brought to bear on present situations the “Wisdom of the Ages,” which has lived in erudite minds from the 400 B.C. Golden Age of Athens, to today.

That night before dinner, my b.w. and I chatted about the arts with Silber for half an hour. I told him that I had not heard a speaker of his caliber since the days of John Finley. “I knew Finley,” Silber said. “You put me in fine company.”

Shortly thereafter Silber sent me a signed copy of a book of his that had enjoyed national impact.

Later Silber ran for mayor of Boston and lost by a hair.

“He would have been great, and would have won had he talked less,” reported a Boston friend. “His erudition was way over the head of the average Joe, and it did him in!”

To me, my longtime friend, poet James Dickey, was first and foremost a “master of the spoken word”— a fact Time Magazine downplayed in Jim’s full-page obituary.

Long before “Deliverance,” the great New Yorker Magazine poetry years, and the Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress honor, Jim’s spoken voice from his earliest youth had intoned the courtly elegance of an Oxford-educated Southern Antebellum intellectual.

Just as naturally, Jim could lapse into the red-clay patois of the rural Georgians he knew and loved. Tall and lanky, Dickey knew how to flash that Gary Cooper-grin that said, “Doan’ mess with me.” Jim’s ordinary daytime parlance was pure poetry to hear.

In his series of PBS TV talks with Bill Moyers, Jim was at his best. The two sat on a dock behind Jim’s house on the river in Columbia, S.C., and spoke unrestrictedly of Jim’s way of thinking and of living. I was sorry indeed when those interviews with Jim came to an end. Dickey was a sought-after public speaker, with a high price.

But Jim didn’t let down in the content or the music of his harmonious sentences at such times as when he was sprawled on the sofa in my New York digs, talking as he gazed out over Central Park.

James Dickey brought with him through life his engaging ancestral manner, whether as a young war hero, a later literary lion, a pickin’ and singin’ down-home guitar player — or, in my case, an entertaining friend and supportive fellow artist. Jim had it all, and all who knew him, knew it.