Pope visits Poland

I have to begin with a reminder. I find that when English friends arrive here, especially ones whose business is in the arts, in books, theatre, music, and so on, even men who are knowing about the ways and the work of television, they come to scoff and state appraise what we call 'public television', the non-commercial television network. But they all seem to suffer from the delusion of believing that it's a New York City phenomenon. It's a delusion, I regret to say, shared by New Yorkers.

It is, on the contrary a national system with the second largest network – over 270 stations – around the country, it never carries an ad, it's devoted mainly to public affairs, the arts, music, ballet, science programmes like the BBC's 'Horizon', and it makes a point of buying all the best series of British television drama whether done by the BBC or the British commercial companies. 

It's financed partly by government grants and by grants from business corporations but they have no more to say about the programmes or their content than the House of Commons has to say about the productions of the BBC. At least one-third of all the money that comes into the public broadcasting system is solicited from the viewers. You pay at least $15 a year and what you get for it is a programme guide. Many people, of course, contribute very much more but without the voluntary contributions of the viewing public, the PBS system could not stand. It's as if the British licence fee were abolished and it was put up to the generosity of the ordinary householder to send in a gift to the BBC because he or she admired its programmes. 

Well, on these hot and sweaty nights, I find that when I'm in the city I have no inclination to go wandering around it. I stay in and I must say that three nights in four I watch television. Such is the achievement of the public system that I stay chained to its local channel for at least two hours and sometimes three or four hours every evening. 

Now one of the lesser, but admirable, features of the network is a half-hour interview programme, done in the evening without fanfare, studio bands or other titivations, by Mr Dick Cavett. It would be an agreeable feature to have once a week but it comes on once a night. In the past week, Mr Cavett has had with him on successive nights Edward Albee, the playwright, Eudora Welty, the Southern novelist, Rex Harrison and John Leonard. Mr Leonard may not yet be a name known far and wide, even among the intelligentsia of Britain or Europe or Australasia. He's a book reviewer for the New York Times and writes the once-a-week column called 'Private Lives' which is a sort of diary of his home life done with wicked fun and self-lacerating insight. 

Mr Leonard is quite probably the most brilliant demon with the English language now extant in the United States. He has a gift of metaphor so prolific and so condensed that every sentence goes off like a rocket. And it has to be said that once you've recovered from being blinded by the sheer dazzle of the language it is quite possible to yearn for a little pedestrian interval, some pause in which to jog before you're whizzed again off into the firework display. 

I brought up Mr Leonard only to quote a single sentence about him, but I thought I ought to acquaint you with his name. He's just put out a collection of his domestic diary pieces under the title 'Private Lives in the Imperial City'. John Leonard, then, is the name and he will appeal to everybody who can appreciate the workings of a devilish talent especially when, I hasten to say, it is working in the service of virtue. 

Well, Mr Leonard's mind was being interviewed by Mr Cavett (whenever Mr Cavett was not interviewing his own mind) and at one point Mr Leonard was asked if he watched television. Of course Mr Leonard watches television! But I think the question was put because pseudo, or hopeful, intellectuals still suspect, maybe even hope, that a true intellectual has profounder things on his mind. Well, like most intellectuals, Mr Leonard is leery of what is nauseatingly called 'cultural' television. But he watches 'The Rockford Files' – he's mad for James Garner – and 'M*A*S*H' as who, with his wits about him, does not? 

He confessed, in a strangely guarded fashion, that he watches sports but he didn't specify which. I suspect he does not watch golf since the intellectual prejudice is against a conservative game in which you watch presumably county types attempting in public to accommodate the muscular and nervous systems of the human body to the one game for which the human body was not invented. I may be wrong about Mr Leonard, who undoubtedly watches baseball, but I find this attitude toward golf rampant among liberals and intellectuals who are unaware that 99 per cent of the golfers you see on television are former garage attendants, farmers, caddies, plumbers, grocery clerks and scholarship winners to state universities. 

Well, let's go back, or rather forward, to the single sentence which prompted this outcry. Mr Leonard said that whenever the news is given some sudden shock, an assassination, the inauguration of a pope, a Christmas present from the OPEC nations, he at once switches on the telly because, as he put it, 'It's the only place today where we can sing or grieve together'. Now that puts in four words what I've often tried to say in several rambling talks. To ignore television is to abdicate not only from the world around us but from the only meeting place the citizens of any one nation have in common. 

And it's this thought which leads me on to say that the most important thing that has happened in America this week is not the petrol shortage or the flaws in the DC-10 or the mischief Mr Carter thinks the Israelis are doing by resettling the West Bank, it's the pope's visit to his homeland. It would have nothing like the significance I am claiming for it if it had been merely another despatch that you could choose to read or not read in the papers. For that reason it probably had no significance at all to the vast populations of Russia or China. It received in the Moscow papers one sixteen-word sentence and the next night the Soviet television bowed to the thunderous cheers coming from the east by showing a 30-second clip of the pope being greeted on his arrival by the Polish Communist leaders. 

But here, at any rate, it was the lead item on the half-hour evening news shows of the three commercial networks and the public system. Something like 50 or 60 million Americans saw the packed multitudes in the squares and the countless thousands of street people who waved like endless streamers in the wake of the pope's car. One hard-bitten American correspondent, a veteran who'd had enough experience of rallies to have some basis of comparison, said he could remember nothing like it since President Eisenhower stood before one million cheering Indians in Delhi. 

After the news programmes here, NBC put on a late-night full hour going into the backstage manoeuvres between the Warsaw government and the Vatican, all the quid pro quos that had to be contrived between the Communists and the church to give an essentially spiritual pilgrimage the public appearance as a friendly visit between two heads of state. Of course it couldn't be done. The pope did agree to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw and the government made the most of this television ceremony to try and leave a strong impression that the pope was content to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and keep religion back where it belongs, in the home. But nothing much could be done to play down the religious and political meaning of the shrines and holy places that the pope had resolved to visit. They're quaint names to us, like the Shrine of the Black Madonna, but they mean as much to the Poles as Runnymede does to Britons or Mount Vernon to Americans. 

I suppose the first shock to millions of American viewers was a crude, though a salutary one. I think it was news to most of us thinking of Poland as a faithful satellite of Moscow that, in a country which has been inflexibly Communist-ruled for more than 30 years, 95 per cent of all babies are baptised in the Catholic Church. Of course this is one of the primary facts of life with which the Polish government has had to live but they've lived with it in comfort because nobody, no cardinal or bishop, has made a point of visiting Poland and advertising it. 

The announcement by the pope some months ago that he longed to go home to Poland, and would do it, must have given the rulers a nasty turn. They knew his history better than anyone. His persistence as a priest during the Nazis time, his underground teaching, the Nazi price on his head, his encouragement of ordinands in the teeth and the full view of the Gestapo, and so on. The New York Times called the nasty turn in a sentence or two, 'When Edward Gierek gave John Paul II permission to come as an honoured guest, they had no choice. They recognised in this first Polish pope the most formidable opponent Polish Communism has ever faced. His elevation to the papacy touched the Polish soul and to have denied him now would have risked more than Warsaw or Moscow dared.' 

Maybe I exaggerate the effect this visit, and the spectacle of it on television, will have on Catholics behind the Iron Curtain because I live for six months of the year among Polish-Americans, Catholic farmers, at the end of Long Island. Our village priest was the only one invited to go from America to attend the inauguration of the new pope. He had never been abroad and he was a man in a trance. What the visit, however, will do in a very mundane way to the Americans of Polish descent is to give them a rousing dose of self-esteem which they have lacked because they've been the victims of those national jokes that pick on another nation as the cradle of specially stupid humans. In Britain it's the Irish, in Hungary it's the Romanians, in America it's the Poles. 

A few weeks after the pope's visit was announced, I was following a twosome down the fairway, a truck driver and a potato grower. The potato grower had just sliced his drive over an out-of-bounds fence and as I went by, at a discreet distance and waved at him, he looked up and grinned, 'Go ahead, Buster, joke away!'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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