November
On the evening of 12 November 2009, the publishers Marshall
Cavendish and the bookseller Blackwell co-hosted a launch party for The
100 at the Phoenix Artist Club on Charing Cross Road, London.
Appropriately, the authors entertained the full house with their
speeches, with Simon Maier's reproduced here in full for the benefit
of everyone else:
 When I was young I loved
to listen to stories read aloud by a wide assortment of people – at
school, at home, on the radio and eventually on TV. The worlds
of Robinson Crusoe, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow,
of anything by Hans Christian Anderson, Hoffmann’s Slovenly
Peter, David Copperfield, Five Children and It, Lorna Doon,
the Famous Five – even I’m only moderately
embarrassed to say, What Katy Did – all these
things came alive.
And I have long marveled at the wonderful speeches of the theatre and the equally
wondrous delivery of speeches in great moments of film that help tell a story.
I have also wondered why people in politics and business, in education and
influence - by and large - don’t take much notice of these things any
more. Or, if they do, they see no relevance.
Language is important. Good language. I used to lecture and one day I was telling
my literature class that a double negative forms a positive. I explained that
in some languages, though, like Russian, a double negative is still a negative.
However, I said that there is no language wherein a double positive can ever
form a negative. A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."
Many thanks must go to
Martin Liu, our very calm and so patient publisher. On behalf
of both Jeremy and me, a very large thank you to all the Marshall
Cavendish team each of whom have worked so hard to get the book
out. Many thanks too to Blackwells and the Phoenix for this evening.
And of course to the muses - Julie Kourdi and Jane Maier - without
whom not a lot would have got done.
I first met Jeremy about
eight years ago when he was deciphering and writing up key messages
at an international conference that I was producing. He sympathized
when I tried to get key international politicians and business
people to get their cues right or to use an autocue properly
or to stop using lashings of PowerPoint. I was battling with
a presenter. I had offered him the Chekovian quote which goes: "Don't
tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken
glass." I was trying to explain how description and expression
can bring an idea alive. He was having none of it and wanted
instead to watch the ladies walk past the glass window which
gave a wide vista of the hotel’s swimming pool.
Later, Jeremy and I talked over the detritus of coffee cups and scripts, lighting
plots and special effects cues. He swept the lot off the table and ordered
a pint of olives. (He likes olives especially the ones stuffed with pimentos). “Why,” he
asked “do these executives who earn a fortune and who have thousands
of people initially waiting on their every word, speak in such an appalling
way? Why are they so very, very bad?” Jeremy doesn’t use words
like ‘crap’.
Where, we wondered, were
the great debates of Burke and Fox or Pitt and Peel? Where were
the clever arguments and the paragraphs, the soaring language,
the great arguments, the emotional or logical appeals that could
influence and lead people?
So we spent four hours eating olives (although, you may like to know, and as
a matter of interest, that I don’t like pimentos) and we drank ouzo -
since we were in Athens which I also don’t like. Ouzo that is, not Athens.
And since we were there, I remarked on the power of oratory exemplified by
Aristotle, Demosthenes and Pericles. He parried with Cicero and Margaret Thatcher.
He said that both those people counted because Mrs T had once spent an enjoyable
holiday in Thebes and Cicero’s mother was half Greek. I blanched at this
ready wit and fought back internationally with Benazir Bhutto, Elizabeth I,
Adrien Brody, Gallilei, Thomas Jefferson, Colonel Tim Collins and Clarence
Darrow. He harrumphed a little and I think he threw Martin Luther King, Disraeli,
Ho Chi Minh and Oprah Winfrey at me. He said that the speech was everything.
I said yes, but the man who’s often regarded as the author of perhaps
America’s greatest speech, Abraham Lincoln, is known more for the superb
eye-watering eloquence and precision of his words than the high-pitched nasal
Kentucky twang with which he delivered them. I said that maybe it was the writing
sometimes - not always the delivery that did the trick. And good, sharp writing
too.
And then Jeremy ate the rest of the olives and he too looked moodily at the
Athenian swimming pool. And there the matter rested. Until we did another event
together, this time in Miami.
Amid the same sort of detritus of lamps, cables, sleeping crew and weeping
clients, we again discussed where oratory had gone. We wondered why politicians
in general and business people in particular - weren’t interested in
the power of rhetoric. Why they couldn’t see that the strength of words
is extraordinary. Why they only relied on Twitter, Face Book, emails, texts,
one-line headlines and sound-bites – all very good things, but not oratory.
Here were people who had the power to lead and persuade, here were people who
could declaim and who could probably write, but chose not to do either. Here
were people, some from the mother of parliaments - but who couldn’t hold
a topic in-depth for more than the short answer to a Question Time question.
But then there was a gradual sea change. About two years ago, we found that
people were beginning to take notice of the great speakers of history. The
arrival of Barack Obama made people look and listen again at the likes of Bill
Clinton, Neville Bonner, Henry Ward Beecher, Rudy Giulliani, Margaret Chase
Smith and others. Maybe some of the world’s recent seismic changes brought
oratory out a bit - not a lot, but maybe a little. And not all from America,
where oratory is still (oh so rightly) regarded as a very important part of
education - but from India, China, Brazil, Canada, Australia. Suddenly, or
so it seemed, oratory and rhetoric were in favour. The Independent led
with articles about speech-making, The Sunday Times and Marketing
magazine zoned in briefly on what rhetoric was all about in modern communications.
Radio and TV programmes suddenly focused on the subject in a haphazard sort
of way. There was a very weird TV programme called The Speaker - designed
to find Britain’s best young public speaker. The participants were by
and large very odd and the judges were led by Jo Brand and included a basketball
player and a lovey person who wore a beret. Jeremy nearly o deed on his olive
consumption and we both thought that oratory was still not getting a fair or
proper in-depth airing.
 So we sat down and began this book. Mind you, I didn’t always get his
attention. On one occasion, he and I were having a script meeting at a London
hotel. Suddenly, Julie, his wife, rushed in sobbing that their house had burned
down. She said ‘Oh Jeremy, it was terrible. I was cooking and then the
phone rang. It was your publisher. Because I was on the phone I didn’t
notice that the frying pan was on fire. It went up in a second and so did the
house. Everything’s gone. And the poor cat….’ ‘Hang
on a second, just hang on a minute,’ said Jeremy alarmed. ‘Did
you say my publisher called?’
We wanted to create a book that analyzed speeches simply and directly to make
them of use to executives, politicians, AS students - indeed anyone who wanted
to understand speech and speeches and how a particular delivery had worked.
And why.
We wanted to make people aware of the devices, the tricks of the trade - like
the anastrophe, the chiasmus and parallelisms – about which Jeremy will
speak in a moment. These are things, we considered, that anyone could use well
and easily.
Of course we argued about who should be in the book. Many olives were thrown
with or without pimento stuffing, but we got to ten inclusions quite safely.
Twenty was very tough. We then decided that we had to include those who used
rhetoric for evil as well as good, for selfish purposes as well as for freedom.
The speech was the driver. Did it work? How did it work? What was the magic
that made it work? We arrived at thirty. Then Jeremy wanted Buzz Aldrin or
Andy Pandy in the book and I smiled porettily and said in that case I wanted
Colonel Gadaffi.
Eventually, we did achieve the 100, but you’ll see that at the
back of the book there’s a section including some of the many, many speeches
we could have included but then the title would have been The 309 and Martin
said that that wouldn’t work so good.
We’re really pleased that we managed to include people who played a part
at the great hinges of history, of unbelievably, mind-boggingly brave people
who claimed that freedom was their audience’s right - people like the
African Americans who began and continued what became a tidal wave of protest
in extraordinary circumstances, the politicians around the world who stood
up to be counted or to help make a difference, people like Neville Bonner and
Patrick Henry, Nehru and Ghandi – both Mrs and Mahatma. I’m really
pleased that we included Oskar Schindler’s speech which he made as he
stood weeping at the end of the war when he told his bedraggled audience that
he hadn’t done enough. I’m glad we included Hitler who’s
ability to stun by his rhetoric was extraordinary and I’m glad that we
included nine year old Severn Cullis-Suzuki who stood up in front of the world
and pleaded with an Earth Summit in Rio that if the politicians of the world
didn’t know how to fix global warming, then would they, she begged, please
stop making it worse.
I’m glad that we managed to include a passionate and lost Salvadore Allende – the
last speech before he died. And that we included the oh so rich language of
Americans like Franklin, Bollinger, Adrien Brody and, my favourite, Bill Cosby
whose brilliant, brilliant Pound speech should be compulsory reading and listening
for every politician in every land. I’m glad that we got our beloved
Dickens in and that Mustafa Attaturk and Napoleon appear for their verve, vigour
and their ability to speak from the heart without sounding remotely soppy.
That Robert and Jack Kennedy are here and Huey Long. And business people like
Apple’s Steve Jobs, Wal-Mart’s Lee Scott and GE’s Jack Welch
- Bill Gates even. And film stars like George Clooney on Darfur and music luminaries
like Sir George Martin on youth. Then the shocking ones, the ones with fear
in their words like Robert Oppenheimer who spoke ashen-faced on TV with his
line from Bagahvad Gita: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to
burst at once in the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’
Many of our hundred undoubtedly had and have terrible table manners, poor social
skills, were poorly educated or brilliantly charismatic, were self-taught or
not taught at all. Some treated life with scorn. Some were cruel. Some were
extraordinarily kind, despite grave consequences. Some committed acts of great
terror and brutality and some were heroes to a few and enemies to many.
 Some spread words of cheer and help amidst chaos. Some spread chaos amongst
those who would spread cheer. Some promulgated moral dignity and others ‘yes
we can’ positivism. Some explained the difficulties of what we now know
as challenging times. Some transformed history and changed the gates of opportunity.
And some peddled in pure magic and hoopla – simply delighting their audiences
taking them to the dizzy heights of happiness and comfort. Some were stopped
in their prime, others did the stopping. Some made us cry, some made us laugh.
All filled Jeremy and me with childish wonder and astonishment.
These 100 all told stories in one form or another and used structures of magic.
Some short and stark, others with exposition and full flavour.
And, whatever the reasons and despite everything, it’s clear that language
isn’t dead and done. The opportunity’s changed that’s all.
Spoken language in many guises can engage us, can change a tide and can change
minds. We need oratory which is why, when Obama began the new trend, he and
it were welcomed.
So, that’s the bedrock and the back story of why this book. Jeremy and
I are of the belief that oratory is still the parent of liberty and it is still
all about thought on fire which we just love. We hope that in reading this
book you’ll agree.
|
