Uncensored John Simon

THE NOSTRUM OF NOSTALGIA

2012-02-17T13:27:00.000-08:00

Americans are too prone to nostalgia, a phenomenon comparable to gushing about babies, movie stars, and pets. That it was considered unhealthy is evident from its name, based on two Greek words: nostos, a return home, and algos, sickness. Dictionaries define it as either a yearning for something past or homesickness. There is a difference.

It is one thing to long for the past in whatever form (retro fashions, vintage cars, one’s real or imagined childhood, and the like), and another to yearn for home from abroad (as in armed service, business travel, special studies, and such). In other words, nostalgia is the wish to negate either time or distance, humanly understandable but scarcely salubrious.

Of course, in a mild form, a great many of us are susceptible to it; it is only when it becomes intense and persistent that it turns seriously unhealthy—like the difference between a cold and pneumonia, between sniffles and high fever. Granted, nobody dies of nostalgia, but why look at the world distractingly through the rear- view mirror rather than as required through the windshield?

Agreed, a major reversal of fortune can elicit , if not entirely justify, nostalgia, but how many people can claim that as an excuse? These thoughts are induced by a couple of recent movies, the Franco-Belgian The Artist, with ten Oscar nominations, and the Anglo-American Hugo, with eleven. Both are competing for Best Picture, but omens are more favorable to The Artist, including its awards and popularity in Great Britain.

I myself find The Artist disgraceful. It is a perfectly silly, sentimental story, told almost entirely without sound and in black-and-white, to resemble old-time flics. This is like trading in your car for a horse and buggy, or like reverting to babytalk. especially considering the paltry quality of those by-gone movies meant to be replicated. Monochrome may be suitable for dark doings, as in Agnieszka Holland's current In Darkness, about a group of Polish Jews in World War Two hiding from the Nazis in the Lwow sewers. But using it merely for nostalgia I consider lack of both good taste and sound judgment.

To be sure there are distinct allusions even to such superior movies as Citizen Kane and A Star Is Born, yet imitation of this kind is hardly a virtue. And what about bringing in Malcolm MacDowell, a major but now neglected actor, merely to share a bench with the heroine for a couple of minutes?

Absurd, too, is the leading man’s losing his fortune and star standing on the flop of an epic, self-financed picture, excerpts from which prove absolutely no worse than the rest of The Artist. Downright ludicrous is the soundtrack’s acquiring audibility just for the depositing of a tumbler on a table, presumably symbolic of the coming of sound to the movies, though this one promptly reverts to mutism.

For further incredibility, consider the hero’s confinement in a burning house long enough to turn to a crisp, but being saved by his faithful dog’s tugging at a nearby policeman’s trousers, which in some unexplained way leads to the putting out of the flames in ample time. Or take the heroine, now a star, getting, as the intertitles inform us, a brilliant idea for saving the situation, which turns out to be nothing more than the surly and despotic studio head’s being enchanted by her and her hero lover’s performing a second-rate dance sequence inordinately dwelled on.

There is an abundance of clichés, such as a torn-off poster for the hero’s ruinous movie blown to a sidewalk, with indifferent feet cruelly treading on it. Be it said, however, for the hitherto undistinguished writer-director of the film, Michel Hazanavicius, that his star and real-life wife, Berenice Bejo, is pretty and charming, and that his protagonist, Jean Dujardin, resembles some of the leading men of yore. But even the unrelenting score by Ludovic Bource will stoop to such a trick as switching into Bernard Herrmann's celebrated score for Vertigo, the sort of dirty doing the great film composers of olden times would not have condoned, let alone perpetrated.

Yes, Hugo, too, has its share of nostalgia, and even rewrites history. Moreover, the notion that a young boy, upon his father’s demise, would inherit the job of regulating the clocks of a major Paris railway station is fairy-tale stuff. But the screenplay is by John Logan, an established writer, and the direction by the distinguished Martin Scorsese. The film unabashedly but nonexclusively appeals to a young audience,
its two young principal actors could not be more delightful, and even its use of 3D is not showily overassertive. I only wish Howard Shore, the composer, had resisted annexing Satie's well-known and superior Gymnopedies to his otherwise acceptable score, for which aberration see above under Ludovic Bource.

Perhaps there is a symbolic significance in the contrast between the dogs that figure importantly in both these Oscar contenders. In The Artist, the dog is preternaturally clever; in Hugo, he may perhaps be (dare I say it?) too doggedly ferocious, but still rather more believable. So, too, Hugo takes place in an ingeniously evoked Paris, whereas The Artist merely smells of the studio.

MEMORY'S TRICKS

2012-01-16T16:23:00.000-08:00

Memory plays strange tricks on us. There are not only (A) the losses of things we want to remember, but also (B) the things it annoyingly won’t let us forget. And further (C), things we puzzlingly don’t know why we remember. They neither bother nor delight us, only make us wonder why these rather than something else.

For reasons that elude me, I recently thought of the Swedish film and stage director, the late Johan Bergenstrahle, whose one superb film not even many Swedes have seen, but whose stage work at Stockholm’s City Theater is remembered and well thought of. One evening in a Stockholm café, he voiced his gnawing concern to me. How to deal with the fact that his still young and beautiful girlfriend’s ass, hitherto firm and smooth, was starting to develop a kind of moiré effect of unsightly ripples?

I don’t recall what sort of solace I could offer him, nor how he responded. But sometime later, I received an unexpected letter from him in his large, imposing handwriting, thanking me for what I had said, and telling me it had helped him. Now, however, I cannot for the life of me recall what it was; all I am sure of is that it wasn’t naming some miraculous ointment or other, but some psychological adjustment. Still, an A case.

But now for a B. The protagonist of a play by Jean Anouilh is tormented by memories of cruelties he inflicted as a youth on various animals. Alas, I too in my boyhood was given an air gun with which I shot poor innocent sparrows without even the excuse of food for myself or fodder for some pets. I still evince intermittent pangs of conscience, and, of course, there is no possible expiation.

Even unarmed, I must have offended some human beings, to whom a belated apology might be possible. Here, however, memory fails me. But I can recall and offer specimens of type C.

My father was fond of philosophy and when the respected philosopher Arthur Liebert, fleeing the Nazis, landed impecuniously in Belgrade, my parents would frequently have him over for dinner. I remember his philosophical head (bald on top and lots of snow-white fringe), but only one inconsequential thing he said. We took him to see “Broadway Melody of 1940,” whose much-touted star, Eleanor Powell, does not appear till the second or third reel. “Wann kommt die Povel?” inquired, stentorously mispronouncing, the impatient philosopher.

There are stranger Cs, however. My father was a wise as well as witty man, yet I remember clearly only one thing he said. My parents and I were in Paris, returning to our hotel after a show, when we saw a sign reading “Repas” (meals) over a closed restaurant door. Said my father in Hungarian, “Even this root vegetable man has shut shop by now.” Repas, with an acute accent on both vowels, would, if such a word existed, mean root vegetable dealer or man. Somehow, the preposterousness of that reading and pronunciation had all three of us burst out laughing. Why remember this of all things?

Of my mother, I recall only, as she was washing me in my childhood behind my ears, referring to “the little bench behind your ears.” Calling it a little bench is rather strange, but surely not memorable. One other remark of hers, to my wife, and relayed to me by her, was, “Who is that old woman looking at me from the mirror?” Seems very apt to me these late days.

The one utterance of my own I recall from my infancy is, walking in the park with my grandmother and seeing a nest of ants, “What a multitude of beetles!” To be sure, “Menge” in German was less resonant than the English “multitude.” Though entomologically incorrect, it made an impression on grandmotherly ears, and was duly reported as proof of my linguistic prowess.

Actions are more memorable than words, and I do remember a few from my boyhood. For instance, on a holiday at an Italian seaside watering place, there was a girl of maybe twelve, like me, who tried fishing in the bay with a butterfly net. It got away from her and was starting to float away to sea. My parents were away, and I, not yet a secure swimmer, chivalrously waded right in fully clothed, unconcerned with how deep and dangerous the water might be just there. Luckily, I retrieved the net. A friendly lady, horrified, carried me off to her room and gave me a rubdown and something dry to wear. I wonder now, is this memory a B or a C?

Oddly enough, an insignificant event from my ripe years often haunts me in B fashion. At a public spelling bee, Phoebe, a co-worker at New York magazine, wanted to join in, but only if I would too. An early word was “cartilage.” I spelled it “cartilege.” This faux pas was actually written up in some British newspaper to my eternal shame.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could teach our memory to remember only pleasant things, and skip the indifferent or bad ones? Of course, the latter may function as useful warnings against recidivism. But when would I ever again have to spell “cartilage” in public?

CENSORSHIP AND CASTRATION

2011-12-27T07:23:00.000-08:00

I just finished a highly important and enjoyable book, two virtues that do not all that often appear in tandem. It is The Language Wars by Henry Hitchings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Subtitled “A History of Proper English,” it is by far the best history of the English language, excitingly and amusingly told in part though striking quotations and entertaining anecdotes. It is based on extensive research, and references a vast number of impressive sources, proving in equal measure history and usage guidebook, as Publishers Weekly rightly observed. Also a splendid example of how to write informatively and wittily on a subject that should be of interest to everyone involved with the English language—by, for instance, speaking and writing it—and indispensable to anyone professionally engaged with it.

Among the innumerable fascinating data I gleaned from it, I single out here the admirable pages about censorship, which succinctly but thoroughly adduce scary and ludicrous specimens of censorship as well as taboo. (The chapter that comprises them is drolly entitles “Unholy Shit.”) That Hitchings is also a theater critic for the London Evening Standard further endears him to me. It may even induce me to seek out his earlier books.

Hitchings discusses Thomas Bowdler, whose The Family Shakespeare (1818) was a popular edition of Shakespeare’s plays that “omitted any words that ‘cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family’—stripping away anything sexual, yet retaining the violence.” A slight compensation for his extensive impoverishments is Bowdler’s one posthumous contribution to the English language, the verb “bowdlerize.” One review of the work accused Bowdler of having “castrated, cauterized and phlebotomized” Shakespeare, which got me thinking about, among other things, castration.

I perceive it as a cruel and unusual punishment, even when it is mandatorily imposed on pedophiles. These, currently very much in the limelight, what with certain low practices in institutions of higher learning, should sternly be punished. That should involve jail sentences and, afterward, preemptive measures such as electronic and other surveillance, housing restrictions, and so forth. But not castration, however much it may have formerly done for young boys’ singing voice. It is not even surefire protection against misdeeds, as it does not wholly eliminate the libido, and can prevent only penetration, but not molestation.

This brings me to the story of Abelard and Heloise, and the dreadful emasculation of the excellent man by the hired thugs of the vicious Canon Fulbert, who incorrectly believed that his niece, Heloise, had somehow been ruined by Abelard, her loving and beloved teacher (and secret husband), a great and noble philosopher and theologian.

Their story has been treated in various works of literature and theater, one of the latter, Ronald Millar’s “Abelard & Heloise,” performed on Broadway by Keith Michell and Diana Rigg in 1971. I quote from my review, as reprinted in Uneasy Stages.

The play is billed as “inspired by” Helen Waddell’s novel Peter Abelard though “inspired” is hardly a word I would use in this context. All I remember of that dryish book by a fine scholar and translator but unwieldy novelist is the character of Gilles de Vannes, modeled on Miss Waddell’s beloved teacher George Saintsbury . . . the only character in the [Millar] play who has any life. Abelard and Heloise have fired the imaginations of such diverse writers as Alexander Pope and George Moore, and there are respectable but uninspired plays on the subject by Roger Vailland and James Forsyth. To these Millar’s work may be appended as the last and least.

For Millar does not convey anything to us: neither life in the Middle Ages nor the conflict of God and Eros during the heyday of the Church; neither Abelard the great dialectician and teacher, nor Abelard the masterly poet. But perhaps one could bypass all these in favor of the tragic love story (and castration is arguably more tragic than death, if only one had the language, the poetry, the fervor. But if you write lines like [here I skip three incriminating samples of dialogue], you are not fit to write a play about these lovers—at best perhaps, about the Windsors or Onassises.

The production contained a most discreet (not to say castrated) nude scene, showing the lovers only on a darkened stage, briefly, and in profile, but sufficient to elicit from me that Ms. Rigg “is built, alas, like a brick basilica with inadequate flying buttresses.” This remark has fueled comments, amused but mostly disapproving, in numerous publications, notably in Ms. Rigg’s delightful book about negative criticism, No Turn Unstoned. In it, the charming and highly literate actress observes, “I remember making my way to the theatre the following day, darting from doorway to doorway and praying I wouldn’t meet anyone I know. The cast behaved with supreme tact and pretended they hadn’t read the review.”

I now regret having written this, but at least I incurred a slight punishment. Absolutely everyone who quotes my line has it wrongly “a brick mausoleum,” whether derived from Ms. Rigg or from any of several anthologies of quotations that incorrectly include it. Now “brick mausoleum,” besides denying me the alliteration in B, makes no sense. A basilica is an early form of Christian church built on an ancient Roman model, and much simpler, chaster, narrower than the later cathedrals, and definitely devoid of anything like a flying buttress. A takeoff on the expression “built like a brick shithouse” for a bosomy woman, it has appropriately some relevance to medieval architecture, but none whatever to a mausoleum. Unfortunately, the wits or wiseacres who misquote me know nothing about a basilica, not even the word. Oh well, grander people have been misquoted in the prints: Marie Antoinette never said that thing about eating cake, and Voltaire never said that thing about fighting to the death for someone’s right to disagree with him.

One other play involving castration, a just slightly better one (play, that is, not castration) is Tennessee Williams’s “Sweet Bird of Youth.” The hero, Chance, has seduced the ingénue, Heavenly, and caused an abortion that left her sterile. He evinces what Kenneth Tynan has called “an obscure awareness” that he must let himself be castrated by the henchmen of Heavenly’s father, a beastly Southern political boss, by way of expiation of his guilt. Moreover, as Tynan writes, he “begs us, in parting, to understand him, and to recognize ourselves in him.”

“For my part,” Tynan continues, “I recognized nothing but a special, rarefied situation that had been carried to extremes of cruelty with a total disregard for probability, human relevance, and the laws of dramatic structure.” And he goes on to make pertinent, perceptive comments, including wonder about why the action begins on Easter Sunday: “Is castration to be equaled with resurrection?”

Well, come to think of it, I can recall another play of sorts, where it is equaled with redemption, two kinds of it no less. In Yugoslavia in my high-school days, religious instruction was compulsory. One day when the instructor was late, I improvised a little miracle play, based on a picture from one of my father’s books with the caption “Saint Origen castrating himself for the sake of the Heavenly Kingdom.” (Note: not Tennessee Williams’s Heavenly,)

So, for my playlet, I picked the prettiest girl in the class and had her kneel before me as I brandished a ruler representing a cutlass, and, turning my rapt gaze at the ceiling, loudly proclaimed, “I castrate myself for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.” The pretty blonde was supposed to supplicate me not to do it. Just then the instructor arrived, and, though I am not quite sure about Origen (it seems the Catholic church has revoked his sainthood), I was barred from further religious instruction, which I hailed as a most welcome redemption.

That may have been the only time in dramatic and religious history when castration, even if only mimed, has proved beneficial.

THE CRITIC, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

2011-12-11T17:49:00.000-08:00

There is a great deal about critics that Americans do not understand. First of all, the difference between what a critic writes for public consumption and what he is in private life. The two are hardly identical.

This comment is provoked by letters to or about me, by talk in the chat rooms, and by occasional references to me and my work in the prints. What it boils down to usually is that I am a good or witty writer, but that my criticism is too cruel or mean, and that I must be a very bitter and unhappy man indeed.

That stuff is based on two, as I see it, misconceptions. First, that criticism must never be that ferocious (I would prefer stern, strict or severe); and second, that such a critic must be a frustrated and embittered human being. Let me try to correct these egregious errors.

Why should a critic in private life be what he is on the page? Does a surgeon go to a party with a scalpel at the ready to cut up his fellow invitees? Does a gardener arrive hoe in hand and start belaboring the hostess’s Persian rugs? Is a cook wielding his spoons not only in the kitchen but also all over the house? Would a ballerina wear her tutu at the supermarket? The tools of one’s trade are not glued to one’s hands or hips.

So, too, with a critic. He (or she) experiences a play exactly the way any civilized audience member does, although he (or she) does not hoot his approval or disapproval loudly at he end, does not talk or fidget in his seat during performance, and does not leap to his feet for standing ovations—although he might if an event truly called for a standing ovation. All this as a normal human being, not as so much of today’s audiences as lunatics laughing loudly at the feeblest jokes (or even none), and beleaguering the stage door as a crowd of maniacs wielding devices for autographing or photographing.

No, the critic is just another human being, whose job it is to write a review rather than a play, short story, or political column. And one who doesn’t allow a stomach ache or spat with his spouse to color his judgment and take it out on the piece under review. If necessary, he’ll count to a hundred before starting to write. Only, please, don’t take that hundred literally; it might also be a night’s sleep.

What may set him off, though, is that he will have certain standards, certain expectations that set him off from the average theatergoer who, worse luck, may also be a reviewer.(Kindly don’t ask me to go again, for the nth time, into the difference between a mere journalistic scribe, the reviewer, and someone to whom dramatic criticism is a branch of literary criticism—who writes for a literate readership and perhaps even, he hopes, for the future.

Well, here goes anyway. The critic may make some allowances, but he cannot forget that there once was a Moliere, a Chekhov, a Wilde, a Tennessee Williams or, in criticism, a Shaw, a Beerbohm, an Eric Bentley, a Kenneth Tynan.. Clearly, I am thinking here of theater criticism; but a similar distinction obtains for criticism of all the arts. In other words, why shouldn’t a current contender be held up for measuring, mutatis mutandis, against past champions? Is there any reason why Rodgers and Hart shouldn’t be able to stand up to Gilbert and Sullivan?

Yes, yes, you say, but must a mere shortcoming be savaged? It may be all right for Edward Albee not to be up to Strindberg, for Arthur Miller not to equal Ibsen, for David Mamet not to be another O’Neill. Granted. But what if “Urinetown” cannot even compete with “Our Town”? What if “The Book of Mormon” cannot even hold its own against “Cabaret”?

And why shouldn’t the critic become outraged when drivel like “Passing Strange” or “Once” is hailed as if it were the like of “Pal Joey” or “Lady in he Dark”? But even if our reviewers did not go ape over garbage, as they all too often do, should one not tear into such unpardonables as the Sam Waterston “Lear” or a Frank Wildhorn musical? What, for heaven’s sake, was the kick in the butt invented for?

Consider, if you will, what Jacques Barzun wrote as a blurb for one of my books—it could have been for any of several others: “Not because he is violent in expression but because he feels strongly and thinks clearly about drama, about art and about conduct, I think John Simon’s criticism extremely important and a pleasure to read. And by the way, who has decreed that violence in a playwright is splendid and violence in a critic unforgivable?”

Or here is what Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1966 to the editor of Esquire about why he should hire me rather than Pauline Kael as film critic: “Simon has a much wider and deeper cultural background . . . I mean he knows and has thought more about other ‘fields’–-ugh—like books, theater, and art—and also because his work seems to me to show an interest in what I think is the point: whether the film is any good aesthetically . . . a much richer and more daring kind of criticism than Pauline’s.”

And here is Wilfrid Sheed in response to Andrew Sarris’s attack: “Sarris’s case against Simon is not so easy to make out, since Andy tends to scream and pull hair when he fights: but it seems, like most Simonology, to take off from Simon’s Transylvanian accent, and the remoteness from American reality which that implies. Simon is, to be sure, not your typical American boy. He staggers under a formidable load of cultural baggage, gathered at a time and place (middle-century Central Europe) when and where it did seem possible to grasp all that Art was doing; to make, as Mr. Simon can, a good fist at criticizing music, painting, sculpture, theater, the works.”

I rest my case, except about that jocular “Transylvanian accent,” which Sheed, incidentally, did not subscribe to but merely used as a comic summary of Sarris’s argument.. My accent is admittedly slightly foreign, but not, as Andrew would imply, Draculan or Lugosian. I would say it is more like that of an American or British actor trying to sound Continental European, and, I am happy to report, has proved rather pleasing to some charming American women who have lent an ear--and more--to it.

IN DEFENSE OF RHYME AND METER

2011-11-11T07:03:00.000-08:00

Lovers of poetry may wonder what happened to meter and rhyme. If one looks at modern poetry, one finds little meter and even less rhyme. Which raises the troubling question “What is poetry?” to which centuries have not provided a compelling answer.

Most famous among English attempts is Coleridge’s “the best words in the best order.” But what are the best words, what is the best order? That could be debated till the cows come home. So let’s take T.S. Eliot’s almost equally famous, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from them.” This raises more questions than it answers. Can there be a human being devoid of personality? Devoid of emotions? And why would one want to escape from them? Are they bad things? And if escape is needed, are there no better ways than through poetry?

Let’s try another famous poet, Pablo Neruda. “Poetry is a deep inner calling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and also the content of religions.” In other words, poetry is the need for religion in its basic, verbalized form. But what if you are an atheist and can still write poetry? And is a comic poet really a seeker of God?

Famous, too, is Wordsworth’s definition: “Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” This is patently self-contradictory: where powerful feelings are in overflow there is no tranquil recollection; where tranquil recollection prevails, feelings are no longer powerfully overflowing.

Then there is Poe: “I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.” Is there poetry other than in words, except as a metaphor? And is satirical verse, for example, a creation of Beauty—with a capital B yet?

Or consider that notorious mystifier Wallace Stevens: “Poetry is a search for the inexplicable,” he writes; and “Poetry is the supreme fiction.” What makes a fiction supreme? Is, for instance, a congratulatory birthday poem a fiction, let alone a supreme one? “Search for the inexplicable” is not bad, but it describes the why of poetry, not the what.

There is also A. E. Housman’s famous warning that poetry is what makes the skin bristle and should not be thought of while shaving because that incapacitates the razor. Charming, but surely a very personal, hardly universal, reaction to poetry; besides, does a bristly skin, whatever that exactly is, present that much of an impediment to a razor? And if it did, would we, to test whether something is poetry, have to promptly start shaving?

Well, let us forget about what is poetry and return to rhyme and meter. These, I assert without being startlingly original, are very useful poetic tools. They serve to make poetry musical and memorable. The musical aspect makes it enjoyable as music does; the memorable aspect makes it portable. It also enables us to recite it more easily for the delectation of others and ourselves. And for all our modern hostility to didacticism, we do learn something from poetry that is useful: that others have felt like us and how they dealt with it.

In the days before portable radios, the Walkman, and the more recent inventions like the Blackberry and all those things with a prefix in “i,” remembered poetry was our most comforting companion, and profited from any mnemonic devices. Which, as noted, were pre-eminently meter and rhyme. Blank verse—iambic pentameter—was particularly ingrained in our minds thanks to Shakespeare and the verse drama and is thus more easily recalled. And if there are such things as i-pods and i-phones and the rest, does it mean that memorization is passé?

Does the motorcar eliminate the horse-drawn carriage? No; we still enjoy such things as a romantic carriage ride through Central Park. Does the electric shaver doom the unmotorized razor? The Sweeney Todd kind, perhaps. But not the good old Gillette, which costs much less and requires no elaborate upkeep. Not even the bow and arrow have fallen completely prey to the gun. We still have archery as a not unpopular sport.

We still like rhythm. And isn’t meter a well-defined rhythm? It needs a bit of variation to avoid becoming doggerel, but it is one of the things that make verse easier to memorize than prose. Many people can recite speeches from Shakespeare from memory; but can anyone recite paragraphs of Faulkner or Fitzgerald? I don’t think most people remember the line “To be or not to be, that is the question” merely for what it says and not as much for how it rolls off the tongue. Those three lovely iambs in the first hemistich, then the neatly bisecting caesura, and then a switch to the two balancing trochees, plus that extra syllable of the so-called feminine ending.

Or take the almost as well-known “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast.” Again, iambic pentameter, with the popular variation in the first foot to a trochee, good in beginnings where we like an accented syllable to start us off with a bang. But then we have the docile progression of four iambs, with that repetition aurally replicating the soothing in question.

As for rhyme; it even helps the poet to create. Suppose he writes a line that ends in “night.” Now he looks for a rhyme that is not the obvious “might” or “right” or “white.” (Rhyming dictionaries exist to help in the search,) And he comes up with things like “dynamite,” “plebiscite” and “troglodyte.” Each one of these can propel him in an original, unusual direction.

Beyond that, rhyme means symmetry and closure, and aren’t those good, desirable things? Doesn’t the saying “makes no rhyme or reason” entwine rhyme with the great good of reason? “Cela ne rime a rien” say the French, equating rhyme in its absence with the lack of good sense. Rhyme betokens order, harmony, fulfillment of expectation—all good things. So, poets, how about a return to rhyme and meter?

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

2011-10-08T17:24:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder about the phrase “too good to be true.” Latterly because in a review of Bruce Jay Friedman’s memoir, “Lucky Bruce,” the reviewer cites a Long Island lunch group of writers as successful as Friedman, Mario Puzo, Joseph Heller and a few others as rejecting “James Salter from the clique because he is too good a writer.”

Is there such a thing as being too good or too true a writer, and being rejected for it by a group of published, established fellow writers? Can you imagine Proust or Kafka or Joyce being rejected by a literary coterie—or worse yet, by a publisher—for such a reason? “Sorry, Monsieur Proust, we cannot publish your book because you are too true, too good a writer”? Can someone be too good a writer for anything or anyone—a clique, a publisher, a readership?

I wouldn’t think so. I can think, however, of other reasons to be thus rejected. Take the case of James Salter. He is indeed a good—but surely not too good—writer, which could be resented and rejected by writers conspicuously less good, envious and exclusionary. Bernard Shaw wittily entitled one of his plays with the reversal of that formula, Too True to Be Good. So Salter may be too true a writer, or even too truthful a person, to be tolerated by lesser writers afraid of his calling their bluff, questioning their exaggerated self-esteem.

True enough. If I were Friedman, Puzo or Heller, I might be leery of regular lunches with the likes of Proust, Kafka and Joyce, or Thomas Mann, Faulkner and Borges. This even if they were willing to join my group, which they might decline, and which unpleasantness to forestall I would not ask them to join. Their mere presence, however collegial, might be a thorn in my ego.

So there is no such thing as too good a writer, only other writers not feeling good enough. Is there, however, too good an anything? Is there too good a medicine, a building, a soup, a companion, an automobile, a gardener, a tailor, an actor? There may well be too good a suit or dress, but not for an excess of goodness, merely too steep a price.

But let’s get back to the phrase “too good to be true.” You would think it included in Nigel Rees’s Dictionary of Cliches, or in Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Cliches or in his A Dictionary of Catch Phrases. Why is it missing from such worthy compilations, none of them too bad to be true. Is it that Rees and Partridge have never come across it? Seems highly unlikely.

Maybe, though, it is considered a maxim by the powerful writer Anonymous that has attained proverbial status and is listed in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations along with such other gems as “A fool and his money are soon parted” or “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” or “Time is of the essence,” all of which make it into that great dictionary of quotations. So why not “too good to be true,” surely as frequent and famous as the included? Yet in no such dictionary (I own quite a few) does it appear, not even as a proverb, if that’s what it is, an inclusion that would conveniently excuse a dictionarist from tracking it down its source.

If the saying were slightly different, say, “too good to be desirable, “ I might guardedly find some justification. To be told that you are too ill to be cured, too stupid to be tolerated, too unsightly to be looked at, this may be all too true, but not desirable to utter or to hear. But neither would it be as euphonious, as effective, as memorable. “Too good to be true” is catchy for several reasons.

Take first the assonance in four out of its five components, all but “be.” Then take the pleasing progression from an iamb to an anapest. They go harmoniously together, each accentuated on its final syllable. Lastly, the very fact that each of the five words is a monosyllable of the kind English abounds in, and that rolls easily off the most untutored tongue. Such things readily ensconce themselves in the memory.

So can we agree that nothing is really too good to be true, except perhaps your winning the grand prize in a lottery for which you bought only a single ticket? That might justly elicit the swift, spontaneous exclamation. It is evidently true, but hold on, is it also too good? Would not winning have been better? But perhaps too good for all those others, the envious losers? Still, why should we enshrine envy as a maxim, as something too good?

True, the gloriously surprised lottery winner might in the first overwhelming moment of triumph exclaim, “This is too good to be true!” Yet even he would, after enjoying the benefits for a time, conclude that it feels deliciously right, but hardly too good to be true.

ANIMADVERSIONS OF A “LOOKIST” CRITIC

2011-10-02T02:53:00.000-07:00

In The New York Times Book Review of September 25, Maureen Dowd reviewed Roger Ebert’s autobiographical “Life Itself.” The highly favorable notice contained the following: “Ebert tries to avoid gossip and ‘hurtful’ comments about actors. ‘I feel repugnance for the critic John Simon, who made it a specialty to attack the way actors look,’ he writes. ‘They can’t help how they look, any more than John Simon can help looking like a rat.’”

Needless to say, in her laudatory review, Dowd does not take issue with this statement, so the burden falls on me. It is a foolish assertion of Ebert’s for any number of reasons. First of all, because it makes him one of those ill-informed people who claim I made that procedure my specialty. I never went out of my way to attack actors for their looks; I attacked then, when I did, for something more relevant: not looking like what their parts called for. That, as I repeatedly stated, does matter.

If a set designer’s sets look poor or inappropriate, we criticize them with universally conceded impunity, even praise for our perceptiveness. The same goes for our criticism of a production’s costumes. Now, of course, it will be said that sets and costumes have no feelings, and cannot be hurt.

True, but their designers can be hurt more than actors can. If I say that actor X, in the hero’s role, looks like a garden gnome (which I haven’t actually), future directors and producers may, being ever so much more humane or purblind, disagree and ignore my “unfounded” slur. If, on the other hand, they agree with it, what harm have I done?

With sets and costumes, though, it is a different matter. Because opinions pro and con in those areas are much less emotionally charged and more debatable, sympathies can be more easily shaken than about faces, and poor reviews may actually damage a designer’s opportunities.

I do not hold with pussyfooting criticism of any kind. If I say that actress Y in the role of the leading lady looked like a cigar store Indian (I actually did), I was saying so because she glaringly didn’t fit the role: two dashing young men would not have fought a deadly duel over her.

Now, I know that some reviewers would merely say of a visually thoroughly unsuited actress that she is miscast; or if she is many years too old, that she is too mature for her role. But those statements do not make much of an impression. A critic is a salesman for his reviews, and to sell them, he needs to make a powerful effect. Ergo the cigar store Indian.

There are other things to be considered. If a performer is brilliant, such talent easily eclipses any deficiency in her looks. Take, for instance, Edith Piaf. Her looks were definitely wanting, but never made me note a lack that she glowingly transcended. OK, she was more a singer than an actress, but I have been just as tolerant of, say, Rita Tushingham or Peggy Ashcroft, whose talents dazzled. And surely sovereign talent is what we are entitled to get from a performer.

In other words, actors can definitely help their looks, often even without surpassing talent. Wigs, makeup, costuming and, onscreen, clever photography can also do the trick. It doesn’t matter how it is arrived at as long as it is done. And then there are all those roles for which looks are not necessary. In some cases, albeit rare, good looks can even be inappropriate and distracting.

Among these cases I include not only such obvious examples as the witches in “Macbeth,” but even Lady Macbeth herself, who, though she shouldn’t look repulsive, need not be a great beauty in that very much leading part. This seems especially true in Britain, which, for whatever reason, does not have so many beautiful women, and thus also beautiful actresses, as can be found in other countries. But who would have found fault, say, with Celia Johnson for not having had Hollywood good looks?

And, speaking of Hollywood, what does anyone who considers thespian comeliness unimportant make of the fact that looks of actresses, and to only slightly lesser extent actors, was capitalized on and greatly contributed to the movies’ success? So why not criticize looks in a medium where looks have been paramount—and not only at Paramount?

But never mind crassly commercial Hollywood; didn’t even so great a director as Ingmar Bergman set tremendous stock by the looks of his leading ladies? And if beauty can be of such importance, cannot its absence be equally important and duly reprehended?

As for me, I take beauty seriously everywhere, even in dogs. I am ill at easy with unsightly canines, no matter how vaunted the supposed superior intelligence of mutts may be. I am all for pure breeds, except, of course, in breeds like bulldogs, where ugliness is prized. But they look funny, and this is where comedy comes to the rescue. An unsightly actor or actress can be just the thing in comedy or, better yet, farce. There lack of looks actually scores.

Accordingly, I have no problem with Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl”; it is only as an unfunny girl, especially when, as in “The Way We Were,” the smashing Robert Redford is in love with her, that she really bothers me. Of course, in real life handsome men often marry plain women, but art plays by other rules than life.

All of which reminds me that Peter Bogdanovich once described my film criticism as being “about as much help as a legless man teaching running.” And why not? May not a legless man value running more highly than those who take it for granted, and so dedicate himself to studying it and guiding runners from his wheelchair?

I have, in any case, one consolation: rat-faced and legless as I may be, I can still be a perfectly adequate critic of performing arts and even actresses’ looks. Unlike actors, a critic does not depend on his looks, only on his writing.

MANNERS TO THE FORE

2011-09-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

All schemes for improving humankind appear to be hopeless. The masses are definitely not kind and, I fear, barely human. Where even quite ordinary individuals manage to rise above ordinary callousness, the moment they merge into a crowd, they become intolerant and intolerable.

Among other seemingly gratuitous pursuits, I have often pondered what could make man and womankind more human. Are there not enough kind humans around even to form an active core of gentility? For, of course, gentility would be the solution.

Gentility or, by its other name, manners. Optimists, if there are any of those, would assume that although intelligence cannot be generated, and stupidity thrives and multiplies even without teaching, manners, at least theoretically, ought to be teachable. Even dogs can be trained to behave as well as cats, which are fastidious by nature.

But what about people? Couldn’t they be taught good manners? To be sure, there have been elegant, seemingly well-behaved persons who, secretly, were criminals. Not for nothing do we have a play entitled “A Woman Killed With Kindness.” It is conceivable that even Dr. Mengele and Vlad the Impaler (aka Dracula) had good manners. On the other hand, can you imagine an off-the-field football team, let alone an army, with good manners?

Still, the majority of persons exhibiting mannerly behavior do this not as a cover-up, but because inwardly too they are considerate and gracious. With those people we have no problems. But can anything be achieved with instinctual loudmouths, boors, bullies, laggards, drones, know-nothings, mugwumps, fence sitters, the various kinds of fanatics or phlegmatics?

Probably not much. Nonetheless, what if, unlike what’s usual, we made an effort? Perhaps the real problem is not so much young rowdies as unqualified or nonexisting teachers. Heaven knows schooling of the traditional kind is generally either failing or not in the curriculum. As an intermittent college faculty member, I can vouch for the untutoredness of even elite school graduates, even by the time they are college upperclassmen. The rub is the lack of learning on the secondary-school level, and, no less drastic, in the home.

There have been times within human memory when parents were willing and able to teach their offspring a thing or two at home, or at least encourage them to become creditable autodidacts. As Jacques Barzun has eloquently pointed out, there is not much real teaching and learning in the schools; instead, there is an abstraction called education, windy palaver instead of getting down to brass tacks.

Given ineffectual parents and teachers, how could manners possibly be acquired? Good question, alas. Perhaps some kind of books could help: books on etiquette, if only they were wittily and charmingly written. Could even worthy works of fiction and drama influence mannerly behavior? Perhaps even certain games, in which finesse triumphs over brashness and opportunism.

I would like to think, for instance, that intelligent reading of Bernard Shaw’s plays might make a difference. Or any number of plays by Giraudoux and Anouilh, Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, possibly still crying out for adequate translations. All of them are foreign; make of that what you will.

And, while I am fantasizing, just think what could be achieved if important phone calls were taken by courteous human beings rather than impersonal machines. If this makes me a Luddite, so be it. And what if computers and their e-mail spoke not some jarring jargon, but simple, good human language?

As I implied in the beginning, probably impossible. But couldn’t we at least try?

INVALUABLE OBITS

2011-09-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

Obituaries should be read by everyone. We already know that life can be stranger than fiction—although contemporary fiction goes a long way toward strangeness—but what we should also know is how fascinating obituaries can be. No wonder many readers of the New York Times begin their reading with them. After all, deaths are in a dead heat with taxes in inevitability and universality, so that every life, tersely summarized in an obituary, should be of commanding interest and importance to any mortal.

Take the September 4 obit of (to quote the headline) “Rev. Eugene A. Nida, 96; Spurred Bible Translations.” Now I have a modest interest in the Bible as literature, but a greater one in Dr. Nida, who, I read, traversed the globe from pole to pole by plane, train and canoe to oversee the translating of Scripture into more than 200 languages.

Margalit Fox, the obituarist, points out that Nida’s efforts were to make the Bible’s language as accessible as possible in all those languages, including English, where the Good News Bible, possibly at Nida’s instigation, translated “Behold the fowls of the air” as “Look at the birds flying around.” That is certifiably colloquial, but surely less appealing than the King James version. The latter, by the way, owes much of its popularity to its English being archaic enough for exoticism, but not enough so to defeat comprehension.

Yet what is most informative, indeed instructive, about the Nida obit is its last paragraph, which concludes: “’I am sorrowful’ gets a variety of translations for tribes within a small area of central Africa: ‘My eye is black,’ ‘My heart is rotten,’ ‘My stomach is heavy’ or ‘My liver is sick.’”

This gives us a lot to think about. If there can be that much difference between adjacent tongues, does that not imply sizable differences between less neighborly ones the world over? To be sure most languages do not—naively or poetically—locate sadness in diverse parts of the anatomy. Still, even without checking up, I can assume that “sorrowful” resonates differently from what I imagine as its counterpart in German and French Bibles. It is peculiar even in English, as is “fowls of the air.”

How? Well, “sorrowful” has a literary, or perhaps romantic, aura that the commonplace, expectable “sad” would not have. It suggests a Byronic hero going about (or flying around) in a showily melancholy state. A modern sports fan, for example, after his team loses, can hardly be described as “sorrowful.”

As for “fowls,” they mean to us chickens or ducks or geese, but certainly not pigeons and sparrows. We are inadvertently nudged to imagine the air around us populated by, say, hens and turkeys, the better to befoul us with bird droppings, but also, conversely, to provide the needy with easily available sustenance.

What this means is that foreign languages may well be more alien, less fathomable, than we realize. The moment another language waxes even moderately poetic like our pre-Nidan biblical English (never mind such difficult poets as Mallarme and Rilke, or, in reverse, Eliot and Pound), we find ourselves more left out than we might imagine.

Still, in Europe and America, thanks to education, travel and dictionaries, these differences have been reduced. But what about other parts of the world, where differences in language may intensify other kinds of difference into hostility and bloody strife?

I have no wish to exaggerate. Even within the same language there can be incomprehension and lack of tolerance. Most Germans read their classical poets—Goethe, Heine, George, Rilke—just as most French people read theirs—Villon, Ronsard, Baudelaire, Verlaine—and such delectable modern ones as the German Erich Kaestner and the French Jacques Prevert, without its making them more tolerant of their neighbor nations, or even of their very own Jews. Did it even keep so many Germans from becoming Nazis that they read, memorized and sang settings of beloved poems by Heine, a converted Jew?

What I really wonder about, though, is those contiguous African tribes. Now that they have, thanks to Rev. Nida, the Bible in their own lingo, does that make them better Christians? Better human beings? Does it stop their slaughtering one another even if they are as neighborly as Sudan and the just recently created South Sudan? It looks as though the confusions of the biblical Babel (which begat the English “babble”), though surely contributive to mutual intolerance in, say, Israel and Palestine, were not the only reasons for the deadly enmity. Does possession of, for all I know, well-translated Bibles in Syria, Libya and Iran make those countries, even intramurally, less murderous?

Alas, poor human nature—plagued by social, political, economic, religious as well as linguistic disparity—whose fault is it that you are so unnatural?

THE GOAT, or WHO IS PORGY?

2011-08-24T13:18:00.000-07:00

One of the major monstrosities is rewriting a classic. That is what Suzan-Lori Parks (playwright), Diane Paulus (director) and Audra McDonald (star) are perpetrating with their forthcoming Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess. Partly rewritten, it is to be called Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, allegedly with the blessings of the executors of the Gershwin and DuBose Heyward estates.

Absurd right off is retitling the classic as “Gershwin’s” after you have arrogantly de-Gershwinized it. If the offenders were honest, they would call it “Parks’s” or “Paulus’s” unless they have obtained the go-ahead from the composer and lyricists in the Great Beyond. Unlike the executors, the authors do not stand to profit from a revival, however travestied.

Stephen Sondheim, in a cogent and witty letter to the New York Times, has pointed out the preposterousness of an undertaking that treats composer George Gershwin, bookwriter and co-lyricist DuBose Heyward, and co-lyricist Ira Gershwin as needing the two P’s, Parks and Paulus, as baldies needing a toupee. (The pun is mine; if you dislike it, don’t blame Sondheim.) The supposed explanation was that the principal characters needed backstories and fleshing out to become rounded flesh-and-blood characters, which is bloody nonsense.

Unlike—perhaps—major characters in a novel, the principals in an opera or musical (which of the two the show is has been the subject of unending and pointless debate) require no such ministrations. The story, lyrics and music of a classic will satisfy all demands. Provide a cast of gifted singing actors or acting singers, and the production’s living is easy.

I realize that I am not saying anything very new, but what is raised here is the larger issue of rewriting the classics to bring them “up to date,” or to bring in a new, young audience, presumably wanting more “reality.” Is then a Porgy who sets out to retrieve Bess from New York with his goat cart less believable than one who needs only a cane—not even a pogo stick—for the journey, and who, in one misguided version, asked “Bring my coat” for “Bring my goat”? A goat makes much more sense, even if, unlike the protagonist of Edward Albee’s ludicrous The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, he is not in love with the critter.

But it’s that damned happy—or at least happier—ending that is supposed to keep an audience contented. Thus the 2P Porgy, needing only a cane, is less of a cripple and so more likely to satisfy Bess and the audience. If audiences were desperate for happy endings, half of our plays and three quarters of our operas would not have survived. As if a good death scene weren’t as satisfying as a final embrace—think Shakespeare’s Othello or Verdi’s Otello.

Well, all this may not be news. What may be news is my contention that the history of the arts is as important as history itself. A human being is three things: what he is, what he thinks he is, and what he would like to be. Now history records the first of those things, but scants on the other two. For them, we have to go to the literature, fine arts, and even music of ages past.

However, to get back to that goat. I read in today’s Times that an experienced hiker in Olympia Park was gored to death by a 300-pound goat. That, of course, was a wild one—the goat, I mean, not the hiker. Still, while a trained goat would behave itself, and not even demand rewrites in its role, it might be a good idea to weigh it as well as the Porgy, and avoid excessive weight disparity. But goat there must be if the production is not to get my goat, not to mention Stephen Sondheim’s and that of other right-thinking folks.

REQUIEM FOR THE LONGHAND MISSIVE

2011-08-10T05:51:00.000-07:00

This is an obituary for the art of letter writing. Of course, there are people who do not believe that e-mail and its electronic relatives have killed epistolary beauties, but they seem to me overly optimistic or purblind. Even the wonderful Thomas Mallon, in his splendid Yours Ever: People and Their Letters, writes about 1997, “ just as e-mail was reaching Everyman and beginning to kill or revive (there are both schools of thought), the practice and art of letter writing.” Note that out of modesty or prudence or politeness (not to offend anyone) he speaks of revival via e-mail.

I don’t believe this for a moment. I do, however, believe that some hardy and gifted epistolarians who were able to conquer the typewriter, taming it into submission to their style, may also still be literate on e-mail, though surely not on Tweeter and the rest of the ungodly inventions. But oh, what was surely lost! You need only read (I sincerely hope you will) Mallon’s marvelous Yours Ever, over 300 pages of sheer delight—not only from the adduced letters, but also for Mallon’s wise and witty commentaries—and you will be sure that, whatever he may or may not say, Mallon considers letter writing a gravely imperiled species, if not quite yet stone cold dead.

It is not just that handwritten letters look a bit different from typewritten and e-mailed ones, even though that “bit” of difference is enormous. It is so many things that I hardly know where to begin. It is first (and more about this later) that the handwriting, as Buffon might also have said, “c’est l’homme” and also, in our less paternalistic times, “la femme.” Ad almost so as in writing “le style” in writing, is style in speech, tone of voice, hairdo, clothes and any number of other things.

Consider merely what letters are written on. I always resented those on a page of cheap lined paper from a pad or torn from a loose-leaf notebook. That, to me, was like someone going out in the street in his underwear. There is the kind of stationery, but also how the writer uses it. Does he write on both sides of even transparent paper, how much margin does he leave, how many words he gets on a page, what color ink he uses (pencil? Heaven forfend!) , whether he thinks me worthy of a second page, etc. etc.

Then there is the handwriting itself. Is it large a la Hancock, or tiny, in the manner of the Swedish writer Per Wastberg? Is it vertical or slanted, the kind taught in school (when such things were still taught there) or something more individual, is it hasty and messy, or finely crafted and beautiful? I recall that the tycoon Huntington Hartford would not employ anyone whose lower-case g was not closed as in a number 8, but had an aperture at the top of the lower half. That was some sort of nonsense graphology, a discipline to be reserved for detective work and court cases.

And what about the things one can do with an envelope? They culminate in Mallarme’s admirable rhyming quatrains, with which he addressed letters to friends, and which the worthy postman, often apostrophized in the first line, always managed to deliver in an age when even mailmen, at least in France, read poetry. They were published as Les Loisirs de la poste, the leisure of the postal service, whose leisure is getting costlier by the minute. In my Harvard days, I too, in emulation of my beloved Mallarme, attempted something similar, addressing with quatrains letters to a Radcliffe girl named Diana Frothingham. I don’t recall whether they reached their destination, but I do remember some of my horrible rhymes, notably the dubiously culinary “brothing ham.” It might better have been ”nothing am,” inasmuch as it never led to getting into that charming but very Protestant New England young lady’s pants.

There are even such niceties as the choice of stamps. I used to—and still do—whenever possible not settle for the basic, humdrum stamp of the requisite denomination, but busied the postal employee with displaying the special issues, and picking the prettiest, or the ones most appropriate to some of my correspondents. I still preserve the original stamp design created for the Canadian mail by a girlfriend who gave me a framed print version of it. The poor woman is long dead, but her stamp, at least in this format, survives. Like the nightingales of Heraclitus, in William Cory’s rendering of the famed Greek epigram, “For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.”

But let’s get to the most important aspect of the handwritten letter. It required some feeling, because of the effort, however minimal, involved. And it required some thought, because it could not be produced as quickly and thoughtlessly as e-mail. This partly because the letter on paper would survive, certainly in human possession, and perhaps even beyond, if it managed to get itself into a printed book.

You really must read at least Thomas Mallon’s remarkable Introduction to Yours Ever, in which, for all his seeming tolerance, he writes, “the relative ease of e-mail feels undeniable, as does . . . the glaze of impersonality over what pops up on that computer screen.” That Introduction comprises, among other things, an invaluable brief history of letter writing, from its alleged beginning with “Queen Atossa, daughter of Cyrus the Great, [writing] the first letter, from Persia, sometime in the sixth century B.C.” or, as Alvin F. Harlow in a 1928 book insisted, much earlier, though unrecorded. From there all the way up to 2009, when Yours Ever was published.

Although Mallon alleges tolerance of it, I cannot really countenance the new language or simplified spelling of computerese, a true atrocity. Even the individual typewriter had its recognizable idiosyncrasies, as Mallon points out. But not so e-mail and the rest. I personally cannot imagine genuine emotion in an e-mail, not even if it’s printed out on paper. Long live snail mail, I say, even if it is not escargot and edible.

TITULAR MISCHIEF

2011-07-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

The other day I read about the Williamstown Theater Festival presenting Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which title is used again and again even though it is wrong. I have waged a campaign, to no apparent avail, on behalf of the correct A Doll House. Not calling the play that is a serious mistake.

Ibsen’s point is that the husband, Torvald, has turned his wife, Nora, into a doll—not a full-fledged human being, but a plaything for himself. Their house is like that still popular toy: a miniature dwelling with a doll as its miniature mistress.

Now if you call the play A Doll’s House, you make Nora the proprietress, in command, which is precisely what Torvald and the mores of that time would not allow. The house is Torvald’s, the husband and master’s, and the play might accordingly be called A Doll Owner’s House. Ibsen’s true meaning is conveyed only by A Doll House, without the apostrophe and the final S, i.e., the possessive case. Other languages have translated it correctly. Thus in German it is Ein Puppenheim, a doll house, rather than Heim einer Puppe, a doll’s house.

This somehow led to speculation about title mistranslation and manipulation in general, most significantly of the titles of foreign films, a particularly nefarious practice. They are the ones with which the crassest liberties are taken, in most cases to lure people in under falsely provocative pretenses.

Ingmar Bergman alone has been the victim of numerous mistitlings. Take the film that first brought me to Bergman, but almost deterred me by its American title, The Naked Night, which doesn’t even make proper sense. Still, it made me think that it was yet another of those Swedish sex movies in which lovers go skinny dipping and the camera lingers pruriently on the heroine’s naked body.

Of course the film was nothing of the sort, although it does contain a very different instance of nude bathing, appalling rather than alluring. The actual Swedish title is The Clown’s Evening, which has several meanings, not least the twilight or downfall of the circus artiste, but perhaps also of other than circus people, stultified in their private lives. The British title, Sawdust and Tinsel, is nearer the mark, because there is in the film a bitter conflict between a man of the circus and a man of the theater.

Consider now the retitling of The Face as The Magician. True, the protagonist is a magician of sorts, but what is more important is that he is in disguise, as is his lovely wife, for safety’s sake disguised as a male youth. But their true faces are revealed, making a vast difference, and implying that all art is a kind of disguise, salutary in some ways, but not the bare truth. The Magician may sell better than The Face, but it derails the viewer’s attention.

Similarly, The Communicants was retitled as Winter Light. Yes, it does take place in a snow-bleached Northern winter, but the film is really about communion with the Divine and communication, or lack thereof, among humans. They try to communicate and commune, but with only mixed results. There are wintry hearts in the story, but light, if any, comes only in a very ambivalent ending. The title change reflects the striving to avoid narrowly Christian implications, but is its vagueness any kind of real gain?

Much more objectionable is the turning of the Swedish for A Passion into The Passion of Anna. That could suggest a woman in heat, whereas the film deals with the very different passions of the four principal characters, inviting also thoughts of Christ’s passion. Altogether it evokes the conflicted and conflicting passions of all humanity, which the changed title cravenly bypasses.

To be sure, Bergman is not the only one to suffer from mistitling. Take Ermanno Olmi’s wonderful Il posto (the job), about two young persons’ desperate need to find gainful employment. In English, it became The Sound of Trumpets, from an almost throwaway line in the dialogue, but having nothing to do with the plot. It has since reverted to its original Italian title, yet again eschewing simple literal translation. Why could it at no time become The Job?

This calls attention to a more recent trend, the retaining of the untranslated original title, usually Italian, as in La Dolce Vita, L’Avventura. I Vitelloni, La Notte and many others, presumably on the assumption that people could figure out the meaning while also basking in the newness, the exoticism of the foreign title.

At other times there was literal translation, albeit foreshortened. Thus what was in the Italian The Nights of Cabiria became a mere Cabiria, perhaps gambling on the suggestiveness of that mysterious foreign word. On the other hand, I can understand the decimation of Lina Wertmuller’s yard-long titles. So it is that Swept Away by an Unusual destiny in the Blue Sea of August became the terse Swept Away. Even more frugally, Film of Love and Anarchy, or At Ten o’Clock This Morning at the Via dei Fiori in a Well-known Brothel was preshrunk into Love and Anarchy, superb films regardless of titular tribulations. But was even the witty Everything Orderly But Nothing Works needful of condensation into All Screwed Up, conceivably because of a far-fetched suggestion of screwing?

However, there are also cases where a literal translation was retained, but not making much sense in English. So with Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups, where in French this means painting the town red, but the English of The 400 Blows means nothing at all. Then there are the tiny, inconspicuous changes, as with that Ibsen play, which nevertheless are misleading. Why would DeSica’s Bicycle Thieves become The Bicycle Thief, when there are at least two characters to whom the title refers? I can see why Rossellini’s Paisa (homeland) was changed to Paisan (homeboy), because the latter had some resonance even for Americanized Italians. But the film is not about a single person; it is about Italy under German occupation.

I could go on and on, but what’s the use of griping? Why in a dishonest world should titling be an exception? But flagrant error, as in Doll’s for Doll, should not be tolerated and prevail. I was once invited to a Midwestern production of the Ibsen play with a seductive note about how my title correction was scrupulously observed. Even so, I didn’t attend. There are matters even more important than fiddling with titles.

ON RELIGION

2011-07-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

Although I am an atheist, I do not dismiss religion; in fact. I envy a bit those who have it. But I don’t understand it; perhaps someone can provide me with a credible explanation.

I can see where people in the Middle Ages believed. But today? We have explored the universe and found no Paradise in it. It is said that space is infinite, and somewhere in it God may be ensconced. But the earth is far from infinite, and we can now affirm that it houses no Hell in its bowels. And even if it were a hollow sphere, how could there be room in it for all the baddies since the beginning of time?

Well, you might say we need not take everything in the Bible literally. But what would a nonliteral afterlife be like? And can you be selectively Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or whatever? Can you partly believe in the multiplication table? Or in astrology? Can you be partly Vegan or halfway superstitious? Can you be semi-agnostic? Or half-humble?

I believe you must either swallow religion whole or you are not religious. So then how can persons with first-rate intellects be believers? Like, for example, T. S. Eliot.

Of course, intellectuals may seek recourse in Tertullian’s famous credo quia absurdum—I believe because it is absurd, I take faith on faith. But why should religion be exempt from logic? Falling in love is. True, but there, palpably, is the love object. Even the troubadour Jaufre Rudel, who fell in love with the unseen Countess of Tripoli, did so on beholding her picture.

I find incomprehensible, for instance, the belief of some perfectly intelligent people that they will be reunited in Heaven with a predeceased spouse. What of the man twice widowed and thrice happily married? Will he become polygamous in Heaven, even though he was perfectly monogamous on earth? And how will the three wives feel about it? Yet how many Christians believe such a thing, even though Holy Writ tells them that in Heaven no marriage is.

Still, I can sympathize with believers. It is human to be afraid of death, or unreconciled to it, and so invent a remedy: the afterlife, the soul’s immortality, its basking in supraterrestrial bliss. But can one perceive the soul as detachable from the body? And, by the way, when does the good Christian go to Heaven? Upon his demise or at Christ’s second coming? Both are advocated. Furthermore, what about those cremated by the family, hacked to death by a madman, or blown to smithereens by some fanatic?

What I have especial difficulty with is uniforms, the regimentation that rejects individualism. Must every Jewish man wear a skullcap, even if, for children, it can be motley rather than black? Must there be prescribed hair- or head coverings? Must a woman’s whole body be hidden from view in a standardized way? I can see wearing an artful cross on a necklace, but even that may be ostentation, zealotry, or proselytizing.

There is also the matter of ritual. I see no pressing need for circumcision, sitting shiva, weekend confinement and other restrictions. Or total immersion. To say nothing of practices such as human sacrifice, suttee, footbinding.

And then there is churchgoing at specified hours. This might seem harmless, except that it involves sermons by preachers who are not in the class of John Donne and genuflections and uncomfortable pews. But probably the most problematic thing about religion is that it breeds intolerance toward noncoreligionists (though it denies any such thing.) In the past, this produced persecution and burning at the stake, but there is unpleasantness even in the present. Is anti-Semitism dead? Far from it. And what about Muslim suicide bombers? Is there no developing anti-Islamism?

One of the arguments for religion is that it keeps the underprivileged from murdering the privileged, that it stops crime from running riot. I am not sure to what extent that still prevails. If it does prevent criminality, it is as good as the system of law, with which no one in his right mind would want to do away.

But what about its interference with our rights? To consensual sex, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, freely available contraceptives and, above all, abortion. The chances of forced parenthood benefiting an unwanted child are slim, and even adoption by the right people is an iffy proposition. Whatever doesn’t harm other people, not mere embryos, should be allowed.

That religion creates a certain clubbiness—favoring the coreligionists—is unavoidable and would, without religion, take other forms. As indeed it does, on the basis of the color of your skin, the shape of your eyes, or even your IQ.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT

2011-07-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

I have now caught the Diana Paulus production of the musical Hair for the third time, having seen it in Central Park and again on Broadway before now. This is the National Company, which has been touring and, after a two-month stint on Broadway, will resume the tour.

Galt MacDermot’s 1967 musical, with book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado has two claims to fame: brief nudity and the introduction of rock to Broadway. (I am not sure of the proper order of importance.) It is an anthem to the youth- and counterculture of the late 1960s, with its celebration of pacifism, free love, drug consumption, and resistance to the draft as a protest against militarism and the Vietnam War.

And something else: a tribute to the eponymous hair. The characters, East Village types, sport long hair, the hallmark of the then new bohemianism. There are two epithets for hairiness: hirsute, if it’s a mere matter of its presence; hispid, referring to its bristliness. And then there is something more specific that had me thinking about hair these days: newspaper pictures of Rebekah Brooks, editor of London’s News of the World, which was shut down by its owner Rupert Murdoch for having caused a major scandal.

Brooks claims that she knew nothing of the staff’s hacking into the private lives of royalty, assassination victims’ families, a murdered 13-year-old girl’s voice mail, or about hiring shady private eyes for prying and making highly illegal financial deals with the police. She has refused manifest culpability by relying not only on the passionate support of Rupert Murdoch, but also on rather close connections to Prime Minister David Cameron. The case is under investigation, though previous investigations yielded largely nothing; the more recent ones only the arrest of a couple of individuals. Ms. Brooks, despite calls for her resignation from many directions, defies them and brazenly stays on.

But what about hair? Ms. Brooks wears her enormous red and curly tresses cascading in bold disarray, sufficient to shelter a couple of rat’s nests. Supremely unappetizing, she appears in newspaper photographs looking like the leader of some gypsy tribe or an especially arrogant teenager.

Well, what about long hair? We know that it was the fashion for men and women in ages past, though the women often tamed it in a variety of hairdos, and the men stopped it at shoulder length. As we see it in paintings and early photographs, we respond to it diversely. On women, if long and neat, it is sexy and appealing. But only up to a certain age. When the wearer is well into middle age—though opinions clearly differ about when that sets in—it looks delusional and unseemly.

Why? Because women’s hair has always been a sexual lure, perfectly respectable but eminently erotic. And somehow—after 40, 45, 50 or whatnot—a woman is supposed to desist from sexual provocation. The exact age limit was never codified, and even its intimations varied from era to era, but long white hair on a crone may always have smelled of witchcraft.

Hair, perhaps because of its role at the pubes, has tended to be viewed as arousing. On account of its aphrodisiac quality, many European woman do not shave their armpits. Paradoxically, however, other women have been shaving off their pubic hair, presumably to appear more naked, more enticing. Such depilation may look unnatural, but is what passes for natural necessarily desirable? Nothing is more natural than an uncombed head of hair, or a loosely flowing hairdo. Yet bear in mind that Casey Anthony, while on trial for murder, kept her hair demurely upswept. But the moment she was found innocent (unjustly, as many of us think), down came her hair freely. Was it resumption of her good-time-girl status?

And what about men? I know women who find long male hair hugely attractive, indeed seductive. Others don’t. It seems to me that the more silky, undulant, and flowing it is, the more it looks feminine and an abrogation of masculinity. On the other hand, it does call attention to itself, and being noticed is the beginning of any kind of relationship, amorous or not.

There is no denying either that running one’s hand through a loved person’s hair is pleasurable. It doesn’t even have to be a lover; perhaps just a child, not even necessarily one’s own. Still, I believe that every youngster resents parental ruffling of his hair. It is a form of playfulness when the recipient doesn’t feel particularly playful. In a sexual situation, however, it is always welcome.

Women’s long hair, at any rate, has earned literary, indeed legendary, tributes. Think Rapunzel or Melisande or Lady Godiva. Think of the title of one of Debussy’s most popular piano pieces, “The Girl With the Flaxen Hair.” Think of O. Henry’s charming story, “The Gift of the Magi.” Recall that when Rossetti buried his love poems with his beloved young wife, it is with her long red hair that he intertwined the manuscript. (Never mind that later he dug it up.)

That Muslim women are supposed to cover their hair attests to its perceived erotic role in that culture; shaving the heads of Frenchwomen who cohabited with Nazis during World War Two testifies to hair’s all-important allure. I am guessing that the self-induced baldness of so many young blacks has to do with their viewing its crinkliness as inferior to the smooth Caucasian kind. Even removed, hair asserts its importance by its very absence. Think if you will of Samson.

Hair is prominent in poetry and song. I cite only two notable examples, Alexander Pope’s “Fair tresses man’s imperial race ensnare,/ And beauty draws us with a single hair”; and Stephen Foster’s “I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair,/ Floating, like a vapor, on the soft summer air.” And let’s not even go into its eulogy on television by Rogaine and the likes.

Finally, hair embodies the relativity of all things human. A copious head of hair on a woman is excellent; a hairy chest on a man is questionable; hairy legs on either sex are anathematized. And what of a beard, a mustache, or bushy eyebrows? How desirable are they? Why is hair under the nose considered better than above it?

Hair, I say, is the great mystery, the carrier of glory and ignominy, an object of affection and revulsion, an instrument of romance and rebellion. No wonder that a show called Hair, if I may put it so, keeps cropping up.

JANACEK’S 'VIXEN'

2011-07-01T21:13:00.000-07:00

Is there any doubt left that Leos Janacek (1854-1928), though born into the middle of the 19th century, was arguably the first truly modern composer, and a great one to boot. He composed superbly in every conceivable genre.

Janacek’s later music far surpasses the earlier, and if he had not died prematurely at age 74, when he was on a roll, from consequences of his unrequited love for an unworthy woman, who knows what further masterpieces he might have written. But the woman’s daughter was lost in the woods, and Janacek gallantly searching for her caught a chill that led to a fatal pneumonia.

“The Cunning Little Vixen” of 1922-23, premiered in 1924, was the seventh of Janacek’s nine operas, known in Czech as “The Adventures of Vixen Sharpears.” It is based on a short novel by the journalist Rudolf Tesnohlidek, whose handwriting was hard to read, so that the typesetter mistook sharp feet for sharp ears, a fortuitous improvement.

It was Tesnohlidek’s editor on The People’s Paper who made the young pessimist write a text to some 200 drawings by the optimistic artist Stanislav Lolek, a text its author thought little of, but which nevertheless came out in book form the following year. (An excellent English translation, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, is heartily recommended.) It seems to have been the housekeeper who brought the Vixen to the master’s attention.

Janacek’s libretto from the novel is much less satirical but more poignant. The animals of the forest and barnyard talk among themselves and understand human speech, but there is no communication between man and beast. This despite the animals’ very human behavior.

The aging Forester captures young Sharpears and she grows up in his yard. She defies the wife’s disapproval and the grandson’s teasing, has a friendship with the dog, and manages to kill the rooster and hens and feast on them. She is punitively tethered, but bites through the rope and escapes into the forest. Various animals, birds and insects live there, and provide commentary on or counterpoint to the main action.

The clever Vixen manages to maneuver the infuriated Badger out of his den, which she takes over. A male fox, Goldenmane, courts and wins her. Married by the Woodpecker, they start a family of many little foxes. The poultry dealer and poacher Harasta shoots the foolhardy Vixen dead. When the Forester rests at his favorite spot, he mistakes one of the Vixen’s daughters for her mother. Similarly the Frog whom he catches proves the grandson of one he caught long ago. Time has moved on and wrought its changes; the Forester, nostalgically reminiscing, catches the forest’s autumnal mood, shared no doubt by Janacek, now 70.

Along with the largely animal story line there is also the human one. This takes place chiefly at Pasek’s inn, where the Forester and his cronies, The Parson and the Schoolmaster, drink beer and play cards. It emerges that the Forester is not overeager to go home to his formidable wife; that the Parson in his youth had a misadventure with a girl that soured him on women forever; and that the Schoolmaster was in love with a village girl, Terynka, who ended up marrying Harasta. The Forester recalls the amorous beginning of his marriage, its passion now spent. The only fully happy relationship is that of Sharpears and Goldenmane.

In the recent New York Philharmonic version of the opera, the orchestra and its conductor, Alan Gilbert, did solid work. During passages when there was only music all was well. But the theatrics, costumed and directed by Doug Fitch, and choreographed by Karole Armitage, were a less felicitous matter.

There is, to be sure, a problem for theater having to share space with a very large orchestra. Still, Fitch using every kind of gimmickry, made good with last year’s similar offering, Ligeti’s “Le grand Macabre.” But that was a postmodern clown show with no claim on the emotions. Janacek’s delicate and profound work does not take kindly to Fitch’s shenanigans.

Fitch turned the “Vixen” into a kind of kiddy show, largely defanged and cutesy. Thus whereas Janacek’s libretto contains one sunflower, Fitch had some 35 in back of the orchestra, turning a forest into a flower patch. Up front, three or four trees were represented by transparencies suggesting nothing much.

Other things, too, suffered in the relatively narrow space in front of the orchestra, even supplemented by a runway that zigzagged into the front rows of Avery Fisher Hall. With only one level, the Badger’s burrow was a kind of hut. The hens were costumed as lower-class housewives with rubber gloves for crests (the costumes were mostly made of mundane objects transformed with mixed results ), the rooster was a soprano with heavily padded shirtfront. These fowls did not get killed by the Vixen, presumably so as not to alienate children and benighted adults.

The smaller animals were played, as the composer wished, mostly by children, who sang sweetly and executed the simplistic Armitage choreography adequately. Instead of a major ballet number for the Dragonfly, Armitage had one for what was meant to be Terynka (who could guess it?), looking much too sophisticated and even kneeling to commune with the tethered vixen.

The scenery could not deal with Pasek’s inn, reduced to a small, solitary counter plunked down in the middle of nowhere. So the alehouse atmosphere was lacking.

The singing was respectable throughout, with Isabel Bayrakdarian a delightful vixen, vocally, visually and histrionically. She has sung the part in her native Canada in Czech, and found it both onerous and inapposite to sing it in English, given the necessary changes and Janacek’s vaunted musical approximation of Czech speech and animal sounds. Goldenmane, meant to be another soprano, was sung nicely by the mezzo Marie Lenormand. Joshua Bloom’s baritone did handsomely by Harasta; Keith Jameson and Wilbur Pauley satisfied as Schoolmaster and Parson, respectively. As the Forester, the respected bass Alan Opie sang opulently and feelingfully. The closing scene for him and the new generation of beasties was properly moving. Here the pathos of aging and death expectancy is beautifully subsumed by the sense of nature’s renewal, which the music conveyed through fearless motivic iteration.

Sadness and ecstasy were both here, as in most Janacek endings, and what cavils one had with the production were erased through the composer’s genius.

TENNIS, ANYONE?

2011-06-21T06:17:00.000-07:00

This is a blog post about tennis. Please bear with me on the somewhat circuitous path leading to it.

The aristocratic German nymphomaniac, Countess Franaziska von Reventlow, has in her charming memoirs a chapter entitled “The Era of Pauls.” (It sounds better in German, “Das Zeitalter der Paule”—kindly excuse the computer’s lamentable lack of umlauts.) In the early twentieth century, Schwabing, the bohemian suburb of Munich, was the German equivalent of swinging Paris and Vienna, and the Countess made full use of it, notably during one phase when all her lovers were named Paul.

I have never had simultaneous namesakes in my romantic life, but, distributed over a good many years, Patricias have been of importance to me. Before the definitive, supreme Patricia—my amazing, beloved wife—there was the film and TV professor Patricia Mellencamp, and, still earlier, the radio interviewer Patricia Marx (now Ellsberg), with whom I traveled through Europe.

In those days, I was better known as a film critic, and in Stockholm we socialized with, among others, the distinguished film director Bo Widerberg, best known hereabouts for Elvira Madigan, a fine film but not, in my view, his best. Bo invited Patricia and me to his studio, where he regaled us with bits of his forthcoming feature on the Movieola. While we were watching, he was summoned to the telephone, and, in the cat’s absence, the mice had fun.

So after some fooling around, Pat smuggled in a text reading Klippning (editing) by Patricia Marx och (and) John Simon, which amused the returning Widerberg no end. He also invited us to the premiere of his new documentary, The White Sport, for good or bad never released in this country to my knowledge.

Why “the white sport”? Well, aesthetically, because in those days tennis was played, exclusively and blessedly, only in white; but also, socially, because, exclusively and unjustly, only persons of white skin were able to participate. So the politically liberal Widerberg used the documentary not only as a tribute to the beauties of tennis, but also as a passionate denunciation of its racism. I don’t know what The White Sport did for my politics (if, indeed, I have any), but it certainly turned me into an ardent tennis fan. So here we are at my present topic.

I am only a selective sports fan, and then chiefly if the sport is televised. I do watch the Olympics, both the summer and winter variety, major figure skating events, and soccer when it is World Cup time. But tennis is my true love, albeit only at grand slam time on TV. Right now I am gearing up for serious Wimbledon watching. (Need I tell you how upset I get when bunglers pronounce it as “Wimbleton”?)

Stimulating as the three esses—soccer, skating and skiing—can be, tennis is the only truly beautiful sport that also requires brainwork. Beautiful even nowadays, when tennis dress evokes the Mardi Gras or trunk dress-up parties. Well, perhaps a little humor is welcome; even the ancient Greeks had, along with their dramas, satir plays. Though happily no longer played in long pants by the men, tennis still, to my eyes, looks best in white, maybe with a touch of added color as in, for instance, Novak Djokovic’s shirts.

The aesthetics of tennis, however, are much more than dress deep. Still, clothes, though they do not make the man and woman in tennis, are a part of the show. Thus the barnstorming gladrags of the Williams sisters do not enhance their appearance, but the stylish outfits of tall and comely Maria Sharapova contribute to her appeal. Maria does, nevertheless, present a problem.

It all began with Monika Seles, who seems to have invented the grunt. A totally unnecessary and unbecoming feature of the game of many female and even some male players, it may help them release energy, or so at least they believe. Still, quite a few top players are perfectly able to dispense with this often earsplitting and tasteless addendum. Perhaps the worst offender in this respect is Francesca Schiavone, although she would be unappealing enough even without it. Tennis, to be sure, is not meant to be a beauty pageant, but good looks, in men as well as women players, do not hurt, especially when you consider that far too many tennis women look like unsightly men in drag.

Martina Hingis used to be the one to watch, not only for physical beauty but also for elegance of play. These days there is rather too much hitting the ball hard from the baseline, and not enough stylish finesse. Of course the truly great players, male or female, combine powerful baseline drive with comeliness of movement and subtle placement of the ball. Still, such stylish play as, for example, serve and volley, is comparatively rare nowadays, although chip and charge, its somewhat poorer cousin, persists. Luckily, there are a few all-round players who can do everything and then some.

Here I instance Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic at their best, who amaze us with, among other things, their spectacular defensive play, the ability not only to return seemingly unreturnable shots but even score winners off them. Yet there is something beyond either great defensive or attacking play, beyond tactics and strategy, something I would call natural grace.

Roger’s movements are nearly balletic, and I am not referring to acrobatics such as hitting a ball between the legs with back to the net, and even winning a point with it. I mean sheer beauty: litheness, easefulness, elasticity, poise—well, yes, grace. Djokovic, a witty Serb, has this too in his—dare I say it?—a somehow witty way; rubbery, perhaps, rather than silken. There is something wonderfully tongue-in-cheek about the way he goes successfully after an apparently unreturnable shot. Or the way he mounts a sequence of shots like repartee from a great comic actor.

But then there is Rafael Nadal, He, too, has an all-around game. He can return serve like a brick wall, retrieve fantastic shots like a golden retriever, place winners into corners or on the lines, serve aces as almost any of the major servers champion, and has been for some time number one in the world. Yet I have scant use for this Spaniard. On the court at least he is without charm, though off court, I gather, he can be quite appealing. His playing, however, is robotic, charmless, humorless, hard-bitten, almost bestial.

Among the women, there are quite a few highly competent players, but not, as of now, charmers among the winners. Ana Ivanovic had the lovable winner quality for a moment, then promptly lost it. Sharapova is too haughty. For Wozniacki, Clijsters, and Kuznetsova, epithets must be drawn from the tubbier reaches of the animal kingdom; the pleasanter-looking Dementieva and even Bartoli, are unfortunately too unreliable players.

Most attractive and promising these days is the lovely German, Julia Goerges, now ranked sixteenth or seventeenth, but who, I hope, is climbing higher. She has already beaten all the graceless dynamos at least once or twice, and her blog postings, especially in German, are perfectly charming. I am rooting for her to make it to the top, although she may be just a bit too delicately feminine to steadily overpower the cows.

At any rate, tennis is no longer the racially white sport. We have Monfils and Tsonga among the men, and , of course, the Williams sisters, great, charmless power hitters, sort of female Nadals. Althea Gibson was a far more appealing player, as were Chandra Rubin, Zina Garrison and, somewhat differently, Yvonne Goolagong.. Among men, Arthur Ashe was a prince, with and without a racket.

Elegance, ultimately, is what I look for, and wearing white, for me, contributes to it. The only time I published anything about tennis was a profile of Mary Pierce for Vogue. I yearned to do Hingis, but, alas, John Heilpern had beaten me to it. So I was given Pierce, a good player, but an erratic and, I am afraid, uncharismatic one. I found her French mother rather more interesting. But, at any rate, Pierce favored white; my profile began with “White is Mary Pierce’s favorite color,” a sentence Pierce found to her liking.

There is no getting around it: tennis is the most elegant sport, with the possible exception of fencing, which I took up during my Harvard days, only to have it be discontinued for austerity reasons during World War Two. Figure skating, though lovely, lacks the head-to-head competitiveness, what with winners determined by several often chauvinist judges and questionable scoring. So now good-bye computer and hello TV screen; Wimbledon is calling, more alluringly than the estimable Bali Hai ever did.

TYPOS AND MISQUOTATIONS

2011-06-14T09:42:00.000-07:00

I read on the Internet that Anthony Weiner’s (or Whiner’s) troubles stem from a typo he committed on Tweeter: @ instead of D, turning a private misdemeanor into a public offense. Typos are pesky things, and must have caused quite some trouble in the history of publishing—someday surely a bestseller on this subject will cash in handsomely.

Yet even if typos don’t ruin someone’s marriage and political career, they can give a fastidious writer a nasty headache. I have had my share of inflicted typos, although some are harmless enough and even a good source of laughter.

For example: I wrote in my review of High in my column in The Westchester Guardian that Kathleen Turner, as a nun in mufti, wore a pants suit, which came out in print as “ants suit.” This had me wondering what an ants suit might be: An outfit impregnated with an insect repellent to protect you in case you stepped on an ant hill? A technological wonder that could transmute ants into an inexpensive textile suitable for suits?

In another recent review—of War Horse—I compared the pleasure of catching the show to receiving my first major literary award. That became my “fist award.” Now this might make sense if I were a pugilist or could put my fists to an unusual type of intercourse, but since neither applied, this fist caused me quite a fit.

Still, typos, I repeat, are of two kinds. The innocent errors that could not have been committed by the writer, and the culpable ones, that could mistakenly be chalked up to the author. That kind truly hurts.

Moreover, it hurts not only the writer, but also the critic reviewing the book or article in which it occurs, unable to determine whether the guilty party was the author or the typesetter, assuming that such a creature still exists and hasn’t been supplanted by a robot.

It is interesting to note that some genuine mistakes can escape censure by not even looking like typos. For example, a “who” for a “whom” has become so firmly lodged in writing as well as parlance that even a strict traditionalist might forgo making an issue of it. But a “whom” for a “who”—an accusative where a simple nominative is called for—is gross and leaves one disgruntled. Yet even the venerable New York Times abounds in this indisputable authorial error, now that it has seen fit to dispense with the luxury of a resident grammarian along with some other niceties.

Similarly, when I read on the Internet the article entitled “The Twitter Typo That Exposed Anthony Weiner,” I feel justified in blaming its author for referring to a hacker “whom [sic] Weiner claimed had cracked his account.” This whom-for-who fallacy has become so popular that it threatens the supremacy of the misplaced nominative in things like “Thank you for inviting Jane and I to your wonderful party.” That one, impossible to gloss over as a typo and ubiquitous, may well become—disastrously—acceptable colloquial English.

I wish I could recall offhand an example of the rare but not unheard-of occurrence of a felicitous typo, which produces a merry verbal gaffe. Something like an elephant that held a midget in his trunk, or the famous student boner, ‘The Templar asked Rebecca to become his mistress. The brave girl reclined to do so.”

Who knows? A lucky typo may even become accepted usage, say, “ants suit” for an ill-fitting garment that causes skin irritation. But enough about typos and on to their cousin, the misquotation. I am the victim of a particularly irritating one. In a 1971 review of a play called Abelard and Heloise, I wrote, “Diana Rigg, the Heloise, is built, alas, like a brick basilica with inadequate flying buttresses.” This in reference to a nude scene revealing her as somewhat deficient in the chest department.

To be sure, a basilica, unlike a cathedral, does not have flying buttresses; still, liking the alliteration of “brick basilica,” I took this architectural liberty. Now it seems that someone unfamiliar with basilicas misquoted this as a “brick mausoleum,” in which faulty form it has become just about my only contribution to various anthologies of quotations, as well as to Miss Rigg’s own charming memoir, No Turn Unstoned. This is unfortunate, because it would suggest some connection between the gifted actress and death, which I never intended, but which makes my sally worse than it was, and destined to haunt me unto my grave—no mausoleum either.

MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY?

2011-06-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

I just read about the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the Serbian ethnic cleanser, and my thoughts went back to Yugoslavia, the lost country of my childhood. Of course, everyone’s childhood is a sort of lost country, but Yugoslavia literally is: it no longer exists. Serbia, however, exists, as does its and the former Yugoslavia’s capital, Belgrade, where I was growing up. But Serbia was never truly my country, because my father was a Hungarian who came to it to make his fortune (he did), and my mother, though technically Serbian, belonged to the Hungarian minority, and never even leaned to speak Serbo-Croat properly.

Emotionally, I felt intensely Yugoslav, and proud of my Serbo-Croat literacy. I had published, at fifteen, a poem in the country’s leading literary magazine, The Serbian Literary Courier, which no other boy my age could boast of. To be sure, it was only a rhymed rendering of “Trees,” by Joyce Kilmer, whom I took to be a woman—Joyce—but it was a pretty good translation, if I say so myself.

So now I would be a man without a country if it weren’t for the United States, to which my family emigrated to our everlasting gratitude, and in whose Air Force I served during World War Two. Never, though, near either front, European or Asian. Still, being in the service, expedited my American citizenship. I was 16 ½ when I came to this country and speak with a slight accent some people find charming, though I’d be happier without it.

Here is how I might have lost it. At age 13, I went to public school in England—the Leys School, Cambridge, to be exact—where I hoped to go on to the famed university. But war broke out, England was being bombed, and my father recalled me to Yugoslavia the following year, before I could shed my accent. I recall that in the military, a fellow soldier (from Brooklyn, I believe) asked me where I hailed from originally. When I told him, he opined that it accounted for my “broken lingo.”

It was nowhere near broken. By that time I had been a junior at Harvard, whence I was drafted, and to which I returned upon my discharge. But it was too late for me to acquire a Boston, Hahvad, or any other kind of American accent. It amused me, however, that I had landed in my second Cambridge, where I took my sweet time earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. I enjoyed being a Cantabrigian, and would have gladly settled in Cambridge, had not the gods wanted it otherwise.

Certainly I sounded foreign enough to Lorne Michaels when I appeared on Saturday Night Live. It was a skit about a good critic played by Jon Lovitz, and a dishonest critic played by me. Chatting backstage, Lorne asked whose army I was referring to when I spoke of my military service. “Ours, of course,” I replied, feeling at that moment very patriotic. “How else do you think we could have won the war?”

It had been a funny year as an English schoolboy, trying unsuccessfully to learn cricket from an odious little brat named Burtsall. He was the only one willing to give me cricket lessons in the Leys School basement, but he was such a pest that I had a powerful urge to slap him. Artful dodger that he was, though, it was only in the common room that he dropped his guard. There was a shilling’s fine for rowdiness there, which protected him. So I went up to the prefect, deposited my shilling in advance, and slapped the hell out of Burtsall. But because this was considered a sneaky, unsportsmanlike attack, the fine was redoubled. Thereafter, even without mastering a perfect English accent, I at least learned British fair play.

I have had my quarrels with both my beloved countries, the United States and Britain; with the English language, properly used, never. (See my book Paradigms Lost.) French, which I know well, may be more delicate, more elegant, more melodious, but English has the richest vocabulary, offers the writer wider horizons. At how many intersections of synonyms or near-synonyms have I pondered which to choose: heavenly or celestial, feverish or febrile, fury or rage? Even from the same etymon, did I want instinctive or instinctual? For the sake of rhythm or euphony, should I pick doctor or physician? And so on endlessly—or ad infinitum.

Language is, in a sense, my country. But Country (capital C) matters to me only during World Cup soccer or grand slam tennis. Even there, I find myself rooting more often for foreign teams and players. Country, otherwise, matters mostly abroad, where some nations are respected, others reprehended. Time was when being American, even by adoption, was hugely prestigious; today there are probably fewer envied Yankees than ugly Americans. I myself do not fancy the thought of being taken hostage or, indeed, getting killed as a mere naturalized American, whose ancestors were never slave owners or warmongers.

Well then, how much does Country matter? In the old days, an American consul could do wonders for you in a foreign country. Being American opened doors when you sought favors, closed them when you needed security. Nowadays I wonder whether an Albanian passport doesn’t provide more protection than an American one.

It might well be a better world in which nationality or ethnicity of any kind did not matter. In my younger days, when I was writing the language column in Esquire magazine that turned into the book Paradigms Lost, I was vastly amused when visiting Yugoslavs gloated about what they called one of theirs teaching the Americans English; next week, some visiting Hungarians relished what they called one of their own doing the same thing. There even exists a book about Hungarians who made it big in America, in which I am one of the chapters, although I never considered myself Hungarian for all the pleasure I derived from reading the very great poets of Hungary in their own language. Translations of lyric poetry always lose a good deal; the great exceptions—and even those of verse drama—are Richard Wilbur’s superb translations of Moliere and Racine.

Then there are the people who, based on my accent, assume I was born in Austria. The truth of the matter is that my smart parents had the good idea of having me learn a foreign language as it were in the cradle by means of a trusted German nanny. So my first language was German. Hungarian I learned from my parents, who spoke it at home., and during a summer in a Budapest kindergarten. Serbian I could then pick up from everyone else, at school or in the streets. I even attended a German-Serbian elementary school. So, for a bit, Germany or Austria was my second country. French came quite a bit later in private lessons from a delightful Frenchwoman.

My country? On occasional visits to Stockholm and meetings with Ingmar Bergman and other Swedish film and literary people—not forgetting a theater date with Bibi Anderson—made me wish Sweden were my country. And when, as a 13-year-old English schoolboy I traveled back to Belgrade on vacation, the Swiss were wonderful to me. A wretched French hotel concierge directed me to the wrong train, and all kinds of trouble ensued.. In Basel, I chose to change trains, and a nice porter who carried my baggage absolutely refused to take money from a boy with an English public school cap.

At the little Swiss border town, where I had to wait to catch the next day the train I should have taken in Paris that morning, the station personnel were perfectly charming. They turned me into some sort of mascot, and taught me all kinds of things about each train that was passing through. At night, they wouldn’t let me pay for a hotel, but made me as comfortable as possible on a waiting-room bench, and sent me rested and cheerful off on the proper train. That I spoke good German may have helped, but I truly felt that Switzerland was my country.

I have had pleasant experiences also with the Dutch and the Italians, including their police, the carabinieri. Only about the French do I have reservations. Not about the upper classes, which, though somewhat cold, are erudite and witty. And certainly not about the lower classes, which I found good-humored and warm-hearted. Only about the middle class, which, in my admittedly limited experience, struck me as penny-pinching, standoffish, and xenophobic, and aptly called petit—or petty—bourgeois.

Take, for example, the couple from whom I rented a room for most of my Fulbright year in Paris: an engineer and his wife. She would drop in on me repeatedly to admire the books I bought with my allowance—mostly Pleiade editions of the classics—praise me for my French, and boast of having gone to school with the great French actress Edwige Feulliere, whom I revered. But always she informed me that I was by no means to expect her to help me meet the star. Not once did this good woman invite me to have a cup of tea or glass of wine with her and her husband in their living room, or even let me set foot in the rest of their apartment.

On the other hand, the lower-class couple, from whom a fellow Fulbright scholar rented his room, could not have been more delightful even to me, and, because I frequently and lengthily phoned their tenant, proclaimed me jovially le roi du telephone. Just as friendly were the flics (cops) at the prefecture, where I had to report for my carte de sejour. Because they liked my French and my humor, they amiably offered to get me a joint French citizenship, which I equally amiably turned down. Only partly because I did not want to become canon fodder in the then raging Algerian War, and partly because, despite their insistence that it had to be otherwise, I could claim not a single French ancestor.

I remain an admirer of everything about France except the French bourgeoisie. And since that is the class I would have been born into were I French, I never imagined France to be my country. Actually, I would like to think of myself as a citizen of the world, if only the world would offer me joint citizenship with the United States. World-United, what a good thing that would be!

GRAFFITI

2011-05-22T20:41:00.000-07:00

I have often wondered about graffiti, the spray-painted writs on walls I perceive from the windows of my commuter train. What person or persons can be responsible for them? How do their perpetrators remain unseen and unknown? Why do they all look so alike? What are these inscriptions saying? Is there a possible argument on behalf of them?

Norman Mailer published an article in the New York Times Magazine praising their beauty and defending them as art. He may not be their only champion, though I myself know nobody who endorses them. I consider them eyesores.

To be sure, they appear on the drab walls of dreary, often uninhabited, buildings. I don’t know that any reputable architect ever built an edifice along these train routes and begging for such bedizening. And if there were a Gropius or Le Corbusier, a Van der Rohe or Alto by the tracks, the scribbler’s hand, awe-struck, might spare it. The question is whether even dilapidation is improved by graffiti.

The train goes by too fast for me to decipher these inscriptions. The proud names of the scribes may be displayed. As my father used to say about names cut into the bark of trees, “Nomina stultorum . . .” (the names of fools), but he always ended in aposiopesis, and I was never able to track down the rest of that Latin adage. However, injuring a living thing like a tree is far worse than spraying a wall. Still, these amoral muralists probably prefer anonymity to avoid apprehension.

But are graffiti truly eyesores? Those large, loping, motley letters, usually in wavy lines, have a conceivable claim to be abstract art, or, at the very least, conceptual art, where whatever the perpetrator proclaims to be art, ipso facto becomes it. To me, saying so doesn’t make it so; indeed, I have trouble even with some established abstract artists, whose work is arbitrary, pleasing some, but boring others. Yet few people have the gumption to call a daub a daub. Obsolete or philistine, I prefer representation, however academic or unoriginal.

The curious thing, though, is the mysterious invisibility of the graffitists. Why is the script always more or less the same, and not just in size, which, granted, the spray gun could not make smaller. Why such uniformity? Is there a school that turns out regimented graffitists, or is this the evenhanded hand of God, which, you’ll recall, did write out a warning on the wall of an Assyrian king. Neither seems likely. Then how do the graffitists remain unobserved, even if they work in the wee hours? It is clearly a mystery, but it shouldn’t become a mystique.

To be sure, there is a human yearning for testimony: I lived, I was there, I deserve my bit of immortality. But is every bequest to posterity of equal, indeed any, value? Especially when it can readily be erased or painted over. Still, it may no be a plea for afterlife; it may be there simply for the delectation of the living culprit, who may keep anonymously revisiting the site of his crime and relishing his achievement.

It is not as if writing on walls were ipso fact unsightly. Egyptian hieroglyphs are very easy on the eye even if meaningless to those who can’t read them. They are decorative in their delicacy, something that the modern graffitist cannot claim for his sprawling, heavy, gross and monotonous doodling. To be sure, repetitiousness is earning millions for Warhol, or his heirs; but then, I wouldn’t want a Warhol on my wall either.

Perhaps one of these days my train will break down (it is known to happen) alongside one of these graffiti-bedecked walls, and I’ll be able to decipher its message. Could it be as momentous as the texts in Chinese fortune cookies, which, by the way, have become less pertinent than they used to be.

By a curious coincidence, the day after I wrote this the Times came out (5/19/11) with an article about another kind of “cozy, feminine” graffiti known as yarn bombing, and popping up internationally. We read: “It takes that most matronly craft (knitting) and that most maternal of gestures (wrapping something cold in a warm blanket) and transfers it to the concrete and steel wilds of the urban streetscape. Hydrants, lampposts, mailboxes, bicycles, cars—even objects as big as buses and bridges—have all been bombed in recent years, ever so softly and usually at night.” A yarn bomber, Jessie Hemmons, age 24, is quoted as saying, “Street art and graffiti are usually so male dominated. Yarn bombing is more feminine. It’s like graffiti with grandma sweaters.”

There are evidently no lengths to which would-be artists won’t go to invent arts that can be practiced by the talentless. But you have to hand it to these women that their undertakings are more difficult and gutsy than the spray-painted male version. To see the Hemmons fuchsia-colored, hooded, woolly vest on the bronze Rocky statue near the Philadelphia Museum of Art is at the very least amusing. Which is more than you can say for those charmless male graffiti that are no laughing matter.

MEANINGLESS MAGNIFICENCE

2011-05-16T07:11:00.000-07:00

Almost as old as the debate about which comes first, the words or the music, is the question of what music means. Otherwise put, is the music saying something specific that the listener can apprehend?

Obviously, a sonata or a string quartet is pure, nonspeaking form. But can’t a tone poem that calls itself Death and Transfiguration say something verbal about death and whatever transfiguration means to the composer, Richard Strauss? Or can another of his tone poems, Thus Spake Zarathustra, convey in music, word for word, what Nietzsche wrote?

The evident answer is No. I recall reading long ago about an experiment conducted with a tone poem played to an audience unacquainted with it, then being asked to write down what it said to them. No two listeners heard the same thing, and no one got from it what the composer thought he had said with it.

We may, of course, ask why a piece of music should “say” anything. Why it should do the work of another art, poetry or drama. But are there perhaps things felt and meant to be expressed in words, which prove, however, ineffable? Can you, for instance, put an orgasm into spoken words? But then again, can you say it in notes?

Or consider “pride”? Can you put into precise words your pride in something your children have accomplished, or in a novel you have written? Can that pride be specifically conveyed to someone else by a certain number of tones in a specified order? You can suggest that it makes you feel good, but then how to convey the quiddity of a good feeling? It makes you happy, but what exactly is “happy”? And how does it differ between having a loved someone return your love and enjoying a rich serving of delicious ice cream?

A piece of music may, granted, be cheerful or mournful, induce a certain mood in you, captivate or repel you, even have you exclaim, “It speaks to me”; but what does it really mean, i.e., say?

It is largely opined that Wagner’s love music in Tristan is erotic. It is said, perhaps accurately, that it arouses erotic feelings, especially in young people, and even provokes masturbation. But surely it does not say, “Go masturbate!” Even that once celebrated pop song, “Gloomy Sunday,” supposedly inducing an international wave of suicides, did not say, “Go kill yourself!” At the utmost, it may have been adopted as a sort of anthem of farewell by those about to die by their own hand. Music may perhaps suggest something, but that is not tantamount to saying it in so many words. Eliciting is not the same as verbalizing.

Certainly music may, somehow, convey or corroborate something. If a character in an opera sings of his love in eloquent words, the music may well confirm his affirmation, make it incomparably more powerful. But would the music say the same thing without being attached to those particular words? Let us assume it could somehow convey the wonder of love. But love of what? A person? A sport? Broccoli?

Still, a stunning edifice by a major architect would seem to say, “Wouldn’t you like to live inside me?” An exquisite painting of a beautiful woman may seem to say, “Don’t you want to make love to me?” Those are meanings of sorts. Then why shouldn’t music have them too? Well, even if a piece of music is called “serenade,” does it necessarily say “I am being played at night by a lover under the beloved’s window”? It doesn’t. It could just as easily be titled “impromptu” or “intermezzo” or ”meditation.” It is the word “serenade” that can convey the situation, not the same music without that name. A hymn in praise of Bacchus may sound just like the music for a saint’s feast; a dirge may just as easily evoke yearning for a dead lover as an exile’s longing for his homeland. Wedding-procession music may serve as well at halftime in a World Cup soccer match.

A string quartet, however, without a title, is about three or four contrasting movements; beyond that it says nothing in words. The march from The Love for Three Oranges could just as easily be for four oranges or two grapefruits. If we heard it at a time when we were happy, it can remind us of the occasion, wordlessly. That, however, is association, not assertion. You can compare the pleasure it gives to winning a game of tennis. Fun without meaning.

Music, to be sure, can imitate—thunder, a cannonade, funeral bells, or hammering in a smithy. But that is not saying anything about how hard work in a smithy is, or the danger of a hammer blow to your thumb. The music for Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus” affects your senses, but bypasses your mind and, by itself, says nothing. It merely simulates and stimulates the emotions. It is the words to it that speak.

We would like it to say things, though, because speech is a noble utterance when it is not inane babble, wherefore we would wish beloved music to have similarly specific, verbalizable effect. In other words, to mean inarguable things. Yet we have it on no lesser authority than Stravinsky’s declaration that his music, in and of itself, has no meaning whatsoever.

Then again, why should music really mean? It enormously collaborates, indeed stars, in song of every kind, from an operatic aria to a pop song, from a lied to a musical comedy number. That easily absolves it from speaking in any other kind of music. Wordless classical music does, however, speak after a fashion to music critics and scholars who write intricate analytical essays, even books, about it, some of them actually quite readable. As for us laymen, to quote the title of Alex Ross’s valuable book, the rest is noise. But music, to all of us is not mere noise, but wonderful communication without verbal meaning. Or, if you will, meaningless magnificence.

GREAT TEACHERS

2011-05-08T18:30:00.000-07:00

The current issue of Harvard Magazine contains the following quotations:

“In any battle between the literati and the philistines,

the philistines invariably win.” –- Harry T. Levin, professor

of comparative literature, following the 1961 court

ruling adverse to Grove Press, in the Boston censorship

trial having published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

“I am a professor of comparative literature, not of com-

parative lust.”— Harry T. Levin, testifying in the same

trial, responding to the prosecutor’s question: “Profes-

sor Levin, which do you think would more excite lewd

and libidinous desires in the mind of a young girl—

Shakespeare’s ‘Rape of Lucrece’ or Henry Miller’s

Tropic of Cancer?’”

This perfectly illustrates the wit and wisdom of Harry Levin, chairman of Harvard’s Comp. Lit. department, in which I was a student and, later, assistant in his course “Proust, Mann and Joyce.” Harry Levin, author of several important books, was also a great scholar and teacher without ever acquiring an advanced degree. He had, however, been one of Harvard’s prestigious Junior Fellows.

Levin was a subtle ironist, a consummate stylist and lecturer, a strict grader, and somebody with whose approval it was unsafe to gamble. I say this as one who had both enjoyed his favor and, on one occasion, incurred his hostility. He and Renato Poggioli were two of my Ph.D. thesis directors, and though alike in brilliance, they couldn’t have been more unlike in temperament. On Levin’s precision and sharpness you could cut yourself; Poggioli was a practitioner of laissez-faire toward both his students and himself. Harry never made the slightest factual error; Renato cheerfully admitted to vagueness concerning such things as exact dates.

About Levin, a famous colleague said, “A dangerous man—you cannot even count on his enmity.” So I experienced in the Lillian Hellman affair, as I dubbed it, in which I incurred his wrath. A fellow graduate student, Richard Defendini, had contracted to supply Hellman with ample specimen passages from Jean Anouilh’s The Lark, which she was adapting for Broadway. The task was to submit translations of chunks of each major character’s speech, so that Hellman (who claimed to know French!) would get a feel for each individual’s language. For a mere hundred dollars, Defendini agreed to a good many pages, but then enlisted my collaboration. We did it, clearly, not for profit, but for prestige.

When Hellman would pay only $50, because the typing was, as she put it, double-spaced, Dick was so disgusted that he left demurring to me. On the phone, I facetiously referred to Hellman’s Calvinism, to which she earnestly replied that she was Jewish. And she remained adamant. Harry summoned me to his office and reduced me to tears, demanding, on the threat of expulsion, a letter of apology to be overseen by him. He let the letter pass, however, despite a certain irony in its tone.

I go into this to show that nobody is perfect; in this case Levin’s excessive awe as a mere academic vis-a-vis an artist. Still, Levin was a great teacher, though that was in a very different time and, I suspect, at a very different Harvard. I do firmly believe that beyond thorough knowledge of his field and a good deal of general culture, a teacher should be simultaneously instructive and entertaining. Students tend to be an unruly audience, and a bit of humor is an invaluable teaching tool. But there should be no jokes about the grading.

Today, things have come to a pretty pass. Students arrive in college equipped with a well-nourished ignorance, and propose to graduate without any serious tampering with it. I have heard a graduate of an Ivy League institution boast of earning his degree without cracking a single piece of assigned reading. This can be partly the fault of teachers, but as often of administrations, expecting for financial reasons the smallest number of flunkings. Which is where I feel defeated, having my employment at more than one institution of higher learning dropped , stated or unstated, for grading too stiffly.

Even more dispiriting is something else. I was reprimanded by a female department co-chairman for making too many corrections in student papers. I had spent roughly an hour-and-a-half on each, only to be told I should have corrected the major mistakes (whatever those might be), leaving the others alone. Too many corrections were depressing and counterproductive.

So it would seem that our teachers need as much educating as our students. A daunting situation, as is the passing of the buck from grade school to high school to college for such basic skills as grammar and spelling. And that does not even account for dealing with copying from Wikipedia or other, subtler forms of plagiarism.

Can there be a solution for all this? I am sorry to say I don’t know.

SUNDRY PRINCESSES

2011-04-25T19:49:00.000-07:00

Why Bertrand Tavernier is not considered up there with the world’s greatest filmmakers is a mystery to me. It must have something to do with the vagaries of distribution, the absence of hype, the obtuseness of reviewers and audiences, perhaps even of festival directors and museum curators.

His oeuvre is varied and extensive, his scope prodigious and vision acute. Google him and you’ll get at least some sense of his achievement, which began spectacularly with The Clockmaker and has continued through his most recent offering, The Princess of Montpensier, for which, as usual, Tavernier collaborated on the screenplay.

The film is based on the first novel by Madame de La Fayette (1662), whose later La Princesse de Cleves (1678) is the first authentic French novel, a psychological masterpiece filmed more than once. Her initial fiction, La Princesse de Montpensier, though not quite so remarkable, provided Tavernier with a more than serviceable story for a major film.

In the history-film genre, Tavernier accomplishes something few if any directors have managed so well: shooting not just a plot, but also a sense of what ordinary life in a given period—in this case 17^th-century France—was like. As in W. H. Auden’s famous poem about the Dutch painting of the fall of Icarus (which shows everyday life going on in other parts of the canvas), Tavernier gives us humdrum and humble activities behind or alongside of the main action, making that very action more embedded in reality, more believable.

Nor is Tavernier loath to repeat things that bear repetition, such as horses ridden by various riders at breakneck speed on diverse occasions that punctuate the film, having the same validity as reckless car rides running through movies about today’s life. It immerses us more thoroughly in the era in question.

Though this is not meant to be a movie review—and isn’t—some Tavernier strengths must be stressed. So the fine performances in even minor parts, though I will mention only one of the major ones: Lambert Wilson, splendid as the Comte de Chabannes, the Princess’s tutor in the remote castle to which her husband confined her, ostensibly as protection from the raging religious wars. Although noble and wise, circumspect in handling with philosophical detachment the Princess’s various involvements (or avoidance thereof) with aristocrats and royalty, Chabannes himself eventually succumbs to his pupil’s charms in heartbreakingly moving scenes.

Again, although this is a story of romantic passions, we get no gratuitous dabbling in sex. There is, remarkably, only one rather discreet bedroom scene, yet all that needs to be shown about the sundry amours is magisterially conveyed. And, as usual in Tavernier’s films, cinematography, editing, music, camera placement and movement are exemplarily managed. Best of all, though the director is clearly in constant charge, his control is not ostentatiously foisted on the viewer, but chastely subsumed by the action.

Tavernier has turned seventy, but The Princess of Montpensier is informed as much by youthful zest as by mature judgment. And though it is a work of fiction, we feel that no documentary could have conjured up historic reality with greater accuracy and suasion.

Speaking of princesses, here comes the wedding of Britain’s Prince William and Kate Middleton, his commoner bride. Of course a royal wedding is of some interest, especially when the bride is not of royal or even blue blood—a pure case of romantic love rather than political expediency, more like a fairy tale in fact.

Even so, isn’t all this frantic American media coverage indicative of something beyond the obvious? Does it not mean that a democratic republic leaves its beneficiaries famished for something more regal? Does it not play out almost as soul-satisfyingly as the legend of King Copetua and the Beggar Maid? Is it not as if a Hollywood happy ending were turning real, the very thing that encourages hopefulness in the drabbest of lives? Not that we can all turn into Prince William or Kate Middleton, but that we live in a world in which, amid economic crises and fighting all over the map, romance of this kind is still possible?

I myself am fascinated by reading that Kate becomes empowered by marriage to choose whether to become princess or duchess. Princess is manifestly grander, but duchess allows for more freedom. This is the kind of dilemma dreams are made of—isn’t a current movie (which I haven’t seen) entitled Win Win?

Be it mentioned here that Englishwomen are not, by and large, noted for their comeliness. It took a great deal of questionable taste or stubborn make believe to consider Princess Di, let alone Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, pretty, to say nothing of beautiful. Conversely, Kate does look undeniably good.

So this is the new TV reality show, with American networks fiercely outbidding one another to engage photogenic Englishwomen capable of reporting on the royal wedding. If there is this much hullabaloo about their mere nuptials, just think what it will be like when the couple get lost somewhere in the jungle with no one around to rescue them except the television crew.

False Analogy

2011-04-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

This week’s sermon is chiefly about false analogy, one of the major ills that plague (not plagues—the subject is plural, ills) our once reasonably healthy English.

Is anything more parlous than the state of our beloved mother tongue? Well, not mine actually, but at any rate stepmother tongue. It may be a kind of haughtiness, but I wince whenever I encounter an offense against grammar, spelling or pronunciation. If only it weren’t considered bad manners to correct someone else’s speech or writing, things would still be bearable; but nowadays, instead of thanks, you might get a punch in the nose.

Offenses are sprouting all over, but one of the most flagrant is the matter of “lie” and “lay.” True, this is an instance where language seems intent on tripping you up. We have not only the infinitives, lay and lie, to contend with, but also the past tense, lay. Laid and lain likewise challenge the standard lack of discrimination. Lie is in bad odor, too, because of its homonym, meaning to tell untruths, which we don’t want to do. To speak incorrectly, however, we don’t seem to mind at all.

The problem is false analogy. It is assumed that if something horizontalized is laid down, something that is horizontal, therefore, lays. Not so! And then there is also the sexual meaning, as in getting laid.

You might feel encouraged by hearing our generally ignorant television newscasters talk of bodies laying in the streets, that, at least after a nasty bombing, some recreational copulation proved restorative and thrived. And why not? Now that countless folks are unappetizingly stuffing themselves from food cartons on buses and subways, should not public fornication be just as acceptable and widespread?

Another, scarcely less glaringly faulty analogy is common as dirt everywhere, notably on TV: “groceries” pronounced, as if it were spelled “grocieries,” as grosheries. The poor misguided souls may even think they’re being refined, just as some deviants do when they say “with Bill and I” for “with Bill and me.” Genteelism, the great Fowler called it: saying something that sounds genteel (I) rather than common (me), but happening to be incorrect.

Still, where did the mispronunciation “grosheries” come from? False analogy with hosiery and glacier, which have an ie where groceries has a mere e. Similarly mistaken, based on misspelling, are the not uncommon “grievious” and “mischievious,” derived by false analogy from words like devious and previous, which have an i before the o.

Similarly false analogy obtains also in writing. Does a week go by in which you don’t read about someone “wracking” his brains about something? Now clearly the verb is meant to refer to self-torture, to being stretched on the rack. But because another bad thing, being shipwrecked or otherwise wrecked, has that w in front of the r, onto “racked” goes that initial w.

What it has to do with is parallelism, symmetry, yes, analogy. If being healthy is good, then the answer to “How are you?” may just as well (note: not just as good) be “I’m good.” But good is a moral value, or a matter of mood (a good feeling), or a practical matter (a flashlight is good for the household); it has nothing to do with wellness, i.e., health. You are well, in good health, and let someone else who respects you say that you are good. But, you may wonder, can’t “I am good” become accepted through popular parlance? Perhaps so, eventually, but not yet.

Much the same, by the way, applies to “great.” You are not “doing great,” however successful you are. You are only great if you are God, or if you are a leader of men and boastful about it. Otherwise, you reserve great for other people and their achievements.

Yes, good usage is a tricky thing, like navigating in shallow waters or among coral reefs. Notice: “among” rather than “between” when referring to more than two, the “tween” clearly coming from twain, which designates a pair. But because so much happens between two people or occurs between two latitudes or lies between two objects, between has become incorrectly preferred to among even where several or many are involved.

But let’s get back to more saliently false analogy. Because “consists of” is correct, it is assumed that “comprised of” must be too. Not so. Comprise, like comprehend or embrace, means for something bigger to include more than one smaller ones. So a standard tool box may comprise a hammer, tongs, a file, various screwdrivers etc. So,too, a string quartet comprises four instrumentalists; but eleven players do not comprise a soccer team, though it does comprise them. “Comprises” is often wrong; “comprised of” always. Would you say “included of”?

It would be nice if correct usage were always logical, as it sometimes is. Careful speakers will not say “Everyone must buy their tickets” but “buy his or her ticket,” or, risking fisheyes from feminists, simply “his ticket.” Yet this fine distinction between singular and plural has pretty much gone by the board. But then, grammar need not be, often isn’t, logical. If “other than” is correct, why isn’t “different than,” which seems to be derived from it? It simply is “different from,” only in England, sometimes, “different to,” albeit, I believe, frowned upon.

So rules require memorization. But what if you ignore them? Will you be punished or ostracized if you say grosheries or grievious

Good English is like good manners: not essential but estimable, and hence highly desirable. Wouldn’t you rather be polite and well thought of by properly brought up, educated people? A mere minority, you say? Certainly, but when all other minorities are respected and deferred to, why should one minority be an exception? In this matter, analogy is more than justified.

FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD

2011-03-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

Amazing how many stories of interest center on food. Some of my and my wife Pat’s liveliest adventures involve eating. Take our holiday weekend in Beach Haven on the Jersey shore, where we had dinner at the leading hotel restaurant. I ordered snails (I doubt if they were known as escargots there), and they came with a modest mountain of croutons. I decided, next, on a salad which arrived with an immodest mountain of croutons. Then onion soup topped with--you guessed it! “More croutons?” I exclaimed in horror. Promptly the waitress returned, beaming, with a Himalaya of croutons.

Wonderful place, Beach Haven. In her musical-comedy actress days, Pat had starred there at the Starlight Theater. But star-bright everyone is not. When at a local cafe, I ordered hot tea and lemon, the waitress apologized that they were out of bottled lemon juice, and all they had were fresh lemons. But can nature, pace Oscar Wilde, really imitate art?

Or take the time in a London Chinese restaurant, where an item on the menu fascinated us: Mange Tout. This didn’t sound Chinese. We asked the waiter what was mange (as rhyming with change) tout (rhyming with trout)? He answered in good French that mange (rhyming with blancmange) tout (rhyming with choux) referred to peas in the pod, eaten whole (mange tout).

Then there was the time in Paris, when we could still afford such things, and went to the most expensive restaurant, Lucas-Carton. Pat ordered something innocuous, but I ordered brains, imagining something nicely breaded, perhaps like a wiener schnitzel, only brainier. When the elegant cover was removed, there was, all by its naked self and staring at me, a large, gray, quivering, convoluted mound, the size of a human brain, perhaps one actually. “Yikes!” as we say in French.

Venice brings to mind a lovely lunch I enjoyed with a former girlfriend. On a cart next to our table was a huge truffle--I still don't know how they could come that big. When no one was looking, she stuffed it into her pocketbook. We kept it hidden in our hotel closet until it started to smell. We had to toss the precious thing into the lagoon. I hope the fish develop a taste for it.

Perhaps the most wonderful dish either of us ever ate was in pre-Katerina New Orleans, at the Stella Restaurant. It was a veal tenderloin, beyond delicious, and much as we searched everywhere, we could not find anything of that kind—not just in culinary quality, but even in quiddity—again. We still think of it with lip-smacking nostalgia, as of a long-lost relative.

Memorable as well were long-ago meals at Le Bec Fin in Philadelphia where on our first visit I opened the gentleman's menu with the prices and exclaimed loudly, "It costs $85.00 per person!!!!" It turned out worth every penny.

One New Year's Eve we hoped to dine at Le Bec Fin but couldn't get a table so decided on the Ritz Carlton where they had a prix-fixe dinner and dancing. There is an art to a proper tasting meal in that the courses must be sized and spaced for enjoyment. By the time the main course--buffalo filet--was served Pat and I were both feeling quite full from the preceding courses but tucked in. We then discovered that we disliked the taste of buffalo filet and asked the waiter to bring us something else. He offered us filet mignon and we agreed. When it arrived we realized we were too full to enjoy it but felt terrible about having asked the waiter to make a switch. So we hid the filets in a potted plant next to our table. The next morning at breakfast we laughed wondering if the people seated at that table could smell the meat beginning to rot.

Our all time best tasting meal was at a now closed restaurant in Portland, Maine. Run by Erik Desjarlais, it was called Bandol--but it should have been called Perfection. Erik now runs a less fancy place in Portland called Evangeline and we keep talking of returning to Portland to see what he's up to there.

At the instigation of the then famous Andre Heller, the Austrian government invited us to visit Salzburg (out of season, alas) and Vienna (never out of season). On Austrian Airlines, in first class, the food was outstanding, and we looked forward to more adventures in gastronomy.

On our very first evening, we were given seats at the Opera for a performance of Don Carlo (not one of my favorite Verdis) starring Placido Domingo. After that, there was to be at the famous Hotel Sacher (home of one of my favorite deserts, the Sacher Torte) a late night supper in our honor. The guest list read like a who is who of some of the greatest names in opera.

We arrived at the already late hour to find a table set for about 24, but no one there except a bunch of nervous waiters eager to get things started and over with. After a while, an elegant elderly lady arrived. It was the fabulous Martha Moedl, an octogenarian still in fine voice, as we found out later at The Queen of Spades, another of my nonfavorites. (How crazy of Tchaikovsky to prefer it to his true masterpiece, Eugene Onyegin.) The diva was utterly charming, graciously spoke perfect English to my wife, and the highest German to me.

Finally, the Nr. 2 guy on the Opera staff, an affable chap, showed up as we sat down to eat. He looked at the list of invitees and laughed. Muti had left Vienna the day before, Abbado had not yet arrived, and Domingo had gone off to his hotel for the night. And so on. We started on the soup just as Herr Direktor showed up, as grouchy as Nr. 2 was jolly.

An awkward, faltering conversation ensued, until the subject of Croatia came up, which, with Teutonic support, had just seceded from Yugoslavia. I expected Austrians, part of whose empire Croatia had been, to side with the Croats. Still, I put in a good word for the Serbs, among whom in Belgrade I grew up, and considered much nicer than the Croats. Well, whose face lit up? That of Herr Direktor, who joined me in enthusiastically extolling the Serbs as far finer than the Croats. Thereupon, though no one further showed up, a pleasant supper was had by all. This despite the accursed Tafelspitz, which pursued us all through Austria. The national dish, beloved of Emperor Franz Josef I, it is boiled beef in broth Viennese style, usually served with roasted potatoes and sourcream mixed with horseradish. Horsefeathers! Imperial palate nowithstanding, we thought, and still think, it tastes like meat gone bad.

But back to the celebrated Sacher Torte, which we bought at the Hotel Sacher with high hopes. Well, it was a huge disappointment. Though gorgeously packaged—the outer wooden box itself is a thing of beauty—the cake was dry, not quite as dust, but approaching sand. I eventually discovered that this was indeed the original Sacher recipe, although later, decadently inauthentic versions have been much more to my taste.

Oh, the shock of it, though! Can you imagine Modena vinegar disappointing in Modena? Dijon mustard fall flat in Dijon? Swiss cheese flunk in Switzerland? Kobe beef batting out in Kobe—prior, of course, to the current catastrophe? But such things do happen. Not in Greece however where Pat found every moussaka she ordered to be different and terrific.

One night dining at Per Se, we found the very nice young waiter mispronouncing Montrachet as he poured it, with the middle T sounded. I amicably informed him that this T was mute, as in, say, Montparnasse, because the T in Mont (French for mountain) is unsounded. Which reminds me of one of my favorite anecdotes, quite likely apocryphal. Jean Harlow was invited to lunch by Lady Margot Asquith, and kept mispronouncing the Countess’s name as Margott. Finally, the great lady pointed out politely, “My dear, the T in Margot is mute—as in Harlow.”

Let me not forget, however, what Pat does for me. Rushing home from her teaching job, she cooks up a helluva a meal in no time before we run out to the theater. To abolish the boundary between good home cooking and fast food is a miracle to be grateful for.

UNSTOPPABLE STOPPARD

2011-03-13T21:55:00.000-07:00

In the Arts and Leisure section of the March 13 New York Times, I find an article about Tom Stoppard and his active involvement in the forthcoming New York revival of his Arcadia. That is a wonderful play, though like much of Stoppard it is hugely cerebral. Which is not to say it isn’t accessible enough to be manna to a civilized audience, but it does make me personally regret not having a scientific enough mind to comprehend it fully. The Times article informs me that “during the 1990s it was one of the most frequently produced plays around the world.” How much of it did or do audiences really get?

What struck me most about that article was that Stoppard is preoccupied with trying to cut three minutes from the first act of the current revival, and having a hard time figuring out just what to cut. So he is postponing the painful surgery till after previews begin, and he and his director can determine from the audience reaction just where to apply the scalpel.

Still, three minutes? What earthly difference can three minutes more or less make to a play? Shakespeare, a dramatist thought to be the equal of Stoppard, has been cut much more than that or not at all, and either way made out quite well. This concern tells us something about Stoppard. Is he a fabulous perfectionist, his brain so discriminatingly fine-tuned, that he can actually be discomfited by such a minuscule difference? Or is he a fussbudget like that fabled princess who couldn’t sleep because of a pea under her

multitudinous mattresses? Or, worse yet, is he a show-off, expecting to call attention to his giant cerebellum and hypertrophic sensitivity, setting him off from lesser playwrights who couldn’t care less about whether and where to cut three measly minutes?

Can you, in all honesty, imagine any of our successful boulevard playwrights shedding a single tear over three lost minutes? I can, though, visualize someone like Tony Kushner yammering about not being allowed to add three minutes of extra garrulity to his existing text. Such addition might not even be a bad idea in a demanding play like Arcadia, which, as the Times puts it, “discusses iterated algorithms, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory.” I myself couldn’t even distinguish between an iterated and an uniterated algorithm, should one of them poke me in the ribs.

There is, by the way, a bit of irony in the Times story’s observing that at the 1995 revival of Arcadia, Stoppard offered the cast “a tutorial in the play’s mathematics and science himself,” rather than having, as at the London premiere, an Oxford don dispense such instruction. When a cast member asked the author to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as Stoppard tells us, “his mind went completely blank.”

It’s honorable of Stoppard to bring up this incident, but blanking out on that law is the equivalent in physics to blanking out in history on who won the Civil War. Or, in grammar, drawing a blank on the difference between an adjective and an adverb. To be sure, the average American college student may not know the answer to that, but then he wouldn’t have written Arcadia either—to say nothing about understanding chaos theory, beyond personifying at least the chaos part of it himself.

Still, it is impressive to have a playwright grapple in his oeuvre with scientific, historical, and political issues the way few if any American dramatists do. It does not make him superior to his equally brilliant British colleague, Alan Ayckbourn, who may not even know what quantum mechanics is—or are—but who turns out no less dazzling plays in even greater number. And while Northern Ireland is still not totally disconnected from England, there is the marvelous Brian Friel, which gives Britain a trifecta leaving most American playwriting eating Albion’s dust.

So overerudite or not, more power to British drama. What do we have to counterpose? Lanford Wilson seems to have stopped writing; Sam Shepard is both too obsessive and too regional; Donald Margolies one would wish more prolific; and even the Alps are more even than Albee. What we do not have is a truly intellectual playwright, such as little Austria had in Thomas Bernhard, and tiny Switzerland in Duerrenmatt and Frisch. Whatever his shortcomings, Stoppard does fill that role.

Beware, however, of the pseudointellectual playwright. Such a one may be talented, as Kushner and Albee are, but not without some pretentiousness or even megalomania that spoils the brew. On the other hand, a playwright may do wonders without major intellectual aspirations, as long as he has acute insight and unstinting empathy. We did have one of that kind, a long-lived and productive one: Horton Foote. His only flaw is being dead.

FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS

2011-03-06T20:02:00.000-08:00

French Without Tears is the title of the charming playwright Terence Rattigan’s first comedic hit. But this post is not a tribute to Rattigan’s centenary now being celebrated wherever English is spoken. For that, catch a forthcoming Theater Talk program on TV, where critic and journalist John Heilpern, actor Edward Hibbert, and I debate and evaluate Rattigan’s contribution to the theater.

No. This post is about my learning French back in the late Yugoslavia with the help of a French primer, which taught through edifying anecdotes. Two of these stick indelibly in my memory, as I experienced again the other day while shining a pair of my shoes, not as expertly as the professionals, but not too shabbily for an amateur.

Anyway, the first of these anecdotes concerns Voltaire and his manservant. As the philosopher was ready to step out one rainy day, he noted that his shoes had not been shined as usual. Under questioning, the servant replied, “What’s the point? It’s raining, and they’ll soon be muddy again.” “Right,” said the sage, and departed with unshined shoes. Forthwith the servant came chasing after him, crying, “Master, you haven’t left me the key to the pantry. How am I to have my lunch?” “What’s the point?” Voltaire rejoined. “In no time at all you’ll be hungry again.”

A thought-provoking morality tale, this. It is perfectly true that certain actions or procedures have to be undertaken even if the outcome is only of transitory value. So I have realized as a teacher that education must not stop even if students forget your teachings and revert to saying “lay” for “lie” or “With Bill and I” for “With Bill and me.” There are times—many times--when, like Nadezhda Mandelstam, one must hope against hope.

There was, to be sure, very little hope for Osip Mandelstam to emerge alive from the clutches of the Soviet GPU or NKVD, or whatever the secret service was called then. But for Voltaire’s shoes there was a faint but encouraging chance that their wearer might circumnavigate puddles, or at least bypass the muddiest spots, and thus preserve a minimum of polish. So too might students who can withstand the teachings of that greatest of educators, television, and thereby not say “We were laying in the dormitory”—unless, of course, the little lechers were.

In other words, without dreaming the impossible dream, there is no way the possible dream, purportedly inside it--and, like the thin man from within every fat man, just waiting to emerge--can conceivably break out. A slim chance, granted, but a slight polish education may, against all odds, conceivably provide. Voltaire’s shoes may not, like the harvest moon, shine on; yet just perhaps they may avoid becoming eyesores.

Now for the other anecdote. King Louis the Eleventh of France—but let me stop right here: Was it really the Eleventh? My secure knowledge of the sixteen Louis extends back only to the Thirteenth (thanks to Alexandre Dumas pere and the Three Musketeers) if that. Or perhaps the Ninth, known as Saint Louis, may have been the one. But no matter.

One day there came before the appropriate Louis a jongleur--or anglice juggler—and his boy to perform a rare skill. The boy stood several paces away, holding up horizontally a long pin. The juggler then, lofting a sack of peas, proceeded to toss pea after pea at the boy. Astoundingly, each pea landed, firmly impaled, on the extended pin. The King had to concede that this was truly amazing.

At the juggler’s request for a reward, the monarch had a page come running with a well-filled crunchy bag. The happy juggler reached inside, but promptly withdrew his hand in horror. Inside were not gold nuggets but peas. Indignantly, he inquired whether this was the royal munificence. “Well”—or Eh bien—replied the saintly Ninth or secular Eleventh Louis, “for a perfectly useless skill this is the suitable recompense.”

As a boy, I felt that this tale made unimpeachable sense. Today, however, I am no longer so sure. Take, in the first place, the great circus artistes—the high-wire acrobats, the human projectiles shot from cannons, the athletic strongmen, the prodigious jugglers, the vast variety of clowns—none of whom provide a cure for cancer or a substitute for oil from Libya—are they to do this for peas or peanuts? Surely the state of wonder they elicit--our not entirely selfless pleasure in seeing human potential in the ascendant—is not to go unrewarded. They deserve whatever they get at least as much as the TV newscasters who deliver the news in their customary faulty English.

But never mind the artistes; what about artists of the not entirely trendily pop kind? Those so-called singers, millionaires whose earnings should really go, if to anyone, to the makers of their microphones. Should not some portion of the earnings of rappers and punkers, of Justin Biebers and Celine Dions, really be diverted to classical composers (other than Philip Glass and Steve Reich), or given to poets who still believe in meter and rhyme and communication, rather than in nonsensical Ashberiesque verbal masturbation?

And what about the monstrously unrewarded intellectual laborers, who, for example, as drama critics (yes, dammit, I am arguing pro domo) work their asses off in uncomfortable theater seats to review often unconscionable plays and are honest enough not to be politically correct and circulationally enhancing professional yeasayers? Sure, there are exceptions, not quite as rare as hen’s teeth, but easily as rare as centenarian ones. If Terence Rattigan were alive today, how many natural choppers would he have left?

This, alas, is late learning. If I had known better in my youth, I might have become a stockbroker or standup comic, anything but a drama critic. At least, though, it disproves those who claim that after age_______(you fill in the blank) one can’t learn anything anymore.

OH, THOSE OSCARS

2011-03-01T08:42:00.000-08:00

Herewith some reflections on this year’s Academy Awards from a longtime film critic currently not reviewing movies. Of course I watched the Oscars as I always do; they provide the kind of entertainment that yesteryear’s really pretentious B-movies used to. But this time round they were mostly just plain boring; still, a few kudos and a number of Bronx cheers don’t seem uncalled-for.

Things began with the very sad appearance of Kirk Douglas as presenter of the Best Supporting Actress award to Melissa Leo of The Fighter. Douglas, saddled with the aftereffects of a stroke, severely speech-impaired and looking like Methuselah on a bad hair day, should probably not be exhibited in public. But far worse was the carrying on of Ms. Leo in a dress bedizened with tiny mirrors, no doubt to attract the attention of fellow narcissists. She had already indulged in an elaborate pre-Oscar self-promotion campaign, which alone should have disqualified her. We would have been spared her lengthy dithering replete with Pinteresque pauses, breathlessly self-serving gush, a laundry list of invoked names, and a general air of participating in a ceremony dedicated entirely to herself. An obscenity inherited from her movie role was not quite obliterated; left intact, it would have revealed her as the vulgarian she seems to be.

The co-hosts, James Franco and Anne Hathaway, were meant to add young viewer appeal, but a prerecorded introductory routine for them already seemed hopelessly contrived. Otherwise they managed to be fairly innocuous, except when Franco appeared in drag as Marilyn Monroe. He did however, look bored or uncomfortable most of the time, whereas Ms. Hathaway effervesced like the queen of the Junior Prom. She did thus contribute some welcome sparkle, though I am bothered by those jet black designer eyebrows, saucer eyes, and large mouth red enough to enrage a bull, rather like a creature born not so much of woman as of Pixar. She had more costume changes than a runway model, but she did sing a bit rather engagingly.

The best Supporting Actor award to Christian Bale, likewise from The Fighter, was yet another reward for overacting. It should, in my view, have gone to Geoffrey Rush, as splendid in his supporting role as Colin Firth was in the lead of The King’s Speech, deservedly winning the Best Actor Oscar.

I have yet to catch Natalie Portman in Black Swan, but am prepared to agree with her Best Actress award. She has been a wonderful performer since her first film role at age eleven, and even her convincing ballet dancing in this movie (I have seen excerpts) strikes me as worthy of recognition.

The Song Oscar had three dismally tuneless numbers competing, and even the fourth and winner—Randy Newman’s “We Belong Together” from Toy Story 3—was only minimally better. On the other hand, Newman’s speech was witty and modest, assuredly one of the evening’s best. He noted that if his category had had five contenders like the others, that fifth might well have beaten his.

The other distinguished speech came from the white-haired David Seidler, who won Original Screenplay for The King’s Speech. Tersely and unostentatiously, he spoke on behalf of older scenarists and stammerers. Charming, too, was Sandra Bullock’s presenter’s banter with celebrities in the audience, better managed than a similar undertaking by Jeff Bridges.

The only King’s Speech winner who, though well deserving of the Direction award, came off unimpressively was Tom Hooper with a mostly flatfooted tribute to his mother. Nor was I impressed with a brief guest appearance by Billy Crystal, a former host, even though it elicited a standing ovation. These days, standing ovations have become as commonplace as hellos, and more often than not undeserved.

Testifying to the Academy members’ benightedness was their completely ignoring the French candidate for the Foreign Language award, Of Gods and Men, by Xavier Beauvais. A story about gallant martyred French monks in North Africa, beautifully written, directed and acted, it did not get so much as the slightest nod.

Another folly was the innovation of having ten films compete for Best Picture. This meant racing through ten items without indication of any special merit, and, to make matters worse, doing this with King George VI’s climactic speech on the accompanying sound track. This must have seemed mystifying to anyone not knowing what it was, and a dead giveaway to others of what the winner would be.

Three further questions arise. Why does the talented Helena Bonham Carter have hair to make a Gorgon envious? Why must the vastly overrated Scarlet Johansson’s hair look as if she came from running a windswept mile without having brought a comb? And why hasn’t the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, who numbers among his many achievements making the Coen brothers look much better than they are--despite nine nominations and numerous Society of American Cinematographers’ and Britain’s BAFTA awards—won a single Oscar?

Finally, as always, there were the absurd dresses, but I’d rather not even get started on those. This year, several of them looked metallic, notably Annette Benning’s, which appeared to be artfully cobbled together out of pieces of surplus armor from the year’s historical epics.

ELEVATOR SCIENCE

2011-02-24T08:57:00.000-08:00

If you ride an elevator often enough—especially to and from a high floor—you can turn this experience into a psychological study of your neighbors, both the two- and four-legged kind. Such close confines offer a focus on some of the most animal aspects of humans, and the most human aspects of some animals.

A damning revelation of human benightedness crops up both inside the elevator and just outside where people wait for it. Inside, the button for the ground floor has been pressed and is lit up. As a new passenger steps in on a lower floor, he or she does one of two things: Either look at the lit-up 1 button, and do nothing, the sensible thing to do; or supererogatorily press that button once or even, in a nervous staccato, several times. This, I am sorry to say, is stupid.

Outside, when the elevator door opens on the ground floor, there is all too often some wretched person smack in front of you, a mere foot or two away, and thus blithely blocking the egress. Of course, the person does eventually step aside or back, but not before having given excellent proof of mindlessness.

Then there is the matter of what conversation may arise during the ride. The most likely subject, the only one of sure concern to all about to go forth, is the weather. You will recall the saying ascribed—with no great certainty—to Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The joke is in the absurdity: how could anyone change the weather? But perhaps the absurdity is even greater: why even waste much time talking about something that you can’t control?

Well, like almost any other subject, the weather can be discussed intelligently or not. Just to utter the cliché the characters sing about in the Kurt Weill-Langston Hughes musical, Street Scene, “Ain’t it awful, the heat?” is of very limited interest. But suppose someone says, “It’s funny. In the August heat we always think we can cope better with a severe winter cold. On a freezing January day, we always say that even the worst heat is better than this.” Not a particularly brilliant observation, but at least one remotely connected with thought.

And, incidentally, one can do something about the weather: dress accordingly. But in the elevator we usually see people dumbly dressed not by the weather, but by the calendar. It may be the most wondrously balmy winter day—65 or 70 degrees—but because the calendar says December, these folks are swathed in layers of clothing. And vice versa: on an unexpectedly frigid July day, with the temperature at an almost unheard-of low, these unfortunates go out in paper-thin batiste shirts.

But let’s get back to elevator talk. To begin with nomenclature, what about the very name “elevator,” which in my mind often conjures up those ugly elevator shoes worn onstage by short actors and singers? The British term, “lift,” adopted by several other languages, is much more attractive, even if you don’t get much of a lift out of the ride. The French ascenseur is quite melodious; the spondaic German, Fahrstuhl, too ponderously earthbound. To be sure, most people are not particularly sensitive to language; if the elevator were called glubglob, it would be just the same to them. Contrarily, the angel that frequently appears in the works of Cocteau, euphoniously called Heurtebise (something like wind-repeller), derives his name from a model of the Otis elevator.

Anyway, talk. Some people will compliment a fellow passenger on his elegant Savile Row suit or her stunning Hermes pocketbook. Deep down, such compliments may please everyone, but the more discriminating person might take umbrage at them as flattery. A fond Dad or Mom may revel in your praise for a cute child; an owner, in admiration for his pure breed Afghan. But then again, must one fill two minutes involuntarily spent with a stranger with chatter? Isn’t a hello or a good-bye quite enough? As long as it isn’t that saccharine “Have a nice day.” But beware of persons who, you feel, cannot stand a couple of minutes of dead air. Those are the undesirably insecure.

Speaking of the cute child, however. Every so often there is the doting parent who must bestow a lesson in elevator science on his tot, explaining what button to choose, how and where to find it, and the way to press it. Or, as more commonly expressed, push it. This can fill you with apprehension: what if the darling presses or pushes the wrong button anyway? The resultant delay is not tragic, unless you are in a great hurry, but somehow, in the close quarters of an elevator even a minor deviance feels like a delinquency. Proximity, like a magnifying glass, enlarges things.

Now what about dogs on the elevator? There is a goodly difference between a well-behaved dog who cleaves to his master or mistress, and one that can’t be restrained from nuzzling you. But an even greater, mysterious difference is between dogs who, upon arrival, respond only to a tugging leash, and others who actually sense the proximity of the desiderated ground or home floor, which will provide them with a walk or bring them back to their quarters. These know exactly when and where to position themselves with palpitating spout, ready to leap forth the moment the door opens. How do they do it? A mystery, like that of the migration of birds, I suppose.

Finally, there is the person with an elevator phobia who refuses to enter one, and not merely because it is too crowded or usurped by carts or strollers. Such a person is also unwilling to walk up more than a given number of floors, and if you live higher than that, won’t visit you. If it is someone you don’t care for, bless the elevator. If it is someone you like—well, what are restaurants made for?

THE BEST OF BEST FRIENDS?

2011-02-19T07:53:00.000-08:00

We know, of course, that the dog is man’s best friend. But how reciprocal is this friendship? Is man also the dog’s best friend? When I see Yorkies being carried about by women in their pocketbooks, or sundry dogs constricted by fancy habiliments, or owners sleeping with their dogs between shared sheets, I begin to wonder. Is this truly mutual friendship or some sort of ego trip or ostentation on the owners’ part? Isn’t the coat nature bestowed on canines enough to keep them warm? Or do spoiled, overindulged doggies feel underdressed in the street without bejeweled glad rags?

These and similar thoughts occurred to me the other day while watching the 135^th annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show on television. This, as you may know, is the canine equivalent of the Miss America and other like shows, where a young woman is crowned the fairest in the country, or the world, or the universe. Is the winner in what is essentially a mere girlie show truly the most beautiful anywhere other than on television, and even there only on that particular show? And is the best-of-show dog at Westminster (the kennel club, not the cathedral) really the best dog of all? And what does “best” in this case actually mean?

I love all sorts of animals including dogs and, perhaps most of all, cats. An ex-girlfriend of mine and I once even co-owned a coatimundi we named Humbaba (because its cage was lined with cedar shavings and the monster guard of the cedar forest in the Epic of Gilgamesh is called that), but which we probably shouldn’t have acquired; a coati, however smart and lovable, is meant for the wild, not for a domestic pet. So I wonder whether all that grooming and fussing, pampering and photographing, really benefits a dog. Or only the owners and handlers, who may thrive on all the hoopla.

My first problem with the dog show is that the competing divas (for that’s what they are) come in seven categories: toy, herding, hunting, working, sporting, nonsporting and terrier. Now, I may be obtuse, but listening to the commentators’ descriptions of the numerous breeds (well over a hundred and counting) it seemed to me that the laudatory epithets that introduced them—such as child-friendly, rat-catching, rabbit-hunting, fox-unearthing, powerfully built and fiercely loyal—were verbosely and repetitiously applied to any number of them, and becoming monotonous. Would Miss America candidates be repeatedly styled bosomy, leggy, family-oriented, negligee-friendly, bedroom-eyed or whatnot?

Above all, the winners in the seven rather tautological categories were all splendid specimens as they were paraded about before the ultimate judge, Paolo Dondina of Italy, who was carefully kept from eyeballing them until the minute he stepped into the Madison Square Garden arena to pick the champion of champions. Incidentally, all the dogs have elaborate names beginning in, or at least comprising, a Ch., meaning some sort of champion, without which they wouldn’t have been qualified to compete. Thus the Scottish deerhound who won this year is named in full Grand Champion Foxcliffe Hickory Wind, regularly abbreviated as Hickory, which is rather as if the Miss America contestants were referred to exclusively by their first names, Jeanie or Katie or Tiffany.

Here, though, is the rub. When one looked at the seven finalists, they seemed not just different breeds, but actually wholly different animals. How on earth could a tiny Pekingese run against a mighty Scottish deerhound? As soon have a contest pitting gorillas against hamsters. At least all Miss America contestants are young women, none of them dwarves or giantesses.

And another thing. I fully appreciate Hickory’s pulchritude, even though, like others of her breed, she displays somewhat spindly legs under a mighty body. Surely no Miss America would combine a C-cup bust with shoe size five feet. But there is something even more problematic: Judge Dondina. For Miss America, there is a whole panel of ten or twelve judges—male and female, young and old, straight and gay—to crown the winner. That winner, then, has amassed the highest point score from a number of ecumenical arbiters, making her an across-the-board laureate. (I am not even mentioning the intelligence test with questions like “If you were stranded in an African jungle, what would you ask for in your prayer?”)

Hickory was pronounced dog of dogs by just one ultimate, ungainsayable judge, old Paolo Dondina. I stress old, because Dondina looked like a dodderer even if he wasn’t, and because the Times quoted him declaring, “I am a hound person. I had Afghans. I had whippets. I had Irish wolfhounds. I never owned a deerhound. This is my dream.” Well, should a fellow who for many years owned big dogs and dreamt about deerhounds be the single, supreme judge, rather than one of at least nine? Who would have been the winner if Paolo had dreamt about Pekes? It’s as if a buxom blonde became Miss America merely because the sole judge did not dream about willowy brunettes.

Yet even this may be less important than what I read about Hickory and her likes. She is a five-year-old veteran of beauty contests, five dog years being the equivalent of thirty-five human ones. How many 35-year-olds would be allowed to, or even want to, compete for Miss America? If not disqualified for being over-the-hill, they would recuse themselves for having better things to do than spend the next year rattling around as poster girl for the title.

Think of what a neurotic mess poor Hickory must be. In shows for five years, dragged hither and yon, exposed to hordes of photographers crowding or dare I say hounding her, with spotlights and flashbulbs, cameras and hubbub? Moreover, I read that she is owned by Sally Sweatt of Minneapolis, but lives on a farm in Virginia with her breeders, Cecilia and Robert Dove, when not, frequently, on the show circuit with her handler, Angela Lloyd. This means that the poor creature is parceled out among four parents and hustled left and right. It is as if Miss America had parents in two separate, distant locations, and were dragged to any number of others by an Argus-eyed guardian who scrutinized her and slept with her (see below) during all these travels and travails.

Any compensation? Well, I read about all manner of absurd diets and cosmetics, routines and rituals, show dogs are heir to. Says the Times: “Hair is blown straight or teased into fanciful poufs. Snouts and paws are daubed with talcum powder. Wayward hairs and whiskers are trimmed with precision.” For Hickory, Ms. Lloyd concedes, this is quite an extreme experience, inflicted on a sensitive dog best suited to living on a farm and chasing deer and squirrels. No wonder Hickory will nudge Angela when the handler is watching television—“really nudge you”—enough to make you throw an arm up in the air. Indeed, she nudges the sleeping Angela even in the middle of the night.

Right now Hickory is already booked into several events, starting at 6:30 a.m. What good is the fluffy bed she sleeps on and the extra biscuits she gets? Unlike some other show dogs, at least she isn’t walking with towels on her back and her ears pinned down. Yet even the less hysterical owners are apt to feed their pets luxury dog food, chicken livers, raw bison, and steak on a restaurant platter. During the post-victory press conference, Ms. Lloyd would blow gently on Hickory’s snout to keep her cool. Still, “growing tired of the paparazzi glare, she walked off the stage.” Hickory that is, not Ms. Lloyd. What’s more, Hickory, the day after her triumph, refused even a diced and elegantly served filet mignon at Sardi’s.

It all goes to show that, however pampered a dog you are—and perhaps especially if pampered—it’s a dog’s life. Is that any way to treat your best friend?

A PRINCESS OF MARS

2011-02-14T17:37:00.000-08:00

School days, school days! Something just reminded me of good old Perkiomen School in Pennsburg, Pa., where I put in a couple of turbid semesters before transferring to the far superior Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York City. It had been very nearly a waste of time, because I was put into a form according to my age rather than my aptitudes, which included a better grasp of English grammar than that of my classmates. No boasting here; they were a pretty dim lot.

Why Perkiomen? My father had a business friend, Stephen Kiss, a good name in English, but not so much in Hungarian (which he was), where it means “small.” He had been in this country longer than our recently immigrated family, so my father asked him to recommend a private school for me. With small understanding, he picked Perkiomen for my sixteen-year-old self.

Pennsburg was a burg indeed. Not even a one-horse town—I certainly don’t recall seeing a single horse. As for the school, no one with horse sense would have chosen it. My having an assiduous, book learner’s grasp of English made me stand out somewhat undeservedly, which is how I, a junior, caught the attention of senior English teacher Homer Nearing. A smart young fellow he was, sophisticated, witty, very erudite, and as eccentric as his name. Why he was stuck in that Sargasso Sea of scholarship, Perkiomen, I cannot now comprehend.

The only distinction the school seemed to have was the chapel, where the banners of many nations were displayed, purchased with the pocket money of hapless former students from the respective countries. Clarence Tobias, the headmaster, had sweet-talked them into forking over a hundred bucks per flag. I later learned that Tobias had embezzled from the school, and much of the flag money doubtless ended up in his pocket. He tried very hard to make me pay for a Yugoslav flag, but I didn’t bite--one of my extremely rare sound financial decisions.

But back to Homer Nearing. He and a girlfriend, a grad student in Philadelphia, were collaborating on an epistolary novel. It took place on a desert island, where two young lovers were stranded. Homer and Girlfriend wrote alternating chapters, but sometimes a favorite student was allowed to contribute a chapter as well. I was such a one, but for the life of me I can’t remember what I wrote.

Most likely it was something in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs, some of whose work, back in my Belgrade days, I devoured. (It made my worthy private English tutor wonder how my bookshelves could incongruously house, side by side, the collected works of Friedrich Schiller, in German yet, and Edgar Burroughs.) I had no use for Burroughs’s Tarzan novels (though I liked the movie versions), but I relished the Martian series. This chiefly on account of Dejah Thoris, a Princess of Mars, for whom the first of the novels was named. She was extremely beautiful, and differed from Earth girls only in that her skin was strikingly pink. Schiaparelli pink, I imagined, a shade I liked.

The good thing about these novels was that they were not sci-fi, which would have bored me. Thus Captain John Carter, the Virginian hero and Dejah Thoris’s lover, did not arrive on Mars by means of some complicated interplanetary contraption, but simply by loving the red (or perhaps pink) planet, often staring at it, and one day finding himself miraculously transported there.

Ah, Dejah Thoris! How lovely a damsel she was, and how much in distress, always needing John Carter to rescue her. In looks and misadventures she was not unlike a much later favorite of mine, Dale Arden, the beloved of the eponymous protagonist of the Flash Gordon comic strip. Equally disaster prone, she was dependent on Flash to keep saving her. Needless to say, I projected myself into the shoes (sandals? boots?) of these gallant rescuers.

I wonder what became of that epistolary novel. Unpublished, it almost certainly never got finished, and was, like Penelope’s web, useful merely as an ongoing project that warded off other lovers. Curiously, though, I have only two clear memories from my friendship with Homer Nearing.

One concerns the pronunciation of the name of the Russian composer Borodin. We had a lengthy and lively altercation about where the accent should fall. Homer insisted it belongs on the BO; I plunked for the RO. When we finally looked him up somewhere in those pre-Wikipedia days, the accent was assigned, reliably or not, to the DIN. To this day I haven’t investigated which is correct, not wishing either Homer or me to be tarred with the stigma of error. The other is Homer's response to someone's suggestion he take up equitation: "Why should I give a horse the useful exercise I need for myself?"

Back, however, to Pennsburg. The prettiest girl around was named Florence, a waitress who went out with some of the Perkiomen seniors, she being, I guess, of their age. Though she liked me, I was too young to be of real interest, which filled me with pangs of jealousy. But my chance came. Florence was operated on for appendicitis, and was recuperating in her Allentown hospital bed. I bought some flowers and made a pilgrimage to her, by my boyish standards, distant bedside. None of her senior boyfriends had paid her the slightest visit, and she was duly touched. But not enough so to go out with me.

Many years later, a man in publishing and common friend of ours, put us in touch, and a correspondence ensued, with--Florence being a divorcee with a grown daughter who favored the idea— her hoping for a possible renewed nexus. As it happens, at that very time a book of mine came out with a reminiscence of Florence. I described her as a charming butterfly getting involved with various students, a bit flighty but appealing. Well, I got a furious letter from her daughter saying how hurt her mother was to be accused of promiscuity, and that was the last I heard from either of them.

However, to return to Homer Nearing. As I got to be somewhat known as a critic, a lady—I forget how she made the connection—wrote to me that my old teacher, now a crabbed recluse, was living in a suburb of Philadelphia, and would probably enjoy hearing from me. In those days, Pat, my wife, and I made fairly frequent trips to Phillie, partly for me to review some play, partly for us to dine at Le Bec Fin, our favorite restaurant anywhere.

So, with such a trip impending, I wrote Homer, and he somewhat reluctantly agreed to a meeting at the hotel. I can’t recall why this didn’t happen, but, alas, I didn’t get a chance to acknowledge how much he had meant to me. Shortly later I was sent a newspaper clipping with his obituary.

Thus, in compensation, I am making a point of thanking my wife for all I owe to her, my real-life Dejah Thoris. And I would strongly advise you that, upon reading this, you too give explicit thanks to someone from whom you have learned an important lesson or two.

In Praise of Concerts, However Imperfect

2011-02-08T20:51:00.000-08:00

Far be it from me to put classical concertgoing above theatergoing, or vice versa. Both afford pleasure and have their important place in civilized life. But I must concede that concerts, even imperfect, tend to be more dependable than today’s theater, at least as experienced by a critic. Why is that?

Classical music has one distinct advantage: it cannot undergo the drastic changes inflicted by megalomaniacal directors, or idiocies served up by deluded producers. Even if, say, a Shakespearean text is adhered to, it is nowadays exposed to unwarranted changes of locale and period, fantastic set design, outlandish costuming, frantic mumbling or illicit pauses, quixotic casting and whatever other iniquities a text can be heir to. And let us not forget cases of egregious lack of talent.

Now take a piece of classical music. True, a conductor or soloist can, and perhaps should, introduce idiosyncratic differences. Yet the notes themselves might as well be written in cement as on paper, and no one wholly incompetent, unprepared or demented would dare to face a keyboard or raise a baton. A performance may be lackluster or hyperkinetic, but the sonata or symphony will still be recognizable. I have caught productions of classic plays, however, that left me wondering what I was seeing.

Thus the three concerts I recently attended were recognizably Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson’s Knickerbocker Holiday, the same team’s Lost in the Stars, and Alberic Magnard’s magnificent opera Berenice. I propose to write about them not as a music critic, for which I haven’t the competence, but as a music lover, for which my book John Simon on Music should adequately testify.

For two evenings in late January at Tully Hall, the American Symphony Orchestra joined by the Collegiate Chorale, both under James Bagwell, put on a semi—no, quarter—staged concert version. The original Broadway production of 1938, directed by Joshua Logan, had a semi-successful run of 168 performances, mostly on the strength of Walter Huston as Governor Peter Stuyvesant.

The story is introduced by Washington Irving, on one of whose writings the show is based. We are in New Amsterdam in 1647, as Stuyvesant, the new governor, is about to arrive. The maladroit and unprincipled town council, to throw dust in his eyes, wants to stage a public hanging. The obvious candidate is young Brom Broeck, the town’s liberal and sweetheart of Tina Tienhoven, daughter of one of the disapproving councilors. Pieter cancels the hanging, but Brom will be jailed so that the elderly governor (a satire on FDR) can himself marry the protesting young woman, as her father commands.

But Washington Irving steps in with a warning about how history will judge Stuyvesant. Broeck is allowed to wed Tina, and the governor is induced to become more democratic. The whole show was a Republican satire on Roosevelt and the New Deal, most of which, however timely today, was lacking from the concert version written by Ted Sperling and Edward Barnes, and directed by the former.

Nevertheless, the orchestra and chorus performed compellingly, and only the characters of the defanged satire, mostly turned into farce figures, fared poorly.The heavy Dutch accent of the councilors clashed with the all-American English of Stuyvesant, though that was the least of Victor Garber’s unvirile personation. No more sturdy was the fussily gesticulating Irving of Bryce Pinkham. As the lovers, Ben Davis and Kelli O’Hara did all right by the indestructible “It Never Was You,” but, afterwards, neither O’Hara, an overdecorated veteran ingénue, nor Davis, a blandly colorless Brom, managed to prove much beyond that two sticks rubbed together require more than a couple of hours to strike a spark. The supporting cast, largely because of the direction, was more hammy than incandescent.

Even so, it was good to hear a more or less complete Knickerbocker Holiday, of which, there is only a CD of a truncated 1938 radio broadcast starring Walter Huston in his signature role. Recording this 2011 version will be no help, considering how bloodlessly Garber rendered, with his fussy but desiccated approach, such a superb number as “September Song,” which only the Times reviewer managed to compare to Huston’s, and only his mother could love.

Encores! the laudable ongoing series of musical comedy revivals at City Center, offered a semi-staged version of the Weill-Anderson Lost in the Stars. Based on a novel by South Africa’s Alan Paton, this tells the story of Reverend Stephen Kumalo, from the South African hinterland, traveling to Johannesburg to retrieve his long unheard-from prodigal son Absalom (note the biblical allusion). The youth has impregnated his girlfriend Irina, and, desperate to provide for her and the coming baby, joins some unsavory companions in a robbery that goes awry as the panicked Absalom inadvertently shoots the son of James Jarvis, the powerful white supremacist landowner. Unlike the lying robbers, who get off scot free, Absalom, partly under his preacher father’s influence and aware of the consequences, tells the truth and is condemned to death by hanging. The two fathers, each with a lost son, manage to become friends.

This 1949 show, Weill’s last, had only a passable 273-performance run, despite a remarkable score blending European, American, and African musical elements, and comprising some marvelous songs. There is “Thousands of Miles,” sung by Stephen Kumalo , in which he reflects about family bonds thicker than geographical distance. Later, there is the minister’s touching title song, “Lost in the Stars,” about forlorn humanity adrift under the cold stars. Both songs were sterlingly rendered by Chuck Cooper, whose somewhat stiff acting did not match his vocal prowess.

Then there were the two terrific numbers for Irina: the deeply moving torch song “Trouble Man,” and the lovingly solicitous ballad “Stay Well,” unhappily damaged by the shrillness and mugging of Sherry Boone. Fine, too, was the song bearing the title of Paton’s novel, “Cry, the Beloved Country,” magisterially delivered by Quentin Earl Darrington as the Chorus Leader, and an endearing comedy number, “Big Mole,” for Stephen’s nephew Alex, irresistibly performed by the child actor Jeremy Gumbs.

Three characters who, for mysterious reasons, have no songs, were nonetheless incisively portrayed by Daniel Breaker as Absalom, Daniel Gerroll as James Jarvis, and John Douglas Thompson, as Stephen’s brother, John, a morally lax, successful opportunist. But I saw why the show didn’t have the musically merited success: despite its quasi-happy ending, it is too serious and sad for popular consumption.

As for me, the acceptable lyrics, shattering story, and seductive Weill score had me stellbound. Weill is one of those composers whose music is a calling card, unmistakably his alone, despite oodles of imitators. Gripping or caressing, declamatory or insinuating, laughing or longing, it targets the gut as much as the ear. Highly chromatic, despite or because of unexpected modulations, the melodies unfailingly hit home and, once there, never leave the ravished memory.

From the two shows discussed, everyone should own at least some of Lotte Lenya’s performances (a plague on Ute Lemper’s later, progressively worse mannerisms.) For Knickerbocker Holiday, there is a 1938 radio broadcast recording with Walter Huston. As for Lost in the Stars, there is a 1974 King Video DVD with Brock Peters and Melba Moore; a 1949 Original Cast recording; and a 1993 studio cast conducted by Julius Rudel.

We move now to Carnegie Hall, for a concert version of Alberic Magnard’s third, last and best, opera, Berenice, with the composer’s libretto based on Racine’s tragedy. It is the story of the historic love affair between Berenice, queen of Judea, and Titus, son of Vespasian and heir to the imperial Roman throne. Though at various times Titus and/or Berenice think they can be happily married, Mucien (Mucianus), a fervent Roman general, keeps reminding Titus--especially after he has become emperor--of the need to send Berenice packing and marry some politically sanctioned Roman maiden.

Finally, the heartbroken Berenice herself persuades the profoundly riven emperor that they must part. Sailing away, she makes an offering to Venus, for having allowed her a final tryst with a loving Titus: she cuts off her gorgeous tresses and tosses them into the sea, whence, back when, the goddess had risen.

At the concert, Leon Botstein led the American Symphony Orchestra with his usual schoolmasterly baton in a rather foursquare rendition. The president of Bard College, he is an incomparable programmer, digging up neglected treasures such as this one with tireless taste and acumen. But as a too schematic conductor, he conducts himself less brilliantly. Yet even in imperfect packaging, his choices are worthy of welcome.

Magnard (1865-1914) was a man of great gifts and the highest principles. The son of the wealthy editor of Le Figaro, France’s leading newspaper, he scrupulously sidestepped his father’s wealth and potentially helpful contacts. A bit of a loner, but generous to a fault, he composed a carefully sifted, unvoluminous oeuvre, somewhat under Wagner’s influence, but ultimately his very personal own, and comprising orchestral, operatic, and chamber works of rare quality.

His death was characteristic of his bravery and highmindedness. It was World War I when an occupying German regiment arrived at Baron, not far from Paris, in front of Magnard’s baronial mansion. Rather than surrender, Magnard alone confronted the enemy troop, shooting one man dead. When fire was set to the building, the heroic defender and a sizable part of his works perished with it.

The Berenice music, with its leitmotifs and sustained intensity, is almost too much of a piece, but that piece, melodious yet also dramatic when needed, has only the lightest dustings of Tristan, and of Massenet and d’Indy, with whom Magnard had studied. It emerges, richly chromatic and lushly orchestrated, enticingly unique. Why it remains, like Magnard’s beautiful music in general, so little performed may be based on an initially uncomprehending and unsympathetic reception. If you can ferret out some of the fairly numerous but relatively hard to come by recordings, pick any and be enchanted. Berenice is available at the House of Opera website in a 2001 recording by the Marseille Opera company--now reduced to a mere $5.83.

At Carnegie Hall, the baritone Brian Mulligan was a forcefully projected Titus, but something in his would-be-heroic but merely haughty demeanor undercut his effectiveness. As Berenice, the mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens struck me as perfectly satisfactory, though the one review I caught (in the Times) was rather less than flattering. As Mucien, the bass Gregory Rrinhart fared better in the review, though to me his voice sounded a bit dry. Berenice’s maid, Lia, was sung without special distinction by another mezzo, Margaret Lattimore, but the part doesn’t require much distinction. As mentioned, Botstein’s conducting lacked pizzazz, or even variety, but the work held one’s gratified attention anyway for all its near three-hour duration.

There is something about French music that I especially respond to. Its lyricism seems to me particularly lyrical, airy but also with a quality for which Hungarian has a uniquely apt expression, fulbemaszo (I lack the necessary umlaut and accents), meaning creeping-into-the-ear, i.e., ambushingly tuneful. And there is in it often a playful wit leavening the sentimental—think Poulenc--which I am a sucker for. Furthermore, if the word “aristocratic” can be applied to music, it surely characterizes a work like Berenice. Though not full of readily detachable arias, it is replete with vocal and orchestral beauties, the whole exponentially greater than the sum of its parts.

So there. This is what I like about concerts: even in imperfect performances, they remain enjoyable. I wish the same could be said for our theater, which is all too often perfect—that is to say perfectly otiose.

Fractured Memoir

2011-02-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

Often I have been asked to write my memoir. My negative answer was always based on never having kept a diary, and not being anywhere near memorious enough. Example: What’s the good of having pleasurably lunched with the great writer Jorge Luis Borges, when all I can remember is how beautifully he spoke English, but not a single word spoken by anyone?

Now, however, a lesser possibility presents itself: retrieving some random fragments from an unrecorded past, starting with my first fifteen-and-a-half years spent, save one year at a public school in England, in what is now Serbia but was then Yugoslavia.

At age two, I moved with my parents to the capital, Belgrade, and along came my trusty nanny, Mia. My parents had the good idea of having me learn an important foreign language as it were from the cradle; this proved to be Mia’s native tongue, German. Much as I loved her, I remember only two things involving Mia.

One was her mysterious response to my insistent queries about how she, as a female, comports herself on the toilet: “I never go to the toilet.” The other concerns a walk in the park (the gorgeous Kalimegdan at the confluence of two rivers) where we came upon a nest of insects. They may have been only ants, though I recall them as beetles. “What a multitude of beetles,” I exclaimed in German. And although the German Menge is less impressive than the English multitude, coming from a four-year-old it was thought to be cause enough to prophesy language playing a significant part in my future.

Later, I was attending a German-Serbian elementary school, where we were taught in both languages. When the school participated in a program at the National Theater, my role was a mute one: To cross the large stage wearing long pants and an adult fedora, and, as I paced ostentatiously twirling a cane, impersonating “a fine gentleman.” Did this augur a theatrical future?

Now take the occasion of a school outing where I walked alongside Christoph von Heeren, the son of the German ambassador. I was about to eat the orange I took out of my satchel when I noticed the envious gaze of the young Teuton. I offered him some of the orange, but the greedy bastard devoured all of it. Not to seem offended or offending, I proceeded to chew on the rinds. “Isn’t it perfect ,” said the Nazi piglet, “that I like the orange while you prefer the peel.” Did this cruelty foretell what his country was to do to ours?

I recall also my being enamored of my Serbian-language teacher, Miss Orahek or Orehek. She was tall, brunette and beautiful, and I recall asking her whether she would wait for me to be old enough to ask for her hand in marriage. I can only guess at her answer, but the question surely portended something like a passionate future. My real first love, though, was Ljiljana (Lilian) Nizhetich, younger sister of my school chum Branko. At thirteen, she was a delicate, porcelain-figurine beauty by whom I was never even granted a kiss. Years later, she was to tell me how envious her classmates were of her being Jovan (John) Simon’s love.

World War II induced our move to America, where my father had already established a beachhead. On a winter evening, my mother and I and another lady with her son, Tom, were to catch what somehow was the last train we could board out of Belgrade. The ladies and Tom were waiting at the railway station while I was saying my mournful good-bye to Branko and Ljiljana at their family home. Someone warned me about missing my train, whereupon I grabbed what I thought was my new hat (though it turned out to be someone else’s and way too big for me), and ran to the station, arriving fairly late, which earned me a slap from a family friend who was seeing us off. Luckily the train was even later than I, so we just managed to catch it.

Another comical memory. I had an older half brother from my mother’s first marriage. This George was a kleptomaniac, and on his rare visits we had to lock up our valuables. Anyway, on a certain night, George and I were in parallel single beds, and he devised a game: who could produce a greater number of farts, as we both held perfume bottles (where did we get them?) to our noses. I can’t remember who won, though in such a game the winner may be the real loser. George was in the Yugoslav navy and vanished during the war. I like to think that he was in our only submarine, the Fearless, on the day of its launch, witnessed by international dignitaries. The submersion was exemplary, but the Fearless proved totally unable to resurface.

As a very little boy I was sick with the flu. I was already enamored of a movie star, Jeanette MacDonald, and kept pestering my parents to get her to come to my bedside and speed my recovery. They assured me that they had wired her and she had wired back that she would come. She didn’t, but somehow I managed to get well anyhow.

Shortly before we emigrated to America, I was in the fifth year of the gimnazija (secondary school), and had already published in the leading literary journal a verse translation of “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer, whom I took to be a woman. On that basis, I was exceptionally elected to the high-school literary society open only to older students. I was very proud of it, and bitterly resented having to forfeit this privilege even for the sake of mythic America.

Apropos literary efforts, a classmate of mine by the name of Feifer persuaded me to submit something to Film Journal, the Serbian film magazine, because I could translate articles from American movie magazines, which we all scoured for their pictures. Filmski Zhurnal was interested, and published a story I had invented out of whole cloth (finding the actual stuff too tame) and dictated to Feifer. It concerned a romance between Dorothy Lamour and Greg Bautzer, a Hollywood lawyer to the stars, particularly the female ones, because, as I was later to learn, he was reputed to have a penis that could compete in magnitude with the champion one belonging to Victor Mature. In my story, with fine disregard for both geography and biography—not to mention creature comfort--I had the lovers making out on a coral reef off the coast of Hawaii.

Our journey to America—to escape the foreseen conquest of Yugoslavia by the hated Germans—was a fraught one. We were stuck for long, frustrating times in both Genoa and Lisbon. On the plane from the former to the latter, with an overnight stop in Madrid, I developed a crush on a Swedish opera singer, Margit von Ende. She, in turn, was starting an affair with another fellow traveler, the famous Italian soccer referee, Barlasina. I paid dearly for my mental unfaithfulness to Ljiljana. On the beach at Estoril I spotted a girl who struck me as a dead ringer for my high-school sweetheart, whom, in that unknown girl, I lost a second time.

The only boat from Lisbon we could eventually get onto went to Havana. On board, I was smitten with an older woman, the Austrian Kitty, all of 18 or 19. In Havana, all passengers were confined for a sleepless night to a sort of concentration camp. This amused Tom and me, but had the frightened Kitty in tears. It made parting easier: I could not love a coward.

When we finally got to New York, I couldn’t quite believe that I was in that fabled land whose capital was clearly Hollywood, where all the movie stars lived. Only when I switched on the radio and heard another love, Loretta Young, so to speak in person, did I fully comprehend that this was indeed America.

That reminds me of another Belgrade activity. I was buying several of those foreign movie magazines and cutting out pictures mostly of my favorite actresses, regardless of whether they were stars or starlets, and pasting them into a scrapbook. This tome was so dear to me that I carried it with me to America in preference to some beautiful books I had received as prizes from my year in the British school. They included the Pleiade edition of Montaigne’s essays and a leather-bound copy of Kipling’s Kim. To be sure, I hoped our relocation would prove temporary—that life would soon be as before and I reunited with my books.

Well, there was no such proximous return, and there is even no Yugoslavia anymore, though Serbia still exists, like that scrapbook, now added to my papers at the Performing Arts Library in Lincoln Center. But there was one glorious long-ago evening when the late playwright-scenarist Peter Stone, Tommy Tune, Donna McKechnie, my wife Pat, and I were leafing and laughing through its pages. I think the greatest number of pictures showed blond Brenda Joyce and brunette Marsha Hunt, never major stars in Hollywood, but paramount in my affection. Only Peter vaguely remembered them, but in that scrapbook they live forever.

Quite a few of the pictures were also of Dorothy Lamour in her sarong. Also a few of male stars, but not a one of Greg Bautzer.

Please Attend to John Pudney

2011-01-25T13:14:00.000-08:00

Because the charming secretary of my primary physician is called Althea, I read her the last stanza of Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea, from Prison.” I quoted from the old Everyman Library’s Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century, though I could have from several other of my anthologies. It contains, after all, the famous lines, “Stone walls do not a prison make,/ Nor iron bars a cage,” and what gloriously follows. But that “minor poets” set me thinking: What exactly is a minor poet? What significance, if any, have the epithets minor and major outside musical scales? Do those presumptive categories have any real meaning in the arts?

Well, in some places, alas, they do. When I was teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle, I casually remarked to someone that Theodore Roethke was a good minor poet. MINOR?! All hell broke loose. Roethke, in those days, was the English department's, the university's, perhaps the entire state's, superstar. He taught the celebrity course that yielded some well-known poets, my favorite among them the sadly underrated James Wright. Roethke, who had at times been quite condescending, wrote me an enthusiastic fan letter about a villanelle of mine published in the Paris Review. But, at that time, he was in the elegant loony bin where he periodically, self-depreciatingly stayed.

So what makes a so-called minor artist in poetry? Who determines the classification? If we stick to English poetry, Auden, Eliot, Yeats, Pound, and my favorite Robert Graves have, or ought to have, major status. Many would argue for Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams, not on my list, though nowadays even such an obvious phony as John Ashbery may pass for major. On the other hand, many of my choices--E.E. Cummings, John Crowe Ransom and Louis MacNeice--may be considered minor. I think Richard Wilbur ought to make major as well, but not Robert Lowell.

Let's examine some criteria. Quantity surely is not it. Eliot's main oeuvre can fit into a very slim plaquette, yet clearly registers major. Conversely, such esteemed polygraphers as John Ashbery, who never wrote anything I would call a poem, or Allen Ginsberg, who wrote at best one dubious rant, would probably get enough votes for major.

Innovation may make majors. But only backed up by poetic quality. Otherwise Louis Zukofsky and H.D. might pass for major poets. Surely not. Others may be teetering on the edge. I would seriously consider Dylan Thomas; but what about a poet like Geoffrey Hill, adored by the academy and many fellow poets, but, except for his earliest poems, most obdurately obscure and esoteric, and incomprehensible even to intelligent readers--can that be a major poet? Yet innovative he certainly is.

Popularity might be a criterion, but is it truly? I myself, like thousands of others, cherish the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, but does that make her a major poet? Hers is essentially love poetry or nature poetry (another kind of love poetry), or elegies for transience and mortality. All perfectly good subjects, but perhaps the least bit too facile, too heart-on-the-sleeve, too modest in scope, too--damn it--accessible. Does speaking simply and directly and without any innovation downgrade the work? I confess I'd rather reread a Millay sonnet than an Eliot "Quartet."

I think it would make much more sense to speak of major poems rather than major poets. Individual poems by so-called minor poets can be every bit as good as the best of a major poet, only probably fewer. Take the case of John Pudney. When I was associate editor of the Mid-century Book Society, whose editors were W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, I happened to bring up Pudney in an editorial meeting. "Great guy," exclaimed Auden, who had been friends with the slightly younger Pudney since their school days. "He stood for Parliament while he was drunk." He may indeed have been a helluva fellow, although that may not show clearly from his rather too modest memoir, "Home & Away," subtitled, even more unassumingly, "an autobiographical gambit" in lower case. Yet the man has written at the very least one major poem.

Pudney (1909-77) had a rich and varied life, and published a slew of assorted verse and prose; and, also, as publisher, the verse and prose of many others. In the Royal Air Force during World War II, he held diverse positions. (Google him!) While squadron intelligence officer in Cornwall in 1941, during an air raid, he wrote his most famous poem, "For Johnny." I would group it with a somewhat later trilogy--as I would call it--"Smith," "Missing in Action" and"One Country-Bred," similar RAF poems. Johnny and Smith, after all, could have been the same person. Here is "For Johnny", immensely popular in wartime Britain:

Do not despair

For Johnny-head-in-air;

He sleeps as sound

As Johnny underground.

Fetch out no shroud

For Johnny-in the-cloud;

And keep your tears

For him in after years.

Better by far

For Johnny-the-bright-star

To keep your head,

And see his children fed.

I won't quote here the abovementioned trilogy, though it too is splendid. But just look how fine this poem is, of which I'll point to only one superb feature. Note how the dead flyer first appears in-the-air, which is rather generalized. But presently he is in-the-cloud, which is much more specific: every time we look at clouds, we may lovingly summon up Johnny flying in them. Finally, he becomes the-bright-star: a permanent, shining memory.

If this isn't a major poem, I don't know what is.

LEAVE SPIDEY ALONE!

2011-01-19T08:11:00.000-08:00

I logged on this morning to write about the Spiderman delay--one last time--but before doing so, thought I’d read up on what some of my colleagues posted on the topic this week. We have a meeting of the Drama Critics Circle coming up and one of the topics is whether one should go ahead and review Spiderman in advance of the rescheduled March 15 opening.

I see that Michael Riedel--the gossip columnist for the New York Post--is clamoring for critics to purchase their own tickets for the February 7 performance--which was to have been the opening. He suggests that the Spiderman folk are hoping the critics will purchase their own tickets on various dates and the reviews will trickle in having no impact. He also suggests that the only review that will count is Ben Brantley’s NY Times notice.

Adam Feldman of Time Out New York said in his January 15 blog post:

http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/upstaged-blog/699119/waiting-for-bono-spider-man-delayed-again%E2%80%A6again

exactly what I was going to say in my post today--and that is that we should leave Spidey and the creative team alone to do their work due to the fact that musicals are complicated of themselves let alone trying to coordinate all the never before seen technical elements that are being attempted in this show.

Looking at the line up of musicals slated to open this spring, most of the new shows have tried-out out of town (Catch Me if You Can, Wonderland) or been successful in London (Sister Act, Priscilla Queen of the Desert). Only the Book of Mormon has had a workshop and a reading but will also be in previews in New York City. The other musicals are revivals (Anything Goes and How to Succeed.)

Adam mentions Hello, Dolly! and the preview period out of town as an example of what can be won in an extended preview period. Back in 1952, the so called glory days of musical theatre, the great director Joshua Logan was faced with having to preview the musical Wish You Were Here in New York City for a similar reason as Spiderman’s--the complicated set. Wish You Were Here had a swimming pool onstage.

The show opened to bad notices. Logan greeted the cast the next day beaming, “It looks like we’ve got a hit!” He then put the show back in rehearsals and with the aid of Jerome Robbins and Donald Saddler made necessary changes. (This was in the days before Actors’ Equity controlled how many hours a cast could rehearse while in performance mode.) Logan used to stand to the side of the house and watch the audience during the performance of the show. When he saw faces looking bored he knew something was wrong on stage and set about to remedy that. He then invited the critics to return for another look. The show became a smash hit introducing young Phyllis Newman and Florence Henderson to New York audiences.

Another example of a show that was changed after it opened in NYC was Camelot. Camelot was overlong in the extended out of town tryout (“Camelot, cost-a-lot, cut-a lot” was the saying.) Moss Hart, Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe all become so ill out of town they had to be hospitalized. The show opened in New York without Moss Hart’s magic touch. When he had recovered from his illness, he came to see the show and made some cuts that tightened and improved it.

The musical Merrily We Roll Along tried out in New York City and suffered at the hands of the gossip columnist Liz Smith who kept reporting how many people were leaving the theatre night after night as changes were put in effect. How dispiriting that must have been for Hal Prince, Steve Sondheim, Larry Fuller and the young cast. Years later I attended a one night concert of the show and remarked to my companion at intermission, “I don’t understand why this show wasn’t a hit.”

These tales are now part of theatre lore. Who knows what will happen when the reviews of Spiderman come out--whenever they come out-- as far as issues of quality of the songwriting and storytelling. I applaud the creative team for taking the time they feel they need to rehearse the new cast members safely and insert rewrites to enhance the show.

I agree with Adam Feldman that this may well change the nature of previews in New York for technically complicated musicals and plays and I applaud that idea. To not acknowledge the time needed to accommodate technical advances is absurd. We are no longer in the time of rolling wagons and painted backdrops after all!

The extended delay may also cause Actors’ Equity to reconsider how many hours a week an expensive show in trouble can rehearse without overtaxing the cast and crew.

Perhaps even the pricing of previews will change. If I have any “issue” with extended previews, it’s that they used to be advertised as “low priced previews” and now they are charging regular prices and beyond.

The next time you’ll hear from me on the topic of Spiderman will be midnight of March 15, 2011 when my review in the Yonkers Tribune and Westchester Guardian will appear. That is--unless there is another delay.

Festina Lente (Hurry Slowly)

2011-01-18T05:47:00.000-08:00

The road to hell is, as we know, paved with good intentions. But there is a less well-known road that also leads to hell, or some lesser hells. It is the speedway, an asphalt express transport to tarnation. Speed, which is the curse of our civilization.

I was thinking of this today when I was looking up the etymology of “impend,” which has two meanings, both, of course, derived from the Latin. Ah, Latin! That reminded me of the College Boards, as a former college entrance exam was called. In it, as my headmaster apprised me, I had achieved the highest score in Latin in the country.

Now, I was pretty good at Latin, sure. But the highest scorer, surely not. Then it occurred to me: It wasn’t knowledge; it was speed. The written examination for Latin was in two sections, one for prose, one for poetry, and you were to choose one or the other. Since I finished the prose section quickly, I thought “What the hell!” and went on to the verse. So it was on the quantity, which is to say speed, of my answers that I really made it.

Ah, speed! It occurs to me that so much in our lives is counterproductively geared to speed: the maximum we can squeeze into the minimum of time. This impended on me on a half-hour phone in radio show on which I was a guest along with another interviewee. We were to make useful pronouncements--in just how much time? Advertising took up easily half of that half hour; the other half, involving a slew of questions (which also took their time) was split up between the two of us. How smart can you be in a sound bite of a few seconds?

It is pretty sad that even on radio, television’s poor cousin, there should be no chance for a little leisureliness--that even there the sound bite should rule. And just how much good are the soundest opinions spouted in sound bites? Do rattled-off statements make much of an impression?

The only place where an interviewee is given a little time is a television talk show, and it had better be a major one if it is to reach more than a handful of fanatics. But for that, you have to be a major celebrity, a movie or sports star or sex kitten, and blurt out chitchat, or at the very least a politician dispensing a prefabricated party line.

It occurs to me that success on every kind of test or examination hinges on speed rather than real aptitude. Thought takes time. Even if you are good at thinking on your feet, it behooves those feet to be running rather than firmly planted.

And speed is indirectly guilty even of crimes against language, against pleasing expression. Why do you suppose the deadly contamination of “like” has infected our language? Speakers who needed a little crutch when talking speedily, as most people do, used to rely on the “er.” It was a filler, as in “It happened on Saturday, or was it on . . . er. . . Friday or Sunday?” Now the “er” has been retired and replaced by “you know” and “I mean” and, most often, “like,” pressed into the service of besmirching speech, even if to “er” was more human.

The one speed-thing I used to be interested in was speed-reading. To a fairly slow reader it seemed like a good idea. Upon investigation, however, that proved illusory. Anything worth reading and absorbing—anything worth retaining—calls for “slowreading.” After all, doesn’t the very word “speed,” as the pseudonym of amphetamines, contain an implicit warning?

Dracula Yesterday, Vampires Forever

2011-01-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

Four rehearsals before the opening of the recent revival of the stage Dracula, director Paul Alexander fired leading actress Thora Birch. Four performances after opening, the revival of the play about the undead was dead as a doornail. Why was this creaky vehicle revived in the first place?

Vampires exercise a tremendous fascination on mere mortals, not only because they beget thrillers on page, stage and screen, but also, perhaps even more, because of their promise of an afterlife. If there can be creatures that survive death—however somberly, and even in godforsaken Transylvania—there is hope. If there are vampires, there may also be angels.

Important, too, is the sexual angle. The vampire is usually an aristocrat, Count Dracula, with whom, despite his creepy Hungarian accent, men want to identify, and by whom women want to be bitten. After all, the sucking of blood is sexy, the spilling of semen in reverse, fluid for fluid. It is a symbolic, uncensorable but equally orgasmic representation of the sexual act. And when the victim herself becomes a vampire, the union is perfect and, what is more, everlasting.

Some such things account for the current renaissance—more properly recrudescence—of the vampire novel, movie and, presumptively, stage play. But the advantages of the movie (sexy young actors, detailed sex scenes, endless special effects, spectacular locales) and the novel (if skillfully written, steady stimulus for the imagination) are enormous. The resources of the stage, mostly live actors, are considerably more limited. And what happens if even the actors fail you?

However, I am most concerned here with the grotesque aspects of the vampire story. I chortle recalling a long-ago movie—Danish, I believe, but dubbed into English—in which the word “vampire” was pronounced as “vompire.” What follows may be called vompire stories.

There is more than one vampire opera, the best known being Marschner’s Der Vampyr. The Grove Dictionary of Opera entry about it opens with the subtitle Grosse romantische Oper and continues “in two acts by Heinrich August Marschner to a libretto by Wilhelm August Wohlbrueck after plays based on John W. Polidori’s story The Vampyre, itself a revision of Lord Byron’s Fragment of a Novel, sometimes called Augustus Dowell.”

From so many Augustuses, or Augusts, involved, you would expect something more august; but though the music is not without some merit, the libretto is. Based like so much later stuff on he novel by Byron’s ludicrous personal physician, Dr. Polidori the first act has the non-singing Vampire Master granting Lord Ruthven, a novice vampire, a begged-for further year on earth, on condition that he suck to death three maidens by next midnight. Ruthven sings the aria “Ha! welche Lust!” (with the German Lust unfortunately joy rather than lust) and manages to dispatch only two maidens. Failing with the third, he is dragged to hell without so much as a memorable farewell aria.

Pretty vompirish, too, are these lines from The Gioaour by Lord Byron: “But first on earth, as vampire sent,/ Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent,/ Then ghastly haunt thy native place/ And suck the blood of all thy race.” That the entire race can be conveniently sucked in one place, suggests overcrowding that might welcome vampiric decimation. In Polidori’s novel we read, “He had been tormented by a vampyre, but had found a way to rid himself of the evil, by eating some of the earth out of the vampyre’s grave.” Which gives the sinister command “Bite the dust!” a therapeutic aspect.

Amusingly, the Oxford English Dictionary adduces the word “vampirarchy” from 1823 as referring to “a set of ruling persons comparable to vampires.” Sound familiar? From the year 1855, we read about “instances of vampirism, which chiefly occurred in Hungary,” a justification of Bela Lugosi’s ripe Hungarian accent

The word “vamp,” immortalized by Theda Bara, is derived from “vampire.” It is a relief, though, to read in The Listener of January 24, 1963, that “Marilyn Monroe had all the physical equipment of the vamp, but the spirit of the girl next door,” and that she was “never truly vampiric on screen.” Nevertheless, no thanks to the ERA, female vampires in literature were even commoner than male ones, with Keats’s Lamia perhaps the most famous

But let us not forget the vampire wife in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Serapionsbrueder (1819), who leaves her husband’s bed for a graveyard snack from a cadaver. Hubby throws her to the ground, she dies, but he, alas, loses his marbles. From 1823, we get E. Raupach’s (I translate) Let the Dead Rest, wherein a husband carries on amorously with his dead wife, who feeds on his and the children’s blood.

Most noteworthy is Theophile Gautier’s novella La Morte amoureuse (1836), with the priest Romuald enamored of a female corpse, kissing it (her?) and so getting a nightly concubine sustained by his sucked blood. A priestly colleague undertakes to dig up the moldering corpse while Romuald is watching, which pouts paid to his insalubrious addiction.

Beside all this, the Twilight novels and movies made from them seem downright epigonic—or perhaps vompiric. Even more so is the entry on “vampire” in the Petit Larousse Illustre. An illustrated text informs us about the giant bats and concludes: “Ils vivent de fruits, d’insectes et sucent le sang des animaux et des homes endormis.” Sucking the blood of sleeping humans? Rubbish. It is the editors of that French dictionary who were asleep, though, admittedly, mine is the 1946 edition. I haven’t checked whether the last sixty years were enough to wake them up.

NY Times Arts Beat Blog--Why Waiting To Review Makes Sense

2011-01-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/theater-talkback-why-waiting-to-review-makes-sense/

Above is a link to an Arts Beat blog post by Charles Isherwood which mentions the fact that I took issue with Jeremy Gerard covering Spiderman and noting that Jeremy has succeeded me at Bloomberg after having been my editor. Here is my feeling about that:

I don’t enjoy unfinished things. I don’t want to see unfinished shows for review. I can patiently wait for the designated time to review, whenever the invitation comes. If a show draws attention to itself by huge cost, injured cast members, and repeatedly delayed openings, so be it. The papers can publish articles about that, and so discharge their reportorial duties and cater to public curiosity. There are always plenty of other shows ready for review. And if some modest, three-performance-apiece experimental series doesn’t want critics at all, fine; the audience who are interested can buy the cheap tickets and be their own critics.

These are my views, quite irrespective of those of Jeremy Gerard, my former editor and now successor at Bloomberg News. If Bloomberg News wants to spend the money saved by firing me on buying tickets for shows, however distant, expensive or inexpensive, to be pre-reviewed by him, so be that too. I may judge it, but certainly not begrudge it.

I'm enjoying looking out the window on this snowy day.

Tonight I appear on Theater Talk with Jacques Le Sourd and Terry Teachout. The episode will be shown 30 minutes after midnight on Channel 13 and then be repeated several times over the weekend on CUNY.

I'll post an essay soon--- on vampires!

Resist the List

2011-01-04T19:23:00.000-08:00

Under the title “List! List! O, List!” a quotation from Hamlet (as what isn’t?), I checked in at New York magazine December 22, 1975, against Ten Best Lists, which I abhor. Here goes again, more compellingly I hope.

Reviewers at year’s end are necessarily less clear about what they wrote early on in the year. This may work to a play’s or film’s advantage if memory embellishes, or disadvantage if it fails. But that is the least of it.

First of all, why ten best? Why not five (more realistic) or twelve if it was a good year. I myself think that the tally is seldom that high; how often is there an exceptional year?

But there is an obsession with the number ten, whether from the biblical Decalogue, the metric system, the decimal system, or the fingers of one’s hands, even if they are all thumbs. We have a sentimental attachment to ten. A smashing woman is a perfect ten. A common reprimand is, “I’ve told you ten times!” There are, or were, such things as "Ten Cents a Dance" and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” And surely many more. But there is no earthly reason for there to be ten best films or plays. By the time you reach six, things become very questionable.

Still, the problem goes deeper than that. Let us assume that #1 is clearly tops. Yet how sure can we be about #2 being better than #3? How does one calibrate these things? In a horse race or in football scores you know exactly the order or ranking. But shows or movies? If anyone confronted the list-maker with exactly why that order, he would quite likely be at a loss, or forced to come up with some highly specious criteria.

Then there may be readers with long memories or ample files who will protest, “But you gave X a much better review than you did Y, so how come it’s lower on the list?” Furthermore, some readers may be incensed by finding something on every other list but yours. Even though you may tell yourself you don’t care, you might want to reconsider when it is already too late.

Let us, however, look closer yet. Something on a ten-best list assumes a special status. It is, as it were, on the books, as a mere review is not. Here the Decalogue comes in again. You are, so to speak, decreeing respect, in a way a mere review does not. (Or if it is a ten worst list, the same thing applies in reverse.) The list cannot be amended, as a review can elicit a re-review.

And heaven help you if, out of an excess of fairness, you offer a runner-up list. Then any number of readers will be reminded of movies or shows that strike them as surely worthy of the top ten, and they might have a point. Or are you to make it, like the wretched Oscars, the top twenty? Again, you may not care for anyone else’s opinion, but just perhaps you should.

All this applies more if you and your editors perceive you as a reviewer and may seek mass appeal. If they and you see you as a critic, full speed ahead without looking over your shoulder. Yet if you are a critic, it should be part of your mentality and mandate to have no use for lists in the first place.

Such matters, however, may have become academic in our age of dumbing-down, which sees to it that criticism—especially of theater and classical music—is irrelevant and discontinued as critics are fired almost wherever you look. And a good deal of so-called criticism that remains could pass for advertising. It may be a way of ridding us of the ten best lists, but hardly the desiderated one.

By Way of Resolutions

2011-01-01T08:58:00.000-08:00

It is New Year’s Day 2011 and what thoughts does this generate in my 85- year-old head? Another tooth has broken and fallen out; it will have to be replaced, however expensively. Thanks to my shrinking spine, I’ve gone from five feet ten and two-thirds to slightly under five seven. My trousers will have to be shortened. I have lost a well-paid job and have not been able to financially replace it. Well, there are enough holes on my belts for tightening. I have sold my beautiful three bedroom home near Lincoln Center and am looking for less expensive quarters.

What’s to be done against such diminishments? Fighting back. Finding good things that will accompany you into decrease, the way Everyman is accompanied into death by Good Deeds. A lovely piece of symbolism, but my good deeds, if any, won’t come walking through the door. Fight back how?

Well, first there is work. There is this blog with which to reach out to the others who can be talked to, befriended, and lose some of their otherness. Perhaps their problems, concerns, pleasures, can fit in with yours like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and together yield the picture of some smiling prospect.

Then there are books, books that can be read or reread and offer consolation. When I was very young, I thrilled to Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer; an autographed copy sits on my shelf. The print is devilishly fine, but I have my trusty glasses. It is a novel about young people growing up—but perhaps old people, too, can still do some growing up.

Or poetry. Here are the collected poems of Robert Graves that can bear repeated rereading. He knew all there is to know about love. Or E.E. Cummings, whose Complete Poems need considerable effort in hefting, but why not, since I don’t do any other kind of exercise? He too is witty and romantic like Graves, plus amusingly experimental.

Essays are always good; they challenge the mind into thinking rather than complaining . Before me is Isak Dinesen’s collection, Daguerreotypes and Other Essays. I have greatly enjoyed her stories, but these essays I have never touched—isn’t it time?

And there is music—my huge collection of classical CDs. How about a Samuel Barber concerto, to set me dreaming? Or some Janacek? His string quartets? Or an opera? There is wonderful tamed wildness in his music that can break out into colorful indignation or subside into jocular intimacy in a trice. Or for amusement, but amusement tinged with exquisite sentimentality, a little Poulenc? The ravishing Sextet, or a ballet, or any of the sonatas?

Well, already at the thought of it, one feels a little better. Then the phone. Isn’t there a conversation with an old pal that wasn’t properly concluded? Let the familiar voice blend with your own even more familiar one, and spontaneous dialogue yield some unexplored diversion.

Finally there is bed, sleep and dreams. This is where you can truly surprise yourself if you can transport your dream scenarios into your waking memory. The other night I had a long dream that, if I could have fully captured it and written it down, would have—damn it—made a terrific short story. But forgetting also has its rewards: dreams are like a collection of stories in a book especially written for you, and you want to get on to the next one. I say “for you” rather than “by you” because they are written by another self astonishingly lodged inside you. Close as a twin yet different. And you can be your own Dr. Freud.

Last night it was New Year's Eve, and waking up this morning it’s a whole new year. What will it bring you—or what will you contribute to it? Like seven new tiles in a Scrabble game: What word can you make out of them? “Renewal” would be nice.

Spiderman Birthpains

2010-12-29T09:34:00.000-08:00

   A curious item in The New York Times of December 28 gave me pause--actually more than a pause: theatrically speaking, a whole intermission. It concerns the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which two critics went and reviewed even though it doesn't open till February 7. Under ordinary circumstances this would be highly unethical: like grabbing a dish from a restaurant kitchen before it is fully cooked, and then judging the meal by it.
   But the excuse of the two reviewers--Jeremy Gerard of Bloomberg News and Linda Winer of Newsday--is that at $65,000,000, this is the most expensive show in Broadway history, and worldwide curiosity has been growing. Its acrobatics have caused four cast injuries--one extremely serious involving a thirty-foot fall. Its premiere has been postponed four times, and there have been nail-biting cancellations during three weeks of full-price previews at $75 to $150, and almost the double through brokers. Actors Equity and state and federal safety agencies have conducted public investigations. Director and co-writer (with Glen Berger) Julie Taymor, of Lion King fame, is making numerous changes to the book, particularly in the shaky second act. for which U2's Bono and The Edge, the songwriters, are writing two new numbers.
   With international interest clinging to the much written-up goings-on, critical coverage may have appeared indicated. Still, we know that all is fair in love and war, but is it also in troubled musicals? Mr. Gerard even states that his non-scalper orchestra seat cost $292.50, presumably the kind of chutzpah that calls for no mercy.
   Telephonically queried by The New York Times, he quoted from his notice that it was "an interim report," and promised to revisit the finished show for a bona fide one. Ms. Winer similarly responded to the Times with a quotation from her published piece (hardly a review), asking wasn't it "nuts that critics should be the only interested parties who can't see the bride before the wedding?" Actually, the trope is unfortunate, it being firmly held that the bridegroom--as the metaphor implicitly casts the critic--should not see the bride before the ceremony.
   As I said, Ms. Winer, who doesn't declare her ticket price, doesn't really write a review either. She mostly quotes the comments she obtained from various audience members, and calls her article "preliminary observations." This doesn't diminish the onus. Most newspaper readers are more likely to honor the opinions of other theatergoers than those of the critics. Then again, even these theatergoers managed to be pretty wishy-washy--presumably not for reasons of ethics. The title of Ms. Winer's piece was "Shedding a Little Light on Spider-Man," which light hardly amounts to a struck match.
   Mr. Gerard, on the other hand, writes a full-scale review. Not having had the good or bad luck of seeing the show in previews, I cannot properly evaluate what he has written. It sounds balanced--half of it positive, half negative--either perfectly justified or carefully calibrated to appear neither cajoling nor craven. I consider it, however, unfair to the show, and certainly discourteous to other critics whose publications could or would not cough up $300 for a preview review.
   If the idea is that critics are to be part of the process of helping a troubled show, perhaps they could be invited to the preview performance and make oral comments to the artists. When Kiss of the Spiderwoman was trying out at New Musicals and was prematurely reviewed in the New York Times and elsewhere, I went up to see it but didn’t write about it—rather, I spoke with the producer Marty Bell about what I liked and didn’t like.
   There have been three or four previous instances of pre-reviewing, but the first time I can recall was in 1979, with a musical called Sarava, which shows how manners, even in such relatively trivial matters, have deteriorated. That one ran prosperous lower-price previews for six months before the papers' patience gave out. Although there were some favorable reviews, there were enough poor ones to close the show. I didn't catch Sarava, but am willing to believe that it got what it deserved; whereas Spider-Man, for all I know, may end up sufficiently improved to merit better. Well, we shall see. Until then, all I can say is we'll see if it's ca va or Serava.