AWARDS

It is unquestionably a good thing that prizes in the arts exist. By and large, artists of all types are underpaid—if paid at all!—and monetary awards help them create or, in many cases, even just subsist. My problem is who or what, and on what basis, is rewarded.

I have never been on the selection committee for a major monetary award, but I have frequently been a voter on New York or national film and theater awards. (Come to think of it, I was once a juror for the Paris Film Festival, but apparently managed to jinx it: it promptly ceased to exist.) Relatively rarely have I agreed on which plays or movies won awards; quite a few of them I downright abominated. The same goes for important awards I only read about.

There is even worse: I frequently had little or no respect for the persons adjudicating these awards. In fact, I was somewhat ashamed—pained by the thought that readers might assume that I actually voted for some of those stinkers. As if my single vote could have made much of a difference by defying the majority.

I vividly recall a session of the National Film Critics’ Society where Hollis Alpert passionately argued for Charles Champlin’s election to the group. I found myself wondering not only about the proposed postulant, but no less also about his ardent champion. What thinking person would want to gain membership predominantly on the efforts of such an advocate?

I likewise recall leaving a meeting with Stanley Kauffmann, whom I respected, and wondered why he had voted for a certain idiot. To which he replied that in a group comprising that many idiots, what difference would one more make. My point, however, was that it further diminished the slender chances of something worthwhile prevailing. Which raises the greater question of who let in the other voters. There is the obvious answer: the jobs they unfortunately held.

Frankly, I can see why first-rate critics might not want to be members of such an organization, although I can also see why they might want to. Being a voting member gives you the (specious) illusion that your views somehow matter, even if not even the whole issue—the unimportance of the occasion--hardly does. So the Oscars are of real interest only in the speeches made by the winners and presenters: who will come off with dignity, and who will make an ass of him or herself? And perhaps also in who will wear what laughably outlandish attire, and who will be in good taste?

Still, not wanting to be a voting member also makes sense. One looks at one’s fellow voters, in a group small enough to fit around a table, and wonders what one has in common with most of these individuals, and what good membership is in an assemblage in which you are visibly outnumbered, and your vote cannot count for much over against twenty or thirty others. And there is such a thing as guilt by association.

And then there is also the dreadful business of political correctness. The Nobel Prize in literature is clearly the most important extant literary award. Now if you look at the list of choices through the years, you are bound to be prey to contrary emotions. Yes, they have chosen some wonderful, often obscure but eminently deserving winners. But no, why on earth would they have picked this or that one?

Some of it has to be P.C. A country that hasn’t had a representative in years, or at all, must—it is high time!—have a winner. And who are we to dispute the choice? How many Egyptian novelists and African poets have we read? Can we truly tell whether this laureate won for being a novelist or for being Peruvian? Or of any other country short on accolades? You may actually stand a better chance of winning if you are from Honduras or Mozambique than if you are from France, England or the U.S.A. Of course, the Nobel Committee will sternly deny that geography has anything to do with it, and they may honestly believe what they are saying, but does that necessarily make it true?

I am guessing that it does for the current winner, Alice Munro. Regrettably, I have never read one of her stories, but I am ready to believe that the award was justified, having read many glowing and credible critiques of her work. The very fact that she has published numerous volumes of short stories, but eschewed novels, speaks for her. Surely the short story is the undervalued and relatively unrewarded cousin of the novel, yet to have steadily favored it may be proof of some kind of artistic valor and magnanimity. Also speaking for the bountiful Ms. Munro, now in her early eighties, is that, before winning her Nobel, she declared that she would write no more.

To acknowledge some sort of limitation in oneself is praiseworthy, but it is especially noble (not Nobel) to know when to stop something you are famous for. Just think of the enormous number of artists in any field who did not know when enough was enough, and went on turning out repetitive, diminished, even worthless work. This even holds for singers, who surely ought to know when their song has turned into a croak.

Then think also how hard things must be for the members of the Nobel Committee who surely cannot know all the many languages in which numerous writers publish, given also that translations from many of them do not exist, and even if they do, cannot readily be trusted. Lyric poetry, for one thing, is virtually untranslatable. So how does one pick a winner among thousands upon thousands? It is no surprise that there have been a few Nobel lit winners who sank back into justified oblivion. The wonder is how many have not.

Lamentable, too, are some of the Pulitzer Prize winners for drama. Nilo Cruz leaps to mind. Am I then against awards? Not at all. If anything, I am for more of them. Imagine if every American who wrote a play got something like a Pulitzer. The result would be that, among heaps of tripe, no genuine talent would be overlooked.

                                                                                                                                                                                  

MUSIC I LOVE

I recall a conversation with a minor conductor. MC: Do you like Bach? JS: Not at all. MC: How about Mozart? JS: Ditto. MC: Beethoven? JS: Hardly. MC (exasperated): Do you like music? JS: Absolutely.

Then there is a hostile review of my book “John Simon on Music,” written by Alan Rich. We knew each other quite well without any love lost. Rich was outraged about there being in it only one mention of Mozart, and even that in a quotation from someone else.

Well, there it is: I don’t like any music before some Schubert, and not even all of his. What is all this about? Let me try to explain.

It seems to me that before the Romantics, music was constricted. I do not dispute that the two Bs and one M were important composers, but for me they were all about technique and technical innovation, but ultimately—even the tonitruous Beethoven—not truly free. Emotion, as I understand it, does not come in until the Romantics, and has been with us at least until Stockhausen and John Cage.

Now it would be nice if I were a musician and able, with illustrative examples and technical analysis, to explain the differences between, say, a passage in Mozart and one in Debussy. But, however enthusiastic, I am only a layman lacking even a college course in music, and can speak only the language of fellow laymen.

It appears to me that Bach and Mozart (Beethoven was somewhat different) wrote predictable, mathematical music, limited in scope, not unlike a caged canary’s pleasant but anodyne chirping. It was also perfectly square, by which I mean that from the first two notes of a bar you could predict the next two. Beethoven was, at any rate, impassioned, but not in a fully melodious way.

There were, of course, changes in rhythm and dynamics, and some very modest surprises. But even when the music deigned to be fast and loud, it was still wallpaper to me, which, after all, can also be loud and repeats its pattern rapidly.

Absent, for me, is what some would call sentimentality. There is no ecstasy, a sense of pathos even in the lighter colors, a stirring up of one’s feelings, beauty so intense that it almost hurts. There isn’t that mercurial quality of sudden changes from comedy to tragedy, a rhapsodic freedom to roam into supermelodiousness, into stirring harmonies and polyphony, into guarded poly- or atonality, into tunefulness that approaches the orgasmic as it fluctuates between gossamer and a kind of endearing grandiloquence. What can I say? Modulation, chromaticism, rapture.

To me, the top dozen geniuses among composers are Barber, Bartok, Berg, Debussy, Faure, Janacek, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Ravel, Shostakovich, Richard Strauss and Stravinsky. Following them there are any number of masters, of whom I want to call attention to only a few, who, not being obvious, are easily overlooked. Among these I cite Berkeley, Dutilleux, Guarnieri, Honegger, Ibert, Martin, Martinu, Mompou, Montsalvatge, Szymanovski, A. Tcherepnin and Tansman, though for a full list of them you will have to consult “John Simon on Music,” where you will find essays on most of them.

And then there are those whom I view as opera composers, even though they may have written quite a bit of other stuff. These would be Bizet, Britten, Gounod, Mussorgsky, Puccini, Verdi and Wagner, though (especially in the case of Wagner) I may consider them quite uneven.

And let me pay tribute to three popular composers who may be distinctly minor, but splendid in their way and particularly dear to me. There is, first, Nino Rota, chiefly remembered for his magnificent scores for Fellini movies. But he composed brilliantly for other filmmakers as well, and wrote classical music and operas nowise inferior to his finest film scores.

There is something about Rota’s music that can bring me very close to tears, as does much of that of Kurt Weill. He, too, was, even in his early classical compositions. close to popular music, but that, in someone like Weill or the delightful Noel Coward, is nowise diminishing, the way some of the great book illustrators are no less admirable than famous painters.

Finally, there are two composers whom I cherish for one work only, but what a work! They are Jerome Moross, whose musical “The Golden Apple,” and Ennio Morricone, whose film score for “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” are, for me, immortal masterpieces.

Let me conclude by translating a small excerpt from an essay on music by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-98), an important Preromantic, who had he not died so very young would have become an even more influential German writer, though he remains notable enough as is.

Music to me is altogether an image of our life: a touchingly brief joy that arises out of nothing and dissolves into nothing. . . .  I consider music the most wondrous of inventions, because it renders human sentiments in a superhuman manner; because it reveals to us, aloft over our heads, all the stirrings of our temperament, disembodied and arrayed in golden clouds of airy harmonies. Because it speaks in a language we do not know in our routine life, one that we learned we know not where and how, and that one is inclined to regard as the tongue of angels.

Just so, dear William Henry, if may translate also your given names, you who are known as the shy and melancholy Wackenroder, happy only when listening to music. I myself can be happy in diverse ways, but my music is surely very high among them.

THE USES OF GOD

When my father lay dying in a Florida hospital, he asked me whether there was God and an afterlife. I was in a quandary. If I said yes, I would have betrayed my sworn conviction. (Perhaps I should have anyway.) But I certainly didn’t want to say no. I chose a middle way: I don’t know. Let the poor man have his bit of terminal hope.

Even though he is a great universal panacea, I still find it surprising how many intellectuals believe in God and his (and their) Heaven, which I view as a survival of the superstitions of medieval Christianity. Even an intellectual like Bill Buckley wrote to me that he couldn’t live on without his firm belief in being reunited with his dead wife in Heaven. I wish I could believe in that happy supraterrestrial reunion.

Belief in God among educated persons today strikes me as peculiar indeed. In the Middle Ages one could entertain such a belief, though even as early as circa 200 A.D. the Christian bishop Tertullian said “Credo quia absurdum,” I believe because it is absurd. Faith, in my estimation, is the one thing one cannot take on faith.

How can one honestly believe in a God who is different in every religion, if not every single believer? Saint Nicholas at least has been recently disenfranchised, little Virginia and her mentor notwithstanding. Alexander Pope wrote, “An honest man’s God’s noblest work of art,” which Oscar Wilde very persuasively reversed, “An honest God’s man’s noblest work of art.” I can even be touched by the humble belief of the French poet Francis Jammes in “the God of the poor, the simple God.” Yet even that was well before the Holocaust.

To be sure, there had been Torquemada and the Holy Inquisition and several varieties of genocide. But after the Six Million, how can anyone take the notion of God seriously? And even that is not all. Medieval folk could pretty much believe in a Heaven above and a Hell below. But we, with modern astronomy, space travel, geology, how can we? Is there perhaps a black hole in the universe where Paradise is hiding? Nietzsche’s God is dead; mine was stillborn.

“God” in fact has become a favorite phrase component, a self-serving battle cry for all the nations “under God.” It is what politicians invoke as part of their patriotic platform: “One nation under God,” “In God we trust,” “For God and country” are remunerative slogans on banners, coins of the realm, in demagogic sales pitches and national anthems.  It is even a word devalued by common usage in “God knows,” “Dear God,” “My God,” “God grant,” “Goddamned,” “Godawful,” “Godforsaken” and the rest. It is no wonder—although it should be—that the related Bible oath still has legal standing.

Granted even the unlikely scenario that God should become outmoded, Christians would still have their Savior, the Muslims their Prophet, and the Jews their Moses, though, to Jewish credit, the latter is invoked far less than the other two. In this respect, the ancient Greeks and Romans should be commended for having had the most entertaining myths, and the gods closest to Wilde’s honest God. A little adultery by Zeus and some mischief by Aphrodite are far more forgivable than a jihad.

All right, let’s look closer. God is credited with the creation of the universe. But surely a god who knew what he was doing would not be guilty of such disparities, such inconsistency, such favoritism. Why does one planet get several moons, while another must make do with one? Why does one planet have people, plants and animals, which no other one has? Why bother creating stars that become extinct? Why are some earthly regions too hot, others too cold?

True, there is something miraculous about the good things humanity has achieved, disregarding for the nonce the bad ones. Even something astonishing about the existence of mankind in the first place. There remains the seemingly unanswerable question: why should there be something rather than nothing? About the development from the atoms upward—or sideways—already Lucretius had creditable answers. But not even he could answer the initial, basic question that will apparently forever defy us to answer.

Deism of old and Unitarianism more recently have come up with tolerable religions—a good word be said too for the Quakers. But the fundamental question remains. My father, with whom this essay began, believed in the quasi-divinity of Nature. Very nice as such things go, but still not an answer. Saint Paul preached an Unknown God, but that was merely a proselytizing subterfuge. Up his sleeve, he had the biblical one.

None of this should discourage atheism. Strictly speaking, agnosticism would be more logical, except for its smelling of a craven compromise. Nonbelievers too must have a creed, especially in their fight against religious excesses. A banner with “We Don’t Know” on it would not stir anyone to action. We have to fight the obvious wrongs of religion: the suicide bombers, the jihads and intifadas, the seemingly ineradicable anti-Semitism. And all the wars fought in the name of religion, which is to say most of them.  But we must be against the less obvious conflicts too. There are Shiites and Sunnis of one kind or another in all of us.

Some successes there have been even without atheist support. The two Irelands seem to manage to coexist more or less peacefully, although future clashes are not inconceivable. French Canada may secede from the English one presumably without bloodshed. Look, however, at the messes in Africa and Asia. Colonialsim has gone, but wasn’t it at least marginally preferable to what has replaced it?

There are those who believe that the moral precepts and restraints of religion keep some order in the word. That without religion, wholesale anarchy and mayhem would become unbiquitous. Yet Nietzsche called Christianity the one great curse, and so it may be. Certainly some of the world’s most inviting and rousing churches are in Harlem, but how much of an Earthly Paradise have they elicited? Are the Tea Party’s born-again Christians making a better world? I doubt it.

Bernard Shaw wittily observed that the problem with Christianity was that it has never been put into practice. Are then two millennia insufficient time? I quote the final words of his Saint Joan, though perhaps in a somewhat different sense from hers: “How long, O Lord, how long?”

WORDPLAY

We need games. We know what all work and no play does to Johnny, and who wants to be a dull boy? The popularity of sports is, of course, the prime example of the role of games in our everyday life. Just try to imagine a world without sports and what that would do to the personality of millions of people: What would the passion expended on sports turn to instead? More crime? More religious fanaticism? More assorted acrimony?

But, even more salient is what we read in the recent obituary of the historian Pauline Maier: “Politics,” she wrote, “in a real sense was the first national game.” (I am not sure about what she meant by “in a real sense,” but never mind.) And so it still is, as witness the televised political debates, most recently among candidates for mayor of New York: all vague promises and intense one-upmanship and a rather gamy one at that.

Even more with us than politics is language. The one thing in quotidian use is words, words, words, to quote Hamlet. And with those words comes wordplay, the games played with words, rather than with balls, bars, or weapons. Which raises the question of what sports and discourse have in common.

Take games in the panem et circenses sense: why our intense fascination with circus artistes? It is threefold. First, surprise. What the circus artiste and the artist (paintier, musician, poet, novelist etc.) have in common is the ability to astonish us. The ability, say, to stand on one foot on the high wire. Or, in the case of the artiste’s relative, the athlete, to be able to jump higher or farther than anyone else. So too to produce an astounding poem, painting or song.

After surprise, comes admiration, involvement. That is to say, our feeling as audience or spectators, somewhat presumptuously, of somehow being part of the achievement: what good is prestidigitation  or  a championship without an audience? In other words, a sense of participation, even from where we merely sit and watch or listen or read.

Finally, pride. Pride that we know all the baseball scores, or the various roles of an actor or ballet dancer, or how a magic trick is done. Or that we played poker with a movie star, or had dinner with a prima ballerina assoluta. Or that we know every aria in a given opera. In other words, a kind of identification.

Now take wordplay, which also reaps a triple response. First surprise: How amazing! Second, admiration: How damn clever! Third pride: How smart of us to get the joke, to recognize and cherish the achievement. Who else would have so appreciated this pun, this witticism, this stylish turn of phrase?

Probably the prime example of wordplay is the pun. Consider, however, the apt yet illogical response to someone else’s verbal winner: “My word!” Surely it should be “Your word!” yet so eager are we to partake and to appropriate it that we illegitimately ejaculate “my.”

Yes, the pun, which in its grander synonym is the paranomasia, carrying its own definition coming from the Greek for “beside” and “to name.” In other words, giving a word a parallel yet different meaning by some slight change in sound, spelling or merely context. Exhibiting a skill similar to (and perhaps no lesser than) some circus or athletic feat.

Puns have borne the unjust brunt of constituting in many minds—including that of one of my former editors—“the lowest form of wit.” To which my response is that anything good enough for a mainstay in both Shakespeare and James Joyce is good enough for me. Alternatively, even the lowest form of wit is vastly preferable to the absence thereof.

But really and truly, why “the lowest form”? Take only two examples from an admirable book, Walter Redfern’s “Puns” (Basil Blackwell, 1984). The year, I’d like to think, not coincidentally that of George Orwell’s masterpiece for bad or well.

Example 1. Redfern writes, “Exploiting the literal level of tired metaphorical phrases can reveal a subtext; here again the pun unearths: ‘An atheist is a man with no invisible means of support.’” Attributed, I hope rightly, to John Buchan, an unfairly underappreciated writer. What exactly does this pun unearth? The courage of the atheist, his staunchness to go on without the lulling comforts of religion—which the irony nicely underlines.

Example 2. Redfern: “Sometimes we are offered an unlikely double helping, as in the Hollywood anecdote of the Jewish writer who went to the plastic surgeon. One of her friends remarked: ‘I see you’ve cut off your nose to spite your race.’ ‘Yes,’ replied the writer, ‘Now I’m a thing of beauty and a goy forever.’” This is rather like battling banjos, proof that punning can be a sport for two.

There is joy indeed in this. Just as a prize-winning sonata is a triumph for the composer, and a winning discus throw a coup for the athlete, a potent pun is a victory for the punster, to say nothing of the delight for his hearers. Of course, for the surprise factor to obtain, the pun has to be produced rat-a-tat, as a swift, unexpected comeback. Hesitancy, excogitation, greatly diminish the pun’s efficacy. Like, for instance, a greeting card well after the actual birthday, when it does not feel like a festive gesture anymore.

To be sure, when published in a piece of writing, time delay is no longer a problem, as when Kenneth Tynan’s review of “The World of Suzy Wong” came out in due times as “The World of Woozy Song.”  A spoonerism that, which is another form of wordplay. Similarly impressive was James Joyce referring to himself in writing as Germ’s Choice, a piece of heroic gallows humor considering how many maladies he suffered from. Names especially elicit punning; I speak as someone who has been duly kidded with Simple Simon and Simon Sez, though, regrettably, seldom if ever with Simon Pure.

A pun or some other wordplay performs handsomely as an aide-memoire. A truly great pun is unforgettable and stays with you for a lifetime. There are two examples I wish to adduce, though neither of them is English. First a German one, from a poem by Erich Kastner. (I have no umlaut, and “Kaestner” would not register with readers who don’t recognize it as a somewhat feeble but customary remedy for that lack.) Anyway, that lovable writer has a brilliant poem about the life of group performers of the Rockette variety, “Chor der Girls.” He refers to their “ewig gleiche Beinerlei.” Though nothing kills a joke like having to explain it, allow me to point out that in German “Bein” means leg, and “Einerlei,” sameness or monotony. Thus the eternal  sameness or monotony of a lifetime of  endlessly high-kicking chorines’ legs.

Now for a favorite piece of French wordplay, attributed, I hope rightly, to the great poet Alfred de Vigny, whose wonderful lyrics could use an occasional bit of levity. It is a distich of alexandrines: “Gall, amant de la reine, alla, tour magnanime,/ Gallamant de l’Arene a la tour Magne a Nimes.” (Again, please excuse my lack of accent marks.) In English: “Gall, lover of the queen, went in a spirited walk./ Gallantly from the Arena to the Magne tower at Nimes,” with reference to two landmarks of the town: the Roman arena and the famous tower. Punning hexameters from alpha to omega, a rhyming pun of epic proportions! Reminder: In French prosody, unlike in English, homonyms are allowed, the equivalent of rhyming words like “bread” and “bred” in English (bad) or “lait” and “laid” in French (okay).

Another popular form of wordplay is the palindrome: a word or whole phrase the same when read forward or backward. Most famous English ones are “Madam, I’m Adam” and “Able was I ere I saw Elba,” about the latter of which the excellent J. A. Cudden writes (in his invaluable “Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory”): “Attributed apocryphally to Napoleon, who, alas, spoke no English.” In his book, Cudden lists a good many other examples, as he does also of such related word games as he acrostic. Palindromes may serve no heuristic purpose, but what I would dub their ambidextrousness  is a pleasure to witness.

The acrostic, incidentally, has a good many practical uses, comparable to acronyms such as the IRA or the USA. But let me adduce a more literary example. a splendid love sonnet by the fine but underrated poet John Peale Bishop, entitled “A Recollection,” which is really an acrostic. It begins: “Famously she descended, her red hair/ Unbound and bronzed by sea-reflections, caught/ Crinkled with sea-pearls. The fine slender taut/ Knees that let down her feet upon the air” etc. Now if you read vertically down the first letters of the fourteen lines, you get “Fuck you, halfass.” Cognoscenti tell me that the obscene mockery was aimed at Nicholas Murray Butler, famous president of Columbia University. Be that as it may, the poem demonstrates how language can be simultaneously lyrical and satirical, with double meanings the stock-in-trade of wordplay.

Yet a further form of wordplay is what I would call the reversal, of which I immodestly quote one of my own examples that I had modestly forgotten until I was reminded of it by an interlocutor who recalled it. It seems that I referred to a certain female as being as homely as sin and as sinful as home.

Anagrams, too, are a popular word game, usable for comic effect. Thus Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet, invented a Welsh-sounding town called Llareggub. A hint to the uninitiated: read it backward and see what you get--a comic way of being obscene.

And then there is the double meaning. A famous example has Buonaparte, as Napoleon was known in Italy, accosting a hostile Italian monk with the accusation that all friars were scoundrels. Came the reply, “Non tutti, ma buona parte.” A dig too clever to be punishable.

Well, enough is enough. Too much play and no work make Johnny a dull jerk.

Sufficient unto the day is a reminder: unlike swordplay, wordplay never seriously hurt anyone, though it may have punctured many an inflated buffoon.

                     

Unwritten Memoirs

Memoirs make a wonderful read. You don’t have to be famous or even outrageous to produce a fascinating book of recollections. Even the humblest persons may have had enough of a roller coaster ride through life for an absorbing account. Of course, being a famous writer can make for spellbinding memoirs—think Gombrowicz, for instance—but most great writers have not bothered. They were probably saving up the good stuff for their fictions. Certainly the most celebrated British memorialists, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, were quite ordinary enough.

I myself never considered writing a memoir—at least until now, when I realize that not having kept a diary disqualifies one as a memorialist. Memory alone is not—to use a Borges word—memorious enough. And yet already a good many years ago, the worthy E. L. Doctorow, then working for a reputable publishing house, took me to lunch and tried to persuade me to write a memoir. It was only one of several suggestions, including a book about mathematics, for which I was about as qualified as piloting a space capsule.

But memoirs, would they have been as impossible? I am not a particularly modest person, but at that time I felt significantly qualified only for turning down such an undertaking. Yet perhaps it should have been a sufficient incentive to be prodded by so distinguished a person as Doctorow, even though he had not yet written Ragtime, to get up from that lunch and start keeping a journal.

Now I do wish I had kept one. To those who still (more rarely) propose my doing so, I reply, “Look at the opportunities I let slip by unrecorded and without which a memoir would be pointless.” Quite a few of them involve writers or future writers. Digging back into early days, I come up with watching a Harvard dance from the sidelines alongside of William Gaddis and hearing him jeer “Vive le sport!” as well as say some other things which I now regret not writing down.

Even more regretfully, I recall a much later lunch with Jorge Luis Borges, one of my favorite writers, and his then translator, Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, after having written some glowing blurbs for his books. All I remember about that enchanting occasion is how beautiful Borges’s English was. Another time, I arranged for the near-blind Borges and his sighted companion to be put up in a friend’s large apartment free of charge during their New York stay. That time I did not even approach him, not wishing to make him feel obligated to reward me with a meeting.

I spent some time with the French poet Pierre Emmanuel, but all I recall is his love of women with heavy legs and thick ankles. I spent more time with a greater poet, Yves Bonnefoy, when I was writing my Harvard Ph. D. thesis about the prose poem as art form. All I remember from his conversation is his disapproving of my imputing in my thesis deliberate ambiguity to Rimbaud, something Bonnefoy claimed entered French literature only much later, with Paul Valery. I still wonder whether he was right.

There was a brief but stimulating relationship with two important German Swiss writers, Max Frisch and Friedrich Durrenmatt. To the former, I lost a girlfriend he memorialized in Montauk; the latter invited me to come visit him in Switzerland, I don’t know how seriously. I was also friendly and shared a girlfriend with, Hans Egon Holthusen, a then noted German poet, critic, and prose writer, now rather forgotten. Of our many conversations, I remember only two. One, about how I should wear more pointy shoes, the kind he favored. Another about how in attacking other writers I should use such safely unactionable terms as ass or asshole.

In Budapest, I got to know some Hungarian writers, notably the splendid Ferenc Santa, whose terrific short story “Nazis” I translated for my anthology Fourteen for Now. I now recall nothing of our lively conversation, at the end of which he gave me one of his novels that, to my shame, I still haven’t read. A perhaps even greater writer, Gyula Illyes, a poem of whose I had translated in verse, I unfortunately did not get to meet.

I also got to know a good many well-known Americans, as well as a lot of film people, but they would require a whole separate blog entry. Here let me record only my missed memoirs of some famous women. There was, first, the talented and beautiful French Canadian movie star, Genevieve Bujold. She had met me briefly at a film party, and, out of the blue, I got a phone call from a press agent that she would be in New York on such and such an evening on which I was to take her out. It was her imperious command.

Well, I took her to a delightful play by Alan Ayckbourn, which we both enjoyed. During intermission, the conversation somehow turned to feet. She declared that hers were very pretty, and promptly shed a shoe for confirmation. She was right. After the show, we drove around in a cab from restaurant to restaurant, all of which regretted, but their kitchen was closed. Not even my favorite French restaurant relented, though I told them that Mlle. Bujold was in a taxi outside, waiting and hungry.

We ended up in a then popular Hunanese restaurant, where, however, the specialties were not the dishes that she, a vegetarian, ordered. When I delivered her to her hotel, and hoped to get to see more of her than her foot, all I got was a chaste goodnight kiss and the enthusiastic suggestion to come visit her in Hollywood, where I would especially enjoy talking to her brilliant son. He was then eight or nine years old.

I did like the ladies of the ballet. I had had a lovely relationship with June Morris during my Paris Fulbright. However, a poem I wrote about us, she said, would shock her mother. A poem I wrote about and sent to Melissa (“Millie”) Hayden, a superbly down-to-earth broad, she repudiated as incomprehensible. Patricia Wilde was also a platonic friend.

I had a date with the Royal Ballet’s great Lynn Seymour, the recent subject of a rapturous tribute from the New York Times’s chief dance critic. Like Alastair Macaulay, but for a different ballet, I fell under the spell of the magnificent Miss Seymour. I took her to the City Ballet for Balanchine’s dance tribute to England, “Union Jack,” which I thought particularly appropriate. But Lynn was unimpressed, and made some unfavorable comments I wish I had recorded. Of our conversation, I remember only how earthy, tough and profane she was, deliciously so, but not at all the creature I had admired onstage. At that time, I found this disappointing; now I would have delighted in it.

My other, closer nexus, was with one of the greatest and loveliest ballerinas of all time, Suzanne Farrell. She had liked a piece I wrote about her and George Balanchine. And I remember how touched I was when, quite a bit later, I came upon her surrounded in talk with a group of admirers. She promptly left them, coming toward me to warmly greet me. This led to several lunches at the restaurant Santa Fe, near where she then lived. And to fine, unrecorded conversations.

I recall a couple of dates with her. One was to a performance of Horvath’s “Don Juan Returns from the War,” which we both liked. As we walked up Eighth Avenue, she joyously remarked, “This makes me understand something important about Mr. B.” as the ballet people called the glorious George. But what was that something?

Another time I took her to a drama critics’ award party. I had hoped to impress my colleagues with my date, the great and gorgeous Suzanne Farrell. Well, they weren’t in the least impressed, most of them not even knowing who she was. To her credit be it said that she was nowise affected by remaining unrecognized and unadulated. I now think it might even have come as a relief. But what did she say?

One last great lady, this time of opera, and one that I did not date, but had a very long, jolly phone conversation with. The film critics were awarding Diane Keaton for her role in “Annie Hall.” Because Annie is much concerned with wanting to be a singer, I thought the presenter could aptly be Beverly Sills. However, in an utterly charming and modest way, “Pinky” kept declining my most persuasive, affectionate arguments. I wish I had recorded her gracious and amusing objections, as spirited as they were witty. Still, in the end she yielded, and proved the most winning presenter. What were her words?

Selfishly I do recall her telling me, years later, that whenever she got a new issue of New York magazine, she turned first to my column rather than to the worthy music critic’s one. But I was not supposed to tell him that. If he reads this blog, which I very much doubt, he will surely no longer mind. If he does, though, let me say that I usually read his column before checking out mine.

STUPIDITY

If you add up the number of practitioners of the seven cardinal (or, in lay terms, deadly) sins, I doubt if the number will equal that of those guilty of stupidity. Ergo: Shouldn’t stupidity make it as a deadly, conceivably the deadliest, sin?

I can say this with some confidence, having evinced some form of stupidity at all stages of my life, the memory of which haunts me despite all attempts at expiation. To be sure one of the problems with stupidity is that it often masquerades as something lesser, like, say, laziness, as in the following example.

Back in my graduate student days I was very friendly with a fellow graduate student in Comparative Literature, the brilliant future academic, Claudio Guillen. Handsome, witty and wise, he was also the son of Jorge Guillen, one of the greatest Spanish poets. Anyway, one day Claudio asked me whether I had ever made love to a Spanish girl. These young women, he said, offer up to you their breasts on a silver platter.

Now you’d think that with such a potent incentive, I’d have embraced the nearest Hispanic girl, even a mere Latino, even if she were no Penelope Cruz or Dolores del Rio. But I didn’t, and haven’t to this day. Is that sloth or stupidity? I rather think the latter, considering that I would have settled for a mere china platter.

Stupidity! Today you see it all around you. Sometimes it is relatively harmless, such as my getting on the wrong subway train or forgetting to fully turn off the bathroom tap. And, of course, one must not confuse the incidental stupidities of an intelligent person, or even of a mere intellectual, with those of a permanent, thoroughgoing stupid individual. Which reminds me that it is a bit stupid of the English language not to possess a single-word noun for a stupid person, such as German has in Dummkopf, or Russian in durak. Granted, we have such supposed substitutes as moron, cretin or idiot, but these are really unwarranted insults to people genuinely afflicted with those ailments.

In any case, the stupidities of intelligent people, though by no means inconsiderable, are no competition for those of the born stupid, which can be colossal, stupendous, tragic. Take for instance the murderous stupidity of some who own guns, even though they shouldn’t and wouldn’t if our laws were smarter. These fellows (we read about them daily) get into arguments they cannot win except by shooting the other chap dead. There follows equally deadly vengeance.

Additionally, there is the even greater stupidity that they often shoot, through misidentification, the wrong person, a mere innocent bystander. Or worse yet, because they are not only stupid but also poor shots, they kill a nearby four-year-old girl, or some poor wretch sitting too near his or her window.

That is the gun-toting stupidity. Now take the religious stupidity, which manifests itself as some sort of fanaticism. Hereabouts it often takes the Tea Party, born-again Christian form, whereby one bombs a clinic where abortions are legally performed.

Farther east, it produces such things as Muslim fanatics, who shoot little girls merely because they attend school. Or suicide bombers, who think they will be rewarded in heaven by seventy-odd virgins administering oral sex. This is particularly stupid for several reasons.

In the first place, girls good at blowjobs usually don’t go to Heaven. But girls who make it to Heaven for not practicing oral sex, what earthly, or rather unearthly, good are they? Or if they are, after all, adept at it and in Heaven, must there not be bitter competition between those chosen and those bypassed by the dead bombers? Or, if all must get their turn, how can one dead male satisfy all seventy plus without his being worn to a frazzle and doubly dead?

One of my readers noted another problem. If I converted to Islam and turned suicide bomber, and thus went to Heaven, how would I put up with those fellationist Arab virgins, all of whom would have Barbra Streisand noses? It is, as the King of Siam was apparently given to remarking, a puzzlement.

Another major form of stupidity is stealing masterpieces of painting from museums. Never mind the unremarkable stupidity of the museums; what about the monumental stupidity of the thieves? How can you possibly sell a master painting readily recognized as stolen from a museum? Can you count on some Oriental potentate to be dumb enough to buy something he’ll have to hide from both others and perhaps even himself? And even if such a millionaire nincompoop exists, how does the thief, from the other end of the world, find and gain access to him?

Apropos hiding, this can beget epochal stupidity. Take the recent case of a dumb Romanian who, with some native Dutch help, lifted seven masterpieces from the Rotterdam museum. He left this sevenfold deadly sin in a plastic bag with his mother in their native Romanian village well behind God’s back. The brilliant woman figured out that if the masterpieces were not found, there would be no evidence. And her son, who indeed was found, would have to be released from his incarceration.

So she hid the plastic bag in ever more ingenious places, culminating in a well-covered hole she dug in her garden. But even this did not seem safe enough, so she dug up the bag and carefully burned it to a crisp in her oven. Or so, perhaps mendaciously, she claims. Now any number of experts have scrutinized those ashes, and though there is no incontrovertible evidence, what they found is consistent with burnt canvas.

It might help if stupid persons recognized their own stupidity, and so took certain precautions, refrained from some rash deeds. But anyone who recognizes his stupidity is ipso facto no longer stupid, may even justly pass for a person of rare intelligence. If, on the contrary, such abstention were a common phenomenon, the people mouthing off on television would instead shut up and so get booted off, thus causing millions of stupid TV addicts to think twice—or even just once—before turning on the idiot box. (Again, my apologies to bona fide idiots.)

Many stupidities are harmful, but, I repeat, there are also harmless ones that prove soothing to their practitioners. Thus William Buckley, Jr., definitely a very smart person, wrote that he couldn’t stand remaining alive if he didn’t believe he would be reunited with his beloved predeceased spouse in Heaven. There are, granted, those cynics who believe that he would end up in the other place, but such determinations are not my point. Similarly, Nancy Reagan firmly believed that she would rejoin her Ronald in Paradise. If I could trust such distinguished believers, I would also believe in those seventy-odd Muslim virgins and their alleged ministrations.

But enough of this and back to my initial query: Why isn’t stupidity one of the deadly sins? Presumably because unlike, say, lust, sloth or greed, it is involuntary and uncontrollable. One is born with it and willy-nilly remains faithful to it. As the German proverb has it: Born stupid and void of any added learning. Bloed geboren, nichts dazugelernt.

Yet are those officially recognized deadly sins any easier to control? Does the lecher want to be a lecher, does the lazybones choose his sloth, is the miser a clandestine philanthropist? No to all.  How, when and wherefrom those compulsions came, they became destiny, just like stupidity.

Besides, intelligence and stupidity can cohabit in the same mind. Take the contestants in the TV show “Jeopardy.” They astound by instantly having the correct answers to the most diabolically contrived questions, often of the most esoteric, trivial sort. But then they will flub or be dumbfounded by the seemingly most obvious ones that anyone could answer.

What are these contestants then? Idiot savants? Perhaps. Or just smart people with certain ineluctable stupidities.

PASSION AND OBSESSION

Passion is generally considered a good thing, obsession a bad one. But are they really two separate, diverse things or merely different degrees of the same phenomenon? In other words, when a worthy passion is overdone, does it degenerate into an obsession?

Yet consider the movie, based on a novel, “Magnificent Obsession,” in which a worthy subject ennobles an obsession. Still, obsessive behavior of any kind is generally reprehended: too much of a good thing may cease to be good.

And yet . . . It is obsession that made Columbus discover America; without him we would all be Indians if we existed at all. I forget which famous medical researcher (was it Paul De Kruif?) had to eat some human excrement to prove something about an illness and immunity from it. Speaking metaphorically, Galileo had to eat shit from the Church and curb his admirable obsession with the truth. But then, is an obsession with the truth really an obsession, or rather a matter of justified perseverance? Perseverance that amounts to passion.

Think of what the filmmaker Dreyer aptly entitled “The Passion of Joan of Arc.” Or of the passion portrayed in Bergman’s marvelous movie entitled, in Sweden, “A Passion,” though in America it foolishly became “The Passion of Anna,” presumably on the notion that “A Passion” would suggest Christ and thus keep away the irreligious.

Either passion or obsession sustained at length can become fanaticism. But there is no doubt that passion enjoys a mostly positive reputation, whereas obsession tends to be held in disrepute. After all, there is such a thing as a passionflower, whereas an obsession flower is unimaginable.

Still, “passion” may pop up where logic calls for “obsession.” Take, for example, Stephen Sondheim’s musical, “Passion,” which surely deals with obsession. To begin with, there was an autobiographical novel by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti called “Fosca,” after its heroine or anti-heroine. It is the tale of the unsightly and hysterical Fosca’s maniacal pursuit of the handsome officer Giorgio, leading to an unlikely, irrational Pyrrhic victory as it lures him away from his beautiful mistress.

When Ettore Scola made his movie from that novel, he did not call it “Fosca”—perhaps even to avoid confusion with “Tosca”—but more likely because the near-pleonastic “Passione d’amore” was much more resonant. For another thing, Visconti had already made his successful, unrelated “Ossessione.” Certainly “Ossessione d’amore” would have been clumsy and devoid of oomph. So too the Sondheim musical based on the movie became “Passion,” what with “Obsession” without a “magnificent” preceding it unlikely to suggest B.O. (box office); at the utmost body odor.

But consider how the very English language comes out on the side of passion. The word “passion” is in just about everybody’s vocabulary, “obsession” not nearly so much. Moreover “passion” has a rich and revered progeny—passionate, dispassionate, impassioned—whereas “obsession” has a comparatively obscure family. Certainly “obsessive” and “obsessional” are not parts of the run-of-the-mill, popular vocabulary. They do not come trippingly off the workaday tongue and are relegated to a more recherché idiom.

Indeed, the shorter word tends to sit much better with the vox populi than the longer one. So we get “conjugal” rather than “connubial,” “marriage” well ahead of “matrimony” and “passion” far more readily than “obsession.” Even two monosyllables are preferred to one polysyllable: what chance against “full moon” has “plenilune’?

I myself have had my innings with “obsessive.” My good wife, though by no means hostile to cleanliness, felt that I was washing my hands too often—a case, I think, of a mild predilection being misdiagnosed as an obsession. In due time I was directed to a specialist in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for assessment. I had two fairly expensive sessions with this fancy OCD shrink, during which I came perfectly clean with my fondness for washed hands, but was nevertheless found innocent of obsession of either the Lady Macbeth or the Pontius Pilate kind.

Passion does have a disadvantage, though: it evanesces; whereas obsession persists. Proust has declared hat physical passion is unsustainable beyond two years. And, truth to tell, I don’t think I have ever encountered a couple who, after a few years of marriage, displayed the aura of physical passion, although, I admit, absolute certainty would have required my hiding under their marital bed. I did, however, hear once and only once about a couple of high-school sweethearts who allegedly maintained a passionate relationship over many years of marriage. I say “passionate” as distinguished from “sexual,” which can be indulged well enough without much true passion. But hearing about that extraordinary couple is no guarantee of authenticity. There too hiding under their bed would have been required.

As some sort of admittedly subjective test, I turned to my “Bartlett’s” (granted not the latest edition, but I doubt if a few years made a significant difference) to do some research. How many quotations would there be for “passion” as opposed to those for “obsession.” Clearly the worthier, more fragile and elusive but finer condition would earn many more entries than the mundane, prosaic, widespread one. And there it was: 62 entries for “passion,” and only one for “obsession”; to my way of thinking proof of the superiority of the former.

And what was the solitary entry for obsession? It came from the prayer written in her Book of Devotion by Mary Stuart before her beheading. It runs (I excerpt): “O Lord my God, I have trusted in thee . . . In prison’s oppression, in sorrow’s obsession . . . etc.” It takes the impending shadow of the executioner to elicit one memorable recording of obsession.

Well, you say, isn’t that a rather circuitous way of arriving at the obvious conclusion, namely that passion is better than obsession? Not quite. By upholding the lasting supremacy of passion over obsession, we make out a stronger case for it, its fragility and its preciousness, its need of nurturing and the rewards thereof.

At the same time, this is a screed against most kinds of obsession, as being a parody or perversion of passion, even if the boundary between it and pure passion is regrettably porous. Yet it behooves me to confess to an obsession of my own, an obsession with symmetry over asymmetry, with aesthetics as a form of morality, and with tradition as so often preferable to mindless novelty.

If I believed in pronouncements on tombstones—if, opting for cremation, I would even have a headstone--this is what I would have it say: “He loved beauty above all things, and above all types of beauty that of the female face and form. If Heaven existed, this rather than asexual angels, is what it would abound in.”