A time when puny Roberta Vinci—bless her!—derails the
elephantine Serena on her route to the Grand Slam, the moment is rife for a
discussion of the Absurd, which I deliberately capitalize. What a presence it
has in our lives, both for the good, as for Vinci, and the bad, as for
Williams.
This is also the time when Brian Kellow’s biography of Sue
Mengers, “Can I Go Now?” hits the bookstores, to mixed reviews: pretty good in
the Sunday Times, pretty bad in the daily one. What absurd grandeur that woman
had! I wish Brian had consulted me about the admittedly not very prime time
story about my lunch with Sue Mengers. This was during her prime time—and
perhaps also mine—during a brief visit to Tinseltown, when she invited me to
lunch. The object was to bring the one critic who was a nonbeliever in her star
client, Barbra, into the church—or should I say temple?
I wish I had a transcript of our conversation. Sue deployed
all of her charms and hegemony among Hollywood agents to entice me into having
lunch with Streisand, panegyricizing about her wit, her smartness, her charm as
she strove to effectuate a conversion of Saul-into-Paul magnitude. This proved
no more likely to succeed than to convince Barbra of the need for a medial A in
her name. But it was all worthy enough of at least a footnote in the bio.
Ah, yes, the Absurd. How it dogs us at every other step—to
fully catalogue it would have added another labor to Hercules, surely the
hardest. I am barely up to it, but at least I can advert to a few salient
examples, and some worthy quotations from others.
For instance, I have always loved the name of an African
head of state: Good Luck Jonathan, the first part of which he did not evince
when it came to recovering the 300 abducted girls from his country. Well, as
the song has it, maybe some other time. Or, for a nearer example, take the
coiffure of Donald Trump, which in itself would be enough to make his
presidency absurd. It is easily the worst since that of Anthony Burgess and Moe
of the Three Stooges.
There had to be a philosophy of Absurdism, of which Albert
Camus—“the absurd is the essential concept and the first truth” plus all his
other writings—is the finest proponent. And how appropriate for the stage to
have spawned he Theater of the Absurd. Here the chief proponent—Samuel Beckett
having, however absurdly, declined having anything to do with it—there remains
Eugene Ionesco, who at a lunch argued with me that his “Macbet” was superior to
Shakespeare’s similarly titled play. Actually, Ionesco did very well by the
Theater of the Absurd, “Rhinoceros” and “The Bald Soprano” being his most
popular successes, although I prefer “Jacques or the Submission” and “The
Chairs.”
But to revert to philosophy. I. M. Bochenski, in his book
“Europaeische Philosophie der Gegenwart” (European Philosophy of the Present)
has, as one of several epigraphs (I translate), “Modern Man, i.e., human beings
since the Renaissance, is ripe for burial.” This attributed to Count Paul Yorck
von Wartenburg, about whom there is regrettably nothing further in the book.
Yet that is perhaps a bit too strong from someone unexposed to the works of
America’s younger dramatists, and thus spared (to borrow a title from Carlo
Emilio Gadda) the acquaintance with grief, or, if you prefer, the depth of the
absurd.
It occurred to me to look up the entry Absurdism in the
American Heritage Dictionary, and find, to my surprise, the following: “A
philosophy, often translated into art forms, holding that humans exist in a
meaningless, irrational universe and that any search for order by them will
bring them into direct conflict with the universe. “True absurdism is not less
but more real than reality. (John Simon).”
What a remarkable quotation, if only I knew just where it
came from and contextualize. Could this come under the heading of Jonathan
Swift’s famous exclamation, “What genius I had then”?
Let me start with a humble but telling aspect of quotidian
absurdity. Until fairly recently people had no problem with correctly
pronouncing “groceries” as if it were spelled “grosseries.” Then along comes
some idiot or bunch of idiots proudly mispronouncing it by false analogy as if
it were spelled “grosheries.” This would be correct if the spelling were
“grocieries,” with an I after the C softening it from an SS sound to an SH, as
in word like “glacier,” where there is such an I. But not so in “groceries.”
Yet so ubiquitous has this blooper become that people who know better don’t
even notice it on television or elsewhere. But all it takes in our democratic
society for one ignoramus to come up with such an absurdity and promptly the
sheep will follow.
Or take the world of fashion. Almost anything you see on
runways or in magazine and newspaper pictures is absurd: anorexic models
wearing things that no woman in her right mind would want to touch with a
ten-foot pole unless she was a six-foot pole herself. Some women realize how
ridiculous and uncomfortable those gladrags would be on them; others know that
they couldn’t afford them if they were foolish enough to want them. But on and
on the parade goes, as long as there are gay men to design them and Anna
Wintours to promote them.
And how about those absurd opera singers? Rabid opera fans
or persons with underdeveloped sensibilities can tolerate an Isolde who could
use a slimming potion more than a love one {“It is only the voice that matters,”
they say) or a Lohengrin who could more suitably ride on an ox than be drawn by
a swan--although there has lately been some improvement in the average
avoirdupois, but still here are plenty of Stephanie Blythes unblythely around.
A rather different kind of absurdity are the wretches who
keep buying lottery tickets hoping for the big prize, who, even if they win a
pittance, will have spent much more for years on lottery tickets than their win
amounts to.
Still, there is also the good, the positive absurd.
Surrealism sometimes provides that. Take the piquant perversity of some of
those clever Belgian painters, Magritte, Delvaux and Ensor. Does it have something to do with the drama of a
country and language split in two? So, too, perhaps with such rather less
talented Spaniards, Miro and Dali, think Basques and Catalans. But then where
are the Canadian equivalents?
