THE AUDIENCE

There should be a difference between a good performance and a great one. Sensibly, one applauds at the end of the former and rises to one’s feet for the latter. About which is which, one knows in one’s bones. Or does one?

I don’t recall seeing in the old days audiences bent on rushing into a standing ovation even for a mediocre, sometimes indeed dismal, play, as if they were goosed by their seats. But nowadays standing ovations are as common as dirt, and strike me as a dirty joke. Why, even at a performance much later than the premiere, benighted souls will leap to their feet, clapping and cheering, as if to stand were standard procedure. This raises a number of questions.

Are audiences particularly stupid? Or did they spend so much on their tickets that they must resort to this device to prove to themselves that the money was well worth it? Or are they lusting for some sort of participation in the creative process and deluding themselves that this is it? Or are they just trying to show off with how much smarter they are than their still sedentary neighbors? What they certainly don’t realize is that they are devaluing the standing ovation, and often adding insult to injury by their shrieks or howls, or whatever you call the throat complementing the feet.

Of course, once a fool thinks up a new trick like that shriek or howl or whatever it is, there is never a shortage of copycats or lemmings to follow suit. We have seen it happen even in the refined sport of tennis, where after Monica Seles started the grunt, it took hold of any number of distinguished players, women first but eventually some men as well. Whatever it means in tennis, in the theater and concert hall it indulges the herd’s need to be heard. Forget about I think, therefore I am: Descartes is discarded. The new motto is: I make noise, therefore I am. And the standing ovation, sometimes also accompanied by foot stamping, is the shout made visible.

Alas, that is not the only sound we hear from audiences. Any number of people talk during the show. It is argued, not without plausibility, that because they watch so much on television, they have lost the sense of difference between the theater and the living room. Some people, more commonly but not exclusively at the movies, randomly get up and leave, and sooner or later return. I doubt that it can all be to the toilet. But it can disturb, like two heads in front of you repeatedly coming together, which is talk made visible.

Some such people can be shushed. Others get furious, glower at you, and continue as before. The supposed option of complaining to an usher is useless. Even in the remote possibility of finding one, it means missing too much of the play or concert. And just what can an usher do? The culprits know that they won’t be physically ejected; a reprimand mostly earns the usher and you the wrath of other audience members who, until now, were not disturbed.

For so many hidebound people in the audience, from whom you might hope for support, the misbehaving persons in front of them don’t matter, and neither do the ones behind them. So perhaps new ways of dealing with the talkers must be invented. Perhaps one could have an index card ready to thrust at them, reading “If you’ll kindly stop talking, I’ll give you a monetary award at the end of the show.”

Sometimes if you hear what they are saying, you can score. At a Truffaut film, where the camera raced around sights of Paris, a man behind me kept identifying them for his companion. “The Eiffel Tower,” he would say, or “Notre Dame Cathedral,” and the like. Finally, when he announced the Triumphal Arch, I corrected him: “No, the Brooklyn Navy Yard.” This somehow stumped him into silence.

Then, at the cinema where there are empty seats, a talker will tell you, “If you don’t like it, move!” You might want to question him why it doesn’t occur to him to follow his own advice. But the trouble is that the offender is often a huge, burly, uncouth fellow, who might start a brawl or worse. In that case, by moving yourself, you may miss some important part of the movie, not to mention disturb innocent people in your present row and the one you move to.

Sometimes I think enviously of mad king Ludwig of Bavaria, who had Wagner compose works for him played at the Private Theater with the king the sole audience. That may well be the ideal enjoyment, especially at a comedy, where primitive audiences will laugh louder and longer than the maddest monarch, and often make you lose several lines of dialogue and the next joke. Sad to say, though I might try to approximate Ludwig’s madness, his money is beyond my wildest dreams.

Speaking of concerts, the late great and eccentric music critic B. H. Haggin was so disgusted with audiences, though rather better at classical concerts (I keep forgetting that these days anything is called a concert), that he would hold his program up before him so that it would block out the audience and leave only the stage in view. I never attended anything sitting close to him, so I can’t tell to what extent he made a spectacle of himself for those he couldn’t block out. He was also unusual among music critics by ignoring if possible any music later than that of the late Romantics.

My own taste is the exact opposite. I have no interest in music from before roughly 1840, and can only wonder at the adulation of, say, Bach and Mozart, when there is Fauré and Debussy and Bartók and Berg and Prokofiev and Janáček, to name only a few. I recall the time when the great lieder singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau gave three recitals in Carnegie Hall, all of which I attended. The first two, Schubert ones, I enjoyed well enough, but really looked forward to the third, which was to be all Hugo Wolf. But Sol Hurok, the concert manager, managed to talk the baritone into sticking with Schubert, who apparently was bigger at the box office. As we were leaving, I bumped into Haggin, who asked me, “Wasn’t it wonderful?” I replied that I would have much preferred Wolf. Haggin burst out laughing; for him, I must have been the only one with such a preference.

I realize now that I have strayed a bit from the subject of the audience. But I too, like all critics, am also audience. And perhaps the only subject on which I wholly agree with my colleagues is about not talking during a show. I mean the professional critics, and not those unfortunate bloggers who, in the Age of the Internet , when everyone is a critic, fancy themselves that. Those, with some honorable exceptions, would do well to shut the hell up.

MISSING LINKY

I read the other day, evoking many memories, that the great publisher Barney Rosset had died aged 89, and reflected on what adventures and enterprises those years had yielded. With his admirable Grove Press, he brought out, among other daring coups, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Waiting for Godot, Story of O, and, on film, I Am Curious (Yellow), which entailed many law suits and other battles with puritanical censors and craven exhibitors, all of which and more Rosset triumphantly won. He achieved free speech for literature and cinema in America for all time to come.

I am happy to note that the Times obituary of February 23 was, as is not always the case, laudably unstinting as written by Douglas Martin, and provided a commendable overview of an exemplary career. I knew Rosset only slightly, encountering him last at a dinner party chez Larry Rivers, which I remember chiefly for having said strongly negative things about my ex-student Harold Brodky to a woman who turned out to be his wife.

I do recall Barney as charming and lots of fun, and only wish I had known him better. I enjoyed several of his controversial books, and was a witness for the defense at several I Am Curious trials. I also read with interest his Evergreen Review, and was very sorry when he had to sell Grove Press. I was even sorrier that the purchasers were Ann Getty and Lord Weidenfeld, both of whom were my friends, but treated Barney badly when, despite contrary promises, they fired him within a year.

The story I have to tell here would have been of scant interest to Barney, but was not unimportant to me. It involves my relationship with a young woman, still alive today, whom I will refer to only by her nickname, Linky, sometimes abbreviated as Link.

Linky was quite simply the most beautiful Radcliffe undergrad at the time, the one most envied by her fellow Cliffies and most lusted after by Harvard students, graduate ones like me included. I recall first spotting her in a booth with some girlfriends at the St. Clair’s eatery, and resolving to become her boyfriend come hell or high water.

I managed to wrangle a date via a phone call whose tactics I forget, and in due time this involved steady dating. This, alas, was not tantamount to sleeping together, which, smitten and devoted as I was, I considered a rightful development. Much about my courtship I can no longer recall.

What I do remember, however, is taking Linky to the Charles river’s further bank for a photo session. In those days, I owned a fancy camera and was a bit of a photography buff. That day I took numerous pictures of Linky, who quite willingly cooperated with a number of charming poses. These were nowise erotic, but such were Linky’s loveliness and her graceful postures that you could not look at them without amorous longing. Today all these snapshots are lost, except for one tiny 35millimeter print that I pasted into a volume of
Mallarmé’s poems.

There she stands on the Charles’s further and wilder bank, on a piece of wood jutting into the river, in a casual yet graceful attitude, a nymph if ever there was one. Her left hand supports her against a tall picturesque shrub that somehow winds its way along a tree trunk, her right arm dangles casually, both arms impeccably beautiful. She is wearing a dark dress with white edging, the fairly long skirt revealing only some elegant shins, perfect ankles, and tastefully ballet-slippered feet. She is gazing into the distance, her face slightly inclined, her lovely blond hair hanging loose onto her left shoulder. In the distance, a solitary oarsman is looking in another direction, unaware of what he is missing.

Amusingly, Linky’s picture is pasted above the famous sonnet beginning rather appropriately “A la nue accablante tu,” and as difficult to interpret as what might have been going through my model’s highly independent mind.

Our platonic relationship continued for a while until a Fulbright Fellowship propelled me to Paris and the Sorbonne. Linky had promised to write me faithfully, but all I got was a couple of letters in large, touchingly schoolgirlish handwriting and with rather noncommittal content. And then complete cessation. I surmised that she had found another swain, and I, in Paris of all places, found other young ladies much more forthcoming.

In the spring, surprisingly, I got a new letter from Linky. A talented sculptress—whose work I may have biasedly found superb—she was headed for Italy for further study with the famed sculptor Arturo Martini. On the way, she intended to stop in Paris for some time with me, and I was to meet her at the appointed time at the city’s airplane bus terminal.

Well, there she was, lovely as ever, and adding to my amazement by having accidentally rented a room, in all that mighty metropolis, only a block away from where I had my rented room. Two things, though, marred my pleasure. One was my not then being fully aware that young American ladies, strictly chaste at home, became, upon landing on European shores, something like maenads, no longer bound by real or imagined surveillance. The other was my being by then madly in love with June, an American ballet dancer who had been my lover, but was lately on tour with her ballet company and hopelessly enamored of its male star, who, however, was homosexual.

Now it damnably so happened that the Ballet de Monte Carlo, and with it June, was guest appearing briefly in Paris, and I harbored crazy notions of somehow recapturing her favors. She was lovely, but not a stunner like Linky; however she was my new love whom I had frantically and unsuccessfully pursued all over tarnation via unaccepted long-distance phone calls.

And now, simultaneously, there was Linky, whom I neglected all next day while feverishly searching for June, who had deliberately withheld her exact whereabouts from me. I finally located her, but that is another story. For the evening’s star-studded performance at the Opera of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust I had two tickets, and to this I invited Linky.

She came, but was silently crying in the seat next to me. In the intermission, she perched on an outside fountain and rivaled it with torrential sobbing. I felt for her, but was unable to console her or accede to what I now assume were her frustrated expectations.

I did not see or hear from Linky for quite a while, at least not until the British National Theatre was appearing in New York with several performances headed by Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, and Vivien Leigh. To one of those I invited Linky and she came. But oh my, what a reversal of roles! How I craved her affection, even as she remained as cold as one of her marbles. When I saw her home, she stopped me at her front door, and hurtfully proceeded to echo all my pleas verbatim in harshly sarcastic tones, accompanied by cruelly mocking facial expressions.

That was the end. The only time I glimpsed her again was on a street in Cambridge, where, catching sight of me, she promptly crossed to the other side. Sad, very sad. Years passed, and the one thing I heard about her was that she was living with Barney Rosset, but that, because of troubles in the relationship, they both had therapy sessions with the same analyst—whether separately or together I don’t know—and that he was paying for them. This struck my friends as mighty peculiar and therapeutically unsound.

Fast forward now to that Larry Rivers dinner party, where I got to talk to Barney and naturally inquired about Linky. They had broken up long before, but remained friends. He spoke of her warmly, saying that she was living happily and, apparently, solitarily, sculpting away to her heart’s content. I am surprised to this day that she hasn’t become a famous sculptor.

HOWARD KISSEL

The premature death at 69—though it would have been premature at any age—of Howard Kissel is a severe loss to everyone involved in the theater, interested in theater, and relative or friend of his. Whenever Howard was at a play, before the beginning or during intermission, a small crowd of chatty admirers assembled around him as they did around few other critics. Lovable as a human being, he managed to be so even as a critic, which, without being a milksop, is no small achievement.

An old joke has it that a pessimist sees only the holes in Swiss cheese, whereas an optimist sees only the cheese.  Perhaps there are also critics who manage to see the cheese above all, and the holes, if holes there are, only in second place. Howard was surely one of those.

He was a drama critic for some forty years, first at Women’s Wear Daily, then, for twenty years at the Daily News, and finally as a columnist at the Huffington Post. He also at various times reviewed film, opera, ballet, food, and books, the last of which he was particularly good at, and I wish he had done more often.

He also wrote books, about David Merrick, Stella Adler’s teachings, and Noel Coward, and was a frequent speaker or panelist on arts subjects. He also briefly taught Musical Theatre History at Marymount Manhattan College. Even more briefly, but delightfully, he played the protagonist’s manager in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. Wherever he went, his shock of wavy silver hair was a cynosure, if not indeed a rallying point.

Politically, he became more and more conservative with the years, but did not allow this to cloud his aesthetic judgments, to the extent that it is humanly possible. He also kept up his interest in the arts, and kept exercising yet another of his talents—for friendship.

Howard Kissel was a true friend to everyone he knew: sympathetic, compassionate, and understanding. This last is important: one can be compassionate without full understanding, but full understanding helps immeasurably. And as if all that weren’t enough, he could also be very witty.

We saw quite a bit of each other. Often at restaurant meals, which was also one we shared at our penultimate get together. The cuisine was quite undistinguished, but Howard, who was also quite a good cook in his own right, enjoyed it a lot more than I did. Eating was always a serious thing for him, and here too he uttered his famous rapt: “This is delicious.” As for our last shared experience, it was a performance of the ballet Romeo & Juliet, which thoroughly pleased Howard, but I found quite deficient in Peter Martins’s choreography, its inability to tell a story in dance, and in the dreadful set by a supposedly leading Danish artist.

But one of the best things I know was chatting with Howard on the telephone. Some people, perfectly pleasant in person, are not so good on the phone. They go on too long or hang up too soon, are too discursive but do not properly listen, or simply don’t think of certain interesting things they would have brought up in a tete-a-tete.

Howard, however, was perfect on the phone, and always good for a stimulating conversation. It is a good thing that these talks, which in our earlier days could go deep into the night, were not long distance. They could have bankrupted both of us. Perhaps kindred to it was his admirably cozy way of chairing both the drama critics’ and film critics’ circles, which no one else has ever straddled.

The especially nice thing was discussing theater with him. Even though we belonged to very different schools of criticism, his tolerance made my strictness as opposed to his indulgence acceptable to him, and his unassuming way made that indulgence somehow acceptable to me. It was wonderful when we did agree, and never annoying when we didn’t. And we had terrific laughs together, many about the reviews by some of our well-paid colleagues, whereas he and I were both eventually treated shabbily by the media we had dedicated so much to.

While his initially pleasant marriage to the late Christine, violinist and ceramist, was still functional—she having later become a rather nutty recluse in the upstate country house, while he soldiered on in the city apartment so cluttered with decades-old newspapers she had amassed that even the dog had to fight his way through to the door—the Kissels and the Simons had many joyous dinners together. But out of respect for Christine, who never even set foot any more in the city, Howard kept those mounds of newspapers till the day she died, though when some utility like the fridge broke down, he felt too ashamed to let a repairman in to see the mess. And that is another good thing about him: he provided one with a veritable trove of bizarrely funny anecdotes. For example, about the leaky roof in the kitchen of their country house, which they couldn’t afford to have repaired, and merely had some sort of tarpaulin to keep the rain off their meals.

Or there was the time when he could finally afford to buy a rickety jalopy ready for the junkyard, and he proudly told us how they could now take extensive snail-speed trips to some neighboring town along sparsely traveled back roads.

But memories, alas, are not quite as good as living company. And so, sadly, I must cite yet another talent of Howard’s: the ability to be missed most intensely—perhaps more than one could miss any other friend. May he rest in the peace he brought to everyone he knew: sharing it with us, and himself enjoying it to the utmost.                

                                                                                                                                                                     It is of some comfort to recall that the final chapters of his life comprised a loving visit with his sisters in Florida, and a greatly savored class reunion in California that also involved other delightful experiences in several Western locations, and can be read about in his last Huffington Post column.

One can truly think of him as having spread and enjoyed good cheer from coast to coast. And how to sum him up, now that he is gone? Noel Coward has a little-known play called This Was a Man. Of Howard it can be said: This was a mensch.

THE NOSTRUM OF NOSTALGIA

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

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

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

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.