LOOKING WORSE

Reading the other day the simultaneous obituaries of Phyllis Diller and Tony Scott has been revelatory. They turned out to be complementary articles serving as bookends for the taste of America or, if you prefer, its psyche.

Note some emerging deductions. Phyllis Diller’s success was based on self-mockery, whereas film director Scott’s was founded on male heroics that, against all odds, led to triumph. Two almost ironclad formulas, both based on lies.

Let’s start with Diller, i.e., ladies first, although her public image was that of a beleaguered average woman, not exactly a lady. As the New York Times obituary made clear, she underwent numerous surgeries to make herself look younger and better, but then exerted almost as much effort, e.g., her explosive Slovenly Peter hair, to make herself look ridiculous, which was the title of the parodic song (Eartha Kitt’s “Monotonous”) that more or less launched her career.

The idea was not to look better than the typical housewife, but, if anything, worse. That way female drudges viewing her would not be envious, as of the sexy Hollywood starlets, but pleasurably patronizing. “I look better than she does, and if only I bothered, which thank God I don’t, I could have the same career.” I firmly believe that looking worse than average helped also the success, among others, of Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli.

Sure, a Hedy Lamarr or Rita Hayworth made it on the sexy allure that secured the male vote. But the probably even more numerous female vote was grabbed by “I don’t envy anyone less attractive than me,” and so becoming reconciled to remaining a cook and child-bearer in prosaic households from coast to coast. Not longing or striving for cinematic stardom—or any other kind—becomes a virtue to be cherished.

But all the polymorphous surgery that Diller underwent does not negate my theory. Underneath the mask of less than ordinariness, it pays to be as desirable as possible so as to please a husband or lover. It is what really allows you to make a clown of yourself: the secret knowledge of being actually much superior to your image. It is rather like the principle by which an actor playing King Lear needs to be younger and stronger than the seeming dotard he portrays. Diller’s obit calls attention to, among other things, her good figure and cosmetically embellished nose.

So much for female fantasy; now what about the male counterpart? Well, that’s where the lone good man, who may or may not be also handsome, wins out against all odds, archetypically in a film such as “High Noon,” where Gary Cooper triumphs not only over assorted villains, but even over the total respectable citizenry that cravenly refuses to lend him a hand.

Yes, you say, but Cooper was also handsome. True, but not in the glamour-guy manner of a Robert Taylor or Tyrone Power, or even a sexy Clark Gable, humanized by his Obama ears. It was Cooper’s rugged virility and moral courage that clearly mattered more than sex appeal. Consider that even such an unsightly actor as Ernest Borgnine could find a not unpresentable female mate. You might even be as underprivileged as a Sammy Davis Jr. or an Anthony Quinn (remember his Mexican mother) and overcome being black or Hispanic.

Consider now Tony Scott’s favorite action hero, Tom Cruise. True, he looks good, but all you need is a picture of him and his wife, Katie Holmes, to see how much shorter he is. Besides, his real family name was Mapother, which could make anyone feel inferior. Anyway, more power to shorties.

But what about the glamorous Tony Curtis? Enough people knew that his real name was Bernard Schwartz, so more power to Jewish men. For that matter, no one could look more Jewish than Dustin Hoffman, who, on top of that, tends to come off as a smartass, and still ends up on top—even in female drag.

So here are keys to success for underachieving exteriors, male and female. Granted that they are not the only ones, and that they are not infallible. Ambition is also needed, and sticktoitiveness, some luck, and, most likely, impudence. But not everyone can claim those, and so for many people, perhaps most, the formula doesn’t work—proves a lie.

Do not, however, for all that, disregard it. It also thrives on mediocrity, which is the unfortunate downside of democracy. Just look at our successful politicians.

MIDSUMMER DREAMS

Most things are either good or bad, but dreams, with fearful symmetry, manage to be both good and bad. Just about everyone has had good and bad ones, and since about a third of our days is spent on dream-producing sleep, dreams are worth a bit of scrutiny.

I wonder whether many can claim, as my wife does, waking up with total oblivion of having dreamt anything. That would seem to reduce such a large part of life to something rather wasteful. Couldn’t we just lie in bed or in a hammock and harbor pleasant daydreams for a couple of hours? Couldn’t reverie replace dream?

To be sure, we dream at our risk. Seldom are we more jubilant than when we wake up from a truly nasty nightmare. This could be anything from being stuck in some unknown, threatening part of town with the way home lost, to a devilishly unpleasant situation incurred by having done or said something unpardonable.

On the other hand, how depressing to wake up from winning a coveted prize, having enjoyed perfect sex, or accomplishing some other resounding success, to mere indifferent reality. It’s almost as bad as losing one’s wallet.

I doubt whether many of us share Hamlet’s fear of bad dreams tormenting us after our demise; compared to global warming, hellfire seems like much less of a menace. A more serious problem may be what’s implied in the epigraph to Yeats’s 1914 collection of poems, “In Dreams Begins Responsibility.” Aside from anything else, this was responsible for an entire collection of Delmore Schwartz’s poems, with a slight variant of that for title.

Responsibility to what or to whom? Yeats attributes the saying to an “Old Play.” But as a note to the putatively definitive edition of Yeats’s works (Macmillan, 1989) has it, “The source . . . has not yet been traced: it may well have been written by Yeats, possibly with the assistance of Ezra Pound.” If no source could be found in 75 years, it stands to reason that there is none. I fully believe that it is the concoction of those young tricksters Willy and Ez, and that the chief responsibility for, if not to it, is the Freudian id, even if Freud himself has become suspect nowadays.

Artists, in a roundabout way, are responsible to dreams. None more so than the lusty Renaissance friar Francesco Colonna, the more than likely author of that wonderful incunabulum Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published in 1499 by the great Venetian house of Aldus Manutius. An article in the Times of May 26, 2004, by Dinitia Smith, begins, “It has been called the most beautiful book in the world, and the most unreadable. Its hero has sex with buildings. It also has a nearly unpronounceable title . . . [which] can be translated as ‘the struggle for love in a dream.’” Or, alternatively, “the strife of love in a dream.” There are about 260 copies in existence, one of them in the Princeton library. Its very illustrations, 174 woodcuts, are an utter delight. But the text is a problem.

The entire long book is a dream, containing further dreams within dreams. It is the story of one Poliphilo, who dreams of his beloved, the nymph Polia, and journeys in constant search of the elusive one. Well, not entirely constant, for Poliphilo may be translated both as lover of Polia and lover of many. He adores fulsomely also architecture, sculptures, gardens, goldsmith’s works, inscriptions on tombstones, music, pageantry, ritual, and colorful fabrics (especially when worn by nymphs). As his modern English translator, the marvelously named Joscelyn Godwin, puts it, he is in love, above all, with Antiquity.

And what language! Greek, Latin, and Italian, with a sprinkling of Hebrew and Arabic. No wonder that the first complete English translation, by the valiant Godwin, did not appear until 1999. As exquisitely published (I own it) by Thames & Hudson in smaller format than the original, it comes to 476 pages with all the illustrations, helpful appendices, plus ten excellent pages of introduction. Erotic as all get-out, but, alas, a mere dream.

A Times article of July 24, 2012, by Jennifer Schuessler, reports on a session at the Rare Books School of the University of Virginia, where bibliophiles shouted out in triumph, “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499!” As the article tells us, if the school had a football team, that might be its rallying cry. Spectacular if hard reading, it ends with Poliphilo finally snatching Polia, only to wake up from a dream.

Dreams, to be sure, have been a paramount staple of literature, at the very least since Moses in the bible.  They figure prominently in the fictions of ancient Greece and Rome, and have gone on and on ever since. One of my favorites is Arthur Schnitzler’s 1931 Traumnovelle (Dream Novella), which begat Stanley Kubrick’s unfortunate Eyes Wide Shut.

In English fiction, early examples are Langland’s Piers Plowman (boring as hell) and several delightful works by Chaucer, who derived some of them from the 13^th-century French Roman de la Rose, a part of which he translated. J. A. Cuddon, in his invaluable Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, cites among major specimens Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Keats’s revised Hyperion, the Alice in Wonderland books, and remarks that Finnegans Wake “has also been taken as a kind of cosmic dream.”

On screen, dreams do not register notably—they blend in almost imperceptibly—but on stage they have an illustrious history. They are memorable as the dream ballets in various musicals, notably Agnes De Mille’s for Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Albertina Rasch’s for Kurt Weill’s Lady in the Dark. But they also score heavily in plays by James Barrie (especially Dear Brutus) and Philip Barry (Hotel Universe).

However, I am not trying to write a history or catalogue raisonné of onstage dreams. And I don’t want to peddle mine, for nothing is more boring than one’s dreams to other people. But let me, against my better judgment, relate one of my own.

A friend and his date join me on a visit to the New York Times. I am trying to sell an article to my editor there, David Kelly. It is about the Sokols, the Slavic version of Boy Scouts. They have a spiffy uniform and (who wouldn’t want it?) a feather in their caps. Sokol means falcon, and one of Janáček’s most wonderful works, the Sinfonietta, was composed for the Czech Sokols.

I have my canny friend with me to help effectuate the sale of what I have titled “Czeducation,” and we approach the Times modestly through the basement. We there pick up as guide a very young editor or perhaps intern, unkempt and pimply. We ascend to a kind of antechamber whose steep, towering walls suggest an expressionist drama with scenery by Gordon Craig, where others too are waiting. There is a huge, Kafkaesque portal through which we glimpse only emptiness. No trace of Kelly or any other editor.

I take a few steps in, but return hastily, pointing out that I have not yet written a word of my article. I am not even sure that the Sokols still exist—perhaps the only one is our beloved comedienne Marilyn Sokol. Never mind; I can always try to sell the idea. But no; suddenly all of us are on a sort of fun-fair train, hurtling downward. We whoosh past another doorway to the Times, labeled quizzically—what?

I wake up trying vainly to recall that curious superscription. It puts me in mind of the frustrating last sentence of the Hypnerotomachia: “I awoke and emerged with a start from my dream, saying with a sigh: ‘Farewell, then, Polia.’”

GORDON BOWKER’S “JAMES JOYCE”

Of all Anglophone writers only Shakespeare has been more written about than James Joyce, and Shakespeare has three-and-a-half centuries on him. Of all modern writers, not only in English, Joyce is probably the most innovative, evocative, and influential. He has had, and still has, numerous followers, some acknowledged, some not, and not a few imitators despite his inimitability. To the huge corpus of Joyceana, now add the apt biography by Gordon Bowker, titled simply James Joyce.

At nearly 600 riveting pages, it is long, but not overlong. Until now, the conceivably definitive biography was Richard Ellmann’s 1982 revision of his remarkable 1959 James Joyce. At almost 900 large, closely packed pages, it remains a cornerstone for all subsequent writings about Joyce. But thirty years since have yielded further revelations, which Bowker, experienced author of three earlier biographies (of Orwell, Durrell, and Malcolm Lowry) has made productive use of.

Bowker’s opus is not primarily a critical biography, in that it refrains from being judgmental even about such lesser efforts as Joyce’s only play, the Ibsenite Exiles, or detailed in its praise of such an early masterpiece as the story “The Dead” and the moving late poem “Ecce Puer.” It offers sufficient accounts of what Joyce’s various works are about, but is primarily interested in the particulars of the life. And what a life it was!

There are easier—which is to say shorter—approaches to Joyce. Harry Levin’s James Joyce: A Critical Introduction remains the best concise evaluation of the writer and man. For those seeking a terse account of the life, Edna O’Brien’s James Joyce will do the job. For those wishing strictly literary criticism, John Gross’s James Joyce is recommended. But for readers who want both in sufficient and up-to-date detail, nothing beats Bowker’s book published here by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and last year in England by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Outstanding about Bowker are his judiciousness and readability on top of thorough research. For more academic—or just more curious—readers there is another forte: relating every step of the way the life to the work. This makes particular sense for Joyce, an extraordinarily biographical and autobiographical fictionist. His plots rely almost exclusively on what he called his epiphanies, a term for events experienced, and conversations participated in or overheard, that lent themselves to

pungent fictional use.

So, reading Bowker, we learn again and again and usually with precise page references, how an incident was exploited in the fictions—and how a person (real name and basic biographical data) became so-and-so in the writings (fictional name and bit of plot summary). For anyone willing and able to follow up on these references, Bowker’s book becomes a paradigm of how brilliant fictional strategy works up bits of reality, how genius transfigures the givens of life.

Especially interesting in this respect is how religion and sexuality figure in Joyce’s life and work. Bowker makes clear how Joyce consciously rejected the strict Roman Catholicism in which he was brought up by family and educated by Jesuits, while instinctively still indulging in much churchgoing, ostensibly only because of enjoyment of the ritual and music involved.

Music indeed, given Joyce’s fine tenor voice, almost leading to a career in music, and love of singing and dancing, which he reveled in with the slightest excuse (parties, literary gatherings, mere dinners with friends) or even without. He could accompany his singing on the piano, and would dance with (usually male) friends in the most exuberant, almost orgiastic fashion.

And what sexuality: Joyce was both masochist and fetishist. The latter in his fixation on female underwear, often urging his wife Nora to purchase and wear sexy drawers. The former in fantasies of, and generally unheeded solicitings for, flogging by Nora, and perhaps also in using and encouraging obscene and scatological language in his letters and fictions, often asking that it be aggressively directed at himself.

Three further fascinating aspects of Joyce emerge. One is Joyce the egoist and rebel who exiles himself from an Ireland that imposed unacceptable restrictions on his ego. Thus we find him with Nora—and later their children, Giorgio and Lucia—steadily changing habitats in Italy, Switzerland, and France, mostly but not exclusively in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. An excellent—indeed fanatical—linguist, he profited from commanding the requisite foreign as well as classical languages, not to mention other, not particularly needed ones. All grist for his existential and literary mills.

Next, Joyce’s ability to acquire and maintain (despite invariable fallings out) many important and useful friendships, in spite of extreme egoistic obsession with his work and personal pursuits. Impractical in many ways, especially in his love of luxury despite minimal earnings as a writer and English teacher, Joyce found his hurtful disregard for others not preventing his living off various patrons. Or, rather, patronesses, such as the French booksellers and publishers Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, the American magazine editors Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, and affluent ladies such as Edith Rockefeller McCormick and, above all, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who alone contributed monies that today would correspond to over a million dollars.

Thirdly, there is Joyce’s struggle for survival amid serious financial straits, sometimes even grinding poverty, whenever gifts or profuse borrowing proved unavailable. There was also the unemployability, as during a failed attempt at banking in Rome, or problems with puritanical institutions of learning, and scarcity of private pupils, though some proved slavishly devoted and variously generous.

Bowker is almost too zealous in reporting every aspect of Joyce’s finances, very often gravely limited by the obtuseness or cowardice of publishers, the almost inconceivable scrutiny and frustration by all sorts of censorship, real or merely putative, and terrible health handicaps, ranging from poor eyesight verging on blindness to raging stomach disorders.

Bowker has further strengths, such as a dry wit that complements Joyce’s own, frequently and hilariously quoted. Also keen psychological insight into such matters as Joyce’s stupendous love-hate for his native Dublin—actually more love than hate, albeit not reciprocated until very late in his life, which ended prematurely just short of his 59^th birthday.

He is also scrupulous in documenting Joyce’s tragic relationship with his gifted but demented daughter Lucia, whom he adored, protected and on whose upkeep he spent his frequently scant and desperately needed money, despite her terrifying rebuffs and even physical assaults on her mother.

But Joyce’s entire life, deftly evoked by Bowker, is heroic in his grapplings with landlords, strings of contradictory and confusing doctors, endless relocations, and often noble but exhausting excesses, such as the sixteen years spent on writing his final work, the gigantic but rebus-like antinovel Finnegans Wake. Its perennial and fascinating challenges to elucidation very nearly subvert the well-deserved fame and influence of his epochal masterpiece, Ulysses, largely “acclaimed [Bowker writes] as the greatest novel of the twentieth century.”

Only slightly offputting are Bowker’s admittedly rare lapses of grammar, easily forgivable among so many virtues. I conclude quoting part of a long, characteristic paragraph, displaying not only delightful fluency, but also the fine ability to summarize, a sovereign gift in a biographer.

“[Joyce] passed through phases of Jesuitical piety, Parnellite nationalism, anti-bourgois and anticlerical rebellion, socialism, intellectual aloofness and Ibsenite devotion. He was altar boy, classroom joker, young know-all, great operatic tenor manqué, a carousing ‘medics’ pal,’ a patron of brothels, poete maudit, exile, prurient lover, writer of licentious letters, ‘undiscovered genius,’ fond father, failed businessman, temporary bank clerk, original language teacher, eccentric dancer, blind Dante, fighter against censorship and literary piracy, lyrical poet, opera buff,  brave experimental writer of prodigious virtuosity and, finally, ‘acclaimed genius.’ But he was other things, too.”

Bowker neatly encapsulates those other things as well, but I don’t want to overwhelm you, though I must mention Joyce’s “help [to] those who were threatened with Nazi persecution.” Sundry plays and films have been based on Joyce’s writings, understandably without doing full justice to them. What might be interesting would be a movie about this astonishing life, if only a great enough cineast and actor could be found. Meanwhile I warmly suggest your reading Bowker’s spellbinding biography.

GODDESS MEMORY

Memory is so much a part of us that it might as well be an organ, like the lungs or the heart. It is as much relied upon as they, equally unconsciously and, when needed, spontaneously. And when is it not needed?

We have to remember to turn off the light when we leave home. We have to remember which one from a bunch of keys opens what. We must not forget the umbrella left under our theater seat. Such things may be as natural as breathing, but breathing does not require remembering as the other things do.

When memory works for us, we feel no gratitude; but when it fails us, how furious we become. Imagine not remembering to pull up the chair when about to sit down at table; yet inconceivable as it seems, haven’t we done so? And that is how embar-rassing all kinds of failure of memory can be.

What keeps memory so persistently in my own mind is awareness of the lack of it. At age 87, I suppose I am entitled to lapses of memory, but doesn’t it seem unpardonable not to remember why I went from one room to the next, to forget something within seconds? Not to remember who that person is who accosts me with intimate knowledge of me? Not to have remembered an important item on my shopping list?

I especially envy people who remember whole poems, lots of poems. They make for a wonderfully portable library we can refer to on all sorts of occasions. Not for nothing were schoolchildren, in the days when education still mattered, made to memorize poems. Why, even on an exam in a Milton course at Harvard, one could score just by writing down a few verses from memory. (I couldn’t. But then I didn’t care for Milton.)

Memory, though, can be a solace: remembering good things from your past. But is that an unequivocal good? Or was Dante right with “Nessun maggior dolore/ Che ricordarsi del tempo felice/Nella miseria,” which Longfellow translated as “There is no greater sorrow/ Than to be mindful of the happy time/ In misery.” But, happy or not, how often we encounter memory in everyday speech, reminders—memorials—of its importance.

Just think: memo pads, memoirs, Memorial Day, memorabilia, memorization, time immemorial, within living memory, and so many other words or phrases. And, somewhat less often, from the Greek, mnemonic and mnemonics. The Latin memoria is obviously present in Latin-derived, Romance languages, as in French, mémoire. But also, as in English, and other kinds of languages. Take the German, Memoire and memorieren. Take the Hungarian, where the prevalent term for memory is emlékezet, but there is also the more intense memória, specially in the phrase tökéletes memória, total recall.

Too much memory, granted, can become a burden. The great writer Jorge Luis Borges has a story, “Funes the Memorious,” about Ireneo Funes, a fellow who remembers absolutely everything. We read, among other things, “Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.” And again: “He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30^th April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho.” No wonder the poor creature could hardly sleep and died young.

Borges himself was no slouch when it came to memory. One of the world’s greatest polymaths, his writings unostentatiously display reading and erudition hard to imagine, let alone equal. Not without interest here is the epigraph in English (which he spoke fluently) from Francis Bacon’s Essays: “Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination that all knowledge was but remembrance, so Solomon gives his sentence that all novelty is but oblivion.”

Well, almost everything has its seductive antithesis, and so too has memory. The marvelous poet Guillaume Apollinaire has written in praise of oblivion, “Où est le Christophe Colomb à qui l’on devra l’oubli d’un continent?” (Where is the Columbus to whom we’ll owe the oblivion of a continent?) And with what melodious eloquence Swinburne has written, “But the best and the worst of this is/ That neither is most to blame/ If you have forgotten my kisses/ And I have forgotten your name.” This is so good as to make the solecism “most” for “more” entirely forgivable.

Nevertheless, memoria, Mnemosyne of the Greeks, is a goddess. Let me quote the delightful Dr. Lempriere’s invaluable Classical Dictionary: “Mnemosyne, a daughter of Coelus and Terra, mother of the nine Muses by Jupiter, who assumed the form of a shepherd to enjoy her company. The word Mnemosyne signifies memory, and therefore the poets have rightly called memory the mother of the Muses, because it is to that mental endowment that mankind are indebted for their progress in science.” Nicely put by the Reverend Lempriere (especially that very Victorian “enjoy her company”). Yet only one of the Muses was the inspirer of science, Urania, the Muse of astronomy. The eight others were the patronesses of history, various kinds of poetry, music, drama and dance.

What is so wise about this myth is that it proclaims the quasi-divine origin and status of the arts, history, and science, and that it recognizes the importance of memory in their creation. For they are all based, at least in part, on memory: summoned-up feeling, memorialized experience, a recalled something or other.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about memory is that, though we may call upon it, it just as likely seeks us out on its own, pleasantly, sadly, wondrously. As the Serbian poet Milan Rakić put it, “When the heart cries out, thought is to blame.” That thought, more often than not, is the voice of memory, happy, unhappy, or just surprising.

I myself am a bit surprised by the particular choices in bits of poetry my memory has made, and that I have remembered, with rhyme in most cases, but for no obvious reason. Well, yes, there is a reason in some cases, as with that great concluding line of The Divine Comedy, that almost justifies slogging through the Paradiso: “L’amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle” (the Love that moves the sun and the other stars), which remarkably loses almost nothing in translation.

But why, from all of Apollinaire’s marvels, remember “Ce lourd secret que tu quémandes” (this heavy secret that you beg for), which haunts me more stubbornly than I can comprehend. In context, it refers to the lover’s secret self, for whose disclosure even the beloved must beg. But I don’t remember the context, merely it. It may have to do with the music of this line of verse, the cunning sequence of vowel sounds, ending in the melancholy nasal “an” and the ghostly mute “e.” Also the echo effect between ce and que and the onomatopeic lourd.

More comprehensible is the staying power of a quatrain from Rilke:

            Befriedigungen ungezählter Jahre

            Sind in der Luft. Voll Blumen liegt dein Hut

            Und ein Geruch aus deinem reinen Haare

            Mischt sich mit Welt, als wäre alles gut.

And in sadly prosaic translation:

            Appeasements of innumerable years

            Are in the air. Your hat lies full of flowers

            And a scent from your pure hair

            Mingles with [the] world as if all were well.

Here there is no question of the beauty and power of the verse. There is, first, the situation. Rilke is writing a poem to Marthe Hennebert, a tearful working girl he crossed in a Paris street. He consoled her and became her lover. I imagine them sitting on grass in a setting not unlike Seurat’s Grande Jatte. The girl’s hat is full of flowers, picked or bought, and their scent, the German says, “mingles with world,” where the German, like English, would expect an article before the noun. Plain “Welt,” however, becomes not the whole world, but something both more intimate and transcendent: part of the surroundings, nature, something greater thus made more immediate.

Then there is the verse, with its music. First, the rhyme scheme: the feminine “Jahre” and “Haare” neatly alternating with the masculine, tonally different, “Hut” and “gut.” There is piquancy in such different vowel sounds, the floating disyllables arrested by anchoring monosyllables.  There is the wonderfully polysyllabic “Befriedigungen” with its dying fall, subsiding from five syllables to the quadrisyllabic “ungezählter,” thence to the two syllables of “Jahre,” followed in the next verse by several monosyllables. There is also a kind of arpeggio in the four u’s, progressing from “Geruch” to the culminating “Hut.” There is the lovely inner rhyme of “deinem reinen,” the bright diphthongs flowing into the dark “Haare.” And there is the delicate assonance in “mischt sich mit,” followed by the alliteration of “Welt” and “wäre.”

More beautiful yet, perhaps, and immensely moving, is he drama of the final verse. Here, in a scene of quasi-pastoral serenity and intimate charm, surely we can expect God to be in his heaven and all well with the world. But no! “Als wäre alles gut”—a melancholy “as if all were well.” For, after all, what is perfect? The splendor is only of the moment, and nothing lasts.

On account of these bits of Apollinaire, Swinburne, Dante and Rilke, I remain deeply beholden to memory, memoria, Mnemosyne. She is truly a goddess.

POLITICS AND TENNIS

There is a similarity between politics and tennis, which I note, even though I am passionately interested in tennis and only slightly in politics. This is too bad, as my wife reminded me the other day. Interest in politics might get me published, for example, in The New York Times Sunday Review section. Interest in tennis would not.

It is true that interest in tennis once got me an article about Mary Pierce into Vogue, even though my great love was Martina Hingis. But John Heilpern beat me to it with a piece about Hingis, so I got Pierce. She was interesting, but not someone I could feel passionate about, because involvement in either tennis or politics is predicated on passion, which is at the very least akin to sexual, and Pierce was way too tomboyish.

Let’s start with tennis then. Being a fan, for me, is definitely tinged with sexuality where women players are concerned. Steffi Graf was the great tennis star of my younger days, but all I could summon up for her was respect. Perhaps her nose was too big. She definitely lacked charm, though she clearly had intelligence. But Hingis had both. Lacking a powerful serve, the Achilles heel of many a female player, was certainly also Hingis’s, although she also lacked the brute force of certain current players, e.g. Serena Williams—and a good thing too.

Hingis had strategic smarts and won matches on strategy and tactics; she could outthink her opponents. She also had movie starlet good looks, charmingly lightly accented English, extreme youth for a good while, and a certain daintiness. Not many female tennis players have daintiness. Maria Sharapova, for example, has looks. But daintiness? Forget it. Thus it never occurred to me to think of Hingis as an athlete. Even from Pierce about herself, as I recall, “athlete” came to me as a bit of a surprise.

But women’s tennis today is full of conspicuous athletes, and very poor lookers. Just try to feel sexual about Kvitova or Azarenka, let alone Kuznetsova. I would as soon dine on goat excrement. There is today only one woman player about whom I have strong feelings, Julia Goerges. She is beautiful and gifted, and has a terrific serve (125 miles), but not quite great. One rarely sees her on television, being German rather than American. If only she could be black or at least butch, but no such luck.

Now what about male tennis players? As far as I’m concerned, they do not depend on anything erotic, but here other things preponderate. Thus Roger Federer is the most elegant, gentlemanly, calm, and seemingly effortless tennis player, whose playing, besides being talented, is also balletically beautiful. And beauty, I feel, is always a bit sensual as well.

Then there is my ex-compatriot, Novak Djokovic, from our shared ex-country, ex-Yugoslavia. A superb all-around player, excelling at everything and, perhaps especially, return of serve. That is where intelligence may count for most: foreseeing where the opponent’s serve will come. And he too moves handsomely, and has, on top, a good sense of humor, as exhibited in his parodies of certain female players. I only wish he wouldn’t grunt.

Grunting, or screaming, was invented by another Yugoslav, Monica Seles, but it is more recently that it has become hideously perfected by any number of women and even some men. It can be disgusting, especially on television, which brings you particularly close. It is the very antithesis of charm, and I dearly wish it could be prohibited.

Lack of charm is certainly prominent in any number of male players: take Andy Murray or Andy Roddick. If he had even a modicum of it, Rafael Nadal too would be high on my list. He also grunts, but far worse than that, he plays with an almost bestial ferocity, with a look you would expect from a pit bull or fighting rooster, but not from a human being. And Nadal’s thighs could give a piano a bad name. He is said to be charming off court, but what good is that? Do we care about what our favorite movie star does off screen? Well, as long as it isn’t Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen.

And then something else comes with tennis. We identify with players of our sex more readily than with those in team sports. The tennis player is out there on his own, mano a mano. No fellow player passes a ball to him, no coach gives him a pep talk during halftime, no referee hands him a warning card, no opposing players crowd him in any way. There is no restorative intermission, as in soccer, and a match can go on for hours, sometimes even days. A football or baseball player may sort of represent me; a tennis player is me. Or, if he is a linguist like Federer, I.

Now what about politics? If we know too little about a politician, as is often the case, we cannot identify with him. If we know too much, as is equally often the case, we can identify even less. Politics, if not quite a sport, is to a considerable extent a game. The winner is the most gifted game player, manipulator, opportunist. There is a lack of transparency; too much of it is played behind closed doors.

One wonders about the ethics and intelligence (or lack of them) in a politician. “I am not sufficiently devoid of all talent,” says the autobiographical protagonist of Anatole France’s The Scarlet Lily, to occupy myself with politics.” And “a politician is an arse upon/which everyone has sat except a man,” writes that charming poet E. E. Cummings. If only he had not banished capital letters, which, for me, ranks with screaming when you serve.

But take the very word “politics,” which has become, in many contexts, synonymous with “dirty politics.” As a profession, “politician” is, in common parlance, second only to that most deplored and ridiculed one, “lawyer.”  Seriously now, can you, unless you are black, identify with Obama? Or, unless you are wealthy, with Romney? The very word “politicking,” close cousin to “politics,” is malodorous. 

The matter of morality comes in. Would I vote for a politician about whom I knew that he cheated at cards, on his wife, on his income tax returns? I don’t know, because I have no personal knowledge and can’t trust what I read much more than what I don’t read about him. But then do I care about what sort of a husband Federer is? As it happens, he seems to be a devoted one, but I identify with him only as a tennis player in any case. As long as he is a champion on the tennis court, I don’t care what scandal might emerge about him in divorce court. And even if I were a bird in the trees and Nadal could charm me out of them, I still would not root for him in tennis. One look at him Rottweilering it up as he returns serve, and I’d root for his opponent—unless he happens to be John Isner or Ivo Karlovic: gigantism, to me, is not art.

In tennis, at any rate, the question of intellectuality doesn’t come up the way it does in American politics. Or do you think Stevenson or McGovern had a Chinaman’s chance of being elected president? (Oops, sorry; I meant Chinese gentleman’s chance.) Even JFK, despite his canniness, probably made it only on not being an intellectual. Consider what sort of books he read outside politics, and that charming, nonintellectual Boston accent of his. In Europe, on the other hand, an intellectual can make it in politics. Perhaps also, should there be one, even in tennis.

SALUTE TO NOEL COWARD

We are having a bit of a Noel Coward revival. There are readings of some of his plays, a course or seminar at Marymount Manhattan College, a marvelous exhibition at Lincoln Center’s Performing Arts Library, where a lively Coward symposium is due on June 11 at 6 P.M. A lecture demonstration is in the planning. In the two last-named events I am a participant.

Lord Louis Mountbatten, a friend of Coward’s, had it right. There are, he wrote, those who could equal Coward in any of the 14 or 15 disciplines in which he excelled, but no one who could combine all those excellences in his single self. I have always been a Coward fan, but having just reread his two memoirs, Present Indicative and Future Indefinite, as well as the voluminous posthumous Noel Coward Diaries, I am more than ever convinced of his genius.

What must be born in mind is that, along with the manifest heavyweight geniuses, the Prousts and Wagners, there are also lighter weight geniuses who do not produce huge masterpieces, but achieve immortality in less profound, philosophical or epic works. They do not invent new techniques or shed new light on the historic past, but they charm generation after generation with lighthearted entertainment.

It is surely remarkable that Coward wrote serious and comic plays, long and short fiction, both words and music for theatrical and nontheatrical songs, as well as poems and parodies. He was also an outstanding actor and an accomplished stage and film director, notably in that masterly tribute to the British navy, In Which We Serve., which he wrote, directed and starred in. He was also a great traveler, writing admirably about exotic places and people, keenly sensitive to beauty in all its forms.

He was also a dazzling wit, which, while not a profession, constituted a social talent, making him a favorite lunch and dinner companion of royalty, aristocracy, and artists of various kinds. Though almost totally self-educated, he was enormously knowledgeable and a superb conversationalist. He was an unofficial cultural ambassador for Britain in both hot and cold war, and was even a sort of gentleman spy. He seldom if ever wrote a dull page, and was no slouch at epigrams. Although, like most geniuses, self-centered, he carried his self-centeredness lightly, with centripetal as well as centrifugal irony. And he was a terrific letter writer.

He was homosexual, but what with England’s draconian laws against homosexuality, rescinded only by his later years, he never came out of the closet, but spoke up, if only privately, for gay rights, and was, if only platonically, loving toward a good many women. Altogether, he had a gift for friendship with all sorts of people, regardless of rank. But for those deserving of contempt or reprehension, he possessed a stock of both, and was not loath to let it hang out.

I found reading The Noel Coward Diaries pure delight. Over its nearly 700 pages, I felt I was getting ever closer to knowing Coward, and found his company consistently stimulating, expectably humorous but also surprisingly humane.

His favorite epithets for people and things he liked were “sweet” (best) and “dear” (a close second), and often both together. For things and people he disliked, it was a tossup between “idiotic” and “ghastly.” But he could make repetition feel not like redundancy but like a jolly refrain.

He had favorite phrases as well. A person might be “merry as a grig” or “happy as a bee.” Things could be “all over bar the shouting,” to end with “and that is that.” But we do not begrudge such verbal idiosyncrasies any more than we would someone’s characteristic gesture or toss of the head. He had, what Kenneth Tynan called “his hard-core court,” consisting of the actor Graham Payn (co-editor of the diaries and at a time Noel’s lover), the actress Joyce Carey (in many of his works), the designer Gladys Calthrop (who created his early sets), his secretary and as it were manager, Lorn Lorraine, and Cole Lesley, who, beginning as his valet (then named Leonard Cole), became another secretary, manager, and probable lover.

The diaries, doubtless intended for eventual publication, are studded with quotables. Of particular interest are Coward’s twin love affairs with England and America, neither of them free from lovers’ quarrels. The real quarrel was with the (mostly English) press, stunningly unfair to both the playwright and the citizen. Some of it was based on envy of his many successes, and some of it on his setting up residences in Paris, Switzerland, Bermuda and, most steadily, in two homes in Jamaica. If some of it was to escape British taxes, why not, given their exorbitance?

Curiously, Coward had scant use for opera and symphonic music. Likewise for certain literary classics, almost always expressing his dislike with the euphemism “too long.” Thus he would have none of Mozart (like me) or Britten (unlike me). He had grave problems with the likes of War and Peace and Death of a Salesman, which I fully share.

Coward is not only good at snappy witticisms; he can also astonish with his sagacity and good taste in longer passages. Consider the following:

            I have plunged firmly through Our Mutual Friend. What a great

            writer Dickens can be at moments, and how completely he fails

            when he becomes sentimental. Some of the characterization

            In O.M.F. is masterly and some, particularly Lizzie and Jenny

            Wren, abysmally bad. I suspect that he suffered from a funda-

            mental lack of taste. The descriptions of the river and London

            and the general atmosphere of the period areal superb, but

            why, oh why, those treacly, tear-sodden, pious, noble, com-

            pletely unreal scenes which I cannot believe that he believed

            himself.

This is not only sound judgment; it is also compellingly expressed. Closer to the epigrammatic is this: “When I eventually write my book on the theatre there will be a whole chapter devoted to leading ladies’ dresses and hair. They are invariably the main stumbling-blocks. Leading ladies’ husbands may also come in for some acrid comment.” Unfortunately, that book never got written, but passages in the diaries, letters and memoirs more than make up for it.

But, of course, Coward is better-known for outright epigrams. Thus about Mary Baker Eddy: “She had much in common with Hitler, only no moustache.” Or this: “It is hard to imagine, considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, that it has contrived to last as long as it has.” Or this, about posterity: “There will be lists of apocryphal jokes I never made and gleeful misquotations of words I never said. What a pity I shan’t be here to enjoy them.”

And again: “It is a natural enough malaise, this idealized remembering, but should not be encouraged too much. There is no future in the past.” Or this, after a day of auditions “Really felt worn out by the end of it and oppressed by the thought of those legions of unattractive men and women thinking they were gifted enough to entitle them to appear on the stage.” And self-criticism, too: “Other people, less clever than I am, can often be dead right when I am wrong.” More typical is this, about the autobiography of Monica Baldwin, an ex-nun, I Leap Over the Wall: “Very interesting, I must say. It has strengthened my decision not to become a nun.”

That, of course, was frivolous, but other epigrams are not. Thus: “Everything I have read lately has confirmed my long-held suspicion that Christianity has caused a great deal more suffering, both mentally and physically, than any other religion in the history of mankind.” (Written, to be sure, in pre-jihad days.) And this, prompted by a later work of Evelyn Waugh: “I do wish highly intelligent writers would not unconditionally surrender themselves to specific religious dogmas; it really does bugger up the output.”

Nevertheless, Coward’s principal achievement is in his best plays, correctly identified by Tynan as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter, though I would add the brilliant one-acters of Tonight at 8:30, especially the musical Shadow Play with its rather daring strategy.

About the avant-garde, Coward could be as wrong as about classical music. Thus concerning Waiting for Godot (which, to be sure, he only read and never saw), “pretentious gibberish, without any claim to importance whatever.” But everyone is entitled to some mistakes; why begrudge them to genius? To Coward’s many talents we must add yet another: a great deal of wisdom.

  

LAUGHING PRIMA DONNA

Yesterday I casually picked up a book that fell off a bookshelf. It turned out to be How I Lost 10 Pounds in 53 Years, and is the wonderful memoir of Kaye Ballard, which I acquired in 2006 when it came out, but foolishly failed to read. Mea culpa! I make up for it now, and what a pleasure it is.

You should know who Kaye Ballard is: one of the great comediennes of the American stage, screen, television, concert halls and nightclubs, who should live in your memory and your heart. Born into an Italian immigrant family as Catherina Gloria Balotta, she is now 86 and still performing in a career that began in 1947, and has included co-starring roles with Eve Arden, Jane Powell, Julie Andrews, Jack Cassidy, Nathan Lane and Maureen McGovern. She was “romantically involved” with Marlon Bando, been friends with Gypsy Rose Lee, Marilyn Monroe, Ethel Merman, Desi Arnaz, Bette Davis, and toured with Helen O’Connell and Margaret Whiting.

But in numerous movies, TV, talk and stage shows (many of then musicals, as an ace singer), she rubbed amicable shoulders with more celebrities than I can begin to enumerate. You should get hold of her memoir, co-written with her friend Jim Hesselman, and published by Watson-Guptill as one of their Back Stage Books. It has earned high praise from, among others, Horton Foote, Doris Day, Phyllis Diller, Walter Cronkite, Rex Reed, and Helen Gurley Brown, to which I now add my own belated but hearty encomium.

A compendium of anecdotes and lively reminiscences of many famous or just plain interesting people that crossed Ballard’s path, it is affectionate and outspoken, often hilarious but never malicious, only slightly mischievous but then mostly about herself. Altogether, it covers delightfully a hefty chunk of show business history from more than six decades.

We have here a feisty but sympathetic woman, smart and versatile, not a conventional beauty but of strikingly characterful aspect, not readily forgettable. Striking enough to have been cast as Helen of Troy in The Golden Apple, a show about which she waxes condignly eloquent.

And why not? This is a marvelous musical, with words by the clever John LaTouche and music by the gifted Jerome Moross, which deserves to be much more than a cult favorite, remembered as a near-success in its Broadway premiere of 1954, shortly after it transferred from an Off Broadway hit. But not even enthusiastic reviews, terrific word of mouth and a Life cover of Kaye Ballard by Richard Avedon managed to propel it into a well-deserved smash. Even today, by when the Encores! series has excavated oodles of forgotten musicals, The Golden Apple remains insufficiently revived other than by a few scattered, less than outstanding productions, including a well-intentioned but mismanaged one at the York Theater in 1962. As Thomas Hischak has written in The Oxford Companion to the American Musical, this “brilliant and charming show [is] one of the American musical theater’s most beloved failures. . . . it was far ahead of its time and its score is still treasured as one of the most unique of the decade.” Most unique? Oh, well.

The original cast recording, an LP of only 45 minutes, does nowhere near full justice; even so, reissued on CD, it’s still worth getting. Ballard writes winningly about the show in general and her experience as Helen, and observes cogently that what was required, “a cast album that was two hours long” would not have been bought by people in 1954, “when so much popular music came from Broadway.”  Not even the splendid opening, scene-setting number about a little Washington state hill town, “Nothing Ever Happens in Angel’s Roost,” made it into those procrustean 45 minutes.

The show is the story of what would have happened if the Iliad and Odyssey had taken place in the Pacific Northwest, the Spanish American War had been the Trojan War, and the Greek and Trojan heroes and goddesses had been racily idiomatic 1912 Americans, without loss of Homeric pungency, poignancy or romance. Even with the battlefield becoming a boxing rink, and Paris a traveling salesman, this seems somehow to have been too alien to audiences, despite a potent cast comprising Stephen Douglass, Bibi Osterwald, Priscilla Gillette, Jack Whiting, Portia Nelson, Charlotte Rae, Jerry Stiller, and Kaye Ballard, a superb Helen, immortalizing the ballad “Lazy Afternoon” into a golden (apple) oldie. Other songs, like “It’s the Going Home Together,” “Windflowers,” and “By Goona Goona Lagoon,” were no less glittering.

There is something obstinately inexplicable about why certain shows unjustly fail to become hits. To me, The Golden Apple ranks with the likes of Oklahoma! and Kiss Me, Kate, yet it remains an also-ran. Could it be that the still mihty Venus, Juno and Minerva vented their their divine displeasure at being turned intoa mere Lovey Mars, Mrs. Juniper, and Miss Minerva Oliver?

Kaye Ballard’s memoir is not the least sparing in stories about her own gaucherie. So, for instance, about her turning down a dinner invitation from Richard Burton, an act quite probably unique in theatrical history. She was in London in a show called Touch and Go when Burton came backstage with Glynis Johns and Jean Simmons and extended the invitation, but she felt too exhausted to accept, only to regret it to this day: “What if I had gone and fallen asleep in my soup? It was Richard Burton!”

Years later, she is backstage in New York after Burton’s opening night in Hamlet. She bumps into Liz Taylor, who looks at her and asks, “You’re the one who refused to have dinner with my husband, aren’t you?” And she wonders, “Oh my God, how did she know that? Was it really possible that my name passed between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s lips? How exciting!’ That sweet innocence makes up for the mistake in what should be “Richard Burton’s and Elizabeth Taylor’s lips.” Close as the couple may have been, they did not share one pair of lips.

“Good memoirs must always be the cumulation of gossip,” Max Beerbohm has written, and when the memoirist is a celebrity among celebrities, a memoir automatically becomes a rich trove of gossip. But much of what makes this book enjoyable is its inspired slapdashness. As Ballard says in her Introduction: “I have met so many remarkable people throughout my lifetime that it seems almost impossible to relate some of them to a specific date or event.” So, she writes, “I have sandwiched in short passages that I call Interludes, about people whom I might mention at other times in the book but to whom I want to give a little extra time. . . . Think of these passages as little ‘palate cleansers’ between chapters.” Well, sandwiches or palate cleansers, they are tasty morsels, and feature Gypsy Rose Lee, Phil Silvers, Fred Ebb, Carol Burnett, and Doris Day among others, and also “Critics,” which graciously repays those of us who have been (deservedly) kind to Ms. Ballard. There is also a final delightful chapter of brief “Afterthoughts.”

She may earn your plaudits or frowns for the following, as stated in the Introduction: “After talking to various publishers, I found that they believe the general public could not be interested in the story of my life unless I include a lot of sordid, X-rated type materials having to do with things like how I lost my virginity, Okay then, here it is: I lost my virginity riding my brother’s bicycle. The whole experience was quick and painful. (And that’s about all the juicy sex stuff about me you’re going to get.)”

There is only one truly negative paragraph in the book, and this, appropriately, about Barbra Streisand dining in a restaurant at a table close to Ballard’s. A female fan approached Streisand and asked for an autograph. “’Can’t you see I’m eating my dinner?’ Barbra snapped at the woman. . . . I can understand that to someone of Barbra’s stature fans, and especially paparazzi, can get very overwhelming at times. What I can’t understand is how, once you’ve reached the ‘star’ level, you can be rude to the people who put you there.”

We get a marvelous chapter centered on the 1988 revival of the Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman Follies at the worthy Paper Mill Playhouse of Milburn, New Jersey. Here Ballard, who played one of the important supporting parts in a flawless cast that included Ann Miller, Liliane Montevecchi, Phyllis Newman, Eddie Bracken, and Donald Saddler, reminisces about that production and that theater (and does me the honor of quoting a couple of paragraphs from my review), and about why, despite rave reviews and enthusiastic audiences, it did not transfer, as expected, to Broadway. This was partly because Goldman’s widow would not authorize it unless it alternated with the revival of one of her husband’s plays, which the producers did not want to do, and partly also, it seems, because Sondheim wasn’t sufficiently impressed. Her memories, speculations, and even divagations are golden.

The memoir is profusely illustrated, and its happy pictures include Kaye with such greats as Ray Bolger, Jack Paar, Shelley Winters, Jimmy Durante, Sandy Duncan, Ronald Reagan, Phyllis Diller, Carol Channing, Mary Martin, and lots more. My favorite one has her and Maurice Chevalier camping it up for the camera, which proves that a mere black-and-white snapshot of veritable comedians can bring a smile to any viewer.

Yet Ballard can also be observantly, impressively serious: “There is no wit anymore, no grace. There are a lot of smart young composers and performers out there with their computers and their telephones that do everything but the laundry. But, you know, once we got through the anger and love power and whatever else we were going through in the sixties and early seventies, we never went back to listening. Every product we invented was about being faster or cheaper. And the art world went right along with it. It is not a coincidence that Broadway musicals began to decline around this time. Once they did return, they were concentrating on sinking ships and flying helicopters instead of telling a story. The world started going so fast there was no time for the wit of a Noel Coward or a Lorenz Hart, no time for the grace of Lerner and Loewe.”

True enough. And though How I Lost 10 Pounds in 53 Years is also show-biz encyclopedic while being a fast read, it is by no means a cheap one. Abounding in wit, it is nevertheless free of cheap shots. Benevolence, indeed beatitude, radiates from its pages, even while it relates fiascos, faux pas, failed opportunities and footling faits divers. It tickles your funny bone and enhances your fantasies. I’m happy that it fell off my shelf, and hope it will fall into your hands as well.