THE -ESS WORDS

There used to be an anecdote around the American Cambridge that, whether apocryphal or not, had wide currency. One of the Radcliffe College dorms being Bertram Hall, story has it that when a lady was introduced to a visiting French academician as the mistress of Bertram Hall, he apologized for not knowing who Bertram Hall was.

The man had to be a Frenchman, for in France a mistress, especially the maîtresse en titre to royalty, could be proud of and respected for being a mistress. Thus a Frenchman could feel apologetic for not knowing who Bertram Hall was. However, for other reasons, other designations for women ending in –ess are rejected in modern society. In America, being mistress to the equivalent of royalty, a movie star, even if widely known, is not to be uttered; but the same holds true even for far less controversial –esses. Yet when you think of it, a few centuries ago Mistress was the proper title preceding the family name for respectable women.

Today, however, such terms as actress, poetess, airplane stewardess, among others, have become objectionable and discarded thanks to political correctness (let alone such things as Negress and Jewess). And yet, isn’t it a respectful recognition of femininity to call someone an actress or poetess?

Well, political correctness has pronounced it condescending to stress the female sex of a person. The argument usually runs that the –ess ending brackets you with animals, such as lioness and tigress. But isn’t that royalty of a kind? After all, there is no such thing as rabbitess or mousess.

There may be no glory in being a waitress, laundress or seamstress, but neither is there anything shameful about it. Granted that even “waiter” has become undesirable, so that we get server (as if it were tennis) or waitperson, which is ludicrous. Can you imagine a diner in a restaurant calling for the waitperson?

I would say that it is downright helpful that some words have feminine forms, as when a Frenchman or a German speaks of his amie or Freundin, thereby indicating that the relationship is heterosexual—not that that makes it better, merely different. It is actually confusing to use a circumlocution such as “female friend,” which can as easily mean friend girl as girlfriend.

I cannot help feeling uneasy when a beautiful actress refers to herself as an actor. Doesn’t it somehow imply that the feminine ending is less dignified, patronizing, or even ghettoizing? Not so for the divas of the past: in nobody’s parlance were Sarah Bernhardt or Eleonora Duse actors. Even much more recently, Helen Hayes and Ruth Gordon, Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman were styled actresses.

The distinction is even more intense in poetry. “Poetess,” nowadays, implies one of those three-named women who publish verse at the bottom of newspaper columns and revel in such dated things as meter and rhyme. No one today would dare to refer to Sylvia Plath or someone even more recent as a poetess. And if the person in question were a tough lesbian like Adrienne Rich, calling her a poetess might have got you a punch in the kisser.

But again, go back into the past and it is perfectly respectable to be a poetess. Sappho was a Greek poetess and Louise Labé a French one. It is not until, I would guess, Emily Dickinson that “poet” becomes desiderated. And yet how confusing for today’s nonspecialist to read about H. D. without knowing that it was a woman, Hilda Doolittle. And who can tell about foreign names such as Turkish ones whether they are male or female? Or even about such Anglo ones as Leslie, Evelyn and sundry others.

There were female prose writers who deliberately wanted to be thought male, such as those Georges, Eliot and Sand. Admittedly “authoress,” before it became obsolete, might already have sounded funny. As a matter of euphony? Not when “prioress” was in good order. Then perhaps because of its rarity, and especially so today, when even Episcopal “priests” can be women.

How then about such most vehemently repudiated terms as Jewess or Negress? Quite some years ago, the critic Robert Brustein got criticized for referring to a female thespian as a “powerful negress.” It wasn’t just the lower-case “n,” but, even more, that –ess. You might suppose that the epithet “powerful” could have created a positive aura. All the more so as “black” or “black woman” would definitely not have passed muster, though today the opposite is true. Well might you ask where the logic is in such matters.

But “Jewess,” even with the capital letter, is unacceptable, as T. S. Eliot has been rightly reprimanded for a lower-case “jew” in a poem, which, however, he never changed. The feminine form, though, was unexceptionable to Sir Walter Scott, whose Rebecca in Ivanhoe is a valiant Jewess. Here I am reminded of Jonathan Miller, speaking about himself in the hit show Beyond the Fringe, as being not a Jew, merely Jewish. This by way of analogy with, say, “bluish” as being less blue than “blue.”

Also, more important, on the anti-Semitic notion that the less Jewish, the better.

The argument against “Jewess” is also that there is no such thing as Christianess and Protestantess. Therefore –ess must be derogatory. And if, for whatever reason, “Jewess” is scarce  and generally avoided, it turns excessive and deliberate, and thus in bad odor, even as such a recherché synonym as “Israelite” becomes an elucubrated edulcoration, and thus distasteful.

Certainly there are no longer stewardesses on airplanes, not even hostesses, as they were briefly known, inconsistently with their services. But the settled-on flight attendants has it downside too, sounding prissily excogitated and perhaps even servile. Isn’t a female servicing a public toilet called an attendant? Words matter, even where they shouldn’t.

Take a very tall woman. Would it be insulting to refer to her as a giantess? Or would it be preferable, as in the case of the actor-actress dichotomy, to call her a giant? Surely less desirable. I think the problem is that in English there aren’t enough examples of –ess endings, as, say, in German, where any noun can also have a female form ending in –in. In English, several of those that do exist are unpleasant, such as traitress, adulteress, procuress.

Of course, there are also respectable ones: sculptress, patroness, proprietress, millionairess, prophetess, baroness, countess, marchioness and duchess. But especially now, with the glass ceiling almost abolished, there ought to be many more. Why not, for instance, painteress and lawyeress? Then even my wife might call herself an ex-actress rather than an ex-actor.

MURDER OF INNOCENTS

What about the horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School?  Of course there should be stricter gun laws and there should be no NRA. Of course there should be greater attention paid to troubled youngsters (and even oldsters) with a seriously antisocial attitude. But what there shouldn’t be—if only one could control it—is a mother like Nancy Lanza.

Da liegt der Hund begraben, as the German adage has it: there lies the buried dog, or, in the English equivalent, there’s the rub. In all this understandable uproar, there hasn’t been enough barking up the right tree (the dog image again!) at mother Nancy Lanza.

What exactly shooter Adam Lanza’s motive may have been we’ll never know for sure, but we could look more closely at Adam’s mother, without whom there would have been no Adam. She is the Eve who, however inadvertently, fed this Adam the apple, which in this case was the assault weapon AR-15.

Let us look at her more closely. What kind of woman keeps a deadly arsenal at home, a semiautomatic rifle and four handguns? Is this for the self-defense of a woman living alone, or with one unbalanced son, which proves more precarious? Either way, one handgun should be sufficient, unless perhaps the locale is Syria, Mexico or the Sudan, although even there more might be less useful. What good is even an armed innocent against a heavily armed killer with murder in his soul? But in peaceable, small-town Connecticut, a Texas congressman’s idea to turn high-school principals into gun-toting cowboys would seem—and be—absurd.

Yet not only did Nancy have such an arsenal, she was also proudly boasting about it in the bar where she was—suspiciously—a regular.  A barfly in the ointment, indeed. And she used her weaponry at the shooting galleries she frequented, taking her troubled son along. Such establishments should provide clients with one relatively harmless gun, and legally ban all others.

In any case, why bring Adam with her? Did she think that that’s the way to make a nerd macho? As far as I can gather, Adam did little or no shooting there. But watching his mother at it must have given him some notions. He must have learned all too well how to use guns.

That Adam was weird was apparent to any number of youngsters and probably not-so-youngsters at school and elsewhere. It may have been made clear by his older brother’s not visiting for the last two years. Also by the father’s having divorced Nancy and subsequently staying away from any contact. What does it mean that the 28 killings elicited only such scant, routine condolences from him?

Significantly, the first person Adam killed with several shots in the face was his mother. Was it only because she happened to be there, blocking his path? He could easily have sneaked out of the house when she was not watching him. Adam, after all, was twenty, and not some kid under close parental surveillance. And that, too, is peculiar. Why, given his acknowledged smartness, was he not in college?

He did, to be sure, speak of moving to the West Coast for some higher education. But why so far away, making it an idea as inchoate, as unreal, as our death is to most of us? More interesting yet is the fact that Nancy declared her willingness, if Adam chose California, to pick up stakes and make a home for him there. Could he have felt smothered by excessive coddling?

But those grade-schoolers—surely they were not suffocating him with some unwelcome and draining dependency. Rather, I think, they represented to Adam the larger enemy, humanity. Moreover, he himself had gone to that school years ago, and maybe harbored unhappy memories. Ultimately, though, it was a place where he knew his way around, and where a sizable chunk of humanity was conveniently gathered nearby into an exposed target. A vulnerable kind of infant humanity, unlikely to fight back. The same for some women teachers, no obviously formidable adversaries. Still, if, say, a factory, or some other adult assemblage, had existed a few miles away, there is no telling that he wouldn’t have hatched the same plan.  

Yet how come that Nancy was blind to the threat Adam represented? Well, is there anything blinder than blind mother love? Only stupidity, of which, too, Nancy may have had a healthy—or, rather, unhealthy—share. Little children, moreover, so dear to their parents, might have been a double target for Adam, a smart, and therefore unsuspected, lunatic, surely the most dangerous kind. His act was clearly excogitated rather than spontaneous. And doesn’t the Bible warn us about the danger to little children ever since Herod’s time?

I repeat, arming teachers won’t do. Perhaps better arm all politicians who support guns for everyone, and have a go at them. Is the danger that the pols are underarmed, hence the murder of our consul in Benghazi, a highly well-meaning diplomat? No, the danger is both inadequate mental health and gun laws (if those aren’t just one and the same problem). And don’t think for a moment that either Bloomberg or Obama or 28 dead can seriously change the situation.

No doubt our Constitution must bear some inadvertent blame. What is that business about the right to bear arms? Protection against whom? Indians? Brits? Hardly threats any more. But certainly not against the Adam Lanzas, who always shoot first, unexpectedly and lethally.

MY MUSIC

The greatness of the Swiss cultural and art historian Jacob Burckhardt (1918-97) is unquestionable. Splendid are even his lesser works, like the Weltgeschichtlische Betrachtungen, whose English translation, Reflections on History, I don’t possess. From time to time I dip into the original, as I did the other day, when his thoughts on music caught my eye. Some of this I translate herewith.

“Its [music’s] effect is (i.e., in the right instances) so great and direct that the feeling of gratitude immediately seeks out the creator and coincidentally proclaims his greatness. The great composers belong among the undisputed geniuses. More questionable is their perpetuity. It depends in the first place on the ever renewed efforts of posterity, to wit performances, which must compete with performance of all subsequent and (each time) contemporary works, while other arts can display their products once and forever; and depends in the second place on the survival of our tone system and rhythm, which is not everlasting. Mozart and Beethoven may become for a future mankind as incomprehensible as might now be to us the Greek music so highly praised by its contemporaries. They will remain great on credit, on the enthusiastic say-so of our times, like, say, the painters of antiquity, whose works have been lost.”

Which makes me wonder: am I that postulated man of the future who has no use for Mozart and Beethoven—and throw in for good measure Bach and all others before the coming of the Romantics, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz and the rest. I have a huge collection of CDs, but nothing before circa 1827. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven (yes, even the vaunted late sonatas and quartets) are anathema to me.

Now all you music lovers may ask, as did once a minor conductor of my acquaintance, “Do you then not love music?” But, of course, I do, only I start closer to home. And I proceed to many a composer, even little-known ones (see my book John Simon on Music), up to some of the more recent abominations, e.g., Pärt, Penderecki, Gorecki, Cage, Stockhausen, Glass, Reich and their likes, but not including the Messiaen of Quartet for the End of Time, a good deal of Henze, and some of Thomas Adès. And I love such slightly earlier composers as Frank Martin, Barber, Britten, Lutosławski and Dutilleux.

Who, though, are my desert island composers, my necessaries? Fauré, Debussy, Ravel and a bunch of other Frenchmen, but not Saint-Saëns and Lalo, and only some of Milhaud. Certainly Satie and Poulenc, and Bartók and Kodály, Berg and Stravinsky and early Schoenberg, the wonderful Janáček and Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and some other Slavs and Central Europeans, Benjamin Britten, William Walton, and a couple of other Brits (but Elgar only for the Cello Concerto), and yes, the delightful Nino Rota. Also Latinos like Falla, Villa Lobos, Guarnieri and the superb Montsalvatge. And still others—check out, I say again, John Simon on Music. 

The late Alan Rich, who loved to disagree with me, wondered how I could publish a whole book on music and mention Mozart only once, and even that in a quotation from someone else. My answer: Easily. Here again is Burckhardt on music: “Now it is fantastic mathematics—and now again all soul [lauter Seele], infinitely distant and yet intimately close.” Well yes: I don’t like it when it is merely fantastic mathematics, or, rather, geometry, governed by the kind of rules that make a square: four equal sides. Such, for me, is Mozart: one bar pretty much replicates the next three or more. (You are free to call me anything uncomplimentary you choose.) Repetition or near-repetition is to me one of the curses of pre-1927 music. A Bard College female student of mine once admonished, “Be charitable, John, toward mathematicians. They are failed poets.”

Failed poets—that covers for me (I keep stressing, for me) those earlier composers. Whereas something like the Janáček Sinfonietta or the Third Piano Concerto of Bartók or Prokofiev—that is poetry set free. It can be achieved even by somewhat lesser composers, say, Tcherepnin, Franz Schmidt (his Fourth Symphony), or much of Dohnanyi. And certainly by Hindemith, Honegger and Hahn, to name only a few H’s. (But not, of course, Handel, Haydn—though preferable to Mozart—or that ghastly Vivaldi.)

But what about failed poetry? Are the poets of earlier eras uninteresting? Certainly not. To say nothing of Shakespeare, a genius for all ages, but also Wyatt, Skelton, Donne, Marvell, Rochester, Prior, Pope, and a lot of others, to mention only early Brits. Still, my great passions are for later poets: MacNeice, Ransom, Cummings, and especially Robert Graves; also the Jameses, Dickey and Wright. Non-Anglos? Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, Prévert, Queneau, Celan, Rilke, George, Hofmannsthal, Kastner, Lenau, Morike, Storm, Morgenstern, Cavafy, Ritsos, Montale, and those amazing Hungarians: Ady, József, Babits, Kosztolányi, Illyés, Pilinszky and Radnóti, and one Serb, Vasko Popa. See my Dreamers of Dreams: Essays on Poets and Poetry.

                                                                                                                                                                

But back to music, and Burckhardt’s “all soul.”  What exactly is soul in music? I can readily point to it in, say, the piano music and melodies of Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, to name only Frenchmen; in operas like, among others, Otello, Falstaff, Wozzeck, Lulu, Bluebeard’s Castle, The Fiery Angel, Jenufa, Vanessa, Ariadne auf Naxos, Salome, Pelléas et Mélisande; in symphonic music by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Myaskovsky, Stravinsky, to name only Russians.

But define it? I defy anyone to do so. I can only say that it is what moves me, stirs up my insides, would make me sing or hum it if I knew how. What, in a Hungarian phrase, crawls (caressingly) into the ear. What makes me forget my worries, my inadequacies, my mortality. What makes me want to hear it again and again. And what reinforces my love for my wife, even though her music is very different from mine.

Finally, what are certain works at least part of which elicit a swoon of ecstasy, that could sustain me in the dire case of all other music being lost? And let us assume that I’m allowed no more than a baker’s dozen.

So here, in no particular order, are fourteen sublime works by thirteen composers: Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto and Souvenirs ballet, Ibert’s Trio for Violin, Cello and Harp, Mompou’s song cycle Combat del somne, Montsalvatge’s Lullaby for a Small Negro Boy, Martin’s Concerto for 7 Winds and Strings, Mahler’s Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, Debussy’s La plus que lente, Ravel’s ballet L’Enfant et les sortileges, Kodály’s Approaching Spring (Közelítő Tél) for baritone and orchestra, Bartók’s Second Suite for Orchestra, Sallinen’s opera The Red Line, Britten’s Peter Grimes, and Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (I cite the works that include the beloved passages). However, I do hope it will never come down to no more than that.

JACQUES BARZUN, R.I.P.

On October 25, 2012, at the riper than ripe age of 104, Jacques Barzun died in San Antonio, where he and his wife had been living for the last 16 years. On the following November 5, at the age of 103, the composer Elliott Carter died in his West Village home. Two veterans, creative in their wheelchairs to the very last, departed within a few days from each other.

 

I can’t really speak about Carter, since I know only a small part of his music, and do not care for all of that. Moreover, I did not know the man, whereas I knew Barzun, mostly from the Mid-Century Book Society, the second book club he headed with W.H. Auden and Lionel Trilling, the first having been the Readers’ Subscription.

At the Mid-Century, I was associate editor and in charge of the magazine, in which books offered to the members were reviewed by the editors, and later an occasional guest as well. And, pretty regularly, I. Of course, one had to, in both senses of the word, sell these books; but that was neither too hard nor dishonest, given that they were really good books we all liked. Some of them were even suggested by me, e.g., the Ford Madox Ford trilogy, Parade’s End.

It fell to me to edit that illustrious triumvirate for the magazine, a very different task with each writer. Auden, who was jovially insouciant, handed in smart but sloppy stuff that needed a lot of editing, which he readily and gratefully accepted. Trilling was more difficult. Always by telephone, one went over proposed changes, some of which, after some discussion, he accepted, some not.

Barzun, however, one was not allowed to edit. Everything, down to the last comma, had to be left as it was, even where—admittedly seldom—improvement was possible. At the other end of the phone, I could conjure up my interlocutor. He was undoubtedly smiling that frosty smile of his, one part convivial and two parts condescending. Since he was tall, when delivered in person, the smile would literally descend upon you, accompanying an elegant diction that itself had a sort of

smile in it.

His figure and posture were excellent, and he wore his well-tailored clothes with an aura more diplomatic than academic. His accent was upper-class American, without a trace of his French childhood. I always wanted to address him in French, to hear how he would sound in that language, but I lacked the guts to do so.

Even though, with rare exceptions, he spurned what I would call human warmth, his eyes had an encouraging glitter when the conversation was about one art or another—or history, or philosophy—which, in my presence, it almost always was. It could, had I shared his interest, also have been baseball. Often, though, it was about the art of correct and appropriate language, which was one of his passions, and about which, happily, we were of the same opinion.

I had not then and, I’m ashamed to say, even now read most of his books, not really even those I owned. The two-volume Berlioz never even left my bookshelf before I sold it along with a number of my books, all of which I regrettably came to miss.

Barzun was not, like Auden, someone to feel warmly about, but he certainly was one to respect. Thus about his steadily ex cathedra utterances, which one could not help admiring. (Incidentally, it was he who taught me that “could not help but” was redundant.)

He was always, like Auden, reciprocally respectful of me—which Trilling never overtly was, although he several times said he envied my wardrobe. Here is Barzun’s blurb for my book Singularities:

            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?

So my admiration for Barzun the writer, thinker, critic and wit is boundless, but I wish I could feel the same for the man. During his 15 years at Scribners as a sort of editorial adviser, he invited me to lunch once. He chose a nearby but cheap and inferior restaurant, called I believe Captain Nemo’s. Came the bill and Barzun, who was wealthy in both his own and his wife’s right, practiced division on the addition, making me pay for half. I recall that because it was an odd number, how to divide that final nickel was a momentary problem. This was to me a major disappointment; how right the British are to use “mean” as a synonym for what we call niggardly.

In an essay, Barzun reflected  pleasantly about the associate editors at his two book clubs: a certain Raditsa at Readers’ Subscription, and John Simon at Mid-Century, both, to his amusement, born Yugoslavs. (It makes me wonder what has become of the drolly eccentric Raditsa.)

Only two book reviews in my long career was I unable to deliver. One was a biography, The Last Pre-Raphaelite, of Edward Burne-Jones, which I read in galley form but waited for the finished book, which included all-important reproductions of his paintings demanding some comment. But by the time this finally arrived, I had forgotten much of what I wanted to say about the text.

The other book was Michael Murray’s Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind, which comprises, with comments, profuse and lengthy extracts from his writings. I tend to run penciled lines in the margins along the passages I wish to quote; here, however, the lines were near-ubiquitous, and I didn’t know where to draw the line. I struggled unsuccessfully with triage, but finally gave up in despair.

The term “polygrapher” usually denotes someone who has written too much, a more or less glorified hack. Barzun’s output—books, contributions to books, independent essays, translations—was all, however copious, of the highest quality, so that the term does not really apply. The authorial portrait of a mind boggles a reader’s mind.

So what I decided to do here is to address only Murray’s last chapter, “Late Years.” This deals with, among others, the very hefty From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, from 1500 to the Present, published in 2000, when Barzun was 92, and covering, I believe (I have never actually seen the book), some 700 pages. It features a major statement of Barzun’s firm belief that our culture has become decadent and is in unarrestable decline, but that, in an as yet unforeseeable future, a different, fresh culture would arise.

A very different Barzun from the one I knew emerges, more modest and adaptable. Concerning From Dawn, he writes his editor, “I want every opportunity to improve my work through the remarks of choice readers. And I mean comments of every sort: clumsy wording, too much on one topic, risky generality about our own time, dull stuff—the lot.”

In a 2004 letter to John Lukacs, he writes, “If I did let go . . . I would exceed all bounds and be put down as a mad professor, fit only to associate with helpless students. . . . I long ago learned to curb the spontaneous Ciceronian invective I might enjoy discharging from time to time.” There are gems in these late letters, as, for instance, when he lectures the language guru William Safire about the difference between a ship that is moored, and one that is merely docked. Heaven only knows how he came by such nautical intelligence.

There are charming aperçus.  “We live longer, it is true, but often without much enjoyment of old age.” Or: “One should not live to so advanced an age. One tends to become indifferent about—manifestations of good and evil in the world, for example, or the obligations . . . incurred when people ask something of one.” Or take this observation: “I think that in the 19^th century and much of the 20^th it was quite normal for gentlemen . . . not to talk about the ladies they took an interest in, epistolary or amorous or even marital as distinct from amorous. I get the impression, from letters and biographies, that to discuss or even mention a new ‘interest’ would be indelicate, for if precisely specified it could sound egotistical, even boastful, and if left vague, would lead to regrettable speculation.” How wonderful from a man 94 years old.

“I keep thinking that I’ve been enormously lucky,” he writes, and avers that he has no regrets about his life choices, even though becoming an academic was “a kind of Why not? Instead of a Yes, by all means.”

He is certainly right about our dumbed-down age, and that a dégringolade (a French word signifying a catastrophic downward hurtling) is taking place. May he also be right about the better future, which, to be sure, not even a child just born and living to be 104 will necessarily live to see. But hope and striving for it are not small potatoes either, and in this disciple of William James and Bernard Shaw they are always there.           

WHITHER ART?

As I have often said and sometimes written, the history of art extends from Anonymous to Untitled, from when only the work mattered to where only the name in the signature does.

What reminds me of this is a reproduction in the New York Times (10/16/12) of an untitled painting by Franz Kline, which, at the forthcoming auction, “is expected to bring $20 million to $30 million” and make me sick to my stomach. I recall a time, long ago, when Kline yelled at me at a party, “You are full of shit!”, and I replied, “Maybe, but at least I don’t smear it on canvas and peddle it as art.”

Art today is the result of a tacit conspiracy among artists, art historians, art critics, art dealers, nabobs who don’t know what to do with their money, and all the people who don’t know anything about art. And why shouldn’t it fetch that much when the article about the Kline painting notes that one by Clyfford Still, resonantly entitled “1949-A-No. 1” went for $61.7 million? Even Clyfford with a Y should raise a cautionary eyebrow.

I have always had my problems with abstract, or nonrepresentational, art, though realizing that when Tom Wolfe published The Painted Word he was, and still is, reviled as a philistine. The Still painting, not to be confused with a still life, is described as “a canvas of thick, jagged brushstrokes in deep reds and black,” perhaps indicating that nonsense in two colors is worth twice as much as another, like the Kline, in just one.

It ought to be evident that when painting was solely representational, even if skewed by an eccentric point of view or offering a dream vision of fantasy beings, or indulging in grotesque caricature, it still had some bearing on reality.

But the moment that art becomes pure abstraction—the honorific by which daubs, drippings, squiggles, gallimaufries are tendentiously labeled—what standards can apply? Preponderant difference, i.e., novelty. So it is that with the arrival of new mediums such as excrement and urine joining the more conventional (not to say outmoded) ones of oil, watercolor, tempera, charcoal and such, my retort to Franz Kline would have lost its sting.

Yet there is something unsettling about “new” becoming a synonym for “good,” and “different” tantamount to “worthy.” Of course, differences differ in degree of what, for lack of a better word, may be termed legitimacy. A Pontuormo differs from a Titian, a Cezanne differs from a Goya, and a Rothko differs from a Kline—though in that particular case I wouldn’t give two cents for either. Still, a cunning art critic could read something out of or into a Rothko that even he or she couldn’t honorably out of a Kline.

The problem for most arts is that so very much has already been done in them, propelling more recent practitioners into horrible distortions, obscure byways, or downright dead ends. This is true also in music, otherwise we would have been spared Stockhausen, Cage, Glass and their likes. This despite the fact that major talents can still find their own valid ways without lapsing into cacophony. I suspect that Thomas Adès can do it, though I haven’t heard enough of his work.

But back to the fine arts. Architecture, arguably one of them, still leaves room for justifiable novelty. In painting, however, the road is all but closed also by extensive, easily available reproductions by photography and widely diffused magazines and books with decent illustrations. The time when the only way to experience a painting was to seek it out for yourself in person is long gone. And once seen in good reproduction it remains, if worthy, duly remembered.

Then what about literature, which still has abundant openings left? Memory has much to do with it. Unlike a painting or statue, a work of literature, other than some poems, does not stay in clear recollection. A novel we read in college, say, will stick in general outline, but not in the details of style, hence seeming novelty can thrive. The devil in the details replicated escapes detection.

And then there is the matter of what words, uniquely, can do. They can be resurrected, recombined and reinterpreted in new ways more readily than your paintings. Thus even a book read some years ago will strike us in many ways different in the rereading. And a current novel, unless a manifest imitation, even more so. Whereas any clear echo of a Schiele landscape or a Modigliani nude will be readily recognized as old hat.

So where does this leave us in the fine arts? In a pretty pickle for the most part. But still (not Still), the best will be able to affect us as new. Even the abstractions may find ways in which some shapes and shades, some juxtapositions or eliminations may significantly impress us. The only monkey wrench is that, whereas almost everyone will agree that a Botticelli woman is beautiful, even a near-consensus about a Picasso is unreachable, unless there is large-scale dishonesty or self-delusion. Which, unfortunately, there is.

One thing, though, I am fairly sure of. Be very wary of anything called “Untitled” or “1949-A-No. 1.” Unless you can sustain a lifelong lie to yourself and others, it bodes no good.

WIT OR HUMOR?

It is an age-old question haunting some of us: What exactly is wit and what humor? Though hard to define individually, the difference between them is worth consideration and identifiable. Because whereas humor is generally appreciated, wit is unwelcome in many quarters, and probably should be avoided by those seeking universal approbation.

Representatives of humor are easy to find. They are all those safe, mostly self-mocking comics who, for my generation were exemplified by Jack Benny and Bob Hope. But even then, there were unsafe comics, such as Mort Sahl and, especially, Lenny Bruce. Basically, then, humor is cozy and is water off a duck’s back, whereas wit is coldly cutting and smarts.

It is, for example, the province of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward and satirists like Bernard Shaw, but will not needle much an audience shielded by a barrier of footlights. But in more specific, direct contact, it is apt to be wounding, perhaps not merely to its immediate butts.

Having had bestowed on me by some the double-edged honorific of being a wit, I thought I might learn something from reviewing my own favorite sallies and their social implication, if any. Often, but by no means always, they involve puns. Take, for example, my remark at a gathering in which the then sensational marriage of Japan’s crown prince Akihito to a commoner was discussed. Someone pointed out that he had impregnated her, and was thus honor bound to legalize it. “Ah so, “ I said, “it was a shogun wedding.”

Another time, a bunch of us were watching a TV show about Judy Garland. There was wonder about her real name, which someone noted was Frances Gumm. So what sort of a name was Gumm, someone else asked. I volunteered; “Chewish.” But whether or not such remarks were cutting, only an antipodal prince and a dead star could have taken umbrage had they present.

But now what about the following? An acquaintance of mine returned from England, where she had been an unpaid assistant to a friend of mine, the drama and film critic Alan Brien. She thought Alan had to be a closet homosexual, because his frequent accusation that the reviewees were secretly gay, had to be a case of projection. “Not necessarily,” I replied; “not all anti-Semites are Jewish.” This could have been offensive to some Jews, but all my Jewish friends happily found it amusing.

Wit can boomerang on its perpetrator. Once, long ago, I applied for a job as translator at the United Nations, and chafed at a seemingly unneeded lengthy written questionnaire. In one rubric about what office equipment one was able to use, after the obvious specified ones came the question: “Others.” Wearily, I responded, “Pencil sharpener.” This, from a humorless examiner who had circled it with enough blue pencil to provide mascara for a dozen movie stars, elicited a severe oral reprimand and, of course, disqualification.

Wit may also have done me harm in the blue book of a final examination in a Harvard philosophy course. T. S. Eliot had been one of the assignments, and hating him as I did then, I considered his inclusion among philosophers inappropriate. So I wrote: “When the great, witty French writer Anatole France died, an obituarist in Le Temps began: ‘We are sad to announce the death of Anatole, who was France.’ I am looking forward to an obituary beginning, ‘We are pleased to announce the death of Eliot, who was T.S.’” In case you are puzzled, T.S., in those more proper times, stood for Tough Shit.

But what about wit in a review, where it might really matter? As, for instance, in my book review of an anthology of poetry, where I wrote, “Robert Creeley’s poems have two main characteristics. 1) they are short; 2) they are not short enough.” This, to be sure, could do little damage, even to Creeley. What, however, about a theater review? Take one of my favorite ones from New York magazine, of the revival of “Private Lives” with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I reproduce the opening paragraph.

“Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” was one of the most coruscating comedies in the English language, and will be so again starting July 18, or whenever Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are through playing it. Actually, that’s not what they’re really playing. Miss Taylor is, all too palpably, repeating her imperious, dying millionairess, Mrs. Goforth, from ‘Boom!’, Joseph Losey’s even more dreadful movie version of ‘The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.’ What Burton is doing is less clear; it would seem to be some combination of a robot from Capek’s “R.U.R.”, an impression of Terry-Thomas as a shell-shocked colonel in an Ealing comedy, and blind Captain Cat in ‘Under Milk Wood,’ which, being a radio play, requires little movement and less facial expression. The celebrated star couple, a mini-constellation, are both on stage at the Lunt-Fontanne (what, alas, is in a name?) Theater, but they are not in the same play and not playing opposite but against, if not past, each other.”

If you want to read the rest, it appears in my book John Simon on Theater. Yet it would have been really damaging only if it had appeared in the New York Times, the only place where a review can affect not only egos, but also the box office. Let me, however, quote from a review by my favorite drama critic, Kenneth Tynan, in a publication that really mattered, of a production of “Titus Andronicus.” He wrote: “As Lavinia, Vivien Leigh receives the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband’s corpse with the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber.”                                                                                                                                                    

And how about this from Tynan, concerning the author of “Playboy of the Western World”? He wrote, “Synge seldom lets a simple, declarative sentence alone. To its tail there must be pinned some such trailing tin can of verbiage as—to improvise an example—‘the way you’d be roaring and moiling in the lug of a Kilkenny ditch and she with a shift on her would destroy a man entirely, I’m thinking, and him staring till the eyes would be lepping surely from the holes in his head.’” This, ladies and gentlemen, is wit of genius.

Still, since the French are said to be the absolute masters of wit, let me quote a couple of examples. The superb playwright, scenarist, director and actor Sacha Guitry once remarked to one of his several actress wives. “Cherie, I’m wondering if you don’t play too great a role in your life.” Similarly, his father, the celebrated actor Lucien Guitry, once responded to a crashing bore who pleaded “I speak as I think” with “Yes, but much more often.”

The brilliant French also coined the phrase “esprit d’escalier” (staircase wit), for a clever retort that occurs to you too late. This may have been the case at a symposium at the Telluride Festival, where someone asked me what I thought of the state of film criticism. I answered, “There ought to be an intelligence test for aspiring film critics. Not a very tough one, which most of them would flunk, but one just enough to eliminate 95% of the junk we get to read.” At this, Roger Ebert exclaimed, “John, that is the dumbest thing I ever heard you say. It means that only you should be allowed to write film criticism.” To which, I think I may have responded (or at any rate should have), “Roger, I said 95, not 99 percent. You have just flunked the mathematics part of the test." 
                                                                                                                                           

Some of the best wit, to be sure, is unprintable. In Budapest, two famous male classical music personages who were lovers had a falling out that lasted for years before they got together again. The town’s wits murmured that the pair must have said, “Let’s start all over again from back.” This works better in Hungarian, where the same single word can also mean from the end.

Well, one thing is certain, a witty criticism of, say, an actor in America is bound to be reprehended. Robert Frost could just as well have written, “Something there is that doesn’t love a critic.” The poem could have ended, “Good reviews, or at least unwitty ones, make good neighbors.”