Unwritten Memoirs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STUPIDITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSION AND OBSESSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OBIT (ER) DICTA

A smart ex-girlfriend of mine always started her matutinal Times reading with the obituaries. At the time, this struck me as peculiar: what kind of spiritual necrophilia induced a vivacious, with-it young woman to evince such retrograde interest? Wasn’t there enough news from the quick to supersede that about the dead?

Well, I was wrong. Obituaries are easily as fascinating as anything else in the morning paper. An obit is really a miniature biography, a life rendered as a short-short story, breakfast food quite as nutritive as Cheerios. But does short-short story, vignette, anecdote or whatever you want to call it do justice to what is essentially stranger than fiction? And please don’t accuse me of peddling platitudes; the phrase “stranger than fiction” has been slathered on any number of lives and become worn as thin as the slice of meat in a bargain ham sandwich.

Stranger than fiction, why not? Many, if not most, lives are that—can’t help being that. Fiction, however avant-garde or post-modern, must play by some rules, if only those circumscribing a lone writer’s imagination. But life, which shuffles events more thoroughly than a professional gambler does cards, is under no obligation to obey any rules. Otherwise would my vita be what it is?

When I was sick as a little boy, I would want my favorite movie star, Jeanette MacDonald to come to my bedside and nurse me back to health. Responding to my urging, my parents assured me that they had wired her, and that most likely come she would. Alas, not even life was quite that strange. But it was when the little boy from Yugoslavia (which no longer exists) came unaccountably to America, and actually could turn on his radio to hear his other favorite, Loretta Young, as it were live on the air waves.

Stranger yet, could he have dreamed that someday he would be married to a girl from Ohio? Not that fiction I had read wasn’t strange enough. As a boy, I devoured the books of Karl May, the German young-adult novelist who had never set foot in America, but made the Wild West as real as possible in his many novels, about, among other things, the blood brotherhood between the magnificent Indian chief Winnetou and the great white hunter, trapper, adventurer (or whatever he was) Old Shatterhand, who turned out to be, of all things, German.

Even stranger than the Apache chieftain were some of the white characters, who went by names like Old Firehand and Old Surehand (which in those days I mispronounced as trisyllabic), but were small potatoes compared to Old Shatterhand, whose very stallion was smarter than some of these Old This and Thats.

How strange was it that, besides loving Erich Kastner (add umlaut on the a) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (for the Martian novels, not the Tarzan ones), I shared the beloved Karl May with another May enthusiast, Adolf Hitler. (No snide comparisons, please.) Later I got to James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London and Mark Twain, but could they really compare with Kastner’s “Emil and the Detectives” and the May novels, including his equally great ones about the Beduins of North Africa and the Incas of South America?

Strange that only the French made a movie based on May, entitled “Winnetou” (played by a French actor), a flop. What could the French know about the German Wild West? They even made the noble savage the protagonist (shades of Rousseau?) rather than the matchless, omniscient German American, Old Shatterhand.

You don’t think life is that strange? Then how about that party at the Persian Shah’s ambassador to the U.N.? One attended those parties mostly for the abundant caviar, and it was there that I encountered a bright young Iranian, Farhad Diba, who had briefly attended M.I.T., where I, equally briefly, had taught Humanities.

Diba said he had had only one good teacher at M.I.T, and I responded that, similarly, I had only one really good student, an Iranian. Did you guess it? I turned out to have been that teacher, and Farhad, that student. A good thing, too, because he was a cousin of the queen, or empress, or whatever the Shah’s royal spouse was known as. So when, later, I was a member of a group of Americans invited to the Tehran Film Festival, it emerged that I was the only one for whom a hotel room had not been reserved. Luckily, however, there was one for Buster Keaton, who had been dead for many years, which I was allowed to inherit.

Thanks to Farhad’s royal cousin, I was provided with a limousine, which none of the others were, but which I generously shared with them, who included Otto Preminger, Paul Mazursky, Sally Kellerman and Brenda Vaccaro. I forgave Otto his cheekiness, when, upon arrival and no room for me, he offered me the space underneath his bed.

But back to the strangeness of life per Times obituaries. Where else would I have read about Anna Merz, guardian and champion of the rhinoceros, “a species that is often misunderstood”? A photograph shows Anna (born Florence Ann Hepburn in England and married successively in Ghana to two husbands both Swiss) cheek to cheek with a hippo. Let me quote from her obit by Douglas Martin.

“Anna Merz, who went to Kenya seeking a serene retirement but became so appalled by the slaughter of black rhinoceroses that she helped start a reserve to protect them, becoming a global leader in the fight against their extinction. . . . She left no immediate survivors, but more than 70 black rhinos, including one born the day she died, continue to thrive in the sanctuary.”

Among other things, she hired, likewise mostly from her own pockets, 100 guards for the expanded sanctuary and bought a surveillance plane, as well as developing a  network of spy informants, all to protect against the numerous armed poachers killing the hapless beasts for their horns, which, ground to a powder, are sold for prices often higher than gold to Asiatics as a medicine or aphrodisiac, and to Arabs whole, to be carved into dagger handles.

A law-school graduate, Mrs. Merz was previously saved as a child during World War Two from attack by a German plane, when a stranger covered her body with his own and paid for it with his life. This started her on preservation, as did also, in Kenya, hearing the yelp from the next room of her favorite dog being swallowed by a python. She grabbed her pistol and shot the snake in the head, and gradually unraveled the dog from its maw.

She revealed rhinos to be far from mean or stupid as commonly held, and able to communicate by altering their breathing rhythms. She read them Shakespeare to soothe them. It is just that they have poor eyesight, “leading them to charge first and ask questions later.” More from the obit:

“Samia, an orphan rhino whom she raised from babyhood, even crawled into bed with Mrs. Merz—not entirely to her delight. Samia would follow her around like a dog, even after leaving Mrs. Merz’s immediate care and returning to the reserve, where she mated and had her own calf. If Mrs. Merz fell, Samia would extend her tail to help her up.

Not realizing how big she had grown, Samia once tried to sneak back into the house where she had been nursed and became jammed in the dining room door. Mrs. Merz had to pour a gallon of cooking oil on her rough skin to ease her through.”

This April 22, 2013 obit (try to seek out the whole article) brings me close to tears. Conversely, I smile at the one of June 10 for Paul Soros, Hungarian-American billionaire shipping entrepreneur, philanthropist, and older brother of the even richer and more famous George Soros. It ends by quoting Paul, “My story is riches to rags to riches again. I was lucky to survive. The rest was relatively easy.”

Not all that easy, what with imprisonment and near shipment to a Nazi death camp. But what brings on the smile is Paul’s “losing a kidney in a skiing accident in which a buried slalom pole popped up and speared him in the back.” Later, in New Canaan, he “lost an eye while taking an indoor golf lesson at a country club.” Is that something out of Monty Python or what?

Today, June 23, I read about the death of the French fashion designer Jean-Louis Scherrer, whose clients included Jacqueline Kennedy, Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, and French first lady Anne-Aymone Giscard d’Estaing. Now I, a collector of neckties from most of the famous Italian and French couturiers, including Jean-Paul Gaultier, Claude Montana and, bought in Hong Kong, Milla Schon (sorry I haven’t the umlaut for her), still lack any by Thierry Mugler and Scherrer, assuming that Scherrer designed ties.

Anyway, my point is that Scherrer’s wife, whom he subsequently divorced, was called Laurence, and that their daughters were Laetitia and Leonor (sorry again for lacking an acute accent). Just think how euphonious a house it was that resounded with calls for Laurence, Laetitia and Leonor. Just read aloud those gorgeously alliterative names in L, and allow me a distich: “Laurence, Laetitia, Leonor,/ Vocables sonnant comme de l’or.”

No Wasps in the Bees?

“Queens boy, 13, wins Scripps Spelling Bee with ‘knaidel’ ” reads a headline in the New York Times of May 30, 2013. But a headline on June 1 announces, “Some say the spelling of a winning word just wasn’t kosher.”

The contest, open to kids up to the age of 15, seems like a good idea on paper. Theoretically at least, it introduces youngsters to a respect for words and their spelling, and so, presumably, to a love of language with a full sense of its importance, and to the satisfaction of spelling correctly. But upon closer consideration, I find this nationally televised event rather more problematic. Could it possibly do more harm than good?

As I peruse the two Times articles and a longer one from the Associated Press of May 31, I find my disapproval mounting. Let us look, first, at some of the words that were to be spelled, or, at any rate, those cited in the various articles.

Take, to begin with, “knaidel” itself. It is a Yiddish word, perfectly unnecessary in English, where “matzo ball” does very nicely, thank you. Now if that dumpling is to be spelled in the form given in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, we should realize that Webster’s Third, as it is usually called, has elicited powerful disapproval from such pundits as Dwight Macdonald among a good many others.

Yiddish, moreover, is a tricky language. Derived mostly from German--some would say a corruption of it—it is a labile lingo, varying somewhat from country to country. There is thus, strictly speaking, no single Yiddish, but rather a number of clearly related yet nevertheless different Yiddishes. Consider merely “knaidel,”  the Yiddish version of “Knodel,” the German for dumpling. Because the “o” with an umlaut was foreign to Jewish speakers emigrating to Germany from Slavic countries, the vowel morphed into a diphthong, more congenial to Jews from Poland and Russia.

How is the word to be transliterated into English? YIVO, the acronym for the Yiddish Scientific Institute for Jewish Research, postulates “kneydl” as the correct Anglicized spelling. But the YIVO people are not considered legislators by many Jews who, for example, do not accept “chutzpah” as spelled “khutspe” by YIVO, which avoids the “ch” as apt to be mispronounced “sh” as in sugar. Be that as it may, the dumpling appears as “kneidel” on the menu of the venerable Second Avenue Deli, whose owner remarks that “there is no real spelling of the word, so who determines how a word is spelled?”

Leo Rosten’s highly regarded “The New Joys of Yiddish” does indeed spell it as “kneydl,” although the famous author Sholem Aleichem preferred “knaydl.”  But Gloria Birnbaum, a teacher of Yiddish, spells it “knadel.” “I wouldn’t have spelled it with an I,” she declares. A respectable old lady, May Schechter, 90, of Romanian origin, says she doesn’t consider variety wrong: “You can spell it any way you want,” she observes, so long as it is understood. There is similar disagreement about other words, e.g., Hanukah and YIGO’s Khanike, with the popular former version prevalent.

My own feeling on the mater is that Yiddish words should not pop up on American spelling bees. They can manifestly be spelled in too many ways, and who is to say that the not universally respected Webster’s Third should be the unquestioned authority?

I haven’t even mentioned “knadle” or “knaidle.” “Knaidel” is attacked even by experts who worry that it might lead people into pronouncing the word as “knydel,” which they say would be definitely beyond the pale (not pail). Couldn’t we just stick to “matzo ball” which nobody seems to spell as “matzoh ball” though that would, apparently, be permissible. And why pick, as the contest repeatedly does, words that are unlikely to figure in most contestants’ or any other people’s lives?

Other words in the Spelling Bee cited in the three articles are cyanophycean, tokonoma, dehnstufe, hallali, and zenaida. When, I ask, would one need to know how those vocables are spelled? But now let us look at the actual contestants whose names appear in the abovementioned articles: Pranav Sivakumar, Nupur Lala, Sriram Hathvar, Vismaya Kharkar, the sisters  Vanya and Kavya Shivashankar and, above all, the current winner, Arvind V. Mahankali,13, from Nathaniel Hawthorne Middle School in Bayside, Queens. Only one name mentioned, Amber Born, does not sound Indian.

It is nice that Arvind is the first New York champion since 1997. But as the son of immigrants from Hyderabad in southern India, he continues the tradition of  winners and runner-ups  of Indian descent. This was his fourth trip to Washington for the contest, eventually winning a competition in which he came in third in 2011 and 2012.

Arvind has never eaten a matzo ball, is not Jewish, and speaks also Telugu, a southern Indi tongue, Spanish and some Hindi. Not only are Indians by upbringing more disciplined and motivated than cosseted monolingual Caucasian-American  kids (and don’t let me get started about American education), but also, speaking at least both English and one Indian tongue, Indian-American youths have the polyglots’ greater interest in, and feel for, languages. Still one wonders: why such knowledge? Arvind is headed for a career in physics, like his idol Albert Einstein; all these words hardly loom important in his future. What he did is spend numerous hours every day perusing the dictionary, and even more hours (6 to 8) on weekends. Isn’t that avoidance of healthier pursuits, and turning a kid into a swotting nerd?

Contestants, to be sure, are presented a word in some kind of context—a single sentence not necessarily very helpful with its meaning and no help at all with its spelling.

In particular, the question arises: How does a winner do it? All we read is that, influenced by a father who loudly chanted Telugu poems backwards and forwards, Arvind started in fourth grade memorizing words that his dad collected from the dictionary. When he began to win spelling bees, Arvind himself proceeded to browse in dictionaries for uncommon words. He also researched their derivations and languages of origin “as a way of better implanting the correct spelling in his mind.” And because he previously stumbled over Germanic words, concentrated on them—thus also on Yiddish words of German origin, llke knaidel.

All very well, but given the thousands upon thousands of words in the dictionaries, the vast majority of them uncommon, how many must one implant to sprout (or spout) correct answers to the particular ones chosen for spelling? The chance of having hit on the right ones may well compare to that of winning the grand prize in the lottery. And even if the words thrown at a kid in the competition might be recalled eventually, that is very different from summoning them up under stress in the few allocated seconds. So winning might be a matter of superior cool and memory rather than greater knowledge.

This year a novelty was introduced, announced a mere seven weeks before the contest. In small separate rooms, contestants were given some kind of multiple-choice vocabulary test, before the televised spelling bee. No detail about this is provided in the articles I’ve read, but it sounds rather like television’s “So You Want to Be a Millionaire,” where luck and good guessing matter more than learning.

Now back to those pesky words in the contest. Take “hallali,” a huntsman’s bugle call known to French speakers, but not to be found even in the huge Random House Complete Unabridged Dictionary, although it evidently sneaked into Webster’s Third. Well, how esoteric can you get? And I’m not even talking about cyanophycean.

So I pronounce the Scripps Spelling Bee not much different from any other television game show, no more educational than, say, “Jeopardy”—in fact rather less so. But it did win Arvin $30, 000 and a $2,500 savings bond, which I do not begrudge him. And one of his teachers has even promised to bring him a matzo ball to class, which should increase his gustatory experience. Perhaps his mother will even learn to alternate matzo ball soup with mulligatawny.

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

What is it that makes smallness lovable? That bigness should be impressive is understandable. We all respect Mount Everest as the world’s highest, and Mont Blanc as Europe’s highest mountain. The Nile impresses us as the world’s longest river. The tallest building (in Dubai, as I recall) takes the breath away. The longest novels, by Tolstoy, and even more so, Proust, hold us in awe.

Yet even weirder forms of bigness command our respect. When Georges Perec contrives a whole novel without the letter E in it, we wonder at so big an achievement, even though it serves no valid purpose. Big too is the number of frankfurters devoured in competition in limited time (hot diggedy dog!), an essentially gross achievement, but eliciting a left-handed admiration.

Someone has the largest number of Impressionist paintings in private possession; someone else the largest number of matchbook covers from the world’s restaurants, amazing even if not worthy of museum exhibition. Currently, a production of the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival features the largest number of pinball machines simultaneously onstage, garnering inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records, awesome even if a greatness of questionable worth.

Still, a greatness predicating wealth or resourcefulness is enviable and therefore also admirable. The size of those presidential heads on Mount Rushmore commands respect, perhaps as great as the achievements of those heads of state. But awe is not tantamount to affection, such as we have for small things. Why?

Why do we all love puppies and kittens, often much more so than full-grown dogs and cats? Ditto babies, so winning that even mighty politicians will stoop to kiss them? And indeed most babies are cute as all getout, yet once grown up, rare is the politician who would kiss any one of them.

So what is it about smallness that we find so fetching? Why do even some boys like dolls? But not all small ones, e.g., dwarfs and midgets, are lovable, even if they’re not as nasty as Swift’s Lilliputians. Toy poodles and bichon frises, yes; Yorkies, conceivably; but definitely not Chihuahuas and some other portable breeds, whose very owners I reprehend.

Smallness scores, I think, in several ways. One is through aesthetics, as in the case of certain small dogs. Sometimes it is through cleverness, as when a sizable text is engraved on the head of a pin. Often it is the miniaturization of something big: a tiny piano, say, whether it works or not. A tiny snail, not being a reduction, does not impress, but a tiny hippo or rhino, whether live or a mere stuffed toy, does. It is an implicit cleverness, whether artisanal, or on the part of nature. Or an explicit cleverness, such as a flea circus, but who would be impressed by a non-artiste flea?

Or it may my be a sense of our superior power that endears a tiny, fragile thing, as long as it isn’t repulsive or vicious. A wild rat, certainly not, but a tame, white, laboratory one, why not? The fondness may be a form of patronization, of perhaps unconscious condescension.

But aesthetics are important. A ladybug or dragonfly appeals; a cockroach repels. A sparrow leaves us cold; a hummingbird does not. A toucan or booby, yes; a common starling or pigeon, no. Rarity also figures in this.

Of course, we like miniatures; something large reduced to toy size. A tiny car or train or whole railroad; a doll house with teensy furniture; in short, something we can play with. The teddy bear rather than the grizzly.

Littleness translates as daintiness. We admire small teeth not just for their whiteness, but also for their delicacy, their pearliness. The epithet “little” readily suggests lovableness. Thus a wife, regardless of her size, becomes “the little woman” at least in regions as yet unconquered by feminism. So a beloved New York mayor became known as the Little Flower. So we say “Good things come in small packages,” however much Fedex and UPS may disagree.

Thus, altogether, little children have become idealized., and Lewis Carroll, that platonic pedophile, becomes enamored of little Alice Liddell. Thus child actors become adored by adults—the Michael Jackson syndrome. The characters in children’s books be are beloved even by grown-ups, and are often not merely kiddies but actual dwarfs.  Never in children’s books are giants or giantesses fair and fine; of course, there is also the occasional nasty dwarf in the fairy tales, but outnumbered by the Tom Thumbs or Petits Poucets, not to mention Puss in Boots and Snow White’s merry companions.

Small is lovable even in miniature paintings; why else would they have been invented—surely not to economize in canvas or paints? Whereas giant frescoes may prompt admiration, charming miniatures elicit affection. As do small characters in paintings. I don’t know how much the Infantas loved their dwarfs, but we just love a Velazquez Infanta. Is there a warmer. more loving term than “cute,” except when pejoratively applied to an affectation? Surely not. Small is beautiful.

A GOOD CRITIC

The recent, glowing obituaries of Roger Ebert raise the question in my mind about what makes a good critic, which Ebert hardly was. What gives the question some importance is the possible influence of the critic on a certain art, in this case principally drama, though with relevance to all the others.

The perfect critic, obviously, cannot exist. There are too many differences in taste that no single critic, however astute, can subsume and satisfy. Probably preferable is the one who reaches out to educated, but not overeducated, readers. In the past, this would have meant graduates of a respectable institution of higher learning, but even among Ivy League graduates there were striking differences.

Thus a degree in chemistry was and is different from one in literature, but even within the latter, one in Romance languages was very different from one in Slavic languages, to say nothing of English, a sort of omnium gatherum for optimistic future dilettantes.

Still, let us settle on the notion that a good critic would excel at three things: thinking, taste and style in a three-pronged approach—just one or two of which virtues won’t suffice. Let me explain.

Good thinking is the ability to determine whether a play (or novel, or film) makes sense. But sense in a work of art is very different from sense in, say, physics. Or even history, where respectable practitioners will disagree about whether Gladstone of Disraeli was the better prime minister, whether the Athenian or Spartan commanders were better strategists. There is no litmus paper that can incontrovertibly decide.

Good taste is a totally unscientific criterion. A respectable drama critic like the late Clive Barnes preferred Neil Simon’s plays to Bernard Shaw’s. I find that absurd. But how do I prove that, in this instance at least, my taste is better than his? Is preferring the plays of Lanford Wilson more tasteful than preferring those of Sam Shepard? Only in extreme cases  is taste demonstrable; say, in preferring Shakespeare to Tourneur or Massinger.

Now style. The theater critics of the New York Times have manifestly better style than that of reviewers for some marginal provincial publication. But however they may champion (as they sometimes do) some trendy, trumpery nonentity, of what value is their eloquent encomium? No one will dispute hat their style is superior to that of some fellow on the Mudville Clarion, but is that enough?

Yet in America today’s two main drama critics of the Times are the nearest thing to theatrical arbiters, if you discount such TV pundits as the late Roger Ebert. But how does one become a main drama critic at the Times? These chaps know how to write, which is for what the publisher or editor picked them.  But said publisher or editor proceeded on the basis of mere style; it is too much to expect those journalistic powers that be to have personally inspected the garbage crowned by proficient prose or the superior work left unappreciated by labile taste and insufficient thought. But the No. 2 or 3 reviewer is never promoted to No. 1 when that post becomes vacated. The successor is always chosen from among some other successful megalopolitan reviewers, American or British, proving that even style is not as important as imported prestige.

Assuming, though, that style matters over thought and taste, what does this really mean? If I may use a tennis analogy: the stylist is like the player who has a terrific forehand (style), but not much of a backhand (taste), and definitely not much talent for volleying. Yet there are all round tennis players (I’ll throw in even lobs and overheads), but no such all round critics to speak of.

But let us get to the problem of how the best possible critic is made. Orator fit, poeta nascitur, as the old saying has it: the rhetorician is made; the poet is born. Still, even if the critic, like the poet, is innately gifted, there are acquired qualities. What truly develops him is good reading, not only in his field but also in related others. This may be acquired partly through education, but must also feature intellectual curiosity. Responsible reading should encourage not only emulation but also refutation: one learns through both approval and rejection.

Experience, too, matters—enormously. For a drama critic, this means seeing as much theater as possible, but also reading the fine plays, mostly classics, many of which remain unproduced or unrevived. Important, too, is seeing theater in more than one’s own country, which, of course, presupposes knowledge of foreign languages. But it also predicates good, inspiring teachers, and demands, however costly, travel. And it also means good human contacts and intellectual exchanges, and willingness to learn from them. No knowledge of any kind, however seemingly remote, is totally dispensable.

But, clearly, learning from the great critics of the past is of the essence. These may be as universally recognized as Aristotle and Longinus, but may also be best known merely nationally. For English speakers, this means the likes of Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin and Pater, Beerbohm and Shaw. For readers of French, this might include Taine, Lanson and Brunetière, and, more recently, Albert Thibaudet and Paul Valéry. It would certainly include, besides such full-time critics as the great Sainte-Beuve and Rivière, some all-important part-time ones like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Gide, Camus and Sartre. Forgive me for skipping more recent ones, structuralists or semiologists, whom I find unreadable.

In the German Realm, there are Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and the Schlegel brothers, but also some writers better-known for other things, such as Loerke, Benn, Mann, and Brecht. Among  even more recent ones, I mention Hans Egon Holthusen, Berthold Viertel, Friedrich Torberg, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

Among the very recent whom I have read with profit, I signal Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald, though none of them is that much concerned with drama, but all are very useful all the same.

However all along, as among some of the above, there have been occasional forays into criticism, or even dramatic criticism, by those of whom one might not necessarily think of as so inclined; take, for example, the poet Heinrich Heine, among whose superb prose writings there is much of interest for critics. Or so, currently, with the writings of the brilliant poet-essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

The sad thing is that criticism is considered a minor art, and, to be sure, by some of its current practitioners it is not even that. A real problem is that to be fully appreciated, it requires also some knowledge of it subject. However compelling Jacques Barzun may be about Stendhal, if you haven’t read Stendhal you may not even want to read Barzun’s essay, let alone be able to fully appreciate it. Even the wonderful Walter Pater is remembered more for a few quasi-poetic bravura passages from his book about the Renaissance than for his fine criticism as a whole.

Criticism, admittedly, lacks a certain oomph. Although Oscar Wilde’s critical essays are as dazzling as his plays, if there weren’t for the latter, the former would be paid scant heed. Even the most magnificent modern dramatic criticism—think Kenneth Tynan, who wrote as well as any novelist or playwright, is unlikely to make it into the classrooms alongside of, say, Coleridge or Yeats, and they too more likely for their poems.

I wonder how many of you will bother even reading all of this. After all, it’s only about criticism.