TALENT, ETC.

What exactly does talent involve? I know what it doesn’t involve. I fully subscribe to the declaration of the autobiographical hero of Anatole France’s Le Lys rouge (The Scarlet Lily): “I am not so deprived of all talent as to occupy myself with politics.”

What precisely is American politics about? Does it involve talent? I submit that politics hereabouts is a spectator sport, a form of gamesmanship. You root for a candidate the way you root for a baseball team, which you love even as you hate or despise the other teams. “Partisanship” is related to “party,” and you know which one you root for: the donkeys or the elephants. Elephants, we know, are smart, and donkeys are smarter than most people realize—how else could they follow surefootedly a steep, narrow and perilous mountain path? But how much should we really care about the propaganda of one or the other?

What kind of talent, if any, is required for politics? Could it involve intellect? Far from it. While all other minorities have their champions and victories, the only American minority that is either despised or ignored is the intellectual, which never even had a successful spokesman.

Just think: I can come up with only three presidential candidates who qualified as intellectuals, all unsuccessful: Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy. Well, the last-named was a bit of a nutcase, but the other two were not, yet their indisputable talents went for naught. (They might not have made more effective presidents than a Bush or a Carter, but that is not the point.) It is true that Obama, starting with his earlier distinction at the Harvard Law School, may qualify as an intellectual, but his success came in spite, not because, of it—for other reasons, which not being my subject, I won’t go into here.

I adduce as characteristic of hoi polloi downgrading talent an incident from my brief, inglorious military career during World War Two. A fellow soldier asked me where I was from originally. I named the now defunct country of Yugoslavia. “I see,” or something similar, he said: “that explains your broken lingo.” Now, I have been accused of linguistic elitism, or, in other words, using some “big words” readily and unabashedly. The sort of vocabulary that is considered by the majority affected,  arrogant, elitist, and definitely undesirable. But nothing like a broken lingo.

And what, in any case, is wrong with elitism? All it implies is a certain choosiness (from the Latin eligere, to choose). As in preferring the beautiful to the ugly (Liz Cho and Sade Baderingwa over Lena Dunham and Kathy Griffin), the intelligent over the dumb (Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen over Quentin Tarantino and Judd Apatow), the true poet over the faker (Amy Clampit and Mary Oliver over Jori Graham and Maya Angelou). Or, if we must pick politicians, the ones who don’t filibuster over the ones who do.

But talent, true talent, is up against an all too formidable adversary: stupidity. Consider the brilliant epigraph that the wonderful Ödön von Horváth appended to his masterpiece, Tales from the Vienna Woods: “Nothing provides so well the sense of infinity as does stupidity.” In German: Nichts gibt so sehr das Gefühl der Unendlichkeit als wie die Dummheit, and I always suspected that the redundant als wie was intended to accommodate popular, non-elitist parlance.

Stupidity is truly pervasive in our society on all levels. Take the unfortunates who whoop it up and give standing ovations to a Broadway show, no matter how stupid. Or the ones who assume that an Oscar, Tony, or Pulitzer—even a Nobel—is a guarantee of quality, as witness such a phony movie as The Artist, play like Water by the Spoonful, or novel like The Name of the Rose. The accolade they deserve is a kick in the rear.

Even smart people have their weaknesses, why else the quasi-intellectual success of the Wodehouse novels, where the facile joke is on the  stupidity of Bertie Wooster. That is a type of cheap humor rather than genuine wit, as in works where the laughs come from the clash of equals.

Of course there are inequalities of talent as well. I often cite the story of the juggler performing before a French king by impaling tossed peas on a long needle held by his son. The king rewarded him with a sack full of small, round objects the thrower took to be nuggets, but proved to be more peas.

Which brings me to the circus, another parallel with politics. Here some remarkable talents of a sort are applauded by multitudes that wouldn’t set foot in a theater or opera house. Now, I have nothing against acrobats and artistes—I enjoy their skills myself—but I do not equate them with the talent of artists without a final “e.”

And while we are on the subject of benightedness, what about the not inconsiderable number of responders to my last blog post about feminine beauty, in which I cited some seventy actresses who had, over the years, elicited the fan in me. (By the way, I should not have overlooked Blythe Danner and Emmanuelle Béart.) It netted me the ire of feminists or P.C. peddlers who accused me of “objectification,” as if responding to feminine beauty were tantamount to reification.

Yet this was much like my admiration for feminine beauty in art, as for instance in the women of Botticelli, without my slightest desire to hump a painting. To love beauty in any form, from the highest to the lowest, seems to me justified, even if it is merely preferring the dogs in a kennel show to those on a street corner. (Next I’ll be accused of zoophilia.)

But even if relishing the beauty of an actress were sexually motivated, where is the harm? Is that such a sin? Is it objectification? It is unfortunate that the term “sex object” has been invented. Unless you are a brute, fantasizing sex with a woman—even if you prefer Angelina Jolie to Barbra Streisand—does not reduce her to a sex object. Or else all those amorous husbands enjoying intercourse with their wives would be turning them into sex objects. I doubt whether mere kindred of souls motivates conjugal intercourse. The reductive view of healthy sexual appetite as objectification I find truly objectionable.

I will make one concession here. It is quite understandable for us poorer folk to envy or resent the fortune of billionaires, especially when such wealth is acquired on the basis of being able, under contesting circumstances, to toss a ball into a basket. So I can appreciate a homely woman’s resentment of a Liz Taylor or Carla Bruni. Even then, though, it is more dignified to keep that feeling private, if not indeed unvoiced, rather than carrying on shrilly about alleged objectification.

FEMININE BEAUTY, OR 70 GIRLS 70

Some things are absurd. I am frequently accused of misogyny; what nonsense! For me, there is nothing more beautiful in the world, and thus more sacred, than a beautiful woman. True, this excludes many women; it presupposes beauty of face and body, of limbs and extremities—ideally, the convergence of several beauties into one.

Of course, face and figure are the most important, and, after that, legs and behind. But one can be a beautiful woman without perfection in all parts; we think of Myrna Loy, Gene Tierney and Liz Taylor as beautiful, even if none of them had perfect legs. And unless we have seen them in bikinis, we cannot vouch for their derrieres. And sometimes not even then.

But even with some imperfections, there is nothing, I repeat, more beautiful than a beautiful woman. This is true even in art, hence the prevalence of female nudes. But art also reveals to us how the concept of beauty has changed over the years. What was beautiful for Rubens or Rembrandt is quite different from what was beautiful for Manet or Modigliani. 

Thus what I proclaim beautiful today may not be so for future generations. Even so, let me name a number of actresses from several countries whom, at one time or another, I have found beautiful. Even just writing down their names gives me a frisson of beatitude.

Isabelle Adjani, Anouk Aimée, Bibi Andersson, Ursula Andress, Laura Antonelli, Karin Baal, Barbara Bach, Brigitte Bardot, Halle Berry, Adriana Beneti, Laura Betti, Jacqueline Bisset, Florinda Bolkan, Francesca Braggiotti, Genevieve Bujold, Leslie Caron, Valentina Cortese, Dorothy Dandridge, Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Doris Dowling, Anita Ekberg, Lena Endre, Jane Fonda, Megan Fox, Jane Greer, Virginia Grey, Camilla Horn, Brigitte Horney, Marsha Hunt, Jennifers Garner and Lopez, Jessicas Alba and Beil, Angelina Jolie, Katalin Karádi, Nicole Kidman, Keira Knightley, Johanna von Koczian, Hilde Krahl, La Jana, Hedy Lamarr, Diane Lane, Virginie Ledoyen, Vivien Leigh, Sofia Loren, Anita Louise, Antonella Lualdi, Silvana Mangano, Lea Massari, Irene von Meyendorff, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Sarah Miles, Marilyn Monroe,  Rossana Podesta, Micheline Presle, Liselotte Pulver, Lee Remick, Julia Roberts, Laila Robins, Keri Russell, Romy Schneider, Simone Signoret, Alexis Smith, Kristina Söderbaum, Audrey Tautou, Elizabeth Taylor, Charlize Theron, Ingrid Thulin, Gene Tierney, Nadja Tiller, Mari Törőcsik and Alida Valli.

Given my lifelong distaste for lists, I have herewith contradicted myself, but, like others who have lapsed into self-contradiction, I invoke Walt Whitman in my defense. Some seeming contradictions may even be mere changes of opinion, which are perfectly permissible.

Now, what of looks acquired through or enhanced by cosmetic surgery? Some people regard that as cheating, indeed invalid. Not so I; I say beauty is beauty, however achieved.

More problematic are women whose sexiness, though not exactly beauty, proves a compelling substitute. Think Nastassja Kinski or Gloria Grahame.

Sometimes the boundaries are blurry and it is hard to decide whether a woman is beautiful or just sexy: think Marion Cotillard, Susan Sarandon or Sigourney Weaver. What is certain is that no straight man would kick any of them out of bed. 

Someone might wonder why my list is as long as it is. Usually lists are of the ten-best or twenty-best variety. This one could easily have been much longer and I am sure to be soon kicking myself for some obvious omissions. The intention was to include those women who, at my various stages, have been most attractive, most exciting to me.

Definitely omitted are women who were merely lovable. That is more of an inner beauty, not visible, and therefore not to be counted. It is more goodness than beauty, though the two sometimes get confused. Not to be omitted were some actresses not known to many of my readers. Not any of them ended up in my arms, but once a woman becomes a memory, there is scant difference between what you had and what you only yearned for.

You most likely know how pleasurable it is to live with a lovely view outside your windows. Well, how about having it inside your walls in the forms of a beautiful face and figure? 

                                                           
You go to bed content and wake up content, and in between there is something even better. You are not plagued by envy of other men, and feel affluent without a dollar in the bank. Life itself has become beautiful.

To be sure, you may resent knowing, or just knowing of, a woman beautiful without deserving it in the slightest. Why such injustice? You must then be either very young or blind not to be resigned to there being no justice in the world.

And then, again, how relative everything is! I see on my computer a full-length picture of Jane Greer in a bikini and leaning on an outdoor chair. She is stunning from top to toe, yet out of eleven respondents, one, so Google tells me, finds her feet ugly. This strikes me as totally incomprehensible. Tastes may differ, but white cannot be anyone’s black, square anyone’s round. Jane Greer’s feet are just fine; is that respondent an idiot?

The only problem with female beauty is that, like any other, lesser one, it ages. Some women age better than others, but none, alas, stays forever young. Some women are beautiful even in old age, but merely with the austere, cold beauty of the monument they have become. It is not even the just one remove from the flesh and blood kind of a photograph. It inspires merely a remote nostalgia for what the woman must have been or, if she is a friend or spouse, was. She is even a symbol of mortality, inducing a kind of melancholy respect. Is that a good feeling? I truly don’t know.

SONG EVENINGS

Theater is not only plays and musicals; it is also opera and ballet, and perhaps even sports events. Also canny storytelling and, if they still exist, poetry readings. And certainly masterly song recitals.

By this I mean the English art song, the German lied, and the French melodie, all of which, expertly performed, yield their kind of drama. Let the song be about a relationship of love or hate, a person’s elated response to natural phenomena like flowers and birdsong, or elegiac contemplation of a parting or death, and drama is born, presupposing of course the capturing and holding of a theatrical audience.

I am thinking here of a recent Alice Tully Hall Liederabend, a concert evening of songs by Hugo Wolf in recital by the English tenor Ian Bostridge and the Austrian soprano Angelika Kirchschlager, a major artistic occasion. The songs were culled from the Spanisches Liederbuch (Spanish Songbook), Wolf’s setting of Spanish folk songs and lyrics by lesser known rhymesters—although also one each by Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and the Portuguese master Luis de Camoes—as translated into German verse by two decent minor poets, Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse.

There was first a group of spiritual songs concerning God and Christ, then a secular group, mostly love songs of one kind or another, and rather more satisfying. Bostridge and Kirchschlager are both consummate artists, but there was a difference. He was affected and posturing—which, in the past, he wasn’t, or just barely—whereas she was perfect and adorable.

The white-bread, gangly, Oxford undergradish (he is indeed an ex-Oxonian) Bostridge has the requisite voice and technique, but his physical mannerisms now cry out for the discretion of the CD, sparing us the distracting carryings-on. The tenor swayed to the right and left, sometimes threatening to fall on the piano—at which Julius Drake superbly supported the singers, albeit as an accompanist, not as a crutch. Worse yet, Bostridge kept taking little—or not so little—listing walks toward the footlights and back again, rather like an as yet novice sleepwalker.

One might also have quarreled with his dynamics, which seemed excessive at times, as were his exaggerated facial expressions. It made me nostalgic for the recitals of the greatest singer among my coevals, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He remained upright, close to the piano, without making faces like the hapless little girl in the Hilaire Belloc poem. The voice acted out the meanings of what it sang, a dignified kind of theater, without unleashed histrionics.

But Kirchschlager made up for everything—and then some. The singers alternated after every one or two songs. When not singing, each sat on a chair well to the right of the piano. As one finished and headed for the chair, the other was crossing him or her on the way toward the piano. The tenor did this deadpan, whereas the soprano with a slightly sly, almost mischievous smile.

Once Angelika sang, she was truly angelic, with understated but charmingly varied facial expressions, whatever subtly enhanced the text. Drama was exuded by the eyes, and surged from the versatility of the voice. That she is a lovely woman added to the expressiveness of the performance. (Personally, I would not allow a pachyderm like Stephanie Blythe on a concert stage no matter how good her voice.)

The last song she delivered in her crystalline yet also warm soprano, “Geh, Geliebter, geh jetzt!” (Go, Beloved, Go Now), was one of my supreme concertgoing experiences. In the text, a girl after a night of lovemaking urges her lover to be off with the dawn, lest prying neighbors’ eyes and malicious tongues put paid to the lovers’ nocturnal trysts.

There was more true, deep feeling in the soprano’s rendition of that one lied than in an entire recital by so many other singers. Then, delightfully introduced by Drake—as apt with his words as with his fingers—we got for an encore a duet by Schumann, which recalled for me an evening at Carnegie Hall: a joint recital by Kirchschlager and the marvelous British baritone Simon Keenlyside, featuring several such duets.

But what about the songs themselves? I prefer Wolf’s similar Italienisches Liederbuch, a setting of songs from the Italian, and even more so the lieder from neither of the songbooks, but superb settings of great poems by the likes of Goethe and Mörike, exalted or shattering as very little in the two song cycles is.

But Hugo Wolf is always interesting. I have a little brochure entitled Das Lied, and subtitled (I translate) “A German Contribution to World Culture,” a collection of essays by various hands (including a lovely prose poem by the distinguished Ingeborg Bachmann), published as an elaborate program booklet in conjunction with a series of concerts and master classes in the fall of 1990, presided over by Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Mitsouko Sirai and Hartmut Höll, and sponsored by the International Hugo Wolf Society of Stuttgart.

I definitely wasn’t there, alas, and have no idea how the brochure came into my possession. In any case, it contains the text of a talk by the eminent French philosophy professor and music scholar Andre Tubeuf, in which he aptly characterizes Wolf’s work as “l’apogée désespérée d’un genre,” the desperate high point of an art form, which Wolf’s lieder assuredly are.

This brings to mind an incident from the distant past, when Fischer-Dieskau gave a series of lieder recitals in Carnegie Hall. The last of them was to have been all Hugo Wolf, but the crass impresario Sol Hurok persuaded the baritone to switch to all Schubert, which, he claimed, sells better. Emerging disappointed from the concert, I ran into the legendary music critic B. H. Haggin, who beamed at me and exclaimed, “Wasn’t it wonderful?” It would have been more so, I replied, had it remained Wolf. Haggin stared at me in disbelief: How could anyone prefer Wolf to Schubert? Well, by and large, I did. And still do.

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.