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April 6, 2005
TT: Entries from an unkept diary
- I wrote a drama column for The Wall Street Journal yesterday. My editor kicked it back to me with the observation that I'd already used the word "clunker" three times so far this season, and would I please come up with a different way to describe the play in question? At once delighted and puzzled by his apparent omniscience, I wrote back to ask how the hell he could possibly know such a thing. It turns out that Journal editors have access to an online archive which allows them to make electronic queries of precisely that sort. My editor, who had a vague inkling of having run across the word "clunker" in one of my recent reviews, checked it out and hit pay dirt.I was, as I say, delighted to have been caught in the act. Not surprisingly, we all have our personal clichés, needless to say, and when you write as much as I do, it's inevitable, alas, that you'll overuse more than a few of them from time to time. (The preceding sentence contains six of them.) Doubtless (that's seven) the day will come, if it hasn't already, when some busybody writes a piece of software that will automatically check for such repetitions throughout the whole of a journalist's oeuvre.
I'm sure that, too, will be a good thing, though I confess to finding it a bit frightening to contemplate. Among other things, I write a thousand-word drama column each week, which adds up to a book's worth of prose every other year. That's a lot of adjectives, only so many of which can be meaningfully applied to the stages of New York, Washington, and Chicago. Should I ever be asked to put together a volume of my theater reviews, I'm sure they'll require a not-inconsiderable amount of editing merely to trim away redundancies and repetitions.
To what extent, then, ought a prolific writer of a certain age be expected to avoid repeating himself? I guess I'm going to find out....
- "Never sleep with anyone you only like well enough," a friend told me the other day, apropos (I hope!) of nothing in particular. I turned this provocative piece of advice over in my mind several times, arriving at no settled conclusion about its general applicability as a rule of life. It did, however, remind me of another half-remembered piece of advice that I've never gotten around to tracking down. I'm pretty sure it was said to Garson Kanin by Leland Hayward, the theatrical agent, and I think it's in Kanin's Tracy and Hepburn, of which I don't have a copy. At any rate, this is more or less how it goes: "Never start off by asking for what you'd be willing to settle for." Inspired by my vigilant editor at the Journal, I just spent a few minutes surfing the Web to pin down the exact wording, but came up empty-handed. (If anyone out there in the 'sphere happens to know the quote or own the book, an accurate rendering would be greatly appreciated.)
Yet my investigation wasn't pointless, for in the process a second half-remembered quote bubbled to the surface of my stream of consciousness, and amazon.com's search-inside-the-book feature sent me to it with a bare minimum of fuss. It's on the last page of A Life on the Road, Charles Kuralt's autobiography, and it was said to him by the humorist Harry Golden: "When you get to be my age, sonny, all you ever think about are the women you could have gone to bed with and didn't."
"I laughed, then," Kuralt added--the last line of the book.
What did we do without the Web? Got more work done, probably.
- I had, as expected, a very pleasant dinner with Alex Ross and Helen Radice. As I walked home from the restaurant, it struck me that I couldn't remember the last time I'd spent a whole evening in the exclusive company of classical musicians. This is all the more surprising given the fact that I am, or used to be, a classical musician, and have spent a good-sized chunk of my life (including the greater part of last Tuesday and Wednesday) writing about classical music. On the other hand, if you were to wake me up in the middle of the night and ask me what I was, I probably wouldn't say, "Why, a musician, of course!" I don't spend most of my time writing or thinking about classical music, or even listening to it. In recent years I've been mostly interested in painting and the theater, and before that I went through a lengthy period of intense involvement in dance. Yet I felt entirely comfortable gossiping with Alex and Helen: it was as if I'd never been away.
Somehow all this reminds me of something Henry James said in an 1888 letter (found, of course, on the Web):
I have not the least hesitation in saying that I aspire to write in such a way that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am, at a given moment, an American writing about England or an Englishman writing about America (dealing as I do with both countries,) & so far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it, for it would be highly civilized.
That's sort of what I aspire to be: a critic who moves among the arts so freely and naturally that it's not immediately obvious which one he knows best. I like to think I've had some success at achieving that goal, but I also know in my heart of hearts that I'm a musician first, if not necessarily last and definitely not always. It's my native tongue--my first love, the one you never quite forget, no matter how many may have followed.
- I just got an urgent e-mail from an editor informing me that Saul Bellow died earlier today and asking if I wanted to write an appreciation. I said no, not merely because I'M TAKING WEDNESDAY OFF!! but because Bellow never really interested me, not as a writer and not as a man. I didn't find him at all sympathetic, yet he didn't irritate me enough to cause the accretion of a strong negative opinion. He simply wasn't on my screen (except when he took a shot at me in the New York Times, but that's another story).
Might it have been a generational thing? Among the New York intellectuals, Bellow was a fixed star, a literary giant about whom you had to have an opinion, be it good or bad. I don't think that's true today, and I wonder how well his work will be remembered ten years from now, or even five. My guess--and it's nothing more than that--is that he'll be seen as a period piece. That doesn't exactly add up to an appreciation, does it?
Five years ago, by the way, I would have said yes to that editor, run straight to the nearest bookstore, come back with a tall stack of paperbacks, and stayed up all night knocking out a thousand words of well-honed prose. I may be a workaholic, but at least I'm no longer a degenerate one.
UPDATE: Rick Brookhiser puts his finger on certain aspects of Bellow's work that I found especially tedious. And Galley Cat is tracking the postmortem bounce in sales of Bellow's books on amazon.com.
Posted April 6, 2005 12:01 PM
