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August 11, 2005
TT: Entries from an unkept diary
- The other night I went to a play in which a very short actress gave a very good performance. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that a great many of the women to whom I've been attracted over the years have ranged in height from five foot zero to five foot three. I once had occasion to mention this fact to a self-styled feminist, who told me that I clearly had an unnatural need to dominate women. (I'm five foot eight.) I sputtered in reply that one of the most attractive women I know is six feet tall, and it later occurred to me that I also happen to like art songs, novellas, small paintings, and cozy little apartments such as the one in which I so contentedly live.To this list I would now add plays of no more than two hours' length, performed if at all possible without an intermission. (Remember my Drama Critics' Prayer?) One such show that I recently reviewed is Primo, Sir Anthony Sher's one-man dramatization of Primo Levi's Auschwitz memoir. I went to see it with Sarah, and as my review doubtless made clear, I was deeply moved. I actually started crying shortly after we left the theater, and the two of us walked together in silence for a block or so as I struggled without success to regain my composure.
For some reason I glanced across the street at the marquee of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, where Sweet Charity is playing. Below it I saw a huge poster on which was emblazoned in jumbo letters the following blurb:
"IT'S A BLAST!"
--Terry Teachout,
The Wall Street Journal
I looked at Sarah and pointed silently at the poster. The absurdity of the juxtaposition caused us both to dissolve on the spot into helpless laughter, and we were still laughing when we finally managed to flag a cab and flee the theater district.
Like the man says, life is pandemonium.
- I recently watched a TV documentary called Ken Russell: In Search of the English Folksong. Like all of Russell's films and TV shows, it stank of self-regard, but there was one moment that struck me as especially awful, even for him. At the top of the hour, an unnamed young woman sang Percy Grainger's seraphically beautiful harmonization of "Brigg Fair," a folk song that Grainger took down in 1905 from the singing of Joseph Taylor, a seventy-two-year-old Lincolnshire bailiff. The camera then cut to Russell sitting at a table with an old phonograph and a stack of 78s, and I realized that he was about to play one of the rarest records ever made, the 1908 performance of "Brigg Fair" that Taylor recorded at Grainger's urging for the Gramophone Company of London. It was one of a dozen folk songs recorded by Taylor in the studio, the very first time that a "genuine peasant folk-singer" had made commercial recordings. "Nothing could be more refreshing," Grainger wrote at the time, "than [Taylor's] hale countrified looks and the happy lilt of his cheery voice....though his age was seventy-five, his looks were those of middle age, while his flowing, ringing tenor voice was well nigh as fresh as that of his son."
I'd long known of the existence of this record (Grainger is one of my favorite composers), but I'd never heard it, and was starting to think I never would. Then, to my amazement and delight, Russell slipped it out of the pile of 78s, placed it on the turntable, and lowered the needle to the spinning shellac surface. From the speakers of my TV set came a century-old sound: It was on the fifth of August, the weather fair and fine/Unto Brigg Fair I did repair, for love I was inclined. I listened with wonder to Joseph Taylor's throaty, ever-so-slightly creaky voice and the fluttering ornaments with which he gracefully decorated the long descending arch of melody. Time was melting away...and then Ken Russell, damn him, started talking. "Bit crackly," he said midway through the second line. "But, you know, it was recorded on a cylinder." (Actually, it wasn't.) "Lovely, isn't it?" He kept on prattling to the very end of the song.
Hell isn't hot enough.
- I met a writer friend for lunch yesterday at Café des Artistes. (We used to lunch at less fancy spots, but decided a few months ago that we deserved to live it up.) He's tall, skinny, and a bit of a dandy, and on this occasion he was dressed in a postmodern version of a Tom Wolfe-style ice-cream suit. I, on the other hand, look rather like Roger Ebert, and was wearing one of my Black Outfits. Looking at my friend, I felt as if I were seeing the negative of a self-portrait refracted in a fun-house mirror.
The captain escorted us to a corner table in the back room. "Do you know where we're sitting?" my friend asked me as we looked over our menus. "Peter Jennings' table." I felt a slight frisson of something or other at the thought of our having taken over the table where the anchorman of World News Tonight once held court. It was, I regret to say, my first and only response to the news of his death. It's been years since I watched any of the nightly network newscasts, and though Jennings was the last anchor with whose program I was at all familiar, the man himself failed to make any lasting impression on me. As a result, the tributes that filled the airwaves and obituary pages on Monday left me feeling much the same way I feel whenever a cabby asks me what team I'm rooting for.
Sometimes I wish I were more in touch with such things, but not often. This isn't to say I'm indifferent to them, merely that I feel no need to keep up with them. Perhaps it's a function of increasing age. At any rate, my lack of interest puts me in mind of this 1949 entry from Somerset Maugham's notebook:
For I am like a passenger waiting for his ship at a war-time port. I do not know on which day it will sail, but I am ready to embark at a moment's notice. I leave the sights of the city unvisited. I do not want to see the fine new speedway along which I shall never drive, nor the grand new theatre, with all its modern appliances, in which I shall never sit. I read the papers and flip the pages of a magazine, but when someone offers to lend me a book I refuse because I may not have time to finish it, and in any case with this journey before me I am not of a mind to interest myself in it. I strike up acquaintances at the bar or the card-table, but I do not try to make friends with people from whom I shall so soon be parted. I am on the wing.
I don't see myself in every word of that entry, thank God: I'm still making new friends, and some of the younger ones are among the best I've ever made. On the other hand, it's been ages since I last made any systematic effort to keep up with, say, pop music. If I should happen by chance (or as a consequence of the prodding of OGIC) to hear and like something new, I'll seek it out and tell others about it, but otherwise I'm content to leave the sounds of today to my younger friends. For I, too, am on the wing, and though I trust the flight will be a long and happy one, I doubt I'll come to the end of it saying, If only I'd gotten around to writing an essay about Death Cab for Cutie!
More and more I question the ultimate value of any criticism whose immediate purpose is not to bring its readers into direct contact with beauty (or shorten the amount of time they spend in contact with ugliness). The purpose of my professional life is to make people happier, and I try not to let myself forget that my way of bringing it about can never be anything more than an imperfect means to a blessed end. C.S. Lewis said it better than I can: "If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him."
Posted August 11, 2005 12:03 PM
