Archives for July 2003

Our Girl in Chicago writes:

Is there a woman out there who doesn’t carry around the invisible scars of her teenage social life? If so, I don’t know her. For everyone else, though, I recommend Special, Bella Bathurst’s psychologically acute, emotionally charged first novel. Why it hasn’t been more widely reviewed is a mystery to me. The perfect title captures one aspect of the angst that makes girls of 13 treat each other so cruelly, even at the height of their own psychic tenderness. How do you square the idea, carried over from childhood, of your own inalienable specialness with the beginning of an adult social life and the regard for others it entails? How can everyone be special? In the adolescent social algebra that Bathurst renders with heartbreaking verisimilitude, to remain special implacably requires that someone else be chaff–to put it politely.

Bathurst tells the story of a school trip that brings eight girls to a shopworn English countryside. Removed from their usual setting, the girls quickly shake off the flickering authority of their two chaperones and hammer out their own pitiless social contract. Early on, one character looks out over the Severn River: “Something about the water seemed misleading to Hen. Over there in the distance the river looked harmless. Only when she looked down through the railings of the bridge could she see how fast it was going. You’d never know until you were dead that it might kill you, she thought.” It’s a powerful metaphor, both for the feelings churning inside the girls and for their shifting alliances with one another. Throw in boys and sex, distracted absent parents, and everyday insecurities, and you have plenty of lit matches to go with this powderkeg.

No doubt you’ve thought by now of Lord of the Flies, a point of reference duly noted in the book’s jacket copy. But it isn’t power that’s at issue here so much as the struggle to shape an acceptable self to present to the world. When the audience is narrowed to seven others involved in the same endeavor, beset by the same vulnerabilities, things get dangerous–like the Severn. The girls’ little world smolders, rather than explodes, but the conclusion is every bit as devastating.

This book dredged up uncomfortable memories of junior high school, but gave me new sympathy with my tormentors of old–something I wouldn’t have thought possible. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman that I find Bathurst’s girls even more fascinating than William Golding’s boys, and her novel at least as penetrating as his. But I think it’s because Special is simply that good.

I’ve been reading Edward Brooks’ The Young Louis Armstrong on Records: A Critical Survey of the Early Recordings, 1923-1928, a record-by-record study of Armstrong’s early work written by a Brit with a Ph.D. in musicology. Most of what he says is astute and well-informed, but I have to confess that I get the giggles whenever he writes about one of the many recordings in which Armstrong can be heard backing up such classic blues singers as Bessie Smith. Each of these latter entries begins with a wonderfully starchy summary of the lyrics of the song in question. To wit:

“The words describe a life of emotional imprudence, but without chronological plot; they are more a series of sorrowful, impressionistic comments about a wasted life caused by a wild temperament.” (Reckless Blues)

“A melancholy but resigned complaint about an uncaring, ill-treating, improvident, impecunious man, sung by a voice well acquainted with grief; it ends with a resolve to find another.” (Cold in Hand Blues)

“A demand for emotional status, the words contain a grain or two of oblique humor.” (I Ain’t Goin’ to Play No Second Fiddle)

I suspect–I hope–that Brooks is pulling our legs, but either way, his decorous little summaries somehow remind me of George Bernard Shaw’s parody of over-technical classical-music program notes:

I will now, ladies and gentlemen, give you my celebrated “analysis” of Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide, in the same scientific style. “Shakespear, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop

I’m not exactly a Shaw fan, to put it mildly, but I forgive him a lot for having written that.

“As soon as I detest something I ask myself why I like it.”

Hans Keller, Essays on Music

I went to The Producers last Friday to see the new leads, Lewis J. Stadlen and Don Stephenson. I’ll leave their performances for my drama column in this Friday’s Wall Street Journal, but what struck me most forcibly about the show is how old-fashioned, even quaint it seemed, from the slam-bam-zowie overture to the billion-decibel acting to–above all–the corny rim-shot jokes.

It stands to reason that The Producers should be old-fashioned, Mel Brooks having been born in 1926, but it occurred to me that what I was seeing on stage at the St. James Theatre was not so much a hit musical as the last gasp of a dying comic language. Strip away the four-letter words and self-consciously outrageous production numbers and The Producers is nothing more (or less) than a virtuoso homage to the lapel-grabbing, absolutely-anything-for-a-laugh schtickery on which so much of the stand-up comedy of my childhood was based. That kind of comedy was for the most part explicitly Jewish, as is The Producers itself, in which Yiddish slang is forever popping up, even in Brooks’ lyrics (which, if I heard right, go so far as to rhyme “caressing you” with “fressing you,” a couplet that would have made Lenny Bruce giggle).

It is this aspect of The Producers that I found…well, poignant. Back when I was a small-town Missouri boy, Jewish humor still had the crisp tang of the unfamiliar, which was part of why it was so funny. But Jewish comics assimilated a long time ago, as was proved beyond doubt by the colossal success of Seinfeld, that least overtly Jewish of Jewish sitcoms. Jerry and his friends shed their parents’ accents and became cool and ironic and put the past behind them–and now it’s gone, never to return.

To see The Producers is to be immersed one final time in that older style of pressure-cooker comedy, and for those of us who were born before 1960 or so, the experience is as sweetly nostalgic as a trip to the state fair, which I rather doubt is what Mel Brooks had in mind. My guess is that he still thinks it’s titillating, even shocking, to put swishy Nazis on stage. It’s no accident that he hasn’t made a movie for years and years: Broadway is the last place in America where he could possibly draw a crowd with that kind of humor, and it’s not an especially young crowd, either.

“It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes,” says a character in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. It can also be sad–and even touching.

A reader writes, apropos of last week’s postings about Giorgio Morandi:

Morandi looks a bit like our local Sacramento Wayne Thiebaud–rather creamy unfocused objects.

Ask yourself–is this really beautiful? Exquisite? As good as Leo Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks (London version)?

I submit it is not. If it is not as beautiful, why should I care about it? Why is it worth my time or eyesight?

I only care about the Good, the True, the Beautiful. Not the sort of good etc. So why should anyone care about the sort of?

I never know quite what to say to people like this, other than what Stephen Maturin says in Treason’s Harbour to a slickster who tries to sell him on the idea that Napoleon was actually a great guy: “Sure, it is a point of view.” But I’ll give it another try.

To begin with, I don’t think Morandi is “sort of” good. I think he’s great, as do many other people who take art seriously and know far more about it than I, among them Karen Wilkin, the author of the eloquent monograph about Morandi I cited in my original posting. Yes, we could all be wrong, just like those 50 million Frenchmen, but as a college teacher of mine once gently informed me in response to my declaration that I didn’t think much of the music of Robert Schumann, “That may say more about you than it does about Schumann.”

I like “Leo Da Vinci,” too, but I also like lots of other painters, many of whom were alive in the 20th century and some of whom are at work right now, whereas there are more than a few people out there–including, I fear, my correspondent–who don’t like any modern art, and are proud not to. Such a lack of receptivity makes no sense to me, if only because there is a vast amount of modern art which is both deeply rooted in tradition and completely accessible to the open-minded traditionalist. Nobody’s asking you to fall in love with green women with two noses, or listen to symphonies with no tunes. If you like (say) Chardin, Brahms, Trollope, and Swan Lake, I can’t think of any earthly reason why you shouldn’t like (say) Morandi, Vaughan Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Balanchine.

And if you don’t? Well, you don’t. De gustibus and all that. But what sort of person doesn’t even want to try to engage with the art of his own day, much less the comparatively recent past? That’s like a six-year-old who refuses to taste anything he doesn’t already like. I spend a lot of time–most of my time, really–engaging with art of all kinds, and I’m here to tell you that there are people out there right now who are busy creating “really beautiful” works of art that will make sense to even the most conservative viewer, reader, or listener, so long as he has sufficient curiosity to give them a try. Once again, I’m not talking about bisected pigs and dried bull dung–I mean this. Or this.

If neither of these things strikes you as “really beautiful,” all I can say is that you may have come to the wrong blog. Fair enough?

“I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening, because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me.”

Marshall McLuhan, “This Hour Has Seven Days”

I reviewed the Public Theater‘s Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry V, directed by Mark Wing-Davey and starring Liev Schreiber (who is really, really good), in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the money graf:

“Up until the war scenes proper, all the energy of this production is comic, with Mr. Schreiber the only straight face on stage. Everybody else is trying to get laughs by any means necessary. Even the low comedians are painted with a too-wide brush: Bronson Pinchot’s Pistol is a pompadoured idiot with a Tony Curtis-type Lawng Oyland accent whom we find amusing himself in a latrine, a girlie magazine in his free hand. The fact that so much of the slapstick is clever (though not that particular bit) only makes matters worse. By the time intermission rolled around, I felt as if I’d been watching an old friend skinned alive by a stand-up comedian who told really funny jokes as he wielded the knife.”

No link, alas, but the “Weekend Journal” section of the Friday Journal is definitely worth a buck, with or without me.

This exchange with Paul Johnson, author of Modern Times, was posted yesterday on National Review Online’s “The Corner.” (Several writers, myself included, were recently invited to supply questions for Johnson to be asked on a PBS show called Uncommon Knowledge. This is from the transcript–the show hasn’t aired yet.)

Q. Terry Teachout asks–

A. I know Terry Teachout. He’s a wonderful writer, especially on music.

Q. Terry would like to know if Paul Johnson has a favorite painting by Norman Rockwell.

A (after a long silence while he thinks). The one of the barbershop. All of his paintings are interesting and good and a lot of them are funny. But that is one which clearly has the right to be called a considerable work of work. The actual structure of the painting is marvelous.

The painting in question, by the way, is “Shuffleton’s Barber Shop,” and I agree.