Archives for 2003

This posting is brought to you by my newly repaired iBook, with all data intact except for my e-mail address file, which so far I haven’t been able to find.

Once again, if you are a regular correspondent through my personal e-mail address (as opposed to the blog), please send me an e-mail ASAP so that I can reconstruct as much of my address file as possible.

That excepted, praise be!

I’ve been looking through the bound galleys of The George Gershwin Reader, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. I flipped through the bibliography and found a piece of mine, “The Fabulous Gershwin Boys,” published in the Washington Post 11 years ago. Nothing unusual about that, except…I don’t remember writing it. In fact, I don’t remember anything about it. I suppose it must have been a book review, but of what? Beats me.

You may not find this surprising for somebody who writes a lot of stuff, but I do. I’m not saying that I could sit down and write out a bibliography of my published pieces. Far from it. When I put together A Terry Teachout Reader out of my clip files last year, I was startled by how many articles I’d forgotten. Still, I recognized all of them as soon as I saw them on the page, and their contents came back to me instantly. Yet I have no memory whatsoever of having written a piece about George and Ira Gershwin for the Washington Post 11 years ago. That’s a definite sign of something or other, though I’d rather not think about what.

Incidentally, I’m quite prepared to be twitted for my vanity in having riffled through that bibliography in search of myself. I have an excuse of sorts: I have to check books I might possibly review to make sure they don’t mention me invidiously, which would create a conflict of interest were I then to write about them. (Yes, this has happened.) But the truth is simpler: I get a kick out of seeing my name in books I didn’t write. I may be 47, but in my heart I’m still a 20-year-old baby writer who marvels at the mysterious spectacle of his own name in print. I still remember the first time I turned up in The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, back in my undergraduate days. You have to be a natural-born library wonk to regard that as a great event, but I sure did.

The real sign that you’ve become a low-grade personage, I suppose, is when you pop up in other people’s memoirs. (This has happened to me twice.) Which reminds me of a funny story that I won’t bother to check because I like the way I remember it. Bill Buckley is supposed to have sent Norman Mailer a copy of his latest book, in which Mailer was mentioned. In the index, next to Mailer’s name, Buckley scribbled in the margin, “Hi!”

As I noted here last week, almost everybody has weighed in against Chicago’s new Soldier Field–so much so that the temptation to buck the trend must have been all but irresistible to New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. So what do you get when an irresistible urge hits an unmistakable eyesore? An explosion of jargon-rich apologetics.

I call this type of design parabuilding: it is the modern tick on the postmodern host….Here modernity erupts with the jubilance of a prodigal returned.

As for those who have lamented the way the new design caters to the relatively few who will enter the stadium, at the expense of taxing the senses of the many who have to drive by it every day, Muschamp directs them to take their medicine and like it:

…implicit in such criticisms is the assumption that the city should somehow operate outside the economic system we have developed for ourselves in the post-cold-war world. Perhaps it should. Until that dubious prospect is realized, however, we shouldn’t expect our architects to do more than aestheticize the actual urban condition.

I think I’d prefer it if he just came out and called all of us who hate it philistines.

(By the way, neither the photos accompanying this story nor the live shots that appeared on “Monday Night Football” effectively convey how alarmingly the new bowl dwarfs and impinges on the old colonnade. There are gorgeous views of the stadium available, for sure; it just happens that the commonly accessible views are not among them.)

Bob Dylan has posted a tribute to Johnny Cash on his website. “If we want to know what it means to be mortal,” he says, “we need look no further than the Man in Black.” And he reminisces: “In ’55 or ’56, ‘I Walk the Line’ played all summer on the radio, and it was different than anything else you had ever heard.” (Link via Boston Phoenix Media Log.)

Dylan’s memory has a close echo in “I Walk the Line (Revisited),” Rodney Crowell’s joyful homage to his ex-father-in-law that appears on his 2001 album “The Houston Kid”:

I’m back on board that ’49 Ford in 1956 / Long before the sun came up way out in the sticks / The headlights showed a two-rut road way back up in the pines / The first time I heard Johnny Cash sing, I Walk the Line.

The best thing about this track, though, is the surprise cameo.

I was glad to receive this response to my recent post comparing Walter Scott to Stephen King:

Scott was no great stylist, but he was vastly more popular and influential in his own time than any novelist is today. Scott’s stories caught the imagination of whole continents, whereas the most one can say about King is that he’s very popular for a writer, and even he can’t match the likes of Dr. Atkins in sales of individual books. I would suggest that the nearest analog to Scott in today’s world would be George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg. Both have created other worlds in which a good

I’ve been reading a new biography of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and wondering how many people under the age of 50–or 60, for that matter–recognize their names. Regular New York theatergoers know, of course, that there’s a Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on 46th Street (Beauty and the Beast is playing there), but who among them knows how that house got its name? Yet the Lunts were still widely known well into the Sixties as the most distinguished husband-and-wife acting team in the modern history of the English-language theater, capable of selling out a show merely on the strength of their choosing to act in it.

How do such formidable reputations vanish so quickly and completely? Well, one answer is that the theater itself is no longer a major part of the American cultural conversation. (If you doubt it, ask a friend who doesn’t live in New York to name a living American playwright.) Another is that Lunt and Fontanne starred in only one feature film, the stagy, now-forgotten The Guardsman, and acted on TV just twice. For whatever reason, they felt their gifts were best displayed in the theater, and so they neglected to leave behind a permanent record of their work. Time was when actors could etch their names into the collective consciousness solely by appearing on stage, but with the invention of film, that time ended forever.

Katharine Cornell was as famous as the Lunts, shunned film and TV as they did, and now is no less forgotten. The only reason why Ruth Draper is remembered is because she was shrewd enough to make audio recordings of her self-written monologues, the existence of which kept her memory green even during the long years when they were out of print. (They’re now available on CD, and can be ordered here.)

Which brings us to the last of the Lunts’ fateful mistakes. Unlike Draper or their good friend Noël Coward, they weren’t writers, and unlike other better-remembered actors, they were notorious for appearing almost exclusively in custom-tailored two-cylinder vehicles unworthy of their great gifts. (The only play they introduced that has held the stage was Coward’s Design for Living.) As Kenneth Tynan, that shrewdest of drama critics, once remarked, “I wish the Lunts would test themselves in better plays. I wish I even felt sure that they knew a good script when they saw one. As things are, they have become a sort of grandiose circus act; instead of climbing mountains, they are content to jump through hoops.” Rarely have more damning words been written about more talented people.

For all these reasons, it strikes me as a bit odd that Alfred A. Knopf took the trouble to publish Margot Peters’ Design for Living: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne: A Biography. (That’s what I call a high-colonic title.) Mind you, it’s not a bad book, but there have been other biographies of the Lunts, and the only thing that distinguishes this one, so far as I can tell, is that it makes explicit mention of the long-standing rumors that both Lunt and Fontanne were homosexual, albeit without a shred of verifiable accompanying evidence. That seems a rather weak reed on which to hang a well-meaning but breathlessly written theatrical biography. Yes, I read it, but only because Knopf sent me a unsolicited review copy and I was desperate for diversion in the midst of more arduous literary chores.

Is there anything so evanescent as what happens on a stage? Paintings last for centuries, the written word for millennia, but performances and productions not captured on film or videotape are gone before they’re over. I’ve long suspected that this was why Jerome Robbins, who abandoned the ballet business to become the richest and most successful musical-comedy director of his generation, started making ballets again in 1969. His productions (especially Gypsy) were praised to the skies by some of the most knowledgeable critics who ever lived. But except for Peter Pan, which NBC taped for TV in 1960, they all vanished into thin air, whereas New York City Ballet performs every ballet Robbins thought worth preserving on a regular rotating basis–while Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne are barely more than names on a marquee.

This story has no moral, incidentally, unless it’s the one that starts Vanity, vanity. But, then, that’s a pretty good all-purpose moral, isn’t it?

On Tuesday night, I went to see Recent Tragic Events, the new play about 9/11 that opened Sunday at Playwrights Horizons (about which more in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal and here on “About Last Night”). Early in the evening, I noted with astonishment that the two principal characters not only were fans of the novels of Anthony Trollope (one plausibly, the other not) but thought The Way We Live Now to be his best book. It so happens that (1) I think so, too, (2) I happened to be rereading The Way We Live Now that very evening, and (3) I had a copy of it in my shoulder bag. Since Recent Tragic Events is about coincidences, I was pleased to be experiencing a big fat juicy one of my own.

I’m one of those benighted souls who prefers Trollope to Dickens, though “prefers” is a weak way of putting it, since I don’t like Dickens at all and have been more than mildly addicted to Trollope for a good many years. I don’t know what caused me to re-read The Way We Live Now this week (other than the long arm of coincidence), but I usually pick it up once a year. In fact, I like it so much that I wore out my original paperback copy and am now the proud owner of an elegant little “World’s Classics” miniature edition printed in 1962 on Bible paper and small enough to fit easily in the palm of one hand–unusually compact for a 960-page novel that is Trollope’s longest.

I like a lot of things about The Way We Live Now, among them the sheer festiveness with which it catalogues the moral disintegration of Victorian London. Trollope was a moralist of sorts, and The Way We Live Now is a vivid document of his change-and-decay-in-all-around-I-see brand of conservatism, but he was too fascinated by the spectacle of human nature not to tell his angry tale with the lip-smacking gusto of a man who knew that a big crook is still big.

I also like the dazzling concision with which so naturally expansive a writer is capable on occasion of making his points. At one point, Trollope describes the frankly cynical way in which Lord Nidderdale, an impecunious young noble, woos Marie Melmotte, the daughter of the aforementioned crook. Nidderdale is looking to marry money, and makes no bones about it. Says Trollope: “I doubt whether Lord Nidderdale had ever said a word of love to Marie Melmotte,–or whether the poor girl had expected it. Her destiny had no doubt been explained to her.” That second sentence is perfect.

Another aspect of The Way We Live Now that I admire more and more as I grow older is directly related to Trollope’s expansive tendencies. As a young reader, I particularly admired short, polished novels written from a tightly focused point of view. I still do–I think The Great Gatsby is the great American novel by an extra-long shot–but I’ve also learned to love the baggy inclusiveness of the triple-decker novel. The Way We Live Now is crammed full of characters, situations, and subplots, to all of which Trollope pays affectionate attention. If you judge novels solely by their neatness, you’ll find this one way too messy. I used to feel that way, but now I revel in the panache with which Trollope riffles through his snapshots of the various strata of London society. He’s out to show us the biggest possible picture, and like Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities, he succeeds with a vengeance.

One advantage of so amply proportioned a novel is that it leaves its readers room to grow. When I first read The Way We Live Now, more than a decade ago, I was completely caught up in the story of Augustus Melmotte, the brazen swindler who cons his way into Parliament. At the time, I was writing editorials for the New York Daily News (and, not coincidentally, had just read The Bonfire of the Vanities), and Melmotte, logically enough, seemed to me the book’s most convincingly realized character. I still think he’s pretty damned impressive, but now that I’ve settled into an uneasy middle age, I find myself far more interested in Roger Carbury, the fortysomething squire who rejects the mad hurly-burly of Melmotte’s corrupt world, falls in unrequited love with a sweet young girl who doesn’t reciprocate his ardor, and does his best to do the right thing by her even though it breaks his heart. When I was 35, Carbury’s dilemma struck me as stagy–rather too Victorian, if you know what I mean. Now that I’m 47, I find it both believable and deeply moving.

That’s the great thing about the large-scale novel of society and manners. Precisely because its canvas is so wide and varied, it can be seen from many different points of view, and so is less likely to go dead on you over time, the way art collectors speak of certain of their paintings as having gone “dead on the wall.” It’s not that I can readily imagine getting tired of The Great Gatsby or Black Mischief or Enemies, a Love Story, but who knows? After all, I might live a very long time (and would like to). Ivy Compton-Burnett confessed in old age that she no longer read Jane Austen because she knew her novels so well from frequent reading that they no longer held her attention. I can’t imagine ever saying such a thing about The Way We Live Now.

So when Heather Graham, the star of Recent Tragic Events, announced in her best party-girl voice that The Way We Live Now was her favorite novel, I giggled to myself. That wasn’t the most unlikely-sounding thing about Recent Tragic Events, but it definitely ranked in the top ten. I’m not saying that leggy young blondes can’t appreciate Trollope. Stranger things have happened…just not to me.

This morning’s Wall Street Journal has a fascinating story (no link, damn it) about the making of sitcoms, whose producers turn out to be as tightly rule-bound as lawyers who specialize in jury selection. I especially liked this paragraph:

Sitcom producers discovered long ago that living rooms offer a ready excuse for characters to gather, and the staircase lets characters enter and exist while talking. Writers are loth to monkey with what works: This fall, 67% of sitcoms on ABC, CBS and NBC feature a living room with a sofa and staircase.

I’m a classicist, I believe in rules, but…