Archives for April 19, 2004

Fats Waller, after Louis Armstrong the most life-enhancing jazz musician ever to make recordings, is never very far from my iTunes player. Needing a pre-bedtime boost of spirits, I clicked on “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” one of his celebrated deconstructions of insipid Thirties pop tunes, and began smiling from the first bar onward. It starts with a get-the-hell-out-of-my-way introduction, immediately succeeded by a jaunty chorus of solo piano in which Waller’s infallible left hand bounces up and down the keys like a fat man on a pogo stick.

There follows a quintessentially Wallerian vocal that goes something like this, sort of:

Be sure it’s true when you say “I love you.”
It’s a sin to tell a lie-uhhllllrrrry!
[unctuously] Millions of hearts have been broken, yes, yes,
Just because these words were spoken. (You know the words that were spoken? Here it is.)
[simperingly] I love you I love you I love you [in an orotund bass-baritone] I love you. [gleefully] Ha-ha-ha!
Yes, but if you break my heart, I’ll break your jaw and then I’ll die.
So be sure it’s true when you say “I love [twitteringly, in falsetto] yooooou.” Ha, ha!
It’s a sin to tell a lie. Now get on out there and tell your lie. What is it?

But words fail me. Go here and rejoice in the real right thing.

I was supposed to see two shows yesterday, Assassins in the afternoon and a workshop performance featuring a friend that night, but I read the invitation to the second show wrong and thought the curtain was at eight o’clock instead of five. Fortunately, I noticed my mistake at seven, just as I was getting ready to shut up shop, go downstairs, and catch a cab. Instead of making a pointless trip to the theater district, I found myself with an unplanned night off, and decided to spend part of it rehanging some of my prints.

It happens that I’ve just acquired a new piece for the Teachout Museum, a copy of Fairfield Porter’s Broadway, the 1971 color lithograph I chose at your recommendation to adorn the dust jacket of A Terry Teachout Reader. (I bought it here, in case you’re looking to make a purchase from a very nice, very reliable Chicago-area dealer.) It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll have to shift some other pieces around when it does, so I opted to do a bit of preparatory puttering. Since I’m going to hang Broadway over the mantelpiece, the place of honor, I moved the Wolf Kahn monotype that currently occupies that space to a spot over the living-room closet. That’s where I’d hung my copy of William Bailey’s aquatint Piazza Rotunda, not very happily, so I took down the Porter poster that hangs over the door to my office and put Piazza Rotunda there.

No doubt all this sounds boring, perhaps even precious, but hanging the art you own is an inescapable part of owning it, and it’s surprising–astonishing, really–how completely the look and feel of my living room have been altered simply by switching a couple of prints. It makes the prints look different, too, not just the ones I moved but all the others that hang around them. Best of all, I can now see Piazza Rotunda from my love seat, the spot where I normally sit when I’m alone, and I find my refreshed eye going to it constantly. Alas, I must make a special “trip” to the other side of the room to look at the Kahn, but it’s the first thing you see when you open the front door, and since most of my guests like it best of all my prints, it’ll be as if I’d given them a present.

As for the Porter poster, a handsome reproduction of Lizzie at the Table used to publicize the Whitney Museum’s 1984 Porter retrospective, it’s going on permanent loan to a neighbor who recently had a baby (a thoroughly appropriate gift, too, since the “Lizzie” of the painting was Porter’s own baby daughter). Meanwhile, there’s a big empty space over my mantelpiece, waiting patiently to be filled by Broadway, which is not only beautiful in its own right but also a visible symbol of my proudest professional achievement to date, the Teachout Reader.

Anyway, that’s how I spent my Sunday evening. I hope you had half as much fun.

His only weakness is a lust for power–

And that is not a weakness, people think,

When unaccompanied by bribes or drink.

Sir John Betjeman, “The Town Clerk’s Views”

• On Sunday afternoon I went to see the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, which opens this week at Studio 54 (and which I’ll be reviewing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal).

• I’ve been watching Gone With the Wind in installments over the past few days. I’d only seen it twice before, both times in the theater (first in the Seventies, then in the Nineties), and not since I finally got around to reading the book, which impressed me rather more than I expected. As I wrote a few years ago:

“No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures,” said Dr. Johnson, right as always. As proof of his point, I offer in evidence Gone With the Wind. Never has a middlebrow bodice-ripper been more widely reviled by highbrow critics, yet ordinary folks continue to buy it, read it, and like it, no matter how often they’re told they shouldn’t do any of the above….

Gone With the Wind, on the other hand, will keep on being read and relished by the common readers with whom Dr. Johnson rejoiced to concur, for the very good reason that it’s a pretty good novel, not to mention a rather surprising one. Over and above the pure pull of plot, it has some unexpectedly shrewd things to say about the vanity of the Glorious Cause (most of which didn’t make it into the movie). Ashley Wilkes’ anguished letter to his wife Melanie is a case in point: “I see too clearly that we have been betrayed, betrayed by our arrogant Southern selves…by words and catch phrases, prejudices and hatreds coming from the mouths of those highly placed, those men whom we respected and revered–King Cotton, Slavery, States’ Rights, Damn Yankees.”

Moreover, Gone with the Wind is peopled with characters whose inconsistencies make them interesting, none more so than Scarlett O’Hara, an unattractive, inexplicably seductive anti-heroine whom Trollope himself might well have been pleased to dream up on an especially good day.

Alas, the movie doesn’t hold up nearly so well, save as a sort of apotheosis of Technicolor. The only other costume piece I can think of that uses Technicolor as vividly is John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel are excellent, Max Steiner’s score is wonderful in its old-fashioned way, and the siege and burning of Atlanta are fully as effective—and unexpectedly unsentimental—as I remember them. But Vivien Leigh’s two-keyed performance as Scarlett is wearying, while the script scissors out most of the novel’s ambiguities, such as they are.

Coming as I do from a small town in the southern half of a border state, one that saw a lynching as late as 1942 and segregated schools well into the Sixties, I’ve never had much patience with those who romanticize the antebellum South, and especially now that I’ve read Margaret Mitchell’s novel, my guess is that this is the last time I’ll ever care to see the film. Sentimental period pieces only work when they evoke periods in which one might want to have lived, however briefly. I can’t think of anything more repellent than living in a land whose gentility was bought and paid for with the flesh of men.

From the April 6 Valley News of Lebanon, New Hampshire, a story headlined “Professor Dumped by Dartmouth Receives Music Pulitzer”:

NEW YORK–A musical work by a former Dartmouth College professor and stories of oppression both home and abroad were rewarded with Pulitzer Prizes yesterday.

The award for music went to Tempest Fantasy by Paul Moravec, who has created more than 80 other compositions. He currently heads the music department at Adelphi University on Long Island, N.Y. Moravec taught at Dartmouth from 1987 to 1995, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate. He was denied tenure at Dartmouth in 1995.

Moravec, who was in Sicily yesterday, told the Valley News by telephone that the Pulitzer was, in part, “vindication” for his rejection by Dartmouth….

Revenge–the gift that keeps on giving.

“I like all your new poems so much, you seem to me to be writing nothing but good poems, something theoretically and practically impossible. I ought to explain my rather funny and personal remark about your sestinas: I like your poetry better than anybody’s since the Frost-Stevens-Eliot-Moore generation, so I looked with awed wonder at some phrases feeling to me a little like some of my phrases, in your poems; I felt as if, so to speak, some of my wash-cloths were part of a Modigliani collage, or as if my cat had got into a Vuillard.”

Randall Jarrell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, February 1957

I’m a little late to this party, as to most things. Everybody has been linking to Dana Gioia’s excellent piece on Elizabeth Bishop in the New Criterion, but there hasn’t been much said about the larger questions raised by the essay. Bishop was Gioia’s teacher, and so there’s a nice personal angle, but what he’s really interested in are the different forces that act on literary reputations, propelling some upward and sinking others. Bishop turns out to be a great case study, having steadily ascended in stature since her death in 1979. It’s pretty surprising, at least for a younger reader, to realize how little this ascendance seemed to be in the cards during Bishop’s lifetime:

If Bishop’s present apotheosis was preordained by Fate, no one told us thirty years ago. At Harvard in 1975 when I studied with Bishop and often spent afternoons chatting with her in a Cambridge teashop, she was a respected elder poet but no literary celebrity. Her seminar on modern American poetry, which I took, had only four other students–a reliable sign of her literary market value in fashion-conscious Cambridge. If John Ashbery exaggerated a few years later when he called Bishop a “writer’s writer’s writer,” it wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

So how did Bishop crack the canon so decisively? Gioia points to factors both extrinsic and intrinsic to her work. On one hand, Bishop’s reputation benefited from growing academic interest in women’s writing and gender criticism in the years following her death. On the other, Gioia argues, the poetry itself does the trick: not only its excellence, a (sometimes) necessary but never sufficient condition for canonicity, but another quality, unfashionable to talk about:

There is something essentially disinterested and noncommittal about Bishop’s sensibility that is central to her broad appeal. More than any major American poet of her generation she possessed what John Keats celebrated as “negative capability,” the imaginative power “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” She had a native genius for reflecting the rich complexity of experience without reducing it into abstraction or predetermined moral judgment. She is inclusive by being artfully inconclusive. This quality of her work is not always evident when we read it casually, but once we teach her poems or analyze them seriously, this aspect is hard to ignore. There was once a term commonly used to describe this sort of meaningful ambiguity and openness to diverse kinds of interpretation: universality. Much derided and oddly misconstrued by critical theorists in recent decades, universality remains an inescapable literary notion. The term does not describe literary works that have fixed and identical appeal to all audiences everywhere; rather, universality refers to works that have a remarkable ability to engage very different audiences often in notably different ways.

I know what he means about teaching Bishop. I once taught some of her poems to a freshman humanities class, populated largely by students who had no notion of becoming humanities majors but were there to fulfill a requirement. These budding economists and biologists really perked up reading Bishop, and turned out what was collectively the best group of papers produced in the course.

In a post today on other matters, Erin O’Connor at Critical Mass discusses the related subject of accessibility in academic literary studies. Insofar as the accessibility of literary criticism and the universality of literary works are related, perhaps the misconstrual of the latter that Gioia points to is not so much “odd” as entirely predictable:

Literary scholars’ collective hostility toward technology, especially as it expresses membership in a self-described cultural elite and a discipline-specific condescension to those outside it with pretenses to know or understand literature and culture, is closely connected to a deep suspicion of accessibility. Holbo is right that literary studies is one discipline that should be aiming at a wide audience and whose health may be measured in terms of its ability to connect with a public that is larger than its overspecialized self. He is right, too, that one sign of the systemic disorder of literature departments today is that their members are positively hostile to the idea that their relevance may and should be assessed by–horror of horrors–uncredentialed laypersons, the great nonacademic unwashed.

O’Connor’s comments come in response to John Holbo’s interesting reflections on academic blogging and non-academic literary blogging at Crooked Timber. Nathalie has additional thoughts here.