Archives for June 25, 2004

The Wall Street Journal sent me to Washington a couple of weeks ago to check out the Kennedy Center’s revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Mark Lamos and starring Mary Stuart Masterton, Jeremy Davidson, George Grizzard, and Dana Ivey as, respectively, Maggie, Brick, Big Daddy and Big Mama. My review appears in this morning’s paper, and it’s broadly similar to what I thought of last year’s Broadway revival: I didn’t like the youngsters, but the old hands knocked me out. As for the play itself, well, let’s just say eeuuww:

Mind you, I don’t much care for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which I dismissed in my review of the Broadway revival as “a flabby, pseudo-poetic period piece that leaves you wondering what all the shouting is about–and there’s a whole lot of shouting going on.” For that matter, I don’t much care for Tennessee Williams in general, most of whose plays seem to me to be peopled by a peculiar race of sentimental, logorrheic mutants bearing no obvious resemblance to human beings. As far as I’m concerned, Mary McCarthy nailed it in a single sentence of her 1948 review of “A Streetcar Named Desire”: “Dr. Kinsey would be interested in a semi-skilled male who spoke of the four-letter act as

As the entire book-reviewing world knows by now, Michiko Kakutani’s evisceration of Bill Clinton’s My Life in the daily New York Times has been followed by Larry McMurtry’s canonization of same in the Times Book Review.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some politically oriented folks who don’t seem to understand the mechanics of the book-review biz have jumped to the conclusion
that Review B was in some way intended as penance for Review A. “About Last Night” has and will have no official opinion on the literary merits of My Life, or of the two reviews published in the Times–we don’t do politics here–but speaking as an old book-reviewing hand, I can assure you from a safe distance that it couldn’t possibly have happened that way. Both reviews would have been assigned separately and before the fact, and their dates of publication were clearly determined by the date of publication of My Life, not by any corporate desire on the part of the Times to kiss up to said book’s author. (As for the early posting of McMurtry’s review on the Times‘s Web site, I’d have done exactly the same thing if I’d been in charge. The Clinton book is news, and news is a dish that tastes best when served piping hot.)

Regarding the mutually contradictory contents of the two reviews, I’d say they bespeak a pretty impressive degree of book-related vitality on the part of the New York Times. Most American newspapers, after all, don’t review books even once, much less twice. Like it or not, My Life is by definition an important book, and the Times has pitched two critical change-ups on it in the course of a single week. First came a savage pan by one of the paper’s in-house critics, followed by a fellatial rave from an outsider writing in its weekly book-review supplement–a publication run, I might add, by an editor
whose alleged right-wing sympathies have been the subject of considerable discussion in the literary sector of the blogosphere. Whatever else those reviews were, they definitely weren’t predictable.

All in all, I’d say the Times just had itself a pretty good week, bookwise.

UPDATE: The third link above is to Jonah Goldberg’s comments at “The Corner,” National Review‘s on-line site. Jonah responds
as follows:

Terry knows more — much more — about such things than I do and I defer to him for the most part. That said, it doesn’t quite wash that the reviews are unrelated in anyway since McMurtry makes pretty much a direct reference to the first Times review in his attempt to debunk the notion that Clinton’s book isn’t better than Grant’s autobiography. Maybe the Times Sunday Book Review supplement editor, Sam Tanenhaus, is off the hook on the conspiracy charge, but McMurtry’s review still seems like a rushed rescue mission for a doomed book than an intellectually honest or even serious effort….

Quite so–McMurtry’s review does make “blind” reference to Kakutani’s mention of Grant’s Personal Memoirs–but given the short time frame, I assume the reference was either inserted in the course of editing in order to make the review more timely, or the whole review was delivered by McMurtry at the last possible minute. The latter wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. I suppose I shouldn’t admit this in public, but it’s not my habit to write most of my reviews more than a day or so prior to their deadlines, if that much!

MORE: A reader writes:

I liked your analysis of the independence of McMurtry’s review. I’m not sure if McMurtry was referring exclusively to the original Times review by referencing comparisons to Grant’s memoirs, however. A Google news search shows many many hits for articles containing both Clinton and Ulysses. This one yields over 500 hits. The original Times review may have provoked all that came afterwards, but does it look to you as if there was a subsequent tsunami which was worth addressing?

A good question, to which I have no answer. Still, it provides additional circumstantial evidence that McMurtry was writing off his own bat, not somebody else’s.

“He would arrive for work in the morning and say, ‘What are the lyrics?’ That’s what he called his lines, his dialogue. He hadn’t gotten around to looking at the script yet, he’d say. ‘Somebody give me the lyrics.’ And I thought that was the secret to doing the lines like he did them. You don’t learn them in advance. ‘I’ll go in each morning and I’ll learn them in makeup.’ Oh, dear, was I wrong. I was stumbling over my first line. And he knew the script backward and forward. It was part of his act…’What are my lyrics?'”

Jane Greer (quoted in Lee Server, Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care”)