Archives for June 2004

“‘And yet,’ demanded Councillor Barlow, ‘what’s he done? Has he ever done a day’s work in his life? What great cause is he identified with?’

“‘He’s identified,’ said the speaker, ‘with the great cause of cheering us all up.'”

Arnold Bennett, The Card

I posted last year apropos of the publication of Ronald Reagan’s letters:

I’ve been looking through Reagan: A Life in Letters, a book whose publication will no doubt startle a lot of people unaware that Ronald Reagan was the most prolific presidential correspondent of modern times. I’m not talking about the kind of “letter” produced in batch lots by a team of secretaries equipped with autopens, either. Of the 1,100 letters in this 934-page book, some 80% were written by hand, another 15% dictated. The editors had “over 5,000 genuine Reagan letters” to choose from, and they estimate that another 5,000 or so have yet to surface.

Put aside for a moment your opinion of Reagan (either way) and think instead about the implications of those numbers. Speaking as a biographer, I can assure you that this is an extraordinarily large number of letters to have been written by any public figure, much less one who wasn’t a professional writer–though Reagan, as it happens, spent a number of years writing his own speeches, radio commentaries, and syndicated columns, and would also have been perfectly capable of writing his own memoirs without assistance had he been so inclined. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other 20th-century president who left behind so large a body of informal writing, and few who wrote as much in any medium. Theodore Roosevelt, probably Nixon, possibly Calvin Coolidge (who was, believe it or not, the best by-his-own-hand presidential prose stylist in modern times), and…who else? Nobody comes to mind….

Read the whole thing here.

“Communism is neither an ec[onomic] or a pol[itical] system–it is a form of insanity–a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature. I wonder how much more misery it will cause before it disappears.”

Ronald Reagan, Reagan, In His Own Hand (written 1975, collected 2001)

I was too sick to do any playgoing last week, so my drama column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal is divided between speculation on this Sunday’s Tony Awards and a brisk pan of Chinese Friends:

Overheard on the street immediately after a performance of “Chinese Friends”: “That’s the worst play I ever saw! What the hell happened to Jon Robin Baitz?” Beats me. Mr. Baitz is, or was, a talented playwright, but you wouldn’t guess it from watching this preposterous mess, which runs through June 13 at Playwrights Horizons. I’m not quite prepared to call it the worst show I’ve ever seen–I survived “The Look of Love”–but it’s worse than “Prymate,” which is saying something.

“Chinese Friends” is all the more disappointing because it’s based on an interesting premise. What might the U.S. look like after the Red America-Blue America political split finally resolves itself? In Mr. Baitz’s dystopian fantasy, set in 2030, the big bad Bushies gave way to a group of tough-minded liberal policy wonks who lost patience with the soft-headed electorate and opted for a stealthy form of fascism they called “soft power.” When that didn’t work out, Dr. Arthur Brice (Peter Strauss, made up to look like Donald Rumsfeld), the gray eminence of the Killer Humanists, withdrew to a remote New England island to hide from his enemies and await his second coming.

Enter his estranged son Ajax (Tyler Francavilla), who unexpectedly turns up on Brice’s doorstep with two hippie-type friends (Bess Wohl and Will McCormack) in tow. At first it appears that the arrival of this motley m

“It is my theory to like vulgarity–to think well of it, to champion it, to gird myself to always fight on its side. It is my theory to think nothing can come to pass without a pinch (or more than a pinch) of vulgarity.”

Percy Grainger, quoted in John Bird, Percy Grainger

I spent much of Thursday trudging from one end of Manhattan to the other, and so had little time for art other than a half-dozen Isaac Bashevis Singer stories gulped down in transit. (Singer is ideal for long subway rides.)

I do, however, want to tell you about Honeysuckle Rose (Living Era),
the terrific new CD to which I listened before bedtime. It’s a two-disc anthology of 51 Fats Waller recordings issued in honor of the centenary of his birth, and it’s extremely well-chosen–most of the big jukebox hits of the Thirties, plus lots of lesser-known gems like “S’posin’,” “I Wish I Were Twins,” and “Oh, Susannah, Dust Off That Old Pianna!” The overlap with Fats Waller: The Quintessence (Fremeaux), the other great Waller anthology, is surprisingly modest, and the two sets contain between them most of his finest 78s.

If you’re feeling blue, be it indigo or merely sky, buy ’em both and listen regularly. I guarantee results!

I hung a caricature by Max Beerbohm on my living-room wall late yesterday afternoon–and thereby hangs a tale.

To begin with, please don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know who Max Beerbohm was. He liked to claim that there were only 1,500 people in England and another thousand in America who understood and appreciated his work. I don’t know whether he would have admitted me to their rarefied ranks, but he’s certainly one of my all-time favorite writers, an essayist of uncommon elegance and wit who was also a wickedly funny drama critic, the greatest parodist who ever lived, and–this is where it starts to get interesting–a caricaturist of lethally comic exactitude.

I can think of more than a few distinguished artists, musicians, and choreographers who have also been very good writers, but the list of distinguished writers who were also distinguished artists is short to the point of invisibility. James Thurber qualifies–if anything, his drawings are better than his essays–and so, needless to say, does Max. (He signed his caricatures with his first name only, and as a result is customarily referred to in that manner by his admirers.) Being a superior writer, it stands to reason that Max should have left behind this typically lucid explanation of his artistic method:

The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment, in the most beautiful manner….The whole man must be melted down in a crucible and then, from the solution, fashioned anew. Nothing will be lost but no particle will be as it was before.

No verbal description can begin to suggest how well Max practiced what he preached. You have to see for yourself, so go here, here, and here to look at his caricatures of three eminent Edwardians, Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, and Frank Harris.

I’ve seen reproductions of hundreds of Max’s drawings, but I don’t know the last time his work was exhibited in this country. Most of his best-known caricatures now belong to museums and other public institutions in England. I’ve never seen a Beerbohm on display in any American museum, major or otherwise, and the only one I’ve seen in private hands was hanging in Whit Stillman’s Greenwich Village living room when I interviewed him in 1998 for an article about The Last Days of Disco (it’s reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader). It seemed almost too good to be true that Whit should have owned one–he is, like Max, something of a dandy–and when I saw it on his wall, I found myself in the grip of an attack of envy so powerful that I feared I might have to take up grand larceny on the spot.

It never occurred to me, then or later, that I, too, might someday own a Beerbohm, so I was astonished when I looked him up on eBay last month and found that one of his lesser-known efforts, a 1913 drawing of Percy Grainger playing piano for a group of society ladies, was being offered for sale by an auction house in Dallas. A quick scan of my bookshelves confirmed that it was a rarity: Grainger is nowhere mentioned in N. John Hall’s Max Beerbohm Caricatures or Lord David Cecil’s Max: A Biography, nor is Max’s name to be found in any of the various books about Grainger that I own. At the same time, I thought it more than likely that they had met at one time or another. Max, after all, was one of Edwardian London’s most inveterate diners-out, while Grainger first made a name for himself as a society pianist.

Now it’s mine, and I’m insanely proud to own it. The Teachout Museum contains no better-loved piece.

A reader writes:

Since you often blog about the process, I’d be interested in how you accumulated the almanac quotes. And I bet some of your other regulars would like to know, too.

Glad to oblige. I noticed long ago that the standard books of quotations didn’t contain very many of my favorite quotes (other than the obvious ones that everybody likes). It used to be my practice to dogear the relevant pages of my copies of the books in which those quotes appeared, but that was both inefficient and aesthetically displeasing. Then, fifteen years ago, I purchased at more or less the same time my first personal computer and a copy of H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources, a wonderful book about which I wrote as follows in The Skeptic:

[Mencken] had long kept a card file of quotations for his own use, and in 1932 he had gotten the idea to expand it into a full-scale dictionary; Charles Angoff worked on it with him for two years, after which he carried on alone. Though not generally recognized as such, it is one of his major achievements, comparable in scope to The American Language and no less personal in its method. “The Congressman hunting for platitudes to embellish his eulogy upon a fallen colleague will find relatively little to his purpose,” he warned in his preface, and many readers have thus concluded that he compiled the New Dictionary of Quotations with tongue in cheek. Like Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, it is wrongly remembered for its eccentricities, among them an extensive selection of invidious remarks about the Jews and a sprinkling of unattributed “proverbs” that sound as though they had been coined by the editor himself. In fact, it contains a vast number of well-chosen, well-organized, accurately attributed and dated quotations on every imaginable subject, ranging widely among both familiar and arcane sources. The only important author missing from its 1,347 pages is Mencken himself, who told Time that “I thought it would be unseemly to quote myself. I leave that to the intelligence of posterity.” Yet the New Dictionary bears the dark stamp of his skepticism on every page, and at least one critic, Morton Dauwen Zabel, was quick to grasp the fact: “The impression soon becomes inescapable that what Mencken has produced as a