Archives for 2004

I’m literally just back from Smalltown, U.S.A., and still a bit shaky from the horrendous circumstances surrounding my trip there (I wrote all night Tuesday, went straight from my desk to LaGuardia on Wednesday morning, endured one of the most terrifying flights of my life, then rented a car and spent two grueling hours slithering through bad weather and exterminate-all-the-brutes traffic). The visit itself was wonderful, except that I ate to excess on Thursday and repented at leisure over the weekend. I also saw Ray, about which more later.

While we’re on the subject of later, I’m about to start sifting through several hundred e-mails and a tableful of snail mail, in addition to which I have six shows to review between now and Monday, plus a couple of other pieces to write. I do promise to post as soon as I can, though not necessarily tomorrow! In the meantime, watch this space for further details. I haven’t forgotten about you….

“He said, ‘Careful you don’t read your brain into train oil, like my old man always used to say.’

“She didn’t look up but said, ‘Mine says I’ll read my life away. I say, why not?’

“‘There’s no answer to that,’ said Dalziel as he left.”

Reginald Hill, Bones and Silence

Alas, the time stamp on this posting is all too accurate: I just finished writing a Commentary essay on Haydn and still have to knock off another piece before I can pack my bag and make ready to fly back to Smalltown, U.S.A., where I’ll be spending Thanksgiving with my family. The car comes for me at 9:15, and I’ll be picking up a rental car of my own at the far end of my flight, there to drive two hours south to the house where I grew up. Seeing as how I don’t expect to spend much time in bed tonight, I’m likely to get a little sleepy on the way to Smalltown, and I’ve promised my mother that I’ll pull off the highway whenever I feel the telltale signs of somnolence. I will, too: I can’t think of anything much dumber than falling asleep at the wheel on your way home for Thanksgiving.

Quite a few of you wrote to tell me that I made you cry
yesterday, so I’m happy to report that I’m in a much better frame of mind this evening (or, rather, this morning). My mother got a good report from her doctor earlier today, and a half-hour after I talked to her, I got a call from a friend who just landed a job for which she’d been longing with all her heart. Even without those two pieces of news, I would have been properly thankful for my myriad blessings, but now I can go home with a genuinely cheerful heart, sleep or no sleep.

You’ll have to do without me until next Tuesday: I’ve decided to be sensible and leave my iBook in Manhattan, where it belongs. Fortunately, Our Girl, who is out of town but not computer-free, just wrote to tell me that she plans to post a bit this week, so you won’t be entirely alone.

I should mention before I go that I count all of you among my blessings. I love this blog and I love your e-mail, some of which I actually managed to answer a few hours ago! I’m almost over the flu, too–I even made it to the gym on Tuesday morning, though I felt like a vampire who’d just crawled out of his coffin of native earth after an exceptionally long stay. Be that as it may, I’m out of the woods, for which still more thanks.

Now I have to get back to work. My car will be arriving eight hours from now (it’d better, anyway!), and my guess is that I’ll need most of that time to get ready, if not all of it. I guess I’ll sleep in Smalltown. Meanwhile, like the Stage Manager says, you get a good rest, too. Good night.

“One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: ‘Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?’ and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

“That’s my Middle West–not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all–Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Few happy days are entirely unspotted by melancholy. I just had an exceptionally fine one, and my mailbox overflowed with congratulations by the time it was done, but I couldn’t help thinking of departed friends with whom I would have rejoiced to share my good news, and how they would have rejoiced to hear it. As I remembered them, I thought of the stark confession Dr. Johnson made in the preface to his Dictionary: “I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.”

Those are terrible words, and in Dr. Johnson’s case they might almost have been true, for he was thinking of his wife, who was forced to live in harsh discomfort because of the paralyzing sloth that kept him from finishing his great work until after her death. He was racked with guilt as a result, and the preface to the Dictionary reflects that guilt. But was it really true that he had “little to fear or hope from censure or from praise”? I doubt it. Dr. Johnson was a very great man, but great men are still men, and few of them are wholly indifferent to the kind words of friends and colleagues, even if they wish to be thought so.

In any case, most of us, however curmudgeonly we may pretend to be, acquire at least a few younger friends as we grow older, in part because it is a comfort–a relief, really–to know people who take you at face value. Old friends know too much about you to do that. I noticed a few years ago that most of my closest friends were younger than I am (two of them are half my age), and briefly wondered what that said about me. Was I seeking to feed off their vitality? Did I hunger for the uncritical admiration of a student for his teacher? Or was I simply following the predictable path of a normal life, in the course of which we sort out our friends and acquaintances over time, picking new ones and pruning old ones in the light of our growing self-knowledge? All of the above, I suspect, and I’m not so sure that there’s anything bad about it. I love my new friends, sometimes selfishly and sometimes not, just as Dr. Johnson didn’t let his pretended indifference stop him from warming his hands at the fire of Boswell’s admiration.

To be sure, the one thing a new friend can never do for you is say I knew you when, and I find it rather sad that there are so few people in my life who can speak those words. None of my closest friends in Manhattan knew me when: we didn’t meet until after I’d figured out who I was and what I wanted to become. On the other hand, the friends of our youth present their own problems. They are part of the train of memories that we all pull behind us, the one that grows longer with each passing day, and for that reason harder to pull. “The friend of your youth,” Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King’s Men, “is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name–Spike, Bud, Skip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave–which belongs to that now non-existent face but by some inane and doddering confusion is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger.” Old friends knew you when, but new ones know you now, and now is when it is and where you are.

Which brings me full circle, back to those absent friends who will never know me now. I miss them all, one or two with a keenness undulled by the passage of time. How I wish they could have seen what they missed–just as I wish I could have seen what they missed. But there’s no point in longing for what you can’t possibly have, especially since I’m as grateful as a man can be for what I do have: the perfect job, a handsome apartment whose walls are crowded with beautiful works of art, and a couple of dozen beloved friends who give me more joy than I deserve. I’d trade every piece in the Teachout Museum for any one of them. They are what I treasure most.

“Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.”

Hippocrates, Aphorisms

A diary of recent events in Teachoutworld:

FRIDAY: Spoke about All in the Dances at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and was given a private view of “Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum,” a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of original costumes and set designs for such legendary ballets as Les Noces, Prodigal Son, and Nijinsky’s Sacre du Printemps (including a costume hand-painted by Matisse). More next week, but for the moment I’ll just say that anybody with more than a casual interest in twentieth-century ballet will find this show, which runs through Jan. 2, jaw-droppingly good.

SATURDAY: A triple-decker day. Went to Knoedler & Company and looked at Onrushing Waves, the Milton Avery exhibition. Then to the nearest movie theater to see Sideways, about which Our Girl was soooo right: it couldn’t have been better. Then to Broadway for a preview of Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance, followed by dinner and a fast cab home, where I watched two stockpiled episodes of What’s My Line?
on the DVR (Steve Allen just joined the panel) and went to bed way too late.

SUNDAY: Maccers, my blogstalker, came to my Barnes & Noble signing last Tuesday (incognito, but I found her out), so I e-mailed her an invitation to a Broadway preview. She turned up her fine nose at a glitzy musical, forcing me to up the highbrow ante several thousand notches with Sheridan’s The Rivals, to which she said yes. Updated the Top Five with four fresh items, including a heartfelt paragraph about the Avery show. (See the right-hand column for details.) Lunched quickly and dirtily on the fly, called my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., from the street, then saw two back-to-back off-Broadway shows, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt
and Woody Allen’s A Second Hand Memory. Called Our Girl the second I got home to discuss Sideways. Knocked out a quick posting for Monday (you’re reading it). The loft beckons.

And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? Well, I have three pieces to write (two shorts and a long) before I head for LaGuardia on Wednesday morning to fly home to my family for Thanksgiving. Between meals, I plan to sleep. No blogging, though–you’ll be on your own from Wednesday through next Tuesday.

How about you?

“If acting is a creative art–if it is–then it is perfectly reasonable to demand for it conditions similar to those of the painter or the writer: the right, that is, to make a mess, to splash around, to make drafts and sketches, to have a wasterpaper bin at your side. In any creative activity, art is madness, craft is sanity. The balance between them makes the work.”

Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor