Archives for April 2008

The big news in today’s Pulitzer Prizes is that Bob Dylan was honored with a special citation for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” A little late, I’d say.

As for the other prizes awarded in the non-journalistic categories of “letters, drama, and music,” I can only speak with authority about the awarding of the drama prize to Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, which was unquestionably superior to its competition. For what it’s worth, here’s what I wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal last year:

As an ardent supporter of Chicago theater, I’m overjoyed that one of that city’s best-known troupes has come east to strut its stuff: The Steppenwolf Theatre Company is performing Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County” on Broadway. Mr. Letts’s new play is a 13-character, 3½-hour monster about the Westons, an Oklahoma family so dysfunctional that it’s a wonder they’re not all dead. Repeat after me: adultery, alcoholism, drug addiction, incest. One of them is even a poet!

No doubt it sounds like Tennessee Williams on a bender, but what makes “August: Osage County” so excitingly watchable is that Mr. Letts has (mostly) chosen to play these grim matters for laughs. The horrific family dinner at which Mom Weston (Deanna Dunagan) pops a double handful of downers and starts settling scores is a glittering piece of black comedy, and the cast, consummately well directed by Anna D. Shapiro, plays it to perfection. Ms. Dunagan and Amy Morton (who gives a commanding performance as Barbara, the oldest Weston daughter) will surely be remembered at Tony time, but everyone deserves a group award for ensemble acting above and beyond the call of duty.

There’s a catch, and it’s a huge one: The hour-long first act is a pretentious piece of superfluous exposition that could and should have been cut. I suppose I ought not to suggest that you come late (nudge, nudge), but if you do choose to see the whole thing, take my word that it gets better–a whole lot better–after the first intermission.

Is that the stuff Pulitzers are made of? I suppose so, though the drama prize has had a fairly impressive batting average in recent years. Anna in the Tropics, Doubt, and I Am My Own Wife all won–but, then, so, did the utterly unmemorable Rabbit Hole. August: Osage County isn’t a great play, but we don’t get many of those, and it’s a solid, exciting piece of work, so I’m not complaining.

As for the other non-journalistic awards, I haven’t read any of the books that won, nor had I heard David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, which won the music prize. You can listen to it here, which I did after the prizes were announced this afternoon. (It’s pretty enough, but I wasn’t impressed.) Truth to tell, I hadn’t even heard of any of the winning titles, and I think of myself as being more or less culturally literate. I did read two of the finalists for the biography prize, Martin Duberman’s The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein and Zachary Leader’s The Life of Kingsley Amis, neither of which I thought prizeworthy, and one of the finalists for general nonfiction, Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, a brilliant and important book which I reviewed with the utmost enthusiasm in Commentary last year. (Alex’s blog is here.)

All of which says…what? Not very much, I fear. Nor are the Pulitzers nearly as important, culturally speaking, as they used to be, though they continue to ensure that their winners will be mentioned at least once in every major newspaper in America, which beats hell out of a sharp stick in the eye. Still, I doubt that this year’s winners will get much more traction in the media after the ink has dried on their citations, since American newspapers are increasingly turning their backs on high-culture coverage of all kinds. I wonder, for instance, what percentage of the papers that will be announcing the victory of John Matteson’s Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father in tomorrow morning’s editions bothered to run a review of the book when it was published.

Incidentally, one Michael S. Malone informed the world the other day that my blogging ought to receive a Pulitzer Prize for cultural criticism. Alas, it was all too plain to see that he was using me, Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington, Mickey Kaus, Markos Moulitsas, Glenn Reynolds, and Michael Yon (talk about mixed company!) as sticks with which to beat the Old Media. This had the inevitable effect of diluting his compliment: “On Tuesday, the Pulitzer Prizes will be announced. And if they are anything like last year, the journalism awards will go to the usual collection of dying newspapers…There will be the usual flurry of media, and then those newspapers will go back to dying.”

Needless to say, the Pulitzers in journalism are for newspapers, not blogs (or magazines or radio documentaries, for that matter). And if I ever win one, it will presumably be for my work as a newspaperman, which takes up most of my time and energy. I love blogging, but I get paid to write for The Wall Street Journal, and far more people read me there than on “About Last Night.” Yes, the newspaper business is in trouble–bad trouble–but it isn’t dead yet.

At the same time, though, I wouldn’t dream of denying that precious few newspapers (mine fortunately excepted) are doing their duty, or anything like it, to high culture in America and the world. Which is why it strikes me as faintly hypocritical that they should continue to devote one day out of the year to praising a playwright, a composer, and a half-dozen writers–and Bob Dylan, who needs a Pulitzer Prize a lot less than the Pulitzer Prizes need Bob Dylan.

A couple of years ago I blogged about making a will:

It took me two days to figure out who was to get what. By the time I was done, I felt so ceremonial that I started drawing up a list of music to be played at my funeral. At that point my sense of humor finally kicked in…
I’ve scrapped my plans for the Terry Teachout Memorial Concert. Should a pianist happen to be present when the time comes, I’d like her to play Aaron Copland’s Down a Country Lane. (Remember that, Heather.) The rest I’ll leave to whoever is in charge of disposing of my earthly remains, with the caveat that she keep it simple. I’ve never cared for funerals, nor do I wish to burden my friends with the chore of attending an elaborate one.

Since then I’ve had Down a Country Lane played at my wedding, thus rendering it unacceptable for mortuary purposes, and last week I attended a very elaborate memorial service in which classical music figured prominently. As I listened to the St. Patrick’s Cathedral Choir sing Palestrina and Victoria, it suddenly occurred to me that The Letter, the opera that Paul Moravec and I are writing, contains an aria whose suitability for funereal occasions is self-evident. It is a lament that one of the characters sings for her dead lover: I am alone,/Lost, lost/In the dark, silent night,/Looking only for light.

Would it be too outrageously immodest to request that an aria you had written be sung at your own funeral? No more so, surely, than the last musical request of W.H. Auden, an opera buff with a sense of humor: “When my time is up, I want Siegfried’s Funeral March and not a dry eye in the house.” (He got his wish.) Alas, our aria is a bit too dramatic to be wholly appropriate to such an occasion. It would be nice to have one of Paul’s pieces played, though, and I can think of two songs that would be just as appropriate, Copland’s “The World Feels Dusty” (from Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson) and Benjamin Britten’s “The Choirmaster’s Burial” (from Winter Words, a song cycle on poems by Thomas Hardy). Both are near to my heart, and it is pleasing to imagine them being sung to a group of friends gathered to see me off.

Needless to say, I couldn’t imagine departing this life without the assistance of Louis Armstrong, who in 1950 obligingly made a wonderful recording called New Orleans Function in which he, Barney Bigard, Cozy Cole, Earl Hines, Arvell Shaw, and Jack Teagarden recreate an old-time jazz funeral. In addition to playing trumpet, Armstrong supplies the gleeful narration: “And now, folks, we gonna take you down to New Or-leans, Loosiana. Tell you the story about ‘Didn’t He Ramble.’ ‘Course you know there was a funeral march in front of ‘Didn’t He Ramble,’ where they take the body to the cemetery and they lower ol’ Brother Gate in the ground. And, uh…dig it!” I think that would fit in quite nicely after “The Choirmaster’s Burial,” don’t you?

This is not to say that I’ve changed my mind about the remainder of the ceremony. “What I’d like,” I wrote in 2006, “is for the thirty-odd friends to whom I’m leaving the Teachout Museum to gather at my apartment, drink a toast, strip the walls, then go home and hang up their booty. That’s my kind of funeral–complete with party favors.” I still stand by that….

But of course I’m being silly. No act is so vain–in every sense of the word–as planning your own funeral. Vain and a little bit sad, and sometimes very sad indeed. One of the characters in The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O’Connor’s beautiful 1961 novel about an alcoholic parish priest, is a dried-up old Irish immigrant who spends his uncrowded days planning his funeral in excruciatingly exact detail. The priest listens patiently and with amusement, for he knows quite well what Bucky Heffernan is up to:

Bucky brought a peculiar zest, a flavor, to the day, and if much of his talk meant nothing at all…there was a kind of fascination in listening to a man who could with such enthusiasm and in such detail outline the blueprint for his posthumous disposition, and who could see in his own grave nothing short of a civic monument. But beyond all this there was something else, something which did not belong in never-never land–not a dream or an antic fantasy, but a fact which belonged to the here and now. This was the plain fact of death itself, the sober side of the picture, which I sometimes forgot even existed as I listened to Bucky, but which–I’m convinced–he never forgot, not even for an instant. Because every once in a while, as he talked, underneath all the complicated and grandiose plans, I caught a note of uncertainty and fear, and after a time I was sure that this was what he was really talking about, and not at all the burial or the dramatic transfer of his bones. I may have been all wrong in this, reading too much into a tone or a look in the eye, but I don’t think so, and in any case the least I could do was to listen.

When I looked up this passage in my battered old copy of The Edge of Sadness the other day, I found tucked among the pages a yellowed newspaper clipping from my hometown newspaper, a four-inch obituary of one of the friends of my youth. Greg Tanner was forty-one when he died in a car crash in 1996, leaving behind a wife and two children. The Smalltown Standard-Democrat summed up his too-short life in six no-nonsense paragraphs, and two days later he was buried in a country cemetery in southeast Missouri. So far as I know, nobody sang at his graveside, even though he loved music and played a mean fiddle.

Greg and I were close–I wrote about him in my first book–but it had been quite some time since I’d last thought of him, and I suspect that a similar interval will pass before I have occasion to think of him again. Few of us are destined to be remembered very clearly or very often, save by our nearest and dearest. We know this in our bones, which is why some monied folk seek to elude the anonymity of the ever-beckoning grave by pasting their names on concert halls or museum wings. For those of us who have done less well in life’s lottery, there is always the elaborately planned funeral.

Me, I’m giving away the pieces in the Teachout Museum, and perhaps the friends who are my legatees will hang their bequests on their living-room walls and think of me whenever they look at them. But even if they forget to remember (and they will, they will!), at least they will be in the life-enhancing presence of something I once thought beautiful. I can think of worse monuments.

Two artists of note died last week.
• Charlton Heston, the better known of the pair, was a much-underrated actor whose old-age excursions into the muddy waters of political activism have had the inevitable effect of obscuring his artistic achievements. He also wrote a very good autobiography, which I reread in 2004 and blogged about with renewed enthusiasm:

Kindly omit boggling: In the Arena is one of the very few books by a movie star that is both intelligent and well-written. (Heston wrote it without benefit of a ghost, I might add–you can tell by the literary idiosyncrasies, including a decidedly shaky grasp of the Theory of the Parenthesis). Not only does Heston shed considerable light on the complex craft of film acting, but he was a class-A raconteur who dishes up polished anecdotes at every possible opportunity….

Heston was and is best known for Ben-Hur and the other historical epics he filmed in his beefcake days, but his acting got more interesting as he grew older and craggier. If you’ve never seen any of his best film performances, I strongly commend Will Penny to your attention.
• The death of Gene Puerling has yet to attract the attention of the increasingly culturally illiterate New York Times, but the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle both paid due tribute to his
great gifts. Puerling was the singer-arranger-resident genius behind the Hi-Lo’s (the superfluous apostrophe was part of the group’s official title) and the Singers Unlimited, the two greatest vocal jazz groups of the postwar era. What he didn’t know about harmony wasn’t worth knowing.
Many of the Hi-Lo’s albums have been transferred to CD in recent years, though the best one, And All That Jazz, is now out of print and hard to find. As for the Singers Unlimited, all of their recordings are collected on Magic Voices, a seven-disc boxed set. Alternatively, go to iTunes and download their luminous version of “The Shadow of Your Smile,” delicately accompanied by the Oscar Peterson Trio. If it doesn’t get you excited, have your ears examined.

“I make it a kind of pious rule to go to every funeral to which I am invited, both as I wish to pay a proper respect to the dead, unless their characters have been bad, and as I would wish to have the funeral of my own near relations or of myself well attended.”
James Boswell, journal entry, Feb. 1, 1779

Moss Hart, who grew up poor and spent a not-inconsiderable portion of his young life riding the subway from deepest Brooklyn to Times Square, swore that if he ever struck it rich, he’d take cabs everywhere, even if his destination was only a block or two away. I’ve never been poor and have yet to strike it rich, but I rode the subway often enough in my first years as a New Yorker to be glad that I can now afford to take cabs. Be that as it may, a true New Yorker who wants to get somewhere at ten on a rainy morning takes the subway, and since today’s Mass for the repose of the soul of William F. Buckley, Jr., who died five weeks ago, was scheduled to start at ten o’clock sharp at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I put on my black outfit and raincoat, descended into the bowels of Manhattan, and made my bumpy way to the Rockefeller Center station in the midst of a rush-hour crowd.

It’s been quite a while since I walked through Rockefeller Center, even longer since I crossed Fifth Avenue and went inside St. Patrick’s, and a very long time indeed since I last attended a memorial service for a public figure. For all these reasons, I have no standard against which to measure Bill’s funeral obsequies. All I can tell you was that today’s service seemed as splendid as it could possibly have been. The cathedral was full of mourners, the choir loft full of singers, and the music was mostly appropriate to the occasion. Bill was a serious amateur musician who loved Bach above all things–he actually performed the F Minor Harpsichord Concerto in public on more than one occasion–so the organist played “Sheep May Safely Graze” and the slow movement of the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C Major. No less suitable were the sung portions of the Mass, drawn from Victoria’s sweetly austere Missa “O magnum mysterium,” and the closing hymn, the noble tune from Gustav Holst’s The Planets to which the following words were later set: I vow to thee, my country–all earthly things above–/Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love.

The only thing that made my inner critic smile wryly was the performance during communion of the Adagio in G Minor long attributed to Albinoni but in fact woven out of whole cloth by one Remo Giazotto. It is a preposterously operatic piece of spurious yard goods, and to hear it played on the organ with all stops pulled put me in mind of something Bill wrote after attending a Virgil Fox recital many years ago:

At one point during a prelude, I am tempted to rise solemnly, commandeer a shotgun, and advise Fox, preferably in imperious German, if only I could learn German in time to consummate the fantasy, that if he does not release the goddam vox humana, which is oohing-ahing-eeing the music where Bach clearly intended something closer to a bel canto, I shall simply have to blow his head off.

That was the Bill Buckley I knew, whip-smart and impishly outrageous, the same man that David Remnick had in mind when he described Bill as having “the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat.”

I wish I could say I knew him well, but I didn’t. I dined at his table a number of times but was only alone with him once, when I interviewed him about Whittaker Chambers for an anthology of Chambers’ journalism that I edited in 1989. On that occasion Bill assured me that although they had been close, Chambers never had “any direct historical or intellectual influence” on him. The reason he gave is striking:

I never embraced, in part because subjectively it’s contra naturam to me, that utter, total, objective, strategic pessimism of his. Among other things, I think it’s wrong theologically to assume that the world is doomed before God decides to doom it. So I never drank too deeply of his Weltschmerz.

Indeed he did not: Bill was the least weltschmerzy person imaginable. Henry Kissinger, who eulogized him this morning, alluded to that side of Bill’s personality when he remarked that Bill “was vouchsafed a little miracle: to enjoy so much what was compelled by inner necessity.” I couldn’t have put it better. Bill worked fearfully hard and was deadly serious about what he believed, but he extracted self-evident enjoyment from everything he did, and you couldn’t be in his presence for more than a minute or two without responding to his joie de vivre. If I’d been in charge of the music today, I would have made a point of picking something a good deal more festive–Bach’s Fugue à la gigue, say, or one of the harpsichord sonatas in which Scarlatti turned Bill’s favorite instrument into a giant super-guitar.

Christopher Buckley, Bill’s son, followed Henry Kissinger, and gave just the sort of eulogy I’d expected from him, funny and light-fingered, putting much-needed smiles on our faces. Only at the end did he sound a darker note, quoting the lines from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” that he chose as the epitaph for a man who loved sailing as much as he loved Bach: Here he lies where he long’d to be;/Home is the sailor, home from the sea,/And the hunter home from the hill. Then we all sang “I Vow to Thee, My Country,” pushed our way past the waiting photographers, and returned to the gray, misty day.

I passed up a lunch invitation and went home by myself, preferring to be alone with my thoughts. I was thinking of an evening in the fall of 1985, not long after I moved to New York from the Midwest. I’d been writing for National Review, Bill’s magazine, since 1981, but I’d never met my first great patron face to face, so he invited me to an editorial dinner at his Park Avenue apartment. Back then I was working for Harper’s, whose offices were in Greenwich Village, and the thought of meeting Bill for the first time was so exciting that I walked all the way from Astor Place up to 73 East 73rd Street (where Bill invariably entertained at 7:30).

It was, of course, a symbolic gesture: I was taking possession of the streets of the city to which I had moved and in which I hoped someday to make a name for myself. At the end of my journey I knocked on the door of Bill’s maisonette, and a few moments later he clasped my hand and said, “Hey, buddy!” It was, I would learn, his standard greeting, always uttered with a warmth that remained disarming no matter how often you basked in it.

Ever since then I have associated Bill Buckley with New York, whose doors he flung wide to me, just as he opened the pages of the magazine he edited. Now New York is my home–but Bill is gone, buried in Connecticut, home at last from the sea. Somehow you never imagine outliving the people who show you through the doors that lead to the rest of your life.

• Whence sprang Miss Havisham? Charles Nickerson argues that a Disraeli novel, Venetia, based on the lives of Byron and Shelley, may have been an inspiration. (Australia responds, “*cough* Emily Eliza Donnithorne.”)
• Dan Chiasson on the poetry and personality of Frank O’Hara: “… where most poets deposited words with an eyedropper, O’Hara sprayed them through a fire hose.”

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to new revivals of two of the biggest stage hits of the Forties, Lincoln Center Theater’s South Pacific and Trinity Repertory Company’s Blithe Spirit, which opened last night in Providence, Rhode Island. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
“South Pacific” goes dead in the water every time the characters stop singing and start talking, which is way too often. The book, adapted by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan from James Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific,” is a wartime drama built around a May-September romance between Nellie Forbush (Ms. O’Hara), a cheery Navy nurse, and Emile de Becque (Paulo Szot), a super-suave French plantation owner who fled to a Polynesian island after killing a man, took up with a now-deceased native woman and sired an adorable pair of children. Their skins, alas, are too brown to suit the Arkansas-born Nellie, and thereby hangs the tale of “South Pacific.” Will true love purge our poor benighted heroine of her racism? Will her middle-aged suitor be killed in a daredevil mission behind Japanese lines? Would that one could care, but Hammerstein preaches his sermon with head-thumping triteness: You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late/Before you are six or seven or eight/To hate all the people your relatives hate. Stir in a megadose of beat-the-Japs period fervor, and you get a show so reeking of uplift that you can all but feel your pulse slowing to a crawl as the second act inches toward its predestined happy ending.
Now comes the good news. The songs sound as great as ever, especially “A Wonderful Guy” (nobody on Broadway wrote better waltzes than Richard Rodgers) and “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” and Christopher Gattelli has staged them with precision and panache. Michael Yeargan’s tropical-island set is downright operatic, while Ted Sperling’s 30-piece pit band plays the original Robert Russell Bennett orchestrations so handsomely that I’d gladly have paid for a ticket to hear them in concert. Mr. Szot is a bit of a stiff, but Ms. O’Hara more than makes up for his phlegmatic demeanor with her unaffectedly winsome acting, and her singing is the best I’ve heard on a Broadway stage since Audra McDonald lit a fire under “110 in the Shade.”…
Not all the big Broadway hits of the ’40s were as boomingly earnest as “South Pacific.” Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” which opened a month before Pearl Harbor and ran for two years, is a flyweight farce devoid of deeper meaning, and Trinity Repertory Company’s stylish revival leaves no doubt that Coward’s very, very British brand of socially insignificant comedy is as enduringly fresh as the book of “South Pacific” is hopelessly dated.
Coward’s best plays virtually play themselves, provided that the director and actors take care to keep things simple. “Blithe Spirit” is no exception, and Curt Columbus, Trinity Rep’s artistic director, has put together a cast of enviably skilled farceurs, all but one of them drawn from the company’s own resident ensemble, who get their laughs with unerring economy….
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Read the whole thing here.