Archives for May 2008

Remember that point in Bleak House when Krook, the drunken rag-and-bone guy, spontaneously combusts in his shop? In my mind I always related the fatal combustion less to Krook’s drinking than to his oiliness and the general blackness of his soul, as if he were a one-man grease fire lit by his own evil (as it were).
Then a couple weeks ago, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! had a segment on Prohibition, and one of the questions had to do with the claim of early temperance activists that alcohol consumption could lead to spontaneous combustion, the logic being that alcohol burns.* And I thought, “Krook! Krook!”
Sure enough, that’s the folk belief that Dickens drew on to plot Krook’s end. Although, according to this website (be warned: there’s a spooky photograph there that Will Haunt Your Dreams), Dickens maintained that Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) wasn’t superstition but fact:

Krook was a heavy alcoholic, true to the popular belief at the time that SHC was caused by excessive drinking. The novel caused a minor uproar; George Henry Lewes, philosopher and critic, declared that SHC was impossible, and derided Dickens’ work as perpetuating an uneducated superstition. Dickens responded to this statement in the preface of the 2nd edition of his work, making it quite clear that he had researched the subject and knew of about thirty cases of SHC. The details of Krook’s death in Bleak House were directly modeled on the details of the death of the Countess Cornelia de Bandi Cesenate by this extraordinary means; the only other case that Dickens actually cites details from is the Nicole Millet account that inspired Dupont’s book about 100 years earlier.

Now, you have to consider any Google search that has already delivered the sentence, “Over the past 300 years, there have been more than 200 reports of persons burning to a crisp for no apparent reason,” as a clear success. But there’s more!** The incidents surrounding the death of the Countess are covered in detail here. Meanwhile, the BBC website sheds light on the other case Dickens mentioned in his preface, Nicole Millet’s death:

However, the first reliable documentation of SHC dates back to 1763 when Frenchman Jonas Dupont compiled a casebook of SHC cases in a book called De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis, having been compelled by the Nicole Millet case, which involved a man who was acquitted of the murder of his wife when the court ruled that the unfortunate woman’s death had been due to spontaneous combustion.
Nicole Millet was the wife of the landlord of the Lion d’Or in Rheims, who was supposedly found burnt to death in an unburnt chair in February, 1725 (on Whit Monday). Her husband was accused of her murder and arrested; however, a young surgeon named Nicholas le Cat managed to convince the court that her death was caused by SHC. The court ultimately ruled her death as ‘by a visitation of God.’ However, the investigative author Joe Nickell stated in his book, Secrets of the Supernatural, that Millet’s body was not actually found in the chair, but that a portion of her head, several vertebrae and portions of her lower extremities were found on the kitchen floor, the surrounding ground of which had also been burnt. Three accounts were cited: Theodric and John Becks’s Elements of Medical Jurisprudence (1835), George Henry Lewes’s Spontaneous Combustion from Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine No. 89 (April 1861) and Thomas Stevenson’s Principals and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence (1883). Strangely, there was no mention of Nicholas le Cat.

Emphasis mine.
* Another rationale for the belief, proferred at the BBC website, is that “a body saturated with such combustible fluids would be prone to combustion at the slightest spark.” However, the article continues reassuringly, “the concentration of alcohol in a body would never be high enough for ignition to occur.”
** If this post is tending a little ghoulish, my apologies. I spent most of the summer of 1978 (age 7) suffering from a morbid fear/hope that I might spontaneously combust at any moment after my best friend J. brought up the possibility during a sleepover. So, in addition to clarifying all things Krook, this research was psychologically cathartic.

“I once asked Ben Britten what he thought was the most important requisite in composing opera. I was sure he would say a sense of drama, ability to indicate the meaning of a scene musically in a matter of seconds. What he said was that the most important thing a composer must have is the ability to write many kinds of music–chorus alone, chorus with orchestra, soloists separately, soloists in ensemble, and so on. The needs are so varied that one must have terrific facility to handle them all.”
Aaron Copland, Copland Since 1943

Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado, died four days ago. No obituaries as of this hour, but the news is up on her Web site.
It was my privilege to be asked to write an introduction to last year’s new edition of The Dud Avocado, published by New York Review Books, and Dundy made it known to me in due course that she liked what I wrote, a fact of which I am very proud.
Here’s how it starts:

It is the destiny of some good novels to be perpetually rediscovered, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, I fear, is one of them. Like William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf or James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, it bobs to the surface every decade or so, at which time somebody writes an essay about how good it is and somebody else clamors for it to be returned to print, followed in short order by the usual slow retreat into the shadows. In a better-regulated society, of course, the authors of such books would be properly esteemed, and on rare occasions one of them does contrive to clamber into the pantheon–Dawn Powell, the doyenne of oft-rediscovered authors, finally made it into the Library of America in 2001–but in the normal course of things, such triumphs are as rare as an honest stump speech.
The Dud Avocado is further handicapped by being funny. Americans like comedy but don’t trust it, a fact proved each year when the Oscars are handed out: our national motto seems to be Lord Byron’s “Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter/Sermons and soda-water the day after.” To be sure, The Dud Avocado is perfectly serious, but it preaches no sermons, and what it has to say about life must be read between the punch lines. That was what kept Powell under wraps for so long–nobody thought that a writer so amusing could really be any good, especially if she was also a woman–and it has been working against Elaine Dundy ever since she published The Dud Avocado, her first novel, in 1958. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that The Dud Avocado has never been out of print in England. I’m no Anglophile, but I readily admit that the Brits are better at this sort of thing. Unlike us, they treat their comic novelists right, perhaps because Shakespeare and Jane Austen taught them early on that (as Constant Lambert once observed apropos of the delicious music of Chabrier) “seriousness is not the same as solemnity.”

Maud Newton posted the entire introduction here last June. I invite you to read it in lieu of an obituary.
UPDATE: Here’s an obit in an unlikely place. I think it would have amused her.
Quiet Bubble has a brief tribute.
More from Dundy’s last publisher.

I’d planned to tell you all about my recent trip to Santa Fe today, but the truth is that after flying back to New York by way of Albuquerque, Denver, and Newark, then seeing four new shows in a row, one of them in Brooklyn and two of them very serious, I’m just too damn tired. Besides, I’ve got to knock out three Wall Street Journal columns between now and Thursday, the first of which is due at noon today if not sooner. So…no posting.
What will I do instead? I’ll start by writing Column No. 1, then go have lunch with a friend, after which I propose to spend the rest of the afternoon unwinding by listening to Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, which is (as Paul Desmond put it) the musical equivalent of getting your back scratched.
Join me if you like. Al is the one on the left:

Mmmmm.
I promise to file a full and detailed report on my recent operatic adventures as soon as I get myself pulled together again. Meanwhile, it might amuse you to know that some anonymous, exceedingly well-meaning soul has gone to the trouble of writing a Wikipedia entry on The Letter. Take a look!
If that’s not enough to keep you busy while I recuperate, go here to read a 1965 interview with Al and Zoot. You might also enjoy this piece by Dave Frishberg, who played piano for them once upon a time:

Zoot and Al were majestic in the way they commanded their horns, and they played rings around that music. They were locked into each other’s playing like no other two musicians I ever heard. During their solos they were really composing as they played–they couldn’t help it. They were compulsive composers, and it would be totally out of character for either of them to play reflexive licks, or to quote from nursery rhymes or corny pop songs, or to trivialize their music in any way. Jazz critics can probably point to certain “influences” in Al’s playing, or Zoot’s–Lester Young is the obvious point of departure. But the fire and the swing, and the way they swarmed over the changes and discovered ever fresher and more lyrical ways to navigate them resembles nothing else that came before or followed after.

What he said.
UPDATE: You’ll also find me here.

“I come to the conclusion that it is a mistake to try to write highly ‘poetical’ and ‘literary’ librettos. The poet ought to concentrate entirely on drama and absolute truth to human nature, however unreal or fantastic the story may be; and always to use the very simplest words which everybody can understand at first hearing. Secondly, always to make the characters talk in their own character, and to avoid carefully all temptation to put the author’s own private philosophy of life into their mouths. This if properly carried out does not at all prevent the poet’s own personality coming through the whole drama, as the great dramatists of the past have shown us. Prospero for instance talks of a good deal of ‘philosophy’ but it is all within the character of Prospero himself.”
Edward J. Dent, letter to Bernard Stevens (June 12, 1950)

Broadway has entered the home stretch of the 2007-08 season, and opening nights are coming fast and furious. I review three new shows in today’s Wall Street Journal column, The Country Girl, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Thurgood. All, alas, proved to be disappointments. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Two of America’s best actors opened on Broadway this week in a pair of plays that don’t suit their talents. Such disappointments are a necessary part of the career of every serious artist who is brave enough to take chances, but some chances are better than others, and I wish that Morgan Freeman and Laura Linney had chosen more suitable vehicles for their long-awaited returns to the New York stage.
Mr. Freeman, who hasn’t set foot on any stage in two decades, is starring in Mike Nichols’ revival of “The Country Girl,” one of the last plays by Clifford Odets to do well on Broadway. Written in 1950 and most recently revived there 36 years ago, it’s best known in George Seaton’s 1954 film version, which won Grace Kelly an Oscar, though it was Bing Crosby who gave the more interesting performance. Like Crosby, Mr. Freeman is playing the part of Frank Elgin, an over-the-hill actor-alcoholic who has been given one last chance to redeem himself. It’s a challenging role: Elgin starts off scared and ingratiating, then goes on a bender, at last pulling himself together and becoming the man he used to be. The trouble is that Elgin is a weak man, and weakness is not one of the more interesting colors in Mr. Freeman’s palette. Once Elgin recovers his courage in the second act, Mr. Freeman snaps into focus and starts making sense, but until then you never quite believe him….
Laura Linney has the twin gifts of simplicity and sincerity: It is impossible to doubt anything she says, whether on screen or onstage. Hence it is hard to see why she would have wanted to play the Marquise de Merteuil, the elaborately deceitful anti-heroine of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” Christopher Hampton’s “Masterpiece Theatre”-style stage version of Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel about a pair of aristocratic immoralists who make the fatal mistake of putting their heads in a noose of their own knotting. Ms. Linney, doubtless to her credit, lacks the sharp, supercilious edge of hypocrisy without which the Marquise cannot be portrayed convincingly, and though she does all she can to simulate it, the results too often suggest a very, very smart young girl playing dress-up….
Thurgood Marshall was by all accounts a peerless raconteur, full to overflowing of blunt, salty tales about the troubles he’d seen. George Stevens, Jr.’s “Thurgood,” in which Laurence Fishburne plays the man who argued Brown v. Board of Education before the U.S. Supreme Court, then became its first black justice, shows us that side of him–and nothing more. Like most one-man shows about historical figures, it’s a shallow exercise in hagiography: Mr. Stevens’ script turns Marshall into a smug, self-satisfied storyteller whom we are invited to admire, and the fact that he did so many admirable things does not make this one-dimensional portrait any more credible, much less dramatic….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

“This was a time in which you were always meeting people who caught politics just as a person catches religion. It was probably the last time in this century when politics in our country will be evangelical, and if a man was once intensely religious, he was bound to be wide open to a mood like that of the Thirties. But why waste time explaining the pattern? It is obvious now, and dozens of books have been written about it. Less obvious have been some of the attendant passions that went along with this neo-religious faith. Passion has a way of spilling over into all aspects of the human mind and feelings. It is the most dangeorus thing in the world whether it focuses itself on love, religion, reform, politics or art. Without it the world would die of dry rot. But though it creates it also destroys. Having seldom been its victim I have only pity for those who are, and I would be a hypocrite if I judged them by the standards you can safely apply to a man at peace with himself and his circumstances.”
Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night

• At MetaxuCafé, a cadre of great contributors are providing ongoing coverage of the PEN World Voices Festival, which continues through Sunday.
• A short film inspired by Leonora Carrington’s “The Debutante.” In a very modern piece of addenda, there’s a note from one of Carrington’s grandsons in the comments. Like the Mansfield and Keogh stories I linked to Tuesday, “The Debutante” is another very, very short story about what it’s like to be a young girl, though it’s the only one of the three to feature a hyena. I smell a bit strong, eh?
If you’re not familiar with Carrington, you can start with this profile; and I wrote a little about her amazing novel, The Hearing Trumpet here.
• His novel is still two weeks from publication, and my James Frey fatigue has already set in.