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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 3, 2009

CAAF: Loose notes

August 3, 2009 by ldemanski

“But it dies hard, that world;
Or, being dead,
Putrescently is pearled,
For I, misled,
Make on my mind the deepest wound of all:
Think to recall
At any moment, states
Long since dispersed;
That if chance dissipates
The best, the worst
May scatter equally upon a touch.
I kiss, I clutch,
Like a daft mother, putrid
Infancy,
That can and will forbid
All grist to me
Except devaluing dichotomies:
Nothing, and paradise.”
Philip Larkin, “On Being Twenty-six”

CAAF: Dance upon it

August 3, 2009 by ldemanski

Remember that Charles Dickens anecdote from a while back? The short version: Dickens, a famed writer already in middle age, reconnects by letter with a woman he once loved passionately. She tells him that in the decades since he’s seen her she’s grown “toothless, fat, old and ugly.” He demurs. They meet. He is repelled to find that she is, in truth, toothless, fat, old and ugly. He places a character based on her in the novel he’s writing, Little Dorrit. The portrait isn’t flattering.
I may be overly sensitive about this story. A couple weeks ago, Lowell and I were watching the recent BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit and at least two or three times when Flora, the character based on Mrs. Winters, came on screen I’d say something like, “SHE TOLD HIM SHE WAS TOOTHLESS, FAT, OLD AND UGLY. WHAT DID HE EXPECT?!?!?”
Now I’m reading the novel for the first time and enjoying it. The BBC adaptation is about 14 hours long, and even at that length they had to elide and compress quite a bit. They did an artful job of it, but still it’s a pleasure to have the fullness of psychology and circumstance that Dickens put in there. One of these places of added dimension is in the meeting of the protagonist Arthur Clennam with Flora. In the BBC version, this scene is mostly comic (Flora is played by Ruth Jones, who is wonderfully funny). In the novel, the meeting is comic — but tinged with a real melancholy. Here is the description of Clennam’s feelings when Flora, now “very broad” and simpering, enters the room:

Most men will be found sufficiently true to themselves to be true to an old idea. It is no proof of an inconstant mind, but exactly the opposite, when the idea will not bear close comparison with the reality, and the contrast is a fatal shock to it. Such was Clennam’s case. In his youth he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked-up wealth of his affection and imagination. That wealth had been, in his desert home, like Robinson’s money; exchangeable with no one, lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out for her. Ever since that memorable time, though he had, until the night of his arrival, as completely dismissed her from any association with his Present or Future as if she had been dead (which she might easily have been for anything he knew), he had kept the old fancy of the Past unchanged, in its old sacred place. And now, after all, the last of the Patriarchs coolly walked into the parlour, saying in effect, ‘Be good enough to throw it down and dance upon it. This is Flora.’

TT: Back to the world

August 3, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Tonight I attend the third performance of The Letter in Santa Fe. On Tuesday I’ll fly back to Connecticut, and the next day I fling myself into the maelstrom of summer theater in New England. Lest you think I exaggerate, I’m seeing Westport Country Playhouse’s revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves on Wednesday afternoon and Goodspeed Musicals’ Camelot that same night, then writing and filing my review of both shows the following morning. Somewhere along the way, I also hope to get some sleep.
Needless to say, you won’t be hearing much from me in this space until next week. I’ll leave you in the capable hands of CAAF and OGIC. In the meantime, suffice it to say that my stay in Santa Fe has been magical–the whole thing scarcely seems real–and I can’t yet come to grips with the prospect of returning to my regular life. I know I’ll enjoy it once I get there, but right now I wish I could stay in Santa Fe long enough to see the last three performances of The Letter. I seem to be developing a taste for taking curtain calls!
More after it happens.

TT: Almanac

August 3, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-ordinary memorist.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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