Archives for August 2009

This is awesome.
Donald E. Westlake, you are missed.
That is all.

Quick, who’s your all-time favorite writer? When was the last time you read one of his or her books? Last weekend a friend who’d started The Portrait of a Lady on my enthusiastic recommendation said she was enjoying the book, and it struck me that I haven’t read it myself in 20 years–roughly half my lifetime, and most of my adulthood. Soon I realized that I haven’t read any James novel in three or four years, at least. What am I even talking about when I call him my favorite writer? That was a different person who read most of those books.

This evening I picked up Portrait again and read a few pages. The last time I read anything James wrote before 1886 must have been fifteen years ago. If the later fiction is what you’re used to, the difference is startling. The 1880 Portrait (my edition is from the revised 1907 New York Edition) has the beginning of an essay:

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not–some people of course never do,–the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime.

As if creatures of delicate sensibilities, we’re lowered into the story gently and the reassuring presence of the narrator never feels very far away. Later, James will omit the overt layer of narration and plunge us into the midst of things. As in The Wings of the Dove.

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.

In short, the first pages make it clear that the James of The Portrait of a Lady is not any longer the James I know. Not after spending years in graduate school poring over The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove, What Maisie Knew, and “In the Cage.”

So who was it who got hooked on that other James? Let’s have a look at what she underlined.

It appeared to Isabel that the unpleasant had been even too absent from her knowledge, for she had gathered from her acquaintance with literature that it was often a source of interest and even of instruction.

The poor girl liked to be thought clever, but she hated to be thought bookish; she used to read in secret and, though her memory was excellent, to abstain from showy reference. She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering.

She was a person of great good faith, and if there was a great deal of folly in her wisdom those who judge her severely may have the satisfaction of finding that, later, she became consistently wise only at the cost of an amount of folly which will constitute almost a direct appeal to charity.

The apparent answer: a very young female person–one of a million–who identified in a hopeful way with Isabel Archer, “her meagre knowledge, her inflated ideals,” and all. (At least through the first half of the novel; the underlining ceases soon after Osmond starts really closing in.) No more surprising is the lessened sympathy I feel for Isabel now, not to mention for the slightly absurd 20-year-old who thought she might be like her.

“He understood well enough that he belonged to that undistinguished majority of men for whom it should no doubt be a mortification that work was an end in itself, not a necessary detested means to make a living, certainly not a shrewd enterprise whose motive and hope was some blissful future state of living without work. His bliss was here and now; there was no pastime like the press of business.”
James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which comes out on December 2, just got a thumbs-up review–with a big red star–in the latest issue of Publishers Weekly:

It may seem odd to speak of someone of Louis Armstrong’s stature as needing recuperation, but his popularity has long been held against him by jazz purists and other music critics. Teachout brings a fresh perspective that, while candid about the ways “Pops” could hold himself back artistically, celebrates his ambition and capacity for renewal. The other knock against Armstrong is that if white Americans loved him so much, he must have been an “Uncle Tom,” a notion Teachout neatly demolishes. While Armstrong was keenly aware of the social realities of his time, his relentless work ethic was fueled by an equally intense optimism. (His patience, however, was not infinite; he publicly criticized President Eisenhower as having “no guts” for failing to enforce desegregation–one of the few celebrities who could be so outspoken without suffering substantial backlash.) Teachout’s portrait reminds us why we fell in love with Armstrong’s music in the first place….

Read the whole thing here.

I zipped through New York over the weekend, sticking around just long enough to collect, open, and answer a month’s worth of accumulated snail mail. Today Mrs. T and I head north to the Berkshires, where we’ll be launching a three-week New England summer-theater tour by seeing Shakespeare & Company’s Twelfth Night and Barrington Stage Company’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Needless to say, I wish we were taking a month-long trip to nowhere instead, but even when I’m worn out–which I am–I still enjoy spending my nights on the aisle.
I doubt I’ll be doing a whole lot of blogging this week, but I did roll over the top-five and “Out of the Past” modules of the right-hand column, so you might want to take a look at all the latest picks.
In addition, I’d like to draw your attention to Live 2.0, a new site launched by Jim McCarthy, the founder of Goldstar Events, a California-based company that sells half-price tickets to live performances in major cities throughout America. Live 2.0 is a blog-like Web-based magazine in which Jim and his contributors write about various aspects of the vexing problem of attracting young people to live performances. I met Jim two years ago when I wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal about Goldstar, and I was intrigued by his hard-headed approach to audience development. We kept in touch thereafter, and Jim interviewed me for Live 2.0 when I was on the West Coast a couple of months ago, partly about The Letter and partly about the challenges currently facing the classical-music business. You can read the interview by going here.
Regular readers of this blog and my “Sightings” column for the Journal will already be familiar with the line of argument advanced in my Live 2.0 interview, which is closely related to what I had to say in last Saturday’s column about the future of jazz in America. Even so, you may find it interesting to read about how The Letter was specifically designed to encourage media-savvy under-40 types to take an interest in opera.
I especially like this exchange:

If you could give one piece of advice to everyone in the opera business, what would it be?
Put a sign in every office that reads as follows: MOST PEOPLE THINK THEY DON’T LIKE OPERA. YOU WON’T CHANGE THEIR MINDS BY TELLING THEM THEY SHOULD.

I still think that’s good advice.

“He recognized that common, much litigated type of human disagreement in which each party to it insists on reducing his opponent’s position or contention to its bare essentials–yes or no; did he, or did he not, still beat his wife?–while asserting the right to state his own position or contention with every circumstantial distinction preserved. High indignation and conflicting strong senses of righteousness resulted.”
James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor