• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2009 / September / Archives for 30th

Archives for September 30, 2009

CAAF: Summertime

September 30, 2009 by ldemanski

SummerWillShow.jpgI’m reading Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show right now. It’s about an Englishwoman who runs away to Paris and falls in love with her husband’s mistress. I’d been wanting to read it ever since Sarah Waters named it as one of her favorite novels. At the time, it was out of print. But NYRB Classics reissued the novel this August, and I really think you couldn’t do better than to get yourself a copy.
Warner was a poet as well as a novelist, and as I read I find myself admiring how this shows in how she works her sentences. It sounds like a deadly dull thing to praise, a writer’s sentences, maybe because its praise that often gets awarded to books that are stultifying (meditations on a woodpile and changing cloud patterns and something-something about mortality and oh my god what page am I on it is only page 23). But the fact is Warner’s sentences are unusually beautiful, and I keep wondering what it is about them that makes them so.
One particular thing I’ve noticed is the ratio of Latinate to Anglo-Saxon in the paragraphs. Warner’s a very elegant stylist, and one danger of “elegant prose” is how easily it can become overly smooth and glassy. And then the reader slips right off the face of it. One of Warner’s tricks is to pop in an Anglo-Saxon-rooted word here and there that’s not only a good, just-right word, it also works like a prick to keep the paragraph from growing too smooth.
Example of elegance that would become glassy if the entire novel were like this:

Together they would look out of the window at the unfinished Ste. Clotilde, and an artistic conversation would take place, Père Hyacinthe with roulades of language expatiating on the beauties of the Gothic Frederick supplying cadences of agreement, till the two voices joined, as it were, in a duet, aspiring in thirds and sixths …

Example of a prick in the elegance:

The pleasures of avarice were emphasized by the surroundings. It was difficult to believe that this was Paris, so nipped and dingy did it look, so down-hearted and down-at-heel. A shrewish wind was blowing.

The “shrewish” is good, but the “nipped” is perfect.
Another prick:

The smell of the sea, melancholy like a whine, rose from the filthy clucking water.

The inverse, of course, is also true. Sometimes the elegance extends and makes beautiful what would otherwise be ordinary. Here is a sentence that could have been “and they breakfasted on coffee, bread and sausage”:

Some tin coffeepots, long wands of golden bread, a sausage in a paper chemise, gave a domesticated appearance to the barricade.

CAAF: Exercise with the authors: Charles Dickens

September 30, 2009 by ldemanski

overlook.jpg
With the recent glut of self-help books based on the works of great authors, I’ve been amusing myself with mock proposals, my favorite so far being Six-Pack Abs With Charles Bukowski. Another idea is a more generalized “exercise with the authors!”-type encyclopedia. Charles Dickens would have the first entry. From Jane Smiley’s Penguin Lives biography:

It was in this period [1838ish] that he took up the habit of long, vigorous daily walks that seem almost unimaginable today for an otherwise very busy man with many obligations. At a pace of twelve to fifteen minutes per mile, he regularly covered twenty and sometimes thirty miles. Returning, as his brother-in-law said, “he looked the personification of energy, which seemed to ooze from every pore as from some hidden reservoir…”

I think of this often as last year I received a fancy GPS-style watch with which to track my walking/jogging (or “wogging”). It was a very generous present, but it’s taken a lot of illusion out of my life. For example, pictured above is an overlook I walk to quite a bit that, if you asked me before, I would have told you was roughly a four-mile walk but which turns out to be more like two.
(If you have any similar “authors who exercise” tidbits, please feel free to share by email.)

TT: Snapshot

September 30, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the “Death Hunt” cue from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground:

Go here to see the main titles from On Dangerous Ground.
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

September 30, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Music arouses in us various emotions, but not the more terrible ones of horror, fear, rage, etc. It awakens rather the gentler feelings of tenderness and love, which readily passes into devotion.”
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

September 2009
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930  
« Aug   Oct »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Terry Teachout, 65
  • Gripping musical melodrama
  • Replay: Somerset Maugham in 1965
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on sentimentality
  • Snapshot: Richard Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in