Archives for 2009

Harcourt sent me the first finished copy of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong last Tuesday. It was an inordinately busy week crammed full of shows and deadlines, but I talked a sympathetic editor into giving me the rest of the day off and spent the afternoon and evening rereading the book. I spent a certain amount of time admiring the index, snuffling for typos–in vain, I’m glad to report–and confirming that the corrections I made on the galley proofs were incorporated into the final version. Mostly, though, I just flipped through the pages of Pops and marveled at how good it looked.

Regular readers of this blog know that I believe the printed book to be well on its way to ultimate extinction. As I put it in a “Sightings” column written in 2006, a year before the introduction of the Kindle:

The printed book is a beautiful object, “elegant” in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses of the word, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology–a means, not an end. Like all technologies, it has a finite lifespan, and its time is almost up.

On the other hand, I have yet to buy a Kindle, and at the moment I have no plans to do so. This is partly because I prefer to wait until the kinks are ironed out (I’ve never been a truly early adopter) and partly because, like most middle-aged authors, I remain enamored of the sheer physicality of the old-fashioned printed book. I was intimately involved in the design of Pops–I even chose the typeface, as I have for all my books–and I think it might just be the best-looking book with which I’ve been involved. The dust jacket is gorgeous, the typography balanced and legible, the photos flawlessly reproduced, the paper pleasing to the touch. All these things add up to a total aesthetic experience that I find immensely gratifying. To put it another way, the printed version of Pops is both a vessel filled with interesting information and an objet d’art that is beautiful in its own right.

So am I really a closet Luddite, a technological Moses who can’t bring himself to enter the promised land of the e-book? Maybe. Six years ago I declared myself to be “open, at least in theory, to the possibility of abandoning the book-as-art-object.” Now that technology has finally caught up with me, I find myself unexpectedly unwilling to put my money where my mouth is. Yet I believe no less firmly than ever that the printed book is a technology whose time has come and gone. Am I, then, a hypocrite? Or merely a middle-aged man who, like most middle-aged men, is reluctant to put aside the youthful things that remind me of myself when young?

I hasten to point out that I no longer own any long-playing records or cassettes, and that I spend more time listening to music on my MacBook and iPod than on my CD player. No doubt the time will also come when I spend more time reading books on a Kindle, or something like it, than reading the handsomely bound volumes shelved in my living room. Not for me the self-conscious posturing of those curmudgeonly poseurs who wail Change and decay in all around I see! at every opportunity. Nor would I surprised if my next book, whatever it happens to be and whenever it happens to come out, is published solely in electronic form–yet I can’t imagine that the thrill I get from downloading the first “copy” will be half so intense as the one I got last week when I held the first finished copy of Pops in my hands.

“One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity.”
Peter De Vries, The Mackerel Plaza

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is #33 on Amazon’s Best Books of 2009 list–and it isn’t even published yet.
Go here to find out more.

Goodness gracious, the dithering I’ve done since I wrote here that I’d only be reading Herman Melville in November. Melville’s an author (like Nabokov and Dickens) I’m always sort of in the midst of reading — which is why I initially thought he’d be a good choice. My affection for him felt big enough, burgeoning enough, that it could last out a month of one-on-one fidelity. Also, the writing itself is so varied, with so many moods and voices, that it wouldn’t be such a narrow diet. But no sooner had I stated publicly, “It’s Herman, nothing but Herman,” then I began to feel hollow the way you do when you’re telling a lie and panicked that I’d chosen wrong. I padded into the library, got one of his Library of America books off the shelf and opened it to a random page. It fell open to this passage from White-Jacket:

“The Sultan, Indiaman, from New York, and bound to Callao and Canton, sixty days out, all well. What frigate’s that?”
“The United States ship Neversink, homeward bound.”
“Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” yelled our enthusiastic countryman, transported with patriotism.
By this time the Sultan had swept past, but the Lieutenant of the Watch could not withhold a parting admonition.
“D’ye hear? You’d better take in some of your flying-kites there. Look out for Cape Horn!”

Christ, I thought, I’ll never make it. By Wednesday night I had decided on Nabokov instead, with a focus on the Russian novels (i.e., Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, Laughter in the Dark, etc.). This would make a neat segue to reading Pushkin and Gogol in December (a Russian Soul odyssey), as well as allow for a day trip to The Original of Laura. Then yesterday it was Eudora Welty — a writer I’ve never read but always meant to. And so on … (The terrible thing: As tiresome as this recital is, it actually represents a radical condensation of interior vacillation.)
I’m now calmed down and it’s back to Melville (Herman, nothing but Herman). The proposed syllabus: Typee (first time); Redburn (partly read, loved, yet inexplicably abandoned halfway); Moby-Dick (a reread); and, time allowing, The Confidence-Man (first time), which makes an arc from the start of his writing to the near-end.
Two things that brought me back to Melville. First, this famous note from Hawthorne’s journals about a visit the two had in England*:

… on the intervening day, we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a hollow among the sand hills … and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated;” but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists–and had persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before-in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth of immortality than most of us.

(Excerpt taken from Elizabeth Hardwick’s marvelous Penguin Life study.)
The second, if you can bear it, has to do with the opening of his story “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” which, as I’ve recalled it and let it play in my head, has gradually overridden the panic engendered by the White-Jacket passage. Here is how it starts:

It lies not far from Temple-Bar.
Going to it, by the usual way, is like stealing from a heated plain into some cool, deep glen, shady among harboring hills.
Sick with the din and soiled with the mud of Fleet Street — where the Benedick tradesmen are hurrying by, with ledger-lines ruled along their brows, thinking upon rise of bread and fall of babies — you adroitly turn a mystic corner — not a street — glide down a dim, monastic way flanked by dark, sedate, and solemn piles, and still wending on, give the whole care-worn world the slip, and, disentangled, stand beneath the quiet cloisters of the Paradise of Bachelors.
Sweet are the oases in Sahara; charming the isle-groves of August prairies; delectable pure faith amidst a thousand perfidies: but sweeter, still more charming, most delectable, the dreamy Paradise of Bachelors, found in the stony heart of stunning London.
In mild meditation pace the cloisters; take your pleasure, sip your leisure, in the garden waterward; go linger in the ancient library, go worship in the sculptured chapel: but little have you seen, just nothing do you know, not the sweet kernel have you tasted, till you dine among the banded Bachelors …

Read the rest here.
* Hawthorne’s journal also notes that Melville ” … arrived in Southport with the least little bit of a bundle, which, he told me, contained a night shirt and a tooth-brush. He is a person of very gentlemanly instincts in every respect, save that he is a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen.”

This was a good week on Broadway. David Cromer’s production of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and the new revival of Finian’s Rainbow, both of which I review in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, are exceptionally fine and persuasive mountings of deeply flawed shows. Here’s an excerpt.
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The trouble with “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” in which Eugene Jerome (Noah Robbins), the author’s fictional mouthpiece, tells us how it felt to be a teenager in Brooklyn on the eve of World War II, is that it’s a slice of life with too much frosting on top. As always with Mr. Simon, the characters all talk like stand-up comics, frothing at the mouth with one-liners (“Her windows are so filthy, I thought she had black curtains hanging inside”) instead of letting laughter arise naturally from the situations in which they find themselves. Mr. Simon abruptly turns off the wisecrack tap in the second act, thereby signaling that he’s Getting Serious. For 20 minutes or so the squabbling members of the Jerome family lob grenades of pent-up rage and frustration at one another. Then they kiss, make up and send everybody home happy, save for those suckers who were briefly fooled into thinking that Mr. Simon’s bait-and-switch act is something other than a sentimental portrayal of the splendors and miseries of Jewish family life circa 1937.
What Mr. Cromer has done to “Brighton Beach Memoirs” is stage it for truth, not laughs, as if it were a play by Alan Ayckbourn–or Chekhov. Except for Mr. Robbins, whose squirmingly self-conscious speeches to the audience give him little choice but to be charming, nobody overeggs the pudding, nor is anyone too pretty or too cute. Dennis Boutsikaris and Laurie Metcalf, who play Eugene’s parents, carry themselves not like sitcom characters but human beings…
I’m not going to try to tell you that all this effort has turned “Brighton Beach Memoirs” into a theatrical masterpiece. It’s still a commercial comedy into which a freshening dollop of vinegar has been stirred. But by steering clear of coarse trickery, David Cromer has made the Jerome family seem immeasurably more real without diminishing the play’s still-considerable entertainment value….
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more musically satisfying Broadway show than “Finian’s Rainbow.” Not only is the Yip Harburg-Burton Lane score a string of flawlessly cut gems, but everyone involved with the production takes the songs seriously, performing them with love and sensitivity….
Unfortunately, there comes a time in “Finian’s Rainbow” when the actors stop singing and start talking, at which point it becomes excruciatingly clear that the book, by Harburg and Fred Saidy, is a heavy-handed mishmash of Irish whimsy-whamsy and smug sanctimony….
Go for the music. It’s worth it.
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Read the whole thing here.

Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: A Personal View, a thirteen-part TV series about Western art and culture, first aired on the BBC in 1969 and on PBS a year later. The series was hugely popular in both countries. Today, however, it’s mostly forgotten save by specialists in TV history. A couple of weeks ago the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., hosted a panel discussion of Civilisation and its significance, but to date PBS has shown no interest in commemorating its fortieth anniversary.
In this week’s “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal I reflect on why Civilisation is no longer well remembered–and explain why many present-day intellectuals hold it in contempt. Pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
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The opening sequence of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” the first episode of Civilisation: