Archives for January 2010

On Saturday afternoon I talked about and signed copies of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, the modest three-story home in Queens where Armstrong lived with Lucille, his fourth wife, from 1943 until his death in 1971. I’ve been there more than once, but this was the first time I’d paid a visit to the Armstrong house since I started working on Pops in earnest six years ago. Several people who had known the Armstrongs well (including Selma Heraldo, his next-door neighbor) came to hear me speak. So did the great jazz trumpeter Jon Faddis, who brought along a bagful of copies of Pops for me to sign.
It was, needless to say, quite something for me to talk about Armstrong in the basement of his very own home, and to do so after having spent the past six years immersed in his life and work. I can’t think of a better way to have put a cap on my book tour–except it seems that I’m not done yet! The popular success of Pops has caught everyone by surprise (except Mrs. T, who told me so months ago and now delights in reminding me of her uncanny prescience). The biggest surprise of all, of course, is that Pops will debut at #32 on the New York Times‘ extended nonfiction best-seller list for January 17. Who knew? Certainly not me.
I’d expected to wind down my promotional activities on behalf of Pops last week, but instead Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is continuing to schedule radio and TV appearances and newspaper interviews, of which I’ve done so many since my book tour got going last month that I can no longer keep track of them. At the same time I continue to hold down my day job at The Wall Street Journal, which means that I’m hitting the road every weekend to see shows, some in New York and others in Florida, where I’ll be serving for the next month and a half as visiting scholar-in-residence at Rollins College’s Winter Park Institute. Needless to say, I scheduled the latter commitment long before I knew that Pops would take off into the lower reaches of the stratosphere, and so I now have no spare time at all.
What I do have is plenty of fresh Pops-related information to pass along:
• The Biographer’s Craft, an online newsletter for biographers, published this gratifying piece of news in the January issue:

Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life (Knopf) was the favorite biography of book critics in 2009, according to a TBC analysis that examined 18 of critics’ year-end lists of best books….Tied for second were T.J. Stiles’s The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Knopf) and Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor (Little, Brown). Tied for third place were Terry Teachout’s Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin) and Linda Gordon’s Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Norton).

Not too shabby, huh?
To read the whole thing, go here and scroll down.
• I flew from Orlando to Washington, D.C., last Thursday to tape an interview with BBC World News America that was telecast the same evening. You can watch it by going here. I spent four hectic minutes answering Matt Frei’s rapid-fire questions about Pops, a nerve-racking but exhilarating experience that reminded me of the last scene of Strangers on a Train, in which Farley Granger chases Robert Walker on an out-of-control carousel that explodes. Fortunately, no fatalities were incurred this time around.
• From there I was driven straight to Arlington, where I taped a seven-minute interview with Jeffrey Brown, the arts correspondent of PBS NewsHour, that was posted on “Arts Beat,” the show’s arts blog, over the weekend. You can watch it by going here.
• The next morning I taped an hour-long TV interview with Brian Lamb that will air on C-SPAN’s Q & A some time in the next couple of weeks. It was, as I told Lamb afterward, the best interview I’ve done with anyone about anything. I’ll pass on the air date as soon as it’s set, and once the show has been broadcast, you’ll be able to watch it by going here.
• I’ll be making my first public appearance at Rollins College on Thursday: I’m giving a lecture called “The Truth About Satchmo: Why Louis Armstrong Still Matters” in which I’ll be collaborating with a group of top local jazzmen. For more information, go here. If you live in Winter Park or the Orlando area, come see me talk and get your copy of Pops signed afterward.
• Lest we forget, I had a life before Pops, and Bookpod, a new site that specializes in “audio essays by writers of lasting value,” recently taped an interview with me in which I talk about the experience of moving from a small town to a big city and the effects that it has had on my career. To hear the interview or download it as a podcast, go here.

“There are two reasons why people don’t make good writers: (a) they have nothing to write about, (b) they are not at home with the written word (however fluent they may be in the spoken word). The latter is by far the most potent reason. If you can write, you’ll find something to write about; having something to write about doesn’t make you a writer. Not that there is the slightest obligation to write, moral or social, as far as I can see. I have the deepest admiration and respect for people who can live perfectly well without writing, who get along without this crutch.”
D.J. Enright, Injury Time: A Memoir (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

I suspect that just about everyone who grows up to be an egghead meets at some crucial point in his youth an older person who makes him feel as though it’s all right to take an interest in intellectual pursuits. For me, that person was Frederick W. Huff, the librarian of the high school in the small Missouri town where I grew up. He was, like most of the librarians I’ve known well, something of an eccentric, a violin-playing opera buff with a stately air and a deep, plummy voice who never met a polysyllable he didn’t like. Why he chose a place like Smalltown, U.S.A., in which to start a family and build a library was never clear to me, but it was my great good fortune that he did so.
Mr. Huff–I never called him “Fred” to his face, not even after I grew up–put together a richly varied collection of books and records that fed my curiosity for four blissful years. He also gave me my first summer job, and I never ceased to marvel at the just-so precision with which he regulated each and every aspect of his professional life. Above all, he took my dreams seriously, and long after I graduated from high school and started making my way in the world, I made a point of stopping by his office from time to time to tell him of my latest adventures and find out what was new in his life. He was, I knew, proud of my work as a writer, and I was prouder still to have lived up to his great expectations. Alas, the protracted illness that finally caught up with Mr. Huff this morning left him incapable of appreciating the success of The Letter. How he would have loved hearing the backstage gossip–and how I would have loved to tell him all about it!
The small towns of America are full of men and women like Fred Huff. Rarely do they make headlines, but their devotion changes countless lives for the better. He changed mine, and I will always revere his memory.

My first Wall Street Journal drama column of 2010 is a report from Florida on two exceptional revivals, Asolo Rep’s Life of Galileo and West Palm Beach’s Copenhagen. Here’s an excerpt.
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Sarasota’s Asolo Repertory Theatre has dared to put on “The Life of Galileo,” a large-cast play that is rarely seen in America, at a time when the sour economy is forcing most drama companies to steer clear of costly highbrow shows. Yet Michael Donald Edwards’s staging, which fields a budget-busting cast of 24, is not a bare-bones antispectacle but a masterpiece of unified design in which Clint Ramos’s modern-dress costumes, Dan Scully’s ultracontemporary digital projections, Peter West’s lighting and Fabian Obispo’s minimalist music are blended into a production whose clean, elegant look is uncommonly fresh and involving. I’ve never seen a handsomer Brecht revival.
All this would be irrelevant, of course, were the title role being played by a less magnetic actor than Paul Whitworth, who gives us an earthy, Cockney-flavored Galileo (he sounds very much like Michael Caine) whose love of sensual pleasure is at war with his iron determination to follow the truth wherever it may lead….
Unlike “The Life of Galileo,” “Copenhagen” is a genuinely popular play. Not only did it run for 326 performances on Broadway after opening there in 2000, but it still gets done with better-than-fair regularity by regional theaters around the country, partly because it’s so good and partly because it has only three characters and needs no scenery or props. What “Copenhagen” demands is first-class acting, and Palm Beach Dramaworks’ revival, directed with tautness and unexpected physical immediacy by J. Barry Lewis, supplies that commodity in abundance.
Like the company’s 2009 production of Eugène Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” also directed by Mr. Lewis, this staging takes a difficult play and makes it cellophane-clear. Christopher Oden, Colin McPhillamy and Elizabeth Dimon, all of whom are new to me, bat Michael Frayn’s arcane conversational gambits back and forth like shuttlecocks…
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Read the whole thing here.

American Theatre published in its October issue a list of the ten plays and musicals that are slated to be produced most frequently by American drama companies in the 2009-10 season. The online version of this piece contains links to similar lists going all the way back to the 1994-95 season, so I combined the last ten and created a meta-list of the most frequently produced plays of the decade. To find out what I learned from this exercise, read my “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s a hint: Samuel Beckett didn’t make the cut. Neither did Arthur Miller. Neither did George Bernard Shaw. Neither did Rodgers and Hammerstein….
Curious? You know what to do.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House