Archives for April 2014

As you may have already heard, I’ve won a Bradley Prize. Here’s part of what The Wall Street Journal had to say about it:

We’re delighted to report that our colleague and artistic polymath Terry Teachout has been named one of the winners of the 2014 Bradley Prize.

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, offers the awards each year to as many as four individuals for their distinguished contributions to American institutions, free enterprise and other causes that the late Bradley brothers championed. The recognition comes with a cash prize of $250,000 and will be presented in Washington, D.C., on June 18. Additional winners will be named in the coming weeks.

Our readers know Terry as our drama critic and cultural essayist in his biweekly “Sightings” column. He is also a man of many artistic parts, as a playwright, biographer and opera librettist. “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” his first play, is currently running at New York’s Westside Theatre. His books include “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington,” “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong” and “The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken.” He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012 and has served on the National Council on the Arts.

“Terry Teachout has distinguished himself, not just as a first-rate journalist, but as a supporter of the arts,” said Michael W. Grebe, president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. “His work as a biographer and a playwright is critical to advancing and preserving America’s artistic and cultural tradition.”…

Read the whole thing here.

I’m flabbergasted–and humbled. And, yes, it’s true: Mrs. T and I really have decided to use part of the prize money to buy a new toaster. We need one.

From a 1945 British Pathé newsreel, preparations for the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Isaiah told a long story about the death of the Spanish poet Lope de Vega. Assured that he was now finally at death’s door, de Vega was able to confess one final (for a poet) sacreligious thought: ‘Alors, Dante m’embête’–‘Well, then, Dante bores me.'”
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life

From 2004:

I worked as a magazine and newspaper editor for many years before becoming a full-time freelance writer, and on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion I edited a piece so extensively that had it been a screenplay, I would have received an on-screen credit. When the piece won a major magazine award a few months later, I smiled wryly, as did my colleagues, yet it never occurred to any of us to blow the whistle on the writer. He “wrote” the piece, and that, so far as we were concerned, was that.
One reason why I kept my mouth shut is that I’ve been the beneficiary of superior editing on innumerable occasions, never that extensive but at times…well, quite substantial.

Read the whole thing here.

“The advantage of vicariousness, of course, is that you do not risk a mistake; you can watch other people making them for you.”
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Most people outlive their parents, but few anticipate doing so. Even when it was agonizingly clear that my mother was dying, I never said to myself, Soon I’ll never see her again. It may be that the finality of death is harder to grasp than any of life’s other hard realities. Whatever the reason, I didn’t expect the sharp jolt that briefly shook me when my sister-in-law e-mailed me a photo of the twin graves in which my parents are buried, marked by a single bronze tablet that shows, for the first time, the dates on which they both died.

My mother, who occasionally visited the cemetery where she now rests, once confessed to me that it made her sick to her stomach when she first saw her name on that tablet, which my father had prudently purchased long before the fact, arranging for the two of them to be buried next to his own mother. I have no such well-laid plans: I intend to donate as many of my organs as can be usefully harvested, and I don’t care what happens to the rest of me after that. But it was important to my parents that they arrange in advance for the disposal of their remains, and being basically conventional people, they did the customary thing.

I wonder if either of them guessed how often I’d think about them after they were gone. Not surprisingly, I did so when my first play opened in New York, knowing that the occasion would have meant the world to them. But it’s the routine occasions, not the special ones, that mean the most to me. I think of my mother, for instance, whenever I take a cab down to the theater district to see a show, that being the time when I usually called her–as I did most days–to chat about whatever might be on our minds. I think of my father, by contrast, whenever I happen to see Perry Mason on TV, for he loved nothing more than to guess who did it midway through each episode, if not sooner. (He usually got it right, too.)

Today is my beloved brother’s birthday, so it stands to reason that our parents should be on my mind. It is a source of ceaseless pleasure to me–as well as a modest amount of friendly envy–that David and Kathy now live in the house where the two of us grew up. While our shared childhood wasn’t perfect, it was mostly very happy. We owe that happiness to Bert and Evelyn Teachout, who spent the whole of our time in that house doing all that was in their power to prepare us for whatever life might hold in store outside it.

I’ve been reading Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin, who made this observation thirteen years before his death in 1997:

As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any. I do not at all ask what it is, but I suspect it has none and this is a source of great comfort to me. We make of it what we can and that is all there is about it.

We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep, says Prospero in The Tempest. My parents made of their little lives what they could, and they didn’t ask what it meant, either. Perhaps it was because they already knew the answer: they built a house and raised two sons whom they loved with all their hearts. That was dream enough for them. I would never pretend that every night I slept under their roof was free of shadows, but I never doubted for a moment that they loved me. Nor do I doubt that the new owners of 713 Hickory Drive feel the same way.

A rare 1933 sound film of Rudyard Kipling speaking at a luncheon of the Royal Society of Literature for visiting members of the Canadian Authors’ Association. To read the text of the entire speech, go here:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“It is an exile’s prerogative to love an adopted home with an absence of irony that is impossible for a native.”
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life