Archives for June 2014

“He did not like to think that he was different from other people when he was writing. He did not want to ask for special consideration, he only wanted to explain why he was more vague at such times than he was ordinarily and why he was less patient with detail and why he seemed oblivious to the ordinary facts of life. You were living in two worlds when you were writing. You were trying, very unsuccessfully, to be omnipotent in the region of the imagination. You had delusions not so very unlike those of some man in an asylum who thought he was Napoleon Bonaparte. The main difference was that you never possessed the inmate’s sublime conviction. If you had any modesty at all—a very bad thing for a writer—you lived in a little hell of your own uncertainty.”

John P. Marquand, So Little Time

Dame Edith Sitwell is interviewed on the BBC’s Face to Face in 1959. The host is John Freeman:

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

“‘Old enough to know better,’ the Prince said to Jeffrey. ‘I do not like that saying. One should never know better.’”

John P. Marquand, So Little Time

The “Notable & Quotable” feature in today’s Wall Street Journal consists of a lengthy excerpt from my remarks on receiving the Bradley Prize last week in Washington:

In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men’s skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are. Art makes sense of life.

To strive toward so noble a goal, the artist must first of all be able to tell the truth as he sees it about the world he sees around him. That task can only be pursued to the fullest degree under the aspect of freedom. Where there is no freedom, there is no art, save at the risk of the artist’s neck. And this freedom includes, among many other things, freedom from the paralyzing obligation to persuade.

The artist whose chief goal is not to make everything more beautiful but to enlist his audience in a cause—no matter what that cause may be—is rarely if ever prepared to tell the whole truth and nothing but. He replaces the true complexity of the world with the false simplicity of the ideologue. He alters reality not to make everything more beautiful, but to stack the deck.

This is what Oscar Wilde meant when he said that no artist ever tries to prove anything, though I’d put it another way. Great art doesn’t tell—it shows. And this act of showing is itself a moral act, a commitment to reality….

To read the entire speech, go here.

From 2004:

Few biographers and fewer critics long outlive their own time, and I doubt I’ll be one of them. More likely I will go down in history as the first known owner of Hart-Davis 631, and in 2104 some art historian specializing in the Edwardian era will click on that entry in a computerized catalogue raisonné, scratch his head, and say, “Who was that fellow with the odd name? Did it ever occur to him that the only thing he’d be remembered for was having owned a Max Beerbohm caricature and edited an H.L. Mencken anthology?” Indeed it did–and let it be said, if not necessarily remembered, that the prospect made me smile.

Read the whole thing here.

“Jeffrey supposed that all married people must have shared some such moment of their own, for he had heard many of them speak of something like it with a sort of faraway affection. ‘We met in the strangest way,’ they would say. ‘It was in front of the Information Desk at Grand Central.’ They met on boats, they met at hotels, or someone introduced them. After all, they had to meet somewhere. They must have remembered it so clearly because it was the one time that human beings ever realized how greatly a fortuitous circumstance could change a life.”

John P. Marquand, So Little Time

No, Zephyr Teachout and I are not related, at least so far as we know. Yes, we are good friends. (In fact, we call one another “Cuz” for fun.) I sought her out a number of years ago after running across her name in a news story, and we discovered at once that we liked each other. (Mrs. T likes her, too.) We go to the theater together whenever our schedules overlap. Yes, we disagree about a lot of things. No, that doesn’t matter in the least bit to either of us.

Satisfied?

UPDATE: And yes, I have lots of trans-ideological friendships. How about you?

One more thing: as long as you’re here, why not read something else?

Mrs. T and I took a friend to see Satchmo at the Waldorf on Friday. An unusually large and responsive crowd showed up, and John Douglas Thompson fed off its excitement. He always gives a good performance—I’m awed by his consistency—but he was flying that night. Every line landed and every detail registered.

The response at evening’s end reminded me of the scene in Satchmo in which Louis Armstrong describes what happened the first time he sang “Hello, Dolly!” in public:

Everybody there, they go ooooh! All at once, just like that. And when we finished, they start yelling. Not clapping—yelling. Like they gonna tear the house down. And I lean over to the piano player and I say, “I do believe they like it.”

No doubt John was intensely aware, as I was, of the fact that the New York run of Satchmo will end on Sunday afternoon. While I have reason to expect that the show will be produced in other cities, and that John will perform it in at least some of those cities, it’s still going to be tough to ring down the figurative curtain (Satchmo, like most modern plays, doesn’t have an actual curtain) on the final performance.

In a manner of speaking, I’ll also be ringing down the curtain on the 2013-14 season, which for me was quite a year. Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington was published in October, a week after the Louisville premiere of The King’s Man, my third operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec. Satchmo opened in New York in March, and I received the Bradley Prize last week.

In 2009 I had occasion to recall in this space the opening lines of one of my favorite movies, My Favorite Year: “Nineteen fifty-four. You don’t get years like that anymore. It was my favorite year.” I reminded myself at the time that anyone as lucky as I’d just been “has no business complaining about anything whatsoever. Today I’m as thankful as it’s possible to be, and I hope I have the good sense to remain so for some time to come.”

Would that such gratitude were more firmly rooted in man’s psyche! Alas, I fear it’s not in our natures to recall such high-minded sentiments for very long. La Rochefoucauld, that cynic of cynics, actually went so far as to claim that “the gratitude of most men is but a secret desire of receiving greater benefits.” Maybe so, maybe not, but it’s certainly true that we must perpetually remind ourselves to be grateful, which is why we celebrate Thanksgiving each year. Yet as wistful as it will surely feel fo me to watch John perform Satchmo at the Waldorf one last time on the stage of New York’s Westside Theatre, I don’t think I’ll need any such reminders, at least not for a while.

Mrs. T and I are celebrating our good fortune by taking two weeks off, something we haven’t done for a long time. My Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal is already written and filed, and we’re heading out to one of our secret hideaways this afternoon. We’ll be driving into New York just long enough to see the final performance of Satchmo, and since next Friday is July 4, I won’t be writing a column that day. As always, this blog will continue to operate, but otherwise I’ll be on ice.

We’ll be back on July 7. Wave if you see us passing by.

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Louis Armstrong and the All-Stars perform “Hello, Dolly!” on stage in Paris in 1965: