Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
From 2004:
Over dessert, the talk would likely turn without prompting to women. Balanchine and Armstrong were both married four times, and though Mencken only tied the knot once, he had his fair share of girlfriends, going so far as to write a book called In Defense of Women. Between the three of them, I dare say quite a bit of light would be shed on the ever-intriguing subject of romance and its discontents….
Read the whole thing here.
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
The Library of America is about to bring out an omnibus edition of Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days, in which H.L. Mencken collected the reminiscential essays that he published in The New Yorker in the Thirties and Forties.
National Review recently asked me to write about this volume. It happened that I hadn’t looked at any of the Days books since The Skeptic, my Mencken biography, was published in 2002. Nor had I looked at The Skeptic since I last wrote about Mencken. That was four years ago, in a New Criterion essay about the Library of America’s two-volume collection of his Prejudices essays in which I suggested that
Mencken might possibly be a young person’s writer, one who excites the unfinished mind but has less to offer those who have seen more of life. Certainly those who look to literature for a portrait of the human animal that is rich in chiaroscuro will not find it in the Prejudices….If a great essayist is one who succeeds in getting his personality onto the page, then H.L. Mencken qualifies in spades. The problem is that his personality grows more predictable with closer acquaintance, just as the tricks of his prose style grow more familiar. Like most journalists, he is best consumed not in the bulk of a twelve-hundred-page boxed set but in small and carefully chosen doses.
Hence it was a very pleasant surprise to return to the Days books after a long absence and find my original judgment on them to be confirmed anew. I described Happy Days as “one of [Mencken]’s most completely realized achievements…a masterpiece of pure style” in The Skeptic, and went on to say that Newspaper Days was “at least as good….It, too, is a not-so-minor masterpiece of affectionate reminiscence, one that in a better-regulated world would be recognized as a modern classic.”
The operative word here is “style.” As I said in the epilogue of The Skeptic, Mencken’s enduring strength as a writer “is less a function of his particular convictions than of the firmly balanced prose rhythms and vigorous diction in which they are couched. It is, in short, a triumph of style.” It was in the Days books that his style reached a peak of perfection, and as I reread Happy Days I was struck all over again by how its pages are festooned with utterly characteristic phrases through which his personality shines forth.
Here are some of my favorites:
• “There is a photograph of me at eighteen months which looks like the pictures the milk companies print in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday papers, whooping up the zeal of their cows. If cannibalism had not been abolished in Maryland some years before my birth I’d have butchered beautifully.”
• “To this day I can’t tie a bow tie, though I have taken lessons over and over again from eminent masters…This inapacity for minor dexterities has pursued me all my life, often to my considerable embarrassment.”
• “She had a fist like a pig’s foot and was not above clouting any boy who annoyed her.”
• On a teacher whose spankings were ineffective: “He rattaned conscientiously, but without any noticeable style.”
• On the hot dogs sold in turn-of-the-century Baltimore: “They contained precisely the same rubbery, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard.”
• “The Baltimoreans of those days were complacent beyond the ordinary, and agreed with their envious visitors that life in their town was swell.”
• “The impact of such lovely country upon a city boy barely eight years old was really stupendous. Nothing in this life has ever given me a more thrilling series of surprises and felicities.”
• “To this day I can taste it at the moments when an aging man’s memory searches through his lost youth for bursts of complete felicity.”
I wish I’d quoted that one in The Skeptic, since it is a perfect summary of what Happy Days is all about. And though I’ve never wanted to be able to write like Mencken—to be influenced by him is by definition to imitate him, which is a dead end—I hope that every once in a while my own writing recalls, however vaguely, his matchless verbal vividness.
The Double Six of Paris sing a vocal version of “Boplicity,” a composition by Miles Davis and Gil Evans originally recorded by Davis’ Birth of the Cool band in 1949. This performance was originally telecast on French TV circa 1960:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
KATHY O’HARA: Eddie’s the only fella in town who doesn’t pass judgment on people.
EDWARD D. WOOD, JR.: That’s right. If I did, I wouldn’t have any friends.
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, screenplay for Ed Wood
Today’s Wall Street Journal contains the first of two reports from Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre. This week I review The Seagull and The Doctor’s Dilemma. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
American Players Theatre, the finest classical repertory company in the U.S., is mounting Carol Rocamora’s engagingly colloquial translation of “The Seagull” in its 1,147-seat rural open-air amphitheater. On paper that doesn’t sound like an ideal site for so intensely personal a play, but John Langs and Nayna Ramey, the director and set designer, have taken sensitive advantage of APT’s Up-the-Hill Theatre, whose long aisles allow the actors to make well-timed entrances and exits that cause the theater to seem much smaller than it is and whose woodsy surroundings are redolent of the Russian country estate where “The Seagull” takes place….
Even more important, Mr. Langs and his cast have found the right tone for “The Seagull.” That’s evident as early as the second line of the play, in which the lovesick Masha (Anne E. Thompson) proclaims just a bit too dolefully that she wears black because “I am in mourning for my life.” And what happens at APT? The audience laughs! As well they should, since we don’t yet know what’s going to happen to Masha and the other characters. Yes, they’re all in love with the wrong people, and that’s funny—but sometimes unrequited love causes those whom it afflicts to do desperate things…
All of Mr. Langs’ actors are as deft as Ms. Thompson. Tracy Michelle Arnold is sharp and haughty as Irina, the great actress who has no time for Konstantin (Christopher Sheard), her painfully earnest son, who longs in vain to become a playwright. Jim DeVita is glamorous and preoccupied as Trigorin, Irina’s middle-aged lover, a not-quite-great writer who makes the devastating mistake of falling for Nina (Laura Rook), a hopeful young girl who, like Konstantin, burns with the dangerous urge to make art. As for Ms. Rook, a wide-eyed Chicago beauty who was extraordinarily fine in Writers’ Theatre’s 2013 production of David Ives’ “The Liar,” she’s even finer here…
“The Doctor’s Dilemma,” George Bernard Shaw’s 1906 play about a group of high-society London physicians, doesn’t get done much these days, perhaps because the “dilemma” of the title seems at first glance to be a trifle schematic. If he has to choose between them, whom should the title character save: a poor but kind-hearted colleague who takes care of inner-city patients, or an indisputably great painter who’s also an unscrupulous bum? But Shaw added a neat twist to the plot by causing his big-shot doctor to fall hopelessly in love with the painter’s adoring wife, and the result is a comedy of ideas that takes the viewer on a moral roller-coaster ride…
Aaron Posner has prepared his own adaptation of the original five-act script for his American Players Theatre production, an abridged version in which the characters successively introduce themselves to the audience by reciting monologues carved out of Shaw’s stage directions. I’m skeptical about the theatrical efficacy of the latter innovation. Shaw wrote his elaborate stage directions in order to make the published versions of his scripts easier to read. To perform them onstage is supererogatory if the performances are sufficiently well characterized…
Fortunately, Mr. Posner has staged “The Doctor’s Dilemma” with a light and witty touch, and his well-calculated cuts help make the play more accessible to modern audiences….
* * *
To read my review of The Seagull, go here.
To read my review of The Doctor’s Dilemma, go here.
An excerpt from Sidney Lumet’s 1968 film of The Seagull, with James Mason as Trigorin, Kathleen Widdoes as Masha, and Vanessa Redgrave as Nina:
The trailer for Anthony Asquith’s 1958 film of The Doctor’s Dilemma, starring Dirk Bogarde and Leslie Caron:
“The general characteristics of this disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be. Reflection may bring to light an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past; but there is no mere idolizing of what is past and gone. What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, Verweile doch, du bist so schön, but Stay with me because I am attached to you.”
Michael Oakeshott, “On Being Conservative”
I ran across this ancient meme on Facebook today and decided that it wasn’t too late to play. Here goes:
1. What was the last thing you put in your mouth? A complimentary sesame pretzel. It was doubleplusungood.
2. Where was your Facebook profile picture taken? Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut. (I change it according to mood, but that’s the one I posted this morning.)
3. Can you play Guitar Hero? I don’t even know what it is!
4. Name someone who made you laugh today. So far, nobody.
5. How late did you stay up last night, and why? Two-thirty. I was reading a novel, William Haggard’s The Need to Know.
6. If you could move somewhere else, would you? That’s a huge “if.” All things being equal, though, I’d like to live on Florida’s Sanibel Island in the wintertime and the Berkshires in the summertime.
7. Ever been kissed under fireworks? No, but it sounds like fun.
8. Which of your friends lives closest to you? My next-door neighbor.
9. Do you believe exes can be friends? Absolutely.
10. How do you feel about Dr Pepper? I’ve loved it ever since I was a boy. I actually visited the Dr Pepper Museum a couple of years ago.
11. When was the last time you cried really hard? The day after my mother died.
12. Who took your profile picture? A photographer for the New York Times.
13. Who was the last person you took a picture of? Mrs. T. (I scarcely ever take pictures of anyone else.)
14. Was yesterday better than today? Yes. (Today has been pretty crappy, actually.)
15. Can you live a day without TV? Of course—I do it all the time. I turned on my hotel-room TV just once last week, and I turned it off again seconds later.
16. Are you upset about anything? No. Worried, yes; upset, no.
17. Do you think relationships are ever really worth it? My God, yes.
18. Are you a bad influence? I certainly hope not.
19. Night out or night in? Tonight, in.
20. What items could you not go without during the day? I’d hate to be without a book or two.
21. Who was the last person you visited in the hospital? Mrs. T.
22. What does the last text message in your inbox say? “Yes, we did.”
23. How do you feel about your life right now? Pretty good.
24. Do you hate someone? Nobody whom I know personally.
25. If we were to look in your Facebook inbox, what would we find? Nothing.
26. Could you pass a drug test right now? Yes.
27. Has anyone ever called you perfect before? Not seriously.
28. What song is stuck in your head? For the moment, Charlie Parker’s “Billie’s Bounce.” It’ll almost certainly change within the hour, though. My earworms come and go with clock-like frequency.
29. Someone knocks on your door at two a.m. Who do you want it to be?
Michael Anthony.
30. Want to have grandchildren by the time you’re fifty? Too late!
31. Name something you have to do tomorrow. Drive from Connecticut to Manhattan and back again, arrgh.
32. Do you think too much or too little? Much too much.
33. Do you smile a lot? Absolutely.