Archives for October 3, 2014

Two magazine pieces of mine have just appeared:

• “Confessions of an Aesthete,” my latest monthly essay for Commentary, is a longer version of the remarks I made in Washington earlier this year after receiving a Bradley Prize:

Not long ago I was introduced to an audience as an “intellectual.” This was a well-meaning choice of word, and a flattering one, but it was slightly off. An intellectual is a person who is mainly interested in ideas. I am an aesthete—a person who is mainly interested in beauty. Nowadays the word aesthete carries with it the musty reek of high Victoriana. Still, there remains no better word to describe the way certain people—people like me—view the world….

Read the whole thing here.

• In National Review, I write about the Library of America’s new omnibus volume containing Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days, H.L. Mencken’s three volumes of autobiographical essays:

Being a journalist, I like Newspaper Days best. Nowhere has the experience of seeing your words in print for the first time been better described: “I was up with the milkman the next morning to search the paper, and when I found both of my pieces, exactly as written, there ran such thrills through my system as a barrel of brandy and 100,000 volts of electricity could not have matched.” But all three volumes of the Days books are jammed full of like nuggets, and to start quoting them is to find it exceedingly hard to stop….

Online subscribers can read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the New York premiere of Donald Margulies’ latest play, The Country House. Here’s an excerpt.

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The backstage play, in which the private lives of theater people are put onstage for the world to see, is one of the diciest of dramatic genres. As much as those who work in the theater love seeing themselves turned into more or less fictional characters, such plays run to self-indulgence, and the truer to life they are, the less likely that “civilians” (the theater-world term for outsiders) will understand more than a sliver of the inside-baseball talk with which they’re typically salted. Not so “The Country House,” in which Donald Margulies shows us three tense days in the life of a theatrical family. Far from being self-indulgent, it is one of the most disciplined and satisfying new American plays to reach Broadway in the past decade.

“The Country House” is the kind of play that is too often dismissively described as “well made,” meaning that its structure is straightforward and its dramaturgy conventional (up to and including a stop-press surprise that rings down the second-act curtain with a gasp). Taking as his point of departure Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” Mr. Margulies presents us with six characters whose lives are so tightly interwoven that you all but need a chart to explain how they fit together…

Put them all in the same country house and you have a surefire formula for friction. Much of what happens thereafter is roughly what you’d expect, but Mr. Margulies makes it new by portraying their collective difficulties with just the right mixture of honesty and sympathy….

Daniel Sullivan has staged the play with an ungimmicky simplicity that allows each one to shine in turn—but it is the author who makes them real. If “The Country House” is a backstage drama by virtue of its setting, its actual subject is how the members of a close family can hurt one another without meaning to do so. You needn’t have done time on the far side of the proscenium to know all about that…

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from The Country House:

“The presence of irony does not necessarily mean that the earnestness is excluded. Only assistant professors assume that.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments