Archives for December 31, 2014

I don’t need to tell any of you that 2014 was appalling in countless ways. That said, it was also the year that Satchmo at the Waldorf came to New York and ran off Broadway for four wonderful months. In the larger scheme of things, I suppose that event must go under the heading of being thankful for small favors. To me, though, it was a grand and glorious thing for which I will forever after be unimaginably grateful to my irreplaceable collaborators, as well as to Mrs. T, without whose steadfast and inspiring love I would never have been able to summon up sufficient nerve to try my hand at writing anything so unlikely as a play.

And now…what? Well, the following posting first appeared in this space on January 1, 2013. Two years later, I can’t put it any better.

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A year ago today I was with Mrs. T on Sanibel Island. I’d just learned that my mother was dying, and I was doing my best to come to terms with the knowledge. A week later I got a call from Massachusetts informing me that Shakespeare & Company had decided to produce my first play. In the months that followed, I got a Guggenheim Fellowship, drove down Highway 1 from San Francisco to San Diego, spent five weeks at the MacDowell Colony, saw Satchmo at the Waldorf produced by three regional theaters, made four new friends, finished writing the greater part of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, and stood by my mother’s open grave. No matter what 2013 turns out to be like, it won’t be like that. It couldn’t.

I brought 2012 to a close yesterday by writing the first three thousand words of the antepenultimate chapter of Duke. A year from now, barring some unthinkable catastrophe, Duke will be in print and I’ll have seen a hundred more shows. Beyond that, I’ve no idea what to expect. I don’t know what my next book will be, or whether Satchmo will have a life after its most recent closing night. I know where I’ll be for the next six weeks…and that’s all.

Is it enough? It’d better be.

I once quoted in this space the following words of Ogden Nash. It seems fitting to repeat them today:

Come, children, gather round my knee;
Something is about to be.

Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year.

To all of you who, like me, suspect that chance is in the saddle and rides mankind, I hope that the year to come treats you not unkindly, and that your lives, like mine, will be warmed by hope and filled with love.

Since Mrs. T and I will be spending the next two months in Florida, we took the precaution of shipping some of our stuff ahead of us. I sent a box containing books and DVDs. These are the books I plan to read on the beach and elsewhere. Some are new to me, some not:

• Jens Malte Fischer, Gustav Mahler

• L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda

• Philip Glass, Words Without Music (which I read yesterday)

• Hugh MacLennan, The Watch that Ends the Night (which I thought might go well with Beware of Pity)

• John P. Marquand, North of Grand Central

• V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas

• Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path

• Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux

• Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

• Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence

• Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity (which I read on the train) and The World of Yesterday

Make of that list what you will!

I posted the following resolutions in this space eight years ago tomorrow:

• To finish Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. I changed the title to Pops, but otherwise done and done.

• To see fewer plays—and write more thoughtfully about the ones I do see. If anything, I now see more plays than I did eight years ago. Whether or not I write more thoughtfully about them is, of course, for others to say.

• To spend more time listening to music, not in the background or on the fly, but with the total concentration and involvement that it deserves. Didn’t happen, and I blush to admit it.

• To read Bleak House and War and Peace at long last, and report on my progress in this space. Ditto.

• To go to the gym four days a week, every week. Ditto redux.

• To take more time off. I’ve made some headway in this area, though not as much as I’d like.

• To visit the Grand Canyon. Alas, this longed-for pilgrimage is still on my list of undone things to do.

That was the last time I made any New Year’s resolutions, public or otherwise.

Five years later, I posted as follows:

I’m not making any clever resolutions this year—I’m too distracted by my mother’s illness, and 2011 was so complicated a mixture of success and sorrow that I scarcely know what to think about the year that’s just arrived. I’ll try my best to be a good husband, a good son, a good friend, and a good writer, and that will have to do.

I remain similarly disinclined to year’s-end hubris as 2014 heads out the door. As far as I’m concerned, it’ll be more than enough to be kind and work hard. Or, in the ever-appropriate words of Henry James, “Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize.”

Max Beerbohm quoted those words to S.N. Behrman when the playwright visited him for the last time in 1955:

I knew I had to leave. I hated to leave. Max went on, “Do you know my favorite line of Henry James?”

I could see that he was not really expecting an answer from me—that he was communing with himself.

“It is ‘Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize.’” Max’s eyes were still fixed on the sun-dotted sea. “He didn’t always live up to it, of course. Who can? But in his work he did live up to it. It was his mask.” There was a pause. Max looked at me and smiled. “If you live up to a good manner long enough, don’t you know, perhaps it will become first nature to you, instead of second, or third.”

Perhaps it will. Sixty years later, I shall do my best to find out.

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Max Beerbohm reads “The Crime” (from And Even Now) and “London Revisited” (originally broadcast on the BBC in 1936). These recordings were made for Angel and released on LP in 1955, a year before Beerbohm’s death. They have never been reissued in any format:

A sound film of NBC’s first TV broadcast, which took place in 1936. To read more about this program, go here:

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

“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition