Archives for 2014

I take pills—six daily, seven on Fridays—that keep me alive. They constitute the gentlest and least intrusive of medical regimens, for they have no obvious side effects, and I can skip them for days at a time without immediately dire consequences. It’s absurd of me to resent them. Yet I do, on occasion intensely so, and I know why: as King Lear said, they smell of mortality.

To be sure, I also know that I’m fifty-eight years old, and I don’t have a problem with that undeniable fact. (Well, not much of one.) But I do have a great big problem with the fact that I’m going to die sooner or later, and having to take pills three times a day is like driving down a highway of indeterminate length along which billboards reading MEMENTO MORI are posted at hundred-mile intervals. No matter how pretty the scenery is, you’re bound to wonder how much gas is left in the tank, or whether you’ll be driving off an unmarked cliff up around the next bend.

All that said, it’s childish of me to object to my thrice-daily reminder of the Dark Encounter, just as it was childish for me to be irked when, a number of years ago, my dentist had to pull one of my back molars. It was a relatively painless ordeal of blessedly brief duration, but when it was over, there was a hole in my head where none had been before. An invisible hole, mind you, and nobody needs to tell me that I’m the furthest thing from beautiful, much less perfect. Still, it was there, and I hated it for that, though I forgot about it soon enough.

About my pills, by contrast, there can be no forgetting, and nobody needs to tell me that the only proper attitude to take toward them is a thoroughly dignified stoicism. But while stoicism seems admirable at first glance—Tom Wolfe preached its virtues quite memorably in A Man in Full—it fails, like light multi-grain English muffins, to convince. At best it reduces to the “gentleman’s code” of which Johnny Mercer made mention in “One for My Baby,” and the ultimate inadequacy of such codes was painfully well known to the narrator of that desperate song. It’s also been the subject of no small amount of cruel fun, of which this line from Dogville is noteworthy: “I’m going to break two of your figurines first, and if you can demonstrate your knowledge of the doctrine of stoicism by holding back your tears, I’ll stop. Have you got that?”

Even more to the point is this insufficiently remembered exchange between Jeeves and Bertie Wooster in The Mating Season:

“I was endeavouring to convey my appreciation of the fact that your position is in many respects somewhat difficult, sir. But I wonder if I might call your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius? He said: ‘Does anything befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.’”

I breathed a bit stertorously. “He said that, did he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.”

That he is—or He, if you prefer it that way. Nevertheless, it is ever and always juvenile to kick against the Big Prick of mortality, especially when you know people for whom the clock is ticking far faster than you. Taking pills three times a day beats the living hell out of chemotherapy, and though we have it on the very best of poetic authority that death is “no different whined at than withstood,” I know that nobody as lucky as I’ve been and (so far) continue to be has any business whining about anything at all, ever.

So shame on me for griping about the wholly unmixed blessing of being able to keep my hypertension under control without having to do anything more than take a modest handful of pills each week and see my doctor with reasonable regularity. You can consider this posting an act of public contrition, the postmodern equivalent of spending twenty minutes in the stocks, there to be pelted with rotten vegetables. Feel free to fling them enthusiastically and at will.

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Frank Sinatra sings “One for My Baby” on The Frank Sinatra Show in 1958:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, nearly all performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Arms and the Man (comedy, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)
• The Sea (black comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 26, closes Oct. 12, reviewed here)
• When We Are Married (comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 26, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• The Doctor’s Dilemma (comedy, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 3, reviewed here)
• The Seagull (drama, G/PG-13, closes Sept. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• Things We Do for Love (serious comedy, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

“He’d been thinking about late middle age, the years which a generous God and good health now offered. They could be fruitful years before death knocked, or a sterile barren decay before the cold. It all depended on how you handled them. It was absurd, no doubt, to pretend to be young: after thirty years of desk work it would be ludicrous to start waving guns. Charles Russell didn’t intend to. What he intended was a calculated avoidance, the avoidance of too much discipline and of over-rigid habits. At sixty one wasn’t elastic still, one had one’s little drills for things and was fully entitled to do so. They made life simpler, they spun out leisure, but what was very dangerous was when the drill became its own reward, not the muddle avoided, the moment saved, but the deadly satisfaction of having completed some trifle efficiently. If that was the trap of old age, its threshold, then Russell had seen it and wouldn’t step over.”

William Haggard, The Hardliners

I’ve always had sharply mixed feelings about Tennessee Williams, and I explore them at length in the new issue of Commentary. The occasion is an essay about John Lahr’s important new biography of Williams:

When asked to name France’s greatest poet, André Gide quipped, “Victor Hugo, hélas!” Though John Lahr unequivocally describes Tennessee Williams as “America’s greatest playwright,” one comes away from his book wondering whether he, too, might have similar reservations about his subject’s ultimate stature, given the paucity of his accomplishments. Indeed, when Lahr remarks on the next-to-last page of Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh that Williams created “characters so large that they became part of American folklore,” the six whom he cites are all from The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

One need not create a large body of major work in order to crack the history books. But a prolific artist whose output is for the most part gravely flawed is by definition problematic, and few artists of stature have been more problematic than Williams….

Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh ends with a chronology of Williams’s life whose final item, from 2011, is significant in this connection: “The Comédie-Française in Paris produces Un tramway nommé Désir, staged by American director Lee Breuer, the first play by a non-European playwright in the company’s 331-year history.” Of such tributes is immortality made. But the fact that Streetcar, Cat, and The Glass Menagerie are the only plays by Williams that have ever been successfully revived on Broadway says much about the likely survival of most of the rest of his output. For like most autobiographical artists, he had only one story to tell, and after he transformed its characters into archetypes and told it twice—literally in The Glass Menagerie, symbolically in Streetcar—he had little choice but to tell it again with increasingly predictable variations….

Read the whole thing here.

Willem de Kooning talks about the creation of his “Woman” paintings in an undated film interview from the Sixties:

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

Q. Sometimes you don’t actually get the color you’re looking at, but the color that reminds you of that color.


A. I never try to get the color I’m looking at. I never copy the color I see. NEVER.

“Neil Welliver in Conversation with Edwin Denby” (Jacket, Feb. 2003)

When I was a boy, my family went to the SEMO District Fair in Cape Girardeau every September without fail. It was one of the supreme treats of a happy childhood, my annual opportunity to ride the thrilling giant double Ferris wheel, eat my fill of Malone’s State Fair Taffy Candy, gorge on the Trinity Lutheran Men’s Club’s incomparably greasy and flavorful cheeseburgers, and—on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion—wander off all by myself and get hopelessly and predictably lost.

The last time I went to the SEMO District Fair, or any other fair, was in 2001, a couple of days after 9/11. I recalled the occasion in this space a decade ago:

I was stranded in Smalltown, U.S.A., waiting for the planes to start flying again so that I could make my way back to Manhattan. Though all of us in Smalltown were stunned by the horrors that had just played out on our TV screens, we knew we needed a break from reality, so I drove up to the fair with my mother, my brother, and his family, and we bought taffy and rode the rides. Alas, the double Ferris wheel was long gone–no doubt it had proved too tame for a generation of thrill-seeking youngsters raised on modern-day theme-park roller coasters–but the taffy hadn’t changed a bit.

Since then I’d assumed that my fairgoing days were over. But Mrs. T pointed out a few weeks ago that the Woodstock Fair isn’t far from our place in Connecticut, and she suggested that we go there this year. That struck me as a wonderful idea, so we jumped in the car on Saturday and drove to Woodstock, where we spent a balmy afternoon eating corndogs and cotton candy, inspecting pumpkins, melons, chickens, rabbits, and farm machinery, and (best of all!) riding the Ferris wheel and bumper cars. We even brought home a sack of taffy.

I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that our trip put me in mind yet again of Walking Distance, the 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone in which Martin Sloan, a harried advertising executive from New York, visits Homewood, the small town where he grew up, one fine summer day. He notices that nothing about the town has changed and in short order realizes that the clock has somehow been mysteriously turned back and that he is in the Homewood of his youth, where the carousel still turns and the calliope still plays.

The way Martin Sloan felt on that mysterious day in Homewood was the way I felt, more or less, when I returned to Smalltown for a visit shortly after my brother began to remodel the house in which we’d grown up together and in which he and his wife now live. He started, logically enough, by stripping my old, long-unoccupied bedroom to the walls, and I was briefly but thoroughly nonplussed when I entered the room and found it bare:

The bed I’d slept in, the bookshelf that once held my burgeoning library of paperbacks, the chest of drawers in which I placed my neatly folded clothes–all had vanished. Even the carpet was gone….

I stepped inside and was no less startled by how small the room looked. Could I really have grown up in this cramped chamber? Was this the place in which I dreamed my youthful dreams of glory? It was—or, rather, it had been. Now it was an empty, memory-free space waiting to be brought to life once more.

Going to the Woodstock Fair, on the other hand, made me feel, if only fleetingly, that Martin Sloan’s father was wrong to warn his son that you can’t go home again: “We only get one chance. Maybe there’s only one summer to every customer.” Maybe so, but you couldn’t have proved it by me on Saturday. Most of the sights, sounds, and smells of the Woodstock Fair proved to be all but indistinguishable from what I’d seen, heard, and smelled in Cape Girardeau a half-century ago, and I found it unexpectedly easy to relax my grip on the present and revel for a couple of blissful hours in the simple joys of an old-fashioned midway. All that mattered was the perfect moment in which I was suspended, and the presence of the loving and beloved companion with whom I shared it. If only for the space of a single blessed August afternoon, time had been regained and the carousel still turned.

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The epilogue of “Walking Distance,” a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone written and narrated by Rod Serling. The score is by Bernard Herrmann:

Jo Stafford, Rosemary Clooney, Mel Tormé, and Edd Byrnes sing “County Fair” (by Tormé and Robert Wells) on The Jo Stafford Show, a 1961 TV special:

From 2004:

For some reason I seem to have a knack for intuiting the large-scale cultural effects of technologies I have yet to adopt. I understood what digital downloading would do to the recording industry years before I downloaded my first piece of iMusic. Yet I wish I were more comfortable with those technologies, which may simply be another way of saying that I wish I were ten years younger. Or perhaps not: I’ve always known that part of me is inclined by temperament to live in the past, and the fact that I don’t never fails to strike me as something of a minor miracle….

Read the whole thing here.