Archives for June 2015

“Shaw has always seemed a journalist and not really a literary man. It’s his tendentiousness, I think, that keeps him trivial. He’s always out to solve social problems—the sure sign of a superficial practitioner.”

Thomas Berger, letter to Zulfikar Ghose (February 5, 1975)

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:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• Hand to God (black comedy, X, absolutely not for children or prudish adults, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, ideal for bright children, remounting of Broadway production, original production reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Flick (serious comedy, PG-13, too long for young people with limited attention spans, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• Doubt (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• On the Twentieth Century (musical, G/PG-13, virtually all performances sold out last week, closes July 19, contains very mild sexual content, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN NEW YORK:
• The Tempest (Shakespeare, G, closes July 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN BALTIMORE:
• Blithe Spirit (comedy, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PHILADELPHIA:
• Passion (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

“I find that I now can read only the true fanatics with any feeling of affinity: those who in courage or desperation abandon any attempt to address an audience of cretins and speak exclusively to themselves.”

Thomas Berger, letter to Zulfikar Ghose (April 5, 1975)

Ever since I was old enough to understand what it meant, seeing the Confederate battle flag on display has made me squirm—and the fact that it continues to fly over state houses in the Deep South makes me genuinely angry. That said, I’m also not fond of “debates” driven by self-righteousness, of which vast amounts have been evident on both sides of this particular fence. Nor do I usually think it wise to take action on anything in the heat of the moment, which is, needless to say, what’s happening right now.

But it’s also true that America is a country in which things tend to get done either in the midst of a crisis or (more often) not at all. And in a sense, what we’re really debating is the wisdom of the post-Reconstruction policy of temporarily tolerating institutionalized racism in the Deep South in the hope of healing the hideous wounds of civil war.

I can’t help but wonder how far Abraham Lincoln would have gone in that direction had he lived. He was, after all, a pragmatist who believed in both the morality and the utility of magnanimity. Magnanimity is incompatible with the all-or-nothing mentality of the ideologue, and Lincoln was anything but that. Yet he truly hated slavery, and it’s hard to suppose that he would have had much patience with the latter-day argument that the Confederate flag can rightly be understood as a symbol of anything other than that monstrous evil.

To be sure, there are serious-minded people who believe that its symbolic value can under certain circumstances be benign, and others who simply don’t know enough about American history to understand what it means to a black person to see that flag flying over a government building one hundred and fifty years after Appomattox. Still, I think we all know in our hearts what at least some of those who continue to fly it today really have in mind. Certainly Dylann Roof was in no doubt about it.

In any case, such debates are academic. Whether or not it was at one time wise for the federal government to turn a blind eye to southern racism in the hope of serving a greater good—and hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20—the moral statute of limitations for that policy has long since run out. That’s why I believe that the Confederate battle flag and all its prideful variants should now be lowered forevermore.

Will that put an end to racism? Of course not. Nor will it stem the rising tide of self-righteousness that is increasingly driving this debate. (I wrote this at the peak of the controversy.) No conversion, after all, is complete enough to suit an ideologue. Even if you kill yourself out of self-loathing, he’ll spit on your grave. But that’s no reason not to do the right thing, and those who still believe in the possibility of good will should be no less willing to trust the sincerity of Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina, who tweeted yesterday:

July 4th is just around the corner. It will be fitting that our state Capitol will soon fly the flags of our country & state, and no others.

I couldn’t agree more.

* * *

Newsreel footage of the government-sponsored reunion of Civil War veterans held in Gettysburg in 1938, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The last surviving veteran of the Civil War died in 1956:

Hearst Metrotone News covers Marian Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. She is accompanied by Kosti Vehanen:

Leonard Bernstein leads the National Symphony in a 1980 concert performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait commemorating the composer’s eightieth birthday. The text is spoken by Copland:

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

“Henry James. He is someone to contend with, but an awful lot is missing—how much can be seen by comparing him with Proust. His sexual sensibility is that of a Victorian maiden of the upper class: he seems to ache to be deflowered. And I think it was Chesterton who said something to the effect that James’s work was too well-written and therefore slightly vulgar.”

Thomas Berger, letter to Zulfikar Ghose (Mar. 26, 1975)

• Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is full of seemingly random observations about life whose general applicability causes them to leap off the page. Here are two that come to mind.

The first, made by Hugh Moreland, a composer-conductor of lively mind and depressive temperament, is from The Kindly Ones:

The arts derive entirely from taking decisions. That is why they make such unspeakably burdensome demands on all who practice them. Having taken the decisions music requres, I want to be free of all others.

I know what Moreland means. To be a critic of the arts is to spend the whole of your professional life making decisions about the merits of what you see and hear. In a sense, it’s all you do. As a result, I tend when “off duty” to be quite easygoing about quotidian matters of taste. To take just one example, I’d be more than happy (as Moreland was) to let Mrs. T choose all of the restaurants at which we go out to eat.

Alas, my line of work has conditioned me not only to be decisive but to maintain meticulous professional habits—I never come late to anything—and it is the evident destiny of such folk to end up serving as the designated drivers for everybody else in the world. As I noticed during the long-ago days when I had a nine-to-five newspaper job, any writer who also has managerial skills will quickly find himself under unremitting pressure to become an editor. It doesn’t matter how talented a writer he is—it’s harder to find good managers than good writers. I suspect that all of life is like that.

The second observation, made by Nick Jenkins, the narrator and Powell’s fictional alter ego, is from The Valley of Bones:

I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

Here, too, I found this remark to have the force of revelation. To be sure, most of my friends are avid readers, and I dare say that a handful of them might actually go along with Logan Pearsall Smith, who claimed to prefer reading to life. On the other hand, I’ve also been close to a few people who never read for pleasure, and when I was a professional musician, I knew a considerable number of otherwise smart and sensitive artists to whom books were unimportant. It would never occur to such folk to look to a novel in the hope of finding illumination, much less delight—and I have a feeling that their numbers are increasing.

Indeed, I think it possible (if unlikely) that I will live to see an America in which great literature has no cultural purchase whatsoever. I wonder what such a country would be like. Ray Bradbury tried to sketch it in Fahrenheit 451:

With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word “intellectual,” of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar.

For some Americans, of course, that new world has already taken shape, and there are those who even claim to find it desirable. But of course they don’t really believe in the desirability of illiteracy. What they want is power—and they’re getting it.

From 2005:

Like everybody else in the world, I’ve become a compulsive shuffle-player. To date I’ve loaded 2,849 “songs” onto my iBook and iPod, and while I occasionally pick and choose from them at will, I usually let myself be surprised. One evening last week, iTunes unexpectedly served up a string of selections fraught with personal associations. Listening to them put me in mind of the scene in High Fidelity (I can’t remember whether it’s in the novel as well) in which John Cusack explains how he arranged his LP collection in “autobiographical order.”…

Read the whole thing here.