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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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To be alive

December 15, 2015 by Terry Teachout

storm16n-1-webTen years and one week ago I was stricken with congestive heart failure during a Broadway preview that took place as a blizzard was getting underway. I managed to sit through the performance, climbed into a cab afterward with the help of a friend and a press agent, went straight home, and spent the rest of the night thinking. Early the next morning I called 911 and was rushed through the falling snow to the nearest hospital. Six days later I returned to my apartment with a half-dozen bottles of pills in my bag, cured and chastened and certain above all things that I wanted to keep on living.

The decade that separates me from that terrifying week has been crowded beyond belief. I published two biographies and wrote three opera libretti. I reviewed a thousand shows for The Wall Street Journal, including the greatest production of a play that I’ve seen in my entire theatergoing career, then wrote one of my own. I went to the MacDowell Colony, served a term on the National Council on the Arts, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Bradley Award. I acquired two dozen pieces of art. I made—and kept—many new friends. Most important of all by far, I entered into what has proved to be the most profoundly fulfilling relationship of my life, my marriage to Mrs. T.

None of these things would have happened if I had died in 2005.

I wrote earlier that year, apropos of a vacation I had taken in the summer, of “the tentacles of dailiness.” The curse of a busy schedule, no matter how much you like what you do, is that it cannot but lure you away from complete awareness of the miracle of life itself. This is something that I feel moved to write about not infrequently, and on two occasions when I have done so in the past, in the spring of 2005 and again last April, I quoted something that John Lukacs said in a memoir called Confessions of an Original Sinner:

The mystery and the reality of our lives consist in the understanding that we are coming from somewhere and that we are going somewhere, and that between these two mysterious phases God allows us to live and to know that we live while we live. Out of what is darkness to our imperfect minds, for sixty or seventy or eighty years we are living in the light, in the open.

I know not whence I came or where I’m bound, but I do try—intermittently and imperfectly—to know that I Iive while I live. What’s more, my brush with death, frightening though it was, has helped me to be “present” in a way I had previously found difficult. I wish I were better at it, but I used to be much worse, and to have gone from one condition to the other is no small thing.

Today I’ll be rehearsing Satchmo at the Waldorf at Chicago’s Court Theatre. As I wrote yesterday, rehearsing a play is an all-consuming process which forces you into the moment. Few things are more exciting. But artists (and I now count myself among their number, if only in a part-time way) too often forget that there is a “real” life beyond the compass of their work, and that it is, or ought to be, more important than the work.

louismirror_bgBarry Shabaka Henley, Charles Newell, and I were talking last week about a passage from Satchmo at the Waldorf in which my made-up Louis Armstrong speaks to this problem in words that derive directly from a remark that the real Armstrong once made. After paying tribute to the virtues of Lucille, his fourth and last wife, my Armstrong says:

You know the thing about Lucille? She know the horn come first, ‘fore everything, even her. Cause me and my horn, we the same thing. We know each other. Pick it up, the world’s behind me. Don’t concentrate on nothing but the notes. I love them notes. What you hear coming out a man’s horn, that what he is.

If I were, like Armstrong, a creative genius, I might well feel that way, too. But I’m not, and I understand that my work, as important as it is to me, is not the most important thing in my life.

Yes, my work makes the rest of that life possible. It pays the bills, and does so in a way that I usually find pleasurable, at times ecstatically so. But I don’t live for it. As starry-eyed as it may sound, I now know that I live for love—the love of my wife, family, and friends—and for those passing moments of heightened awareness when I emerge from the cloud of dailiness and behold, if only for a few fleeting seconds, the piercing beauty of the world.

This knowledge is the gift my illness gave to me. I wish I were more consistently deserving of it, and of those who love me. Still, I try always to remember, as Philip Larkin wrote, that what will survive of us is love, and to be as worthy as possible of the inestimable privilege of living “in the light, in the open.” Even on the worst of days, it’s the best place there is.

* * *

To Be Alive!, a film written and directed by Alexander Hammid and Francis Thompson and shown at the Johnson’s Wax Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and 1965. It won an Oscar in 1965. This is a single-screen version of the original film, which was originally shot to be projected on three different screens:

Lookback: time off for good behavior

December 15, 2015 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKFrom 2005, ten years ago today:

My friend Nancy LaMott, the cabaret singer about whom I’ve written in this space and elsewhere, died ten years ago Tuesday. It wasn’t an anniversary I’d intended to spend in a hospital room, two months shy of my fiftieth birthday, waiting as patiently as I could to find out just how sick I was–but, then, life has a way of pitching curve balls at your head.

As I thought back over the past couple of months and remembered some of the things I’d been posting, it hit me for the first time that I must have decided somewhere in the deepest recesses of my mind that I was dying, and that I’d been spending the preceding days and weeks trying as best I could to come to terms with the seeming arrival of what Henry James called “the distinguished thing.” Why had I been so shy about calling a doctor? What made me respond so immediately and intensely to the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd? Why did I quit listening to music for pleasure after hours? All at once I knew….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Viktor Frankl on survival

December 15, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.”

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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