Archives for May 2016

This is something I wrote a quarter-century ago in a memoir of my childhood and youth:

Memory is the key to a small town. A stranger driving through my home town would see nothing but schools, stores, and houses. Some are handsome, others nondescript, but all have one thing in common: the important parts are invisible, at least to eyes unaided by memory. This is why people like me never like to hear about how their home towns have changed since they moved away. Every change in the place where you grew up is an insult, a run in the homespun fabric of recollection.

I still feel much the same way, which is why it saddened me to learn that the International Order of Odd Fellows Building, which has stood in the center of Smalltown, U.S.A., since 1908, was torn down the other day. It had to go: old age made the building structurally unsound, and after a passing storm caused the roof to cave in, no part of the rest of it could be saved. Still, I don’t like to think of so familiar a corner of my beloved home town now being “occupied” by a pile of rubble. The downtown districts of small midwestern towns, after all, aren’t exactly a growth stock, and I suspect that it will be a very long time before anything new goes up at this particular address. More than likely, its destiny is to look for many years to come like the gap left by a missing front tooth.

The Independent Order of Odd Fellows is itself a dusty anachronism, one of the many fraternal organizations and service clubs that, like Kiwanis, the Elks, and Rotary, used to be so prominent a part of the American cultural landscape. H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis loved to whack them around once upon a time, but they are now as distant a memory as The American Mercury itself. While a few seem to be coming back, most of the rest are fast-fading relics of the days when men liked to get together of an evening to amuse one another instead of peering at their iPads in the hope of staving off ennui.

I never went in for such collective amusements, being the least clubbable of people, but neither did I hold them in the jeering contempt that was Mencken’s specialty. He was, of course, what we are now smugly pleased to call a “hater.” I’m not, and never have been: I’m all for innocent pleasures of every sort, and surely there are few things more innocent, or pleasurable, than belonging to a club that exists to do service to the community in which its members live and work. My brother belonged to such a club, the Jaycees, and he’ll be the first to tell you that it was one of the best things that ever happened to him.

I don’t doubt that Smalltown’s Odd Fellows Lodge was no less beneficial to its loyal members, and that they were hugely proud of their second-story hall. But Lodge No. 358 is, so far as I know, defunct, which if true makes me almost as sad as does the demolition of its ancestral home.

I think I’m pretty sanguine, for the most part, at the prospect of coping with change. I proved as much when I returned to Smalltown four years ago for a visit and discovered that my brother, who was then in the process of remodeling the house in which we grew up, had just cleared out my childhood bedroom. But I have my limits, and I think the city fathers might just have surpassed them when they tore down the Odd Fellows Building—though I shall, as always, endeavor to cope.

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Thelonious Monk’s arrangement of “Abide With Me.” The horn section consists of John Coltrane, Ray Copeland, Gigi Gryce, and Coleman Hawkins:

From 2006:

Every film shot on location, whether in whole or in part, is a home movie in which bits and pieces of history are embedded, and I find myself growing increasingly fascinated by these snippets of lost time. I can’t watch North by Northwest, for instance, without thinking about how Grand Central Station has (and hasn’t) changed, or how the Plaza Hotel will never be again as it was.

This is, I suspect, as much a function of my increasing age as anything else. Just the other day, for instance, Backstage Books sent me a copy of the newly revised and updated edition of James Gavin’s Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. The earlier edition was one of my favorite books, but I found this version even more interesting, in part because it’s the first time I’ve read a work of history in which someone I used to know well figures prominently. That sort of thing doesn’t start happening to you until you’ve achieved a certain degree of seniority, and I’m there.….

Read the whole thing here.

“Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn’t, he should be ashamed of himself.”

Robertson Davies, “Somerset Maugham”

“I saw a woman in Central Park today wearing a T-shirt that said ‘America Was Never Great,’” a friend of mine tweeted over the weekend. I wasn’t surprised to hear it. My country contains many people who are contemptuous of its past, some of whom are no less dismissive of the men and women who endeavor to ensure that it will have a future. (Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep/Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.) All they can see are the flaws, of which there were and are many—many flaws and much honor.

At no time am I more intensely aware of that honor, and the fearful toll that it exacted, than on Memorial Day. Mrs. T and I watched The Longest Day a couple of nights ago, and I found myself thinking: could I ever have done anything like that? I hope so, but I’ll never know, for history did not demand it of me.

And what did I miss, other than stark terror and the ever-present possibility of violent death? Justice Holmes, who fought and was wounded three times in the Civil War, summed it up in a speech that he gave on this day in 1884: “I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”

Whenever I read those words, I think of my late father, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. Though he never saw combat, he stood ready to do his duty, and I have no doubt that he would have done it without hesitation, just as he unhesitatingly saved me from drowning at the risk of his own life when I was a child. He was that kind of man. I hope I would have been the same kind under similar circumstances—but I’ll never know.

That is why I overflow with respect for those who, like my father, did what they had to do when their country asked them to do it. More than anyone else save for the Founders themselves, they made America great. I have no doubt—none whatsoever—that they always will.

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“The Battle of Midway,” an official 1942 war documentary directed by John Ford. Some of the combat footage was shot by Ford himself with a handheld movie camera:

Andrew Davis leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the prelude and “Angel’s Farewell” from Sir Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. The vocal soloist is Catherine Wyn-Rogers. This performance was telecast from St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1997:

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

“All the time you spend tryin to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.”

Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on the premiere of Chicago Shakespeare’s Tug of War: Foreign Fire. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s become common—even fashionable—to mount Shakespeare’s history plays in bulk. From Edward Hall’s “Rose Rage,” in which the three parts of “Henry VI” were packed into a single five-and-a-half-hour span, to the four-night “Henriad” (“Richard II,” the two parts of “Henry IV” and “Henry V”) that the Royal Shakespeare Company recently brought to the Brooklyn Academy of Music under the portmanteau title of “King and Country,” such festival-like productions have the signal advantage of supplying a wider context for each individual play. And while they require a not-inconsiderable investment of time—not to mention money—the current vogue of “binge-watching” consecutive episodes of arc-based cable-TV series like “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones” has accustomed viewers to grappling with extended narratives over relatively short spans of time.

All of which bodes well for the success of “Tug of War,” in which Barbara Gaines, the artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, is presenting six of the history plays in two installments. The first installment, “Foreign Fire,” consists of her own adaptations of “Edward III,” “Henry V” and the first part of “Henry VI,” all performed by a 19-actor ensemble in a single six-hour span that is interrupted by a 45-minute dinner break. (It will be followed in September by “Civil Strife,” which comprises the second and third parts of “Henry VI” and “Richard III.”) Sure enough, Ms. Gaines herself uses the word “binge-watching” to describe the effect of “Tug of War,” but to me it feels more like the theatrical equivalent of an exceptionally well-done Shakespearean TV miniseries, though a more pertinent comparison comes no less readily to mind. Boldly drawn, slashingly direct and as fast-moving as an arrow whizzing toward its target, “Foreign Fire” is everything that the Royal Shakespeare Company’s much-ballyhooed 2015 marathon stage version of “Wolf Hall” should have been—and wasn’t….

Ms. Gaines has an ulterior motive: She has edited and directed “Tug of War” in such a way as to turn the history plays into an antiwar statement. If you cut your Shakespearean teeth on Laurence Olivier’s flag-waving 1944 film of “Henry V,” you’ll be surprised by the way in which she leaches the glory out of her combat scenes. Nary a sword is drawn all night long, and the emphasis goes squarely on what old-time warriors called the “butcher’s bill.”…

Yet “Foreign Fire” never stoops to can’t-we-all-just-get-along Pollyannism. Indeed, Ms. Gaines is true to Shakespeare in suggesting that war, hideous though it is, is also an enterprise to which well-meaning men are somehow irresistibly drawn, a tragedy we seem doomed to repeat—and repeat—in spite of ourselves, or because of ourselves….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Foreign Fire:

The Battle of Agincourt sequence from Laurence Olivier’s film version of Henry V. The score is by William Walton:

Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim sing a bossa nova medley on Frank Sinatra: A Man and His Music + Ella + Jobim. This program was originally telecast by NBC on November 13, 1967:

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