Archives for June 2016

“ It’s risky business to speak for the dead. In the terrible case of Dmitri Shostakovich, the temptation is strong, because history, in the form of Stalin, didn’t allow the composer to speak for himself. Of course, there’s the music, but music is reticent about meaning—like a therapist, it prefers you draw your own conclusions.”

Jeremy Denk, review of Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time (New York Times Book Review, May 9, 2016)

From 2006:

Nobody walks anywhere in a small town, except maybe next door or across the street. When I told my mother I was going to walk downtown to buy a belt, she boggled. It took me a good ten minutes to persuade her that I wasn’t kidding, and another five to talk her out of driving downtown to pick me up after I’d made my purchase.

It’s been years since I last took a long walk in Smalltown, U.S.A. Much has changed since then, though mostly only on the surface. I walked across a couple of dusty, weedy vacant lots that once held stores at which I shopped when young, and I saw quite a few buildings that had changed virtually beyond recognition in the thirty-two years since I went off to college. One of them used to be a fire station, the same one I visited on a first-grade field trip. Now it’s a schoolhouse, an Adult Basic Education Center. I wonder if the fire pole is still there….

Read the whole thing here.

“This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s Hindu parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

V.S. Naipaul, “Our Universal Civilization”

Ivy Compton-Burnett admitted in old age that she could no longer read the novels of Jane Austen, which she loved, because she knew them so well that they could no longer hold her attention. Much the same thing happened to me with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories: I read them so often as a boy that I lost the ability to enjoy them in adulthood. Even so, the Holmes stories are still very much a part of the common stock of literary reference on which I draw in writing and conversation. Hence it was a source of great vexation in recent months that I found it impossible to trace to its original source a remark by Holmes that I remembered—or, as it turned out, misremembered—as follows: “I shall watch your future career with great interest.”

I was certain beyond the slightest possibility of doubt that Holmes had said something like that, for I was no less certain that it was also a favorite phrase of Bertie Wooster, whose conversation is studded with quotations from the books and stories that P.G. Wodehouse read as a boy, among which the published cases of Sherlock Holmes figure prominently. But I couldn’t trace the remark to anything that Conan Doyle or Wodehouse had written, try though I might, and the more I tried to find it via Google, the more frustrated I became.

Over the weekend it finally occurred to me to do what I should have done long ago, which was to ask Mrs. T, who is, like me, an ardent Wodehouse fan of long standing. No sooner did I ask her than her face lit up brightly with the realization that she knew something I didn’t. “I think you’ve got it wrong,” she said with uncontained glee. “It’s not great, it’s considerable.” And sure enough, it was: a quick search on Google told me that Bertie says “I shall watch your future progress with considerable interest” in Joy in the Morning and The Mating Season, in addition to which the same sentence is said to Bertie by another character in one of the stories collected in Very Good, Jeeves!

The problem, as I should have realized all along, is that Bertie was a notorious quotation-bungler, making it unlikely in the extreme that he would have cited Holmes exactly. So I took to Twitter and asked for help, and within a few minutes two of my followers had pointed me to two stories by Conan Doyle that, between them, are clearly the source of the “quotation.”

The first story is “The Adventure of the Three Students,” collected in 1905 in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which ends as follows:

Well, Soames, I think we have cleared your little problem up, and our breakfast awaits us at home. Come, Watson! As to you, sir, I trust that a bright future awaits you in Rhodesia. For once you have fallen low. Let us see, in the future, how high you can rise.

The second story is “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” collected in 1917 in His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, in which Holmes signs off with this capper: “If our ex-missionary friends escape the clutches of Lestrade, I shall expect to hear of some brilliant incidents in their future career.”

It’s easy enough in retrospect to see how Bertie, whom even the ever-faithful Jeeves unhesitatingly described as “mentally negligible,” might well have managed to conflate these two quotations. His mind—such as it was—worked that way. Had I continued searching on my own, though, I very much doubt that I would ever have managed to track them down to their primary sources. Such being the case, I humbly thank Mrs. T, David Hines, and David Mackinder for pointing me in all the right directions.

I feel much better now, thanks.

Jeri Southern sings “Do I Love You (Because You’re Beautiful?)” on The Jonathan Winters Show. The song was written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for the score of Cinderella. This telecast originally aired on NBC on April 16, 1957:

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

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review off-Broadway productions of two shows by Alan Ayckbourn. Here’s an excerpt.

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Alan Ayckbourn, England’s comic Chekhov, is also a famously accomplished stage director. In recent seasons 59E59 Theaters’ “Brits Off Broadway” summer festival has been doing theater-loving New Yorkers a signal service by importing Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre, which Mr. Ayckbourn ran for 37 years, to perform his stagings of his own plays. This year’s fare includes the U.S. premiere of “Hero’s Welcome,” his 79th play, and the New York premiere of “Confusions,” a 1974 mixed bill of interconnected one-act plays. Both are musts: “Confusions” is funnier than just about anything else to be seen on a New York stage right now, while “Hero’s Welcome” is one of the most poignant dramas that Mr. Ayckbourn has given us.

First performed in 2015, “Hero’s Welcome” is a dark comedy of domestic strife, the story of three married couples who become ensnared in a tight tangle of mixed motives that leads inexorably to violence and despair. Unusually for Mr. Ayckbourn, Murray and Baba (Richard Stacey and Evelyn Hoskins), a returning war hero and his waif-like refugee bride, still have a fair chance at happiness, but the other two couples exemplify in sharply contrasting ways his long-standing conviction that marital life is a state in which, to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, much is to be endured—most of it by women—and little enjoyed….

Unlike the impressively substantial “Hero’s Welcome,” “Confusions” is a dessert platter, five sketches about various aspects of middle-class life. One of them, “Gosforth’s Fête,” is a pulverizingly ludicrous miniature farce about a small-town church bazaar that disintegrates into utter chaos when a witless know-it-all (Mr. Dixon) leaves a backstage microphone switched on just in time for the whole town to overhear…but I’d better stop there. Only in the last play, “A Talk in the Park,” a snapshot of five strangers sitting in a park, each of whom wants to do all of the talking and none of the listening, does Mr. Ayckbourn draw explicitly from the well of melancholy that flavors most of his major work. Yet the other four plays, even “Gosforth’s Fête,” are sadder than they look, and though they’re all wonderfully funny, someone pays for every laugh….

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Read the whole thing here.

Alan Ayckbourn talks about his work in the theater in a 2016 interview:

Salvador Dali appears as the celebrity guest on an episode of I’ve Got a Secret, originally telecast by CBS on February 25, 1963. Garry Moore is the host and the panelists are Bill Cullen, Betsy Palmer, Henry Morgan, and Bess Myerson:

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