Archives for July 2018

“Writers take words seriously—perhaps the last professional class that does—and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.”

John Updike, “Writers on Themselves: Magic, Working Secrets” (New York Times, August 17, 1986)

From 2003:

If absolutely necessary, I can manage 2,500 polished words between sunrise and bedtime. In the immortal words of James Burnham, “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.” But I try not to write that much in a single day. It’s not exactly compatible with having a life….

Read the whole thing here.

“That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.”

Anthony Burgess, English Literature: A Survey for Students

I recently ran across a long-forgotten meme called “Random Facts About Yourself That May Surprise People” that I never got around to finishing or posting. I don’t know how surprising you’ll find the answers, much less amusing, but the questions amused me enough to finish answering them:

• Do you make your bed? More often than not, and almost always when I’m sleeping in my Manhattan bedroom, which doubles as my workroom (and also contains a fair amount of art, including my Max Beerbohm caricature of Percy Grainger). For some inexplicable reason, I find it hard to write in the same room as an unmade bed.

• What’s your favorite number? Why on earth would I have a favorite number? What’s that about?

• What’s your dream job? I’ve got it, though I’d love to spend a few years doing nothing but directing plays.

• If you could, would you go back to school? Not for any amount of money, however fantastic—except as a teacher, in which case I’d jump at the chance.

• Can you parallel-park? In Missouri, you can’t get a driver’s license without being able to do so (or at least you couldn’t when I got mine a half-century ago).

• A job you had at which people would be surprised? I used to repair musical instruments. Ineptly, you understand, but I did my best.

• Do you think aliens are real? I suppose it depends on what you mean by “aliens.” I think it’s perfectly possible that there’s some kind of life elsewhere in the universe, but I don’t believe that we’ve had any first-hand evidence of its existence.

• Can you drive a stick shift? I tried to learn when Mrs. T had a car with a manual transmission, but I was too old to master so alien a skill. She thinks I could have done so if I’d tried harder, and she’s probably right, but I think part of the problem was that I was embarrassed by the fact that I found it so difficult.

• What’s your guilty pleasure? I don’t belive in guilty pleasures. If you like something, don’t be ashamed to admit it.

• Tattoos? God, no. I am too old for such foolishness, though Mrs. T would doubtless love it if I got one, as would a number of my millennial friends. They’d probably cheer me to the echo.

• Favorite color? I like lots and lots of colors, all the time. I once described Duncan Phillips, the man whose art collection is now the core of Washington’s Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, as “the purest of sensualists, drunk on color and perpetually suspicious of what he took to be the excessive intellectualizing of the cubists.” Me, too.

• Things people do that drive you crazy? Jeepers, where to start? Talking in the quiet car unglues me pretty extensively, though.

• Phobias? I spent a few years gradually becoming afraid to fly, but I nipped this fulminating phobia in the bud by spending a year undergoing intensive cognitive psychotherapy. Other than that, the only one I can remember is that I was afraid of dogs as a child. Nowadays I don’t especially care for dogs—I’m a cat man from way back—but I’m not afraid of them.

• Favorite childhood game? I’ve never been one for games, then or now. I can’t see the point of engaging in an arbitrary activity whose objective is to perfect a meaningless skill, if you know what I mean. I’d much rather be doing something productive (like writing a piece) or engaging in an act of aesthetic contemplation (like looking at a painting).

While we’re on the subject, here’s Parker on gambling:

So the question is, why not gamble? Parker’d never thought about it, he just knew it was pointless and uninteresting. He said, “Turn myself over to random events? Why? The point is to control events, and they’ll still get away from you anyway. Why make things worse? Jump out a window, see if a mattress truck goes by. Why? Only if the room’s on fire.”

• Do you talk to yourself? When I’m alone in a car, I do so constantly, and always have. (This is, I suspect, the reason why I speak so fluently on radio, podcasts, and in post-lecture Q-&-A periods.) Otherwise, not very often.

• Do you like doing puzzles? As Nero Wolfe once said, “I like using words, not playing with them.”

• Favorite kind of music? I like some of just about every kind of music except for hip-hop, which to my ear (to borrow Louis Armstrong’s phrase) doesn’t have enough ingredients. If I were forced to listen to only one kind of music for the rest of my life, I’d probably pick classical music, but no day would go by without my bitterly regretting not being able to hear jazz as well.

• What story do you adore? I’m not entirely sure I get this question. If what is meant, however, is a “story” that reflects some key aspect of my sense of identity—or, to put it another way, a story that for me has an element of personal myth—then I’d probably have to choose John P. Marquand’s Point of No Return, a 1949 novel about a small-town boy from Massachusetts who became ambitious as a result of falling in love with a girl from a well-to-do family, left home when his life was disrupted by a family tragedy, moved to New York, transformed himself by stages into a polished executive, and came to realize as he approached middle age that he wasn’t quite sure he’d done the right thing with his life. (In 1951 Paul Osborn turned it into a Broadway play starring Henry Fonda that had a successful run but was never revived and is now forgotten.)

Needless to say, that’s not what happened to me, but Point of No Return still resonates with me for a variety of reasons.

• Tea or coffee? Tea, if necessary. I don’t drink coffee and never have, though I do love the way it smells. All things being equal, I tend not to care for hot beverages.

• The first thing you remember you wanted to be? A fireman. It was the pole, naturally.

Alec Guinness appears on Late Night with David Letterman. The occasion was the publication of Blessings in Disguise, Guinness’ autobiography. This episode was originally telecast by NBC on September 26, 1986:

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

“I’m very happy I’m an alcoholic—it’s a great gift, because wherever I go, the abyss follows me. It’s a volcanic anger you have, and it’s fuel. Rocket fuel. But of course it can rip you to pieces and kill you.

Anthony Hopkins (interviewed by Miranda Hopkins in The Guardian, May 26, 2018)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two noteworthy musical revivals, Bucks County Playhouse’s 42nd Street and the Irish Repertory Theatre’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Here’s an excerpt.

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What’s the best of all possible summertime musicals? You could do a whole lot worse than “42nd Street,” the stage version of the 1933 movie musical that put the line “You’re going out a youngster—but you’ve got to come back a star!” into the English language. Having racked up two long runs on Broadway, in 1980 and again in 2001, “42nd Street” has since vanished from the stages of Manhattan, but it remains a staple of seemingly every regional theater in America capable of convening a stageful of halfway decent tap dancers. Now the Bucks County Playhouse is mounting it—but in a production to which the words “halfway decent” couldn’t be less relevant. Directed by Hunter Foster, whose 2015 Bucks County revival of “Company” marked him as an up-and-comer, this “42nd Street” is pure fun without a scintilla of cold-weather seriousness.

Mr. Foster’s staging is engagingly cast, and Tessa Grady and Monette McKay are especially winning as Peggy Sawyer, the sweet small-town girl who becomes an overnight smash, and “Anytime” Annie, her spunky sidekick. But “42nd Street” is an ensemble show first and foremost, and in order to produce a proscenium-stage spectacular on a smallish stage in a 409-seat house, every element must be identically persuasive. What is most striking about Mr. Foster’s “42nd Street” is not any individual performance but its total effect…

No major musical, not even “Candide,” is more incapacitatingly flawed than “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” The score, by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, is a gorgeous necklace on which two 50-carat diamonds, “Come Back to Me” and the title song, are strung. Alas, Lerner’s book, in which a psychiatrist falls in love with a patient who appears both to have ESP and to be the reincarnation of an 18th-century English society lady who drowned in a shipwreck, was an obsessive mess. As a result, the show closed in 1966 after an eight-month run and has never been successfully revived in its original form. The film version, which came out in 1970, didn’t do much better, while a 2011 Broadway revival, for which Peter Parnell wrote a brand-new book of the utmost ineptitude, was a well-deserved flop.

Enter Charlotte Moore, artistic director of the Irish Repertory Theatre, who loves “On a Clear Day” but is fully aware of its problems and has endeavored to solve them in her new small-scale revival, in which she has revised Lerner’s book without altering it beyond recognition, ruthlessly scissoring away superfluous characters and dialogue…

The result of Ms. Moore’s handiwork is a miniature musical of tremendous charm whose plot suggests a cross between “Vertigo” and “Arcadia.” While the results aren’t perfect—some of the second-act plot points don’t land as clearly as they might—her “On a Clear Day” works much more than well enough to make the show viable at last, and every other aspect of the production is completely successful….

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To read my review of 42nd Street, go here.

To read my review of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, go here.

The trailer for the Irish Rep’s revival of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever:

Noël Coward appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line?. John Daly is the host and the panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert Preston. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on January 12, 1964:

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