Archives for January 2020

From 2004:

On the surface, Annie Hall purports to tell the tale of how his peculiarities alienate the woman he loves, but its true subject matter is how their relationship actually makes Diane Keaton a better person. I suppose this must have been the first on-screen manifestation of Allen’s Pygmalion complex, which in Manhattan would explicitly reveal itself as an obsession with malleable young women….

Read the whole thing here.

“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—too soon before life itself.”

Joseph Conrad, Youth

My old friend Jody Bottum recently wrote a social-media posting that has stuck with me:

There’s a book I’ve always wanted to write—titled, maybe, The Christ of the Mind, about the deep content of the idea of the savior and its effect on thought. An account of the faith of intellect.

And, poking around for my next project after getting out the Decline of the Novel book, I’ve come to realize—to fully internalize—that I will, in fact, never have the time to write this book, short of the grave. Never have the space and freedom to think my way through it. A strange and powerful insistence of mortality.

To be a writer is to measure out our lives in what we did not write.

That last, lapidary sentence, with its unostentatious echo of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” has set me to asking: is it true? For Jody, it might well be. He is a fine and thoughtful writer who turned sixty last year, and I’m not surprised that he now finds himself reflecting on the inescapable fact that time is now working against him, meaning that there are things he’s always wanted to write that most likely aren’t going to get written.

My mind, by contrast, doesn’t really work that way. I am, and have always been, a journalist, which means both that I write about a lot of different things and that my life and my editors tend to decide which ones I’ll write about. I review for The Wall Street Journal the shows I see each week. I write a column every other week for the Journal and an essay every month for Commentary about art-related subjects, some of which I suggest to Eric Gibson and John Podhoretz, my editors, and some of which they suggest to me. Indeed, the ideas for most of my books and plays have been suggested to me. I don’t have a problem with that: I’m a person of wide-ranging interests who likes to engage with the passing scene, and I’m never happier than when somebody says to me, “Hey, why don’t you write a piece about so-and-so?”

All that said, I’m well aware, and increasingly so, that I won’t be writing forever. This is my favorite couplet from Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, one that I’ve not infrequently had occasion to quote in this space: And, ere afresh the ruin on me fall,/Use well the interval. At some unknowable point in the future, my writing days will come to an end, and it’s perfectly possible that I’ll have just enough time to ask myself, “Gosh, how come I never got around to writing about so-and-so?”

But will I? Justice Holmes gave a short radio talk on his ninetieth birthday in which he reflected on the effects of extreme old age (he retired ten months later) on those who are accustomed to hard work:

The riders in the race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to oneself that the work is done. But just as one says that, the answer comes: The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains. The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be while you still live, but to live is to function. That is all there is. And so I end with a line from a Latin poet, who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago, “Death, death, plucks my ear, and says, ‘Live. I am coming.’”

I hope this is what happens to me as the end approaches. I simply can’t imagine not writing about what I’m thinking at any given moment. At the same time, though, it rarely if ever occurs to me to think very far beyond that moment, though I do have another big book—a biography—that I still hope to get around to writing.

That said, I find that I’m more preoccupied these days with something very different: having unexpectedly discovered at the age of sixty that I can direct for the stage and that I do it well, I find that what I really want to do in the years left to me is direct more plays—preferably written by other people.

And what if the clock runs out before I get another chance to direct? Will I die a disappointed man? Here’s how I answered that question shortly after the opening night of my first stage show, Palm Beach Dramaworks’ 2016 production of Satchmo at the Waldorf:

I do think that Satchmo went well, but I know that I still have a long way to go before I can call myself a fully formed director, and that it won’t be until I direct a second show—preferably written by somebody else—that I’ll really start to see what, if anything, I have in me.

As yet nobody’s asked me to do that, and it may well be that no one ever will. We have it on the best authority, after all, that you can’t always get what you want. Nevertheless, I’m already longing to try my hand again at the elusive, seductive art of stage direction, and I’ll be sorely disappointed if it turns out that I never get to do so. Having reluctantly left Satchmo behind in West Palm Beach, I know beyond doubt that once is not enough.

I still feel that way—but there’s nothing much I can do about it, at least not for the moment. To be sure, I did get to stage Satchmo again two years later, and had a whale of a time doing so. Since then, though, I’ve been increasingly, necessarily, and rightly preoccupied with taking care of Mrs. T. What’s more, I’m just fine with that: she is the center of my life, and every hour I spend at her side is an hour gratifyingly spent.

The good news is that because of the nature of my professional life, I’m able to earn a living in a soul-satisfying way while simultaneously taking care of my beloved spouse. Not everybody is lucky enough to be able to do that, and I’m grateful beyond words that I can.

It may well be, then, that I’ve embarked on Justice Holmes’ “finishing canter,” and that I will now spend what is left of my life doing things I already do well instead of trying my hand at new ones. If so, then I will very definitely be using well the interval. Nevertheless, I’m still hoping that a few more surprises await me before death plucks my ear and tells me that the clock has finally run out. I suppose none of us can ever have quite enough sugar when all is said and done.

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“Rouse thee, my fainting soul,” an excerpt from The Dream of Gerontius, Edward Elgar’s 1900 setting of Cardinal Newman’s poem, performed by Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten, the London Symphony Chorus, the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and the London Symphony Orchestra:

“Beat the Reaper,” a 1969 comedy sketch by the Firesign Theatre:

The Dave Brubeck Quartet performs Brubeck’s “The Duke” in an undated 1956 film clip. Paul Desmond is the saxophonist, Bob Bates the bassist, Joe Dodge the drummer:

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

“One needs a town, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A town mens not being alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the soil, there is something of yourself, that even when you’re not there it stays and waits for you. But it isn’t easy to live there and not be restless.”

Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires (trans. R.W. Flint)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway premiere of A Soldier’s Play. Here’s an excerpt.

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Winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama can be a mixed blessing when it comes to commercial success in theater. Even though the past 10 plays to be so honored all received New York productions, five have yet to reach Broadway. Sometimes decades go by before producers are prepared to bet on a prize-winning play. Take Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play,” the harrowing story of the 1944 murder of a black Army sergeant. It opened in 1981, winning the Pulitzer after a 468-performance off-Broadway run. Norman Jewison turned it into a modestly successful film in 1984, and “A Soldier’s Play” has since received two short-lived off-Broadway revivals, in 1996 and 2005. Only now, though, has the Roundabout Theatre Company deigned to give Mr. Fuller’s play a biggish-budget Broadway production starring David Alan Grier and Blair Underwood and staged by Kenny Leon, Broadway’s top black director.

Fortunately, this tautly mounted, strongly cast version was more than worth the wait. It is, in fact, one of the very finest revivals, whether on or off Broadway, that the Roundabout has given us…

No small part of the excellence of “A Soldier’s Play” arises from the fact that it’s well-wrought without being predictable. It’s a whodunit set on Fort Neal, a segregated Army base in Louisiana, deep in the heart of Ku Klux Klan country. When Sgt. Vernon Waters (Mr. Grier) is found shot to death in the woods surrounding the base, the “tan yanks” of Company C, the 221^st Chemical Smoke Generating Company—or, as they bitterly refer to themselves, the Great Colored Clean-Up Company—understandably conclude that he has been lynched. So does his white commanding officer, who promptly contrives to have the case investigated by Capt. Richard Davenport (Mr. Underwood), a black Army lawyer who is all too clearly meant to be the fall guy.

But Capt. Davenport, who takes his duties with crisp seriousness, discovers no less promptly that Sgt. Waters, as we see in flashbacks, was a spit-and-polish martinet who looked upon his well-meaning but ill-educated troops with undisguised contempt…

Just as “A Soldier’s Play” keeps you guessing all the way to the final curtain, so do the members of Mr. Leon’s cast shun stock characterizations. Mr. Grier, for example, is best known as a stand-up comedian whose performing energy is essentially genial. That’s what makes his performance all the more excitingly unpredictable, for he is playing a decent man who is cleaved by passionate rage at the system of which he has chosen to be a part…

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Read the whole thing here.

A video featurette about A Soldier’s Play:

Decca’s original-cast album of the 1950 Broadway production of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, directed by E. Martin Browne and starring Alec Guinness, Robert Flemying, and Irene Worth:

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

“Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”

George Orwell, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”