“The biography of a great writer is not that of a man of the world, or a pervert or an invalid: it is that of a man who draws his stature from what he writes, because he has sacrificed everything to it, including his lesser qualities.”

Jean-Yves Tadi

Erin O’Connor has a thread going at Critical Mass about memorable first paragraphs. One of my all-time favorites is from an utterly unknown book, Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me. I’ve posted it on the blog before, and do you know what? I’m going to post it again:

There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone’s nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again–leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.

I sort of can’t get over this paragraph. I think it is just about perfect. I hope Ms. Dundy wrote it after she wrote the rest of the novel, because if I were her I would have stopped dead after writing those two sentences, thinking “My work is done here.” (But the rest of the novel is very good too.)

Last week, Terry asked me about my experience watching dance. His question was a timely one; just last night I pilgrimaged west to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company in a one-night-only performance (the kickoff, mind you, of a fifty-state tour) in the suburb of Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Terry’s book, his recent blogging about dance, and the questions he posed to me were on my mind.

If I remember correctly, the first dance I saw was Balanchine’s Jewels, circa 1992, with Terry (natch). We sat in an upper level of the auditorium, which proved useful for my rather anxiously held purposes: to get it, and to be able to prove that I had gotten it by having something thoughtful, or if possible penetrating, to say about it afterward. From our high-altitude vantage point, the dance looked like architecture in motion. It was on that level–not in terms of the dancers’ individual moves and gestures but in terms of the kaleidoscopic formations and patterns they all made together–that I tried to grasp what I was seeing. This was my way of trying to intellectualize it: to make it into something I could read. In keeping with what Terry wrote, I don’t think I got as much out of that initial outing as I did from subsequent dance performances where I was more at ease watching. That first time out, I felt almost as though I was performing. I was intent on having the correct response. But there’s no such thing.

I want to make a brief detour here and talk about live classical music (don’t blink–it won’t last long and it may never happen again!). Terry drew a distinction between narrative and non-narrative art forms, grouping painting, dance, and music as not essentially intellectual. For me, a more operative divide has always been the one between performing and non-performing arts; my grasp of the latter is decent, of the former pathetic. When I came to Chicago, though, I started going to the Symphony semi-regularly–say, half a dozen times a year (a habit that has now, sadly, dropped off). Somewhere in that time, I reached a deeply satisfying understanding of how to enjoy a classical concert, if you happen to be me. I realized that if I let my mind wander a bit, I would actually hear the music better than if I spent the whole concert policing my concentration. At some point I started accepting the meandering thinking I was doing at concerts, however far-flung, as an associative response to the music rather than a philistine, well-nigh punishable distraction from it. At that point I moved from thinking of concert-going as vaguely hard work that just might confer virtue (like church-going) to thinking of it as an authentic sensual luxury.

Because Terry had started this conversation and I had been mulling a response, I was quite conscious of my minute-to-minute reactions to the Paul Taylor dances I saw last night. Speaking generally–though I’ll have more to say later about the individual pieces–I spent most of the evening bouncing between asking myself “What does it mean?” and simply forgetting the question. Forgetting about words and language themselves, really, as something especially stunning or delicate unfolded on the stage. For me, anyway, this shuttling mode in which I seem to watch dance offers the best of both worlds. As a dance begins I inevitably find myself pushing lightly toward an interpretation, but when the work does something that exceeds or confounds the interpretation–as it continually does, if it is any good–I happily give up thinking and, as Terry says, eat it up. I love this ebb and flow of thought, the thinking and the being drawn away from thinking by fresh experience.

Here’s Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times, writing in Sunday’s paper on Nadine Hubbs’ The Queer Composition of
America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music and
National Identity:

This is an ambitious, provocative and
impressively documented work, with more than 70 pages of
detailed footnotes for a 178-page text. It tries to prove
that what has come to be considered the distinctive
American sound in mid-20th-century American music–that
Coplandesque tableau of widely spaced harmonies and
melancholic tunes run through with elements of elegiac folk
music and spiked with jerky American dance rhythms–was
essentially invented by a group of Manhattan-based gay
composers: Copland, of course, and Virgil Thomson, Paul
Bowles, David Diamond, Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein,
Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem….

My gay brothers and sisters should welcome Ms. Hubbs’s account of the pivotal role played by gay composers in the development of a musical idiom that as the book argues, still signifies “America,” not just in the concert hall but also in movies, television and commercial culture.

Yet, I suspect that many musicians, however fascinated by
Ms. Hubbs’s treatise, will share my discomfort over the
notion of trying to identify anything as elusive as a gay
sensibility in music. It’s significant, I think, that most
of the advance praise for the book (“a landmark study,”
“breathtakingly original history”) comes from cultural
historians, not musicians….

Perhaps a sense of separateness emboldened this circle of
gay composers, who shared an affinity for French culture
and aesthetics, to distance themselves from the
domineering, aggressive (meaning rigorously German) brand
of 1920’s modernism….

By the late 1930’s, Copland, with his language now
simplified as well, was writing the works that would make
him famous, especially the ballet scores “Billy the Kid”
and “Rodeo.” Still, what is so gay about a symphony that
uses hymns as thematic fodder, or a ballet score run
through with cowboy tunes and Old West dance rhythms? What
is the gay sensibility of Copland’s 1939 “Quiet City” or
the vibrant 1943 Violin Sonata?

(Read the whole thing here.)

I was thinking of reviewing Hubbs’ book, but Tony has said most of what I wanted to say, and the rest of it can be found in an essay I wrote about Benjamin Britten for Commentary. Much of what has been written about Britten since his death in 1976 has revolved around the posthumously disclosed fact that he was sexually attracted to pre-pubescent boys. As I explained in 2000:

[R]evelations about the composer’s private life, particularly the candid account of his pederastic inclinations supplied by Humphrey Carpenter in his 1992 biography, add force to the now widely accepted argument that it is impossible to fully understand his music without taking his sexuality into account. Yet such a critical perspective, while capable of providing valuable illumination, is ultimately unequal to the task of explaining Britten’s enduring appeal….he is not a prisoner of identity, speaking only of and to his own kind, but a universal genius, intelligible to everyone. Even in The Turn of the Screw–perhaps his best work, certainly his most disturbing–he succeeds in transcending the particularity of his sexual character and portraying the human dilemma in terms that speak directly to all men in all conditions.

I’ve written in similar terms about Copland and Tchaikovsky, two other great composers whose music is infinitely important to me. The fact that they were both homosexual should never be disregarded in discussing their life and work–but only an unmusical ideologue would try to explain away their genius by engaging in the kind of politico-sexual reductionism of which Hubbs is merely the latest purveyor. In the words of Tony Tommasini:

Ultimately, what we may most value about music is that it moves us in powerful but indistinct ways. It’s the one thing that cannot be analyzed or deconstructed for its expressive content, and thank goodness for that.

I think that’s exactly right. It is, after all, the radical ambiguity of music that underlies its unique power–an ambiguity that cannot be clarified by resort to verbal analysis or description, however superficially sophisticated.

I’ll leave the last word to Felix Mendelssohn, who put it better than anyone else, before or since: “The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.” By which Mendelssohn meant roughly what Igor Stravinsky meant when he said that “music expresses itself.” That’s why we love it, and never more so than in an age increasingly dominated by aesthetic politicians. It’s too blessedly slippery for such misguided folk as Nadine Hubbs to put it in a box and nail the lid shut.

A reader writes:

You recently mentioned reading “Brideshead Revisited” on your way to Minnesota, and you frequently allude to books you read over lunch and such. As someone who is chronically behind in his reading, I’d like to know two things: how fast you read, and how you read. You’ve already looking at biographies back to front, so no need to go into that again. But are you a speed reader? Or do you selectively harvest paragraphs or chapters from a book? And I gather you keep some sort of commonplace book or electronic file of juicy lines to repeat at a later date. Do you note those as you go (copy them? mark the book for later retrieval?), which I imagine might slow you down, or do you go back and fish them out later?

And in light of all this, how, exactly, would you want people to read your books?

I read a book on speed reading once, but it was slow going.

I don’t know how fast I read, but I can polish off a book of normal length and density in three or four hours, and if absolutely necessary I can read a newly published book and write a thousand-word review of it between Friday night and Monday morning. (On one horrendous occasion I actually read a short book before lunch and filed a review by dinnertime, but that was a special one-time-only favor for an old friend.) Speed reading, if that’s what I do, comes naturally to me: I’ve never taken a course in it. I think I’m glad I read so quickly, but it’s like spelling really well or having perfect pitch, two of my other peculiar endowments–a convenience, nothing more, especially for a working journalist.

It’s occurred to me more than once that I may not be getting as much pleasure out of the books I read as do slower readers. In any case, and perhaps not surprisingly, I’m a reflexive rereader, and my guess is that over the course of my lifetime I’ll probably spend about as many man-hours with my favorite books as a slower reader. If that’s true, it all evens out in the long run.

I’ve kept an electronic commonplace book, organized by subject, for the past decade and a half, and I drew on it regularly for the almanac entries I posted throughout the first seven or eight months that I kept this blog. Now that I’ve mostly exhausted its contents, I simply post quotations from whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. Long experience as a journalist has given me an eye (and ear) for memorable quotes, and I dogear the pages on which they appear–an ugly but unbreakable habit–then input them when I’m working on the next day’s blog.

As I wrote back in June:

I hasten to point out that the authors of “About Last Night” do not necessarily agree or disagree, in whole or in part, with each day’s almanac entry. To be sure, I usually do, at least up to a point, but not always. (Our Girl in Chicago has nothing to do with the almanac, by the way. Instead, she posts her own “fortune cookies.”) Similarly, the almanac is occasionally meant to provide oblique commentary on current events, but not normally. As a rule, my sole purpose in posting each entry is to give you something to think about–and to let you do your own thinking.

(Go here for more on the almanac and my electronic commonplace book.)

Regarding my correspondent’s last question, if I may be flippant for a moment, I want people to read my books after buying them! Beyond that, I’m not even slightly fussy. I’m glad when anyone cares enough to go to the trouble of reading what I write, though I do get irritated when people write nasty things about my work without having read it attentively, as occasionally happened with The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. Take a look at the reviews posted on amazon.com and you’ll see what I mean. (I got off a lot easier with A Terry Teachout Reader, no doubt because fewer people bought it.)

By the way, I also post quotations from readers, so long as they’re sourced and checkable. Today’s almanac entry, for example, came from a correspondent who heard me speak last week in Minneapolis. I revel in your contributions!

Your attention, please: I now share Our Girl’s obsession
with Erin McKeown. She is one smart cookie.

More later, but in the meantime, get with the program and listen to Grand. I was hooked by the end of the first cut, and I’ll be quite surprised if the same thing doesn’t happen to you.

“Pictures and books are fine for those that have the time to study ’em, but they don’t shoot out on the road and holler ‘This is what little old Zenith can put up in the way of Culture.’ That’s precisely what a Symphony Orchestra does do. Look at the credit that Minneapolis and Cincinnati get. An orchestra with first-class musickers and a swell conductor–and I believe we ought to do the thing up brown and get one of the highest-paid conductors on the market, provding he ain’t a Hun–a it goes right into Beantown and New York and Washington; it plays at the best theaters to the most cultured and moneyed people; it gives such class advertising as a town can get in no other way; and the guy who is so short-sighted as to crab this orchestra proposition is passing up the chance to impress the glorious name of Zenith on some big New York millionaire that–that might establish a branch factory here!”

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

For the rest of this week, I won’t be able to blog during work. Circumstances. So I will have to wait until tonight to tell you about the grand weekend, highlighted by the mesmerizing Luciana Souza and the golden Paul Taylor. For now, just one tantalizing tidbit: it wasn’t until we had taken our seats last night out in little Glen Ellyn, Illinois, that OFOB and I realized we would be seeing the world premiere of a new Taylor dance. Golly.

Later, alligators.