My old friend Tim Page, the classical music critic of the Washington Post, came to New York last night to cover the opening of New York City Opera’s new production of Richard Strauss’ Daphne. We hadn’t seen one another in months, so we had lunch at Good Enough to Eat today. Like me, Tim is a man of many interests, and in an earlier part of his life he developed a passion for Dawn Powell, one which eventually led him to write her biography and edit her letters and diary (which he discovered) and the Library of America’s two-volume set of her comic novels.

Tim is, in other words, the Big Powell Guy, and seeing as how I’m a Little Powell Guy–the first essay in the Teachout Reader is about her–he saw fit to bring me a stupendous present this afternoon. He handed over a manila folder inside of which was a tattered but still intact pen-and-ink caricature of Martha Graham drawn by none other than Powell herself. It’s a Thurberesque full-length portrait in reddish-brown ink, captioned “Martha Graham: Analysis in Wonderland.” Modern-dance buffs will immediately recognize the inverted triangle before which Graham is standing as the set piece Isamu Noguchi designed for Frontier, choreographed in 1935. The expression of loony anguish on Graham’s face, by contrast, is all Powell and a yard wide.

Needless to say, I nearly fell out of my chair when Tim presented me with this wonderful souvenir of one of my favorite writers. It was especially appropriate because I already own a Graham-related piece of comic art, an assemblage made for me by Paul Taylor. Not long after 9/11, I wrote an essay for the New York Times called “The Importance of Being Less Earnest” (it’s also in the Teachout Reader) in which I poked fun at the humorlessness of such iconic figures of modern dance as Graham and Isadora Duncan:

What Duncan sowed was soon reaped by a generation of modern-dance choreographers for whom humor was, to put it mildly, a superfluity. To flip through Edwin Denby’s collected reviews of dance in New York in the Thirties and Forties is to be struck by how dour he makes their dances sound. Though he made a point of being fair, he also believed deeply in the inestimable value of lightness, and so it is instructive to watch him grapple with Martha Graham, whose clenched-hair psychological dramas did so much to shape the emotional landscape of dance in postwar America. (When Randall Jarrell wanted to spoof modern dance in Pictures from an Institution, he made up a perfectly plausible-sounding piece called The Eye of Anguish, not realizing that Graham had used that same title four years earlier.) On one occasion Denby described her company as “bold about being earnest, but timid about being lively,” which neatly sums up what many balletomanes find unsympathetic about Graham’s painfully sincere art.

I contrasted their portentousness with Taylor’s miraculous ability to say dark things with a light touch:

It’s surprising (well, no, it isn’t) how many dance buffs are still suspicious of Taylor, mainly because his work, though serious, is never ponderous. Having seen a lot of art of all kinds since September 11, I’m impressed by how many of the things that spoke to me most strongly, from Urinetown to Ghost World to the exhibition of Ben Katchor’s “picture stories” currently on display at the Jewish Museum, were either wholly comic or partook of the sweet-and-sourness found in Paul Taylor’s best dances.

Taylor danced with the Graham company for a number of years, by the end of which he was thoroughly fed up with her high-minded self-importance. What I wrote about her in the Times obviously tickled his funnybone, for he put together a Joseph Cornell-like shadowbox incorporating a clipping of my piece, which had been illustrated by an old picture of Duncan. On the clipping Taylor mounted a butterfly, and on top of that he placed the business end of a rusty old flyswatter. He titled it “Gotcha Both,” put it in an envelope, and sent it to me. “Gotcha Both” now occupies an honored place in the Teachout Museum, and I plan to hang “Martha Graham: Analysis in Wonderland” below it as soon as it comes back from my framer.

I’m especially pleased by the juxtaposition because it happens that I also made admiring mention of Dawn Powell in “The Importance of Being Less Earnest”:

Small wonder…that the children and grandchildren of Isadora, Martha Graham foremost among them, dominated native-born American theatrical dance for so long. They were right at home, particularly during World War II, when American culture, already sick unto death from the political pieties of the Thirties, came close to choking on its own high-mindedness. Dawn Powell, a cruelly funny woman who had no use for such nonsense, skewered the spirit of the age in her 1942 novel A Time to Be Born: “The poet, disgusted with the flight of skylarks in perfect sonnet form, declaimed the power of song against brutality and raised hollow voice in feeble proof. This was no time for beauty, for love, or private future…This was a time when the artists, the intellectuals, sat in caf

A reader from Cleveland writes:

Glad to hear you took in our museum. How cool. It’s also heartening to hear your still-warm regard for the “smaller” places in the US (and really, what place is “bigger” than NYC?). Most of the people I know who’ve moved on to big cities develop a contempt for any place less populated (including their own birthplace). I suppose it must always exist within them, but snobbishness of this kind makes little sense to me as location does not make the man.

As a change of pace and in hopes it will be an exercise you’ll enjoy, how about a little classical music advice? Borders is running a 4-for-3 sale and I was browsing the classical music section. I was at a loss. I have works from the most well-known composers, but that’s about it. How about your thoughts on the 5 essential classical works of the 20th century? Please expand the time frame if current constraints make the list unworkable.

I did indeed take in the Cleveland Museum of Art, one of America’s half-dozen greatest museums, a fact of which many American art lovers don’t seem to be aware, perhaps because of its comparatively modest size–34,000 objects, compared to the two million owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If the Met is an encyclopedic museum, then Cleveland is a one-volume desk encyclopedia.

What makes the Cleveland Museum so extraordinary is the jaw-dropping connoisseurship with which those 34,000 objects were chosen. Instead of collecting in depth, Cleveland’s curators, like their counterparts at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum, opted for quality over quantity, and time and again they hit the bull’s-eye. When I visited the abstract expressionist gallery last Tuesday, for instance, it contained paintings by William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, sculptures by David Smith and Isamu Noguchi, an Alexander Calder mobile, and a Joseph Cornell box–the whole history of abstract expressionism summed up in fourteen objects, all on display in a single room. Except for the Krasner, each one was of the highest possible quality. The whole museum is like that, more or less.

As for my correspondent’s request for advice, it happens that Time magazine asked me four years ago to pick (anonymously, alas) the greatest classical-music composition and opera of the twentieth century, plus two runners-up in each category. A year before that, I’d written a series of articles for Commentary called “Masterpieces of the Century” in which I drew up “a counter-canon of 50 major works.” Based on those two lists, here are five essential twentieth-century classical works, with links to my favorite recordings of each piece:

– B

“I don’t want to sound falsely na

Supermaud linked this morning to “The Education of Stacy Sullivan,” Gal Beckerman’s story in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review about a journalist who wrote a book about Kosovo, then was astonished that it didn’t become an overnight best seller.

Actually, that’s just my jaundiced take. Here’s Maud’s, which is a lot more fair:

Beckerman chronicles the many obstacles faced by journalist and debut author Stacy Sullivan in publishing and promoting Be Not Afraid, for You Have Sons in America, her nonfiction book. Sullivan’s story is familiar to me, mirroring those I’ve heard even from seasoned and extremely well-regarded novelists. The upshot: unless your book is seen as bestseller material, you’re on your own.

Editors no longer edit. The art department doesn’t care whether the exploding grenades on the proposed cover undermine the themes of your book. And your publicist is not going to lift even a pinky to help you, especially not if he or she is also responsible for promoting books written by star authors like, say, David Sedaris (or even, as in Sullivan’s case, Newt Gingrich).

All true, at least for the most part–but is it news? Not to me, or to anyone who’s published a book in the past quarter-century or so. Poor Stacy Sullivan, on the other hand, seems to have been shocked beyond words by the facts of publishing life. Says Beckerman:

By the end of last year, the book was out of [Sullivan’s] hands and in print, at an initial run of 5,000 copies. By this point, she had long abandoned the illusion that her publisher cared about her book’s fate. “It’s your book,” Sullivan now tells herself. “It’s not your agent’s, your editor’s, or your publisher’s. It’s your baby and you have to nurture it.”

Well, duh!

Allow a cynical old author with several books under his belt to offer a more realistic perspective on the way things work:

• Publishing is a business. It always was. It always will be. No reasonable publisher will buy your book save with the reasonable expectation of selling enough copies to earn back your advance, plus enough profit to keep the wheels turning. Hence the chief function of an agent is to get your editor to give you an advance large enough to make the bean counters feel they have a stake in the book’s success. The larger the advance, the more seriously your book will be taken by everyone involved in its publication. If you don’t get a good advance, it means the publisher doesn’t expect the book to sell well, and won’t act accordingly–and there’s nothing you can do about it. (Stacy Sullivan got $35,000, a dead giveaway that St. Martin’s had only modest expectations for her book.)

• In my experience, Maxwell Perkins-style editing is a thing of the past. That’s fine with me. If you aren’t capable of writing a book that’s publishable in the version you submit to the publisher, you’re not a professional. I’m not talking about copyediting, the painstaking clean-up job in which a line editor makes sure your whiches and thats are all in the right places. That kind of editing is very much alive and well. All my books have been copyedited scrupulously, and they’re the better for it. But don’t assume that some magic-fingered editor is going to make your book a bestseller by rewriting it. Clean up your own mess. If you don’t trust yourself, ask a trusted colleague for advice. Then do your own editing, based on that advice. Write the book you want to see in print.

• The art departments of major publishing houses are busy with lots of books besides yours. Left to their own devices, they may or may not produce a relevant, attention-getting dust jacket. So roll up your sleeves and involve yourself in the process of designing your book. Get to know the designer. Don’t be a nuisance, but be clear and straightforward about what you think might be appropriate in the way of possible cover images. And don’t wait until the last minute: make sure you’re in the loop from start to finish. In my experience, you’ll be listened to, so long as you appear to know what you’re talking about. Arbitrary, whimsical advice will be ignored. Intelligent, informed suggestions will be heard and heeded, not just about the cover but about every aspect of the book’s design, right down to the choice of typeface. I’m neither rich nor famous, but all my books look exactly the way I wanted them to–or better.

• According to Gal Beckerman, publishers like “presentable” authors. That’s true–but you don’t have to have great hair in order to impress them. You do, however, have to be able to talk concisely and intelligently about your book under pressure (i.e., on a live radio broadcast). You also have to know how to give effective speeches and readings.

For road-tested advice on how not to sound like an idiot when talking about your book, go here.

• In-house book publicists are a mixed bag. I’ve had great ones and lousy ones. But no matter how smart or committed they are, they can’t work miracles. If you’re an unknown first-time author, they won’t be able to do much for you, no matter how hard they try. If you got a five-thousand-dollar advance, they won’t try very hard.

You can, of course, hire an outside publicist, and sometimes that helps–but be realistic about your prospects. Stacy Sullivan’s book is called Be Not Afraid for You Have Sons in America: How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure the U.S. into the Kosovo War. Do you really think a publicist could have gotten her on TV?

• Print advertisements don’t sell books. (Neither do fancy book parties.) They make nervous authors feel better. Unless you’re famous, your publisher won’t spring for an ad until after your book is selling. Live with it.

• The effects of book reviews on sales are unknown. They don’t hurt (assuming the reviews are good), but there are lots of other ways to sell a book. If you’re reading these words, for instance, you already know that the blogosphere has started to become a significant factor in the marketing of midlist books. Take advantage of it. Well before the publication date, register www.yourname.com, get a blog up and running, and use it to publicize your book.

• Don’t worry about the New York Times Book Review. It’s nice to be reviewed there and nicer still to get a good review, but far from necessary. I’ve never gotten a favorable full-length review from the Times Book Review for any of my books–and I’ve been writing for them for years! Be that as it may, I continue to crank out books, and publishers continue to publish them, so I must be doing something right.

I close with the Prime Directive of Writing a Book. Print it out, frame it, and place it in a prominent spot on your desk:

• Anyone who writes a serious book with the expectation of making a lot of money and/or becoming famous is a fool. If you can’t afford to write a book in your spare time for its own sake, you’re in the wrong business.

• Never look at great art for more than an hour at a time. After that, your eyes go numb. When that happens, take a lunch break.

• One museum a day is enough.

• Bring twice as many CDs and half as many books as you think you’ll need.

• Unless you’re driving an expensive car, don’t bother listening to classical music—the road noise will drown out the quiet parts.

• When staying at a bed-and-breakfast, don’t eat all of the first course, no matter how good it is. (If you do, you won’t be able to finish the entrée, which is usually even better.)


• Once you’ve spent three consecutive nights at B&Bs, spend the fourth at a roadside motel. You’ll appreciate the contrast—both ways.


• In Pennsylvania, all roads are under construction at all times.

• Anyone more than casually interested in Frank Lloyd Wright should invest in a copy of William Allin Storrer’s The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: A Complete Catalog. This compact catalogue raisonné contains illustrated entries for all 433 pieces of “built work” by Wright, plus road maps showing how to find them. The maps are legible and accurate—I can vouch for them. In addition, they clearly indicate which buildings can be viewed from “publicly accessible property” (i.e., they can be seen from the street).

• When visiting a medium-sized city, make a point of dining at the museum café. Not only is the food good, but you can also eavesdrop on the staff—and the donors.

• If you’re driving, either wear a long-sleeved shirt or put sunscreen on your left arm.

• Bring your own pillow. You’ll sleep better.

“Whether you like it or not, when you’re sixty-two you’re fulfilled.”

Burt Lancaster (quoted in Kate Buford, Burt Lancaster: An American Life)

From I Want Media:

Q:

I’ve just read the Columbia Journalism Review piece that first Maud, and then Terry, linked to today. I’m left with mixed feelings. I don’t doubt that certain factors make the process of publishing a book today regrettably frustrating for most authors, and unsuccessful for many: the sheer volume of books being published and, of course, book publishers’ pesky need to make money. I sympathize with Stacy Sullivan’s plight, but I’m not certain she’s the ideal poster child for suffering midlist writers. Her situation as described in Gal Beckerman’s article seems to a considerable degree self-created.