Nobody practices everything they preach, and in the cases of certain people, the practice-preach ratio is quite spectacularly out of whack. While I think my ratio is reasonably healthy, one thing that I recommend wholeheartedly to students but have never managed to do for myself is keep a writer’s notebook. (My excuse is that this blog is to some degree a substitute, but I know that’s only an excuse.) When a writer of quality publishes such a notebook, as Somerset Maugham did in 1949, the results are invariably illuminating—if not necessarily in the way that the writer in question had in mind.

I wasn’t aware that Anthony Powell had gotten on the bandwagon until Levi Stahl started tweeting entries from his notebook. It was published a year after Powell’s death in 2000, though my impression is that it was his intention for A Writer’s Notebook to appear while he was still alive. It’s not intimate in any way, merely a 169-page collection of phrases and aperçus that he scribbled down at odd intervals for possible use in his novels and essays. Even so, it is still immensely revealing of Powell’s distinctive turn of mind, not least because a modest number of the entries made it into A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell’s twelve-volume novelistic masterpiece, usually but not always in altered form.

Anyone who has read Dance knows that its author had a sententious streak, but one that is far more attractive than the most familiar usage of that ambiguous word suggests. Nick Jenkins, the fictional narrator who represents Powell in A Dance to the Music of Time, is given to tossing off aphoristic observations at not-infrequent intervals, many of which are quite exceedingly wise and provocative. (This one, from Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, is my favorite: “In the end most things in life—perhaps all things—turn out to be appropriate.”)

I have long been a devoted admirer of Powell’s work, and in recent years I have come to feel that Dance is even better than I originally thought it to be—that it is, in fact, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, perhaps even as good as Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, to which it is frequently and understandably compared. I reread the entire sequence every couple of years, always with increasing pleasure.

In honor of that midlife conversion, I’ve decided to spend the next two weeks reprinting excerpts from Powell’s notebook in the form of daily almanac entries. I hope you find them as edifying as I did.

* * *

Excerpts from the first part of A Dance to the Music of Time, a seven-hour-long TV version of Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume cycle of novels, originally telecast in 1997 on Britain’s Channel 4. The four-part miniseries has never aired in this country:

Robertson Davies talks about critics on the CBC in 1973:

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

“One of the very few realistic advances that can be achieved in life is to realize that one has been an ass regarding a given subject.”

Anthony Powell, A Writer’s Notebook

The Broadway season ended last week, and today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review the off-Broadway premiere of Grounded, reflects that fact. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

No director makes more magical stage pictures than Julie Taymor. If only she were better at using them to illustrate what her actors are saying! Her fantastically complicated 2013 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” for example, was a mountain of buttery frosting beneath which the sweet cake of Shakespeare’s verse all but vanished. Ms. Taymor’s staging of George Brant’s “Grounded,” by contrast, is both more modest and more effective, an eerily timely monologue about drone warfare that no amount of misguided directorial excess—and there’s plenty of it here—can sabotage.

Anne Hathaway plays a fighter pilot who becomes pregnant and is reassigned from Iraq to a Las Vegas base, where she joins the “Chair Force” as a drone operator. She carries out “personality strikes” on “military-age males” halfway round the world, then drives home to her doting husband and baby daughter each night after work….

“Grounded” is a taut piece of storytelling that shines a bright light on the little-understood emotional stresses that gnaw at the psyches of the practitioners of electronic warfare who only see the people they kill on a TV screen. And while Ms. Hathaway is now a movie star, she still knows her way around a stage: Her performance is tough and smart…

But “Grounded,” as usual with Ms. Taymor, is smothered in a thick sauce of over-elaborate, over-literal visual and sound effects. It’s as though “American Sniper” had been staged in the hyperactive video-game style of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.” While the parade of stage trickery is always ingenious and often memorable, it deprives the audience of the chance to use its collective imagination to bring the play to life….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Anne Hathaway and Julie Taymor talk about Grounded:

“Very few plays are any good and no first plays are any good.”

George Abbott (quoted in Maurice Zolotow, “Broadway’s Most Successful Penny Pincher,” Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 29, 1955)

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, nearly all performances sold out, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out, reviewed here)
• Hand to God (black comedy, X, absolutely not for children or prudish adults, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, all performances sold out, reviewed here)
• It’s Only a Play (comedy, PG-13/R, closes June 7, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, virtually all performances sold out, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)
• On the Twentieth Century (musical, G/PG-13, many performances sold out, extended through July 19, contains very mild sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Visit (serious musical, PG-13, far too dark and disturbing for children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, ideal for bright children, remounting of Broadway production, original production reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN BALTIMORE:
• After the Revolution (drama, G/PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND OFF BROADWAY:
• Hamilton (historical musical, PG-13, closes Sunday, moves to Broadway Aug. 6, reviewed here)
• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, two different stagings of the same play performed by the same cast in rotating repertory, closes Saturday, reviewed here)

“He was a great original, but he was not a one-off, like Katharine Hepburn, or Michael Caine, whom it is possible to imitate, but from whom it is not possible to learn.”

Simon Callow, preface to the 2012 edition of Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor

David Letterman is about to retire after thirty-three years as a late-night TV host, and he’s marked the occasion by giving a genuinely revealing interview to the New York Times:

I’m awash in melancholia. Over the weekend, I was talking to my son, and I said, “Harry, we’ve done like over 6,000 shows.” And he said, [high-pitched child’s voice] “That’s creepy.” And I thought, well, in a way, he’s right. It is creepy….I’ll miss it, desperately.

My guess is that he’ll miss it more than we’ll miss him. I remember when Letterman was still fresh and original—quite startlingly so—but that was a long, long time ago. Now he’s sixty-eight years old, and he’s outlived the conventions that he used to mock, as well as the new ones that he helped to create. Indeed, he’s come very close to outliving network TV itself.

For that we should, I suppose, feel nostalgic, but I find it impossible to feel any sentiment at the fast-approaching departure from the scene of a public personality whose stock-in-trade has always been the unfelt snarkery that I call “Irony Lite.” Aside from everything else, I don’t associate him with what I think of as my youth: I was already out of college and earning a living when he launched Late Night with David Letterman in 1982.

What now strikes me most forcibly about his retirement is the very thing for which his own son twitted him. As I wrote in this space apropos of Johnny Carson’s death in 2005, Letterman has

devoted most of his adult life to that most ephemeral of endeavors, hosting a late-night talk show….I wonder what [Carson] thought of his life’s work? Or how he felt about having lived long enough to disappear into the memory hole? At least he had the dignity to vanish completely, retreating into private life instead of trying to hang on to celebrity by his fingernails. Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous.

Perhaps David Letterman knows that, too. For in the end, having done six thousand episodes of a late-night talk show scarcely comes to more than having showed up for work six thousand times in a row. And while it is no small thing to have earned your living honestly, all that matters in the end is what you did with the living you earned.

Knowing nothing of Letterman’s private life, I can’t express an informed opinion about the latter question. Yet I can’t help but think of The Unknown Citizen, W.H. Auden’s sharp-toothed elegy for a machine-age American who “served the Greater Community” with robotic exactitude: Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:/Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. (That’s real irony.)

I note with interest that the word “proud” is nowhere to be found in Letterman’s New York Times interview. Is that significant, or merely characteristic? Maybe it’s just honest.