About Last Night

“The last line uttered by the Devil in the first part of Goethe’s Faust is the abrupt command, Her zu mir! Faust’s adventure is over, his dream of eternal happiness gone. The Devil, who had been waiting ironically, says ‘Come to me!’ and it is over. I think of that line whenever I hear the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth where, time and again with a compulsive beauty, the key changes to that ominous note of pity and terror against which all but courage and art quails. From the statement of the opening theme this key-change has been inevitable. One senses, even if one does not know, that it is sure to come, and it does.”
Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night

• Maud points the way to a Theodora Keogh story, published in 1957, called “The Man Who Loved Old Ladies .” It’s a short-short story, easily readable online, and it’s interesting to place it in tandem with another short-short story, Katherine Mansfield’s “The Young Girl“, especially in the way both stories close.
Keogh is a new author to me — I hadn’t heard of her before reading an obituary that ran in the Telegraph this January — but Maud, who along with others is agitating that Keogh’s books be brought back into print, can tell you more.
Mansfield’s story, by the by, is included in the Angela Carter-edited anthology Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, put out by Virago in the ’80s. The collection’s out of print but you can still pick up a used copy dirt cheap.
• Lately, I’ve been re-reading David Copperfield as my before-bed, literary-cup-of-Ovaltine book. Last night I hit the chapter called “My First Dissipation.” It’s such a funny set piece and can be read as a stand-alone excerpt if you start here, where David first decides to have a few friends over to his new apartment for dinner (Mrs. Crupp is his landlady).
A taste of the dissipation:
I began, by being singularly cheerful and light-hearted; all sorts of half-forgotten things to talk about, came rushing into my mind, and made me hold forth in a most unwonted manner. I laughed heartily at my own jokes, and everybody else’s; called Steerforth to order for not passing the wine; made several engagements to go to Oxford; announced that I meant to have a dinner-party exactly like that, once a week, until further notice; and madly took so much snuff out of Grainger’s box, that I was obliged to go into the pantry, and have a private fit of sneezing ten minutes long.
I went on, by passing the wine faster and faster yet, and continually starting up with a corkscrew to open more wine, long before any was needed. I proposed Steerforth’s health. I said he was my dearest friend, the protector of my boyhood, and the companion of my prime. I said I was delighted to propose his health. I said I owed him more obligations than I could ever repay, and held him in a higher admiration than I could ever express. I finished by saying, ‘I’ll give you Steerforth! God bless him! Hurrah!’ We gave him three times three, and another, and a good one to finish with. I broke my glass in going round the table to shake hands with him, and I said (in two words) ‘Steerforth -you’retheguidingstarofmyexistence.’

Personal aside: Whenever my book club meets, there’s inevitably some point in the evening where we all start making plans to go on a trip to Cuba together, or Budapest, or else, you know, start a bowling team. So the “made several engagements to go to Oxford” bit hits home.

Consider yourselves warned: this is not a post about the arts, but one of those occasional yet inevitable posts about the life of the blogger that are delightful to some and obnoxious to others. Proceed or click away accordingly.
My absence from this space recently, excepting the occasional fortune cookie, can be explained in two short words: work and hockey. Behind these words lie a very boring story and a semi-interesting one. The first goes like this: work is busy. I know you know all about it. The second? I think it’s pretty cool, actually. I haven’t trotted out this particular obsession for a matter of years, maybe, but longtime readers will remember that alongside the interests that brought me here, interests in books, movies, criticism, and to a more limited extent the performing arts, stands a less elevated but equally passionate love for ice hockey–for the professional variety, from a strictly spectatorial perspective. Until recently.
The more hockey I watched over the years, the more a question or possibility gnawed at me: what does it feel like–to fly across the ice like that, to deliver a pass or receive one, to shoot and, in my very wildest dreams, score? Until a couple of years ago, the question seemed purely theoretical and made me increasingly melancholy. I was on the far side of 35 and I didn’t know how to ice-skate, let alone do things with pucks. Even if I learned some of this, somehow acquiring skates and the bulky, mysterious-to-me carapace of a hockey player, and finding ice to play on and other people to play with who would not laugh me off said ice–even if I overcame all of these obstacles, I would certainly never be capable of performing any of the highly-skilled on-ice feats that most piqued this niggling desire to capture a feeling. There was perhaps a remote possibility that I could pursue this, but no question that anything transcendently gorgeous would always be beyond my grasp. So why bother? It would have to be more frustrating than gratifying, right?
(Speaking of ungraspable beauty in hockey, the nonpareil hockey blogger E, who runs A Theory of Ice, once posted a great little paragraph by William Faulkner on first witnessing this strange northern game. Read the whole thing here, but a bit of it goes like this: “it seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. Then it would break, coalesce through a kind of kaleidoscopic whirl like a child’s toy, into a pattern, a design almost beautiful….”)
Something had to happen to change my mind. And, as with many consequential and fortunate turning points in my life, the difference was made by my dad. At the age of 64, just after Christmas, he went out and bought new skates, suited up, and took to the ice for the first time in about four decades. True, he had years of real, competitive experience as a teenager and young man. But he also was almost thirty years older than me. Part of me was envious, part inspired. By March I had new skates too and was enrolled in beginning figure-skating lessons in a fairly distant suburb. I made the 45-minute drive every Monday evening, right after work, spent half an hour on the ice, and turned around to head back. Behind-wheel to on-ice ratio: 3 to 1, but worth it. I learned some basic skating that would help later, and some kid-level figure-skating stuff that wouldn’t. I earned a turquoise ribbon with a penguin on it certifying my mastery of 1/2 level of skating expertise.
This was all extremely exciting, but it didn’t feel like it was getting me much closer to playing hockey.
I kept skating wistfully, trying to work diligently on my stride and my backwards with dim hope of someday, somehow, getting a stick and a game. And this winter, wouldn’t you know, the stars aligned and I found myself becoming friends with someone whose friend was about to begin teaching a beginner’s hockey class. By now I’ve had maybe ten lessons. I am entirely incompetent and thoroughly addicted.
Some amateur observations:
• Many things in ice-skating are easier with a stick in your hands and an urgent purpose.
• Stopping is not one of those things. Did you ever see a lot of beginning skaters play a hockey scrimmage? Everyone goes into big loops or dire spin-o-ramas to get to the puck facing in the right direction. I can’t imagine it’s not very funny to observe. “Frantic darting of the weightless bugs” indeed.
• No matter how wretchedly you play, the hunger to get the puck is all-consuming. In my case, the need to get rid of it once I have it is equally urgent. One-half of this attitude needs changing.
• Playing hockey means developing a deeper relationship with velcro.
• A one-minute shift in scrimmage is almost enough to kill me.
But most of all: I love this game and already can’t imagine life without it, even though I clearly will never be any good at any part of it and what I’m doing is to the real thing what fingerpainting is to Frankenthaler. I remind myself, in fact, a bit of Terry when he finally put paint to canvas a few years ago, after years of wondering what it felt like: “It was, as I’d hoped, completely absorbing fun, and though I fear I have no obvious aptitude for the making of visual art, I still can’t wait to do it again.”

“I looked at her and knew she was sincere, and I remembered what else Catherine had said about her, and my world rocked, for this was the first time–I had always been slow on the uptake–when I realized that under certain circumstances sincerity is the most dangerous thing in the world.”
Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night

• Last week, Slate reported that The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, would face foreclosure unless the historic site managed to raise $3 million by April 24. According to The Mount’s website, that deadline’s now been extended to May 31. So far $816,753 has been raised.
• Seems like old times: Another new novel from Curtis Sittenfeld, another round of commentary re: the writerly abilities of “Mr. Sittenfeld.”
From the vaults of Web .2, an early story of Sittenfeld’s, one I’m still fond of, about New Year’s at the office.
• A history of literary tattoos. The Gutenberg Bible tats seem like an especially dedicated way to salute the printed word. (Via Bookslut.)

I sent Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong off to Harcourt, my publisher, last Friday, and I also sent it to two people who knew Armstrong and offered to read the manuscript. So begins the long and complicated process that will lead to the book’s publication a year or so from now.

In a perfect world I’d celebrate by going on a vacation, but I haven’t had much luck with that in the past–I took a week off to visit my mother when I finished my Mencken biography, only to be stranded in Smalltown, U.S.A., by 9/11–and in any case a New York drama critic doesn’t get to take any time off at this time of year. I saw Cry-Baby the night I finished writing Rhythm Man, The Country Girl two days later, and two more shows, Thurgood and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the day after that. Yesterday I wrote a 2,500-word essay about Gustav Mahler for Commentary, and today I have to write Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column. Tomorrow I fly to Santa Fe by way of Dallas and Albuquerque, about which more later, and on Thursday night I’ll be in Brooklyn, watching Endgame at BAM Harvey, with three more shows to come on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Contrary to popular belief, my life isn’t always this hectic, but as I pointed out last week, I didn’t plan to be finishing Rhythm Man and The Letter at the same moment, much less to have that moment occur simultaneously with the peak of the Broadway season. In the ever-relevant words of James Burnham, if there’s no alternative, there’s no problem, and since there’s definitely no alternative, I’m at least trying to behave as if there’s no problem.

One of the ways in which I cling to normality in the midst of frenzy is to read something each day that is irrelevant to my proximate concerns. For the past week I’ve been periodically immersed in a book I’ve long wanted to read, Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night. MacLennan, a Canadian novelist and essayist who died in 1990, is all but unknown in this country. (You can read about him here.) So, of course, are most Canadian artists who stubbornly insist on living in their native land instead of moving south, which says more about America than it does about Canada. Edmund Wilson praised his writing in O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture, perhaps the least well known of his books, in which he compared MacLennan to Balzac and said that The Watch That Ends the Night was “invested with a kind of poetry that, to a reader living in the United States, makes Canada seem almost exotic.” But even though I read O Canada many years ago, I didn’t remember what Wilson had to say about MacLennan–I had to look it up on my New Yorker CD-ROM set–and the only reason why I knew about The Watch That Ends the Night, which was published in 1959, is that I once ran across a mention of it in a biography of Glenn Gould.

At any rate I finally got around to reading The Watch That Ends the Night last week, and I was knocked flat by it, so much so that I had to ration the number of pages I allowed myself each day so that I wouldn’t be distracted from my deadlines. I intend at some point in the next couple of weeks to discuss it in the weekly book column that I write for Commentary‘s Web site, so I won’t jump the gun here. Suffice it for the moment to say that I feel inclined to rank it alongside Peter de Vries’ The Blood of the Lamb, an equally ill-remembered novel of similar vintage and subject matter (both books have at their center a woman who is suffering from a fatal illness and are narrated by a man who loves her).

A few years ago I quoted from The Blood of the Lamb in one of my daily almanac entries:

We live this life by a kind of conspiracy of grace: the common assumption, or pretense, that human existence is “good” or “matters” or has “meaning,” a glaze of charm or humor by which we conceal from one another and perhaps even ourselves the suspicion that it does not, and our conviction in times of trouble that it is overpriced–something to be endured rather than enjoyed.

That quote caught the eye of my friend Maud Newton, who subsequently read The Blood of the Lamb and later cited the University of Chicago’s paperback reprint as her favorite novel of 2005. I don’t know whether The Watch That Ends the Night would hit Maud as hard as did The Blood of the Lamb, but I do know that it hit me as hard as any novel I’ve read in the past decade. I plan to devote all of this week’s almanac entries to it.

The Watch That Ends the Night is out of print, but a new edition is about to be published in Canada, and in the meantime used copies are easy to order. I commend it to your attention.

“Some people have within themselves a room so small that only a minuscule amount of the thing we call the spirit can find a home in them. Others have so much that what the world calls their characters explodes from the pressure. I think of it as a force. I have recognized–and I am no mystic–an immense amount of this spiritual force in people whose characters, judged by the things they do, are bad. In others who are blameless I have found hardly any. Probably I will never be able to know what its real nature is; all I do know is that I know it is there. Call it the Life-Force if you prefer the modern term; call it anything you like. But whatever it is, this thing refuses to be bounded, circumscribed or even judged. It creates, it destroys, it re-creates. Without it there can be no life; with much of it no easy life. It seems to me the sole force which equals the merciless fate which binds a human being to his mortality.”
Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night

The big deal arts-wise in Asheville this weekend is the inaugural WordFest, a poetry festival featuring a number of local and visiting poets at readings and talks around the city. It kicked off last night, and events continue through Sunday night. The website features live video so, if you can’t make it, you can tune in remotely.
I tend not to share my jetting-around calendar here because, as you may have gathered from all the excitement about the Jane Austen marathon on PBS a while back, there’s usually not much to report. But I’m looking forward to this weekend:
• Friday: Drinks with my friend Robert McGee, who has a new story in the just-launched Raleigh Quarterly.
• Saturday afternoon: Blue Ridge Rollergirls recruitment session at Malaprop’s.*
• Saturday night: Fatemeh Keshavarz and Galway Kinnell reading at Asheville WordFest.
• Sunday: Harold and Kumar Escape From Guatanamo Bay!!
* This has bad idea written all over it, but I can’t help it: I want to roll! I went to a match last weekend and it was, not to put too fine a point on it, awesome. Also, I seem to have come to the point in writing the book where even getting body-checked sounds more appealing than sitting in front of the computer any longer.