About Last Night

• I’ve been reading the second revised edition of Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a very solid piece of work which I skimmed inattentively not long after its original publication in 1981. I admire Fitzgerald’s best work without reservation–I consider The Great Gatsby the great American novel–but I can’t think of another major writer who led a less edifying life. The story of Fitzgerald’s drunken slide into artistic inertia is so pathetic that it’s hard to take, and the more you read, the more depressed you get.
Speaking as a biographer, it’s interesting to compare the problems Bruccoli faced in writing Some Sort of Epic Grandeur with the ones I face in writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Indeed, I’m not at all sure that the word “problem” applies in my case. Armstrong was born into desperate poverty, pulled himself out of the gutter via a combination of genius and iron determination, and eventually became a celebrity who was loved by everyone who knew him. His life became less dramatic as he grew older, but it remained eventful, and when he died, Duke Ellington pronounced the perfect epitaph: “He was born poor, died rich, and didn’t hurt anyone along the way.” In short, you couldn’t ask for a better biographical subject, and insofar as any such book can properly be said to be easy to write, Hotter Than That qualifies.
One of the characters in Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution is a cheerfully disillusioned European émigré composer named Gottfried Rosenbaum whose duties as a professor of music at Benton College include composing scores for the modern dances of the school’s resident choreographer, a gym-teacher-turned-Martha-Graham-clone whose efforts are a trifle short on angst. These Rosenbaum knocks off in a maximum of fifteen minutes apiece, explaining, “Ven idt take more dan fifteen minutes, zell me down the river.”
That’s sort of how I feel about writing the life of Satchmo: if you can’t write a good book about a man like that, you can’t write.
• In my last “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal, I wrote about my love for midcentury modern domestic architecture, which many readers of this blog do not share:

What is it about midcentury modernism that gets under so many people’s skins? In May I toured Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, a glass-walled weekend retreat tucked away in a leafy corner of rural Illinois. Built in 1951, the Farnsworth House is beloved of architects and art critics the world over. It is entrancingly beautiful–but its transparent walls are cruelly unforgiving of the clutter of everyday life. Franz Schulze, Mies’ admiring biographer, admitted that it is “more nearly a temple than a dwelling.” I’m unusually neat and so could (just) imagine living there, but Edith Farnsworth, the house’s original owner, came to loathe its lack of privacy, ruefully admitting that it made her uncomfortable to see so much as a single coathanger out of place.
That’s what’s wrong with the more extreme forms of modern architecture: Too often they tell you how to live instead of helping you live the way you want. But even those modern architects who were sensitive to the needs of their clients often failed to please the public at large. In her brief life of Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest architect, Ada Louise Huxtable, the Journal’s architecture critic, pointed out that his houses “never insisted that their occupants reshape themselves to conform to an abstract architectural ideal.” Yet their distinctive style failed to catch on with ordinary home-buyers, and you can drive for hundreds of miles throughout America without seeing a single Wright-like house by the side of the road….

I got two funny letters from friends in response to this column.
One was from Florida:

I just read your article about 50s modern architecture. Boy, that woman was right. It is maddening to live in a house like that. We’re renting a place here in Tallahassee that’s 50s modern and I have to fight the urge to throw away everything we own and buy chrome furniture. Also–there are pocket doors all over the place and sliding cabinet doors, sliding glass doors–all over 50 years old and all off their tracks & nearly impossible to use. I’ll have to send you some pix…but of course, these houses look awful when someone actually LIVES in them, so I’ll have to tidy up first!! I think if I were super-rich, I’d buy a place like this just to throw cocktail parties in. That’s what they were built for, I think. At night, you get the feeling you’re being watched because of all the huge windows. Weird.

I’ve since seen the pictures, and I confess that I would kill to live in that house, sticky pocket doors notwithstanding.
The other letter was from Manhattan:

Professor Donald Fleming, who looked like a bald friendly turtle peering myopically over the lecturn, said to us undergrads in his course on American intellectual history: “The thing…about…Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses is…that…you can’t have sex in them.”

Alas, I must stand mute.
• Incidentally, I’m told that the photo of the Farnsworth House that ran with my column in the print edition of last Saturday’s Journal was captioned “Gropius House.” Or maybe it was the other way round. I don’t read the Journal on paper–I’m an Online Journal man–nor do I choose the art for my columns, so this was news to me. At least one blogger has already hastened to blame me for the blunder, though, accusing me of first-degree aesthetic stupidity. Not guilty!
• Speaking of elective mutism, I got stuck on the phone the other day with a fast, uncontrollably verbose talker. I’m a pretty good talker myself, but I couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise with a blunderbuss had I cared to do so. Fortunately, he was (mostly) telling me things I wanted to know, but listening to him was like standing in front of a fire hose. Are such compulsive monologuists aware of the impression they make? I doubt it. For that matter, I doubt they’re aware of much of anything.
Neville Cardus, the English music critic about whom I’ll be writing in Commentary later this year, was a notoriously one-sided conversationalist, but Christopher Brookes, his biographer, tells a funny story of the day that Cardus met his match:

One of his favorite conversational adversaries was John Barbirolli. As well as being close friends, they were both great actors and each enjoyed upstaging the other “for the greater glory of God.” At one of their lunchtime meetings, true to form both spent the first hour talking sixteen to the dozen without taking the slightest notice of what the other might have been saying. The occupant of a nearby table recalled that to his surprise and admiration at one point in this exchange Sir John took out his false teeth but still kept talking. By this time Neville was of course a master of the art of masticating and conversing simultaneously….

I know very well that I talk too damn much, and I hate myself for it, but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten wound up that far.

“Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness–that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, ‘with it,’ and unsentimental in all things political–is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it.”
Jay Rosen, “Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press” (PressThink, Aug. 14, 2007)

Howard Sherman, who interviewed me day before yesterday for the American Theatre Wing’s weekly radio broadcast, has blogged about the experience:

I haven’t done p.r. for some 14 years now, my personal knowledge of those who populate the critical field is rather less current, and while I remain an avid reader of all theatre journalism, I don’t know the writers themselves as I once did.
Of course, the public rarely gets to know any of these folks personally, and only the astute readers who check bylines really develop a sense of the author’s voice–and personality–through their reviews.
So when I had the opportunity to meet Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal yesterday, while taping a Downstage Center program, it was my first opportunity in years to meet a critic after knowing him only through his writing. In the course of the conversation, we spoke about this issue, and Terry commented that he feels people can get to know him from his reviews alone (although he blogs constantly), because he writes the same way he talks. And after an hour with him, I can say that his self-assessment is correct: the man I met is the man I’ve been reading for four years.
But even more striking, after years of knowing and reading dozens of theatre critics: he’s the exception more than the rule. The personal conversations I have with critics about shows and issues often seem quite different than when I read about those same shows and topics in print.
I am too close to this issue to have any genuine perspective, but I do wonder which is more useful to those who read and follow reviews: do they want “the critical voice” or “the personal voice,” or are they always one and the same?

I wonder, too.

The original author of my Wikipedia entry wrote today to warn me that some nameless clod had vandalized it over the weekend (he kindly fixed it for me). I guess I asked for it, but I’m still impressed–if that’s the word–by the way in which the Internet facilitates idiocy. Or, in the words of an unknown commenter quoted in Daniel J. Solove’s forthcoming book The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, “The Internet makes fools into stars and stars into fools.”
Needless to say, the latter isn’t always a bad thing….

• Luciana Souza is singing at the Jazz Standard on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The band consists of Edward Simon, Larry Koonse, Scott Colley, and Antonio Sanchez–the same group heard on her new album, The New Bossa Nova–with tenor saxophonist Chris Potter sitting in on Friday. Two sets each night, at 7:30 and 9:30. Reserve early–this one will sell out. (I’m going on Friday, so look for me at the first set.)
For more information, go here and scroll down.
• I’m the guest on this week’s episode of Downstage Center, the satellite radio program of the American Theatre Wing, the organization that (among other things) runs the Tony Awards. Howard Sherman and John von Soosten, the hosts, interviewed me about my work as the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, as well as about The Letter, the opera I’m writing with Paul Moravec. The hour-long conversation, which was taped on Monday afternoon, was unusually detailed and wide-ranging, and I think it will make for good listening.
XM Satellite Radio’s Channel 28, On Broadway, airs Downstage Center on Fridays at six p.m., Saturdays at noon, and Sundays at seven p.m. (all times are EDT). Next Monday my interview will be archived on the American Theatre Wing’s Web site, where you can listen to it in streaming audio or download it to your mp3 player by going here.
You can also subscribe to the podcast version of Downstage Center by going to iTunes and searching for “American Theatre Wing.”
Happy listening!

“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (courtesy of The Rat)

James Wolcott didn’t like Mozart Dances, or what I wrote about it. I think he has a tin eye and a sour puss. De gustibus!

At the library last week I picked up the first volume of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I’ve read many of the mysteries before (“The Red-Headed League” was a particular favorite when I was a kid) but never the first one, A Study in Scarlet (published 1887), in which Watson and Holmes meet for the first time and arrange to set up digs together on Baker Street.
In that first interview, Holmes warns Watson “I get in the dumps at times, and don’t open my mouth for days at times.” Am I the only one who thought “being in the dumps” was a modern construction? (Linked to town dumps, junkyard dogs, being put to the curb, etc.) It is not. A friend with a copy of the OED was kind enough to send along the appropriate dictionary entry — forthwith, the three definitions of “in the dumps” with their earliest usages:

1. A fit of abstraction or musing, a reverie; a dazed or puzzled state, a maze; perplexity, amazement; absence of mind.
1523 Skelton Garl. Laurell 14 So depely drownyd I was in this dumpe, encraumpyshed so sore was my conceyte, That, me to rest, I lent me to a stumpe of an oke.
2. A fit of melancholy or depression; now only in pl. (colloq. and more or less humorous): Heaviness of mind, dejection, low spirits.
1529 More Comf. agst. Trib. i. Wks. 1140/2 What heapes of heauynesse, hathe of late fallen amonge vs alreadye, with whiche some of our poore familye bee fallen into suche dumpes.
3. A mournful or plaintive melody or song; also, by extension, a tune in general; sometimes app. used for a kind of dance.
1553 Udall Royster D. ii. i. (Arb.) 32 Then twang with our sonets, and twang with our dumps, And heyhough from our heart, as heauie as lead lumpes.