About Last Night

I’ve been reading a new biography of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, and wondering how many people under the age of 50–or 60, for that matter–recognize their names. Regular New York theatergoers know, of course, that there’s a Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on 46th Street (Beauty and the Beast is playing there), but who among them knows how that house got its name? Yet the Lunts were still widely known well into the Sixties as the most distinguished husband-and-wife acting team in the modern history of the English-language theater, capable of selling out a show merely on the strength of their choosing to act in it.

How do such formidable reputations vanish so quickly and completely? Well, one answer is that the theater itself is no longer a major part of the American cultural conversation. (If you doubt it, ask a friend who doesn’t live in New York to name a living American playwright.) Another is that Lunt and Fontanne starred in only one feature film, the stagy, now-forgotten The Guardsman, and acted on TV just twice. For whatever reason, they felt their gifts were best displayed in the theater, and so they neglected to leave behind a permanent record of their work. Time was when actors could etch their names into the collective consciousness solely by appearing on stage, but with the invention of film, that time ended forever.

Katharine Cornell was as famous as the Lunts, shunned film and TV as they did, and now is no less forgotten. The only reason why Ruth Draper is remembered is because she was shrewd enough to make audio recordings of her self-written monologues, the existence of which kept her memory green even during the long years when they were out of print. (They’re now available on CD, and can be ordered here.)

Which brings us to the last of the Lunts’ fateful mistakes. Unlike Draper or their good friend Noël Coward, they weren’t writers, and unlike other better-remembered actors, they were notorious for appearing almost exclusively in custom-tailored two-cylinder vehicles unworthy of their great gifts. (The only play they introduced that has held the stage was Coward’s Design for Living.) As Kenneth Tynan, that shrewdest of drama critics, once remarked, “I wish the Lunts would test themselves in better plays. I wish I even felt sure that they knew a good script when they saw one. As things are, they have become a sort of grandiose circus act; instead of climbing mountains, they are content to jump through hoops.” Rarely have more damning words been written about more talented people.

For all these reasons, it strikes me as a bit odd that Alfred A. Knopf took the trouble to publish Margot Peters’ Design for Living: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne: A Biography. (That’s what I call a high-colonic title.) Mind you, it’s not a bad book, but there have been other biographies of the Lunts, and the only thing that distinguishes this one, so far as I can tell, is that it makes explicit mention of the long-standing rumors that both Lunt and Fontanne were homosexual, albeit without a shred of verifiable accompanying evidence. That seems a rather weak reed on which to hang a well-meaning but breathlessly written theatrical biography. Yes, I read it, but only because Knopf sent me a unsolicited review copy and I was desperate for diversion in the midst of more arduous literary chores.

Is there anything so evanescent as what happens on a stage? Paintings last for centuries, the written word for millennia, but performances and productions not captured on film or videotape are gone before they’re over. I’ve long suspected that this was why Jerome Robbins, who abandoned the ballet business to become the richest and most successful musical-comedy director of his generation, started making ballets again in 1969. His productions (especially Gypsy) were praised to the skies by some of the most knowledgeable critics who ever lived. But except for Peter Pan, which NBC taped for TV in 1960, they all vanished into thin air, whereas New York City Ballet performs every ballet Robbins thought worth preserving on a regular rotating basis–while Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne are barely more than names on a marquee.

This story has no moral, incidentally, unless it’s the one that starts Vanity, vanity. But, then, that’s a pretty good all-purpose moral, isn’t it?

On Tuesday night, I went to see Recent Tragic Events, the new play about 9/11 that opened Sunday at Playwrights Horizons (about which more in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal and here on “About Last Night”). Early in the evening, I noted with astonishment that the two principal characters not only were fans of the novels of Anthony Trollope (one plausibly, the other not) but thought The Way We Live Now to be his best book. It so happens that (1) I think so, too, (2) I happened to be rereading The Way We Live Now that very evening, and (3) I had a copy of it in my shoulder bag. Since Recent Tragic Events is about coincidences, I was pleased to be experiencing a big fat juicy one of my own.

I’m one of those benighted souls who prefers Trollope to Dickens, though “prefers” is a weak way of putting it, since I don’t like Dickens at all and have been more than mildly addicted to Trollope for a good many years. I don’t know what caused me to re-read The Way We Live Now this week (other than the long arm of coincidence), but I usually pick it up once a year. In fact, I like it so much that I wore out my original paperback copy and am now the proud owner of an elegant little “World’s Classics” miniature edition printed in 1962 on Bible paper and small enough to fit easily in the palm of one hand–unusually compact for a 960-page novel that is Trollope’s longest.

I like a lot of things about The Way We Live Now, among them the sheer festiveness with which it catalogues the moral disintegration of Victorian London. Trollope was a moralist of sorts, and The Way We Live Now is a vivid document of his change-and-decay-in-all-around-I-see brand of conservatism, but he was too fascinated by the spectacle of human nature not to tell his angry tale with the lip-smacking gusto of a man who knew that a big crook is still big.

I also like the dazzling concision with which so naturally expansive a writer is capable on occasion of making his points. At one point, Trollope describes the frankly cynical way in which Lord Nidderdale, an impecunious young noble, woos Marie Melmotte, the daughter of the aforementioned crook. Nidderdale is looking to marry money, and makes no bones about it. Says Trollope: “I doubt whether Lord Nidderdale had ever said a word of love to Marie Melmotte,–or whether the poor girl had expected it. Her destiny had no doubt been explained to her.” That second sentence is perfect.

Another aspect of The Way We Live Now that I admire more and more as I grow older is directly related to Trollope’s expansive tendencies. As a young reader, I particularly admired short, polished novels written from a tightly focused point of view. I still do–I think The Great Gatsby is the great American novel by an extra-long shot–but I’ve also learned to love the baggy inclusiveness of the triple-decker novel. The Way We Live Now is crammed full of characters, situations, and subplots, to all of which Trollope pays affectionate attention. If you judge novels solely by their neatness, you’ll find this one way too messy. I used to feel that way, but now I revel in the panache with which Trollope riffles through his snapshots of the various strata of London society. He’s out to show us the biggest possible picture, and like Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities, he succeeds with a vengeance.

One advantage of so amply proportioned a novel is that it leaves its readers room to grow. When I first read The Way We Live Now, more than a decade ago, I was completely caught up in the story of Augustus Melmotte, the brazen swindler who cons his way into Parliament. At the time, I was writing editorials for the New York Daily News (and, not coincidentally, had just read The Bonfire of the Vanities), and Melmotte, logically enough, seemed to me the book’s most convincingly realized character. I still think he’s pretty damned impressive, but now that I’ve settled into an uneasy middle age, I find myself far more interested in Roger Carbury, the fortysomething squire who rejects the mad hurly-burly of Melmotte’s corrupt world, falls in unrequited love with a sweet young girl who doesn’t reciprocate his ardor, and does his best to do the right thing by her even though it breaks his heart. When I was 35, Carbury’s dilemma struck me as stagy–rather too Victorian, if you know what I mean. Now that I’m 47, I find it both believable and deeply moving.

That’s the great thing about the large-scale novel of society and manners. Precisely because its canvas is so wide and varied, it can be seen from many different points of view, and so is less likely to go dead on you over time, the way art collectors speak of certain of their paintings as having gone “dead on the wall.” It’s not that I can readily imagine getting tired of The Great Gatsby or Black Mischief or Enemies, a Love Story, but who knows? After all, I might live a very long time (and would like to). Ivy Compton-Burnett confessed in old age that she no longer read Jane Austen because she knew her novels so well from frequent reading that they no longer held her attention. I can’t imagine ever saying such a thing about The Way We Live Now.

So when Heather Graham, the star of Recent Tragic Events, announced in her best party-girl voice that The Way We Live Now was her favorite novel, I giggled to myself. That wasn’t the most unlikely-sounding thing about Recent Tragic Events, but it definitely ranked in the top ten. I’m not saying that leggy young blondes can’t appreciate Trollope. Stranger things have happened…just not to me.

This morning’s Wall Street Journal has a fascinating story (no link, damn it) about the making of sitcoms, whose producers turn out to be as tightly rule-bound as lawyers who specialize in jury selection. I especially liked this paragraph:

Sitcom producers discovered long ago that living rooms offer a ready excuse for characters to gather, and the staircase lets characters enter and exist while talking. Writers are loth to monkey with what works: This fall, 67% of sitcoms on ABC, CBS and NBC feature a living room with a sofa and staircase.

I’m a classicist, I believe in rules, but…

Felix Salmon has posted some provocative thoughts about blog timeliness, custom-tailored for “About Last Night”:

One of the greatest things about blogs in general is that they’re much more personal than, say, the Wall Street Journal. Updating a website shortly after midnight every day is not personal: it’s mechanical. It also mitigates against the kind of impulsive postings which might not go down in internet history but which help to build community: the things which give your audience an idea of who you are and what makes you tick. “Ohmigod I just heard George Plimpton died,” maybe followed by a personal anecdote, is not exactly newspaper material, but it’s perfect for a weblog….

So the upsides to publishing on an as-and-when basis are many: your site stats increase, your readers become more loyal (if only because they visit you more often), your blog becomes more blog-like and less like a daily newspaper column, and it also, when it wants or needs to, becomes more timely. What are the downsides? For you, I’d say the main one would be that blogging would become more of a full-time occupation. At the moment, you might be doing your regular job during the day and then settling down in the evenings to do the blog, maybe after having mulled a number of different possible topics in the back of your head over the course of the day. If you change posting habits then you might find yourself blogging during hours of the day in which you had intended to do something else.

That said, no-one’s going to mind if you don’t update between the hours of nine and five, or if you do so only very occasionally. Do what works best for you, because that, I can guarantee you, is going to be what works best for your readers. I would only urge you not to sit on blog postings for hours after you’ve written them, just because you want to wait until a certain hour before you post. I simply cannot see why that does either your or your readers any favours at all.

This hit me where I live. I spent a lot of time (three years, off and on) thinking about the nature of blogging before I decided to launch “About Last Night,” and I worked out a lot of things in my head in advance of the first day’s postings. But blogging really is a new medium, with its own indigenous properties and natural laws, and after actually doing it for two months I’m only just beginning to grasp some of them. What Felix Salmon is saying may well be obvious to people who came to blogging first, as opposed to people with a long history of print-media journalism, with its deadline-driven timetables (to which I am a slave, as all of you who’ve been reading my recent postings will be all too aware). But it wasn’t obvious to me–at least not until my hard drive crashed and I found it impossible to keep to the kind of clockwork schedule I simply took for granted was as necessary on line as off.

I think I may already have been starting to realize some of this on my own. I’d noticed, for example, that the traffic for this site is lowest in the mornings–the very time I took for granted that most people would read it, the way they do a newspaper. Instead, the numbers start to spike upward around one p.m. on the East Coast, and you can see them continue to climb as the lunch hour moves across the continent. Had I expected that? No. Did it change my posting habits? No. It took a computer-related disaster to jolt me out of my print-based routine, and even then I felt odd, almost guilty, because I wasn’t hitting at the same time every day.

Old habits die hard, even when they’re ill-suited to new circumstances. I suspect this is especially true for middle-aged people who are stumbling into a brand-new conceptual world pioneered by younger folk. (As I remarked in this space a couple of weeks ago, advancing age brings wisdom and inflexibility in equal measure.) The trick is to see what’s under your nose, and what I seem to be seeing, thanks in part to Felix Salmon, is that the whole point of blogging is to do things your way, at your own pace, secure in the knowledge that the 24/7 nature of the medium will allow other people to do exactly the same thing.

As it happens, I was talking about all this yesterday with Our Girl in Chicago, who is considerably younger than I am and thus has found it easier to adapt to the intrinsic nature of the medium. In addition, we’re both enjoying joint blogging very much (an idea I got from 2 Blowhards, by the way), and it occurred to us at roughly the same time that this is no coincidence. Two-headed blogs are not only easier to keep in motion, but the unpredictable alternation of the two voices makes for a serendipitous variety of tone and topic that I find appealing. Yet that, too, is something you won’t find in newspapers and magazines, whose fixed periods of publication are antithetical to free conversational interplay.

As I announced on Monday, “About Last Night” will be updated on what Felix Salmon calls an “as-and-when” basis for the duration of the current computer crisis. But I now suspect that is likely to become a permanent arrangement once my iBook is up and running. Once again–and not for the first time–what initially seemed like a major disaster has actually had the effect of dynamiting an arbitrary routine and making me rethink the way I do things.

So here’s to the unforeseen…up to a point.

This is the inaugural installment of a recurring feature by OGIC that, like Terry’s “Almanac,” will provide profound or funny or otherwise arresting words–something I’d like to find in my next fortune cookie. Or, who knows, maybe something I have found in a fortune cookie. It will appear not daily, but as frequently or infrequently as fortune sees fit.

“On the way back to Tourves we drive past it again, Mont Sainte-Victoire. It looks bald, formidable, remote. It looks like it would kill you if you tried to paint it.”

Robert Cohen, Slate “Diary”

(1) It’s been an open secret for several months now, but I’m one of the judges for this year’s National Book Awards (I’m on the nonfiction panel). Our short list of nominees will be announced on October 7. We think we picked a very nice bunch of books.

(2) No, I didn’t have anything to do with Stephen King’s lifetime achievement award. I found out about it the same way you did.

(3) No, I don’t have an opinion about the award, because I’ve never read anything by Stephen King (I don’t much care for tales of horror). OGIC thinks you ought to have read at least some of his stuff before making up your mind about its quality (see below). I agree.

Fair enough?

“If one plays good music people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.”

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

I was mistaken when I said last week that you could email me at “ourgirlinchicago….” That email address is a mere flimsy fiction.

However, I don’t think Terry will mind if you write to me via his Arts Journal address–just make it easy on the poor guy and put “OGIC” in the subject line, would you?