About Last Night

“All get what they want; they do not always like it.”

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

A reader writes, apropos of last week’s posting on vicious critics, in which I argued that “sometimes it’s your duty–your responsibility–to drop the big one. But you shouldn’t enjoy it, not ever. And you should always make an effort to be modest when writing about people who can do something you can’t, even when you don’t think they do it very well.” He thinks otherwise:

Why not take pleasure in “dropping the big one” on works that are truly hateful? (I’m thinking of stuff like Ancient Evenings, the films of Ken Russell or Peter Greenaway, The Night Porter, Piss Christ.) These works present issues that go way beyond quality of execution. They are fundamentally anti-human, not to mention anti-art. As such, their infliction on the culture should evoke righteous anger and disgust from any critic with blood in his veins. As I see it, identifying the false, the mindless, or the pretentious (which so often are taken for the real thing) is no less important than heralding the beautiful and the wise–and should afford the critic no less satisfaction. Of course, I don’t have in mind here works that are bad in a trivial or routine way. I’m speaking of stuff that is importantly or dangerously bad.

I think this is a fair distinction, and I won’t deny that I smiled quietly as I piled up dynamite around, say, Franco Zeffirelli’s Metropolitan Opera production of Carmen, with which I dealt rather summarily in the New York Daily News a few years ago:

The Met chorus covered itself with glory, but the orchestra was out of sorts, and James Levine conducted as if his mind were elsewhere. I sympathize: Mine was, too. I kept thinking, “Has everybody at the Met forgotten that ‘Carmen’ is a French opera?” Evidently so: Thursday’s performance featured a German Carmen, a Spanish Don José, a Romanian Micaela, a Russian Escamillo and an Italian director. The results were as confused as the casting. Bizet’s elegant, deadly opera is a feather-light soufflé with a pinch of cyanide; this production is a Wiener Schnitzel smothered in red sauce. Too bad the Met can’t send it back to the kitchen.

That was fairly nasty, and we’re not even talking anti-human anti-art, just a piece of gold-plated junk. So sue me. (No, don’t.) But I will say this in my own defense: now that I mostly pick and choose my own assignments, I find I want to spend as little time as possible putting myself through hell on the aisle. I’ve come to feel that as a rule, the thing I do best is point people in the direction of that which and those whom I love. Let somebody else ice “Piss Christ.” I’d rather spend my remaining hours on earth telling you how beautiful “The Open Window” is, especially if you’ve never seen it before. In the long run, silence may be the most powerful form of negative criticism.

Incidentally, please don’t bother to remind me of what I just said the next time you catch me beating up on a bad play in The Wall Street Journal. I mean, you don’t have to sit through it, right?

P.S. For those youngsters who only know Randy Newman as a composer of sappy movie scores, he’s had his moments, as the title of this post recalls.

“I detest a man who knows that he knows.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Holmes-Laski Letters

I’ve been reading a lot of biographies in recent weeks (I’m judging a literary award), and I’m struck by the fact that so many of them, including several of the best ones, start out more or less like this:

“In an old barn fixed up to serve as a studio, Arshile Gorky backed away from the canvas on his easel.”

“Alexander Hamilton realized instantly that he would die.”

“Guilty. He heard the verdict and flinched.”

“‘I am going to Washington Saturday night to make a speech at the Gridiron Club dinner,’ H. L. Mencken wrote to a friend on December 7, 1934. ‘This is a dreadful ordeal for me, and I bespeak the prayers of all Christian people.'”

In case you didn’t guess, the last of these books is my own The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, so I think I can poke fun at this particular stylistic quirk with a fairly clear conscience. Yes, jumping in at the deep end can be a fine way to lure the reader into the tent, but it’s also becoming a trifle overfamiliar, and I wonder if perhaps the time has finally come to put it out to pasture, once and for all.

I don’t mean that starting a book in medias res can’t still be effective, even brilliantly so. Virtually all of Kingsley Amis’ novels begin that way (“‘They made a silly mistake, though,’ the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory”), propelling the reader into the midst of the action in much the same way you might shove a nervous paratrooper out the hatch. But biographies aren’t novels, much less magazine articles, and there’s something to be said for launching them in a no-nonsense manner. Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers (out of print, believe it or not) has the best of both worlds, leading off with a conventional fanfare, then slipping in a blue note: “Jay Vivian Chambers was born on April 1, 1901–April Fool’s Day, as he liked to point out.” Very neat.

As for the best of all possible biographies, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, it gets underway with a preamble worthy of a Haydn symphony:

To write the Life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endowments, or his various works, has been equalled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.

To paraphrase what John Coltrane once said about Stan Getz, we’d all write like that if we could. Failing that, we do the best we can, and I will confess that as of this moment, my brief life of George Balanchine will probably begin with the premiere of one of his greatest ballets, Serenade. I could always change my mind, though, and I’m inclined to start my Louis Armstrong biography on the day he was born (which wasn’t July 4, 1900, alas, though Armstrong liked to pass off that superlatively resonant date as his bonafide birthday).

Your thoughts?

Courtesy of my fellow artsjournal.com blogger Greg Sandow, I read a terrific piece from Opera News about the gradual disappearance of opera on public television. It seems the ratings just aren’t there–nobody wants to watch opera on TV, or on PBS, anyway. (And it’s not just opera. When did you last see a first-rate ballet on public TV?)

Two telling quotes. The first is from John Goberman, who produces Live at Lincoln Center for PBS:

In a way, we’re denying the use of our airwaves to a gigantic number of people by not offering something that more will find appealing. I’m not necessarily talking about pandering. I just feel it’s my obligation to deal realistically with our potential audience. I wouldn’t put an opera on that I thought would appeal to practically no one, or even an opera people thought they might want to see but if they saw it, I thought they would hate it. Is Porgy and Bess an easier sell than Dead Man Walking? Yes. With television, you have to keep in mind that you’re dealing with access to the greatest number of people. In the same way that you wouldn’t put on a specialized opera in Madison Square Garden or at Yankee Stadium, there is the same sort of calculation with what we’re doing here.

The second is from Paul Kellogg, the general and artistic director of New York City Opera and the man responsible for making NYCO the most interesting big-city opera company in America:

Lincoln Center and Live from Lincoln Center and PBS are all interested in works that have a very broad public appeal. When I first came here, six years ago, John Goberman said we would have the final word on what we would broadcast. Well, we did wind up broadcasting a couple of things that were not of huge public interest–Lizzie Borden and Paul Bunyan. I was idealistic in those days. I still am, but back then I certainly thought these operas would have an audience, that a loyal audience that turned on Live from Lincoln Center for whatever was on would become involved. But that is not how this works. So, increasingly, what television audiences are asking for–and this is being responded to by the network and the sponsors and the whole enterprise of Live from Lincoln Center–are operas that have a name and a broad public appeal. I don’t use the word “warhorses.” I would say, things that are generally known to a wide public. This year there’s just nothing in our repertory that works. I would love to broadcast Dead Man Walking. It is and would be TV-friendly. But we are one of many constituents who make up Lincoln Center. And Live from Lincoln Center now determines what it is that it wants to broadcast.

I want to add two things:

(1) Three cheers to Paul Kellogg for telling the truth. Not many people in his position would do that in public.

(2) If this is the kind of calculation PBS is making about its arts coverage, then there’s no justification whatsoever for the existence of PBS–that is, for a subsidized, “public,” non-commercial TV network that presumably exists to do what the commercial networks won’t do, starting with the dissemination of high art. None. Zero. I’m picking up a strong whiff of hypocrisy here, and I don’t like it one bit. To hell with Live at Lincoln Center. Screw Ken Burns. Pull the plug and leave the job to the commercial arts channels, which don’t pretend to be anything other than profit-making entities. At least they’re honest about it. PBS isn’t.

Theodore Dalrymple is in a fine old change-and-decay-in-all-around-I-see mood in the current issue of City Journal, wherein he manages to blame everything from Marilyn Manson to S&M on the 1960 unbanning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book he describes as “radically humorless,” placing a few choice examples in evidence. To be sure, plucking dumb sentences out of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is like shooting dead fish in a small barrel, but Dalrymple goes unerringly to the worst line in the book, which also happens to be my personal candidate for the title of Silliest Sentence Ever Emitted by an Allegedly Major Writer: “Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd.”

If my memory is functioning correctly, this is the very sentence Max Beerbohm had in mind when he pronounced his immortal epitaph on the creator of Lady Chatterley and her lascivious gamekeeper:

Poor D. H. Lawrence. He never realized, don’t you know–he never suspected that to be stark, staring mad is somewhat of a handicap to a writer.

I really, really, really wish I’d said that.

Here’s a great fact–the film screened most frequently at the White House during the past half-century was High Noon. (Bill Clinton saw it 20 times.) Bravo is airing a documentary this Thursday about movies at the White House, and it’s full of similarly toothsome facts, courtesy of Paul Fisher, the official White House projectionist, who kept a log of the 5,000 movies he showed there between 1953 and 1986.

Another statistic worth recording for what it’s worth, if anything: Jimmy Carter watched 580 movies, more than any other president.

“Today’s literature: prescriptions written by patients.”

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

I was dining on the Upper West Side the other evening with a composer friend (the one who sings Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme, as a matter of fact), and we got to playing a game that we dubbed “Canonical Death Match.” You play it by rating classical composers on a scale of zero to 10–comparatively. If Bach is a 10, what’s Poulenc? (Answer: 7.) Or Wagner? (That’s when we started throwing rolls.)

The comparative aspect of the game is what makes it interesting. The reigning cultural orthodoxy of the present moment states that all values are relative, so invidious comparisons are naturally discouraged on penalty of contemptuous sneers. But we all know the reigning cultural orthodoxy of the present moment is hogwash, even if we wouldn’t necessarily care to say so in the faculty lounge with our pants down. Of course Joseph Conrad is better than Toni Morrison–not just as far as I’m concerned, but period–and anybody who doesn’t know it or won’t admit it is a dolt and a buffoon. In the immortal words of W. S. Gilbert, “In short, whoever you may be,/To this conclusion you’ll agree,/When everyone is somebodee,/Then no one’s anybody!”

After disposing of a couple of dozen composers and a bottle of wine, my friend and I started playing the desert-island game. In our version, you can put five works of art into your bag before departing for the proverbial desert island, and you have to decide right now. No dithering–the enemy is at the front door, lasers blazing. What do you stuff in the bag?

The flavor of “In the Bag” is obviously somewhat different from “Canonical Death Match,” because it’s not about absolute values but arbitrary preferences. Yes, I grant you that Bleak House is a great book, but would I grab it if the building were on fire? Not a chance–I’m a Trollope man. And top-of-the-head answers are of the essence, lest you find the temptation to posture overwhelming. (Why, yes, I’d take Beethoven’s Ninth and War and Peace….)

In the interests of stimulation and outrage, I’ve decided to play “In the Bag” each Monday as a regular feature of “About Last Night.” You are welcome–nay, encouraged–to send in your comments, which may range from Nice list this week, dude to Are you serious? I never heard anything so pretentious in my life! I, in turn, do solemnly swear that my lists will be utterly unpremeditated and unsparingly honest, even if I look into my secret heart and realize that what I really want to see at the bottom of the bag this morning is a DVD of The Dirty Dozen. (Hey, these things happen.) I will also invite selected colleagues to play the game from time to time, so long as they agree to swear the same blood oath on a copy of The Secret Agent.

So here goes. As of this moment, my top-five in-the-bag list, subject to change at the drop of a hat, is as follows:

FILM: Alfred Hitchcock, Shadow of a Doubt

PLAY: Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler, Sweeney Todd

BALLET: George Balanchine/Paul Hindemith, The Four Temperaments

PAINTING: Paul Cézanne, “The Garden at Les Lauves”

BOOK: Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Brickbats, anyone?