About Last Night

“Art, and the summer lightning of individual happiness: these are the only real goods we have.”

Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts

A couple of months ago, I hung a poster over my front door, a reproduction of a still life consisting of three boxes, a cup, and a jug, all floating in a neutral-colored void. The painter’s name appears nowhere on the poster, which came from a still-life show at Washington’s Phillips Collection, my favorite museum. Ever since I put it up, at least one visitor per week has asked me who did the painting. You wouldn’t think so plain an image would attract so much attention–I have far more eye-catching items on my walls–but there’s something about it that speaks to a certain kind of person.

Not to keep you in suspense, but the painting in question is a 1953 oil by Giorgio Morandi called, simply, “Still Life.” Most of Morandi’s paintings are called “Still Life.” He was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1890, and died there in 1964, and he spent most of his seemingly uneventful life arranging and rearranging a dozen or so boxes, cups, jugs, bottles, and pitchers on a tabletop, and painting them over and over again. Sometimes he made etchings of his carefully arranged objects, and from time to time he painted a landscape. That’s about all there is to say about him, really, except that he was a very great artist, which is more than enough to say about anybody.

What makes Giorgio Morandi’s paintings so special? To begin with, most people don’t seem to find them so. Though Morandi is renowned in his native Italy, he is unknown in this country save to critics, collectors, and connoisseurs. It’s easy to see why. His art is too quiet and unshowy, too determinedly unfashionable, to draw crowds. It creates its own silence. “Curiously, these deceptively modest paintings, drawings, and prints seem to elicit only two responses: extreme enthusiasm or near-indifference. And yet, this is not surprising, since Morandi’s art makes no effort to be ingratiating or to put itself forward in any way….For anyone who pays attention, the microcosm of Morandi’s tabletop world becomes vast, the space between objects immense, pregnant, and expressive.”

That quote is from Karen Wilkin’s Giorgio Morandi. Wilkin is one of America’s finest art critics (as well as a damned good freelance curator), and her profusely illustrated monograph makes the case for Morandi far better than I could ever hope to do. What I wish I could do is tell you to go right out today and look at a dozen Morandis, but you can’t, unless you happen to live in Bologna, in which case you can go to the Museo Morandi and look at them to your heart’s content. Most major American museums in America own a Morandi or two, and sometimes they even hang them. The Phillips often has one of its two oils on display, and in recent months I’ve seen Morandis in Princeton and St. Louis. But I’ve never seen one in New York, except for the reproduction in my living room. Somebody in this country is collecting them–Morandi’s etchings are way out of my modest price range–but it clearly isn’t MoMA or the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Barring a quick side trip to Bologna or Washington, your best bet is to purchase a copy of Giorgio Morandi. I’ve given away several copies as presents. Only last week, I gave one to a friend who noticed my Morandi poster and asked about it. Should that ring the bell, you can buy a poster of your own. You will then be officially enrolled in the International Society of Morandi Fanatics. We don’t have meetings–we just trade occasional e-mails about what’s hanging where. Feel free to advise me about domestic Morandi sightings. And if any of my wealthy readers are feeling moderately generous, a gift of a Morandi still-life etching would not go unappreciated.

A reader invited me to post “some words on your working life as a critic.” To this end, he submitted the following questionnaire:

Does having to write about something ever diminish the pleasure you take from it? No, but knowing I have to write about it first thing tomorrow morning sometimes does. Taking notes at a performance takes away part of the fun, so I try to do it as infrequently as possible.

Do you read, listen to music, sitting, lying down? I read lying down and listen sitting up.

Do you write in the morning, evening? Full, empty stomach? Take coffee? I usually start writing shortly before the deadline. Prior to Monday, I generally managed not to write at night (at least not very often), but that went out the window as soon as this blog went live. Stomach contents don’t seem to matter. Except for the odd mocha frappuccino, I rarely drink coffee other than to be sociable.

Do you ever work in an, ahem, merry state? Surely you jest, sir!

Do you worry, prolific as you are, that you won’t get all around your subject? Jeepers, why worry? Nobody ever gets all around his subject, least of all me.

Do you, did you ever consciously imitate any style? Oh, Lord, yes. In fact, I once wrote an essay about this very subject, which will be reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader, out next spring from Yale University Press.

Who are your critical influences? Originally Edmund Wilson, more recently Edwin Denby, Joseph Epstein, Clement Greenberg, and Fairfield Porter. I would be happy to be a tenth as good as any of them.

What do you try to do in a review? Not to be cute, but I try to write pieces that are (A) cleanly written enough not to give my editors any unnecessary trouble and (B) personal enough that they sound like me talking. Beyond that, I leave it to the muse.

Do you have an idea of what you’re going to write before you do it? Usually, but rarely more than the title and the first few sentences. On occasion, though, I just sit down and wing it. (So far as I know, by the way, there’s no correlation between the length of time I spend writing a piece and its quality.)

How many words a day? It depends on what’s due. If absolutely necessary, I can manage 2,500 polished words between sunrise and bedtime. In the immortal words of James Burnham, “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.” But I try not to write that much in a single day. It’s not exactly compatible with having a life.

Do you revise? Endlessly–but I hope it doesn’t show.

“I never saw a good ballet that made me think.”

Arlene Croce, Afterimages

A friend writes:

Difficult, is it not, to know the effect of one’s literary efforts. My sense is that H. L. Mencken’s literary reputation is much lowered after the printed discussion of your Mencken biography–and yet I believe that you have great admiration for Mencken and showed it in your book. Does Mencken’s reputation deserve to be lowered? I rather doubt that it does. My sense is that you were trying to straighten some things out–Mencken’s anti-Semitism, among others–and a coarse public (intellectuals among that public) coarsely took the information you provided to disqualify Mencken. Not sure I have any interesting explanation for all this, but I wonder if some of the problem doesn’t inhere in biography itself.

I’ve been thinking about the same thing, and coming to roughly the same conclusion. I don’t think it’s a biographer’s job to be an excuse-maker, much less a hagiographer. I thought Mencken was big enough to be written about honestly, flaws and all, and I certainly didn’t write The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, my most recent book, in order to take him down a peg or two. I admired him when I started writing it, and I still do, with strong reservations but nonetheless wholeheartedly. Many reviewers agreed with me, and nearly all of those who didn’t thought I treated him fairly and left room for the reader to make up his own mind–which was exactly what I had tried to do. So far as I know, the only people who slammed The Skeptic in a snarky way were a handful of extreme Mencken buffs certain their idol could do no wrong (several of whom made a point of posting their opinions on amazon.com, for which I was somewhat less than grateful).

All this notwithstanding, I fear my friend is right. At least in the short run, Mencken’s literary standing does seem to have been diminished by the publication of a balanced biography that pays proportionate attention to his dark side. Meaning…what? The easiest answer, of course, is that Mencken did deserve to be taken down a peg or two, and I accomplished the feat in spite of myself (which doesn’t reflect very well on me, does it?). Or perhaps, as my friend suggests, there is indeed something in the nature of biography that necessarily diminishes its subjects (not exactly a comforting thought, since I’m about to start writing another one).

More likely, the problem is that most people simply find it hard to take men as they are–to live with the uncomfortable but undeniable fact that we are all indissoluble mixtures of good and bad, wise and foolish, generous and selfish. “I do not believe,” Somerset Maugham wrote in Don Fernando, “that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him, would not seem a monster of depravity; and also I believe that there are very few who have not at the same time virtue, goodness and beauty.” (That might make a good warning sticker for the cover of the paperback of The Skeptic.) You’d think we’d have figured that out by now, but when it comes to the people we admire most, I’m not sure anybody really knows it, not in his secret heart.

I know, I know, hybridization is the hallmark of post-postmodern art, but lots of people still stubbornly insist on disliking works of art they find difficult to pigeonhole. I suspect that’s why Hollywood Homicide slipped through the cracks so quickly, and I know it’s why Mary Foster Conklin isn’t nearly as popular as she ought to be–she’s not quite jazz, not quite cabaret, and not even slightly worried about it. She sings what she wants the way she wants, and if you don’t get it, somebody else will. Me, I think she’s the best cabaret singer on the East Coast (Wesla Whitfield being the best cabaret singer on the West Coast–they don’t sing a whole lot of cabaret in between coasts), so I made sure I was at Danny’s Skylight Room last week for the opening of “Caught in the Trance: The Songs of Matt Dennis,” Conklin’s first single-composer show ever.

You know Matt Dennis, even though you don’t think you do. He wrote the music for “Angel Eyes,” “Everything Happens to Me,” “Let’s Get Away From It All,” “The Night We Called It a Day,” and a half-dozen other blue-chip standards that get sung all the time. Conklin sang them at Danny’s, but she also left plenty of room for such lesser-known gems as “That Tired Routine Called Love,” “Where Am I to Go?,” “Compared to You,” and “Blues for Breakfast” (“No coffee, please”). In between tunes, she talked about Dennis and his lyricists, wittily and charmingly and never excessively. She brought along an amazingly hot band led by pianist-arranger John di Martino, whose dapper, Shearingesque arrangements were unfailingly appropriate. I don’t think I’ve ever heard tastier drumming on a cabaret gig than that supplied by Ron Vincent. There was even a printed program!

As for Conklin herself, I can’t do any better than quote from what I wrote about her in “Second City” a couple of years ago: “Mary Foster Conklin…started out as an actress, and her style is precisely balanced between jazz and cabaret. Scratch her witty tough-girl-from-Jersey patter and you’ll find a sensitive artist (but not frail!) with a wide-ranging, boldly colored voice and an open ear for offbeat material.”

Conklin and her band will be returning to Danny’s July 23 and 24 for two more performances of “Caught in the Trance.” Both shows start at 9:15.

“Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally, unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which it is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand.”

Henry James, “Ivan Turgenieff”

I’ve seen a whole lot of Pilobolus Dance Theatre over the years, but familiarity has yet to breed contempt, which is why I was sitting on the aisle at the Joyce Theater last night, watching with delight as they performed two new works, “Star-Cross’d” and “Wedlock,” and two old standbys, “Walklyndon” and “Day Two.”

As always, I was happy (but no longer surprised) to see that much of the crowd consisted of New Yorkers who don’t make a habit of going to dance concerts. Pilobolus’ light-hearted style, an unabashedly sexy combination of dance, gymnastics, and performance art, appeals not just to dance buffs but to audiences of all kinds. You don’t have to know anything about dance to revel in a piece like “Day Two,” in which the dancers take their curtain calls while spinning and sliding crazily across a water-covered stage. The setting is pure Pilobolus, a hot, steamy jungle of the mind inhabited by six all-but-naked people who enact a series of mysterious rituals apparently intended to propitiate the god of fertility. At the end, the stage floor seems to buckle and the dancers suddenly rip through it, an effect as exhilarating as the launch of a rocket.

But is it really dance? Even Arlene Croce, a longtime admirer of the troupe, insisted on calling Pilobolus “a company of acrobatic mimes rather than dancers,” and the distinction is more than mere hair-splitting. What Pilobolus does is not ballet (though its members frequently fly through the air) and not quite modern dance (though they usually perform barefoot). The group’s movement vocabulary is designed not to show off the body in motion but to exploit its sculptural properties in order to create theatrical illusion–hence the trompe l’oeil effects that are Pilobolus’ trademark.

Arguments about the definition of dance are about as productive as arguments about the meaning of life. Yet this ambiguity is part of what makes Pilobolus’ work so interesting. The elusive beauty of the company’s sleight-of-torso tricks, combined with a consistently imaginative use of music (much of it popular) and a generous touch of slapstick (if cream pies were cheaper, Pilobolus would throw them), also has much to do with its accessibility. When the curtain goes up and a half-dozen handsome dancers come running on stage and start tying themselves into exotic knots and strange, almost-familiar shapes, only a hopeless prig would worry about whether the results are really, truly dance.

Alison Chase’s “Star-Cross’d,” announced as a “premiere-in-progress,” turned out to be a lovely exercise in seemingly plotless lyricism with a show-stopping opening tableau: the lights come up on five dancers who appear to be floating high above the stage, upside down. (Presumably the Shakespearean angle will become clearer as the piece continues to take shape.) First viewings of unfinished works tend to be deceptive, but “Star-Cross’d” already looks like a keeper to me. Jonathan Wolken’s “Wedlock,” by contrast, is a suite of eight short vignettes about relationships, some jokey and others serious, fun to watch but not nearly as compelling as “Star-Cross’d.” As for the classics, “Walklyndon,” a zany bit of Ernie Kovacs-like pantomime danced (so to speak) in silence, is as infallibly funny as ever, while “Day Two,” the company’s signature piece de facto, continues to cast its inscrutable spell. Renee Jaworski, the company’s resident blonde, was slightly injured, so Rebecca Jung, my all-time favorite Pilobolus alumna, came back to dance her old part in “Day Two.” It was pure pleasure to see her striking face and strong, shapely legs and feet again after an absence of several years.

This is the last week of Pilobolus’ annual month-long run at the Joyce, and all three programs will be seen at least once more between now and Saturday night. I’ll be back on Saturday afternoon. When it comes to Pilobolus, once is never enough for me.