About Last Night

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say:—
“We invaded you last night—we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:—
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:—

“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!”

Rudyard Kipling, “Dane-Geld”

Today has been an orgy of self-righteousness and pusillanimity. Tomorrow will be no different. To be sure, there is no shortage of those who claim to “be Charlie” and “stand with Charlie,” but there has long been a shortage—in France, I fear, a fatal one—of those who are prepared to do anything more than affect to support the cause of freedom. As for the rest of Europe, now we will learn what is left of its soul.

For my part, I can do no more than reprint the cartoons that appear below, which were originally printed on the cover of Charlie Hebdo. The New York Daily News and the Daily Telegraph declined to do as much. When they ran photographs of the magazine in their online news coverage, they pixelated the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad for which the staff of Charlie Hebdo was exterminated. In addition, the Associated Press is refusing to distribute images that contain such caricatures. Would that it didn’t need to be said, but it does: a newspaper that doesn’t believe in freedom of speech believes in nothing—not even itself.

May these acts of cowardice be forever remembered in the annals of journalism.

UPDATE: I am proud to report that the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is reprinting the above cartoon in Thursday’s editions.

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Washington Post (the news side, not the editorial page) have decided not to reprint or telecast images of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that led to the attack.

Charles Boyer appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? on Nov. 25, 1962. He was appearing on Broadway in the title role of Lord Pengo, a play by S.N. Behrman about Joseph Duveen, the celebrated English art dealer:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Along with his prolonged childhood Max kept the child’s confidence in the possibility of happiness. Unlike so many sensitive artists, he suffered no premature disillusionment, was not brought up against the brutality and ugliness of life before he was old enough to stand it. In consequence, he did not suffer from any of those inner wounds and hidden resentments that lead people unhappy in childhood to set up later as outsiders and rebels. Thirteen years of happiness had given him a basic faith in life which was to be like a sort of spiritual bank balance on which he could always draw for reassurance when things went wrong.”

David Cecil, Max: A Biography of Max Beerbohm

Yes, I’ve been fortunate beyond my wildest dreams and am well aware that it would be churlish to ask for more. Be that as it may, I still wish that I:

• Could read and speak French fluently

• Owned a Frank Lloyd Wright-style beach house on Florida’s Sanibel Island (this one would do quite nicely)

• Could play piano half as well as Nat Cole

• Were far more patient than I am

• Would someday get the chance to work on a musical (I know, I know, be careful what you wish for!)

• Had been friends with Louis Armstrong

• Knew how to do reasonably complex home repairs

• Owned an etching by Giorgio Morandi (this is my all-time favorite)

• Could sing and/or dance

• Had met Mrs. T years and years before I finally did

* * *

Gerry Mulligan’s New Sextet plays Mulligan’s “Just Want to Sing and Dance Like Fred Astaire.” The band also includes Dave Samuels on vibraphone, Tom Fay on keyboards, Mike Santiago on guitar, George Duvivier on bass, and Bob Rosengarden on drums:

From 2005:

I figure I’m entitled to a little more than my train fare and the satisfactions of a job well done. Obviously the White House agrees, which I assume is the reason why presidential appointees are given such handsome-looking documents to hang on their walls. It went without saying that I’d put mine in a first-class frame, one identical to the ones I use in the Teachout Museum—but where to hang the damn thing? It’s too big to fit in any of the remaining empty spots (of which there are no longer very many) on the walls of my minuscule one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment, and when I considered taking down a piece of art to make room for my commission, my heart sank.

I thought and thought, and suddenly it came to me: why not the bathroom? Not only is it tastefully decorated in cornflower blue and yellow, but it’s next to the living room, thus allowing me to show off for my visitors by leaving the door discreetly ajar. But would it be disrespectful to hang a presidential commission there? Though a friend assured me that many actors keep their Oscars in the bathroom, I wasn’t satisfied. Such a gesture smacked of phony humility….

Read the whole thing here.

“Children often have a sense of fun, but it is very rare for them to take a predominantly humorous view of life, still less an ironical pleasure in the spectacle of human folly. If humour comes into their daydreams at all, it is as comic relief to thrills and romance.”

David Cecil, Max: A Biography of Max Beerbohm

Mrs. T and I boarded a train in New York last Sunday, and twenty-six hours later we got off in West Palm Beach. The next day we drove to Sanibel Island. Since then I’ve read three and a half books, watched nine movies, taken a sunset cruise, plucked a stray coconut out of the Gulf of Mexico, and found a great new place to eat—but I haven’t written a single word that is destined for publication.

The two of us thought it would be wildly romantic to take a sleeper car to Florida, so I’m sorry to say that long-distance train travel chez Amtrak leaves much to be desired. Our roomette was cramped and shabby, the dining-car food strictly institutional, and the ride was too bumpy to permit easy sleeping. On the credit side, though, were the wonderfully kind people who looked after us on board and the ever-changing views from the windows of the tiny compartment into which we were shoehorned, as well as one seeming disadvantage that turned out to be a plus: Amtrak’s Silver Meteor, believe it or not, has no wi-fi. No sooner did it pull out of Penn Station than I was cut off from the outside world. No e-mail, no Twitter, no nothing.

Since there was also no point in complaining, I powered down my laptop and called time out, and what started as an enforced break soon turned into a full-fledged holiday. It helped that I’d already written and signed off on the two columns of mine that appeared in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, and that I didn’t have any other outstanding deadlines. As a result, I had no need and felt no compulsion to resume my usual schedule once we reached Sanibel. Instead I hit the beach, which is a few steps from our back door. Not only did I stop writing, but I read no books about which I plan to write. Yes, I tinkered with the script of a new play on which I’ve been working, but that was mostly for fun: I find it restful to snip away bits and pieces of superfluous dialogue, in much the same way that another person might enjoy sitting in the sun and whittling.

I suppose I could justify this protracted stretch of inactivity by claiming that I’ve been lying fallow, letting my creative batteries recharge themselves, but I’m not going to do any such thing. I don’t think inactivity needs to be justified. It took me the better part of a lifetime to figure out that you don’t need a reason to take it easy. Now that I’ve finally learned my lesson after years of compulsive overwork, I don’t propose to unlearn it by coming up with elaborate justifications for doing what I’ve been longing to do for weeks and weeks.

Pope Francis, it seems, agrees with me. “A time of rest, for those who have completed their work, is necessary, obligatory and should be taken seriously: by spending time with one’s family and respecting holidays as moments of spiritual and physical recharging,” he recently declared. So now I have it on impeccable authority (if you believe in authority, papal or otherwise) that watching the sun set, especially on Sanibel Island, is sufficient unto the day thereof, especially when I’m in the company of Mrs. T, who likes it as much as I do.

A couple of days ago a friend of mine posted as follows on Facebook: “I feel more purpose in cleaning out my closets—a/k/a, making my life less chaotic—than working on this article I’m supposed to be writing.” To which I replied, “I vote for clean closets. Articles will keep.” So they will, and so they have, though not, alas, forever. Today I start easing back into something more closely resembling my normal routine: I have to see a play in Fort Myers on Wednesday and review it on Thursday, and on Friday afternoon I’ll be flying up to New York to see two more shows on Broadway. But come Sunday I return to Sanibel, and when not actually earning my keep, I plan to keep on doing plenty of nothing.

* * *

Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald perform “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” from Porgy and Bess: