About Last Night

Tyrone Power appears as a guest on Person to Person, hosted by Edward R. Murrow. This episode was originally telecast live on December 20, 1957, by CBS:

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

“If anyone not a moron has determined to kill your husband, he will be killed. Nothing is simpler than to kill a man; the difficulties arise in attempting to avoid the consequences.”

Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

A Terry Teachout Reader, my self-anthology, came out sixteen years ago. I’ve published hundreds of pieces on various subjects since then, and I have no plans to put together a sequel to the Teachout Reader, so I’ve launched a series of occasional posts drawn from my fugitive essays, articles, and reviews. I hope you like this one, which came from a 2004 review of Bright Young Things, the film version of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies.

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Like so many other novelists of his generation, Waugh was keenly interested in how films “make things happen” on the screen by showing “actions and incidents” instead of allowing characters to explain their motivations at length. In Vile Bodies he translated this essentially visual approach into words on paper, depicting London in the Twenties in a tumbling rush of fragmentary scenes and spare, elliptical dialogue that suggests far more than it states. Nothing could have been so self-consciously modern. Yet the uproariously funny Vile Bodies turns out to be the darkest of “comic” novels, one whose inhabitants are all hurtling gaily toward their doom. It’s anything but surprising to learn that Waugh’s first wife left him while he was writing Vile Bodies, or that he converted to Catholicism eight months after it was published. Every page is scented with the anguish of a disillusioned young man searching for meaning in a world gone grossly wrong.

“They are the greatest living masters of the subtlest and kindliest of the arts.”

Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks

Lenny Bruce appears on The Tonight Show. This episode, which was portrayed on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, was originally telecast by NBC on April 5, 1959:

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

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

From 2006:

One of my mother’s most treasured heirlooms is a copy of the second edition of Our Baby’s First Seven Years, the “baby book” in which she set down the particulars of my early childhood. I flipped through its yellowed pages yesterday, and as I set out on the longish three-leg trip (two hours by land, two at the airport in St. Louis, three in the sky) from Smalltown, U.S.A., back to New York City, it occurs to me that you might be amused by some of what I found there….