I’ve always been oddly unsentimental about objects, and I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s simply a manifestation of a preference that I mentioned a few months ago apropos of the rise of pay-per-song Web sites and the resulting decline of the record as art object: “I’m old-fashioned–but my attachment is to essences, not embodiments.” Or maybe it has more to do with the fact that I’ve spent the past quarter-century moving from one small apartment to another (two in Kansas City, one in Illinois, four in the New York area), a practice that tends to inhibit the accumulation of superfluous stuff.
Whatever the reason, I haven’t kept many souvenirs of my past life. Nearly all those dating from my childhood and adolescence–my old Roth violin, my high-school yearbooks, a scraggly pair of stuffed cats named Russell and Louise–are at my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A., which is where I expect they’ll stay. Beyond that, next to nothing remains. I’ve never saved the manuscripts of my books, for instance, and I got rid of all my tattered old clippings after putting together A Terry Teachout Reader. I sold two-thirds of my library when I moved to my present apartment, mainly in order to have room to hang the art I was starting to collect. I don’t keep programs from the performances I review, nor do I have any photograph albums (in fact, I don’t even own a camera). The only pictures I have on display are the ones of my parents, Our Girl in Chicago, and my old friend Nancy LaMott that are on my desk, plus a snapshot taken in an old-time photo booth immediately after I completed my first roller-coaster ride. A mottled, surf-pocked stone from the shore of Isle au Haut, the Maine island to which I traveled last fall in search of the spot that Fairfield Porter portrayed in a lithograph I own, rests atop my incoming mail. One of my paintings was done by a friend. And outside of a few inscribed books and a bare handful of unsorted photos crammed randomly in a drawer, that’s pretty much it. Except for these few relics, I live almost entirely in the present, surrounded by books, CDs, and the art on my walls.
If my uncluttered existence strikes you as austere, all I can say is that I’m not unsentimental about other things. I’m the easiest of weepers, always ready to turn on the taps while watching an old movie or listening to a piece of music with personal associations. Nor am I shy about quarrying my past life for literary purposes (one of my books is a memoir). Yet for whatever reason, I prefer to travel light–as lightly, that is, as a man who owns twenty prints, two paintings, a pastel, a Max Beerbohm caricature, a small assemblage by Paul Taylor, a cel set-up of Jerry Mouse, several hundred books, and a couple of thousand CDs is capable of traveling–and I never think about the things I haven’t saved.
So it was with no small amount of surprise that I found myself confronted the other day with three grocery sacks full of miscellaneous papers retrieved from an old desk I’d left behind in my previous apartment. I’d completely forgotten the contents of that desk, and though I didn’t expect them to include anything important, I thought I ought to give them a quick sifting just to be sure.
I threw out most of what I found. I saw no reason, for instance, to hang onto a two-inch-thick stack of photocopied pieces I’d written for the New York Daily News during my tenure as its classical music and dance critic, though I did shake my head at the thought of the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve published in the twenty-seven years since my very first concert review appeared in the Kansas City Star. Middle age has its cold consolations, one of which is the knowledge that you’re not nearly as important as you thought you were, or hoped someday to become. I used to save copies of everything I wrote, and for a few years I even kept an up-to-date bibliography of my magazine pieces! Now I marvel at the vanity that once led me to think my every printed utterance worthy of preservation.
Only one of those pieces held my attention for more than the time it took me to pitch it in the nearest wastebasket: a copy of the first piece I wrote for Commentary, a review of James Baldwin’s The Price of the Ticket published in December of 1985, six months after I moved to New York. I remember how hard I worked on it, and how proud I was to have “cracked” Commentary. Today it sounds hopelessly stiff and earnest, which is why I left it out of the Teachout Reader. What on earth could have possessed Norman Podhoretz to find a place for that immature effort in his book-review section? He told me the first draft was too “knowing,” the best piece of advice any editor has ever given me, and I revised it nervously, hoping to pass muster, never imagining that I would write hundreds more pieces for Commentary, eventually becoming its music critic. Would it have pleased me to know these things back in 1985? Or might it have dulled the tang of my first sale?
I didn’t expect to find a Metropolitan Opera program among my forgotten papers, though no sooner did I look at it than I knew why I’d saved it. I went to the Metropolitan Opera House on the evening of January 5, 1996, fully expecting to review the company premiere of Leos Janacek’s The Makropulos Case for the Daily News. Instead, I ended up writing a front-page story about how one of the singers in the production died on stage, a minute and a half into the first act. The opening scene of The Makropulos Case is set in a law office where Vitek, a clerk, is looking up the files for a suit that has been dragging on for close to a century. To symbolize the tortuous snarl of Gregor v. Prus, designer Anthony Ward turned the entire back wall of the set into a forty-foot-high filing cabinet containing hundreds of drawers. Enter Vitek, played by a character tenor named Richard Versalle. As the curtain rose, he made his entrance, climbed up a tall ladder and pulled a file out of one of the drawers. “Too bad you can only live so long,” he sang in Czech. Then he let go of the ladder and fell mutely to the stage, landing on his back with a terrible crash.
Three thousand people gasped. David Robertson, the conductor, waved the orchestra to a halt and shouted, “Are you all right, Richard?” Versalle didn’t speak or move, and the curtain was quickly lowered. I sat frozen in my aisle seat, stunned by what I had seen. Then I pulled myself together and ran to the press room to find out what had happened. A company spokesman told the rapidly growing band of critics and hangers-on what little he knew: Versalle had been rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital. We started firing questions at him. How old was Versalle? When did he make his Met debut? Did he have a wife and children? I scribbled the answers (63, 1978, yes) on my program and pushed through the crowd to the nearest pay phone, where I dropped a quarter in the slot, dialed the number of the Daily News city desk, and spoke three words that had never before crossed my lips other than in jest: “Get me rewrite.” Eight years later, I leafed through the program of that unfinished performance, looking at my barely decipherable notes. As souvenirs go, it was a good one, and I decided to keep it.
Almost as evocative was a sheaf of birthday cards given to me on my fortieth birthday, a month and a day after The Makropulos Case‘s abortive opening night. It was a strange and somber event, for my friend Nancy had died only a few weeks before, and I was nowhere near getting over the shock of her loss. Still, you only turn forty once (if at all), and I didn’t want to disappoint the friends who’d planned a party to mark the occasion, so we went through with it and had a surprisingly good time, considering. Tucked inside the cards was a short stack of photographs, most of them of my parents, my niece, and the various cats I’ve owned over the years. I saved four of the best ones, along with a fading snapshot of Harry Jenks, a half-blind Kansas City jazz pianist with whom I used to sit in back in my college days (he could play just like Art Tatum, by which I don’t mean sort of like Art Tatum), and a picture of Our Girl in Chicago standing in front of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park, Illinois, dressed in white from head to toe and looking like a warm summer day come to life.
I also found two wallet-sized photos of Libby Miller, an adored friend from Smalltown, U.S.A., with whom I ran a lemonade stand once upon a time. I had a crush on her but was too shy to do anything about it. Libby joined the Air Force after graduating from high school, and I played piano at her wedding. Then she vanished from sight, as the friends of our youth are all too prone to do, and I heard nothing more from her for a quarter-century. Not long ago she called me up from out of the blue, and I learned that she’d divorced and remarried, retired from the Air Force, settled down in rural Washington, and taken up watercolor painting as a full-time hobby. I Googled her as we talked, found one of her watercolors on the Web, and saw with a start that my long-lost friend had somehow transformed herself into Elizabeth Michailoff, a bonafide artist. Now I held two of her fresh-faced high-school pictures in my hand, marveling at the myriad changes that thirty years’ worth of living had wrought.
I slipped the pictures and birthday cards into my Makropulos Case program, left everything else for the garbage collector, and headed back to my apartment, feeling wistful and unsettled, the way we so often feel after a brief immersion in the irretrievable past. Two packages awaited me on my return. I slit open the first one and was astonished to find a gorgeous, near-abstract marine watercolor by Libby–or Elizabeth, as I suppose I ought to call her now. With it was a note: “I painted the tide flats in February–and I have enjoyed how it turned out. When I started thinking of a painting to send to you, I kept returning to it. I don’t know why. But I do know why I wanted to send you one. You were such a great friend to me at a time when I dearly needed someone I could go to and just be me. You gave me that gift and now in a very small way–I wanted to return the kindness. So I hope you do enjoy it.” I do, dear Libby, I do.
The second package contained a handsomely carpentered wooden box with an elegant latch and a Georgian-blue lid. Inside, I discovered to my amazement and delight, was a custom-made jigsaw puzzle that depicted the front cover of A Terry Teachout Reader. It was a belated birthday present from Our Girl in Chicago, very possibly the best one I’ve ever been given. I tucked my snapshot of Our Girl into the box and put it on one of my bookshelves, where I expect it will remain. Yes, I like to travel light, but no matter how many times I move between now and the end of my life, whenever that may be, I intend to hang onto that particular souvenir. Some things–not many, but some–are meant to be kept.