Archives for August 5, 2003

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