Archives for May 13, 2004

Now on this out of season afternoon
Day schools which cater for the sort of boy
Whose parents go by Pullman once a month
To do a show in town, pour out their young
Into the sharply red October light.
Here were The Drive and Buckhurst Road converge
I watch the rival gangs and am myself
A schoolboy once again in shivering shorts.
I see the dust of sherbet on the chin
Of Andrew Knox well-dress’d, well-born, well-fed,
Even at nine a perfect gentleman,
Willie Buchanan waiting at his side–
Another Scot, eruptions on his skin.
I hear Jack Drayton whistling from the fence
Which hides the copper domes of “Cooch Behar.”
That was the signal. So there’s no escape.
A race for Willow Way and jump the hedge
Behind the Granville Bowling Club? Too late.
They’ll catch me coming out in Seapink Lane.
Across the Garden of Remembrance? No,
That would be blasphemy and bring bad luck.
Well then, I’m for it. Andrew’s at me first,
He pinions me in that especial grip
His brother learned in Kobe from a Jap
(No chance for me against the Japanese).
Willie arrives and winds me with a punch
Plum in the tummy, grips the other arm.
“You’re to be booted. Hold him steady, chaps!”
A wait for taking aim. Oh trees and sky!
Then crack against the column of my spine,
Blackness and breathlessness and sick with pain
I stumble on the asphalt. Off they go
Away, away, thank God, and out of sight
So that I lie quite still and climb to sense
Too out of breath and strength to make a sound.

Now over Polegate vastly sets the sun;
Dark rise the Downs from darker looking elms,
And out of Southern railway trains to tea
Run happy boys down various Station Roads,
Satchels of homework jogging on their backs,
So trivial and so healthy in the shade
Of these enormous Downs. And when they’re home,
When the Post-Toasties mixed with Golden Shred
Make for the kiddies such a scrumptious feast,
Does Mum, the Persil-user, still believe
That there’s no Devil and that youth is bliss?
As certain as the sun behind the Downs
And quite as plain to see, the Devil walks.

John Betjeman, “Original Sin on the Sussex Coast”

My art engine has finally turned over after a week-long stall. Here’s what’s I’ve been up to:

– I hung the Teachout Museum’s latest acquisition, Neil Welliver’s Night Scene, a thirteen-color woodcut (my first) made in 1982. I spent a pleasant hour yesterday afternoon standing on a rickety ladder, juggling three other prints in order to find exactly the right spot for “Night Scene.” Figuring out where to hang a piece of art is half the fun of owning it. (Well, maybe not half, but you know what I mean.)

As it happens, I already own one Welliver print, an unsigned lithograph called “Canada Geese,” so I rehung that one in my sleeping loft, which strikes me as the very height of low-budget luxury!

– I read George R. Gaddis’ Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America. Austin was the man who turned Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, long a sleepy backwater far from the beaten path of even the most assiduous museumgoers, into a major center of activity for the modern movement in America. (It was solely because of Austin that the world premiere of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts took place at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and he also played a key role in bringing George Balanchine to this country.)

Gaddis’ book is solid and informative, but I’m struck by a major failure of interpretation on his part: he doesn’t seem to have understood that the common thread running through many, perhaps most of Chick Austin’s innovations, from Four Saints to his twin passions for the neo-romanticists and seventeenth-century baroque art, was his taste for camp. (I’m not absolutely sure, but I don’t think the word “camp” appears anywhere in Magician of the Modern.) This strikes me as close to inexcusable, especially given the fact that his book is reasonably frank about Austin’s bisexuality. While you certainly don’t have to be gay to grasp such matters–I’m as straight as a stick–it’s hard to imagine a homosexual writer making the same mistake.

– I’ve taken of late to viewing movies in half-hour chunks of in-between time, a practice facilitated by my digital video recorder. Last night I finished watching Howard Zieff’s Hearts of the West, a sweet little spoof of the “B” westerns of the Thirties. Jeff Bridges, the star, looked impossibly youthful in 1975. It’s hard to imagine that he would someday metamorphose into the Mitchumesque star of noir-flavored films like The Fabulous Baker Boys (which I adore).

– Today I’m nibbling at They Live by Night, Nicholas Ray’s 1949 film version of Edward Anderson’s Depression-era novel Thieves Like Us. It was Ray’s first movie, the only one of his major films I hadn’t seen (it’s not available on DVD, and I’m not sure there was ever a VHS version, either–thank you, Turner Classic Movies!). More as I make my way through it, but I’m already dazzled by Ray’s pioneering use of a helicopter to film the opening sequence. It’s excitingly rough and jumpy, nothing like the slick, swoopy aerial cinematography to which we’ve long since become accustomed.

– Now playing on iTunes: Bill Evans’ 1977 trio version of “You Must Believe in Spring,” newly reissued on CD. Mmmm.

Enough for now. Alex Ross will be knocking on my door at any moment for a private view of the Teachout Museum. This reminds me to remind you that Alex now has a Web site, The Rest Is Noise, which I added to the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column last night. It’s not quite a blog (though it seems to be evolving into one willy-nilly), but it does contain links to Alex’s New Yorker essays on music, which I never fail to find provocative and stimulating.

After lunch, it’s back to the grindstone (I’m in the process of updating my playgoing schedule for the next couple of months), after which I’ll be heading down to the Atlantic Theater to see Jay Johnson’s The Two and Only, a one-man play by and about a ventriloquist, which I suppose means that it’s really a two-man play, right? Either way, you’ll be reading about it in The Wall Street Journal at some point in the near future.

In the meantime, enjoy the weather–I see warm sunshine out my office window, and hope to experience it at first hand sooner or later!

It’s not exactly news that I’m no great fan of Tony Kushner and his public utterances, theatrical or otherwise, but sometimes we do find ourselves on the same page. On Tuesday Kushner gave a speech at a conference of the League of American Theatres and Producers. Most of it was variously silly and self-righteous, as is Kushner’s wont, but toward the end he delivered himself of this paragraph:

My little niece, Ciara, who lives in Vienna, has listened all her young life to opera, my brother is first horn of the Vienna Symphoniker and so Ciara has heard, since she was embryonic, great operas, Wagner, Verdi, Massenet, Schonberg, Tchaikovsky. But recently the Vienna Symphoniker played West Side Story. Now we sing Tony and maria duets together, Ciara and I

Ever since I got back from Monticello the other day, I’ve been thinking about American presidents who could write–not just competently, but with real distinction. The list is very short, and though it has some unexpected names on it (did you know that Calvin Coolidge was a classicist?), I doubt many people would question the presence of Abraham Lincoln at its head. Rhetorically speaking, Lincoln was America’s Churchill, and so it’s not altogether surprising that I felt the urge to reread David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, by common consent the greatest of modern Lincoln biographies, though I confess to still getting pleasure out of the one-volume abridgement of Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln, albeit for rather different reasons. (Interestingly, Donald isn’t snobbish about Sandburg’s much-maligned book, which he correctly describes as “the most imaginative and humanly flavorful of all the [Lincoln] biographies.”)

One of the passages in Lincoln that struck me most forcibly when I first read it in 1995 was Donald’s description of the writing of the First Inaugural Address. It seems that Lincoln had help–quite substantial help, in fact–in drafting the unforgettable last paragraph of that immortal speech. William Seward, soon to become Lincoln’s secretary of state, told the president-elect that he needed to “meet and remove prejudice and passion in the South, and despondency and fear in the East,” and suggested the following lines:

I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren….The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation

Lincoln rewrote them as follows:

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies….The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

To compare these two versions is to receive an invaluable lesson in the difference between a good idea and a great piece of writing. Even so, anyone ignorant of American history who saw both versions set up in parallel columns would very likely suspect the second writer of having plagiarized the first one. Without doubt, the coda of the First Inaugural wouldn’t have existed had Seward not supplied Lincoln with his preliminary draft–yet what Lincoln did to Seward’s clunky prose cannot be dismissed as mere editing. If I may borrow an example from the world of jazz, it’s more like what Gil Evans did to the slow movement of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez when he “arranged” Sketches of Spain for Miles Davis. Evans’ version of Concierto de Aranjuez is not an “original” composition in the normal meaning of the word. It is based explicitly on Rodrigo’s music. Yet it is pure Gil Evans, so completely transformed as to have become an independent composition, one arguably superior to its source material. So who’s the composer?

Real editing, even at its best, is a different thing entirely, though the difference can be subtle to the point of tenuity. I worked as a magazine and newspaper editor for many years before becoming a full-time freelance writer, and on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion I edited a piece so extensively that had it been a screenplay, I would have received an on-screen credit. When the piece won a major magazine award a few months later, I smiled wryly, as did my colleagues, yet it never occurred to any of us to blow the whistle on the writer. He “wrote” the piece, and that, so far as we were concerned, was that.

One reason why I kept my mouth shut is that I’ve been the beneficiary of superior editing on innumerable occasions, never that extensive but at times…well, quite substantial. At the time of the original publication of one of the best essays in A Terry Teachout Reader, I received a letter of praise from a well-known author who singled out for particular comment a sentence I hadn’t written. To be sure, it had been implicit in my draft, but I didn’t make it fully manifest: my editor did the job for me, and I gladly accepted his contribution. That sentence now appears in the Teachout Reader without benefit of asterisk or footnote. It’s taken for granted that I wrote it, and I don’t propose to blow the whistle on myself now. That’s what good editors do–they make your stuff better by any means necessary, and they keep their mouths shut about it.

I remembered that sentence of “mine” when I read the two drafts of the last paragraph of Lincoln’s First Inaugural. It amuses me to know that Lincoln relied so heavily on Seward’s contribution–yet I’m awed by the use he made of it. Does that knowledge lessen my admiration for Lincoln the writer and rhetorician? If anything, it makes me admire him all the more. As T.S. Eliot wrote in The Sacred Wood, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”

I’m neither a poet nor a Lincoln, but I’m a good enough critic to know the carpentry of a great writer when I see it–even if he borrowed the lumber from someone else’s yard.