“The essence of dilettantism consists not so much in a lack of high artistic intentions as in the fragility of the technical scaffolding.”
Carl Flesch, Memoirs
Archives for May 2004
TT: Consumables
This was an all-theater day, and a long one (but what else is new?).
– I spent the morning and early afternoon writing my Wall Street Journal review for Friday.
– After a couple of hours’ worth of miscellaneous busywork, I headed for Avery Fisher Hall, where I saw the New York Philharmonic’s semi-staged concert version of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, starring Kristin Chenoweth, directed by Lonny Price, and conducted by Marin Alsop. That’s for next Friday’s Journal.
– Because of an early curtain and an earlier dinner, I didn’t have enough in-between time to do much of anything other than give my guest for the evening a tour of the Teachout Museum and read the first couple of chapters of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake.
– Now playing on iTunes: Helmut Walcha’s recording
of Bach’s chorale prelude Schm
TT: Consumables
Not much to tell, though I only have one more crowded day before I pull up stakes and leave town for a long weekend of laptop-free rest, relaxation, and art consumption at a Secure Undisclosed Location. In the meantime, here’s my Tuesday:
– I saw a press preview of Neil LaBute’s new play, The Distance from Here, about which I’ll be writing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.
– I found out that my absentee bid for a Hans Hofmann lithograph, “Composition,” was unsuccessful. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but I got creamed–somebody with money to burn wiped the floor with my pitiful little bid.) In case you’re curious, here’s what it looked like. Sigh. Arrgh. Oh, to be rich! Alas, I picked the wrong line of work….
– I’m doing Raymond Chandler in between everything else, and today I finished rereading Farewell, My Lovely, partly in the hopes of persuading a friend of mine who recently confessed to having read only The Big Sleep (shame, shame) to embark forthwith on the whole corpus, currently available in an elegant Library of America two-volume edition.
– Now playing on iTunes: “Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me,” recorded live by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1954 and currently available on Jazz Goes to College. This do I in honor of Doug Ramsey, Paul Desmond’s biographer, who left a message last night for me to call him. (If you’re reading the blog right now, Doug, the next phone call you get will be from me.)
I’ll try to work in another post or two in before I hit the road first thing Thursday morning. I see that Our Girl has finally come in from out of the cold, so if you ask her nicely, maybe she’ll keep you company until my return on Sunday night!
TT: Closed circle
I started reviewing books for magazines nearly twenty-three years ago (and no, it doesn’t seem like only yesterday). The third or fourth book about which I wrote was Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal, a memoir by Toni Bentley, who was at the time a twenty-two-year-old dancer with New York City Ballet. I can’t recall how I heard about her book or why I took an interest in it, since I’d as yet seen only two or three ballets, none of them by George Balanchine. Whatever the reason, I was struck by Bentley’s poetic chronicle of a dancer’s life, and wrote a review in which I called Winter Season “quite possibly the most revealing book about the world of ballet ever to see print.” This is an embarrassingly choice example of a baby critic talking through his hat–I doubt I’d read any other books about the world of ballet in 1982.
Be that as it may, my review found its way into print. I shelved Winter Season and eventually forgot about it, but Bentley’s evocative little memoir obviously made a deeper impression on me than I knew, for a decade later I finally got around to seeing my first Balanchine ballet, and within a couple of years I had somehow metamorphosed into a full-fledged dance critic. Now I’m about to publish a book of my own about Balanchine’s life and work. Would any of that have happened had I not stumbled across Winter Season in 1982? Maybe–but maybe not.
As for Toni Bentley, she fell victim to a hip injury and stopped dancing a few years after publishing Winter Season. She turned herself into a full-time writer, collaborating with Suzanne Farrell on her autobiography
and writing several striking books of her own. I learned a few years ago that we shared an agent, but by then Bentley had moved to Los Angeles, and our paths never crossed. Last year, though, the University Press of Florida brought out a new edition of Winter Season, and a sentence from my 1982 review was printed on the back cover. I smiled to see it, remembering what a powerful effect the book had had on me all those years ago, and what an unexpected effect it ended up having on the rest of my life. Not only that, but I realized upon rereading it that the uninformed praise of a baby critic had by some unearned act of grace been right on the money: Winter Season is one of the most revealing books about the world of ballet ever to see print.
Four months ago, as I was gearing up to write All in the Dances, I looked in my e-mailbox one evening and found a note from a reader of “About Last Night” that was signed “Toni Bentley.” Astonished, I wrote back at once, asking if she were the Toni Bentley. Sure enough, she was, so I told her to look on the back cover of the paperback of Winter Season, which in turn astonished her. Charmed by this chain of coincidence, we resolved to have lunch the next time she found herself in Manhattan, which was yesterday. Toni appeared on my doorstep, I gave her the fifty-cent tour of the Teachout Museum, and we proceeded from there to Good Enough to Eat, where we conversed for an hour and a half, marveling every few minutes at yet another unlikely-sounding thing we had in common. She’s as good a talker as she is a writer, and we vowed to do it again soon.
This story has no moral, save that my chance meeting with Toni was made possible by the existence of this blog. To be sure, it was possible, if difficult, for readers and writers to get in touch prior to the invention of blogs, and sometimes correspondences and even an occasional friendship blossomed as a result–but not often. “About Last Night,” by contrast, has made it easy for anyone who reads my stuff, on or off line, to send me a note that I’ll see within hours of its dispatch. Even if you know nothing about the blogosphere, all you have to do to find the e-mailbox of “About Last Night” is google my name. It’s amazing how many people have done just that in the past ten months, including a number of performers about whom I’ve written, a couple of long-lost friends I hadn’t seen since high school–and Toni Bentley.
So this is a Tale of the Blogosphere, as well as a Tale of Middle Age. Once you’ve lived long enough, certain arcs in your life loop the loop and start heading your way again. The urge to reconnect with the past, to answer unanswered questions, becomes all but irresistible, which is why people write memoirs, call up old girlfriends (and occasonally write novels
about it), and go to class reunions (I’ve been to one so far). I can think of at least a dozen friends from my increasingly distant past about whom I’m curious, and in a few cases I’ve been able to satisfy that curiosity by surfing the Web, though most of them, alas, have slipped between the cracks. This is another aspect of middle age that goes unmentioned in the instruction manual: you learn that some stories have unhappy endings, while others simply trail off into silence. Even so, the Web does facilitate the closing of certain circles, some as small as a fleeting desire to know the name of an actor seen and noticed in a bit part, others as large as a lifelong quest for a missing piece of your identity.
Nor is it always a one-way process. Sometimes you find in your e-mailbox a note from a person you’ve never met, and all at once you remember what it felt like to open an unread book and fall headlong into a strange new world. That’s what happened to me in 1982, and I’m glad I got a chance to tell Toni Bentley about it face to face. I hope I get to repay a few more debts like that while I still can.
TT: Almanac
“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Did you know his name?
Did he get on?”
Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Ben
TT: News of the book in review
The Wall Street Journal doesn’t review books by its writers and regular contributors, but it does feature them in its book-review column from time to time, and I awoke this morning to find that I’d gotten the deluxe treatment, a very nice little package of excerpts from A Terry Teachout Reader called “The Critic and His Culture” in which I talk about Leonard Bernstein, Martha Graham, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, and Frank Sinatra.
The unsigned compiler of these excerpts remarks that some of the essays in the Teachout Reader
are devoted to cultural politics, others to the arts, which ideally seek to describe life, as he puts it in one essay, “in all its proliferating, ideology-transcending complexity.” Mr. Teachout writes about music, dance, literature and the movies for many publications–and, along the way, about the often wayward personalities who have dominated the American cultural scene.
I’d say that’s a pretty good summing-up of my self-drafted job description.
To read the whole piece, go here.
UPDATE: So far today, the amazon.com sales rank of the Teachout Reader has risen from somewhere around 18,000 to 477. (It was hovering around 31,000 last week.) I know, I know, that probably means seventeen people ordered copies this afternoon, but at least it makes me feel like a literary rockstar.
TT: Not quite close enough for jazz
Via God of the Machine (all is forgiven, Aaron), this list by David Hurwitz of what he claims are “classical music’s ten dirtiest secrets”:
1. Mozart really does all sound the same.
2. Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge is just plain ugly.
3. Wagner’s operas are much better with cuts.
4. No one cares about the first three movements of Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique.
5. Schoenberg’s music never sounds more attractive, no matter how many times you listen to it.
6. Schumann’s orchestration definitely needs improvement.
7. Bruckner couldn’t write a symphonic allegro to save his life.
8. Liszt is trash.
9. The so-called “happy” ending of Shostakovich’s Fifth is perfectly sincere.
10. It’s a good thing that “only” about 200 Bach cantatas survive.
When I went to school, five out of ten wasn’t a passing grade….
TT: Supplemental guest almanac
A reader writes:
Your quote from Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister (“She reached a quick arm around my neck and started to pull. So I kissed her. It was either that or slug her”) put me in mind of the following, from P.G. Wodehouse’s story The Castaways (1933):
Even when he ached for Genevieve Bootle, some inner voice told him that if ever there was a pill it was she. Sometimes the urge to fold her in his arms and the urge to haul off and slap her over the nose with a piece of blotting paper came so close together that it was a mere flick of the coin which prevailed.
Fascinating, is it not, how two superb writers express a similar idea in two very different and very idiosyncratic ways?
As you may know, Chandler and Wodehouse were students at Dulwich College at the same time!
Nice. It just goes to show the value of an English public-school education. But were Chandler and Wodehouse really at Dulwich at the same time? That doesn’t sound quite right to me.
Trivia-minded readers, solve this conundrum!
UPDATE: My original correspondent writes:
Your skepticism about whether the two authors-to-be attended Dulwich College simultaneously proves justified. David Jasen, in his P.G. Wodehouse: A Portrait of a Master, states that Wodehouse started at Dulwich in May of 1894 at age twelve-and a half, and left in July 1900. According to the Spring 2004 edition of the Dulwich Society Newsletter, Chandler didn’t start at Dulwich until the September term of 1900 (when he was twelve).
I knew I smelled a slight case of rat!