Archives for March 24, 2005

“‘She still has no taste, thank God,’ Ethel thought, comfortingly, but the truth was that Amanda was too successful, too arrogantly on top, to even need good taste. Good taste was the consolation of people who had nothing else, people like her own self, Ethel thought, inferiority feelings leaping back at her like great barn dogs trying to be pets.”

Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

I am now officially the Honorable Terry Teachout, having been sworn in this morning (together with Gerard Schwarz and James Ballinger) as a member of the National Council on the Arts. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dropped by to administer the oath. It was a near-run thing, for Justice O’Connor didn’t know when she agreed to do the honors that she and her Supreme Court brethren would be hearing the Terri Schiavo case today. “We had a busy morning!” she said as she arrived, still wearing her judicial robes. I’d never seen her in person, and was surprised by how short she was. Charismatic, too: she’s engaging, energetic, and has amazing eyes, dark and snapping.

The oath she administered is the one specified in Section 3331 of the United States Code:

An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: “I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

I’d never taken an oath remotely like that–in fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever taken any oath before today–and as I repeated the words after Justice O’Connor, I suddenly realized that my voice was on the verge of cracking. Maybe it was because I’d looked up and seen my brother standing just fifteen feet away, snapping a picture. On the other hand, it wasn’t the first time in the past couple of days that my emotions had been engaged so strongly. Under Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, public sessions of the National Council on the Arts always begin with a performance of an appropriate piece of music, and today we heard the finale of Walter Piston’s Fourth Symphony in a recording conducted by Gerard Schwarz, who was seated next to me. My eyes filled with tears as I listened, the same way they’d grown moist the day before as we watched a video clip of Ethan Stiefel and Alessandra Ferri dancing the pas de deux from Sir Frederick Ashton’s The Dream. That’s one of the biggest differences between a meeting of the National Council on the Arts and one of, say, the board of directors of Citibank. Great art has a way of slipping in under the radar and filling you with extraordinary sensations.

As soon as Justice O’Connor finished swearing us in, she smiled and said, “Now, go do a good job!” To which Jim Ballinger (who knows her) instantly responded, “You, too!” That brought down the house, and the four of us went back to work.

I could tell you all sorts of other things about today’s meeting, but I’ll pass on just one detail. Gordon Davidson, the outgoing artistic director of Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, just finished serving a term as a member of the NCA. He had to miss his final meeting, so he came to our first one to say his goodbyes, which consisted of an elegant little speech in which he said something which struck me so forcibly that I scribbled it down on my notepad: “I liked being here because I love asking questions. I think the best art asks the best questions.” Me, too.

Chairman Gioia gaveled the proceedings to a close at noon, after which my brother and I said our goodbyes, jumped into a cab, went back to his hotel, changed clothes, caught a Tourmobile bus in front of the National Air and Space Museum, and spent the rest of the day looking at monuments. This is my brother’s first trip to Washington, and it’s been ages since I last did any tourist-type stuff here. I’d forgotten how stirring an impression the Lincoln Memorial makes, even when it’s full of noisy tourists. Once again, I caught myself choking up as I read the so-familiar words carved into the wall: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Washington has a way of doing that to you, too.

Now we’re back in our hotel room, worn out from walking and preparing for what I sincerely hope will be a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we’ll be visiting Arlington National Cemetery, the National Archives, and whatever else sounds good, weather permitting. I’ll be returning to New York on Saturday, and I expect to be more worn out still–and inordinately happy. It’s been an extraordinary week, in all sorts of ways….

One last thing: Dana introduced me this morning as “a critic, biographer, and blogger,” adding that I’m “the first blogger ever to serve on the National Council on the Arts.” How about that?

Henry James isn’t famed for making people laugh, but when he’s guarding his turf an evil sense of humor can rear its toothy head. For example, in the sections of his famous “Art of Fiction” essay where he is responding directly to Walter Besant’s lecture of the same name, James is hilariously withering (and Besant’s philistinism well deserves it). And in “The Death of the Lion,” previously discussed by me here, he takes on literary journalism as personified by the comically monstrous Mr. Morrow, who shows up with a notebook one afternoon at the home of the reclusive author Neil Paraday. Also on the scene is the story’s narrator, a critic who considers himself above mere literary fashion and who here interposes himself between the voracious would-be reporter and his reluctant quarry.

Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses: they suggested the electric headlights of some monstrous modern ship, and I felt as if Paraday and I were tossing terrified under his bows. I saw that his momentum was irresistible. “I was confident that I should be the first in the field,” he declared. “A great interest is naturally felt in Mr. Paraday’s surroundings.”

“I hadn’t the least idea of it,” said Paraday, as if he had been told he had been snoring.

“I find he has not read the article in The Empire,” Mr. Morrow remarked to me. “That’s so very interesting–it’s something to start with,” he smiled. He had begun to pull off his gloves, which were violently new, and to look encouragingly round the little garden. As a “surrounding” I felt that I myself had already been taken in; I was a little fish in the stomach of a bigger one. “I represent,” our visitor continued, “a syndicate of influential journals, no less than thirty-seven, whose public–whose publics, I may say–are in peculiar sympathy with Mr. Paraday’s line of thought. They would greatly appreciate any expression of his views on the subject of the art he so brilliantly practises. Besides my connection with the syndicate just mentioned, I hold a particular commission from The Tatler, whose most prominent department, ‘Smatter and Chatter’–I daresay you’ve often enjoyed it–attracts such attention. I was honoured only last week, as a representative of The Tatler, with the confidence of Guy Walsingham, the author of ‘Obsessions.’ She expressed herself thoroughly pleased with my sketch of her method; she went so far as to say that I had made her genius more comprehensible even to herself.”

…Not because I had brought my mind back, but because our visitor’s last words were in my ear, I presently inquired with gloomy irrelevance whether Guy Walsingham were a woman.

“Oh yes, a mere pseudonym; but convenient, you know, for a lady who goes in for the larger latitude. ‘Obsessions, by Miss So-and-So,’ would look a little odd, but men are more naturally indelicate. Have you peeped into ‘Obsessions’?” Mr. Morrow continued sociably to our companion.

Paraday, still absent, remote, made no answer, as if he had not heard the question: a manifestation that appeared to suit the cheerful Mr. Morrow as well as any other. Imperturbably bland, he was a man of resources–he only needed to be on the spot. He had pocketed the whole poor place while Paraday and I were woolgathering, and I could imagine that he had already got his “heads.” His system, at any rate, was justified by the inevitability with which I replied, to save my friend the trouble: “Dear, no; he hasn’t read it. He doesn’t read such things!” I unwarily added.

“Things that are too far over the fence, eh?” I was indeed a godsend to Mr. Morrow. It was the psychological moment; it determined the appearance of his notebook, which, however, he at first kept slightly behind him, as the dentist, approaching his victim, keeps his horrible forceps. “Mr. Paraday holds with the good old proprieties–I see!” And, thinking of the thirty-seven influential journals, I found myself, as I found poor Paraday, helplessly gazing at the promulgation of this inepititude. “There’s no point on which distinguished views are so acceptable as on this question–raised perhaps more strikingly than ever by Guy Walsingham–of the permissibility of the larger latitude. I have an appointment, precisely in connection with it, next week, with Dora Forbes, the author of ‘The Other Way Round,’ which everybody is talking about. Has Mr. Paraday glanced at ‘The Other Way Round’?…Dora Forbes, I gather, takes the ground, the same as Guy Walsingham’s, that the larger latitude has simply got to come. He holds that it has got to be squarely faced. Of course his sex makes him a less prejudiced witness. But an authoritative word from Mr. Paraday–from the point of view of his sex, you know–would go right round the globe. He takes the line that we haven’t got to face it?”

I was bewildered; it sounded somehow as if there were three sexes. My interlocutor’s pen was poised, my private responsibility great. I simply sat staring, however, and only found presence of mind to say: “Is this Miss Forbes a gentleman?”

Mr. Morrow hesitated an instant, smiling: “It wouldn’t be ‘Miss’–there’s a wife!”

“I mean, is she a man?”

“The wife?”–Mr. Morrow, for a moment, was as confused as myself. But when I explained that I alluded to Dora Forbes in person he informed me, with visible amusement at my being so out of it, that this was the “pen-name” of an indubitable male–he had a big red moustache. “He only assumes a feminine personality because the ladies are such popular favorites. A great deal of interest is felt in this assumption, and there’s every prospect of its being widely imitated.”

Who’s on first? Of course, the narrator is being skewered here, too, for his pompous, principled disengagement from fashion–absurd as that fashion may be. The narrator is exposed by the prim horror with which he regards Morrow, Morrow principally by his own speeches. If Morrow never opened his mouth, we might well find him sympathetic just by virtue of how effortlessly he moves our priggish narrator to overblown similes involving barges and dentists. We don’t have to trust the author’s or narrator’s assertion that both of these men are ridiculous–James has each character manage to damn himself, just by being himself.