August 22, 2007 | About Last Night

I’ve always wondered about the correct usage of this word, and no wonder:

§ 90. deceptively

Would you dive into a pool that is deceptively shallow? The question gives one pause. When deceptively is used to modify an adjective, the meaning is often unclear. Is the pool shallower or deeper than it appears to be? We asked the Usage Panel to decide. Fifty percent thought the pool is shallower than it appears. Thirty-two percent thought the pool deeper than it appears. And 18 percent said it was impossible to decide. Thus a warning notice worded in such a way would be misinterpreted by many of the people who read it, and others would be uncertain as to which sense was intended. When using deceptively with an adjective, be sure the context leaves no room for doubt. An easy way to remedy the situation is to rewrite the sentence without deceptively: The pool is shallower than it looks or The pool is shallow, despite its appearance.

Per The American Heritage Book of English Usage. My Fowler’s (second edition) is silent on the matter.

• I’ve been reading the second revised edition of Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a very solid piece of work which I skimmed inattentively not long after its original publication in 1981. I admire Fitzgerald’s best work without reservation–I consider The Great Gatsby the great American novel–but I can’t think of another major writer who led a less edifying life. The story of Fitzgerald’s drunken slide into artistic inertia is so pathetic that it’s hard to take, and the more you read, the more depressed you get.
Speaking as a biographer, it’s interesting to compare the problems Bruccoli faced in writing Some Sort of Epic Grandeur with the ones I face in writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Indeed, I’m not at all sure that the word “problem” applies in my case. Armstrong was born into desperate poverty, pulled himself out of the gutter via a combination of genius and iron determination, and eventually became a celebrity who was loved by everyone who knew him. His life became less dramatic as he grew older, but it remained eventful, and when he died, Duke Ellington pronounced the perfect epitaph: “He was born poor, died rich, and didn’t hurt anyone along the way.” In short, you couldn’t ask for a better biographical subject, and insofar as any such book can properly be said to be easy to write, Hotter Than That qualifies.
One of the characters in Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution is a cheerfully disillusioned European émigré composer named Gottfried Rosenbaum whose duties as a professor of music at Benton College include composing scores for the modern dances of the school’s resident choreographer, a gym-teacher-turned-Martha-Graham-clone whose efforts are a trifle short on angst. These Rosenbaum knocks off in a maximum of fifteen minutes apiece, explaining, “Ven idt take more dan fifteen minutes, zell me down the river.”
That’s sort of how I feel about writing the life of Satchmo: if you can’t write a good book about a man like that, you can’t write.
• In my last “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal, I wrote about my love for midcentury modern domestic architecture, which many readers of this blog do not share:

What is it about midcentury modernism that gets under so many people’s skins? In May I toured Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, a glass-walled weekend retreat tucked away in a leafy corner of rural Illinois. Built in 1951, the Farnsworth House is beloved of architects and art critics the world over. It is entrancingly beautiful–but its transparent walls are cruelly unforgiving of the clutter of everyday life. Franz Schulze, Mies’ admiring biographer, admitted that it is “more nearly a temple than a dwelling.” I’m unusually neat and so could (just) imagine living there, but Edith Farnsworth, the house’s original owner, came to loathe its lack of privacy, ruefully admitting that it made her uncomfortable to see so much as a single coathanger out of place.
That’s what’s wrong with the more extreme forms of modern architecture: Too often they tell you how to live instead of helping you live the way you want. But even those modern architects who were sensitive to the needs of their clients often failed to please the public at large. In her brief life of Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest architect, Ada Louise Huxtable, the Journal’s architecture critic, pointed out that his houses “never insisted that their occupants reshape themselves to conform to an abstract architectural ideal.” Yet their distinctive style failed to catch on with ordinary home-buyers, and you can drive for hundreds of miles throughout America without seeing a single Wright-like house by the side of the road….

I got two funny letters from friends in response to this column.
One was from Florida:

I just read your article about 50s modern architecture. Boy, that woman was right. It is maddening to live in a house like that. We’re renting a place here in Tallahassee that’s 50s modern and I have to fight the urge to throw away everything we own and buy chrome furniture. Also–there are pocket doors all over the place and sliding cabinet doors, sliding glass doors–all over 50 years old and all off their tracks & nearly impossible to use. I’ll have to send you some pix…but of course, these houses look awful when someone actually LIVES in them, so I’ll have to tidy up first!! I think if I were super-rich, I’d buy a place like this just to throw cocktail parties in. That’s what they were built for, I think. At night, you get the feeling you’re being watched because of all the huge windows. Weird.

I’ve since seen the pictures, and I confess that I would kill to live in that house, sticky pocket doors notwithstanding.
The other letter was from Manhattan:

Professor Donald Fleming, who looked like a bald friendly turtle peering myopically over the lecturn, said to us undergrads in his course on American intellectual history: “The thing…about…Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses is…that…you can’t have sex in them.”

Alas, I must stand mute.
• Incidentally, I’m told that the photo of the Farnsworth House that ran with my column in the print edition of last Saturday’s Journal was captioned “Gropius House.” Or maybe it was the other way round. I don’t read the Journal on paper–I’m an Online Journal man–nor do I choose the art for my columns, so this was news to me. At least one blogger has already hastened to blame me for the blunder, though, accusing me of first-degree aesthetic stupidity. Not guilty!
• Speaking of elective mutism, I got stuck on the phone the other day with a fast, uncontrollably verbose talker. I’m a pretty good talker myself, but I couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise with a blunderbuss had I cared to do so. Fortunately, he was (mostly) telling me things I wanted to know, but listening to him was like standing in front of a fire hose. Are such compulsive monologuists aware of the impression they make? I doubt it. For that matter, I doubt they’re aware of much of anything.
Neville Cardus, the English music critic about whom I’ll be writing in Commentary later this year, was a notoriously one-sided conversationalist, but Christopher Brookes, his biographer, tells a funny story of the day that Cardus met his match:

One of his favorite conversational adversaries was John Barbirolli. As well as being close friends, they were both great actors and each enjoyed upstaging the other “for the greater glory of God.” At one of their lunchtime meetings, true to form both spent the first hour talking sixteen to the dozen without taking the slightest notice of what the other might have been saying. The occupant of a nearby table recalled that to his surprise and admiration at one point in this exchange Sir John took out his false teeth but still kept talking. By this time Neville was of course a master of the art of masticating and conversing simultaneously….

I know very well that I talk too damn much, and I hate myself for it, but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten wound up that far.