Archives for November 14, 2007

A reader writes:

This is just a note to thank you for your website and your theatre criticism in the Wall Street Journal. I have been enjoying your reviews since I began work at a company where one of my co-workers brings his copy of the WSJ in to share with us, and since I am a devoted attendee at plays here in Boston, I am always happy to hear what you have to say about productions here in my hometown.
I’ve been delighted to find that your website has also added to my life by introducing me to authors I wouldn’t otherwise have heard of, and musicians I wouldn’t otherwise have heard. The world currently offers lots of ways to spend free time, but I try to spend it wisely, and the advice and opinions of you and your fellow columnists on your website have helped me to do so. Thank you and your colleagues for your work, and congratulations on your recent marriage.

Right back at you, dear correspondent. Letters like this remind me–and OGIC and CAAF–of why we keep on doing what we do.

I put my Louis Armstrong biography aside in order to get married, and yesterday I took it up again in earnest–a good thing, too, since I’m having lunch with my editor tomorrow and have promised to deliver the manuscript to Harcourt next February.
As usual, I’m floundering in a sea of distractions, many of which have to do with the stagehands’ strike that has shut down most of Broadway and…er…fouled up my schedule beyond recognition. Among other things, I spent a chunk of time talking to a producer about a strike-related TV appearance that never happened (though it could take place tonight–watch this space for details). I also saw an off-Broadway show in the evening and fielded a day-long series of phone calls from Smalltown, U.S.A., where my mother underwent cataract surgery in the morning (she’s fine, thanks).
In between all these events, I worked at getting myself back up to speed on Armstrong in the Thirties, and by bedtime I was ready to start piling up words again. Today I roll up my sleeves and resume work on the seventh chapter, in which Satchmo runs afoul of a Chicago gangster and heads for the hills.
More later, but I can already tell you that it’s awfully nice to be writing a book again.

In my weekly book review for “Contentions,” Commentary‘s group blog, I discuss a new collection called Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. If you didn’t read past the jump, you won’t have seen the following:

Capote makes the following nostalgic claim in a 1959 essay about Louis Armstrong: “I met him when I was four, that would be around 1928, and he, a hard-plump and belligerently happy brown Buddha, was playing aboard a pleasure steamer that paddled between New Orleans and St. Louis….The Satch, he was good to me, he told me I had talent, that I ought to be in vaudeville; he gave me a bamboo cane and a straw boater with a peppermint headband; and every night from the stand announced: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, now we’re going to present you one of America’s nice kids, he’s going to do a little tap dance.’ Afterward I passed among the passengers, collecting in my hat nickels and dimes.”
As the Brits say, no doubt this is true, but the fact is that “the Satch” stopped playing on New Orleans excursion boats in 1921, three years before Capote was born. It seems that the author of In Cold Blood was fabricating material long before the reliability of his most successful and admired book was challenged by those in a position to know. William Shawn wouldn’t have liked that one bit.

I might stick that into my Armstrong biography as a footnote, but just in case I don’t, I wanted to pass it on. It is, of course, no secret that Truman Capote was a near-chronic fabulist. Even so, I didn’t expect to encounter so unabashed and outrageous an example of Capote’s penchant for rolling his own.
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Speaking of now-deceased New Yorker editors, I hear from Supermaud that the Library of America will be bringing out a William Maxwell collection called Early Novels & Stories on January 10. I regret to say that I’ve never written a word about Maxwell, though he’s popped up more than once in this space. He happens, however, to be one of my favorite American writers, and I hope that the publication of this volume (which contains, among other things, the exquisite 1945 novel The Folded Leaf) will bring him some of the posthumous recognition he deserves.
If I had to guess, though, I’d say that Maxwell fits into much the same category as Elaine Dundy. As I wrote in my introduction to the recent paperback reissue of Dundy’s The Dud Avocado,

It is the destiny of some good novels to be perpetually rediscovered, and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, I fear, is one of them. Like William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf or James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor, it bobs to the surface every decade or so, at which time somebody writes an essay about how good it is and somebody else clamors for it to be returned to print, followed in short order by the usual slow retreat into the shadows. In a better-regulated society, of course, the authors of such books would be properly esteemed, and on rare occasions one of them does contrive to clamber into the pantheon–Dawn Powell, the doyenne of oft-rediscovered authors, finally made it into the Library of America in 2001–but in the normal course of things, such triumphs are as rare as an honest stump speech.

What is it about some artists and works of art that keeps them from winning wider recognition, intelligible and accessible though they may be? I posted on this subject back in 2004, but I invite further speculation, since the question is of permanent interest.
Maud? OGIC? Carrie? Anyone?

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely