Archives for 2007

This week we’re having a “craft session” in writing class. This means no manuscript critiques; instead, discussion and one or two in-class writing exercises. In preparation we’re to read the first 50 pages of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s profile of the crusading Dr. Paul Farmer, and the short story “Magda Mandela” by Hari Kunzru.
As we read Kidder’s nonfiction work, our instructor has asked us to “think of fiction that has a similar narrative structure. The obvious one, for me, is The Great Gatsby, with Tracy Kidder as Nick Carraway and Dr. Farmer as Jay Gatsby. Also think about the difficulty in writing abut a person who is larger than life, whether real or fictional, with ‘Magda Mandela’ in mind.”
It’s a pleasing assignment. For the first part, I’ve got Cakes and Ale, Prayer for Owen Meany, and, even though it figures a quartet, not a duo, A Dance to the Music of Time. Pale Fire might also qualify, although that parallel would have Kidder twisted out of all recognition: cracked, from Zembla, and suffering mad halitosis.
Thinking about larger-than-life characters my mind keeps flashing on how in Gothic novels the male lead (terrible, mysterious) is sometimes introduced as a potent presence thumping around another part of the manor — sensed but unseen — an eminence for the narrator to wonder about from afar, sometimes for days before a first meeting. (Incidentally, this is how Melville introduces Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, just replace the crumbling manor with a ship.) It reminds me a little of the first of the Vera Pavlova poems I linked to the other day, where the “he” of the poem grows from the size of a speck to glacier-like immensity. But I’d guess we’re supposed to be thinking more concretely, e.g., CHARACTERS WHO SPEAK IN CAPS LOCK: VIABLE OVER THE LONG HAUL?, etc.

• Imaginary trip: Bomarzo, a park of monsters and harpies located near Viterbo, a couple hours’ drive from Rome.
• Read some of Henry James’ writings on Rome or download Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens.
• ALN vault: Terry shares his favorite Henry James anecdote, Wharton’s account of getting lost with James in Windsor.

I received an e-mail the other day from Theresa Squire, who designed the costumes for the Keen Company’s revival of A.R. Gurney’s The Living Room, which I praised in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal. My review contained the following paragraph:

The Keen Company specializes in performing “sincere” plays: “We believe that theater is at its most powerful when texts and productions are generous in spirit and provoke identification.” As a mission statement, that strikes me as a bit po-faced, but there is nothing stiff or staid about this production, directed and designed with discreet skill by Jonathan Silverstein and Dana Moran Williams….It is a lovely piece of work, and I wholeheartedly commend it to your attention.

Squire pointed out that in giving Dana Moran Williams, the set designer, sole credit for the design of The Living Room, I was overlooking the work of several other professionals, herself among them, who had contributed significantly to the show’s total effect. She was, of course, dead right, and when I looked her up on the Web, I was embarrassed to learn that she’d also designed the costumes for a number of other shows that I’d reviewed favorably in the Journal (including Orson’s Shadow, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and The Bald Soprano) without ever mentioning her name in print.
Needless to say, a critic can’t mention everybody, and my Journal reviews are often too short for me to cite by name more than two or three people in a given show. To do otherwise would be to turn the review into a laundry list, thus making it unreadable. In addition, I find that good costume and lighting design tend to be self-effacing in a way that set design is not. When the characters in a naturalistically designed play are wearing appropriate clothing, you perceive it as a manifestation of their personalities, not as an independent entity.
That said, I’ll admit that I don’t write nearly often enough about costume design, no doubt because I don’t understand it as well as I should. I know quite a bit more about lighting and sound design, and so am more likely to mention them in a review, just as I’m one of the few critics in New York who not infrequently makes a point of mentioning the playing of the pit orchestras that accompany the musicals I review. Would that I could be all things to all people!
One more thing: the next time I go to a show and find Theresa Squire’s name listed in the program, I’ll know that I’m about to see well-designed costumes that will enhance the credibility of the actors who are wearing them. And I’ll try to remember to say so in the Journal, too.

Stay near me. Speak my name. Oh, do not wander

By a thought’s span, heart’s impulse, from the light

We kindle here. You are my sole defender

(As I am yours) in this precipitous night,

Which over earth, till common landmarks alter,

Is falling, without stars, and bitter cold.

We two have but our burning selves for shelter.

Huddle against me. Give me your hand to hold.

So might two climbers lost in mountain weather

On a high slope and taken by the storm,

Desperate in the darkness, cling together

Under one cloak and breathe each other warm.

Stay near me. Spirit, perishable as bone,

In no such winter can survive alone.

Phyllis McGinley, “Midcentury Love Letter”

Last week OGIC, who has been reading The Hobbit for the first time, asked the following question:

What children’s classics did you first discover as an adult (Harry Potter doesn’t count), and how did it make you feel—old? young again?

I didn’t read many children’s books when I was a boy. E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little were read out loud to me in the classroom, but I didn’t read them for myself until I was in my thirties. This didn’t make me feel old or young: I simply experienced and judged the two books as works of art.

Charlotte’s Web I found charming, but Stuart Little seemed to me something more, and still does, perhaps because its symbolism is so precisely gauged and its inconclusive ending so unabashedly open. Even now it strikes me as a little masterpiece, one of the few children’s books that is equally satisfying to the adult reader. I well remember how stunned I was by the vulgarity of Rob Minkoff’s 1999 live-action film version, which made no effort whatoever to convey the book’s quiet, wistful tone.

While we’re on the subject, allow me to share with you this reminiscence by White himself:

A couple of days after the book appeared, Harold Ross, my boss at The New Yorker, stopped in at my office. His briefcase was slung over his shoulder on a walking stick and he looked unhappy. “Saw your book, White,” he growled. “You made one serious mistake.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Why the mouse,” he shouted. “You said he was born. God damn it, you should have had him adopted.” The word “adopted” boomed forth loud enough to be heard all down the corridor. I had great respect for Ross’s ability to spot trouble in a piece of writing, and I began to feel uneasy….

My next encounter was with Edmund Wilson, who stopped me in the hall. “Hello, hello,” he said, in his wonderfully high and thrilling voice that sounds like a coaching horn. “I read that book of yours. I found the first page quite amusing, about the mouse, you know. But I was disappointed that you didn’t develop the theme more in the manner of Kafka.”

I thanked Edmund and wandered back to my room to chuckle at the infinite variety of The New Yorker: the editor who could spot a dubious verb at forty paces, the critic who was saddened because my innocent tale of the quest for beauty failed to carry the overtones of monstrosity. What a magazine. There’s never been anything like it.

That’s my all-time favoriite Edmund Wilson story—and as the Italians say, Si non è vero, è ben trovato.

“I do not necessarily want to live a balanced life. I like the idea of my tensions and my slack being all askew, all illogically different lengths. I am shocked but still kind of love it when my sleepy and mundane life is pierced by exhilarations so ferocious that I wonder what bit me. I like the idea of being so out of balance that sometimes I topple over.
“And if it means that all too often I have to sit alone and lick my own skinned knees, so be it. So be it.”
Heather Heise, “On Balance” (in the wings, Sept. 18, 2007)