Archives for 2007

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week’s installment comes from Katharine Weber, whose fascinating novel Triangle is being discussed this week at the Lit Blog Co-Op.
I was a morbid child, they (teachers, my mother) said. My favorite moments in the relatively sunny Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” books were the near-death of the entire family in the “Fever and Ague” chapter in Little House on the Prairie
and the threat of starvation in The Long Winter . My Ordeal by Hunger Donner Party book report in sixth grade was deemed tomboyish and strange by most of my classmates (the boy before me reported on a biography of Thomas Edison and the girl after me reported on My Friend Flicka). My Evanston relatives were impatient with my wishes to visit landmarks to feed my Chicago Fire fascination. Whenever I had a cold I would try to suppress my coughing the way Anne Frank in her secret annex had to, during office hours. I was a font of Titanic trivia long before Leonardo DiCaprio was born. Maybe feasting on all that disaster helped my own chaotic childhood feel comparatively safe and organized. Maybe all those disaster books were like survival handbooks for me, illuminating my private secret sense that I could have endured and managed to find my way through those events; surely I would have been one of the canny ones, equipped with fine-tuned survival instincts.
1. Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George Stewart. The very words “Donner Party” offer a frisson of horror and then a snicker you don’t want to own, because you don’t quite know what to do with that incongruently festive designation. Bad decisions, snow, worse decisions, more snow, bad luck, more snow, and then comes the cannibalism you anticipate from the first page.
2. A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. Who cares if the prose is merely adequate when the story is among the best tragedies in the history of the civilization? This is the definitive account for those of us who prefer our Titanic the way she was last seen, strains of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” (probably) wafting from the strings of the heroic musicians who played on the deck until the end, when the ship upended and slid to the bottom of the sea. Lord’s book was published the year I was born, many decades before technology could dilute the mystery by providing salvage loot and glimpses of that sad rusting hulk on the ocean floor (not to mention a terrible framing device for that movie).
3. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad by Harrison Salisbury. Endless winter plus starvation and cannibalism, plus Nazi atrocities — so many of my favorite obsessions are represented in this stirring, majestic book.
4. The Circus Fire: The True Story of an American Tragedy by Stewart O’Nan. Circuses and clowns are creepy anyway, even without a conflagration. The horrific 1944 Ringling Brothers circus fire in Hartford that killed nearly 170 people, more than half of them children, took only a few minutes to ignite, because the immense circus tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline. As the tent went up in flames, the waterproofing mixture rained down on the crowd of some eight thousand souls like napalm. Adding to the mystery and horror, several of the children were never identified, most famously the eerily beautiful Little Miss 1565. This elegant account, which gets my vote for best Stewart O’Nan book, is informed by dozens of interviews with survivors of the fire. Many of them described the hideous, unforgettable sounds of the trapped animals burning. The eerie still point at the heart of the book is when O’Nan follows the eyewitness accounts of the animals screaming with the quiet statement that no animals were burned in the fire.
5. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. Ambition, hubris, bravery, selfishness, death, and a bizarre cast of characters. An irresistible, horrible sequence of events with all the elements of a thriller, this is a book that succeeds because Krakauer tells the story with clarity and insight.

“Popular art is dominated throughout by the star system, not only in its actors but in all its elements, whatever the medium. Every work of art, to be sure, has its dominant elements, to which the rest are subordinate. But in popular art it is the dominant ones alone that are the objects of interest, the ground of its satisfaction. By contrast, great art is in this sense pointless; everything in it is significant, everything makes its own contribution to the aesthetic substance. The domain of popular art is, paradoxically, an aristocracy, as it were: some few elements are singled out as the carriers of whatever meaning the work has while the rest are submerged into an anonymous mass. The life of the country is reduced to the mannered gestures of its king. It is this that gives the effect of simplification and standardization.”
Abraham Kaplan, “Aesthetics of the Popular Arts”

Here I am again! I’ve wrapped up my nine-day whirlwind theater tour of New England, and will be headed back to Manhattan shortly. I saw and did plenty of interesting stuff while I was gone, and I plan to tell you all about it–but not today, and not all at once.
Having been absent from the Big Apple for a whole month, I’ve got a lot of snail mail to read, a lot of shows to see, and a lot of people with whom I urgently need to catch up. All this being the case, I’ll share my recent adventures with you on the installment plan, and it’ll be a couple of days before the first installment arrives. In the meantime, I’ve updated the Top Fives, so take a look and see what’s new.
As always, CAAF and OGIC are alive, well, and ready to entertain you–and me–while I find my footing.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to pack.

I’m still hard at work on The Letter, the musical version of Somerset Maugham’s play that Paul Moravec and I are writing for Santa Fe Opera. Paul is writing the music, I the words, and I knocked off a huge chunk of the latter while I was up in Connecticut last month. In fact, I finished the first complete draft of the entire eight-scene libretto. Paul and I are both pleased with it, though we’ll put it through the wringer of revision several more times before we’re done. Nevertheless, I believe we’ve got ourselves a libretto, and it sounds like a libretto, by which I mean that it reads like an opera, not a straight play.

An opera libretto resembles a play at first glance, but the differences are bigger than you might realize. To begin with, a libretto is shorter than a play, since it takes longer to sing words than to speak them. For the record, the first draft of The Letter is 8,700 words long, roughly half the length of the play on which it’s based. (By way of comparison, Macbeth, Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, is 18,301 words long.) I expect it will shrink still further before it reaches its final form. Yet our version of The Letter tracks the action of Maugham’s original play fairly closely.

So what happened to the rest of the play? Some was cut outright–I started by eliminating two of Maugham’s characters–and the remainder was trimmed ruthlessly. Paul and I have said all along that we want the operatic version of The Letter to feel like a movie, which means, above all, that it must move. The current London revival of the stage play runs for two hours and fifteen minutes with one intermission. William Wyler’s 1940 film version, on the other hand, is ninety-five minutes long, and our goal is to bring the opera in at an intermission-free hour and a half.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my “trimming” quickly turned into rewriting, much of it radical. The Letter is a prosy play, and no sooner did I start working on the dialogue than I realized that most of it was unsingable in its original form. I had to make it more lyrical. The first step in doing that is to strip away every superfluous word. When writing a libretto, you must always keep in mind that each and every word you write will be accompanied by music–and that the music, if it does its job, will tell the audience what the characters are thinking and feeling. You don’t have to spell things out: the composer does that for you. Nor is there much room for subtlety, since opera is a primary-color medium that deals exclusively in large, explicit emotions. You don’t need a lot of words to say I love you or I hate you or I want to see you hang. (That last line, by the way, comes straight from the libretto of The Letter.)

A couple of weeks ago, I watched Budd Boetticher’s Comanche Station on TV for the first time since I’d written about it in the essay reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader. Boetticher’s Westerns have a reputation for being talky, but in fact Burt Kennedy’s script is masterly in its economy. Most of the first reel contains no dialogue at all, and elsewhere the characters never say ten words when three will do.

Here’s a typical exchange between Randolph Scott, the stoic hero of Comanche Station, and Claude Akins, the charming villain:

AKINS It wouldn’t surprise me if somebody didn’t try to take that woman away from you.

SCOTT Like you, for instance?

AKINS Like me, in particular.

As I listened to that scene, I thought, They don’t call ’em horse operas for nothing!

So far as I know, there are no how-to-do-it books about libretto writing. You have to figure it out yourself, and it didn’t take me long to figure out that the trick is to lay back, keep it simple, and give the composer plenty of room to make things happen. I spelled a lot of things out in the early drafts of The Letter, but in each successive editing pass, egged on by Paul, I tried to cut all the way down to the bare bones of emotion.

Here’s an example from the second scene, in which Leslie Crosbie (the character played by Bette Davis in the movie) is telling Robert, her husband, and Howard Joyce, their lawyer, why she shot and killed a man whom she claims (falsely) had tried to rape her.

First, Maugham’s original:

I began to lose my temper. I think I’d kept it too long. I think I’m a very even-tempered woman, but when I’m roused I don’t care very much what I say. “But, you poor fool,” I cried at him, “don’t you know that I’ve never loved anyone but Robert, and even if I didn’t love Robert you’re the last man I should care for.” “What do I care?” he said. “Robert’s away.”

And here’s my version:

“You poor fool,” I said. “I’ve never loved anyone but Robert!” And then he said, “So what? He’s away.”

In my last report, I described what it felt like to hear Paul play through his sketches for The Letter. At our most recent working session, he played me the first scene of the opera in its entirety. It starts off, literally, with a bang: there’s no overture, and the first sounds you hear are six pistol shots fired on a darkened stage. That was my idea (and Maugham’s). To be sure, I knew it would be difficult for a composer to grab the audience by the throat after an opening like that–but I knew my composer. Paul’s music for the first scene is staggeringly intense. As my brother, who knows about cars, might say, it goes from zero to 100 in nothing flat.
It’s a truism that there are no sure things in theater, but if the rest of The Letter is as effective as the beginning…well, let’s just say that I think we’re off to a pretty good start.

“I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.”
Henry James (quoted by Leon Edel in Letters of Henry James, Vol. 4)