Archives for October 2008

“I sometimes suspect that New Yorkers do not have a desire to be in theatres, I think they want to go to whatever the certified hit is, of the season. What the Delphic oracle tells them to go and see, sometimes in depressed moments I think, ‘Well, they really don’t want to be there at all. They’re looking for every excuse not to go. The New York Times tells them it’s not up to much, “Oh good, we’ve got a reason for not going.”‘ The English are not like that. They’re much more independent about their theatre. They’re much more naturally theatrical in their instincts. Theatre is part of their life in a way that it is not part of the average American’s life.”
Peter Shaffer, interviewed by Mike Wood for the William Inge Theatre Festival, Feb. 27, 1992

My paid workload is at something like an all-time height this week and into next, so consider this just poking my head in. I’ve been in this boat for a while, leading a narrowed life. But I did carve out some time last weekend for something special: a first-ever viewing of The Godfather on the big screen, and a gorgeous new print at that. In a recent story in Slate, Fred Kaplan walked readers through the heroically painstaking process through which Coppola’s masterpiece, and its even greater sequel, were restored to their original glory.
The quality of the picture and sound, and of course the liberation from living-room scale, made the film a new experience. We noticed details that were easy to lose in the background in previous viewings–a tear in Tom Hagen’s eye in one scene and numerous details of setting throughout. But Al Pacino’s performance is the element that most benefits from the restoration as far as I’m concerned. It’s a more subtle and powerful performance than I knew before. And it’s all in the eyes.
The transformation of Michael Corleone is tracked as much in his countenance and expression as in his speech, actions, and gestures. Pacino conveys all of this with terrific restraint, building his performance from the eyes out. After the incident outside the hospital, Michael becomes a strikingly more self-contained figure–composed, calculating, and almost shrunken–so that the eyes become his main conduit of expression. They’re darting and furtive in the earliest scenes following the blow to Michael’s face, the scenes in which the hits on Sollozzo and McCluskey are planned and carried out and Michael is still making rookie mistakes like betraying his surprise when the car gets on a bridge to Jersey. But the eyes themselves eventually come under discipline, too, growing steady and dead well before the final settling of accounts.
The new print is an electrifying experience, and one that really makes you lament what’s happened to Pacino. If you knew him only from such latter-day growling and bellowing as his performances in, say, Heat and Any Given Sunday, would you even recognize him here?
I can hardly wait to see Part II.

Truman Capote talks to a CBC interviewer in 1966 about how he came to write In Cold Blood:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.”
A.J. Liebling, “A Talkative Something or Other” (The New Yorker, Apr. 7, 1956)

• Richard Eder’s view of Ted Hughes is more chilly than my own, but his review of Hughes’s collection of letters, just released stateside, is still worth a read.
• A great interview with Kelly Link, whose new collection of short stories Pretty Monsters I got this past weekend and am loving. (Via Gwenda. She also notes that Link’s previous collection, Magic for Beginners, is now available for free download.)

In the October issue of Poetry, William Logan writes about the responses he received to his review of Hart Crane’s Complete Poems and Selected Letters, which ran last year in the New York Times Book Review. As Logan puts it, “I’ve always loved Hart Crane; but I love him in fractions, delighting in half a dozen of those rhapsodic poems long on style and short on sense but finding the rest mystifying as a Masonic ritual.” Perhaps inevitably, some readers took issue with this mixed assessment and wrote in “furious” letters to the editor, leading Logan to conclude, “[r]eviewing Crane, if you don’t review him fondly, is like poking a pencil into a hornet’s nest.”
Little of Logan’s experience will surprise anyone who’s ever expressed a dissenting opinion as a critic, but it can be enjoyable to have a look at other people’s hate mail. And an interesting side issue crops up in the essay about the factual, if not critical, errors that Logan made in his review, all of which fell in the review’s first sentence, “Before Hart Crane’s leap into the Caribbean that fatal April noon in 1932, he folded his jacket over the ship’s rail with impeccable manners. Striking out into the glassy sea, he was seen no more, dying younger than Byron but older than Shelley.”
As Crane biographer Paul Mariani pointed out in his own letter to the editor, that sentence contains three errors: Crane was wearing a light topcoat that day, not a jacket, the sea in question wasn’t the Caribbean but the Atlantic, and the water wasn’t “glassy” but had “sizable waves.”
Logan cedes the first two points but notes there’s conflicting opinion among Crane’s four biographers about what exactly the conditions of the water were that day at noon — which then leads him to a nice consideration of the role of fact vs. fantasy in the summing up of someone else’s life (or is it factual truth vs. truth truth?):

Mariani fails in The Broken Tower to describe the roughness of the ocean (he mentions the “impenetrable waters off which the noon sun gleamed,” which doesn’t sound choppy or rugged); Philip Horton in Hart Crane claims the “sea was mild”; and Clive Fisher, quoting Guggenheim in Hart Crane: A Life, says the sea was “like a mirror that could be walked on.” [In a later version of the review] I changed my “glassy sea” to a “violent wake” (the wake, some think, dragged Crane under). On balance, however, the “glassy sea” seems likely.
In his description of Crane’s death, Mariani was attracted to the captain’s notion that the poet might have been eaten by a shark–“Did he feel something brush his leg, the file-sharp streaking side of concentrated muscle, before the silver flash and teeth pulled him under?” This is sheer moonshine, but a biographer’s fantasies–and gruesome fantasies they are–don’t mitigate the critic’s error of fact. (The biographer then throws some of Crane’s purple prose–or rather purple poetry– back at him: “But this time the calyx of death’s bounty gave back neither scattered chapter nor livid hieroglyph.” The allusion is to “At Melville’s Tomb,” but as prose it sounds like a canceled passage by Sir Thomas Browne.) The aggrieved reader’s fondest delusion is that a critic’s sidelong errors undermine a disagreement about taste; yet don’t we prefer Eliot’s opinions, despite his habitual misquotation, to the arguments of some bozo supported by quotes correct to the last nicety? That doesn’t make the errors less embarrassing.

In the run of things, a small scholarly kerfuffle, but one that’s stayed with me, maybe because it’s suggestive of the two great difficulties of writing — how hard it is to enter other people’s minds, to see the world and think as your characters or subjects do (we don’t know what was in Hart Crane’s mind before he leapt, we can’t even agree on what the sea looked like in front of him), and then to actually write well & with accuracy about what you find there. For example, it is hard to write well and with particularity about the sea — whether it is “glassy” or “violent” or “immense” or “wet.” Here, for what it’s worth, is Herman Melville describing conditions at the outset of Benito Cereno, “The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything grey. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that had cooled and set in the smelter’s mould.”

“The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”
Frank Lloyd Wright (quoted in The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 4, 1953)

As I mentioned the other day, Mrs. T and I are spending the week in Cleveland, seeing shows and hitting museums. We are, amazingly enough, quartered in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, about which much more later. Unfortunately–or not–the house in question is Web-unfriendly, so any blogging I do this week beyond the routine and regular almanac entries, weekly video, and theater-related postings will be catch as catch can.

I say “or not” because Mrs. T and I are greatly looking forward to having a bit of time to ourselves. We were married a year ago tomorrow, and we’ll be celebrating our first anniversary by seeing Noises Off, the funniest play ever written, at the Cleveland Play House, having what I hope will be a very nice dinner, and reveling in the always-special experience of spending the night with Frank Lloyd Wright. We’d just as soon not invite anyone else over, if you know what I mean.

I make regular mention of Mrs. T on this blog, so I expect you’ve long since figured out that our marriage has proved to be a rip-roaring success. She wouldn’t want me to blather on about it, but since she’s asleep in the next room and doesn’t know that I’m writing these words, I’ll add one thing more: I never expected to be as happy as I am now, and Hilary is the reason why it happened. I met her a bit less than three years ago, a few weeks before I fell victim to the illness that nearly killed me. I had already come to the reluctant and unwelcome conclusion that I would be spending whatever was left of my life flying solo, and by then I was starting to wonder whether that time might be short. Instead I fell in love, got well, got married, wrote a biography and an opera libretto, and discovered that there was much to be said for embarking on my fifth decade.

I am, in short, a very lucky man–but meeting Mrs. T was the best piece of luck I ever had, and I don’t expect to top it. Or want to. Or need to.

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Our Girl and CAAF will be taking it from here for the rest of the week. See you next Monday.