Archives for 2008

• 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.

“It wasn’t until I got to New York that I became a Kansan. Everyone there kept reminding me that they were Jewish or Irish, or whatever, so I kept reminding them that I was midwestern. Before I knew it, I actually began to brag about being from Kansas! I discovered I had something unique, but it was the nature of New York that forced me to claim my past.”
William Inge (quoted in Ralph F. Voss, A Life of William Inge)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway production of The Seagull and a very rare revival by Chicago’s Strawdog Theatre Company of Karel Capek’s R.U.R.. I had fair-to-partly-cloudy feelings about The Seagull, but R.U.R. knocked me out. Here’s an excerpt.
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It’s been eight years since any play by Anton Chekhov was last seen on Broadway, and 15 since Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre performed “The Seagull” there. So the arrival in town of the Royal Court Theatre’s highly praised production of 2007, in which Kristin Scott Thomas (“The English Patient”) plays Arkadina, ought to be cause for celebration. Sure enough, Ian Rickson has given us a carefully considered staging, one that makes sense on paper–yet I never managed to warm up to it, or felt myself drawn into Chekhov’s world, in which comedy and tragedy are tied together so tightly that you can’t tell them apart.
Not until well into the second act did I figure out what was bothering me. Especially in Christopher Hampton’s new English-language version, this is a very British “Seagull,” but not in the pale, old-fashioned way: I’ve never seen a production of “The Seagull” that was played so successfully, even relentlessly, for laughs. Up to a point this is as it should be, but Mr. Rickson’s staging is over-emphatic and overly detailed, often to the point of outright fussiness. Nobody throws anything away–every moment is made to register–and much of the play’s poignancy, at least for me, got lost in the resulting clutter. Compared to the Classic Stage Company’s recent Off-Broadway “Seagull,” which was as intimate as it was immediate, this production struck me as both too big and (so to speak) too noisy….
The word “robot” was introduced to the world by the Czech playwright Karel Capek in “R.U.R.,” a play that was first performed in 1921 and ran for four performances on Broadway in 1942. Now you know all I knew about “R.U.R.” when I went to see it in Chicago last week. It is, to be sure, known by name to most people with a serious interest in science fiction or Central European drama, but I’d never seen it on stage, nor has it been professionally performed in this country at any time in my memory. I went partly out of curiosity and partly because I was so impressed by Strawdog Theatre Company’s electrifying 2007 production of Brian Friel’s “Aristocrats” that I wanted to see if it had been a fluke. I’m happy to report that lightning struck twice: Strawdog’s “R.U.R.” is a major revival of a play that turns out to be far more than a mere historical curiosity.
“R.U.R.” is a tale of modernity run amok, the story of Rossum’s Universal Robots, an island factory that manufactures lifelike but soulless artificial humans in vast quantities, then ships them all over Europe to grateful purchasers who use them to do their dirty work. This being science fiction, things inevitably go wrong: Dr. Gall (John Henry Roberts), one of the white-coated scientists in the employ of Rossum’s Universal Robots, makes the fatal mistake of building a few hundred robots that can feel emotions, upon which all hell breaks well and truly loose….
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Read the whole thing here.

This is the last paragraph of today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in its entirety:

Footnote: Hildegard Bechtler, who designed the sets and costumes for the Royal Court Theatre’s production of “The Seagull,” is also working on the Santa Fe Opera’s 2009 premiere of Paul Moravec’s “The Letter,” an opera for which I wrote the libretto. For the record, I have never had any contact of any kind with Ms. Bechtler, didn’t recommend her to the Santa Fe Opera, and didn’t even know that she had designed “The Seagull” until I read the press release for the show a couple of weeks ago.

I never expected to have to publish such an author’s note in the Journal. Bechtler is based in Europe, not the United States, and the only other time her work (which I admire greatly) has been seen on Broadway was when the National Theatre of Great Britain’s production of Anthony Sher’s Primo came to New York in the summer of 2005 for a month-long run, long before I knew that she would have anything to do with The Letter.
As soon as I found out that Bechtler had designed The Seagull, I e-mailed my editors at the paper to ask what they wanted me to do. After due consideration they decided that I could write about The Seagull, provided that I said nothing about Bechtler’s sets or costumes and disclosed my professional connection to her at the end of the review. Needless to say, I did just that.
I mention all this because I thought you’d like to know how such matters are handled at The Wall Street Journal, and that I take them as seriously as the Journal does.

“My stage successes have provided me with the greatest moments outside myself, my film successes the best moments, professionally, within myself.”
Laurence Olivier, On Acting