Archives for February 2009

Ralph Fiennes performs excerpts from Brian Friel’s Faith Healer on Broadway in 2006. The production was directed by Jonathan Kent:

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

“Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.”
E.B. White, Here Is New York

If you know anything about Fanny Burney, you probably know that Samuel Johnson was a great admirer of her first novel, Evelina, and that his admiration was the beginning of a beautiful friendship between them. I’m rereading the book for the first time since college and finding it just as disarmingly funny and irrepressible as the first time. Edward A. Bloom, in the introduction to my Oxford World’s Classics edition, details the making of the Burney-Johnson friendship:

When eminent figures like Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke joined the growing company of Evelina‘s admirers, Fanny was elated. But no one’s approbation meant more to her than that of Dr. Johnson: upon learning that he had read the book, she ran out on to the lawn at Chessington and danced around a mulberry tree. The elderly Johnson was indeed so intrigued by the characters–especially the vulgar ones–that he memorized their scenes and was convulsed with laughter.

The book will do that to you. The vulgar characters in Evelina’s circle, especially the perpetually battling Frenchwoman Madame Duval and English Captain Mirvan, are eager to point out each other’s vulgarity but, of course, blissfully unaware of their own: “he has no more manners than a bear,” Mme. Duval says of the captain; he just laughs at her–and never more than in Letter XVI, when she and her escort M. Du Bois not quite accidentally fall into a mud puddle.

All eyes were then turned to Monsieur Du Bois, whose clothes were in the same miserable plight with those of Madame Duval, and who, wet and shivering, and disconsolate, had crept to the fire.

The Captain laughed yet more heartily; while Mrs. Mirvan, ashamed of his rudeness, repeated her enquiries to Madame Duval; who answered, ‘Why, as we were a-coming along, all in the rain, Monsieur Du Bois was so obliging, though I’m sure it was an unlucky obligingness for me, as to lift me up in his arms, to carry me over a place that was ancle-deep in mud; but instead of my being ever the better for it, just as we were in the worst part,–I’m sure I wish we had been fifty miles off,–for, somehow or other, his foot slipt,–at least, I suppose so,–though I can’t think how it happened, for I’m no such great weight,–but, however that was, down we both came together, all in the mud; and the more we tried to get up, the more deeper we got covered with the nastiness,–and my new Lyon’s negligee, too, quite spoilt!–however, it’s well we got up at all, for we might have laid there till now, for aught you cared; for nobody never came near us.’

This recital put the Captain into an extacy; he went from the lady to the gentleman, and from the gentleman to the lady, to enjoy alternately the sight of their distress. He really shouted with pleasure; and, shaking Monsieur Du Bois strenuously by the hand, wished him joy of having touched English ground; and then he held a candle to Madame Duval, that he might have a more complete view of her disaster, declaring repeatedly, that he had never been better pleased in his life.

“You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it may be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended joys.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits

Fair warning: I’ve been immersed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge-related reading for the past month or so and am spilling over with observations & anecdotes. Buckle up!
In Early Visions, the first of his two-part biography of STC, Richard Holmes gives the genesis of “Kubla Khan,” and what it got me thinking about is the ways in which the kingdom described gets mapped and re-mapped as it goes from source material to poem and then to interpretation of the poem.
When he published “Kubla Khan”, Coleridge explained in an attached note that its inspiration came from John Purchas’s Pilgrimage, a nine-volume anthology of travel stories and folk tales published in 1614 (“Kubla Khan” was written in 1797). Here’s the relevant paragraph of the Purchas, which Holmes quotes in full:

In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddows, pleasant Springs, delightful Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the midst thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place. Here he doth abide in the months of June, July, and August, on the eight and twentieth day whereof, he departeth thence to another place to do sacrifice in this manner: He hath a Herd or Drove of Horses and Mares, about ten thousand, as white as snow; of the milke whereof none may taste, except he be of the blood of Cingis Can. Yea, the Tartars do these beasts great reverence, nor dare any cross their way, or go before them. According to the directions of his Astrologers or Magicians, he on the eight and twentieth day of August aforesaid, spendeth and poureth forth with his owne hands the milke of these Mares in the aire, and on the earth, to give drink to the spirits and Idols which they worship, that they may preserve the men, women, beasts, birds, corne, and other things growing on the earth.

So that was the source. Now read the poem. Then here comes the next layer of imagining of the kingdom, in the mind of the reader/ critic — in this case, Ted Hughes, whose book of essays Winter Pollen includes a wonderful study of the poem:

Looking at the paradise depicted in what I called the Overture, one gets the impression of a great sphere, or perhaps an ovoid, broader at the bottom.
The ‘sunny pleasure dome’, with its gardens, woods, and river valley, is at the top. A little below, tucked in somewhat under the dome, beneath a forested overhang, removed from the direct sunlight that falls on the dome but mysteriously open to the moon, a deep fold encloses the sources of the river. These are the upward, outward features, like the hair and splendid brow, with the spiritual eyes, and beneath it the sensuous perhaps rather crude mouth, of an exotic humpty dumpty.

[Read more…]

“I eventually went up into that little side valley where the rhododendron thickets are and there I sat. I began to read and I read about an hour. Twice rabbits came to within ten feet of me–quivering with nerves–almost ready to drop in nervous breakdown they look when they know something’s wrong but not what. I read on 100 pages then was interrupted by a cat. A black and white cat. It sat within fifteen feet of me, on a rock, and began to stare me out–very offensive. When I threw a sod at it, it just flattened and went on staring. I couldn’t go on reading–the cat completely disturbing the landscape. It wasn’t an interesting wildcat, and while it was there no interesting wild thing would come near, so I moved off and came home, ousted by a cat.”
October 1956 letter from Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath, Letters of Ted Hughes

“To divide one’s life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.”
Clifton Fadiman, “On Being Fifty”

I once described Blossom Dearie as “the hippest person in the world.” It was a forgivable piece of hyperbole, though she was surely one of the strangest creatures in the world, a fey woman with a tiny, childlike voice and a hard-earned reputation for craziness who sang in a style precisely equidistant between jazz and cabaret, accompanying herself on the piano with supreme delicacy and finesse. She was also an exceptionally fine composer whose best songs, “I’m Shadowing You” and “Sweet Surprise” in particular, deserve to be much better known. Her long run at the now-defunct Danny’s Skylight Room, which lasted into the twenty-first century, gave those not yet born when the New York cabaret scene was at its height a chance to know something of what it was like.

Her best records were the solo albums she made in the Seventies for Daffodil, her own label, all of which, alas, are now out of print, including Needlepoint Magic, the live album that introduced me to her crystalline way with a song and to which I am listening as I write these words. This compilation of her earlier sides for Verve is almost as good, though, and provides an even clearer sense of her jazz roots, which ran very deep (Miles Davis admired her greatly).

I first heard Blossom sing in 1979, became a fan on the spot, and stayed that way forever after. She was the first cabaret singer I made a point of hearing in person when I moved to New York, and I continued to seek her out from then until 2002, when I caught one of her last live shows and wrote about it in my Washington Post column:

As for Blossom Dearie, who has settled into Danny’s Skylight Room for a hyper-extended run, I can do no better than to say of her what Walter Winchell said of the Stork Club: She’s the New Yorkiest thing in New York. Her piping, super-sly voice and crystalline pianism haven’t changed much in the past four decades–the only difference is that she now brings a sharply sardonic edge to tough-minded songs like “The Ladies Who Lunch”–and if you long for the long-lost days of cabaret at its classiest, you’ll find them here.

That brief review sums up part of what Blossom Dearie meant to me: I identified her with New York, the city of my dreams, so much so that I named a cat after her. The cat and I finally made it to New York, but now that Blossom is gone, my dreams will never again be the same.

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Stephen Holden’s excellent New York Times obituary is here.

Doug Ramsey’s eloquent tribute is here.

Blossom Dearie sings “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” on The Jack Paar Show: