Archives for May 2009

“Instinct.–When our house burns down, we even forget our lunch.–Yes, but we go back to it later in the ashes.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I like the Graham Greene letter that Terry quoted this morning as I know what Greene means, and I feel like the opening chapters of David Copperfield are something that regularly should be exclaimed about. They must be among the most beautiful and sustained performances of music-making ever to happen in a novel; so rapturous and psalm-like, never a word out of place. A sample from Chapter 2., the “I Observe” chapter: “There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tomb-stones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, ‘Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again?'” As Greene says, they’re “perfect.”
I’d argue that contrary to Greene’s expectations, Dickens never mis-steps once for the novel’s first ten chapters. But at Chapter 11 the tone shifts to something more ordinary. It clearly is a deliberate choice by Dickens, and one appropriate to the plot: It occurs at the point that the young Copperfield, having lost his mother, is being sent by the dreadful Murdstones out into the world to work; and it’s only fitting that as he’s ejected from childhood, the language of childhood would end. You couldn’t call it “a mistake” but I never reach it without experiencing a feeling of deflation.
Here is the close of Chapter 10, which sounds in the same magical key as the novel’s beginning:

Behold me, on the morrow, in a much-worn little white hat, with a black crape round it for my mother, a black jacket, and a pair of hard stiff corduroy trousers–which Miss Murdstone considered the best armor for the legs in that fight with the world which was now to come off–behold me so attired, and with my little worldly all before me in a small trunk, sitting, a lone lorn child (as Mrs. Gummidge might have said), in the post-chaise that was carrying Mr. Quinion to the London coach at Yarmouth! See how our house and church are lessening in the distance; how the grave beneath the tree is blotted out by intervening objects; how the spire points upward from my old playground no more, and the sky is empty!

And then Chapter 11 opens and the music is over:

I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became at ten years old, a little laboring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.

When I told Paul Moravec three years ago that I’d love to collaborate with him on an opera, it didn’t occur to me that The Letter would open in the same year that Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong would be published. I’m sure I would have said yes anyway–it was an offer I couldn’t refuse–but I might have thought twice, and maybe even thrice, if I’d known exactly what I was getting into.

The good news is that Pops won’t be coming out until four months after The Letter opens. That doesn’t mean I can simply put Satchmo aside for now and concentrate solely on Santa Fe, of course, though The Letter is rarely far from my mind these days. Paul and I popped up in the annual list of summer-festival highlights published in Sunday’s New York Times, and I also ran across an Associated Press story the other day in which Charles MacKay, the general director of the Santa Fe Opera, announced that the company has been “doing pretty well” despite the current economic difficulties. That tallies with everything I’ve been hearing so far. Ticket sales for The Letter are looking good, and though we’ve encountered a few bumps in the road to opening night, we haven’t hit any potholes.

On the other hand, I’ve had to juggle Pops and The Letter more or less simultaneously in recent weeks, and while I have yet to drop any balls on my head, it’s been a near-run thing. Last Tuesday, for instance, Paul and I auditioned a pair of singers, then went straight to a club in midtown Manhattan to give an hour-long presentation on The Letter. The next day I was interviewed twice about Pops, once via e-mail and once on the phone, in preparation for my May 29 appearance at BookExpo America (Benjamin Moser, the alarmingly smart new-books columnist of Harper’s, will be interviewing me on stage that afternoon). I also finished writing an essay about the making of The Letter for the July issue of Commentary. In between these varied activities, I chipped away at the page proofs of Pops, knocked out a Wall Street Journal drama column, went to Brooklyn to see a performance by Propeller of The Merchant of Venice, and started drafting proposals–strictly preliminary, at least for the moment–for three books that I’m giving serious thought to writing.

If you think I’m working too hard, you’re right, and it’s only going to get worse. The only thing that’s keeping me on a fairly even keel is that both The Letter and Pops are basically finished: I still have a certain amount of this-and-that left to do, but the really heavy lifting is now in the hands of the Santa Fe Opera and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Nevertheless, I’m going to be unremittingly busy between now and January, and I find the prospect unnerving, sometimes even scary.

How do I cope? By going to the gym each day, going to bed as early as I can each night, and seizing every opportunity, however brief, to put down the reins and read, watch, or listen to something unrelated to Pops or The Letter. It’s helping, too, that so many of the shows I’m seeing these days are turning out to be exceptionally good. Great art is, among other things, a powerful distraction from the problems of the moment, and it has been a blessed relief to be able to escape into such enveloping theatrical experiences as The History Boys, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and The Norman Conquests.

What I can’t do–at least not very often–is lie fallow. That’s something I need to do, but it won’t be possible any time soon. In order to make it all the way from here to January without falling over, I have to pedal as fast as I can. Moreover, I feel guilty every time I complain about being too busy, because I know that the world is full of anxious artists who aren’t nearly busy enough. As I’ve previously had occasion to mention in this space. George Balanchine was once asked why the members of New York City Ballet’s pit orchestra were paid less than New York City’s garbagemen. His answer? “Because garbage stinks.” Nobody has to tell me that my life smells like roses.

The fact that I have an opera opening in July and a book coming out in December is by any reasonable standard a wholly unmixed blessing, and few days pass without my remembering to rejoice at my good fortune. But as Raskolnikov reminds us, “Man grows used to everything–the beast!” I’ll try to remind myself at regular intervals not to be too beastly about being too busy.

Mrs. T and I watched a documentary about Rita Hayworth on Saturday night. Afterward I went to bed and slept deeply. I got up the next morning, went straight to my iBook, and tweeted as follows: “I dreamed last night that I saw Alec Guinness in Pal Joey. Can’t remember what part he played, but I hope it was Nicely-Nicely Johnson.”
It seemed perfectly plausible: not only did Rita Hayworth star in the 1957 film version of Pal Joey, but I had “The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York” running through my head all morning long as a result of the dream. As for Guinness, I just wrote an essay about him for Commentary. Q.E.D., right? Wrong. Both Nicely-Nicely Johnson and the song that was playing in my head are from Guys and Dolls, not Pal Joey, a fact that several of my fellow tweeters hastened to point out to me.
Moral: don’t tweet about a dream while you’re still half asleep.

“Started reading David Copperfield. My goodness, the first two chapters are perfect. I don’t believe there’s ever been anything better in the novel–& that includes Proust & Tolstoy. One dreads the moment of failure, for Dickens always sooner or later fails.”
Graham Greene, letter to Catherine Walston, Feb. 15-24, 1959

• Description of the complexion of Edward Cullen (the Robert Pattinson character) in Twlight: “literally sparkles”; “like thousands of diamonds” are “embedded in the surface.”
• Description of livestock in the West Country, as written by Dorothy Wordsworth in her journal in 1798: “the sheep glittering in the sunshine.”
Conclusion: English sheep are vampires.
Quotes from Twilight were lifted from Jenny Turner’s terrific essay about the series and movie for the London Review of Books. While I was looking it up, I came across this Twilight-inspired WikiAnswer exchange (presented here with spelling, grammar corrected):
Q. Does vampire skin really sparkle in the sunlight?
A. Unfortunately, vampires don’t really exist.
That is unfortunate — and, according to this news item on i09, also correct: “Two physicists have published an academic paper where they demonstrate, by virtue of geometric progression, that vampires could not exist, since they would almost immediately deplete their entire food supply (a.k.a, all of us).” (Last link via Rebecca Skloot.)

It is still raining. And I just realized that thanks to a fifth-grade production of “Rip Van Winkle” my class put on during elementary school I never hear thunder without thinking “God is bowling.” Or excuse me, “playing nine-pins.”
• A couple things to listen to: Mary Gaitskill reads Vladimir Nabokov’s short story, “Symbols and Signs.” You may think, as I did, that listening to this will be a spinach-y experience — it won’t be. Also amazing, albeit in an entirely different way: Christopher Walken reads “The Raven.” (Second link via Maud.)
• Speaking of Nabokov, scholar and author Alfred Appel, Jr.’s obituary in the New York Times ends with this anecdote:

Speaking at a memorial service for Nabokov in Manhattan in 1977, Mr. Appel recalled telling him about an antiwar protest at Northwestern during which a student had called Mr. Appel a eunuch. Nabokov said quickly, “Oh no, Alfred, you misunderstood him. He called you a unique.”

Sam Jones reminded me that Nabokov also praised Appel’s work in his eccentric “Anniversary Notes” — one of those pieces which ideally would be presented in a fan of index cards.
• Ammon Shea picks his 26 favorite words from Reading The OED. Relatedly, I’m now holding auditions for my new glam rock band, Wonderclout.