Archives for 2010

“I get very impatient with people who say ‘I go to the theatre to be taken out of myself.’ I think, ‘There’s probably nothing in yourself.’ I’m only interested in making sure people are reintroduced to themselves. Great theatre draws your attention to things in real life, to the negligible, the boring and nondescript. A playwright like Chekhov makes that considerable and reintroduces us to the things that we have overlooked.”
Jonathan Miller (interviewed in The Independent, Aug. 3, 2010)

An excerpt from the 1942 film of The Man Who Came to Dinner, directed by William Keighley and adapted (mostly faithfully) by Philip G. Epstein and Julius J. Epstein from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Monty Woolley, who plays Sheridan Whiteside, created the role on Broadway in 1939:

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

“To be able to write a play, for performance in a theatre, a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naïve, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool. He must be a chaser of wild geese, as well as of wild ducks. He must be prepared to make a public spectacle of himself. He must be independent and brave, and sure of himself and of the importance of his work; because if he isn’t, he will never survive the scorching blasts of derision that will probably greet his first efforts.”
Robert E. Sherwood, preface to The Queen’s Husband

Stephen Hough plays Paderewski’s B Flat Nocturne, Op. 14, No. 6:

“A lost cause may still deserve support, and that support is never wasted.”
Kingsley Amis, The King’s English (courtesy of Levi Stahl)

• Somebody compared me to a Holocaust denier the other day for having spoken ill of Elie Wiesel. While I wouldn’t dream of dignifying such a remark by responding to it, I was struck by its sheer nastiness. It goes without saying that the world has always contained plenty of people who assume that you’re a contemptible idiot if you disagree with them about anything. To be sure, I doubt that such creatures are significantly more numerous today than they were a century ago, or even a quarter-century, but I incline to think that they now talk quite a bit louder than they used to–especially when they’re sitting alone at their computers.

I hear the gentleman in the second balcony yelling “You’re one to talk!” He’s got a point: I’ve written some awfully sharp things in my capacity as a professional critic, and will doubtless continue to do so. But I don’t think I’ve ever cast personal aspersions on the artists whom I’ve criticized. That seems to me to be supremely inappropriate, even when the aspersions are true–and I do know a fair number of unpleasant things about some of the artists whom I cover in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. The world of art has always had its share of…well, bad actors.

Speaking as a biographer, I believe deeply that it is my responsibility to tell the truth about artists who are no longer living, even when it makes them look bad. Speaking as a critic and commentator, I think the private lives of living artists are their business and no one else’s. And lest we forget, the argumentum ad hominem is not in fact an argument at all, though it can be effective when deployed with skill and mercilessness.

Which brings us back, however circuitously, to my own case. I’d like to think that anybody who read a piece (or a posting or tweet) in which I was compared to a Holocaust denier would simply roll his eyes and move on. But I’m old enough to know better. More and more of the American people are choosing to live in closed circles of collective concurrence, and I have no doubt that in certain of those circles, those who read such an attack on me would nod their heads sagely and say something on the order of “Yep, it figures. Probably beats his wife, too.”

George Washington once drew up a list of rules of civility. Here is the first one:

1st Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.

I’m with the father of our country. To be gratuitously nasty in public discourse is like relieving yourself in a swimming pool. Even if nobody knows you did it, you still made the pool a dirtier place for everybody–yourself included.

“When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand, we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”
Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, 1935