This Day in Opera History (Marc Blitzstein Adaptation of Hellman Drama Opens)

Oct. 31, 1949— Marc Blitzstein's Regina, premiering at Broadway’s 46th Street Theater, represented a cross-section of American musical influences: hymns, blues, foxtrots, ragtime, polkas, and field songs, as if trying to reach a mass audience.

But the masses didn’t turn out for this adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s hit 1939 drama The Little Foxes, about the deforming impact of greed on a woman and her siblings in turn-of-the century Alabama.

In fact, even in an era when quasi-operatic productions were created for Broadway by such ambitious composers as Kurt Weill (Street Scene), Gian Carlo Menotti (The Consul), Leonard Bernstein (Candide), and Frank Loesser (The Most Happy Fella), audiences did not warm to this material, with some attendees even demanding their money back because they were expecting a musical.

Even with a full-page ad in The New York Times signed by Bernstein and 11 other musical and theater luminaries that extolled the virtues of this production, Regina lasted just seven weeks—one-twentieth of the time it took to create this piece of musical theater.

My post from earlier this year, on a 1959 Blitzstein production, Juno, related how that show fell victim to misdirection and miscasting. The problem with Regina was simpler: After much back- and-forth discussion, producer Cheryl Crawford convinced the composer that this show belonged on a musical stage rather than in an opera house.

Blitzstein, longing for the kind of recognition then being given Rodgers and Hammerstein for South Pacific, went along with the idea. It was a mistake.

Some opera purists didn’t appreciate the show’s use of spoken recitative. But the principal cause of the truncated run were fans who, expecting a traditional brassy musical comedy, encountered a brooding opera about capitalistic excess—and demanded their money back at the show’s intermission.

Blitzstein’s lyrics drew heavily from Hellman’s dialogue from the original play—a convention often ignored in opera, whose creators adapt material to their own ends.

In what’s frequently considered the loveliest song in the show, “Birdie’s Aria,” Blitzstein affectingly depicts Regina’s sensitive sister, who mourns the gracious aristocratic manners that once held sway at the family estate, Lionnet, even as she drowns her sorrow in elderberry wine. Birdie becomes a sister under the skin to another lost Southern belle crushed by a rapacious age, Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire (which itself was turned into a 1995 opera by Andre Previn).

Quote of the Day (Henry James, on a Fraudulent Medium)

“[T]he individual who was repairing the tattered flag, turned round, perceived me, and showed me a countenance which could belong only to an ‘infallible waking medium.’ It was not, indeed, that Professor Fargo had the abstracted and emaciated aspect which tradition attributes to prophets and visionaries. On the contrary, the fleshly element in his composition seemed, superficially, to enjoy a luxurious preponderance over the spiritual. He was tall and corpulent, and wore an air of aggressive robustness. A mass of reddish hair was tossed back from his forehead in a leonine fashion, and a lustrous auburn beard diffused itself complacently over an expansive but by no means immaculate shirt front. He was dressed in a black evening suit, of a tarnished elegance, and it was in keeping with the festal pattern of his garments, that on the right forefinger of a large, fat hand, he should wear an immense turquoise ring. His intimate connection with the conjuring class was stamped upon his whole person; but to a superficial glance he might have seemed a representative of its grosser accomplishments. You could have fancied him, in spangled fleshings, looking down the lion's mouth, or cracking the ringmaster's whip at the circus, while Mlle. Josephine jumped through the hoops. It was his eyes, when you fairly met them, that proved him an artist on a higher line. They were eyes which had peeped into stranger places than even lions' mouths. Their pretension, I know, was to pierce the veil of futurity; but if this was founded, I could only say that the vision of Ezekiel and Jeremiah was but another name for consummate Yankee shrewdness. They were, in a single word, the most impudent pair of eyes I ever beheld, and it was the especial sign of their impudence that they seemed somehow to undertake to persuade you of the disinterested benevolence.”—American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and essayist Henry James (1843-1916), “Professor Fargo,” originally printed in Galaxy, August 1874, reprinted in Complete Stories, 1874-1884 (1999)

Though Henry James’ most famous short story might be “Turn of the Screw,” he wrote approximately two dozen tales of the supernatural that gave critical cachet to a genre that could use some at the time.

One of his earliest stories in this vein, “Professor Fargo,” featured more than just characters whose consciousness is profoundly disrupted by horrifying people, events or phenomena. It also involved contention for an innocent soul, and added a theme would preoccupy him for the of rest of his life: the pernicious effect of those who pursue wealth without scruples.

Together with Colonel Gifford, a down-on-his luck inventor now forced into billing as “The Great Mathematical Magician and Lightning Calculator,” Professor Fargo exploits the credulity of the grieving by promising to bring their loved ones back from the afterlife.  

Their “connection,” Gifford confides to the tale’s narrator, implies “no intellectual approval of his [Fargo’s] extraordinary pretensions.” But Gifford becomes even more alarmed by his partner’s growing influence over the colonel’s deaf-and-dumb teenage daughter.

When Gifford vents his disgust, Fargo proposes another “exhibit”: "Allow me to exhibit your daughter for a month, in my own way and according to my own notions, and I assume your debt."

Miss Gifford responds instantly to Fargo’s glance of command: “The poor child fixed her charming eyes on his gross, flushed face, and awaited his commands. She was fascinated; she had no will of her own.”

I don’t know where James came up with the idea for this haunting short story, but he seems to have been fascinated for a long time afterward by the instinct underlying stage hypnosis. After attending a lecture by his friend George du Maurier, he confessed his fascination with mass audiences’ susceptibility to sensation and sound, “the many-headed monster…, mak[ing] the mass (as we know the mass), to vibrate.”

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Twilight Zone,’ on ‘Weapons That Are Simply Thoughts’)

Rod Serling [Closing Narration]: “The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”— The Twilight Zone, Season 1, Episode 22, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” original air date Mar. 4, 1960, teleplay by Rod Serling, directed by Ron Winston

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Raven,’ As Poe’s Creature Offers an Unexpected Answer)

Dr. Craven [played by Vincent Price, center] [to The Raven]: “Who sent you to me?”

[The Raven stares at him silently]

Dr. Craven: “Are you some dark-winged messenger from beyond?”

[Still no answer]

Dr. Craven:” Answer me, monster, tell me truly!”

[sadly]

Dr. Craven: “Shall I ever hold again that radiant maiden whom the angels call Lenore?”

Dr. Bedloe [played by Peter Lorre, left] [as The Raven] “How the hell should I know? What am I, a fortune teller?”—The Raven (1963), screenplay by Richard Matheson, very, very loosely suggested by the Edgar Allan Poe poem, directed by Roger Corman

As soon as I heard this exchange, I burst out laughing, at the sheer surprise over Edgar Allan Poe being sent up. That line from The Raven was ad libbed by Peter Lorre during production of the film.

The actor’s penchant for improvisation deeply annoyed co-star Boris Karloff (right). In a post-film question-and-answer session at the Barrymore Film Center in Fort Lee, NJ last week, Sara Karloff and Victoria Price, daughters of the two horror icons, related this and other anecdotes about their fathers, holding forth in as entertaining a fashion as what the audience had just witnessed on screen.

Accustomed to English theatrical tradition of learning his lines cold, Karloff was constantly made uncomfortable by Lorre, who was more used to improvisation from his time with continental European troupes. It fell to Vincent Price, who had trained in both styles in London and American stages, to become the go-between for his two co-stars. (This was the fifth and last film together for Price and Lorre, who died a year after its release.)

Among the other anecdotes shared by Ms. Karloff and Ms. Price:

*Karloff, still under contract for a couple of days for producer-director Roger Corman, found himself acting in a hastily created film for rookie director Peter Bogdanovich, Targets.

*Jack Nicholson, in one of his earliest roles, did not turn in one of the more impressive performances of his career.

*The beautiful cinematography for the movie was created by Floyd Crosby, father of rock ‘n’ roller David Crosby.

*Karloff made 80 films after coming to Hollywood in the silent era, but people forgot all of them until his 81st, Frankenstein, he told his daughter.

*Price came to London in the mid-Thirties to study art history, but he enjoyed the theater so much that he eventually tried out for a play, and began his acting career there. Nevertheless, Ms. Price observed, he never lost his love for art--not only being an avid collector himself and serving on the board of museums, but even staying at cheaper hotels and buying lower-price tickets to spend on paintings.

*Price credited his first notable horror success, House of Wax (1953), for keeping his name before the public, at a time when Hollywood had "graylisted" him for past political activity--i.e., not subjecting him to the full ban that blacklisting represented, but ensuring he would only get lesser roles.

Quote of the Day (Isaac Babel, on the Impact of Literary Style)

“No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.” —Russian short-story writer Isaac Babel (1894-1940?), “Guy de Maupassant,” in The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, translated by Peter Constantine and edited by Nathalie Babel (2001)

Quote of the Day (John Sayles, on Music and Movies)

“Movies are visceral as well as intellectual. Unless you give someone a CD to listen while reading a book you don’t have the same experience you do with film, which allows you to use music in incredible ways.  In a movie you have this whole other thing you can do – rhythm [is] the spine of the story. I use music sparingly though and this is the reason some people come out of my films saying what was that. We don’t have wall-to-wall orchestral movie music telling them how to feel.   In doing that, I do lose some people but it’s really, really important to use music to support the story.” — Indie actor-screenwriter-director-novelist John Sayles interviewed by Antonio D’Ambrosio, “An Interview with John Sayles,” The Believer (Issue 61, March 2009)

Quote of the Day (Moliere, With Don Juan on How ‘To Do Anything I Want With Impunity’)

“If it happens that I am discovered, without my lifting a finger I’ll see the whole cabal espouse my interests and defend me in spite of and against anyone. In short, this is the real way to do anything I want with impunity. I shall set myself up as a censor of the actions of others, judge everyone harshly, and have a good opinion of no one but myself. If once anyone has offended me the least little bit, I shall never forgive, and shall very quietly retain an irreconcilable hatred. I shall play the avenger of Heaven’s interests, and, on that convenient pretext, harass my enemies, accuse them of impiety, and contrive to turn loose against them some undiscerning zealots who, without knowing what it’s all about, will raise a public outcry against them, load them with insults, and d—n them loudly by their own private authority. That’s the way to take advantage of men’s weaknesses, and for an intelligent mind to adapt itself to the vices of his day.” —French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), Don Juan, or, The Stone Guest (1665), translated by Donald Frame, in Tartuffe and Other Plays (1967)

In writing a play for his time, Moliere ended up creating a seriocomic parable for all times—but one that seems especially prescient for this troubled season in American history.

I couldn’t help sharing the astonishment of the spineless but sensible servant Sganarelle, who, after warning his master about a fearsome moving and talking statue that represents doom, hears Don Juan blithely reply, “hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtues.”

Every line in the above quote feels as if it could have been said now about a national figure who, whatever his other qualities, surely knows how to “take advantage of men’s weaknesses.”

(The image accompanying this post shows Andrew Weems as Sganarelle and Adam Stein as Don Juan in a production of Don Juan, which played in The Old Globe Theatre of San Diego from May 8 to June 13, 2004. It was directed by Stephen Wadsworth.)

Quote of the Day (Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Collective Action as a Source of Strength)

“Concert appears the sole specific of strength. I have failed, and you have failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail.” — American philosopher, essayist, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), “New England Reformers,” in Essays: Second Series (1844)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Gospel of Mark, on the Faith of the Blind Beggar)

“And they came to Jericho; and as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great multitude, Bartimae′us, a blind beggar, the son of Timae′us, was sitting by the roadside. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’ And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent; but he cried out all the more, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’ And Jesus stopped and said, ‘Call him.’ And they called the blind man, saying to him, ‘Take heart; rise, he is calling you.’ 50 And throwing off his mantle he sprang up and came to Jesus. And Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ And the blind man said to him, ‘Master,[h] let me receive my sight.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Go your way; your faith has made you well.’ And immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.”—Mark 10: 46-52 (Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition)

I searched YouTube for the late British actor Alec McCowen’s legendary solo performance of the Gospel of Mark, hoping to find a snippet containing this passage, among the most startling of this shortest of the four canonical accounts of the life of Christ. Though I found this excellent “best of” clip from that show, it did not include the story of the blind beggar.

I see, however, that Amazon sells a DVD of this performance from 1990. Reviews indicate that the quality of its reformatting for DVD is a bit sketchy. But if you can put up with that, I would hope that you can experience this remarkable moment in the life of Christ with all the drama it deserves.

(The image accompanying this post, The Healing of the Blind Bartimaeus, is an oil-on-panel painting from the workshop of Fernando Gallego, a Spanish Renaissance artist active from 1543 to 1565.)

Quote of the Day (Joseph Pulitzer, on a ‘Public-Spirited Press’ and Public Virtue)

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”—Hungarian-born American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911), “The College of Journalism,” North American Review, May 1904

Quote of the Day (Filmmaker Nancy Meyers, on Boys and Girls Growing Up in the Oprah Era)

“When my daughters were growing up, Oprah was on TV every day at three o’clock pushing girls forward. Meanwhile, boys fell in love with video games. These boys turned into men who wear hoodies and don’t shave. I think there is a reluctance to embrace adulthood.” —Film director-screenwriter (What Women Want) Nancy Meyers interviewed by Eliana Dockterman for “7 Questions: Nancy Meyers,” Time Magazine, October 5, 2015

The image accompanying this post, showing Nancy Meyers at the Screenwriting Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center hosted by Creative Screenwriting magazine, was taken Nov. 16, 2008, by thedemonhog.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Minister,’ on Public Subsidies for the Arts)

James Hacker [played by Paul Eddington, left]: “Why should the rest of the country subsidize the pleasures of the middle-class few? Theater, opera, ballet—subsidizing art in this country is nothing more than a middle-class rip-off!”

Sir Humphrey Appleby [played by Nigel Hawthorne, right]: “Oh, minister—how can you say such a thing? Subsidy is about education preserving the pinnacles of our civilization, or haven't you noticed?”

Hacker: Don't patronize me, Humphrey. I believe in education, too. I’m a graduate of the London School of Economics, may I remind you?”

Humphrey: “Well, I'm glad to learn that even the LSE is not totally opposed to education!”—Yes, Minister, Season 3, Episode 7, “The Middle-Class Rip-Off,” original air date Dec 23, 1982, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Peter Whitmore

Photo of the Day: The Flames of Autumn, Overpeck County Park, NJ

The other day, when I stepped out the door of my house, I couldn’t believe how fast and so much the leaves on a nearby tree were coming down.

Further confirmation that autumn was here at last came as I walked around Overpeck County Park, a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. The tree you see here had not really changed since summer, but the sudden change I noticed on Wednesday led me to take this photograph.

Quote of the Day (Sidney Lanier, on ‘Tolerance, That Can Kiss and Disagree’)

“Bring Tolerance, that can kiss and disagree,—
Bring Virtue, Honor, Truth, and Loyalty,—
Bring Faith that sees with undissembling eyes,—
Bring all large Loves and heavenly Charities,—
Till man seem less a riddle unto man
And fair Utopia less Utopian.”—Southern poet, musician, literary critic, and academic Sidney Lanier (1842-1881), “Ode to the Johns Hopkins University (Read on the Fourth Commemoration Day, February 1880),” in Poems of Sidney Lanier (1885)

I found these lines while tracking down the source of a quotation from Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life: specifically, that phrase “large Loves and heavenly Charities.” That led me to this poem and Sidney Lanier, who preached here a message of idealism and charity—and who was himself a casualty of a society that had lost that capacity.

Like Robert Louis Stevenson, Lanier ended up disregarding his father’s wish that he practice the law and took up poetry—which, along with his skill in playing the violin, flute, piano, banjo and guitar, evidenced his inclination towards the arts.

Most photos of Lanier show him bearded, in his later years. I prefer this one, from age 15, where you can see him in all his youthful promise.

But the poet-musician’s life was transformed—and, eventually, curtailed—by the Civil War. Leaving an offer as a tutor at Georgia’s Oglethorpe College, he joined the Confederate Army.  In 1864, after transferring to a blockade runner seized by the Union, he was imprisoned and contracted tuberculosis—the disease that killed him at age 39.

I first came across Lanier’s name in a high school English anthology from the late 1960s. Even then, he was considered old-fashioned for exhibiting the influence of Anglo-Saxon and Romantic poets.

“In Lanier,” Edmund Wilson wrote in his influential 1962 overview of the literature generated by the Civil War, Patriotic Gore, “the chivalric romance of the South was to merge with German romanticism and to become inflated and irised, made to drip with the dews of idealism.”

Critical disdain only gathered force in the years afterward because Lanier’s style, unlike Walt Whitman’s or Emily Dickinson’s, was not original for his time; he was crowded out of “best of” poetry collections by 20^th-century giants like the “beat” and “confessional” poets; and some of his verses, written in African-American dialect, are dated.

Though not a slave trader or slave owner himself, or even a veteran of combat (according to this 2020 Montgomery Independent article, he only led his unit’s band and never fired a shot), Lanier, like many white male southerners of his time, served in the Confederacy’s armed forces and in the Reconstruction Era wrote verses critical of civil rights for freedmen. That put him in the crosshairs of the movement to rename southern schools to remove vestiges of the slavery and Jim Crow eras.

After some heated debate, the Austin (TX) school named in Lanier’s honor was changed in 2019 to commemorate Juan Navarro, a 2007 graduate who died in Afghanistan five years later from an explosive device.

In reading about Lanier’s life and character, I couldn’t help but think of Gone With the Wind’s Ashley Wilkes—another bookish, sensitive scion of the Old South who, out of loyalty to his state, marched off to a war that ends with his life “permanently shattered once the North wins the war,” as Marc Eliot Stein (aka Levi Asher) noted in this 2015 post from his blog “Literary Kicks.”

Stein’s characterization of Wilkes’ genteel racism, born of a “fear of invasion” (in this case, Northerners out to destroy slavery and, with it, the antebellum plantocracy), applies just as readily to Lanier—who, in one of the first examples of what might be termed “Lost Cause literature,” memorialized one of the fallen heroes of the defeated South in “The Dying Words of Stonewall Jackson.”

It was deeply tragic that a multi-talented artist and intellectual like Lanier had his life cut short before he could achieve even more. It was also tragic that he could never see beyond the closed circle of his society and imagine a life of opportunity for freedmen.

These days, for the first time in my lifetime, the American political atmosphere has been inflamed by talk of civil war. We would do well to follow the high ideals that Lanier advocated in the verses I quoted above, rather than commit to the lack of a broader vision that wrecked his world and his life.

Quote of the Day (W.E.B. DuBois, on the Need To ‘Distinguish Between Fact and Desire’)

“If we are going, in the future,… to use human experience for the guidance of mankind, we have got clearly to distinguish between fact and desire.

“In the first place, somebody in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief. What we have got to know, so far as possible, are the things that actually happened in the world. Then with that much clear and open to every reader, the philosopher and prophet has a chance to interpret these facts; but the historian has no right, posing as scientist, to conceal or distort facts; and until we distinguish between these two functions of the chronicler of human action, we are going to render it easy for a muddled world out of sheer ignorance to make the same mistake ten times over.”— American sociologist, historian, editor, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935)

Quote of the Day (William Hazlitt, on Tyranny)

“Tyranny, in a word, is a farce got up for the entertainment of poor human nature; and it might pass very well, if it did not so often turn into a tragedy.” —English essayist William Hazlitt (1778-1830), “On the Spirit of Monarchy," originally printed in 1823, reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, edited by A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (1904)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Designing Women,’ on the REAL ‘Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia’)

[Sugarbaker family nemesis Marjorie Lee Winnick, having just made catty comments about Suzanne, a former beauty contest contestant, thinks incorrectly that she’s now the only one in the room.]

Julia Sugarbaker [played by Dixie Carter]: “I’m Julia Sugarbaker, Suzanne Sugarbaker’s sister. I couldn’t help over hearing part of your conversation.”

Marjorie Lee Winnick [played by Pamela Bowen]: “Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was here.”

Julia: “Yes, and I gather from your comments there are a couple of other things you don't know, Marjorie. For example, you probably didn't know that Suzanne was the only contestant in Georgia pageant history to sweep every category except congeniality, and that is not something the women in my family aspire to anyway. Or that when she walked down the runway in her swimsuit, five contestants quit on the spot. Or that when she emerged from the isolation booth to answer the question, ‘What would you do to prevent war?’ she spoke so eloquently of patriotism, battlefields and diamond tiaras, grown men wept. And you probably didn't know, Marjorie, that Suzanne was not just any Miss Georgia, she was the Miss Georgia. She didn't twirl just a baton, that baton was on fire. And when she threw that baton into the air, it flew higher, further, faster than any baton has ever flown before, hitting a transformer and showering the darkened arena with sparks! And when it finally did come down, Marjorie, my sister caught that baton, and 12,000 people jumped to their feet for sixteen and one-half minutes of uninterrupted thunderous ovation, as flames illuminated her tear-stained face! And that, Marjorie—just so you will know—and your children will someday know—is the night the lights went out in Georgia!”— Designing Women, Season 1, Episode 2, “The Beauty Contest,” original air date Oct. 6, 1986, teleplay by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, directed by Jack Shea

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on ‘Anxious Apprehensions’)

"Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security."—Anglo-Irish statesman and conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Quote of the Day (James Madison, on Voting for ‘Men of Virtue and Wisdom’)

“I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.” —Founding Father and 4^th President of the United States James Madison (1752-1836), “Judicial Powers of the National Government,” June 20, 1788, Founders Online, National Archives [Original source: The Papers of James Madison, vol. 11, 7 March 1788–1 March 1789, ed. Robert A. Rutland and Charles F. Hobson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977, pp. 158–165.]

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on the Christian Subject to Misinformation and Demagoguery)

“The Christian who is misinformed; who is subject to the demagoguery of extremists in the press, on the radio or on TV, and who is perhaps to some extent temperamentally inclined to associate himself with fanatical groups in politics, can do an enormous amount of harm to society, to the Church and to himself. With sincere intentions of serving the cause of Christ he may cooperate in follies and injustices of disastrous magnitude.” — American Trappist monk, theologian, memoirist and poet Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Life and Holiness (1963)

Quote of the Day (Eve Babitz, on Two Sisters and a Friend)

“Just then, Haily arrived, Kate's best friend who nobody but Kate could stand. Haily was the kind of woman who took people's boyfriends when they weren't looking and then wanted you to feel sorry for her because she had no friends. Except for Kate. Haily was even more in love with Kate than everyone else, and attempted to look just like her, dying her own dishwater brown hair dark red like Kate's was naturally, even though Kate was so nonchalant about her beautiful hair that that day she just wore it in a long braid down her slender back. Kate was so otherworldly in her beauty that it was hard for me to believe her sister Vicky looked just like her except that the things Kate did to accentuate her beauty, Vicky refused to even consider. Kate, for example, used silvery eye shadow to bring out the silvery lime of her eyes; she often let her hair cascade down her back in a darkened red cloud, whereas Vicky chopped hers off at chin length and shoved it off her face in a bandanna…. [W]hile Vicky always wore either loafers or tennis shoes or else terrible low-heeled black scuffed pumps if she was really backed into a corner and had to go to a dinner party, Kate's shoes were all silver, including the boots she wore that day with her Moroccan pants. Haily looked like a smudged charcoal drawing of Kate done by someone with no talent.”— American artist, author and muse Eve Babitz (1943-2021), “Expensive Regrets,” in Black Swans: Stories (1993)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Best Man,’ on a Candidate’s Missing Wife)

Sue Ellen Gamadge [played by Ann Sothern, far right]: [to William Russell, played by Henry Fonda, center] “We want to see a lot more of your wife—a great deal more. You know, there are still people who don't trust the English.”

Dick Jensen [played by Kevin McCarthy]: “Mrs. Russell was sick during the primaries.”

Sue Ellen: “Yes, yes, yes. I know. But she has to be at your side at all times. She must seem to be advising you. It did Adlai Stevenson great harm not having a wife and trying to be funny all at the same time, too. Great harm.”— The Best Man (1964), screenplay by Gore Vidal, based on his play, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner

Gore Vidal’s political satire has lost little if any of its sting, six decades after he wrote it. The setting—the smoked-fill rooms at a convention that will determine a party’s candidate—may have lost its importance, but his Broadway play and adaptation are at heart about power and its use in smashmouth politics.

And, even though we now—courtesy of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump— have Presidents who’ve been divorced, voters are still awfully curious about candidates’ spouses.

Which brings us to William Russell’s wife Alice in The Best Man.

The actress who played Alice on Broadway, Leora Dana, was American, as were the actresses who took on the role in 21^st century revivals: Michael Learned, Candice Bergen and Cybill Shepherd. So perhaps that line about “the English” above was made to account for the casting of the admittedly marvelous Margaret Leighton (pictured far left) when the play became a movie.

But, as a student of history, Vidal would probably have been struck by the irony of a foreign-born First Lady. For the first two and a quarter centuries after the founding of the republic, there had only been one such spouse: Louisa Johnson Adams, born in—yes, England.

Then came Melania Trump, Donald Trump’s second wife from Eastern Europe. (Perhaps he might want to reconsider his position on imports?)

For the longest time, I thought Louisa Adams underwent some of the worst experiences of any First Lady as the marital and political partner of John Quincy Adams, a notably frosty fellow who suffered bouts of depression.

After being largely ignored in the White House by her husband, Louisa became something of a recluse and worked on an unpublished autobiography whose title signals her misery: Adventures of a Nobody.

But I’m afraid that the Slovenian-born Melania has—well, trumped her. Ms. Trump has been largely AWOL as her husband plotted his return to the White House (her appearance with him at the Al Smith Dinner being a curious and rare exception), and her memoir, Melania, has just been published.

There is one line from The Best Man, flung out by Leighton, that First Ladies Adams and Trump wish they could have said to their husbands, I’m sure: “I’ve had twenty years of nonsense, of being a good sport.”

At least Mrs. Adams, however, never had to read about her husband’s affair with an adult-film actress conducted during her own pregnancy, sexual misconduct accusations by dozens of other women, and even a civil court jury finding that he’d sexually abused and defamed one of them.

What does the Slovenian Sphinx think of all this? Publicly, nothing. Privately, if she’s ever had a chance to watch The Best Man, I bet she snorts at Ann Sothern’s line about “seeming to advise” the candidate—but nods vigorously at Leighton’s “twenty years of nonsense.”

Quote of the Day (Jacob Silverman, on the New ‘Authoritarian-Curious’ Tech Elite)

“The tech elite once limited themselves mostly to preaching crypto, artificial intelligence, and life extension to a public that mostly wants messaging apps, free health care, and cheap rent. But now, they seem to be possessed by a grievance-driven groupthink, intolerant of criticism. Living the cloistered, easy lives of the Burning Man set, microdosing on ego worship, this authoritarian-curious crew has helped frame the online discourse around—and lead the backlash against—criminal justice reform, urban homelessness, immigration policies, and transgender rights.”— American journalist and author Jacob Silverman, “The Tech Elite Swerve Right,” The New Republic, October 2024

The image accompanying this post, showing the tech entrepreneur, investor, engineer, and all-around nuisance Elon Musk, was taken July 13, 2018, by Duncan Hull and comes from The Royal Society.

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on a Dismal Autumn Twilight in Czarist Russia)

“A crowd of coach-men and pilgrims was sitting in Uncle Tikhon's tavern. An autumn downpour with raging wet winds that lashed across their faces had driven them to seek refuge there. The tired, drenched travelers sat listening to the wind, dozing on benches by the wall….

“Outside the tavern door splashes of rain flew around the dim, grimy lantern. The wind howled like a wolf, yelping, as if to tear itself away from its tether by the door. From the yard came the sound of horses snorting and hoofs thudding in the mud. It was dank and cold.”—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), “In Autumn,” originally printed in 1883, reprinted in The Undiscovered Chekhov: Forty-Three New Stories, translated by Peter Constantine (1999)

Well, with this kind of terrible weather—not to mention life under the Czars (and later, under the Communists, then under Putin)—you can understand that the tavern patrons are a miserable, even sodden, bunch.

But one in particular—a man of about 40, wearing “a wrinkled summer coat covered with mud, calico pants, and rubber galoshes without shoes”—has his own personal reasons for begging Uncle Tikhon for a drink.

This was not one of the stories that Chekhov had collected in his life. But already you can see, from this short description, how he was learning to write concisely but vividly. A year away from earning his medical degree, he had also learned to observe the outward signs that pointed to a human being’s physical and mental condition.

Quote of the Day (Washington Irving, on Ichabod Crane)

“The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.” — American fiction writer, biographer and diplomat Washington Irving (1783-1859), “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Complete Tales of Washington Irving, edited by Charles Neider (1975)

The image accompanying this post shows Will Rogers as Ichabod Crane and Lois Meredith as Katrina Van Tassel, in the 1922 silent film The Headless Horseman.

At five feet 11 inches, Rogers was not the beanpole imagined by Irving. But the lovable humorist was already well launched on a career that would make him one of Hollywood’s most highly paid stars before dying in a plane crash in 1935, so that made him a box-office draw.

Quote of the Day (Neil Gaiman, on ‘Dracula’ as a ‘Victorian High-Tech Thriller’)

“Dracula is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of science, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders, blood transfusions, shorthand and trepanning. It features a cast of stout heroes and beautiful, doomed, women. And it is told entirely in letters, telegrams, press cuttings and the like. None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is going on. This means that Dracula is a book that that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know the significance of what they do tell.”— English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films Neil Gaiman, “On The New Annotated Dracula,” in The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016)

The image accompanying this post shows Bela Lugosi in the 1931 film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But come on—after all these years and so many millions of viewings on screen and TV, who doesn’t know that?

Song Lyric of the Day (Kris Kristofferson, on Love, ‘The Last Thing to Go’)

“Love is the last thing to go…
And it bought us the freedom
to fall into grace
On our way
to our place in the sun.”—Country music singer-songwriter and actor Kris Kristofferson (1936-2024), “The Last Thing to Go," from his This Old Road CD (2006)

The image accompanying this post of Kris Kristofferson, live at Roskilde Festival 2013, was taken July 6, 2013, by Morten Jensen.

Quote of the Day (Lena Dunham, Defining ‘Brat’)

“Brat is walking down the street with headphones on and eyes closed, knocking over passersby and refusing to say you're sorry.”— American writer and director Lena Dunham, “Shouts and Murmurs: A Guide to Brat Summer,” The New Yorker, Sept. 2, 2024

When I was a youngster, if I heard my father refer to me as a “brat,” the last thing I would do was revel in the term.

But this year—and specifically, around mid-to-late summer—“brat” had acquired far different connotations than that of a rotten little kid who needed discipline.

Now, according to Russell Falcon of the Los Angeles TV station KTLA, a “brat summer” “encourages enjoying life as much as you can in spite of the struggles you’re facing.” Or, put another way, according to another online dictionary site: It means “confidently rebellious, unapologetically bold, and playfully defiant.”

Heck, in the groundswell of euphoria following Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, the Veep was being described as “brat.”

Well, baby boomers are likely to react to this new bit of slang with the same impatience voiced by Regina George to one of her breathless hangers-on in Mean Girls: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!”

“Brat” has been hard-wired into boomer consciousness for so long that dislodging it is probably out of the question now. Maybe that is partly why the 50-64 and 65+ age cohorts are also the most immune to the candidacy of Ms. Harris.

I’m afraid for many of these older voters, “brat” is going to fall as flat as “phat.”

(The image accompanying this post, of Lena Dunham at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival premiere of The Russian Winter, was taken Apr. 20, 2012, by David Shankbone.)

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on ‘Beauty Visible to Us in the Landscape’)

“Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more.”—American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Autumnal Tints,” The Atlantic, October 1862

I took the image accompanying this post in late October 2008.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thornton Wilder, on Faith)

“Faith is an ever-widening pool of clarity, fed from springs beyond the margin of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day (1967)