A Boat Against the Current

Quote of the Day (William Ellery Channing, on Being ‘Content With Small Means’)

2012-01-29T08:27:00.000-08:00

“To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
   and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
   and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
   act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
   and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,
   do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
   unbidden and unconscious,
   grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.”—American Unitarian clergyman, writer and philosopher William Ellery Channing (1810-1884), “My Symphony”

Flashback, January 1077: Emperor Yields to Pope in Snows of Conossa

2012-01-28T23:51:00.000-08:00

In one of the most extraordinary moments in the papacy’s two-millennia history, the former Benedictine monk Hildebrand—having become, against his wishes, Pope Gregory VII, and now known to history as St. Pope Gregory VII—brought the German emperor Henry IV to heel by making him stand barefooted outside the castle where the pontiff was staying in Canossa, Italy, shivering for three days in the severest winter temperatures in years, before granting absolution and rescinding the excommunication under which the ruler had been placed.

The good feeling between the two, however, was short-lived. Henry, smarting from the indignity he had to endure, struck back at the pope when he had the chance, invading Rome and forcing Gregory into bitter exile seven years later.

“How many divisions does the Pope have?” Joseph Stalin once asked. The question, though sardonic, got to the heart of papal authority. Nowhere, I would argue, was the issue joined more momentously than in the snows of Canossa. Indeed, I would rank it among the half-dozen most dramatic moments in the history of the popes. (The other moments, in case you were wondering, are the upside-down crucifixion of St. Peter; Pope Leo the Great’s visit to Attila the Hun outside Rome to persuade the barbarian ruler to leave the Imperial City alone; Pope Julius’s assumption of an army to quell unrest; and the unsuccessful attempt on the life of John Paul II).

The issues that Gregory confronted during his papacy bedeviled the church for the next few centuries as well, even down to the present day: simony, lay investiture, and clerical celibacy.

Photo of the Day: Saturday in Bryant Park

2012-01-28T23:20:00.000-08:00

Today, with a few minutes to spare before I saw the Roundabout Theatre’s production of The Road to Mecca (a review on that will come later), I walked over to Bryant Park. With one of the nicest days of this winter at hand, I wanted to get a shot of how this spot behind the Central Research Library in the New York Public Library system looked. As you can see, a full crowd was out in force to enjoy the day.

For a period not so many decades ago, Bryant Park fell into the kind of urban decay and disorder that once bedeviled New York City. Its more recent beautification and revival demonstrates what concerned citizens can do when they put their minds to it.

Quote of the Day (Umberto Eco, on Thomas Aquinas)

2012-01-28T22:32:00.000-08:00

“[I]t is hard to understand how scandal could come from this person, so unromantic, fat, and slow, who at school took notes in silence, looked as if he weren't understanding anything, and was teased by his companions. And, in the monastery, as he sat at the table on his double stool (they had to saw off the central arm to make room for him) the playful monks shouted to him that outside there was an ass flying and he ran to see, while the others split their sides (mendicant friars, as is well known, had simple tastes); and Thomas (who was no fool) said that to him a flying ass had seemed more likely than a monk who would tell a falsehood, and the other friars were insulted.”—Umberto Eco, “In Praise of St. Thomas,” in Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (1986)

Have you ever read a piece whose first few sentences left an extraordinary impression on you? Such was my experience 25 years ago, when I read this essay by bestselling Name of the Rose novelist Umberto Eco in the Autumn 1986 issue of The Wilson Quarterly. The vivid opening in question went like this:

“The worst thing that happened to Thomas Aquinas in the course of his career was not his death, on March 7, 1274, in Fossanova, when he was barely 49, and, fat as he was, the monks were unable to carry his body down the stairs.”

Well! Let me tell you, that’s not the kind of anecdote I would have been likely to hear during 12 years of parochial school. More’s the pity, I think. It would have helped many a student, then and now, to know that the greatest scholar-saint of the Middle Ages carried on his own (ultimately losing) battle with gluttony, but that somehow he’d endured to achieve his staggering life work, Summa Theologica.

The Eco quote above hints at the reputation that St. Thomas Aquinas, whose feast day is celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church today, acquired in his early years as “the dumb ox.” There’s a danger, when such rich anecdotes are employed, that the reader will dwell on that eccentric little story to the exclusion of all else.

But Eco knows, from his years of lecturing on semiotics at the University of Bologna, that such stories also hook readers as they grapple with an important argument of the author’s: “Within Thomas’ theological architecture you understand why man knows things, why his body is made in a certain way, why he has to examine facts and opinions to make a decision, and resolve contradictions without concealing them, trying to reconcile them openly.” Reacting to the cross-currents of his time--surging Islam, renewed interest in Greek philosophy--Thomas succeeded in overturning old Church strictures against Aristotle, while forging a solid theological synthesis that has withstood constant assaults across the centuries.

In other words, as his age experienced the first whiffs of the material world, Thomas—not a heretic or revolutionary, Eco agreed, but a “concordian”—“simply gave the church a doctrinal system that put her in agreement with the natural world.”

Flashback, January 2007: Synge’s ‘Playboy’ Causes Dublin Riot

2012-01-27T23:33:00.000-08:00

At Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, the company’s initial good feelings about the reception of John Millington Synge’s new three-act comedy were rudely destroyed at its Saturday night premiere on January 26, 1907, when the audience took offense, midway through the play, to what one theatergoer called “an unusually brutally coarse remark.”

The line in The Playboy of the Western World that set off a week of rioting and debate came from young protagonist Christy Mahon, who, when told he could find other girls besides the one he loves, remarks: “It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World?”

One word in particular— ”shifts,” an Irish expression for ladies’ undergarments— started the donnybrook. The company might have inadvertently heightened the impact of the remark, however, by substituting for “chosen females” the more geographically precise, but earthier, phrase, “Mayo females.”

At the end of the first act, Lady Augusta Gregory, one of the theater’s artistic directors, sent a telegram to her company partner, poet William Butler Yeats, who was lecturing in Scotland: “Play great success.” But by the curtain, she’d had to send another, acknowledging that the show had been “broken up” because of the offensive word.

Two nights later, Gregory, noting not just a packed house but one with an unusually high concentration of males in one section, correctly surmised that the disorder at the premiere was about to be repeated. She not only took the precaution of securing police protection, but also college athletes who might discourage the ruffians.

Neither tactic worked. In fact, the mob regarded the athletes as a challenge rather than an impediment to their mischief, and pummeled one of the would-be burly protectors to such an extent that he had to be carried out by one of the actors he was ostensibly guarding. From the moment the curtain rose, nearly 40 men, many equipped with tin trumpets, managed to make the play inaudible.

On Monday, February 4, Yeats--back in Dublin by this time, and having issued an invitation to debate the meaning of the play--told Abbey playgoers that the play demonstrated the rise of "a new thought, a new opinion, that we had long needed."

The reception for The Playboy of the Western World was nothing like that given at the Abbey to Synge’s Riders to the Sea, when the audience was so overwhelmed by the one-act tragedy they had just witnessed that they sat in stunned silent at the show’s conclusion.

Instead, Playboy brought to the fore internal tensions within the company, as well as the adversarial relationship that was developing between its prime movers— an overwhelmingly Protestant Irish group— and the larger Irish Catholic Dublin populace that, in its nationalist fervor, took quick offense against anything that remotely smacked of the hated stock “stage Irishman” character fostered by their longtime British overlords.

Many on that second, even more tumultuous Monday performance agreed with Joseph Holloway, a local architect who later claimed that, over 40 years, he had never missed an Abbey show. Synge, he wrote testily in his diary, possessed a “dungheap of a mind.” But he also recorded a dissent by another theatergoer, George Roberts, who said, “The play is the finest ever written if you had only the wit to see it!”

Contemporary critics and theatergoers are far more likely to side with Roberts, seeing Playboy of the Western World as a landmark in world drama, a truly original work that matched a hilarious plot twist (a cowardly youth who, mistakenly believing he’s killed his bullying father, becomes the hero of the countryside) with language that raised common peasant speech to levels of unexpected poetry and eloquence.

Time proved that Playboy of the Western World was one of the cornerstones of the Irish Literary Renaissance, a significant outpouring of talent and genius in a small land whose liberties had been traduced and language nearly destroyed by a colonial power. It became one of the best-known works of the Abbey, the first state-subsidized theater in the world.

Photo of the Day: Demarest Railroad Depot

2012-01-27T22:47:00.000-08:00

I’m a sucker not just for railroads but also for thestations that once dotted their lines. Thisparticular station, in Demarest, N.J., several miles north of where I live,was considered “the handsomest of the line” on the Northern Railroad of NewJersey. Until my (very) early childhood, in the early 1960s, passenger trainsstopped here.

My area needs another rail link to New York very,very badly. In the last few years, transportation planners and governmentofficials have, variously, tied themselves in knots or (in the case of Gov.Chris Christie) badly fumbled the ball on this issue. I rue the years when thiscountry made our passenger trains economically unfeasible. We have lostsomething environmentally useful and—in the case of this depot—aesthetically pleasingin the process.

Quote of the Day (Clive James, on U.S. vs. Foreign Talk Shows)

2012-01-27T02:55:00.000-08:00

“In Britain and Australia, most of the talk shows go on the air once a week for a limited season. In America it is more like once a day forever. The host's huge salary is his compensation for never being free to spend it. The schedule is crushing, and the top-of-the-show monologue, if the host were to write it on his own, would need a full day’s work, with no time left over for all the other preparation he has to do.”—Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007)

Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, on Winter in England)

2012-01-26T02:19:00.000-08:00

“The comic almanacs give us dreadful pictures of January and February; but, in truth, the months which should be made to look gloomy in England are March and April. Let no man boast himself that he has got through the perils of winter till at least the seventh of May.”—Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne (1858)

Photo of the Day: Colors of the (Fall) Day

2012-01-25T22:25:00.000-08:00

I took this photograph what feels like a long timeago: late October 2008, around Concord, Mass. I’d like to think it’s WaldenPond, but I didn’t label this when I had the chance.

Quote of the Day (Tennessee Williams, on Memory)

2012-01-25T03:00:00.000-08:00

“Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”—Tennessee Williams, Stage Directions for Scene 1 of The Glass Menagerie (1944)

Photo of the Day: Now, What Was That About Snow?

2012-01-24T21:23:00.000-08:00

I took this photo of Depot Park, down the street from me in Englewood, N.J., after rain had washed away the weekend snow. Towering in the back, partly hidden by trees, is my spiritual home for virtually my whole life, St. Cecilia’s Roman Catholic Church.

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on the ‘Social Aristocracy’ of Her Youth)

2012-01-24T04:38:00.000-08:00

“The readers (and I should doubtless have been among them) who twenty years ago would have smiled at the idea that time could transform a group of bourgeois colonials and their republican descendants into a sort of social aristocracy, are now better able to measure the formative value of nearly three hundred years of social observance: the concerted living up to long-established standards of honour and conduct, of education and manners. The value of duration is slowly asserting itself against the welter of change, and sociologists without a drop of American blood in them have been the first to recognize what the traditions of three centuries have contributed to the moral wealth of our country. Even negatively, these traditions have acquired, with the passing of time, an unsuspected value. When I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured. Now I see that one of its uses lay in preserving a few drops of an old vintage too rare to be savoured by a youthful palate; and I should like to atone for my unappreciativeness by trying to revive that faint fragrance.”—Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)

Yes, I know that I had two posts, on the short story “The Triumph of Night” and the novella Ethan Frome, at the end of last year. Some of you might have a feeling of déjà vu over this.

But it seems to me we can never celebrate enough the achievement of Edith Wharton, born on this date in 1862. She would be appalled to know that her childhood home, at 14 West 23^rd Street, instead of featuring select people of her class being invited to afternoon tea, has been converted into a Starbucks that provides liquid refreshment to the masses (or, at least, those of the masses okay with paying the inflated New York price for varying species of coffee).

She was a snob, sorry to say. But among the giants of American literature, that’s a relatively venial sin. The important thing was that she could write brilliantly--clearly, elegantly--and that she was not blind to the failings of the “social aristocracy” in which she was born.

The excerpt from Wharton’s autobiography quoted above points to an evolution in her thinking about the past and her class. She was still capable of the kind of sublimely witty observation she tossed off in The Age of Innocence: “An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

But “twenty years ago” from the publication of A Backward Glance, World War I had blown the world to hell. For all its restraints on individual freedom and the ability of men and women to form what a character in The House of Mirth called “a republic of the spirit,” the New York elite had at least preserved order--a value in noticeably short supply not just in war-torn Europe, but afterward, in Prohibition America.

As she eyed the past, Wharton must have felt as if she were commemorating ghosts. Her memoir was dedicated “to the friends who every year on All Souls Night come and sit with me by the fire,” and her last tale, completed before her death in 1937, was the ghost story “All Souls.”

Photo of the Day: Brownstone View, Upper West Side

2012-01-23T21:49:00.000-08:00

This photo, which I took at the end of the year, shows somewhere in the vicinity of 76^th Street.

Quote of the Day (Will Rogers, on How Elections Are Like Marriages)

2012-01-23T02:21:00.000-08:00

"Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials."—Attributed to American humorist and man-of-all-media Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Photo of the Day: Two for a Ride In the Park

2012-01-22T20:55:00.000-08:00

Yet another photo I took, on the last Friday of 2011, in Central Park.

Song Lyric of the Day (Craig Finn, on How the Cross Exists For Those ‘Confused and Cold and Scared’)

2012-01-22T08:31:00.000-08:00

“We're awake and we're aware
That we're confused and cold and scared
And the cross reminds us that He died for me and you.”—Craig Finn, “Honolulu Blues,” from his Clear Hearts, Full Eyes CD (2012)

I had never heard of Craig Finn, nor his longtime rock ‘n’ roll band the Hold Steady, let alone this new solo CD, until I read David Carr’s profile of the singer-songwriter in today’s New York Times. Originally from Minnesota, Finn now resides in Brooklyn, where, according to the article, he now attends, when he can, St. Anthony-St. Alphonsus Roman Catholic Church.

For those who went to hear this tune, here’s the YouTube link.

Song Lyric of the Day (David Crosby, Influencing Newt?)

2012-01-21T23:38:00.000-08:00

“So you see what we can do
Is to try something new —that is if you're crazy too
But I don't really see, why can't we go on as three.”—“Triad,” written by David Crosby, from the CD 4 Way Street, performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1971)

What a difference sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll makes! In October 1967, Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman sacked Byrds bandmate David Crosby for pushing the group too hard to play his songs. The last straw was probably “Triad,” which the future CSNY legend later stated was about “lust and perversion.” Even for the bohemian atmosphere of Sixties rock ‘n’ roll, Crosby’s mating call for multiples was the equivalent of stepping on the third rail.

But the song did end up getting performed--not just by CSNY, but also by Jefferson Airplane, on their 1968 “Crown of Creation” LP. And so, it began to penetrate, slowly, into the general public consciousness.

Could it be that one of those affected was Newt Gingrich? You’d never think that the man who advised members of the Occupy Wall Street movement to go home and take a bath would ever consort with protesters who took a walk on the wild side. But in the late 1960s, while a grad student at Tulane University, that’s exactly what he did. It was beyond simply going one toke over the line. No, it turns out, according to an essay by Tim Wise, that during this time, Gingrich also backed the idea that the student newspaper should be allowed to print photos of nude statues with enlarged genitalia, along with shots of the sculptor himself also in the altogether.

Maybe at one of these protest sessions, Newt first heard Crosby’s musings about a different kind of love. That might be speculation, but where else could such an innocent, impressionable mind such as Gingrich’s find out about this stuff?

In the old days, they used to call “this stuff” “free love,” but today’s Tea Party-friendly Newt would probably call it something else. “Free,” after all, sounds vaguely Communistic. He’d probably want to label it “an opportunity relationship,” though the “opportunity” sounds as if it would have benefited one person only: himself.

Which brings us, inevitably, to his role in the increasingly nutty GOP Presidential race. The same day that Gingrich heard that Rick Perry was not only withdrawing, but throwing his support behind him, the news broke of the ABC News interview with the former House Speaker’s second wife, in which Marianne Gingrich claimed that he pressed her for an “open marriage” as their relationship came to an end.

Former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan wasn’t alone among Republican old pros when she speculated, in her weekly Wall Street Journal column, that the latter news “is going to have an impact. ” The funny thing was, that view turned out to be dead wrong--at least for now.

It’s hard not to interpret Gingrich’s double-digit victory margin in the South Carolina primary as “Annoy the Media Day.” How else to view this tally as anything but that, in a state with evangelicals who, under normal circumstances, would shake their heads and flood talk-radio stations wiht complaints about the shame of this all?

In the wake of the Clinton-Lewinsky imbroglio, all the old, familiar rules about politicians and sexual waywardness have been scrambled. Clinton and Rudolph Guiliani went out of office with sky-high ratings, but the public didn’t look so kindly on others. Arnold Schwarzegger earned a “Sperminator” tag for knocking up the family help, and John Edwards finds himself with all doors to future high office closed to him for the foreseeable future, even if he survives his current simultaneous legal and health crises.

In this world-turned-upside-down, Anthony Weiner lost favor in his heavily Democratic district in New York--yes, the same place that most South Carolinians probably view as akin to Sodom and Gomorrah--after his experiments with social media turned him into a national joke. How unlike the big, fat wet electoral kiss South Carolina voters just bestowed on Gingrich!

Predictably, Gingrich has lambasted the media for dredging up a matter more than a decade old and not concentrating on real issues. Many people are going to find that a bit odd coming from the same politician who brought up a matter nearly a half century old--i.e., his speculation that the “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior” that President Obama inherited from his father is “the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

Gingrich has called Marianne Gingrich’s claim about the open marriage “false,” but he is saying this on the stump. Were he to be hauled into court on the matter, he might be forced into an admission to the contrary (as Bill Clinton was, five years after denying any involvement with Gennifer Flowers), or run the risk of having a jury weigh his ex-’s truthfulness versus his own. Based on his past admitted adulteries and his reprimand for violating House ethics rules, such a test is hardly a slam dunk for Gingrich.

Like Clinton--so like him in his academic leanings outside of politics, his baby-boomer background, his outsized ambition and ego, and his difficulties with marriage vows--Gingrich has become a marker in the culture wars. Some, in fact, might find him a bizarre cross between Clinton and Edwards, then somehow squared--a serial philanderer who cheated not just on one wife, but two--wives, be it noted, who were about to experience severe health crises.

Photo of the Day: View From Central Park West

2012-01-20T23:29:00.000-08:00

I’m much taken with views toward a river. So I couldn’t help pulling out my camera, while standing at Naturalists’ Gate on Central Park West, and shooting this street scene of the view west. Off, far in the distance, even beyond the shaft of light at the vanishing point of this shot, looms New Jersey, where I live.

Quote of the Day (Richard Henry Lee, With an Early Blow for American Liberty)

2012-01-20T23:14:00.000-08:00

“As the Stamp Act does absolutely direct the property of the people to be taken from them without their consent expressed by their representatives and as in many cases it deprives the British American Subject of his right to trial by jury; we do determine, at every hazard, and paying no regard to danger or to death, we will exert every faculty, to prevent the execution of the said Stamp Act in any instance whatsoever within this Colony. And every abandoned wretch, who shall be so lost to virtue and public good, as wickedly to contribute to the introduction or fixture of the Stamp Act in this Colony, by using stampt paper, or by any other means, we will, with the utmost expedition, convince all such profligates that immediate danger and disgrace shall attend their prostitute purposes.”--From the Leedstown (or Westmoreland) Resolves, co-authored by Richard Henry Lee, February 27, 1766

The half-century relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is so overwhelming that it practically sucks the air out of all remaining discussion of politics in the Continental Congress. You’d think they were the only important allies in the struggle to declare American independence. But not only were they not the only allies in Independence Hall in 1776, but Jefferson probably wasn’t even Adams’ key partner in the Virginia delegation.

It might have been Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence, but it was fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee—born on this day in 1732—who introduced the blockbuster resolution “that these united Colonies are, and ought to be, free and independent States” (language that Jefferson incorporated as the climax of his document).

Revolutionary War historian Pauline Maier (American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence) has gone so far as to state, to American Heritage magazine, that Jefferson was “the most overrated person in American history." That might be stretching matters, but there’s no doubt that the Sage of Monticello benefited from founding one of America’s two enduring parties and from his prolific, superb writing.

In contrast, Lee’s image in the popular imagination has been shaped disproportionately by the musical 1776, where, in his big number, he acts, in the words of historian-novelist Thomas Fleming, in an essay contributed to Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, like “a giggling buffoon“ for whom “the idea of independence would never have occurred to him in a million years [without Adams and Ben Franklin]" before he "rides wildly off to do their bidding.” Adams, predictably, can’t wait to see the last of this galoot.

That scene might be the biggest departure from fact in the musical. The reality, as Fleming observes, is that Lee was, “after Adams, the most powerful orator in Congress.” (Certainly more so than Jefferson, who, throughout his long public career, could barely manage to make himself audible.)

Adams found few delegates outside of New England so congenial, in politics and temperament, as Lee:

* The latter’s deep, classics-based education gave him a common background and frame of reference as the Harvard graduate;

* His austerity made him, in Fleming’s words, a kind of “Virginia puritan”;

* His first bill in the House of Burgesses in 1759, proposing an end to the trafficking in slavery in Virginia, would have appealed to the deeply antislavery Adams;

* As a Virginian, Lee could be listened to in a way denied to John and cousin Samuel Adams, who were widely regarded as representatives of a hotbed of radicalism in Massachusetts;

* His bitterness toward corrupt elites (even though he himself was from a longstanding colonial aristocracy) in his state mirrored that of the rising Massachusetts lawyer-farmer; and

* His speeches on behalf of independence were exceeded only by the Adams cousins in number and fire.

That last quality is important. The American Revolution has frequently been contrasted with the French and Russian Revolutions as supposedly “conservative.” But that notion is deeply misguided, as Gordon S. Wood demonstrated in his brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning study, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. You can sense just how mistaken it is by re-reading the quote that started this post--or, better yet, by reading the Westmoreland Resolves in their entirety.

Lee and the other signers of this document are not merely announcing their opposition to the controversial Stamp Act, or even that they will act against those who aim to collect it. No, they are threatening “immediate danger and disgrace” even to anyone who uses the hated stamps. Few other pre-Revolutionary documents bristle so much with ferocity.

There is a sequel to this story about the alliance between Adams and Lee. I’m not speaking here merely of the praise the aged Declaration signer and President heaped on his old colleague when Lee’s grandson wrote him in 1821 about the Virginian’s contribution to independence. (“As a public speaker, he [Lee] had a fluency as easy and graceful as it was melodious”).

No, I mean what happened on January 19, 1907--the centennial of the birth of Robert E. Lee, Richard’s great-nephew. The guest speaker for the celebration in Lexington, Va., at Washington and Lee University was Charles Francis Adams Jr.--great-grandson of John Adams.

A Union colonel during the Civil War who had fought against Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg, Adams had come to appreciate the Confederate’s refusal to obey Jefferson Davis’ desire for a guerrilla campaign at the end of the war, as well as the general’s personal qualities. Adams’ Lexington address had an extraordinary impact, raising the reputation of Lee in the North (where, until then, something of the odor of treason still clung to him) to match its nearly demigod level in the South.

Paul Nagel, a biographer of both the Adams and Lee clans, summed up the effect of Adams’ speech in The Lees of Virginia: “An old warrior himself, Adams had converted a Confederate general into civilization’s hope by arguing that Lee’s gentle, loving, selfless virtues must somehow recapture America.”

More than a century and a quarter after the summer of independence in Philadelphia, the Adams family of Massachusetts had, in its way, returned the favor to their Virginia allies and friends, the Lees.

Photo of the Day: Mr. T at the Central Park T

2012-01-19T21:47:00.000-08:00

The Mr. T of the headline is not the massivepersonality of the big and small screen but the CEO of this blog. The “CentralPark T” is near Naturalist’s Gate, across from the New-York Historical Society.This particular landscape configuration so caught my eye that I had to take theaccompanying picture.

Quote of the Day (Meryl Streep, on Pretending)

2012-01-19T02:31:00.000-08:00

“Pretending is a very valuable life skill.”—Meryl Streep, quoted in “Quotes,” Reader’s Digest, October 2011

Easy for you to say, Meryl, what with that new Golden Globe (for Iron Lady) to go with your Oscars and who knows how many other awards? But what if someone’s not ready for stage or screen?

Then, as they say, it depends.

If you pretend to be a police officer, for instance, you may wind up in court. If you pretend to have clients’ money when you don’t, same thing. If you pretend to be an honest, competent steward of the public trust…

Well, then you might run for President.

Movie Quote of the Day (Oliver Hardy, on ‘Another NICE Mess’)

2012-01-18T04:03:00.000-08:00

Ollie (played by Oliver Hardy): "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into."--The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case (1930), written by H.M. Walker, directed by James Parrott

For years, I’ve operated under the assumption that Oliver Hardy--born on this date in 1892 in Harlem, Ga.--used the word “fine” rather than “nice.” Not really so, though the reason for the misunderstanding is understandable.

Hardy and rubber-faced British foil Stan Laurel did make a movie from 1930 called Another Fine Mess, but the famous phrase was never actually used in that film, or any other. Instead, the operative word--in that movie, as well as another 15 stretching from 1930 to 1951--was nice.

Okay, it may be nice--or fine--that we’ve cleared that up. But here’s the really remarkable thing about the careers of Stan and rotund Ollie: of the movie comics chronicled in Walter Kerr’s seminal analysis The Silent Clowns, only this comedy duo not only maintained the level of their popularity into the sound era, but even raised it, to the point where many regarded the pair as the greatest film comedy team of all time.

This Day in Exploration History (Scott Loses Race to South Pole, Then His Life)

2012-01-17T20:54:00.000-08:00

January 17, 1912—Captain Robert Falcon Scott, reached one of the last Holy Grails of the Age of Exploration, the South Pole, only to find it a hollow victory. Not only had Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen beaten him in the race to the Pole, but now the 43-old British explorer and his crew found themselves in the vast reaches of the desolate Antarctic facing bitter weather that was worsening—and dwindling supplies.

“Great God!” Scott wrote in his journal. “This is an awful place, and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

Two and a half months later, Scott and his men would perish. If he hadn’t achieved the goal to which he had committed the last dozen years of his life, though, he had won a place in the hearts of his countrymen, with his posthumously published journal acclaimed as an example of the kind of stiff-upper-lip resolve that had given truth to the line that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”

In his last log entry, the explorer wrote: “Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman."

In 1948, the film world produced its own account of his last voyage, Scott of the Antarctic, with Scott‘s log and personal effects of his crew loaned by the British Museum to enhance the near-documentary feeling of the movie. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ intense score only added to the mood of impending tragedy.

Nearly four decades later, Masterpiece Theatre would offer a rather less romanticized take on the expedition in The Last Place on Earth. The PBS miniseries, based on a comparative account of the Amundsen and Scott expeditions by Roland Huntford, presented a much less idealized version of the British explorer. Amundsen’s meticulousness in planning every detail was contrasted with Scott’s style of winging it, and the Norwegian’s willingness to learn from native peoples of the polar regions on proper clothing and the best animal to use for the polar push (hardy sled dogs) with Scott, so caught up in national chauvinism to appreciate these same insights.

Even Scott’s onetime crew member (on the 1901-04 Discovery expedition) and later polar rival, Ernest Shackleton, is coming in for greater respect now. Which one is getting the TV hero treatment? (See Kenneth Branagh in Shackleton.) Which is having papers written about him at Wharton, and even becoming the subject of extended learning plans on leadership? Which is being voted the greater polar explorer in a BBC poll?

Scott, even despite the compliment paid to him in the following quote from another British explorer, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, would have bristled at the conclusion: “For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.”

Photo of the Day: Icy Premonition

2012-01-17T03:05:00.000-08:00

Yet another photo I took on Saturday while in the largely empty field in Overpeck County Park, near where I live in Bergen County, N.J.

Last night, before going to bed, I saw more than ice on the ground--there was evidence of the white stuff. Now, I know that both the absence of cold temperatures and snow has been rather unusual so far this winter, but I still get concerned at the prospect, no matter how remote, of serious snow shoveling, so I was glad this morning to find no evidence of what I saw last night, except for a thin film of ice. (Which, come to think of it, is still unwelcome, as I’d have to walk in it later.)

Quote of the Day (Bill Cosby, on His Awful College Team)

2012-01-17T02:17:00.000-08:00

"Every school - the name had a 'berg' at the end of it. Muhlenberg, Gettysburg, Shippensburg. We lost to all of them.”—Bill Cosby, on his college football opponents at Temple University, quoted in Neil Genzlinger, “CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK: Mining Cosby’s Golden Past,” The New York Times, January 11, 2012

Well, according to an earlier Times story on the legendary comic and actor, Cosby exaggerated his team’s ineptitude--somewhat (5-11-2, in two seasons). It still sounds as if he rues not having listened to his grandfather’s advice when he was a young: “Do. Not. Play. Football.” The reason? “Your. Bones. Are. Not. Set. Yet.”

Quite a few professional football mastodons--including members of the 28 teams who won’t be going to the Super Bowl this year--are dealing with aching bones, or worse, this morning, undoubtedly wishing they had better sense than to get involved with the game.

Quote of the Day (Martin Luther King Jr., on Nonviolence and What Is ‘Worth Dying For’)

2012-01-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

“This method [nonviolence] has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale, and at the same time it works on his conscience, and he just doesn’t know what to do. If he doesn’t beat you, wonderful. If he beats you, you develop the quiet courage of accepting blows without retaliating. If he doesn’t put you in jail, wonderful. Nobody with any sense likes to go to jail. But if he puts you in jail, you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame to a haven of freedom and human dignity. And even if he tries to kill you, you’ll develop the inner conviction that there are some things so dear, some things so precious, some things so eternally true, that they are worth dying for. And I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Speech at the Great March on Detroit,” June 23, 1963

Photo of the Day: Icy Web

2012-01-15T23:13:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, even with temperatures plunging dramatically and the wind picking up, I still felt the need for air and exercise outside. While walking the largely empty field in Overpeck County Park, near where I live in Bergen County, N.J., I took this close-up of a cracked frozen patch.

Quote of the Day (Fr. John Courtney Murray, on the ‘Spectacle of a Civil Society’)

2012-01-15T13:35:00.000-08:00

“We face a crisis that is new in history. We would do well to face it with a new cleanliness of imagination, in the realization that internecine strife, beyond some inevitable human measure, is a luxury we can no longer afford. … Perhaps the time has come when we should endeavor to dissolve the structure of war that underlies the pluralistic society, and erect the more civilized structure of the dialogue. It would be no less sharply pluralistic, but rather more so, since the real pluralisms would be clarified out of their present confusion. And amid the pluralism a unity would be discernible—the unity of an orderly conversation. The pattern would not be that of ignorant armies clashing by night but of informed men locked together in argument in the full light of a new dialectical day. Thus we might present to a ‘candid world’ the spectacle of a civil society.”—John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967), We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1960)

Quote of the Day (Alistair Cooke on Bogie, ‘Saved and Soured by Time’)

2012-01-14T20:01:00.000-08:00

“It is fair to guess that far back in the Coward- Lonsdale era, [Humphrey] Bogart was always his own man. He no doubt stood in the wings in his blazer chuckling acidly over the asininities on stage, and he would have been the first man to question that youth ever deposited its bloom on him. But for a long time it obscured, in a sleek complexion, bold eyes and a lid of black hair, his essential and very individual character and its marvelous adaptability to one of the more glamorous neuroses of the incoming day and age: that of the hard-bitten ‘private eye,’ the neutral sceptic in a world exploding with crusades and the treachery they invite. He probably had no notion, in his endless strolls across the stage drawing-rooms of the Twenties, he was being saved and soured by Time to become the romantic democratic answer to Hitler’s new order. “—Alistair Cooke, “Humphrey Bogart: Epitaph for a Tough Guy,” in Six Men: Charlie Chaplin, Edward VIII, H. L. Mencken, Humphrey Bogart, Adlai Stevenson, Bertrand Russell (1977)

A cigarette never seemed far from the lips of Humphrey Bogart in his films, and on this date in 1957 it finally caught up with him, as he succumbed to cancer. Death concluded a career in which he became one of Hollywood’s most honored actors, but it hardly ended the public’s fascination with his persona.

That voice, one of the most distinctive of the sound era in Hollywood, epitomized the word “snarl.” It seemed redolent not merely of all the cigarettes that a Bogart character (or the actor himself) smoked, but of all the booze he consumed. It captured what mystery novelist Raymond Chandler meant when he observed that the actor could be “tough without a gun.”

It was a distinct surprise for me to learn, then, that Bogart’s beginnings were far more benign. Oh, I knew the odd bit of trivia that onstage, he had made famous the eternal cry of preppies: “Tennis, anyone?” But I hadn’t realized, until I visited the Ernest Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, Illinois, that Bogart’s mother, a prominent commercial illustrator, used her baby boy as a model for a baby food ad. (I wrote about this in a prior post.)

As you might expect, Bogart had a sour wisecrack about this: “There was a period in American history when you couldn’t pick up a goddamned magazine without seeing my kisser on it.” But with time, I’ve come to wonder about deeper affinities between Hemingway and Bogart.

In the Quote of the Day, one phrase from Cooke (who got to know Bogie and his last wife, Lauren Bacall, while covering the first Presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson, whom the two actors backed) really strikes me: the part about a “neutral sceptic in a world exploding with crusades and the treasury they invite.” Actually, it hints at more than the Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe roles that Bogart played in classic film noir. It’s also the essence of the early, and best, Ernest Hemingway fiction.

Gary Cooper might be the actor most identified with the closest thing to successful adaptations of Hemingway that Hollywood ever made (i.e., the original Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls). His looks made him a natural for those works by the novelist featuring a love story, and his love of the outdoors made him a boon comrade to the novelist.

In contrast, Bogart was identified with what might have been the loosest adaptation of a Hemingway novel that Hollywood ever made: To Have and Have Not. I can’t imagine him competing with Cooper in the great outdoors. But in attitude, Bogie, rather than Coop, might be best regarded as the disillusioned but proud Hemingway Hero.

Consider what might be the key line of that novel, from its hero, Harry Morgan: "No matter how, a man alone ain't got no bloody fucking chance." It speaks of a too-deep knowledge of the world. Optimism is for chumps.

Lack of illusion might make you street-smart and tough, but it also makes you weary and sad—qualities that, I think, come through in the image accompanying this post. Like Hemingway's Jake Barnes, not to mention the later Frederic Henry, the Bogie hero is an outsider, no matter which side of the law from which he operates.

But, as the fascist threat loomed larger on the verge of WWII, Hemingway moved his protagonists—still doomed—to a recognition of collective action. War was a dirty business, but sometimes, as when facing a Hitler, there might not be any alternative, and in that case you’d better get it done and over with.

Bogart’s success with The Maltese Falcon moved him into a position where he could become Warner Brothers’ embodiment of America as reluctant—but, in the event, all the more effective—warrior and ally. Casablanca was only the most obvious example of how the actor became, to use Cooke’s formulation, “the romantic democratic answer to Hitler’s new order." There’s also his felicitously named character Sgt. Joe Gunn, leader of a polyglot American tank crew, hopelessly outnumbered against Nazis in North Africa, in the 1943 film Sahara.

More intriguingly, there’s Key Largo, in 1948—superficially an opportunity to bring together two of the iconic actors associated with the gangster picture, Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. In reality, it’s a political allegory of the fight against fascism.

“I had hopes once, but I gave them up,” Bogart’s war vet, Frank McCloud says.

“Hopes for what?” asks Robinson’s crime kingpin, Johnny Rocco.

“A world in which there's no place for Johnny Rocco.”

McCloud’s decision to act against Rocco parallels long-isolationist America’s entrance into the war. The actor who played the reluctant hero became such a symbol of his nation’s cool resolve that Nobel Prize-winning novelist Albert Camus--himself a member of his country’s Resistance--effected, with his cigarette and trench coat, the style of Bogart.

For an interesting take on the actor and his persona--not to mention the Stefan Kanfer recent bio, Tough Without a Gun--see this post from the classic-film blog “Out of the Past” from its creator, Raquelle.

This Day in Baseball History (First Lady Ump Wins First Legal Round)

2012-01-13T23:01:00.000-08:00

January 13, 1972— The New York Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Bernice Gera in her attempt to become the first female professional umpire. The victory was short-lived, however, as five months later, the former housewife was subjected to such abuse from players and fans--and lack of support from male umpires--that she quit after her first game.

I first came across the story of Gera in a marvelous essay collection by Nora Ephron, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women. Forget about her derivative, often snaky work as screenwriter and director: Ephron’s real calling is as an essayist. Her January 1973 piece one on Gera, written shortly after the latter’s failed attempt at breaking into the game, is shadowed by irony: I.e., the would-be feminist icon that somehow failed the movement. Yet, for all Ephron’s wishes that everything would have turned out differently for Gera and women’ s liberation, you can’t help but like this baseball lover.

Four decades later--and two decades after Gera’s death--it’s even harder not to feel sympathy for her. Reading her story, you might wish that she had succeeded as a rule-breaking pioneer, but then might have been glad that she did not, when you consider the physical and psychic toll that prolonged disrespect might have exacted on her.

What Gera was facing was probably best described by a later woman who got closer--but still didn’t fulfill--her dream of becoming a major-league umpire, Pam Postema. “Almost all of the people in the baseball community don’t want anyone interrupting their little male-dominated way of life.,“ she wrote in her 1992 memoir, You’ve Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League. “They want big, fat male umpires. They want those macho, tobacco-chewing, sleazy sort of borderline alcoholics.”

It was even worse for Gera. Two and a half decades after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball, Art Williams was having a tough time becoming the first black umpire in the National League (a situation recounted in Lee Gutkind’s 1975 The Best Seat in Baseball, But You Have to Stand). If a black umpire seemed difficult for many to accept even at that late date, the concept of a female umpire was impossible.

By Gera’s own later account, she didn’t really want to be a revolutionary, or disrupt the game she had come to love so well. She would have been content to have been a goodwill ambassador for the game, serving in some sort of community relations program.

But matters took a turn for the worse when, after graduating from a Florida umpire-training school, she applied for a job with the New York-Penn League, near her Jackson Heights, N.Y. home. The league’s agreement to offer her a contract was rejected by the president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, who unsuccessfully invoked a minimum-size requirement to try to keep her out.

The courage of Robinson, Curt Flood, and Roberto Clemente in breaking down racial, ethnic and labor barriers is not to be underestimated. Gera, however, was virtually isolated. The opposition of the male mossbacks of baseball, such as the now-justly-forgotten commissioner, General William Eckert (she would become an umpire “over my dead body, he vowed), was to be expected.

Less well known, however, was that Gera was taking her case through the courts without the help of the feminist movement, which was just then emerging as a significant political and legal force. According to a Craig Davis profile of Gera in a 1989 South Florida Sun-Sentinel article, not one women’s organization assisted her in her court battle. This made doubly ironic the later contention of many feminists that she had set back the movement when she quit her job.

Many were chagrined when Gera resigned after a single New York-Pennsylvania League game in Geneva, N.Y., in June 1972, less than six months after she won in court. It seemed as if she had one fight with a manager who didn’t like one of her calls, then threw in the towel. But it wasn’t that simple.

Gera had spent four years in court only to find that, the closer her dream was coming to fruition, the harder became the resistance to it. She continued to receive threatening letters and late-night calls, and the portents for her first game proved particularly ominous: Not only were fans taunting and abusing her, but the other umpire refused to speak to her as the game started. His behavior was startling and unprofessional, as it meant that these game partners would not know the elementary signals that would allow them to function as a working team.

That’s what happened in the sixth inning of the game, when Gera, momentarily confused by a play, immediately reversed herself. When the manager of the team suffering the reversed call rushed out to protest, Gera let him jabber on and on, feeling he had a legitimate gripe because she had initially blown the call. Finally, she felt compelled to act when he called into question her basic authority: “You made two mistakes. The first was leaving the kitchen; you should have been home peeling potatoes.” Gera ejected him, completed the last few innings, then, before the second game of the double-header, resigned.

Sportscaster Dick Schaap, echoing a comment made by an interviewee about Gera, noted, perhaps ironically, “She committed the cardinal sin of baseball--she admitted she made a mistake.” How times have changed! A year and a half ago, major-league umpire Jim Joyce manned up and admitted he had blown a call that cost a pitcher a perfect game. Even his teary greeting of the pitcher, the next time they encountered it each other, was regarded as the epitome of honesty, even a guide to politicians on how to behave after a mistake has become all too public.

In contrast, reactions to Gera at the time for similar behavior amounted to, “What do you expect?” from antediluvian crowd, and “She let down the movement” from the presumably more enlightened. And so, even though she vowed to Ephron, “Don’t count me out; I expect to be in baseball next year,” she would never umpire a professional game again.

The New York Mets have been taking it on the chin lately for the Wilpons’ financial misadventures. However, even a team that is otherwise horribly run can have real moments of grace. I’m speaking, in this case, of the Mets regime under M. Donald Grant. The team board chairman did succeed in, among many other sins, driving away star Tom Seaver and manager-to-be Whitey Herzog, but the team did during that time employ Gera for five years as part of its community relations and promotions team.

Nobody should ever have questioned the toughness of Gera, a product of a broken home in an industrialized region of Pennsylvania. Even to get to her one game umpiring, she had to endure a pioneer’s struggle, consisting, in Ephron’s words, “of the loneliness she will suffer if she gets the job, of the role she will assume as a freak, of the smarmy and inevitable questions that will be raised about her heterosexuality, of the derision and smug satisfaction that will follow if she makes a mistake, or breaks down under pressure, or quits.”

Two decades after her lawsuit and her exit from the game, Gera died after struggling against cancer, enduring at least 31 radiation treatments, medication that left her woozy, and an operation to restore the use of her right arm that only worsened matters. She was as tough and brave as they come--fully the equal of those who rejected her from the "summer game."

Quote of the Day (Tim Parks, on the ‘Excitement of Reading’)

2012-01-13T02:12:00.000-08:00

“The excitement of reading is the precarious one of being alive now.”—Tim Parks, in Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!, edited by Mark Haddon (2011)

Quote of the Day (Wolcott Gibbs, With Advice to Editors)

2012-01-12T02:27:00.000-08:00

“Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.”—New Yorker theater critic Wolcott Gibbs, quoted in Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from the New Yorker, edited by Thomas Vinciguerra (2011)

Quote of the Day (Richard Cohen, Likening Romney to ‘Archie’s’ Reggie)

2012-01-11T18:39:00.000-08:00

"Mitt Romney is starting to get on my nerves. He reminds me of Reggie, the rich, handsome, athletic and effortlessly superficial character in the “Archie” comics. He does almost everything well, and he looks like a million bucks (leveraged for much more), but he rings hollow, like the class president who would bring glee to all of Riverdale High by slipping on a banana peel. I’d kill for that.”—Richard Cohen, “Romney’s Aw-Shucks Rhetoric Rings False,” The Washington Post, January 9, 2012

This Day in Theater History (‘Finian’s Rainbow,’ Filled with Irish Blarney, Opens)

2012-01-10T21:56:00.000-08:00

January 10, 1947--From Edward Harrigan and partner Tony Hart in the 19^th century to George M. Cohan in the first few decades of the 20^th century, Irish-Americans have made major contributions to advancing the American musical. But perhaps the one that has helped perpetuate their image of whimsy, Finian’s Rainbow, involved no Celtic songwriters at all. The creators, E.Y. “Yip” Harburg and Burton Lane, were products of the Tin Pan Alley tradition, dominated largely by descendants of immigrant Jews.

When the musical was turned into a film 20 years later, it featured three other exceptionally well-known individuals of Irish descent: Petula Clark (then at the height of her career), director Francis Ford Coppola (then beginning his), and Frederick Austerlitz, a.k.a. Fred Astaire (near the end of his, in this last musical of his).

You'll have to pardon the heavy-handed irony in the last paragraph, but in a way, it mirrors the libretto of this show, which is actually a satire on racism in the American South. The setting is an American state called Missitucky, and the show's race-baiting Senator Billboard Rawkins would, in the 1940s, have been a recognizable lampoon of Senator Theodore Bilbo. For his sins, he is turned into a black man, where he comes to see the errors of his ways.

In contrast, the primary image of the Irish in this musical is similar to what historian Terry Golway, author of The Irish in America, a companion volume to the PBS documentary series The Long Voyage Home, called “Hollywood's idea of acceptably Irish movies": i.e., "affable blarney that spoke to sentiment, not reality.” Finian's Rainbow premiered at a point when Ireland, though untouched by WWII (in which it stayed neutral), was also an economic backwater of Europe--in fact, still a year away from, at last, formally declaring independence from Great Britain. The rather dour aspects of the time were chronicled memorably in Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Angela's Ashes.

Okay, so what if, as Wilfred Sheed wrote in his once-over-easy survey of the Great American Songbook, The House That George Built: "Although Harburg loved the idea of Ireland, his lyrics never really got out of the harbor [New York's, that is], or all that far from McSorley's Wonderful Saloon either."

Well, I suppose that the sly leprechuans and redheaded colleens of Finian's Rainbow are far better stereotypes than drunks, which represents a far more pervasive--and enduring--image.

Moreover, I’m not sure that other non-Irish songwriters would have made a better job of this show. Harburg and Lane, at least, had an essentially sunny vision of life (“Look to the Rainbow”). In contrast, given the opportunity, Stephen Sondheim, I think, would have adapted Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, which would have made an appropriate Celtic bookend to his British-set musical bloodbath Sweeney Todd.

One trait that the public frequently associates with Irish-Americans is the gift of the gab. Ironically, Harburg and Lane did not possess this, at least with each other throughout much of the production of this show, which premiered on this date at the 46^th Street Theatre. A silly wisecrack made to cast members by lyricist and co-librettist Harburg about his partner ("Don't listen to him; he's only the piano player") on the first day of rehearsals led Lane to stop speaking to his friend throughout much of the musical’s 725-performance run. It's probably just as well, then, that none of the three Tony Awards the show earned in that initial run--for orchestra conductor, featured actor and choreography--involved the songwriting team, as it would have made for some awkward moments onstage.

Well, it didn't matter, I guess. The two collaborators, both Hollywood pros (Harburg wrote the dazzlingly witty lyrics to The Wizard of Oz), were thoroughgoing professionals who created a whole raft of songs so imperishable that they've even survived the libretto, now commonly regarded as blunt and anachronistic. Many of the 11 songs became standards, including "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?", "Old Devil Moon," "Necessity," "When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich,"
"Look to the Rainbow," "If This Isn't Love," and "When I'm Not Near the Girl I Love."

The current Broadway season, as outlined in a New York Times article from the other day about composer estates authorizing revised librettos, proves that faulty "books" such as this one are no obstacle to re-mounting shows with such glorious tunes. Even New York's fine Irish Repertory Theater, despite the musical's Celtic stereotypes, staged a revival not that long ago with Melissa Errico. Broadway witnessed a 2009 production with Cheyenne Jackson. I myself saw a very, very fine version performed in Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theater back in the fall of 2005.

TV Quote of the Day (Paul Lynde, on Hell’s Angels)

2012-01-10T21:39:00.000-08:00

Host Peter Marshall: “Paul, why do Hell's Angels wear leather?”

Paul Lynde: “Because chiffon wrinkles too easily.”—Hollywood Squares

As a youngster in the late Sixties and early Seventies, I was addicted to quiz shows, including It’s Academic and the Art Fleming-hosted, Merv Griffin-created Jeopardy. But the quiz show with a difference—about as serious as a banana peel on the floor of a vaudeville show—was Hollywood Squares.

Moving across metaphorical tic-tac-toe boards, contestants had to decide whether or not to believe the celebrities in the boxes. More often than not, that meant listening to wisecracks by the likes of comics Rose-Marie, Marty Allen, Jan Murray, Wally Cox, and Charley Weaver (real name: Cliff Arquette—yes, Rosanna’s granddad). Center square came to be occupied by Paul Lynde, a stage, film and TV supporting actor who found his own measure of stardom on Hollywood Squares.

“Eccentric,” “fey,” “campy,” “flamboyant,” “bitchy”—it seemed as if, in an effort to capture his essence, critics trotted out every word but “homosexual,” which is what the actor—who died on this day in 1982 of a heart attack at age 55—was.

Technically, Lynde never admitted his sexual orientation. But if he never formally came out of the closet, he left less than a millimeter of doubt about it.

Theater historian Ethan Mordden, in his discussion of the golden age of Broadway drama, All That Glittered, sees the 1950 John van Druten comedy Bell, Book and Candle as full of encoded language about gays, in the guise of a lighthearted comedy about witches and warlocks. One of the latter, Nicky, is described as “impish, and somewhat impertinent.”

That could describe Lynde as well, particularly when he appeared as witch-housewife Samantha Stevens’s Uncle Arthur, “The Clown Prince of the Cosmos,” on the Sixties sitcom, Bewitched.

One of the actor’s big breaks occurred in the musical Bye Bye Birdie, when, as father
Harry MacAfee, he asked grouchily, “What’s the Matter With Kids Today?” TV producers may have had that in mind when they finally promoted him, from supporting player to lead actor, in the short-lived, eponymous The Paul Lynde Show (1972).

its Audiences never really took to the show, and critics pointed out, rightly, how much its premise—a conservative father barely tolerates his daughter and no-account, lusty son-in-law—resembled All in the Family. (I may be one of the few people alive who remembers this sitcom, and, for all its slavish imitation of the huge CBS hit, I doubt if Carroll O’Connor could have packed quite the same kind of inflections into his voice that Lynde’s Paul Simms did in upbraiding the friends of his daughter and son-in-law as “NUUUU-die LOOO-neys!”

In the current TV environment, when people can say practically anything at any hour, Lynde and Hollywood Squares should be seen in the context of their time. Some of his responses would have been considered pretty risqué for that period. (Marshall: “Paul, can anything bring tears to a chimp's eyes?” Lynde: “Finding out that Tarzan swings both ways!”) Other responses would, if delivered today, be considered so politically correct that they would provoke boycott threats, and such vituperation as to short-circuit a career. (Marshall: “What is the official currency of Puerto Rico?” Lynde: “Food stamps.”)

Though many of the show’s viewers could have guessed that Lynde was gay, they might have had a tougher time figuring out that offscreen, he was a heavy drinker who often struggled with his weight and depression. How much of that was due to the particular context of his time, when his sexual orientation was a matter of shame, and how much the product of the insecurity that so often plagues figures in the entertainment industry?

Photo of the Day: A Statue to Sing About

2012-01-09T21:26:00.000-08:00

Three decades ago, having endured four years of commuting to a New York institute of higher learning, I thought of myself as, at least to some extent, wise to the ways of the city.

Then one day, walking with a native of the Upper West Side on our way to a movie, I noticed a seeming small oasis of green. “Verdi Square,” I read aloud from the sign on the perimeter of teh park to my college friend as we passed by.

“Too bad that isn’t it what most people call,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Well, what do they call it?” I asked innocently.

“Needle Park.”

In an instant, I knew I wasn’t as grizzled an urban veteran as I thought. Yet I still recognized that place name as part of an Al Pacino film about drug dealers and addiction. “Let’s go,” I said to my friend, moving hurriedly.

Fifteen years ago, the monument in this onetime gathering place for musicians (even before Lincoln Center was built seven blocks down) was restored. Though I’ve read on the Internet that several years ago, the city began to take extra measures to eliminate the rodent population cropping up here, neither the rats nor the drug dealers who are their human counterparts in pestilence showed up (at least in the daytime) over the Christmas holidays when I walked past again, and took this picture.

I hope that the park is now experiencing a renaissance of grace and stability--all the more reason to enjoy the statue of the great Italian opera composer that serves as the square’s centerpiece, created by Sicilian sculptor Pasquale Civiletti.

Quote of the Day (Laura Kightlinger, on Old Boyfriends)

2012-01-09T02:48:00.000-08:00

“Getting back together with an old boyfriend is pathetic. It’s like having a garage sale and buying your own stuff back.”—Comic Laura Kightlinger, quoted in “Laugh!”, Reader’s Digest, October 2011

Photo of the Day: Park, Lake and City II

2012-01-08T20:27:00.000-08:00

This is yet another view of the man-made lake in Central Park, complementing the image I posted last week.

Quote of the Day (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, on Christ and a ‘Higher Ideal’)

2012-01-08T10:36:00.001-08:00

“Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.”—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov(1880)

Quote of the Day (John Steele Gordon, With a Bad Guess on the National Debt)

2012-01-07T20:58:00.000-08:00

“For the first time in more than 70 years, the United States is dealing with the politics of surplus. Between 1930 and 1997, the government ran surpluses in only 10 years, and they were small ones. Meanwhile, the national debt ballooned by a factor of no less than 340, from $16.1 billion to about $5.5 trillion. But now the government has taken in more money than it spent for the last four years, and it does not appear that will change in the near future [emphasis added].”—John Steele Gordon, “Perils of the Surplus: How Andrew Jackson Got in Big Trouble When He Was in Bush’s Fix,” American Heritage, May 2001

Dredging up old predictions that make people look stupid is hardly confined to the political black art of opposition research. Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky found that their 1984 book The Experts Speak barely exhausted its subject, so they were able to return in 1998 with an expanded edition.

So I don’t mean to pick on John Steele Gordon for his errant guesstimate above, even though pointing out mistakes made by someone famous and/or presumed to be knowledgeable is—let’s be honest here!—awfully fun. I don’t share many of Gordon’s conservative positions, but this business-and-financial historian can offer many useful insights, I’ve found over the years.

No, what Gordon’s bad guess points to is the inherent difficulties in economic soothsaying. Particularly when it comes to the national debt (the subject of one of Gordon’s books), economists are like old sea dogs about to sail again: blissful unaware that they’re heading right into a perfect storm.

The beauty of economic forecasts, at least when employed by journalists, is that only very, very seldom does anyone go back to determine how on target those estimates really are. I should state right here that I’m not one of these economist-trackers. I did not set about learning how well Gordon’s predictions accorded with eventual reality; I simply happened to be perusing an American Heritage issue from 10 years ago when I found the above quote.

Today, according to data from the U.S. Treasury Department, the national debt stands at $13.6 trillion dollars—an amount that would have staggered Gordon had he known it in 2001. Meanwhile, the deficit has grown from $459 billion in 2008 to $1.3 trillion in 2011, according to a “TRB” article by Timothy Noah in The New Republic‘s December 29, 2011 issue.

These numbers should surprise no one. “The experience of the past 15 years is that budget deficits—and surpluses—can oscillate wildly,” noted longtime political observer Michael Barone in a 2005 column for U.S. News and World Report. The question is, why? (Or, in this case: Why was Gordon so wrong about deficits after 2001?)

What happened was, to use a title out there, "a series of unfortunate events." Who would have guessed in May 2001 that, in a little over four months from then, the nation would be unexpectedly attacked by terrorists, and that this would plunge us not only into an effort to guard internal security with virtually no precedent, as far as cost was concerned, but also into two foreign wars, halfway around the world, along with consequent prolonged efforts at nation-building? Who would have guessed a recession (the longest since the Great Depression) that dramatically reduced government revenue? Who would have guessed that Congressional Republicans would continue the Bush tax cuts, even as the deficit grew--or that the Democrats would embark on their own major new program (Obamacare) whose overall impact we still can’t completely gauge?

Quote of the Day (Bernard Shaw, As ‘St. Joan‘ Turns on Her Accusers)

2012-01-06T04:02:00.000-08:00

“You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread: when have I asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times. I could do without my warhorse; I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.”—George Bernard Shaw, St. Joan (1923)

In his preface to Three Plays for Puritans, George Bernard Shaw posed the question, “Better Than Shakesepear?”, referring to their respective treatments of Cleopatra. His answer, of course, was that his own was.

That particular point might be arguable, but not the question of whose treatment of St. Joan of Arc was superior. In the Bard’s Henry VI, Part I, Joan (here called Joan La Pucelle) is a villain, and her death at the stake for witchcraft celebrated. In St. Joan, Shaw depicts her as the surprising center of one of the great theatrical treatments of intolerance. The above monologue, when Joan recants her confession and rounds on her accusers, is one of the most eloquent passages in all of Shaw. (It is also the one that Jane Fonda’s Bree, on one of her fruitless auditions when she is not doing tricks as a call girl, recites in the 1971 thriller Klute.)

Shakespeare and Shaw are only two of the many writers--and, for that matter, filmmakers--who have been fascinated by the Main of Orleans, who was born on this date--the Feast of the Epiphany--in 1412. Schiller, Mark Twain, Anatole France, Jean Anouilh, and Mary Gordon are among the authors who have found this young girl (dead before she even reached 20 years old) a figure epitomizing what Kathryn Harrison, in an op-ed article for The New York Times, termed “Enduring Power.”

Filmmakers, too, have been drawn to her: Victor Fleming, Robert Bresson, Otto Preminger (in a 1957 adaptation of Shaw’s play), and, in one of the most powerful of all silent films, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). (The star, Maria Falconetti, is in the image accompanying this post.)

The script from Dreyer’s film drew heavily on the actual trial transcripts. That, along with testimony from more than 100 witnesses the 1456 “retrial” ordered by the Vatican that reversed the earlier judgment, have proven crucial to biographers. It is doubtful that any other ordinary, young European of the time has ever had her life documented so thoroughly.

This leads to a crucial point about Shaw’s take on the life of the saint. The playwright delighted in paradox, and from first (his preface states, “Though a professed and most pious Catholic..she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs”) to last (the Dominican friar Martin Ladvenu, her spiritual counselor in her last days, explains that “At the trial that sent a saint to the stake as a heretic and a sorceress, the truth was told [and] the law was upheld”], this play follows the same pattern as his other many plays.

But Shaw’s point--that the first trial was conducted honestly by well-meaning fanatics, while the “retrial,” a product of “shameless perjury, courtly corruption, calumny of the dead” nevertheless correctly exonerated Joan--simply flies in the face of the facts, including what was documented at the above-mentioned tribunals.

Joan was held for a year in a dank cell as a prisoner of war, then tried for heresy. As the Regine Pernoud/Marie-Veronique Clin biography, Joan of Arc: Her Story demonstrates, she should, according to canon law operative at the time, not only have been held in an ecclesiastical prison (where she would have been guarded by women rather than men, and thus been treated better), but would also have been entitled to legal representation. Instead, this provincial woman, under threat of death, faced off against multiple leading legal minds and intellectuals (the University of Paris was heavily involved in the proceedings). Despite Shaw’s contention that the condemnatory trial of 1431 delivered a wrong verdict despite the principals’ best intentions (Cauchon, her prosecutor, says, “I will not have it said that we proceeded on forced confessions”), the first trial was riddled with political biases from its inception.

And yet, Shaw still managed to convey much of the greatness of this simple rural girl who confounded older, more worldly men. As she defends herself against her clerical accusers, Shaw--whose will stated that his only religious belief was in “creative revolution”--gives some of the most eloquent words of faith to a saint who had to wait for posterity to be understood:

“I see now that the loneliness of God is his strength: what would He be if He listened to your jealous little counsels? Well, my loneliness shall be my strength too; it is better to be alone with God; His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die. I will go out now to the common people, and let the love in their eyes comfort me for the hate in yours.”

(Incidentally, poet-biographer Ben D. Kennedy has his own blog devoted entirely to the Maid of Orleans.)

Photo of the Day: Pedicabs, Central Park-Style

2012-01-06T02:13:00.000-08:00

Here is another photo I took while enjoying the balmy weather last Friday in Central Park. After a couple of days of the wintry sort of blast we normally get this time of year, it sounds as if we’ll get something of a return to last Friday’s weather this weekend. I think I’ll take it.

This Day in Classical Music History (One-Armed WWI Vet Aces Ravel Piano Piece)

2012-01-05T21:32:00.000-08:00

January 5, 1932—In Vienna, Paul Wittgenstein (pictured), a piano virtuoso who lost his right arm because of wounds incurred during World War I service, performed in the world premiere of Piano Concerto for Left Hand, a composition he had commissioned.

My headline states that Wittgenstein "aced" this work, and for most people in addition to me, the idea of a person with only one arm performing anything as technical as a classical composition is itself extraordinary. But one person--really, the one, besides Wittgenstein, most concerned with this work--woulud have begged to differ.

Composer Maurice Ravel—best known to modern audiences for Bolero, the Spanish-flavored orchestral composition that, in the Bo Derek film 10, became inextricably associated with sensuality—did not attend the performance, as he was only nine days from the Paris premiere of another one of his compositions, Concerto en sol. He did not, then, see the audience’s reaction to Wittgenstein, but it is unlikely that this would have changed his opinion of the interpretation.

Wittgenstein’s initial tepid reaction, upon first listening to the music, had disheartened Ravel. In turn, when Ravel finally heard what Wittgenstein had done with his composition, he demanded that the Austrian leave it alone. That insistence meant that it would be another year before the composer would witness, in Paris, a performance of the work that satisfied him.

The premiere marked the collaboration of two intelligent, brave--and, perhaps underlying the latter quality, stubborn--musicians whose experiences in the Great War seared them for the rest of their lives. Ravel, acclaimed as the greatest postwar French classical music composer, had volunteered for service. Only five feet two inches tall, the 39-year-old composer (exempted from military service nearly 20 years before because of a hernia and general weakness), enlisted as a truck driver--a particularly hazardous duty in 1916, when he had to drive behind the front lines at Verdun, with shells exploding to the left and right of him, according to New Yorker critic Alex Ross’ account in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Arbie Orenstein’s Ravel: Man and Musician includes a revealing postcard the composer wrote at this time, telling a friend about “the center of this city which rests in a sinister sleep.”

For all his physical fearlessness, Ravel also demonstrated significant moral courage. Despite the presence of 80 signatures of French musicians, he refused to back a proposed ban by the National League for the Defense of French Music on music by German and Austrian composers, arguing that without exposure to foreign colleagues, the nation’s musical art “would soon degenerate, becoming isolated by its academic formulas.”

During the conflict, Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin would pay tribute, in each of the piano suite’s six pieces, to the memory of a different comrade struck down in the fighting.

On the opposite side of the war, Wittgenstein just barely escaped being one of these casualties. Three days after arriving on the Russian Front with Austrian forces, he was shot in the right elbow. It was bad enough that doctors performed a clumsy amputation operation in a field hospital, but he then was confined for months in a freezing Russian prisoner-of-war camp.

Yet Wittgenstein refused to abandon the desire to perform again. After drawing a picture of a piano keyboard on an empty crate in the camp, he took, according to Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, to “tapping his freezing fingers on the wooden box, listening intently to the imagined music sounding in his head and creating, in the corner of a crowded festering invalids’ ward, a tragicomic spectacle that aroused the sympathy and curiosity of his fellow prisoners and all the hospital staff."

Once demobilized, Wittgenstein pursued with a will his dream of performing as a one-armed pianist. He possessed several advantages in his attempt:

* Even before the war, his skill with his left hand had been remarked upon;

* Plugged into an extensive network of fellow musicians, he knew about the work of Leopold Godowsky, director of piano studies at Vienna’s Imperial Academy of Music, who had created a small but significant set of works specifically for the left hand; and

* The wealth of his prominent family (younger brother Ludwig became a famous philosopher) enabled him to commission new pieces for the left hand.

The latter proved especially helpful, as, over the next couple of decades, Wittgenstein played pieces written especially for him by Richard Strauss, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten, Erich Maria Korngold, and Sergei Prokofiev.

This was the background when Ravel began writing his concerto with Wittgenstein in mind. Some have suggested that the composer was already aware of the difficult relationships his client had developed with prior composers. Wittgenstein’s preference for 19^th century music instead of the more avant-garde variety being created in the postwar, his desire to highlight his own playing, and his lack of diplomacy frequently annoyed collaborators. Prokokiev, for example, complained that without his disability, Wittgenstein “would not have stood out from a crowd of mediocre pianists." Moreover, because of the musician’s insistence on exclusive performing rights, he could effectively kill a piece that didn’t meet his demands--which is what happened to Paul Hindemith’s composition, which remained undiscovered in a drawer until 2003, four decades after the composer’s death.

After nine months of concentrated effort in which he put aside work on the two-handed Concerto en sol , Ravel played for his client his composition for the left hand. Characteristically, Wittgenstein made no effort to hide his feelings: “He [Ravel] was not an outstanding pianist," he recalled later, "and I wasn't overwhelmed by the composition. It always takes me a while to grow into a difficult work. I suppose Ravel was disappointed, and I was sorry, but I had never learned to pretend. Only much later, after I'd studied the concerto for months, did I become fascinated by it and realise what a great work it was.”

After the 1932 Vienna performance, an epistolary battle ensued between Ravel and Wittgenstein centering on the former’s insistence that the piece not be tinkered with. After considerable rancor, Wittgenstein finally was able to placate Ravel enough so that the composer agreed to lead the pianist and the Orchestra Symphonique de Paris in a performance of the piece, a little more than a year later. It couldn’t have come at a better time for Ravel, who had been involved in a taxi collision in the city only three months before--an incident that began an inexorable downward spiral in his health.

Critics raved about the concerto, marveling at its “sumptuous richness” and “astonishing variety.” Indeed, perhaps by this time it had finally penetrated even the prickly personality of Wittgenstein that the piece really allowed an interpreter such as himself to shine, providing at times more work than even two hands could normally handle.

Wittgenstein's ego was formidable even by the standards of creative artists, but that should not blind us to the magnitude of his achievement in this case. Far too many people, faced with staggering odds against ever appearing again on the concert stage, would have simply given up. Wittgenstein refused to accept the limits of despair, and by so doing he opened up the world of music in ways that the physically challenged can only appreciate now.

Quote of the Day (Dorothy Parker, Sizing Up--or Down--a ‘Writer of Power’)

2012-01-05T02:08:00.000-08:00

“He is beyond question a writer of power; and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically, and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing.”—Dorothy Parker, reviewing the novel An American Girl by Tiffany Thayer, in The New Yorker, March 18, 1933, reprinted in The Portable Dorothy Parker

TV Quote of the Day ('The Avengers,' With Typical Peel-Steed Banter)

2012-01-04T03:05:00.000-08:00

Emma Peel (played by Diana Rigg) (surveying an antique bed): “I've always rather fancied myself in one of these."

John Steed (played by Patrick Macnee): “So have I—I mean, I have, too."—The Avengers, Episode 83, “Too Many Christmas Trees,” U.K. airdate December 23, 1965, U.S. airdate August 11, 1966, written by Tony Williamson, directed by Roy Baker

When I Googled “The Avengers,” the overwhelming number of initial hits concerned a summer 2012 movie gathering together Marvel Comics superheroes. (Sigh): If Google forgets all about the tongue-in-cheek British spy-fi series of the same name, the technology that changed the world not only has no memory, but no conscience.

As a young boy in the mid-to-late Sixties, when The Avengers first aired stateside, innuendo-rich dialogue such as the above flew right over my head (or, if you prefer another cliché, under the radar). Ditto for those knowing smirks between oh-so-dashing Steed and “Mrs. Peel.”

(Question: Who was Mr. Peel? More to the point, where was he, when his wife went around saving Great Britain and Western civilization from the world’s oddest bunch of baddies—that is, when she wasn’t flirting like crazy with her bowler-attired male partner from the cryptically named “Ministry”?)

But one thing did make an impression on me: Emma Peel was not to be messed with. Steed, already middle aged, preferred foiling supervillains with his hat, umbrella, or some stratagem. Emma wasn’t averse to using her brain, but she was younger and far more athletic than Steed, who seemed positively delighted when she handled the rougher stuff.

That black-leather suit of hers radiated power from every pore, in a way it never did on Barbara Gordon, a.k.a. Batgirl on Batman, the campy American show to which I gave allegiance during these years. Batgirl was a sideshow to the Dynamic Duo, a librarian out for a little fun in fighting bad guys under the nose of her crime-fighting Gotham dad.

In contrast, any guy who dared to do something stupid with Mrs. Peel risked dismemberment at her hands. And that was only one part of its quirky appeal. As noted by blogger Tansy Rayner Roberts: “the joy of the show is in the banter, the dialogue, the beautifully tailored clothes, and the odd not-quite-speculative-fiction crimes and mysteries to be solved.”

More than a decade later, I watched Diana Rigg in a TV special in which she played Regan, one of the two evil daughters to Laurence Olivier’s King Lear. So lasting—and glorious—was the impression she made from years before that I half expected her to karate-chop the poor, foolish monarch.

Oh, sharper than a serpent’s tooth, to be done in by the ex-Mrs. Peel! What a way to go!

Photo of the Day: Raven on Broadway

2012-01-03T21:40:00.000-08:00

As I was crossing Broadway on 79^th Streetlast Friday, my eye was caught by this bronze statue, Raven on Three Great Apples. Created by Peter Woytuk, it is one ofseveral of his sculptures at various locations on Broadway.

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, Impressing America Right Away)

2012-01-03T02:06:00.000-08:00

“Nothing but my genius.”—Playwright Oscar Wilde, stepping foot on American soil, responding to the usual custom agent inquiry if he had anything to declare, quoted in Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (1912)

In researching this famous—no, make that unforgettable—quote from Oscar Wilde, I found that sources were equally divided on whether it occurred January 2 or 3 of 1882. More astonishing to me, a post from John Cooper from the Oscar Wilde Society of America raises the dismaying but legitimate question of whether these words were uttered at all. (Recall painter-wag James McNeill Whistler’s wicked response upon hearing Wilde say, after someone else's witticism, “I wish I had said that”: “You will, Oscar, you will.”)

Whatever the exact circumstances, it remains a fact that America took quickly to the flamboyant Anglo-Irish aesthete. According to contemporary accounts, he does really seem to have expressed "disappointment in the Atlantic." By the time he was done with his visit, he had served notice that a brilliant new presence was indeed on the literary scene. But it would be fully a decade before he really did offer proof—and for such a short period before folly and catastrophe overtook him—of the genius he is reputed to have declared.

Photo of the Day: Park, Lake and City

2012-01-02T20:58:00.000-08:00

Friday, on my last day in New York City for 2011, Ipaused before visiting the New-York Historical Society to enjoy theunseasonably mild late-December weather in Central Park. Hundreds of other peoplehad the same idea, including this group I photographed by the 20-acre man-made lake—thesecond-largest in this entire majestic urban park—near the Ladies’ Pavilion.

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, with a Thought to Ponder After Seasonal Revelries)

2012-01-02T08:32:00.000-08:00

“Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it's compounding a felony.”--Humorist Robert Benchley, quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958), by Herbert Victor Prochnow

Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on the New Year and the New Man)

2012-01-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”—G.K. Chesterton, The G.K. Chesterton Calendar: A Quotation From the Works of G. K. Chesterton for Every Day in the Year (1921)

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Fends Off Critics)

2011-12-31T23:44:00.001-08:00

December 31, 1861— As the first year of his administration drew to a close, President Abraham Lincoln sought to ease the concerns of a small group of meddlesome but highly influential Congressmen that the direction of the effort to crush the Confederacy needed to be changed quickly. Seldom has the Clausewitz dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means been demonstrated so much as in Lincoln’s attempt to maintain unity between the nation’s representatives and its armed forces, as well as among the states.

The postwar public deification of Lincoln should not blind us to the fact that, well into his administration, he had neither a master plan to win the Civil War nor the extensive military experience that provided instant credibility for George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower on national-security issues. His was, inescapably, a reactive Presidency: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” Lincoln wrote in a letter in April 1864.

The subject of this letter was the measures Lincoln had adopted to advance the Union effort. His observation that “indispensable necessity” had guided him throughout, despite seeming policy changes, can be seen nowhere more vividly than with the slavery issue.

As much as he had felt a bone-deep hatred for "the peculiar institution" since a trip down the Mississippi to Louisiana in the early 1830s, Lincoln felt that he had to tread cautiously in stamping it out, and not only because that action would break a campaign promise only to limit its spread, not to interfere where it curently operated. Use of slaves to crush the Confederacy by force might only lead border states such as Kentucky and Missouri to throw in their lot with their secessionist sisters farther south. The President preferred colonization and/or compensation emancipation for slaveholders. The failure of these proposals, along with reverses in the eastern theater of the war, led him to conclude later in 1862 that necessity required “military emancipation.”

But Lincoln had not reached this point when he and his Cabinet met with the Joint Select Committee on the Conduct of the War on the last day of 1861. Only appointed by the House and Senate less than two weeks before, the Republican majority on this group were already giving the President severe agita, and much more would come from them by war’s end. While well-meaning and capable of performing useful investigations (on such matters as military supply abuses, the Fort Pillow massacre, and Union troop deaths in Confederate prisons), they were also already driving the President crazy with their preference for state militias over West Point-trained soldiers, as well as their relentless urging to take Richmond, never mind the preparedness of Union troops for doing so.

Now in their sights was the Army of the Potomac’s new commander, General George B. McClellan. “Little Mac” had long put off any move toward invading Virginia, claiming that the less than two months he had had since being appointed commander was hardly enough time to train, provision, and organize his 100,000 troops. But discussions with other military commanders led the committee to believe that the general could have moved far sooner. This added to their initial grievances against him: his Democratic leanings and his stand against interfering in any way with slavery.

Even McClellan’s latest claim to Lincoln--that he was in bed with typhoid--cut the general little slack with the group. Senator Benjamin Wade from Ohio, the committee chairman whose lack of diplomacy led a reporter to call him "grim as a bear in ill health," got right to the point: “Mr. President, you are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and the want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.”

This put Lincoln in a bind. He did not want to undercut the man he had chosen to succeed General Winfield Scott as America’s leading soldier. At the same time, unlike Confederate President Jefferson Davis—not only a West Point graduate, but also a hero of the Mexican-American War and Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce—Lincoln had no sterling military credentials. Not only had he made himself conspicuous by opposing the conflict that started Davis’ upward trajectory, but he liked to joke about the limits of his own service record—three months in the Illinois militia in the Black Hawk War of 1832.

And so, the President chose, when he wasn't cheerleading the war effort, to bring the committee's Republicans and his balky general closer together. On New Year’s Day, Lincoln wrote McClellan to put aside his "uneasiness" about the joint committee's "doings": "You may be entirely relieved . . . The gentlemen of the Committee were with me an hour and a half last night; and I found them in a perfectly good mood. As their investigation brings them acquainted with facts, they are rapidly coming to think of the whole case as all sensible men woud."

Had Lincoln lived in the 21st century, it’s unlikely that this letter, however well-intentioned, would have done him any good. Just imagine this, a scenario repeated, with only slight variations, in recent years: lack of progress in the war leads the Democrats to regain control of Congress. When Lincoln removes McClellan from command, the Senate investigates. McClellan, called to testify, produces the President’s letter. “Honest Abe” ends up looking like a spinmeister, The Great Dissembler rather than the Great Railsplitter.

Over the next two weeks, the joint committee grew increasingly outspoken about the President's trust in his commander. Indiana's George Julian was stunned to find that the President and his Cabinet had no information on any of McClellan's plans, and that "Mr. Lincoln himself did not think he had any right to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan."

Even at the time, Lincoln’s trust in his general didn’t sit well with several people, not just the Joint Committee. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase made it plain even during the meeting that he agreed with the Congressmen and Senators.

More influential was Attorney-General Edward Bates. He, like Chase and Secretary of State William H. Seward, had battled Lincoln for the Republican nomination as President, but, with instincts more conservative than Chase’s, could not be written off as a radical abolitionist.

In his diary, Bates confided his dismay over what he had just witnessed: "The Prest. is an excellent man, and in the main wise; but he lacks will and purpose, and I greatly fear he, has not the power to command." In dealing one on one with the President, however, he was far more diplomatic, able to couch his tough love in legal arguments that Lincoln would find compelling.

It would not do for Lincoln to defer so often to McClellan, Bates claimed. The Constitution had explicitly vested in him power as Commander in Chief. Thus, Lincoln should "organize a Staff of his own, and assume to be in fact, what he is in law."

Lincoln was motivated enough by Bates' claims that he took out a book on military strategy from the Library of Congress. He became increasingly wedded to the idea of simultaneous attacks by Northern forces to prevent Confederate troop movements. While he continued to find the committee bothersome, they had shaken him enough that, from this point on, he challenged "Little Mac" more often to take the fight to the enemy.

As for the Joint Committee: They should be given due credit for recognizing early that McClellan was unsuited for his job and that emancipation was not only moral thing to do, but a weapon to destroy the Confederacy. But their thinking on other matters was terribly flawed. Their military favorites were leaders such as John Pope, Ambrose Burnside and Joseph Hooker--commanders hardly better than McClellan.

Their thinking about Lincoln was as myopic as it was cruel. After his assassination, several members were delighted that the President's successor, their former Democratic colleague, Andrew Johnson, would be far more vengeful against the South. By the end of Johnson's term, as he opposed one Reconstruction measure after another, Wade and company would have abundant reason to understand how wrong they had been about Lincoln, who, for all his seeming slowness, had embraced emancipation while eventually finding the commander who would put his strategy for dismembering the Confederacy into action.

Flashback, December 1941: Wartime Film Short Marks Ford-Hepburn Affair

2011-12-31T22:02:00.000-08:00

A little more than two weeks after Pearl Harbor, Hollywood swung into action behind the war effort with Women in Defense, a short documentary directed by John Ford and narrated by Katharine Hepburn (pictured). Their relationship had led Ford, then Hollywood’s hottest director (two consecutive Best Director Oscars), to a painful moral dilemma and, more recently, a surprising resolution.

Hollywood’s gung-ho attitude toward the war might seem hard to believe nowadays, but there was surprisingly little anti-war dissent in the film community, for these reasons:

* The U.S. had suffered a surprise attack by the Japanese, so there was no question who was the aggressor;

* As the children of immigrants--or even immigrants themselves--Hollywood’s studio moguls, a heavily Jewish group, were understandably anxious to demonstrate patriotism to a public that still evinced all too much anti-Semitism;

* The moguls also wanted to defeat Hitler, whose mistreatment of Jews in both his country and lands conquered by his forces was already manifest (even if the Holocaust was only barely beginning);

* The most leftist elements in Hollywood--Communists and fellow-travelers--switched from opposition to support of the war following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

As my friend, fellow blogger Dennis Brady, noted in a recent post about the 8^th Army Air Force, a number of Hollywood stars, notably including Clark Gable and James Stewart, served with distinction in the war.

Writers and directors presented special cases. Their talents consisted of presenting stories and crafting images were deemed crucially important in creating films for a mass audience. Over the next four years, Ford, Frank Capra, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler would cooperate with the War Department, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Army Pictorial Services, the Army Educational Program, the American Armed Forces First Motion Picture Unit, and other units in explaining, both to servicemen and their worried families, “Why We Fight” (to use the title of Capra’s seven-film series). They would counter the black art of propaganda, as practiced by Josef Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl, with a more benign variety.

Women in Defense, released on Christmas Eve, was a good case in point. The 10-minute film, with a script by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, depicted women as instrumental in preparing for the coming war, working in scientific, industrial, and voluntary-services activities such as sewing parachutes in silk, testing chemicals on mice as part of health programs, shaping bullets and other munitions, and giving out blood that might be used later with wounded soldiers.

Viewers caught up in aspects of the film that would seem familiar to them—Hepburn’s upper-crust diction, Ford’s homey images of communities coming together—would not know at the time that the relationship between the star and her onetime director contained its own love, longing, and pain, tried by circumstance and the passage of time.

Five years before, shortly after filming concluded of their flop Mary of Scotland, Hepburn and Ford seemed on the brink of marriage, particularly following their idyllic trip to her family home, Fenwick. But the devoutly Catholic Ford interpreted the death of his father immediately afterward as a divine judgment on their illicit relationship, and Hepburn’s offer to his wife Mary--$150,000, in return for ending the marriage and granting him access to his beloved daughter Barbara—only hardened Mary’s opposition to their union. “Jack is very religious, he’ll never divorce me,” Mary predicted confidently. “He’ll never have grounds to divorce me. I’m going to be Mrs. John Ford until I die.”

That is how it turned out, but for the next five years, the Ford-Hepburn affair had a curious half-life. They never spoke of marriage again, and by 1938 Hepburn had decamped for the East Coast while Ford stayed in Hollywood. But they remained fond of each other, and, even as the actress was pursued by billionaire aviator Howard Hughes, the possibility of a permanent union between the two seemed out of the question so long as Ford figured in the background.

Then, in 1941, several developments changed the nature of the relationship between Ford and Hepburn for good:

* Ford’s sense of betrayal over Hepburn’s affair with Spencer Tracy. Ford gave Spencer Tracy his first break in Hollywood with Up the River (1930), but relations between the two cooled after the actor rejected the lead in Ford’s adaptation of The Plough and the Stars. Within a week of the start of production of Hepburn’s first film with Tracy, Woman of the Year, as industry insiders began to gossip about the possibility of an affair between the two MGM stars, Ford traveled cross-country to Washington, D.C., where he would begin serving as part of what later became the Field Photographic Unit under William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services. Cast and crew members on his films, long given to interpreting what his sometimes mysterious actions (or even lack of them) betokened, had no doubt that this was his way of registering disapproval.

* The death of Mary’s first husband. Though Ford and Mary had married in 1920, it had not been a Catholic ceremony, because the bride was divorced and Protestant. By 1941, Mary’s ex-husband had died. Her conversion to Catholicism removed the only obstacle to the religious ceremony that Ford had long wanted.

* Pearl Harbor. Mary, complaining of loneliness, had traveled to DC to see her husband off to his new naval job when the Japanese attack on December 7 occurred. Perhaps the prospect of death in a war now at hand decided John. Before the month was out, the couple was at last married by a Catholic priest in the National Cathedral in Washington.

Ford, who would be promoted to Captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve by war’s end, continued to create films of distinction while n the armed forces. He won two more Oscars, this time for Best Documentary, with The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7^th (1943). (At Midway, where he was wounded in the shoulder and elbow so badly that he was temporarily knocked unconscious, he is said, while filming in an exposed watertower at the height of the battle, to have yelled “at the attacking Zeroes to swing left or right--and curs[ed] them out when they disobeyed directions.”)

Ford’s World War II works, concluding with the fictional full-length feature They Were Expendable (1945), depict the conflict less as a matter of glory than as sacrifice for an ideal. That might also characterize his relationship with Hepburn. Given his devotion to Catholicism, marriage to the star, at least while his wife was alive, was out of the question.

But the great director, crusty to cast and crew to the point of abusiveness, still carried a noticeable soft spot for the actress. His rollicking 1952 valentine to Ireland, The Quiet Man, featured a chief female character named Mary Kate Dannaher. It’s impossible not to read those the first and middle names without thinking of the two most important women in his life. When Hepburn came to visit, as he was dying in March 1973, he threw her off-balance first by telling her she was beautiful, then by asking if she knew that he loved her.

It is one of the curiosities of Hollywood biography that unconventional, freethinking Connecticut Yankee Kate Hepburn gave her heart to two Irish-American Catholics unwilling to divorce their wives and bent on self-destruction: Ford and Tracy. The only way that I can begin to understand this is by thinking that each relationship began with admiration for two film professionals who had virtually no equals at their craft, then passed into an understanding and love for the sensitivity that these men hid as much from themselves as from the world.

Quote of the Day (Euripides, with a Thought to Ring Out the Old Year)

2011-12-31T10:46:00.000-08:00

“Time will explain it all. He is a talker, and needsno questioning before he speaks.”—Greek playwright Euripides (ca. 480 B.C.-406B.C.), Aeolus

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on “Mute Melancholy” Ethan Frome)

2011-12-30T23:29:00.000-08:00

“The next morning, when I looked out, I saw the hollow-backed bay between the Varnum spruces, and Ethan Frome, throwing back his worn bearskin, made room for me in the sleigh at his side. After that, for a week, he drove me over every morning to Corbury Flats, and on my return in the afternoon met me again and carried me back through the icy night to Starkfield…. Ethan Frome drove in silence, the reins loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”—Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

I should have written about Ethan Frome in September, on what would have been the centennial of its publication by Scribner’s, but the date slipped by. Perhaps it’s for the best: Ever since I read this as a high-school freshman 37 years ago this month, it’s impressed me as the most wintry of fiction.

The 1993 film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novella was a major disappointment. It had all the hallmarks of a production that would have come close to matching its high literary quality, especially with the leading actors in the rural love triangle: Liam Neeson as Ethan Frome, Joan Allen as his shrewish wife Zeena, and Patricia Arquette as their pretty young servant, Mattie Silver. Unfortunately, the pacing was glacial, a far cry from the original source’s concentrated, searing plot.

The description above alone is highly cinematic, filled with precise, economically selected details that accumulate to heavy symbolism.

Consider the name of the village: Starkfield. Can you think of a name more resonant in classic American literature? It evokes an environment in which everything is stunted. Production for both crops and mills is meager, and the barrenness extends to the Fromes’ marriage, which has produced no children (Zeena, several years older than her husband, is constantly sickly) and only a joyless fidelity that is no substitute for love.

The above description of Frome, coming from the novella’s prologue, is preceded by another in which the narrator is brought up short by the sight of the taciturn farmer, “the ruin of a man,” characterized by “a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain—which, we’ll discover shortly, implies the restrictions imposed by Frome’s marriage.

Frome’s bearskin is “worn”—i.e., tattered, beaten-down, defeated. His silence during his drive practically becomes absorbed into the larger “mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe.” The subdued repetitions (Frome’s “silence” and the “mute” landscape, “melancholy” and “woe”) work in counterpoint to the talk about him in the town. Most ironically, the surprising and grim conclusion overturns nearly everything that Harmon Gow had hinted.

The most natural detail in this description might also be the most symbolic. Ethan’s bay, we are told, is “hollow-backed.” Similar to the term “broken-backed,” this implies that the horse is staggering beneath a crushing weight, just as Ethan is in his daily existence. The impact of burdens, on both the horse and its master, is profound: “hollow-backed” is a common equine deformity (a back curved abnormally downward), reflecting Frome’s own disability.

The narrator is driven in Frome’s sleigh, the vehicle that, by the story’s end, will lead to the farmer’s death-in-life. At the same time, Wharton cannot simple promote a weakling pummeled by circumstance. A tragedy requires a hero, someone whose strength makes inevitable his decision to rebel against fate. And so, she provides a quick suggestion of latent possibility, a “brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero”—a Berkshires Achilles.

Such a hero must be strong indeed even to think of defying the bonds of society’s conventions. Wharton memorably evokes Frome’s failure to remake his world because it is a fictional incarnation of her own. Three years before the novel’s publication, in an effort to break free from her unhappy marriage, she had embarked on an affair with the American journalist Morton Fullerton. (Indeed, the first initials of the novella’s lovers clue us in to their fictional inspirations: Ethan=Edith, Mattie=Morton.)

One might ask how Wharton, a product of the New York aristocracy, could write so convincingly of the Berkshire poor. It’s easy enough to ascribe it to imagination (and you can practically hear Wharton guffawing in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, over the reviewers who stated, incorrectly, that she had never seen the Berkshires before she wrote about them). But, if she might not have been able to understand Ethan Frome’s economic plight, Wharton understood the psychological bonds that restricted and deformed her failed hero all too well.

TV Quote of the Day (Mary Tyler Moore, on a Different Kind of Family)

2011-12-29T08:44:00.000-08:00

Mary Richards (played by Mary Tyler Moore): “Mr. Grant? Could I say what I wanted to say now? Please?”

Lou Grant (played by Ed Asner): “Okay, Mary.”

Mary: “Well I just wanted to let you know that sometimes I get concerned about being a career woman. I get to thinking that my job is too important to me. And I tell myself that the people I work with are just the people I work with. But last night I thought what is family anyway? It's the people who make you feel less alone and really loved. [She sobs]
And that's what you've done for me. Thank you for being MY family.”--The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Season 7, Episode 24, “The Last Show,” air date March 19, 1977, written by Allan Burns, James L. Brooks, Ed Weinberger, Stan Daniels, David Lloyd, and Bob Ellison, directed by Jay Sandrich

Mary Tyler Moore, 75 years old today? Where did the years go?

How many performers are lucky enough to lead one classic TV series, let alone two? How many, in both cases, end the show while it's still on top? How many influence an entire generation of women with a landmark depiction of a single woman in her 30s, happy in her job and her life? As one of those women, screenwriter-director Nora Ephron, wrote in an essay on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows (2004): "You made it possible for millions of Americans to stay home on Saturday night and not feel they were missing anything. For that alone I love you."

From the moment she began playing young suburban wife and mom Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Tyler Moore endeared herself to TV audiences. With then-husband Grant Tinker, she went on to tweak the workplace-comedy format for the series named after her that began its run in 1970.

Though her own series included Mary Richards’ friends Rhoda Morgenstern and Phyllis Lindstrom, the heart of the show was the newsroom WJM-TV. It’s a testament to Moore’s healthy ego--and sense of what made for great television--that she so often played straight lady to her fellow cast members, transforming a bunch of supporting players into more like an ensemble in which she functioned as first among equals.

As the show evolved, it became increasingly clear that Mary’s workplace was, as the above quote indicates, a second family. The ending for the show devised by her, Tinker, and their marvelous creative team at MTM, now that I think of it, has only gained in meaning with time. The funny--but capricious--fate of WJM (the company acquiring the station cleans house, terminating everyone but incompetent anchorman Ted Baxter) now seems like a harbinger for all that has befallen journalism and the American economy as a whole in the years since.

If the workplace is a form of family, as so many of us feel about the arena where we spend so many of our waking hours, then its changes take on enormous importance. When those changes happen for no good reason, they can tear at the fabric of your life. On the other hand, if you’re lucky, you’ll meet someone like Mary Richards, who’ll make you laugh and lift your heart, even in the darkest moments.

I write “someone like Mary” because there really is only one Mary Tyler Moore. Over the last few years, she’s battled health issues (e.g., loss of peripheral vision due to diabetes, removal of a benign tumor from the lining around her brain). When she receives a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Van Dyke next month, then, I’ll be among those cheering the loudest, from one of the millions of living rooms she graced as a funny, warm, infinitely luminous presence in the television age, the one who "turned the world on with her smile."

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on the Evil Rich)

2011-12-28T06:47:00.000-08:00

“In spite of the balmy temperature and complicated conveniences of Faxon's bedroom, the injunction [I.e., ‘Make yourself at home‘] was not easy to obey. It was wonderful luck to have found a night's shelter under the opulent roof of Overdale, and he tasted the physical satisfaction to the full. But the place, for all its ingenuities of comfort, was oddly cold and unwelcoming. He couldn't have said why, and could only suppose that Mr. Lavington's intense personality—intensely negative, but intense all the same—must, in some occult way, have penetrated every corner of his dwelling. Perhaps, though, it was merely that Faxon himself was tired and hungry, more deeply chilled than he had known till he came in from the cold, and unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of the prospect of perpetually treading other people's stairs.”—Edith Wharton, “The Triumph of Night” (1916)

Mention “winter” and “Edith Wharton” in the same sentence and the immediate association is with her classic novel, Ethan Frome. This year being the centennial of that marvelous tale of fate and thwarted love in the Berkshires, don’t be surprised if I post something about it before 2011 draws to a close.

But for me, Wharton has become linked with winter not just through this tragedy, but through her ghost stories. Brought together in the compact but choice collection The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, they might not have been as long, various, or tantalizingly ambiguous as those of friend and mentor Henry James, but to me, they surpass “The Master” in their evocation of atmosphere and, for want of a better phrase, the chill factor--and none more so than “The Triumph of Night” (even the title haunts me).

From its beginning, this tale is about imbalance and psychological disorientation. George Faxon has been hired as a secretary for a wealthy New Hampshire woman, but she’s forgotten about his arrival. His surmise has been acquired “through long experience,” suggesting vulnerability at the hands of the rich. His plight is worsened by exposure to weather so brutal that it almost becomes a character in its own right. (“Dark, searching and sword-like, it alternately muffled and harried its victim, like a bull-fighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts.”)

He’s seemingly rescued from this situation by Frank Reiner, who brings him to the home of his uncle, captain of industry John Lavington. But, as seen in the passage above, Lavington’s mansion is unsettling. Faxon simply can’t get a handle on it (he “couldn‘t have said why”)--especially the presence of a figure that mysteriously materializes and disappears in Lavington’s study with nobody else even noticing him.

By the time the night is through, Faxon realizes that this other visitor, focusing “eyes of deadly menace” on the guileless Reiner, is Lavington’s doppelganger, or double.

Like a New England Hamlet, Faxon bemoans his fate as the only person who, witnessing an apparition, is given the responsibility to prevent evil (“he, the one weaponless and defenceless spectator, the one whom none of the others would believe or understand if he attempted to reveal what he knew--he alone had been singled out as the victim of this dreadful initiation”). His panicked flight leads to tragedy, a breakdown and the lasting recognition that “he might have broken the spell of iniquity” had he acted immediately.

“The Triumph of Night” belongs to a group of stories written around 1910 that emphasize male characters; this and two others, “Afterward” and “The Eyes,” are ghost stories. A decade later, she would write of this milieu in which she grew up with increasing nostalgia, but at this point she left no doubt that much of the wealth of the Northeast aristocracy was acquired through fraud. “The Triumph of Night,” then, becomes not just a tale of the supernatural but also a moral consideration, an examination of the desperate and evil lengths to which the rich will go to prevent their own ruin.

Tales of the supernatural need not be simply gory fright fests; they can also memorably evoke the sorrows and evils created by our most compelling everyday concerns. That includes the world of work and finance.

It amazes me that, three years after the Wall Street collapse, no film of the supernatural has considered these events. (Even the skullduggery of 1980s Wall Street, far milder in effect than the one with such explosive consequences in 2008, eventually inspired the Oscar-winning script for Ghost.) As for supernatural fiction, it feels more genre-dominated than ever, less likely to be taken up by masters of mainstream literary fiction such as Wharton, who, with subtlety and concision, knew how to suggest evil all the more terrifying for being initially immaterial.

Quote of the Day (Oscar Levant, on a Politician)

2011-12-27T13:34:00.000-08:00

“I once said cynically of a politician, ‘He'll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it.’”—Pianist-composer-wit Oscar Levant, in The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965)

Oscar Levant, born in Pittsburgh on this date in 1906, was a close friend of George Gershwin. He is probably best known to film fans for musical comedies that highlighted his caustic wit, such as An American in Paris and The Band Wagon. For the two decades before his death in 1972, his mounting neuroses, stage fright and hypochondria led to several stints in mental hospitals, inspiring increasingly self-directed humor.

I prefer his one-liners directed at outside targets, such as today’s quote—a statement that, I think, never really goes out of fashion.

Flashback, December 1931: Churchill Nearly Killed in Car Accident

2011-12-26T23:55:00.000-08:00

In what may have been the low point of his decade outside the British Cabinet, Winston Churchill was struck by a car late one evening while crossing New York’s Fifth Avenue, barely escaping with his life.

Even Churchill’s alleged “premature” birth (likely a story concocted by his parents so that Victorian society would not know they had slept together before marriage) led biographer William Manchester to joke: “He never could wait his turn.” That same boundless, ceaseless energy explains how his near-fatal accident on December 13, 1931 occurred.

From the start of his public career 30 years before, the future Prime Minister had the reputation of a young man in a hurry. At age 37, he was named First Lord of the Admiralty, the equivalent of America’s Secretary of the Navy. Yet the same dash and energy led him to incur risks, including backing the disastrous 1915 Dardanelles expedition, a controversy that threatened to leave him with the same fate that befell his father Randolph: “a man with a brilliant future behind him.”

Even after painfully working his way back into the upper reaches of the government, Churchill had thrown it all way, resigning from the “shadow cabinet” of Conservative Party leader Stanley Baldwin, in profound (and mistaken) disagreement with its position on Indian independence.

Now he not only had more time on his hands than ever, but a continuing, pressing need to meet his extravagant expenses. Personal economy was impossible for this former Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British equivalent of Treasury Secretary), so he needed to earn sizable sums when he wasn’t attending sessions of the House of Commons.

Like the earlier American statesman Theodore Roosevelt, Churchill saw writing as a means of earning a livelihood while keeping his name before the public. He had started a book tour in December, with his first lecture, “Pathway of the English-Speaking Peoples” (a characteristic theme of his later writings and work), being particularly well received.

Around 10:30 pm on December 13, Churchill was running late for an appointment with Bernard Baruch. Having forgotten the address from the last time he visited two years before, he was fuming at himself when he stepped out of his taxi. That might have made him doubly forgetful that American cars drove on the opposite side to British ones, so he looked left instead of right. He hadn't gotten too far when a car going 35 miles per hour threw him to the pavement.

Rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital, Churchill was diagnosed with a scalp wound, two cracked ribs, considerable bruises and pleurisy. When the motorist who hit him visited the out-of-power politico, Churchill assured the 26-year-old Italian-American--so distraught that he had called the hospital repeatedly to check on the victim’s condition--that the accident was all his own fault, since he hadn’t been looking in the right direction. (I hope that the motorist held onto the autographed book that Churchill gave him before he left, A decade later, when the author had finally reached the top of the British political ladder, the value of the signature had grown exponentially and would have earned a nice sum for the Yonkers man, identified in contemporary press reports as either a cabby or an unemployed truck driver.)

Churchill sent a telegram to his friend Dr. Frederick Lindemann, asking him to calculate the force of the impact involved in the accident. The Oxford University physicist complied, but couldn’t resist the teasing suggestion that Churchill’s chubbiness had cushioned him from the full force of the car.

Churchill had hoped he could continue with his lecture tour, but lingering weakness while in the hospital convinced even this famously obstinate man that it was out of the question. Instead, he made do by turning the accident into an article for Britain‘s Daily Mail. (“I do not understand why I was not broken like an egg-shell or squashed like a gooseberry,” he wrote.)

On New Year’s Eve, he and wife Clementine sailed for Nassau in the Bahamas for further rest and relaxation. Even with beautiful weather, that must have been a sweet agony for this most restless of men.

I first came across the story of Churchill’s near-fatal accident in the superb 1980s Masterpiece Theatre mini-series, Churchill: The Wilderness Years, 1929-1939, starring Robert Hardy in the finest performance I’ve seen of the great man. It was brought to my attention once again by Matthew Continetti’s article, “A World in Crisis,” in the January 3 issue of The Weekly Standard.

Continetti’s article is a maddening mishmash--one moment offering striking parallels between the world situation at the time of the accident and our own, the next moment setting out preposterous similarities between the American President that year, Herbert Hoover, and Barack Obama. But one of his points seems incontestable: “if the car had been traveling just a little bit faster, the history of the twentieth century would have been irrevocably altered.”

How, exactly? Let’s assume for a second, for the sake of argument, two otherwise eminently contestable points: 1) that America would have willingly helped a different British Prime Minister as the mother country faced the Nazis alone in 1940; 2) that Britain’s Parliament and public would have followed another leader in standing fast. What then?

Would a different Prime Minister have established as good a working relationship with Franklin Roosevelt as Churchill? Not likely. For all their policy differences (downplayed in Churchill's war memoirs), it still seems clear that the two were basically simpatico. Both men, because of their WWI governmental experience, loved their country’s navies; both had a flair for the telling phrase; both had been instrumental in moving their country toward the modern welfare state (as David Lloyd-George’s Liberal Party colleague, Churchill championed old-age pensions and unemployment insurance two decades before the New Deal); and both possessed abiding affection for the other’s country (FDR graduated from the Anglophilic prep school Groton; Churchill’s mother was the Brooklyn-born beauty Jennie Jerome.)

Which British politician would have replaced Churchill as the face of British defiance? No Labour Party figure would have done so; not only did they not have the votes to take charge in 1940, but during the 1930s their strongly pacifist wing had been no better than most of the Conservatives in appeasing Hitler.

Among Conservatives, Lord Halifax, Neville Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, had been the alternative to Churchill at the time of Chamberlain’s resignation as Prime Minister. But the Labour Party quickly indicated that Halifax was unacceptable in leading any coalition War Cabinet.

Which of Churchill’s fellow “insurgents” (Conservative opponents of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy) would have stepped to the fore? Consider the list: Leo Amery, Duncan Sandys, Harold Nicolson, Godfrey Nicholson, Leonard Ropner, Derrick Gunston, Ronnie Cartland, Ronnie Tree, the Duchess of Atholl, Paul Emiys-Evans, Vyvyan Adams, Louis Spears, Bob Boothby, Victor Cazalet, Brendan Bracken and Jack Macnamara. While they were figures of undoubted talent, none had Churchill’s extensive experience--nor, even more crucially, his ability to frame an argument for public consumption through oratory.

Alternative history--i.e., speculation on how the past might have turned out given a change in an event--can be fun to explore, and Churchill himself delved into it while visiting America, even writing about how a win at Gettysburg would have resulted 40 years later in an anti-German pact among Britain, Theodore Roosevelt and the Confederate President, Woodrow Wilson.

But one trembles to think what would have happened if "The Last Lion" had not been around to roar against Hitler--and all lovers of words would be left with an immense gap, minus the speeches tand memoirs this Nobel laureate for literature would pen to steel his nation for its "finest hour."

Quote of the Day (Wes Nisker, Making Like a Buddhist Woody Allen)

2011-12-26T07:32:00.000-08:00

"Before I became a Buddhist, I worried about my life. Now I worry about my next life."—Buddhist teacher, author, radio commentator, and performer Wes Nisker, quoted in "Laugh!", Reader’s Digest, September 2011

Quote of the Day (St. Augustine, on the Importance of Jesus' Birth)

2011-12-25T08:33:00.000-08:00

“You would have suffered eternal death, had he not been born in time. Never would you have been freed from sinful flesh, had he not taken on himself the likeness of sinful flesh. You would have suffered everlasting unhappiness, had it not been for this mercy. You would never have returned to life, had he not shared your death. You would have been lost if he had not hastened to your aid. You would have perished, had he not come.”— St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 185, on Christmas

I Triple-Dog Dare Ya to Have a Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T08:22:00.000-08:00

If you don’t…well, what happened to Ralphie could happen toyou!

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, with an Early Version of Scrooge)

2011-12-24T23:53:00.000-08:00

"In an old abbey town, a long, long while ago, there officiated as sexton and gravedigger in the churchyard one Gabriel Grub. He was an ill conditioned cross-grained, surly fellow, who consorted with nobody but himself and an old wicker-bottle which fitted into his large, deep waistcoat pocket....

"A little before twilight one Christmas Eve, Gabriel shouldered his spade, lighted his lantern, and betook himself toward the old churchyard, for he had a grave to finish by next morning, and feeling very low, he thought it might raise his spirits, perhaps, if he went on with his work at once....

"He strode along until he turned into the dark lane which led to the churchyard—a nice, gloomy, mournful place into which the towns-people did not care to go except in broad daylight, consequently he was not a little indignant to hear a young urchin roaring out some jolly song about a Merry Christmas. Gabriel waited until the boy came up, then rapped him over the head with his lantern five or six times to teach him to modulate his voice. And as the boy hurried away, with his hand to his head, Gabriel Grubb chuckled to himself and entered the churchyard, locking the gate behind him."--Charles Dickens, "The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton," from The Pickwick Papers (1836)

December 1836 was usually busy even for the naturally hyperkinetic Charles Dickens. On the 22^nd, his comic operetta The Village Coquettes was performed; earlier in the month, he befriended his eventual biographer, John Forster; and he anxiously awaited the birth of his first child, which would occur a week into the new year.

The last event was no small reason why the 24-year-old journalist-turned-novelist finished writing “Number 10” of The Pickwick Papers on December 23. The installment, which would appear in the December 31 serialization of the novel, was necessary to be whipped out--and fast--to take care of his new, and already growing, family.

The Pickwick Papers, Dickens recalled later, was written largely on the fly. But his many gifts of observation and narrative were already on display in his initial attempt at a novel, and the above quote offers a good opportunity to see these qualities at work. (I myself stumbled upon this story-within-a-novel in the Everyman's Library anthology, Christmas Stories.)

The quote offers something else, too, which I found surprising: The way his imagination reworked characters, even after initial publication.

The other day, listening to a radio performance of A Christmas Carol, I found myself saying many of the lines before the actors did. This was hardly due to my memory, but more likely testified to how much I--how much all of us--have heard the work over a lifetime. After so much exposure, responses to this work become automatic--unthinking, even. Maybe it helps to step back, to think of this thousand-times-told tale (60 film adaptations alone!) afresh.

That, in essence, is what the tale of Gabriel Grub can do. It is, according to theologian Mark D. Roberts, writing for the blog “Patheos,” “like looking at the charcoal sketches of an artist getting ready to paint a masterpiece.”

Both tales involve nasty old men so miserly that they scorn Christmas celebrations. Even their surnames epitomize their psyches: the hard “gs” in “Grub” and “Scrooge” indicate how obdurate they have become with age. Indeed, they are such lost cases that paranormal visitors (dream goblins in the first, the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future in the second) are required to effect drastic change in them on Christmas Eve.

But Ebenezer Scrooge has made a far more vivid impression on readers over time than Gabriel Grub. You could argue, I suppose, that Grub’s occupation--gravedigging--already leaves him sharply inclined toward the vision of final things with which he’ll be afflicted this night. But more than this is at work.

First, “The Story of the Goblins” is only an “inset story” in a larger picaresque tale (Pickwick) heavily indebted to Cervantes, Smollett, and other novelists given to shambling stories. By the time of A Christmas Carol, Dickens had become adept at creating his own narrative structures.

Second, the passage of seven years had given him more perspective on this story that, according to a 2007 article in the British newspaper The Guardian, he had first heard about a Danish gravedigger. The ills of the Industrial Revolution were more widespread than even Dickens himself--famously, one of its early victims as a child worker in a shoeblacking factory and warehouse--suspected. The Gabriel Grubs of this world were not merely spiritually dead themselves, he realized, but caused the same condition in others.

Third, an entire novel allowed him to draw out the full psychological implications of the story and give the protagonist a deeper, more understandable background. He could also render in greater detail how obsession with money (a condition with which he had become increasingly familiar with because of the need to provide for his family) could deform lives.

Fourth, the novel allowed Dickens to pile on plot developments so shattering that they could effect an instantaneous change in his protagonist. Grub, fearing his experience with the goblins will make him the laughingstock of the community, disappears for a decade before returning virtually unrecognizable. The change in Scrooge is overnight, enabling a more rapid conclusion--and the possibility of endless theatrical interpretations that would have overjoyed this most theater-loving of novelists.

Quote of the Day (Kobe Bryant Divorce Weighed by ‘Left Coast Sports Babe’)

2011-12-22T03:08:00.000-08:00

“In Vanessa Bryant’s statement that she and Kobe are divorcing, she asks for ‘privacy during this difficult time.’ Not that I wish the woman any harm, but if she wanted privacy, she should have married someone other than Kobe Bryant.—Wonder what happened between the Bryants? Did the lockout dent Kobe’s jewelry budget?”—“Left Coast Sports Babe” comic, on NBA superstar Kobe Bryant, “Kobe Locked Out?”, December 18, 2011

Photo of the Day: Wooden Soldier, Rockefeller Center

2011-12-21T21:32:00.000-08:00

I took this shot a couple of weeks ago, just as theholiday tourists were beginning to descend on Rockefeller Center in earnest, ofthis wooden soldier—one of the more striking sights in a midtown Manhattanfilled with them during Christmas.

Quote of the Day (Vaclav Havel, on the ‘Contaminated Moral Environment’ of Communism)

2011-12-21T02:49:00.000-08:00

“We live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loudly that the powers that be should not be all-powerful and that the special farms, which produced ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children's homes and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all.”— Vaclav Havel, “New Year’s Address to the Nation” after his election as President of Czechoslavakia, January 1, 1990

The life and career of playwright-dissident-statesman Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), who died over the weekend, was a standing rebuke not just to totalitarianism but also to the habits of mind to which even politicians in a democracy can slip when spin becomes, by ever-so-artful degrees, lying. He showed that, while words alone might not be sufficient in political discourse, they are an indispensable starting point in framing arguments and, as he put it, "living within the truth."

We are about to find out not only if that example will not only prove an enduring object lesson to the countries involved in the "Arab Spring," but whether the parties that followed his path toward freedom behind the Iron Curtain will have the backbone to tell their constituents the hard choices that await them in the worst economic crisis since the end of the Cold War.

Vaclav's crucial recognition--that in politics (especially in politics) moral considerations still need to be brought to bear--is analyzed in a fine post by the blogger “Archbishop Cranmer.” (No, not the archbishop executed in the 16^th century, but the contemporary British blogger using the name as a pseudonym.)

This Day in Film History (‘Wonderful Life,’ American ‘Christmas Carol,’ Opens)

2011-12-20T21:51:00.000-08:00

December 20, 1946—Arguably Frank Capra’s greatest tribute to the common man he celebrated his entire career, It’s a Wonderful Life, opened in New York City. Though the movie was nominated for five Oscars (including for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, for star James Stewart), it won none and languished at the box office. It would take another three decades of multiple showings on television before America recognized it as a classic.

You can examine this film from dozens of different perspectives, and they would all repay the scrutiny. It’s natural for many to focus especially on Stewart, in what might have been his quintessential Everyman role, or Donna Reed, still only in the early stages of her fine career.

But Stewart’s George Bailey needs a foil, a polar opposite who can test him and push him to the extremities of despair from which he needs to be rescued on Christmas Eve. That is supplied, in a masterful performance, by Lionel Barrymore (pictured left, with Stewart).

I have written a prior post about this movie as “An American Christmas Carol.” Its single greatest connection to the Charles Dickens classic was through Barrymore, who had made something of a holiday tradition in the 1930s with his radio broadcasts as Ebenezer Scrooge.

The actor was, in fact, ready to put his stamp on the role in the first American film version of it in 1938. His longtime studio, M-G-M, had cast him in the role when fate intervened. The death of Jean Harlow required reshooting of a few scenes of her last film, Saratoga. When Barrymore came back to that set for what was basically a mop-up operation, he slipped over a sound cable and broke his hip. For the rest of his life, he was confined to a wheelchair. (The role of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol went to the actor Barrymore recommended, Reginald Owen, who made something of a career highlight of it.)

By the time he signed up later that year as Grandpa Vanderkof in Capra’s adaptation of You Can’t Take It With You, Barrymore was in disabling pain. Arthritis in his “hands, elbows, feet and knees…[left him] stiff and knobby as old oak roots,” the director recalled in his memoir, The Name Above the Title. Only hourly shots got him through production.

When he heard about Capra’s first postwar production for his new venture, Liberty Films, Barrymore committed to the project without even reading the script, convincing MGM to loan him out for the project. In substance, if not in name, Mr. Potter was Scrooge, the film role that got away from Barrymore. You can practically see him tear into the part with relish.

More so than his accomplished siblings, John and Ethel, Lionel was not merely comfortable but accomplished with film--every aspect of the medium. He had been acting in short films as early as 1911, and had directed and composed as well as acted for the cinema.

In his most memorable outburst against the miserly small-town banker, Bailey lashes out against Potter as a “frustrated old man.” Barrymore had his own frustrations in life--not merely his terrible physical pain, but the sense of disappointment that he could not make a living out of what he saw as his real vocation: painting.

One of the things he learned about art--use all the colors in one’s palette--was something he employed in It’s a Wonderful Life. Barrymore's wheelchair becomes a prop--all the characters come to Potter, like some blighted sun god--and the most notable point when he moves it--right after discovering that George’s Uncle Billy has absentmindedly left him with the Bailey Savings and Loan’s cash--is the precise point when the plot propels forward in earnest. And then there’s that raspy voice--which the actor used most often beforehand to suggest an irascible but essentially kindly figure, but here to evoke villainy.

The ironic aspect of this, of course, was that, according to Capra, Barrymore was “the humblest, most cooperative actor I’ve ever known.” His performance stands out even amid the great cast of supporting players (Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi, H.B. Warner, Gloria Grahame, Ward Bond, Frank Faylen, and Sheldon Leonard) that the director assembled for his Yuletide classic.

Quote of the Day (Caitlin Flanagan, on What Men Don’t Get About Women)

2011-12-20T02:23:00.000-08:00

“There are certain things about women that men will never understand, in part because they have no interest in understanding them. They will never know how deeply we care about our houses—what a large role they play in our dreams for ourselves, how unhappy their shortcomings make us. Men think they understand the way our physical beauty—or lack of it, or assaults on it from age or extra weight—preys on our minds, but they don’t fully grasp the significance these things have for us. Nor can they understand the way physical comforts or simple luxuries—the fresh towel or the fat new cake of soap—can lift our spirits. And they will never know how much our lives are shaped around the fear of bad men and the harm they can bring us if we’re not careful, if we’re not banded together, if we’re not telling each other what to watch out for, what we’ve learned. We need each other’s counsel, and oftentimes it comes when we’re talking about other things, when we seem not to have much important on our minds at all.”—Caitlin Flanagan, “The Glory of Oprah,” The Atlantic, December 2011

Photo of the Day: From Heroes to Zeroes

2011-12-19T21:08:00.000-08:00

I just had to snap pictures of two action figures, representing the New York Giants and the New York Jets, this morning as I passed the Tonic Sports Bar in Times Square on my way to work. They simply seemed so symbolic of their teams’ maddening seasons.

There’s the sense of premature jubilation in the raised fingers, followed by the crushing realization that they had failed to show up against teams they should have beaten handily. There’s the shameless appeal to the hometown crowd.

And it ends, of course, with those 00s. No, they’re not the jerseys of the great Hall of Fame center Jim Otto. Nor, as the makers of these statues of Big Blue and Gang Green probably believed, are they diplomatic ways of not associating a team with a single player. Instead, the numbers have become emblematic of the teams’ slide toward absolute oblivion.

Funny, isn’t it, that, for all their differences in temperament and coaching philosophy, Tom Coughlin and Rex Ryan now stand with their teams at the same ugly pass.

Tonic features karaoke. Perhaps, before their next game, Giant and Jets fans can sing a Tom Petty song. You know the lyric: “Baby, even the losers get lucky sometimes…”

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Pocketful of Miracles,’ on Its ‘Lady for a Day’)

2011-12-19T04:05:00.000-08:00

Junior (played by Mickey Shaughnessy), seeing boozy beggar Apple Annie (played by Bette Davis) transformed into a duchess: “She's like a cockroach what turned into a butterfly!”—Pocketful of Miracles (1961), written by Hal Kanter and Harry Tugend, based on an earlier screenplay by Robert Riskin and the Damon Runyon short story “Madame La Gimp,” directed by Frank Capra

Fifty years ago today, Frank Capra’s remake of his 1933 Gotham fairy tale, Lady for a Day, premiered, with a bigger budget, bigger stars, and longer running time, in New York City. Its failure this time around led the great director to decide that the thrill was gone out of moviemaking in an age when a star (to his aggravation, only a middling one like Glenn Ford) could force him into a compromised product. Partly as a result, this would be his last completed feature film: three years later, he pulled out of Marooned when he tired of incessant studio demands for script approval and budgets.

Capra was right in this respect: among his quartet of holiday movies (the others: Lady for a Day, Meet John Doe, and, of course, It’s a Wonderful Life), this one ranked last. I’m afraid that, like another holiday film, Love, Actually four decades later, the final product of Pocketful of Miracles failed to deliver on its tremendous promise. Miscast are Bette Davis and Ford, as, respectively, the street woman desperate that the daughter who has lived abroad for years not realize how far she has fallen, and the unexpectedly tenderhearted racketeer who decides to turn her into a duchess (or, at least, appear like one). Moreover, the extra 40 minutes gained since Lady for a Day puffed up what at heart is a comic fairy tale.

Not to say that there aren’t moments, even whole stretches, of pure enjoyment. When he wasn’t coping with cluster headaches over his feuding co-stars, Capra delighted in his terrific group of supporting players— not just Shaughnessy but also Sheldon Leonard, Edward Everett Horton, Thomas Mitchell (Uncle Billy of It’s a Wonderful Life), and especially Peter Falk, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his turn as Dave the Dude’s underling, the ironically named Joy Boy.

And then there is the dialogue. Much of the best of it sprang from unaccredited Jimmy Cannon (“superb slinger of Broadway’s argot,” Capra called him in his autobiography, The Name Above the Title). The sportswriter managed to blend seamlessly Runyon’s original lingo with his own, so it’s hard to tell the source of such lines as the above, or Joy Boy's exclamation upon seeing a room after a quarrel between Dave and girlfriend Queenie: “Look at this place, like the inside of a goat's stomach!"

For another Runyon Yuletide take, in undiluted form, you might want to turn to the short story “Dancing Dan’s Christmas,” in the Everyman Library anthology Christmas Stories. It now only features the colorful characters and hilarious dialogue that Hollywood and Broadway (Guys and Dolls) have long loved about Runyon, but also an O.Henry-style ending and a distinct undercurrent of danger downplayed on film and the stage (we are, after all, reading about people engaged in criminal enterprises).

Quote of the Day (Luke, on Mary, ‘Handmaid of the Lord’)

2011-12-18T15:35:00.000-08:00

“In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent fromGod to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man namedJoseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming toher, he said, ‘Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you.’ But she was greatlytroubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.Then the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favorwith God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shallname him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, andthe Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will ruleover the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.’ ButMary said to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?’And the angel said to her in reply, ‘The holy Spirit will come upon you, andthe power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be bornwill be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, Elizabeth, your relative, hasalso conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her whowas called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.” Mary said, ‘Behold,I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.’ ” Luke 1: 26-38

Nobody else in the human race has ever been giventhe great honor and responsibility accorded Mary, but all of us, even thehumblest, are called to give honor to God. Among the examples of this—not justin the United States, but around the world—are the artisans who have testifiedto their faith through their work.

Everyone knows the extraordinary examples of this inthe Vatican, but I think that I and many of my fellow Catholics take forgranted the many—and, more frequently than not, all but anonymous—architects,painters, sculptors, and stained-glass makers who have made even the ordinaryparish churches little jewel boxes. I took the photo accompanyingthis post, for instance, a couple of years ago, while on vacation, in Staunton,Va., the birthplace of President Woodrow Wilson and home of the BlackfriarsPlayhouse. This particular Madonna-and-Child statue is just outside St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church. You can multiply examples of these around the country.

Photo of the Day: On Fifth Ave., Awaiting Xmas

2011-12-17T11:52:00.000-08:00

I took the photo here last week of the windowdisplay in the Fifth Avenue Build-a-Bear store in New York.