Photo of the Day: Peter Quinn’s Book Party, Glucksman Ireland House, NYU

This past Friday, I attended a party to celebrate the publication of Peter Quinn’s third and final installment in his Fintan Dunne trilogy, Dry Bones. The event was held at New York University's Glucksman Ireland House, an appropriate venue for Irish America’s finest scholars and writers.

The Dunne series (the earlier volumes are Hour of the Cat and The Man Who Never Returned) are detective novels set in the 20-year-period before and after WWII, and are highlighted by Quinn’s vivid descriptions, colorful dialogue, and mastery of every detail of New York as it looked, sounded, and was experienced before everything irretrievably changed.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Read Tom Nolan’s extremely perceptive Wall Street Journal review of Dry Bones and its distinguished predecessors nearly two weeks ago.

Faithful readers of this blog realize that I’m not a subtle person. This photo of me (holding the books) with Peter proves the point. The novel’s availability now makes it an ideal time to figure it into your holiday buying plans. There’s no reason why you can’t do what I have done (and am trying, not so subliminally, to persuade you to do): buy one for yourself and another for a friend.  

(If you’re feeling especially festive, you should also look into Banished Children of Eve, Quinn’s American Book Award-winning novel of New York City on the brink of the Draft Riot in 1863--still the worst racial disturbance in American history--and Looking for Jimmy, a collection of his evocative essays on the Irish-American experience.)

Photo of the Day: A Legend of War and Film

Every day, on my way to work in midtown Manhattan, I pass this bronze statue of the man for whom Duffy Square was named: Fr. Francis Duffy (1871-1932). If you’ve ever seen that old movie chestnut, The Fighting 69^th, starring Pat O’Brien, then you know a bit more than most of the thousands of heedless, bargain-hungry theatergoers who line up at the TKTS booth in this square. You know that he became a legend in WWI for ministering to troops, hearing last confessions and even carrying some of the wounded to safety—enough to win him a Distinguished Service Cross. 

As depicted, in this sculpture by Charles Keck (dedicated five years after the priest’s death), Fr. Duffy is far-seeing and resolute, and he was like that in civilian life, too, against adversaries within and without the Church he guarded. One of the manifold marvelous bits in Peter Quinn’s 1930s detective novel, The Hour of the Cat, is a short section on Fr. Duffy in peacetime. Early in the 20^th century, the priest had been exiled from his position as an editor at a theological journal for progressive opinions that ran afoul of the New York Archdiocese. By the end of his life, as pastor of Holy Cross Church, he was giving himself, characteristically, as unselfishly as he had on the fields of France, only this time to the skid-row denizens of Hell's Kitchen.

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ on ‘Guns for Everybody’)

[Archie Bunker—played by Carroll O’Connor--is delivering an editorial on a local TV station]

Archie: [on TV] “Good evening, everybody. This here is Archie Bunker of 704 Hauser Street, veteran of the big war, speaking on behalf of guns for everybody. Now, question: what was the first thing that the Communists done when they took over Russia? Answer: gun control. And there's a lot of people in this country want to do the same thing to us here in a kind of conspiracy, see. You take your big international bankers, they want to - whaddya call - masticate the people of this here nation like puppets on the wing, and then when they get their guns, turn us over to the Commies.”

Edith Bunker (played by Jean Stapleton): "Oh, Archie, I'm glad they put you on a stool--you look taller sitting down.”

Archie: [on TV] “Now I want to talk about another thing that's on everybody's minds today, and that's your stick-ups and your skyjackings, and which, if that were up to me, I could end the skyjackings tomorrow.”

Mike “Meathead” Stivic (played by Rob Reiner): “You could?”

Archie: [on TV] “All you gotta do is arm all your passengers. He ain't got no more moral superiority there, and he ain't gonna dare to pull out no rod. And then your airlines, they wouldn't have to search the passengers on the ground no more, they just pass out the pistols at the beginning of the trip, and they just pick them up at the end! Case closed.”

Mike: “That's incredible, Arch.”—All in the Family, Season 3, Episode 1, “Archie and the Editorial,” air date September 16, 1972, teleplay by George Arthur Bloom and Don Nicholl, based on a story by George Arthur Bloom, directed by Norman Campbell

When the above scenario played out on the TV hit sitcom All in the Family 40 years ago, it’s a safe bet that everyone watching at home, even those on the “anti” side of the gun control debate, recognized the patent absurdity of Archie’s position.  Forty years later, however, the National Rifle Association (NRA) appears to have accepted this proposal lock, stock and barrel, so to speak, as its president, Wayne LaPierre, responded to the Newtown Massacre by calling for armed guards in every school.

In a blog post even more squarely in the tradition that Jonathan Swift established in “A Modest Proposal” of satirizing the most deadly matters in absolutely deadpan treatment, novelist Peter Quinn suggests compulsory gun ownership for every American school-aged and above—including for members of Congress, who, when some whacko opens fire from the visitors’ gallery in the Capital, will instantly deliver “bipartisan return fire by 435 crack shots.”

Unfortunately, daily news reports outstrip the capacity of satire to shock with rank absurdity anymore. I’m afraid that before long, the NRA will respond to Quinn’s wildly tongue-in-cheek “proposal”—and others of Swiftian ilk, on matters of the most deadly seriousness—just as it appears to have done with Archie Bunker’s idea: by embracing it.

This Day in Theater History (‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ Adapted for Stage)

August 24, 1852—Theater producers, in the 19^th century, as much as now, knew a good property when they saw one, and by the summer of 1852 there may few as hot as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. With Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about slavery causing a firestorm of controversy, interest would soar if the audience could see a play based on it.

And so, Charles Taylor, an English-born actor who had made a specialty of adapting famous novels to the stage, set to work. It was, he later admitted, a pretty hasty job—so much so that two of the novel’s best-loved characters, Topsy and Eva, never made it to the stage at all. Almost as bad, the bloodhounds pursuing Eliza across the ice were not depicted through real canines but, according to 20th century critic George Jean Nathan, "through the howling larnyx of one Joe Mitchell, a stagehand." 

It didn’t matter. The reach of the abolitionist novel was broadened when it was adapted for Purdy’s National Theatre in Chatham Street in New York. It was on its way to becoming the most popular stage play of its era.

Part of the reason the novel was so successful was that everybody took a crack at it--sort of similar to the situation that obtains today around Christmastime, when, it seems, every theater company in the nation stages A Christmas Carol, only in Stowe's case it was all year round.. Not one of these productions was authorized by Mrs. Stowe herself. Indeed, for producers and directors of the time, the thought of authorization or copyright was a joke.  The likes of Charles Dickens (himself almost unsurpassed as a theater buff) may have howled about writers’ royalties, but novelists such as himself and Mrs. Stowe could do little about it—at least, until the United States finally got around to passing a copyright act in 1891.

Taylor became something of an old hand at adapting Stowe, as he would, four years later, adapt another work of hers, Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp. But he would soon be competing with other, more audience-appealing versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The one that won the most acclaim was a six-act version by George L. Aiken that began as a 100-performance run in Troy, N.Y., before coming to Purdy’s, where it made an even bigger splash, with 325 performances.

The impetus for the Aiken play was the desire for a vehicle for a child actress. Four-year-old Cordelia Howard had been stealing the show right from under her parents, Caroline and George C. Howard, in their production of a temperance drama, The Drunkard. Rather than displaying jealousy of their child, the Howard parents decided to milk her box-office appeal for all it was worth, and prevailed upon their cousin Aiken to adapt to the stage a novel in which a child also figured prominently: Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The spotlighting of a child was crucial to the reception of the play. In his excellent novel of New York’s 1863 Draft Riots, Banished Children of Eve, Peter Quinn, through the consciousness of "Eliza," an actress in one of the later shows, demonstrates that, though Stowe’s understanding of African-Americans was extremely limited, she had hit upon a plot element with universal appeal: the death of a child:

“It wasn’t something she learned about through reading or conversation. Here was the central event of the play, the mystical chord that resounded through the audience. Slavery and the black man remained an abstraction for most, a white man in burnt cock serving as a summation. But the dead child was everywhere, in the past, the present, the future, cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid, a continual slaughter of the innocents.”

The Howards would go on to tour with Aiken’s play for 35 years. But it was the New York production that made the biggest impact in how dramas were presented. Before its premiere, no stage property was considered complete without another bit of theatrical entertainment, such as an “afterpiece” or a ballet. But the length of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was such, the Howards insisted, that any other property tacked onto it would only overstrain the audience.

The management of Purdy’s protested, but to no avail. The show’s nearly year-long engagement at the theater proved the Howards were correct. Thus was the concept of one-play entertainment in the United States born.

In the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” in his 1955 collection Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin noted Stowe’s distinct lack of gifts as a fiction writer: “She was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel.”

But Stowe’s one-dimensional, over-the-top denunciation of slavery made her novel ideal as melodrama, the predominant American theatrical mode up to the 1920s. The presentation of good and evil in vivid colors, and the inevitable triumph of good, reassured audiences, despite a rapidly changing world, that the values with which they grew up endured, all appearances to the contrary.

The sheer theatricality of the show helped, too. Aiken and the Howards fixed that problem of the bloodhounds very well indeed in their version. Eventually, six real bloodhounds pursued Eliza across the icy floes in their production.

As I wrote, the one person who didn’t make money off  the many theatrical versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was Stowe herself. She could have used it. Her husband Calvin was a respected minister who, for all his gifts as a scholar, didn’t make much to support the family. Harriet’s novels helped gain the money to raise their seven children. 

(The accompanying photo from a 1901 stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin features Uncle Tom at the whipping post.)