Flashback, November, 1964: O’Hara Reaffirms Short-Story Mastery With ‘The Horse Knows the Way’

The publication of the latest short fiction collection from John O’Hara, The Horse Knows the Way, in November 1964 should have been cause for unalloyed delight for author and publisher alike. Its 28 tales, like his other work, not only garnered unusually high sales for short fiction but cemented his status as a master of the form.

Instead, O’Hara inadvertently provided more fodder for his detractors. In a foreword, describing his need to get down on paper all he knew about how the people of his town lived, he concluded, “I have work to do, and I am afraid not to do it.”

More than a few critics, however—led by those in the highly influential New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review—transposed the key words at the end to read, “not afraid to do it.”

Just the kind of braggadocio you’d expect from O’Hara, they noted.

Predictably, that observation only increased the fury of a man who perceived slights everywhere he turned. It also reinforced why he requested that his publisher, Random House, officially release his books on Thanksgiving: Because, unlike reviewers in the more high-profile Sunday Times Book Review, he would get a respectful hearing from the paper's daily critic, Charles Poore (who thought highly enough of his work and character that he delivered the eulogy after O'Hara died in 1970). 

Worse, like so much else associated with this gifted but touchy writer, the mangled quotation originated from anything but a close reading of O'Hara's work.

Consider, for instance, Adrian Mitchell’s dismissal of the volume in The New York Times Book Review: “It’s not the flat, monochrome characters but the author’s flat, monochrome vision of their world which is so often discouraging.”

But this largely forgotten British novelist, poet, and critic missed what other authors (including E.L. Doctorow, whose left-wing politics was diametrically opposed to that of the increasingly conservative O’Hara’s) have picked up on: that, while O’Hara’s prose might be prismatic, his presentation is anything but. 

With abrupt, often stunning endings, his stories send readers scurrying back through these works, trying to pick up on the clues they missed earlier.

It was true that O’Hara could be his own worst enemy: openly craving the Nobel Prize, for instance, or an honorary degree from Yale University, an institution of higher learning he’d been unable to attend because of the financial complications following the death of his father. Asked why the school had never awarded him that degree, the president at the time, Kingman Brewster, responded simply, “Because he asked.”

But at his best—and the stories in The Horse Knows the Way are consistently good—they fulfill his intention of trying to tell the truth about his time.

Roughly speaking, his short stories occur in three locales, the places where he had spent most of his time: New York, Hollywood, and Gibbsville, PA (the fictional stand-in for his hometown, Pottsville). Like much of his other Hollywood fiction, an example from The Horse Knows the Way, “The Answer Depends,” spotlights the kind of actors who populate much of the fare on Turner Classic Movies.

But my favorite stories from the book are set in Gibbsville, whose physical and emotional geography he knew with bone-deep understanding. These are the stories to seek out in this volume: "At the Window," "The Hardware Man," "The Victim," "The House on the Corner," "Aunt Fran," and "All Tied Up."

“For a while, at least,” O’Hara warned his loyal readers, “this will be my last book of short stories.” It wasn’t so much that he had descended into sloth, however, as that he decided to focus his energy on other projects.

One, the novel The Lockwood Concern, which appeared the following year, at least earned some critical plaudits as among his better entries in the long form in the last part of his life.

The other activity, a syndicated column for Newsday, lasted only a year, and did nothing but swell his reputation for bumptiousness and bellyaching about his lack of respect.

Fortunately, he returned to the short story genre in 1966 with Waiting for Winter, whose title strongly hinted at his increasing concern for aging and mortality.

The Horse Knows the Way appeared midway through a decade of flabbergasting productivity in the short-story form for O'Hara: from 1960 to 1968, seven collections of 137 tales, bringing his career total to more than 400. 

Other writers (like my favorite, F. Scott Fitzgerald) impress with their shimmering style, but they never took the measure of so many people from so many walks of life as O'Hara. These late stories, like his earlier ones, rely heavily on dialogue. 

But, because O'Hara feared that younger readers would be more likely to miss the resonances of his tales set decades earlier, they are often more ruminating, even melancholy, as in this passage from "The Answer Depends":

"I don't try to follow the plot lines of Ned Revere's films. In a few minutes after one of his pictures has begun to roll, I am in a daze of recollection, of remembering Ned as a gay companion: irresponsible, Quixotic, romantic, attractive to men as well as to women, and with no illusions then as to his stature as an artist."

Surveying where life has left them, the narrator, a retired actor named "Bobby," concludes: "I don't know who is better off: me, at my TV, with memories as fresh as the news in the morning paper, or Ned, scornful of those pleasant and profitable days, and with the lingering bitter taste of that one success on Broadway."

Flashback, November 1604: Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ Premieres With Dark Mirror of Its Time

When it was presented by "the King's Majesty's players” 420 years ago this month, Othello seems to have pleased his primary audience, King James I, still only a year and a half into his reign.

Understandably, considering that “the Moor of Venice” is the only black character in all of William Shakespeare’s 38 plays, current dramaturgy tries to examine how the playwright speaks to the racism of our time. It has, as part of that process, thrown into question the common practice of actors donning blackface for the role.

But the tragedy should also be subjected to literary excavation to determine how the play was written, performed, and viewed in its own time—an era of danger and secrets.

Shakespeare had learned his lesson well while crafting plays under the watchful eye of James’ predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I: searingly depict the society and psyches of courts swirling with intrigue, but set the action far away, lest listeners find the plots and characters striking too close to home. 

(And Renaissance Venice was much farther away in time if not distance from England than we can ever imagine today: storms in the English Channel were known to delay passage to France for as much as two weeks.)

Clare Asquith’s 2005 study, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, with its contention that the playwright was a secret Catholic when the faith was banned in England, has hardly been universally accepted by Bardologists. But she draws some interesting parallels between Othello and James, including that both leaders:

*survived narrow escapes;

*professed that their wives offered life-saving love;

*came to their new status as foreigners (James had been James VI of Scotland before assuming the English throne, while Othello, “the Moor of Venice,” would have been understood by audiences of the time as being from modern North Africa);

*celebrated Venice’s preservation from Moslem invaders (James, in his poetry; Othello, in battle).

For all the coding and deflection that Shakespeare, like other literary figures of the time, resorted to throughout his work, he was also sending “an urgent message” to James in this new play: “Royal authority must not fall into the hands of base men like Angelo [the Me-Too-like abuser of Measure for Measure] and Iago; it must be exercised responsibly.”

Starting in 1600, Shakespeare wrote what are often considered his four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello. Of these, the last is the most tightly constructed in character (three main ones: Othello, Desdemona, and Iona) and time.

The time element may be the most important, as Iago, with an energy to match his cunning, sets in motion with stunning speed the plot that will destroy the life, reputation, and happiness of his commander. Two days after Othello and Desdemona reunite in Cyprus with mutual ardor, they are dead.

Commercial, overcivilized, seething with intrigue, Venice provides a ripe environment in which Iago can plant the seeds of the downfall of his plain-dealing commander. But such is his sense of invention that even a military outpost like Cyprus, more congenial to Othello, furthers his nefarious purposes: this time, the innocent Desdemona is utterly at sea.

The Venetian republic had depended on foreigners to defend itself from Moslem attacks, as seen in the play by service personnel from Spain (Iago—interestingly enough, Spanish for “James”) and Othello (from North Africa). Even so, the court of King James and throngs who saw the play at both the open-air Globe playhouse and the indoor Blackfriars in the next couple of decades would have known that its possession Cyprus had eventually fallen to the Ottoman Empire.

Venice could ill afford, then, to lose the likes of great commanders like Othello, and their absence from future councils of war could only increase the vulnerability of the republic.

Even in this point of geographic deflection, Shakespeare was hinting to his audience that the personal could become the political very quickly.

In the case of the English monarch, listeners had a strong reason to think so: a monarch’s inability to produce a male heir had pushed the nation into the cohort of Protestant European nations under King Henry VIII, then had hastened the transition from his childless (Tudor) daughter Elizabeth to James (Stuart).

Literary and theatrical culture supplied Shakespeare’s plot. His major source was an Italian novella in Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, translated into French (where, presumably, the playwright saw a translation).

Cinthio's “ensign” brings about the fall of his chief in this tale, too. But the lesson is decidedly different from what Shakespeare conveyed: children should obey their parents, even if—especially if— this means the bride should not marry a black male without their permission.

Shakespeare also drew on a tradition better known to English theatergoers: morality plays that were popular in his teens. As Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt observes in Will in the World, these productions had fallen out of favor by the time the playwright reached his creative zenith late in the Elizabethan era, but they had concentrated viewers’ attention on a representative figure of evil, often named Vice.

In Othello, the sin—jealousy—becomes the tragic flaw that Othello, so used to commanding men in battle, finds impossible to quell within his heart, with Iago serving as the supercharged symbol of evil.

I have seen several productions of Othello onstage or onscreen, featuring such compelling actors as Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, and Ron O’Neal. This has continued the tradition that began with Shakespeare’s leading player, Richard Burbage, playing the role before King James.

But Jones’ 1982 Broadway hit crystallized one of the common dilemmas of the play: No matter how magnetic the star playing Othello might be, the spotlight, more often than not, swings to the actor embodying Iago. 

Ecstatic reviews for that show’s Iago, Christopher Plummer, considerably annoyed Jones (and, let’s face it, brought out a jealous streak not unlike his character), who was already perturbed by his co-star’s penchant for hamming up scenes with crowd-pleasing humor, according to Plummer's memoir In Spite of Myself.

But this tendency of Iago consuming greater viewer attention is also grounded in the play itself:

*Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies such as King Lear, evil is massed in one character rather than dispersed across multiple ones;

*Iago not only has more lines than Othello, but also, because he appears before he comes onstage, has the opportunity to set expectations about their relationship;

*Iago’s soliloquys render the audience complicit in his plotting;

*Iago neither makes amends for nor adequately explains his actions—indeed, he offers so many, with so little real justification, that he appears to be grasping at straws to fill what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge memorably called the villain’s “motiveless malignity.”

The great essayist William Hazlitt, in his book Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, aptly summarizes Iago as possessing a "diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter."

(The image accompanying this post shows a particularly celebrated influential production of Othello, from 1930 at London’s Savoy Theatre, with Paul Robeson as the title character and Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona.)

Quote of the Day (Rebecca West, on Art as a Way to ‘Cultivate Annoyance With Inessentials’)

“For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.” —British novelist, biographer, journalist and critic Rebecca West (1892-1983), “The Duty of Harsh Criticism,” The New Republic, November 7, 1915

(Photograph of Rebecca West by Madame Yevonde.)

Quote of the Day (Charles de Gaulle, on Courage in the Face of Obstacles)

“Let us be firm, pure and faithful; at the end of our sorrow, there is the greatest glory of the world, that of the men who did not give in.”—French soldier and statesman Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), Bastille Day Speech, July 14, 1943, Algiers

TV Quote of the Day (‘Friends,’ on a Thanksgiving Necessity)

Joey Tribbiani [played by Matt LeBlanc]: “You can't have Thanksgiving without turkey. That's like Fourth of July without apple pie, or Friday with no two pizzas.”—Friends, Season 8, Episode 9, “The One with the Rumor,” teleplay by Shana Goldberg-Meehan, directed by Gary Halvorson

Quote of the Day (Rose Horowitch, on College Students’ Fewer, and Slimmer, Books)

“Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.”—American journalist Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” The Atlantic, December 2024

I well remember the shock all over an English teacher’s face in my parochial high school in the mid-1970s when one of her students confessed that he’d never read a book all the way through. When she was finally able to recover her composure, she demanded to know how he’d managed to get through 11 years of elementary and secondary school without accomplishing what she saw as a basic educational task.

My high school classmate would have plenty of company these days. Rose Horowitch’s report from the current groves of academe begins with a student telling a teacher in the literary humanities course at my college alma mater, Columbia University—an institution considerably more selective than my high school way back when—that she, too, had never read a book cover to cover.

Columbia is hardly the only college facing this dilemma. Most of the 33 academics contacted by Horowitch related similar experiences.

So, what gives? The article offers several reasons for this, including:

*Electronic devices that compete for attention with apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

*New educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core that led to short informational passages that mimic standardized tests, rather than longer texts.

*Shifts in values rather than skill sets—i.e., students can still read long books, but they don’t want to.

*Jobs and extracurricular activities that sap the time they need to read in depth.

*Identity politics that makes young readers less inclined to tackle the thinking of writers far away in place and time.

*Grade inflation that doesn’t penalize students for failing to keep up with the course load.

I read with particular interest an admission by Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American Studies professor at the school, that, in now teaching a seminar on short works in American literature rather than a full survey course, he had dispensed with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in favor of the author’s Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

For my American lit survey course back in the day, my class had to read these shorter works and the epic novel. Our professor urged us, if we had time, to get a jump on Melville’s stab at the Great American Novel: “It’s a long whaling expedition,” he joked.

I finished reading this article right after listening to a podcast on the English novelist Anthony Powell, who created a 12-novel sequence chronicling more than four decades in 20^th-century life, A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell’s style is not daunting, and believe it or not, readers years ago managed to plow through most, if not all, of this work.

But it’s inconceivable to me that many readers today will make it through just one of his novels, let alone all of it.

It should also be said courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) have made the appeal of humanities course offering mass immersion in reading less lucrative.

That high school classmate of mine, for instance? He entered the armed forces, where he learned computer sciences—and ended up making considerably more money, after he left the military, than fellow high school graduates who took the time to make it through one long book after another.

(The image accompanying this post, if you haven't guessed it from the guy with the long hair, is a relic from a bygone era, in more ways than one. It shows a Shimer College student reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty under a tree on the school's original campus in Mount Carroll, IL. The photograph was published in the school's 1973-1974 catalog. I hope that this seminal work of political science, at any rate, continues to be read in its entirety, but I’m not betting on it.)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Hardy, on a Woman’s Communication of Feelings)

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” — English poet-novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)

One hundred and fifty years ago this month, Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd was published. It was a notable success that enabled him to marry Emma Gifford, and to give up architecture so he could concentrate on writing.

The novel also marked a turning point in his subject matter and setting, as he first used the name “Wessex” to represent an imaginary region of south and southwest England.

The heroine of the novel, Bathsheba Everdene, was played by Julie Christie (pictured here) in the 1967 film adaptation by John Schlesinger.

Quote of the Day (Tom Hanks, on Squandering Time)

“I’m 68, and I must say, I view time differently. I used to think a day was 36 hours long, and now I’m convinced it’s only 18. I never get done what I want. I guess I’m aware of being on the back nine — that time is a very, very finite thing. And to squander it, I think it’s a sin.”—Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks quoted by Melena Ryzik, “A New Age For Some Old Friends,” The New York Times, Nov. 3, 2024

The image accompanying this post, of Tom Hanks at the premiere of his film Elvis, was taken June 6, 2022, by Eva Rinaldi from Abbotsford, Australia.

Movie Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, As a Psychoanalyst Futilely Interacting With a Patient)

Psychoanalyst [played by Robert Benchley]: “Ah, you think both your father and mother were normal?”

Patient [played by John Butler]: “How should I know? They looked all right to me!”

Psychoanalyst: “Was either one of them ever psychoanalyzed?”

Patient: “No, of course not.”

Psychoanalyst: “Just how would you describe your phobia?”

Patient: “My what?”

Psychoanalyst: “Your phobia—this fear that you seem to have—uh, what it is you're afraid of.”

Patient: “Oh, I seem to be afraid of falling all the time, falling off things.”

Psychoanalyst: “You're afraid of falling off high places.”

Patient: “Huh? Uh, no—off of low places.”

Psychoanalyst: “Would you please explain that a little more fully?”

Patient: “Well, whenever I get on anything low like a milking stool or a suitcase—you know, [motioning toward his knee] about that high—I'm just afraid I’ll fall off, that's all.”

Psychoanalyst: “Well, it's a clear case of gluctophobia. Have you ever actually fallen off a milking stool or a suitcase?”

Patient: “Oh, sure—all the time.”

Psychoanalyst: “Very interesting, very interesting. When did you first notice this?”

Patient: “When I first fell off.”— Mental Poise (1938), film short written by American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945) and directed by Roy Rowland

This Day in Film History (‘Murder on the Orient Express’ Serves Up Prime Agatha Christie)

Nov. 24, 1974— Dame Agatha Christie couldn’t have been more pleased at the all-star screen adaptation of one of the most beloved of her 66 detective novels, Murder on the Orient Express, released in the United States on this date.

It’s remarkable how much the judgements of youth can stand the test of time. That, at least, was the case for me with how I felt about the production that director Sidney Lumet molded.

I should tell you that, though I’m a fan of Margaret Rutherford’s four Sixties films as Miss Jane Marple, Dame Christie didn’t appreciate how far these movies departed from her original plots. 

She had no such complaint with this latest adaptation, though: the screenplay by Paul Dehn (with an uncredited contribution by Sleuth playwright Anthony Shaffer) stuck closely to what she wrote, while adding touches of light humor that never descended into campiness.

Other Christie adaptations have come and gone, with some even being remade. But when I saw Murder on the Orient Express (hereinafter abbreviated as MOTOE) early in high school, I put it in the upper tier of Christie films with And Then There Were None (1945), another all-star vehicle.

Starting with the sumptuous soundtrack by Richard Rodney Bennett and the production and costume design by Tony Walton, this was a sumptuous, old-fashioned production—and that was before any of the actors said a word!

When I viewed MOTOE again several weeks ago on Turner Classic Movies a half century later, I was taken once again with the incredible gallery of actors assembled for Dame Christie’s “Grand Hotel” on the rails, including Martin Balsam, Richard Widmark, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Michael York, Lauren Bacall, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, and Rachel Roberts.

It was a conscious strategy on Lumet’s part, as he figured that the audience would find it easier to keep the multiple characters straight by casting well-known actors in the roles—and it worked.

Three actors stand out, for me, in this galaxy of stars:

* Sean Connery, as the first major one cast—whose luster, after a decade as James Bond, made him the most bankable;

* Albert Finney (pictured, with that amazing mustache); many in the cast, Bacall remembered, came to the project at least in part for the chance to work with this superb actor chosen to play Belgian detective Hercule Poirot;

* Ingrid Bergman, who rejected Lumet’s initial suggestion that she play the role of Princess Dragomiroff  for that of the Swedish maid because the Scandinavian actress felt a greater affinity for the character—an instinct that was rewarded with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Quote of the Day (Elmore Leonard, on ‘Contention’ in the Old West)

“He had picked up his prisoner at Fort Huachuca shortly after midnight and now, in a silent early morning mist, they approached Contention.

“Entering Stockman Street, Paul Scallen glanced back at the open country with the wet haze blanketing its flatness, thinking of the long night ride from Huachuca, relieved that this much was over. When his body turned again, his hand moved over the sawed-off shotgun that was across his lap and he kept his eyes on the man ahead of him until they were near the end of the second block, opposite the side entrance of the Republic Hotel.

“He said just above a whisper, though it was clear in the silence, ‘End of the line.’”—American fiction writer and screenwriter Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), “Three-Ten to Yuma,” originally published in Dime Western Magazine (1953), reprinted in The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard (2004)

In popular culture, even place names can be enough to foreshadow peril, and more: Starkville, the depressed Berkshire village of Edith Wharton’s wintry novella, Ethan Frome; Perdition, the Illinois town that might represent sanctuary or damnation in the Tom Hanks film The Road to Perdition; and Contention, the Old West train stop where thieves and killers stalk a cash-strapped lawman and his smug prisoner in this fine Elmore Leonard short story.

I haven’t seen the 2007 remake starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. But the sense of atmosphere of Leonard’s story is also present in the acclaimed 1957 movie adaptation with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin (left to right in the accompanying image) in the principal roles.

Even where the action breaks off in the quote above that begins this story, the reader senses that the overnight ride was fraught with danger for Paul Scallen, as he transports outlaw Jim Kidd to the train station that will take them to Yuba, where the criminal will be tried. The silence mentioned here is merely the calm before the storm. We wonder if this will be the “end of the line” for the taciturn Scallen, too.

Leonard’s editor at Dime Western certainly made him work for the $90 received for this submission, pressing for more details: “You can do it better. You’re not using all your senses. It’s not just a walk by the locomotive. What’s the train doing? How does it smell? Is there steam?”

It all pays off on the printed page, and Leonard retained the lessons he learned here for the remaining six decades of his writing career. Maybe that’s part of the reason why, though he turned towards crime fiction in later years, he retained an abiding affection for the western.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Epistle of St. James, on Why ‘The Tongue is a Fire’)

 “So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.

“How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”— James 3:5-8 (New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition)

The image accompanying this post, of St. James the Apostle, was created in 1516 by the German Renaissance painter Albrecht Durer (1471-1528).

Quote of the Day (Alfred Adler, on the Importance of Setting Goals)

“In each mind there is the conception of a goal or ideal to get beyond the present state, and to overcome the present deficiencies and difficulties by postulating a concrete aim for the future. By means of this concrete aim or goal the individual can think and feel himself superior to the difficulties of the present because he has in mind his success of the future. Without the sense of a goal individual activity would cease to have any meaning.”— Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology Alfred Adler (1870-1937), The Science of Living (1929)

Song Lyric of the Day (Steely Dan, on ‘Any Minor World That Breaks Apart’)

“Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you my friend
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again.”—“Any Major Dude,” written by American songwriters and musicians Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (1950-2017), performed by Steely Dan on their Pretzel Logic LP (1974)

Quote of the Day (Damon Runyon, With a Female Example of ‘The Underworld Complex’)

“Waldo Winchester says the underworld complex is a very common complex and that Basil Valentine has it, and so has Miss Harriet Mackyle, or she will not be all the time sticking her snoot into joints where tough guys hang out. This Miss Harriet Mackyle is one of these rich dolls who wears snaky-looking evening clothes, and has her hair cut like a boy's, with her ears sticking out, and is always around the night traps, generally with some guy with a little mustache, and a way of talking like an Englishman, and come to think of it I do see her in tough joints more than somewhat, saying hello to different parties such as nobody in their right minds will say hello to, including such as Red Henry, who is just back from Dannemora, after being away for quite a spell for taking things out of somebody's safe and blowing the safe open to take these things.”—American short-story writer and sportswriter Damon Runyon (1880-1946), “Social Error,” originally printed in Furthermore (1938), republished in New York Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell (2011)

If the name in that quote sounds very vaguely familiar, it’s because the socialite described here shows up as one of the characters in the not-terribly-well-known 1989 film Bloodhounds of Broadway, a mashup of several Damon Runyon short stories including “Social Error,” and featuring Julie Hagerty (pictured) as Miss Mackyle.

Runyon is best known for the musical Guys and Dolls, adapted from two of his other stories. He made a tidy sum in the Thirties and Forties with Hollywood transferring some of his properties to the screen, not always successfully.

I think you really must read his words on the page rather than seeing them on a screen to appreciate their unusual quality.  Films convey the funny patois of his characters but not the danger and menace that sneak up between the colorful phrases, like “tough joints,” “blowing the safe open” and “Dannemora” (for readers outside the tristate region, an upstate New York maximum security facility).

Runyon himself had something of an “underworld complex.”  Much of the considerable money he earned as a New York sportswriter and short-story writer was spent at the racetrack, where he met many gamblers and absorbed the speech patterns that later figured so prominently in his work.

Some of those people turned up as thinly disguised people in his stories, including:

*Bat Masterson, who became Sky Masterson;

*Walter Winchell (Waldo Winchester);

*Arnold Rothstein (Nathan Detroit);

*Texas Guinan (Miss Missouri Martin);

*Harry Morgan (The Lemon-Drop Kid);

* Otto Berman (Regret);

* Frank Costello (Dave the Dude);

*Johnny Broderick (Johnny Brannigan)

I haven’t been able to discover the original inspiration for Harriet or Red Henry, but they must have been something else.

This Day in Jazz History (Birth of Tenor Sax Titan Coleman Hawkins)

Nov. 21, 1904— Coleman Hawkins, who became the first important tenor saxophonist with his mastery of the art of vertical improvisation, was born in St. Joseph, MO.

The circumstances of Hawkins’ birth were infinitely fungible in his telling, including its location (on an ocean liner) and time (as much as eight years after the event). 

Even his formal musical education could be fudged, with biographers unable to document claims that he attended Washburn College in Topeka or the University of Chicago.

His real musical development needed no embellishment. Encouraged from an early age by his mother, a pianist and organist, Hawkins tackled the piano by age five, the cello at seven, and (an outgrowth in range and color), the tenor sax at nine. He was a natural musical talent.

In adulthood, he interacted with a galaxy of jazz talent across four decades, from Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson (whose band he joined) in 1924 to Sonny Rollins in the mid-1960s. Through vertical improvisation, he showed how to use his chosen instrument—which had earlier taken a supporting role to clarinets in jazz bands—to weave chords in a progression to improvise, rather than doing so through scales.

But the first decade in that time was spent learning the tenor sax thoroughly enough to make it do his bidding, while the last half decade was a remorseless physical decline. For all practical purposes, then, the height of his influence extended from the Thirties through the Fifties.

The year 1939 may have represented his zenith with his rendition of “Body and Soul.” Though the Eddie Hayman-Johnny Green composition had attracted attention since its release in 1930, Hawkins’ performance helped make it a standard, opening up manifold interpretations even within its strictly instrumental format.

What was especially noteworthy was how, after the first two bars, Hawkins largely dispensed with the melody in favor of a riff and variations. (“It’s Coleman Hawkins superimposed on Johnny Green, if you will,” the composer told Fred Hall in a January 1986 interview that was later collected in an anthology edited by Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz.)

Having already inspired the likes of Lester Young and Ben Webster by disclosing how the unique, full-bodied sound of the tenor sax, Hawkins quickly also recognized its potential through the fast tempos, complex chord progressions and improvisational lines of bebop.

It was Hawkins who in 1944 made the first recording of young Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody ‘n’ You” (see this blog post from the independent public radio station KUVO) and Hawkins who in that same year employed pianist-composer Thelonious Monk as part of his quartet.

In his younger years, even with his short, compact frame, Hawkins dominated virtually every room where he was present with his dapper attire, attractive dates, and cosmopolitan manner.

By the mid-1960s, as his increased drinking affected his appearance, Hawkins looked more like a jazz Methuselah. In a Spring 1998 reminiscence in The Antioch Review, jazz historian and critic Gary Giddins described his physical impact in a 1966 performance at New York’s Village Vanguard:

“The grizzled, full-bearded patriarch still looked sharp and slightly forbidding, even if he had receded a bit into his tailored gray silk-mohair. He gazed over the crowd with sad but alert eyes, his tight-lipped smile implying bemusement and perhaps disdain. When he greeted someone between sets, his voice was stately and deep, a match for his sound on tenor. He exuded dignity.”

Quote of the Day (Margaret Renkl, on the Paradoxical Faith of the Bluebirds)

“Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them into the roundness of the world.”— American essayist and New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year (2023)

The image accompanying this post, of a pair of Eastern Bluebirds in Michigan, was taken Apr. 14, 2010, by Sandysphotos2009.

Flashback, November 1959: ‘Ben-Hur’ Remake Charges to Front of Nation’s Box Offices

Sixty-five years ago this week, struggling MGM bet that the market for cinematic biblical epics was not yet exhausted. The game paid off handsomely when the release of Ben-Hur—the sound adaptation of the best-selling novel of the 19^th century—reaped box-office gold, saving the studio from bankruptcy.

In looking through my past blog posts, I was surprised to discover that, though I had written about much connected to this property—General Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, a director whose one-reel 1907 short triggered a landmark copyright decision, and a 1925 budget-busting silent epic—I’d never written about the version that thousands have seen, in theaters and on television, for the past three generations.

This post, then, is my attempt to rectify this situation and to give this movie all the honor it deserves.

The 1959 remake became one of the most honored films in Hollywood history, netting Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), and Best Actor (Charlton Heston). The 11 it netted in all set a record for the time that has only been equaled since then by Titanic in 1997 and The Return of the King in 2003.

It is also among the most influential movies in screen history. Most recently, Francis Ford Coppola listed it among the 20 films that inspired the epic he released a few months ago, Megalopolis.

Yet another director-producer’s debt to the film is more obvious. The first installment in “Star Wars” saga, The Phantom Menace, features a pod race that is a homage to the archetypal chariot race of Ben-Hur.

Even more so, the first trilogy in George Lucas’ bestselling series, focusing on Anakin Skywalker, bears strong similarities to Lew Wallace’s hero: another slave who makes a splash by competing in a great race, but never really feels entirely at home in the society that now embraces him, and is consumed by revenge for much of the action.

Ben-Hur also left its mark on the evolution of the film epic itself. Without ever stinting on pyrotechnics (it became the first film shot with Panavision lenses to win the Best Cinematography Oscar), it veered sharply from the sword-and-sandals movies associated with Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments), Howard Hawks (Land of the Pharoahs), and King Vidor (Solomon and Sheba).

Wyler delegated direction of the chariot race sequence to Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, while concentrating with his usual perfectionism on the actors’ performances. His creation of a more intimate, character-driven epic would release later releases such as Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Young Winston, Reds, and, only a year later, Spartacus.

(In fact, Kirk Douglas only pursued the latter property when he lost out in the competition to play Ben-Hur to Heston, being offered instead the consolation prize of the titular hero’s friend-turned-enemy, Messala—a role that he considered nothing more than a second-rate villain.)

This desire to focus on characters rather than spectacle has led some viewers to regard the hour-and-a-half remaining after the chariot race to be anticlimactic. But this misunderstands the nature of the property.

The movie took its cue from the subtitle of the Wallace novel, “A Tale of the Christ,” tracking the miracle following Christ’s crucifixion that eventually frees Judah of the bitterness that has spurred his quest even as it deformed his life.

In their quest for character development, Wyler and producer Sam Zimbalist (who died of a heart attack in Rome just as the movie neared completion) employed six different screenwriters: Karl Tunberg, Gore Vidal, Christopher Fry, S. N. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, and Ben Hecht.

Decades after the film’s release, Vidal caused a stir with his suggestion of a gay subtext in the Judah-Messala relationship. Audiences at the time were less likely to notice such elements than today, and in any case both Wyler and Heston denied them when asked about it in later years.

More likely, contemporary audiences would have responded to the Cold War resonance of the plot.

Judah’s refusal to renounce his Jewish heritage and pursue Roman glory with Messala triggers his family’s fall from wealth and influence, not unlike how rejection of informing consigned a host of Hollywood talent to blacklisting in the McCarthy Era.

At the same time, the presence of Rome as an authoritarian power imposing its will on a restless foreign people would have reminded many of the similar role played by the Soviet Union.

Quote of the Day (Hara Estroff Marano, on Resilience, ‘The Capacity to Adapt’)

“At its core, resilience is the capacity to adapt, to update ourselves, to adjust to new conditions after an unexpected and almost invariably unwanted experience has disrupted our old moorings. It is a necessary capacity for setting up the human tent in an unrelentingly dynamic and often unpredictable world.”— Writer and editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano, “9 Ways to Overcome Adversity,” Psychology Today, November/December 2024

Quote of the Day (Henry Adams, on Friendship)

“One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.” — U.S. historian (and descendant of Presidents) Henry Adams (1838-1918), The Education of Henry Adams (1907; posthumously published 1918)

Quote of the Day (Juan Ramírez, on Shakespeare and the Theater’s Hardiest Superstition)

“Perhaps the industry’s best-known bylaw is that, unless acting in Shakespeare’s early 17th-century play, one should never say the word ‘Macbeth’ inside a theater — otherwise you risk ruining the current production. The origins of this are predictably murky. The play traffics in things that might very well incur a hex — witches, hauntings, grisly murders — but one possible source could be the simple fact that, in an era when most theater companies operated in repertory (performing a rotating selection of popular works), ‘the Scottish play,’ as the piece can be safely referred to, was a guaranteed moneymaker. If your season was failing, it might be time to stage ‘Macbeth.’”— New York-based Venezuelan-American writer and critic Juan Ramírez, “Don’t Say ‘Macbeth,” in T (The New York Times Style Magazine), Nov. 17, 2024

I noticed the above article, with its explanation for the bad luck associated with saying the word “Macbeth,” on the same weekend that one of my local PBS stations was re-running a charming indie production from a few years ago, called—yes, The Scottish Play.

But even before writer-director Keith Boynton had alluded to this curse in comic cinematic fashion, someone else had beaten him to it in the early oughts: the creators of the fun Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, set in a fictional Shakespearean festival like the real-world Stratford Festival.

One episode from its second season, “Rarer Monsters,” sends up the whole jinx with tongue in cheek, much like the rest of this series.

Some readers of this post—those who have a real sense of theatrical history—are likely to protest: “But, Mike, the curse is real!” 

They’ll point to a legendary British production of the play starring Sir John Gielgud, when three actors died during the show’s run and a costume designer killed himself right after the premiere.

And what about poor Charlton Heston, who, in a 1953 production, had severe burns to his legs—the result of his tights being soaked in kerosene?

“Fie!” as The Bard would say (and as I do now). Did that stop Gielgud from directing a 1952 production of the play with the Royal Shakespeare Company? And did the curse stop Heston from coming back to the play for the fifth time in a 1975 staging with Vanessa Redgrave?

Well, I will give the skeptics this: Those witches at the start of the show, if costumed and lit correctly (maybe like the image accompanying this post), are definitely enough to give one…the Willies.