Movie Quote of the Day (‘High Anxiety,’ With a Nasty Nurse If There Ever Was One)

Nurse Charlotte Diesel [played by Cloris Leachman]: “Those who are tardy do not get fruit cup.”— High Anxiety (1977), screenplay by Mel Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca, and Barry Levinson, directed by Mel Brooks

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. John Climacus, on How ‘God Belongs to All Free Beings’)

“God belongs to all free beings. He is the life of all, the salvation of all—faithful and unfaithful, just and unjust, pious and impious, passionate and dispassionate, monks and seculars, wise and simple, healthy and sick, young and old—just as the diffusion of light, the sight of the sun, and the changes of the weather are for all alike; ‘for there is no respect of persons with God.’” — Christian monk St. John Climacus (?-649 AD), The Ladder of Divine Ascent (ca. 600 AD), translated by Archimandrite Lazarus Moore (1959)

Quote of the Day (Samuel Johnson, on ‘Knowledge Without Integrity’)

“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”— English man of letters Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759)

Theater Review: Moliere’s “The Imaginary Invalid,” Presented by the Red Bull Theater

Argan, the title character in the Red Bull Theater’s The Imaginary Invalid, gives a whole different dimension to the term “health nut”—a hypochondriac whose ailments require three physicians and so many magic elixirs of dubious benefit that he’s lucky any one of these doesn’t kill him.

Fortunately, this Off-Broadway adaptation of the uproarious 1673 comedy by the French genius actor-playwright Moliere—playing at New World Stages at 340 West 50th Street through Sunday—will relieve the symptoms of any audience member who’s badly in need of laughs.

The Red Bull, in existence for roughly two decades, takes its name from a leading playhouse of Shakespeare’s time that sorely tested the patience of the Stuart monarchy—and, while delving into the Bard and his contemporaries through fully mounted plays as well as staged readings, will also venture elsewhere in the realm of classical theater, as, to great effect, here.

Working from a new translation by Mirabelle Ordinaire, Red Bull artistic director Jeffrey Hatcher has streamlined Moliere’s three-act structure to 80 minutes without an intermission, rendered in colloquial English.

At the same time, Red Bull artistic director Jesse Berger has put together a show that remains true to the spirit of the original, including elements that appear repeatedly in Moliere’s work: a screen where characters hide and eavesdrop; doors opened and slammed as characters chase each other on and off stage; a saucy maid far smarter than her deluded employer; a daughter and her boyfriend who must convince her father not to give her away to a loathsome suitor; and, presiding over the madcap household, a paterfamilias not only cuckolded (and about to be swindled) by his much younger wife, but in the grip of an absolutely unreasoning obsession.

Moliere used his last farce to poke at a longtime bugaboo: quack doctors. (He suffered his fatal illness mid-performance in the lead role, leaving many in his audience, much like Redd Foxx, thinking that coughing blood was part of his act.)

Creating a massive opening for such medical mountebanks is the aging Argan (with veteran stage, film, and TV comic actor Mark Linn-Baker as masterful with dialogue as with demanding physical comedy). So convinced is Argan that lack of feeling in his buttocks foretells worsening health that he requires the strenuous ministrations of a trio of doctors (all played, hilariously, by Arnie Burton, who deftly differentiates each).

Argan’s plan: marry his daughter Angelique to a doctor so he’ll have free healthcare for the rest of his life. The problem is that the lucky fellow (played with panache by Russell Daniels), the son of one of Argan’s current physicians, is an unprepossessing specimen—dressed in a child’s sailor uniform barely able to contain his porky physique, and even less skilled (and far more squeamish) than his father about the healing arts.

The cast not only maintains a breathless pace but obviously delights in feeding off each other’s energy while playing this assembly of deceivers, both well-intentioned and, in the case of the doctors and lawyer on hand, out-and-out charlatans—sometimes even breaking character by dissolving in laughter onstage at another character’s antics. In addition to the above-named actors, also worthy of note are:

*Sarah Stiles, stealing scene after scene with merely a sly grin as the servant Toinette;

*John Yi, lending musical accompaniment as well as generating chuckles as Angelique’s handsome but dim-witted suitor, Cleante; and,

*Emily Swallow as Argan’s gold-digging second wife.

In the enormous enemy dispenser brandished in this farce, properties designer Laura Page Russell has fashioned the New York theater world’s most explosive weapon of mass eruption.

I have favorably reviewed other Red Bull productions before, notably Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, and Ben Jonson’s Volpone. But none were as rollicking from start to finish as this one.

I was thrilled to watch this theater group for the first time since the pandemic. Argan is the type who today would be gulled by Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, not to mention new medications approved by Robert Kennedy Jr.’s FDA.

Rather than sink into dismay over the fools and frauds who are multiplying in the current political environment, the Red Bull has adeptly supplied appropriate therapy in the form of Moliere’s boisterous mockery.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ on Lou Grant’s Disastrous Date)

[Recently divorced Lou Grant buys two tickets for an awards banquet, then is persuaded by Mary Richards to take a date. Mary is given a name by Rhoda, but instead of it being an age-appropriate 45-year-old, Lou ends up with a senior citizen.]

Mary Richards [played by Mary Tyler Moore]: “Mr. Grant, I am just... so sorry.”

Lou Grant [played by Ed Asner]: “Please, there is no need to apologize. It's not your fault. All I said to you was, 'get me a date.' I didn't specify what kind of a date. How were you to know that I wanted somebody under 90?”

Mary: “Mr. Grant, won't you please let me explain? You see, there are two Mrs. Dudleys.”

Lou: “Mary, there are thousands of Mrs. Dudleys. Why this Mrs. Dudley?” —The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Season 4, Episode 8, “Lou‘s First Date,” original air date Nov. 3, 1973, teleplay by Ed. Weinberger and Stan Daniels, directed by Jay Sandrich

Quote of the Day (Thomas Hardy, on Being ‘Under the Summer Tree’)

 “They are blithely breakfasting all—
       Men and maidens—yea,
       Under the summer tree,
            With a glimpse of the bay,
       While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .
            Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.
 
“They change to a high new house,
       He, she, all of them—aye,
       Clocks and carpets and chairs
          On the lawn all day,
       And brightest things that are theirs. . . .
          Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.”—English poet-novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), “During Wind and Rain,” in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917)

Flashback, June 1965: Conservative Bill Buckley Launches Long-Shot NYC Mayoral Bid

The three-way New York City mayoral race among Republic nominee Curtis Sliwa, surprise Democratic primary winner Zohran Mamdani, and incumbent Eric Adams is already shaping up to be one for the ages. But it will be hard to top the 1965 campaign, if only for the independent candidate that year.

Even with no realistic chance to win the race for New York City mayor in the fall, William F. Buckley, Jr. announced that he would campaign as the candidate of the Conservative Party 60 years ago this week.

The National Review editor and newspaper columnist entered the race hoping to deny victory in November to the Republican nominee, John Lindsay. He didn’t achieve that goal, but the 13% he did pull indicated a strong rightward drift in the New York GOP that eventually forced Lindsay to seek reelection as the Liberal Party candidate four years later—and, eventually, to leave the Republican Party altogether.

Buckley also hopped his run would be “fun,” and so it proved, especially for reporters delighted by the copy provided by a candidate never at a loss for words—especially big ones.

It all started with his initial press conference, when his response to a question on what he would do if elected became an instant classic in the annals of campaigning: “Demand a recount.”

A self-styled “radical conservative,” Buckley disagreed with virtually every major liberal initiative of the prior three decades, from the New Deal’s economic measures to civil-rights legislation, and regarded with horror Republican efforts to move to the center to accommodate these.

A prominent campaign of his read, “He has the guts to tell the truth: WILL YOU LISTEN?”

At the end of three terms under Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., not to mention three decades under the increasing control of urban planner and neighbor destroyer Robert Moses, New York was entering a spiral of urban decay that would climax in its bankruptcy crisis in the autumn of 1975. Crime, inner-city unrest, and busing proposals were fueling a white backlash against civil rights.

An initial, positive response from cops encouraged Buckley to run. But his support widened after that to the outer New York boroughs, where residents felt their concerns were ignored. He could be coy in how he exploited such appeals. Though he refused to grant that racial superiority had a biological basis, he had written National Review editorials criticizing federal attempts to end segregation.

During his mayoral campaign, he said whites supporting the candidacy of segregationist Governor George Wallace were not motivated by racism but by dislike of African-American figures like author James Baldwin and activist Bayard Rustin who “despise the American way of life and our civilization,” and “challenge root and branch the American approach to ­free civil order.”

His brilliance lay in how he could press hot-button issues in the coolest possible manner: with polysyllabic vocabulary delivered with a posh, mid-Atlantic pronunciation and coruscating wit, concluding with a sly grin and a flick of his reptilian tongue.

In spite of the liberal leanings of many reporters, even they couldn’t help but chuckle at his best sound bites (e.g., on his two rivals, the tall Republican Lindsay and the short Democrat Abraham Beame: “The differences between Mr. Beame and Mr. Lindsay are biological, not political”).

Not having compiled a record in public office that needed to be defended, Buckley found himself on ground ideally suited to a skill he had cultivated since his Yale days, particularly after a newspaper strike left a print information vacuum for many voters: debates.

Buckley was free to stake out unusual positions on issues. As future biographer Sam Tanenhaus discussed in an October 2000 New York Times Magazine article on “The Buckley Effect,” one of these turned out to be nearly four decades ahead of its time: bicycle paths as an alternative means of transportation throughout the city, similar to what he had seen in major European cities.

Other positions turned out to be a good deal less mainstream—certainly in the context of his time, and even more so now:

* “either lock up teenage felons or make their parents legally responsible for them”;

* cut off welfare for everyone but invalids and mothers "looking after children 14 years or younger"’

*“relocating chronic welfare cases outside the city limits”;

*legalize drugs for adults—but have…

*“great and humane rehabilitation centers” for drug addicts;

*encourage emigration;

Tanenhaus says that Buckley was an arguer rather than a thinker—never able to finish what he hoped would be his magnum opus, The Revolt of the Masses. But arguing, in the form of forensic skills, was indisputably what he had developed as far back as his undergraduate days at Yale.

Just as his much-publicized two faceoffs with African-American novelist and activist James Baldwin served as an appetizer to his mayoral campaign, the latter race led in the following year to the start of a three-decade stint hosting his public television show, Firing Line.

During the campaign, Buckley increasingly absorbed the lesson that he could blunt opponents’ threats better through genial wit than with harsh rhetoric. More than a decade later, he would back a Republican candidate for President with even greater skills of this kind: Ronald Reagan.

In his new biography of Buckley, Tanenhaus notes that, for all their differences in style, it would be a mistake to think that Donald Trump has little in common with the conservative movement that Buckley helped coordinate in the postwar period. In an article last year for The American Prospect, Rick Perlstein seconds that idea, noting that “new scholarship suggests that Trump’s rise was not a reversal of what Buckley was up to, but in many ways, its apotheosis.”

I believe it is more appropriate to believe that the nature of Buckley’s forays into the public arena will never be seen again. He belonged to a group that Mitchell Ross, in a provocative 1978 book, called The Literary Politicians—figures who “practice politics by writing books” rather than continually running for public office.

Whether in newspaper columns, extended television interviews, and especially entire books, Buckley and other figures in the book such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, and Gore Vidal preferred to advocate positions at length.

They did not always fit comfortably into the party orthodoxy of their time and, though they could toss out epigrams with the best of them, their arguments rested on logical propositions rather than 30-second soundbites. The nature of American political discourse is poorer for the absence of the forums where they could appear to best advantage.

Quote of the Day (Stefan Zweig, on ‘The Greatest Curse Brought Down on Us by Technology’)

“The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time. Previous generations could retreat into solitude and seclusion when disaster struck; it was our fate to be aware of everything catastrophic happening anywhere in the world at the hour and the second when it happened.”— Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), The World of Yesterday (1942)

At least one more curse might have been bestowed on humanity since Zweig’s observation: We are not only made aware instantly of a catastrophe, but our understanding of the event is likely to be misinformed through lack of historical perspective, disinformation, or both.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on the Law, Politics, and People)

Logan Roy [played by Brian Cox]: “The law? The law is people. And people is politics. And I can handle the people.”—Succession, Season 3, Episode 3, “The Disruption,” original air date Oct. 31, 2021, teleplay by Ted Cohen and Georgia Pritchett, directed by Cathy Yan

Photo of the Day: Carson McCullers House, Nyack NY

Eighty-five years ago this month, a debut novel of unusual sensitivity, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, was published. The author, the Georgia-born Carson McCullers, achieved wide acclaim for this study of a deaf mute and those who encounter him.

In 1945, McCullers moved into the house in this photo, which I took last month on my way to the Nyack Public Library in Rockland County, NY. 

Here, for the next 22 years until her death in 1967, under increasingly difficult physical and emotional conditions, the author turned out additional novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and autobiographical works filled with compassion for the misfits and dreamers of the world—those similar to herself.

Here also, Marilyn Monroe, playwright husband Arthur Miller, and novelist Isak Dinesen came to lunch in February 1959 (an encounter I discussed in this blog post from 17 years ago).

From a sign outside, it appears that her former home is being renovated by Aurell Garcia Architects, so I did not step inside. It will be interesting to see how it will be used and visited when the process is completed.

Quote of the Day (Moliere, With a Romantic Young Woman's Notion of Courting)

MAGDELON. “Father, my cousin here will tell you just as well as I that marriage must never come until after the other adventures. A lover, to be agreeable, must know how to utter fine sentiments, breathe from his heart things sweet, tender, and passionate; and his suit must follow the rules. First he must see, in church, or on a walk, or at some public ceremony, the person with whom he falls in love; or else be fatally taken to her house by a relative or friend, and leave there dreamy and melancholy. For a time he hides his passion from the beloved object, and meanwhile pays her several visits, in which some question of gallantry never fails to be brought up to exercise the wits of the company. Comes the day of the declaration, which should ordinarily be made in some garden walk, while the company has moved on a bit; and this declaration is followed by instant wrath, which shows in our blushes, and which, for a time, banishes the lover from our presence. Then he finds a way to appease us, to accustom us imperceptibly to his talk about his passion, and to draw from us that admission that pains us so. After that come the adventures, the rivals that cross an established inclination, the persecutions of fathers, the jealousies conceived over false appearances, the laments, the despairs, the abductions, and what follows. That is how things are done with elegance; and those are the rules that cannot be dispensed with in proper gallantry. But to come point-blank to the conjugal union, to make love only by making the marriage contract, and to take the romance precisely by the tail! I repeat, Father, nothing could be more mercantile than such a procedure; and just the picture it gives me makes me nauseated.”

GORGIBUS. “What the devil is this jargon I hear? That’s the grand style all right!”— French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), The Ridiculous Precieuses, in Tartuffe and Other Plays, translated by Donald Frame (1967)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (James Agee, on the Wonder of ‘High Summer’)

“High summer holds the earth.
Hearts all whole.
Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder wand'ring far
alone
Of shadows on the stars.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, poet, screenwriter, and film critic James Agee (1909-1955), “Sure on This Shining Night,” in Permit Me Voyage (1934)

Photo of the Day: Pascack Brook County Park, Westwood NJ

I took the image accompanying this post a week ago while visiting Pascack Brook County Park, about a 20-minute drive from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. 

Though there are picnic areas, pavilions, playgrounds, and athletic facilities, this pond, with its circular walking path, is the centerpiece of the 79-acre park.

Quote of the Day (Holmes Rolston III, on Paradoxical Attitudes Towards Nature)

“Nature is wilderness yet paradise, demonic yet divine, asset yet enemy, jungle yet garden, harsh yet healing, means for man yet end in itself, commodity yet community, the land provoking man's virility yet evoking his sentimentality.”—American philosopher, Templeton Prize winner, and “pioneer of environmental ethics” Holmes Rolston III (1932-2025), “Philosophical Aspects of the Environment” (1973)

The image of Holmes Rolston III that accompanies this post was taken Apr. 4, 2008, by David Keller.

Flashback, June 1965: Last J. D. Salinger Work Published in His Lifetime

When New Yorker readers received their most recent copy of the magazine 60 years ago this week, they didn’t know they were experiencing something extraordinary: not just a 26,000-word novella by J. D. Salinger that filled 50 pages in that issue, but the last time with a new work by the novelist and short-story writer what would come out in his lifetime.

Considering Salinger’s output for the prior several years, “Hapworth 16, 1924” closed out his career in an appropriate fashion: a letter by Seymour, the eldest son in the Glass family, who had also figured in Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963).

Coming from an upper-class environment, the Glass children grew up privileged, precocious and dysfunctional, a tendency borne out in the 1948 short story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” in which a grown-up Seymour commits suicide.

A post of mine six years ago surveyed most of the course of the enigmatic writer’s career, but I didn’t concentrate on “Hapworth 16, 1924,” or what came after: silence.

If you want to encounter this last published story to date by the author of The Catcher in the Rye, you can’t find it in a collection of his work. You can’t even find it in a New Yorker anthology. Instead, you have to go to the actual physical issue of the magazine (June 21, 1965) online (if you have a subscription to the magazine and its archives) or click this YouTube link to listen to a reading.

In a March 2010 article in New York Magazine, Roger Lathbury discussed how his hopes for publishing this elusive title in book form were briefly fanned before dying.

He had sent a letter to Salinger in 1988 proposing that his tiny company, Orchises Press, issue the novella. After a quick note from the author saying he’d consider it, Lathbury heard nothing more for eight years when, out of the blue, he was contacted by Salinger’s literary agency, Harold Ober Associates. If a book were to be issued, he was told, it needed to be done “to exacting standards”—i.e., bound in buckram.

A cordial meeting at Washington’s National Gallery followed between publisher and novelist, with Lathbury acceding to Salinger’s unusual demands (e.g., limited distribution, the author’s name nowhere on the cover).

Then, the deal came unraveled after Lathbury confirmed to the press that the book would be published. Horrified by what he evidently felt was a betrayal of trust, Salinger withdrew his approval.

Six years ago, Salinger’s son Matt and widow Colleen indicated that they had since 2011 been preparing to release for publication stories written by the legendary New Hampshire recluse in the more than four decades after “Hapworth 16, 1924.” But it was an arduous process, Matt told   of the British publication The Guardian:

“[My father] wanted me to pull it together, and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time. This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. ... [But] there’s not a reluctance or a protectiveness: When it’s ready, we’re going to share it.”

Since then, silence—not unlike the sphinx who began it all.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Barney Miller,’ On Getting Off on the Wrong Foot With an Eyewitness)

Detective Ron Harris [played by Ron Glass, pictured]: “Miss Jacobs? Hi, I'm Detective Harris. If you'll have a seat right over there, we'll be right with you.”

Miss Jacobs [played by Ivy Bethune]: "Both of you?”

Harris: “Uh, no, I meant me.”

Miss Jacobs: “Then say what you mean, for heaven's sake!”—Barney Miller, Season 5, Episode 29, “Quo Vadis?” original air date Mar. 2, 1978, teleplay by Tony Sheehan, directed by Alex March

Quote of the Day (Tobias Wolff, Urging a ‘Turn Away From Power to Love’)

“Mend your lives. You have deceived yourselves in the pride of your hearts, and the strength of your arms. Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, thence I will bring you down, says the Lord. Turn away from power to love. Be kind. Do justice. Walk humbly."—American novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist Tobias Wolff, title story from In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981)

Happy birthday to Tobias Wolff, born 80 years ago today in Birmingham, AL!

(The image accompanying this post, showing Tobias Wolff at an event at Kepler's in Menlo Park for his short story collection Our Story Begins, was taken Apr. 25, 2008, by Mark Coggins from San Francisco.)

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on How One Private Citizen Can Avert a Public Crisis)

“How often has public calamity been arrested on the very brink of ruin by the seasonable energy of a single man! Have we no such man amongst us? I am as sure as I am of my being, that one vigorous mind, without office, without situation, without public functions of any kind (at a time when the want of such a thing is felt, as I am sure it is), I say, one such man, confiding in the aid of God, and full of just reliance in his own fortitude, vigor, enterprise, and perseverance, would first draw to him some few like himself, and then that multitudes, hardly thought to be in existence, would appear and troop about him.”—Anglo-Irish statesman and father of conservatism Edmund Burke (1729-1797), “Letter to William Elliot,” May 28, 1795, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) (1887)

The kind of person envisioned by Burke possesses not just “seasonable energy” but moral stature to influence followers. In our cynical age, who wields such authority?

If there is such a person, I hope he or she will step forward quickly.

Quote of the Day (Bonnie Kristian, on How to Stay Truly Well-Informed)

“Resolve to know just a few stories and to know them well. Your time and attention are limited. You can’t do justice to every issue of the day, and maintaining a broad, shallow pattern of news consumption makes you vulnerable to manipulation and confusion. So this year, pick at most half a dozen big stories to follow carefully and in depth. Read books, not just the latest headlines. Learn key names and legislation. Find trustworthy journalists to keep you up-to-date. Then remember your finitude and ignore everything else.”—American journalist and author Bonnie Kristian quoted by Tish Harrison Warren, “Resolutions That Are Good for the Soul,” The New York Times, Jan. 4, 2023

Quote of the Day (Desiderius Erasmus, on ‘Conniving at Your Friends' Vices’)

“Conniving at your friends' vices, passing them over, being blind to them and deceived by them, even loving and admiring your friends' egregious faults as if they were virtues—does not this seem pretty close to folly?”— Dutch monk and Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), In Praise of Folly (1509)

It also seems pretty close to complicity in an emerging American autocracy.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Karen Armstrong, on Serenity Vs. ‘The Nervous Craving to Promote Yourself’)

“Once you gave up the nervous craving to promote yourself, denigrate others, draw attention to your unique and special qualities, and ensure that you were first in the pecking order, you experienced an immense peace.”— British religion scholar Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (2009)

This Day in Architectural History (Pierre L'Enfant, Visionary Capital Planner, Dies Lonely Death)

June 14, 1825— Major Pierre L'Enfant, an architect who designed the capital of the new American republic only to miss out on his chance for credit and compensation, died at age 70 in Prince Georges County, Md., destitute and ignored by the seat of government he had helped conceive.

A trained painter who, like the Marquis de Lafayette, left his native France in a burst of youthful idealism to join the American colonies in their fight for freedom, L'Enfant caught the attention of George Washington with his draftsmanship skills while serving in the Continental Army Corps of Engineers. He not only endured the brutal winter at Valley Forge but suffered a grievous leg wound at the Battle of Savannah and spent six months as a prisoner of war after being captured at the Battle of Charleston.

After the war, L’Enfant worked on the insignia and diploma for the Society of Cincinnati and the design for New York’s Federal Hall. In 1789, even before Congress had formally approved a capital district for the nation, L’Enfant was lobbying Washington with his proposal for creating it.

Only 11 months after obtaining his prestigious architectural commission, L’Enfant was off the project—depending on who you believe, having resigned or been fired. In a way, the manner of his departure doesn’t matter, because, following continual clashes with the three supervisory commissioners of the new federal District of Columbia, he would have been gone in just a matter of time.

Perhaps taking a cue from his adored commander in the war, Washington, L’Enfant had neither requested nor been given a salary for his work in planning the district. But, as the years went by and his income from other projects dwindled, he felt the urgent need to press his claims.

It did not help that when he had left, he had annoyed many with his egotism, his overbearing ways, and his failure to adequately communicate his vision. He had ordered the demolition of a property belonging to a prominent resident; delayed producing a map for the sale of city lots; spoke and wrote English poorly; and, when he walked away from the project in a huff, taken all the plans with him.

For his last 15 years, the unmarried and childless L’Enfant lived as a charity case on the estate of his benefactor, William Dudley Digges. Long before he was buried in an unmarked grave on the plantation, he had haunted key figures in the city he designed through rambling letters and appearances, wearing his blue Continental Army uniform, in which he fruitlessly pressed his case for proper remuneration for his work. (He wanted $95,000 for his architectural services; Congress would go no higher than $3,800.)

The fulfillment of L’Enfant’s vision for the city—and his honor for creating it—did not occur until early in the 20^th century. The centennial celebration of Washington’s founding led the McMillan Commission—a panel of architects and planners appointed by the U.S. Senate—to consider how to beautify a metropolis that had fallen victim to decentralized, private land development.

The commission members sought to adapt L’Enfant’s original scheme in the light of the “City Beautiful” movement coming into being.

At the same time, a parallel movement grew to remember L’Enfant in the fashion he craved during life. His remains were exhumed, transported in in a casket draped with the American flag to the U.S. Capitol (where he became the first foreign-born man to lie in state) before being taken by military escort to Arlington National Cemetery. There he was buried overlooking the city he had created.

Some aspects of L’Enfant’s plan, such as a waterfall flowing down Capitol Hill, never came to fruition. But others eventually were adopted, including:

*the seat of government on Capitol Hill;

*the mall connecting Capitol Hill to what he called “The President’s House” and we call the White House;

* a four-quadrant grid, with north-south and east-west streets crossed by grand diagonal avenues, creating public squares and beautiful buildings in what consisted of hills, forests, marshes and plantations.

Quote of the Day (Margaret Chase Smith, on True Strength and Leadership)

“Strength, the American way, is not manifested by threats of criminal prosecution or police state methods. Leadership is not manifested by coercion, even against the resented.” — Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995), Republican Senator from Maine, “Declaration of Conscience,” U.S. Senate speech, June 1, 1950

The Fallen Boys of Summer: RIP, Brian Wilson and Sly Stone

 Just when music fans with indelible memories of the Sixties were getting used to the death of Sly Stone, Brian Wilson followed him within 48 hours.

The conjunction of deaths had an all too sad symmetry: both gone at age 82, with their heyday as pop trailblazers 50 to 60 years behind them, undone by drug abuse, with occasional reappearances in the spotlight that started and electrified admirers.

The critical and commercial peak of each man lasted for about five years. At first, to the wide public that snapped up their hits, most, if not all, of their behavior seemed a matter of the kind of eccentricity that often accompanies artistic genius, like Wilson wearing a fireman’s hat while directing a promo video for “Good Vibrations” or Stone donning long wigs and hats.

For Wilson and Stone, the expectations generated by their success proved too immense to handle. Somewhere along the line eccentricity shaded into instability, then worse: mental illness (Wilson) or homelessness (Stone).

By 1975, canceled concerts and musician departures meant the effective end of Sly’s band. The Beach Boys carried on, even braving multiple changes in popular taste. But at roughly the same time that the Family Stone folded its tents, the Beach Boys became no more than Mike Love’s nostalgic troupe. 

Canceled concerts followed, then isolation from collaborators, a vacuum in their bands’ leadership, and concluding with declines on the pop charts. Their creativity then came only in fits and starts. Wilson admitted to Rolling Stone that he became “too concerned with getting drugs to write songs.”

Eventually, reality fractured Wilson and Stone without destroying them. 

That is not what I remember them at their best, though. Then, while listening to their best records—the Beach Boys’ entire Pet Sounds LP, “Good Vibrations,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “Don’t Worry,” or Sly’s “Everyday People,” “Dance to the Music,” or “Everybody is a Star”—I can only marvel at their effortless mastery of sounds and styles.

But, although the Beach Boys and Sly and the Family Stone released records throughout the calendar year, I—and, I suspect, many other fans—think of them overwhelmingly in terms of summer.

Wilson ran with his brother Dennis’ suggestion that the group record songs appealing to the carefree, hot-rod-and-surf culture then springing up in California, giving rise to a whole string of hits: “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Surfer Girl.” Stone and his band became indelible parts of the counterculture with their summer 1969 appearances at Woodstock and the Harlem Cultural Festival.

During his glory years, Stone created what sounds like a quintessentially Beach Boys tune: “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” In fact, the Beach Boys, nearly three decades after their time atop the charts, recorded a cover version for their Summer in Paradise CD.

For fans of the two groups, their peaks occurred during our summers, too—when our energy seemed as endless as the world that beckoned to us.

But, for all the aural complexity of their masterpieces, they won the allegiance of listeners with simple, effervescent messages of joy and love.

Decades ago, we could never imagine Wilson and Stone getting old, any more than we could imagine we could. Their bodies may have died, crumbling as much from their Dionysian excesses as from old age, but they live in the endless summer of memory, where youth is forever golden.

(The image of Sly Stone that accompanies this post was taken in Berkeley, CA, on Apr. 16, 1982, by Sarfatims.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Frasier,’ As the Crane Brothers Weigh Filling in During an Emergency)

[An ailing Frasier suggests to his brother Niles that he fill in for him on his psychiatry advice radio call-in show.]

Dr. Niles Crane [played by David Hyde Pierce]: “Frasier, I think that fever of yours is making you delusional.”

Dr. Frasier Crane [played by Kelsey Grammer]: “Oh, no! I filled in for you when you were too sick to meet with your ‘Fear of Intimacy’ group!”

Niles [heading into the bathroom]: “I wasn't sick. They were just getting too close.”—Frasier, Season 1, Episode 23, “Frasier Crane's Day Off,” original air date May 12, 1994, teleplay by Chuck Ranberg and Anne Flett-Giordano, directed by James Burrows

Quote of the Day (Ralph Ellison, on Americans’ ‘Limited Attention to History’)

“At best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.” —American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison (1913-1994), Shadow and Act (1964)

Ours is no longer “the tempo of the motion picture,” or even the 24/7 news cycle, but instead TikTok. Fear for any nation that not only no longer remembers the past but isn’t even inclined to learn about it.

This Day in Literary History (William Styron, Chronicler of Slavery, Holocaust, and Despair, Born)

June 11, 1925— Novelist and essayist William Styron, who wrote powerful fiction about slavery, the military, and the Holocaust—as well as a searing memoir of his own struggle with suicidal depression—was born in Newport News, Va.

Lie Down in Darkness brought the 26-year-old Styron notice as a novelist of abundant narrative gifts and deep moral seriousness, working in Faulkner’s tradition of Southern storytelling. He did not realize until his first bout of mental illness in the mid-1980s that even the heroine of this early effort suffered from this affliction.

As part of a cohort of writers who served in World War II and briefly spent time abroad after its conclusion, he—as well as friends James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Norman Mailer, and Peter Matthiessen—took cues from the “Lost Generation.”

They were, Styron’s youngest daughter Alexandra wrote in her memoir Reading My Father, “Big Male Writers…[who] perpetuated, without apology, the cliché of the gifted, hard drinking, bellicose writer that gave so much of twentieth-century literature a muscular, glamorous aura."

Even as Styron played the bon vivant during summer parties at Martha’s Vineyard, his poet-activist wife Rose and their four children endured his moodiness, angry outbursts, and frequent frustration over his inability to bring his work to as quick and successful conclusion.

In middle age, that age of homage, masking their own attempts to obliterate the shock of their war, proved increasingly unsuccessful and counterproductive. Though Styron’s career lasted four decades, his output was not that extensive—four full-length novels, a book of short stories, a memoir, a play, and an essay collection—finding, at the age of 65, that the “senior partner” to his writing, his drinking, no longer satisfied or spurred his writing.

A childhood in Tidewater region of Virginia was overshadowed by his mother’s decline and death from breast cancer, a struggle that only worsened his father’s melancholy. W.C. Styron’s second marriage left his son with a stepmother he found chilly and unsympathetic.

I briefly described in this post from 14 years ago the controversy surrounding Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the bloodiest slave uprising in antebellum America, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Many admirers like myself of his forays into the darkest chapters of American life attributed the long gaps between books to perfectionism, a tendency common among authors.

But with Darkness Visible, he described, in shattering detail, how his writer’s block was bound up with a psychic condition that he likened to a storm in his brain.

This memoir provided knowledge and help to others similarly afflicted. But, aside from the trio of novellas collected in Tidewater Morning (1993), Styron was never able to complete his World War II novel, The Way of the Warrior, after Sophie’s Choice in 1979, because his depression returned with a vengeance in the spring of 2000, troubling him till his death six years later.