Quote of the Day (Stritch, on Brando)

“Marlon’s going to class to learn the Method was like sending a tiger to jungle school.”—Actress Elaine Stritch on Marlon Brando, her fellow-student of acting teacher Stella Adler

(The always quotable Ms. Stritch is cited in Claudia Roth Pierpont’s article “Method Man,” appearing in this week’s New Yorker. The magazine, bless its chintzy little heart, has not posted the full text online, in keeping with its policy of only putting some pieces from each issue up. You can see an abstract here, then, if you want, either shell out the dough at the newsstand or—if you’re looking to economize in these troubled times—look it up at fine libraries everywhere—a prospect that, as what is called an “information specialist”, I certainly have no objection to.

In any case, Pierpont hasn’t produced a radical reconsideration of the man who, it’s commonly agreed, transformed American acting, but she does include—besides the lovely quote from Ms. Stritch—some details about the actor’s life that I, for one, did not know. Did you realize, for instance, that John Garfield was originally considered for Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, until his demands led director Elia Kazan to look elsewhere?)

This Day in Diplomatic History (Alaska Border Dispute Settled, to TR’s Satisfaction)

October 20, 1903—Undoubtedly crying “Bully!” when he received the news, President Theodore Roosevelt saw his “big stick” diplomacy rewarded when the Alaska Boundary Tribunal ruled in favor of the U.S. on virtually all counts.

For years, the Alaska border between the U.S. and Canada was unsettled, but nobody paid it too much mind. The territory, after all, was known as “Seward’s Icebox” when the American Secretary of State negotiated its purchase from Russia to generally widespread derision.

Then practically overnight, the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1896 made this deal the most lopsided transaction until the California Angels swiped fireballer (and future Hall of Famer) Nolan Ryan from the Mets in exchange for on-the-way-out shortstop Jim Fregosi. Nobody cared that much about fisheries or lumber, but serious money—well, this was something different.

In short order, a joint high commission was formed to deal with the issue, but the matter dragged on without resolution. Pushing for one was not exactly high on the agenda of President William McKinley.

When it came to being filled with the milk of human kindness, the Republican President would probably rank among the top five who ever filled this position. Along with his warm disposition, McKinley thought he could be excused for having a lot of other things on his mind:

* His wife Ida, to whom he was utterly devoted, was an invalid who suffered from epilepsy and needed to be kept near his side at state dinners, where he managed to discreetly cover her face whenever he sensed an impending seizure.
* He had the Spanish-American War to fight.
* The treaty concluding that war put in America’s hands a number of former colonies whose fate needed to be decided.
* McKinley’s eventual decision on this—to embark on a policy of imperialism—excited criticism from, among others, Mark Twain, William James, Andrew Carnegie, and the once-and-future Democratic nominee for President, William Jennings Bryan.
* That decision also led to another conflict, an insurgent war in the Philippines led by Emilio Aguinaldo, featuring atrocities by the military that McKinley had to beg the American press not to expose.

In other words, McKinley’s attitude was: One war at a time, fellas. Let’s keep our friends on our side—you never know when we’ll need them. All things considered, not a bad governing philosophy.

After McKinley’s assassination in 1901, everything changed under his successor, T.R.—and in few areas more than in the President’s relationship with the Secretary of State, John Hay.

One of two secretaries for Abraham Lincoln, Hay had been a Washington player for four decades. I’m afraid that John Huston’s performance as him in The Wind and the Lion gives, in some respects, a false impression of the man. I’m not talking here solely about their difference in height (like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, the great director was considerably taller than his subject). More crucial was the distinction between their voices. Huston’s, of course, was whiskey-soaked and nicotine-tarred, while Hay’s vocal instrument, according to Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris in Theodore Rex, was “like a well-resined viola.”

The change in bosses meant that Hay was jumping to the tune of a man two decades his junior in body—and, if we are to believe the word of British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, six decades younger in temperament. “You must always remember,” the future British Ambassador to the United States once said, “that the President is about six.” (And he would know—he’d served as best man at the London wedding of Roosevelt to wife Edith.) Indeed, had he been born in a later time, T.R.’s youthful interest might have turned not to taxidermy but acting, so he might have appeared in those commercials that those of us of a certain age remember: “I want my Maypo!”

This totally hyperactive, hyperbolic man was setting a sharply different tone in U.S. diplomacy. He had tired of what he regarded as the Canadian-British delaying game, just as, at the same time, he was growing impatient with Colombia’s dickering over building a canal. T.R. didn’t mind stirring things up on two fronts.

Let’s stop here for a second for a different perspective on T.R. As a young New York state assemblyman and again as Police Commissioner of New York, Roosevelt had tangled with Irish-American politicians and cops over corruption. As he contemplated the Alaska boundary dispute, however, he might have been forgiven for thinking that the Irish might not have been entirely mistaken for several centuries in describing their colonial tormenters as “perfidious Albion.”

Come to think of it, the Irish members of New York’s finest might be onto something with their use of the good cop, bad cop routine. With his cultivated tastes, fashionable prejudices (anti-Semitism, along with anti-labor sentiments he vent in an anonymous novel, The Bread-Winners), and “sherry-now-or-after-the-Wordsworth-reading?” manner, Hay was practically central casting as the good cop. Roosevelt—arms flailing, voice rising, with all those teeth—was born to play the bad cop.

So T.R. made his move. He not only sent troops to the Alaskan border but slipped to Associate Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. a note that could be “secretly” shared with members of His Majesty’s government. It bristled at the objections of Canadians that the three men he had appointed to the tribunal—Secretary of War Elihu Root, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and former senator George Turner—might not be impartial.

Moreover, Roosevelt threatened that if there continued to be a disagreement, the next time he sent a message to Congress, “I shall take a position which will prevent any possibility of arbitration hereafter; a position … which will render it necessary for Congress to give me the authority to run the line as we claim it, by our own people, without any further regard to the attitude of England and Canada.”

It worked. The two Canadian representatives on the tribunal, Sir A.L. Jette and A.B. Aylesworth, continued to object, but the British representative, Richard Webster, 1st Viscount Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice, sided with the Americans. The commission acceded to the U.S. claim for a boundary behind the heads of inlets, while equally distributing four islands at the mouth of the Portland Canal. The Canadian commissioners, sore at the outcome, refused to sign and went home, and the blow-up led the Canadian government to create its own Department of External Affairs to look after its own interests better.

But the settlement turned out to be a marker in the transition from tension between Britain and America (including a near set-to in the Civil War over use of British ports in building Confederate ships) to the celebrated “special relationship” of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill (whose mom, be it noted, was the New York beauty Jennie Jerome).

Quote of the Day (Archibald Cox, on the “Saturday Night Massacre” and Its Resulting Firestorm)

“The most important thing was that the rule of law should prevail; the president must comply with the law. Ultimately, all [the people’s] liberties were at stake.”—Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (1912-2004), quoted by Judge Steve Halsey, “It’s In Your Court: Rule of law, Not Rule of Men,” Press Publications, Nov. 27, 2013

It’s hard to convey, to anyone not born on this date in 1973, the shock and sense of events veering out of control in Washington when the news broke that not only had Cox been fired, but that Attorney-General Elliott Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus had resigned in protest rather than carry out the deed. 

Eventually, the matter fell into the hands of Solicitor General Robert Bork, who considered joining his colleagues in leaving, but decided not to do so when Richardson assured him that the department would descend into chaos.

Richardson and Ruckelshaus had felt honor-bound not to fire Cox for pressing his investigation into Watergate—and, with Richardson, there was an additional consideration: Cox was his old law professor at Harvard.

Cox had pressed Nixon to turn over audiotapes made in the White House during the Watergate period, and a court backed the special prosecutor up. Nixon refused, standing on executive privilege. Instead, he offered the “Stennis Compromise”—i.e., permitting a conservative Democrat from Mississippi to listen to the tapes.

It sounded, on the surface, so reasonable—get a Senate elder with no ideological axe to grind to resolve the matter. 

But the proposal reveals why the President was not known as “Tricky Dick” for nothing—Stennis was in his seventies, ailing and very, very hearing-impaired! Cox refused the Machiavellian offer, and Nixon forced the matter.

The "Saturday Night Massacre" unleashed a firestorm of controversy. Capitol Hill shortly became swamped with impeachment bills. 

Eventually, of course, a new special prosecutor was appointed, who also pursued the tapes; Nixon pursued the matter to the Supreme Court, which ruled against him; Nixon resigned after the tapes showed he had unequivocally told aides to “stonewall”; and, in 1978, Congress passed and Jimmy Carter signed a special prosecutor law that both parties would eventually regard as the work of the devil.

This Day in Literary History (Death of Ben Wolfe, Inspiration for “Look Homeward, Angel” Character)

October 19, 1918—In the upstairs bedroom off the sleeping porch of the family homestead/boardinghouse, as parents and siblings watched in stunned anguish, a sardonic 25-year-old, Benjamin Harrison Wolfe, died in Asheville, N.C., from a severe case of pneumonia—a death scene memorably recounted by Thomas Wolfe, his adoring younger brother, in the latter’s first and most famous novel, Look Homeward, Angel.

By the end of October 1918, approximately 200,000 people had died of Spanish flu. The influenza pandemic that swept through Europe and America that year and the next killed more people than the Great War itself, with estimates of loss of life at somewhere between 20 and 40 million.

Two of those deaths would affect a pair of young American writers for the rest of their lives. One was William Maxwell, the novelist-short story writer who made an equally profound impact on American literature as the longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker. His mother’s death in December 1918 plays a role in three of his novels.

The centennial of Maxwell’s birth occurred this past summer. I was fortunate enough to meet this very fine writer before he died, and I intend to write about him at greater length in a not-so-distant future post. But for now, I’d like to discuss Thomas and Benjamin Wolfe.

Like most readers, I discovered Thomas Wolfe in adolescence, the time of life when one becomes as drunk on words as on alcohol, when life quivers constantly on the edge between boundless promise and utter heartbreak. It’s not only the best time to experience Wolfe but, I would argue, perhaps the only time to understand his bildungsroman, or “coming-of-age” novel.

Within a year, I had devoured the four sprawling roman a clefs that constitute most of the bulk of the North Carolina writer’s legacy: Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River; The Web and the Rock; and You Can’t Go Home Again.

Literary reputations can fluctuate as wildly as some nation’s currencies. Some writers manage to be revived after a period of malign neglect toward the end of their lives, only to achieve a posthumous immortality, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, and, perhaps, Dawn Powell. Other writers have seen their stock in reputation plummet because of revelations about their character and attitudes, such as Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin.

Wolfe represents an especially problematic case. From his six-foot-seven-inch frame to the manuscripts he brought editors Maxwell Perkins and Edward Aswell, everything about him was huge. I think modern readers—especially those of the 21st century, brought up on MTV and video games—have an especially tough time with his books.

Add to that the grievous blow dealt Wolfe in his own lifetime by Bernard De Voto’s critique, “Genius Is Not Enough.” After that, the academy and creative writing schools increasingly fell under the sway of what I’ll call the Flaubert-James method of self-conscious literary craftsmanship—the notion that it’s better to have a novel that’s laboriously, painstakingly crafted like a perfectly shaped egg than that it grab and depict large chunks of life.

Some practitioners of the latter school are not to be sneered at—especially the writer who inspired the title of this blog. (Incidentally, Fitzgerald was jealous of the attention given the younger novelist by the editor they shared, Maxwell Perkins.) But so much of the style of fiction writers today make more of a fetish out of what is left out or buried in a work—its “subtext”—than they are by what’s put in.

William Faulkner, a fellow Southerner who received the literary accolades that eluded Wolfe, would, I suspect, have rebelled at this worldview. He wrote that the North Carolinian was his generation’s greatest novelist. It was undoubtedly an assessment based on the ambition Wolfe shared with Wolfe—to get everything down on paper.

The death of Ben Gant, occurring toward the end of Look Homeward, Angel, is probably the scene best recalled in the book. Ben was the brother that stayed with Thomas and his mother when the Wolfe parents, W.O. and Julia, decided to live in different houses. His brother’s death hit Thomas hard. “I think the Asheville I knew died for me when Ben died,” he wrote his sister Mabel.

Three deaths of fellow students occurred during my high school years, with one particularly shattering one that in my sophomore year. The experience of death at such a young age is especially hard to process, and perhaps that had something to do with the visceral reaction that I and so many other readers had to the death of Ben Gant.

But much of the power of this passage derives not just from Wolfe’s extraordinary rhetorical quality, but from the enormous love for his brother that Wolfe communicated. Consider especially this haunting prose-poem of a passage, when the dying Ben briefly rallies:

“But suddenly, marvelously, as if his resurrection and rebirth had come upon him, Ben drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration; his gray eyes opened. Filled with a terrible vision of life in the one moment, he seemed to rise bodilessly from his pillows without support—a flame, a light, a glory—joined at length in death to the dark spirit who had brooded upon each step of his lonely adventure on earth; and, casting the fierce sword of his glance with utter and final comprehension upon the room haunted with its gray pageantry of cheap loves and dull consciences and on all those uncertain murmurs of waste and confusion fading now from the bright window of his eyes, he passed instantly, scornful and unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death.”

Ben, his brother noted, was “one of those fine people who want the best and highest out of life, and who get nothing—who die unknown and unsuccessful.” Ben might have died unsuccessful, but through the love and lyrical powers of his brother Thomas, he did not die unknown. Ninety years after Ben’s death, many readers of Look Homeward, Angel would insist that they know him very well—about as well as their own siblings, even.

Quote of the Day (Fr. Martin, on Canonization)

“Certainly there have been as many saintly wives and husbands as there have been holy priests and nuns. But religious orders and dioceses know how to navigate the canonization procedures on behalf of bishops, priests, brothers and sisters. By contrast, how many families have the resources to embark on the decades-long process on behalf of even the holiest mother or father?”—James Martin, S.J., “His Wife’s a Saint, So Is Her Husband,” The Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2008

(At Mass this weekend, the pastor of my church, St. Cecilia of Englewood, N.J., Fr. Hilary Milton, drew our attention to the beautification occurring in Lisieux, France, today for Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of St. Therese of Lisieux. The ceremony has particular interest for my church, which is the Eastern Shrine of St. Therese the Little Flower. Fr. Hilary pointed out how unusual it was that the parents of a saint are themselves now on the road to canonization.

Fr. Martin’s excellent article, which I’ve linked above, underscores another unusual aspect of this process: the short roster of saints who have been married, and the even briefer list of those married to each other. It’s an inspiring piece about the persistence of faith even amid the multiple difficulties and tragedies of life.)

Flashback: Einstein Comes to America, October 1933

October 17, 1933—Albert Einstein and his wife arrived in New York Harbor on the ocean liner Westernland, then were whisked away from a crowd of reporters by tugboat to New Jersey, where he would take a position with Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. 

His move, as newsworthy as it was, was just one part of what might have been the greatest brain drain in history—the vast exodus of scientists, writers, directors, artists, architects, and other intellectuals who first fled Hitler’s Germany, then the other European powers that fell under the Nazi shadow.

As a Jew, the German scientist had already been marginalized in his own country. 

A Nazi edict on April 7 dismissing politically suspect academics would undoubtedly have caught him in its web anyway, since by the start of the 1933-34 school year that fall fully 15 percent of the nation’s established university teachers had already been cashiered, according to Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich.

Einstein had taken the extraordinarily brave step earlier in the year of denouncing the thuggish crackdown by the regime after the Reichstag fire. He resigned from the Prussian Academy of Science before that organization could accede to the Nazi demand that he be expelled. 

But, since he was visiting America at the time of his denunciation of Hitler’s terror, there was nothing he could do to prevent the seizure of his property.

Joining Einstein among the refugee tide were the following past or future Nobel laureates: Gustav Hertz, Erin Schoringer, Max Born, Fritz Haber and Hans Krebs. Who knows how much of a military advantage Hitler would have gained during World War II if he had not evicted so many?

Staying in America –even a beautiful campus such as Princeton’s—did not prove to be the happiest period in Einstein’s life, however, and for more than the obvious reason that he was now cut off from longtime friends and family. There were also these issues:

* Just like a great forebear in applying the laws of mathematics to the physical universe, Isaac Newton, Einstein devoted himself to an endeavor that consumed his energy with little to show for it. Newton had become sidetracked by alchemy, while Einstein’s unfulfilled passion was for a unified field theory.

* Einstein’s prestige was considerable enough that his letter to FDR warning that Germany could design an atomic bomb would lead to the Manhattan Project. But his socialism and pacifism rendered him so politically suspect that he could not serve on the project.

* The scientist’s political views led him to run afoul of Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. His public statement that all intellectuals called before McCarthy’s committee should refuse to testify led at least one witness to take his advice. Hoover’s paranoia was so wide-ranging concerning Einstein—as attested to by the 1,800 pages in the FBI file—that the agency head even suspected the scientist might be a Communist spy.

For a treatment of the Princeton sojourn of this genius, I recommend renting a DVD of a highly fanciful—but equally delightful—romantic comedy, I.Q., with Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins as the young lovers brought together by Walter Matthau, playing the bushy-haired refugee who in this movie—if not in real life—had a sly twinkle in his eyes during these years.

TV Quote of the Day (“Roseanne”)

Roseanne (after her children have left the house): “Quick, they're gone. Change the locks.”--From "Life and Stuff," Season 1, Episode 1 of Roseanne

(On this date in 1988, the sitcom Roseanne, starring Roseanne Barr—who later changed the last name to Arnold following marriage to the comedian Tom Arnold, then dropped the whole business altogether—premiered.

Creator Matt Williams left the show after 13 episodes, despite the fact that the series had quickly become one of the top three programs on television, after repeated run-ins with the former nightclub comedienne-turned-TV star. Another executive producer, Jeff Harris, departed with a line almost as funny as anything that appeared on the show: an ad in Variety that he had decided to "vacation in the relative peace and quiet of Beirut." At a baseball double-header the buttons-pushing star sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” off-key, grabbed her crotch and spit.

Some might say that Roseanne epitomized the phrase used by Shirley MacLaine to describe her Terms of Endearment co-star Debra Winger: “turbulent brilliance.” Others might say that Roseanne made Ms. Winger look like Bernadette of Lourdes by comparison.

My take is a bit different. I think that for nine seasons, she managed to become a late-century TV version of Jackie Gleason: another large-sized comedian with a difficult temperament whose sitcom masterfully mined the humor of married life in a stressful, blue-collar environment. How many people made that kind of shows during those years? Now quick—aside from Gleason’s The Honeymooners or All in the Family, how many shows in the history of television did that? As a product of that environment, I remain grateful that she tried to depict that life with as much truth as the medium could bear, even as I acknowledge the limits of her acting ability as well as what must have been the immense difficulties of working with her.)