American Cultural Treasures - ACT

2011-12-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

AMERICAN CULTURAL TREASURES

Table of Contents

Statement of Purpose

A Battle with Both Sides Using the Same Tactics
Eudora Welty Losing Battles (1970) [fiction]

Exaggerated Realism
Charles Burnett Killer of Sheep (1977) [film]

Burying the Dead
Alfred Hitchcock The Trouble with Harry (1955) [film]

Distribution and Equilibrium in Stein's Three Lives
Gertrude Stein Three Lives (1909) [fiction]

Between Heaven and Hell
Richard Bruce Nugent Gentlemen Jigger (2008) [fiction]

Screwing Things Up
Robert Rauschenberg Canyon (1959) [art]

Archetypal America
Thornton Wilder Our Town (1938) [drama]

Capote's Cold Blood
Truman Capote In Cold Blood (1965) [non-fiction novel]

The Poetics of In and Out
Toby Olson The Bitter Half (2006) [fiction]

The Novel Against Itself
Gilbert Sorrentino Aberration of Starlight (1980) [fiction]

The Voice from the Body Lying Face Down in the Pool
Billy Wilder Sunset Boulevard (1950) [film]

Common and Uncommon Sense
Thomas Paine Common Sense (1776) [essay]

Up in Smoke
Leonard Bernstein Trouble in Tahiti (1952) [opera]

A World Detached
William Carlos Williams Spring and All (1923) [poetry/manifesto]

A Way Out
George Abbott, Douglass Wallop, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross Damn Yankees (1955) [musical]

In the Middle of Nowhere
Budd Boetticher The Tall T (1957) [film]

Hiding Out
Don DeLillo The Body Artist (2001) [fiction]

Anatomy of Self
Bernadette Mayer Eruditio ex Memoria (1977) [autobiographal writing]

A Necessary Remedy
Jane Bowles In the Summer House (1953) [drama]

Three Children of the Fifties
J. D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951) [fiction]
Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955) [fiction]
James Purdy Malcolm (1959) [fiction]

The Dreadful Hollow
William Faulkner As I Lay Daying (1930) [fiction]

State of Uncertainty
Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers Oklahoma! (1943) [musical]

Life Force
John Hawkes The Beetle Leg (1951) [fiction]

Abandonment, Involvement, and Surrender
Djuna Barnes Ryder (1928) [fiction]

A War Against Death
Marianne Hauser The Collected Short Fiction (2004) [fiction]

Creatures Afire
Jack Smith Flaming Creatures (1963) [film]

What Have We Reaped?
John O'Keefe Reapers (2005) [drama]

Answering the Sphinx
David Antin i never knew what time it was (2005) [talk pieces/performance]

Out of Step
Donald Ogden Stewart Aunt Polly's Story of Mankind (1923) [fiction-satire]

Starting Over
Stacey Levine Frances Johnson (2005) [fiction]

Making the Mind Whole
Charles Bernstein Controlling Interests (1980) [poetry]

A Homespun American Proust
William Christenberry (1954-2006) [painting, photography, sculpture]

Love, Guilt, and Consolation
Martha Graham and Aaron Copland Appalacian Spring (1944) [ballet/music]

Independent Dependents
Tennesse Williams (1947)/Eliza Kazan (1951) [drama/film]

The Gang's Still Here
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee The Gang's All Here (1959) [drama]

Between You and Me
Edward Albee Me, Myself & I (2008) [drama]

Reasonable Doubts
Reginald Rose and Sidney Lument 12 Angry Men (1957) [film]

I'm Still Here: Two Valentines
Betty Garrett: Closet Songwriter and Elaine Stritch: At Liberty at the Carlyle (2007 and
2008) [revues]

Our Wonderful Lives
Harry Mathews My Life at CIA (2005) [fiction]

Pondering the Struggle
John Singleton Copley Paul Revere (1768) and Watson and the Shark (1778), Gilbert
Stuart Paul Revere (1813) and Grant Wood The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931)
[paintings]

On Alien Land
Violet Kazue de Christoforo May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow—An Anthology of
Japanese-American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku (1997) [poetry/cultural history]

Between Visions
John Wieners Ace of Pentacles (1964) and Selected Poems (1972) [poetry]

Mirror Image
George Axelrod (screenplay, based on a novel by Richard Condon), John Frankenheimer (director) The Manchurian Candidate (1962) [film]

Flags and Letters
William Broyles, Jr. and Peter Haggis (screenplay, based on the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers), Clint Eastwood (director) Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Iris Yamashita (screenplay), Clint Eastwood (director) Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) [film]

Wearing the Grin
Michael Maltese (story), Chuck Jones (director) Rabbit of Seville (1950), Wearing of the Grin (1951), Rabbit Seasoning (1952), Duck Amok (1953), and One Froggy Evening (1955) [animated cartoons]

Looking for Love
Nathanael West Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) [fiction/satire]

A Torn Curtain
Brian Evenson The Open Curtain (2006) [fiction]

Thomas Eakins and Cathy Opie
Thomas Eakins Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins and Cathy Opie Figure and Landscape (at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) (2010) [art]

Beverly Hills Housewife
Betty Freeman (1921-2009) [philantrophist and photographer]

Flopping Around
Preston Sturges The Palm Beach Story (1942) [film]

Six Degrees of Insanity
Alice Goodman, Peter Sellars, and John Adams Nixon in China (1987) [opera]

The Company Way
Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, Willie Gilbert, and Frank Loesser How ot Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961) [musical comedy]

Anything for Love
Frank Pierson and Sidney Lument Dog Day Afternoon (1975) [film]

Born Again
George Seaton and Valentine Davies Mircale on 34th Street (1947) [film]

Locked Up
Julius J. Epstein, Phillip G. Epstein (based on the play by Moss Hart and George S. Kafman), William Keighley The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942) [film]

LOCKED UP

2011-12-21T07:40:00.000-08:00

locked up
by Douglas Messerli

Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein (screenplay, based on the play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman), William Keighley (director) The Man Who Came to Dinner / 1942

Every year at Christmas time at our home we watch The Man Who Came to Dinner, the wonderful comedy by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Even though this film takes place at Christmas, however, the movie has very little to do with the holiday, and is almost as far removed from the happiness of the season as it could be.

In fact, this time viewing the film I was struck at just how removed this comedy is from any joy. Although it often howlingly funny, underneath, it is more of dark comedy akin to Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel than it is to the family farce of this play righting pair, You Can't Take It with You! The movie is so popular that I need not, I hope, repeat the plot. Although the film is filled with numerous plot complications, it actually has only one major event, repeated at the film's end: Sheridan Whiteside (inspired by Alexander Woolcott) comes to Medalia, Ohio, presumably to give a lecture, but falls on the ice-filled stoop of the Stanley family's home, whereupon a local doctor declares that he must be wheel-chair bound until he heals some days later.

Although extremely popular in the media, having a weekly radio show, Whiteside (wonderfully played by Monte Woolley in large, campy gestures) is a tyrant who puts his own welfare over concerns for anyone else; so monstrous is his surface behavior that it is almost impossible to imagine how a sweet woman like Maggie Cutler (played against type by Bette Davis) can stand to be in his employ. As she, herself, comments: "You know, Sheridan, you have one great advantage over everyone else in the world. You've never had to meet Sheridan Whiteside." The poor Stanley family, Ernest, Daisy and their two children (the parents acted by Billie Burke and Grant Mitchell) are horrified by the situation, as Whiteside threatens to sue them, and insists upon taking over their library, living room, and front entrance, while they are assigned a back stairs and confined to their own bedrooms.

In short, the Stanley family is locked away in their own house, just as Whiteside is locked up in a small hick town which he has not even wanted to visit ('I simply will not sit down to dinner with midwestern barbarians. I think too highly of my digestive system.") The house, in fact, has become a kind of penitentiary, reiterated by the behavior of the completely flustered Nurse Preen (Mary Wickes) and the Stanley children, who, each for their own reasons desire to leave home, the daughter being in love with a union agitator whom her businessman father detests, and the would-be photographer son desiring new scenes and subjects for his art.

The theme of imprisonment is played out again and again in this work. Whiteside, it is suggested, is fascinated by criminal activity, and invites several inmates from a nearby penitentiary for lunch—much to the horror, of course, of the locked-away Stanleys. Throughout the movie, Whiteside is sent presents—penguins, an octopus, and a mummy case—the first two contained in crates while the latter is itself a kind of coffin.

Meanwhile, Maggie becomes involved with the local editor of the town newspaper, the affable Bertram H. Jefferson (Richard Travis), and for the first time after years of exciting travel, suddenly seeks to settle down into this small town and marry, another kind of imprisonment—at least to Whiteside's way of thinking. Jefferson has also written "the great American play," which helps Whiteside lure Lorraine Sheldon (Ann Sheridan) from vacationing in Florida to Ohio, hoping she will bollix up Maggie's plans. By the end of the film, having caused a series of disastrous situations, he must also lock away Lorraine and ship her off in a plane.

Finally, the Stanley home has itself another kind of prisoner, Harriet, an aunt who, as a young woman, killed—like Lizzie Borden—her mother and father. She is also imprisoned in the family secrecy of her past.

When the penguins escape their crate, they are quickly rounded up and impounded once more by the doctor and nurse. When the children both bolt the home, Ernest Stanley quickly tracks them and returns them home. Suddenly one can comprehend, perhaps, Harriet's childhood actions, and may help explain her strange behavior.

Only two people, it appears, can come and go at will, but both these, like Sheridan Whiteside, are so self-centered that they cannot escape themselves. Carlton Beverly (based on Noël Coward, performed by Reginald Gardiner) drops by to see Whiteside, but talks of hardly anyone but himself:

I have very little time, and so the conversation will entirely be about me and I shall love it.

Banjo (inspired by Harpo Marx, wonderfully played by Jimmy Durante) can barely sit still for more than a moment, "Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay," imitating the "I must be going" phrase of Groucho in Animal Crackers. Both visitors conspire to help Maggie to escape Whiteside's grasp so that she might enter matrimonial bonds.

Even the two servants, cook and butler, hoping to escape the Stanley household by taking up service in Whiteside's home, remain locked away, as Whiteside, finally leaving the Stanley mansion, once again falls on the ice. Like the figures in The Exterminating Angel, no one in this work can leave his self-imposed entrapment.

With such a marvelous cast, however, who cares? Even though director William Keighley has done little to transfer this stage-bound work into film, we might wish to watch these poor trapped beings play out their destinies again and again.

Los Angeles, December 18, 2011
Reprinted from American Cultural Treastures (December 2011).

BORN AGAIN

2011-12-03T07:33:00.000-08:00

born again
by Douglas Messerli

George Seaton (screenplay, based on a story by Valentine Davies), George Seaton (director) Miracle on 34^th Street / 1947

I’ll begin by admitting that I absolutely enjoy George Seaton’s and Valentine Davies’ holiday fantasy, Miracle on 34^th Street. I have probably watched this film every year of my adult life on Thanksgiving day or during the Christmas season, and I get delight just imagining that I might have been able witness the premiere of this film as a 6-month old baby.

This year, watching it just before Thanksgiving dinner, however, I had a different, more contrarian view of the holiday chestnut, listed in the National Film Registry.

Let me start by saying the obvious, a cliché spouted each year by thousands of religious Americans, particularly, one imagines, by those who describe themselves as “born again:” the Christmas season has increasingly become commercialized, and most Americans have lost the sense of the holiday’s true focus, the birth of Christ.

Admittedly, I am not among those religious or “born again” Americans, but even I was appalled when the Christmas shopping season, it was announced, would began this year not on the Friday morning after Thanksgiving, but at midnight. A local radio station began 24 hour programming of Christmas carols (most of them centered on the holiday festivities instead of the child in Bethlehem) two weeks ago!

Generally recognized as the emblem of that pagan, commercialized Christmas is Santa Claus, the jolly, fat Dutch gift-giving Sinterklaas. You remember him, the one about whom your parents lied, leading you on to believe that he was the source of all of those lovely Christmas presents beneath the tree until you grew old to appreciate the loving care they had been secretly showing you for all those years? As I have written elsewhere, I came to that realization, almost miraculously one morning, at a far younger age than most of my peers; it didn’t bother me one little bit that there wasn’t any Santa Claus and that my parents had been so nice to me for all those years. But my revelation of that fact to a school friend, sent her off crying into her mother’s arms. I was told that I must never reveal the truth to anyone my age or younger. But even older children, I realized, might not like to hear my discovery.

Seaton’s work, however, begins almost at the opposite end of the equation. The young girl at the center of this story, Susan Walker (Natalie Wood), has been told by her level-headed mother, Doris (Maureen O’Hara) that there is no Santa Claus, without any noticeable effect in the child’s demeanor. Mrs. Walker, who works at Macy’s, coordinating the all-important Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, is apparently a strong-headed and practical woman, who has, one imagines, tried to remove almost all fantasy and myth from her young daughter’s life. She has told that there are no giants, and the girl is discouraged from reading “fairy tales.” Obviously, the mother has been hurt by what she perceives as the fantasies of her married life. One wonders how she has dealt with Christian myths, including the child born in a stable. But fortunately, for the survival of the film, Seaton has skirted that issue and, indeed, all issues having to deal with the real season’s purpose.

The film begins with a seemingly pernickety old man scolding a young window dresser for putting the reindeer in the wrong places in relation to his store’s depiction of Santa and sleigh. The man, Kris Kringel (the marvelous Edmund Gwenn), we soon discover, is very particular when it comes to all things about Santa. After all he believes he is Kris Kringel, Santa. It is, as the doctor to the nursing home where Kris lives later assures us, a quite harmless delusion, one that only leads him to do good. But everything is soon made much more complicated when Kris accidentally encounters, during the early moments of the Macy parade, that the man hired to play Santa Claus—the traditional star of the event (even today, as I watched the parade, the bands, floats, balloons, and other theater and vaudeville events, the parade culminated with Santa’s arrival)—is absolutely soused! Reporting the man’s condition to Mrs. Walker, Kris seems a natural to replace the drunk Santa. After all, he even looks like a well-trimmed and tailored Santa. It is almost inevitable that Mrs. Walker should invite him to portray Santa, since, he declares, he has certainly had experience.

Meanwhile, Doris’ daughter, Susan is watching the parade from a neighbor’s window, from what we might presume is a Central Park West apartment. Today we might worry about the fact that she is watching this with an adult male, Fred Gailey (John Payne)—although we have been reassured by the Walker’s maid that she has been keeping an eye on the girl—who occupies an apartment across the way. The Santa Claus, declares Susan, is quite convincing, far better than the one of the year before. Gailey is a bit troubled by her mature dismissal of Santa, as well as giants, but is not beyond encouraging her to invite him to dinner in the Walker home. Mr. Gailey may be a happy man (the old fashioned meaning of “gay”), but he is represented as bit disturbing in his forward behavior. His “move” on the daughter, clearly, is also a move on her somewhat cynical mother. Nonetheless, he is invited to dinner.

Kris, meanwhile, not only looks the part of the perfect Santa, but is quickly hired by Macy’s to become their Department Store Santa. Kris is delighted to be able to return to his rightful place, and everyone seems happy with his “acting,” until it is discovered that he has been telling some parents to purchase their children’s gifts at competing stores—even Gimbels. The scene where Thelma Ritter (in one of her first film roles) stops to thank the floor manager for their unusual new policy, where they put the spirit of Christmas, so it appears, before their own financial gain, is one of the most delightful of the film.

Such radical behavior is, expectedly, met with horror, until both the floor manager, Julian Shellhammer (Philip Tongue) and Mrs. Walker, summoned to Mr. Macy’s office, are surprised to discover that their boss loves the idea, realizing that it will result in even more gift-paying customers. In another assault on the Walker family, Gailey encourages Susan to wait in line to see Santa, before dropping her off to her mother’s office. The girl is skeptical, until she hears Kris speak and sing to a young Dutch orphan in her original language. Doris’s response is predictable: “Susan, I speak French, but that doesn’t make me Joan of Arc.”

To back her up, Doris summons their Santa, encouraging him to tell Susan that he is not really Santa Claus, but when he insists that he is, she demands his file, wherein she discovers that he goes under the name of Kris Kringel and declares his birthplace as the North Pole. A visit to the store psychologist is ordered for Kris, who passes all the tests with great aplomb, yet raising the ire of the psychologist, Granville Sawyer (Porter Hall) who throughout the interview pulls at his eyebrows (a trait shared by his secretary), by suggesting that something may be problematic in his home life. In retaliation, Sawyer suggests that Kris may have a latent hostility that could break out at any time. A call to the doctor who heads the Long Island nursing home where Kris has been living, brings reassurances from Dr. Pierce (James Seay), who also suggests it may be easier if Kris can find a place to stay nearer to the store in Manhattan. Before you can say Kris Kringel, Gailey has invited the old man to share his bedroom, further insinuating his being into the Walker’s life.

As the old gent speaks to Susan, he is saddened to learn that she does not believe in his existence and that she has been spurned by her playmates for being unable to imagine herself as an animal. “But I am not an animal,” she declares, after which he patiently teaches her how to pretend to be a monkey. It is clear that he has taken on the Walkers as a kind of test case:

…Christmas isn’t just a day, it’s a frame of mind…and that’s what’s

been changing. That’s why I’m glad I’m here, maybe I can do

something about it.

Kris even repeats the sentiments I stated earlier in this essay, disparaging the commercialism of the holiday—a strange thing for that emblem of the commercial to do; but it is clear the director and writer want to both ways.

Soon after Kris discovers that a beloved young janitor, Alfred (Alvin Greenman) has also been seeing the mean-spirited Sawyer, who suggests that Alfred has psychological problems simply for wanting to play Santa Claus at his neighborhood YMCA. Furious with the abuse of this good-hearted boy, Kris charges into Sawyer’s office, accusing him of malpractice and hitting him over the head with his cane. The violence Sawyer has predicted has, alas, become reality, and Kris is sent to Bellvue Psychiatric Hospital for evaluation, believing that Mrs. Walker has been behind the decision.

Despairing of the lack of faith she has shown, Kris purposely fails the psychiatric examination, and is destined to be locked away. Almost everyone knows the rest of the story, how Gailey takes on Kris’s case, fighting to convince a disbelieving world and court that Kris Kringel is truly Santa Claus. Even Mrs. Walker and her daughter come round to support his cause.

The case is miraculously won due, in part, to the political exigencies of court. As the Pol Charles Halloran (William Frawley) puts it to Judge Henry X. Harper (Gene Lockhart):

All right, you go back and tell them that the New York State

Supreme Court rules there’s no Santa Claus. It’s all over the papers.
The kids read it and they don’t hang up their stockiings. Now what

happens to all the toys that are supposed to be in those stockings.

Nobody buys them. The toy manufactures are going to like that; so

they have to lay off a lot of their employees, union employees. Now
you got the CIO and AF of L against you and they’re going to

adore you for it and they’re going to say it with votes. Oh, and the
department stores are going to love you too and the Christmas card

makers and the candy companies. Ho ho, Henry, you’re going to be

an awful popular fella. And what about the Salvation Army? Why,

they got a Santa Claus on every corner, and they’re taking a fortune.

So much for Kringel’s dismay for the commercialism of Christmas! Perhaps no clearer statement of the relationship of the fat, jolly, fellow and money has ever been made. Harper’s children even hate him, and Gailey calls the young son of District Attorney Thomas Mara to testify that his father has told, assuredly, that there is a Santa Claus.

Even more cynical are the US Postal employees, tired of all the unclaimed mail addressed to Santa Claus, who win the day for Gailey and Kris Kringel by forwarding dozens of sacks of letters to the courthouse, providing the Judge with an easy way out:

Uh, since the United States Government declares this man to be

Santa Claus, this court will not dispute it. Case dismissed.

So, insists Seaton’s film, Santa Claus, despite all evidence to the contrary, is alive and well. Yet Seaton and the original author go even further, demanding of even the adult characters and viewers their utter belief in the commercial emblem. When asked what she might like for Christmas, Susan pulls out an advertisement for a suburban Long Island home. Even Kris Kringel is a bit stunned by her demand, when he suggests, “…Don’t you see, dear? Some children wish for things they couldn’t possibly use like real locomotives or B-29.s.” Her retort is the stubborn insistence of any spoiled consumer:

If you’re really Santa Claus, you can get it for me. And if you can’t,

you’re only a nice man with a white beard like mother said.

The filmmakers hardly pause to take in the significance of what the child has just said, before Kris has sent the three traveling along a route that winds by the house of her dreams. Upon glimpsing it, Susan demands they stop and runs into the home as if she already owned it. How can Mr. Gailey and Mrs. Walker resist such a consumer dream, even if it means giving up their perfectly nice apartments, overlooking the parade route, and now probably worth millions of dollars? They will simply have to marry, move to the suburbs, and build on the little family with which they have begun. The discovery of Kris’s cane left near the fireplace convinces them surely—as “born again” Christian’s zealous rediscovery of Christ—of Santa Claus’ existence, just as the audience is bathed with consumer assurances that this is, in fact, the perfect house.

Perhaps never in the whole of Hollywood productions was there a more central pitching of consumer products. Even movies with thousands of “product placements” cannot match, Nathalie Wood’s answer to Kris’ question of where she had found the lovely sweater she is wearing: “My mother got on sale it at Macy’s.”

During an ad between events of this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Macy’s proudly quoted that line among other cinematic mentions of the august department store.

As Susan chants to herself: “I believe…I believe…it’s silly, but I believe.”

Los Angeles, Thanksgiving 2011

ANYTHING FOR LOVE

2011-05-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

ANYTHING FOR LOVE
by Douglas Messerli

Frank Pierson (screenplay, based on an article by P. F. Kluge and Thomas Moore), Sidney Lument (director) Dog Day Afternoon / 1975

Sidney Lument's death this month, on April 9th, sent me back to review his 1975 film, Dog Day Afternoon, a work I remember with great fondness.

For the first half of the film, however, it appears that Dog Day Afternoon might be weighted down with the thematic concerns that are so dominant in his oeuvre, focusing on the moral, political, and social issues as in works such as The Pawnbroker, A View from the Bridge, Serpico, and The Verdict. These films are all admirable, and are well-directed. But for my taste there is something almost lugubrious about many of them, as they slowly uncoil, revealing their characters' moral fibre and the social conditions which define them. In some respects, many of Lument's works never seem to be completely transformed from stage plays into cinematic creations, although that is precisely what I love about his Long Day's Journey into Night.

Dog Day Afternooon begins simply as a badly bungled bank robbery, with one young participant abandoning his cohorts even before the two central robbers, Sonny Wortzik (Al Pacino*) and Sal (eerily played by John Cazale) can notify the manager and tellers what they are undertaking. When they do demand to be taken to the vault, they discover that there is no money, it having just been picked up for deposit elsewhere.

The only takings that Pacino has for all his trouble are the teller's drawers, which he carefully empties, making sure that he does not pull all the bills out at once so that he will not trigger an alarm. When offered, by one teller, the wrapped new bills, he refuses, noting that they are marked. Yet for all his carefulness, he is soon called to the phone, where a policeman wants to talk to him, the bank having been already surrounded.

Suddenly we perceive the absurdity of the whole event. The inept robbers are now forced into a standoff with what appears to be, as Sonny later announces, "the fucking militia." Indeed, there are so many policeman, setting up camp across the street, blocking off cars, swarming the roof and the back of the building, and hanging from fire escapes that one would think they were responding to an international terrorist threat. Even though he is now forced to take the tellers and manager as captives, as he himself proclaims: "I'm a Catholic, I don't want to hurt anybody." Even the dense-minded Sal insists he doesn't smoke because "the body's the temple of the Lord."

Before long a large crowd has developed, and the movie appears that it will shift into a work dealing with police brutality, particularly when, on one of his sidewalk discussions with the police coordinator, Det. Sgt. Eugene Moretti (Charles Durning), Sonny invokes the Attica prison riots of 1971, when, after days of negotiations, police killed and caused the deaths of over 39 prisoners. Pacino, brilliantly over-the-top, whips up the crowd for his cause—and assured safety:

Tell them to put their guns down! Put the fucking guns down!
Put 'em down! Put the fucking guns down! Put those guns down!
Attica! Attica! You got it, man! You got it, man! You got it, man!
You got it! You got it! (pointing to different individuals in the crowd
as they should ATTICA! ATTICA!)

Moreover, when Lument briefly inserts scenes showing Sonny's mother (hilariously played by theater director Judith Malina) and his overweight, beleaguered, and not very bright wife, we begin to fear that the film may attempt a psychological explanation for his acts.
But even early on, we suspect that the story has something important yet to reveal, particularly when, after being lied to by the Moretti, the two have the following interchange:

SONNY: Kiss me.
MORETTI: What?
SONNY: Kiss me. When I'm being fucked, I like to get kissed a lot.

Everything soon shifts, in a delicious twist of reality, when we discover the wife Sonny has asked for the police to bring to him is another man, Leon Shemer (Chris Sarandon), and the reason for the bank robbery is Sonny's attempt to get enough money for Leon's sex-change.

Even stranger, it is not Sonny demanding the sex-change, who seems to be perfectly in love with Leon as two gay men, but the psychiatrist's idea:

LEON: I couldn't explain why I did the things I did. So I went
to this psychiatrist who explained to me I was a woman
in a man's body. So Sonny right away wanted to get me
money for a sex change operation: but where was he to get
that? 2500 dollars! My God, he's in hock up to his ears
already.

Before long the gays have joined the crowds surrounding the absurd standoff, Sonny becoming a kind of ridiculous folk hero in an era in which police were hated for their abuse. And Lument has sent his film on a loony and, quite frankly, bravely outspoken path where I am sure some members of the original audience had not been prepared to go. One must remember that the only major American film that had seriously and openly dealt with homosexuality was William Friedkin's The Boys in the Band of 1970, a film so based on gay stereotypes that, even after I had served for a few nights as an usher during its New York run, Howard and I, along with other members of the newly formed gay liberation group at the University, picketed the film outside the Madison, Wisconsin theater where it was shown.

Lument was not only taking on the issue of homosexuality in Dog Day Afternoon, but transgender sexuality, and, even more complicated, the subject of bisexuality, since Sonny was also heterosexually married with two children! Yet Lument allows this subject to be treated seriously, by including the scene where Sonny dictates a will, leaving most of his money to Leon, with only a small amount going to his legal wife.

Even though he is, as he admits, "a fuck-up" and "an outcast," Sonny is also a caring and loving man. As he admits to Sal, "I got all these pressures!" and, at another point, "I got to have all the ideas!"

And strangely and absurdly, he takes those ideas to their logical extension, planning to use the hostages to get an airplane traveling, of all places, to Algeria! When asked to what country he might like to go, Sal replies, "Wyoming." We know, accordingly, that there can now be no turning back, and there will be no way of returning to whatever they might define as normality for these poor, sweet outcasts. The only element of the plot still unrevealed is whether the two will be brutally murdered or simply arrested.

Both happens, as the limousine driver pulls out a gun and shoots Sal, the police arresting Sonny.
In real life, John Wojtowicz served 14 years in prison for the attempted robbery. The $7,500 he received for the movie rights went to his lover, Ernest Aron, for the sex change. Aron became Elizabeth Eden, dying of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. Wojtowicz died of cancer on January 2, 2006.

Los Angeles, Easter 2011

________
* I might note that there is a wonderful irony in Pacino's performance, for which he was nominated for Best Actor by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts. In real life, Wojtowicz and his co-conspirator Salvatore Naturile had seen The Godfather, in which Pacino also played, earlier in the day and planned their robbery based on events in the film. John Cazale performed alongside Pacino in The Godfather as Fredo.

THE COMPANY WAY

2011-05-16T07:53:00.000-07:00

THE COMPANY WAY
by Douglas Messerli

Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert (book, based on the book by Shepherd Mead), Frank Loesser (music and lyrics) How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying / New York, Al Hirschfeld Theater, 2011 / the performance I attended was a matinee on May 7, 2011

I will admit to a certain sentimental attachment to the American Musical Theater, although I feel, given the quality of the musicals for which I care, there is no reason for apology. Most of my friends who cannot comprehend my love of this genre have perhaps never seen a musical comedy before 1970, when the genre, as far as I'm concerned, almost died. The handful of good musicals since that time have been so few (most of them composed by Stephen Sondheim) that one might almost say that the form has died out. Today, except for revivals, musical comedy is for audiences who like songs consisting of three memorable notes, repeated through chorus upon chorus of driveling lyrics sung at very high decibels. But then, we do, from time to time, have wonderful revivals of the older works of this genre that remind us of what the musical theater was all about.

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, the 1961 New York Drama Critics and Pulitzer Prize-winning gem by Frank Loesser, was not, I am afraid, one of the "wonderful revivals." I do not mean to suggest that it was not worth attending, for, at moments, this version was absolutely delightful, but overall it simply couldn't live up the standards of the original and the movie version.

I have never before sat in an audience with so many first-time theater-goers, mostly teenage girls and their slightly stunned families in tow. The girl next to me was celebrating her sixteenth birthday and "just had see" Daniel Radcliffe, this revival's star attraction, "in the flesh." In some senses the freshness of the fans was a treat. And Radcliffe, a trouper already at age 22, was not about to disappoint them.

Radcliffe, who I suspect has by this time quite settled into his performance, was better by far than the critics led audiences to believe. Although, as the New York Times suggested he is not a natural "song and dance man" (I am not quite sure what that means, and when I think of such figures I can only conjure up Robert Preston and Robert Morse, the original J. Pierrepont Finch, neither of them great singers or even able dancers!), he can now belt out a tuneful song and, with the help of the able chorus, jump, leap, and hoof it across the stage quite ably. Once and a while you can still see him grimace a bit, as if muttering deep within, "I'm gonna be great!" And, at moments, he is! If nothing else you have to recognize that Radcliffe is giving his all, which unfortunately, if you have seen Robert Morse in the role—I saw only the movie version, but listened to the original cast recording so many hundreds of times in my youth that the old wax stereo recording is all scratches and scapes—is just not enough.

Oddly, given the fact that he has now been nominated for a Tony for a supporting role (while Radcliffe was ignored), John Larroquette seemed far less engaged in the piece, speeding through his lines at times as if he were trying to catch a plane, and other times performing on cruise control. When Larroquette "woke up" once or twice in his role as J. B. Biggley, as he did in "Grand Old Ivy," he was quite charming, with both him and Radcliffe performing brilliantly. Unfortunately, director/choeographer Rob Ashford could not leave a good thing alone, bringing a whole chorus of football players to dance along, wiping away one the few enchanting character encounters.

Most of the other cast members are quite excellent, particularly Ellen Harvey as Biggley's executive secretary, Miss Jones, Mary Faber as Smitty, and, although a little young for the role, Rose Hemingway (at 27 she seems more a neophyte than Radcliffe). Christopher Hanke makes the nasty Bud Frump almost likeable. And, although her humor switched on and off at times, Tammy Blanchard is basically an hilarious Hedy LaRue.

Perhaps the most serious problem about this revival is that, despite its obvious satirical intentions, the work seems extraordinarily outdated and unnecessarily coy today. For those who have never seen the musical, I'll briefly relay the plot: window washer J. Pierrepont Finch, enters the executive suites of the World Wide Wicket Corporation in search of a job, armed with a little book that promises immediate success, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. Within minutes he has literally bumped into the president of company, J. B. Biggley, encountered a woman, Rosemary Pilkington, who falls in love with him at first sight, and captures a job in the mailing room by transforming the unpleasant encounter with Biggley into what the employment head interprets as a friendship.

Finch is highly likeable, even charming, but he is without a single moral principle in his desire to rise up the corporate ladder, and within hours, so it seems, he shifts into the positions of a junior executive, advertising manager, and, even after a disastrous failure, is elected Chairman of the Board, all before you can say, ROSEMARY, the woman with whom, along the way, he has reluctantly fallen in love.

Biggley's nincompoop nephew, Budd Frump, tries his best throughout to trip up Finch, as the other executives, terrified by Ponty's swift rise in the company and fearing the discovery of their own ineptitudes, plot to destroy him; yet Finch (as he reminds everyone F-I-N-C-H) miraculously survives each battle, primarily because he is so self-centered that he fails to see the restless men on the prowl.

The most famous song of the musical is Finch's love song to himself, sung into a mirror of the men's room as he shaves:

FINCH: Now there you are;
Yes, there's that face,
That face that somehow I trust.
It may embarrass you to hear me say it,
But say it I must, say it I must:
You have the cool, clear
Eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth;
Yet there's that upturned chin
And that grin of impetuous youth.
Oh, I believe in you.
I believe in you

Women in this male-dominated world are all secretaries, whom the males are reminded, should are not be treated like toys—but nonetheless are. In today's world, it is clear that the efficient and trustworthy Miss Jones, the smart Smitty, and the quick-plotting Rosemary would be at the head of the World Wide Wicket Company instead of out bowling or wickedly spinning webs to find husbands. But in 1961...well, those gender lines were at the musical's satirical heart. Today the plot appears somewhat as a stale joke with little resonance.

For all that, I think the audience was willing to overlook the datedness of the piece if only the actors could come together and enjoy their own spoof. But time and again, it seemed, Radcliffe was not the only one grimacing. Everybody seemed to be playing it "the company way," refusing to get excited about anything. Two of the best dance numbers of Lambert and Fosse's original, "Coffee Break," (such a difficult number that the movie dropped it), and the sprightly "A Secretary Is Not a Toy," seemed lackluster in Ashford's staging, while at other times, as I mentioned, the director seemed to suck all the attention away from the actors through the introduction of gratuitous routines.

Finally, despite Radcliffe's pluck and elfin charm, I kept missing the puckish comedy of Robert Morse, the silly imperiousness of Rudy Vallee, and the jazz inflections of Michele Lee's voice.
One piece, alone, came to life and created for its few minutes the magic that might have stood as a beacon to these young performers. The last full number of the musical, "Brotherhood of Man," was so richly sung, punctuated by Ellen Harvey's coloratora soprano, and so thrillingly danced that it almost redeemed everything else. If only the cast might have realized that "brotherhood" earlier in the show, How to Succeed might have gone straight to the top!

In the end, however, it didn't matter. The young girls and their families stood up in celebration and absolutely roared (I've never heard as loud an applause) as Radcliffe bowed appreciatively to his fans.

Los Angeles, May 13, 2011
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (May 2011).

SIX DEGREES OF INSANITY

2011-03-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

SIX DEGREES OF INSANITY

by Douglas Messerli

Alice Goodman (libretto), Peter Sellars (director), John Adams (composer) Nixon in China / The Metropolitan Opera, New York / the production I saw was a live, in HD, screening at the Rave Theater, Westchester, California

Although most of the critics who I read (Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times, Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times, and Anne Midgette of The Washington Post) agreed that the Met's new production of Nixon in China was excellent and long overdue, there was a sense among the three that the plot of the work was static and that one character, in particular, Henry Kissinger (sung by Richard Paul Fink) was a figure of parody whereas the others were treated more seriously. In a piece by Max Frankel, published in The New York Times a couple of days before the live HD airing, the former editor of the Times—who was with Nixon in China and won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the trip—squarely asked the question which the other reviewers only intimated:

...Why bother, as in Nixon, to lure us to a fictional enterprise with
contemporary characters and scenes from an active memory bank?
Why use actualities, or the manufactured actualities of our television
screens and newspapers, to fuel the drama?

The answer, he feels, is "obvious but also treacherous," that the use of actual characters helps to "overcome the musty odor that inhabits many opera houses," drawing new audiences into the theater. But, Frankel continues, it brings other dangers with it:

The danger is that despite the verisimilitudes of text, setting and
costume, a viewer's grasp of events may not match the fabric
being woven onstage. What the creators intend to be profundity
may strike the knowing as parody.

Most of the reviewers agreed that the composer, writer, and director did give their figures a range of emotions, both serious and comic, and between acts, Winston Lord (of National Security) assured us that much of the talk between Nixon and Chairman Mao in the First Act was close to what actually was said in their meeting; but all also felt that the opera did move to a kind of parody in the Second Art performance of The Red Detachment of Women, in which Fink, the singer-actor who played Kissinger, also plays a lecherous, Simon Legree-like landowner who has stolen away a young maiden. Fink sings:

She was so hot
I was hard-put
To be polite.
When the first cut
—Come on you slut!—
Scored her brown skin
I started in,
Man upon hen!

Some characterized this scene as surreal and the last act as psychological, as if they were somehow different in tone from the more historicized events in the First Act.

If nothing else, there was a sense that Nixon in China, without a narrative arc, was a bit of a rocky ride. Certainly, at times, while always enjoying the shimmering glory of the music, I too felt that way while watching it. Yet now that I've pondered it for while, I believe I was mistaken, that, in fact, the opera is highly structured and fairly coherent in its tone and presentation of characters.

First of all, John Adams and Peter Sellars are never going to present something that works as a Verdi opera might. Although all may work with a complex weaving of historical events, Verdi's sense of drama is highly embedded in narrative, while Adams and team, postmodern in their approach, eschew what we might call "story."

Nixon in China has "events," but there are presented in a series of tableaux, not unlike some medieval musical productions. Each character gets the chance to reveal his or her selves. But what Alice Goodman, Adams and Sellars are interested in is not so much the outer faces they present to the world, but what these figures are thinking and imagining within. And I think they would have to admit that every figure on their stage is, in one way or another, a bit unhinged; these are, after all—with the exception perhaps of Pat Nixon—people desperate for power. And all are on the edge of insanity.

Even before we meet any of the major characters, the people of China speak in a strange manner that we comprehend is not quite rational thought, as they sing from the text of "The Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention":

Prompt delivery directly to authorities of all items
confiscated from landlords.
Do not damage crops.
Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses.
Pay for everything you damage.
etc.

As they chant, "The people are the heroes now," even if these "heroes" are highly manipulated and controlled.

Out of the sky drops the Nixons' Spirit of 76, and no sooner does the President descend the airstair, shaking the hand of Premier Chou En-lai, than he begins inwardly calculating the great results of this journey as the filming catches him just in time for the evening news broadcasts in the USA, he hilariously singing out his fascination with his own acts: "News! News! News!

News has a kind of mystery;
When I shook hands with Chou En-lai
On this bare field outside Peking
Just now, the whole world was listening

James Maddalena, who has now sung this role in hundreds of performances, is an amazing actor, who brings off those jowl-shaking absurdities quite brilliantly.

Nixon's and Kissinger's meeting with Premier Chou (Russell Braun) and Chairman Mao (Robert Brubaker) in the next scene is perhaps the most absurd of the entire opera, as the two powerful leaders speak in a series of alternating gnomic jokes, apothegms, and, in Nixon's case, simple American verbal blunders. As Mao becomes more and more incomprehensible ("Founders come first / Then profiteers") in sayings parroted by a wonderful trio of assistants, Nixon attempts his linguistic twists spun from what he believes the Chairman might be saying. It all reminds me, a bit, of the other Peter Seller's performance as the totally innocent and ignorant Chance in the film Being There, where he spouts meaningless sentences interpreted by others to be full of profound significance. Mao and Nixon, one a bit senile, the other humorless and often depressed, hit it off beautifully in their mindless chatter, while the more rational Kissinger proclaims to be unable to understand anything, and the Premier sits silently in sufferance.

What that meeting accomplished, an issue clearly of importance in this opera, is questionable. But surely we can feel, and, in Adams' delicious scoring, we can hear the growing friendliness of all figures as they swill down Mai-tai after Mai-tai with toast upon toast. Again, non-drinker Kissinger misses out on all the glorious insanity of the evening.

In Act II we get a chance to see Pat Nixon at the edge. She begins the morning, in fact, downing a couple of needed pills. Like Premier Chou she is in sufferance, and, although excited by the whole trip, she is also exhausted and, we feel, not at all comfortable. The most American of this opera's figures, she flaunts a bright red coat. Flawlessly played by Janis Kelly, Pat comes off as somewhat frail and slightly terrified being as she is rushed through a glass factory (where the workers award her a green elephant) and classrooms in which the students have clearly been told what to say and how to behave, before stopping by the Gate of Longevity and Goodwill, where she sings her touching and slightly pathetic paean to the world she loves:

This is prophetic! I foresee
A time will come when luxury
Dissolves into the atmosphere
Like a perfume, and everywhere
The simple virtues root and branch
And leaf and flower. And on that bench
There we’ll relax and taste the fruit
Of all our actions. Why regret
Life which is so much like a dream?

Yet the homespun images she spins out of her sense of momentary joy—lit-up farm porches, families sitting around the dinner table, church steeples, etc.—are right out of Norman Rockwell paintings and is just as absurd of a vision as are her husband's darker mumblings.

That evening's presentation of The Red Detachment of Women ballet, written by Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's wife—as she so shrilly reminds us later—is experienced by the now overwhelmed Nixons less as an objective performance—in reality the evening ended with enthusiastic praise by the President and First Lady—as from a psychological, inner viewpoint. It is clear that Nixon, as he suggests several times in the opera, admired Kissinger's mind, but he also mocked his ways and apparently disliked the man personally. Accordingly the Nixons both conjure up the evil landowner in their tired travelers' minds, to be, or, least, to look like Kissinger.* Like many an innocent theater-goer, the Nixons become so involved in the story of a poor girl who is saved and then destroyed by refusing to obey Communist doctrine that they confuse drama with reality, breaking into the action of the ballet itself to save and protect the young dancer.

Mark Morris, using some aspects of the original choreography, nicely stages his orderly squadrons of young military dancers against the chaos of events. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the opera, and I am still not sure whether or not it truly succeeds, but it is crucial to our witnessing the truly mad person behind Chiang Ch'ing (Kathleen Kim)—who in real life may have been responsible for hundreds of deaths and had, herself, erratic nerves and severe hypochondiasis—as she proclaims in the noted aria, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung," angrily declaring that all be determined by "the book." After Mao's death, we should recall, Chiang Ch'ing committed suicide.

After witnessing these six individuals'—Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Pat Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Chiang Ch'ing—mental dramas, we can only breathlessly watch as they slip into sleep. Kissinger shacks up with one of Mao's translators before disappearing into the bathroom. The Nixons share their disappointments, the President for being misinterpreted by the newspapers, Pat silently suffering, with tearful eyes, from her husband's inattention and having herself to attend yet again to what may be his ritual recounting of an attack he endured in World War II. Mao also finds relief in the hands of one of his translators before threatening his wife for having made political mistakes, until he falls with her into a lustful embrace upon their bed. Chou En-lai, clearly already in pain from the bladder cancer which would kill him 4 years later, awakens early to return to his never-ending work, drawing a close to all the madness with the most profound question of the opera: "Was there any point to any of it?" The "it" may refer, obviously, to the Nixons' visit, but it also suggests another possibility of meaning: "Was there any point to all their madness, to their desperate struggles to hold onto any power they might have over others?" All ended their lives in disgrace and shame, except for Pat; but even she almost disappeared from the public eye after the death of her husband, suffering a serious stroke the same year that Chou En-lai died.

In some respects, I now wonder, despite its occasional comic elements and always lush sonority of sound, if this isn't one of the darkest of operas. But then, aren't the young and the old—represented by the US and China—usually at the heart of the tragic, Romeo and Lear?

Los Angeles, February 19, 2011

_____
Coincidentally, in my 1990 "opera for spoken voices," The Walls Come True (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), I included Dr. Kissinger in my "Twelve Tyrants Between Acts: Mundane Moments and Insane Histories," based on the paranoia and ridiculous accusations he expressed in his Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little Brown, 1982) when, in 1973, he was in Hanoi attempting to negotiate the Paris Accords.

FLOPPING AROUND

2011-03-24T07:50:00.000-07:00

FLOPPING AROUND

by Douglas Messerli

Preston Sturges and Ernst Laemmle (writers), Preston Sturges (director) The Palm Beach Story / 1942

One the funniest of films about the institution of marriage, Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story, almost did not get made. The script, originally titled Is Marriage Necessary?, was rejected by the powerful censors at the Hays Office several times—despite continued changes—for its “light treatment of marriage and divorce,” along with its “sexual suggestive” situations.

It’s hard to imagine what those revised situations might have been, but they certainly would have had to involve Mary Astor’s man-hungry character, Princess Centimillia, who criticizes her would-be lover, Captain McGlue (Joel McCrea) (in the film’s reality, Thomas Jeffers, the husband of Geraldine [Claudette Colbert]), who accuses him, at one point when they are dancing, of “letting her flop around.” This is a woman who has been married, in the original script, eight times (plus two annulments), and she wants most definitely to be held tightly.

But letting her “flop around” might also be Gerry’s complaint of Tom, who, because of his inability to support her, lets her slip away to flop where anyone will let her, staying one night in a train car filled with gun-toting, drunken millionaires of the “Ale and Quail” Club, and literarily losing all her clothes. She has escaped the Club’s railroad car because of because they have taken up target practice with their rifles; the engineer orders the car that car to be uncoupled and left. By the next day at the she has been invited to be a guest in the palatial estate of America’s richest man, John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), an obvious jibe at John D. Rockefeller.

Tom is a ridiculous dreamer, an architect who is trying to build airplane landing nets that hang over downtown city streets! If he could only raise $99,000 to test it out!

Before her amazing voyage from New York to Palm Beach, the couple was about to lose their glamorous apartment, with the grocery bill is growing larger every day. Gerry, a long-legged beauty, insisted she could do something about it and packed her bags to prove her theory. Apparently, she was right, for just by standing in her bathroom in her wrapper the hilariously near-deaf Wienie King (Robert Dudley) handed her a substantial amount of money, and on her second day out Hackensacker has purchased an entire wardrobe for her, including a diamond bracelet, agreeing to invest in her brother-husband’s absurd invention. He’s clearly fallen for her, and when Tom shows up to claim his wife, Hackensacker’s sister, the Princess, is just as determined to claim Tom for herself.

The only problem is this irreverent marital comedy is that the two, Tom and Gerry, are still in love. The propulsion of the movie, accordingly, hinges on the strange question: What are we going to do about it? Who could resist the life styles of such rich and famous beings?

Fortunately, the would-be lovers are as ridiculously outsized as the comic-book pair at the center of this tale. As Hackensacker observes of the Princess: “You know Maude, somebody meeting you for the first time, not knowing you were cracked, might get the wrong impression of you.” Even she admits “Of course, I'm crazy, I'll marry anybody.” Her former “lover” Toto (the marvelous Sig Arno) gives evidence for that!

The more reserved Hackensacker is almost as hilariously absurd when he reveals to his sister that he determined to “bundle” with his wife just to test her out. His idea of romance is as ridiculously ancient as the actor who plays him, crooning to his sweetheart outside her window in the dark.

Tom and Gerry are not just a bit “screwy” because of their refusal to accept their marital bliss, but, as those viewers who have stayed attentive during the credits, they are perhaps not truly who either of them think the other is. By film’s end we come to realize that they are both identical twins, and that the intended wedding couple was hijacked from their own marriage plans. As in Mozart’s Cosi fan tutti, by film’s end we truly don’t quite know who was married to whom, as Tom and Gerry call their twins to their rescue, who marry the wealthy Hackensacker and Princess in their steads.

In such a world perhaps there is no true need for marriage, just love and sex. In the “real” world the Hays Office let the movie proceed only after its director-writer, Preston Sturges, reduced the number of Princess Centimillia’s marraiges to three (plus two annulments). One has to ask, is the film world or the real world more like a screwball comedy? For Sturges’ characters get everything they wanted: love, sex, and wealth! Or—as the film itself asks—do they? At least Tom can build his airport!

Los Angeles, January 16, 2011
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (January 2011).

BEVERLY HILLS HOUSEWIFE

2010-11-19T09:39:00.000-08:00

BEVERLY HILLS HOUSEWIFE
by Douglas Messerli

On Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 the world lost one its "great ladies"—as Earl Powell III, the former director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art once described Betty Freeman. She died in her Beverly Hills home at the age of 87 of pancreatic cancer.

Born as Betty Wishnick, the daughter of a wealthy chemical engineer, Betty grew up in Brooklyn and New Rochelle, New York before studying music at Wellesley College. Upon graduating, she married the investor Stanley Freeman, moving with him to Los Angeles, where they had four children.

Like so many wealthy citizens of Beverly Hills, Betty could have easily spent the rest of her life as the "housewife" type as David Hockney had portrayed her, a woman living in relative ease in her well-appointed home. And, in fact, Betty remained in that famed house for the rest of her life.

Yet Betty was anything but the iconic image Hockey had portrayed in his 1966 painting. In 1964, two years earlier, she met the American composer and inventor of unusual instruments, Henry Partch, who was living in his car. Freeman provided him with a studio and covered his living expenses for ten years until his death in 1974. She had already taken a great interest in contemporary music, and in 1961 contributed to the bail out of Fluxus composer La Monte Young, who had been arrested on marijuana charges in Connecticut. He responded by dedicating a work to her.

The same year that she encountered Partch, she became the producer of a new music series at the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon Museum of Art). In 1969, she underwrote Partch's opera Delusion of the Fury at the University of California, Los Angeles. And so began a philanthropic endeavor that included support to most of the great experimental composers of her time, including Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Harrison Birtwistle, Steve Reich, Lou Harrison, Kaija Saaiaho, and John Adams, whose opera Nixon in China was dedicated to her.

While producing a documentary about Partch in 1972, she was asked to help with the photographs, which resulted in a new career of photographing noted musicians, works later shown in galleries and published in several books.

In the early 1980s Betty began celebrating her musician friends through salons in her Beverly Hills home. My companion Howard and I attended several of those events, including one for John Adams, an event celebrating a series of pieces written for singer Joan LaBarbara, a performance of works by Gordon Getty, and others. Being able to hear the composer and performers in the intimate space of a large living room was a memorable experience, and Howard and I always felt saddened when we were unable to attend. After these Salotti, Betty's second husband, the Italian artist Franco Assetto, would serve up large bowls of pasta and salad, accompanied by various drinks. Guests would mingle, discussing what they had just heard with one another, the composers, and performers. It was at one such event that I first met director Peter Sellars. The salons ended with Assetto's 1991 death.

Over the years Betty became a dear friend who, at times, would invite us over for small dinners, usually with one or two others. I recall one evening she invited us upstairs to her bedroom to listen to Nixon in China.

While Freeman was a magnanimous individual, with the ability to inspire a true dedication to the new, she was not without her eccentricities. People who attended more traditional concerts with her found her intolerant of older work. And in the last years of her life she had seemingly abandoned American composers for contemporary European figures, the fact of which understandably upset many friends.

In October or November of 2006, Betty called me, suggesting a luncheon to discuss some new projects she was considering publishing. The day of the luncheon she called, saying she had just broken her foot! We met, accordingly, at her home a few weeks later on December 28.

The glorious Beverly Hills home had been radically altered. We dined on excellent carry-in food, but the kitchen was overwhelmed by piles of dirty dishes. Obviously, the maid had not been in for several days. The grand hallway was filled with piles of photographs and various applications for musical aid.

She took me upstairs to her study. She had three books which she was interested in publishing. One was a semi-critical study of the art of her friend Sam Francis, the second a collection of interviews by music critic Alan Rich of the figures who had appeared in her Salotti, and the third a book of reproductions of visually entertaining faxes sent to her over the years by director Robert Wilson.

I explained to her that I was not the right publisher to do the Francis book, but that the other two were interesting projects, particularly the interviews with the musicians. She seemed, however, more engaged in placing musicians within the context of her salons (each section was introduced by the salon invitation, often hand-corrected and of little visual interest) than in Rich's interviews with the artists.

A call to Alan Rich revealed that he had been somewhat frustrated by Betty's focus, and that he would rather move ahead with the book without her. I had lunch with him a few weeks later, and we signed an agreement for the work in which we would explain the context of these interviews in an introduction rather than reproduced invitations.

Betty was still interested, however, in publishing the Wilson book—which she wanted to be published in the size of the large 8 x 12 faxes (an idea from which I tried to dissuade her)—and called me in late March of 2008 proposing another meeting which, unfortunately, because of my procrastination and my own illness soon after, never took place.

Our last encounter with Betty was at the opening on May 9, 2007 of "Dan Flavin: A Retrospective" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Betty, in a wheelchair propelled by a young man, was radiating with joy from the artist's fluorescent tubes of blood-red lights. "Isn't this just glorious?" she rhetorically asked. She literally glowed against the banks of Flavin's lights, convincing me, in fact, that everything was glorious. I leaned over to kiss her as she almost giggled with delight.

Betty has one of the most gracious women I have even known, a woman who had a passion for life, and who was a grand and original philanthropist who contributed to music and art not only with money, but with her heart.

Los Angeles, January 13, 2009
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (January 2009).

FROZEN IN THE ACT

2010-09-07T07:57:00.000-07:00

Thomas Eakins, "The Swimming Hole," 1884-1885

George Bellows, "42 Kids," 1907

Thomas Eakins, "Salutat," 1898

Cathy Opie, "Josh," 2007

Cathy Opie, "Football Landscape #5," 2007

Thomas Eakins Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins, Los Angeles County Museum of Art / July 25 - October 17, 2010
Cathy Opie Figure and Landscape, Los Angeles County Museum of Art / July 25-October 17, 2010

One might well argue that all representational portraiture is a kind of frozen art, a work documenting a second in the life of the individual or individuals portrayed. Even surrounded by the objects and costumes of a entire lived life, or represented with emblems that suggest the ideals or behavior of that life, such painting is, as the early abstract experimenters so entirely perceived, basically "dead." Yet there is something about the works of American artist Thomas Eakins as gathered in the titled "Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins," brilliantly curated by Ilene Fort, that particularly evokes a sense of freezing instantaneousness of that moment that makes one almost want to look away because it is so revealing of the painter's own sensibilities.

Eakins, as we know, was also a photographer, and that obviously effected his paintings. But it is not just the snapshot quality of the paintings here on display, but what lies behind these images which all, in one way or another, represent the male body at the moment of its greatest beauty and muscular display in the form of swimmers, boaters, wrestlers, and other male pairings and groupings, most represented as images of male desire and, symbolically speaking, lovemaking itself.

One need only compare the mix of young and older swimmers in Eakins's The Swimming Hole (1884-1885) with George Bellow's 42 Kids of 1907. For Bellows the children, painted as something closer to sticks than real-bodied beings, represent a series of ideologically-loaded statements, including their social status (these children have no pool in which to swim), their pastoral enjoyment in the act, and the simple joys of being children. Eakins' is a far more complex image in that the bodies are most definitely men of flesh and blood, and gathered as they, young and old together, the artist flirts with numerous suggestions of sexual interconnections. In the Bellows' painting the children gather in a near-mass forward-leaning motion as they ready to throw themselves from the broken-down pier. Only two of Eakins' figures have dived into the waters, the rest gradually wading in or standing almost relaxed poses upon the solid brick wall, demonstrating their beauty and prowess, one rising figure seemingly reaching out for another's ass.

The latter is basically a study in youthful innocence, while the Eakins is a representation of a kind of Arcadian world in which the men and boys enjoy not only the water, but one another's company and, by extension, their bodies. In short, while Bellows' work may freeze the motion of the energetic children, Eakins' painting catches them in a moment that is closer to something suggesting love or even lust.

Similarly, the far more innocent moments, such as those depicted in The Biglin Brothers Racing, captures the sexual energy of James and Bernard Biglin against the backdrop of the large number of spectators the brothers drew to their events. In one race these world champions gathered a crowd of more than 20,000 to watch their physical expertise. So attracted was Eakins to the brothers that he painted them in a series of eleven works.

So too is the crowd essential to Eakins painting of 1898 Salutat, where a handsome boxer salutes the mostly male gatherers with a joyful extension of the hand, somewhat like a Roman gladiator, influence obviously by Eakin's teacher, Jean-Léon Gérôme. Here, the homoeroticism of the scene is made even more apparent, particularly given the water boy's attentive gaze upon the boxer's buttocks, and the overall joy of all the attending males for the gifts evident in the boxer's thin physique.

Wrestlers, acquired recently by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, even more clearly demonstrates what I am attempting to describe. In this work Eakins actually addressed the action of the event as he had done in The Biglin Brothers, but here the highly homoerotic grappling of the two fighters freezes them in the sportive act that might just as easily be perceived as a sexual embrace. In short, he has fixed them in the "act" itself, however one wants to define it. But there is no question that in these manly pursuits, there is little separation between body and act, the fact of which Eakins clarifies. To love the sport one must love the embodiment of the sport, the man. It is not just that these paintings point to Eakins' homoerotic desires (anyone who has read his biography and seen his many photographs can attest to that); rather what matters in these works is that in freezing the image of these sportsmen's bodies he makes that desire apparent; he clarifies what all the attention and the applause is truly about.

The act or action about which I am speaking, accordingly, is always simultaneously a representation of the sport and of the body, the object of love. That he accomplished this within a Puritan culture terrified of the body itself, speaks volumes about his own lack of recognition in his life.

A smaller "sideshow," one might call it, consists of a series of photographs by Los Angeles artist Tad Beck, strongly influenced by Thomas Eakins as a representative of queer history. Like Eakins, particularly in his Grafly Album, Beck arranges his male nude students in various choreographed scenes that suggest both an enactment of sports and, even more apparently than in Eakins' work, homosexual gatherings. Here the photograph is not only "frozen in the act," but frozen in time, representing a nostalgic look back upon the American artist and his period. Like Eleanor Antin's photograph representations of a nurse in the Crimean wars, so Beck's aesthetized images contain an element of camp in their own restatement of Eakins' more subtle depictions.

Accompanying these shows is photographer Cathie Opie's show "Figure and Landscape." Her images, mostly of young high school football players, are also about "manly pursuits," and cover much of the same ground as Eakins. But in the direct stares of her young players we do not see their sexuality as much as their adolescent fragility. These boys, particularly in photographs such as Adam and Josh, may wish to see themselves as sex heroes or at least highly masculine beings, but their youth and the immediate ferocity with which they face the camera belies deeper confusions and fears. Unlike Eakins, I would argue that here, even if caught "in the act," so to speak, the emphasis is on the spectacle, on the group rather than the numerous individuals we witness. Each individual presented appears fragile out of the crowd, so to speak, while Opie's larger images of the games themselves, all lit up against the nighttime landscapes, provide the true image of these games and their theatrical settings against the backdrops of small-town America. The several individual portraits portray boys caught "outside the act," and, accordingly represent males filled with confusion and doubt. It is only when they join the others "in the act," that their performances gather meaning, perhaps even a veneer of sexuality.

Los Angeles, August 30, 2010

A TORN CURTAIN

2010-08-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

Brian Evenson The Open Curtain (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2006).

Brian Evenson’s new novel, The Open Curtain, begins with what increasingly has become an almost predictable plot: a basically good boy—in this case the son a Mormon widow—at puberty begins to explore the past along with new ideas that gradually alter his personality. In this case the young Rudd uncovers a letter sent to his father by an unknown woman, claiming that he was the father of her son. Rudd’s father—who later committed suicide by slitting his own throat—denies any paternity, and when Rudd confronts his mother with the letter, she can only repeat the denial, claiming to have no knowledge of any such event.

The incident is forgotten for a while, but as some time passes, Rudd looks up the address written on the letter, uncovering his half-brother Lael. At first the boys, radically different from one another, do not particularly get on. Indeed, Rudd is frustrated by Lael’s lack of communication skills and, more importantly, his manipulation of Rudd as he maneuvers the two of them into increasingly dangerous situations. In one instance, for example, Lael determines that they drive Rudd’s scooter far beyond the point in which they will run out of gas and be forced to walk several miles in return. But it is precisely Lael’s going beyond the limits that both attracts and repels Rudd; being the psychologically weaker of the two, he cannot resist his brother’s entreaties. Rudd clearly feels a sense of near-powerlessness around Lael, with whom, as he rides clinging to him on the scooter, he seems gradually to develop an attachment that, if not actually homosexual, borders on the kind of relationship that one might compare to the famed Leopold-Loeb friendship, a love ending in a murder, explored from the various viewpoints of Hitchcock’s film Rope and Levin’s novel and play Compulsion.

It is not long before Rudd begins to lose faith in the church. An English class project for a research paper results in Rudd (and Lael, who joins his half-brother in later treks to the local university library) uncovering a turn-of-the-century murder of a woman, Anna Pultizer, by Mormon founder Brigham Young’s grandson. The murder, which implicates not only the young boy, Hooper Young, but his homosexual friend Elling, was also connected to a little known doctrine of Mormon theology—utterly denied by the church—of Blood Atonement, a doctrine that suggests when sinners have become so guilty of sin that they cannot be forgiven, a ritualistic murder (in which their throats are slit and blood, let to drain from their bodies) is not only justifiable, but that the murderer may be forgiven and awarded in the Mormon afterlife. With its mysterious story and its gruesome details, it becomes quickly apparent why two young Mormon boys, in a time of confusion and disbelief, might become fascinated with the tale; but the mystery surrounding the form of the murder and the relationship between Young and Elling attracts the boys in ways that might be inexplicable if Evenson had not carefully developed his story to suggest both their own relationship to one another and to their dead father. The books in Rudd’s father’s home library are marked, moreover, with marginalia on the very pages describing the Mormon Blood Atonement theory!

Before long, Rudd is having difficulties in school and, more importantly, in paying close attention to anything around him. He and Lael are somewhat involved in drugs, but what is even more horrifying are the long stretches of time in which Rudd later can remember nothing, periods which he describes as “blackouts” or “holes” in time. Part one of this sophisticated horror tale ends with the boys together on an adventure in the woods, with Rudd feeling “himself crowded out of his senses and into oblivion.”

The second section quickly shifts the action to the aftermath of a multiple murder of campers, their bodies placed carefully in positions suggesting a ritualistic act. There is only one survivor, a young boy whose neck has been severely cut. The daughter of the murdered family—who had stayed home during the camping trip—is strangely attracted to the survivor, a boy close to her own age, and watches over his comatose recovery. As the police are pulled away from his protection—the murderer still at large—the girl, Lyndi, pulls him into another room and watches over him until he finally awakens. The survivor is Rudd.

No perceptive reader observing the developing relationship between the daughter of the victims and Rudd can move forward in this tale without great discomfort, for we know instinctively that Rudd was in some way involved with the deaths. Strangely, we have no choice now but to hope that Lael—the evil twin, so to speak—is the guilty party, that Rudd will somehow be brought back into sanity. Rudd has, however, no memory of the events.

After a period in which Lyndi’s aunt encamps within the family home, hoping to cheer up her grieving niece, but having quite the opposite effect, Lyndi is only too happy to let Rudd, whose mother has forced him to escape his own home, move in with her; the two set up an awkward household outwardly, perhaps, suggesting a sexual relationship, but, in fact, consisting of a kind of brother-sister or roommate situation. Rudd is painfully confused, sometimes gentle and solicitous, clearly feeling the need to protect his new friend, but at other times he remains aloof, secretive and protective. He insists that she never enter his (formerly her sister’s) room uninvited. As time passes, the two grow further apart until Lyndi confronts him, ending in Rudd’s attempted suicide and his insistence that they get married.

The Mormon marriage ceremony described is perhaps one of the strangest passages in the book. As the couple, who have previously remained outside of church ritual, are taken through the various steps of the ceremony—the ritual washing, the awarding of a secret name, the various questions asked as they sit on opposite sides of a veil marked with symbolic slits in positions not unlike those in which Lyndi’s family were placed by their murderer—the reader feels nearly suffocated by being enwrapped in such ritualistic acts. The couple themselves seem about to flee, as Rudd, breaking with the ceremony, denies Lyndi the use of her “secret” name Rachel, insisting it is Elling—and, in so doing so, feels he has cheated the blessing of the church, has torn the veil.

But if Lyndi is merely confused by the event, we know that within Rudd’s mind the symbolism of that veil is interwoven with the events of both the 1902 murder and the murders of Lyndi’s family; and the two begin to converge in a way that becomes increasingly frightening. As Rudd and Lyndi attempt to begin life as a married couple, he retreats even further, ultimately moving into a kind of makeshift tool shed, the entrance of which he has now covered over in a veil—a real sheet that serves as a symbolic separation from the world at large. As Lyndi grows more and more troubled by the course of events, she explores the shed, realizing in the process that Rudd was indeed involved in her parent’s murder and discovering something that is too horrible for words.

The third section of Evenson’s unholy trinity relates a near-surrealistic series of events in which Hooper’s murder of Anna Pultizer, his determination to hide the body, and his attempt to send off her clothes in a large chest is played out again and again, as each time Rudd—living like a drugged man in a time warp—is coached by "Elling," actually Lael, apparently have returned. Gradually, the reader realizes that the seemingly murdered body is, in fact, Lyndi, still living perhaps, but bound and suffering as the boy enacts, again and again, the events from the distant past. When suddenly the deus ex machina return of Lyndi’s aunt interrupts this horrific passion play, Rudd refuses to let her enter, and Lael/Elling announces his departure. At that very moment, we suddenly are faced with the possibility that, in fact, there has been no Lael, no half-brother, ever in Rudd’s life (Lyndi has previously sought out the brother, who insists his name is Lyle—an incident repeated from Rudd’s first encounter with the boy—and that he has no knowledge of Rudd), or, even worse, he has been himself sacrificed to Rudd’s horrific myth. With the policeman in tow, Lyndi’s aunt gains entry to the house, but neither she nor we know what she may find. Even if Lyndi is still alive, we perceive that Rudd has lost his life to the demons of the past. We can only imagine that he sits somewhat like Psycho’s Norman Bates, wrapped in a sheet, living in a world from which he can never return.

Evenson has created a compelling horror tale that is not as much an indictment of Mormonism as it is a warning of the dark sides of all religions and the willingness to (con)fuse the power of faith with the power of controlling other people’s lives.

Los Angeles, September 21, 2006
Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, IV, no. 2 (April 2007).

LOOKING FOR LOVE

2010-08-26T08:16:00.000-07:00

Nathanael West Miss Lonleyhearts in The Complete Works of Nathanael West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957)

Preparing to teach an MFA course on American Satires at the Otis College of Art + Design in the Fall, I recently reread Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933).

I had remembered better than I thought I might. I had correctly recalled from a youthful reading that the major character, a male newspaper writer assigned the job of answering letters from the love-stricken and forlorn, becomes increasingly forlorn himself and ultimately becomes depressed as he attempts to honestly answer these anonymous epistles of distress. Moreover, I had remembered the spiritual demise of the "hero," as he becomes more and more entrapped in the cynical lies of his own world—a world partly of his own making, pointed up by the very fact that the feature editor, Shrike, Miss Lonelyhearts' boss, has assigned the job as a joke. In short if the newspaper's advice to a suffering public cannot be taken seriously, what can be said of its reporting of city and world events; are their reports also jokes? And if so, where does any notion of reality begin. It is no wonder that Miss Lonelyhearts falls deeper and deeper into despair until in a feverish vision he rushes out of his room into the arms of death in the form of a vengeful husband of a woman with whom our "hero" has (somewhat unwillingly) had sex.

But this time around, I also saw what I perceive as a somewhat deeper structure to the book. I kept thinking, as I moved forward in the plot, of a popular song (not one of my favorites) made famous by country western singer Johnny Lee. One phrase will suffice to remind the reader of the piece: "I was looking for love in all the wrong places / looking for love in too many faces." For that is just what Miss Lonelyhearts does throughout West's masterwork. It is almost as if the moment he has become assigned the job of responding to his audience's tales of heartbreak, that he himself begins to seek out love, while brutally rejecting it, failing just as miserably as do his readers.

His first vague encounter with the possibility of "love" is with the all-male gathering of fellow workers and friends at Delehanty's speakeasy after work, where Shrike and others mock his job:
Miss Lonelyhearts, my friend, I advise you to give your readers stones. When they ask for bread don't give them crackers as does the Church, and don't, like the State, tell them to eat cake. Explain that man cannot live by bread alone and give them stones.

Despite his superior's cynical advice and the writer's attempt to laugh at himself, Miss Lonelyhearts realizes: "He had given his readers many stones; so many, in fact, that he had only one left—the stone in his gut."

Still, he sits down with these men, attempting, if nothing else, to engage them in conversation, to participate in a kind of male camaraderie at the very least. Soon, as these men become drunker and drunker, they spill out onto the streets where they buy a lamb to sacrifice. The men only half-kill the poor beast and Miss Lonelyhearts, after begging them to put the lamb out of its misery, is forced to go back and crush its head with a stone. Almost immediately in this work, West reveals the violence behind almost all actions in this society, and the inability of more caring individuals, which Miss Lonelyhearts would like to be, to prevent it.

His second encounter is with Betty, his girlfriend, who it is clear is not at all suitable for the writer. As he describes her, she is "Betty the Buddha," a unmoved woman, smilingly and smugly judging his every act. What begins as an attempt to find some rapport, ends, once more, in a kind of violence, abusive language, followed by tears and the order for him to leave.

The next adventure in this "Looking for Love" tale is even more brutal as, once more with his speakeasy friends, he encounters an older homosexual man waiting in a public bathroom. The group entices the man to join them. After toying with him for awhile, joking about the psychologists Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, the men begin to get ugly, particularly Miss Lonelyhearts. As the man begins to sob, Miss Lonelyhearts falls upon him: "He was twisting the arm of all the sick and miserable, broken and betrayed, inarticulate and impotent. He was twisting the arm of the Desperate, Broken-hearted, Sick-of-it-all, Disillusioned-with-tubercular-husband." As the old man screams, someone hits Miss Lonelyhearts over the head with a chair.

It is not unusual, I should mention, for highly-closeted individuals such as Miss Lonelyhearts seems to be, to turn their frustrations and violence upon those who are more sexually open.

His next stop, a swing to the opposite sex, is to visit his arch-enemy's wife. Mary Shrike, hating her husband, is only too happy to accommodate him; but the sex is empty, and leaves him even more lonely: "Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile." Later Mary invites him back to the house, and he agrees to return, finding a diffident Shrike at home. The two, Mary and Miss Lonelyhearts go out on the town, but when they return she no longer will let him kiss her, and they are greeted at the door with Shrike in only his pajama top.

Within this dizzying spiral of failed love is Miss Lonelyhearts' meeting with one of his readers, Fay Doyle, a woman who literally entraps him and forces her love upon him.

A field trip and even a short stay in the country with Betty does not cure him. Upon his return, he meets with Fay Doyle's crippled husband, who—in the very language of Miss Lonelyhearts' letter-writing sufferers—pleads with him to help him regain some self respect, follows. That outcry finally begins to awaken something in the failed would-be lover; the newspaperman finally finds someone with who he can share his love:

...Doyle's damp hand accidentally touched his under the table. He jerked it away, but then drove his hand back and forced it to clasp the cripple's. After finishing the letter, he did not let go, but pressed it firmly with all the love he could manage. At first the cripple covered his embarrassment by disguising the meaning of the clasp with a handshake, but he soon gave
in to it and they sat silent, hand in hand.

It is only after this homoerotic experience that Miss Lonelyhearts is prepared to give in to the easy "normality" that stands as a false image of true love. He agrees to marry Betty, attended with all the legalistic decision-making of any new partnership: she agrees to have a child, he agrees to see a friend about a job. "...They decided to have three beds in their bedroom. Twin beds for sleep, very prim and puritanical, and between them a love bed, an ornate double bed with cupids, nymphs and Pans." It is clear that love will be more a symbol in that household than an everyday reality.

Once he has settled for this image of normality, however, a fever rises in him like a furnace to reveal what no one in this fiction has previously seemed to comprehend: the spiritual force (he names it as Christ) he has been searching for is life and light! His search for love has always been undertaken in confusion and the dark, never openness and honesty. In something close to a recognition of a new sexuality, Miss Lonelyhearts (who in an earlier draft was named, but in the final version is described only his female moniker) is prepared to rush down the stairs and embrace Doyle, who has just rung the bell.

God had sent him so that Miss Lonelyhearts could perform a miracle and be certain of his conversion. It was a sign. He would embrace the cripple and the cripple would be made whole again, even as he, a spiritual cripple, had been made whole.

He rushed down the stairs to meet Doyle with his arms spread for the miracle.

Confused and frightened by the rushing man, Doyle attempts to escape, but in their fall, accidentally it appears, shoots him with a gun he has wrapped within a newspaper. The false, the dark hypocrisy of that newsprint world of lies, wins yet again, destroying, evidently, any chance of life and light. And so ends West's brutal satire of love.

Los Angeles, July 19, 2010
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (July 2010).

WEARING THE GRIN

2010-07-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

from Wearing of the Grin

from Duck Amok

Michigan J. Frog

Michael Maltese (story), Chuck Jones (director) Rabbit of Seville / 1950
Michael Maltese (story), Chuck Jones (director) Wearing of the Grin / 1951
Michael Maltese (story), Chuck Jones (director) Rabbit Seasoning / 1952
Michael Maltese (story), Chuck Jones (director) Duck Amok / 1953
Michael Maltese (story), Chuck Jones (director) One Froggy Evening / 1955

With the death of film animator and director Chuck Jones on February 22, 2002, I decided to revisit several cartoon works by him, a joyful task which reminded me of my childhood, and gave me the opportunity to really watch these innovative and, often, abstract works of art.

Jones' long career, spanning work for Warner Brothers from 1933 to 1962, when his job was terminated for illegally working on the animated cartoon feature, Gay Purree, saw a complete transformation in the cartoon industry from realist-like images and cartoon characters to abstract and even surreal-looking backdrops and absurdist figures. From early characters such as Charlie Dog, Hubie and Bertie, and The Three Bears, Jones refined and transformed his art, creating such memorable figures as Claude Cat, Michigan J. Frog, Pepe LePew, the Road Runner, and Wile E. Coyote. Working with Michael Maltese, he also transformed the characters of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Elmer Fudd.

I watched about twenty of Jones' cartoons, but will focus on just a few in order to point to some of his remarkable transformations. In Rabbit of Seville (1950), for example, Jones and his staff took on the relationship of opera and animation more seriously than before as Bugs Bunny, chased by the gun-toting Elmer Fudd enter the domain, much like the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera, of an opera-going audience. The lyrics are a zany mix of nursery rhyme and doggerel:

[singing to Elmer outside the barbershop]
Bugs Bunny: How do?/Welcome to my shop/Let me cut your mop/Let me shave your crop/Daintily, daintily... Hey, you!/Don't look so perplexed/Why must you be vexed?/Can't you see you're next?/Yes, you're next, you're so next!

With manic shifts in character and scene, the two undergo battles of rising barber chairs, a scalp-massage timed to the music of Rossini, and numerous other hilarious interruptions as the befuddled conductor and orchestra blithely play on. As in other Jones cartoons, Bugs shifts in and out of gender, here ending the eternal battle between him and Elmer, briefly, by marrying him!

Wearing of the Grin (1951) features Porky Pig on his way to Dublin. In a heavy rain he finds himself still twelve miles away and decides to spend the night at the nearby castle, haunted, he soon discovers, by leprechauns, who eventually convene a court, trying him to "the wearing of the green shoes." Once Porky has put on the shoes, like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes, he cannot stop dancing and quickly enters a surreal, dream-like world made up by terrifying Irish smoking pipes, pots of gold, shamrocks and other Erin icons that consume and taunt him. When he awakens to be invited again into the castle, Porky suddenly remembers that he has another appointment—with his psychiatrist!

In 1952's Rabbit Seasoning, Fudd is again on the road to murder, as the self-assured Bugs and the increasing confused Daffy Duck join together to create a chaos of visual and linguistic signs that flummoxes the slow-minded Elmer. Their "Shoot me now" routine, right out of Laurel and Hardy, further confuses the would-be hunter, who by the end cannot even recognize his prey.

Bugs Bunny: Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?
Daffy Duck: Shoot him now! Shoot him now!
Bugs Bunny: You keep outta this! He doesn't have to shoot you now!
Daffy Duck: He does so have to shoot me now!
[to Elmer]
Daffy Duck: I demand that you shoot me now!
[Elmer shoots him.]
Daffy Duck: Let'sth run through that again.
Bugs Bunny: Okay.
[in a flat tone]
Bugs Bunny: Wouldja like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?
Daffy Duck: [flat tone] Shoot him now, shoot him now.
Bugs Bunny: [flat tone] You keep outta this. He doesn't hafta shoot you now.
Daffy Duck: [with sudden passion] Ha! That's it! Hold it right there!
[to audience]
Daffy Duck: Pronoun trouble.
[to Bugs]
Daffy Duck: It's not: "He doesn't have to shoot "you" now." It's: "He doesn't have to shoot "me" now." Well, I say he does have to shoot me now!
[to Elmer]
Daffy Duck: So shoot me now!
[Elmer shoots him]

Duck Amok (1953) is perhaps the quintessential Jones film. Here a slightly paranoid Daffy is delighted to have captured a role as a slightly mad musketeer, but the moment he attempts to enter the set, the scenery shifts, first to a farm, then to an igloo, later a Polynesian paradise, each with its own music. As he absurdly attempts to play along, things become even more impossible as, first the sound, then the scene, and, finally, he himself disappears. "Where am I?" he existentially pleads, trying to return the story to some semblance of order before being mixed and matched with all sorts of other figures dressed in outlandish mixes of costumes. A final frame reveals that the mad animator of this piece is none other than Bugs Bunny.

One of my very favorites is One Froggy Evening (1955) with the infamous Michigan T. Frog, who, discovered by a worker in a time capsule of a demolished building, suddenly springs to life singing and dancing—top hat on head, cane in hand—songs from ragtime and popular music. The amazed witness of this event suddenly envisions fame and money, and quickly runs off, time capsule in hand, to promote his new discovery. Yet every time he opens the box to others, the frog simply sits as a regular frog. Michigan will sing only for the man, who ultimately nearly loses his sanity before placing the box in the cornerstone of a new skyscraper.

After leaving Warner Brothers, Jones continued to work on his own, making the truly abstract cartoon, The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics and working with his friend Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) on How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966).

Jones' work. obviously, was simply funny to children, but his crazy battling characters, believing in the power of guns and all other forms of killing devices manufactured by the Acme Company, reveal to adults the kind of insanely absurd violence that dominated post-war America, helping us, perhaps, to laugh heartily at some of our deepest fears.

December 27, 2002

FLAGS AND LETTERS

2010-07-19T08:19:00.000-07:00

FLAGS AND LETTERS

William Broyles, Jr. and Peter Haggis (screenplay), based on the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers, Clint Eastwood (director) Flags of Our Fathers / 2006
Iris Yamashita (screenplay), Clint Eastwood (director) Letters from Iwo Jima / 2006

True to my pattern of doing things, I saw Clint Eastwood’s magnificent diptych, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima in early 2007 in the reverse order from which they were released. After seeing Flags of Our Fathers (the second film of my viewing), I observed to my mate, Howard, that had I seen that film first, I might not have been so eager to see its companion. That is not to say that Flags is not a significant film, but simply that, without the context of the more coherent and darker second work, it functions in a much more scatter-gun, even disjunctive manner that is simply not as fulfilling to its audience.

Actually I believe Eastwood has made an important statement in the structural differences between the two films. Recognizing these two works as opposing representations of the same series of incidents—the battles at Iwo Jima occurring from February 19 through March 24, 1945—we quickly perceive that the American version, Flags of Our Fathers, is presented from the viewpoint of how Americans in general perceived the event at the time, as part of a grand heroic effort to defeat the Japanese.

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s picture of six men hoisting the flag into position atop of Suribachi mountain quickly consolidated the actual battles into an icon of the hallowed values for which American soldiers were fighting. The three individuals in that picture who survived the Iwo Jima invasion, John “Doc” Bradley, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, accordingly, were immediately recognized as representatives of what most Americans sought, living manifestations of the heroism of their young men and women in World War II. Higherups, moreover, recognized these men as the perfect salesmen in the pitch for American War Bonds to raise monies desperately needed to continue the war effort.

The truth of these events was quite different. Forgetting for the moment that in a matter of 37 days nearly 30,000 men (6,891 Americans and close to 22,000 Japanese) had been killed and another 18,070 wounded, and focusing only on the famed photograph, there had in fact been two flag raisings, the first, a more instinctual act of claiming the island with a smaller flag tied with rope to a shell casing, the second, a military-ordered raising of a larger flag (to be rewarded to an observing congressman) carefully staged for the camera. Moreover, one of the men reported to have helped to raise the second, now iconographic flag, actually helped raise the first, and the name of a marine raising the second flag was omitted in military reports. The men who had survived the ordeal all recognized that there was little “heroism” in raising that second flag (or, for that matter, in raising the first), while the acts of all the soldiers—including their own—involved in actual battle represented what might really be thought of as heroic. Of the three survivors, Ira Hayes, of American Indian heritage, wanted nothing at all to do with the wartime pitch; the other two, medic Bradley and Gagnon—the latter presented as a naïve and somewhat dim-witted solider (assigned the position of a “runner”), participated with a sense of increasing disdain and distress for their ballpark reenactments and celebrity status.

In the American experience of the event there is little coherency. While the three soldiers relived nightmarish scenes from the battle, the public in general saw the battle only through the lens of a split-second photograph. The press conjured up “a truth” out of unrelated events (such as Gagnon’s marriage and Hayes’s apparent alcoholism) before completely dropping their coverage. It mattered little to the military, the press, or the public that these men’s lives had been utterly transformed or that perhaps their real heroism related less to the war than simply withstanding the onslaught of publicity heaped upon them.

Ultimately, it was left to their sons and daughters to piece together—through interviews and a book publication—any sense of reality of the Iwo Jima battle. Heroism, Bradley’s son suggests, was not a unifying force; it meant fighting with and saving, if possible, the men immediately closest to one in battle, protecting and saving one’s friends. For the individual soldiers, the public displays of nationalism were not what they had fought for. There is a strange (if predictable) homoeroticism to the young soldiers’ oceanside swim soon after the battles that Eastwood presents as the image of friendships behind some of these men’s heroic exploits.

The Flags version of Iwo Jima, accordingly, presented in disjunctive pieces and viewed from various angles and perceptions—from the viewpoints of individuals, friends, the military, the national public, the families, and history—is a narrative without the possibility of a unifying vision.

Contrarily, Letters from Iwo Jima reveals events primarily based on the letters of three soldiers writing their loved ones back home and other unmailed letters later discovered buried on the island, and for that reason presents a much more intimate portrait of military men, many of whom knew they were doomed to die in the battle.

Unlike the American presentation of the Iwo Jima slaughter, moreover, Letters has at its center two great military leaders, Lieutenant General Kuribayashi Tadamichi (stunningly portrayed by Ken Watanabe), commander of the Empire of Iwo Jima, and Baron Nishi.

Nishi, a great horseman, winner of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, and celebrity of Japanese culture, knew English and had befriended, before the war, numerous American film actors such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

Kuribayashi, assigned by Hideki Tojo to defend Iwo Jima, had spent part of his education in Canada, and, in 1928-29 served in the United States as a deputy military attaché, traveling throughout the country. Kuribayashi, accordingly, knew well the American state of mind, and through careful study of US military strategy, was able to determine on which shore the Americans would land. As opposed to the standard strategy of entrenching opposition soldiers near the landing point Kuribayashi catacombed the local mountains as a fortress, thus allowing for a longer survival time for his soldiers and a high ground from which to shoot and kill the American enemy.

Even though he was of samurai and aristocratic descent, and was one of the few soldiers who was granted an audience with Emperor Hirohito, Kuribayashi had opposed the war with the United States from the beginning and had fallen into opposition with numerous colleagues. According to scriptwriter Iris Yamashita and director Eastwood, moreover, he opposed the traditional self-immolation upon failure in battle, arguing that instead of destroying themselves, the troops should move forward or retreat to a place of better advantage.

One of the most terrifying scenes in both films is the reference to and depiction of the self-destruction of a Japanese platoon as, one by one, they discharge grenades against their heads or torsos. Two soldiers in that group do not choose to “die honorably.” One of the major figures of Letters, Saigo, formerly a student in Japan’s prestigious military school, along with Shimizu save themselves and, ultimately, rejoin Kuribayashi’s forces, only to be threatened with death by a lieutenant of the old school. Saigo’s and Shimizu’s lives are personally spared by Kuribayashi, representing, in Saigo’s case, the second of what will be three of Kuribayashi’s interventions on his behalf.

Eastwood painfully demonstrates the horrors of war when these two soldiers later determine to surrender. Shimizu escapes and is captured by the Americans, only to be killed by two American soldiers under whose protection he and another man have been assigned. Although there have been many films of the past that revealed the absurdity of war, the brutal killing of this young man by Americans reverberates in a way that can only call up similar shocking events in Viet Nam and our current Iraqi invasion. Americans, we have had to recognize, are not always the “good guys” we like to think they/we are.

In the United States it is amazing that Eastwood’s eloquently sympathetic presentation of enemy combatants has received so little negative reaction. Japan, one must recall, was one of the few countries ever to actually attack Americans on their own soil! Perhaps it is a testament to the director’s honesty and integrity. One wonders, moreover, how this film is being perceived in Japan, where it is still generally believed—although his body was never discovered—that Kuribayashi committed seppuku, the ritual suicide of the samurai. In Eastwood’s version the general dies before he can destroy himself, to be buried by the loyal Saigo, who, recognizing the general’s gun hanging from the belt of a conquering American, springs into his first actual attempt at combat with “the enemy” before he is quelled, to become one of the few Japanese survivors.

The letters, intimate communications between wives, sons, and others, create a coherency not to found in the American version of war. While the Japanese Kuribayashi goes to his death knowing that he has attempted to communicate with his beloved son Taro, for the American soldier Bradley, up until the last moments of his death, there is a feeling of having been dissociated from his own son, of having so buried the war within his own being that he has remained at a distance from one so loved. It appears, Eastwood suggests, that a culture that prefers flags to letters, a culture which offers up symbols as opposed to simple human expression—the culture of my own father—is doomed to estrangement.*

Los Angeles, January 19, 2007
Reprinted from Nth Position [England], February 2007.

___
* One must recognize that Japanese culture is also highly involved in and enchanted by symbols, a point Eastwood brings up in his film. As a young military student, Shimizu is commanded to enforce the rule that all houses display the Japanese flag, an incident which, when he also is commanded to destroy the family’s dog—an order he disobeys—results in his dismissal from military college and in his being posted to Iwo Jima. It is particularly notable, therefore, that the three major figures of Letters from Iwo Jima spend their last days in epistolary communication.

MIRROR IMAGE

2010-07-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

MIRROR IMAGE

George Axelrod (screenplay, based on a novel by Richard Condon), John Frankenheimer
(director) The Manchurian Candidate / 1962

Other than the Visconti film I discuss later in this volume, few films reflect the theme of this year’s volume, “love, death, and transfiguration,” more fully than John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate. Frankenheimer, who died on July 6th of this year, described the work as being centered around what he described as “double images.”And indeed, the film contains a good many of these, which I would prefer, however, to speak of as “mirror images,” images that, while revealing one reality also suggest or show its reverse, what might be perceived as the darker side of what the surface presents.

The return home of Raymond Shaw, for example, is, in one sense, the homecoming of a war hero, the supposed celebration of a man who has received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery in saving his patrol in the Korean War. Yet Raymond is clearly not at all approving of his step-father’s and mother’s “disgusting three-ring circus” to celebrate him, and we soon find out that, although described as a “hero,” a man referred to by his entire unit as “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I have ever known in my life,” he was scornfully dismissive of his underlings, was a man aloof from his fellow men.

We already know, from the film’s very opening scene, moreover, that although he has been awarded the medal for saving his men from capture that his unit was captured in Korea
in 1952, as the men, against army strategy, marched along a path in single file. And we gradually discover that the “loveable Raymond Shaw”—as one of his fellow men sarcastically describes him—is not even a hero, but was brainwashed along with his fellow men, forced to strangle fellow-soldier Ed Mavole, shoot their young “mascot,” Bobby Lembeck, and programmed to do the biddings of his handlers, foes of the American government.

One of the most famed of the mirror images of the film is represented in Frankenheimer’s brilliant presentation of these American soldiers in enemy hands—recalled in a dream of intelligence officer Ben Marco—as they sit in what seems at first to be an elegantly decorated room among a gathering of a lady's garden club that, upon the camera’s second pan around the room, reveals a room closer to an observatory operating room, wherein sit numerous male Communist officials (both Chinese and Russian), discussing their success at reconditioning their captives.

At the congressional session wherein Marco is serving as public relations officer, we see one of Frankenheimer’s most brilliant mirror images. As senator John Iselin interrupts the hearings with McCarthy-like charges of governmental ties with Communism, we observe the drama in the room—which gradually is reduced to a shouting match—while at the same time seeing it replayed, from a slightly different perspective, on a television monitor—a mirror image that would later become a staple in such politically-centered movies.

Although Marco speaks of Shaw—like the others—as a good man, he has nightly dreams that convey another truth, and admits to his superior that “It isn’t as if Raymond‘s hard to like, he’s impossible to like. In fact, he’s probably one of the most repulsive human beings I’ve known in my whole—in all of my life!”

The discovery by Marco that Chunjin, the former Korean guide, is now a butler working in Shaw’s apartment and the revelation of a letter from Al Melvin, another of the army patrol members, that parallels his own nightmares, finally forces him to act, informing his superiors of his and Melvin’s dream, being asked, in response, to identify the villains from two simultaneously projected sets of photographs—these representing double images more than “mirror” ones—some of bouncers, thugs, and normal individuals, the others of high-ranking members of the Communist party.

If Raymond is acerbic and intellectually aloof, we also discover that, for at least one year, he was a true Romantic, having fallen in love with the daughter of his mother’s political rival, Jocie Jordan.

The mother’s determination to end that relationship draws one to conclude that she is also someone who is not what she pretends to be, that her evident devotion to protecting her son has yet another manipulative element that becomes clearer as the film proceeds, as we ultimately discover that she is not at all the upright American conservative that she pretends be, but is a member of the Communist party devoted to their takeover—albeit on her terms—of the American government.

The intense play of doubles or mirror images turns tragically-comic in the penul-timate scenes of Frank-enheimer’s work where Iselin, dressed as Lincoln—a man in real life who was 6 feet, 4 inches tall—attempts to bend under a limbo stick. Having revealed that Raymond’s obedience is triggered by the Queen of Diamonds in a deck of cards, Frankenheimer almost transcends believability by having Jocie attend the party dressed as that playing card!

Love seems to win the day once again, as Raymond and Jocie run off to be married, but by now we recognize that it cannot end well, and we are hardly surprised when, soon after, he is ordered to kill Jordan, and in the process murders Jocie as well.

By this time, Raymond’s identity has been lost in the hall of mirrors of his ever-shifting desires and commands. And finally, dressed as a priest, Raymond both curses and saves himself by reversing his role of the assassin, killing not the intended target, the presidential candidate, but the “Manchurian candidates”—the individuals who have ordered the murder: his mother and father-in-law—before turning the gun upon himself, simultaneously destroying both the surface and mirror images, and by doing so, breaking through the looking glass.

The movie that has begun with a loud American marching band celebrating the return of a hero, ends in a solitary whimper of profanity as Marco utters Raymond’s eulogy (presenting the opposite, in many respects, of what he has seemed to be), ending with the words “Hell. Hell!”

Los Angeles, August 19, 2002

BETWEEN VISIONS

2010-07-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

I printed a few paragraphs from the essay below in My Year 2004 in a piece devoted to Marjorie Perloff, in whose course I first encountered the work of John Wieners. The essay was one of my first attempts to discuss contemporary poetry, and it reveals the graduate-student environment in which it was written. The essay was written at a time when postmodernism was just beginning to have an impact on literary texts and my own notions of postmodernism, moreover, were highly influenced by the course for which I wrote the essay, which would ultimately result in Marjorie Perloff’s important study, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage.

Consequently, I had decided not to republish the piece until news came last week that Wieners had collapsed on a Boston Street and died a few days later, on March 1, in Massachusetts General Hospital. Without any identification upon him, he lay in the hospital for several days, hooked up to a machine, until a worker traced a prescription in his pocket to a local pharmacy. Soon after, the hospital connected with John’s friends Jim Dunn and Charles Shively, who sat with him as he died.

I first met Wieners in the mid-1990s when Raymond Foye, who had edited Wieners’ Selected Poems in 1986, introduced me to him at a small press book fair in New York. I had previously communicated with Wieners and had published some of his poems in my 1994 volume, From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990, but I don’t believe John ever knew of the essay below. Nonetheless, he recognized my name, and, although he looked like a street derelict with his three-day beard and torn and ripped clothing, he spoke—as Fanny Howe described him—like a Southern gentleman: “Sir, it is so very nice to meet you,” he slightly bowed. The paradox was memorable, as if one were witnessing a true-life character out of a Damon Runyon novel.

I believe that I met him again a year later at the same affair, which I attended briefly for several years out of a sense of affiliation with these very small presses similar to mine years before. I believe Raymond invited him there each year—where he stood out as a sort of unexpected celebrity—to sell books and signatures that might bring the destitute Wieners a few needed dollars.

In 1996, Lewis Warsh sent me a manuscript which he had rediscovered in his files of Wieners’ 707 Scott Street, a mix of prose and poetry documenting John’s San Francisco life at the time of the legendary Hotel Wentley Poems. For the rights to that book, I paid Wieners $2,000—an exceptional sum for Sun & Moon Press to pay, given that we were always on the edge of bankruptcy; but I was pleased to be able to help John get by for several more months.

A year after its publication, I was invited by Boston poet Aaron Kiley to attend the first Boston Poetry Marathon, where I met Jim Dunn, who had been unofficially caring for Wieners. He, in turn, suggested that John and I meet, and I told him to tell John that I would take him to any restaurant he might choose in the city. Word came back, Wieners wanted to go to—Burger King! And so the three of us dined royally at his usual hangout—my treat!

I took several photographs of Wieners at the Burger King, but my camera’s battery must have been low, and none of them turned out. Soon after, Dunn took another photo of John at the same spot and sent me a copy, reproduced here.

It was hard to tell whether Wieners was extraordinarily coy and witty or simply uncomprehending and unable to verbally express himself. I chose to believe the former. Several times I tried to ask him if he had any other materials that remained unpublished, but each time he vaguely answered, brushing away any real response. Finally, upon the third try, he pointed up a hill, saying “There, there, I’m sure they’ve got some—all of my work. Up there!” Dunn explained that “up there,” was the publishing house, Houghton Mifflin!

As I have written elsewhere in these volumes, Wieners was an extremely important figure for me; it was while working on his poetry that I discovered the dozens of 1960s small presses and magazines in the Library of Congress that not only provided me with a history of small press publishing, but helped me to understand that I too might be involved in small press activity. And soon after, I began Sun & Moon: A Journal of Literature & Art, publishing my essay on Wieners in its second issue. Wieners’ poetry, with its mix of romantic idioms, gay slang, and postmodern techniques, struck a cord with my own poetic concerns.

Los Angeles, March 12, 2002
Revised July 2, 2008

BETWEEN VISIONS

John Wieners Ace of Pentacles (New York: James F. Carr and Robert A. Wilson, 1964)
John Wieners Selected Poems (New York: Grossman, 1972)

From the beginning of his career John Wieners has been a poet who experimented with poetic forms that we have come more recently to describe as Postmodern. As a student at Black Mountain College, Wieners, like other writing students, was inspired by Charles Olson’s influential Projectivist theories. In Wieners’ own poetry, however, Olson’s influence seems negligible. Rather, Wieners turned for moderns to the literary forbearers of Postmodernist poetic writing: Rimbaud, Stein, Apollinaire, Pound, and, to a lesser degree, Williams. In short, we can observe in both Wieners’ poetry and his few theoretical statements that he discovered a personal mode which grew out of a process of trial and error based on conscious imitation. In fact, Wieners’ early poetic attempts are fascinating, not only because they tell us something of the development of his own theory and art, but because they parallel much of the poetic development in the twentieth century which only in the past few decades have we come to see as a poetics which stands at odds and often in opposition to the theories and work of such men as Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens, all dominant writers of the first half of that century.

Wieners’ earliest poetry, for example, especially The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), was written from a perspective akin to Rimbaud’s. In his 1965 “Address to the Watchman of the Night,” Wieners explains that the creative energy behind this early poetry had its genesis in a need

To explore those dark eternals of the nightworld: the prostitute, the dope addict, thief and pervert. These were the imagined heroes of my world: and the orders of my life. What they stood for, how they lived, what they did in the daytime were the fancies of my imagination. And I had to become one of them until I knew.

We perceive from the beginning that Wieners’ desire for a life ordered according to what he recognizes as an inverted world, owes much to Rimbaud’s “raissonné de tous les sens.” In this early poetry Wieners consciously sought out a world that would allow him to explore exactly that which Rimbaud asserts that the voyant must: “Toutes les forms d’amour, de souffrance, de foile.” The Wentley poems present a world of tortured homosexual love and drugged insanity that one cannot help but compare with Une Saison. We can hardly be surprised, therefore, that as recently as his 1972 preface to Selected Poems Wieners advocates a poetry “dependent of question, producing revelatory postures for men, animals and stars,” or, that he asserts that “the poet is one pastor of [a] distribution between two visions,” that he defines one of poetry’s forms as a “transformation by fire.”

All of these can be traced back to Rimbaud’s theory as expressed in his well-known letter to Demeny of 1871:

…the poet is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, even for animals; he will have to have his inventions smelt, felt and and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form, he gives form; if it is formless, he gives formlessness.

However, in Wieners’ own poetry this comparison does not appear to be sustained. Whereas Rimbaud’s Saison creates a world so completely disorienting that the reader is forced to drop all previous notions of value, Wieners’ poetry relies for its effect upon the values the reader brings to the poem.

A poem such as “To H,” for example, depends upon the reader’s traditional expectations.

I like Sunday evenings after you’re here.
I use your perfume to pretend you’re near
in the night. My eyes are bright, why
can’t I have a man of my own?

Your wife’s necklace’s around my neck
and even though I do shave I pretend
I’m a woman for you
You make love to me like a man.

Even though I hear you say why man
he doesn’t even have any teeth
……………………………………
I make it up to you in other ways.

I will write this poem.

As critic Marjorie Perloff has noted of this work, “After the opening tum-ti-tum stanza, it comes as something of shock to learn that the person who wants a ‘man of my own’ is himself a man, that his lover is married, that the poet tries to impersonate a woman so as to attract her husband….” In fact, it is this “shock” effect which gives the poem its power. Through his use of hackneyed rhymes (“here,” “near,” “night,” "bright"), the sing-song rhythms of the first two lines and the lament of the fourth line, Wieners encourages us to expect that the rest of the poem will fulfill the requirements of a popular love song. Even when the “shock” occurs, we are not made to question our own values. Indeed, the poet asks us to remain within our own value systems as voyeurs of sorts, for it is only as somewhat disparaging observers that we can see the humor of the situation, and it is upon that humor which the poignancy of the last line and the poem as a whole relies. As Perloff perceives, “…any such impersonation is doomed to failure…” Thus we find the situation somewhat ludicrous, and as we do we are made to see the inevitable loneliness and sadness of the figure at the center of this work; and it is only through this perception that we come to sympathize.

“To H,” accordingly, has little of Rimbaud’s transformative power. In Wieners we are not made to participate in a deranged world; we are merely asked to listen to the self-disparaging cries and open our hearts to the figure caught in such a world. Wieners himself has since rejected the “là-bas” of which Rimbaud would have the poet write: “I know now that ‘the dark eternals of the nightworld’ are only deprivations of the self, not further extensions of its being: manifestations of want, denial and betrayal” (in Donald M. Allen and Warren Tallman, eds., The Poetics of the New American Poetry). Such a statement shows us that, as Gilbert Sorrentino recently suggested, Wieners is at heart much closer to Baudelaire than to Rimbaud. Nevertheless, Rimbaud’s influence should not be underestimated, particularly since Wieners’ mature work owes much to Rimbaud’s ability to transform objects and landscapes into an almost surrealistic world infused by process.

The most fascinating aspect of Wieners’ poetry, I would suggest, is not the question of whether or not he has been directly influenced by Rimbaud, but the fact that in this early period he was drawn to such poets and was in his personal life and theory influenced by their work while simultaneously embracing modernist values when it came to his own writing.

This is particularly apparent in Wieners’ “imitations” of other poets. In “The Windows,” the poet has taken Apollinaire’s “Les Fenêtres” and seemingly translated the French, concretizing the images and a few of the lines (for example, “Abatis de pihis” appears in Wieners as “A bat is pinned to a tree.”), changing some colors, adding an occasional negative (“Nous l’enverrons en message téléphonique” becomes in Wieners “We cannot take calls by telephone), and altering some personal pronouns, adjectives, etc. On the surface, it is exactly the kind of poem that literary historians love to point to as an “apprentice piece,” a work written in the formative years in imitation of a previous “master.” This can be said as well of Wieners’ “The Magic of This Summer June 23, 1963,” wherein a stanza such as

The sense of continuity entirely destroyed by many
new senses, continually destroyed by many new
shapes o continually destroyed, o many new sphere,
many life entirely destroyed, continued by
many spheres, entirely lost, o continually destroyed
many lost by more o continually new generation,

with its shifting repetitions, reads like a parody of Gertrude Stein. In poems such as “Times Square” or “A Dawn Cocktail,” we see obvious imitations of Pound’s Imagism, modeled after “In a Station of the Metro.” In each of these cases we can see Wieners’ experimentation with a poetry moving towards and defining something akin to what we now call Postmodernism.

Wieners’ poetry, accordingly, would seem to be exemplary of the contemporary poetics. In a poem such as “A Poem for Cocksuckers” we can see nearly all the elements by which critics such as Charles Altieri have defined Postmodernism: preference of “the direct, the personal, the local, the anti-formal, and the topical." These are particularly explicit in the poem’s first stanza:

Well we can go
in the queer bars w/
our long hair reaching
down to the ground and
we may sing our songs
of love like the black mamma
on the juke box, after all
what have we got left.

The narrative “we” directly presents us with a specific scene, a gay bar, and that specificity is established by a language which is at once colloquial and topical. Words such as “queer bars,” “black mamma,” “juke box,” and, in the next stanza, “fairies” and “nigger’s world,” and the informality of tone call up this scene. However, the specificity is of a type, not a particular. Indeed, we are given few visual images. Just as in “To H,” “A Poem for Cocksuckers” is a poem that calls for reader participation. We have been warned by the title itself that this poem is a poem “for cocksuckers.” Wieners presumes, obviously, that any reader is thereby included in the type. Indeed, the gay scene which we are now part of is established by stereotypes, by words charged with negative societal values, values which some of the readers, in fact, might bring to the poem. The few visual images with which we are presented only reinforce these stereotypes. “Our long hair reaching to the ground” is, quite obviously, a topical reference to the late 1950s and '60s when societal reaction to long hair was most vocal. Images such as “On our right the fairies / giggle in their lacquered voices & blow / smoke in your eyes….” Phrases such “It is all here between / powdered legs & / painted eyes of the fairy / friends….” are also emotionally charged in a way that necessarily brings up negative connotations. As part of this world, therefore, we are also stereotyped: we are “cocksuckers.” While we have been brought into this place, moreover, we are simultaneously alienated from it. We are made to see it truly as a “nigger’s world,” a world which is brought to detest itself.

Yet that is not at all the feeling we get from the rest of the poem. The second stanza tells us of the “gifts” that “do not desert us, / fountains do not dry / up there are rivers running / mountains / swelling for spring to cascade.” The poem has suddenly shifted to a more lyrical tone which draws us away from the specific scene and makes us think in a symbolic context that is very unlike the beginning. Here “gifts” represent both “our” mental abilities to transform this negative experience into something creative and suggests “our” sexual organs which await release. Even when we are brought back into the specific gay bay world with the lines, "friends who do not fail us / in our hour of despair,” the symbolic associations remain. Although , we are specifically pointed out the phalluses of “our” "fairy friends,” it remains purposely unclear whether it is the sex itself that saves us from despair or whether it is the experience

imaginatively recalled that gives us value—or both. But almost before we can ask this question, we are left alone as suddenly the poet enters the poem in the first person, and lyrically calls upon us to “…Take not / away from me the small fires / I burn in memory of love.”

The effect of this sudden emotional command is that the “I” which we have felt has been guiding us all along removes himself from the specific scene and leaves us there, almost as a jilted date. Wieners turns on us and calls upon us both as outsiders who would deny him his love through our stereotyped vision of him, and, now, as insiders who would take his “lover” away, imploring us like the “black mamma” of the juke box to let him live his life with the small pleasure he has left intact. This is a brilliant maneuver, but as a tactic it is far more Modernist than Postmodernist. This last outburst leaves the reader behind, while the poet, again in metaphorical language, states his meaning. The reader has been somewhat “manipulated” into participating; he has been “used” to say something rather than asked to share in the poem-making process.

The direct presentation, we must feel, has only been a sort of decoy to involve the reader in what is actually a tightly controlled construct.

Altieri has asserted that the philosophical foundation of Postmodernism is the belief that value and meaning are immanent in nature, “that God…manifests himself as energy, as the intense expression of immanent power.” For the Postmodern “…value is not mediated but stems from a direct engagement with the universal forces of being manifest in the particular….” This idea is close to what Pound expressed in his Imagist and Vorticist theories, and what Williams was later to summarize in Patterson as “no ideas but in things.” Having been brought up with these theories, Wieners, as we have seen, seemingly supports them. Ostensibly, it is the process of poem-making, not the finished product, with which Wieners is most concerned. “A poem does not have to be a major thing,” Wieners wrote in Donald M. Allen’s 1960 New American Poetry anthology. “Poetry even tho it does deal with language is not a more holy act / than, say, shitting.” Two lines later, however, comes a question which, I suggest, is at the heart of the contradictions we have thus far observed in Wieners’ work. He begins with the Postmodern assumption that poetry is a “Manifesting of process…,” but he is not sure of what process it is a manifestation: “Is it life? Or action between this and non-action?” He continues, “For to take up arms against the void is attack, and the price of / was / is high.” For a poet and theorist like Pound there would be little question here. Poetry was for Pound a manifesting of the process of life because it was life itself which was in process. But Wieners suspects a void. Wherein then does the immanence lie? From where does the process issue? The Postmodernist necessarily believes in the material reality of the world around him, for it is primarily that reality which gives meaning and/or value. Ideally, the Postmodern poet demonstrates, restates, or clarifies the process that is already active in the world of objects. Wieners seems to be inferring that it is in the poet alone that meaning is immanent, that the process issues not from the world but from the poet. We are getting closer here to a Modernist orientation akin to Wallace Stevens’ in which the poet imposes meaning upon an otherwise dead or meaningless universe.

This same pattern can be observed in Wieners’ imitations previously described. “The Magic of This Summer,” for example, has all the superficial characteristics of a Stein work. It is, as in most of Stein’s writing, a direct statement wherein what is stated is given a sense of process by the use of present tense, active verbs, and by shifting repetitions. This latter, especially, gives us the sense of a cubistic perspective, for each time an idea is repeated it is slightly altered—either the construction is changed or a word has been added or subtracted—so that it is given a slightly different emphasis. All of this is at work in Wieners’ poem, but, once more, he uses this Postmodern-like technique to present a dialectic between Modernist and Postmodernist issues, to discuss issues of form which eventually contradict the form itself.

Wieners’ question in this poem is, once again, “Where does meaning or value reside?” The poet begins with a seemingly Postmodern position: “Form to be given / declared at any moment by what lies outside of us, and within us”; “the form declares / shape, given, of any, this moment, everything / declares itself in the moment, hidden in the declaration / of life, this moment, remains entirely given.” Suddenly, however, he remembers an event from the past, and he realizes that “this means, you are to be given, at any moment, / the fragments of past life.” “It seems,” therefore, “there is nothing, entirely given over the any moment,” because the moment can return. This is indeed a troubling concept, for if “The hand of the maker carves everything to be,” then, “For its own being, will come our shape. Form declares / itself. / In the given moment / In every living being.” This means that there is nothing more to be declared “at any given moment.” In being, everything “is given over to the moment.” “…Life is not over,” but “There is not more to be given.” If this is true, Wieners perceives, he must surrender his constructs of value to being; he must give up his “castle in the sand, on the beach, o the castles surrendered, / in my air.” But how can it be that everything is given when “still my life, by back life given many more days?”

The rest of the poem, accordingly, is a struggle to find continuity between the past and being, between value immanent in nature-in-process and values that we impose on nature or are given to us from the past. By the end of the poem, Wieners has been able to unite them in the “continual reality; expressed in the afternoon window,” and the heat, trees, and sun. Although he has returned to nature here, to the idea of immanence in the object, we rrealize that in remembering he has brought a “new consciousness” to bear upon the object that certainly contradicts Stein’s admonition against remembering, and brings into question the whole Postmodernist stance. If value is given us from the past, then how can we be free to see without preconceived notions that value is immanent in the object? It is clear that, at least for Wieners, this issue is unresolved. Here, as we saw previously in his experiments with Rimbaud, Wieners is unprepared to deny all previous values. As we have noted of all these poems discussed so far, Wieners brings to the writing his own values based upon previous encounters with nature. The poem itself is a construct of the previous process; it is not a document of his engagement with that process itself.

In Wieners’ Apollinaire imitation we can see further traces of Modernist or Symbolist tendencies. Apollinaire and his friends, who reportedly sat at the Paris café calling out lines to each other which would become “Les Fenêtres,” were certainly not attempting to create a poem in which one was encouraged to make connections. In fact, if anything, the connections were totally cut, which is what makes this experiment in poetics so fascinating. As Wieners notes in the short introductory paragraph to his imitation, “each line of his poem” is a poem “entire to itself, a sound and end in itself, without periods.” But then, Wieners adds two sentences that lead the reader to attempt to do just what the original was discouraging him from doing. Wieners writes: “There are no connections. Yet, look how each of us is hooked.” What is implicit in this statement is that Wieners is “hooked,” that it is the poet who has a tendency to make connection, bringing meaning out of discovery and imposing form upon formlessness. In fact, Wieners changes the text to encourage tenuous connections. For example, what in the original appear as completely unrelated phrases,

Beauté pâleur insondables violets
Nous tenterons en vain de prendre du repos

reads in Wieners,

Beauté paler than manila violets
We transplant in vain what cannot blossom.

We logically associate these two lines in the Wieners version because of the image of flowers in the first line and the words “transplant” and “blossom” in the second. Similarly, the French original

Et l’oie oua-oua trompette au nord
Où les chasseurs de ratons
Raclent les pelleteries
Entincelant diamante

appears in Wieners as,

While reeds whine through trumpets up north
Where strippers offstage
Sell their skin cheap as ice
Tinkling like diamonds.

Again, the desire to make connections in the Wieners version is natural. The idea of strippers up north selling their skin as cheaply as ice tinkling like diamond is quite plausible, and is a rather arresting image. However, in the original, except between “Où les chasseurs de rations” and “Raclent les pelleteries,” we would have no reason to make such connections. This is a type of process, but once more these are connections that have already been established in logical discourse. They do not force us in any way to arrive at a new set of associations as a Cubist work might. Even if the original “Les Fenêtres” were not an experiment in dissociation, and instead a Cubist-like collage, Wieners’ version is, accordingly, a completely different kind of work. It is a poem that has as its philosophical foundation the idea that the world is a void upon which man imposes meaning, to which man gives form, an idea antithetical to the Postmodern perspective that underlies much of Wieners’ work.

In other words, we can say that Wieners is an author who is not really comfortable with some of the values we have come to associate with Postmodernism. For Wieners, in short, nature is not immanent, but is a void or at least a chaos from which man with his imaginative powers must call up meaning. Yet, it would be hard to describe Wieners as a Modernist, for in the vast majority of his poems Wieners uses techniques—direct presentation of the personal, reader participation, etc.—by which critics have come to define Postmodernism. Thus we are faced with a quandary of sorts. In Wieners we have come up against, who uses contemporary techniques that create a tension between the immanence of the thing being presented and the values which the poet and/or reader puts upon the thing. While this may appear to be quandary only from the perspective of our Postmodern lens, it is actually a quandary of which Wieners himself is aware, and an important tension at work in a great many more experimental poets’ works. If believing in the Pound-Williams notion of the immanence of nature requires of the poet that he constantly seek for ways of seeing anew, of “making it new,” that effort simultaneously denies the poet his past. In this post-Bergsonian world of durée the poet is asked to continually surrender his values as soon as he has perceived something. If he stops to reflect, if he remembers, his poetry is deadened, becoming a remnant of some previous process. This, in turn, produces a moral dilemma for the contemporary writer, for he understandably desires to assert value, especially when faced with a phenomenon like the Viet Nam War. Since the Postmodernist is already concerned with process it is, accordingly, tempting to convert the energies of discovering the essence of process in nature to the promotion of process or change through a propagandistic or didactic art. From Pound’s “Usury” Canto to Denise Levertov’s Staying Alive we have seen the precursors of Postmodernism and Postmodern poets themselves turn to a preconceived value-oriented poetry.

In a recent interview, Robert Van Hallberg brought up just this issue:

…You seem to have a firm sense of the poem’s commitment to
a moment in history. Do you feel that at a particular moment in
history, specifically in the last few years, the pressure of political
tensions may push the poet, even a lyric poet, toward a more public
and rhetorical poetry?

Wieners’ answer follows from his poetry:

Yes, I do…. Yes. Lyricism is still a quality of a political career.
…Until the right moment, I created from past-inhabited experiences,
or vice-versa. These topics arise only upon consideration.

What Wieners is suggesting here, it seems to me, is that the subject for the contemporary poet does arise at least as much if not more from his past values and the values he has come to in that past as it does from the present. We can surmise that for a poet like Wieners it was from the beginning impossible, caught as he was in the nightworld, to reject past values. Indeed, his desire to know the nightworld was grounded in his awareness of his own past and the societal values which he had know from childhood. Once he had become part of that nightworld, moreover, he must have discovered himself more than ever comparing it with those values. Survival came to depend more and more upon his imaginative powers to convert his suffering into statements of faith. Wieners came to depend upon what he has described as “…other realities / besides those existing before / your eyes.” Despite his playing down of the importance of poetry, it is totally consistent with his work that Wieners should see the poet as “a pastor,” or as a priest of sorts.
This same tension was potential in Rimbaud’s poems as well. His dérèglement was utterly dependent upon his knowledge of traditional systems of cognition, for only with that knowledge could he give his reader anything “deranged,” could he make nature through language alive in a new way. Eventually, once he had perfected it, Rimbaud would have been forced also to tear down his own system and start all over again. But, of course, he stopped writing before his poetry had become artifact.

Wieners’ solution, then, is to make use of this tension, for when he writes with it in mind, he is saved from flat didacticism. “Long Nook,” for example, is a poem that could not have been written without the experimentation of Rimbaud and Pound, yet we can immediately see that it is a poem that neither of them would have written. It would not have been “deranged” enough for Rimbaud, and it would have been too controlled, too much of an artifact for Pound’s taste. Yet what an exciting poem it is! As Gilbert Sorrentino has written of it, “There is not a line…not charged with risk.”

There she took her lover to sea
and laid herself in the sand.
………………………………

He is fast, was down the dune
with silk around his waist.
Her scarf was small.

She opened her clothes to the moon.
Her underarms were shaved.
The wind was a wall between them.
Waves break over the tide,
hands tied to her side with silk,
their mind was lost in the night.

The green light at Provincetown
became an emerald on the beach
and like stars fell on Alabama.

The poem begins with a direct narrative statement in the past tense, with the vague “There” hinting at a world beyond time, like the “faraway country” of children’s tales. We are immediately made, however, to question these expectations. The construction of “to sea,” because there is no article, makes us think of the infinitive “to see,” which changes the whole tone of the line and urges us to move to the second line to find out what it is that she wants him to see. But we are not told; we are simply described the process of her lying down in the sand. The word “laid” is wrong here, however, and the object of the verb, “herself,” makes no sense. Even as a sexual pun it is, at first thought, ludicrous. Yet, when we think back to the first line, we recall that it was she who “took” to her “to sea,” and thus, we see the connotations of the pun. As the seducer, she encourages her lover to have sexual intercourse by seductively lying down in the sand, a seduction which is reflected by Wieners’ use here of l and s sounds (lover, laid; she, sea, herself, sand). But in that seduction she is also taking on the male role (as we shall see there are reasons for the stereotyping of roles) and, thus, in the sexual slang sense, is “laying herself.”

Suddenly, in the next line, there is a shift. A command is whispered in the present tense, ostensibly her command: “Go up and undress in the dark.” In its short, clipped iamb with a labial ending followed by two anapests, we are told more about the upward movement of the male than about her. This movement is rhythmically stirring compared to the slower pace of the first two lines, and in the next line, a mirror image of the previous line (an anapest followed by two iambs which gives the sense of downward movement), words like “fast” and “down the dune” give the male’s movements a vital energy. This sense of vitality is reinforced by the use of the present tense. The shift in tense in the first line of the second stanza does two things: first, it begins what I shall call a whistling sensuality of the second line, a sensuality suggested by the short s sounds (was, silk, his, waist) and by the associations we have with the texture of silk; second, this shift in tense creates a balancing effect in which we are given a sense of the male’s wholeness and surety. The correspondence of the last line of the first stanza and the use of the word “around” in the following line with the two iambs on either side of it (“with silk,” “his waist”) all contribute to this sense of balance. With all this detailed attention to the male, moreover, we are asked to take a special interest in his movements. When in the next line we are presented with a direct statement that draws attention to his genitals which are evidently not completely covered by the scarf tied around his waist, accordingly, we become voyeurs in the same way in which the woman is in her waiting position. We come to perceive at least one meaning, thus, of what it was she wanted “to see.”

“Her scarf was small” subtly suggests that the male is aroused and ready for sex. And by the next line we see, once again, the female’s readiness as she “opens” her clothes to the moon. The next line, “Her underarms were shaved,” repeats this whole idea of preparedness, and there is something slightly sinister in that fact. Compared with the male’s natural vitality and energy these is something almost unnatural in her presentation of herself to the moon, creating an almost surrealist quality here that inexplicably makes us feel that we are observing something connected with ritual, as if she were worshipping the moon. I do not believe that Wieners would have us ignore, moreover, all the more traditional associations that this image calls up. Facing the moon this way, she comes to be connected with it as an archetypal female symbol and as a traditional symbol for the imagination and mutability.

The next line contributes to this sinister mood. The description of the wind as a wall between them, obviously, is one way of saying that they are embracing each other. But the fact that the wind is suddenly brought in here, and that it metaphorically becomes a “wall,” in addition to the fact that the w sounds (wind, was, wall) recreate the whining sound of the wind, suggest that nature itself is somehow being affected by this coming together of the couple. It is almost as if before the final moment of sexual intercourse, the wind is holding them apart.*

In the next stanza this idea is repeated. The “waves breaking against the tide” metaphorically represent the orgasm, but again we recognize that there is something violent, disintegrating about this, especially when Wieners uses “tied” homonymically in the next line, and then rhymes it in the same line with “side.” At first, it is not clear whether her hands are tied to her side, but with the connection of “tide” to “tied” we are logically, if a little roundaboutly, led to thank that his hands are those which are tied. For “tide” cannot help but be connected with the moon, and therefore, with the female. We have a parallel construction, then, reinforced by the rhyming of “tied” and “side.” This is less complex than it sounds; it is simply the parallel relationship of male to female, and female to male, but it is important in how it affects the poem, subtly restating her dominance. He is tied to her.

It soon no longer matters, however, for in the sex act they have now “lost their minds in the night.” Their individuality no longer exists, as they abandon their cognitive faculties. In love, they have transcended the world in the Romantic sense, have become one with the world. But in so doing they have lost the natural vitality of being in nature that we saw previously in the male. Archetypally we have just witnessed the seduction by an Eve of an Adam. Just as suddenly it becomes quite clear what Wieners has meant by the female’s desire to take her lover “to see.” She has determined to show him a world beyond the everyday material reality.

In the last stanza we also are made “to see” this transcendent vision. But we see it both in its dangers and ridiculousness. The green light is also Gatsby’s green light in The Great Gatsby and, accordingly, represents the absurdity and dangers of the American dream; in Wieners’ poem that light is transformed into the ridiculous “emerald on the beach,” and, as if that were not absurd enough, the emerald surrealistically falls like stars on Alabama, this last phrase calling up the Brecht-Weill song “Moon over Alabama,” which makes the sex act we have just witnessed slightly tawdry, corny, and sentimental—all of which connects to the pornographic title of the poem itself. In the end we are made to see the silliness and destructiveness of associations. Like the female whose conscious preparedness is witnessed most clearly as she undresses to the moon, we would worship the associations more than the object itself and end up with the tawdry and sentimental instead of the vital being we observed in the man’s race down the dune.

We cannot come to understand this poem, however, without traditional symbolist values. Wieners may assert the Postmodern approach to poetry, but he requires that we know and use more traditional constructs. And while it is clear that these last lines present a vision which is quite ludicrous, they simultaneously present a fascinating and disorienting transformation the likes of which we have seen in Rimbaud.

Writing poetry for Wieners means combining both the seductive and imaginative awareness of the female in “Long Nook” and the vital energy in process of the male. And it is between the distribution of these two visions that Wieners sees himself as “pastor” (Selected Poems, p. 5).

____
*The original version of “Long Nook” (published in Floating Bear, no. 10 [1961]) makes this even more clear by setting off the line and putting it in quotations: “The wind was a wall between them.”

College Park, Maryland, December 1975
Reprinted from Sun & Moon: A Quarterly of Literature & Art (No. 2, Spring 1976).

ON ALIEN LAND

2010-07-13T08:06:00.000-07:00

Violet Kazue de Cristoforo May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow—An Anthology of
Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon
Press, 1997)

I was saddened to receive the news this morning that Violet de Cristoforo had died on October 3, at the age of 90. I had not been in touch with her for a long time, and I felt some guilt for not continuing communication over the years. For some years, Violet had sent a small gift to me each Christmas, which I had followed with a telephone call or note.

Her death reminded me of the day in 1995 when I received a baggy monster of her manuscript in the mail. The book, a collection of Kaiko Haiku written in the Japanese internment camps in California and elsewhere during World War II, was a mix of historical information about the internment, descriptions of the art and poetry done in various communities before the war and within camps during World War II, and brief comments on the various camps throughout the American West. While extremely informative, it was poorly organized and was unpublishable in its original state.

I telephoned Violet, who invited me up to her home in Salinas where I had dinner with her and her husband, Wilfred de Cristoforo, staying the night and talking with her much of the next day. I suggested that, without abandoning the important historical contexts of the volume, she refocus the book on the haiku itself, beginning with the various pre-war groups and following them into the camps, providing the information on the internment and the concentration camps themselves before presenting the substantial selection of poems which she had translated. I also suggested that she attempt to give short biographies of each figure, even though much of that information was now unfortunately lost since many of the poets had returned to Japan and others had died.

Violet, who had spent much of her life writing this work, and who had dedicated herself to disseminating information about the Japanese internment—often in opposition to the Japanese community itself—was quite obviously overwhelmed by the changes I had suggested. Through that first evening and much of the next day, she attempted to explain, with the stories and texts she put before me, the difficulties of camp life and the terrible effects it had had on her and her husband’s own lives.

Born of immigrant parents, Violet spent her early life near Hilo, Hawaii. From her birth in 1917 until her family’s return to Japan in 1924, she attended a Japanese Language School. When they returned to Hiroshima, she was enrolled in the Danbara Elementary School. In her mid-teens her family decided that she should have an American education, making arrangements for her to move to Fresno, California, where she stayed with the Stuart family, who raised her as their own daughter.

Upon graduation she married Shigeru Matsuda, a charter member of the Valley Ginsha Haiku Kai and a practicing Kaiko (freestyle) Haiku writer. With her husband, she ran a Japanese language bookstore in Fresno. She had two children, Kenji and Reiko, with whom, in 1939, she traveled back to Hiroshima for a visit to her mother, gaining further knowledge during her visit about the fine points of Haiku. When she returned to the US just prior to the outbreak of World War II, she was startled to learn that the family bank accounts had been frozen by the US government under the Enemy Alien Act. While expecting her third child, she and her family—subject to the signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—were forced to abandon their home and bookstore and were relocated to the Fresno Assembly Center, where she gave birth to her child over an orange crate.

After several months, they were transferred to the Jerome Concentration Camp in the swamps of Arkansas, whereupon her husband and his parents, having lost everything, decided to return to Japan. In the fall of 1943, Violet and her children were taken to the Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California, where she remained throughout the rest of the war. Camp life, as she described it to me that weekend in Salinas, was difficult; the dorms were often cold and any complaints about conditions resulted in censor and sometimes imprisonment. Her brother was arrested and thrown into the stockade, and she herself was branded by camp “spies” as an agitator, in part because she refused to sign the loyalty oath, feeling that she could not swear loyalty to a government who had without cause taken away the rights she has as an American citizen. One of her few joys left was her writing, where she found a serenity that was not always available in camp life:

Winter shower
distant mountains
serenity

Yet bitterness often showed through her carefully composed lines:

Looking at summer moon
on Castle Rock
we are living in alien (enemy) land

At war’s end in 1946 Violet was expatriated to Japan, returning to the bomb-scarred Hiroshima where both her father and mother had died in the explosion of the atomic bomb. Her husband, she discovered, had remarried. In order to support herself and her children, she worked concurrently in three jobs, paid by the Americans in the devalued yen instead of dollars.

In 1956 she met and married American army officer de Cristoforo, with whom she returned the United States, where he attended the Army Language School while she began working for the educational division of McGraw-Hill. But even then, her past seemed to haunt her and her new husband. Both told me that they believe he did not receive military advancement because of his marriage to Violet, which information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act seemed to confirm.

Now, perceiving her complete immersion in these experiences, I suggested that she simply send me more information, photographs, and other materials, and I would reedit and reorganize the manuscript myself.

Fortunately, I had a gifted intern at that time, who worked dedicatedly on the project, and was able even to match the Japanese with the English translations. Working hand in hand with my typesetter, Guy Bennett, she shaped, with my suggestions, the book into a coherent whole. In 1997 I published May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow—An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku in a cloth edition, a book I am very proud of having produced.

Although the book received some critical attention, the major newspapers and magazines, to my amazement, did not bother to review the work. Clearly there was some confusion over whether this was a history of the Japanese Concentration Camps or a collection of Haiku; it was both, I tried to explain, but book editors often can only comprehend books that fall into standard categories; and, I suspect, that if they sought any guidance from Japanese scholars or critics, Violet’s outspoken history did not help the matter. I called book editors across the country, sent copies of the book to the newspapers of every major city—not one of them responded! Although there have been several studies now on the shameful incarceration of Japanese Americans, there had never been a book that explored the issues from this perspective. Evidently, those in power still did not want to face the past!

I am pleased, however, that many of the poems have been anthologized in poetry collections of American writing. An individual from the California State Historical Society recently told me how important he felt this book had been. He had only to thank its courageous author, I responded, a woman who lost everything before recovering her powerful voice.

Los Angeles, October 9, 2007

PONDERING THE STRUGGLE

2010-07-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

John Singleton Copley Paul Revere

Gilbert Stuart Paul Revere

Grant Wood The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

John Singelton Copley Watson and the Shark

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February 28, 2010-May 23, 2010 / I attended the show on its closing day, May 23rd

On the very last day of the exhibition, May 23, 2010, my companion Howard Fox and I attended to Los Angeles County Museum of Art show American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915, a show containing some of the most iconic images of American painting by major American painters such as Winslow Homer, George Bellows, George Caleb Bingham, William Sidney Mount, Thomas Eakins, and Mary Cassatt.

I will write of some of these works at a later time. But two of my special favorites were by the great pre-Revolutionary American painter, John Singelton Copley who by the time of the revolution had moved to England, where he would go on to express himself more as a British painter.

Earlier in his career, Copley painted at least two important images that represented—each in a radically different way—what the United States and the Americas in general were to come to represent. The first of these, painted in 1768, was a portrait of the silversmith Paul Revere, who sat for the painting. This work is also one of the most ironic paintings in the show, not necessarily because of authorial intent but simply because of the emblems Copley used, whether they were actual or imagined, to portray the nature of his subject.

By the time of the sitting Revere, who had gained attention as a silver craftsman in Boston, had also become highly involved with political agitators, producing several political engravings as well as taking political actions with the Sons of Liberty, a group of individuals—including Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Edes and others—whose purpose was to incite change in the British government's treatment of the Colonies, actions which resulted in the Battle of Golden Hill just two years after Revere's painting and in the burning of the HMS Gaspée in 1772.

The artist, on the other hand, was insistently neutral and would soon after marry into the Tory family of the Clarkes. Clarke, in fact, was the merchant to whom the tea that provoked the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773 was consigned. Copley himself wrote of that significant event, defending his in-laws. And in its aftermath, when patriots had threatened to have his blood if, as he had dined that night with the Loyalist Col. George Watson, he ever "entertained such Villain for the future," Copley protested, "What a spirit! If Mr. Watson had stayed (as I pressed him to) to spend the night. I must either have given up a friend to the insult of a Mob or had my house pulled own and perhaps my family murthered."

On the surface Revere is portrayed quite lovingly, a young man instead of the older one we know from Gilbert Stuart's portrait of 1813. Dressed in a linen shirt, at a time when linen was prohibited to Americans unless it was imported, the craftsman's handsome face, mirrored—as art historians have often pointed out—in the polished surface of the tea pot he has just completed, and his simple tools still resting on the dark mahogany work table, the image encapsulates the ideal of American achievement. Whereas, the linen shirt, it might be argued —and has been by Sister Wendy Beckett—could be construed as a patriot concession (in opposition to the ban, Boston seamstresses had produced that very year more than 100 yards of linen), the teapot was a emblem of the Tories alone. In protest to the tea tax, patriot Bostonians drank only what was described as "Boston Tea," a drink closer to punch.

The major irony, accordingly, is that this young patriot made a livelihood by producing an item unavailable or, at least, unused by his American fellows. Whether or not, as some have argued, Copley was simply balancing the parts, creating a figure in Revere who might appeal to all Colonists, he, nonetheless, succeeded in creating a thoughtful and appealing man, far different from the comical and satiric figure of Grant Wood's 20th century painting with its strange aerial perspective and ridiculously high pointed church spire below which, as if he were on a rocking-horse, Revere madly rides off.

There is something hilariously funny in Revere's ride as he runs to the church tower to watch British movements and speeds away to report what he has seen. The startlement of pigeons, the "trembling ladder," and the moonlight view of the town below is slightly ludicrous in Longfellow's famous poetic depiction of that night adventure:

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,--
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

In Grant's depiction the whole event echoes, what Longfellow's poem suggests was its intended audience, a children's tale ("Listen my children and you shall hear..."). Copley's stately portrait of a thoughtful and skillful man of crafts is a statement of willful industry aimed at adults.

The second painting, Watson and the Shark, is Copley's exciting and romanticized telling of the tale of a fourteen-year old orphan, Brook Watson, who served as a crew member on a trading ship. The young man, a natural swimmer, dove in for swim in the waters of Havana Harbor in a trip to the West Indies in 1749. Suddenly he was attacked by a shark who soon after bit through his leg which subsequently had to be amputated. The shark also bit off his other foot.

Watson was saved by his fellow crewmen, who, awaiting the arrival of their captain, drove their dingy forward into the waters to fight off the shark.

Despite his injuries, Brook Watson lived on, eventually becoming Lord Mayor of London, and commissioning the now-famous painting from his friend Copley. At his death, he bequeathed the painting to Christ's Hospital.

The melodramatic lone swimmer and shark in the front of the painting are carefully balanced by the crew of various ethnicities in the triangularly arranged grouping of nine figures, some trying grasp the failing swimmer, some rowing, another attempting to spear the beast, and others simply expressing their horror of the event. How different the depiction of this terrifying and chaotic accident is from the almost static portrayal of Revere— unless one imagines that in the mirrored image of the silver pot the smith has caught a glimpse the impending struggle of the Revolution and his own involvement in those battles.

Watson and the Shark is certainly a powerful depiction of an occurrence in the Americas, but is, strictly speaking, not at all about US life. Indeed the painting was done in 1778, four years after Copley had emigrated to London, and its subject was British, not an American citizen. Unless one understands "American stories," accordingly, in the broadest sense, this might be argued to not be an American tale at all, but rather a British or even a Cuban one. But who would quibble with the opportunity to see this great painting, which hangs in Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery, once again?

Los Angeles, June 30, 2010

OUR WONDERFUL LIVES

2010-06-30T08:37:00.000-07:00

Harry Mathews My Life in CIA (Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).

I have long felt that Harry Mathews is one of the best American fiction writers who came of age in the mid-twentieth century, and his newest fiction confirms my opinion. Mathews’s 2005 work, My Life in CIA, might be said to represent a late-career shift in style and subject, imbuing his work with a new accessibility not unlike that of Gertrude Stein, whose late-life The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas has generally been represented by critics (including myself) as a simplification of her previous bravura techniques. Like Stein, Mathews appears in this work to be writing an autobiography, strange as that lived experience may seem, a work very different, for example, from his earlier convoluted tale of an obsessive journalist (hero of The Journalist) who uncovers shockingly “secret” information about his family and friends.

For one personally acquainted with Mathews as I am, the facts of this seemingly experiential recounting of his illusionary life as a CIA agent at first seem almost plausible. The tall and trim, often behatted Mathews—whom many individuals also mistakenly perceived as being gay (in part because he had several gay friends, John Ashbery among them) and as a man of “independent means” (even I presumed this, since he had, it appeared, two addresses in France, a Key West abode and an apartment in New York)—seemed almost to match the image one might conjure up of a CIA operative (although one must admit Mathews dressed, when I met him, far too foppishly to fit the mold.) In Paris of the early 1970s, accordingly, friends and strangers alike suspected that he was an agent, and the more he attempted to deny it the firmer they grew in their beliefs. The fact that he had a diplomat friend who became ambassador to Laos in the midst of the Viet Nam War and that Mathews visited him in Laos in 1965—information leaked, unknown to him, by real agents and perhaps members of the French Communist Party—gave credence to the gossip.

Understandably, Mathews—in reality an experimental author sympathetic with several liberal and leftist causes and the only American member of the French-based group of writers, mathematicians, and scientists called the Oulipo (Ouvrior de literature potentielle) who employ a wide range of formal constraints in their literary endeavors—grew increasingly distressed by these rumors. In 1972 Mathews met two Chileans, Silvia Uribe and Enrique Cabót, who encouraged him, along with other French friends, to enjoy his unwanted celebrity by embracing it, to pretend he was an agent, a game which might also give him entry to different elements of French society and, if nothing else, provide him with an entertaining avocation.

Part of the great fun of this “fiction” is Mathews’ recounting of how he goes about—often unwittingly—to establish his CIA identity, reasserting the rumors with more concrete evidence. Since most agents hide their activities behind fabricated employers, Mathews creates a mythical travel agency (named after his real avant-garde journal of Locus Solus), listing himself among other non-existent directors. The company, amazingly, attracts the interest of some who ask him to lecture and, others, ultimately, who hire him for covert deliveries of documents. Most of his efforts to establish his “CIA connection” are ridiculously ineffective: observing that someone appears to be following his footsteps, the author takes absurdly convoluted walks, marking his tracks in chalk upon certain buildings along the way, even renting a car to stage an imaginary “drop.” But when he meets a supposed businessman, Patrick Burton-Cheyne—a new acquaintance whose employment involves him in activities seemingly in synch with that of an undercover agent—Mathews is educated in new ruses which grow increasingly complex, ending in attempts to make contact with the French Communist Party and other organizations.

At this point, the reader also begins to realize that the seemingly plausible “adventures” of the author begin to move into the realm of marvelous fabulation, as Mathews describes various escapades, including several sexually unconsummated encounters with a beautiful woman and an interrupted sexual episode with a weaver of Turkish rugs, which ends with him being rolled up in the rug and his accidental delivery to a party of right-wing conspirators who, after a lavish dinner, play an Oulipean-like game of Squat in which he is forced to improvise lyrics rhymed with words such as swastika, haddock, jonquil, plectrum, gardenia and farthing while he and others dance.

As the story moves forward, Mathews—without completely perceiving the extent of his involvement—is caught up in a vortex of coincidental assumptions and events inevitably leading to his attempted assassination by individuals from both the political right and left. His advisor and friend Patrick disappears, and after failing to gain access to the Communists, he is warned for his own safety to leave France. His final escape reminds one of something out of a James Bond movie, as he seemingly kills one of his adversaries and apparently eludes his enemies by joining up with a family of sheep-herders.

Just as the author-narrator finds himself moving from what might be a very real dilemma to a fantastically absurd series of events, so too do we, as readers, experience a shift from a very plausible autobiographical tale to an entertaining invention. By book’s end we no longer can separate the “real” (his life in Paris, his friendship with the noted author Georges Perec, his involvement with Oulipo, etc.) from completely fabricated situations. Just as Stein weaves real events into a fictional autobiographical story with herself as the center of grand adulation, so too does Mathews present himself within the context of a great adventure worthy of being filmed by a major American studio. Even the author believes what he overhears in an East German café, that he has been “terminated with extreme prejudice”; for the prejudice emanates, perhaps, not only from some unknown outsider, but from the author himself.

Like Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Mathews represents his life through the voice of a being that is as fictional as any reader’s representation of his or her self. While it may be wonderful if others could perceive how exciting each of our lives has been, we might also find ourselves, like the hero of Mathews’s fiction, in great danger. For, if nothing else, our lies and selfishly coincidental participation in villainous acts would turn everyone against us, perhaps even our own consciences. Are not all Americans, for example, covert agents behind the war in Iraq? Were we not all, as political activists argued, somehow involved in the atrocities of Viet Nam? Perhaps that’s why so many Americans resist all attempts to describe and reveal the events of our own lives; for only those who remain ignorant of their involvement in the world can pretend to the innocence to which most of our countrymen seem to aspire.

Los Angeles, August 1, 2006

I'M STILL HERE: TWO VALENTINES

2010-06-30T07:49:00.000-07:00

Betty Garrett in an early movie

Elaine Stritch

Betty Garrett: Closet Songwriter, with Betty Garrett, Debra Armani, Daniel Keough, Jack Kutcher, Robert W. Laur, Barbara Mallory, Lee Merweither, and Andy Taylor, Los Angeles/Theatre West [the performance I attended was on Sunday, November 18, 2007]

Elaine Stritch: At Liberty at the Carlyle, with Elaine Stritch, New York/Carlyle Café [the
performance I attended was on Friday, January 18, 2008]

Over the last few months I have witnessed two performances by musical legends, each woman recounting memorable events in her life and singing some of the notable numbers of her career. At ages 89 and 82 Betty Garrett and Elaine Stritch both are old enough to declare as Stritch does in her At Liberty at the Carlye, “I’m Still Here.” And in both cases, their primarily geriatric audiences attended these potentially embarrassing self-celebrations with total love and devotion.

My companion Howard and I saw Garrett on November 18 at what was to have been Los Angeles’s Theatre West’s last performance of Betty Garrett: Closet Songwriter, although the show was later extended for another week.

Garrett—whom we both loved for her acting in several film musicals we own on DVD—had chosen in this show to sing, along with seven other actors, music for which she had written the lyrics, and accordingly she didn’t have as rich material to work with as the slightly sassier and brassier Stritch. But along with her long-time friend Lee Meriwether (actress, journalist, and former Miss America winner) and other Theatre West regulars she entertainingly presented a medley of 28 songs interspersed with memories of her career.

Like Stritch’s life, Garrett’s is a story of amazing fortune and darkly sinister events. Beginning on Broadway as an understudy to Ethel Merman, Garrett’s career quickly rocketed as she performed in several plays and the musical revue Call Me Mister, where she famously sang “South America, Take It Away,” winning her the Donaldson Award. In 1944 she married actor Larry Parks (star of The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again) and moved to California, where she acted in a string of successful films, including Words and Music (1948), Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Neptune’s Daughter, On the Town (all three 1949), and My Sister Eileen (1955).

In 1951, however, Parks was subpoenaed to appear as one of a group of individuals connected with Hollywood before the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Of that group, only Bertolt Brecht and Larry Parks testified; ten others (Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Larder, Jr., John Howard Lawson, and Alvah Bessie—a group which came to be called the Hollywood Ten) refused to answer questions and were all blacklisted.

A few years ago, at a memorial dedicated to the Hollywood Ten and an unstated apologia for the Writers and Directors Guilds’ complicities with the HUAC and McCarthy hearings, Howard and I saw Billy Crystal enacting Parks’ tormented testimony as he attempted to allay the questions of committee members. “I would prefer, if you would allow me, not to mention other people’s names. Don’t present me with the choice of either being in contempt of the Committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer.” Later: “I don't think this is American justice...So I beg of you not to force me to do this." Reminding the committee that he had two small children, Parks confronted his questioners: "Is this the kind of heritage that I must hand down to them? Is this the kind of heritage that you would like to hand down to your children?" The committee insisted, however, that he name names. Although Parks was, accordingly, not added to the blacklist, his contract with Columbia Pictures nonetheless was soon cancelled and he made only three more films.

So too had Garrett’s film career ended, and the two of them had no choice but to form a musical team appearing in nightclubs and theatres across the United States, later, like Stritch, performing in England.

Betty is anything but bitter, and her lyrics, if at times satirically biting, are never cynical. While a large number of her song lyrics are mere rhymed ditties and “patter” songs, a few of these pieces, in particular “Remember Me” (a song written for her grand-daughter), “Lack-a-Daisy Day” (a number she performed with her husband on tour), and a song written for her close friend Lloyd Bridges and his family, “Bridges of Love” are charming songs, the first and last moving, if somewhat sentimental ballads. I believe the entire audience left Garrett’s show with even more admiration for her musical and acting contributions and her lifetime of sustained energy.

I had seen Stritch’s At Liberty on DVD several times, so I was prepared for the sometimes raw and down-to-earth humor of her artful autobiographical tribute to her survival and past. The treat for me was to see her so close-up in the Carlyle’s small dining room accompanied by the youngest person in the room, 15-year old Felix Bernstein, son of my dear friends Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein.

Felix, who is quite knowledgeable about musical theater and is an aficionado particularly of Stephen Sondheim, enjoyed this show which included three numbers by Sondheim: the previously mentioned “I’m Still Here,” and two songs from her legendary performance in Company, “The Little Things You Do Together” and “The Ladies Who Lunch.” But we also both took joy in her two Noël Coward numbers, “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party” and Sail Away’s hilarious “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?” And who could not find pleasure in the simple “Something Good,” a song, Felix pointed out, with both music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers. Stritch’s perfectly timed telling of her travels each night from her role—like Garrett—as an understudy for Ethel Merman in New York to the New Haven production of Rodgers’ and Hart’s Pal Joey, where late in the show she performed the fabulous “Zip,” is one of the best skits of the show. Later, she would star in the national company role of Merman’s Call Me Madam.

Stritch’s humorous tales of her strict religious background (her uncle was Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago Samuel Cardinal Stritch) and her descriptions of her relationship (or perhaps one should say, lack of relationship) with Marlon Brando and intended marriage to Gig Young are alternatively funny and sad. Stitch was clearly unlucky in love (throwing over Ben Gazzara for Rock Hudson) until she met and married, later in her life, the British actor John Bay, living in London with him until his death. At the heart of Stritch’s stand-up comedic presentation of her raucous life is a painful story of alcoholism and near death from diabetes. She wrote this show, in part, she proclaims, to get back her life, to recall all those events from which alcohol had kept her from completely experiencing.

Both Felix and I loved the evening, and although I had come into Stritch’s performance believing that this may be her last act, I am now sure that, given the gusto with which she performed her closing show on January the 18th, she will be back, still here for years.

As we took the taxi back to the West Side, Felix asked me two questions that deserved more discussion than we had time for. He queried how Noël Coward had become such a legendary figure in a time when there was no television, no cell phones, no easy computer downloads for songs as there is today. I reminded him that most large cities had several newspapers, many of them filled every day with news on actors, writers, and other celebrities of the moment. And, I might have also added, there was radio, with a very large audience and a wide variety of shows. Instead of the tabloids there were a number of quite popular fan magazines which reported on both theater and film.

Knowing of my great love and knowledge of New York theater and its history, Felix later asked: “I can understand why I love theater; I live here and witness it; I can see it almost any day. But how did you fall in love with musicals and plays growing up in such a distant place as Iowa?”

“Imagination,” I answered. “I never got to New York until college, but I lived in New York in my imagination for years before that.”

Los Angeles, February 14, 2008

REASONABLE DOUBTS

2010-04-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Reginald Rose (screenplay, based on his teleplay), Sidney Lument (director) 12 Angry Men / 1957

A tired and disinterested judge gives the jury his final summation, and they are locked away in the concrete box called the jury room. It is a hot and humid day, about to rain, and the fan does not seem to work; the windows are difficult to lift. The twelve men about to sit down to decide the fate of a young teenage boy are, as the title suggests, all angry—except perhaps for three or four who gradually reveal more temperate personalities.

Director Sidney Lument shoots these early scenes from high above, with the camera looking down on these seemingly insignificant beings. Gradually, as they begin to discuss the case, the camera joins them, closing in upon their faces until the audience is made to feel the claustrophobic atmosphere of this intense space.

As anyone who has seen this melodramatic and creaky confection knows, the men begin their deliberations by discovering that all but one of them is convinced of the defendant's guilt. Only Juror #8 (a role brilliantly downplayed in a kind of "aw shucks" manner by Henry Fonda) believes there is a reasonable doubt that the boy is innocent, and, gradually over the 96 minutes of this film, convinces the other jurors, one by one, to see it his way. As he admits several times, "I really don't know what the truth is."

The intent of Reginald Rose's teleplay transformed into screenplay, quite obviously, is to give credence to American jurisprudence, to demonstrate the importance in the process of the twelve jurors to reach a unanimous viewpoint before convicting a man. For me, however, the slow unmasking of Juror #8's eleven opponents is absolutely horrifying. What Rose's work reveals is just how strongly bigotry, personal jealousies, selfishness, fear, and just plain ignorance influence a jury's, any jury's, decisions. Certainly the fact that there is not a single man of color on this jury (white immigrant Juror #11, George Voskovec, substitutes) and no women represented may account for some of the open hostility expressed, particularly by Juror #10 (Ed Begley) and sadistic and failed father (Lee J. Cobb). The 1957 film seems to indicate, however, that even these kind of men, given the rational consensus-building of Juror #8, can be turned around or, at least, made temporarily to see their own mistakes. Yet one finds it hard to believe that this rather soft-spoken individual could sway the votes of some of these unreasonable beasts.

Today, given the radically divided and outspoken fractiousness of our society, it seems even more unlikely that one man or woman could affect a group in the manner that Henry Fonda does.

Perhaps that's why it is so important to have the protection of unanimity, but what it suggests is that, whatever the outcome of the process, true justice is a nearly impossible thing to accomplish, particularly given, in this instance, Fonda's concession after the first round of discussions to go along with the others if there is not another one among them who will change his vote. Certainly Juror #8 would not have been permitted to explore his own investigation by locally buying a knife similar to the one that killed the boy's father, and he would never today be allowed to bring it into court. I fear, moreover that, in reality, some jurors might join with the majority, as does Juror #7 (Jack Warden), simply to escape the process and get to a beloved baseball game or other event.

Yet we do know that some people having served jury duty describe the experience as uplifting and even spiritually moving, and believe that the men and women with whom they served tried as best they could to make a fair and just decision. Perhaps Americans are not as truly divisive and inwardly angry as writers and the media portray them.

If so, it seems even stranger that 12 Angry Men—which I recently revisited on the television screen—is so routinely touted as an American classic, a work chosen, for example, for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Rose's depiction of the jury process is a fairly mannered expression of a series of different viewpoints, as well, as I've argued, as representing a frightening vision of the American common man, unless we see Fonda as the only paragon. And, if so, who are all those other men filled with such anger, even hate? Why is it that today more Americans are in jail than almost any other country in the world? Maybe the accused might be better served by the admission, as in some cultures, that no group can truly be unanimous when it comes to innocence or guilt.

Los Angeles, April 1, 2010

BETWEEN YOU AND ME

2010-03-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

Edward Albee Me, Myself and I, The Berlind Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, Princeton
University, January 11, 2008 [the performance I saw was a matinee on January 19, 2008]

Edward Albee’s new play, Me, Myself & I, is in some senses a return to his earliest work, more influenced by Beckett and what we used to call the absurdist theater than the several plays in the intervening years, which may have something to do with his recent return to his earliest work, The Zoo Story in writing its sequel Peter and Jerry of 2007.

The world premiere of the new play at the Berlind Theatre at Princeton University, a production directed by Emily Mann, confronts the audience during the first scene with an architectural perspective (the set is outlined with a rectangular of strings) of a bedroom, featuring only a double bed, inhabited by Mother (Tyne Daly) and her Dr. (the hilarious Brian Murray)—a man who for the past 28 years has replaced her missing husband (he has disappeared upon the announcement that he was the father of identical twins)—sleeping, dressed still in suit and shoes. With the sudden appearance of one of the twins, OTTO, we quickly discover the depths of her lunacy as her son and Dr. recount her reactions to the news of the twin births and her illogical logical actions of naming them both (they are, after all spitting images of each other) Otto—one whose name reads left to right, the other right to left, and one whose name is capitalized, the other all in lower case! The two dress alike, and although she perceives that one (the loud and evil OTTO) does not love her while the other otto (the softer spoken good otto) is a devoted son, even she cannot tell them apart! We later discover that she cannot remember which of her Ottos was born first; she has, she declares, lost the papers!.

So has Albee exaggerated the dilemmas of all identical twins, two beings so alike that, like many twins, they speak a kind of private language and—employing the lurid fascination of gay (and heterosexual) pornography—even share some in some sexual delights. These brothers, however, emphatically declare they are “straight”—or perhaps, to employ the malapropism of OTTO (“We’re straight as a gate”), “strait,” very narrow in their perspectives.

Both brothers dislike their mother’s Dr., and OTTO warns him that he should leave, since their father will soon be home accompanied by six panthers and a load of emeralds with which he had promised to “bathe” their mother (the Dr. sardonically suggests the husband may have said “pave”). OTTO also announces that he is going to become Chinese and that otto is no longer his brother, that he has a new brother.

Any family might be nonplussed by these strange pronouncements, but Mother and Dr. are not just any family. Mother is, as the Dr. suggests, utterly demented, insane as the Dr.—who can only be equally insane to remain in her bed—is there to help prove it to the audience! The results are some of Albee’s wittiest dialogue since The Zoo Story and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. As the dueling duo attempt to debate the implications of OTTO’s statements—does his statement that otto is no longer his brother mean that otto no longer exists?—an older patron in the row in front of me spoke out, “This is all very silly—and confusing!” Indeed it is both silly and confusing, but also gleefully intriguing as Albee pushes us to realize that the relation of twins—particularly this identical pair—is every bit as impossible as the relationships each of us have with our mirror images—with ourselves.

Indeed, the brother OTTO has discovered is his mirror image, is himself. Gradually, as he and otto describe their almost enchanted youth, the deep love they have between them, it becomes apparent that the bad-boy OTTO has been psychologically forced into his new relationship by his brother’s love for a woman, Maureen (the Mother’s conversations with the Irish, Chippewa-Indian, Scottish, French girl are some of the funniest of the play). Even though he does what any healthy identical twin might do, beds Maureen pretending to be his brother, OTTO clearly feels in this new relationship that he has lost himself to the intruder. He has found himself again, accordingly, as a new man, as a Chinese man whose brother is the man in the mirror, Otto (an italicized self).

Unfortunately, the second act is only a playing out of the situation of the first. However, if Daly in the first seemed uneasy with the shifting realities of the play, by the second act she had clearly discovered herself as a truly mad Mother, destroying nearly everything in her path. Like a kind of Beckettian Mamma Rose, in her bullying insanity, Mother sees herself as doing the very best by everyone. After an impossibly crazed conversation with Maureen, a woman worried about otto’s sanity since his brother has refused his existence, Mother declares to Dr., “Well that went well, I think.”

When all in this dysfunctional family seem doomed in their attempts to love, the father miraculously does return in a coach led by six blank panthers followed by a cart of glowing emeralds—brilliantly portrayed in emblematic form as “The Happy Ending”—Mother excoriates her husband for having abandoned her. To everyone’s amazement, without saying a word, the former Father returns to his coach and speeds off. The family is left again in complete abandonment to their “strait” self-loves and loathings. Yet as the two twins, OTTO and otto, hug goodbye—perceiving there is still something left of their intense former relationship—we realize that they are better off on their own than as beings entrapped in each other’s identity, that they will stumble along in the gap just as we all do, forward or backward, loudly or softly, for better or worse.

New York, January 20, 2008

THE GANG'S STILL HERE

2010-03-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

Robert E. Lee/Jerome Lawrence

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee The Gang’s All Here / New York, the Ambassador Theater, October 1, 1959

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee The Gang’s All Here (Cleveland: The World Publishing
Company, 1960)

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s The Gang’s All Here (1959) is a play loosely based on the presidency of Warren G. Harding, remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal involving several of his friends and cabinet members.

Like Harding, Lawrence’s and Lee’s Ohio senator Griffith T. Hastings, name comes forth in the smoke-filled rooms of the Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel as an alternative to candidates (in 1920, General Leonard Wood and Illinois Governor Frank O. Lowden) who have Republican Party members deadlocked. Engineered by Walter Rafferty and other cronies in Lawrence and Lee’s play (in 1920 by Harry M. Daugherty) Hastings is elected and fills his major governmental posts with his “Ohio gang.”

In the play Hastings is presented as a man modest enough to admit to his limited capabilities and honest enough to claim that he is not up to the position; but through the intervention of his friends and strong-willed wife (who Hastings and others describe as “The Duchess,” Hastings, despite his misgivings, determines to run.

Once he is locked away within the presidential quarters, however, he hasn’t a clue how to begin governing, hiring on the spur of a moment a man employed to oversee his transition, and demanding the immediate presence of his cronies, who quickly fill his ears with speedy decisions concerning the issues with which he is now forced to grapple. In only a few weeks after becoming President, we see him sneaking away from the White House to play poker with his cronies—now all political advisors—and ready to sign on nearly any dotted line put before him.

Strangely, the only honest man surrounding him is Bruce Bellingham, the interim assistant he has hired. Bruce, along with Hastings’s wife, Frances, attempts to warn him away from his gang—his own Attorney General, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of the Interior, and Head of the Veterans Bureau. By this time, however, Hastings has become so dependent upon their advice that he has no one else to whom he can turn and fires Bellingham, the only one willing to tell him the truth.

As the Hearn committee begins investigations, it becomes clear that Hastings must act; as he attempts to query the honesty of members of his own cabinet and staff, Rafferty reminds him that he has knowledge of Hastings’ sexual affairs which he’s willing to reveal. Rafferty’s moral jingoism, his long justification for his immorality, reminds one of Harry Lime’s argument with his friend Holly Martins in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man of ten years earlier:

He [Sam Cavendish] can afford morality. He’s rich enough. I’m not. Neither are you. The “land of plenty” for everybody except a politician, who sticks his head through the hole in the canvas and lets the
goddamned free press sling mud balls at him. He can’t run his business like a business, because it’s never his business. It belongs to the blessed American public that doesn’t give a hoot in hell until some poor bastard
gets his pinky caught in the cash register! Name me the job that demands more and pays less than serving the American taxpayer. The Customers’ Man can screw ‘em blind on the Big Board. That’s O.K. The Oil Boys
can simmer the fat out of the ground, the Real Estate Sharks can bank a six-month million—everybody gets rich except the poor ass of a “Public Servant.” (Straight at Hastings) And you’ve got the gall to scream because a few of your friends are smart enough to do exactly what everybody else in the country is doing.

In the context of Rafferty’s argument, the actual president Harding’s campaign slogan—“Return to Normalcy”—seems bizarrely appropriate.

With the news of Ax Maley’s suicide (head of Hastings’ Veterans Bureau), Hastings must face his own political and real death as well. In Harding’s administration it was an assistant to Daughtery who committed suicide, while Fall, Miller, and, Forbes were convicted of fraud and bribery. In the Lawrence and Lee play, all other consequences remain in the future.

Harding clearly knew his presidency had been destroyed by the scandal, and in 1923 set out across the country to boost his own ratings on what he described as a “Voyage of Understanding.” Understanding for whom, one might ask: the electorate or himself? In Lawrence and Lee’s version it is Hastings who comes to the “understanding,” ultimately seeking the resignation of Rafferty before drinking a deadly medicinal concoction left behind in his Surgeon General’s bag. Harding’s illness was simply attributed to food poisoning—and his death soon after to a heart attack. At least Hastings dies with some recognition, with some sense of dignity.

The published volume of The Gang’s All Here begins with a short piece by the playwrights published in the New York Herald Tribune of September 27, 1959, warning the public to take the lessons of their play to heart in the upcoming elections. That election between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy was even more fateful in several respects than the 1920 race between Harding and the Democratic nominee James A. Cox. One candidate of the 1960 race clearly was a man (particularly in his later administration) with a notorious gang—the other a man with a notorious family.

Lawrence and Lee’s work functions as a terribly old-fashioned drama, and creaks in its historical underpinnings. Given that the 1960 election, for the first time, depended heavily upon television news coverage as opposed to the simple workings of backroom politics, the play seems particularly old-fashioned. With a cast that included E. G. Marshall, Howard Smith, Melvyn Douglas, and Jean Dixon the stage theatrics must have been almost magical; but reading it in 2003, the dramatic action seems to be missing.

What struck me most, however, as I read this play was that in terms of politics little has changed. The gang is still with us. President Bush won the 2000 election, in fact, by machinations that Rafferty and company could not even have imagined. The three R’s with which Bush and Cheney now control our country—Rove, Rumsfield and Rice—far more than those basic areas of learning, Reading, Writing, and ‘Rithmetic—serve the President as a gang whose personal agendas far surpass those of Harding/Hastings’s petty greed. Lawrence and Lee ask a naïve question, but one that should not be glibly answered by Americans today:

If the man we fondly X’d in a voting booth turns out to be a struggling incompetent, whose fault is it? The President’s? ….It’s too easy to blame the gang around him, because opportunists are always waiting to fill any governmental vacuum. Perhaps the real trouble lies in our own reluctance to think about history except on that November Tuesday.

Los Angeles, October 6, 2003

INDEPENDENT DEPENDENTS

2010-03-13T10:25:00.000-08:00

from the original stage production

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 1947)
Tennessee Williams (screenplay), Oscar Saul (adaptation), Elia Kazan (director) A Streetcar Named Desire / 1951

The death on September 11th, 2002 of actress Kim Hunter sent me back to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, in which Hunter played Stanley Kowalski's wife Stella in both the 1947 stage production and Elian Kazan's film of 1951.

Although I have seen the film numerous times, and watched it again last week, I have never seen a staging of the work. I was only six months and a few days old at the time of its original production, and, although I am sure the play is popular with some college and repertory theater groups, the intense acting required from its two major figures, Stanley and Blanche, make it a very difficult play to revive, although Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange were fairly well received in the 1992 Broadway production, which I also missed.

Accordingly, I have spent the past three nights rereading the play, which allowed me some new perceptions about this work.

Because of the stunning acting of both Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in the film version, it has always appeared to me that their characters are at the center of this work, and the very acting styles they embody—Leigh's highly theatrical performance and Brando's influenced strongly by the Actor's Studio method acting—created a high tension that drove the work into its near manic expressions of cultural extremes, one of Williams' major subjects.

This time, however, after watching both the film and reading the text, I realized—much as I did for O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in My Year 2004—that the actual fulcrum of the work was an apparently weaker figure, in this case Stella.

Although all of the characters in this play must function in an ensemble manner, their radical differences in acting styles, language, and personalities is what the work is about. Indeed, one might almost argue that each of the three major figures living in the Kowalski hovel have an act devoted to them: Stella is the dominant figure of Act 1, Blanche of Act 2, and Stanley of Act 3. In Act 1, Stella is the first figure we see in the play, and draws both Blanche and Stanley to her throughout.

Williams' stage directions make quite clear that Blanche is the center of Act 2:

Some weeks later. The scene is a point of balance between the plays two sections, BLANCHE'S coming and the events leading up to her violent departure. The important values are the ones that characterize BLANCHE: its function is to give her dimension as a character and to suggest the intense inner life which makes her a person of greater magnitude than she appears on the surface.

The rape and its aftermath ends in Blanche's fall and departure. In Act 3 Stella is simply compelled to accept Stanley's version of reality, and he and his poker-playing friends are quite clearly in charge, as he returns to being the rightful "king" of his "domain."

In short, Williams attempted to give equal weight to all three characters. Yet, Stanley and Blanche stand out, primarily because they are both such absurd figures. At times Blanche seems to be performing more in the manner of the mad scene in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermor than in an American-conceived stage drama, yet she is often quite capable at punching back at Stanley with realist-like quips. For example, she comments to Stanley upon meeting him:

You're simple, straightforward and honest, a bit on the primitive side, I should think.

And throughout the play she devastatingly puts Stanley in his place, as when she hands over the papers detailing the loss of her and her sister's home, Belle Reve:

There are thousands of papers stretching back over hundreds of years affecting Belle Reve, as piece by piece our improvident grandfathers and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic fornications—to put it plainly. The four-letter word deprives us of our plantation, till finally all that was left, and Stella can verify that, (Moves to him, carrying papers) was the house itself and about twenty acres of
ground, including a graveyard to which now all but Stella and I have retreated. (Pulling papers out of envelope, dumping them into his hands on table. Holds empty envelope.) Here they all are, all papers! I hereby endow you with them! Take them, peruse them—commit them to memory, even! I think its wonderfully fitting that Belle Reve should finally be this bunch of old papers in your big, capable hands.

For the most part, however, Blanche is not as realistically combative or even insanely abstracted as she is simply witty. Like a campy gay man of the old school dressed in drag (is it any wonder that she demands the lights are left low?), Blanche is a ridiculously humorous figure, and I think we have to admit that ridiculousness, accepting the comic elements of the entire play, if we want to understand Williams' characters. Even simply addressing her sister, Blanche is a "hoot" who would be at home in any gay bar of an earlier generation:

Stella, oh Stella, Stella! Stella for Star! ...But don't you look at me,
Stella, no, no, no, not till later, not till I've bathed and rested! And
turn that over-light off! I won't be looked at in this merciless glare!

Along with dozens of such lines ("Never, never, never in my worst dreams could I picture—
Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe—could do justice!," "The blind are leading the blind," and her renowned last line, "Whoever you are—I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers"), Blanche's dialogue belongs more to the world of melodrama and camp epics peopled with the likes of Lana Turner and Charles Ludlam than the world of a former beauty from the South. Williams points this up even more dramatically by portraying her husband—a nervous, soft, tender boy—as having been gay (which in the film is almost erased) and revealing that, although she poses as a virginal beauty, Blanche is well known back in her home community of Laurel, Mississippi for her sexual excesses, including bedding down with one of her own 17-year-old students. If Jessica Tandy or Vivien Leigh hadn't so brilliantly defined the role of Blanche, Ludlam might later have been an appropriate choice.

While Brando may seem, at times, to be performing a role from the realist school of Clifford Odets, Williams gives Stanley lines that catapult him into a kind of loony soap-opera or a vaudevillian production of Tobacco Road. Stanley's hilarious fascination with the idea of the Napoleonic Code, his famous deconstruction of Blanche's clothes trunk ("Look at these feathers and furs that she comes here to preen herself in! What's this here? A solid gold dress I believe! And this one. What is these here? Fox pieces! Genuine fox fur pieces half a mile long! Where are your fox-pieces Stella? Bushy snow white ones, no less! Where are your white fox-pieces?"), and his macho-laden outburst against his sister-in-law and wife ("That's how I'll clear the table [he has swept the plates and food to the floor] Don't ever talk that way to me. 'Pig—Polack—disgusting—vulgar—greasy!' Them kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister's too much around here. What do you think you two are? A pair of queens? Remember what Huey Long said—'Every man is a King!'—And I am king around here, so don't you forget it!") all point away from a realist construction. Like Blanche, no matter how Brando might believe he's portraying a kind of reality, Stanley is an absurd stereotype born in theatrical fantasy rather than New Orleans' Elysian Fields.

How then does Williams "get away with it," so to speak? Why do we truly care about and become moved by these larger-than-life figures. For unlike Rhett Butler of Leigh's Gone with the Wind, we are compelled in Williams' drama "to give a damn."

In part, of course, it is the remarkable acting. I never saw Tandy play the original Broadway role—although I've seen her in other roles, and I am certain she was splendid—but Leigh is quite simply a genius given the slightly confused mix of poetic fragility, wonderment, and sexual distractedness through which she realizes Blanche. Brando may talk, at times, like an illiterate beast, but his sexuality is evident in every smirk of his lips and swing of hips. And despite his masculinity, which can even be scented over the smell of lit-up celluloid, there is something almost feminine about everything below his waist.

Increasingly, however, I have come to see that Stella is most important in bringing the play and its characters any credibility. If A Streetcar Named Desire has any realist potential, it lies in her character, who, although constantly abused by both husband and sister, quietly loves while attempting to disabuse them of their fantasies. She is truly the star brought to earth, a figure fecund in her ability to love and nurture. And the power of Stella, who time after time refuses to enter into the gushing anger and self-hatred of Williams' comic types, keeps silent or leaves the room or house, demonstrating a strength that helps us to recognize that there is an underlying reality, a secret humanity to both Stanley and Blanche.

For the dueling couple, appearing as rivaling individuals of astounding independence, are one and the same thing, exaggerated portraits of the extremes of society. And in that sense they are also dependent on each other as types. Both Stanley and Blanche are naturally sexual beings who live in imaginary worlds where they drink, gamble, and incessantly bathe their bodies—he in sweat and beer, she in scalding water—requiring them to endlessly undress and dress. Both seem defined by but also estranged from their cultural and social identities. As Stanley remarks as he is about to sexually attack: "We've had this date with each other from the beginning."

Stella is a steady force of balance between these two, and her child, we can hope, will incorporate the imagination and animal sexuality that lie in both Stella's sister and husband.
Unlike Kazan's film, where, upon her horrific realization that Blanche is now insane, Stella turns on Stanley, rushing up the neighbor's staircase to escape her bestial lover (a second—and I have always felt a permanent—ascension of the star to its natural habitat), in the script, Stella stays in the arms of her husband below, while he, for one of the few times in the drama, attempts to comfort her:

Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love. Now, now love. Now, love....

In that gentle reiteration of the present, we realize that Stanley has perhaps changed ever so slightly. The past is over, a new world possible, a world determined by love.

Los Angeles, April 9, 2009
Revised, April 10, 2009

LOVE, GUILT, AND CONSOLATION

2010-03-04T09:09:00.000-08:00

Martha Graham (choreographer), Aaron Copland (composer), Isamu Noguchi (set design) Appalachian Spring / premiered October 30, 1944 at the Library of Congress Coolidge Auditorium / the version I saw was the 1958 film version, shot by Peter Glushanok, produced by Nathan Kroll

I have seen the film version of Martha Graham's and Aaron Copland's great collaboration several times, and in 2002 I watched it again, this time taking notes on the associations and feelings the music and dance brought to mind. The reader should understand my comments not as a literal description of the dance's events, but as my immediate interpretations of what I thought I saw. Another viewing might produce yet other such emotions.

In a sense, the work, which so brilliantly expresses the heartland and seemingly captures the sense of Appalachia, was itself a kind of accident. Commissioned by Graham and the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation to write a work for dance for Graham's company, Copland drew on Shaker songs and the kind of American idiom that he had already expressed so brilliantly in his ballet "Rodeo" of 1942.

Yet Copland had no idea what to title his piece, and even upon its delivery to Graham it was still titled, according the composer, "Ballet for Martha." It was only as the piece was readied to be performed that Graham titled it, after a few lines in The Bridge by Hart Crane, the "spring" Crane mentions referring to water instead of a season. Yet, Copland reportedly laughed, everyone applauds me for so aptly expressing the sensibility of Spring in Appalachia.

Moreover, the original outline of script, described as a kind of gender conflict between men's and women's work, featured not only a Pioneer mother, but an Indian Girl, a Fugitive, and a Citizen. In the end the story was winnowed down to the simple outline published in the preface to the Boosey & Hawkes score:

A pioneer celebration in spring around a newly-built farmhouse
in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last century. The
bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful
and apprehensive, their new domestic partnership invites. An older
neighbor suggests sorrow and then the rocky confidence of experience.
A revivalist and his followers remind the new householders of the
strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are
left quiet and strong in their new house.

It seemed to me that instead of the more European concept of "Love, Death, and Transfiguration," the tenor of Graham and Copland's more innocent and emphatically American fable is "Love, Guilt, and Consolation."

Here are my notes:

Into the yard of a newly built home, wonderfully represented by Isamu Noguchi's open walls with a porch-like structure on which sits a kind of rocking chair shaped like a butter churn, come the figures of the dance, first The Preacher (played in the original by Merce Cunningham and in the film version I saw by Bertram Ross), then the Pioneer Woman (Matt Tumey in the film version), and the Wife (Martha Graham in both the original and, at the age of 62, in the film). Four women (Worshippers) follow, who clap and dance joyfully, frolic, and, at moments, gesture prayer.

A flute, oboe, and clarinet dominate this early passage, and when the flute reaches its highest note, The Husband (Graham's favorite, Erik Hawkins in the original and Stuart Hodes in the film version) enters, lovingly stroking the side of his new house, as he moves forward in pony-like and proud struts and leaps.

The couple walk to each and move backwards, seemingly to reveal the history of their love, which is, through their various posturings, made somewhat ambiguous at times, with moments of fear revealed among their steady pleasure in one another.

Now The Preacher kicks up a kind of ruckus, with the Worshippers following behind him as acolytes reveling in what one might describes as is a kind of spiritual square dance, in which he also leaps, bends, grovels, stands, and lifts.

The Pioneer Woman comes forward expressing her own sorrows and delights, while the Husband quietly ponders his new life. The Wife turns to win the attention of her Husband, simultaneously demonstrating her own new fears and worries, and yet flirting joyfully with a kind of awkward hesitation.

At one point she takes up the baby of the Pioneer Woman, kneeling, entreating her husband. Is it a desire for a family or her fear for the responsibilities it will mean, the commitments and sacrifice? Clearly, it is both.

Although the storyline does not describe it as such, there seems to be also a tension between the two women, almost as if the Husband has previously known the Pioneer Woman and they been somehow involved.

But now the Preacher comes forward into the center, as the couple join him, turning to stare in opposite directions before they enter the church for the plain but joyous ceremony, which ends in the couple stretching, spinning in joy, leaping in the wonderment of it all. The shaker hymn, "'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free," dominates the spirit of occasion.

Here the music changes, the Preacher suddenly becoming agitated, spinning forward almost in a kind of dervish, tearing at the air, renting his hair, damning, cursing, accusing, praying. What is their sin? What horror is he describing to them? Is it an actual or imagined transgression.

The Pioneer Woman comes forward as if to plead for the Preacher to cease, the Husband standing up, turned away in refusal of the sermon. So the Preacher gradually shifts from his violent gesturing, moving forward in a lighter tone and tune. The husband embraces the world, returning to his wife, while his wife dances a more agitated dance, focusing on her chair-rocker-milking stool as if she were reevaluating her situation. Again the Husband returns to her, as they repeat some of their earlier dances of joy, reiterating and repeating their testaments of love while Copland's score returns to "'Tis a gift to be simple," ending in a long bassoon chord.

The Wife turns from her former fears to a sense of relinquishment, resolution, consolation, as the couple kiss away their fears and embrace. The community moves off, the Preacher wishing them peace as he leaves. Husband and Wife now stand alone in their new domain.

Los Angeles, March 3, 2002

A HOMESPUN AMERICAN PROUST

2010-02-28T08:24:00.000-08:00

Church, Sprott, 1971

William Christenberry, Kudzu with Storm Cloud, near Akron, Alabama, 1981

K House, 1998-2000

James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Familes (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1941)

William Christenberry, Foreword by Elizabeth Broun, with Essays by Walter Hopps, Andy
Grundberg, and Howard N. Fox (New York: Aperture/with the Smithsonian American Art
Museum, 2006)

Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry, Smithsonian American Art Museum, July 4,
2006-July 4, 2007

William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961-2007, Aperture Gallery, July 6-August 17, 2006

Howard N. Fox, lecture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, July 22, 2006

Richard B. Woodward, “Country Roads,” New York Times Book Review, September 3, 2006

William Christenberry, lecture, UCLA Hammer Museum, November 30, 2006

On July 22, 2006—during a trip to Washington, D.C. to celebrate the 90th birthday of his father—my companion Howard lectured on the occasion of “Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Howard had also contributed an essay to the recent Aperture publication, William Christenberry. Although we intended to arrive early to meet the Christenberrys for a tour beforehand, D.C. traffic prevented him from joining them—he had to preview the sound and projection systems before his lecture—and I toured the show with Bill and Sandy without him.

We had known Bill and Sandy for some years going back to our life in that city. Howard reminds me that our first dinner of spaghetti alla carbonara was shared with them at Pettitos on Connecticut Avenue. I also recall an afternoon in their home and a visit to his studio with Howard, which I will discuss later in this brief essay.

The tour of his new show was fascinating to me not only because I enjoy Christenberry’s art, of which this show presented a good selection, but also because of the artist’s own observations about his art. I recognize that most critics detest just such heavily “guided” viewings; but I love them, if only because it is at these times when one can truly get to know the artist—or at least get to know what the artist feels is most important about his art. Bill is a laconic southerner, and I don’t believe that he offered much information about his work that hasn’t previously been published, but the tone of his comments and the focus of his observations were significant, if only in his reiteration of his major concerns. What a pleasant afternoon: a guided tour by the artist followed by my friend’s lecture!

It may appear, accordingly, that I might have little to observe other than sharing these pleasant memories. Given that one of Christenberry’s major concerns is the role of memory, that may not be a bad way to approach the assemblage of paintings, photographs, sculptures and mixed-media works collected in “Passing Time.” What do we remember, and why? The numerous old houses, sheds, barns, roads, churches, road signs, graves and grave-markers, and other representations of his native Hale County, Alabama—a region also explored in the photographs of Walker Evans and writings of James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—seem to call up Christenberry’s youth or a time before his youth, when these same buildings and objects, many now in decay, actively housed the activities of living beings. And in that sense, there is a bit of nostalgia in the beautiful world he presents, a beauty that, perhaps, illuminates the lives once involved with these places and things. As Walter Hopps writes in his short essay to the Aperture book: “Without its ever being maudlin or sentimental, there is a belief in human goodness and redemption—in virtue and hard work and effort, however tattered.”

Howard Fox reiterates these concerns in his essay, “An Elegiac Vision”:

He characteristically depicts in all of his art—photographs, paintings,
sculptures, drawings—the most intimate aspects of people’s daily
human existence: the doorways through which they enter and leave
in the course of their workaday routines; the windows through which
they gaze out or peer in; their front and back yards; the sheds where
they store their tools, their forgotten belongings, and maybe their
secret things; the calendars and diaries wherein they mark the passage
of time; even the humble objects used to mark their graves.

Christenberry’s depiction of this everyday Alabama world, however, often appears to be one of complete objectivity. As Fox points out, these places and objects, particularly in the mature work, are nearly all bereft of people. It is as if they are sensed only “by their absence.” The riotous force of nature, indeed, has taken over, and, in that sense—and despite the “goodness and redemption” that once existed in these places and was represented by the objects—there is a sense of total objectivity in his work. As Richard B. Woodward observed in his New York Times Book Review essay on the book, William Christenberry:

The kudzu devouring a vacant cabin in a 2004 photograph is a science
fiction monster that can turn anything into a Chia Pet. Neither good
nor evil, the vine is simply a nuisance of life in this part of the country.
Christenberry’s focus on the habitats and hangouts of the poor, blacks
and whites, is similarly nonjudgmental. These places weren’t constructed
to last for the ages and aren’t likely to be missed, except by those
who filled them for a few years or decades. Still, he treats them with
respect, charting their alterations and passings. Paying careful attention
to surroundings that would otherwise be forgotten or unremarked upon
can be its own political statement.

Accordingly, it appears, it is the attention to these places and things, the importance the artist himself has put upon them and the memories through which he has viewed them that awards any value to his subjects.

Indeed, Christenberry further extends these issues of memory with his own reconstructions of various places and objects, most notably the 1974-75 sculpture of Sprott Church (surrounded on its pedestal by “real” Alabama clay)—a “reconstruction” of the 1971 photograph, an image presented again in photographs of 1981 and 1990 (the last of which reveals the removal of the church’s two steeples) and the 2005 “memory” reconstruction (titled “Sprott Church [Memory]”) that in its ghostlike white wax-covered rendition appears like something out of a dream. Similarly, the “Green Warehouse,” photographed 18 times over a period from 1973-2004, is remembered in his 1978-79 sculptural reconstruction of the 1998 painting “Green Warehouse.” Combined with his several “Southern Monuments,” which read almost like surrealistic dreamscapes, his patchwork house, and various “dream buildings,” these works call up issues surrounding memory and the dreams memories invoke. His “Alabama Box” contains works by the artist depicting his native landscape as well as objects and even soil from that state, a work which may remind one—in the art historical context—of the dream boxes of Joseph Cornell, while recalling—from a more populist perspective—Jem Finch’s treasure box (in To Kill a Mockingbird by fellow Alabamian Harper Lee) filled with hand-carved objects found in the knot of a tree. Christenberry’s art carries with it, accordingly, a sense of totemism, an almost mystical kinship with the group of southern individuals whose structures and objects these works of art symbolize.

What has generally been described as the “dark side” or the “underbelly” of this world is Christenberry’s obsession with The Klan. Some photographs call up Christenberry’s personal encounters with the Klan. “The Klub” for example is a photograph of a small bar in Uniontown where, so Bill described the incident to me, he had stopped for a drink. But upon entering the building he’d gotten a strange feeling about its inhabitants, and he quickly turned to leave, observing several individuals gathering near the doorway. “It dawned on me, suddenly, the existence of the K in the word Klub. It’s a good thing I left as quickly as I’d entered the place, and my car was tagged with Tennessee license plates.” Fox relates Cristenberry’s first engagement with the Klan in 1960, when he attended, “out of curiosity,” a Klan meeting in the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse. “Or at least he planned to: ascending the stairs, Christenberry was stopped dead in his tracks by the presence of a Klansman in full regalia, whose menacing eyes glaring through the slits frightened him off in a rush down the stairs.”

Howard also recounts his first viewing of the mysterious “Klan Room” in Christenberry’s studio, a room separated from the rest of his studio that looked like a padlocked storage area, a room revealed to very few individuals. I was with Howard on that day in 1979:

For the few to whom Christenberry did reveal this secret place,
the experience was eerie, disturbing, and spellbinding. It was pure
theater. The door opened into a claustrophobic space flooded with
blood-red light and as crowded as an Egyptian tomb, stacked floor-
to-ceiling with hundreds of Klan-robed dolls and effigies of all
the Klan represented: torchlight parades, strange rituals, lynchings.
A neon cross high up on the wall presided impassively over the
silent mayhem of the room.

I recall he also had a photograph taken of a Klan march in Washington, D.C. in 1928.

As Andy Grundberg reminds us in his essay in the William Christenberry volume the contents of this Klan Room were stolen, under mysterious circumstances, soon after we had seen it. I recall Bill telling Howard and me about the robbery, and him describing his distress in now having to suspect everyone to whom he’d shown it, a chosen few friends.

At a recent lecture in Los Angeles Bill revealed that during the robbery the doors to the storeroom had evidently been taken off their hinges and then replaced before the thief’s or thieves’ escape, which suggests a highly focused robbery by a very professional group or individual. It is no wonder that among the suspects were pro- or anti-Klan sympathizers.

For Christenberry this more frightening side of Alabama life is presented as another aspect of his memory, dark and horrifying memories as they are. And, although no works from the Klan Room appear in the Smithsonian American Museum Show, one eerily recognizes the same terrifying images in the reverse V-shaped images of the “Dream Building Ensemble,” a suite of eleven sculptural forms that may appear first as images similar to the Washington Monument in D.C., but quickly transform themselves before one’s eyes into terrifying all-white emblems of futurist-like cities akin to those of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or even of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Christenberry’s drawing “Study for a Dream Building,” his variously colored sculptures “Variations on a Theme, Eight Dream Buildings,” and his 2000 “Dream Building (Blue)” all reiterate the same images, thus incorporating the Klan figures into his totemistic memory as well.

A few years ago, I would have stopped this essay here, agreeing with all of the observations—observations which include comments by the artist himself—I’ve reiterated above. But this time, as I observed the various photographs, paintings, sculptures and combines while discussing with the artist and his wife the writings of James Agee and Eudora Welty (the latter with whom Bill had a long conversation in her Jackson, Mississippi house), I suddenly was struck by the fact that despite the great beauty and longing of this work, it is not representative of what one might describe as a confirmation of life. Indeed, except for a couple of early works (“Fruitstand, Sidewalk, Memphis, Tennessee” of 1966 and the beautifully formally-constructed [by accident Christenberry told me] photograph “Horses and Black Buildings, Newbern, Alabama,”), Christenberry’s art was not only “bereft of human beings” but conveys little sign of the lives connected with his subjects. Change, yes change is expressed everywhere: in image after image one witnesses the transformation of buildings through time. But in most cases, these buildings had already lost their original purposes and were left in a state of decay or, as with the iconic Sprott Church, were transformed beyond recognition before being caught in the shutter of Christenberry’s camera.

When Christenberry personally describes several of the images, he is delighted to share the stories involved with them, revealing often anecdotal and emotionally moving incidents that relate to the houses, barns, warehouses, and even signs which his art has embodied. We discover, for example, that the seemingly impenetrable “Red Building in Forest” was, in fact, originally a small, back country schoolhouse and, later, a polling location for people living in this removed location.

But without the background information, his images seem to have little to do with human use, and even the artist, before his encounters with owners and neighbors, often pondered some of these buildings’ purposes. Even without the obvious images of graves and the most recent crypt-like constructions of “Black Memory Form” of 1998, “Memory Form with Coffin” of 2003, and “Memory For (Dark Doorway)” of 2004, much of this art consists almost entirely of images of the dead. Far from being objective, “nonjudgmental” presentations of nature, the photographs of kudzu for example (such as “Kudzu Devouring Building, near Greensboro, Alabama”) are quite emotionally-charged even in their titles. This world, the world we cannot help but recognize as one with which the artist is nearly-obsessed, is literally falling apart, being destroyed not only by nature but by the forces—social and individual—that once controlled it. One need only compare the various photo-graphs and reconstructions of Sprott Church with Agee’s description of an Alabama church to recognize that the vision with which Agee imbues buildings and objects is not that of Christenberry’s:

It was a good enough church from the moment the curve opened and we
saw it that I slowed a little and we kept our eyes on it. But as we came
even with it the light so held it that it shocked us with its goodness straight
through the body, so that at the same instant we said Jesus. I put on the
brakes and backed the car slowly, watching the light on the building,
until we were at the same apex, and we sat still for a couple of minutes
at least before getting out, studying in arrest what had hit us so hard as
we slowed past its perpendicular. (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men).

If Agee’s church—not far away, according to Christenberry, from Sprott Church—is all aglow with “goodness,” Christenberry’s 1981 photo is set against a dark stand of woods. No doubt, if Christenberry had photographed only that image, it might also be said to represent “goodness straight through the body”; but in the repeated images—whether reconstructed as sculpture or revisited as in the truncated 1990 photograph—we ultimately see this structure as a strangely lonely and isolated thing. In the 1974-75 sculpture, wherein the church is represented as being set up on blocks and the stairway is presented without railings so that one might almost fear to enter—particularly in its photographic reproduction in the book, but also in its actual dramatically lit position of isolation in the show—Christenberry’s memory church resembles less a site which might elicit a cry of “Jesus” than an image out of a lonely Edward Hopper landscape. Whereas Agee’s church seems to call up “God’s mask and wooden skull and home” standing “empty in the meditation of the sun,” Christenberry’s “house of God” calls up something like a burial tomb, topped with majesty of two Klan like reverse V-shaped figures. The later truncated version looks more like the “Red Building in Forest” hut, the latter with a door so uninviting to entry that it matches the bricklike surface of the rest of the structure. It is no accident that the most recent “Sprott Church” is covered, like Poe’s famed house, in wax.

Again and again, not only are Christenberry’s structures devoured by kudzu but are destroyed by time and nature (such as “Fallen House, near Marion, Alabama” or the “Remains of Boys’ Room, near Stewart, Alabama”). The transformation of “Wood’s Radio-TV Service” to “The Bar-B-Q Inn” ends in the vacancy of Martin Luther King Road. Christenberry’s Alabama represents not only a world out of the past, but a world destroyed, dead, lost.

Within this context, The Klan Room and the associated images of its undeniable evil do not appear to be so much in opposition or even in juxtaposition to these other images, as they are at home in it, perhaps even partially explaining why and how that Eden fell. Here, for the first time in the artist’s oeuvre, are human beings—and grandly dressed beings at that—but instead of bringing life to this now empty world, they symbolize the brutal hate and death that were at the heart of its destruction.

Christenberry’s is a world fallen, lost, yes, but also a world once loved. And in that respect, we perceive in his obsession with his Alabama childhood—depicted not only in his own works but in some carved wooden tools from the museum’s vast folk-art collection, crafted by his own father—a sort of homespun American Proust who is bent on not simply representing his own Edenic past, but portraying a life now lost to all, an Eden wherein man was Satan himself. Perhaps such a world was destined to be destroyed and can only now be represented in the remnants that still exist or might be imagined in monuments of one’s own making, the only possibility left for redemption.

Los Angeles, September 4, 2006
December 1, 2006
Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 7 (January 2007).

MAKING THE MIND WHOLE

2010-02-26T11:01:00.000-08:00

Charles Bernstein Controlling Interests (New York: Roof Books, 1980)

In the past few years, Charles Bernstein has gained national reputation for his involvement with what he and others have described and defined as “Language” poetry. But that reputation has accrued more as a result of his theories than of his poetic output (amazingly, nine books to date); and, invariably, his critics and admirers write more on his poetic practices than on specific poems. Much of this focus has been inculcated by Bernstein himself; like Ezra Pound earlier in this century, Bernstein (as well as other “Language” poets) has felt the need to write about writing almost as actively as to write poetry. Indeed, for this author, as for many contemporary writers, there has been a purposeful equivocation of the linguistic activity of creating a poetics by which to live and that of creating an artifact. That Bernstein’s particular poetics, moreover, has been perceived as a kind of “warrior” movement—that it has enraged as many readers as it has engaged–has helped to divert attention from the his poems to his allegiances.

Concomitantly, it is clear that many critics of contemporary poetry find it terribly difficult to discuss a particular poem that is not about something, but is something “fixed” in perpetual process. Reflecting this, obviously, is the conversion from New Critical practices to phenomenologist, structuralist, semiotic, and other methodologies: all shifts from a reading of the poem to an exploration of what causes and determines the poetic act. But although this has been a healthy antidote to the textual stupor into which American critics of previous decades had fallen, for younger poets it has resulted in a radical disregard of their writings. This is particularly unfortunate in this instance, for not only have Bernstein’s ideas stirred and stimulated the literary community, but his poems are some of the most original and imaginative of American lyric verse. Those of his recent collection, Controlling Interests, especially lie in wait for a contextual reading, if not for an old-fashioned textual one.

Certainly, these poems represent a great many of the “Language” strategies. Passages from “The Next Available Place” and “Standing Target” can almost be read as paradigms for the extensive use of alliteration, onomatopoeia, aural and visual punning, syntactic fragmentariness, enjambment, and outright glossolalia that characterize much of “Language” writing. In such passages–

Dread, scuzzy. Perhaps Polish (polish). I
feel rearranged, mandate a macaroon. Cuba,
Taiwan. Indubitable dauntress fraudulent as ever
attempting a view: binary, bisected, by the seaside,
beside myself. ... (“The Next Available Place, p. 32)––

Bernstein evinces his commitment to a poetry of thinking in process and demonstrates the “controlling interests” of a literary mode that permits the “leaps, jumps, fissures, repetitions, bridges, schisms, colloquialisms, trains of associations, and memory” that are integral to the music and rhythm of contemplation “as it is being lived in a body” (see Bernstein’s essay, “Thought’s Measure,” collected in Content’s Dream). In these poems, there is an enigmatic, charm-like effect, an almost cabalistic quality which is alien and even frightening to a society that still believes that reading a poem is related to an explication de texte.

What Bernstein’s poetry demands of us is that we be as intuitive as we are analytic, that we use the right side of our craniums as much as the left. Reading a poem, Bernstein’s writing implies, is an act that permits the reader to bring the irrational into touch with reason, that allows the reader to hear the unspoken self in the voice of its hegemonic sister. Meaning, accordingly, is not a closed system; the author does not declare ideas cloaked in poetic language, but rather, through his language explores a range of ideas and experience.

The first few lines of “Sentences My Father Used,” for example, seemingly abandon the reader to a landscape of uninterruptible fragments:

Casts across otherwise unavailable fields.
Makes plain. Ruffled. Is trying to
alleviate his false: invalidate. Yet all is
“to live out”, by shut belief, the
various, simply succeeds which. Roofs that
retain irksomeness. Points at
slopes. Buzz over misuses of reflection
(tendon). Gets sweeps, entails complete
sympathy, mists. I realize slowly,
which blurting reminds, or how you, intricate
in its. .... (p. 21)

Who or what is “casting” in the first line of this passage? Of what “fields” is the poet speaking, and why are they “otherwise unavailable?” Who or what “Makes plain” in the second line, and what is being “made plain” or “explained?” Who or what is “ruffled,” and does the word here mean “irritated,” “undulated,” or “gathered along one edge?” Who is trying to “alleviate his false,” and where is the object? What is “false?” These and dozens of such questions understandably may discourage the uninitiated reader. Yet he who would turn away would miss the point and experience of reading this remarkable work. The meaning does not lie in answers, but in the very questions which the poem generates. The “indeterminacy” of this sort of poetry, as Marjorie Perloff argued in her Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), permits us to receive its images as “living phenomena,” as words that exist in a fluid and plastic relationship.

It doesn’t really matter that we cannot determine immediately who or what “casts across” the “fields,” for the action occurs even without its subject, an action that not only “reveals” or “manifests” itself (“makes plain”), but also “begets” (another meaning of “makes”) a “plain,” a flat or level field. Similarly, it isn’t important to know who or what is “ruffled,” for the word alone serves to signify simultaneously a “vexation” or “irritation” (perhaps because the fields are “otherwise unavailable?”), a sudden “undulation” (of the flat “plain?”), and a “gathering [of people] along one edge” (of the now available “fields?”) The following phrase introduces a male subject through the pronoun, and the reader cannot help but connect him with the previous actions and with the title of the poem. But even this new information is framed in aposiopesis, is cut off in mid-sentence, so that the reader must continue the process of relating word to word, line to line in order to discern the object of the father’s “false” (“faults?”). Like a detective, the reader must (re)construct the details, must (re)build the poem to its meaning. As the author implies in the first lines, one comes to “realize” the poem “slowly,” “through surprising details that hide more than announce” (p. 21).

In saying this, Bernstein is not arguing for obscurantism, but for a poetry in which the reader must use all of his or her faculties, in which he must “listen” for meaning as well as look for it. The reader of this poem cannot read merely at the level of the denotation or connotation of the words, but must experience their rhythms, sounds, and patterns the way one might read a score for orchestra. As any musician knows, a successful interpretation of a symphony depends not only upon reading notes, but upon playing with the nuances of phrase, rhythm, volume, pitch, and timbre; similarly, Bernstein requires that the performer of his poem attend to all the nuances of language.

That is not to suggest that in a poem such as “Sentences My Father Used,” style outweighs content. The attentive reader soon discovers that the poems do have denotative/connotative meanings. As we (re)construct the poem, we encounter the poet’s father, a man who has gone through life in “shut belief,” with “a sense of purpose divorced from meaning.” Having put “everything....into the business,” he is isolated from family, friends, and life itself. The concerns of the poem–“Could life have been different?” “Is there hope for change, a possibility to ‘recover what was in your pocket, the watch your / parent gave you if you would only mind / the hour’” (p. 27)–are issues that might have been raised by any Modernist poem.

But it is here that Bernstein’s reader is rewarded. In the hands of a lesser poet, such questions would be answered with an image, symbol, or statement of reconciliation (or perhaps irreconcilableness) introduced into the poem by the author, or, at most, generated by a series of authorial devices which inherently would exclude the reader from involvement. In Bernstein’s poem, however, the answers derive directly from the language and the reader’s commitment to it. For the sensitive performer of the poem, I suggest, the “field” of the poem’s beginning is gradually perceived to be not merely a field to the edge of which the poet’s father has come to alleviate his “false” or “faults,” to be not only a “canvas of trumped up excuses” for the father’s evasion of “the chain of connections,” but also to be a field through which the reader must journey, a terrain of pain and missed opportunities through which the reader must search with the poet (and through the poet, with his father) to bring meaning back into touch with purpose. If the reader is successful in the linguistic (re)construction, he eventually comes to view the “field” or “plain” of the poem from a new perspective. By the end of the poem, things are, indeed, “made plain,” as from the windows of a “plane” the reader glimpses the “gleaming lights” which “waken the passengers to the possibilities of the terrain” (p. 26), lights which enlighten us to new ways of seeing and signify the potentiality of reuniting that individual vision with society.

Depending as they do on each of our interpretations, upon the consciousness which each reader brings to the poem, these new ways of seeing, these “possibilities” are “dreadfully private”; not everything can be spoken. But, if we have followed the flux and reflux of the language, with the poet we share a breakthrough at poem’s end, as the pain and isolation which the poem has recounted is transformed into the “pane” of the “plane” window, which “gives way, transparent, / to a possibility of rectitude” (p. 27).

It is this “possibility of rectitude,” the potential for righting or correcting the individual’s and society’s refusals to participate in the act of making meaning which Bernstein offers in nearly all the poems of this collection. The first poem of the book, in fact, focuses on that very problem. In “Matters of Policy,” the reader is asked to participate with the poet in an exploration of the failures and successes of contemporary American culture, a culture that has assimilated and now presumes the great technological advancements of this century, a society that, through “electricity” and “Speed,” has seemingly been given more time for amusement and, thus, has achieved a greater worldliness than any society in history. As the poet somewhat cynically observes:

....Electricity hyperventilates even the
most tired veins. Books strew the streets.
Bicycles are stored beneath every other staircase.
The Metropolitan Opera fills up every night as the
great masses of the people thrill to Pavarotti,
Scotto, Plishka, & Caballe. The halls of the
museums are clogged with commerce. Metroliners
speed us here & there with a graciousness
only imagined in earlier times. Tempers are
not lost since the bosses no longer order about
their workers. Guacamole has replaced turkey as
the national dish of most favor. .....(“Matters of Policy,” p. 4)

In such a post-Mauberlian world, guacamole may have cast out turkey (as “croissants” have replaced “absinthe” [p. 1], but, along with the poet, what we “most care about / is another sip of....Pepsi-Cola” (p. 1). For, the benefits of change have engendered not only extreme eclecticisms, but an insatiable desire for change itself, as if it, too, were a consumer product; “Even nostalgia has been used up” (p. 4). Our perspective has shifted from despair for what we have lost to impatience for what the future is about to bring. The “wasteland” has metamorphosed into “a broad plain in a universe of / anterooms” (p. 1), into one boundless waiting place.

But what is most disturbing, Bernstein hints, is not that we wait, but how we wait. There is a “spirit / of the place–a certain je ne sais quoi that / lurks, like the miles of subway tunnels, electrical / conduits, & sewage ducts, far below the surface” (p. 3); there is a passive acceptance of the future that is of far greater import than the customs and values we have surrendered. As we (like our reporters) “sit around talking over Pelican Punch tea about the underlying issues” (p. 5), there is a danger that we will fail to note our own demise, there is a possibility that we may become the “matters of policy” – the subjects of a course of action. Will we be determined by or will we determine our future technology? The poet fears that, although there’s now “plenty of time,” there are few individuals “with enough integrity or intensity to / fill it with the measure we’ve / begun to crave” (p. 7).

Indirectly, these are issues raised by John Ashbery’s early poem, “The Instruction Manual,” a work which, at moments, Bernstein’s poem seems to parody in its search for answers. Both poets seek to revitalize the technological society in which they find themselves through the creative act of thinking/making a new world out of language, and in pursuit of that, both interweave the technical language of the work-day world with more lyrical evocations of exotic landscapes. But Ashbery’s dream-tour of Guadalajara, “City of rose-colored flowers,” reappears in Bernstein’s poem as a farcical journey to a

....relaxing change
the sofa, Alexandria, Trujillo. You looked
into my eyes & I felt the deep exotic textures
of your otherworldliness. A tangle of thorns bearing
trees, extensive areas in Asia, Australia, South
America. Rye, oats, &c. The tall grass
Prairie of the pampas of Madagascar, Paraguay
& the Green Chaco. ..... (“Matters of Policy,” pp. 5-6)

While Ashbery fantasizes paradisiacal scenes that reaffirm the imagination, Bernstein hallucinates in a series of associations that disintegrate into a mere listing (“Lobsters, oysters, / clams, crabs, tuna fisheries, shrimps,” p. 6), and immediately relapses into the surrounding technological structures:

(1) The use
of easy & fair surfaces along the general paths
followed by the after flow. (2) At & near
the surface of the wave profile. (3) Proof
of good design. (4) Submerged
bulbs. .... (p. 6)

Similarly, both Ashbery and Bernstein look for a resolution between the languages of the visionary and the technocrat in the vernacular of the tour guide, who, if unable to express the full meaning of such voyages, at least can summarize events. And for Ashbery, in fact, this is the best we can hope for, a kind of poetic jargon, half-way between the dreamer and the society in which he lives:

How limited, but how complete withal, has been our
experience of Guadalajara!
.......................................................
And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered
old tower, I turn my gaze
Back to the instruction manual which has made me
dream of Guadalajara.
(“The Instruction Manual,” Some Trees. p. 18)

For Bernstein, however, twenty-five years later, there is an inherent ridiculousness in such a compromise, and the poet and reader are mildly mocked for believing in such simplistic solutions:

At last, the
cabin cruise is over & the captain gently
chides farewell to us with a luminous laugh.
(“Matters of Policy,” p. 8)

For, while Ashbery’s vision derives from a basic juxtaposition of antithetical positions, for an aesthetic of collage with roots in the Hegelian dialectic, Bernstein’s poetics, with its traces of American Romanticism, functions in terms of the simultaneity of object and experience. Any “answers” that “Matters of Policy” proffers to the questions it has raised result from the synchronism of reality–which I have expressed in my own poetry as the “seams in seems”–rather than from accommodation. Everywhere in Bernstein’s poetry there is an immediate, nonsymbolic simultaneousness of meaning. Language for Bernstein is both creator and agent of ideation, and it is in the words as objects, accordingly, that the potential solutions of our culture’s dilemmas lie. Although along with the poet we may fear that our society is more interested in buying and selling art than in creating or experiencing it (“our museums are clogged with commerce”), there is a possibility that the museums can become places of social intercourse (another meaning of “commerce”). The cause of the constantly changing colors of the sky of which the poet writes is probably pollution, but the shifts of the hour and the season can also produce dazzling changes of color. Although “hyperventilation” usually results in a “black out,” an intake of extra oxygen can be temporarily invigorating, and, as applied to medical technology such as breathing apparatuses, it can save lives.

It is our capacity to understand this simultaneity of things in and through language that will determine whether, as individuals or a society, we can “fill” our cravings. We must understand that the “measure” with which we fulfill our desires is not simply a “capacity,” but also is both “a course of action” (a “matter of policy”) and a “standard” by which our future can be constructed. Like the poet, who, upon completing the voyage, takes out his “harmonica” and “bang[s] out some scales,” we must create our own “measure,” we must devise our own means of survival through the language, music, rhythm, and beat of life. If we can accomplish such measures, like the bongo player in the candy store with whom the poem closes, our meaning will penetrate the silent inaction of the world around us.

In nearly all of the poems of Controlling Interests, Bernstein reveals his desire for an fascination with the concomitance of the individual and the world, of all language and experience. But simultaneity, as I suggested earlier, functions in his work not merely in terms of meaning, but in terms of nearly all the senses, in terms of the actual texture and sounds of the words and sentences he uses. It is this texture, this entangled density and richness of syntax, which is the meat of his poetry, but which, in its very impenetrability, is lost in any standardized reading. Yet, it is this maze of seemingly superfluous matter that is the most important aspect of his work; for it is in his “forensic bouts with the subterranean,” as he puts it in the last poem of the book, that he “hears the way the world hears,” permitting him to allow readers with radically different experiences and sensibilities to draw simultaneously upon the poem for their range of private associations and understandings. It is this attempt to “portray a / version of that timeless time, ...that our nostalgia clings to and our reason discounts” (“Island Life,” p. 77), I argue, that is Bernstein’s most original contribution. For this reason I have described my couple of readings as contextual, readings with the text, as opposed to readings of the text. No one reading of a Bernstein poem could ever be complete, and that is the wonder of each. My readings, thus, must not be seen as “fixes” on these poems, but should be understood as one reader’s attempts to bring his unspoken feelings about Bernstein’s writing into touch with a more analytic critic. It is this kind of synchronism, this act of making the mind whole, which Bernstein ultimately asks of his readers and fellow poets in his poetry and criticism both.

Philadelphia, 1982
Reprinted from Paper Air, III, no. 1 (1982).

STARTING OVER

2010-02-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

Stacey Levine Frances Johnson: A Novel (Astoria, Oregon: Clear Cut Press, 2005)

About a third of the way through reading Stacey Levine’s new novel, Frances Johnson, I commented to a friend that, unlike so many American fictions which seem to plow through plot and character like a thresher moving down rows of corn (if rows might be understood as chapters), this was a wonderfully lazy narrative, a story that seemed to have no particular place to go and all the time in the world to take you there.

The jacket cover of this Green Integer-size paperback compares Levine’s writing to that of Jane Bowles, and there is a certain truth to that observation, particularly in the eccentricity of Bowles’s characters who act less out of determination than from whim and behave with an almost passive acceptance of forces beyond their control. Behind Bowles’s writing, however, there are generally exotic, strange worlds (Panama, Guatemala, Morocco, etc) that transform or at least inform both characters and text. Although Levine has set her new fiction in Florida with a nearby volcano to possibly stir things up, the small town of Munson —despite the daily rumblings of the natural forces around it — is a drab world of dirt and mud. Buildings, streets, homes, and general landscape are rarely described, and when they are it merely confirms the feeling that the town and its citizens are perpetually in a fog, enervated, unable to act. Accordingly, the fiction, unlike more normative realist presentations with emphasis on place, centers itself on character —particularly upon the thinking processes of its central figure, Frances Johnson. And it is the languid revealing of this figure that seems to slow the story down and to allow it to move in the multiple directions in which Frances feels driven and pulled.

Midway through the book, as Frances arrives at the house of her close friend Nancy (a house, incidentally, which the author does describe and observes it as being “lovelier than any dwelling in Munson, and perhaps for this reason folks bore her [Nancy] grudges”), Levine admits to the very method of storytelling I had noted:

“Frances, you recently told me you had several
dreams about chopped onions,” and Frances nodded
rhythmically, smiling happily as the two women
found the thread of a familiar, meandering dialogue
that proceeded in the halting yet serene manner of a
snail crossing a road over hours, unaware of time; and
forgetting the time indeed, not interested in turning
back, the friends talked, less in a conversation with
a point than in a kind of unstoppable practice that
neither woman wished to end.

Faced with such a linguistic construction it would be almost pointless to describe the fiction’s “plot.” The story —for those who must have one —is about a few days in Frances’ life in which she suddenly takes stock of herself and feels drawn to make decisions about her life: should she leave the small and grungy town of Munson and enter the world; should she abandon her sexless relationship with Ray Mars, who the rest of the townspeople, including Ray’s brother Kenny, feel is not good enough for Frances; should she attend the annual town dance and be swept away
in the arms of the new town doctor Mark Carol?

These are the issues, along with others, that suddenly face our hero, and are posed, along with questions with which the author directly confronts the reader in her own series of interrogations such as “To which places would Frances Johnson go?”

In search of answers, Frances goes many places: to visit her friend and doctor Palmer, to speak to the owner of the local diner, Mal, and, as previously mentioned, to visit Nancy. Yet none of these people can answer for her, and each helps only to instill yet more confusion as to what she should do. Mal insists she is sick and will die of some dread disease; Palmer encourages her to leave town in search of vast oil deposits that he needs for a balm he has concocted; and Nancy, who Frances suddenly perceives is more ordinary that she imagined, asks her to help out in cleaning and cooking for the impending visit of her children.

In the end none of these choices seem to matter. Frances’s mother, a determined small-town woman who in her dominance of her daughter has obviously helped to generate the young woman’s passivity, insists that she attend the dance, where Frances is, so to speak, swept away into the arms of Doctor Carol. But even this event has little significance as the author hilariously pulls the rug out from under character and reader by sending the mother back to the clearing where she has left her daughter lying beside both Mark and Ray, to announce that the community has suddenly determined Mark Carol is a no-good “crumb-bum!” “There are others, though, Frances: you’ll see.” The story, accordingly, has the potential to start over. And the reader —like Frances and Nancy in their conversations — has taken so much pleasure in the telling of the story that, indeed, he is willing to read the book —and experience these few days of her life —again.

Los Angeles, October 25, 2005
Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, Vol. 3, no. 2 (April 2006).
Reprinted in Douglas Messerli, My Year 2005: Terrifying Times (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006).

OUT OF STEP

2010-02-19T10:59:00.000-08:00

Donald Ogden Stewart Aunt Polly's Story of Mankind (New York: George H. Doran, 1923)

An early friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald's, Donald Ogden Stewart lived, for most of his life, in a charmed world. After graduating from Yale University, Stewart began writing satires in the manner of Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker and others, and, while writing for Broadway, become a member of the renowned Algonquin Round Table. After a stint in Paris, where he developed close friendships with Hemingway (he was the model for Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises), Dos Passos, Tristan Tzara and numerous others, he returned to write screenplays for Hollywood, winning an Oscar for his adaptation of his friend Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story.

Previously he had also adapted Barry's Holiday, and wrote the screenplays of That Uncertain Feeling and Life with Father, among others. Djuna Barnes' interview with him in 1930 was brimming with sarcasm of his enormous successes. At interview's end Barnes finally comes full out with her disdain for him:

We said: "Do you want to die?"
"No," he answered lightly, "do you?"
"We don't mind," we answered, stepping into the night.

One of Stewart's most noted satirical works, Aunt Polly's Story of Mankind, a seemingly gentle riff on WASP culture and values, sat for years in my library until I recently aired it out.

Aunt Polly, concerned about the education and behavior of her sister's three children, takes it upon herself over a period of a few weeks to share with them her version of the history of mankind, a delightfully Panglossian tale of the endless progress of man from caveman to the present day, culminating in the perfect family of herself, her husband Frederick, a banker, and her sweetly behaved son, David.

Sweeping them up into her limousine after school, Polly skims over various historical periods, "Egypt and Mesopotamia," "Greece," "Rome and the Christian Crusaders," and "European Monarchies and the American Revolution," portraying them each as a "step forward" to "The Glorious Present," a post World War I paradise of her family's wealth and privilege in a world where there will never again be war.

The perfect David is, contrarily shown by the author, to be an absolute monster who poisons his dog, begins fights from which he runs, and financially takes advantage of his classmates.
Meanwhile, his cousin Samuel and his two sisters, who have obviously grown up in a more liberal atmosphere, are naturally curious and pepper Polly with numerous questions that she determines are certain signs of their impoliteness, discouraging, accordingly, any deeper entry into her bumbling recounting of the past.

"Egyptians did build up a certain form of civilization although of course
the wrong form and did not last."
"How long did it last, Aunt Polly?" asked Samuel.
"Why—I think about five or six thousand years," replied Polly.
"That's longer than America, isn't it?" said Mary.
"Why, yes, dear," replied Aunt Polly, 'but, children, you must remember that all that happened a long, long time ago when time didn't really matter so much. ...An Egyptian didn't have anything to do all day compared to a person to-day. He had no magazines, no books, no shopping, no church work, no lectures, no social duties, so, don't you see, time didn't really matter."

Had Stewart kept his entire tale at this level, however, we might consider this a slightly humorous piece, without any serious satirical bite. But Polly's bland musings on "the best of all possible worlds," are constantly undercut by the series of good deeds she, the church, and the school inflict upon the children, with David as the centerpiece.

After being told about the Crusaders and visited soon after by a War veteran, her husband and her son cook up the idea of creating a crusader group of young boys, with David as their leader.

The boys proudly march for a while, but David's dog gets in the way and the boys soon lose their patience with the child's pointless commands. A day later, the dog is found dead, and David insists it is the work of another school class. Now with an enemy on the horizon, most of the boys return to their marching. Frederick buys them uniforms, and, with his father's help, David purchases air-rifles at a discount, selling them back to the boys at the regular price. The crusader company is formed, and the other class develops its own competing group. When the church gets involved, they change their name to the Christian Scouts.

David's cousin, Samuel, however, refuses to join, and is labeled a "slacker" by David and the other boys, who refuse to speak to him. Joining up with the only Black and Jewish boys in the school, Samuel begins a newspaper. Insisting that he intends to investigate the poisoned dog episode, David and others begin to fear what he might say, ultimately dressing, like Klu Klux Klan members, in white robes, beating up Samuel, destroying his printing press, and frightening his partners off.

The two competing Christian Scout troupes, meanwhile, plan to march in the Armistice Day Parade, to show themselves ready to fight. All the Allies are represented by flags the boys carry, but as they meet one another upon the stage, the two groups cannot resist a all-out battle; only David escapes unharmed. The book ends with him safely ensconced in his bed counting out the money he has earned from his rifle sales.

Stewart's parody, accordingly, has some tooth: not only does he comically predict World War II, but unknowingly points to his own end. During the McCarthy era, Stewart was named as a Communist and was blacklisted in 1950. A year later he immigrated to England where lived out his life. He died in 1980 at the age of 86, Barnes outliving him by four years.

Los Angeles, February 19, 2010

ANSWERING THE SPHINX

2010-02-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

David Antin, I Never Knew What Time it Was (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

I told my friend David Antin the other day that I had a bone of contention with his new book, i never knew what time it was. For the several days I was reading it, whenever I went into the room where I had last left his book and glimpsed the cover, I immediately began singing the Rodgers and Hart song. That song began to haunt me, in fact. I couldn’t remember the actual lyrics, so I would begin with “I never knew what time it was / Till there was you…” and make up the rest… “What a strange time it was / so long without you,” each time creating new lyrics. For those who have a memory for lyrics, of course, the song actually begins with the phrase “I didn’t know what time it was / Till I met you.” and continues, “Oh, what a lovely time it was, / How sublime it was too!” So both David (perhaps intentionally) and I had gotten the lyrics wrong. How appropriate for a book that is very much about memory, about what one thinks one remembers in relationship to whatever the actual “reality” may be.

Reading David’s book, moreover, called up my own memories of David and his readings. I witnessed two of these pieces in their oral performances: “california — the nervous camel” at one of Paul Holdengräber’s cultural forums at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — where I also served as unofficial photographer of the event — and “time on my hands,” performed at CalArts.

Accordingly, I spent some time, after reading these works, attempting to remember them in their oral manifestations — which seemed to me quite different from the written documents. This is inevitable, I suspect, when attempting to remember what was said during a hour-long event. In short, I experienced a sort of fracture between event and document, a sort “crack in time,” if you will, which my memory had to bridge. I have known David and his wife Eleanor now for about 25 years, moreover, and during that long period my personal memories of these and numerous other performances I’ve witnessed have become intertwined with their personal lives and the several events I shared with them.

For example, after reading “california — the nervous camel”— the title of which arose, apparently, from the travels of a San Diego couple to Egypt, where the couple’s camera had captured the fall of a woman from a camel who’d been given contrary orders (“get up,” “go down”) by the camel driver — I could not quite comprehend this image within the context of what David was saying about the region. It was a wonderful image and sounded perfect as a metaphor for the desert lands of Southern California, but I grew uncertain whether California was like the camel because of the rolling earthquake-like temblors, the indecisiveness of its citizens or leaders, the quick rise and fall of its cultural interests and/or economy, or the constant shifts in its values. The metaphor presented a series of possibilities, all of which were of interest. Just as I had reinvented the lyrics of the standard ballad, I made a new meaning of David’s image. I chose a much more personal meaning for the metaphor, picturing the author himself as the “the nervous camel”— albeit with one hump, that marvelously domed head that anyone who’s seen him cannot forget.

When I first visited California, I stayed with the Antins, who lived, as they do today, near San Diego. I remember them picking me up at the train station and the three of us beginning a series of conversations that would continue seemingly nonstop during the two days of my visit. As he drove up the sandy paths to their then somewhat isolated home, David, speaking, seldom seemed to attend to the road, which terrified me! Between the continued movement of his hands and the almost complete inattention of his eyes upon the road, I was amazed we reached their house safely.

Later he took me to the beach — as he reminds me it must have been the more isolated Solana Beach rather than the popular La Jolla beach — where I recall, with fondness, our remarkable discussion as we walked along the Pacific (in what must be one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world), the bald pate of his head glistening in the afternoon sun. We returned to the house and friends stopped by, friends who were introduced not just by name or vocation, but through extensive descriptions of their intellectual achievements and their current subjects of research. Such intense conversation is highly exciting, but also exhausting, and I was almost relieved to hit the bed. From my room across the way from their bedroom, however, I could hear David and Eleanor continuing the day’s discussions long into the night. I realized that, in a sense, language never quite stopped in the Antin’s house. Just as Eudora Welty had described the constant rhythm of the cotton gins as defining the life of the Fairchilds in Delta Wedding, so did the sound of voices define the Antins. It is easy for me, accordingly, to project the image of David as the nervous, one-humped camel of California, attempting to display the beauty of the landscape while discussing the narrative theory of my PhD dissertation which I was currently writing as we shuffled across the sand in a constant state of indecision between the enjoyment of space (sitting down to rest) and intellectual pleasure (moving forward with our ideas).

One might note that David was born into just such a world. As he describes his early life in his
recent book-length conversation with Charles Bernstein: “My earliest family memories were living with my grandmother and my aunts — all beautiful women — living in a great old house in Boro Park. …People kept coming from all over the world to visit, to play cards or chess and to tell stories and argue in a handful of European languages about people and facts and politics. …And my grandmother presided over the entire household in a droll, mischievous manner. This is the household I most remember. It was noisy, cheerful and gay, and a world away from the austere prison of living with my mother, which happened only once in a while.”

It is no wonder that Antin has spent a lifetime now “talking,” talking in public about the past and family, the present and ideas, philosophy and reminiscences. Although Antin has long been determined to separate his “talking” from fiction or story, and has doggedly argued that his work, with its intense use of poetic devices, is poetry, one must admit—as David does finally in this new volume — that his is a life of storytelling as intense—if not as encyclopedic — as Scheherazade. Indeed, it is the life-saving necessity of Scheherazade’s Thousand and One Nights, a necessity growing out of desire — in her case the desire to survive — that most distinguishes Antin’s storytelling from other, more normative, patterns.

These, in fact, are the very subjects of this new book: How does one remember? How does one understand life within the constant flux of time? How does one frame meaning when it constantly shifts? Or, to put it in the context of “the nervous camel,” how does one live in a place that is simultaneously rising and falling, beginning always anew by destroying the old? Naturally, one cannot help tumbling from time to time.

In exploring these ideas, however, Antin does not simply weave fictions — at least the kind of fiction most people understand by the word. For Antin’s talking is as interesting for what it leaves out as for what it presents.

The long California piece, for example, is a strange kind of love story. Well — it might be seen as a love story, although we have no evidence, no plot details that allow us any certainty. “california — the nervous camel” is about many things, but at its heart is a narrative about two couples, friends of the Antins, who seemingly do everything — except travel on vacation — together: Jack and Melissa, Richard and Alexandra. When Jack is killed in a car accident, Richard’s behavior radically changes:

Richard never seemed to recover from jacks untimely accident
his life changed completely after that he moved out of his house
and into the servants quarters behind it he stopped going to concerts
and openings where alexandra appeared alone he started spending
more time at the clinic in mexico and even that wasnt enough for
a while he literally disappeared …but when he came back to
san diego he gave up his practice left the house to Alexandra and
took up an entirely new career….

In Antin’s “story,” in which the characters are not overtly psychological, the reader/listener has no way of knowing what Richard is really feeling. Perhaps the death simply reminded him, as many men are reminded at his age, of his own mortality; perhaps he merely suffered a kind of mid-life crisis. Yet we feel, given the extensiveness of his withdrawal from his previous life, that the two men may have had a deeper relationship than the narrative itself presents, that perhaps their friendship might have been a gay one.

As with living beings, however, there is no discernable “plot,” we have no clear motivating action, just the events, the narrative of his acts. Antin has presented us with a story that, just as in my confusion of the work of art and the person, creates a sort of “crack in time” which the individual perceiver must fill with a significance of his own imagination. For Richard the face of the “nervous” camel, as it settled back into its relaxed state, appeared as a sphinx, an inscrutable beast demanding an answer to its impossible riddle, which is perhaps what Antin really means by his comparison of California to the camel. Clearly it is an image that might also help to describe Antin’s art. For what the cracks or hollow spaces of Antin’s “stories” force the reader to encounter is precisely that: the riddles of life.

In the title piece, Antin’s father-in-law undergoes a stroke and is able to speak only one word that sounds as if it might be from his native language, Hungarian: zaha. “zaha zaha he said zaha shaking his head and repeating it over and over zaha zaha to anything we had to say.” The Hungarian dictionary has no word remotely like it, and David is puzzled by the repeated word: is it a command? a desire? a person? something or someone he loved?

A Hungarian friend, a violinist, suggests it’s an inverted word, haza, which means homeland. But even this “answer,” if it is one, explains little. What does a dying man who has spent most of his life as a displaced Hungarian painter and poet in La Jolla mean by repeating “homeland?” As Antin notes:

…he was thinking of his homeland and of course budapest
is no longer his budapest and keckemet is no longer the little
town where his father painted the interiors of churches but
he was looking for this one place that he was sure never ever
to find again

The reader/listener can only imagine, can only fill in this “crack in time” with his own imaginative responses.

Something similar to the riddles at the heart of David’s “stories” occurs also on their larger structural level. In the more constrained form of commercial fiction it is plot that carries forward the events. In other words, it is a pattern of narrative continuity that allows the specific events of a tale to occur at regular intervals to this: Unhappy with her life, Jane takes a vacation to a small village to visit her friend Sally. There she meets an old friend Richard, a handsome man, who is still in love with her. Jane refuses the old friend’s advances, but as she finds herself growing fond of him once again, she discovers that Sally, who has always hated Jane’s husband, has secretly invited Richard to the town. At first she feels betrayed, but gradually comes to understand just how mistaken she has been in marrying her husband, a man whose affections she accepted just to goad her mother and father. Suddenly, comprehending that her life has been lived in emptiness, she seeks out her old friend’s love. But having been spurned twice, he has left the little country village. She follows him to the mountains, but he has moved on, and she is forced to return to her husband and family with the realization that true love will never be possible again. (If you don’t like my hastily constructed plot, substitute the plot of almost
any Henry James novel).

What Jane does in the little tourist town, the beautiful coat she wears as she again encounters Richard, what the town looks like, what she says to her acquaintances, the memories that overcome Jane in the little village — these are pearls on the string of the previous paragraph’s somewhat banal story-line, that, apparently, retain the attention of certain kinds of passive readers.

In Antin’s writing the strings have all been cut; his “tales” have no true beginning, no middle, no necessary end. Rather, they are structured by a sense of rhythm, most often linked by philosophical meditations or ideas, closing only when a literary narrative presents a parallel image of the ideas about which he has been talking.

For example, in “the noise of time” Antin begins with a discussion of an essay he’d read in The Nation on Robert Morris, an essay that disappoints the author and happens to mention the Hegelian aphorism that “an artwork is the embodiment of some truth.” Antin finds it difficult to perceive something as tangible as a piece of art or an artwork as a receptacle for abstract concepts, propositions or ideas. Perhaps the closest an art work can come to the embodiment of an idea, he suggests, is in the form of a machine, as an example of which he drolly proposes a mousetrap, a killing machine set up to act in a certain way when the mouse licks the peanut-butter. But what if the mouse prefers jelly, or the spring on the trap was not properly wound, or a whole myriad of other events intervene? Will the machine-of-art still hold its truths? Perhaps the “truths” only work under certain conditions.

Abandoning this possibility, Antin humorously explores another, slightly violent image: perhaps making art is more like bowling. The ideas are the pins toward which one propels the work of art, the ball of art hitting some of them, leaning against others. But the author admits he is a terrible bowler and most of his balls reach only the gutter. How does one then get at ideas through art? How does something mean?

Ultimately Antin argues that, for him, a work of art is something in which ideas go running in all directions, sometimes to be lost, sometimes accidentally crossing paths with others. He presents two narratives to prove his point about how ideas are lost or are transformed into other things. Having just purchased a copy of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s essays, The Noise of Time, he is struck with the translator’s use of the word “noise” in the title, since in Russian shum is used to evoke the sound of repetitive or abrasive events, “the rustle of leaves,” “the roar of the sea,” “the pounding of the surf,” “the clamor of a crowd,” etc. Translating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Vladimir Nabokov renders the word as “hubbub.” Why has this translator, Clarence Brown, translated the word as “noise?” Perhaps, argues Antin, Brown was influenced by the period in which he was translating, when “noise” came to be understood as entropy, “the growing disorder that affects all ordered systems over time the frictional forces that reduce all directed energies to forms of disorder sooner or later as we go from more orderly universes to more disorderly universes given enough time.” I am personally somewhat skeptical about this explanation for the translator’s choice, but certainly anyone aware of the association of the word “noise” with “entropy,” would find the title much richer, as Antin argues, than Mandelstam might ever have imagined in his use of shum. And that is Antin’s point. Time and its myriad changes alter the way in which we interpret things, even how we interpret.

A more convincing example is a discussion he has with the critic Leo Steinberg about a passage of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Steinberg uses the passage as a proof of Shakespeare’s genius: “His head sat so tickle on his shoulders that a milkmaid might sigh it off an she had been in love.” For Steinberg, the choice of the word “tickle” so close to a dark moment when the hero is in danger of losing his life, is proof of the bard’s monumentality. Antin, however, is suspicious. Perhaps the word “tickle” meant something other in Shakespeare’s day than the light rubbing under the arms, something we have forgotten. Looking it up later in the OED, Antin finds that indeed it had been used in a fifteenth century text to describe rocks “that stood tickle in a stream,” rendering passage perilous. His inclination is to write Steinberg, telling him of the discovery, that the older meaning has simply been lost in “the noise of time.” But he resists doing so, knowing that he would simply take away Steinberg’s great delight in the “strange” usage of the word. In short, the “truth” of the meaning is of less interest than the reinterpretation of it.

This “story’s” final narrative event concerns the same father-in-law he describes in his title piece. Antin’s then teenage son Blaise and the poet from Hungary enjoyed one another’s company, played tennis together, discussed literature and even, apparently, the older man’s “Schnitzlerian” love life in the old days of Budapest and Vienna, which must have reflected his present sexual loneliness, with which Blaise could probably sympathize, coming as he was into his full adolescence. But Blaise was about to go away to college, and desiring to give his grandfather a special gift, he and a friend came up with the idea of setting him up with a hooker, which they planned to do with what they perceived to be the quite generous sum of $150. All the hooker had to do is to pretend to accidentally encounter the gentleman and seduce him. “you don’t have to say a lot,” the boys explained, he may just show you his paintings and “recite some poetry to you.” They tried several street girls but found no hooker willing to take on the job, not if they had to listen to poetry!

What Antin reveals in this wonderful narrative is the absolute worthlessness of poetry and art as a container for good ideas. The gap between generations has been bridged by his son’s and his father-in-law’s friendship, but what I have called “the cut in time” has irreparably severed the art from its would-be perceivers, for the art — and whatever truths it may bear — has no currency in the world of these women of the street.

In this “talk,” as in almost all of Antin’s “stories,” there is no true plot, but a series of events or narrative incidents that can only be comprehended — if they can truly be comprehended — through the reader’s/listener’s imagination, his desire to make meaning and determination to answer the sphinx.

Isn’t that, of course, what all great art, all great poetry and fiction depends upon — the willingness of the author to invite the reader into the text and the reader’s reciprocation? After all, Scheherazade would not have been able to relate her remarkable stories if the Caliph had refused to listen.

Los Angeles, July 25, 2005
Reprinted from The New Review of Literature, Vol. 3, no. 2 (April 2006)
and from My Year 2005: Terrifying Times (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006).

WHAT HAVE WE REAPED?

2010-02-12T08:12:00.000-08:00

John O’Keefe Reapers / Odyssey Ensemble Theatre, Los Angeles, opened July 16, 2005

In the program notes for his new play, Reapers, playwright and director John O’Keefe describes the work as a “memory of a fantasy,” “What in Greece was the island, in Iowa is the farm. The farmer is the king, his wife, the queen, his daughter, the princess, and his son, the prince. Joey Beam is the chorus. The storm has already happened. The play is being performed by ghosts.”

Indeed, life down on the farm as presented by O’Keefe has as much in common with the Furies as it does with any Norman Rockwell portrait of a country family at table. For the Fox family, working a hardscrabble plot with nothing to farm but hay, everything has gone rotten before the play begins. Hulda, the mother, is catatonic, a wheelchair bound manikin her son describes as having been stuffed, but who from time to time awakens to terrorize all. Mildred Fox, the matriarch of this Orestesian brood, is a brutalized housewife longing to kill either her husband or her son, it doesn’t seem to matter which. Her daughter Deirdre is a sometimes innocent but more often flirtatious young woman on the prowl. Son Bruce, whose major activities include raping the sleeping daughters of nearby families, nightly dueling with his father, and ultimately killing his best friend, characterizes his behavior as one of “startlement,” an activity which consists mainly of popping out from beneath the bed of a young man, Tom O’Brien, whom the family has obtained from the state juvenile home to help with the three-day endurance test described as reaping. Locked in the basement between long stretches of hard work, Tom is subjected to homoerotic “startlements” by Bruce as well as the love-starved blandishments of Deirdre. The father is the kind of farmer my own Iowa grandfathers were, men who did little but work themselves into death.

As we observe this loving quintet at their evening chowdown (“dinner” is too polite a word), we witness their simple home-bound pleasures: washing their hands, chewing slices of white bread, and verbally abusing one other. Other than the nightly father-son fights in the barn, temporary escapes — the son’s “running” with his friend Dickie, the daughter’s quick forays into the local town for fresh admirers, the father’s insistent consumption of alcohol, and the mother’s brooding day and night-time visions — are the only possible “pleasures” available to them. But there is no escape, obviously, for young Tom. He is their temporary prisoner, and as an outside agent caught in this spinning web of horror, is called upon to witness their unspeakable deeds and unwillingly participate in their disgusting visions and acts. At moments, O’Keefe brilliantly crystallizes the absurd but utterly logical political conclusions of right-wing America: it’s time to stop allowing foreigners to come here and take over our jobs, and to start sending Americans overseas to destroy the foreigners’ homes and cities and take over their jobs, their oil wells, their manufacturing plants.

The satire of this play, however, is at other times too broad. Religious fervor, racial prejudice, violent political values — the author has perhaps created too many vectors for this wacky, ultra-dysfunctional family to successfully embrace; and the final furor of nature, madness, and personal hate take the play to a mountaintop of hysteria that the wide-eyed audience can merely endure — all belief in and sympathy for its characters having long been erased.

The “hero” of this fantasy is nature itself, the forces that every farmer knows are at the center of his existence. Like O’Keefe, I grew up in Iowa. Even living in a city, as I did, the constant subject of daily life was the weather — there was never enough rain and there was always too much; it was always too hot, too cold. Every farm family had tales of relatives being killed by or surviving tornadoes.

The single-man chorus of this play, Joey Beam, poetically conjures up a world of just such forces—clouds that shout, winds that whisper, earth that cries out from its daily abuse. And at the center of the horrible fury of this play are characters desperate themselves to sing out for the joy of living and the praise of nature’s gifts. Deirdre and Tom both sing lovingly at moments in the play, and in one short scene, hidden away in her upstairs bedroom, the two remind one almost of another young couple, George Gibbs and Emily Webb of Our Town, discussing their lives and futures. We quickly realize, however, that, unlike the world facing the Thornton Wilder figures, the couple of this current-day fantasy have no real lives, no real future to embrace. Tom attempts to describe his family as a “broken” one, with a dead father and a mother who “forgets” him for long stretches in state orphanages and juvenile centers.

Deirdre decries his metaphors as mere euphemisms. What is “broken” about a relationship where a mother refuses to retrieve him? The “relationship” is one of hostility, not a “break,” which might suggest a possible mending. For, as she knows from her own insufferable life, there is no longer any hope for love.

It may be that, given the “relationships” these would-be dreamers have had to endure, there is no longer even a possibility of hope. As the author describes the changing forces of nature in our real global-warmed world: “Diseases spread, spring arrives earlier, plant and animal range shift, the coral reefs bleach. There are downpours, heavy snowfalls, flooding, droughts
and fires.”

Let us hope, O’Keefe seems to argue, that we awaken before the Apocalypse arrives.

Los Angeles, August 1, 2005
Reprinted from My Year 2005: Terrifying Times (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006).

CREATURES AFIRE

2010-02-07T08:18:00.000-08:00

Jack Smith Flaming Creatures / 1963 / The screening I saw was presented with a talk by J. Hoberman at The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theatrer (Redcat) at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on November 9, 2009.

For years I'd been hearing about the sensational film Flaming Creatures which seemingly influenced filmmakers and dramatists from Andy Warhol, John Waters, and Federico Fellini to Cindy Sherman and Richard Foreman.

From the beginning, after its New Bowery Theater showing in 1964, screenings were rare, and in the late 1960s Smith took the film out of circulation. For all these years, accordingly, I had been seeking an opportunity to attend a rare showing, and despite the fact that I was scheduled to teach a literature course on November 9th, I arranged from the first day of class that we would skip the week in question.

Listening to J. Hoberman's historical recounting of the film, which was deemed pornographic on its release and was denounced in the media and even in the halls of congress (one congressman being outraged that it was not even good pornography (evidently he couldn't get an erection), it is difficult not to let out a hoot of laughter.

Indeed, in today's world, Smith's orgiastic figures of mostly gays and transvestites seems almost innocent. Yes, from time to time, one or another shakes a flaccid penis in the camera's face, but, for the most part, the figures of this pastiche of scenes and music reminiscing from Maria Montez to Josef Von Sternberg's films and numerous other popular cultural references, seems utterly innocent. Hoberman himself describes the film in those terms:

Flaming Creatures' forty-five washed out, dated minutes depict a place where a cast of tacky transvestites and other terminal types (some costumed as recognizable genre faves—a Spanish dancer, a vampire, an exotic temptress), accompanied by recordings of popular music, shrieks, and snatches of Hollywood soundtracks ("Ali Baba is coming! Ali Baba is coming!") dance, grope, stare, posture, and wave their penises with childlike joy. The marriage of Heaven and Hell presented with playful depravity.

The creatures in Smith's film are aflame with buried desires—blindingly bright passions to show off, to love, to dance, to cry out, perhaps even to die—the creatures burning up before our eyes. What makes this film so troubling to some I believe is that it is almost a screed simultaneously to life and to extinction, a kind of mad portrayal of Heaven and Hell: not St. Peter's Heaven paved with good acts nor Lucifer's burning inferno but internal heavens and hells within each of us, often so potent that coherent language and expression cannot be reached. Smith himself described the work as "a comedy set in a haunted movie studio," which at first, given the very ludicrousness of the actor's portrayals, I dismissed.

Clearly, however, there is something comical about the full throttle simmering of this heap of human flesh at the center of the short film. And yet, it is a haunted, ghostly world left behind by the cheap and gaudy reality that Hollywood directors have awarded us as alternative spaces in which to exist. And in that sense Flaming Creatures is an inevitable product of filmmaking itself. In a strange way this silly, tawdry, outrageous depiction of a hopped-up bacchanalia is no more or less unbelievable than hundreds of scenes from Cecil De Mille epics such as his 1949 Samson and Delilah, Bible-tales turned into fantasylands for a world of displaced souls.

Los Angeles, November 13, 2009

A WAR AGAINST DEATH

2010-02-04T09:20:00.000-08:00

Marianne Hauser Dark Dominion (New York: Random House, 1947)
Marianne Hauser The Choir Invisible (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958)
Marianne Hauser Prince Ishmael (New York: Stein and Day, 1963); reprinted by (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989)
Marianne Hauser A Lesson in Music (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964)
Marianne Hauser The Talking Room (New York: The Fiction Collective, 1976)
Marianne Hauser The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986)
Marianne Hauser Me & My Mom (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993)
Marianne Hauser Shootout with Father (Normal, Illinois/Tallahassee, Florida: Fiction Collective
2, 2002)
Marianne Hauser The Collected Short Fiction (Normal, Illinois/Tallahassee, Florida: Fiction
Collective 2, 2004)

All year long I’d promising myself to read Marianne Hauser’s Collected Short Fiction, and here it was nearly the end of June and I’d still not picked up the book. I loved Hauser’s writing as much the woman herself, and anticipated the reading as a pleasurable experience; but other more pressing commitments kept me from attending to the 2004 collection. I had hoped when I finished the book and had written something about it, to send it to Marianne as a kind of apologia—my Sun & Moon Press had published three of her fictions, The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley (1986), Prince Ishmael (originally published by Stein and Day in 1963, and reprinted by Sun & Moon in 1989), and Me & My Mom (1993), books, except for the latter, now out of print on account of the press’s demise—and a simultaneous testament to her literary contributions. I knew she was aging, and her silence haunted me, but when I’d last seen her in her late 80s she was spryer than a 60-year-old—which I will become in another year—with an athletically wiry body that promised to house her comfortably for decades to come.

What a shock, accordingly, to receive an e-mail from Marianne’s son, Michael Kirchberger, about her death at the age of 96 on June 21. “We knew she was quite ill,” Michael wrote, “but we thought she was recovering and doing well.” Even her family, apparently, had been misled by Marianne’s seeming robustness.

I remember her sitting upon her couch in her tiny New York apartment (apartments that at one time at least were—and perhaps still are—leased primarily to faculty and staff at New York University), dressed entirely in black, long before it became fashionable to dress that way, both legs hiked up under her buttocks like a new kind of Buddha, lithe and, with those glittering eyes (were they green?), ready to spring up, panther-like and embrace any new task.

Ray Federman recalls her smoking pot—I am sure he is correct, although she never did so in front of me—her joints stashed away in “an antique silver cigarette box.” I have never seen such a box, nor can I imagine Marianne owning the object. For she was stunningly sleek, all moderne, in the old meaning of that word, a kind of ur-beatnik (whose mirror-opposite was the slim, well-groomed early 1960s executive, epitomized by young president Kennedy) dressed in a turtle-neck sweater and leotards. Later she might wear a brown or white silk blouse, but her taste in dress could never have diminished into the garish colors, loopy beads, and granny gowns of the hippies or the later shoulder-padded blazers that characterize the costumes worn by powerful women like Hilary Clinton today. I believe she was a vegetarian—although I can’t swear to that fact; in any case she clearly ate healthfully.

Federman also calls her an “outrageous lesbian,” but I was somehow oblivious to that possibility. She had after all been married to the great German-born pianist and music teacher, Frederic Kirchberger, whose books, including Let Them Sing in English! (a compilation of “over 200 German Lieder with singable English translations”) is still advertised on the internet. Truman State University in Missouri notes with pride, moreover, the Kirchberger scholarship for the study of piano “established by Dr. Frederic Kirchberger and friends” in 1983, the year of his retirement from the institution where he had come in 1951. I knew only that she had long ago divorced him—understandable, I felt, given the restrictions that must have been placed upon her as a faculty wife (who, not to mention, was a sophisticated Alsatian who had traveled to Egypt, India and China as a journalist before settling in 1937 in the United States) ensconced in the small, Midwestern town of Kirksville, a community brilliantly and often satirically portrayed in her 1958 novel, The Choir Invisible. I also knew that she had some years before been part of a circle centered around Anais Nin and that she had met, if I remember correctly, Djuna Barnes—although, given Barnes’s hatred of Nin, it would have had to have been apart from that circle of friends. By the time I met Marianne, she had already written four English-language novels and one collection of stories. The fact that one of them, The Talking Room, had been a work about lesbian life seemed to me beside the point. Her major characters were always outsiders battling the dominant culture, class values, and sexual mores. These, indeed, were the major issues of most great European fiction, to which, despite her intimate understanding of contemporary American life, Hauser would throughout life have close ties. The first book of Hauser’s I published, The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley, moreover, was written from the viewpoint of a married, New England man, a closet homosexual, whose relationship with an American-Hispanic hustler is shockingly revealed to his family and friends with his sudden death. Despite the distance in manner and time from own experiences with gay life (I was the first of generation of new gay openness), I found the work totally believable. Marianne was clearly a writer who wrote less from experience than from her brilliant imagination.

I might rather have called Marianne “omnisexual,” particularly given her statements in the introduction to her stories, where she describes her new lover as a vibrator. “Touch is the key. When I make love and come to the perfect climax, it may well be the key to paradise. Now in my nineties, arthritic joints easily hurt, I feel safest to be my own lover, alone in bed. The paradisiacal orgasms have become rarer. But they still happen. And when they do, their intensity and beauty are beyond words.” Marianne glorified “eros,” and that included not only the enjoyment of every part of body, but of being itself. She was in love with life!

Her Collected Stories, accordingly, meant far more to me than just another book. Sun & Moon was to have published that collection, along with her other recent title, Shootout with Father, both scuttled in the closing of the press. Nine of these stories appeared in her 1964 collection, A Lesson in Music, a book I remember from my high school days sitting for several months on the “New Books” shelves of the Marion (Iowa) City Carnegie Public Library, my home away from home for much of my young life. Its dark blue cover beckoned to me for months—although I never read it nor Prince Ishmael, which also temporarily appeared upon those shelves. In those days, I loved books but seldom read them; I was in awe of them, I suspect, for the potential experiences that awaited me between their covers. It was not until my senior year in Norway that I began to read with any regularity and only in college did I begin reading in way that would come to define my daily life. Now, once more, I was faced with that childhood potential, the older collection interleaved with newer tales by the same author. With Marianne’s death that potential joy seemed to come crashing down upon me, representing a failure on my part; I had missed my opportunity to return a favor, to send Marianne a personal response in return for the great imaginative journeys she had provided me throughout my life.

These stories, like her novels, witness a life lived at war with ignorance, complacency, stupidity. One didn’t need to have a long afternoon conversation with Marianne—as I had—to know that she was impatient with many of society’s most beloved values. “A Lesson in Music,” like the novel The Choir Invisible recounts a frightening encounter with death. But the story’s young heroine is not as aware or as expressive as the young wife of the novel. This story’s narrator tells of her piano lessons with an elderly spinster, Miss Stoltz; as time progresses, and the young girl’s abilities regress, the teacher becomes more and more distressed. The student arrives early each week, listening to the near-perfect renditions by a young boy, Manfred, before her inadequate performances. The girl practices arduously, but without being able to convey any improvement. One day, in a near hysterical frenzy of laughter, the girl admits that her behavior is in response, in part, to the way Miss Stoltz nods in time to the music, the result, probably, as Manfred later perceives, of “nerves” or what today we might describe as Parkinson’s Disease. The lesson is cancelled, and on her way home, her young pianist friend reveals that Miss Stolz will soon stop teaching, that she is too old to go on with the lessons. This surprising and now painful information helps the young girl to pinpoint the real problem of her piano playing, that what most troubled her was not the nods but what those nods perhaps symbolized.

There was the whistle of the evening train. A red glare hit the clouds
and vanished. “Maybe she’s too sick to go on teaching. Or maybe she’s
just too old,” he said in his clear, untroubled voice.

His footfall resounded evenly from the wet pavement. I did not dare
touch his hand. “Old,” I said. “Yes, very old.” And unthinkingly, as though
some other person whom I had never seen was making me say the words,
I added, “She reminds me of death.”

While “A Lesson in Music” shares the psychological intensity of stories by Eudora Welty, other psychologically framed works in this volume such as “Allons Enfants” and “My Uncle’s Magic Machine”—works that recount childhood experiences during World War I (Marianne was just six years of age by the end of the war)—seem, understandably, much more embedded in European literature, with slight nods to Mann, Gide, Céline, and particularly the European-aligned American writer Henry James.

In some senses, it is difficult to reconcile the Hauser of these psychological portrayals—her greatest effort in that direction being the remarkably epic-like story of Casper Hauser (the young boy who mysteriously appeared at the gates of Nuremberg in the early part of the 19th century) presented in Prince Ishmael—with her more postmodern fiction (what I’d prefer to call “nonmodern,” if by “modern” one means the kind of psychological realism practiced by James, Conrad, Woolf, Proust, Faulkner, and the early Joyce) particularly given her jabs at Freudian psychoanalytical studies in Dark Dominion, wherein the characters are hilariously forced each morning to recount over breakfast their night-time dreams. As early as “The Sheep” of 1945, Hauser had shifted her concerns from psychological perceptions to social and class interactions that betray the absurdity of situations and characters. “The Sheep” of the title are a mother and her daughters caught up in the courting of the eldest, Elizabeth, by a charmingly intelligent, knowledgeable, and solicitous Greek named Alcibiades. The imperiously bourgeois mother is horrified by the intrusion of this exotic outsider into her waspishly organized home, but his conversations prove so amusing and his manners so polite that he charms all three women—against the increasing objections and resulting ostracism of the father. When the Greek suddenly disappears for an entire season, the women become as despondent as if the couple had been married and divorced, and the mother gives up her artful reorganization of her furniture and careful tending of her house. Like Odysseus, this Greek one day returns, but is now rejected; soon after the mother discovers that he is married with children, merely an everyday shopkeeper living in the nearby town.

“The Cruel Brother” of the same year has important psychological implications, but is more evocative and absurd in its assumptions. A respectable salesman refuses to pick up a woman hitchhiker, observing that the car behind him has taken her in. The car soon passes him, the girl waving in apparent spite. Several miles later, however, the woman reappears sitting on her suitcase in the middle of the highway. The other man apparently made a pass, and she is determined to catch a new ride. Once again on the road, she begins to endlessly chatter about anything and everything that crosses her mind. The salesman suffers her until they reach a small town, where the two have a long and increasingly drunken lunch, while she flirtatiously praises his silent sensitivity, perceiving he must have a mean older brother. Returning to their journey, she has no perception that they are traveling in the direction from which they have just come. Stopping before a small, decaying corncrib he had previously spotted, he points out the hut which she willingly enters as he pulls the fragile walls down over her body. He turns the car around and speeds off in the original direction of his voyage. The cruel brother is, obviously, himself.

The New Jersey housewife of “The Other Side of the River” (1948) is happily married with a child, while secretly in love with an adventurer named Brooks, whose photographs and stories recounted in a travel magazine have been her solace for years. In her youth she had known the world-renowned traveler and temporarily lived a bohemian life with him, before leaving for a more conventional and safer existence. Now that he is returning to New York, she is determined to cross the river into Manhattan and regain the link to the world of adventures she had regretfully forsaken. Terrified, she travels into the city to reencounter the life she has left behind, only to discover that her Brooks is not the same as the one in the magazine, but is a photographer of babies, living for all these years in a squalid home in Greenwich Village. As in the previous two stories, Hauser suggests that these women are deluded not so much by their men as by their own romanticized desires. The comedy—and nearly all of her tales are ironic comedies—is primarily a social one, not a tale centered upon psychological insights.

“Peter Plazke, Poet,” originally published in 1955, is a hilarious study in cultural pretension. A petty pickpocket seeking to outrun the police joins a group of people filing into an Manhattan apartment; once inside he discovers himself among a strange, incoherent party of individuals who, after scooping up drinks and appetizers, gather into groups speaking a language he can hardly comprehend. A somewhat elderly but beautiful woman explains that they are all writers and this is a weekly salon where they gather to steal each other's plots for new stories and subjects for poems. The thief is described by the woman as a poet, and given his disinterest in and naiveté of the scene around him, he quickly becomes the subject of deep gossip in several conversations. Itching to find out how much money the wallet he has stolen contains, he retreats to the bathroom, after which he is ready to return to the party and accept their adulation. The party-goers, however, have all suddenly disappeared, taking his legendary status with them. He has no choice, if he wishes to regain his new-found identity, but to return the next Thursday, when, presumably, he will shift his activities from stealing wallets to stealing ideas.

The dominating mother of “The Dreaming Poseidan” of 1961 somewhat foretells the mother-daughter relationship of Hauser’s 1993 novella, Me & My Mom. Only in the short story the daughter speaks through a letter that infuriates the nouveau riche mother, whose offspring is determined to remarry, this time to an “underpaid research professor” from Missouri. Despite her wealth and pretensions, we gradually discover the course and nefarious background of the mother who has used men sexually before suing them through her lawyer/now lover.

The father appears to be at the center of Hauser’s story, “The Island,” in which Homan Waterlow Hatchetson Boman the Fifth has inherited a booming construction business to which he now is slave. As in Hauser’s 2002 novella Shootout with Father, the father is both hated and beloved. In the story, however, the mother’s love for her son and their time away from the father in summer vacations on a remote island far outweigh the son’s relationship with his father. Upon the mother’s death, he determines to place her ashes on their beloved retreat, only to discover that it, like the city from which has escaped, has been transformed by his business’s cheap constructions, and, that despite his futile attempts to destroy the new cottages and break his ties with his father and company, his efforts will be futile. He is too weak to control his own destiny, because, Hauser hints, corporate worlds control even those seemingly in charge.

In the most recent of Hauser’s stories, such as “The Seeksucker Suit,” first collected in the 1986 Fiction Collective anthology, American Made, Hauser has nearly abandoned any psychological realist conventions. Caught up in a clearly abusive and criminal life with a man identified as R, his wife suffers his fits of temper, beatings, and long disappearances, feeling herself blessed by the gift of a fur stole, which quickly transforms into a dog dressed in a seersucker suit, whom she suddenly recognizes as her son, Karl. Entertained by the “talking dog,” she attempts to raise money for herself, R, and their new son by offering the scientific wonder to the local university, which at first dismisses the tongue-tied animal, but then takes him away for further studies. Days later—and only after her insistent entreaties—the laboratory delivers up his dead body. Here the satire, cloaked in the guise of an absurd fable, is broad, aimed at once at various institutions—marriage, the subservience of women, and the university. But in its absurd, Ionesco-like transformations of human and beast, is one of Hauser’s best short works.

Each of these stories, in retrospect, presents us with individuals wounded, if not yet destroyed, by their own inability to relinquish absurd social conventions as well as by the corrupt society at large. Almost all of Hauser’s characters, in both her short fictions and longer works, are trapped by dominating figures and their own ready subservience. Nowhere is that more apparent, in fact, than in “Conflict of Legalities,” wherein a lawyer—formerly a grammar-school student of his client—attempts to engage his former teacher in her own defense against a murder by poisoning to which she has admitted. After years of rape and other abuses by a local farmer to whom she consigned her life in return for financial protection, the teacher is just “too dead tired” to go on, and placidly slathers a dose of rat poison on the ham sandwiches she prepares for his picnic lunch. The woman, however, refuses to participate in her own defense, knowing that she has been a victim, but perceiving that in the murder she has freed herself from further victimization. She conceives of her imprisonment not as punishment, but as a strange reward—for she now has a room (however humble) and sufficient food without having to serve as a slave to a cruel master. Now, she can peaceably sleep.

The characters of “Heartlands Beat” cannot comprehend why their son, lover, friend Johnny Upjohn, Jr. has, on the night of the prom, committed suicide. But through their revealed conversations, diary entries, and letters we quickly discern that not only is the small town in which he lived without any cultural or social diversions, but that his life has already been determined by the various battles between his unexpressive, insensitive father and his near-incestuously doting mother. In his death, he has finally escaped a more horrifying living death the others keep within themselves:

What can I say? It’s been a bad, bad trip….Yes, I could use a shot.
But first scoot over, willya, honey? I’m so godawful dead inside. Hold
me.

(Mary-Sue May [Johnny’s girlfriend] tells it “like it is” to Eddy,
chance acquaintance, instant confidant & psych major at
Munich U.)

If the young girl of “A Lesson in Music” is terrified in her subconscious realization that, despite the transformative power of art, death ultimately rules, by the end of Marianne Hauser’s writing career, her characters have come to comprehend that life itself is a war against that death we all carry within ourselves. Hauser herself demonstrated that tenacious will, not only to survive, but to prevail (as Faulkner put it) against all the enemies of living life to its fullest, whether those forces come from within or outside of oneself.

If Hauser has a grave—I presume, however, like the dead narrator of her The Memoirs of the Late Mr. Ashley she willed herself to the fire*—the words upon Casper Hauser’s tombstone, the hero of her great Prince Ishmael, might equally serve her:

You call me what you will, angel or liar, I may yet live forever, mark my word.

__
*Hauser’s body, I was later told by her son, was cremated.

Los Angeles, August 13, 2006

ABANDONMENT, INVOLVEMENT, AND SURRENDER

2010-02-03T12:31:00.000-08:00

A drawing from Ryder

Djuna Barnes Ryder (New York: Horace Liverwright, 1928); reprinted by (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979)

In the last few pages of Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, one of the title character’s multitudinous offspring describes another of the fiction’s minor figures (Dr. O’Connor, the renowned monologist central to Barnes’s Nightwood) as sounding as if his wisdom “were ill gotten”; “and when it has become mature,” the boy prophesies, “I would be the first to fly from it, for it will be overheady and burst from its sides.” A few pages later, upon completing the fiction, the reader may well wonder whether such a statement might not be applied to Barnes herself. For there definitely is something about the message of Ryder that strikes one as “ill gotten,” as emanating from an author who, more than precocious, is painfully clairvoyant.

When this work was first published in 1928, with its jumble of picaresque, anatomy, and epistolary genres, it appeared as a startlingly archaic hybrid, as a fantastic blend of the best of James Branch Cabell, the worst of Joyce. The fact parts of it were censored helped to put it for a few weeks on the list of best sellers; but reviewers and critics of the day clearly did not know how to respond to such eclecticism. “In brief, a piece of rubbish,” scoffed The American Mercury. Today, in the context of such works as Russell Bank’s Family Life, Barbara Guest’s Seeking Air, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, and John Barth’s Letters, Ryder—now reprinted by St. Martin’s Press—in its linguistic and generic mix is at once familiar and fresh. Contemporary readers no longer expect—even desire—“pure” fiction, that seamless weave of voice, time, place, character, and plot by which authors such as Barnes, Lewis, Stein, and ultimately even Joyce (in Finnegans Wake) were tested, judged negligent, and exorcised from academic reading lists.

The irony is that Barnes, perceived by Moderns as an avant-gardist “gone too far,” is actually a moral classicist. She never really adapted much to the modern way of thinking and writing of life. Barnes’s is a Medieval vision of a universe inhabited by creatures from a Restoration play. Accordingly, in Ryder, as in all her works, everything and everyone is ajingle, in continual battle between the body and the intellect, between spirit and animal lust.

No figure is more aware of such perpetual alternation than is Jonathan Buxton Ryder, a character based on Barnes’s father. Having been raised in an atmosphere of high wit and sexual freedom (Barnes’s grandmother—Sophia Grieve Ryder in the fiction—held a salon which included such notables as Elizabeth Stanton and Oscar Wilde), Ryder attempts to bring the twain together in polygamy. And much of the fiction’s plot—such as it is—is focused on his fruitless schemes to reconcile the wife and mistress he sleeps between, in himself. But life, Barnes demonstrates, is not about to permit humankind its birthright, its full range. Entrapped in poverty and a two-room cabin, the religious Amelia and lusty Kate—bearing children at prodigious rates—fight tooth and claw for the soul of Ryder. If Ryder survives these hostilities with humor and grace, he cannot withstand the social dictums of the village bourgeoisie nearby. While he saves his growing offspring from a “public” education, he cannot save himself.

Delegations of outraged citizens are visited upon him; and, in the end, he must send his legal wife packing in order to protect his helpless mistress and his progeny, whom he has come to call “the Ryder race.” In short, Ryder must give up the spirit to continue to produce his own and, by metaphor, the human species. At novel’s end, having had to sever his love of the spiritual from his love of life, Ryder recognizes that he can no longer achieve the ideal. In a world where everyone is broken, damned by circumstance, one can only “disappoint.”

Humankind is doomed to failure, Barnes seems to argue, from the start; her theme, so it appears, is one of despair. Such conclusions, however, are highly Romantic, and help to explain, perhaps, why Moderns had such difficulty with her writing, why they “flew” from her visionary truths. For in Ryder, as in its successor, Nightwood, Barnes is less a tragedian than a comic, a comic in the way Dante was. If man’s desire is to be whole, his condition, to Barnes’s way of thinking, finds him caught—where the Great Chain of Being put him—“halfway between the angels and the beasts.” The fact that Ryder can only “disappoint” is not meant to bring the reader to despair, but to knowledge, to the awareness of what it means to be the human beast.

Just before the young Ryder bastard tells Dr. O’Connor what he thinks of him, O’Connor recites the “Three Great Moments of History”: the moment when Cleopatra, reaching for a fig, saw beneath it an asp, and placing it to her left dug, “drew her breath backward through her teeth,” saying “oooooooOOOO Jesus!”; the moment when Stonewall Jackson went riding by, and Barbara Frietchie, “putting her head out the window, shrieked, ‘UUUUh, HHHu, Stonewall!’”; and the moment when General Lee, “knowing he had to surrender, polished-up his medals, reswung his epaulets, tightened his girdle, and burnishing up the old blade, walked into the courthouse,” and “drawing himself up to full height,” presented it, hilt first, to Grant, saying, ‘You know what you can do with this, don’t you?’” (pp. 304-306). In a fiction riddled with parables, fables, and tales, O’Connor’s is especially significant. For these three moments represent, I suggest, the three basic attitudes with which humankind, faced with that chasm between desire and destiny, has dealt with life: abandonment, involvement, and surrender. In a world where there are no solutions, each position has its grandeur. And which posture this fiction’s hero takes, the reader is never told. In Ryder’s cry of “And whom shall I disappoint?” however, one senses his need for an object to disappoint, and one suspects that his lament is the impetus of another search. Like all picaros, Ryder retains the potential to begin the voyage again.

College Park, Maryland, 1979
Reprinted from The American Book Review, 1979

LIFE FORCE

2010-02-02T08:03:00.000-08:00

John Hawkes The Beetle Leg (New York: New Directions, 1951)

Except for his Alaskan novel, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, The Beetle Leg is Hawkes’s only fiction in which the action is located in America. Hawkes has plenty of American characters in his oeuvre, but on the beaches of Greek islands and other exotic locations they become figures that might be just as at home on the moon. Hawkes, or perhaps his publisher, even titled a collection of his short works Lunar Landscapes. The Beetle Leg, which purports to be a Western, might as well also be lunar located, and indeed much of its action occurs in the moonlit desert. In its near lunatic story, moreover, it would be difficult to speak of plot. Let us just say it’s “story,” if you have to have one, concerns the various comings and goings, loves and deaths, of a group of characters living in the isolated desert encampments of Mistletoe, Government City, and the nearest “town,” Clare. The Sheriff, the Lampson Brothers, Ma, Cap Leech, Finn Mandan, Thegna, Harry Bohn, the Red Devils and the intruders—Camper, his wife Lou and their rattlesnake-bitten son—are figures in this unlikely tale, as prickly and isolated as the desert landscape, and as dangerous and hostile as the mosquitoes, lizards and snakes that inhabit it.

If the character names sound like they’re from early Djuna Barnes stories it is no coincidence; Hawkes has often been compared to Barnes. His insistence that he read her work long after he had begun his own writing only reiterates that there is an authentic strain of Gothic exaggeration in American culture; and, like Barnes, Hawkes’ exploration of that tradition has helped to make him one of the most noted of American writers.

The Beetle Leg is not so much about the American West as it is about how a desolated landscape and near complete isolation affects its inhabitants. Not only is the world of Misletoe, Gov. City, and Clare naturally harsh, but the absurd creation of a dam, which clearly does not properly function and gives way from time to time to catastrophic mud slides, makes these outposts nearly uninhabitable. In a world, moreover, with very few unmarried women, sexuality is ambiguous. In their violence, the men of The Beetle Leg seem also to gather themselves into almost sexual postures—dance, incessant touching, and a camaraderie that far outweighs their detestation of each other. Women are shared and, even in the marriage we witness, the groom/child spends the night, not with the bride, but with another. In such an environment, violence is nearly palpable, and the novel ends with a cathartic and horrible release of tension as the men gather to shoot down the motorcycling tribe of local Indians, the Red Devils. The passion and affirmation these figures nonetheless display is astounding. The life force is everywhere, Hawkes seems to argue, and these raw aggregates of clay and straw live by pure American pluck, perpetual pioneers in an already settled planet.

Train from Münich to Rome, October 15, 2003

STATE OF UNCERTAINTY

2010-02-02T07:38:00.000-08:00

Alfred Drake in the original Broadway production
of Oklahoma!

Josefina Gabrielle and Hugh Jackman in Oklahoma!

Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics) [based on Green Grow the Lilacs by Lynn Riggs], Richard Rodgers (music) Oklahoma! St. James Theatre, New York / 1943

Fred Zinneman (director) Oklahoma! [film version] / 1955

Oscar Hammersein II (book and lyrics), Richard Rodgers (music) Oklahoma! Royal National Theatre, London / 1998 Gershwin Theatre, New York / 2002 [televised version with a slightly different cast presented on PBS stations in 2003]

The first thing that springs to mind when thinking of the musical Oklahoma! is its joyousness. This is, after all, a paean to the settlement of the American West—without all the guilt-evoking images of Indians, buffalo, and gunslinger-ridden bars with their show-girl hussies. It takes place on a farm where “the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye,” far away from the sumptuous temptations of Kansas City. Its major action is a journey to a nearby ranch, where a combination potluck, hoe-down is to be given in order to help raise money to build a new school house. The intimate jealousies of the characters are overcome by the obvious love between Curley and Laurey which must inevitably be consummated in marriage, with chorus in tow, in an anthem to statehood that quite literally spells out their affirmation of place.

But beware! This is, after all, an American work, and as I have demonstrated throughout my writings, there’s quicksand in these here parts. First, there is the case of Ado Annie, practically a nymphomaniac (a girl who “cain’t say no”), who, although loved by the gentle cowboy Will, is just as ready to run off with a Persian traveling salesman, to whom her own father (a role I played in a high school production) is perfectly willing, even eager, with shotgun in hand, to give her away. Curley, moreover, is a bit too self-sure with regard to Laurey; and to spite him, she agrees to attend the upcoming affair with the hired hand, Jud—a filthy pig of a man who buys pornography from the traveling salesman and spends some of his spare time playing a voyeur to his employer. The young woman is clearer dumber than she seems.

Curley takes time off from his flirtations with “that Jenkins gal” to visit Jud in his hovel, implanting within the creature’s mind the joys and beauty of suicide. “Poor Jud Is Dead” may be a wonderfully comic number, but it represents black humor worthy of John Hawkes or the British writer Joe Orton. And the scene ends, predictably, with guns—fortunately aimed at a hole in the wall and not at one another.

The center of this great musical lies not in its hoe-down or in its ending affirmation, but in Laurey’s dream, a scene in which the “drugged” girl (to be fair it’s only smelling salts named “The Elixirs of Egypt”) attempts to see into the future. What she witnesses we could have easily predicted: in Agnes DeMilles’s stunning dances the cowboys and farm girls serve up a celebration of Americana with particular emphasis on DeMilles’s hands-to-hips to outstretched gestures of community, prayer, and, ultimately church steeple. But, in some ways, this part of the dance is purely gestural. Even the cowboys’ oval-legged step into hoe-down, suggesting obviously their more common placement on the rump of their horses, seems a bit wooden—despite occasional exuberance, pattern and propriety dominate. Of much more interest to me—particularly when I first saw the film as a child and despite what I recognized even then as kitschy sets—were the long-legged contortions of the bar-room molls controlled by the dancing Jud. Their final fling into a French can-can was far more exciting, even if a bit horrifying. And Laurey’s terror at not being able to escape so powerful a force is quite justified. She’s an innocent, totally unable to assimilate Jud’s pent-up passion and lust. Even as she accepts his company on route to the social event, it is inevitable that she must flee his presence like the serpent Curley has compared him to. He, in turn, just as inevitably seeks other remedies in the form of “the little wonder,” a mechanical device that, while revealing pictures of naked women, releases a knife that slits the throat of its viewer.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, or should we say farm, a range war is brewing. Even as they dance, it is clear that it is difficult for the farmer and the cowman to remain friends. In truth, the battle was waged for decades throughout Texas and Oklahoma; in the film it merely takes Aunt Eller a bit strong-arm cajoling and a gun to return things to order. And so, too, does Aunt Eller save Curley from viewing Jud’s dirty pictures.

Laurey is restored to Curley’s arms, but the so-called friendly society treats him to a somewhat sinister shivaree, which isolates them on a mountain of hay, the perfect place for the immolation Jud has now planned. Fire breaks out. Curley’s dive onto his nemesis accidentally implants Jud’s knife into his own chest.

The good folk of the soon-to-be new state set up a hasty trial, but in their impatience to see Curley and Laurey catch their train to happiness, they hurriedly—and without due process—pronounce him innocent. Of course, he is innocent, but one wonders about such a society, with the violent forces and raw feelings lying just below its surface. Perhaps that’s why DeMille’s depiction of the community in dance appears so gestural, so procedural. Only a strong anthem can drive away the elemental rhythms of a can-can.

Ristorante Galessi, Piazza S. Maria in the Trastevere, October 18, 2003

In the few weeks since I wrote about Oklahoma! I watched a version of the British 1998 revival on television. That production, a generally fine one—with particularly good performances by Hugh Jackman and Josefina Gabrielle, but with weaker secondary character actors than the movie and what I felt was uninspired choreography by Susan Stroman (the good territory folks were even more gestural and less exuberant in her version)—basically supported my feelings about the dark elements of this fable.

Even though the Trevor Nunn production attempted to portray Jud in a more balanced manner, and actor Shuler Hensley succeeded (compared to the film portrayal by Rod Steiger) in making Jud more likeable, the dangerous aspects of the culture he represents remained embedded in his behavior. Indeed, in this production it became even more apparent that Laurey had chosen to go with him to the social because he was a farmer, and, accordingly, someone more familiar than the self-assured cowboy Curley. What the film had not revealed to me quite as clearly as the play was that, upon asking Laurey to marry him, Curley “converts,” so to speak, promising to become a farmer. The two warring factions—farmer and cowman—demand alliances, it appears, almost like the family kinships of Romeo and Juliet. And the musical even more pointedly reveals that Aunt Eller and friends are ready to break the law—or at least, as she puts it, “bend it a little”—in order to speed love on its course.

I am even more convinced after seeing this stage production that Oklahoma!, despite its energetic portrayal of the American frontier, just as clearly reveals the underlying contradictions and perversities of American life.

Los Angeles, November 30, 2003

Perhaps the only advantage to not having the financial means to publish books closer to the date in which they written is that I get the opportunity to rewrite and revise—in this case nearly six years after the fact!

I recently saw Oklahoma! again on The Movie Channel on television, and found the work almost as refreshing and entertaining as the first time saw it as a child. As I told Howard, I'm still convinced that, along with West Side Story, the nearly impossible Finian's Rainbow, and Guys and Dolls, it is one of the great American musicals.

Some of Hammerstein's lyrics, however, have yellowed a bit over the years, particularly those of the memorable anthem "People Will Say We're In Love." It is hard to imagine, for example, that a farm girl such as Laurey might even have had "a rose and a glove" which she exhorts Curley to return. Although spirited, Laurey seems to lack a sense of humor which might lead her friend to "laugh at her jokes too much." And even more to the point, it seems ludicrous for her to sing "Don't please my folks too much" when she has, evidently, no living parents, only a maiden aunt.

In fact, there are hardly any normal family units in this popular family entertainment. Ado Annie apparently lives alone with her father, who, as I mentioned above, is only too ready to have his daughter taken off his hands. Most of the males in this work, unmarried cowboys, work for rancher Andrew Carnes, who also seems to live without a wife, with no children in sight. The beautiful women of the chorus, all quite desperate for husbands, seem to have had no success. This 1955 film, most importantly, presents a world entirely without young children—unless you count the two youngest dancers as kids; to me they seem more like young adults. It is as if the small town of Claremont and environs has been emptied of normal families. Why, one can only wonder, are they attempting to raise money for a schoolhouse? If there was ever example of "voices without a voice," Oklahoma! represents it. For the family values it espouses seem to have little effect upon the figures we encounter.

Finally, I would suggest that Curley and Laurey—now that handyman Jud Frye is dead—cut that honeymoon trip short and return immediately to pick and shuck that corn "as high as an elephant's eye" if Aunt Eller and her farm is to survive.

Los Angeles, March 4, 2009

THE DREADFUL HOLLOW

2010-01-31T10:29:00.000-08:00

William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (New York: Random House, 1930)

I recently reread and taught Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, sharing with my class the timeworn themes of the book, the strange family dynamism of the Bundren family, the narrative Rashoman-like structure of the work, the social and economic situations of the family in relation to the financially depressed South (As I Lay Dying was originally published in October 1930, the same month as the stock market crash), and the mythic journey of the family from their home to Jefferson to bury Addie, where they endure nearly unbearable trials of earth, air, water, wind, and fire.

But as I began teaching the book this time around, particularly during the discussion of their tribulations, I was forced to admit that while in most classical works these trials generally resulted in redemption and/or transformation, in Faulkner’s novel only Anse, the father, receives any benefit: a set of new teeth and a wife to replace the one whom he has just buried. Cash nearly loses his leg, and, if the doctor is to be believed, will be partially crippled for the rest of his life; Darl loses his mind and is taken away to the Mississippi State Hospital in Jackson; Jewel loses his horse and any possibility of mythic potentiality that lay in his centaur-like being (early on, his body is described as “in midair shaped to the horse” [p. 13]); Dewey Dell is stripped of the money Lafe has given her for an abortion (and stripped of any remaining respectability by the salesman MacGowan), dooming her to the kind of servitude to family-life that Addie has had to endure; and even the young boy Vardaman loses, if nothing else, his innocence, perhaps even his future sanity. In his desperation to get Addie to her own “flesh and blood” in the Jefferson burial ground, Anse has sucked the very life out of his sons and daughters, one by one, so that he might obtain the set of teeth and, almost magically, be able to remarry.

And just as suddenly, it became clear to me that the family’s trip from their mountain-top home (the location of which is made clear in Peabody’s visit to the Bundrens, where he has to be towed up to the top by a rope) into civilization is not only a trip to Hell, but a sort of metaphorical rendering of what has already happened in Addie’s life. The Bundren shack lies at the entrance of Hell, a place in which the light appears to be “the color of sulphur matches,” “The boards look like strips of sulphur” (p. 43) and “The air smells like sulphur” (p. 76), their hellish voyage presaged by Faulkner’s title, a quote by Agamemnon in Homer’s Odyssey, “As I lay dying, the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.” Even before Addie’s death we begin to perceive that the family members she has borne are no longer whole beings.

As Michael Neal Morris has noted in his internet essay, “Wood Imagery in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying,” in many ways the Bundrens are a people made of wood, “The Bundrens are rigid in that they are hard, unbending people who stick to their principles, no matter how absurd or impractical. Death in the novel is not only the physical death of the matriarch, but also the spiritual death of those who retain their foolish pride.”

Cash, quite obviously, is a carpenter who spends most of the early part of the novel constructing the coffin of wood, with adze and saw endlessly constructing a container of death, his saw like a tongue lapping away at life, “one lick less, one lick less.” Cash’s major statements in this book are numbered, as in a sort of maddened series of notes on how to build a coffin. Jewel is described as having a face made of wood and is represented in several places in the book as being “wooden-faced”: "He sits lightly, poised, upright, wooden-faced in the saddle, the broken hat raked at a swaggering angle.” Although Darl is not described as wooden, he is, as Cora and Tull make quite clear, “queer,” with something wrong in his head. Dewey Dell is characterized as having “a dazed way.”

Darl notes of his father: "He had that wooden look on his face again; that bold, surly, high-colored rigid look like his face and eyes were two colors of wood, the wrong one pale and the wrong one dark.” At several points, moreover, Anse’s whole being is described as hollow, his arms dangling from his shirts, his “chin collapsing slowly,” a man, “dangle-armed, humped, motionless” (p. 51). The name Anse means, in French, a cove, defined in its first meaning in Webster’s English dictionary as “a recessed place: concavity,” which, as we know is something “hollow.”

In short, the Bundren family members are not just living at the lip of Hell but are themselves already dead in Hell, hunkering, as Eliot describes it in his poem “The Hollow Men,” at the “last of meeting places,” groping together, avoiding speech, “gathered on [the] beach of the tumid river.”

In her horrible apologia spoken from the dead—Faulkner’s strange, almost “postmodern” tour de force—Addie expresses Anse’s condition quite clearly: “He did not know that he was dead.” She means this, obviously, metaphorically, that he is one of the “living dead,” one who, because has he no imagination nor vision, is, as Morris argues, “spiritually dead.”

Yet I think, given the events of the novel, that we have to understand this sentence also as being literal, that Anse is actually one of the living dead, a vampire if you will, a man who early in the novel is described as never sweating, afraid that if he were to sweat he would die (p. 17). Anse also admits that he has no heart: “…I just cant seem to get no heart into anything,” “…I just cant seem to get no heart into it" (p. 38). In the same chapter, Anse complains of being unable to “eat God’s own victuals as a man should,” and throughout the book he refuses to enter any other man’s house, insisting that he “wouldn’t crave nothing,” and can subsist on what little food they have brought with them, despite the fact that their voyage takes several days.

Once one begins down this path, it quickly becomes apparent that Faulkner is interested in the vampire myth and even in the story of Dracula at a much deeper level than it might first appear. If Anse is one of the living dead, a vampire who sucks the blood from Addie and his children, we begin to comprehend many of the mysterious aspects of the book. Jewel’s wasting away—which his brothers attribute first to an affair with a married woman, only to later discover that he has nightly been felling trees (another reference to the woodenness of this family) to make enough money to buy a horse—can also be comprehended, metaphorically, as a disease resulting from a loss of blood. Indeed the scenes describing his condition (pp. 128-136) closely resemble Bram Stoker’s descriptions of Lucy Westenra as she wastes away from the vampire’s bites.

Blood, in fact, is mentioned throughout the book, not only in Anse’s repeated creed of flesh and blood, but particularly in the scene describing Vardaman being “bloody as a hog to his knees, (p. 38),” ordered by Anse to clean and cut up the large fish he has caught, the fish representing forces against which the Bundren's are allied, Christianity and Christ.

While Dracula and his vampire family escape their mountain-topped mansion as bats, the hollow men and women of the Bundren family leave their home as buzzards. Early in the book, Jewel sees his family members sitting like buzzards (p. 15), and soon thereafter buzzards begin to appear in the skies. By the middle of their voyage Vardaman, the youngest, and, therefore, perhaps the least dead of this vampire-like family, is kept busy chasing the seven buzzards (the number of family members) away, wondering where they go at night.

We know that secret, and if we recognize Anse and the others as being transformed into the buzzards that follow along with Addie’s stinking corpse—a smell which horrifies everyone but the family itself—we can better understand, moreover, Anse’s humped body and his propensity, described several times early in the novel (see pp. 18, 19, 29 and 30, for example), to “rub his knees.” In his one section, Samson clearly seems to link the buzzard he sees with the family:

I saw something. It kind of hunkered up when I come in and I
thought at first it was one of them [the Bundrens] got left, then
I saw what it was. It was a buzzard. It looked around and saw me
and went on down the hall, spraddle-legged, with its wings kind
of hunkered out, watching me first over one shoulder and then
over the other, like an old baldheaded man. When it got outdoors
it began to fly. It had to fly a long time before it ever got up into the
air, with it thick and heavy and full of rain like it was.

By novel’s end, accordingly, we understand how Anse has “worn out” his wife, sucking the blood from her body—just as he almost crucifies Cash upon the coffin of his own making by embedding his leg in concrete; transforms Darl into a maddened Renfield-like figure (and in this context we can also better understand Addie’s statement that her family “uses one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam” [p. 172]); robs Jewel of any transformative potential by selling his horse, the beast that is described almost as being part of Jewel’s body; and dooms Dewey Dell to a life of patriarchal servitude. And Vardaman? Perhaps he is destined to commit suicide, his blood already having been drained by the suck of his own teeth:

From behind pa’s leg Vardaman peers, his mouth open and all color
draining from his face into his mouth, as though he has by some means
fleshed his own teeth in himself, sucking. (p. 49)

At work’s end only Anse, the original vampire, remains intact, with a new set of teeth and a new bride into which he can sink them.

When I first read As I Lay Dying as an M.A. student in Lewis Lawson’s 1973 Faulkner seminar at the University of Maryland, a woman in the class suddenly burst into tears one day as we were discussing this novel. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered, “but you are all speaking of this work from an objective position which I simply cannot share, having just gone through the death of my mother.” For years I have described this incident as being one the earliest indicators to me that the New Critical perspective of literature was about to crumble. The woman in our class, I now perceive, was correct in her assessment; by enfolding the popular vampire myth within this modernist masterpiece, perhaps Faulkner himself knew that he had created—as Darl describes Anse’s face upon the death of Addie—“a monstrous burlesque of all bereavement.”

As I began research on this short essay, I came upon a brief piece from 2006 in the Los Angeles Times reporting that among the manuscripts found in Faulkner’s papers by his daughter Jill was a full-length, unpublished screenplay about vampires titled, unsurprisingly, Dreadful Hollow!

Los Angeles, October 9, 2008

American Cultural Treasures - ACT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LOCKED UP

BORN AGAIN

ANYTHING FOR LOVE

THE COMPANY WAY

SIX DEGREES OF INSANITY

FLOPPING AROUND

BEVERLY HILLS HOUSEWIFE

FROZEN IN THE ACT

A TORN CURTAIN

LOOKING FOR LOVE

WEARING THE GRIN

FLAGS AND LETTERS

MIRROR IMAGE

BETWEEN VISIONS

ON ALIEN LAND

PONDERING THE STRUGGLE

OUR WONDERFUL LIVES

I'M STILL HERE: TWO VALENTINES

REASONABLE DOUBTS

BETWEEN YOU AND ME

THE GANG'S STILL HERE

INDEPENDENT DEPENDENTS

LOVE, GUILT, AND CONSOLATION

A HOMESPUN AMERICAN PROUST

MAKING THE MIND WHOLE

STARTING OVER

OUT OF STEP

ANSWERING THE SPHINX

WHAT HAVE WE REAPED?

CREATURES AFIRE

A WAR AGAINST DEATH

ABANDONMENT, INVOLVEMENT, AND SURRENDER

LIFE FORCE

STATE OF UNCERTAINTY

THE DREADFUL HOLLOW