A Moment of Silence for Harold Pinter

British playwright Harold Pinter succumbed to cancer this past week. I admire many playwrights, but Pinter is beyond category.

Pinter discovered something in drama just as surely as Einstein discovered something in physics. By his own account, it was just an intuition, as it was with Einstein. He was an actor who started a script called "The Room," for which he had only a vision of two characters in a room. The dialogue developed without a backstory, and without a plot. They spoke about nothing in particular, and they paused between lines.

What he had discovered, he later expressed this way: "There are two kinds of silence," he observed. One is the absence of speech; the other is a "torrent" of speech that a person uses to cover up something.

This insight taught me that the actor's most important job is to imagine what's happening between the lines. The insight carries through to real life.

[Photo: Pinter's No Man's Land at the Old Vic Theatre in London, 1975, could've been billed as Pinter's Greatest Hits, tropes and practices from his whole career to then. Betrayal the next year broke the mold. In this picture are two grand old men of theatre, Sir Ralph Richardson right, and Sir John Gielgud -- my drama teacher's drama teacher. In his memoir, Gielgud professed not to understand the play at all, but once he discovered the character's look -- that toupé and the shoddy-genteel clothes -- he made the character unforgettable. Who needs backstory?]

My first reaction to Pinter was revulsion. In Drama 101 at Duke, I had been assigned a part in "The Collector," and I told professor John Clum that I didn't want to do it. My character's behavior just didn't make sense to me. For example, my character -- a good-for-nothing "kept man" -- didn't move when a jealous husband brandished a knife at him, even when the husband stood behind the armchair where my character lounged.  These were disgusting types of people, behaving inscrutably.

Dr. Clum asked if I could think of an animal that was like my character, and suddenly it all made sense: my character was a cat! He was all sensual experience, with no forethought, no loyalty, no goals but pleasure and security.  He was alert to danger, but afraid to move. In a cat's calculations, moving may be riskier than just crouching in an armchair.

Suddenly, the character's behavior was not only real, it was also very funny, without a lessening of the tension. Importantly for me, as a fundamentalist Christian in those days, the characters were in a hell of their own making - so moral judgment was implied.

Once I'd become a fan, I devoured every Pinter script I could find, and I can thus say with some authority that Pinter reached his zenith with his 1978 play BETRAYAL. This tells the story of a wife's affair with the husband's best friend, the discovery of the affair, and the dissolution of the marriage. Pretty standard stuff, but Pinter tells it backwards: the first scene takes place in 1977, in a furtive meeting between ex-lovers. The final scene is at the wedding reception, 1968. We hear the characters' reflections on the past, and then we get a fact check. You laugh and cringe at the same time to see how they've deceived themselves, year before year, reaching all the way back to the wedding. [See my review of Betrayal at Aurora Theatre near Atlanta (10/2012)]

After BETRAYAL, his plays shortened and veered off in another direction. I loved "A Kind of Alaska," a pretty straight-forward retelling of neurologist Oliver Sacks's account of awakening a middle-aged woman who had been in a virus-induced coma since early adolescence.

I stopped caring about Pinter after I read "Mountain Language." The Pinteresque dialogue here was applied to a stereotyped situation: some government official's interrogation of some innocent indigenous victims. Then I read some of Pinter's pronouncements about America, even leafing through a book of his "poems," which were all polemics. I stopped paying attention.

I find this weekend that I wasn't alone. London TIMES columnist Minette Marin writes, "It wasn’t just that his plays began to seem so much less inspired. He had written so many great ones that nobody could complain if he didn’t have any more arrows left in his quiver... What amazed me, more and more, were his enraged political outbursts. However critical one might be of US policy, his furious anti-Americanism – 'the most dangerous power that has ever existed' – was unworthy of an intelligent man. It is simply silly to compare American foreign policy with Nazi imperialism, as he did, and to insist that western governments are as evil as any of the worst in the world. " Noting other brilliant writers who were crackpots in politics (Tolstoy, Pound, and my favorite anti-American Graham Greene), she looks to the theory of "different intelligences" to explain how artists might produce brilliant stories and still be totally irrational and myopic in their views of the worlds around them.

Tim Walker, in a column for the London TELEGRAPH, acknowledges some truth-telling in Pinter's depiction of life, but dismisses his work in the end as ephemeral, meant only to shock, and already dated: "If one were to take a shorthand note of conversations one happened to overhear in such places as police stations, A&E departments and at the offices of social workers and transcribed every word – and every pause – I suspect it would all sound very Pinteresque indeed... These words may be true to life, but they are also in large measure frustrating, aimless and depressing. There is a dark side to the human psyche, but there is also a lighter, more optimistic and appealing side to it that Pinter chose never to acknowledge."

Not true. Last spring, preparing to see Pinter's re-working of SLEUTH (starring Michael Caine and Jude Law), I read an interview with Pinter in which he confessed that all the tension and hostility on view in his scripts were never present in his real life. For him, marriage (to historian Antonia Frazier), parenthood, friendship, sports, and life had been very happy.

Another critic for the TIMES, John Peter, reflects on Pinter's friendliness in person, his temper regarding slights and criticisms, and forgivingness. Peter reflects: "Like so many of his characters, [Pinter] deployed attack as a means of self-defence and investigation. ...His last theatre appearance was in Samuel Beckett’s one-man play Krapp’s Last Tape. He played it in a wheelchair. The great voice, still undiminished by pain, seemed to shake the walls at the Royal Court. He played Krapp as an angry man: angry at failure and at the passing of years, and grabbing the world by its throat. Pain, endurance and an invincible dignity: this was one of the great theatre experiences of my life."

Pinter used his craft to distill on stage one aspect of universal experience: how every conversation is in some way a competition for dominance -- do it my way, or see it my way, or tell me what I want to know. In the process, he made us cringe, and made us laugh. That's a good thing, and the experience of laughing at it is indeed optimistic. For me, that's better than sitting through "light - hearted" stuff about cute characters who fall in love.

When I was a very young drama teacher, not even a decade older than my students, I directed a group of four students in a full-length production of BETRAYAL. (We did have to turn "f***ing" into "scr**ing" but performed the rest of the script intact). They performed it one time only. The house was packed with family and friends. I recall laughter, and sharp intakes of breath. I recall the slow fade on the final tableau at the wedding reception, as the whole audience took in with horror the final truth that's revealed in Pinter's script. Those students -- Emily Powell, Paul Catherwood, and Thomas Crockett in the principle roles, and the younger actor Bill Hamilton as the waiter -- made an unforgettable night of theatre, thanks to what was real, and artful, and beautiful, in Harold Pinter.

Aurora Theatre's Intense Betrayal

Opening scene of "Betrayal" at the Aurora Theatre, from the theatre's Facebook page.

The Aurora Theatre north of Atlanta has just opened a run of Harold Pinter's 1977 play Betrayal.   The characters -- married couple Emma and Robert, and Robert's best friend Jerry, her lover -- can't always tell what the other characters are concealing, but we in the audience can. Pinter puts us in the know by presenting scenes from 1977 backwards to 1968, so that we can "fact check" characters' recollections.  The dramatic irony and the characters' second-guessing each other make for a funny and intense experience, as layers of emotion underlie every second.  Betrayal is so funny, but so intense, that my friend Susan and I were relieved that it lasted just 75 minutes.  

Pinter once distinguished two kinds of silence, the speechless kind, but also the kind that covers feelings by "a torrent of words."   For much more on Pinter's technique, see my blogpost "A Moment of Silence for Harold Pinter".  Here, I'll review particular's of Aurora Theatre's production.

We're treated to virtuoso acting, understated to give each nuance a highlight.  For example, in the opening scene, Tess Malis Kincaid ("Emma") and her real-life husband Mark Kincaid (as the ex-lover "Jerry") each has to repeat the line "How are you?" several times, during different "rounds" of dialogue -- the scene being structured like some martial arts match.  The first time, they ask, "So how are you?" to open the conversation.  It's old friends, meeting each other on uncertain terms, falling back on polite formulas.  Another time, it's a show of deeper concern.   Later, the question "How are you?" seems to be asking something more like, "How do you feel about us?"   It's a testing of the state of the old relationship.  

Mostly sitting at a cafe table, the actress worked the tiny space given her.  Her hands on the wine glass sometimes clutched, sometimes caressed, and sometimes explored the surface.   Her head bowed when Jerry turned to refill the glasses.  That's at the end of "round one," and she seemed to be struggling to find a way to communicate, or to discern, what she wanted from Jerry. But she faced him again, smiling.

For his part, Mark Kincaid's "Jerry" seemed to be keeping a safe distance from the fight, actually pushing his chair back from the table, smiling a lot.  It's only when Emma revealed that her husband had learned all about their old affair that Mark Kincaid became animated, a clue to where "Jerry's" strongest feelings and deepest vulnerability lie.

Later, with Jerry watching, Robert unleashes one of those "torrents of words" on Emma, and his words are weapons.   Director Freddie Ashley has staged this so that Anthony Rodriguez ("Robert" and also Aurora's Producing Artistic Director) commands stage center.  Jerry stands stage right, at Robert's back; drink in hand and smiling.  Emma sits on the far left end of the sofa, legs crossed, also drink in hand, smiling.  Interrupting a little dialogue between the men about who buys lunch after the next squash game, Emma suggests that she might come to watch and buy lunch for both.  Robert starts small -- "you have your game, then your shower, then your pint" -- and becomes increasingly animated as he develops his topic: "You've been at battle, you've been at it."   By the time he says that a man "doesn't want a woman in the locker room" or even "within a mile" of the squash game, Jerry and Emma are both receiving his barely-concealed hostility behind tumblers and their frozen smiles.  

We know what Robert is thinking:  his wife's lover has gall to come visiting them to flirt with her.  Emma is in agony.   At the start of this scene, when Robert called up to her to come on down, "Jerry's here," her response, off-stage, was, "Who?"  (after a pause, natch).   Meanwhile, Jerry is simply clueless.  Does he rise to the implied challenge to defend Emma's honor?   He fails to do so, and is out the door moments later.  For the audience, it's chilling and hilarious at the same time.  There's a coda:  In silence, Emma collapses, crying.  Robert slowly comes over to her, lays his hand on her shoulder -- comfort?  possession?  It's somehow both -- and they embrace.

The rest of the show is filled with so many moments similarly rich with nuance, that discussing them makes for great conversation hours and even days after seeing the show.  

We loved the set, by Isabel and Morley Curley-Clay.  At first glance, it's a high-ceilinged interior.  But on second look we see mismatched doors, window frames superimposed on mismatched windows, empty picture frames superimposed on others -- the effect being to show us several similar interior spaces superimposed on each other:  restaurants, a hotel room, and two families' living rooms.  Wall panels opened to admit sliding beds, sofas, and a wet bar.

The production as a whole, like Pinter's script, is elegant, understated, and efficient.

Tom Stoppard and Me

The one thing left on my bucket list is to write a Stoppardian play. That would mean a comedy with characters whose dialogue would mix their personal stories with some intellectual controversy in a collage of images, literary allusions, and scholarly research. A prominent critic said that Stoppard disguises simplicity of thought with complexity of form.

I tried to write my Stoppardian play, but never got beyond the brainstorming stage. It's probably a mistake to start with the form and not with a subject of interest. Anyway, he died today, so he'll never see my homage, should I ever write it.

Regardless, I loved what I read and I liked what I saw.

Bruce Davison, actor on stage and screen, starred in the Duke Players' production of Stoppard's Travesties for which I, a drama major 20 years old, was props manager. Davison was Duke's artist-in-residence that year, around 1980. I felt honored when the actor inserted "Scott Smoot" into a list of names during a performance.

The earth moved for me the first time I saw a play of Stoppard's that I could understand. It was a one-act take-off on Agatha Christie's plays that he called The Real Inspector Hound. Mid-way, the phone rings and just keeps ringing. A theatre critic who has chatted loudly with a colleague during the first half of the play gets annoyed and climbs up onto the stage to silence the phone. From that point on, every line and stage movement is practically a repeat of the first half of the play, only it all means something new with this different character.

Stoppard performed a similar feat in his screenplay for Russia House, which opens with a story told by Sean Connery, heard three times, verbatim. Each iteration comes with images of the events from a different angle that upends our understanding of what Connery describes.

Watching both of these works, I was awestruck and delighted. I felt the ground drop away, in free-fall. I'm always grateful to Stoppard for that experience, unparalleled.

I got that same feeling from Arcadia, a play much more substantial, joyful, and meaningful than Hound. My first time watching it, I didn't get it. The truth is, live performances of Stoppard's plays were rarely as strong as the ones I imagined while reading them, when I could make marginal notes of cross-references, puns, and epigrams. A Broadway production of Jumpers, a play I had read with acute pleasure, was especially disappointing. When the action was happening on stage, I missed so much that I had caught on the page.

That's more or less my experience with other Stoppard plays. Below are links to my blogposts about Stoppard's works:

• Stoppard's The Hard Problem: Dramatizing Thought
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Still Kicking How do we gain when Stoppard crosses Hamlet with Waiting for Godot? Let me count the ways!
• The Invention of Stoppard reviews The Invention of Love, Stoppard's favorite of his own works. I saw it on Broadway and later read it closely. Stoppard eluded me, but I do think my essay about the show hits on something great: the playwright known for verbal virtuosity achieves his greatest emotional effect with just "Oh."
• I read today (Stoppard's death) that he thought Arcadia was his best play. Me, too. I wrote about it in Math and Tenderness.
• I tried to appreciate Stoppard's suite of plays called The Coast of Utopia about the intellectual developments of the 19th century that led Russia to totalitarianism. I didn't succeed. Or maybe, Stoppard didn't. You Had to be There.

I may some day post notes I wrote longhand on Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, The Real Thing, Professional Foul (a teleplay), Travesties, and Night and Day.

When I studied at Oxford in the summer of 1980, the lords of British theatre were Stoppard, his buddy Pinter, and their less-revered-but-more-popular colleague Peter Shaffer. I wrote about the other two when they died:

Playwright Sees God: Remembering Peter Shaffer with a lot of attention to Equus and Amadeus.

A Moment of Silence for Harold Pinter

The Queen Off-Script: The Uncommon Reader

Reflections on THE UNCOMMON READER, a novella by Alan Bennett (Picador 2007).

Queen Elizabeth is an actress, in “the role of a lifetime.”    It’s easy to make fun of her simply by imagining her dropping character for a split second, muttering “Damn!” when she spills coffee in her lap, for example.  It’s even funnier to imagine her sitting stock-still as scalding coffee burns through her yellow skirt, carrying on in a strained voice:  “Milk?”

Alan Bennett, playwright, takes full advantage of comic possibility number two in his novella THE UNCOMMON READER.  His Queen has played her role so long, suppressing her own thoughts until she doesn’t have any.   Doing all for show, she goes where her handlers direct her, she says just what will make people feel noticed during her visit.

In Bennett’s story, she borrows a book to smooth an awkward encounter with a librarian.  Then, to follow through, she reads it.  

Thus begins a royal odyssey of the mind, and Elizabeth becomes first, a voracious reader, and then, a discerning reader.   The script she has followed all her life loses its interest for her.

The comedy grows as the handlers try to get her back on script.   Suddenly, she wants to share what she has discovered. She wants to read a poem about the Titanic for her annual Christmas message, and she asks the Archbishop to let her read a lesson.   She wants the President of France to tell her more about Jean Genet (whose name and reputation are unfamiliar to Le President).  

While Bennett has fun with this character he has created, he is not unkind to her.  His targets are the non-readers among her staff, among political leaders, and among her obtuse subjects.    As Bennett imagines it, the prime minister has an Iran policy, but knows nothing of the history of Persia.  And so on.

The book seems plausible.  Maybe the People and their Leaders need less news, less business, more books, and more poetry. I get what William Carlos Williams means in “Asphodel”:   

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

           

But it’s best not to take it any more seriously than Bennett himself does.  It’s a lightweight book, easy to read before dinner.   He doesn’t really suggest that, say, the late Harold Pinter would have made a good PM, only that lives are enriched by the way that reading takes us into lives outside our own, and certainly all of us, the People and their Leaders, need enrichment.

(See my other reflections on this “Good Art Makes Bad Politics” and “A Moment of Silence for Harold Pinter” )

The Foreigner: Actor's Play makes an Actors' Play

(reflections after seeing a production of Larry Shue's comedy THE FOREIGNER at Pope High School in Marietta, GA)

To the ranks of great actors-turned-playwrights David Mamet, Harold Pinter, and William Shakespeare, add Larry Shue.

I met the actor Shue during his stint as a leading member of the Harlequin Dinner Theatre, a company that produced musicals in Atlanta and DC, running them a month and then trading them. He was particularly memorable in the title role of WHERE'S CHARLEY? I met him after a performance of I DO, I DO, in which he starred with Dorothy Collins. Gaga over her status as alumna of Sondheim's original cast of FOLLIES, I got her autograph, but just shook his hand.

During that period of his life, Shue was drafting the play that gives him his claim to immortality, THE FOREIGNER. Set in a small bed-and-breakfast near Atlanta in the late 70s, it tells the story of Charlie, a shy Englishman seeking a quiet retreat. His friend Froggy Le Seur concocts a fool-proof plan to allow Charlie to keep to himself: let it be known that Charlie is really Cha-oo-lee, a foreigner who speaks no English. But the plan backfires, as all the inhabitants of the bed-and-breakfast find it therapeutic or fun to speak their deepest secrets to him.

PHOTO COLLAGE: Our production of THE FOREIGNER by the Walker School's Middle School, 2002.

The show had a couple years' run off-Broadway in the early 80s. Shue starred first as "Froggy," then as "Charlie." Then a plane crash killed Shue en route to Hollywood with the screenplay for the movie version around 1984. The play has been in constant production ever since, and I've directed it with middle schoolers twice, most recently four years ago with a cast of devoted and gifted eighth graders.

Now, Chase McCallum, who played Froggy in eighth grade, grown up and graduating from high school, has on his own produced and directed a superb staging of the show, playing Charlie. He drafted Carrie Stallings, another veteran of that fabled staging of four years ago, to reprise her role as the older woman "Betty." Reed McCallum, who followed Chase in my drama program, portrayed the duplicitous Reverend David Lee with subtlety and relish.

Chase chose to seat the audience on stage, closing the curtains behind us, to create an intimate "black box" feel in the large auditorium. His actors inhabited that little bed-and-breakfast for real, ignoring the chatty couple and the rude high schoolers and the video cameras.

As I say whenever some snob claims that Shakespeare was a front man for some aristocrat, only an experienced actor could write this way. Shue generously gives every actor great chances to show off with set pieces and moments of transformation that delight the audience. While words are the source of great fun throughout the play, it's a play about characters, not their lines. Charlie gets huge laughs simply by reacting silently, and he gets to perform a virtuosic story in mime and double-talk (an actor's exercise used in drama class -- to create stories from nonsense lines) . One stretch of the script that makes an audience breathless features the young woman in the play reading aloud from a newspaper to mute Charlie, gradually breaking down from sarcastic debutante to a child bride, vulnerable and scared. The emblematic moment of the play, often photographed, is the mute breakfast scene in which Charlie draws out a sullen boy who is supposed to be mentally deficient. He does it by simply imitating the boy's movements -- another actor's game that any drama student would know. The boy, finding himself in the role of teacher, grows in self-confidence.

In a way, the whole play is about what acting teaches. Charlie tells Froggy (I paraphrase), "I'm acquiring a personality. People hand me pieces of it." The actor always works to assemble the personality of his role, and the good actor finds pieces in his own real life and experience to make the role real. A good actor reaches a better understanding of himself and others in the process.

The play makes reference to THE WIZARD OF OZ in several subtle ways, and spectacularly so in the finale. It's no casual connection. The inhabitants of the bed-and-breakfast are as different and lost as the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy. Through the agency of the imaginary foreigner, each discovers inner resources in time to defeat the forces of evil, and we feel great affection for the characters by the end.

A couple of personal notes, here. First, having seen the play in a professional production, and having spent literally hundreds of hours of my life in rehearsals for equally professional student productions, I had the odd and pleasurable sensation of coming home when I saw the set for Chase's production. The same thing happens when I see a production of SWEENEY TODD or any other familiar musical or opera. Seeing such a play, so familiar, and so rich in feeling, is a bit like participating in a religious ritual -- engendering the same feelings, no matter the size of the church or the characteristics of the priest. No wonder the ancient Greeks worshipped through theatre: these characters are spirits that possesses the actors who play them, and I know them and love them, no matter who embodies them.

Second, we who saw the play Friday night shared the unique and bittersweet experience of being forced to leave at the end of act one. A passing storm blew out the electricity early in the act, and emergency generators provided some fluorescent light for the remainder. Fire regulations required us to leave as soon as possible. Chase, having planned this production for years, remained in character as all of us, audience, actors, crew, filed out in darkness into the parking lot, all disappointed. Impromptu, Chase presented Charlie's "story" for us, with the dumpster as his backdrop - a strange and memorable moment of theatre.

Benjamin Franklin v. Brat Farrar: Why History Beats Mystery

Reflections while reading two books:  novel BRAT FARRAR by Josephine Tey (1950; Scribner Paperback 1997) and biography BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, AN AMERICAN LIFE by Walter Isaacson (2003; Simon and Schuster paperback 2004).

Hey, B. F. is the monogram for main characters in both books that I'm reading now!  Is that proof that truth is stranger than fiction?  Reading both a chapter of Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin and a chapter of Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar in one sitting, I can attest to one thing:  When an author provides a quirky detail so ridiculous, touching, or coincidental that the reader thinks it must be made up, then non-fiction is at its most appealing, and fiction is at its worst. 

I've reached the part in Isaacson's biography where Ben Franklin successfully obtains France's commitment to American independence.  But his every move was reported to England by his secretary Edward Bancroft, a spy.  More surprising, and more fun, is that Bancroft speculated on trade and rushed his insider information to his stock broker before he reported to the King's spymaster Paul Wentworth, who also had a financial interest in the information.   We read reports by Wentworth about agent 72 and 51 (Franklin and Deane) who are hot for 107 (Independence) (Isaacson 345).  He invited American Silas Deane to rendezvous at an exhibition in Luxembourg and a certain public bath on the Seine, though Deane replied simply that the spy could drop by the American's office anytime (344).  Franklin uses British involvement and "secret" counter-offers of peace as leverage to make the French act sooner than later, and he plays up the American victory at Saratoga to get the treaty that made independence possible.  The outline of the story and the basics of the characters are already well-known to me; the details make the history personal, and I now look at a century note with a knowing smile as if that portrait reminds me of an old pal.

Now, friends have lauded Josephine Tey to me for decades, and I find much to admire in her Brat Farrar.  I especially enjoy those elliptical passages where something important happens between two lines in a manner that calls to mind either her contemporary Noel Coward or else Harold Pinter.  Here, we meet the title character and a man named Loding, and we know the basics of their initially adversarial relationship in the first words they speak:

"Well?" said Loding at last.
"No."
Loding took a mouthful of coffee.
"Squeamish?"
"I'm not an actor."  (Tey 26)

Other characters converse in the same understated manner:

"What became of Cousin Walter?"
"Oh, he died."
"In an odour of sanctity?"
"No. Carbolic.  A workhouse ward, I think."  (21)

Tey sets up her novel of suspense in a way that appeals to me, alternating chapters between predators and the intended victims.   We quickly get the idea of what's going to happen, and so we wonder how far it will go before the victims realize how they're being duped.

Still, I'm exasperated by all the novel's fictions that are stranger than truth.   The boy's body was never found;  the young man with the striking resemblance to the long-lost boy just happens to be an orphan with a past that's a blank; the unscrupulous actor who knows the family just happens to encounter the false twin just at the time when the family estate is due to go to the surviving brother; and -- wouldn't you know? -- the old dental records perished with the late family dentiist.

While reading the biography feels like a story I already know is opening up for me,  reading the crime novel feels like a series of predictable crises are closing in.  It was a relief to put down Brat Farrar and to open Benjamin Franklin.  

This may be an example of something Stephen Sondheim describes in his second volume of lyrics, Look I Made A Hat, when he and a playwright friend were bored stiff at a play filled with purportedly exciting events and dramatic plot twists.  Incident is no substitute for surprise, the playwright remarked.    Author Frederick Buechner once described (in The Book of Bebb) a high school class's stories filled with the "requisite number" of suicides, terminal illnesses and car crashes because young writers try to use death to make up for the lack in their stories of "anything that resembles real life."

I usually love to read mysteries, so I'll have to think a bit more to figure out what line this one crossed.  

Rhymes with Integrity

Mark Umbers, Damian Humbley, and Jenna Russell
as Frank, Charley, and Mary

(reflection on the High Definition transmission of Merrily We Roll Along, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by George Furth, directed by Maria Friedman.  Production at the Harold Pinter Theatre, summer of 2013.  Also, Stephen Sondheim's book, Finishing the Hat, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

About Stephen Sondheim, the commonplace comments are, "You can't hum his tunes," "His songs are too cerebral," and "He sure does know how to rhyme!"

Since I saw director Maria Friedman's 2013 revival of Merrily We Roll Along broadcast in HD from London last week, I've marveled how natural-sounding rhymes bring home the characters' thoughts and feelings with a snap that makes the listener chuckle, or wince.  Finding myself humming the song "Growing Up" non-stop,  I've realized that song haunts me for an oh-so-cerebral reason:  added to the score four years after the show closed on Broadway, this song snaps together the story's characters and themes with the score's musical motifs.

Purpose for "Growing Up" The commonplace comments about Merrily are, "It's told backwards," "It was a fiasco in 1981 that ended Sondheim's collaboration with Hal Prince," and, "You don't like the main character." In Sondheim's own words...

Frank, the central figure, is entirely unsympathetic for the first half hour of the show.  He is arrogant, an adulterer, a betrayer of his best friend and the cause of near-suicidal alcoholism in the woman who loves him unrequitedly. (Sondheim 395)

Sondheim doesn't disagree:

I just happen to like stories about unsympathetic characters, because I trust the author to tell me why they interest him. That was the purpose of "Growing Up"...(396).

Four years after the short-lived run of Merrily on Broadway (so short-lived that I never got to use my tickets), director James Lapine revised the show with Sondheim and book writer George Furth. He suggested a song for the third scene to give the audience "a progress report on [Frank's] moral state." Sondheim obliged with a song that "allowed the audience to feel affection for Frank an hour earlier than they had in 1981."

Set Up for "Growing Up" So, in the fully-integrated version of the show, Frank sits down to a piano. He's alone in an unfurnished room, trunks and suitcases unopened around him. He's back from a cruise, beginning a new life after divorce. His closest friends Charley and Mary have just visited, but the joyful reunion almost fell apart in a disagreement about Frank's next move: Will he collaborate with Charley on the politically idealistic musical they've always wanted to write, or put that off again so Frank can pursue a Hollywood deal that'll pay child support? The adults worked through their differences in the tense middle section of an otherwise joyful paean to "old friends." Now, Mary and Charley have gone off to an old favorite night club to wait for Frank, who stays behind to take a call expected from Gussie, a Broadway star, wife of his producer / patron Joe. 

Because Merrily We Roll Along is told backwards, we know what's "ahead." Frank, at a party some years from now, surrounded by sycophants, denounced by ex-friend Mary, despised by second wife Gussie, forbidding any mention of his ex-friend Charley, will proclaim "I hate my life.  If I could go back and start over....!" 

But there's a lot we don't know, yet, about what brought him to this piano in an empty apartment.  Sondheim's song laces together strands of Frank's past. Given the backwards flow of this script, "Growing Up" foreshadows what we'll hear later. Sondheim invests later moments with resonance.

"Growing Up," part one Frank softly plays steady chords and hums a melody.  Then he sings words, as if to Charley and Mary,

Thanks, old friends ...
Keep reminding me...
Frank's old friends
Always seem to come through.
Frank will, too. 

No tricky rhymes here, just a natural sounding statement of affection and gratitude. He continues his thoughts about the decisions ahead:

So, old friends,
Now it's time to start growing up.
Taking charge,
Seeing things as they are.
Facing facts,
Not escaping them,
Still with dreams,
Just reshaping them,
Growing up...

It's a gentle tune, every phrase reaching upward in a way that feels positive.  With a couple of rhymes, now, the lyrics still feel like something a guy might say to explain himself across a table in a coffee house. 

Yet there's more going on, here:  We in the audience have heard those steady chords once before during the overture, along with what Frank hums.

When we will hear those chords again, in the second act, it will be years in the past, when Frank and Charley are about to find commercial success. They're at a swanky party, where Frank accompanies Charley on "Good Thing Going," a song they've written for their idealistic musical Take a Left. Frank is about to take a sharp right: Charley doesn't know that their hostess Gussie Carnegie has just seduced Frank into promising her that song for a frivolous rom-com she hopes will boost her career. Charlie's lyric, a gentle breakup ballad, could describe Charley's and Mary's relationship with Frank, their regret that "it could've kept on growing, / instead of just kept on."

While the accompaniment for "Growing Up" is borrowed from "Good Thing Going," the vocal line comes from another source, a motif we will hear at other crucial moments in Frank's life. Compare "So old friends / now it's time to be / growing up" to Mary's advice for Frank when divorce seems to have shattered his life: "Now you know,/Life is crummy, well,/ now you know." While Mary's song is uptempo, and the second and third pitches are reversed, "Growing Up" is still a variation on the same tune. So is the tune Gussie sings in mockery of her own guests: "Meet the Blob, / The bodies you / read about. / The ones who know everyone / that everyone knows." Using that same wise-cracking "now you know" motif, Gussie lets Frank in on her private joke -- flattering him, buttering him up for seduction. Moments later, Gussie sings her own slow, seductive version of "Growing Up."

But in the present scene, the tune comes across as a gentle affirmation of acceptance.

"Growing Up" interruption Then there's an outburst of short musical phrases that twist around within an interval of just four steps of the scale,  a little like kids' sneering "nyeah- nyeah nyeah" on a playground: 

Charley is a hothead.
Charley won't budge.
Charley is a friend.

Charley is a screamer,
Charley won't bend.
Charley's in your corner.

We've heard that twisted little tune several times already. It's the second motif of the overture. It starts the innocent little figure that the keyboard plays early in the song "Franklin Shepard, Inc." As that song grows into a furious indictment of Frank for abandoning friends and ideas, that little mocking motif snakes under most of the song.

But, for now, at the climax of "Growing Up," Frank's outburst grows to a high note on the word "change" before it subsides in the pair of lines that follow, which rhyme like an old adage:

Why is it old friends
Don't want old friends to change?
Every road has a turning,
That's the way you keep learning.

The "turning" of a "road" is a metaphor developed in the opening number, and repeated at transitions between scenes: "Bending with the road, / Gliding through the countryside, / Merrily we roll along, / Roll along, / Catching at dreams" (384).

"Growing Up," first ending Frank's conclusion pulls all these strands together:

Trying things,
Being flexible,
Bending with the road,
Adding dreams
When the others don't last.
Growing up,
Understanding that growing never ends,
Like old dreams --

Frank qualifies this last one:

Some old dreams --
Like old friends.

The vamp returns for "Good Thing Going," and, with the apparent end of the song, Frank has made up his mind to meet his friends, to leave Gussie and her "blob" world behind, but then, suddenly, she's there. She snuck in while he was playing.

She tells Frank that she has left her husband. He rebukes her for leaving a man devoted to her who is Frank's patron and friend. Why now, asks Frank. "Because I saw tonight that I could lose you." She continues Frank's song:

Growing up
Means admitting
The things you want the most.
Can't pursue
Every possible line.
Folding tents,
Making choices,
Ignoring all
Other voices,
Including mine...
You're divine...

"You're divine" is a non-sequitur, but it keeps the integrity of the drama, as Gussie is turning from rhetoric to outright seduction.  The phrase is a bit far-fetched, but not for Gussie, whom George Furth endowed with memorably precious dialogue, as when she tells her guests to "fermez all those bouches".  At this spot, where the twisty mocking motif comes in, Sondheim stretches it out in legato phrases, and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick brings in the saxophone to make it into a sultry tune:

You decide on what you want, darling,
Not on what you think you should.
Not on what you want to want, darling,
Not from force of habit.
Once it's clearly understood, darling,
Better go and grab it.
Things can slip away for good, darling.
What is it you really --?

She finishes with a come-hither gesture, and Frank follows her to the bedroom.  He's hooked.

But Frank fought the good fight, and every word of this song rings true. It's realism, it's common sense, it's appealing:  Who doesn't want to grow?  Who doesn't realize that realities change?  Who can't identify with "wanting to want" what one "should?" 

And That's Just One Song Every scene, every song in Merrily We Roll Along displays such integrity. 

But if the songs are good, who needs all that? Why should Sondheim and Furth have taken such care to integrate music, lyrics, and dialogue, along with story, character, and theme? 

They do it to create a world for the actors -- and audience -- to inhabit.  In an interview before the broadcast, Mark Umbers ("Frank") tells us that "Sondheim does all the work for you," unlike other writers who leave gaps for the actors to cover over.  Director Maria Friedman's staging and her cast's performances match the material in integrity and skill. Moment to moment, we feel that what we see and hear is really happening;  everything fits;  and, for the man who has lost his integrity, there is no escape from the consequences.

Happily, Friedman finds a way to emphasize a possibility for redemption at the very end.  When we first see Franklin in her production, he's pacing alone at night, considering a manuscript bound in red. Then follows the party where he says that he hates his life, and that, if he could go back, he'd start over.  After the beautifully hopeful anthem "Our Time," sung by young Frank, Mary, and Charley on a rooftop under a clear starry sky, the scenery and ensemble fade away, and we're left again with Frank in that living room.  He's back to clutching the red manuscript, which we now recognize to be the play that he and Charley always wanted to complete.  Could he be ready for a new start?  There's hope.

"The Ladies Who Lunch" 50 Years Later

YouTube suggested I might like a video from 1970 of actress Elaine Stritch singing "The Ladies Who Lunch." The song was from a musical that had just opened on Broadway, Company, book by George Furth, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, who composed the song for her character "Joanne."

YouTube was right. It's a good excuse to reflect on this song, that performer, and how the song holds up 50 years later. (See Elaine Stritch's TV studio performance from 1970.)

Before I'd ever heard of Stephen Sondheim or Company, comedian Carol Burnett shocked America by staging this bitter song in the middle of her beloved, folksy, charming TV variety show.  At age 11, I knew she was singing about my mother and my Aunt Blanche, and it wasn't funny at all. For years after, I'd find others impacted by Burnett's serious turn.

Sondheim writes in his memoir Finishing the Hat that "the character of Joanne was not only written for Elaine Stritch, it was based on her" with her "acerbic delivery of self-assessment" (193).

Until I saw this video artifact from 1970, I thought I knew everything about the song. I've heard and seen dozens of performances of the song, and I've accompanied myself singing it a few dozen more. The music has the mid-60s basso-nova feel, with dark coloration in the harmony, and a fun detail in the melody: whenever Joanne repeats the phrase, "I'll drink to that," the notes slide downward with notes out of the key, in a musical expression of inebriation. The lyric is a toast to different kinds of women that Joanne observes - the ladies who lunch, the ones who stay smart, the ones who play wife. In each verse, Sondheim hides an inner rhyme "to give the lines a tautness." I've italicized the syllables that rhyme to show what he means:

Here's to the girls who play wife --
Aren't they too much?
Keeping house but clutching a copy of Life
just to keep in touch.

He explains, "The 'clutch' is hidden, there's no musical pause there, no way of pointing it up, but it's there to help make the line terse, the way the character is" (quoted in Craig Zadan's book Sondheim and Co. 2nd Edition 1986, p.232).

So I cried to see Stritch, some 15 years younger than I am now, perform the lines in ways that bring tenderness out of this "acerbic" and "taut" song. It was a surprise, though I've seen another video of Stritch from around the same time.  It's in the Pennebaker documentary of the original cast's recording. Stritch fails in multiple takes. Everyone else had gone home hours before, and she's there screaming the song at the microphone, looking harried, insecure, ashamed.

This is different. "I'd like to propose a toast," she says, while an off-screen pianist plays the first chords rubato. Stritch is wearing her own signature outfit - a man's dress shirt, leggings. There's that late-60s eye-liner, but no other noticeable makeup; no accessories, no prop tumbler. Hands folded on her lap, she sings, "Here's to the ladies who lunch" the way I'm used to hearing it, as a clarion call. But then she sings softly, "Everybody laugh."

Already, she's laid out her attitude. These women are ridiculous, but she feels for them. They're "planning a brunch" she sings, scowling as if to say, "really?", then clasps her hands to sing softly, "on their own behalf."

This was taped at New York's Channel 13, a low-budget production, without any fancy camera work. The camera moves in on her sarcastic question, "Does anyone still wear a hat?" Her anger picks up as she rips through the girls who stay smart, giving us sarcastic jazz hands for "a matinee," and an-oh-so-serious scowl as her forefingers touch her thumbs -- we're being intellectual, now -- for "a Pinter play," and then an extravagant gesture for "a piece of Mahler's." (Sondheim reveals that Stritch didn't get the reference. She thought a piece of Mahler's would be some kind of pastry. In the full orchestration, Jonathan Tunick quotes a riff from Mahler's 4th after this line.)

She mocks the "ones who follow the rules, and meet themselves at the schools" before mocking her own kind, "the ones who just watch," who take "another chance to disapprove... another reason not to move," screaming "I - I - I - I'll" drink to that.

In the final verse, Stritch conveys strongly what's implied in the lyrics. Mock them she might, but she's with them, too. The camera moves in close on her eyes as she begins the last verse, when the internal rhymes punch up what these women all face together:

So here's to the girls on the go
Everybody tries.
Look into their eyes and you'll see what they know:
Everybody dies!

We've already had several "Everybody" lines: this is the ultimate. Sondheim tops it with a scary grand finale. Joanne commands an ovation, "Everybody rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise!" Stritch is uninhibited here, unafraid to sound hoarse, angry, and hurting.

Fifty years later, the song doesn't sound dated. I know these women. Stars keep wringing meaning from it -- Meryl Streep, Audra MacDonald, and Christine Baranski did a Zoom cocktail hour version for Sondheim's 90th birthday. If Mr. Sondheim is reading this, I suppose an update should include a toast to the ladies with jobs.

For now, as for the past 50 years, here's to "The Ladies Who Lunch."

[See my Sondheim Page for much more about the man, his shows, craft, and colleagues. I write about what I learned from interviews with Elaine Stritch and a folk singer, her contemporary Jean Redpath, at Diverse Divas and the Art of Showbiz]

London Homecoming

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Scott Smoot and his bike at Trafalgar Square, virtually

After the Queen's funeral last Monday, I took some time away from the bike. I got back in the saddle this weekend with two rides, 56 miles, enough to take me from Oxford to London on my virtual tour of the world. In the selfie, I'm resting my other arm on the seat of my bike while I rest myself in Trafalgar Square.

This is a place I lived and loved in my imagination long before I first visited in 1980. From Mary Poppins in grade school to practically all the dead white guys I read for my English major, my memory was packed with London images and incidents, so much so that I burst into tears coming up from the Marble Arch station, as if it were a homecoming, not my first step on a London street.

On great advice from my mentor Frank Boggs, I first toured London's National Portrait Gallery. From the top floor where I saw Alfred the Great's crude likeness on a ship's plank, to the basement, where I recognized Henry James from across the room, I strolled through a thousand years.

In a room dedicated to massive framed portraits of 18th century writers, I found my favorite portrait on the back of an envelope. From several feet away, I saw the sketch of a gentleman with a hunched back and bowed legs disproportionately short, and knew that it must be the refined but feisty poet Alexander Pope. He fought to have no likeness made of what he called his "misshapen" body. Portrait artist Joshua Reynolds drew him surreptitiously while the poet gestured in conversation. I was amused and touched.

During six weeks of studying literature at Oxford, I reserved weekends for London theatre. I saw first London productions by some of my heroes that summer: Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, Harold Pinter's The Hothouse, and, my favorite of the summer, Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, much more fun than the movie. Another highlight was a Samuel Beckett double-bill at the Old Vic theatre, Krapp's Last Tape and Endgame, the author directing inmates from San Quentin.

I had London all to myself at sunrise on my last day in England. Walking to Paddington, I sang "London Pride," learned from a recording by Cleo Laine. Noel Coward's wartime benediction for the city expressed what I was feeling:

Gray city,
stubbornly implanted,
taken so for granted
for a thousand years.

Stay, city,
smokily enchanted,
cradle of our memories,
our hopes and fears.

Every blitz,
our resistance toughens
from the Ritz
to the Anchor and Crown.
Nothing ever can override
the pride of London town.

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to trace the entire tour from the beginning.

The Last Five Years on Screen: Feeling is Enough, with Music

It's not the tale but the telling that makes the film adaptation of The Last Five Years wonderful.

Supple, expressive songs by Jason Roberts Brown articulate and enlarge the characters' thoughts and feelings in a variety of styles. The camera, directed by Richard LaGravenese,  also enlarges the characters' faces, expressive and appealing. "Jamie"(Jeremy Jordan) and "Cathy" (Anna Kendrick) fall in love, marry, then grow apart as his career becomes "the other woman" (actual other women being his accessories).

It's a familiar story made fresh by the author's manipulation of time.  At the start, "Jamie" has left to pursue his career, and "Cathy" is "still hurting."  We see her, tears in her eyes, take off the wedding ring, the watch, the bracelet. But then we see Jamie burst into an apartment with Cathy wrapped around his thighs, singing to his "Shiksa Goddess" about how crazy he is about her.   He's at the start of the relationship, moving forward, giving her along the way that bracelet, the watch, and the wedding ring; she's at the end, looking backward; we see their opposing trajectories in alternating scenes, meeting midway at the wedding. 

The most magical song of the movie is the story of "Shmuel," a song in Brown's best Fiddler-on-the-Roof  style, in which energetic "Jamie" tries to lift dispirited "Cathy" to see herself in a fable about a tailor who has a chance to use time in a new way.  Performing as husband, tailor, spirit, and old Yiddish narrator, Jordan performs the number with verve and precision, tugging "Cathy" out of her funk.  It's staged for "Jamie" to dramatize his whimsical story from cloth, lamps, and holiday decor found in the apartment

All the other songs are so honest that they make us smile and hurt.  The hurt is always there, because we know how it turns out, though we hope against hope that these sweet, well-intentioned, beautiful people with their soaring voices are going to somehow get back together.

I had mixed feelings about the stage show.  (Read reflection here.) The movie is able to round out the story in a new way, and I love it.

My only qualm is this:  Betrayal, by Harold Pinter, also told its story backwards, peeling layer after layer off the original impression we get of the affair.  Betrayal thus builds to a revelation that the situation was never so clear-cut as we thought.  In the end of this one, have we learned anything new?  I can't think of anything revealed by the criss-crossing of time, only an uptick in sympathy for the boy.  Feeling is the point:  At any given moment, we're feeling the exhilaration of young love and ambition, while we're also feeling sympathy with the loss of the same.

Well, with all the music, the lyrics, the acting, the scenery, the dancing and glorious voices to appreciate -- feeling is enough. 

[See my Sondheim page for many other reflections on matters relating to the composer that Jason Roberts Brown "worships" (his own word) Sondheim, his shows, and musical theatre more generally.]

Tributes to My Teachers: Dr. John Clum, Writer, Dramatist, Scholar

Dr. John M. Clum at Duke University showed me a deeper way to enjoy literature when he became the first English teacher to ask me a question I couldn't answer. 

"Don't you see the structure?" 

I was puzzled. "You mean, how many chapters the book has?" Yes, he said, that's part of it. "You mean, whether it's in first person?" Yes, he said, that's part of it. I ran out of ideas then, but I spent the rest of my semesters at Duke trying to find out what he meant. 

For the first time, after years of getting an A for essays that simply stated what was obvious to me, I started to use every essay assignment as a challenge to work out ideas that were new to me. I took risks, and, all of a sudden, the student who knew everything about art realized that he had barely begun to appreciate it (for the same lesson applies to music and visual arts). 

Dr. Clum led me to the right destination following the pivotal wrong turn in my life, the very same day it happened. Nothing in my freshman year had excited me or challenged me so much as "Music 101-102" taught by the university chapel's gentle and jovial organist Fenner Douglass. On the first day of classes in my sophomore year at Duke, I took my seat in "Music 103," anticipating that I would declare a music major and pursue a career in music composition. Then the head of the Music department entered and announced, "If you're interested in composing music, get out now: this department is for scholars and performers only." I stood, walked out, and phoned Dr. Clum to enroll in his class as a drama major. Years later, I had to recognize that music was my true love, and I still regret not withdrawing from Duke right then and transferring to some school where I could have pursued music composition. 

I may have made a wrong turn, but Dr. Clum led me to the same destination anyway. (As Sondheim wrote it in a song: "I chose and my world was shaken / So what? / The choice may have been mistaken, / The choosing was not. . .") Besides the insight about "structure" in art, Dr. Clum taught me these lessons:

• Following a monologue that I performed for his class, using all the actors' tricks I knew, he gently pointed out that I was "acting" instead of trying to communicate what was specific to the text. That was the first of many times that he confronted me with how much more I had to learn about things I'd thought I knew.
• When he cast me as the husband of the heroine in the nineteenth-century classic Hedda Gabler, he created a seminar for the cast so that we could study the social and artistic context of that play. Rehearsing and studying for four months, I experienced depth in a role for the first time.
  Another experience I had for the first time in that course: He gave me the first grade lower than "A" that I ever received on a paper about literature. I was indignant. In a conference, he said, "Lord knows, it's a good paper. I just expected more from you."
• That "B" actually precipitated a crisis for me, and Dr. Clum was again there to help me towards the right goal. After I'd calmed down, I recognized how right he was. After eight years of secondary education, I'd never had to think in a literature course. All of my work had been reporting or describing what was obvious to me. I went back to Dr. Clum, who was also my academic advisor, and asked him about that. His answer was simple: Enroll in a certain unusual course taught by General Irving B. Holley, and that course redeemed all the others, and became the basis of everything I've taught my students in history and literature courses ever since (read more about General Holley).
• He did me a favor by casting me (for a class performance) in a play by Pinter. I hated the play, I hated the role, I didn't understand it, it seemed stupid, it seemed sordid -- and then he helped me to understand how the words could say one thing but mean another, how characters can use words for weapons (or defenses). Then his question, "What animal is your character like?" got me to think about a cat, with its caution, its alertness, its laziness, its hedonism. Portraying that part in that play taught me the main lessons that I've been imparting to my drama students ever since.
• In a playwriting seminar, I treasure above all the conference I had in his office on the top floor of the old Carr building. My play about a busybody secretary named "Lotty" was going nowhere. It was a true-to-life depiction of real experiences I'd had in a summer job at a department store -- but, just like real life, it had no direction. "What can I do?" I asked him. Without speaking, he rose from his desk and closed the door to the hallway. Then, smiling, leaning up against the door, he said in a low voice, "Kill Lotty."  I laughed. First, it was such a shock, and it felt like a real conspiracy. Then, I saw pretty quickly that he was right. Murder would be an exaggeration of what we all felt, and that would make our feelings more clear than my accurate report of actual events. I'd learned how something can be more true than actual.

The academic program in Drama that he created now thrives. The story of his struggle to raise drama from a club activity to an academic discipline was the subject of my researched paper for Dr. Holley, which can be found in Duke's archives -- listed on the archives web page. I hear from Dr. Clum that my history "Dramatic Changes" stands today as a reference for researchers.

Carol's Unpredictable Moments

For all the sumptuous beauty of the settings and costumes of expensive 1951 hotels and bars, my favorite scene in Carol is set among dour suits at a table in a law office.  

Directed by Todd Haynes, based on Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt, much of the story follows a familiar pattern. 
We've seen Cate Blanchett's "Carol" of the upper-echelon seduce Rooney Mara's young "Therese" from her Bohemian life, and conflict when the husband stumbles on his wife with the younger woman. Once the story gets going, it all seems pretty inevitable.  We guess that some kind of drastic, punishing repercussion will follow the consummation of their relationship.

But as my friend Susan said, "When they sat down with the lawyers to argue over custody of the daughter, I had no idea what was going to happen." The eloquence and simplicity of "Carol's" plea is unexpected and memorable.  "It's going to get ugly," Carol warns, "and we're not ugly people."

I was intrigued by another scene that seemed to serve no purpose in the film. Briefly, we see Therese with pals in a theatre's projection room, all watching Sunset Boulevard.  The scene has no bearing on plot or character development, leaving me to wonder if we're seeing a clue to the director's thinking: does he see his film as analogous to the earlier one?  Is "Carol" a predatory older woman, like "Norma Desmond?"  Commenting on the film, Therese's friend is keeping score of times when the dialogue covers up what the characters really think. Is this a sort of directorial watermark, highlighting for us the Pinter-esque brevity and obliqueness of the dialogue?

Early Frost

(Reflection upon the first few dozen pages of ROBERT FROST: COLLECTED POEMS, PROSE, & PLAYS in The Library of America.)

Before my voice changed, I could recite all of "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," and key phrases in "The Road Less Travelled" and "Mending Wall." My teachers treated Frost as a voice apart, wonderful and unmatchable as Shakespeare.  (The AP exam my senior year presented both writers in one: Frost making allusion to Shakespeare in the poem "Out, out--:). To this day, Robert Frost’s words and wisdom are tucked away in the same mental file as The Lord's Prayer, Psalm 23, and The Gettysburg Address. All the contemporary poetry I've read and enjoyed in adulthood has seemed to be written by mere mortals, while Frost remains on his pedestal.

This year, I've resolved to make my way page by page through his Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, to re-evaluate him. Here's what I've discovered, so far:

His life, summarized in a chronology at the back, was much more complex than I'd heard. In his youth, through his twenties, I notice a theme of having to prove himself to be more than his mother's boy. His father died early; he grew up in San Francisco long before returning to become the quintessential New England writer. Several items tell us how he got in fights, fought two boys at once, beat 8th grade boys when he took over his mother's unruly class, and how he was beaten up by those same students in an ambush later that year. Besides work in the classroom, he was a drama teacher, and a mill worker, before he settled down on a farm. We also read that he “heard voices” when he was nine; and close relatives were institutionalized with debilitating mental illness, including his sister and his daughter.

In his earliest collection, Frost was imitating poetry that must have been pretty corny even in the early 1900s. Take, for instance, the first lines of the penultimate poem in that first collection, “My Butterfly”:

Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun - assaulter, he
That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead. . .

But the last verse in that collection achieves a gracefulness that sounds natural despite the triple rhyme, and that rhyme clicks the thought into place:

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

The next collection, NORTH TO BOSTON, published in 1914, begins with “Mending Wall,” and we sense a quantum leap for Frost. It’s no longer a young man alone with his old man’s thoughts. In that first poem, and in all of the others, it’s one mind wrestling with another’s. A taciturn neighbor mutters, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Our poet says, “I wonder / If I could put a notion in his head: ‘Why do they make good neighbors?’” Many of the other poems are like short - short - films in verse: setting the scene with sensual detail, then a dialogue. Often there are spaces and indentations that have the effect of Pinter’s pauses. There are soliloquies (Frost emulating Browning), including this, from “A Servant to Servants”:

It’s got so I don’t even know for sure
Whether I am glad, sorry, or anything.
There’s nothing but a voice - like left inside
That seems to tell me how I ought to feel,
And would feel if I was all gone wrong.
You take the lake. I look and look at it.
I see it's a fair, pretty sheet of water...

... but the character, a woman, doesn’t feel the beauty that draws others to the lake. She is a fictional character dealing with mental illness in the family as Frost did.

We can see Frost developing a different technique in some of these, where our poet is an intermediary between characters of strong opposing feelings. In “The Death of a Hired Man,” it’s the wife attempting to shield the sleeping, good-for-nothing hired hand in the next room from her husband’s ire. In “The Black Cottage,” our spokesperson is a parson describing how he bridges the gap between old and young in his church. In “The Code,” an employer and two hired hands have been working on a farm, and one of the laborers has just left in a huff. Our spokesperson is the remaining worker, trying to explain the quitter’s state of mind to the employer.

Rhythm, sometimes rhyme, enter in, but always so naturally that they don’t intrude, but lend a sheen, and a sense that everything is just right.

All that said, these are still the work of a young man in a context. The popular culture of his day was filled with melodrama, the populism of Progressive “muckrakers” and a fascination with deaths of innocents. So we get a young couple still mourning the death of their infant child (“Home Burial”), and the shyster company lawyer trying to bilk the stoical mill worker maimed on the job, and a sort of ghost story. His poems concern the cook, the housekeeper, the farm hand, the decayed home of the forgotten old woman, and the honorable farm life compared to the decadent urban life.

I checked the blogosphere to see whether I’m thinking along the same lines as others, and stumbled happily across the blog of Dana Gioia (DanaGioia.net), recent head of the NEH, a poet around my age whom I’ve had the pleasure of hearing in a small room at Emory University. I’ve read his book CAN POETRY MATTER? in which Gioia describes the insularity of many contemporary poets, English Departments, and poetry publishers.

According to Gioia, the purposeful accessibility and public persona of Frost made him a target for a hostile biographer and academic disdain.

Gioia quotes Frost about that dramatic angle in his poems: “I make it a rule not to take any character's side in anything I write." Gioia comments, “Like Shakespeare, Frost's imagination was capacious enough to encompass contradiction. He used the friction of irreconcilable opposites rubbing against each other—sometimes humorously, more often tragically—to spark the dramatic energy of his narratives.”

Gioia continues:

In Frost's lyric poems, however, his gift for opposition took a more complicated turn. On the surface he would create an engaging poem that memorably argued some sensible point of view. Meanwhile underneath he would set loose another line of argument that subversively qualified or rejected the surface message....In "Mending Wall," for instance, the speaker does not agree with the farmer's pronouncement that "Good fences make good neighbors." Nor does "The Road Not Taken" unambiguously assert that the choice of paths "made all the difference." While the Modernists made the surfaces of their poems complex and forbidding, Frost made his surfaces deceptively simple. On close examination, however, his seemingly lucid poems often unfold into imaginative enigmas.

About Frost’s capsule biography, Gioia makes a point about a “central paradox in Frost's career—the great poet of New England was born and raised through childhood in San Francisco.” So, coming from temperate urban San Francisco to rugged, snowy, rural northeast, Frost “took nothing in this new landscape for granted. ...The newcomer has to make conscious sense of a place in ways a native never bothers. Frost was an elective New Englander, and a convert is always more passionate about the new faith than someone born to a religion.”

Thanks to Gioia for introducing me to this quote, which I am evidently the last English major to learn: Poetry "is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget."

Poetry, June 2007

(reflections on the June 2007 issue of the journal POETRY)

Following an issue that apologized for being mostly commentary with little poetry, this one is all poetry. But the number of poems that tickled me is about the same as usual.

The issue begins with several pages of something by Frank Bidart that looks like a poem - consistent with a pattern of two lines, space, one line, space, repeat... interrupted from time to time with prose paragraphs. It's an exploration of an anecdote: as a young man, the poet saw a film of aging dancer Ulanova performing a role that she could no longer sustain in performance straight through. Is it a poem? An essay? An anecdote? The story of "Giselle" itself? A poem can be all of these things, and that's okay with me. At the end, there's a note about how this film, in 1952, taught the author about art. There's a lot here to appreciate and think about .

Much of what follows is crude, or crudeness gussied up. Some of it is posing -- attitude, scorn, ugly. The "f" word appears in five or so consecutive poems, and I just skipped those. Such a word is a sign of laziness. (An exception: it's the key to Harold Pinter's wonderful, creepy play BETRAYAL, carefully placed midway). There's another thing that annoys me in a lot of the poems I read in this journal, poems that fall into lists of proper nouns. Here poems listing flowers by name, or ancient poets.

A poem by John Koethe called "Chester" conjures thoughts of waking with pet at the end of the bed, and that fantasy of "the half-concealed life that lies beneath / The ordinary one, made up of ordinary mornings." A. E. Stallings' poem, "Misspent," touches on the same fear, that days are being mislaid the way bright shiny coins picked up and put in the pocket are spent on trifles one doesn't even recall.

David Yezzi's poem "The Good News" seemed to be a reflection on my own recent experience of meeting an old friend 30 years later. Like the other poems I've mentioned here, it strikes me as being like my own experience. I guess this means that these experiences are pretty universal, and discovering that is one of the pleasures in reading poetry.

A very short poem called "Scree" deftly makes a point about suffering, that it's not a stop, but a misstep from which we recover our footing, unsteadily.

Film Noir Makes Me Happy: Chinatown and LA Confidential

I watched Chinatown and LA Confidential again under ideal circumstances, i.e., in my friend Susan's darkened den on a summer night, cold martini in hand.  It's strange, though: both films concern sad people who dislike themselves for the disgusting or violent things they do.  So when we see a still photo from the films, or hear a lonely trumpet over brooding orchestra that reminds us of Jerry Goldsmith's music (he scored both titles), why do we go "ahhh," as if it were a snapshot of last summer at the beach?  Why do we look forward to revisiting their retro-noir landscapes?

First, there's the story for both movies, simple and uplifting. Sure, the plots concern misdeeds and betrayals so twisted that I still can't tell you for sure which woman had coffee at the fatal diner in LA Confidential, nor why that matters; nor can I say of Chinatown whether the victim's wife witnessed his murder.  But the story, as opposed to plot, is simple: when a cynical man arrives at a place where the truth is worse than he thought, he finds there a wise woman who needs his help.  For her sake, he takes action with newfound passion for justice.  What could be more uplifting?  LA Confidential gives us three such men, though only two live to the finale.

It occurs to me just now that the story of descent through stages of darkness to bring a woman up to the light shares a lot with Ovid and Dante.  So this basic story may also stir us from deep down in our collective unconscious. 

Reasons two and three for taking pleasure from such on-screen misery comprise a matched set.  We're caught up in artifice as dazzling as a Busby Berkeley musical number, while being flattered that we're in the know, seeing the world as it really is. 

The artifice begins with the baroque intertwining of plot lines, but also involves a lusciousness of style that we respond to on several different levels.  A thoughtful essay by Jake Hinkson at CriminalElement.com considering "retro-" v. "neo-" noir, places both films in a broader context:

Retro-noirs can certainly be done well—Chinatown and LA Confidential are about as good as movies have a right to be—but they come with certain pitfalls. Like all period pieces, they erect an additional layer of unreality between their story and the audience, a fabricated distance of time. There’s something distracting when a modern star slips on a fedora and fires up a Lucky Strike. This ties into another problem with Retro-noirs: they have to negotiate the pull between being a reenactment of another time period and a reenactment of the movies of another time period.  (Hinkson)

Hinkson feels uneasy about the unreality, but not I:  The unreality of it is part of the fun, no less than seeing chorines tapping on the tiers of a wedding cake.

The style of noir dialogue is easy to parody because it encompasses both Shakespearean eloquence and Pinter's theatre of menace.  In LA Confidential, when "Exley" asks "Lynne" what she sees in detective "Bud White," she answers in six or seven lines in a row that begin the same way and build to a devastating punchline: it's a soliloquy in verse.  Police Captain Dudley Smith delivers a memorable address on police ethics, comprised all of rhetorical questions. Then, because the world of film noir is so layered with lies and menace, even mundane lines have ironic implications, such as the simple statement, "He used to be a cop. Ha!"

While all this style washes over us, we're buying the noir line that this is Truth, the way our world really works.  In both Chinatown and LA Confidential, the trail of the killers leads upward to the highest echelon of LA society and government.  That gives us a feeling that this game matters.

The noir view is oddly comforting, too, in the way that conspiracy theories help some people to cope with randomness in the world.  So Secretary of State Clinton said she didn't exchange any classified emails on her private server, but investigators found the notation "C" for "confidential" beside portions of emails: Do we want to know that a figure on the world stage skims her emails the way regular people do?  Yet, having studied histories of Presidents Johnson and Nixon a few years ago, I found,  "Sensitive to criticism, paralyzed by the fear of failure, prone to miscommunication, careless of facts that don't go with our preconceptions: that's all of us, even Presidents, Vice-Presidents, and Cabinet officials" (from my blog post Half Way with LBJ).

The world is messy.  But film noir is neat and stylish.  At the end of a week of news that's hard to take, the world of Chinatown and LA Confidential is dark but beautiful.

Of related interest:
See Black, White, and Noir, my reflection on crime novels by Walter Mosley and Ross McDonald, and a reflection on the complete Philip Marlowe series by Raymond Chandler, It's About the Driver, not the Drive.

For more on international leaders who were just as lost as anybody else, see How Little We Knew How Little They Knew: Nixon and Kissinger, and Partners Across Party Lines: The Presidents' Club.