Crazy

Every now and then, a wonderful singer comes up with an interpretation so wrongheaded that you can only scratch your head and mutter, “What the hell?” Music lovers keep lists of such moments; for a long time, mine has been dominated by (but not limited to) Renata Scotto’s florid account of “Over the Rainbow,” on the occasion of Beverly Sills’ retirement. A lovely gesture to a colleague went horribly wrong, because the great Italian soprano couldn’t locate the correct style: simplicity.

Now another singer whom I admire, the French soprano Natalie Dessay, has topped the list. Her style isn’t bad, but the meaning of Bernstein’s “Glitter and Be Gay” eludes her entirely. What makes her rendition most troubling is that, on the evidence I’ve heard, other, younger French sopranos are now copying her travesty, in the not unreasonable belief that anything Dessay does must be right.

Dessay has been mangling this aria for a few years, but it’s only recently that I’ve identified the source of her misinterpretation, courtesy of the title of her latest album: Mad Scenes.


In its original context, “Glitter and Be Gay” finds the heroine of Candide in despair. She’s been raped, losing in the process not only her virginity but all her plans for a noble marriage back in Westphalia; she’s now a courtesan in Paris. But she takes comfort in the rewards of her new profession: jewels. Lots and lots of them. Which make her not only rich but even more beautiful. She stops crying and starts to laugh.

In an operetta that makes a frontal assault on many of the conventions of grand opera, “Glitter and Be Gay” shows us the soprano unhinged. Musically and dramatically, the song is a parody of the Jewel Song from Gounod’s Faust, and Cunegonde’s skipping, staccato “Ha-ha-ha” reflects Marguerite’s “Ah! Je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir” (I laugh to see myself so beautiful in this mirror).

Dessay takes what ought to be a fou rire (giggle), maybe a little bit hysterical, and turns it into something madder. She doesn’t even articulate the “Ha-ha-ha” as laughter at all. She lands so wide of the mark that I couldn’t understand her intention, the first times I heard her sing the aria. And that’s unusual, given that she’s an exceptionally smart and communicative musician, whose English is fluent, and whose husband (the baritone Laurent Naouri) happens to speak nearly as well as I do.

What the hell? Then her new album came out: Mad Scenes. Oh. That explains everything. Almost.

So Dessay thinks Cunegonde is outright crazy — like Lucia di Lammermoor, Ophélie (in Ambroise Thomas’ Hamlet), and Bellini’s Elvira. Never mind that, if Bernstein wanted to write a parody of a mad scene, he’d have done so; instead, he wrote a parody of the Jewel Song. Even out of context, Dessay’s interpretation makes no sense — and she’s missing a terrific opportunity to poke fun at one of the hoariest clichés in French opera. (Even the Tintin comics mock the Jewel Song: it’s the only number in Bianca Castafiore’s repertoire.) I can’t imagine why that prospect didn’t appeal to Dessay.

Maybe it’s the fault of the record company. Wanting to spotlight a gallery of loony ladies in Dessay’s growing repertory, and to sync with her Metropolitan appearances as Lucia and Ophélie, they may have originated the “Mad Scenes” concept. But there weren’t enough arias to round out an album. “We need one more,” they said. “I don’t know any,” she replied. “What about ‘Glitter and Be Gay’?”

I’m guessing here. But to paraphrase another American musical comedy of the same generation, “So wrong! Farewell, auf Wiederseh’n, goodbye.”



I’ve heard a number of good singers do right by “Glitter and Be Gay,” starting with Wendy Chatman, who played Cunegonde in our college production of Candide, and continuing through Erie Mills, Harolyn Blackwell, and Diana Damrau; I’ve always regretted that Sills herself never sang the role. While June Anderson struck me as a tad Wagnerian, and Kristin Chenoweth a bit steely, they surely understand the song, too, and I’ve enjoyed their interpretations.

To my pleasant surprise, the best of the lot turns out to be Madeline Kahn, who sang Cunegonde in a gala concert performance of Candide to mark Leonard Bernstein’s 50th birthday. Her friend Michael Cohen has told me that together they prepared “Glitter and Be Gay” even before she auditioned, so that it’s no wonder she’s note-perfect. (The rest of the cast, heard on a pirate recording, is less polished.) Madeline has all the notes and all the humor, with some touches I’ve never heard elsewhere. “Bracelets, lavaliers!” she growls with contempt, before imploring, “Can they dry my tears?”

One of these days, I’m going to dub that recording and send a copy to Natalie Dessay.

Read more!

Chartres

The filmmaker Wash Westmoreland has the uncanny ability to find images to illustrate my innermost thoughts — often before I’ve had a chance to think of them. This is how he sees the light at Chartres.
Photograph by Wash Westmoreland©

Among the many resolutions I made but did not keep when I moved to France was to make an annual pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres: it’s nearly five years since I set foot there. But this week, chance brought me to its door, on a sunny afternoon, when there were few tourists about and, as we made our approach by car, the Cathedral rose up majestically above the surrounding farmland, like a great frigate on the high seas. I hadn’t planned the visit, but how could I resist?

The Cathedral is built on a hilltop, and such is the esteem in which it is held by local landowners that, not only in town but in the surrounding countryside, as well, nothing stands taller. Depending on which route you take, you will always get this unobstructed and awe-inspiring view. It is especially impressive on those days when the light is golden, the sky steely, and the fields all amber and emerald. My luck this time wasn’t quite so good, yet I know what medieval travelers must have felt, as they drew near the town and saw what is still the principal landmark in the area.


Between my first visit, as a high-school student in 1977, and my second, in the early 1990s, I studied the Cathedral, as part of an art-history course in Gothic architecture. My professor required that we be able to distinguish, from a single photo of a statue or a piece of stained glass, one saint from another, and to identify the church it came from. Though I passed the course, nowadays I know only the most famous saints by their most familiar attributes (Wheel = Catherine), and the surest means of telling which cathedral they’re from is to go there.

And so, as I contemplate their mysteries, it’s clear that, if I’d just look a little longer, and think a little harder, they’d divulge their secrets. I might even be able to name the Old Testament kings.

This visit to Chartres was a pit stop, really, and afforded me minutes, not hours, to study. I concentrated on inspiration — breathing in the atmosphere. The best part of this is to play in the light that shines through the stained-glass windows, and it was here at Chartres that I understood the significance of that light to the people who worshiped here first.

In the Middle Ages, most people owned no glass of any kind, least of all on their windows; the properties of colored light (so humdrum to us who are surrounded by neon, television, computer and movie screens, and so on) were exotic to my ancestors, and the colored glass must have resembled the jewels of kings, which peasants seldom saw at all.

So they came to Chartres, which rose higher than any other building they knew or thought possible, its masses of stone majestic and yet not heavy, climbing purposefully toward the unreachable heavens. And once inside — on sunny days — the people might stretch out their hands to see their skin splashed with red and gold, and even bleu de Chartres, in light that moved with the sun, slowly. Do you wonder that they took this for proof of God’s grace?

For that matter, do you wonder that, on my first trip to France, I learned to genuflect and to make the sign of the Cross, because I wanted to be part of whatever had made anything so magnificent? Nowadays I simply accept that art is my religion, and that, by sheer coincidence, many churches are also temples of art.

Since I first saw the place, the stones of Notre Dame de Chartres have seemed washed with India ink, but on this visit I noted that a cleanup is underway, and parts of the church interior are as bright and white as if brand-new. I’m not entirely happy with the prospect; so far the results are a little too perfect, and one thing we admire about Chartres is the sublime imperfection of the place, starting with its mismatched towers.

The old dark stones seemed to throw the stained glass into sharper contrast, and to carry us back to the (literal) Dark Ages; the cleaned stones look more like a modern replica than like the real cathedral. And since Viollet-LeDuc, we’ve had the chance to see, in a few privileged locations (as at Sainte-Chapelle, in Paris), the kinds of wall paintings that the medieval French used to decorate their holy places: I’m not sure the original congregants have approved of the bright, bare stones, either.

But I’ll reserve judgment. Airiness and light were among the principal goals of the architects of the great cathedrals. Maybe the cleanup will help us to appreciate the degree to which they succeeded.

Sometimes I try to imagine the conversation at the city council, back in the twelfth century, when construction of the cathedral was first proposed. “We’re going to build a gigantic church; it will require the efforts of the whole town, and in all likelihood, the project won’t be completed when our grandchildren themselves are grandparents. We’ll never see the fruit of our labors.”

This in itself would provoke no complaint, but the fact that, in Chartres and elsewhere, other grandiose churches had been built, only to burn or collapse, would surely have been discussed.* In the case of Chartres, someone must have mentioned the Veil of the Virgin Mary, a relic that miraculously survived a couple of fires in the church. Was this not a sign that God had elected the people of Chartres, and that it was their duty to build something magnificent?

Besides (someone undoubtedly said), a cathedral would be good for tourism. It still is. Chartres does have other economic engines, but they don’t compare with Notre Dame. For example, each time I come to town, I take coffee or lunch at La Reine de Saba (the Queen of Sheba), next-door to the cathedral. It’s a nice little restaurant, and reasonably priced, but it would not be a regular stop on my itinerary if its terrace weren’t a few meters from the south transept. Even in bad weather, the view is sublime.

I didn’t see Malcolm Miller on this visit. He’s an English art historian who, many years ago, consecrated his life to Notre Dame de Chartres, not like a priest but like a husband. Today, in the twilight of that marriage, he knows by loving heart each and every detail of his spouse’s body and soul. He’s written several books, and he gives little one-hour tours of the cathedral, balancing the needs of the uninitiated, the dilettante, and the expert.

I took his tour once, when a friend was visiting from Texas, and what impressed me most, perhaps, was this: Miller wasn’t bored by his own spiel, after all these years and several recitations per day.

Even when Miller’s not around Chartres, I think of him. I wonder whether I will ever know anything — or anyone — the way he knows that cathedral. Yet it’s not my competitive spirit (far from it) that keeps bringing me back.


*NOTE: After all, the flying buttress isn’t something you invent because it’s pretty. You resort to it after other methods have failed: it is what prevents a very high wall from falling outward, as many walls presumably did, prior to the distinctive innovation.

Read more!

In Praise of Andy Griffith

There are three reasons Andy Griffith isn’t considered one of the finest actors America has ever produced. First is his accent: the cultural elite (myself included, alas) don’t believe that’s how real artists should sound. Second is his focus on television, The Andy Griffith Show and Matlock, programs with a broad appeal that seldom permits work of insight, delicacy, and personal conviction. Third is his specialization in comedy — and as the straight man, he’s typically the least showy character onscreen.

In sum, Andy Griffith is no John Barrymore. Yet an honest actor will tell you that what Andy Griffith has done is herculean, wholly original and nearly unattainable in any venue or form: simplicity is always hardest.

Consider the naturalness with which Sheriff Taylor engages in conversation with his deputy, Barney Fife, in those seemingly pointless dialogues that are the heart of the characters’ relationship (and the root of Tarantino’s and Seinfeld’s work).

Andy listens, he thinks. We see his wry amusement and his genuine affection. The cadences are slow yet powerful, unforced, and we share this ease. As an actor, Griffith can cede the spotlight to the more elaborate (though brilliant) performance of his co-star, Don Knotts, and yet he holds his ground; as a character, Andy can indulge his friend’s flights of fancy, and then gently bring him back to earth.

Some of his confidence stemmed, no doubt, from his other role, as producer of his series. Mayberry was constructed to his specifications, and while it remains an idealized (or whitewashed) image of rural Southern life, it is built on a foundation of respect for other people — something more diverse communities today can learn from. The town is full of oddballs, yes, but the show recognizes their good intentions; even when they do wrong, we are shown that their actions are the result of foibles (especially selfishness or fear) that will be corrected by greater attention to what Mayberry really stands for.

As “Lonesome,” with Patricia Neal

I reflect on Andy Griffith now because I have caught tantalizing glimpses of one of his early movies. Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) suggests Griffith’s range as an actor and the directions in which he might have taken his career — had he not preferred to work on the smaller scale, and to apply that trademark, almost Chekhovian restraint and naturalism, of his best-known television roles.

My first reaction to this scene from A Face in the Crowd was that of an electrical shock to the brain — as if I’d just had a dose of Vitajex. Watch the clip and see what I mean. Playing “Lonesome” Rhodes, an overnight radio star turned dangerous demagogue, he’s goddam terrifying, and totally brilliant. It’s as if your favorite uncle is suddenly grinning at you in a way you’ve never seen before, you’re all alone in the cabin with him, and now he’s got an axe in his jittery hand....



I can’t wait to see the whole thing.

Read more!

Field Guide: Agnès Jaoui

By happy accident, her last name contains two words for “Yes.”
(And her first name is pronounced “Ahn-Yes.”)

The almost perversely prodigious polymath Agnès Jaoui (actress, dramatist, director) has been making the rounds of French talk shows lately — to promote her new record album. Because, on top of everything else, she sings, too.

While it’s not unusual for French movie stars to cut albums, it’s quite a bit rarer for their vocalizing to be worthy of our attention for any reason other than their celebrity — because, you know, they make movies. Jaoui has joined the ranks of such illustrious predecessors as Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau. Her first album, Canta (2006), is a collection of mellow, Latin-accented numbers: not terribly deep or demanding, it’s great for dinner-time when you’re tired of Gipsy Kings. But she’s got an appealing, vibrant timbre, solid range, and (not surprisingly) admirable expression. I’m looking forward to hearing Dans mon pays.


Onscreen, Jaoui the actress projects an image of intelligence, unpretentious beauty, and (sometimes neurotic, sometimes deluded) confidence. Some of this may be affect, but it works for me, and moreover, it’s true: she really is too smart to need to worry about whether she’s brushed her hair this morning.

I have yet to see all of her films, but I was taken with her work in Le Rôle de sa vie (Role of a Lifetime, 2004), in which she plays a famous French actress who hires a timid writer (Karin Viard) as her personal assistant. Having worked in precisely that capacity both for a famous opera singer and for a famous television newsman, I snapped to attention immediately.

Compensation: Sometimes your boss will sing for you.
Viard (left) with Jaoui in Rôle

Jaoui captured the star’s egocentrism, but that’s the easy part: any three-year-old can play a diva. Her greater success lay in her ability to win the audience’s sympathy with humor and occasional flashes of compassion. We didn’t question Viard’s affection for her in return, or her persistent hope, despite ample evidence, that her boss would some day get her act together.

Toward the end of the picture, when Viard says, in a double-barreled blast of pent-up accusation and regretful forgiveness, “I thought you were my friend,” Jaoui’s shocked, silent reaction tells us that, yeah, she thought so, too. So did we — for much of the movie.

And that’s how those relationships play out, in real life. Take it from me.

As a playwright and screenwriter, in collaboration with her spouse, Jean-Pierre Bacri (who is also an actor and director), she has specialized in the group dynamics of genuine eccentrics, spiced with wit and sharp observation. One good example is Le Goût des autres (The Taste of Others), in which several characters keep bumping up against each other, falling in and out of relationships, as their differing cultural tastes make it harder to communicate. (I just saw this on TV and thoroughly enjoyed it.) Not surprisingly, their scenarios represent a field day for other actors; one of their earliest successes, Un Air de famille, catapulted my beloved Catherine Frot to stardom.

I’ve yet to see any of the pictures she’s directed, though one in particular has tempted me so that I nearly bought the DVD, sight unseen: Comme une image (Like a Picture, 2004) explores questions of self-worth, beauty and art, centered on an ugly duckling who is studying to be an opera singer. The picture received rave reviews. What am I waiting for?

Oh, and apparently she dances, too.
From the photo shoot for her new album.

Where Jaoui fails, as I’ve been reminded as she takes her latest press tour, is in giving interviews. She just doesn’t focus. On one recent program, her vagueness seemed reasonable: it was a Sunday lunch-hour show, and as she explained, she’s seldom awake so early. Worse, they were asking for her opinion on politics. (Every French actor is automatically presumed a political philosopher of the highest order.) Yet what I see in these appearances is a mind constantly racing ahead: to the next question, to the next answer, before she’s gotten to the end of her first sentence.

Happily, when her responses count most, she’s better than coherent: she’s eloquent and wise.

Ahn-Yes? Yes-Yes!

Read more!

Field Guide: Danielle Darrieux

As Max Ophüls’ Madame de…, with Charles Boyer

To call Danielle Darrieux a national treasure is so obvious and so easy as to be downright lazy. She’s been making movies since 1931, and she’s still at it, at the age of 92. In her spare time, she’s been a concert singer and stage actress, with the occasional foray into both MGM and Broadway musicals, even replacing Katharine Hepburn in Alan Jay Lerner and André Previn’s Coco. Authentically French, a superior singer, and younger and prettier, too, Darrieux made Hepburn a nervous wreck.

In one of her recent films, Darrieux lent her voice to a character who is, in a way, another country’s national treasure: the grandmother in Marjane Satrapi’s animated memoir of Iran, Persepolis. The warmth, cultivation and familiarity of Darrieux’s voice must have provoked a pavlovian response in French audiences, because cinematically, she’s our grandmother. And one of that character’s signature touches — perfuming her brassiere with fresh jasmine blossoms — seems exactly the sort of thing Darrieux must do in real life.

Somehow, you know she smells good:
That’s the sort of woman she is.

I haven’t seen all of Darrieux’s movies (there are more than 100 of them), and I wonder whether she has. Several are among the best ever produced in this country: The Earrings of Madame de …, La Ronde, Le Plaisir (all by Ophüls), Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, even Ozon’s 8 Femmes. She also appeared in a number of glossy literary adaptations that strictly adhere to the so-called “tradition of quality” against which the Nouvelle Vague directors rebelled. Among these are the movie versions of two of my favorite novels, Zola’s Pot-Bouille and Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir.

Extremely pretty without being conventionally beautiful, she possessed two assets above all others. Well, three, actually: two sparkling eyes and an equally sparkling wit. With these gifts, she proved well-suited to characters who, if they’re not in a drawing-room comedy, usually act as if they were. Often she’s been cast as a bourgeoise, to exploit her innate elegance. (And it’s true that, if she ever played a fishwife, I’m in no hurry to see the results.)

Madame de…, perhaps her best-known film role, admirably sums up her abilities. She presents a spun-sugar lightness to the character, and then, as the circumstance turns from game to reality, she shatters that brittle façade, bringing into clear view a substantial, poignant core.

Darrieux has excelled at sophisticated comedy.
Here, a scene from La Vie à deux.*

One of my favorite of her pictures is Le septième ciel (Seventh Heaven), in which she plays a youngish, upper-class widow whose piety and charitable works are supplemented by her oh-so refined murder of people who really, really, truly deserve it. (Something like what I imagine Bernadette Chirac must be like, when nobody is looking, only quite a lot prettier and more tasteful.) The movie is a trifle, but her sense of comedy is simply sublime to watch in action.

In Le Rouge et le Noir, which I saw not long after reading the book, she wasn’t quite my mental image of Mme de Rênal — blonde instead of the brunette I’d pictured. But she did a brilliant job of conveying the character’s moral conflict, often with immense humor but equal sympathy. And as the story turns from bedroom farce to prison drama, Darrieux admirably conveyed Mme de Rênal’s growing passion and determination. Stendhal couldn’t have asked for better.

Wrestling with her conscience,
tiptoeing to her lover’s bedroom.
This scene from Le Rouge et le Noir is quite funny, actually.

If all goes well, next year will mark her 70th anniversary in motion pictures. Even Katharine Hepburn couldn’t claim such a record. But in both cases, it’s talent and personality — charm — and not merely longevity, that make an actress truly special. Danielle Darrieux has been sprinkling movie screens with jasmine blossoms for generations.



*NOTE: Not having seen La Vie à deux (by Yves Allégret, first husband of Simone Signoret and father of Catherine Allégret), I don’t know whether it’s a comedy at all, sophisticated or otherwise. But this is exactly how Darrieux looks in Le septième ciel, which was made around the same time.

Read more!

The Morini Method

With her essay due the next morning,
our heroine is distressed to find she’s run out of Scotch tape,
just when she needs it most.

The Morini Method, like churning your own butter, operating the steam-powered loom, or blacksmithing, is an ancient, nearly-lost art form displaced by more efficient technological means, yet it was a cornerstone of my high-school education. The Method involved essay-writing with the use of “Specific, Illustrative Examples,” scissors, and Scotch tape. We were asked to write and write and write, then edit our work: cutting out the dross, salvaging all the best bits and patching them together in a perfect whole — and that’s where the scissors and tape came in.

If this sounds like a primitive, pre-computerized version of word-processing, it is, and surely some day my English teacher, Anna Morini, will get credit and some much-deserved remuneration for her farsighted innovations. Please note that the application of the fundamental principles of the Morini Method to the new technology can be effective: I underwent just such an exercise the other day, in revising an article for Opera News.

Having already won prizes for my writing — and not just the creative stuff, but the “ready writing,” wherein I was given a topic and 30 minutes in which to construct a balanced, five-paragraph essay, or an inverted pyramid of journalistic clarity — I resisted Mrs. Morini at first. Why should I learn something I didn’t know, when I knew so much already?

A typical Morini word processor
(Mouse not included)

Well, youth is rebellious. But she indulged me, a little, and my grade-point average didn’t suffer too much. Lately I’ve come to appreciate not only her efforts but those of several of my high-school teachers. People in real estate always talk about the importance of neighborhoods with “good schools,” and my parents surely settled in one.

Consider Carlene Klein Ginsburg, my French teacher, who gave me the tools with which I make my way in France; and Melinda Smith, a former beauty queen (Miss Wool and Mohair!) who suffered fools not at all, and who taught me the journalism that earns me my living today. Since I went on to obtain pricey Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, it’s somewhat disconcerting to think that, thanks to Carlene and Melinda, I’d already laid the groundwork for my future before I ever left high school. But it’s true.

I was by nature and vocation a teacher’s pet, and both Carlene and Melinda knew how to handle me. There was distinct collegiality in their demeanor, but I had to earn that. When Carlene took a group of students to France, I placed into the advanced class — alongside her and the other teachers. As an editor on the newspaper staff, I had to show leadership, pretty much running the class, some days. However, despite my precocity (and inflated sense of merit), and though we got on easily, in neither woman’s class was there any question who was the boss among “colleagues.” We were not peers, and believe it or not, that suited me fine.

I wish to hell that, in addition to French and journalism, they’d taught me people skills like theirs.

Another fine teacher, Joye Davis, taught English in my junior year, with a focus on American literature. She had an advantage over any other teacher I knew, since she grew up in Mississippi. As kindergartners in Jackson, she and her classmates were taken to visit a certain “Miss Welty,” who read stories to them; as a college student in Oxford, she used to sit near William Faulkner at the drugstore soda fountain, eavesdropping on his conversations. She swore she hadn’t learned much from these encounters — Miss Welty struck her primarily as odd-looking, and Mr. Faulkner tended to talk about the weather — but I learned plenty from her.

For example, she pointed out that Amanda Wingfield, in Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, isn’t nearly what she pretends to be, and the fatal clue is not her rapturous recollection of Gentleman Callers past. For no fine Southern lady of Amanda’s generation would ever discuss “gastric juices” at the dinner table, as she does. The entire play fell open like a blossom in my hand after that.

Mrs. Davis knew when to level with us. We weren’t assigned Shakespeare’s Othello in Texas public schools, she said, because it was about a black man and a white woman. (Was any other teacher so honest with us?) But she also knew when to be tactful. When one classmate took umbrage at the politics behind Miller’s The Crucible, Mrs. Davis graciously ceded the floor and let her present an impassioned defense of Joseph McCarthy. (Something most people reading the play, even in Texas, don’t get the benefit of.)

Zona Ray taught drama class, and it was a good fit for her. Headstrong and beautiful, with a powerfully projected speaking voice, she reminded me some days of the young Bette Davis, and other days of Faye Dunaway. But not until I was a senior did I understand how much theater meant to her.

Ambitiously, she selected Jean Anouilh’s Antigone for our school’s entry in a play competition, and she went at it with a hacksaw to bring it to the mandatory 30-minute running time. Though we’d clashed a couple of times in the past, and I was no longer enrolled in her course, she cast me as Creon, the king. I understood this as the gift she intended it to be, and I took the part gratefully and seriously. I was as proud of my work as of anything I’ve done — but we lost the competition.

Almost immediately, I saw that Zona wasn’t merely disappointed, having worked her ass off for months. She wasn’t merely frustrated by the opaque injustice of the judge’s decision. She was wounded. For she had, with a handful of teenagers and a battered script, tried to create a thing of beauty. It wasn’t flawless, but it was honest and smart, tough and true. It tested her limits, and dared her to soar, which is, after all, what theater is supposed to do.

And then some fool had turned his back on what she believed in — in favor of a Neil Simon comedy.

Nowadays, I see that my high school produces spectacles on the scale of Les Misérables. I wonder how they manage that: we always had to scrape to find enough boys to put on a musical, which is how I got cast in one.* But I’d be very surprised if they ever put on a show as good as that Antigone.

There were other good teachers, too — Anne Bean, who was so tolerant of (and amused by) my attempts to learn algebra; Homer Alexander, who showed a similar attitude toward my attempts to learn physics; Terry Kwan, who designed an intensive course in German, cramming three years into one, just for me; and Alicia Ceverha, who gave me my first real lessons in Italian grammar (as well as the Cuban accent I still possess in that language).

In hindsight, I realize that I received a truly first-rate education at my dinky little suburban Texas high school, and when I got to college, I had nothing to fear from kids who went to Andover instead of J.J. Pearce. I was hardly aware at the time how truly lucky I was.

Hallowed Halls

Yet one of my most telling experiences came outside the classroom. Mrs. Morini’s husband had heart trouble, so raking the yard in November was out of the question, though there were heaps of fallen leaves. She asked me and another student, Margaret Guttes, to come over one Saturday morning to help.

It was a cool, clear day, of a kind that Dallas doesn’t often see, a bona-fide autumn day, like something out of a picture book. Margaret and I worked for several hours, and then Mrs. Morini invited us into the kitchen for lunch. She’d made chicken noodle soup — not out of a can — with penne pasta, which struck me as just about the most exotic thing I’d ever seen — until she sprinkled parmesan cheese on it, which struck me as nothing short of otherworldly.

And that was the end of the story, or so it seemed. Only years later did I realize that Mrs. Morini had taken a terrible risk. Who knows what kind of trouble her average punk student might have caused? And remember that my grade-point average did suffer under the Method.** Just giving me her address must have required a leap of faith that I wouldn’t vandalize the house, in a fit of resentment, some other day.

Yeah, I was a teacher’s pet, but Anna Morini gave me something that day more valuable than the Method: her trust.

I say it again: I was luckier than I knew.

*NOTE: Because my last sung line in Something’s Afoot came before the first entrance of one of the other actors, David Arment, he was able to dub my singing lines from backstage. Now there’s a good indication of Zona Ray’s superlative theatrical ingenuity! (And ever since, I‘ve identified closely with Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain.)

**To this day, my mother blames the Morini Method for my failure to gain admission to Yale. Thus perhaps the greater risk to Mrs. Morini was that my parents would turn out to be vandals. However, the celebrated Texas Cheerleader Mom scandal had yet to happen, and we were all more innocent and unsuspecting in those days.

Read more!

A Brief Word on J.D. Salinger

Like many, perhaps most, adolescents, I was drawn instantly to Holden Caulfield, the narrator and central figure in J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye — but less for the way he feels about the world than for the way he expresses himself. That voice! It is a siren song, luring other writers to destruction — because we all try to mimic it, when we are young and think ourselves rebels, misfits, and loners. This is the ironic conformity of the most resolutely non-conformist among us. We never mind that imitation is the sincerest form of phoniness.

I soon realized that, whenever I reread Catcher in the Rye, I began to write in a voice that sounded like Holden’s. I’d be stuck in it for weeks. I couldn’t help myself.

And though the narrative voice that Salinger employs in his other fiction is not precisely Holden’s, it’s hardly less potent. Some time after I graduated college, I realized that I would have to set Salinger aside, if I wanted ever to find a voice that was my own. I don’t say that the results were superior, but they belonged to me.

So it is that I read Catcher in the Rye several times; Franny and Zooey twice; the other fiction only once. I haven’t returned to any of it in many years, and prior to Salinger’s death this week, I couldn’t have named all the Glass children, or told you whether Franny or Zooey was the sister.

What strikes me now, as I look back, is how little I see: almost nothing of Salinger’s fiction stuck with me. No lesson, no scene, no affection. Some of it strikes me as irritating, as for example, both Holden and Zooey do. Some of it strikes me as preposterous, particularly after having lived in (and thereby created) New York for myself. Zen on Park Avenue? Was he serious?

This is not to discount the admirable artistic achievement of Salinger’s authorial voice; it is rather to wonder whether, after all, he said much worth hearing. Is it only quantitatively that his output was slim? I haven’t mourned his long, unpublished isolation; and I will feel ambivalence, whether his post-Hapworth writings are published now or not.

Read more!