Five Hundred and Still Counting

Only six months ago that I wrote about the eighth “anniversary” of this blog. When I posted my last entry BlogSpot reminded me that that was my 500^th entry.  The reasons I write were fairly well summed up by what I wrote in that anniversary piece, part of which is included below. 

When I started this, who knew I’d keep going.  I certainly didn’t.  It was an experiment which still makes me wonder, why?  Perhaps it’s because I sometimes don’t even know what I think until I put my hands on a keyboard.  Writing requires thought, working things out in a way speaking does not, and certainly thinking is completely unnecessary (in fact thinking is the enemy) when forwarding mindless email chains. 

A consequence of writing in this space is “thought accountability.”  I have to take responsibility for the views expressed here which change over time. If others tap into my stories, photographs, and views, benefit by them, identify with them in some way, or are bored by them and never return, so be it.  I chose not to support a comment section in the blog, but one can reach me at lacunaemusing@gmail.com.

One thing I mentioned below is my intent to lessen the focus on family history, not only because of

Age 9

privacy issues, but I’ve covered the essentials.  At the same time I am purging some of the physical “stuff” associated with that history.  The older one gets, the more things own you. In that regard, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester is enthusiastically accepting much of the memorabilia I have from my family’s photographic studio, the history of which I have detailed in this blog. It will be suitable home for those materials, accessible to future generations.  Once they have received everything, catalogued it all, and digitize much of it, I’ll provide a link in some future entry.

And further along those lines, there have been a number of emails back and forth with the The National WWII Museum in New Orleans regarding my father’s unique scrapbook of his service during the War and ultimately I’ll be donating that to them, once I digitize all his letters and locate the photographs he took during the war which are not in the scrapbook itself.

With the completion of that donation, I will be through with not only writing about those pieces of my family’s history, but putting the physical evidence in strong hands for preservation.  Maybe if I didn’t write this blog I might have been less proactive in this regard, another benefit.

So, from my “anniversary” issue….

Can it be?  Eight years writing this blog.  That’s the amount of time I spent in grammar school. Those eight years in PS 90 seem to be light years in the distant past, but at the time they were an eternity.  And four years in high school were equally drawn out, anticipating adulthood, the point at which I could leave the turmoil of my parent’s home.  Time accelerated in college, came on full speed during my career and raising a family, and now it’s a year in a blink.

I think I’ve been true to my “mission statement” in this space -- essentially an eclectic, kaleidoscopic diary. There have been 480 entries thus far, enough to fill at least five printed volumes.  Content has morphed into more about theatre, literature and still some politics and economics, but less about family history.  I’ve pretty much covered that, and the older I get the more I’d like to move on. 

Nonetheless, I still write about things which are fairly personal, always hesitating about what I “put out there.”  As this blog has evolved, so has the digital world, data mining for all sorts of nefarious reasons.  And the digital world has moved way beyond blogs to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler, social networks where a momentary impulse can be just thrown out as a developed thought.  Not here.   Traffic building has not been my intent.  According to Google, in eight years there have been 86,021 page views. Some web sites do that in a minute. Most land here via searches (not for me, but topics I write about) and frequently those are image searches as I’ve incorporated countless photographs in this space

The most viewed entry is one in February 2011 about the Maiden Voyage of Oceania’s ship ‘Marina.’ Not far behind in fifth place is the one I wrote on my open heart surgery, only two months later 

Without going into details of the latter, it is truly a twist of fate that I made it through that voyage without ending up in the freezer with the flowers (a favorite repository for those who die on cruises).  Of course I didn’t realize that I was so vulnerable at the time (although we’re all vulnerable all the time). I suppose that is another reason I write this blog:  it is a record and it allows me to reflect on my life and matters of living, to have a documented trail.  I go to it when memory fails.

I add this coda, something I came across in my files while searching materials for the George Eastman Museum.  My father had saved it and obviously so did I.  It is the first letter I ever received -- about a month after I was born, from the War Price and Rationing Board of the Office of Price Administration during WW II.  This presumably contained ration coupons – a bit of history including the address of my parents’ first home, an apartment house which is still standing.

Light Years

Can it be?  Eight years writing this blog.  That’s the amount of time I spent in grammar school. Those eight years in PS 90 seem to be light years in the distant past, but at the time they were an eternity.  And four years in high school were equally drawn out, anticipating adulthood, the point at which I could leave the turmoil of my parent’s home.  Time accelerated in college, came on full speed during my career and raising a family, and now it’s a year in a blink.

I think I’ve been true to my “mission statement” in this space -- essentially an eclectic, kaleidoscopic diary. There have been 480 entries thus far, enough to fill at least five printed volumes.  Content has morphed into more about theatre, literature and still some politics and economics, but less about family history.  I’ve pretty much covered that, and the older I get the more I’d like to move on. 

Nonetheless, I still write about things which are fairly personal, always hesitating about what I “put out there.”  As this blog has evolved, so has the digital world, data mining for all sorts of nefarious reasons.  And the digital world has moved way beyond blogs to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler, social networks where a momentary impulse can be just thrown out as a developed thought.  Not here.   Traffic building has not been my intent.  According to Google, in eight years there have been 86,021 page views. Some web sites do that in a minute. Most land here via searches (not for me, but topics I write about) and frequently those are image searches as I’ve incorporated countless photographs in this space

The most viewed entry is one in February 2011 about the Maiden Voyage of Oceania’s ship ‘Marina.’ Not far behind in fifth place is the one I wrote on my open heart surgery, only two months later 

Without going into details of the latter, it is truly a twist of fate that I made it through that voyage without ending up in the freezer with the flowers (a favorite repository for those who die on cruises).  Of course I didn’t realize that I was so vulnerable at the time (although we’re all vulnerable all the time). I suppose that is another reason I write this blog:  it is a record and it allows me to reflect on my life and matters of living, to have a documented trail.  I go to it when memory fails.

This is a natural segue into a book I recently read, Light Years by James Slater. We’re talking about elegant masterpiece writing here -- an author I should have read long ago, known as a “writer’s writer” by many, a prose stylist.  Perhaps I failed to come to his writing as his earlier work was based on his years as a fighter pilot in the Korean War.  His novel The Hunters was made into a movie starring one of my favorite film noir actors, Robert Mitchum.  Little did I know when I saw the film, it was based on James Salter’s novel of the same title. It is so incongruous that the same person wrote both novels.

Salter died only recently, having just turned 90, in Sag Harbor, where I spent part of the summers of my childhood.  The New Yorker published an elegant eulogistic essay on his passing.

 

So I am very late to discovering Salter, although his Light Years is closely related to other authors I have admired, ones who have written  about marital implosion (the subject of Salter’s great work), Updike, Cheever, Yates, Ford, to name but a few.

Lapidary, ethereal, poetic prose fills the pages of Light Years.  The plot almost exists out of time and place – although it’s set in the 70s, mostly in the northern suburbs of New York.  The dissolution of a marriage is presented as a case of everyday entropy, but in stunning language and descriptions.  Think Hemingway’s short, rhythmic sentences and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lyricism. .  It’s unlike anything else I’ve read.

It is the story of Viri Berland, a moderately successful architect, and Nedra his beautiful free-spirited wife.  Mind you, this was written in the nascent days of feminism.  Much of the novel is viewed from Nedra’s viewpoint.  They live in the Hudson Valley, with their children.  Days pass, light into darkness, darkness becomes new days, years.  Light years.  (The light imagery is omnipresent.) They have a social life, parties, each have dalliances, quiet ones, not the kind which lead to nasty marital confrontations. Time passes until they find they are empty nesters and now what? 

Nedra is the one who makes the break but it is Viri, confounded by the change in his life who moves on to another marriage, one he regrets.  To indulge in more detail about the plot, though, is senseless as it is the feeling that one derives from reading Light Years which is the point.  We’re all just brief flickers of light in the annals of time, eternity of nothingness before we are born and a similar eternity when we are gone.  We believe in endless tomorrows while living out our younger years, the sum of countless moments, most not remembered later, but near the end, the hour-glass so one sided, we look back and wonder where it all went.

Salter tells his story in lush language.  Of  those parties in their early years of marriage: “Country dinners, the table dense with glasses, flowers, all the food one can eat, dinners ending in tobacco smoke, a feeling of ease.  Leisurely dinners.  The conversation never lapses. Their life is special, devout, they prefer to spend time with their children, they have only a few friends.”

Or, when Nedra goes to the city to shop:  “Life is weather, Life is meals.  Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled.  The smell of tobacco.  Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.  It is trips to the city, daily trips.  She is like a farm woman who goes to the market.  She drove to the city for everything, its streets excited her, winter streets leaking smoke. She drove along Broadway.  The sidewalks were white with stains.  There were only certain places where she bought food; she was loyal to them, demanding.  She parked her car wherever it was convenient, in bus stops, prohibited zones; the urgency of her errands protected her.”

In his prime, Viri thinks about his career as an architect:  “I must make one building, even if it’s small, that everyone will notice.  Then a bigger one.  I must ascend by steps….He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous.  He wanted to be central to the human family, what else is there to long for, to hope?  Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was coming.  He had nothing.  He had only the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life, his scalp beginning to show beneath the hair, his immaculate hands.  And the knowledge; yes, he had knowledge….But knowledge does not protect one.  Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside.  Passion, energy, likes: these are what life admires.  Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching.  The martyrs prove it.  We live in the attention of others.  We turn to it as flower to the sun….There is no complete life.  There are only fragments.  We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.  And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams …one must be unthinking, like a tortoise.  One must be resolute, blind.  For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite.  Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.  So that life is a matter of choices, each on final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea.”

Viri’s and Nedra’s time with their children is precious:  “Children are our crop, our fields, our earth.  They are the birds let loose into darkness.  They are errors renewed.  Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own.  Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit.  We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see.  Children must live, must triumph.  Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept….There is no happiness like this happiness: quiet mornings, light from the river, the weekend ahead.  They lived a Russian life, a rich life, interwoven, in which the misfortune of one, a failure, illness, would stagger them all.  It was like a garment, this life.  Its beauty was outside, its warmth within.”

After one of their parties, later in their marriage, Salter writes:  “Nights of marriage, conjugal nights, the house still at last, the cushions indented where people had sat, the ashes warm.  Nights that ended at two o’clock, the snow falling, the last guest gone.  The dinner plates were left unwashed, the bed icy cold…They lay in the dark like two victims.  They had nothing to give to one another, they were bound by a pure, inexplicable love….He was asleep, she could tell without looking.  He slept like a child, soundlessly, deep.  His thinning hair was disheveled; his hand lay extended and soft.  If they had been another couple she would have been attracted to them; she would have loved them, even – they were so miserable.”

When Nedra begins to hint at leaving, Viri is stunned, especially now that he was approaching late middle age:  “He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain.  The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.”

And when she is gone, he is left in the house: “Dead flies on the sills of sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty.  The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist’s wax, the organ has been gutted.  Viri did not have the spirit to do anything about it.  He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older.”

“...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.”

As one might imagine from the last quote alone, the novel comes to a profoundly sad ending, disturbing in so many ways.  And I’ll let it go at that.  

Trevor Revisited

My first entry on William Trevor was last December when I began to savor his huge The Collected Stories (1992), but that was a thousand pages ago.I’m still reading the book!  His stories require close reading, even a second reading, as there is the story itself and then the meaning along with all the underlying emotions.  There are also the settings and cultural references, typically UK and Irish or along the Amalfi coast or Tuscany, that often requires some additional research by me.  The further he strays from London and its environs which I’m familiar with to a degree, the more demanding the task becomes.  What did we do before Google?

However in the end, it’s almost unnecessary to understand all those references as Trevor primarily deals with universal truths mostly borne by the experiences of everyday people.  As John Updike noted in his 1981 review of one of Trevor’s collections, “Mr. Trevor knows, and dramatizes, two principal truths about low life: it never utterly lies down, but persists in asserting claims and values of its own derivation; and it cannot be fenced off and disowned by the fortunate.” 

Trevor’s1989 interview in The Paris Review is very revealing (one of his rare interviews).  I was particularly struck by Trevor’s answer to the following question by the Interviewer, Mira Stout, as it reveals the mind of the writer:

 INTERVIEWER

I read somewhere that you describe yourself as a melancholic; how does this manifest itself? Is it a state, a temperament through which you write?

TREVOR

I don’t ever recall referring to myself as a melancholic—I would rephrase that, with the chicken farming too. A melancholic chicken farmer suggests suicide to me. I don’t think you can write fiction unless you know something about happiness, melancholy—almost everything that human nature touches. I doubt that an overwhelmingly jolly, optimistic person has ever been an artist of any sort. You are made melancholy, more than anything, by the struggle you have with words—the struggle you have with trying to express what sometimes resists expression. It can be a melancholy business. As a fiction writer, every time you go out into the day you’ve also got to experience the bleakness of night. If I were purely a melancholic I don’t think I’d write at all. I don’t think writers can allow themselves the luxury of being depressives for long. Writers are far less interesting than everyone would have them. They have typewriters and will travel. They sit at desks in a clerklike way. What may or may not be interesting is what we write. The same applies to any artist; we are the tools and instruments of our talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we’re watching, and dealing with. Other people make their way in the world. They climb up ladders and get to the top. They know ambition, they seek power. I certainly don’t have any ambitions, nor am I in the least interested in power. I don’t think fiction writers tend to be. Certainly not as a civil servant may be, or an engineer. Fiction writers don’t want in the same way; their needs are different. Personally, I like not being noticed. I like to hang about the shadows of the world both as a writer and as a person; I dislike limelight, and the center of things is a place to watch rather than become involved in. I dwell upon it rather than in it; I wonder about what occurs there and record what I see because that seems to be my role. I get matters down onto paper and impose a pattern, and all of that is a fairly ordinary activity, or so it seems to be. If I could analyze all this, if I could really talk about it, I don’t think I’d be writing at all. It’s invading the gray-haired woman, the child, the elderly man, that keeps me going and delights me; but I don’t know how I do it. And I believe that mystery is essential. Again, if you now ask me why, I won’t be able to tell you.

The heart of the interview, where he refers to fiction writers as “outsiders,” ones who have no place in society because society is what we’re watching” and that he “hang[s] about the shadows of the world, that he “likes to dwell upon it rather than in it,” can be seen in each and every one of his short stories. 

Here are widows and widowers, miscreants and innocents, the travails of the elderly juxtaposed to the innocence of youth, the dilemmas of the middle aged and the divorced, so often lonely people trying to connect with someone who is inappropriate, and people from all economic stations of life. His characters are victims of their own actions, sometimes “imagining” (the number of times Trevor says, “he [or] she imagined” is countless) different outcomes and different realities.  There is a Pinteresque quality to many of the stories, showing humanity, some humor, and a hint of the absurd.

We identify with his characters, perhaps their taking the wrong fork in the road as we might be prone to do, and the consequences of their actions.  He spotlights that inherent loneliness we sometimes feel at social gatherings, or in our everyday relationships.  The mistakes of our lives add up but so do our little victories, our justifications of our actions making things seem alright. 

Sometimes I sense the shadow of Thomas Hardy reading Trevor, Hardy’s sense of realism, even suffering. And a few stories slightly reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe, not that Trevor delves into horror, but there is a mysterious quality to many of his stories and tension. I also suspect he is a “fan” of A.J. Cronin, a popular English storyteller of the 1930’s and 40’s, who wrote in a similar style.  He mentions A.J. Cronin in a couple of stories and even one of his characters is named “Cronin.” I read Cronin’s The Citadel in high school, a book I read for pleasure, and remarkably it held my attention (at the time I read mostly science fiction for my pleasure reading).  Perhaps Cronin merits a revisit.  

Trevor’s stories take place in boarding schools, social gatherings, the office, small towns, dance ballrooms, and hotels and pensiones making them central scenes for these mostly melancholy, moving tales to play out.  Here he can observe his characters while he moves them about like pieces on a chessboard, his detailed descriptions always precise.  Humiliation seems to run through his stories as a leitmotif.

Interestingly he seems to find women, not the men, the most interesting subjects simply because, as he’s said, "I write out of curiosity more than anything else. That's why I write about women, because I'm not a woman and I don't know what it's like. The excitement of it is to know more about something that I'm not and can't be."

In spite of the foibles of his characters, Trevor mostly manages to demand our empathy for them.  We’ve all known people such as Trevor describes or recognize ourselves, sharing similar emotions. On the other hand, there are also hints of misanthropy, a sense that to be human is to be imperfect, even a species to be deplored.  Always, his stories are memorable and haunting, people who are as real as your best friend.  They are unforgettable.

I’m tempted to write about some of the specific stories in this collection, as I began to do in my last entry on Trevor, but to do so, without revealing key turns in character and plot is next to impossible.  A short story is not like a novel; it’s about (as Trevor said), a “glimpse” and to describe the glimpse is to, well, ruin another reader’s enjoyment of the story.  Perhaps I’ll visit some specific stories (trying to avoid spoilers) in this blog when I reread my so called favorite ones (there are many)

Suffice it to say, here is a writer you can read again and again. His stories provoke introspection and reflection.  He is certainly in the class (or the head of it) of the other great contemporary short story writers, Cheever, Updike, Carver, and Munro (and perhaps T.C. Boyle in that mix, the next contemporary short story writer on my list).  I’ve written a lot about writing in this blog, and my enjoyment of many great contemporary novelists and short story writers, but I can say that never have I been so profoundly moved and amazed by one short story collection, The Collected Works, by William Trevor (Penguin Books, 1992

Author! Author! Indeed!

I've written so much about Dramaworks in the past, one would think that's the only thing I do (although other topics in this blog reveal I do have another life).  But back again to Dramaworks, this time seeing one of their "Dramalogues" where they delve more deeply into an aspect of theatre.  Last night's program was Author, Author: Israel Horovitz.  If it was a lecture about his works, we would not have gone, but this was a live intimate interview with Horovitz himself, one of our most prolific playwrights, with 70 under his wing, very capably moderated by Sheryl Flatow

In the 1960s I occasionally went to Café La MaMa and there I might have seen the play that launched his career, Line, This had an off Broadway revival beginning in 1974 and still runs to this day, the longest running NYC play ever!

What struck us about the interview was how engaging and personable he was, not remote like the interview with Stephen Sondheim we attended a few years ago.  Perhaps Sondheim has some disdain for anyone less then genius level and outside the world of the creative arts (not that he isn't entitled to his perspective -- he is the greatest living Broadway legend and I will continue to worship at his feet!)

Horovitz is a remarkable man at the age of 75.  He looks and speaks like a man in his early 60's and has the demeanor, a bounce to his step, of a much younger man.  I'm sorry I left my camera at home and didn't think of taking a couple of shots with my iPhone, but photos of him are abundantly available on the web.  He has a great sense of humor as well, offering that he was born in 1939, "not a good year for Jews!"

He just seems like an average guy, although he was best friends with Samuel Beckett!  Born in Wakefield, Massachusetts, a town of just six Jewish families, he hardly thought of himself as a Jew.  He joked that the Jewish families there all sounded like Jack Kennedy.  However, his first trip to Germany made him more sensitive to his own heritage.

His father was a trucker who became a lawyer at age 50.  Some of the anger issues in his plays are derived from his father's frustrated and abusive behavior during his trucking years while the humor and tenderness come from his mother.  Today, Horovitz makes Gloucester, Massachusetts one of his homes where he founded The Gloucester Stage Company -- still going strong after 35 years.

Horovitz has also been active in the world of films, perhaps his best known being the somewhat autobiographical Author! Author! starring his old friend Al Pacino. That was until now -- as he's just returned from Paris where he wrote and directed My Old Lady based on his own play, not too coincidentally the second play of Dramaworks' next season. The film will be released sometime this fall.

The three main characters are none other than film icons, Maggie Smith, Kevin Kline and Kristin Scott Thomas.  Nothing needs to be said about Dame Smith especially given her recent notoriety in the continuing series, Downton Abbey (our favorite "TV show"). Kevin Kline and Kristin Scott Thomas have also been in scores of films but my favorite Kline movie is the idiosyncratic Dave, and I thought Thomas' role in Four Weddings and a Funeral memorable.  Can't wait to see the movie and can't wait to see the play next fall.

I started this entry noting that I have another life other than writing this blog.  Recently I've been trying my hand at some short stories (probably not to be published here), and maybe that's the most important take away I had from this extraordinary interview with Horovitz.  He emphasized that you need not write about the world, but, instead, write about the world you uniquely know.  If you do it right, the world will come to you.  Certain truths are universal.  Actually, he was given that advice by Thornton Wilder.  Ironically, Dramaworks' first play of next season is Wilder's Our Town, a play that we've seen in many venues, and one that we could watch again and again.   

Thank you Israel Horovitz, for your plays and for the very good advice that you passed along!

A beautiful sunset the night before