Gotham Diary:
Poultice
6 November 2013
Oh, dear! Just as I sit down to write — and it’s already the middle of the afternoon — word comes that boxes of books have been delivered downstairs…
Let’s see: what have we got here? A CD and two DVDs. Sweets From a Stranger, the Squeeze album that we all had. For a very short time, I recall, we would think, while playing this LP (as it then was), that the spirit of the Beatles, the early-ish Beatles, had been revived; the songs seemed to have the same appealing brashness. We were already too old to let ourselves get carried away, and Squeeze did nothing to recapture our attention. But I’ve found myself longing to hear “Black Coffee in Bed” — not so much to hear as it imagine the mood that it captured. It was definitely a Sixties mood.
The DVDs are Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, which Peter Cameron, who wrote the book herein adapted, told me, at a book signing, probably “isn’t very good”; and Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night, which I can hardly believe I didn’t already own. I read the play last week and fell for it completely. (I’m having a much harder time with All’s Well That Ends Well and Love’s Labours Lost.) As long as we’re talking about Shakespeare, one of the books in the box is the Pelican edition of the sonnets, chosen because it is small, and will fit next to the translation into Nederlands. I have two Dutch sonnets, but the first one was a mistake; it’s a freestyle adaptation that makes little or no attempt to capture Shakespeare’s rhythm. The second one, which I bought with my eyes open, is so close to the original that, in a sleepy state, one might not grasp the foreign tongue.
As soon as I’ve written the rest of this report, I’m going to watch Someday. I’ve been dying to see it ever since I heard about it. Marcia Gay Harden and Peter Gallagher play the parents, and Ellen Burstyn the grandmother. I don’t know who Stephen Lang plays, but I have an idea. I’m wondering just how free the adaptation is. And I’m also wondering how the novel’s wonderful centerpiece — a disastrous class trip to Washington, DC — will be presented (if at all). In case you haven’t been paying attention, permit me to ring-a-ding my endorsement of Cameron’s novel, which is a lovely classic.
Back to the books: Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs. Talk about the Sixties — “hand grenades”! It’s James Wolcott’s new collection, to be stood, I should think, next to his memoir, Lucking Out. Opened at random, the book offers up Wolcott’s somewhat withering dismissal of Woody Allen’s Celebrity, a movie that even I never wanted to see again (but now do, of course). Why do I say “somewhat”? Turning a few pages, I discover that Wolcott didn’t think much of actress Jessica Harper (My Favorite Year).
And here’s a blast from the past (1980): Wolcott attends a Salmagundi conference entitled “American Civilization: Failure in the New World?” Already a fairly vieux jeu topic at that time, I should think. As this little snippet might indeed suggest!
It took Susan Sontag (who was sitting in the front row wearing baby blue cowboy boots) to say what sorely needed saying: that Fiedler’s categories not only have lost their usefulness but now clutter his (and our) vision. At one time his heady love of myth and genre and archetype allowed him to detect patterns in American literature that had eluded less foolhardy critics. Fiedler’s unashamed love of pop — sci-fi, comic books, Russ Meyer flicks — was also liberating at a time when academic critics tended to be ponderously Olympian (Lionel Trilling), hyperaesthetically gnomic (I A Richards, R P Blackmur), or sneeringly severe (F R Leavis and the Scrutiny spear carriers). In recent years, however, Fiedler’s love of pop has turned into a love of pop. He extravagantly admires his appetite for trash; it’s his way of proving that he isn’t a prissy academic prig — that he’s one of the kids. Similarly, Fiedler’s schlock-Freudian methodology is now used onanisticially — his allegiance is not to the artist but to his own technique. An artist who doesn’t fit Fiedler’s archetypes has his limbs lopped off.
Takes you back. It does me, anyway. Felicitously, the passage catches a parade of critical intellectuals, including Sontag herself, whom I should like to displace, not by being better at what they did, but by proving at the it needn’t be done. “Onanistically,” indeed!
Here’s a wonderful book that I used to own but imprudently lent to a friend, William Prosser’s collection of lawyerly frolics, The Judicial Humorist, published by Little, Brown in 1952 and by Fred Rothman in 1989. In case you’ve ever wondered why I’m sitting in my living room and not on an appellate bench, it’s because I spent my law school years giggling over such verbal treats as this report of a 1935 New York case.
This was an action for assault arising out of a baseball game. The plaintiff, at bat, was struck on the hip by a pitched ball; to show his displeasure as he took his base, the plaintiff admittedly threw his bat in the direction of the pitcher’s box. There ensued then an altercation between the two teams, during which the plaintiff tried to steal second base. Being returned to first base by the umpire, a colloquy arose between the runner and the first baseman during which allegedly the first baseman asked the plaintiff if he had ever received a “punch in the nose.” This is the prologue. The plaintiff hero, 17 years of age and 127 pounds in weight, undaunted by the fact that the “first sacker” stood 6 feet 2½ inches tall and weighed 220 pounds, scornful of the fact that “a soft answer turneth away wrath,” retorted in which in the lexicon of youth is called “a snappy comeback”: “Do you think you’re big enough?” This retort is classic; it will be found on the same page of “War-talk” with “Oh, yeah?” “You and what army?” et cetera, et cetera. Whatever plaintiff’s doubts may have been as expressed by his query, they were immediately resolved by the action of the first baseman, defendant herein. Having been carried to the dugout by his team mates, and subsequently examined by physicians, the plaintiff’s injuries were diagnosed as a fractured jaw, for which injury he now seeks a poultice of damages. Most of the facts are conceded. That an assault occurred is not open to doubt. Indeed the defendant admits that he “slapped the plaintiff down”; that plaintiff was pugancious and provocative is also beyond question. However, this does not excuse the defendant for “slapping the plaintiff down” as he might a troublesome mosquito. The plaintiff says he suffered pain for one day, was kept from school for several weeks, but is now fully recovered, for which the court directs a verdict for the infant plaintiff in the sum of $150. Let the plaintiff learn to keep his tongue in his cheek and the defendant his hands in his pockets.
$150 in 1935 was a lot of money; I’m not sure that justice was served. I wasn’t there in the courtroom with the first sacker, but something tells me that this wasn’t the plaintiff’s last brush with fisticuffs.
At the bottom of the box, two more. Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. You knew I was going to buy it, didn’t you? This fairly recent Harper Perennial features facsimiles of Plath’s drafts. After reading The Silent Woman, I can’t be tempted to quote anything. Then there’s the second installment of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Walk memoir, Between the Woods and the Water. I haven’t read the first volume (A Time of Gifts), but that’s not important; I want to read about Leigh Fermor’s time in Transylvania, so soon after the setting of Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvian Trilogy, which I’ve resumed reading.
***
When I sat down to write, my subject was going to be Henry Hitchings’s Sorry!: The English and Their Manners, a book that I finished reading just before lunch. It’s just as well that I’ll have the night to sleep on it, because the book is much more important, I feel (but can’t yet say why), than its title suggests. Hitchings appears to have read everyone, from Norbert Elias to Francis Osborne to Richie Frieman. Tomorrow!