Tom Stoppard

One speech [in the play “Dirty Linen”} that gets an unfailing ovation, however, is the following tribute to the American people, paid by a senior British civil servant:

They don’t stand on ceremony. . . . They make no distinction about a man’s background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean, and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. . . . They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressibly good-humoured, ambitious and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I’ve got nothing against them.

from this 1977 New Yorker profile of Tom Stoppard by Kenneth Tynan. I used to buy used copies of Tom Stoppard plays at the Harvard Bookstore, in this way I read Arcadia, Travesties, Invention of Love, a bunch of the other ones, they’re all terrific. Salute to a real one. Since how much money writers make is always of interest:

When I asked him, not long ago, how much he thought he had earned from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” his answer was honestly vague: “About—a hundred and fifty thousand pounds?” To the same question, his agent, Kenneth Ewing, gave me the following reply: “‘Rosencrantz’ opened in London in 1967. Huge overnight success—it stayed in the National Theatre repertory for about four years. The Broadway production ran for a year. Metro bought the screen rights for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and paid Tom a hundred thousand to write the script, though the movie was never made. The play had a short run in Paris, with Delphine Seyrig as Gertrude, but it was quite a hit in Italy, where Rosencrantz was played by a girl. It did enormous business in Germany and Scandinavia and—oddly enough—Japan. On top of that, the book sold more than six hundred thousand copies in the English language alone. Up to now, out of ‘Rosencrantz’ I would guess that Tom had grossed well over three hundred thousand pounds.”

That’s in 1977!

Paul’s Case by Willa Cather

New York has certainly inspired its share of coming-to-the-city adventures. One of the most striking is a short story by Willa Cather called “Paul’s Case,” which first appeared in The Troll Garden in 1905. Paul, a high school student in Pittsburgh, is gawky and awkward, with a “certain hysterical brilliancy” in his eyes. A fantasist and a dreamer, he is hopelessly out of sync with the life around him—but he has neither the graces nor the gifts that might enable him to escape from the constricting middle class life on suburban Cordelia Street, where he lives with his father, a widower, and there is nothing but “the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a home permeated by kitchen odours.” Paul comes alive only in the evenings, when he works as an usher at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall, wears a uniform that makes him feel handsome, guides elegant people to their seats, and listens to the music and experiences a “zest for life.” Paul is not exactly a music lover; it’s the enveloping glamour of the theater that holds him. He loves to visit backstage with the artists; “the stage entrance of the theater was for Paul the actual portal of Romance.”

But Paul’s father, a dim figure constantly urging on his son the example of more enterprising young men, becomes increasingly enraged by his son’s behavior. He pulls him out of the school he barely seems to be attending, forbids the theater to employ him or to let him through the door, and puts him to work at the offices of Denny & Carson. And suddenly Cather jumps forward, to Paul sitting on a train. He has stolen a thousand dollars in cash that he was supposed to deposit in the bank for his employer, and he is on his way to New York.

Arriving in the city, Paul buys expensive clothes, fine luggage, “silver mounted brushes and a scarf-pin” at Tiffany’s. He takes a luxurious suite at the Waldorf, and for a few days he exults in his sitting room, which he fills with flowers, in the perfectly appointed bathroom, in the elegance of the hotel dining room, in carriage rides up Fifth Avenue. He knows that it will only be a matter of days before his crime is discovered and he is tracked down. All over New York, the snow is falling. Paul’s “chief greediness,” Cather writes, “lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the gray winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his sense of power.” As soon as he “entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the music,” he was “lightened by his old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all sufficient.” He exults in “the glare and glitter about him.” He is cosseted in a magical world. And when he is down to his last hundred dollars, he knows the game is up. He leaves New York, lies down on a train track in New Jersey, and lets the end come.

In Cather’s story, New York is less a place that a person can actually inhabit than a kind of luxurious illusionist’s trick, centering on the Waldorf and the city avenues, and united by the snow that softens the views out the windows and carpets everything. In “Paul’s Case” New York is not a living city so much as it is a fantasy, a stage set.

from this great 2001 essay, “The Adolescent City,” by Jed Perl.

The pages in Balzac’s Lost Illusions in which the young writer Lucien Chardon comes to Paris and wanders through the overwhelming elegance of the city constitute one of the greatest descriptions in all of literature of the tidal pull of urban life, with its intoxicating strangeness. Visual artists have generally shied away from such a theme, which necessitates unfolding, multiplying revelations, though there are a few exceptions, the greatest of which is probably Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s vast City of Good Government, painted on a wall in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1338-1339. Here relations between the city and the country center around the gate of Siena, where elegant aristocrats going out for a day of hunting pass country yokels coming into town with their livestock.

Scialabba

George Scialabba is no wild man. A soft-spoken, introverted soul, he doesn’t drink or smoke; no alcohol, tobacco, or recreational drugs. Healthy, moderate eating (no red meat, and “a kind of cerebral Mediterranean diet”) keeps Scialabba, at age 67, lean to a degree that is downright un-American. He has never married nor fathered children, and lives alone in a one-bedroom condo he has occupied since 1980. He doesn’t play sports (“I don’t exercise — I fidget”). For 35 years, Scialabba, a Harvard College alumnus, held a low-level clerical job at his alma mater that suited his low-profile style. For the past decade, his desk has occupied a windowless basement in a large academic building.

from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Scialabba toiled for thirty-five years at a desk job in the windowless basement of Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies, writing book reviews in his spare time; he has much to say about the economic conditions that enable or disable the life of the mind. (A sufferer from chronic depression, Scialabba credits his union for enabling him to take several paid medical leaves. “This is one of many ways in which strong unions are a matter of life and death,” he writes in How To Be Depressed.) And yet, for Scialabba, the essence of intellectual and creative exchange remains a gift economy: “When we’re young, our souls are stirred, our spirits kindled, by a book or some other experience,” he once said, “and in time, when we’ve matured, we look to pay the debt, to pass the gift along.” Gratitude, deeply felt, enables generosity. And never has a writer of such enviable talents displayed such undiminishing patience for his reader, such evident and unpretentious pleasure in the pedagogical function of good prose.

Commentary on Scialabba often makes much of his marginal status in relation to the more glamorous—or, at least, more lucrative—centers of intellectual life. As Christopher Lydon once put it, he has “no tenure…no tank to think in, no social circle, no genius grant (yet), no seat in the opinion industry or on cable TV—‘no province, no clique, no church,’ as Whitman said of Emerson—not even a blog.” In this, there was always a note of condescension: the working-class boy from Sicilian East Boston made good (but not good enough for the academy).

That from Commonweal.

Both note that his office is “windowless.” Love that the interesting work at Harvard is coming not from a professor but from a guy who’s working as a building manager. Lee Sandlin vibes. We love an amateur.

economics of literature

from The Guardian’s profile of Andrew Wylie:

Later in their conversation, the editor worried about what to do with the latest novel by an award-winning British writer. “The modest offer you are waiting to make will be accepted, maybe with a small improvement,” Wylie told her. He suggested €6,000.

“It’s not going to work, since he only sold 900 copies of his last book,” the editor replied.

“This is the weakest argument I’ve ever heard in my life,” Wylie teased. “The flaws are transparent and resonant.” He pointed out that a publisher’s greatest profitability comes before an author earns back their advance, then he suggested €5,000.

“More like €4,000,” the editor said.

“Forty-five hundred? Done.” Wylie announced, pleased but not triumphant.

As meagre as that amount was, if the agency could make 20 such deals around the world for a writer, and earn a similar amount just in North America, a writer might, after the 15% agency fee and another 30% or so in taxes, afford to pay rent on a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment for a couple of years. How they would eat, or pay rent after two years if it took them longer than that to write their next book, was another question.

More Sappho fragments

Fragment 91

[I] never met anyone more irritating, Eirana,

than you.

Stanley Lombardo of University of Kansas has that one as

having never found her more annoying

than you, Irana

Fragment 39

sandals

of fine Lydian make, straps rainbow-dyed

covered her feet

says the footnote:

A scholiast (an ancient commentator who wrote notes in and around the main text) preserved this fragment in the margins of a manuscript of Aristophanes’ play Peace.

My favorite of all might be fragment 57

What farm girl has seduced you?

Draped in burlap,

she doesn’t even know to pull her rags

down over her ankles.

That line quotes by Antheneus, a second- to third-century BCE writer in his The Learned Banquet.

Diane J. Rayor and André Lardinois set that one as:

What countrywoman bewitches your mind…

wrapped in country dress…

too ignorant to cover her ankles with her rags?

The way the less complete bits lay out on the page:

That from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus.

Spooky! A call from the distant past. In their introduction Rayor and Landinois paint a picture of Sappho as something like a 600 BCE Lana Del Rey, gathering a circle around her on Lesbos (closer to Turkey than to Greece).

Beach cottage books

During a stay at a beach cottage recently I picked some books off the shelf.

Paperback version of a beloved classic. But is this even readable?

Yeah I dunno…

Recalling that I read a section of All The King’s Men at a high school speech and debate contest. “Interpretive Reading” was not my strongest event.

Does this lady ever miss? Check out this plot:

Quinn Blackwood, Sugar Devil Swamp, Goblin. YES! How about:

This sounds like a bodice ripper but for men:

I put these books back and didn’t read any of them. If I had to pick I’d read about Goblin!