Stephen Sondheim and Antony Sher

The week between November 26 and December 2, 2021, was catastrophic for the theater community. Stephen Sondheim died just after Thanksgiving, and Antony Sher followed six days later. In many ways these two figures stood at opposite boundaries of the theatrical universe. Sondheim dominated musicals as an innovator and stunning lyricist; Sher was a classical actor renowned for his Shakespearean roles and his occasional appearances in the movies and on television. They both performed at the peak of their profession. They both left hordes of admirers to recall their work. I am one of those admirers.

At first I didn’t get Sondheim. I was one of those people who complained that his tunes weren’t hummable. (Sondheim responded to those of us with tin ears in a song called “Opening Doors” in Merrily We Roll Along.) In those early days I thought he should have stuck to writing lyrics and left the music to the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne, his collaborators on West Side Story and Gypsy, respectively, and I considered his A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to be his best work. Then I started to develop some taste. One day in 1978 my friends Bud and Kathy and I went to what was then the Uris Theater to see Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury perform Sweeney Todd, and I emerged from the theater gobsmacked. The man had written a musical thriller, a piece that was both horrifying and shamefully funny. If he had given us nothing but “A Little Priest,” Sondheim would deserve canonization on Broadway, but of course he bequeathed us much, much more.

I got to the Kennedy Center in 2001 for three of the six shows in the Sondheim Celebration, and it was there, during Company, that I first witnessed what it meant to stop the show. At the end of one number—I can’t recall which—the audience clapped and cheered and wouldn’t cease; the applause just went on and on, and the show perforce had to stop until the house quieted. It was there that I first saw A Little Night Music and its intricate, dazzling series of tours de force, including “Now/Later/Soon,” three intertwining songs sung by three actors simultaneously, and “A Weekend in the Country,” which kept building from solo to duet to trio to quartet to quintet to chorus. Not everything he tried was commercially successful. I got to watch a few rehearsals for Road Show at the Public Theater in 2008, and I was put off by both the pretentiousness of the director and the thinness of the material. But I admired Sondheim for continuing to tinker with material that didn’t work, for always pushing himself, for never resting on those extensive laurels. Fifty years after Richard Wilbur published “The Death of a Toad,” the poet mused on whether he should change the word “steered” to “veered.” One single word, half a century later, was still on the writer’s mind. That was how Sondheim lived as well, forever looking forward, but never forgetting the blemishes that he wanted to correct.

Antony Sher was also a creator. He wrote journals, memoirs, and novels, and he brought the world’s most famous fictional personalities—I’m talking about the characters in Shakespeare’s plays—into startlingly fresh form on the stage.  He was not a conventionally handsome actor; it would be hard to imagine him as Lieutenant Cable in South Pacific. But he was a ferociously intelligent one, and he gave every ounce of energy to every role he created. I saw him first in July of 1982 in Stratford, England, on one of the greatest days I’ve ever spent in a theater. That afternoon I watched Sinead Cusack and Derek Jacobi as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, a pleasant, conventional rendering of the play that turned out to be a nice warmup act for the headliner that evening: King Lear directed by Adrian Noble with Michael Gambon in the title role and Antony Sher as the Fool. It was an all-star cast in a jaw-dropping production: Jenny Agutter as a beautiful, sadistic Regan; Malcolm Storry as a tall, stoic Kent; Jonathan Hyde as a patrician Edgar; David Bradley as Albany. But Sher stole the show as a manic, raw-egg-eating music-hall clown who ended up dying onstage when a mad Lear accidentally stabbed him. Later, in 1985, I took my parents and sister to see Sher play Richard III at the Barbican in London. That was the role that made him a star, a spidery Richard on crutches with a grotesque prosthetic hump on his back that, at one point, was bare to the audience. Sher wrote his first book about the experience, Year of the King, which he followed with Year of the Fat Knight (about playing Falstaff) and Year of the Mad King, describing his return to Lear to play the king himself. He died too young at age 72, as did Sondheim at 91, But, damn, they left behind a huge pair of comet tails blazing across the boards.

Anthony Doerr, Amor Towles, Hillary Clinton, and Louise Penny

On Halloween of 2021, which happened to fall on a Sunday, the Washington Post published its weekly list of hardback bestsellers, and to my amusement, the first three fiction titles were The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, and State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny. Why was I amused? Because those are the three books that I just finished reading consecutively, and because my reading list rarely consists of current bestsellers.

Since I’m so uncharacteristically au courant, I feel not merely nudged but called to comment on these three quite different and successful novels. All three are long. (Okay, the Clinton-Penny novel is maybe a bit too long, but not fatally so.) All three are ambitious. All three are page-turners. All three have benefited from strong reviews and the reputations of their authors. All three present appealing characters and substantial themes. All three could generate a classic elevator pitch:

Towles, Two brothers set out on the most entertainingly episodic journey since Huck and Jim found that raft.

Doerr: An ancient manuscript inspires a series of interlocking heroic actions over several centuries.

Clinton and Penny: A feisty American Secretary of State confronts a series of threats at once personal, national, and global.

But all three supersede the confines of the elevator pitch triumphantly.

Before I go any farther, let me clarify that the Towles and Doerr books are literary novels that could reasonably earn nominations for Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and Booker Prizes. The Clinton and Penny collaboration is, to borrow from Maureen Corrigan, who in turn borrowed from Graham Greene, an entertainment. Towles and Doerr craft elegant sentences and conjure vivid scenes; Clinton and Penny rely frequently on the sentence fragment and the one-sentence paragraph to sketch enough of a setting to get us grounded in time and space. There’s an art to what all four writers are doing, but I can’t call State of Terror a work of art. Still, it’s a commendably distracting yarn. Clinton’s expertise with affairs of state and her personal experience with government at the highest levels marries smoothly with Penny’s skill in setting multiple plots in motion and keeping them all clear for a reader. The result is a book that feels at once like a good season of “24” on television and an inside look at how intelligent government officials would respond to one crisis after another. Moreover, as an English teacher, I had to admire the variety and wit of the rhetorical devices used as a private code between Ellen Adams, the protagonist, and Betsy Jameson, her best friends and confidante.  One of them types a text message—An oxymoron walks into a bar—and the other confirms her identity with an appropriate reply: and the silence was deafening. At nearly 500 pages State of Terror will probably not conjure memories of Samuel Johnson on the topic of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, but Johnson’s famous assessment of Milton’s epic—“none ever wished it longer”—fits. Still, you get your money’s worth.

Anthony Doerr and Amor Towles both faced the challenges of high expectations after each delivered hugely popular and acclaimed novels with All the Light You Cannot See and A Gentleman in Moscow. Both writers have met the challenge magnificently. Doerr, in Cloud Cuckoo Land, risks charges of being a show-off when he so deftly manages multiple genres, many points of view, and a distinctive set of narrative voices in this stunning tour de force. We get historical fiction, modern-day social commentary, and sci-fi in a work that recalls David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas but stands very much on its own. Despite my willingness to do the elevator pitches earlier in this posting, I detest the very idea of reducing a huge, ambitious novel to one theme or sound bite. (It’s so glib and easy to summarize Hamlet as a play about a man who can’t make up his mind. If that were all that Hamlet offered, then Shakespeare could have rendered it as a quatrain in one of his sonnets.) But one of Doerr’s most striking themes is that of the resilience of literature and story. As many critics have noted, much of the novel takes place in a library, a repository of books, and Doerr’s novel itself serves as a repository of multiple stories. Bravo, Mr. Doerr, you dazzler.

I’m equally enthusiastic about Towles’s The Lincoln Highway. His protagonist, Emmett Watson, is your basically good guy, a 17-year-old recently released from a work camp to which he’d been sentenced for a crime. Emmett’s sidekick, his eight-year-old brother Billy, is almost unbelievably cute, endearing, and intelligent. (Lots of reviewers have called him precocious. That’s accurate enough, but he’s extraordinarily self-possessed, affectionate, and principled.)  You have to love both of these kids. But the character who threatens to run away with the novel is Emmett’s friend Duchess, the son of a ne’er-do-well actor and an escapee from the work camp where Emmett was incarcerated. Duchess is dangerous but is also acutely aware of living in a moral universe. He’s a teenage version of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit before the Misfit has chosen a life of nihilism. Much of this novel considers the settling of debts and obligations, and Duchess is a primary catalyst in such transactions. If Emmett is Oliver Twist—parentless, good-hearted, and kind—then Duchess is the Artful Dodger, who is not at all a good boy but who is a hell of a lot of fun on the page.

When I say that Billy is almost unbelievable, I’m getting at one of the most striking characteristics of this novel. At times Towles tiptoes right up to the border of the surreal or the fabulous, but he never quite crosses the line. Even in 1954, when the novel is set and when automobile traffic would be greatly reduced from the way it is today, surely driving from Nebraska to New York City would be more difficult than it seems in Towles’s telling. Indeed, driving from the outer suburbs into the heart of the city comes off as no more difficult than riding a bike from Opie’s house to Sheriff Taylor’s office in Mayberry. I might quibble, too, that tracking down an alcoholic should be a bit harder than it is for these kids. But I’m not complaining. Towles is inviting us to join these characters in their own odyssey, or perhaps I should say Odyssey, in a novel where tales of derring-do and heroism and fantastic events, including a pared-down version of the travels of Odysseus himself, speak to and affect the lives of a large cast of well-drawn characters. Perhaps the most impressive feat of all for Mr. Towles is that this novel is the antithesis of his last work. A Gentleman in Moscow unfolds within the claustrophobic world of a luxury hotel in Russia. The Lincoln Highway races into motion by car, train, and foot, and it roars to the ideal conclusion, one simultaneously surprising and inevitable.  

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S.A. Cosby and James Fenimore Cooper

S.A. “Shawn” Cosby has joined John Grisham, David Baldacci, and Patricia Cornwell as nationally famous crime writers who live in Virginia, but Cosby’s writing is all his own. Alerted to his presence with the publication of Blacktop Wasteland, which I have not yet read, I bought his follow-up novel Razorblade Tears just to see what all the fuss was about. It didn’t take long for me to confirm that Cosby’s acclaim is no fluke. Cosby manages to create endearing, distinct, and quite dynamic characters who frequently experience (and inflict) extreme violence, but the bedrock of the story is social justice and fair play. His are not simply sensational thrillers, but also skillful ruminations on the current state of our world. And he manages to leaven it all with wit, clever repartee, and steady laughs. I’m impressed.

The protagonist of Razorblade Tears is a Black man named Ike Randolph. Ike has done time and was known in his criminal life as Riot, a nickname reflecting his volatile temper and physical intimidation. Nowadays he’s a married man who runs a legitimate landscaping service, but when the novel opens, he is grieving over the loss of his son, a gay man killed in an atrocious hate crime.  Enter Buddy Lee Jenkins, another grieving dad whose gay son was married to Ike’s son and who died in the same hate crime.  Buddy Lee, whose ready quips and open-mindedness complicate his potentially stereotypical incarnation as an alcoholic roughneck, teams up with Ike to find whoever killed their sons, and from that moment on, the action never relents. I expected the violence. I did not expect the complexities, humor, and depth of these two appealing characters. Despite their many flaws, you have to love these guys; they are on the right side of justice, even if it’s the vigilante sort.

In Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins the clever Mr. Cosby has tapped into one of the oldest and most successful tropes in storytelling: the complementary companions whose combined skills make them an unstoppable team. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza provide an early example from Spanish literature; Holmes and Watson serve the same function slightly more recently.  But as Leslie Fiedler, Arnold Rampersad, and other critics have noted, this pairing motif works especially well in American literature, where so often these partners are of two different races: Huck Finn and Jim, Han Solo and Chewbacca, Danny Glover and Mel Gibson (in the Lethal Weapon movies), the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Robert Culp and Bill Cosby (in 1960’s-era television show called “I Spy”), Ishmael and Queequeg, to name a few.  

But if you want to visit the single novel where American literature begins, go to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. I know. It’s easy to mock Cooper—Mark Twain reveled in doing so—for his turgid prose and his romantic excesses (for me the low point of the novel occurs when Hawkeye disguises himself as a bear in order to rescue a captive). Cooper, however, was a genius, a man of vision, and when he sets his novel (published 1826) in 1757, he chooses a time when all the assets and all the problems of the yet-to-be-established republic are coming into relief. In this novel Cooper addresses racism, misogyny, and the advent of multiculturalism. The woods of upstate New York, where the action of the novel unfolds, are as dense and as scary as any forest primeval in fairy tales, an untamed natural wilderness where anything is possible. Cooper wrestles with the inevitability of European intrusion into this pristine continent, knows that the native people will die in order for the new country to come into being, and encapsulates the tragedy of native genocide in the stunning death of Uncas, the last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s protagonist, Duncan Heyward, is a European who learns from, absorbs, and assimilates the culture of the native people and becomes something new, an American amalgam. His two mentors and foils are Hawkeye, who calls himself “a man without a cross,” by which he means cross-breeding of blood lines, and Chingachgook, father of Uncas and a pure-blooded Mohican. These two complementary companions, Hawkeye and Chingachgook, make an unstoppable team, but by the end of the novel, both are childless, and both represent the last of their kind. Without entering the melting pot, they face a future of solitude.

Go on. Get yourself a copy of Razorblade Tears and of The Last of the Mohicans. Once you get past Cooper’s numbing opening chapter (it’s not long), you’ll find that the pace of the old canonical classic is just as fast as that of Cosby’s brand new thriller.

John Steinbeck and Harry Potter Hanukkah

What I’m hoping to accomplish with this blog is to generate a conversation about the creative arts across the centuries and the continents. If that sounds a bit too ambitious and grandiose, I apologize. I’m always going to be aiming to connect with readers with shared experiences, and I hope to marry discussions of popular culture with classic works of the past. That’s hardly original, I know, but if The New Yorker can offer “The Talk of the Town” to its readers, then surely I might aspire, here from my home in southwest Virginia, to present “Talk of the Provinces” to a few inquisitive souls. Note that I’m not claiming to post the talk of the provinces, merely some of it.

I retired from teaching at Woodberry Forest School in June of 2020, and since then I’ve been on something of a tear in my writing—at least for me. While I was teaching, I would maybe finish a short story every three or four years. During the twelve months after my retirement, I finished two short stories (one of which has been purchased by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) and one of which, a non-mystery, is under submission at literary journals. I’ve also tweaked and edited a novel manuscript and, to my great pleasure, have trimmed it from 122,000 words to 98,000.  All that work was lots of fun.

Now, however, I find myself in that awful state of being between projects. I’m not like Anthony Trollope, who wrote from 5:30 to 8:30 a.m. and kept himself on a strict schedule of 250 words every fifteen minutes, for a total of 3,000 words per day. If Trollope finished a novel before the three hours had expired, he started a new one. Good for him, but I can’t do that. I have to wait for the imaginative well to fill up again, and I have learned over many years that there’s nothing productive about demanding a visit from the Muse before she is ready to sing. But I’m ready to get started on a new project and am feeling impatient. So what am I doing to keep myself open for the next big idea?

First, I’m reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and am finding it a fascinating mess. By the early 1950’s, when Steinbeck was assembling the novel (published in 1952), he was famous and well established and had already won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award for The Grapes of Wrath. Now that I am 500 pages into East of Eden, I’m thinking that the early success bred a degree of languor over editing and revising this big, sprawling, erratic saga. The first fifty pages read like brainstorming or free-writing, the kinds of things we writers might do if we’re trying to find a way into a story. But I sense that Steinbeck simply wrote what was on his mind for any particular day, saved the pages, and handed them over to his editor without another glance. I’m still reading. I’m still a fan and an admirer of Mr. Steinbeck. But his novel strikes me as surprisingly undisciplined.

Second, when I learned that HBO Max had re-acquired the rights to broadcast all eight of the Harry Potter movies, I decided to give them another look. I had seen them all when they had first appeared in the theaters and had read all the books, but it had been several years since I’d visited J.K. Rowling’s most famous creation to date. Rowling, like Steinbeck, is a story-telling genius and a remarkably prolific one, but I thought that she, too, grew a bit undisciplined starting with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when there were so many characters to track and so much story to absorb that the books began to feel bloated. Waiting for a new book or movie in the Potter cycle to appear, I would lose track of some of the secondary characters.  So a couple of weeks ago, I decided that I would celebrate what I came to call Harry Potter Hanukkah: eight consecutive nights of watching one Harry Potter movie per night, a festival of narrative binging.

I established several rules. I couldn’t start watching before 10:00 p.m. because I wanted to guarantee that I would accomplish something less self-indulgent during daylight hours. It also seemed right to be watching while it was dark outside and getting late, to add to the sense of bonus entertainment at the end of the day. I couldn’t skip ahead and watch more than one movie per day, though I was allowed to cue up the next one in line for the following night’s viewing. All these rules were arbitrary, of course, but I sensed (correctly, I think) that it would be quite possible to overdose and to spend too long in the land of Hogwarts, like eating an entire box of candy at one sitting. As King Henry IV said to his son Hal, it’s possible for one to begin to loathe the taste of honey, “whereof a little more than a little is by much too much.” But eight movies in eight nights turned out to be just right—enough for me to keep fresh with the unfolding epic without sacrificing exercise, regular meals, and human contact.

The pleasure of such an exercise came for me in watching those young actors grow up on the screen. In Sorcerer’s Stone they are children, and they—as characters and as actors—had no idea of what kind of international celebrity they had launched when Ron, Hermione, and Harry met on that train for the first time. I felt the same ripple of awe that I get when I look back at Chapter 6 of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Here’s the moment I mean:

Tom hailed the romantic outcast:

“Hello, Huckleberry!”

“Hello yourself, and see how you like it.”

“What’s that you got?”

“Dead cat.”

 Neither Tom Sawyer nor Huck nor Mark Twain himself had any inkling of just what a monumental, controversial, beloved, provocative character had just made his entrance onto the world stage. I’d argue that Huck’s entrance was every bit as significant as Falstaff’s three hundred years earlier in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. And while I loved to see J.K. Rowling bring her mammoth undertaking to such a satisfying and grand conclusion, I loved the beginning even more. I love to be there at the start, when so much of the adventure lies ahead.

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