Richard Brookhiser on Bill Buckley and National Review (Right Time, Right Place)

If Richard Brookhiser had to sort out some feelings when he wrote Right Time, Right Place (a Father’s Day gift from Emsworth’s youngest daughter), well, so did we when we read it. Brookhiser’s subject is William F. Buckley, Jr., who discovered Brookhiser as a teenager, talked him out of Yale Law School, gave him a job at National Review, mentored him, and, when Brookhiser was only 23, promised that he’d be the next editor-in-chief and owner of National Review upon Buckley’s eventual retirement.

Richard Brookhiser, a Rochester, New York native. One would think that the local press would have taken notice of this locally-born author of several popular books on the Founding Fathers, but if so, we've missed it.

Brookhiser had to adjust his image of his hero when, eight years later and out of the blue, Buckley told Brookhiser (in a note left on Brookhiser’s desk) that he’d changed his mind and had concluded that his protege lacked executive ability and was “unsuited” to edit the magazine. Brookhiser overcame his bitterness at what he still considers Buckley’s “cowardice” and continued to work part-time for National Review; Buckley died in 2008. On the side, Brookhiser has written several popular books about American history.

William F. Buckley, Jr. with Ronald Reagan

We never knew any of this, even though Emsworth has read National Review faithfully for over 35 years and has admired Brookhiser’s work. We remembered when (without explanation) Brookhiser became a “senior editor” instead of “managing editor” about 20 years ago. After that, all we knew was that we didn’t see Brookhiser in NR nearly as often.

Later, we bought and appreciated his excellent biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Knowing no better, we assumed that Brookhiser had independent means and had decided to pursue free-lance writing as his primary career.

In this new book, Right Time, Right Place, Brookhiser tells the story of his years with National Review and yields up his memories of his imperfect hero. Brookhiser has a rare ability to reflect with objectivity on his own life, and his controlled prose has never been better. We were fascinated. The magazine has been part of our life for a long time, and Bill Buckley was one of our heroes too.  Finally, here was something more than the air-brushed stories of life at NR that we’d always had to settle for.

The book also brings into view other long-familiar National Review figures like William Rusher, Joe Sobran, and Jeffrey Hart. Brookhiser was more enthusiastic about some of his NR colleagues than others. (Sadly, Brookhiser’s wariness of Sobran has kept him from appreciating the arguments in favor of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as the author of the Shakespeare plays. Sobran has been a prominent champion of Oxford.)

But it was the glimpses of the human side of Buckley (as opposed to the public figure with the carefully cultivated public image) that kept us glued to the book. We expect more of the same when we get a copy of Christopher Buckley’s book about his father.

And what feelings do we have to sort out as we read Right Time, Right Place? Frankly, jealousy of Brookhiser, his superior talents, and the doors that opened for him. He’s about our own age, he’s a fellow pianist, and his interests in literature very nearly mirror ours. We’ve known for years that his political views are closer to ours than anyone else at National Review. And he’s from Rochester! — born and raised in Irondequoit (sadly, with no more independent means than we have).

We don’t complain about our own career. But how we would have enjoyed working at National Review, making words matter, wrestling with ideas and policies, mixing with people of congenial views, trying to make the conservative case. Brookhiser, to his credit, seems genuinely grateful for the opportunities he’s had.

What P. G. Wodehouse owes to Oscar Wilde

Wilde

Seeing The Importance of Being Earnest at the Shaw Festival in 2004 persuaded us that P. G. Wodehouse had no greater literary influence than Oscar Wilde. How very like Wodehouse’s idle young men in spats were Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing (as played by David Leyshon and Evan Buliung)! How very like the manner of Jeeves was the deadpan sarcasm of Algernon’s manservant Lane (as played by Robert Benson)! How very much like Bertie Wooster’s dragon aunts was Algernon’s aunt, Lady Bracknell!

Wodehouse

And how much do Wodehouse plots owe to The Importance of Being Earnest?  In how many Wodehouse stories do young men and women make their way into English country houses posing as tutors or gardeners or friends of friends so they can pursue forbidden romances or purloin prize pigs or play detective? Of course Wilde’s play is a story of imposters too. When he is in London, Jack adopts the identity of a fictitious brother named “Ernest” so that he can live the life of a libertine in the city (as Ernest) without tarnishing his respectable reputation back home in the country. And when Algernon wants to meet Jack’s pretty ward Cecily Cardew (who like so many Wodehouse young women cannot marry without her guardian’s permission), he goes to the country house where she is staying, posing as Jack’s much talked-about but never-seen brother “Ernest”.

Wodehouse was only an impressionable 14 years old when The Importance of Being Earnest premiered in 1895, and we think it must have influenced him powerfully.  If you took out of Wodehouse all the foppish young men, imposters, domestic blackmail, dragon aunts, butlers, and young women who need permission from guardians to marry — that is, the characters, the plot, and the comic elements of Wilde’s play — there wouldn’t be much Wodehouse left on our library shelves.

It’s easy to identify the writers who were dear to Wodehouse’s heart; his novels and stories have thousands of quotations and allusions to Keats, Tennyson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and especially Shakespeare. Nowhere, however, is Wodehouse’s delight in Oscar Wilde so transparent as in his 1952 novel Pigs Have Wings.

Galahad Threepwood in one of Wodehouse's later, lesser novels

There is, first, Lord Emsworth’s brother Gally. The now middle-aged Galahad Threepwood (a recurring Wodehouse character) has spent his life carousing in nightclubs and chasing barmaids, just as he did in the 1890s when he was a young man. (Galahad’s character is the antithesis of that of the pure knight of the Arthurian legends.) Remarkably, however, Gally’s decades of fast living have had no impact on his health or his perennially youthful appearance — no more than they did, Wodehouse gleefully tells us in Pigs Have Wings, on Dorian Gray.

Ivan Albright's alarming 1943 painting of Dorian Gray is at the Art Institute of Chicago

The chief imposter in Pigs Have Wings is the butler’s niece Maudie, formerly a barmaid, now co-proprietor of a detective agency. Gally engages her to come incognito to Blandings Castle to help foil what Gally fears to be a plot to either steal or nobble Lord Emsworth’s prize-winning fat pig — and he insists that she pose as “Mrs. Bunbury,” an old friend of one of the guests.

Brian Bedford will take the part of Lady Bracknell at the Stratford Festival in 2009

Wodehouse’s choice of “Bunbury” for Maudie is, we think, the most explicit homage to Oscar Wilde in all of Wodehouse.  The reference, of course, is to opening scene of The Importance of Being Earnest , when we learn that for some time Algernon has pretended to have a friend in the country named Bunbury whom Algernon must frequently visit because of Bunbury’s alleged ill health. Whenever Algernon wants to escape London because of inconvenient social obligations, he pleads that his friend “Bunbury” needs him and flees town.

We have tickets to see The Importance of Being Earnest again next month in Ontario, this time at the Stratford Festival. Stratford stalwart Brian Bedford will be directing and playing Lady Bracknell (in drag), but the roles of Algernon and Jack will be played by two actors that we’ve seen most often in years past at the Shaw Festival, Mike Shara and Ben Carlson.

June 2009: We liked Bedford’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest. See this post.

October 2009. We weren’t altogether satisfied with the Stratford Festival’s 2009 Macbeth, but it did remind us how Wodehouse borrowed the most famous lines in Shakespeare’s play and turned them on their heads in his comic stories. See this post.

Bill Bryson on Shakespeare (and the authorship question)

Shakespeare biographies are something of a pet peeve of ours, since so few hard facts about the life of William Shakespeare are actually known, and nobody ever turns up anything new. And so many new Shakespeare books come out every year that we don’t even try to keep up. So we nearly missed Shakespeare: The World as Stage, a modest little “biography” of the Bard that Bill Bryson published in 2007. 

Marlowe

We really liked this crisply written little book (196 pages and wide margins), even though a lot of it consists of filler material about 16th-century social and political history that doesn’t have any direct connection either with William Shakespeare or with the plays attributed to him. From pages 62 to 65, for instance, and for no compelling reason related to the life of Shakespeare, Bryson gives us a lively account of the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1567. From pages 92 to 94 he bunny-trails into an entertaining biographical sketch of Christopher Marlowe. We don’t blame him; if Shakespeare biographers didn’t do this sort of thing, their books would be awfully short.

And we did learn a few things that we didn’t know, or needed to be corrected on. Take the matter of the “second-best bed” bequeathed to Mrs. Shakespeare in Will Shakespeare’s will.  The old conventional wisdom (which we were taught long ago) was that Shakespeare’s failure to leave his wife his best bed was a sign of strained marital relations.  The newer conventional wisdom (which we dutifully accepted) was that the “second-best bed” would have been the marital bed and the one that Anne would have wanted most, after all.  But the latest wisdom, we learn from Bryson, is that it truly was unusual and inexplicable for a husband to leave his wife their second-best bed.

It is hard to imagine why anyone would write a “biography” of William Shakespeare today without giving at least some attention to whether the man born and buried in Stratford actually wrote the celebrated plays and sonnets, or whether someone else wrote them using the pseudonym “William Shakespeare.” Yet many writers on Shakespeare do ignore the issue. To his credit, Bill Bryson does not gloss over the question of authorship and, in fact, devotes the ninth and final chapter of his book to it.

Bill Bryson

To our sorrow (for, as noted in an earlier post, we ourselves are of the Oxfordian persuasion), Bryson is a hardened skeptic on the subject.  He goes so far as to say that “nearly all the anti-Shakespeare sentiment — actually all of it, every bit — involves manipulative scholarship or sweeping misstatements of fact.”  Unfortunately, Bryson uses mostly straw-man arguments to support this sweeping statement, making sport of some of the least defensible things said on the subject — assertions that are very far from being pillars of anti-Stratfordian schools of thought.

For example, Bryson mocks a writer for the New York Times for claiming that William Shakespeare (the man from Stratford) never owned a book. As to that, there is no evidence one way or the other (except that that no books are mentioned in William Shakespeare’s will).  Personally, we don’t doubt that he was literate; why shouldn’t an actor, theatrical producer, and prominent citizen of Stratford have read and owned books?  But what does it matter? The argument against authorship by the Stratford man doesn’t depend in the slightest on the assumption that he didn’t or couldn’t read.

Bacon

Bryson devotes five pages to making fun of the old theory that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author.  As Bryson well knows, however, hardly anything really thinks Bacon wrote the Shakespeare plays anymore.  Bryson gives less space, though he pays more serious attention, to Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, a candidate who does have a great deal of support today (including Emsworth’s).  Bryson concedes that de Vere

had certain things in his favor as a candidate: He was clever and had some standing as a poet and playwright (though none of his plays survives [or do they survive? Mr. Bryson, that's the issue!], and none of his poetry indicates actual greatness — certainly not Shakespearean greatness); he was well traveled and spoke Italian, and he moved in the right circles to understand courtly manners.

Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford

But Bryson goes on to attack de Vere’s candidacy with some thoroughly debatable assertions. Bryson argues that de Vere’s colorful personal history (squandering his fortune and episodes of violence and sexual depravity) is irreconcilable with the “gift for compassion, empathy, or generosity of spirit” reflected in the plays and sonnets. Emsworth emphatically disagrees; the plays are more than violent and kinky enough to suggest that the playwright had first-hand experience with such matters during an irresponsible youth.

Bryson also claims, as if it were an unanswerable point, that de Vere couldn’t have written a number of the “later” Shakespeare plays because he died in 1604. In fact, as Bryson also knows very well, there’s no evidence as to when any Shakespeare play was actually written or even first performed.

In fairness, this book was intended to be a popular biography, not a work of scholarship, and the question of who wrote the plays and sonnets wasn’t Bryson’s main focus at all. Still, on the issue of authorship, we were unmoved either by Bryson’s mockery or by his reasoning.

Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister makes us think

For our recovery from a particularly nasty dose of the flu this week, we credit the patient ministrations of the wife of our bosom, but we also acknowledge the healing powers of Anthony Trollope, whose The Prime Minister was never far from our bedside.  As usual, Trollope got us to thinking.

Anthony Trollope, champion of the introvert

1. A lot of journalists are beating their breasts and rendering their garments because newspapers are shutting down and reporters are being laid off right and left. Panic on the left! — how can America escape fascism without Woodward and Bernstein on the job? What’s to become of us if Americans read bloggers who aren’t “accountable” to anyone instead of “professional” reporting by people with journalistic standards?

We can only scratch our heads at the foolish and flagrantly unconstitutional proposals being floated. Government subsidies for “independent” journalism, so Americans won’t have to rely on the unregulated internet for news? Government regulation of the internet? Bah!

The left is reactionary by nature and has always been afraid of technology-driven change, and what it doesn’t like this time is that the cost of publishing one’s thoughts has once again gotten very cheap. (For instance, we don’t remember paying anything for this nifty forum here on WordPress!)

But a world of unregulated, irresponsible journalism is familiar territory to readers of Trollope. The cost of entry into the newspaper business was cheap when The Prime Minister was written in 1874 — practically as easy as setting up a political blog today. It was cheap enough that London was littered with all kinds of tabloid-style newspapers, each violently partisan, like the People’s Banner, the fictional mouthpiece of the detestable Mr. Quintus Slide.

Clifford Rose as Quintus Slide, wielding his poison quill in the BBC production of The Pallisers (we've never seen it)

Trollope’s character Quintus Slide was a unprincipled self-promoter just like a lot of the political bloggers, and like them he mostly just recycled material he’d read somewhere else, adding invective, innuendo, and malice. Midway through The Prime Minister, for example, the coalition government of which the Duke of Omnium is the head loses one of its chief supporters, Sir Orlando Drought, who has ambitions of its own.  Remember the hysteria on the internet left when Colin Powell left the Bush administration several years ago?  Not much different at all from the way Quintus Slide and his rag reacted to the withdrawal of Sir Orlando from the Duke’s Ministry:

Three or four of the morning papers were of opinion that though Sir Orlando had been a strong man, and a good public servant, the Ministry might exist without him. But the People’s Banner was able to expound to the people at large that the only grain of salt by which the Ministry had been kept from putrefaction had been now cast out, and that mortification, death, and corruption must ensue. It was one of Mr Quintus Slide’s greatest efforts.

If parliamentary government survived yellow journalism in Trollope’s time, American democracy has nothing to fear today.

2. After seeing the 1942 film The Talk of the Town on Turner Classic Movies a week or so ago (while we were still in the opening chapters of The Prime Minister) we were surprised to learn from the TCM host that director George Stevens filmed two different endings of the movie and chose the one that preview audiences seemed to like best. Thus, in the last minutes of the final cut of the movie, Jean Arthur chooses Cary Grant (dashing ne’er-do-well) over Ronald Colman (stodgy law professor).

Now we knew that Hollywood has been doing this sort of thing for a while (at least as long as Julia Roberts has been making movies); the only thing that surprised us was that it was going on as long ago as the 1940s. Emsworth is heartily thankful that Anthony Trollope had more artistic integrity than Hollywood.

The thing is, a Trollope novel does not come with a guarantee of a comfortable ending. Foolish misunderstandings don’t always get cleared up, fortunes don’t always get into the right hands, and the girl doesn’t always end up with the right guy.

So how was The Prime Minister going to end? As we approached the last few chapters of this 680-page novel, we realized nervously that we didn’t remember. Never mind that this was at least the third time that we’d read The Prime Minister. We surely remembered most of the scenes as we came to them, and the characters were old friends. But we weren’t sure what would become of Emily Wharton. In the book’s opening chapters she had chosen the wrong man (the swarthy, smooth-talking adventurer Ferdinand Lopez) over the right man (the fair-haired, noble-hearted, gentlemanly Arthur Fletcher). Would Trollope straighten it out in the end?

Lily Dale and Johnny Eames (pencil drawing by Victorian artist John Everett Millais)

We remembered uneasily that in The Small House at Arlington, Trollope’s heroine Lily Dale did not end up with the plucky, ever-true Johnny Eames. To the consternation of readers, Lily refused to marry Johnny even after all the obstacles and complications manufactured by Trollope had been cleared away. In The Prime Minister, was Arthur Fletcher destined for perpetual bachelorhood like Johnny?

We couldn’t remember. And we knew Trollope hadn’t taken a public opinion poll on how his novel should end.

3. That an introvert, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, should be the hero of The Prime Minister, one of Trollope’s very best novels, is something in which Emsworth and other introverts can all take deep pride.

Philip Lathan as Plantagenet Palliser (later the Duke of Omnium) in the BBC television series. Not quite the image we'd created of him in our own mind's eye.

Of course, Trollope wouldn’t have known the word “introvert,” and it is only in recent years that we introverts have come to be more fully understood. (We especially commend to readers a piece by Jonathan Rauch that we read in The Atlantic several years ago, and which we have often shared with our friends. It is entitled “Caring for Your Introvert: the habits and needs of a little understood group.”)

But no author has ever portrayed an introvert with more accuracy — and sympathy — than Anthony Trollope. The Duke’s wife invites dozens of friends and supporters to his castle for week-long house parties — but he stays in his room with his books and avoids his guests as much as possible. And even after he’s been Prime Minister of England for three years, his closest supporters complain that he never talks to them. What introvert can fail to identify with a man?

Almost every Trollope novel includes a love story, but The Prime Minister contains Trollope’s most intimate and psychologically telling portrayal of a love relationship, and it’s not a story of young love, but instead a tale of married love — the relationship between the introvert Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, and his extroverted wife, Lady Glencora. The novel tells of their desperate (and ultimately successful) attempts to try to understand and to please one another. Reading The Prime Minister, an extrovert might well think that a lovely, intelligent, socially skillful woman like Lady Glen was thrown away on an undemonstrative, socially inept man like the Duke. We introverts know better.

Christopher Plummer writes In Spite of Myself

Literature it’s not, but what a read! Christopher Plummer has written a memoir of his life on the stage, on the movie set, and in the bedroom. We were riveted by every page of stage gossip and titillating reminiscences.

In Spite of Myself reads in Mr. Plummer’s own voice; there’s no trace of a ghost-writer. He begins with his childhood in Montreal, where his mother read him the Just So Stories and The Wind and the Willows (just what Emsworth read to his own children!) and the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (introduced to Emsworth by his favorite college professor). She also took him to the theater (his first play: J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose, another of our favorites).

Plummer studied piano but was upstaged by a more talented high school classmate, Oscar Peterson. Still underage, he began to hang out at Montreal nightclubs, where he met an alcoholic Diana Barrymore, who asked her to escort him to a posh after-dinner party. As Plummer remembers it,

I boldly sat down at the piano, hoping to accompany Diana in a French song or two. She winked at me and took up the cue. As was her custom, she had decked herself out in a daringly revealing low-cut dress. In the middle of a song in order to emphasize a phrase, she made a sweeping theatrical gesture, miles over the top, when suddenly, not just one but two glorious breasts popped out in full view and stayed out for the rest of the number.

That’s on page 49; this 650-page book is full of juicy bits like this.

And his amours! For the most part, Plummer names names. By his account, he has enjoyed the favors of scores of beautiful women (besides his three wives) over his long life.

His show-business stories (not all of which involve him personally) are marvelous. One that tickled our fancy has to do with the composer-pianist Percy Grainger, whom Plummer saw in Montreal as a teenager:

The Australian, Percy Grainger, came to town very often — declined hotels and insisted on sleeping on his piano in a studio at Steinway Hall. He was most eccentric and would play only two encores: “The Man I Love,” as if Grieg had written it, and his own “Country Gardens.”

For the most part, Plummer’s gossip is good-humored; several accounts of nasty behavior by show business colleagues omit names. One is left in awe of the sheer numbers of distinguished actors, directors, playwrights, and producers, from Noel Coward and David Selznick to Katharine Hepburn and Julie Andrews, that Plummer has known during his career.

And there’s plenty in this book about the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (Stratford, Ontario), which is clearly close to Plummer’s heart, as well as about Plummer’s work in England and on Broadway. Did you know that Duke Ellington dedicated his 1957 album Such Sweet Thunder to the Stratford Festival? Plummer met Ellington when the composer, doing research for his album, was in Stratford monitoring a rehearsal of Hamlet.  The dedication’s right there on the front cover.

One does not have to believe all of Plummer’s stories to enjoy them. (Did Grainger really sleep on his piano?) At one point Plummer tells of a Montreal music critic who fell asleep, missed a performance by Horowitz, wrote a glowing review of a performance he did not hear, and only discovered afterward that the maestro had become ill and did not play. Over the years we have heard other versions of such a story, with different performances and critics; no doubt Plummer thinks he is telling the original.

Another tale that tested our credulity involved an affair between the young Plummer and a married actress. According to Plummer, he and the lady were making love on a chair in a dressing room when the lady’s husband walked in and engaged them in casual conversation. Supposedly, the husband never suspected what was happening, because the lovers’ lower limbs were fully covered by the woman’s long, full gown. It’s clear that’s how Plummer remembers the incident. But it’s hard to believe it happened quite that way.

We expect that it is because Emsworth has raved for years about Plummer’s performance as Lear at the Stratford Festival in 2002 that one of our daughters knew to snap up a copy of In Spite of Myself for our Christmas stocking. In fact, Plummer’s King Lear remains the high point of our theater-going career. Plummer’s ribald, swaggering king seemed to us exactly what the Bard had in mind. And with Plummer, the language barrier simply disappeared; he rendered Shakespeare’s immortal lines so naturally that he might have been speaking twenty-first century American.

The passing of our old friend John Mortimer

We’d been thinking about him a lot lately. First, desperately browsing at Barnes & Noble three weeks ago for last-minute Christmas ideas for others, we found a 2005 novel of his in a remainder bin that we somehow missed altogether, Quite Honestly. We snatched it up for ourselves and rejoiced in the thought that there was, after all, more Mortimer that we hadn’t read.

Second, realizing we’d carelessly forgotten to put it on our Christmas list, and having given up on finding a used copy anywhere, we ordered, received, and devoured (on Christmas Day) a new paperback copy of Mortimer’s remarkable 1971 play A Voyage Around My Father.

(Pointed reminder to the management of the Shaw Festival: this play, set in the 1930s, still hasn’t ever been performed in Niagara-on-the-Lake. We’d love to see Michael Ball in the title role.)

John Mortimer with Leo McKern as Rumpole

Then, blessedly, one of our offspring left for us under the Christmas tree a complete set of Rumpole of the Bailey on video, with Leo McKern. It’s a gift that will keep on giving, as there are 14 discs and 42 episodes in all, nearly an hour each. It’ll take a while; we don’t mind.

We don’t remember exactly when we first made John Mortimer’s acquaintance. It was certainly, however, through one of the earlier collections of Rumpole stories, which we probably bought on a whim at a used bookstore.

Mortimer and Rumpole rapidly staked out space in our library, and we kept acquiring new Rumpole books as they were written, right up until last year. Rumpole was a grand, marvelous comic character, like Pickwick or Trollope’s Mrs. Proudie, and we liked him for a lot of the same reasons we came to like Mortimer himself: his love for Shakespeare, his commitment to the rights of Englishmen (see this Emsworth post), his tolerance for the foibles of his fellow humans, and his sad failure to strike a decent balance between his profession and his private life. We admired Mortimer’s unsentimentalized picture of a barrister’s law practice and life in the lesser law courts of London; we can’t think of anything like it in American literature. And we learned a good deal about the differences between British and American law, which were greater than we’d suspected.

After a time we realized that Rumpole was also a television character and that more people knew him through the BBC series than, as I did, through the published stories. We also came to realize that there was a lot more to Mortimer than Rumpole. We picked up a used copy of his 1985 novel Paradise Postponed with no particular expectations; this story of the fictional Tory politician Leslie Titmuss turned out to be one of our favorite books written during the last 30 years. Naturally, we snatched up its two sequels when they were published: Titmuss Regained (1990) and The Sound of Trumpets (1998). It’s not too much to compare Leslie Titmuss to Trollope’s Tory anti-hero, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium.

On my new set of Rumpole videos, an elderly John Mortimer introduces each episode, and it’s a treat to see him and hear his accent in his undisciplined tenor. He looks much as he does on the cover of this Rumpole collection.

Almost the first thing we saw when we checked the New York Times online this morning was the report of Mortimer’s death at the age of 85. The report must have come through only minutes before, because the Times apparently didn’t have time to update its two-year-old draft obituary (“An authorized biography, “A Voyage Round John Mortimer” (Viking), by Valerie Grove, is to be published in Britain in October 2007.)

Losing this old friend was a sad start to a day. We don’t suppose that we would gotten along very well if we’d ever met in person; his way of living was, to put it mildly, much different from ours. So were the old socialist’s political views, although we admired him for his love of liberty, his contempt for political correctness, and his devotion to the presumption of innocence.

Mortimer spoke at a gathering of the P. G. Wodehouse Society in the UK several years before his death

Like us, John Mortimer loved the performing arts, and indeed was a major figure in modern British theater. We had other close friends in common, like Dickens and Shakespeare. In an introduction to one of the episodes on the Rumpole series, he mentions how heavily he was influenced as a young man by the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle and P. G. Wodehouse.

It’s gloomy to reflect that his typewriter has finally gone quiet. But we’ll watch another episode or two of Rumpole of the Bailey tonight, just for old time’s sake.

Hollywood butchers The Women

Clare Boothe (before she became Clare Boothe Luce)

We should have known better, but when we saw that last year’s Hollywood remake of Clare Boothe’s classic 1936 play The Women was available on video, we couldn’t resist.

We bit on this turkey because we are great fans of the late playwright, socialite, politician, and diplomat, and because, for our money, The Women is one of the great American plays.  Boothe’s satire is dead on, and every line tells.

(The Shaw Festival hasn’t mounted The Women since 1985, when Nora McLellan was cast as Mary Haines. Hint to the management: it’s overdue.)

Unfortunately, the makers of the 2008 movie stripped everything from Boothe’s comedy but the bare outline of its plot. They failed to notice that the genius of the play lay, not in its plot, but in its glittering dialogue and its merciless portrayal of a circle of idle, insecure, amoral women.

Here’s one example of how Hollywood didn’t get it. In Clare Boothe’s play, socialite Mary Haines discovers that her husband is doing her dirty with a bimbo who sells perfume at Saks. She wants to save her marriage, so she decides to wait the affair out instead of confronting him.

Meg Ryan (Mary) and Annette Bening (Sylvie) as buddies in this Sex and the City knock-off

But then Mary’s “friend” Edith leaks the details of the affair to a gossip columnist, who splashes headlines about the Haineses across the front of the society section of the newspaper. The publicity forces the issue and leaves Mary no choice but divorce, as Edith knew it would. Edith’s betrayal is all the more shocking because of the casual glee with which she boasts of it to the other women (“Oh, Sylvia, I’ve done the most awful thing . . . .”).

Best friends forever! Meg Ryan and buddies

That’s Boothe’s play. No such subtlety or understatement for Hollywood! In the movie, it’s Sylvie, not Eydie, who betrays Mary (Meg Ryan) to the gossip columnist. (In the movie, “Edith” has become “Eydie” and “Sylvia” has become “Sylvie.”) And in the movie, Sylvie doesn’t spill the beans out of boredom and malice, as Edith does in Boothe’s play, but because she’s cut a deal with the columnist in a desperate attempt to salvage her faltering career as editor of a fashion magazine, and only after losing a battle with her conscience. We’re not shocked by Sylvie’s selling out her friend; we’re simply bored.

Emsworth strongly recommends the 1939 movie version of The Women, directed by George Cukor and starring Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and Rosalind Russell

Producer Victoria Pearman bragged to a Boston newspaper that the movie-makers kept the remake true to the original play by having an all-female cast (the women talk about men all the time, but no men are never seen, not even among the extras). But Boothe’s women-only cast was hardly the essence of the play; it was just a gimmick. And screenwriter Diane English apparently thought she could improve on Boothe’s play by making The Women a female buddy movie and injecting “diversity”; she filled out Mary’s circle of friends with a new character who is a black lesbian (Jada Pinkett). How badly they missed the wheat for the chaff!

We regret missing the Broadway revival of The Women several years ago. It starred Cynthia Nixon as Mary Haines; maybe that was what gave writer and director Diane English the stupendously foolish idea to remake The Women as Sex and the City lite.

Why would a black actor want to play in a Priestley play, anyway?

As Emsworth noted in an earlier post, certain factions have been lobbying the Shaw Festival (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario) to hire more actors of color and to cast them in lead roles. Why wasn’t a black actor considered for the lead in An Inspector Calls, they ask, referring to the J. B. Priestley play that was at the Shaw in 2008? (See Emsworth’s review in this post.)

We’re just not sure Priestley himself would have returned the compliment. We’ve been reading Priestley in recent weeks, and just as we were annoyed by the hard-left politics of An Inspector Calls when we saw it on stage at the Shaw last spring, we bristled at the casual racism we found in the old lefty’s books.

Not that the three Priestley books we read (two novels and his travel book, English Journey) actually had anything to do with race.  The novels don’t have any black characters, and Priestley apparently failed to meet any black people during the several-month tour of England that he took in 1933 to gather material for English Journey.

No, the references to race in these books of Priestley’s are entirely random and gratuitous. It’s not just that Priestley’s fictional characters have a habit of dropping the “n” word from time to time — including characters who are presumably speaking Priestley’s own mind. It’s also offensive passages like this one, from the sixth chapter of The Good Companions, Priestley’s successful 1929 novel. One of his characters, Inigo Jollifant, walking near a train station, is surprised to hear someone playing the banjo:

Tired as he was, Inigo found that his feet itched to break into a double shuffle. If the station had been crammed with grinning coons, buried under melons and cotton blossoms, he would not have been surprised.

Or this telling passage from the Lancashire chapter of English Journey, in which Priestley describes his visit to a school in a Liverpool slum quarter for mostly mixed-race children. Most of the girls, the vicar at the school told him, would probably become prostitutes, “following the female family tradition of the quarter.”

I suggested that some of them, especially those with negro blood in them, might prove to have theatrical talent, like the “high yallers” of Harlem; but he replied that in his experience they had never shown any signs of possessing such talent. (But have they ever been given a chance? I doubt it.)

Sadly, this talented playwright, this supposedly progressive thinker who was one of Britain’s leading intellectuals, was also one of those people who felt compelled to pigeon-hole people. To Priestley, what black people were good at was pickin’ and grinnin’.

Eddie Anderson was Donald in You Can't Take It With You. Anderson also worked with Jack Benny as "Rochester."

What a strange pathology! But it was widely shared in his era. I saw another random example of it over the holidays in the Academy-Award-winning movie You Can’t Take It With You. Toward the end of the movie, the eccentric Vanderhoof family is packing up to move from Manhattan to Connecticut, and there’s a quick exchange in the kitchen between Rheba, the household cook, and Donald, the handyman, who are black.

Donald tells Rheba he’s worried about having to move — what if they don’t have “relief” in Connecticut? Assured by Rheba that they have “relief” everywhere, Donald gives a wide smile and relaxes. (This cringe-making scene cannot be blamed on George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, who wrote the original Broadway hit play; it appears only in the movie and must therefore be blamed on Frank Capra.)

That was in 1938. But public stereotyping of black people was still going on in the United States in 1959, when Bob Gibson, one of the heroes of my youth, was coming up with the St. Louis Cardinals. In his fine autobiography, Stranger to the Game, which we just finished, the Hall of Fame pitcher tells how he was interviewed by Sports Illustrated in 1959 during spring training.

I felt reasonably good about the interview. When the magazine came out, there was a forgettable short story accompanied by a photograph with an unforgettable caption that said something like: “I don’t do no thinkin’ about pitchin’. I just hum dat pea.”

Gibson's 1961 Topps baseball card

Gibson was a college graduate and an articulate man who certainly did not talk like Uncle Remus. Gibson resented the “quote” (he never said any such thing, let alone in dialect) and boycotted the magazine for decades.

How might a black actor feel about speaking the lines of a playwright who thought about black people as J. B. Priestley did? Well, the plays themselves — we’ve read several besides Time and the Conways and An Inspector Calls, which we’ve seen — don’t get into race. Presumably Priestley was careful to keep it out of his plays, and if he hadn’t, we suppose that a Shaw Festival director would make cuts and alterations.

The actors at Shaw Festival have no qualms about the works of Bernard Shaw, despite his shocking and frequently expressed views on Soviet totalitarianism, next to which Priestley’s off-handed racism hardly seems worth mentioning. So bring on an all-black cast for the next An Inspector Calls!