Monday, June 20, 2011

Magisterial Writing

Despite a huge backlog of really fine reading matter waiting for my attention, I found myself drawn to an old paperback on my shelf of the seemingly last collection of the writings of Janet Flanner, the longtime New Yorker Paris correspondent, who wrote under the pen-name "Genet." (Yes, I know the second e should have a circumflex but this program being what it is...)

This volume of her uncollected writings followed what would have seemed to have been a complete gathering of her articles contributed over 50 years in four previous volumes. It was published in 1979. Reading these pieces--many of them were written on reporting trips to Germany before and after World War II, with side trips to Vienna and Warsaw after the war--makes one remember what great writing is like. Her prose always has a knowing, commanding tone without acting like it does. But it grabs you and holds you, just as her seemingly numberless Letters From Paris did every time The New Yorker arrived with one of her pieces, almost every month or more frequently.

In this particular collection, you get to read a famous early profile she wrote in the early 30s of Hitler, and then a post-war account of the Nuremberg trials, along with side trips to Bayreuth for the Wagner Festival and Vienna for a description of how the state opera carried on postwar without its own opera house. Lastly, there are several pieces from Italy in the very early 50s. All superb, of course, but probably the perfect subject for such a magisterial writer--and I use the word to mean one with great authority or assurance--was the writer Thomas Mann, resident in the U.S. after fleeing Germany in the late 1930s. Flanner, whose elegant style makes one forget at times that she was born an Indiana Quaker, takes the full measure of Mann the individual as well as the famed author.

Her 1947 "Letter From the Ghetto" recounts conversations with the few surviving Polish Jewish leaders, who are wondering why the U.S. was taking quite good care of former Nazis it deemed of possible use in the already incipient Cold War, while denying entry to the Jewish refugees who might quite justifiably have been given the unused German and Austrian quotas from the war years as an easy bureaucratic device. Everywhere she went she seemed to put her finger on the key issues that others missed amid the turmoil of largely destroyed Europe.

She wrote with the ease also that came from knowing everyone who mattered in Paris. Her obituary of Margaret Anderson, who ran The Little Review, and her review of the memoirs of Sylvia Beach, who published Joyce's Ulysses when no one else could or would, are magnificent, especially as she knew the subjects well. Probably to me the capstone was a 1975 piece that summed up the "years alone" Alice B. Toklas spent in Paris after Gertrude Stein's death in 1946. I don't think I've ever seen a more comprehensive summary of both the difficulties of the survivor and the sheer amazing quality of her story.

Friday, June 17, 2011

It's Bloomsday

For those who find Joyce endlessly fascinating, yesterday--June 16--Bloomsday as it's called--remains the great day of the year to deal with all things Irish, beyond March 17, which, so far as I have gathered, is hardly celebrated in Ireland save for pleasing tourists. But this was the day--June 16, 1904--Joyce picked to be the time of his great novel, Ulysses. Everything occurs within the 24-hour span. Apparently, it was the day he met his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle.

What is it about Joyce that is so compelling? Ulysses, of course, is the definition of a tour de force. First of all, he sets up a wonderful, often satirical parallel with Homer's original. Joyce, raised a Catholic but an exile both from religion and his homeland for most of his life, understood what it meant to wander as Odysseus did; in Joyce's case it was from Rome to Trieste to Zurich to Paris. It was not a romantic journey, either, as he struggled to make a living while writing his masterpiece(s). So Leopold Bloom wanders through Dublin, encountering everyone from a bile-spouting editor who rejects his ad canvassing (Aeolus), to observing a girl on the beach (Nausicaa) to an encounter with a blind, bigoted old soldier (Cyclops). He befriends a young man in search of himself, Stephen Dedalus, sort of a stand-in for Joyce himself, and who may become a surrogate for Bloom's deceased son, and finally Bloom manages to wind up first in the last night thoughts of his wife Molly, who has committed adultery in their house that very afternoon.

It is the richness of life that Joyce captures, including the ads of the day, references to the art and music of the ages, and even some arcane satire of Irish intellectuals discussing Shakespeare. Some of his parallels with the Odyssey are fantastic--the enchantress Circe appears in the form of bawdyhouse madam Bella Cohen. Nor does Joyce shrink from including all thoughts, many uncensored, including the scatalogical and the sado-masochistic, contrasting the vision of Bloom engaging in voyeurism as he gazes upon a group of young women on the beach while bringing himself to climax with the sublime yet wordly measures of Mozart's DaPonte operas, for which Joyce reputedly enjoyed exercising his tenor voice.

If you couldn't get a bad childhood memory out of your system--consider Father Dolan, who punishes the young Stephen in the preceding set-up novel for Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, only to appear hundreds of pages later in the dream sequence of Nighttown popping out of a jack-in-the-box to remind Stephen that he remains "a lazy little loafer." The quotidian discussions of a group of men put together in a carriage to ride to a funeral become timeless in Joyce's hands.

You somehow keep reading while realizing that the master has been engaging in wordplay among multiple languages. Each chapter is written in a different style--from the headlines describing the scene in the newspaper office to the dramatic events in Nighttown written as a play. In one chapter, he provides a complete history of English language and literature. Another chapter is written in imitation of the catechism Joyce learned as a boy.

While some have told me of the even greater wonders to be found in Finnegan's Wake, where Joyce seems to have sought to invent his own language, I find his last work virtually impenetrable. I know every time I pick up Ulysses, though, at any page I will discover things I never noticed before.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Pomp and Circumstance

My daughter Vanessa was awarded her Master of Public Health degree recently at a nice ceremony the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conducted at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore. She was part of a rather large group of MPH candidates, other health-related masters, and PhD and DPH recipients. It was noteworthy to me because she had worked very hard in an intensive one-year (eleven-month) program that effectively compacted two years of work into one. She also took even more of all the science courses her mother and I never went near.

The large complement of degree candidates did remind me of the late Georgetown President Father Healy's comment upon awarding 616 J.D. degrees to Eileen's class at Georgetown Law just a quarter-century ago, when he preceded his conferral of those degrees with the introductory "With fear and trembling for the future of Western civilization..."

I'm hoping she finds something she enjoys by way of work--even though the common parlance these days would have it that new graduates had better be satisfied with getting a job. Until proven otherwise, however, I have great confidence that with some application on her part, she will wind up with something she will enjoy as well as earn a paycheck. At a time when many also are questioning the value of much that is labeled higher education, it struck me that she did get reasonably good value for her year's investment at Hopkins. She threw herself into both her coursework and her required project work and I suspect made the most of the bargain of getting all this in one year.

She also enjoyed living in the Mt. Vernon section of downtown Baltimore and frequented some of the more interesting eating places and entertainment venues there. In honor of her getting her MPH, her friend Dave's birthday, and our 41st anniversary, we celebrated at Woodberry Kitchen, an excellent restaurant that focuses on locally-grown and natural ingredients, which has become common, of course, but also presents a varied and stimulating carte de jour. Best of all was a selection of four varieties of revived local Chesapeake Bay oysters followed (in my case) by perfectly-braised veal accompanied by farro and wild mushrooms. By the by, in case you're interested in who serves what I regard as the tastiest mussels in the area, I heartily recommend Granville Moore's, a old barely-renovated bar on the now-being-redeveloped H Street, N.E., near the Atlas Theater complex.

The commencement remarks by the incumbent Maryland Secretary of Health (and recently interim head of the Food and Drug Administration) were, most significantly, blessedly brief. I might have found the address at the overall Hopkins commencement the next day on Homewood Field, the university's lacrosse citadel, worth hearing as they were delivered by the editor and columnist Fareed Zakaria, who had written only days before an enlightening column on why Obama was right on about the Middle East. But mine was the only vote favoring attending the big ceremony, as it seems the MPH crowd figured they had all sat through both their own ceremony, and no more than a few years ago, their own undergraduate commencements.

In a strange sort of way I tend to like commencement ceremonies, despite the ludicrousness of much of the content. I sat through two of them at Cornell--for my graduation and Vanessa's-- where headline speakers are never on hand because the university generally grants no honorary degrees and the university's President delivers the commencement address. I can't say I recall much of either talk. I think this year's convocation speaker was Rudy Giuliani, whose shelf sell date has clearly expired.

I also missed my "second commencement"--from law school, mainly because I hurried back from Reserve basic training to complete my degree one semester late in January; I did get a copy of the program from that following June and I think the lead honorary degree was given, in Harvard's infinite wisdom, to the Shah of Iran. But probably my first introduction to the general zaniness of these occasions was when a more knowledgable (musically, that is) high school classmate mentioned to me that the recessional, Berlioz's Marche Hongroise (Hungarian March), being played at the end of our ceremony came from a scene in his now-more-often performed opera, Le Damnation de Faust, when the condemned march into Hell.