How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Read online

  How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken

  Essays

  Daniel Mendelsohn

  for

  Bob Silvers

  Chip McGrath

  and for

  Bob Gottlieb

  Contents

  Introduction:

  How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken

  Part One Heroines

  Novel of the Year (The Lovely Bones)

  Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf (The Hours)

  Victims on Broadway I (The Glass Menagerie)

  Victims on Broadway II (A Streetcar Named Desire)

  The Women of Pedro Almodóvar (Volver)

  Lost in Versailles (Marie Antoinette)

  Looking for Lucia (Lucia at the Met)

  Not an Ideal Husband (Ted Hughes’s Alcestis)

  Part Two Heroics

  A Little Iliad (Troy)

  Alexander, the Movie! (Alexander)

  Duty (300)

  It’s Only a Movie (Kill Bill: Volume 1)

  Nailed! (Dale Peck’s Hatchet Jobs)

  The Way Out (Everyman)

  Mighty Hermaphrodite (Middlesex)

  Part Three Closets

  The Passion of Henry James (The Master)

  The Two Oscar Wildes (The Importance of Being Earnest)

  The Tale of Two Housmans (The Invention of Love)

  The Truman Show (the Stories and Letters of Truman Capote)

  Winged Messages (Angels in America)

  An Affair to Remember (Brokeback Mountain)

  The Man Behind the Curtain (John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe)

  Part Four Theater

  The Greek Way (Greek tragedies in New York)

  Bitter-Sweet (Private Lives)

  Double Take (The Producers)

  Harold Pinter’s Celebration (Pinter Retrospective at Lincoln Center)

  Part Five War

  Theaters of War (Thucydides’ History)

  The Bad Boy of Athens (Medea on Broadway)

  For the Birds (Nathan Lane’s Frogs)

  September 11 at the Movies (World Trade Center and United 93)

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction:

  How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken

  The words critic and critical, which tend to leave a slightly sour taste in the mouth of contemporary American culture (“Don’t be so critical!”; “Everyone’s a critic!”), are derived, indirectly, from the Classical Greek word krinô, “to judge.” The noun that comes from that verb, kritês, simply denotes a person who makes judgments—this being another word that provokes a certain anxiety today. (“Who am I to judge?”; “Don’t be so judgmental!”) For the Greeks, a kritês could be any number of things: an arbitrator in a dispute; a historian (who, according to one Greek author writing in the second century A.D., must approach his raw data in the manner of an interrogating judge in a legal proceeding); an interpreter of dreams; or one of the aesthetic referees who judged the fiercely competitive theatrical competitions held each spring in Athens. The playwright Aristophanes liked to interrupt the action of his comedies in order to make flattering appeals to this or that kritês watching the show. Not infrequently, he won.

  Critic, then, is a word with a rich and suggestive pedigree. As, indeed, are other words derived from krinô, words like criterion (a means for judging or trying, a standard) and—a word that you might not have suspected is even remotely related to “critic”—crisis, which in Greek means a separating, a power of distinguishing; a judgment, a means of judging; a trial. For what is a crisis, if not an event that forces us to distinguish between the crucial and the trivial, forces us to reveal our priorities, to apply the most rigorous criteria and judge things?

  This book is a collection of judgments: which is to say, a collection of essays by a critic. As might be guessed from the foregoing excursion into etymologies, the critic in question has a background in Classics. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I did my graduate work in Greek and Latin, with an eye to a career in academia; instead I became a journalist. This fact will help to explain two important features of this collection.

  The first, and less important, is its content. The subjects of many of the pieces collected here, which span a number of genres—books, theater, films, and translations—and represent most of the fifteen years I’ve been writing as a professional critic, have some connection with Greek or Roman culture. There are essays about a movie version of the Trojan War and a steroidal biopic about Alexander the Great; about an updated feminist spin on Euripides’ Medea and a romanticized drama about the Classics scholar and poet A. E. Housman; about a contemporary verse adaptation, by Sylvia Plath’s widower, of a Greek tragedy about a man who treats his wife badly, and a tendentious popular account of the Peloponnesian War. As this list suggests, I’ve generally been less interested in writing about classical texts or culture per se than in taking a look at the ways in which popular culture interprets and adapts the Classics—not least because of what those interpretations and adaptations tell us about the present, about us. (The Athenians may well have thought that Medea was about language and politics; we think it’s about desperate housewives.) Only one of the essays here, in fact, is about a book that is scholarly in nature, and that book caught my interest precisely because it attempted to use the Classics as a weapon in a contemporary political battle. Such attempts to use, and abuse, the classical heritage in order to influence mainstream political and cultural discussions, from the conduct of the war in Iraq to the legal status of gay marriage, are the object of more than one judgment in these pages.

  A background in the Classics accounts for another, more important and I hope more consistent feature of this collection (which, after all, consists mostly of pieces that have no connection at all to the classical world). When you are exposed for a long time to the astringent beauties of the classical languages—the hard and unyielding grammars, the uncompromising demands of syntax and exigencies of meter, none of which admit of either shoddiness or approximation—you can develop a taste for a certain kind of rigor; you may begin to seek it elsewhere. To my mind, that rigor serves as a kind of template not only for the method that the critic necessarily applies to his subject (art, theater, film, dance, literature, whatever) but also for the qualities to be sought in the works themselves. Those qualities are: a meaningful coherence of form and content; the subtle but precise deployment of detail in the service of that meaning; vigor and clarity of expression; and seriousness of purpose. Since I see no reason why those standards shouldn’t be imposed on (and those qualities sought in) the products of mainstream culture—at least those with aspirations to seriousness—as much as on those of high culture, I’ve attempted to seek, and to impose, accordingly in my own critical writing.

  Those conjugations, declensions, and meters can take you away from texts altogether; can give you a taste for what you might call the infinite interpretability of things—not of this or that book or play (with their hidden coherences, turns of phrase, and elegances of poetic diction, which, armed with your paradigms and dictionaries, you eventually learn to decipher) but of whole cultures. These, too, can in their way be reduced to their essential components—to their grammars and vocabularies, so to speak. Civilizations, too, can be “read.” (And judged.) It says something significant, for instance, about the Greek conception of the mind and its activities that hidden in the very old verb oida, “to know,” is a fragment of an even more ancient word, id-, “to s
ee.” (It’s the vid- in video.) And it might well say something meaningful about the Greeks and their understanding of the complicated and perhaps inevitably tragic relationship between art, which gives meaning to life, and death (which gives meaning to life in a different way) that the name of that shining god of Art, Apollo, is so closely linked to the verb apollumi, “to destroy.”

  This brings me to my title—which, as it happens, has nothing whatsoever to do with the ancient world, although the words in question belong to a writer whom you could certainly characterize as the twentieth century’s answer to Euripides: a modern playwright who, like his ancient antecedent, had a particular genius for creating memorable heroines as mouthpieces for universal human emotions.

  “How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken” is a quote from the stage directions to a play by Tennessee Willliams, a great American drama about the victimization of a fragile girl who is tragically in love with beautiful, breakable things: the famous glass menagerie that gives the play its title, and which of course provides a richly useful symbol for the themes of delicacy and brittleness, of the lovely illusions that can give purpose to our lives and the hard necessities that can shatter them. Interestingly, Williams’s phrase occurs in a stage direction not about the play’s set design but about a certain musical leitmotif he has in mind, one that (he writes, in his typically meticulous directions)

  expresses the surface vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and inexpressible sorrow…. When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken. Both of those ideas should be woven into the recurring tune.

  I suppose that one reason that this haunting line struck me with such force when I first came across it is that it acknowledges, with perfect simplicity, the inevitable entwining of beauty and tragedy that is the hallmark of the Greek theater, and is a consistent element in the works that have always moved me the most, from the plays of Euripides to the History of Thucydides, from the light comedies of Noël Coward to the films of Pedro Almodóvar. As the Greeks knew well, it’s the potential for being broken—which boils down to the knowledge that we all must die—that gives resonance and meaning to the small part of the universe that is our life. The necessity, in the end, of yielding to hard and inexplicable realities that are beyond our control is a tragic truth; without that, all you’ve got is mush—melodrama, and Hallmark sentimentality. That so much of contemporary culture is characterized by this kind of sentimentality, by a seeming preference for false “closures” over a strong and meaningful confrontation with real and inalterable pain, is a cultural crisis. That crisis is another theme that runs through many of the essays here.

  But to my mind Williams’s haunting phrase illuminates not only the nature of certain works that have preoccupied me, but also something about the nature of the critics who judge those works. For (strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even) critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken. What motivates so many of us to write in the first place is, to begin with, a great passion for a subject (Tennessee Williams, Balanchine, jazz, the twentieth-century novel, whatever) that we find beautiful; and, then, a kind of corresponding anxiety about the fragility of that beauty.

  Many of the reviews here are, in fact, judgments about the success of contemporary attempts to interpret, or adapt, or reexamine subjects about which I have deep feelings: the grand and glittering Homeric epics and Virginia Woolf’s gossamer Mrs. Dalloway; the comedies of Mel Brooks or the tragedies of Euripides; the Classics as a symbol, now being used and abused by this or that faction (the gays, the neocons) to score points in the Culture Wars. And those pieces that are about new work for which there is no original still seek to make use of standards, of criteria, that like so much of contemporary culture are, in fact, rooted in certain ancient traditions which are themselves beautiful—and fragile. If I mention Aristotle’s or Horace’s theories of poetry in my review of Troy, it’s not out of some kind of loyalty to my subject—product placement for the Classics—but because no one has ever stated as crisply and usefully just what it is that epic is supposed to do for its audience.

  Respect for the integrity of the original stems, indeed, not from some blind curatorial reflex (hence my conclusion, in one of these pieces, that Aeschylean tragedy is better served by productions that put, say, a bathtub and some circular saw blades onstage than by “authentic” stagings complete with ancient-looking muslin cloaks and sandals), but instead precisely from a sense that the classics of any genre are classic in the first place precisely because they have always been, and will always be, deeply relevant to, and incomparably illuminating of, human experience. That relevance, that ability to enlighten, are themselves rather beautiful; they’re the ultimate standards, kriteria, by which any work is judged.

  Rather than organizing the pieces collected here chronologically or by genre, I’ve grouped them according to some broad categories. When you first start writing as a freelancer, you’re happy to take whatever work you can get; over time, though, it becomes clear both to your editors and to yourself that there are certain subjects you’re attracted to, certain motifs you keep finding no matter what you’re writing about. Another way of saying this is that however random the assignments you accept, you always end up writing your own intellectual autobiography. As I read over the past fifteen years’ worth of my articles and reviews, I was struck by the way in which, however diverse the subjects under review—The Lovely Bones and Brokeback Mountain, Henry James and United 93—I’ve kept returning to certain general themes. These themes, perhaps not surprisingly, are the same ones that interested me when I was a graduate student in Classics working on a dissertation about heroines in Greek tragedy and the heroes they often compete with, and sometimes displace, in times of civic crisis or war: the representation of women and men, of femininity and masculinity, in popular culture; gender and sexuality—particularly, since I’m gay, homosexuality; the techniques of tragedy and comedy; the translation and adaptation of classics for general audiences; and the often fraught intersection of literature and war. So I’ve organized my essays accordingly here, although they can of course be read in any order at all.

  —New York City, October 2007

  PART ONE

  Heroines

  Novel of the Year

  On May 22, 2002, six weeks before the official publication date of Alice Sebold’s debut novel, which is narrated from Heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who’s been raped and murdered, the novelist and former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen appeared on the Today show and declared that if people had one book to read during the summer, “it should be The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. It’s destined to be a classic along the lines of To Kill a Mockingbird, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in years.” Viewers did what they were told, and seemed to agree. Within days of Quindlen’s appearance, Sebold’s novel had reached the number-one position on Amazon.com, and her publisher, Little, Brown, decided to increase the size of the first printing from 35,000—already healthily optimistic for a “literary” first novel by an author whose only other book, a memoir, was a critical but not commercial success—to 50,000 copies; a week before the book’s official publication date, it was in its sixth printing, with nearly a quarter million copies in print.

  One week after publication, after Time magazine’s book critic Lev Grossman had declared the novel “the breakout fiction debut of the year,” the book was in its eighth printing, and there were 525,000 copies in print; two weeks and three additional printings later, the number was just under a million. By the end of September, it had become clear that the book was a phenomenon of perhaps unprecedented proportions: an eighteenth printing of a quarter million copies, itself more than seven times the number originally planned for the first printing, put the number of
copies in print at over two million. Such figures suggest that this work may be more than merely the novel of the year: the Barnes & Noble fiction buyer has declared that “a book like this comes around once in a decade.” If not, indeed, longer. Little, Brown’s marketing director has commented that it’s “one of those books that rarely comes along, that reminds you why you chose this business.”

  Reviews of The Lovely Bones have been almost uniformly good, ranging from very warm (Michiko Kakutani, in the Times, called it “deeply affecting”) to ecstatic (The New Yorker called it “a stunning achievement”); but the pattern of the book’s remarkable rise to preeminence among novels published during the past year, if not the past few years, suggests that it owes its success to word of mouth. Indeed, it must be remembered that its spectacular rise was achieved without the help of the now-defunct Oprah’s Book Club, which floated more than one small first novel onto the best-seller lists.

  So there can be no question that the book’s popular appeal is deep and authentic. One measure of this is the fact that while the novel has, in its fifth month after publication, finally fallen to the second spot on the Times best-seller list, and to the fifth on Amazon.com, it has received a remarkably high number of customer reviews—842, as of this writing—this being perhaps the real measure of reader engagement. By contrast, Ian McEwan’s Atonement (a best-selling book, according to Amazon, that readers of The Lovely Bones are also buying) is number thirty-five in ranking, with less than a quarter of the number of customer reviews that Sebold’s book received; Austerlitz, by Sebold’s near namesake, the late W. G. Sebald, has a ranking of 2,073 and a mere thirty-eight customer reviews. Proust’s ranking is 9,315, with fifty-seven reviews.