Wild Rose MacDowell

On December 14, 1894 Edward MacDowell performed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl. Although it had been first performed in Boston some five years before, the concerto had not previously been performed here. After all, before

On December 14, 1894 Edward MacDowell performed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Anton Seidl. Although it had been first performed in Boston some five years before, the concerto had not previously been performed here. After all, before the advent of the phonograph and the radio, orchestral music could be heard only in live performance.

Thus, the piece was in a very real sense new to New Yorkers—and MacDowell himself was a magnificent pianist at the top of his form. He triumphed, and in the hour of performance, his work seemed to stand on the edge of immortality. W. J. Henderson of the New York Times found the concerto impossible to speak of “in terms of judicial calmness, for it is made of the stuff that calls for enthusiasm…here is one young man who has placed himself on a level with the men owned by the world.”

In fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, the New York–born MacDowell was world-renowned as America’s greatest living composer. His concerti, sonatas, tone poems, and song cycles were being performed throughout Europe, in Japan, even in South Africa. Some contemporaries—Seidl in particular—declared him superior to Brahms. Yet today, he is nearly forgotten.

He was born Edward Alexander MacDowell, at 220 Clinton Street in Manhattan, on December 18, 1860. His father was a prosperous wholesale milk dealer who loved the arts; his mother, having seen to it that he knew French, Spanish, German, Latin, and Greek, arranged his first piano lessons. In 1876 he was sent to the Paris Conservatoire, then as now one of the world’s leading conservatories.

At sixteen MacDowell was the youngest applicant in a pool of 300, and his performance in the entrance examinations won him one of the two scholarships awarded that year to foreign students. Yet he found the Conservatoire’s method of teaching piano—which relied heavily on sight-reading skills—to be pointless and absurd. His instructors wanted him to play music with the score turned upside down or to transpose it into a different key, and directed him to correct the work of earlier composers, such as Bach, so as to make it conform to the Conservatoire’s notions of what constituted proper composition. MacDowell wanted to work and felt he was being taught to play games.

After hearing the Russian virtuoso Anton Rubenstein burn up the piano in a bravura performance of Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in B-Flat Minor at the Paris Exposition of 1878, he resolved to leave Paris, where he would never learn to play like that. Despite his youth (he was now eighteen), he won a place at the Frankfurt Conservatory, where most of his classmates were closer to 30. There he found instructors who, as McDowell wrote, dared to teach and play the classics “as if they had actually been written by men with blood in their veins.”

One day, one of MacDowell’s teachers, Joachim Raff, a composer, interrupted MacDowell while he was supposed to be practicing. He was actually just fooling around at the keyboard. Raff asked about the piece MacDowell was working on. Embarrassed at being caught idling, MacDowell, though usually candid, said he was working on a composition. Raff asked to see it when it was done. Feeling trapped (and liking Raff, as well), MacDowell chose to deliver. He wrote his first piano concerto over the next two weeks. Raff glanced at it. Then he scribbled a letter and said, “Take it to Liszt.”

Franz Liszt had created the stereotype of the great Romantic pianist and lived the rock star’s life, groupies and all. Now, in the fall of 1881, he lived in semi-retirement in Weimar. MacDowell arrived at Liszt’s home with Raff’s letter and the concerto’s manuscript. Shyness overcame him; he could not raise his hand to the doorbell, and so he sat in Liszt’s garden for an hour. Then the old man himself came outside and escorted MacDowell into his house. After MacDowell had warmed himself, he played the concerto. Liszt knew a good thing when he heard it and used his influence to have MacDowell’s work placed on concert programs. He also persuaded his own publishers to take the piano concerto.

MacDowell remained in Germany for the next decade, teaching, composing, and performing. He married one of his students, a young American woman named Marian Nevins, in 1884. The marriage was a wonderful success: Marian later wrote, “There was an extraordinary camaraderie between us which we never lost… Until he died, he gave me what few women ever have [from a man], his absolutely undivided affection…”

The first concerto premiered in 1885 and made MacDowell famous overnight. Stirring in mood, dazzling in technique, it provided him with a splendid vehicle for concert performances. So did his fiendishly difficult Witches’ Dance, a bit of showmanship that knocked their socks off across Europe. Critics hailed MacDowell’s mastery of the keyboard, his supreme power and control, as well as his striking stage presence. Tall, slender and broad-shouldered, with muscular arms and hands, he had jet-black hair and flashing blue eyes. All this, along with a flamboyantly waxed dark red mustache, must have made him irresistible.

In 1888, the MacDowells came home. They settled in Boston, then the center of American musical life. There MacDowell taught and went on national concert tours. His piano miniatures Woodland Sketches and New England Idylls, his settings of “To a Wild Rose” and “To a Water Lily” were on drawing room pianos throughout the country even as his larger works were being performed from Portland to San Francisco. During his Boston years, he wrote four massive piano sonatas, the Tragica, Eroica, Norse. and Keltic, each investing (or warping, as MacDowell self-deprecatingly said) the sonata form with symphonic grandeur.

On January 23, 1896 MacDowell gave a return performance of his Concerto with the Boston Symphony at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Seth Low, president of Columbia University, was in the audience. Earlier that year, Columbia had received a grant to establish its first professorship of music. In April 1896, Low offered MacDowell the job. He was thirty-five years old.

MacDowell was the music department. He taught seven year-long courses, each meeting two to three hours weekly, and—without teaching assistant or secretary—dealt with everything from purchasing desks, pianos, and library books to hiring outside lecturers, ordering chalk, and keeping the instruments in tune. (He often retuned them himself—it was easier than fighting with the university’s business managers, who refused to understand that pianos do go out of tune.) MacDowell slaved over the organization and content of his lectures to have them appear spontaneous, and also provided substantial individual instruction and individual examinations.

In 1901, Seth Low was elected mayor of New York and resigned from Columbia’s presidency. His successor, Nicholas Murray Butler, was a very different kind of man—a power seeker, far more interested in administration and in the idea of the educator than in ideas themselves, though he had taught philosophy. A mere five years in the classroom had convinced Butler that education was a science. He had founded Teachers College, successfully lobbied for compulsory state licensing of teachers (all of whom were required to have a degree in education, thus promoting the interests of the education industry), and advocated the centralization of the New York City schools, all reflecting Butler’s faith that centralized authority in the hands of men such as himself inevitably led to improvement.

Unfortunately, MacDowell chose this moment to propose restructuring Columbia’s curriculum, passionately arguing that some education in at least one of the fine arts was as essential as in science or history. Butler opposed the idea, largely because the mainstream faculty felt threatened and it seemed more politic to soothe their feelings. But MacDowell persisted. Butler saw this as a challenge to his own authority and vision for Columbia. He was not above spreading sly, personal speculations about MacDowell’s character, temperament, and intelligence among colleagues—all behind the composer’s back. MacDowell’s proposal was definitively turned down in September 1903. He resigned the following February.

In March 1905, MacDowell was knocked down by a hansom cab at Broadway and 21st Street. One wheel rolled over his spine: the injuries were physically and emotionally debilitating. He had been depressed since his resignation; now his depression darkened. Over the summer, his hair turned white. By November, his gait had become unsteady. His physicians never quite diagnosed his illness: Alan H. Levy, his most recent biographer, speculates that his depression, deepened by his physical injuries, led to a progressive aphasia. By the winter of 1905–06, he was dying. Friends raised funds to defray his medical expenses. Seth Low privately gave $2,000 to Marian MacDowell and lent the MacDowells his car. Butler didn’t even send a get-well card.

Now he was attended by a full-time nurse and a servant who carried him about. By the summer of 1907, he no longer recognized his parents. On January 23, 1908 his wife said to him, “Won’t you give me a kiss?” He managed to pucker his lips. He looked at her for the first time in days with something like recognition. Then he stopped breathing. He was forty-six years old.

His reputation was as the wild rose that fades. By the 30s, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, who should have known better, dismissed MacDowell and his contemporaries as genteel, over-gentlemanly, and bourgeois. Copland claimed that none of them wrote with fire in the eye: “There were no Dostoyevskys, no Rimbauds among them; no one expired in the gutter like Edgar Allan Poe.”

Alan H. Levy has called this phenomenon “the great erasure.” He suggests that the Copland generation wanted to believe itself the first American composers in whom the nation could take pride. They weren’t, of course, but the eclipse of MacDowell and the composers of his generation reflects how the Depression-era seizure of the nation’s musical establishment by the left sent much of America’s musical culture down the memory hole. Thomson finally admitted, shortly before his death, that MacDowell’s reputation might supplant that of MacDowell’s contemporary Charles Ives, whose cantankerous personality and freakish originality long charmed the critics. Only in the last few years have people begun quietly admitting that most of Ives’s so-called major works are unlistenable.

Nicholas Murray Butler remained president of Columbia until 1945. During World War I, he purged the faculty of antiwar professors and did the same to leftists during the 1930s and 1940s. The Republicans nominated him for vice president in 1912; he sought their presidential nomination in 1920. His support for the Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928, one of many attempts between the wars to achieve peace without creating a means to enforce it, won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. He, too, is almost forgotten.

New York Press, April 30, 2003

Images of Elsewhere

Waiting for the light to change at Broadway and 18th, the other night, I eavesdropped on a couple of guys who, like me, had just come from seeing Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Our Lady of 121st Street at the Union Square Theater. They were talking about the unconventional relationship between the set and the action of the play, hardly any of which actually takes place in the space we spend the evening looking at—a large, institutional room that, depending on how the light is falling, can look like either a funeral parlor lobby

[From New York Press, March 18, 2003]

Stephen Adly Guirgis, John Patrick Shanley and Frank McGuinness

Waiting for the light to change at Broadway and 18th, the other night, I eavesdropped on a couple of guys who, like me, had just come from seeing Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Our Lady of 121st Street at the Union Square Theater. They were talking about the unconventional relationship between the set and the action of the play, hardly any of which actually takes place in the space we spend the evening looking at—a large, institutional room that, depending on how the light is falling, can look like either a funeral parlor lobby or a parochial school lounge. What’s curious is that the set should be so realistic, when—as the young men behind me were saying—we’re almost never supposed to take it literally. It’s there because most of the characters in Guirgis’s play have come to pay their respects to a teacher at the Catholic school they all attended. But Guirgis’s script seems, with the help of James Vermeulen’s artful lighting, to be forever taking us away from that room and relocating us in some even more transient place—a street corner, a confessional, a bar.

Guirgis’s characters are themselves transients of a sort. They’re latter-day O’Neill characters, damaged, disappointed and dispossessed: hookers and ex-hookers, alcoholics and lungers (well anyway, there’s an asthmatic), a closeted homosexual, an apostate amputee priest, a cop haunted by the moment of abstraction that led to his small son’s death, a man chained to his brain-damaged brother—you get the idea. Actually, Guirgis’s characters are more interesting than O’Neill’s. For one thing, they don’t keep saying the same thing over and over. Instead, they say things we haven’t heard before or have never heard expressed in quite that way. Also, they resist pity. Where O’Neill intends us to see his characters as tragic ruins of humanity, Guirgis writes in a way that commands respect rather than compassion for his characters, and he has no grand portentous literary agenda, both factors that keep his play from being a pretentious downer.

Our Lady of 121st Street was written for the LAByrinth Theater, where it was first produced last fall. Guirgis’s two earlier plays were both written for the LAByrinth as well; in fact, it was the actors John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman, co-artistic directors of the decade-old theater company, who encouraged Guirgis to begin writing for the stage. Since then, the New York Times seems to have anointed him God’s latest gift to American theater. No matter. Our Lady of 121st Street is worth seeing anyway.

One reason is that it’s full of wonderful voices. Another is that the LAByrinth seems to be fast becoming what Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater was to American theater in the 80s, not only a source for interesting new work but also the source of something like an esthetic. Originally founded as a sort of haven of artistic ethnicity (the acronym in the name stands for “Latino Actors Base”), LAByrinth has begun setting a standard for direction and ensemble performance that makes a good deal of what’s around it look phony, if it didn’t already look that way before.

Some of this is surely due to Hoffman, who has staged Our Lady with the same integrity and exquisite skill that informed his direction of Rebecca Gilman’s The Glory of Living in 2001 and his own performances in such roles as the drag queen protagonist of Joel Shumacher’s film Flawless and Konstantin in Mike Nichols’ production of The Seagull in Central Park. Here, Hoffman has orchestrated a cast of twelve, the best of whom all seem to be company members: Elizabeth Canavan, Liza Colon-Zayas, Ron Cephas Jones, Russell G. Jones, Richard Petrocelli, Portia, Felix Solis, David Zayas—they’re too numerous to mention, but they’re all wonderful.

Our Lady of 121st Street resists the conventions of the various genres it draws upon; and, let’s face it, it contains elements of the reunion play, the nun play, even the wheelchair play—all justly despised forms. No one really gets reunited (or even reconciled) and nothing gets reaffirmed (or even affirmed). Nothing is resolved at all, and even poor Sister Rose—the disappearance of whose body provides the single strand of plot on which Guirgis has hung what amounts to a succession of wonderful episodes—remains largely unretrieved; at any rate, there’s less of her at the end than we started out with. It seems she has nothing more to offer her former pupils. One reason that ever-present set works so well is that it’s the play’s only concrete reference to the two things that have brought the characters together: death and the Catholic-school values they carry around with them wherever they go.

The latest from John Patrick Shanley, Dirty Story, which opened at the Harold Clurman the same week that Our Lady of 121st Street transferred to Union Square, is another LAByrinth production. To the best of my knowledge, it’s unlike anything Shanley’s ever done before, a political allegory that recasts American foreign policy and the Mideast conflict as a torrid love affair glimpsed through a gauzy veil of popular culture stereotypes. Whether you greet it with mirth or disgust will probably depend on how open-minded or confused you are about American foreign policy. I am the very soul of confusion, so I enjoyed it immensely.

Shanley has always had a gift for creating complex, idiosyncratic characters and setting them at odds with one another. Also for making neurosis both lyrical and surreal. Also for plumbing the deep recesses of fear and desire that drive heterosexual passions and hatreds. Shanley fans will rejoice to hear that none of these elements is absent from Dirty Story. They may also be glad to learn that the play reunites the wonderful David Deblinger and Florencia Lozano, who played the mutually murderous pair locked in a battle-to-the-death marriage in Where’s My Money? (also a LAByrinth production).

Here Deblinger is Brutus, a poet and essayist of gargantuan ego and intellectual capacity. Lozano is Wanda, a dewy-eyed graduate student and aspiring novelist who has sent him a manuscript. In the opening scene, set in a public park, Brutus eviscerates both Wanda and her novel, while a bumbling Englishman sits listening to Mozart on headphones, making alternately whingeing and inane observations. How quickly you begin reading between the lines will depend on how attuned you are to the potential layers of meaning in references to real estate and borders and seemingly inconsequential remarks like, “Even conflict requires common ground.” But even the most dogged hunter after subtext will become mystified when the second scene finds Wanda and Brutus in the midst of a romantic dinner at his place, and a comic bout of role-playing, growing out of a discussion of the sous conversation in “The Perils of Pauline,” turns sado-masochistically nasty.

I won’t describe the Act I curtain, though I probably could without spoiling the effect. My guess is that Dirty Story is probably critic-proof. There’s so much more going on in the play at any given moment than what is happening in the story that descriptions of this or that element leave it still-virgin territory. What delights is the phenomenon of experiencing the play on both levels, the human and the allegorical.

Act II is where the fun really starts, as Lozano and Deblinger, now full-fledged embodiments of the Israeli and Palestinian viewpoints, are joined by Chris McGarry and Michael Puzzo, playing two characters named Frank and Watson, who embody America and England respectively. Questions of self-interest and historical alliance, national guilt and moral responsibility briefly surface and disappear again, eclipsed by the flashes of rage that erupt from Deblinger and Lozano or engulfed by eddies of cluelessness that swirl around McGarry and Puzzo. Shanley isn’t for or against anything or anyone. His satire takes in everyone—us, the Brits, the Israelis, the Palestinians, even the French—and he gets everyone right, too. What makes it all so delightful and disarming—in every sense—is that he isn’t looking to make any political point. He has no agenda. Even here, it’s people he’s really interested in, with the result that the pseudo-human and pseudo-political aspects in the play shed light on each other.

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, is a play that pays lip service to the idea of politics. An early work by the Irish playwright and screenwriter Frank McGuinness, it purports to explore the tragedy of the Western Front from the perspective of a platoon of Irish Protestant volunteers. In fact, McGuinness (himself a Catholic nationalist) merely uses the nationalistic and religious fervor of his characters as stepping stones on the way to the revelation that fanaticism leads to war which in turn breeds bigotry. (Who knew?)

The play’s only other apparent point—that some members of The Lost Generation were bent—will be equally unsurprising to Lincoln Center audiences (and anyone who’s ever heard of Siegfried Sassoon). McGuinness’ hero, Kenneth Pyper, a highly articulate—and unlikable, in Justin Theroux’s self-important performance—gay sculptor has cut short a sojourn in Paris on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, owing to a severe case of ennui. He aims to enlist in the hope of getting killed. Newly arrived at his barracks, he baits and provokes his less sophisticated comrades, seduces one, uncoils a bit, and eventually becomes less of an outsider. Meanwhile, there is much drum-beating and tub-thumping as well as prayer, hymn-singing. Incessant references are also made to the Red Hand of Ulster as well as her rivers, islands, battles, legends, archeology, and fraternal orders. It is all exceedingly tedious—the more so as Nicholas Martin has directed at a glacial pace. (The Titanic also gets considerable mention.)

It’s difficult not to draw an adverse comparison between Sons of Ulster and Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, given the presence of the divine Richard Easton in the cast of the McGuinness play. It was Easton who gave such a haunting performance as the aged A.E. Houseman in Stoppard’s play last season. Here he’s utterly wasted playing Pyper at eighty, a role that gives him about five minutes on stage. Like Sons of Ulster, Stoppard’s play was full of esoterica—classical jokes and historical references. But Stoppard is actually interested in the abstractions he takes on. He dramatizes them for that very reason: to see where they will go. McGuinness’s play fails to dramatize or contextualize anything, so that we’re forced to fall back on the poorly written and edited program notes the Lincoln Center theater has provided, which (among other lapses) have the British following “the roles of trench warfare.” (Italics all mine.)

To my mind, the play also fails to make connections between elements in its own story. The “Carson” referred to in the phrase “Carson’s men,” for instance, which the program glosses Wikipedially as “Sir Edward Henry Carson…dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ulster,’ for opposing Home Rule…”) happens to be the same Edward Henry Carson who prosecuted Oscar Wilde (or, rather, defended Queensberry, which ended up amounting to the same thing). Yet McGuinness’s hero, an Irish homosexual artist who has spent time in Paris (where Wilde died and is buried) apparently knows nothing of this and lets the name pass without comment. I wonder what universe that would happen in.

How Things Seem

New York Press, November 6, 2001

Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things; Strindberg’s Dance of Death with Mirren and McKellen; Artistic disarray at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater

There’s some first-rate acting going on at the Promenade Theater, where Gretchen Mol is appearing with Paul Rudd, Frederick Weller, and Rachel Weisz in a new play by Neil LaBute called The Shape of Things. The play is part comedy of sexual manners and part drama of sexual intrigue, which is to say that it feels a little like Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Howard Korder’s Boys’ Life while you are watching it, and like Dangerous Liaisons afterward.

LaBute is a filmmaker with something of a reputation for “misogyny,” or so reviewers keep saying. Actually, his work appears no more anti-woman than Mamet’s. It may be anti-people, but there’s nothing wrong with that, to my mind. LaBute seems to be primarily interested in power and cruelty. The young people he writes about commit emotional atrocities for no reason other than that they can and the amusement the fact affords them.

LaBute’s first film, In the Company of Men, was about the calculated seduction of a young deaf woman by a pair of businessmen. The Shape of Things has a similar plot: Adam (Rudd), a nebbishy undergraduate, falls for a shrill and pusillanimous art student with advanced ideas who sets about trying to destroy him. What’s curious is her choice of weapon, which is positive influence. She brings him down by making him over into a more attractive and self-confident person than he was before. LaBute isn’t advocating superficiality; on the contrary, in the play’s own most superficial strain he makes this horror-show of a girlfriend spout pseudo-intellectual apercus about dishonest art and our surface preoccupation with “the shape of things.”

If this sounds muddled, it is. LaBute’s intellectualizing is almost indistinguishable from his anti-heroine’s. Moreover, nearly everything about the play is artificial: the plot, the two central characters, the denouement. That it’s also riveting—and it is—is largely due to the quality of the acting, not from Weisz, who is strident and pedantic, or Rudd, who has an impossible task (playing an intelligent man hoodwinked by a woman who is obviously up to no good), but from Weller and Mol, who play two friends of Adam’s, a former not-quite-girlfriend and the former roommate to whom she is ambivalently affianced. These are contemporary humor characters—the almost-insipid blonde, the testosterone-happy best friend—and Mol and Weller play them with great subtlety and humanity. A couple of scenes in which Adam fails to recognize his repressed feelings for them, or theirs for him, are electrifying.

Two good characters and two great scenes are nothing to sneeze at, and there’s an art to making us want to see a predetermined story play out. The Greeks did that a lot. So did Mamet in Oleanna, where our knowledge of what had to happen seemed to militate against what we saw in front of us. Watching The Shape of Things, I found myself admiring the way in which LaBute had taken into account one of the contemporary realities of theatergoing: the knowledge we come to the theater with about where a play is going. It’s knowledge derived mostly from hype and buzz, things without which theater can’t survive.

LaBute has The Smashing Pumpkins blaring out at deafening levels between scenes, reportedly to keep audience members from talking to each other. He runs the two-hour play without intermission, like a movie. And he keeps us asking ourselves, “How are these characters going to get where they have to go?”—which doesn’t make his play literature. It’s a potboiler, but it’s good commercial theater.

What exactly constitutes “commercial” theater is a question I found myself pondering during a recent performance of The Dance of Death at the Broadhurst. There I was in a big Broadway house, watching Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, two of the greatest living actors of the English-speaking theater, acting their hearts out in one of Strindberg’s most unrelievedly grim and cerebral plays. There before me was one of those breathtaking Santo Loquasto sets that contrive to evoke squalor pleasingly and express a life of mind-crippling tedium while offering us no end of interesting things to look at.

Nothing very pleasant or uplifting was happening onstage: a husband and wife who loathed the sight of each other were battling it out, alternately abusing and tormenting each other, while a third character, played by David Strathairn, tried to make sense of it all, allowing himself to be used and manipulated by both. Not jolly stuff; yet all around me hundreds of people seemed, like myself, to be having a perfectly swell time. There was no restlessness, no checking one’s watch every five minutes. We were engrossed, entertained. And if, during the intermission, we found ourselves talking about other things, if the play stopped short of actually moving us, it wasn’t for anything lacking in the production or the performances. It just wasn’t King Lear, that was all—that was the worst you could say.

On the whole, it was like going to see a non-masterpiece performed by a world-class opera or ballet company. This in itself can be a rewarding and uplifting experience: exposing oneself to extraordinary human achievement—great dancing or singing or, in the case of Dance of Death, acting. For me, seeing Dance of Death was primarily about seeing Mirren in a stage vehicle that, unlike the Roundabout Theater’s dreadful A Month in the Country some years back, was worthy of her gifts. It’s always a treat to see McKellen doing what he does best, which is hamming adorably and what he does here.

But Mirren belongs to that rare breed of British actress who can be many different women at the same time, often within the same role. We’ve come to know her mostly through her role as the unsexualized heroine of the Prime Suspect series on television, but over the years, on film, she’s played a whole spectrum of differently tempered women in a man’s world—wives and mistresses, most of them, whose alliance with an obsessed or unbalanced man gives him a clarity or depth he might have lacked with a less interesting woman. Often, these roles have entailed little more than radiating a kind of sexualized intelligence that hinted, in silence or repose, at what Mirren hid below the surface. The Strindberg gives her a chance to be Hedda and Ophelia, Miss Julie, Lady Macbeth and Arkadina all at the same time.

There’s a long pause between acts, about three-quarters of the way through, where Mirren is offstage changing her costume and McKellen, left alone onstage, goes about in the dim light picking things up and putting them in order in a desultory way. It was during this lull that I found myself wondering what made this production any more “commercial” than any of the plays or productions New York’s institutional theaters send to Broadway. At a time when artistic directors all over the city are behaving like Broadway moguls and all the interesting, healthy, vibrant impulses in New York theater seem to be coming from outside the nonprofit sector—from institutional theaters abroad, like the Almeida in London, or from small independent producers—this seems like a valid question.

Certainly it’s worth asking in the context of the institutional meltdown that the New York Shakespeare Festival seems to be going through. Earlier this month, the theater announced the resignation of Fran Reiter from the top financial post. A former deputy mayor, Reiter was the latest in a succession of people who had tried to put the theater’s affairs in order. Then last week came the news that the two largest and most loyal donors on the theater’s board of directors had stepped down.

More than once, Times theater reporter Robin Pogrebin has characterized the situation at the Public as a dispute over money laced with personality conflicts. Her most recent article, from last week, made the current disarray sound like a function of George Wolfe’s unrealistic spending policies and an inability to play well with others. For people familiar with the history of the New York Shakespeare Festival under its founder, Joe Papp, and its subsequent fate under Wolfe, it’s hard not to suspect that there is more going on, and that at least some of it has to do with Wolfe’s lack of anything like an artistic policy and his apparent inability to behave like the artistic director of one of the country’s most influential nonprofit theaters.

Since taking over the Public, Wolfe has focused almost entirely on commercial productions, using the company chiefly as a tryout ground for productions he hopes will move to Broadway. The Times, equating “artistic” with commercial achievement (“The theater has also had its share of recent artistic successes. This season’s production featuring Elaine Stritch is already sold out…”), seems to have no problem with this but others may.

Mostly what the company has lacked under Wolfe is any serious or consistent vision, which may well be what its longtime supporters are finally responding to. Among the many basic things that Wolfe has failed to do, one was to keep up with what was happening in the nonprofit theater elsewhere in the world. Over the years, for instance, Papp had developed a longstanding alliance with London’s Royal Court Theater, a connection he mined as a source for new work. Wolfe let that relationship lapse—and just at a time when the Court and the Almeida Theater, in Islington, were becoming centers of a renaissance in writing for the stage. Under Stephan Daldry, the Court had opened its doors to unrepresented writers, while the Almeida, under Ian McDiarmid and Jonathan Kent, had opened its to movie folk, creating a synergy between the worlds of theater and independent film. The result was a general rekindling of interest in the stage.

If Wolfe had wanted to, he could have made us, his constituency, beneficiaries of that rebirth. If he’d done anything—anything at all—to foster a spirit of non-commercialism at the Public, New York’s other institutional theaters would have had to follow suit. A rivalry might have developed, like the rivalry between the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, which sparked so much great theater in the 70s and 80s, or like the rivalry that exists between the Royal Court and the Almeida now. Instead, what has happened is a wholesale betrayal of the philosophies upon which art and arts patronage are based.

Oklahoma, Oh No!

There’s a bright golden haze on the medder—and on just about everything else in Trevor Nunn’s revival of Oklahoma!—but it’s the hard, cold glint of lucre, not the burnished glow of harvest and renewal. This long-awaited production, which was hailed, when it opened four years ago at London’s Royal National Theatre, as a wholesale rethinking of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first-ever collaboration, arrives at the Gershwin looking strangely like a revival you might have expected to see at the Paper Mill Playhouse ten or fifteen years ago. It’s anxious to be liked but charmless, imitative rather than innovative or inventive, and very much of a piece with the poster art advertising the show here in New York—that garish computerized photo of a pretty, hay-sucking cowboy superimposed on a Chamber of Commerce vista of grass and sky. (The London artwork was more sophsticated.) Only two of the cast members from the RNT production appear here: Shuler Hensley, who plays the villainous hired hand Jud Fry as though he were playing Sparafucile, and Josefina Gabrielle, reprising her performance as an ingenue who might be a lot happier in a production of South Pacific.

So what gives? How could a production that caused such a stir over there be such a disappointment here?

A good deal seems to have hinged on casting. In London the role of Curly was played by the somber, laconic Australian actor Hugh Jackman, a then-newcomer who has since gone on to become something of a movie star. That he was sexy and smoldering and seemed innocent of Broadway-style vulgarity are easy things to imagine. (You can hear, on the London recording, how simply and unselfconsciously he sings; you can almost taste the absence of that dreadful Broadway ailment, a desire to please.) The young man who plays the role here in New York, Patrick Wilson, comes with a long string of regional and national-tour credits, as well as a recent stint in another big, boisterous musical (The Full Monty). Not surprisingly, he is about as laconic and unshowbiz as Ethel Merman.

It’s hard to imagine if you’ve never seen it happen how casting even a single role against expectation or tradition so as to distance it from a familiar style of performance can alter the terms of a piece of drama. That, certainly, was behind Nicholas Hytner’s casting of the leads in his 1993 “reinvention” of Carousel, which came to Lincoln Center the following year. Hytner cast Michael Hayden, a diminutive actor with virtually no training in musical theater as Billy Bigelow, and in New York, the unaffected but slightly mousy young Steppenwolf actress Sally Murphy as Julie Jordan. Opera aficionados beefed about the quality of their vocal skills. The fact was though, that with a runty Billy and an unglamorous Julie, the codependent relationship at the heart of the show became instantly intelligible.

The revival of Carousel had a great deal more going for it, though. What Hytner did, essentially, was bring to bear on a Broadway musical the same “close textual reading” that’s characterized British productions of Shakespeare for forty years. He looked at the show and determined, rightly, that on numerous levels it was really all about time—fleeting time, yawning time, seasons and ripeness, urgency and delay, nonfulfillment and the brevity of life. Time is everywhere in Carousel. It presides over the lyrics of all those songs about the future (“When I marry Mr. Snow…”, “When the children are asleep…,” “My  boy Bill will be tall…”); it is fractured by the bizarre structure and chronology of the show; and it teases our musical instincts and expectations with a barrage of melodic postponements, phrases that stave off resolution and hang tantalizingly suspended until the last possible moment. (Listen to “If I Loved You” again, if you don’t believe me.) it was all right there for anyone to see, and had been all along, but no one before Hytner had ever thought of making any of it visually explicit.

Following a design-to-text approach that had characterized mainstream British Shakespeare since the early 60s, Hytner devised a system of time-related imagery that grew out of the O of the carousel itself and informed and embraced the whole production.  Choreographing the overture—an unheard-of and dangerous thing to attempt—Hytner dressed the opening moments of the show in a succession of circles and revolves. It began with a giant illuminated clock on the wall of the textile mill where the girls worked—another first, bringing the factory onstage— giant illuminated face with moving hands before which a line of them sat working a loom. As the hands of the clock reached six, and the girls were let out of the mill, we watched the stage (itself a great revolve) become a world of circles and parts of circles-a bit of ironwork on the factory gates, the curve of a rail where the girls hung their coats, the slope of a hill, the bend of a white picket fence topping a rise. There was scarcely a curve that didn’t seem to echo the perfect O of the central image or the shape of the spinning earth, and when the lights of the carousel roof came down out of the flies at the climax of the overture, and a line of tiny matching lights appeared high up along the circumfrence of the Beaumont itself, it was as though Hytner had brought the theater within the embrace of this huge, turning world.

There’s nothing-nothing at all-even remotely like that in Nunn’s Oklahoma!, nothing visually interesting or enlightening, nothing that causes you to view the story in a different way or gives it a deeper meaning. None of the numbers have been noticeably reorchestrated or rearranged-the way Richard Eyre’s National Theatre production of Guys and Dolls in the early 80s rethought “My Time of Day” and “I’ve Never Been in Love Before,” the way Hytner reconceived “This Was a Real Nice Clambake.” With two exceptions-the overpowering Jud and a tomboyish Laurey-it’s all sub-Broadway casting and line-readings (or someone’s idea of them), every familiar pause or inflection, every hokey gesture in place. It’s a revival one could imagine oneself without going to the theater.

A number of things about this Oklahoma! were held up as noteworthy when it played in London. Jackman’s performance was one. Another was Nunn’s decision to throw out the old Agnes de Mille choreography and bring on board the American director-choreographer Susan Stroman. A third was Stroman’s notion of having the leading actors themselves dance the Dream Ballet, traditionally performed by dancers designated as “Dream Curly” and “Dream Laurey.” (Presumably, it was to this end that Gabrielle, a former soloist with the National Ballet of Portugal, was cast. Unfortunately, she’s not particularly enchanting to watch in motion. There are members of the female ensemble far lovelier and more graceful. Moreover, there’s a shrill quality to her singing voice.)

But the major claim made for the production-what led critics on both sides of the Atlantic to put it in a class with the Hytner revival-was Nunn’s putative discovery of a murky subtext, the idea that below the show’s ebullient surface ran a “dark” undercurrent expressive of a deep fear of sexuality and growing up. Accordingly, Nunn has Laurey tomboying it up in overalls and Stroman escalates the rape-fantasy implicit in the Dream Ballet into a full-scale sexual assault. Neither choice is particularly edifying.

In London, Stroman’s choreography won an Olivier award. Certainly it furnishes the show with its only high points. Best are the hoedown numbers, of course, but also the Dream Ballet is considerably less dated and cartoonish. Stroman has tried to revitalize some of the other dances as well, but often her approach has been to replace dance with dance-mime. This is nice for the kiddies but tough on the rest of us, and most of it’s jokey without being particularly witty or smart. And, alas, she hasn’t managed to solve the “chorus boy” problem. You never saw cowboys who looked so much like rough trade.

Anthony Ward’s scenic design relies heavily on the cinematic device where you keep showing the same landscape in different sizes and perspectives, like a series of establishing shots. (It’s a swell trick if you’ve never seen it before. Julie Taymor first used it in Juan Darien 14 years ago.) There’s also the obligatory Trevor Nunn turntable and a block of elephant’s-eye-level corn that came down out of the flies a few too many times for my liking.

For the rest, Andrea Martin’s Aunt Eller is unmemorable, Jessica Boevers’ Ado Annie downright vulgar and Justin Bohon’s Will Parker too young, too pretty and much, much too gay. More distressing is the performance Nunn has elicited from the writer-performer Aasif Mandvi as the “Persian” peddler, Ali Hakim. (New York audiences may remember Mandvi’s one-man, multicharacter play Sakina’s Restaurant, which the American Place Theater presented some years back.) I don’t know what possessed Nunn to reconceive this role, alone of all the roles in the show, or to think it wise to do so along racial lines. Perhaps he remembered the flap over Miss Saigon, 11 or 12 years ago, when he cast Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian. The idea here seems to have been to avoid casting an Anglo. Mandvi is Indian, though, not Iranian. He was born in Bombay.

I can’t help wondering, in any case, if the peddler is supposed to be a real “Persian” at all. The role was originally played by the great Yiddish actor Joseph Buloff, which would seem to suggest a mere Jew masquerading as an “exotic.” Certainly that would have been a better choice here. As it is, Nunn has Mandvi doing the worst sort of Stepin Fetchit acting, which really is racist, as well as being a betrayal of the actor’s considerable talents.

I don’t know that I buy this whole notion of a “dark” subtext to Oklahoma! anyway. I think it would be tough to find a Broadway musical whose fundamental discomfort with sex was less hidden. Nearly everything about Oklahoma! suggests a schoolyard mentality, from its childishly simple book and squabbling lovers to its all-or-nothing view of desire. Everyone in the world of the show is either virginal or promiscuous; there’s no in-between. Either interest in the opposite sex is absent or else it’s lewd. Because Jud has pictures of naked ladies up on the wall of the smokehouse, it follows that he must therefore be a psychopath. The gawping cowhands may giggle over Will Parker’s account of a burlesque show, and Aunt Eller may feign shock at the gizmo he brings back with him from Kansas City, through which scantily clad woman may be glimpsed, but the “Little Wonder” comes equipped with a hidden blade, capable of blinding or killing a man with the push of a button. The whole show-not just its heroine-wants to blot out the specter of desire. It’s all there in the score of the Dream Ballet: the music tells its own story.

The Jew of Schmalta

Iwent to see the new Neil Simon play the other night. Oy, vhat an old-feshioned play! Even I don’ remembah ven dey yoosta produce plays like dis. Dey’s dis character in de show dat talks joost like dis on account he’s supposta be Jackie Mason de stend-up comic. He talks like dis all evenink long. So if dis don’ mek you leff, don’ go see de show—because this is about as funny as it gets.

45 Seconds from Broadway is set at the Cafe Edison, the coffee shop in the lobby

[From New York Press, December 18, 2001]

Iwent to see the new Neil Simon play the other night. Oy, vhat an old-feshioned play! Even I don’ remembah ven dey yoosta produce plays like dis. Dey’s dis character in de show dat talks joost like dis on account he’s supposta be Jackie Mason de stend-up comic. He talks like dis all evenink long. So if dis don’ mek you leff, don’ go see de show—because this is about as funny as it gets.

45 Seconds from Broadway is set at the Cafe Edison, the coffee shop in the lobby of the Edison Hotel, also known as “the Polish tea room.” The Edison is located almost directly across the street from the Richard Rodgers Theater, where 45 Seconds is running—and that, except for a real live taxicab that rolls across the stage at rise of curtain, is about as close as the play comes to truth. Don’t, by the way, underestimate the thrill of seeing a real live taxi roll across a Broadway stage. It’s pretty terrific. Certainly it elicited little squeals of delight from me, and I clapped my fists together in girlish glee at the spectacle of John Lee Beatty’s recreation of 46th Street. What a wag that boy is!

On a wall of the coffee shop, a poster for David Auburn’s play Proof bearing the face of the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh tells us how up-to-the-minute the play is supposed to be. (Leigh only went into the show in September.) It’s too bad about the poster. It’s conceivable that 45 Seconds from Broadway might have had some charm if it were set twenty-five or thirty years ago. In a play that took place in 1970, Mickey Fox (the Mason sound-alike played by Lewis J. Stadler), Bernie, the gruff-but-kindly proprietor of the coffee shop (Louis Zorich), and Bernie’s wife, Zelda (Rebecca Schull), might have seemed like the avatars of a sweet, forgotten world (though actually even 1970 might be pushing it).

For most of the other characters in the play you’d probably have to go back to about 1964. These come in two varieties, stereotypical Jews and stereotypical non-Jews. The Jews include Bernie and Zelda (survivors of the camps, thankful for every day they’re alive); Mickey and his whiny, worshipful older brother Harry (David Margulies); and a pair of matinee matrons played by Judy Blazer and the usually droll Alix Korey, who overplays the notion of shrill vulgarity so ferociously here that she seems in danger of blowing the roof off the theater.

Among the non-Jews are an aspiring young playwright from South Africa (Kevin Carroll), proud but generally upbeat and respectful; a fresh-faced hopeful from the Midwest (Julie Lund) whose failed-actress mother still remembers Bernie and Zelda’s kindness from twenty years ago; a West End producer who wants Mickey to come to London in a show (he just adores New York and can’t seem to get enough of either Mickey or Jews); a plus-size blues singer (Lynda Gravatt) full of yo’-mama attitude and wisdom; and an old-money husband and wife (Bill Moor and Marian Seldes), the former of whom never speaks, while the latter suffers from a form of dementia that leads her to think herself always either at a cotillion or in a bar on the piccola marina. In most contemporary plays you would expect such characters to be angrier or better medicated.

Simon used to write characters. Now apparently he’s reduced to constructing plays around real-life celebrities. They’re not as interesting as real-life taxicabs. At any rate, his sanitized version of Jackie Mason isn’t. Simon seems to have missed the point about what makes Mason funny, which is the same thing that makes him interesting. It’s what folks who use twenty-dollar words call cognitive dissonance. Mason says mean, hostile things in that cute, cuddly voice. They’re objectionable things that often happen to be true, and because he says them in the funny voice, they’re more surprising and less objectionable than they might otherwise be. Simon’s Mickey Fox only says cute, cuddly things so there’s no dissonance, and not a whole lot that you could call cognitive, either.

In fact, there’s no dissonance anywhere in the play. You long for some dissonance—an unkind word, a barbed retort. Oh, how you long. But the play is all smarmy, showbiz warmth and heart. Everybody’s jovial and well-meaning, full of wide-eyed appreciation for everyone else. The oldsters want to help the youngsters, and the non-Jews want nothing more than to stand around contemplating the phenomenon of the cheese blintz. Conflict here—which rears its head only once, in the specter of Harry’s untalented lawyer son, who wants to be a comedian like his famous uncle, and whom Harry wants Mickey to take under his wing—is expressed entirely in terms of trips to the bathroom. (A late plot twist involving the sale of the coffee shop announces itself so clearly as a contrivance that poor Mr. Zorich seems embarrassed even performing it.) And everybody wins. Little Miss Hopeful gets a part, the South African writes a good play (about Mickey, of all people!) and hooks up with the producer, and it seems there will even be a part for the untalented nephew, whom Mickey has been coaching to do passable imitations of himself. Even Ms. Seldes’ psychopharmacologist comes through in the end.

Of course, Jackie Mason’s self-invented persona is a device, a construct built on the idea of out-caricaturing a caricature. If you exaggerate a stereotype, you can sometimes discredit it and disarm it. Mason is fond of pointing out to his audiences that nobody really talks the way he does, (a joke that Simon appropriates and defangs).

Mason’s stage-self, which may be no different by now from his real self, is really a hybrid made up of two very different and historically antithetical versions of the stage Jew. The old Elizabethan stage Jew had been a comic figure—part miser, part Satan (himself a comic character in medieval drama). His darker counterpart dates from 1741, when an actor named Charles Macklin insisted on performing Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in place of a popular Restoration version of the play and reinvented the role of Shylock.

Macklin shocked audiences (and his fellow cast members) by playing the character as a realistic villain rather than a pantomime devil or a pantalone. In doing so, Macklin invented a new sort of stage Jew who partly survives today. Played straight, whether villain or tragic hero, Shylock is the embodiment of ugly, objectionable truth—and you can see this in any decent production of the play, even one as archly perverse as Trevor Nunn’s recent Royal National Theater version, which aired on Masterpiece Theater in October. Both in his person and his pronouncements, Shylock represents the harsh realities that the world at large would really rather have remain hidden (like Jews themselves) or at least not be made explicit—the need for money, for instance, and society’s hypocrisy in refusing to acknowledge that need.

Take from Shylock the element of usury, though—an aspect of the character that Shakespeare seems not to have been all that interested in anyway—and what you have is essentially the figure of the angry, truth-telling Jew. He’s a tragic figure, too clear-eyed and more candid than is healthy: a spirit of resentment and retribution with no retributive powers, a sort of non-Fury. That’s the interesting side of Jackie Mason—the subtext that Simon, perhaps understandably, purged from his play.

Off-Broadway audiences are encountering two rather intriguing versions of the stage Jew just now—the embittered older sister played by Robin Bartlett in the first act of Richard Greenberg’s ambitious but ultimately unfulfilling family saga Everett Beekin, and the demonic matrimonial lawyer played by David Deblinger in the last half of John Patrick Shanley’s Where’s My Money? Both characters are reality-mongers of the harshest variety, both endowed with a decidedly Jewish cast of mind, and both are portrayed with a loving attention to ethnic mannerism that keeps threatening to topple over into caricature but never does. Bartlett and Deblinger are engaging in a sort of actorly brinksmanship, a heightened realism that stops short of passing judgment on the characters or offering editorial commentary.

Lesser actors might have tried to distance themselves from these roles. Bartlett and Deblinger are both playing highly unpleasant people. Greenberg’s Sophie is a monster of inflected irony and over-interpretation, the sort of woman for whom schadenfreude is the breath of life, who can read negativity into the most neutral statement and detects slights wherever she looks. (She’s a literary descendant of the martyred mother in Neil Simon’s autobiographical Broadway Bound.) Shanley’s Sidney is a misogynist of epic proportions. He sees infidelity in marriage as a moral imperative and makes his perverse case for it with Talmudic thoroughness.

He’s a little like Milton’s Satan or the Vice figure in Medieval drama—a poet of perversity, irresistible but wrong. Actually, both characters are: they have a warped perspective that becomes, in each case, the most entertaining and compelling thing in the play. But Shanley isn’t as interested in Sidney’s Jewishness as he is in the discrepancy between the man Sidney presents himself to be and the one we see confronting his wife in the next scene. The marriage and the wife are both more interesting and complex than Sidney makes them out to be. They’re worthy (in every sense) of his rhetoric and the quality of his thought. As always, Shanley is interested in the pathology of heterosexual guilt, which he explores here in a sort of Schnitzlerian rondeau that substitutes spiritual malaise for the venereal disease that the characters in La Ronde pass on to each other. Matrimony itself, rather than promiscuity, is the incubator here.

Where’s My Money? doesn’t pretend to be any more than a shaggy-ghost story. Shanley’s characters are literally haunted by the shades of the people they fear they’ve wronged. Everett Beekin is a ghost story too, in a way. Greenberg is attempting a reverse-angle version of something he did in an earlier play, Three Days of Rain. There three actors portrayed six characters, a generation apart: first the children, then their parents. Everett Beekin leaps forward in time, showing us a Jewish American family in 1940s New York in Act I and some of their descendants in Southern California in Act II. Again, all the actors play different roles in each act, but Everett Beekin doesn’t rely on the same one-to-one correspondence between characters and their genetic forebears. Rather, Greenberg seems here to want us to draw connections between the two respective characters played by each actor as archetypes. The Jewish characters in the first half of Everett Beekin are all stereotypes—the operatic mother (Marcia Jean Kurtz), the wartime wife (Bebe Neuwirth), the brisket-loving husband, the romantic youngest sister (Jennifer Carpenter), who is beautiful, talented, and offered an escape through marriage to a gentile (Kevin Isola.)

Greenberg is examining stock characters from life, asking us to view them as the beneficiaries of a literary inheritance. Except that they’re non-beneficiaries or it’s a non-inheritance. This is a play about assimilation and its discontents. Greenberg wants us to think about what this or that stereotype of Jewish family history has become—just as he wants to demonstrate that the fantasy of the easygoing gentile for whom success and achievement come effortlessly—embodied in the WASP of the title, a character we never see, who turns out never to have existed—is as much a part of Jewish American family mythology as anything else.

It turns out the youngest sister didn’t get away after all, but died—soon after the scene we witnessed—of a form of cancer that would be curable now. More interesting than either this revelation, though, or seeing her reborn as a perennially restless and bewildered Valley Girl, is what happens to the Robin Bartlett figure, Sophie. Like the other members of the family, she’s lost her Jewishness and with it all sense of purpose and identity. Greenberg’s point—that rootlessness is a bad thing—may be banal and not an ideal subject for the stage (Everett Beekin would probably make a better novel or movie), but it’s interesting that what he’s demonstrating on the stage of Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater is essentially what’s going on night after night in Neil Simon’s play at the Richard Rodgers—the assimilation of the stage Jew by a process that, robbing him of his Jewishness or his anger (they’re the same thing), makes him essentially harmless.

New York press, December 18, 2001

Mayoral Election Digest: The End of Ideology

The revolutionary left did not contest this year’s municipal elections. The Communist, Socialist, Socialist Labor, and Socialist Workers tickets were not on the ballot. Somehow the ballot seemed incomplete without the SWP’s striking emblem: a lightning bolt shattering the chains of capitalism

[From New York Press, December 4, 2001]

The revolutionary left did not contest this year’s municipal elections. The Communist, Socialist, Socialist Labor, and Socialist Workers tickets were not on the ballot. Somehow the ballot seemed incomplete without the SWP’s striking emblem: a lightning bolt shattering the chains of capitalism wrapped around the globe. As for more idiosyncratic candidacies, one daily reported that Kenny Kramer, the Libertarian mayoral nominee, received 2620 votes, a shade less than one-fifth of one percent of the poll.

Kramer’s claim to fame is derived from Jerry Seinfeld, who used his appearance and personality in creating a character, also named Kramer, in his television comedy. Kramer is merely the latest attempt of the Libertarian Party (in most states, a party of ideas; in New York, a party of stunts) to gain attention by nominating a celebrity to high office. Some may recall the Libertarians nominated Howard Stern for governor some years ago. Stern withdrew from the race on learning that he would have to file public reports about his income and investments—something that all candidates for state office and many civil servants do as a matter of course.

The other minor celebrity in the mayoral race, Bernhard H. Goetz, subway gunman turned vegetarian activist, polled only 1300 votes as the Fusion Party’s candidate. Goetz failed to publish his platform in the city’s Voter Guide. If he had, he might have polled more votes: apparently, upon taking office, Goetz intended to appoint Rudy Giuliani his first deputy mayor and let him continue running the city.

When Kenny Kramer, whose activities largely involve milking his false celebrity, outpolls Bernie Goetz, there may be no justice in this life. At least Goetz performed a socially useful, albeit violent and unlawful, act by shooting four punks who were threatening him on the subway. Thus, for a few weeks, Goetz was among the most popular public figures in the city. Jimmy Breslin seems to have consistently argued that Goetz’s odd, nerdy demeanor at the time of the incident was an open invitation to the punks: that he wanted to be attacked by muggers so he might kill them, in self-defense, of course. Other than Breslin, no one taken seriously suggests this, and not even Breslin argues that a law-abiding subway rider, however odd his appearance, should be harassed with impunity.

The Fusion Party is controlled by Dominick Fusco, an elderly Bronx lawyer of considerable self-importance. His tiny party’s name has historical resonance. Fusion, in New York City politics, traditionally refers to the legal device by which a single candidate, nominated by several parties, aggregates the votes cast for him on each party line. Fusion became synonymous with the reform movement—something wholly different from the so-called Reform Democrats—which historically advocated honest, nonpartisan government in the interests of the wealthy elite. The other piece of any successful reform campaign was the Republican Party, which elects mayors only in coalition with some Democratic splinter group or reform-minded new party.

The City Fusion Party arose in 1933 in response to the scandals in city government revealed by the Seabury hearings. Fiorello La Guardia, nominated by the Republicans and the City Fusionists, polled nearly half his votes on the new party’s ticket. However, the Fusionists had no interest in patronage—the loaves and fishes by which one builds a permanent mass movement. Enthusiasm flags in the absence of a paycheck. By the 1950s, the party had nearly faded away. Its tattered remains—largely the right to use a four-leaf clover as a ballot emblem—became the property of Counselor Fusco, a Republican turned Democrat turned Perotista. No election since the late 1960s has been complete without Fusco or his friends somewhere on the ballot. Fusco last ran for citywide office in 1997, when he polled fewer than 1000 votes running for mayor as a Fusionist. This year, he ran for comptroller on the Fusion ticket with Bernie Goetz and polled 6989 votes. From the Little Flower to the Subway Gunman—what a fall was there, my countrymen. As far as ideas are concerned, Fusco’s remain a mystery: he, too, published no platform in the city’s Voter Guide.

Last and least of the mayoral candidates was Kenneth B. Golding, the nominee of his one-man machine, the American Dream Party. Probably the Board of Elections was too busy running the primary, runoff, and general elections within a few weeks to notice that the very name of Mr. Golding’s party was illegal under section 2-124 of the Election Law, which forbids the use of the word “American” in a party name. But, then, no one noticed Golding, including the voters. I met him briefly on election night, when I was going home from the gym: he was standing near the top of the escalator leading down to the E and F trains at 53rd Street, distributing his fliers and urging people to vote. His platform seemed a tissue of idealism and gentle good will. This didn’t count for much in an age of anxiety: Golding polled 583 votes to come in ninth of nine candidates.

During my ride home, a panhandler entered my subway car, demanding alms because he didn’t rob people or use drugs. The reappearance of the permanent homeless on subway benches seemed somehow symptomatic of the Mayor’s loosening of the reins as he moved toward the end of his second term. Instead of maintaining general public order, the police power seemed focused on punishing ordinary citizens for the crimes of terrorists by forcing us through intrusive personal searches. Liberty—one of the ideas for which this country supposedly stands—is a negative thing. It is simply the right to be left alone in the peaceful conduct of one’s affairs. That right has been destroyed with no effective protest.

One saw it coming even before September 11. Earlier this year, a police officer prevented me from leaving the building in which I work. He simply told me that I couldn’t leave the building. I attempted peaceably to go my way. Then his sergeant came up and said I couldn’t leave the building because the President was in the vicinity. I attempted to step past him. He threatened me with arrest.

Now, I had been convicted of no crime, made no disturbance and was not subject to any court order restraining my passage on a public street. I had not consented to the restraint. However, as I told the sergeant, I obeyed him because he had a gun. Naked force counts for a lot with an unarmed man.

Now some Neanderthal security guard can paw through my briefcase when I enter a public library as well as when I leave one. Deputy U.S. marshals examine my clients’ papers when I enter a federal courthouse. I am compelled to offer the contents of my pockets for examination on entering the Brooklyn and Manhattan municipal buildings. Amidst all this, I keep remembering Ben Franklin’s epigram: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

If one can be so cynical as to suggest someone can earn a public office in the gift of the people, then within the context of New York City’s political system Mark Green had earned the mayoralty. As commissioner of consumer affairs and public advocate, Green had held city offices giving him publicity without power, which meant he made no serious mistakes while becoming and remaining one of the city’s best-known politicians. I had been acquainted with Mark Green for more than two decades, since we opposed each other for a Democratic congressional nomination in 1980. I found him arrogant and condescending. He seemed compelled to prove his intellectual superiority by insulting people. Nonetheless, I voted for him at the 1980 general elections, being a good loser, and voted for him again when he ran for U.S. senator in 1986, as he seemed more qualified than his opponents.

Over his decade in public life, as he ducked and weaved from left to center, he reminded me of the suggestion of Pierre Laval, a brilliant French politician of the years between the World Wars. He once told a youthful rightist, “You’ve made a strategic mistake. When you are young, you should go to the Left. Go as far to the Left as you can. And spend the rest of your life coming back. They’ll think you’re a statesman.” Laval began his career as a revolutionary socialist. He ended up against the wall, shot as a traitor. With Green, one’s distaste stemmed from the sense that his politics had moved to the center from calculation rather than maturity or conviction. This is the sort of thing that weakens one’s faith in a politician’s sincerity. You should believe in something, even if you only believe you’ll have another drink.

Perhaps Green believed—his arrogance can rise to the level of delusion—that his independence of the usual Democratic Party constituencies would enable him to govern without having to pay off the leadership of the unions, the teachers, the blacks and the gays. As we now know, however, you have to win the election before you can govern, and if your party’s constituents don’t turn out for you, you will lose.

This is a kind of institutional veto, and not a bad thing. As a longtime regular Democrat and clubhouse lawyer put it to me as we leaned on the brass rail at Dusk on W. 24th Street, “Mark Green,” he remarked, before pouring most of his Maker’s Mark down his throat, “is a man who has no friends. We”–gesturing grandly to encompass the entire city–“would have been fucked.” The election of Green’s opponent doesn’t guarantee that we won’t be. It proves we knew enough to try to avoid it.

December 4, 2001, New York Press

Albert Jay Nock, Superfluous Man

In 1910, Albert Jay Nock, then forty, joined the American Magazine. His writings, unusually good, were his best credential. Otherwise, no one knew much about him. Writing about Thomas Jefferson years later, he would characterize him as “the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of

In 1910, Albert Jay Nock, then forty, joined the American Magazine. His writings, unusually good, were his best credential. Otherwise, no one knew much about him. Writing about Thomas Jefferson years later, he would characterize him as “the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of acquaintance, impossible of knowledge. In a sense Nock was describing himself.

His secrecy achieves epic grandeur in his brilliant autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943). He does not disclose the place and year of his birth (Scranton; 1870), the names of his parents or the occupation of his father (Joseph Albert Nock, an Episcopal clergyman, and Emma Jay, a descendant of John Jay), the name of his college (St. Stephen’s, now Bard), his twelve years as an Episcopal priest, his failed marriage (he left his wife after his second son was born in 1905), or his brief career in minor league baseball. He felt such information was unnecessary. Memoirs, the book’s publisher noted, was a “purely literary and philosophical autobiography.” A reader might know Nock’s mind through his work without needing to know him.

To our culture, Nock’s secrecy is unnerving. When he worked for The Nation during World War I, he refused to provide his superiors with his home address. During the early twenties, when he was editing The Freeman (a peer of H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, Harold Ross’ New Yorker and Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair for consistently brilliant writing), his editorial staff believed, according to his literary editor, Van Wyck Brooks, that Nock could be contacted outside the office only by leaving a note under a certain rock in Central Park.

Nock read by the age of three. He taught himself in his father’s library until he was eight, when he began studying Latin and Greek with some slight assistance from his father. At fourteen he began formal classical studies while developing his taste for German beer and the local “alfalfa-fed” girls. Then he went to St. Stephen’s. According to Nock, the college was, outside of certain Jesuit institutions, “possibly the last in America to stick by the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.” At graduation Nock felt himself prepared for living, albeit in proud ignorance of the natural sciences since Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny, or any history since 1500, including that of the United States. His education, he believed, had left him without a “lumber of prepossession or formula to be cleared away.”

Nock then bounced among universities, receiving an advanced degree almost by accident, and played minor league baseball. He was ordained in 1897 and served in various parishes until he left the priesthood in 1909. As a journeyman muckraker in New York, Nock wrote memorably about William Wirt’s experiments in progressive education in Gary, Indiana and the lynching of an African-American millworker in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. He knew offbeat reform politicians, including New York Governor Martin Glynn and Mayors William J. Gaynor of New York and Brand Whitlock of Toledo, Ohio.

In 1915, during the first year of WWI, Nock traveled to Europe as an agent of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. According to Michael Wreszin’s The Superfluous Anarchist, Nock was to investigate State Deptartment employees’ surreptitious cooperation with British agents. Apparently, Bryan had no one else he could trust. However, Nock returned to America on Bryan’s sudden resignation on June 9, 1915. What he found and would have told Bryan is unknown.

Nock then worked for The Nation, which so strongly opposed American intervention that the government closed it down. In 1920, he organized The Freeman, which he intended as a radical publication.

Great editors inspire great magazines. Nock claimed only two gifts as an executive. One was judgment of ability: he claimed, “I can smell out talent as quickly and unerringly as a high-bred pointer can smell out a partridge.” The other was his belief that “a good executive’s job is to do nothing, and [one] can’t set about it too soon or stick to it too faithfully.”

Nock never gave orders, assigned subjects or set general policy. He sought merely writers (1) with a definite point of view, (2) stated clearly, (3) using “eighteen-carat, impeccable, idiomatic English.” He told one would-be contributor, “Now you run along home and write us a nice piece on the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you can put it over those three jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would rather do something on a national policy of strangling all the girl-babies at birth, you might do that—glad to have it.”

Nevertheless, the paper had a distinct point of view. When The Nation welcomed The Freeman to “the ranks of liberal journalism,” Nock replied that he didn’t want to seem ungrateful, “but we hain’t liberal. We loathes liberalism and loathes it hard…”

Within two years, success became a bore. On February 10, 1924 after an extended sick leave and a dispute with his backers, Nock announced the magazine would fold with the issue of March 4, 1924. A day later, he sailed for Brussels, his favorite city, where he largely remained for fifteen years.

In 1926 Nock published Jefferson, the first of three biographical studies that occupied him for the next thiteem years. Richard Hofstadter, the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics,dismissively suggested Nock had created a Jefferson with the inner vision, aspiration and values of Albert Jay Nock. Nonetheless, the critics found it “provocative and insightful” and “sparkling, charming, witty, and all the other adjectives inevitably called forth by Nock’s inimitable prose style.”

After lecturing on education at Bard and the University of Virginia, Nock published The Theory of Education in the United States (1932). Education, to Nock, was a preparation for living, to see things as they are. Getting a living is merely a question of training. Few are educable; all can be trained. Certain intellectual and spiritual experiences are open to some and not to others: to Nock, this was simply a fact of nature, such as one’s height.

Nock argued that the distinction of education and training had been destroyed because the meanings of equality and democracy had been perverted. The first now meant “the rabid self-assertion…of ignorance and vulgarity.” Similarly, as he later wrote in Memoirs, “…the prime postulate of democracy is that there shall be nothing for anybody to enjoy that is not open for everybody to enjoy. Hence, despite human experience, everybody must be educable.”

Nock’s intellectual framework shifted in 1932 when the self-professed radical and Jeffersonian stopped believing in the improvability of man. This was catalyzed by Ralph Adams Cram, a distinguished architect, whose essay, “Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings,” appeared in the September 1932 issue of The American Mercury.

Cram’s reputation as an architect (he redesigned the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights) obscures his social criticism. In his essay, he argues that most men do not behave like human beings because they are not human. They are Neolithic barbarians with delusions of grandeur. In Cram’s view, the doctrine of progress—that the most recent stage of human development is superior to earlier stages—is unsupported by recorded history. Cram argued that anthropologists had erroneously categorized all men as human.

Nock soon professed his new faith. He wrote of momentary distress at seeing a man scavenging in a garbage pail. A few minutes later, he was undisturbed at seeing a dog do the same thing. Then he realized his erroneous presumption: that the man was a human being, rather than merely a man. Now, he no longer found any anomaly in a man’s behaving as a brute and not as a human being. To Nock, the distinction between the mob (which he called “mass-men”) and the few who were a glory to the human race (which he called the “Remnant”) was greater than that between the mob and certain higher anthropoids.

Oddly, he claimed he no longer hated anyone or lost patience with anybody. He wrote in Memoirs, “One has great affection for one’s dogs, even when one sees them reveling in tastes and smells which to us are unspeakably odious… One can hate human beings…but one can’t hate subhuman creatures, or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them unkindly… If cattle tramp down your garden, you drive them away but can’t hate them, for you know they are acting up to the measure of their psychical capacity… The mass-men who are princes, presidents, politicians, legislators, can no more transcend their psychical capacities than any wolf, fox, or polecat in the land. How, then, is one to hate them, notwithstanding the appalling evil they do?”

In this frame of mind, he wrote Our Enemy, the State (1935). Nock saw the state as antisocial, commandeered by one group or another of “mass-men” to legalize their appropriation of the product of others’ work without compensation. Revolutions merely reapportioned “the use of the political means” for such exploitation. He argued that most liberal reforms, such as the income tax, merely enhanced state power to further exploitation. If “Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so many trade names for collectivist Statism,” he asked, why should one think more of Roosevelt than of Hitler?

From 1933 to 1939 Nock contributed a current affairs column, “The State of the Union,” to The American Mercury. He consistently assaulted the New Deal’s swineries, both foreign and domestic, and after 1936 argued American foreign policy was conducted to provoke war. In 1941, he published “The Jewish Question in America,” a two-part article in the Atlantic Monthly. Wreszin calls it “subtle and restrained.” Indeed, the prose is elegantly polished; the tone is serenely analytical; the venue is respectable; and the argument favors excluding the Jews through apartheid. Nock claims, as Wreszin says, “that he wished to launch a meaningful dialogue whereby intelligent Americans might probe the bigotry that infested not merely the lower orders but all society…” He claims to be charting “quicksands and rock formations so the piers of some future structure might be secure.”

He argues that Jews, being Orientals, cannot understand or communicate with Americans, who are Occidental. He suggests the Jews have failed to know their place, and anticipates seeing the “Nuremberg Laws reenacted and enforced with vigor.” Finally, Nock dismisses criticism by claiming Jews would be peculiarly unable to understand his meaning.

Thereafter, fewer editors accepted Nock’s articles. He began appearing in Scribner’s Commentator, an odd mixture of general essays and Nazi apologia, until it folded after Pearl Harbor. Finally, he was reduced to reviewing books in the Review of Books, published by Merwin K. Hart’s National Economic Council, a front for the few rightists openly opposed to the war after Pearl Harbor.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man appeared in 1943 to great praise. Clifton Fadiman, that most energetic of second-rank men of letters, wrote, “I have not since the days of the early Mencken read a more eloquently written blast against democracy or enjoyed more fully a display of crusted prejudice. Mr. Nock is a highly civilized man who does not like our civilization and will have no part of it. He is a rare bird, one of an almost extinct species, and as he very properly puts it, a superfluous man. We are not apt to see his like again.” The New York Herald Tribune’s Isabel Paterson wrote, “Whether for instruction or for entertainment, this is a unique book, of instant timeliness and permanent value.”

In Memoirs, published two years before his death, Nock wrote of being asked what he thought were the three most degrading occupations open to man. He replied that the first was holding office in a modern republic. The second was editing an American metropolitan newspaper. As for the third, he was unsure whether it was pimping or managing a whorehouse. He died on August 19, 1945, ten days after the bombing of Nagasaki.

New York Press, January 21, 2001

The Young Lion of Wrath

The rushed decisions are the worst. Imagine being a politician: not an orator or a legislator, but an administrator, one who governs, daily responsible for implementing policies devised by others. Imagine constantly making decisions with incomplete understanding and insufficient knowledge and not enough time to fill either gap; living with the paranoia—after all, does not the word bear translation as “higher knowledge”—that nearly everyone around you has a hidden agenda and plays you for a sucker….

(Pontius Pilate, by Ann Wroe. Random House, New York, 2000. 412 pg., $25.00)

The rushed decisions are the worst. Imagine being a politician: not an orator or a legislator, but an administrator, one who governs, daily responsible for implementing policies devised by others. Imagine constantly making decisions with incomplete understanding and insufficient knowledge and not enough time to fill either gap; living with the paranoia—after all, does not the word bear translation as “higher knowledge”—that nearly everyone around you has a hidden agenda and plays you for a sucker.

Make things darker, more personal, and more dangerous. Your spouse is your only confidant. Your colleagues, the men with whom you work, eat, drink, and relax, would abandon you at a finger snap. The people you govern mistrust you and sometimes hate you enthusiastically.

Worse still, you can draw strength only from the love you bear the institution you serve, from your sense of its tradition, greatness, and enduring glory. Yet the man who gave you the job is monstrous, as are most politicians: a tissue of lusts rising to perversion, insecurities shading to paranoia, and self-confidence curdled into megalomania. Your dinner guests gossip of his misconduct. You “listen in the awful, sinking knowledge” that this man has made you what you are, and sometimes his obscenity sickens you.

Ann Wroe, who edits the American section of The Economist, has written the most remarkable book I have read this year: a biography of a minor politician of the first century. Merely writing the book seems an insuperable challenge. There are nearly no records. Even his numerous public works (an aqueduct, military roads, and public buildings, all probably padding his pocket—bribes were an accepted prerogative of the job, called unguentaria, ointment money)—have vanished. All that remains is a single limestone block found amidst the ruins of Caesarea, bearing a fragmentary inscription with his name and office:

PONTIVS PILATVS
PRAEFECTVS IVDAEAE

Though one of the most famous men in world history, Pontius Pilate, fifth Prefect of Judaea, is a difficult subject. As Wroe found, even the evidence of his existence is fragmentary. Though his name has been uttered daily in prayer for nearly two thousand years, even this is a fragment: we do not know his first name, the praenomen, “the name his mother and wife and friends called him by.” None of his writings survived—not even a leaf of a decade’s daily reports to the Emperor. He must have made thousands of decisions during his decade in power. We remember only one.

Today, the contemporary documents of his existence might be transcribed onto three or four typed pages, double-spaced. Flavius Josephus, a Romanized Jew, mentions him not unfavorably in The Jewish War, written four decades after Pilate’s return to Rome. Philo of Alexandria knew Pilate. He savages him in a few pages of his voluminous works. But Philo hated all Romans and the portrait is two-dimensional. Tacitus mentions Pilate once in the Historia. Even that is a fragment: Tacitus’s chapters for the early thirties are missing and may have said much more. Last, the Dead Sea Scrolls call him “the Young Lion of Wrath.”

Starting with these materials, Wroe studied the Apocrypha (the religious works excluded from the official Bible, early victims of consensus reality) and Pilate’s hagiographies (the Ethiopians consider him a saint, as the means by which the prophecies were fulfilled and one of the first to believe in the Resurrection: “I believe that you have risen and have appeared to me, and you will not judge me…”). She read the surviving Roman literature from his lifetime or shortly before or after for a sense of how he would have seen the world; the “fairy tales, legends, travelogues, guidebooks, to follow where his ghost had walked around Europe”; and numerous lives of Christ to see how commentators have seen Pilate over the last two centuries. She viewed or read the modern works in which Pilate appears as a character, including Antonio Ciseri’s historicist masterpiece, Ecce Homo, which graces the cover.

The result is a beautiful, compelling study of the man who ordered the Crucifixion. Pontius Pilate was a professional soldier, probably not much older than thirty, the statutory minimum for a Roman governor. His temperament and character reflect a man not yet smoothed by experience, efficient but not mature, “enthusiastic, sarcastic, nervous, occasionally brutal.” The Gospels suggest he had a short fuse. All the sources unite on this: he was a man of action, not reflection.

He probably disliked the Jews because they despised him. Even the high priests and Pharisees who dragged Jesus to Pilate’s palace in Jerusalem refused to pass its doors, for Pilate and the Romans were unclean. Then there were the rebels, “mavericks, prophets, and impostors,” the usual cross between bandits, vandals, and freedom fighters. Roman policy favored their comprehensive elimination. His predecessor Gratus crucified hundreds; his successor Varus would crucify thousands. Yet, as his foes agreed, he kept the peace for ten years. The most important messianic disturbance of his rule was suppressed with only three crucifixions.

Wroe notes that his clan, the Pontii, was not Roman but Samnite: Italian tribesmen conquered by the Romans in the third century BC. His family was thus probably respectable, but second class: members of the knightly class, special administrators, and trouble-shooters, never rising to patrician rank.

His cognomen, Pilate, comes from pilatus, “one skilled with the javelin.” It meant more than this, of course: his father or he had excelled with a difficult weapon, showing traits of “decisiveness, strength, straightness of aim.” Yet, the evidence of his political life shows little of that.

Perhaps these traits were unnecessary. As Wroe observes, the Emperor Tiberius preferred unknown quantities in high office. It may have amused him. At best, Tiberius looked for decent behavior and good character. In a pinch, even decent behavior might be dropped: Tiberius appointed Pomponius Flaccus governor of Syria on the strength of a thirty-six hour orgy, endorsing his commission with “A good fellow at all hours, day or night!”

The Emperor was tall, robust, and handsome, slow spoken, with something of an affected drawl, shrewd, suspicious, and devious. He was an alcoholic with a taste for naked swimming-and-sex sessions with minors of both sexes. We are told that some, whom he called his “minnows,” gave him particular pleasure by swimming up to him underwater and taking him in their mouths.

The Emperor believed the revelation of his thought a calamity.  Dio Cassius wrote, “he put many to death for no other offense than having grasped what he meant.” He trusted no one, and of his twenty or so intimates over his seventy-seven years of life, all but two or three were put to death. In a killing mood, “which lasted for most of the time Pilate was governor of Judaea,” he executed people “on the least word of any informer, and informers were everywhere.” Perhaps this is why Pilate, as presented by John the Evangelist, flinches when the Jews suggest that if he spares Jesus, “You are no friend of Caesar’s.”

This mediocrity is the hinge of Western history. The Evangelists were fond of citing famous events to provide a temporal reference for their story. Thus, at the time of the birth of Jesus, Caesar Augustus commands a census be taken so all the world may be taxed. The head tax, literally per capita, could be audited only by taking a census. It was unpopular: Copronius, one of the first prefects, crucified Judas the Galilean, a tax protester. So one would remember, or remember hearing from one’s father, about the census and then paying the tax. Thus, Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas the high priest, Herod the king, were not merely names, characters in a narrative, to the Christians who first read the Gospels, but men, as real in the memory of the First Century as FDR or JFK are in our own.

Pilate is more important than the others, as Wroe observes, “because he stands at the center of the Christian story and God’s plan of redemption. Without his climactic judgment of Jesus, the world would not have been saved. Without Christ’s death, pronounced by Pilate, there would have been no Resurrection, no founding Christian miracle.”

She describes the book in her introduction as a collage of biographical scenes, drawing on a diversity of traditions and writings. Perhaps it is the only way to sketch someone so unknowable. “We long for records, letters, diaries, the memories of friends,” Wroe writes.

As she notes, we cannot presume the Romans to be just like us, save for their clothes and haircuts. We would find them alien. Their sensual appreciation of blood is repellent; their admiration of suicide repugnant; as Wroe notes, Marcus Aurelius, among the noblest men who ever lived, considered putrescence a thing of beauty.

Yet, we know one thing that intrigued Pilate as it does us. At the trial of Jesus of Nazareth as presented by St. John the Evangelist, the defendant and judge endure a frustrating exchange. Pilate asks direct questions. When Jesus answers at all, he is responding on a different plane. The two men are simply not talking about the same things.

At last, Jesus states that he has come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Pilate replies with a question so strange that you know he said it: “What is truth?” or, in Greek, then still the working language of the eastern empire, “Ti estin aletheia?”

Wroe points out the subtle difference: Pilate is speaking of a narrow, particular truth: the truth of facts and testimony and evidence. But Jesus was speaking of “he aletheia”—absolute Truth. Wroe observes, “Jesus was referring to a truth that was overpoweringly different: as different, Polybius had once said, as when a galley rower, trained on skeleton ships on dry land, suddenly felt in the live ocean the pull of the oar and the craft’s response.”

And Pilate? Perhaps, as an Academician, he believed the way of wisdom was acknowledging the uncertainty of knowledge, and he felt the claim of Jesus was recklessly certain. Or perhaps, as Kazantzakis wrote, the Roman believed in nothing at all, “neither in gods nor in men, nor in Pontius Pilate.”

What is truth? The question is relevant to Pilate’s biography, too. In writing the life of a man nearly two thousand years dead, who disappears from the record after his recall from office, one is not transcribing a life. One seeks the truth, or at least, the truths, with a certain resolute desperation.

Yet Wroe gracefully presents the alternative theories of the essential moments in Pilate’s career and of his background (the Italians call him a Spaniard and the French and English a German) without stalling her narrative. Her prose is clear, supple, and quite beautiful. She captures the texture of power, particularly the confusion and exhaustion stemming from its exercise, with clarity and common sense. Anyone who has wielded limited authority has been there: to be tired, confronted by someone who wants something very badly, about which you care little save as it may affect your mission. To grant it is unjust. Yet if you give it to them, they will leave you alone.

She captures this so well. She brilliantly juxtaposes images spanning two millennia—the Dead Sea Scrolls, David Bowie, 19th century academic painters, modernist playwrights—with a dexterous ease that betrays intellectual power and integrity.  Pontius Pilate is impressive, concise, and fast moving, with eloquence that naturally flows from the grandeur of her material rather than a rhetorician’s self-conscious flourishes.

Ann Wroe has not written a book so much about Pilate as all our Pilates: how each generation projects on the tabula rasa that is this man our image of how he lived and saw the world. Yet somehow she gives us the sense of “a man actually walking on a marble floor in Caesarea,” a narrative pieced from a thousand fragments into the outline of a life.

New York Press, June 7, 2000

More Catholic than the Pope

The titles of the Pope sound like a fanfare: Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant

The titles of the Pope sound like a fanfare: Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the Servants of God. He is elected in secret conclave, met in the Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Upon his election, the ballots are burned: their white smoke, rising from a Vatican chimney, signals a new pope to the world.

Until the 1960s he was crowned amidst unbearable splendor, culminating when, placing the tiara on the Pope’s head, the Cardinal-Archdeacon intoned, “Receive this tiara adorned with three crowns, and know Thyself to be the Ruler of the World, the earthly Vicar of Jesus Christ our Savior, to Whom be glory and honor without end.” Many elements of the baroque grandeur of the church before the Second Vatican Council were merely the accretions of nearly 2000 years’ worldly power and as such, though often thrilling, poetic, or touching, secondary to its divine mission: saving souls. Most were swept away in the post-conciliar upheaval.

For the people in the pews, the most important change involved the Mass, the center of Catholic worship. The Mass is not a communion service, a reenactment, a commemoration, or a symbolic performance. To believers, it is literally the sacrifice of the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Savior of the World: perhaps the most important thing in this life. In the 16th century, Pius V and later the Council of Trent confirmed the traditional Roman rite, popularly called the Tridentine Rite, and commanded that it endure for all time. It lasted four centuries, followed without variation throughout Catholicism: celebrated in Latin, with the priest facing God at the head of the people, its focus the sacrifice itself. One might attend Mass anywhere in the world and be at home.

In April 1969, Paul VI authorized the Novus Ordo to replace the Tridentine Mass as the universal liturgy of the church. The old rite was never abolished, although the elite favored doing so. Often those who spoke most of opening the church to the people forced the new rites on those who preferred the old one. The American media vulgarized the changes as no more than celebration of the Mass in the vernacular. This was incorrect. Important things were changed. The emphasis shifted from the sacrifice to the congregation. The rhetoric was different, and the new language often ambiguous, bureaucratic and unsatisfying. The priest now faced the congregation rather than God.

Many Catholics still resent the modernized vernacular liturgy. By contrast with the rampant supernaturalism of the old rite, as Michael W. Cuneo observed, contemporary Catholic worship in America is sanitized and culturally respectable. But it is bourgeois: bloodless, unimpassioned and decorous. In the suburban parish where I grew up, the Mass became a matter of enveloping us in hazy good will, forced handshakes, and a middle-class coziness. It calls to mind Hugh Cecil’s characterization of the Church of England as “a spiritual pharmacy to which one may send for a bottle of grace whenever one happens to want it,” with “no sense of belonging to an unseen Kingdom with a loyalty to an unseen King.”

Some traditionalist Catholics have gone their own ways. Desiring the unified, triumphalist church of half a century ago, they seek it through schism. Some flirt with the unauthorized Tridentine Masses of Father Gommer de Pauw’s Catholic Traditionalist Movement or of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X.

Beyond Lefebvre lie the fever swamps. Sedevacantists (literally, “the chair is vacant”) hold that as Catholic doctrine is eternally valid and unchanging and the papacy exists to preserve it as such, any so-called pope who would alter these teachings is illegitimate. For example, the Second Vatican Council’s declaration on religious freedom, Dignitatus Humanae, affirms the spiritual value of other religions and calls for interreligious cooperation. At first glance, this apparently contradicts encyclicals of Popes Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius XI and Pius XII, published from 1832 to 1943. Each affirmed that the Catholic Church alone possessed fullness of truth and the certain means of salvation. A pope speaks with infallibility on matters of faith and morals. To traditionalists, the principle of noncontradiction means either these popes were right or the Council was right. Both cannot be right at the same time.

Sedevacantists hold that by calling the Council and enunciating its teachings, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and now John Paul II are heretics and not popes. (Some also hold John XXIII was a Freemason and the tool of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy and as such ineligible to be the Vicar of Christ.) Some sedevacantists go from proclaiming the seat vacant to filling it themselves.

At one time, being an antipope meant something. Once during the Great Schism of the West (1378-1417), Pope Gregory XII and two antipopes, Benedict XIII and John XXIII (not to be confused with the modern John XXIII) disputed pontificality. The last was particularly controversial: Edward Gibbon wrote that when John XXIII was indicted by the Council of Constance in 1417, “The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the Vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy and incest.”

Today’s antipopes command neither armies, nor territories, nor much of a following. One doubts the Vatican is much concerned with Gregory XVII of Troyar la Palma, Spain; Gregory XVII of St. Jovite, Quebec; Michael I of Kansas; Peter II of Pennsylvania; Peter II of France; or Peter II of Germany. Happily, some maintain Web pages, like that of the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church. Its bishop, James H. Hess, part-time cleric and full-time CPA, also sells “a board game which I created and copyrighted.” A persistent salesman, Hess writes, “…you of the clergy, accept the truth of apostolic Roman Catholicism, work to establish a true papacy.”

…and then, if in your ministry, you find you need good vestments and altarware at good prices, write to Pax House, Apdo. Postal 39-181, Guadalajara, Jalisco 44171, Mexico.

Clemente Dominguez Gomez of Troyar la Palma claimed the Virgin had revealed to him Paul VI’s secret imprisonment and replacement by “an exact impostor.” As if Marian apparition were insufficient, Dominguez said Paul VI had confirmed this through “bilocation.” On these credentials, the Spaniard persuaded Pierre Martin Ngo-Dinh-Thuc, an exiled Vietnamese bishop, to ordain him a priest on January 1, 1976. Eleven days later, Thuc consecrated Dominguez a bishop. When Paul VI died in 1978, Dominguez proclaimed himself Pope Gregory XVII.

In 1968, Father John Gregory of the Trinity, founder of the Apostles of Infinite Love at St. Jovite, Quebec, announced he had been mystically crowned Pope, also under the name of Gregory XVII. Thirty-one years later, he was arrested for child molesting, on charges going back as far as 1965.

Now John Paul II has another rival. According to the True Catholic website (www.truecatholic.org), Earl Pulvermacher was elected Pope Pius XIII on October 24, 1998. Pulvermacher states that he was born in Wisconsin in 1918 and ordained in 1946. Thirty years later, he rejected the Novus Ordo and became a freelance priest. Pulvermacher’s “conclave movement” holds that the entire hierarchy of the church—pope, cardinals, bishops and priests—having fallen into heresy, have ipso facto vacated their offices. Thus, under natural law, the true Catholics have the right to fill the vacancy by electing a pope.

He claims the organizers of the 1998 conclave took three years to plan and organize the election. They approached “all known true Catholics,” requiring would-be electors to sign documents relating to their baptism, age, beliefs with respect to the Second Vatican Council, and nonassociation with any individuals connected with the “Novus Ordo Church.” On October 23, 1998, three scrutinizers at a telephone began taking votes from electors. They worked until the next day, recording each vote on a separate paper ballot. Then they communicated the result to Pulvermacher by speakerphone. Presumably, they asked something resembling the old question, “Reverend Lord, the Sacred College has elected thee to be the successor of St. Peter. Wilt thou accept pontificality?” Pulvermacher accepted, and, according to the website, “at that very moment, the papacy was restored.” The site shows a picture of the “White Smoke” rising from the eaves of a prefabricated log cabin.

Again according to the site, “Catholics world-wide rejoice and offer their thanks to Almighty God for restoring the papacy to the Catholic Church,” while “the youth of the world…are getting the answers they seek, answers from traditional Catholic teaching…giving their ‘Profession of Faith’ and joining the true Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation.” The documents accessible through the website offer no comment from the secular or religious press, no words of affirmation from distinguished laymen—or anything that might not have come from a fertile imagination and decent catechetical library. The photographs show only Pulvermacher, his henchman Gordon Cardinal Bateman, two other persons in ecclesiastical robes and, of course, a couple of altar boys.

There are no Swiss Guards, no Chamberlains, no papal knights, no throngs pressing against the rail. Only once, indeed, does Pulvermacher’s site note the actual number of participants in any of his ceremonies: twenty-eight, who attended his consecration as a bishop in a rented hotel ballroom in Kalispell, Montanna. Each shared a slice of a frosted cake decorated with the words, “Long Live Pope Pius XIII.”

New York Press, April 4, 2000

The Truth as You See It

In 1900, when newspapers were still the only mass media, over thirty daily papers of general and specialized circulation were published in Manhattan alone. But by the Twenties, a combination of massive capital investment and increasing difficulties in getting through traffic jams to deliver the newspapers to customers made launching

In 1900, when newspapers were still the only mass media, over thirty daily papers of general and specialized circulation were published in Manhattan alone. But by the Twenties, a combination of massive capital investment and increasing difficulties in getting through traffic jams to deliver the newspapers to customers made launching a new daily something only an established publisher might try.

For example, the Daily News, first published on June 26, 1919, was founded by Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, an heir to the family that published the Chicago Tribune. Within five years its large photographs, wild headlines, and popular columnists had given the Daily News a circulation of 750,000, making it the most widely read daily in the United States. In 1924, William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Journal and the New York American, declared war on Patterson by starting his own tabloid, the Daily Mirror.

But these papers, however sensational, still published something that could be recognized as news. Nothing had prepared journalism for Bernarr Macfadden’s New York Graphic.

Macfadden proved that material success can be won by the hard-working, ambitious, and utterly humorless. He was an ignoramus with the courage of his convictions, believing that whatever interested him would interest everybody else, and for an amazingly long time, he was largely right.

He was a graphomaniac health nut: during his long career, he published some 150 books on diet and fitness. He was also fixated on sex, although to call his focus on the human body an obsession is to lend glamor to a grimly Celtic fanaticism.

Bernard Adolphus McFadden was born near Mill Spring, Missouri on August 16, 1868. No one knows when or why he changed his name: one memoirist wrote, “…there was a legend around the Macfadden magazines…that the name was a misprint of Bernard, but that upon seeing it misspelled by a printer he had decided to keep it.”

He arrived in New York in 1894 after a brief stint as a professional wrestler with Sandow, the Strong Man. Four years later, already a vegetarian and non-drinker, Macfadden launched his first magazine, Physical Culture, from the Flatiron Building. At first he wrote most of the magazine himself, including its serialized novels. He also posed for the magazine in various stages of undress as an exemplar of Healthy American Manhood. He lectured, denounced alcohol and tobacco, and advocated fasting, natural healing, and exercise.

In 1912, his five-volume Encyclopedia of Physical Culture argued that all major illnesses, including polio, cancer, and Bright’s disease, could be cured by simple diets, water therapy, and modest exercises. One diet called for grapes—nothing but grapes—which Macfadden insisted would eradicate any cancer in the system.

His four marriages produced eight children, six of whom were daughters—Berwyn, Braunda, Beverly, Brynece, Byrne, and Beulah. They were a handsome family, and he loved publishing photographs of his children as representative of ideal American youth, often wearing costumes that Graphic reporter Lester Cohen later described as looking “like…a number of silk handkerchiefs, hanging here or there.”

Then he made his fortune. True Story began publication in 1918. It was the first modern true-confessions magazine. It warned young women against “random flirtations and promiscuous sex.”

One of his writers once asked an editor, “Can a heroine of True Story have sexual intercourse?”

“Yes,” the editor replied, “if she doesn’t enjoy it.”

Perhaps the greatest argument for Macfadden’s sanity is that, when the magazine’s sales dipped in 1920, he did a complete turnabout, publishing stories that placed a heavy emphasis on women who sought sexual gratification outside the bounds of marriage (although Macfadden still drew a conventional moral lesson from his characters’ unhappy lives).

At a time when most magazines still used illustrators, Macfadden used posed photographs of actors or models to illustrate his stories. He always admitted the photographs were posed, usually in microscopic type on the contents page. The mere use of photographs blurred the line between fiction and fact: many of his readers believed the stories were true.

True Story became enormously popular. It spawned legions of imitators. Then he started True Detective Stories and other gritty pulp magazines. He made $30 million within five years. This was not enough: he had to publish a New York City daily. Thus, on April 15, 1924, the New York Graphic hit the streets for the first time.

Of course, Macfadden’s paper would publish Nothing but the Truth: it said so on the masthead. He knew what the public wanted: after all, he’d succeeded with True Story and his other magazines. And it would be a crusading newspaper, fighting for health and physical fitness and against medical ignorance, fighting against the use of pharmaceuticals and against what he called “Prurient Prudery,” to advance “a new human race, free of inhibitions and free of the contamination of smallpox vaccine.” Within days, the joke was that the Graphic was for fornication, against vaccination.

Macfadden, then in his late fifties, was slender, beaky, and about five feet, six inches tall. He looked vaguely exotic: many thought he had Native American blood. He spoke with a bizarre accent: one listener compared it to a combination of Old Scotch and Choctaw.

Macfadden had assembled some interesting professional talent. Money can do that. His managing editor, Emile Gauvreau, had been editor of the Hartford Courant at twenty-six; his memoirs, My Last Million Readers, is a fine, racy impression of Twenties tabloid journalism. Macfadden’s greatest catch was an unknown, Walter Winchell. It was Winchell’s first job on a daily newspaper. He was the nightclub editor, sports columnist, and dramatic critic. Within months, his gossip column made him famous; within two years, it landed him a job with Hearst. Better than Macfadden, perhaps, he knew what “they” wanted.

Between his own genius, the keyhole journalism of Walter Winchell, and contests (the Graphic appears to have been the first American daily to offer cash prizes in crossword puzzle competitions), Gauvreau built circulation from 30,000 to 300,000 within two years. Headlines like “Nude Models and Students in Mad Revel at Paris Ball” and “Boys Spill Beans on Nude Coeds in Reservoir Swim” helped a lot.

So did the Composograph, “a depiction, posed in the Art Department, of a sensational real-life scene that…could not be photographed.” To Macfadden, it was simply the logical extension of the sort of thing that his magazines  had done for years. His competitors found it fraudulent and unethical.

The tabloid photographers would do almost anything for a great shot. Thus, on January 12, 1928, Tom Howard, a Chicago Tribune photographer on assignment to the Daily News, concealed a miniature camera in his pants to illegally smuggle it into Sing Sing so that he could snap murderess Ruth Snyder, bound and hooded in Old Sparky, just as the executioner flipped the switch.

They were nearly two years behind the Graphic, which had used a Composograph to cover the execution of cop-killing post office bandit Gerald Chapman, whose polished manner had won him the tabloid nicknames “Gentleman Gerald” and “The Count of Gramercy Park.”  Gus Schoenbaechler, a Graphic staff, posed as Chapman; his editor hung him from a steam pipe for the shot; Schoenbaechler nearly strangled himself when he accidentally kicked away the chair; and the picture made the Graphic’s front page on Tuesday, April 6, 1926.

More importantly for the Graphic’s prurient readership, as long as the darkroom held out, the Graphic could simply fake front page photographs showing celebrities in intimate situations, as in the misadventures of Daddy Browning and his child-bride, Peaches.

Edward West Browning (1875-1934) rose from office boy to real estate multimillionaire by the age of forty. He first appeared in the tabloids when his wife left him for the family dentist in 1924. He complained, “How can any sensible woman fall in love with a dentist, particularly with the dentist who has done her own work?” Mrs. Browning’s response was to allege Browning’s weakness for little girls.

The divorce settlement left Browning with custody of his adopted daughter Dorothy. Within a year of the divorce, Browning, claiming she needed a sister, advertised in the Herald Tribune for a “pretty, refined girl, about fourteen years old…” He allegedly interviewed 12,000 applicants over two weeks, bouncing the girls on his knee as he caressed and pinched them. Unfortunately, the successful candidate was soon exposed as a twenty-one-year-old impostor.

A year later, Browning met Frances Heenan at a sorority dance. The fifty-one-year-old was entranced by the fifteen year-old blonde. He said, “You look like peaches and cream to me! I’m going to call you Peaches.” The tabloids had already named him “Daddy.”

At five feet, seven inches and 145 pounds, Peaches was a healthy girl. Damon Runyon wrote, “She is…one of those large, patient blondes…her legs are what the boys call piano legs. They say she is fifteen, but she is developed enough to pass anywhere for twenty.”

They were married on April 11, 1926; on October 2, 1926, less than six months later, she marched out of their hotel lugging $30,000 worth of jewels, furs, gowns, and gifts while screaming, “Money isn’t everything!”

Daddy and Peaches each held numerous press conferences, at which they washed, as one writer commented, not only their dirty linen but their scanties and socks as well. Before their five-day divorce trial, Peaches confusingly claimed that: that he had forced her to perform unnatural acts, that she had had nightly relations with him “except when ill,” and that she had never slept with Browning at all.

At trial, Peaches testified that Browning had forced her to look at pornography and eat breakfast with him in the nude. He loved to hide behind doors and screens and then jump out naked to surprise her, shouting “Woof! Woof!”

Macfadden found this material irresistible.  A flood of Composographs followed, such as one showing Daddy (discreetly in his pajamas) advancing on a cowering, towel-draped Peaches, saying “Woof! Woof! Don’t be a goof!” in an overhead comic-strip balloon while Daddy’s pet African honking gander, “perched on the marital bed,” comments “Honk! Honk! It’s the bonk!”

Peaches was awarded $350 a week in temporary alimony, cut off when the divorce was finalized.

The death of film star Rudolph Valentino, the Great Lover of the silent screen, made the Composograph almost  infamous. Near the height of his fame, Valentino was only 31 when he died suddenly of peritonitis on August 23, 1926. There was an orgy of frenzied mourning, encouraged by the studios and the tabloids, with hysterical mobs shattering windows to get into Frank E. Campbell’s funeral home on Madison Avenue where Valentino’s body lay in state.

Macfadden sent two photographers to Campbell’s before the body’s arrival. Presumably after a distribution of appropriate gratuities, one photographer posed in Valentino’s empty casket. The other snapped away. While developing the photograph, the darkroom boys superimposed the actor’s head on the photographer’s body. Thus the Graphic had a picture of Valentino in the box before Campbell’s had finished embalming him. The boys also created a picture of Valentino on the operating table (Graphic staffer Lester Cohen later wrote that he recognized two fellow reporters among the “surgeons” and “nurses” in the photograph) and yet another, based on a medium’s vision, showing Valentino standing with Enrico Caruso in heaven as scores of dead souls ascend the stairway to the Pearly Gates.

Macfadden responded to one critic of this sort of thing by snapping, “What’s the harm in telling the public the truth as you see it? I ask you, sir!”

Macfadden never tired of pushing his nuttier ideas into the paper against Gauvreau’s better instincts. In 1928, Gauvreau, worn out by fighting with his boss, left the Graphic for peace and tranquillity as managing editor of Hearst’s Daily Mirror, and the paper lost momentum with his departure. Macfadden, now convinced he should be President of the United States, further dissipated his energies by building a chain of newspapers and magazines to further his ambitions. Nearly all lost money.

On July 7, 1932, Macfadden folded the Graphic. In eight years, he had reportedly lost between seven and eleven million dollars. He never actually ran for President: in 1940, he ran for U.S. Senator from Florida in the Democratic primary, one of those old-fashioned races with sixteen candidates, and managed to poll a little over ten percent of the vote. A year later, the bankers took over Macfadden Publications and he was out.

In 1955, Macfadden was diagnosed with jaundice. Refusing all medical help, he trusted to fasting. He died on October 12, 1955—probably of his own prescription.

New York Press, January 11, 2000