Pnin
(Vladimir Nabokov) (1953) Say what you like but America and Americans are lovely. In this grand, concise novel, Nabokov sets his fish, Professor Timofey Pnin, given new teeth to match the wounds of his new challenges, in unaccustomed, American, waters, with morbidly hilarious results, in an “almost perfect work” according to Harold Bloom, the man who, like Anna Cunningham, has read everything. Nabokov described the pedantic Professor as “A man of great moral courage, a pure man, a scholar and a staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single love, he never descends from a high plane of life characterized by authenticity…
Continue Reading →Dumb and Dumbest
"You were a wonderful Goneril at Eton." (Painting by Edwin Austin Abbey, 1902)
In Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, the character Henry Carr is suggested to play the leading role in The Importance of Being Earnest because he’d been ‘”a wonderful Goneril at Eton.” This line has recently been dusted off, again, in the context of Stoppard’s bemoaning the decline in cultural literacy. As The Wall Street Journal records, Stoppard said the joke was understood and appreciated in 1974 but materially less so in the early 1990s. Tom claims half of the more recent audience didn’t know who Goneril was. A generation later, they fail to get his latest work at the National Theatre…
Continue Reading →I Pagliacci
and Cavalleria Rusticana (Filmed at the Met, Northern winter, 2015) (screened in Adelaide, 8 July 2015) It’s more (squalid, proletarian) potboiler than verismo, but this time-honoured double bill of adulterous, hypocritical, homicidal southern Italians is, pardon the expression, impervious to the knife. The Met, under baton of Fabio Luisi, is faultless, and the direction and cinéma vérité staging, after Sir David McVicar, is pretty good, albeit a little clunky (*QUIBBLE ALERT*). Appropriately, ’twas the Met that first combined these two hardy perennials in 1893; a good idea that seems obvious in hindsight. The pieces are worthy but slight, crisp wafers soaked…
Continue Reading →Watch on the Rhine
At the Movies, London, 1943
(Dir. Herman Shumlin) (1943) Nazis, ISIS, Port Adelaide Football Club…the forces of evil bring us together and so it proves here, in Warner Brothers’ film of Lillian Hellman’s play about a member of the resistance and his family, seeking refuge from the Nazis in his wife’s family dream house in Washington DC, some time before Pearl Harbour shook the American lethargy… Bette Davis and Paul Lukas are given some very snappy lines, but they rise above them and give us performances that convince us of a couple driven to poverty and danger, for a cause. Bette Davis is wonderful (some thought her role marginalised and consequently…
Continue Reading →The Masterpieces of the Early Flemish
Jerome Bosch
(F. Hanfstaengl) (1905) One of those great little guides, blocked in gold, crammed with plates and a table of particulars – no commentary required. The early Flemish painters were conventional in subject, usually involving Christian imagery, but were radical in their eclectic rendering. Some examples will illuminate:
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