R.I.P. 2021

American poetry and the lives of poets since the middle of the 20^th century would be inconceivable without Robert Bly.  I heard Bly read twice in the 1960s, in a relatively small room on our college campus.  He was theatrical, enthralling, mesmerizing. He above the few others who got poets reading in public again popularized the practice. Poetry readings are now everywhere, and provide another income stream and contact with the public for contemporary poets.

 Bly organized and led poets against the Vietnam war, and they gave group readings. I heard him again years later in a reading in Pittsburgh with his good friend, James Wright, in one of the last appearances of Wright’s life.

 With his magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties), his translations and his proselytizing at his readings, Bly introduced previously ignored poets from Europe and especially Latin America.  He especially championed Pablo Neruda.  In one of his last interviews in 2011, Bly acknowledged that these activities brought new poets to the attention of American writers, and that attention “changed American poetry and made it less rigid and more playful.”  He favored a more imaginative poetry “which allows the unconscious to come in with its various ignorances and brilliances.”

 In the late 1980s and early 90s, Bly reached a larger audience through his participation in a series of Bill Moyers programs on poetry and then in Moyers’ program “A Gathering of Men,” the first national exposure of a series of workshops for men, which were  joined by psychologist James Hillman and scholar Michael Meade.  At roughly the same time, his book Iron John was published, which explored an ancient tale for insights into modern men.  It became a best seller. 

This so-called men’s movement and Bly’s participation in it have been willfully distorted from that time to this.  Bly, who organized the annual Great Mother conference in the 1970s, used myth and poetry to illuminate common and unspoken challenges for contemporary American men.  His emphasis was not on their relationship to women but on their damaged relationships to their fathers, those “bad moods behind the newspaper” which were many boys’ experience of their fathers in childhood.  Bly, Hillman and Meade later edited an excellent anthology of poetry they used in these retreats and conferences, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (a line from a Yeats’ poem.)

 In later life Bly became an example of articulate aging, as he became more humble and his poems became even more playful, with some of his most incisive lines.

   I first encountered Bly at the age of 19 or so, and all along the years since. (He was also one of the few established poets who responded to poems I sent him, though he had no reason to.)  Now that I have entered old age and recognize some of his changes, I expect I will continue to look into his work for the rest of my life.

 American poetry since 1950 would also be very different without Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died in 2021 at the age of 101.  Though his own exuberant and playful poems were important, it was his role as publisher and leading light of the fabled City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco that provided access to a number of poets outside the mainstream at the time, but who later became major figures in American literature.

 Joan Didion operated in a different sphere, as evidenced by the many tributes published in major newspapers and magazines in the short time since her death, especially in contrast to the absence of attention to Bly.  She was a writer of the public world, of current mostly urban landscapes (particularly California, when California was still something of a mystery to New York publications) and events in larger contexts. 

I valued her especially in two areas.  First, contemporary writing, the writing biz and Hollywood. In particular I absorbed what she and her husband John Gregory Dunne said and wrote about the movie biz.  I think it was in one of their dual interviews their tip for writers in story conferences with executives was to bring a conspicuously large legal pad and take notes.  They claimed that executives found this so disconcerting that they suddenly had little to say. Even if it doesn’t actually work, it says all you need to know.

 Didion once called writing a hostile act, which means (as she explained in her Paris Review interview) that “you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it.”  She seems to have done that partly by defining herself as part of stories, so readers could identify with her perspective.  She learned journalism the old fashioned way, by doing it.  But Hollywood helped, and she was already unusual simply by being a woman in a then male dominated trade. The skillful deployment of intriguing and attractive photos of herself added to the mystique. She became a name, and that became part of her professionalism.

 Didion said that one way she learned to write was by typing out some of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction.  The famous Hemingway sentences are of course pertinent to her writing style, but it was the typing out that interested me—that the knowledge was physical.  This is both a neglected aspect of writing and another key to Didion’s style. 

Her writing applied a unique point of view to matters important to me in the 1960s and 70s.  I must have been reading Didion in the New York Review of Books for I acquired her first several books as soon as they came out in paperback.  The title song in her The White Album begins with the sentence that has since become the title of a omnibus of her nonfiction, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Yet in the penultimate essay of that book, “On the Morning After the Sixties,” she admits she found no narrative in that decades events, especially not the conventional ones.  Her own reporting emphasizes the specific, the contrary, the fragmentary.  I was in the generation that identified with the 60s and our narratives, but I valued her observations that questioned them, for it added to and validated my own questioning observations.  She was a bit more than a decade older, but I got at least a whiff of what college was like for her (which, she wrote, formed her perspective) from some of my professors, who also drilled us in Pound and Yeats and existentialism.

 That of course included the lines from Yeats that provided her with one book title, and with a central sense of apocalyptic breaking apart.  And we’ve had searing reasons to recall multiple lines from “The Second Coming” during the Bush years and most emphatically in the Trump era, which still seems to be the gyre that’s widening. 

I’ve written extensively earlier in the year on the death of Larry McMurtry.  Other prominent writers include journalist and literary critic Janet Malcolm, and novelists Ved Mehta and Roberto Calasso.

 Speaking of the 60s, Gene Youngblood wrote the definite book on that era of filmmaking dreams in Expanded Cinema, and Morris Dickstein one of the first evaluations of the decade in The Gates Of Eden.  We remember Ed Ward’s music coverage in Rolling Stone.  And speaking of California, Eve Babbitz was famously infamous as a commentator and exemplar of LA.  In defining the black experience of the era, especially of women, bell hooks was the measure. 

 The theatre world—which generates books as well—saw the deaths of lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, credited with changing the American musical and theatre in general.  In his era, playwright Arthur Kopit was also revolutionary. Other prominent playwrights who died in 2021 include Ed Bullins and Robbie McCauley.  Novelist Jean-Claude Carriere wrote classic movie scripts for Bunuel and other European directors.  Veteran actor for the world stage and screen Christopher Plummer also wrote a graceful and informative memoir, In Spite Of Myself.

 2001 Pulitzer Prize poet Stephen Elliot Dunn died in 2021, as well as poets Martin Greenberg, Al Young and Jack Hirshman.  Denis Donaghue wrote extensively on literary authors.  Vartan Gregorian was an effective advocate for book culture, and savior of the New York Public Library. 

Other prominent names—including world icon Desmond Tutu, Apollo astronaut Michael Collins, veteran talk show host Larry King, comedian Mort Sahl, and television reporter Roger Mudd—also generated books.

 2021 lost beloved children’s books authors Beverly Cleary, Joan Walsh Anglund and Norman Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth). Gary Paulsen wrote adventure stories for young adults and children, Bill Johnston wrote young adult novels and Lois Ehlert wrote for children.

 Harry Mark Petrakis wrote fiction about Greek immigrants in Chicago, and Gerald Haslam wrote about working class communities in the California Central Valley.  Margaret Warner Bonanno, Anne Wingate, Sally Miller Gearhart, William F. Nolan, Patricia Kennealy, Graham Dustan Martin and Storm Constantine, wrote science fiction or fantasy or both.  Dewey Lambdin wrote nautical novels, Michelle Serott wrote romances, Margaret Maron wrote mysteries and Jason Matthews wrote spy novels.

 Literature also lost literary biographer Jonathan Fryer, and translators Harriet Weaver and Thomas Cleary. 

In the multiple areas of non-fiction, I want to draw attention to a few authors whose deaths were not widely noted.  Jerome Kagan was an eminent American psychologist who wrote a series of books in his last years that questioned current methods and directions in psychology, including An Argument for Mind (2006), Psychology’s Ghosts (2012) and On Being Human (2016.)  I get the sense that they were politely ignored within the current mainstream, but they are the kind of books that current and future rebels may well discover.

 Mary Catherine Bateson first came to my reading attention as co-author of Angel's Fear, the posthumous book by her father Gregory Bateson that she completed.  Later I read her fascinating book about her famous father and even more famous mother, Margaret Mead.  Trained as an anthropologist (her opus, with Richard Goldsby, was on race), she wrote perceptively about contemporary culture and thought from the perspective of her own life.

 Lee Marmon photographed Laguna Pueblo and other Native American life for some 60 years.  He was particularly known for his portraits of elders, creating lasting art and giving faces to memory and tradition. (I reviewed one of his books here.)

 John Naisbitt wrote best sellers such as Megatrends. Hans Kung had a long career writing on theological matters which often got him in trouble with the Catholic Church.  Journalist James Ridgeway exposed far right American movements when more people should have been listening.

 Writers in the field of history include Mary Matsuda Gruenwald (on U.S. World War II internment camps for Japanese-Americans), Frank J. Cappa, Stuart Woolf (English-Italian historian), Leon Litwack, Robert Middlekauff (American revolution), Lyn McDonald (World War I.)

 E.O. Wilson wrote prolifically and often dubiously about biological matters.  Bruce Berger wrote about American deserts.  W. Royal Stokes was a music writer and historian, Peter G. Davis was a classical music critic.

  Apologies for omissions and misspellings.  May they rest in peace: their work lives on.

Two Giants of Our Times, Also Friends

Mike Nichols: A Life

By Mark Harris

Penguin Press

671 pages

 Tom Stoppard: A Life

By Hermione Lee

Knopf

872 pages

 These two books belong together not only because they are both extensive and well-written biographies published in the last year, and their subjects are major arts and entertainment figures of the past half century, but because these two men knew and very much liked each other, and featured in each other’s lives.

 They also started out in a similar—and similarly peculiar—way.  Both were eastern European emigrants at a young age, and remade their identities in a new country and a new language with new names, prompting a sense of doubleness or inauthenticity that haunted each of them.

 They both became globally famous, yet highly identified with their new countries. As they became financially as well as creatively successful, they each developed a lavish lifestyle, tailoring it to their particular tastes: Stoppard collected first editions, Nichols collected art and horses.  They were both inner-directed and perhaps shy, while both also cultivated a large and varied array of friends, and both became known for entertaining well and on a large scale.

 Both of these biographies extol this friendship. Both note the speech Stoppard made when Nichols received the ultimate accolade of the Kennedy Center Honors.  But only the Nichols biography mentions that, in a long mental fog from a reaction to prescription sleeping medication that led him to believe he was going broke, Nichols called Stoppard and asked if he could come and live with him.

 Yet they worked together only once, when Mike Nichols directed the first Broadway production of Stoppard’s play, The Real Thing in 1984, which began their friendship.  Though Stoppard sometimes wrote for the movies, he never worked on one that Nichols directed. The main aspects of their professional lives were very different.

Mike Nichols with playwright Neil Simon

 Nichols was famous in America, first from television and then as a director.  He was a powerful presence in Hollywood and New York theatre who was essential to the success of many others, beginning with Neil Simon and Whoopi Goldberg, and many young actors who became stars.  But Tom Stoppard is equally famous in England, and in the smaller theatrical world of London he also had furthered careers and maintained a web of relationships.  People were devoted to both of them. The style and subjects of Stoppard’s plays, which may seem arcane to Americans, nevertheless have won him international attention and acclaim.

 There was much about Nichols childhood I didn’t know, but I remember Nichols and May on our black and white TV set.  Still, I was surprised to realize that of Nichol’s 19 feature films, I saw all but three in theatres when they came out.  There is no other director I can say that about, nor is there ever likely to be another. Though I didn’t live in New York, I even saw two of the Broadway plays Nichols directed, including that original production of The Real Thing.

 I was in college when Nichols directed the quintessential 1960s movie, The Graduate. He’d already directed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in its way the classic movie about 1950s marriage and sexuality, and Carnal Knowledge, which took that sensibility into the 1970s.  He nailed the 80s with Working Girl, and the 90s with Angels in America (a miniseries for television that I first saw on DVD) as well as Postcards From the Edge, Primary Colors and The Birdcage.  One of his lesser-regarded films, Regarding Henry (with Harrison Ford) is one of my personal favorites.

 At the same time, the style and subjects are so varied, I’ve often forgotten which movies Nichols did direct. This biography notes that his genius was applying fundamentals by the core question he asked: what was this situation really like?  And his attention to the expectations of story: what happens next?

 I was in college as well when Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead exploded in London and then on Broadway.  We could feel the exciting rush of fresh air (not usual with explosives, as Stoppard might point out) breathing into our theatrical efforts on the Midwestern prairie.  I read it, as I did all of his plays thereafter. 

 Stoppard is rightly skeptical of how true to the play as performed the reading of it can be.  But most of his early plays required such large productions that they seldom got out of New York.  I eventually managed to see several regional theatre productions (notably of Arcadia, which he calls his “perfect” play, and which has the advantage of a small cast and single set and no special effects) and several university productions, good and indifferent.  Some of the plays became more coherent on stage, and some productions didn’t match my imagination.  Though I’ve seen some of his television plays and heard radio plays, basically, the playwright Stoppard has been on the page, as language. Even so, I’ve been an enthusiast.

Benedict Cumberbatch in "Parades End"

 I’ve been particularly delighted by some of Stoppard’s film work: from the Indiana Jones movie with Sean Connery to his Oscar-winner Shakespeare in Love, probably the most similar to his stage writing on film (apart from the film of “Rosencrantz…” he directed—his one play made into a movie so far.)  But I equally admire Parade’s End, his BBC TV miniseries adaptation of several novels by Ford Maddox Ford.  I’ve seen it, and by reading the books and then Stoppard’s screenplay, I’ve deepened my appreciation of his achievement (and his methods.)   

Stoppard brought wit and erudition back to playwriting. In his work and through his personality, he made intellectual respectability respectable as entertainment.  His sense of craft is also important and inspiring, and his idea that the writer's task is to regulate the flow of information to some end, is especially fruitful.

 So I’ve been aware of Nichols and Stoppard’s professional careers more or less all the way through.  (Nichols died in 2014 at age 83.  Stoppard keeps threatening to retire, but then comes up with another idea for a play.) Therefore these biographies contrast and compare with my experiences and memories of these years.  I know the references, I get the jokes.  But of course there was a lot I didn’t know, that I learned in context in these pages.  Marriages and affairs, children and friendships, muses and nemeses, all texture their lives.

 Stoppard gave many interviews over the years which I’ve read and watched.  He was intelligent and charming, as was Nichols in his interviews and discussions.  So I’d formed impressions of both men, which were augmented if not fundamentally changed by these biographies.  Perhaps Nichols was somewhat farther from his public persona, but my sense of him deepened.  These biographies detail how both of them were aware of these differences between their public persona or public perception, and the complexities of their private selves.  Both had persistent self-doubts.

 Given the circumstances of their early lives, a dogged sense of uncertainty would seem inevitable.  Hermione Lee in particular suggests how the theme of doubleness runs through Stoppard’s work.  He consciously applied it to his own life with his play Rock & Roll, which he said began as an exploration of what his life might have been like had he not left Czechoslovakia and ended up in England. 

As seems ironic but is frequently the case, both are immigrants who more thoroughly embrace and express characteristics of their country than many native-born.  Stoppard has lived the life of an English squire and man of letters of earlier ages, adapted to his times.  Mike Nichols lived the American dream of show business fame and glitter, and expressed much of what America was in his time.

But late in life both men looked to the past and to their roots, and found something else they had in common: while Nichols knew of his European Jewish relatives and ancestors, Stoppard learned of his only in recent decades.  Both lost relatives to the Holocaust, adding tragedy to their dislocation. 

 Both biographies—by Mark Harris and Hermione Lee—are judicious and admirably written, and a great pleasure to read.  Lee has the additional critical job of elucidating plays that many readers probably haven’t seen, which she does gracefully and convincingly. 

 Books are internal negotiations; perhaps biographies more than others.  It’s a difficult form, requiring a lot of research and then a lot of construction.  Harris and Lee have selected and shaped, but without reducing their subjects to formulas.  They sprawl appropriately, making for rich reading.