By Stuart Mitchner

It was while exploring “In the Company of Good Books: From Shakespeare to Morrison” at Princeton University Library’s Milberg Gallery that I found myself face to face with George Eliot. An hour later when I walked back into the light of day from this 400th anniversary celebration of the “First Folio of 1623” and other Firestone Library rarities, an unmissable show that I very nearly missed (it closes December 10), all I could think about was the woman gazing out at me from Frederick William Burton’s charcoal drawing, a preparatory study for his fuller, more detailed, but less intriguing colored chalk portrait in London’s National Portrait Gallery.

Eliot would have been 44 on February 14, 1864, when, in the words of her journal, “Mr. Burton dined with us and asked me to let him take my portrait.” According to the curator’s note, the fact that Burton was a friend “may account for the closely-cropped, full-frontal and altogether more intimate portrayal of her face.”

Maybe it was the aura of intimacy that drew me in and held me, so serenely sympathetic were her pale blue eyes, the only color in the drawing; at the same time, I knew I was in the presence of the author of this remarkable sentence, from her masterpiece Middlemarch: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

Approaching the “last Beatles’ song,” my first thought is how well the title “Now and Then” fits the occasion. The dominant line, “It’s all because of you,” works for people who have lived more than half a century with the group as I have, as well as our generation’s children and grandchildren, like the 23-year-old who says “I was 1 when George Harrison died” in a November 3 New York Times article about Gen Z Beatles fans on TikTok.

The Romance

In last Sunday’s Times (“At the Heart of the Last Beatles Song, A Love Story”), Ian Leslie views “Now and Then” in the context of the book he’s writing about Lennon and McCartney’s “love story in songs.” While he seems to agree that “their love story is “our love story, too” and that  “their songs still permeate our lives,” Leslie views “Now and Then” as a song based on Lennon’s last words to McCartney in the hallway of the Dakota, “Think about me every now and then, old friend.” However, highlighting the romance inevitably distracts from the fact that the song and the official video with its doctored clips of Beatles “now and then” is being presented to the world as a technologically achieved Beatles reunion. While George Harrison’s searing guitar was the defining force in the 1994 “reunion” that produced “Free As a Bird,” this time it’s Paul who “came up with a slide guitar part played on a lap steel guitar,” according to the liner notes, “in homage to George,” who had dismissed “Now and Then” as “rubbish” when they first tried to work with the demo in the late nineties. more

By Stuart Mitchner

Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.

—James Dean (1931-1955)

You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye…

—Taylor Swift (born 1989)

The reality of writing an open-ended weekly column is that at the last minute someone or something may come out of nowhere to redirect a piece that was originally triggered, in this case, by controversial basketball coach Bobby Knight’s front page obituary in the New York Times. First thought is you’ll be writing about growing up with Indiana basketball, which goes according to plan until you remember a player you admired as a 10-year-old, who reawakens thoughts of James Dean, the actor you were obsessed with at 17.

It seems incredible that at the time I was buying everything about James Dean I could lay my hands on, I missed the poem with the line about dreaming and living that contains other “last words” such as “Forgive quickly, kiss slowly,” “Dance as if no one’s watching,” and “Love as if it’s all you know.” Any one of those lines could be the title of a song by Taylor Swift, who brought Dean dancing back into the pop culture conversation in 2014 and then again last week in her rerecorded version of “Style.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

The youth was not conscious that he was erect upon his feet. He did not know the direction of the ground. Indeed, once he even lost the habit of balance and fell heavily.

—Stephen Crane (1871-1900), from The Red Badge of Courage

According to R.W. Stallman’s biography, Stephen Crane claimed to be prouder “of his baseball ability than some other things” even after The Red Badge of Courage had made him an international celebrity at 25. Asked how he could write about war without seeing combat, Crane once again cited baseball: “The opposing team is an enemy tribe.” A Syracuse teammate recalled that Crane played ball “with fiendish glee.” On the field, “he was constantly in motion, agile on his feet, a fast base runner.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

I didn’t know what I would find
When I went looking for a reason…

—Taylor Swift, from “The Outside”

I didn’t know what I’d find when I went looking for a reason to go downtown last week. The last thing I expected was a paperback at Labyrinth called Taylor Swift In Her Own Words (Agate $12.95), edited by Helena Hunt. All I knew of her at that moment was the spectacular silver on black image looming on the cover of the October 15 New York Times Magazine (“The Kingdom of Taylor”). The faceless figure framed in black reminded me of nothing so much as a sexy, satiny, silver-booted, silver lamé alien, an ideal mate for Gort, Klaatu’s armor-plated robot in the original Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). So that was Taylor Swift? Really?

Still, the grotesque, off-putting image made me curious. I didn’t know Swift’s music, couldn’t have named a single song, and found the idea of her billion-dollar Gala Tour totally unappealing. Not really expecting to find her in “her own words,” I opened the book and read the first thing she had to say, which was set apart on a single page in front: “I feel no need to burn down the house I built by hand. I can make additions to it. I can redecorate. But I built this.” Right away I was asking myself, “Who is this person whose illustrious namesake, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, might have written those words, such was their cranky, in-your-face command of the moment. What followed was admittedly less Swiftian: “And I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t had corkscrew-curly hair and worn cowboy boots and sundresses to awards shows when I was 17’…. Because I made those choices, I did that. It was part of me growing up. It wasn’t some committee going ‘You know what Tayor needs to be this year?’” 

Never mind, the opening sentence about burning down the house was worth a thousand glitzy cover images, so I bought the book.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

Introducing his Elizabethan tour de force “Tarquin of Cheapside” in Tales of the Jazz Age (Scribners 1922), F. Scott Fitzgerald admits it was “a product of undergraduate days at Princeton” that he’d since “considerably revised,” adding that “the peculiar affection” he feels for it has more to do with its age than “any intrinsic merit.” In fact, it had taken a passionate last-minute plea to convince his editor Maxwell Perkins to make space in a Jazz Age collection for a tale about Shakespeare on the run from sword-wielding pursuers.

In her introduction to Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories (Scribners 1959), Fitzgerald’s daughter Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan provides a facsimile of a handwritten list of her parents’ monthly expenditures for 1923 and wonders “how there was a moment left for the bathtub gin and the splashing in the Plaza fountain.” Everyday expenses ranging from taxes, rent, and food to typing amounted to $1,629.40. The cost of “trips, pleasure & parties” came to $2,396, including $100 for “Wild Parties.” Lanahan takes comfort in the fact that as “wasteful” as it was that her father died so young, “there must have been 48 hours a day in that Golden Era,” making it possible for him pack “at least two lives into those 44 years.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

A little over two months ago, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was all the rage, and Princeton and the Garden Theatre were at the center of the cinematic universe. A little over 10 years ago, in May 2013, Baz Luhrman’s big, jazzy, flamboyantly picturesque improvisation on The Great Gatsby was all the rage, and Princeton and the Garden Theatre were again at the center of the cinematic universe. One big difference is that Oppenheimer himself, or Hollywood’s version of him, was the hero, or anti-hero, of the celebration. Ten years ago the true hero, Gatsby’s creator F. Scott Fitzgerald, seemed to be the forgotten man, overshadowed by his own creation.

As I wrote at the time, “Gatsby lives, while his creator, the poet laureate of Old Nassau, is a tragic phantom. The charismatic Gatsby is front and center along with the Great Baz and a lot of chatter about poor boys, rich girls, and the American dream, while Fitzgerald seems to be hanging on to his creation’s coattails.” And when the author died in 1940, a self-confessed Jazz Age has-been, the novel appeared to be dead as well. Dorothy Parker famously made the connection, so the story goes, with her remark, “The poor son of a bitch” at Fitzgerald’s passing, a direct quote of the comment made by the only one of Gatsby’s party people who bothered to come to his funeral.  more

By Stuart Mitchner

It’s the center of all these things. It’s the center of all these ideas.

—Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017) on New York City

In a C-SPAN interview about his book Damon Runyon: A Life (Ticknor & Fields 1991), Jimmy Breslin is asked to compare his journalistic style with Runyon’s. After saying Runyon “had his own way,” Breslin describes a card game that goes on for 26 hours and does not stop until one guy says, “He wins, I lose.” This is the source of Runyon’s “first-person-with-no-contractions present tense, or the historical present, as somebody calls it,” which Runyon decides will sound “great and comic and stilted coming out of the mouths of Nathan Detroit and people like that.” more

By Stuart Mitchner

Mr. Gershwin was a child of the Twenties, the Age of Jazz. In the fast two-step time of the years after the war he was to music what F. Scott Fitzgerald was to prose.

—from the July 12, 1937 New York Times obituary

After pairing George Gershwin and Scott Fitzgerald as voices of the Jazz Age, the Times obit observed that “Four years after that mad decade began, Paul Whiteman sent the strains of Rhapsody [in Blue] cascading far beyond Broadway and the music they called Jazz had come of age. Serge Koussevitsky of the Boston Symphony Orchestra played his work and the capitals of Europe called for more.”

When Fitzgerald died three and half years later, the December 23, 1940 Times obituary spoke of a career “that began and ended” with the 1920s, its “promise never fulfilled.” The paper does at least note that “the best of his books” was The Great Gatsby, published “at a time when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession.” In it Fitzgerald was “at his best,” which was in his “ability to catch the flavor of a night, a snatch of old song, in a phrase.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

You can see it isn’t easy to get on with me. But don’t lose heart because of that.

—Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

Harvey Sachs begins and ends Schoenberg: Why He Matters (Liveright 2023) with those words from an August 30, 1923 letter the composer sent to “a new acquaintance.” The statement’s simplicity is reflected in the way Sachs demonstrates why an artist as notoriously difficult as Schoenberg is worth “getting on with.”

The “difficulty” is addressed in Schoenberg’s Wikipedia page under the heading “Twelve-tone and tonal works,” which begins by noting that he once compared his discovery of a new compositional method to Albert Einstein’s discoveries in physics. The language from Ethan Haimo’s 1990 book Schoenberg’s Serial Odyssey: The Evolution of his Twelve-Tone Method, 1914–1928 is nothing if not daunting, difficult, and discouraging (try getting on with “hexachordal inversional combinatoriality” or “isomorphic partitioning”), especially compared to the composer’s own simply, vividly worded “painting without architecture … an ever-changing, unbroken succession of colors, rhythms and moods.”  more

By Stuart Mitchner

Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song….

—Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

It’s broad daylight, I’m driving in rush hour traffic, and my eyes are tearing up because of a song called “Sleeping” from the Band’s third album, Stage Fright (1970). In his liner notes, Rob Bowman calls it “a gorgeous ballad” that Richard Manuel co-wrote with Robbie Robertson. But “gorgeous” doesn’t do it justice, nor does PopShifter’s Paul Casey when he calls it a “desperately sad song,” Manuel’s goodbye to the Band “and Robbie’s goodbye to his friend,” who died in Florida 16 years later by his own hand. Casey finds it “hard to separate Richard’s bad end from the songs he worked on,” and this one “was the end of the line, and addresses the oncoming void openly.”

That dark reading misses the emotional and poetical magnitude of the song. My excuse for turning to Walt Whitman at this point is that while reading Leaves of Grass and listening to Stage Fright late the other night, I sensed that Walt must have had “Sleeping” in mind when writing section 26 from Song of Myself, with its reference to the violoncello as “the young man’s heart’s complaint” and to the way the “key’d cornet … shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast” while the orchestra “wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possessed them.”

 more

By Stuart Mitchner

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book…

—Edgar Allan Poe, from “Berenice”

I love Poe. He’s always there, the shadowy Kilroy of American literature. Last week my attention was “riveted” by the chapter subheaded “Berenice the Barefoot Queen: Revolution” in Jerusalem: The Biography (Knopf 2011). Holding Simon Sebag Montefiore’s 650-page historical epic open in both hands like a gigantic hymnal, I read the first two sentences of the chapter on the Death of Jerusalem AD 66-70, in which barefoot Berenice walked “the same route Jesus would have taken from Herod Antipas back to Pilate thirty years earlier. The beautiful Berenice — daughter and sister of kings and twice a queen — was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to thank God for her recovery from an illness, fasting for thirty days and shaving her head.” In the next chapter, she’s become the “Jewish Cleopatra,” of whom it was said that Titus “had a general murdered for flirting with her.”

According to an online National Library of Israel article titled “The Queen Who Loved the Destroyer of the Second Temple,” Berenice’s pilgrimage had a nobler goal, which was to plead with Florus, the procurator of Judea, for “the lives of the city’s residents.” The article about “a Jewish woman, a queen” whose “dramatic life story might resemble something out of Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon” is accompanied by Queen Berenice, a painting by Charles Landelle (1821-1908). more

By Stuart Mitchner

After we recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” and “Across the Great Divide,” I felt we were making some kind of magic.

—Robbie Robertson (1943-2023), from Testimony

In a 1995 interview, the Band’s lead guitarist and songwriter Jaime “Robbie” Robertson, who died August 9, said that he wanted to write music “that felt like it could’ve been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday — that had this lost-in-time quality.”

Halfway through his memoir Testimony (Crown Archetype 2016), Robertson refers to his interest in writing lyrics about the Civil War “from a southern family’s point of view” — “there was a chord progression and melody rumbling through my head, but I didn’t know what the song was about.” When he played the sequence for the Band’s only American member, drummer and singer Levon Helm, the Arkansas native “liked the way it stopped and started, free of tempo.”     

After a visit to the local library to do “a little research on the Confederacy” (“They didn’t teach that stuff in Canadian schools”), Robertson “conjured up a story about Virgil Caine and his kin against this historical backdrop, and the song came to life,” the only catch being could he get away with it? Could you call this rock ‘n’ roll? more

By Stuart Mitchner

You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s…

—Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

Thoreau scholar William Howarth quotes those words in his June 5, 2017 American Scholar essay “Reading Thoreau at 200.” When I learned of his death two weeks ago, I felt as if I’d lost a friend, although we’d met only once in person, at a party in Princeton some 30 years ago. While I can’t remember what we actually discussed, we most likely talked about family names, politics, Princeton, writers and writing, and of course Thoreau. One thing I surely mentioned was my long ago visit to Thoreau’s grave in Concord, where the only word on his gravestone is HENRY, no secrets, no obscurities, just the name, as if he’d died on familiar terms with the planet. more