By the way . . .

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Sam Shepard died on Thursday, July 27, 2017 at his farm in Kentucky. I read all of the plays he'd composed by the mid-eighties while I was living in Berkeley in the mid- to latter eighties, but I didn't keep up with his later plays. I found his writing fascinating at the time, but I see no influence on my own writing, unless some poem or other was touched. Maybe a reader of my poems can let me know.

Anyway, Mr. Shepard, RIP.

Boy-o-Boy!

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Boys will be boys-terous!

Sam Tanenhaus and Others on Death of a Salesman

Sam Tanenhaus

Photo from October 28, 2009

Charlie Rose

I can't say that I ever much cared for Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, though I've seen it two or three times . . . inadvertently. But I was interested in something that Sam Tanenhaus -- writing in "A Nation of Willy Lomans" for Newsweek (March 19, 2012) -- said about it in response to Mike Nichols's current revival of the play:

What [many critics] . . . missed [but Nichols hasn't] was that Miller's play isn't ideological at all. There is not a whiff in it of anti-capitalist "critique." Its subject, at once deeper and less abstract, is the American myth of self-invention or reinvention, the dreams and delusions it fosters in us, which lead us away from our true selves.

I thought that Tanenhaus's remark about Miller's play not being anti-capitalist was rather neatly to the point. I never got that message from it. The damn thing was depressing, but to see it as anti-capitalist seemed to me more like eisegesis than exegesis. I was also interested in Tanenhaus's view that the play is really about the 'American' myth of self-invention or reinvention. I guess I can see that, sort of, but I don't think that I quite agree. Still, let's see where this point leads. Willy Loman tries, without success, to invent himself as a salesman. Tanenhaus cites a remark by Nichols as evidence:

"Willy has chosen to follow the craft that is not a craft, and he has a craft," Nichols says. "The sad thing about it is, as his sons know, there are things he's very good at -- carpentry, building, putting in a ceiling in his house. But he doesn't have any respect for that. What he thinks is important is to be able to sell, to convince, to charm, and it's one of the things that's wrong with us now. If you go into any office and ask people, 'What exactly is it that you do?' they either say, 'I record the numbers, and then I put them in another book,' or they say, 'I have ideas. I have ideas for commercials, promotion.' We basically are promoting our product."

This remark by Nichols, if viewed through the refractive power of the right interpretive lens, could have supported the point made by Tanenhaus, but it seems more to indicate our identification with what we do in our work than with who we are. Nichols draws a somewhat different point, however, that we're "promoting out product" (though his examples aren't typical products). Loman, however, wasn't interested in a product. He wanted to have the reputation of being a great salesman, and though selling involves promoting a product, the product itself doesn't interest Loman (as Tanenhaus notes later with respect to the fact that we never find out "what's inside the heavy sample cases Willy lugs into the house"). Granted, this may amount to the same thing -- Loman's product is himself (as Tanenhaus also later notes) -- so maybe the quote from Nichols could support Tanenhaus's point that Loman exemplifies "the American myth of self-invention or reinvention." I just wish Tanenhaus had drawn out the implications more clearly.

But I nevertheless wonder if Loman's wish to have the reputation of being a great salesman is a matter of 'invention' (whether 'self-' or 're-') or more the optimistic American belief that the future is open for you to be what you want to be. That might be an illusion, if life in America is more closed than usually believed, but is it about invention, whether self-invention or reinvention? It seems to me to have more to do with the belief that one has more than just a single talent to pursue. Loman's personal tragedy is that he couldn't bring himself to see that he had talents for things other than salesmanship. In short, that while he had tried all his life to 'invent' himself as a salesman, he couldn't see that he needed to 'reinvent' himself through following his true talents, though that was what he truly ought to have done.

Incidentally, although I've just referred to Loman as a tragic figure, the man can also be seen as a hero who sacrificed himself for his family by ensuring that his life insurance policy was up to date before he suffered his fatal automobile 'accident' -- the death of a salesman alluded to in the play's title. That word "death" tells us what we should be asking about when we talk about the play, namely, what kind of death is this, tragic or heroic?

Michael Morpurgo: Untimely Success?

War Horse

Photograph by Simon Annand

(Image from New York Times)

I'd heard of the hit play War Horse back when it came out in London's National Theater because I saw photos of the 'horses' and marveled at what I read of how equine puppets could take on such vivid life in the hand of skilled puppeteers, but I knew nothing of Michael Morpurgo, author of the children's book on which the drama was based.

I discovered him yesterday, however, in the Global Edition of the New York Times and located the article online by Sarah Lyall, "Undaunted Author of 'War Horse' Reflects on Unlikely Hit" (April 11, 2011), which I'm linking to here today for the convenience of anyone stumbling onto this blog entry, but also for myself because my paternal grandfather, Horace Hodges, after whom I am named, was something of a horseman and worked with war horses in the First World War, so the connection makes this story feel a little closer.

The novel for children, also titled War Horse, saw light in 1982 but not stage light till 2007, which reflected its glory back onto a novel that had seen no more that 1500 copies sold per year but that now has more than 500,000 copies in print in the US alone. The book sounds deserving:

The book . . . is written from the point of view of Joey the horse. It was inspired, in part, by a series of conversations Mr. Morpurgo had had years ago in his village, Iddesleigh, in Devon, with an elderly man who had served in a cavalry unit in World War I. "He told me with tears in his eyes that the only person he could talk to there -- and he called this horse a person -- was his horse," Mr. Morpurgo said.

From the Imperial War Museum, Mr. Morpurgo learned that between one million and two million British horses had been sent to the front lines in the first World War, and that only 65,000 or so had come back. He resolved to write about them but struggled to find the right voice.

Then one evening he was at the farm he and his wife run in Devon, where poor children come to work with animals . . . . He was passing through the stable yard when he saw one of the children, a troubled boy who had a bad stutter and had not uttered a word in school in two years, standing head to head with a horse.

"He started talking," Mr. Morpurgo recalled. "And he was talking to the horse, and his voice was flowing. It was simply unlocked. And as I listened to this his boy telling the horse everything he'd done on the farm that day, I suddenly had the idea that of course the horse didn't understand every word, but that she knew it was important for her to stand there and be there for this child." That became Joey's role in "War Horse" -- observer and witness as much as protagonist.

I can understand the profound appeal. To have someone listen, truly and patiently listen, with deep understanding even of those things that defy ordinary understanding, to listen in a way that renders even the mundane extraordinary, in a mysterious way that dissolves reserve and opens trust . . . that is rare. And intense . . . and some of that emotional intensity comes through in the play:

[I]n 2007 . . . a dramatic version of "War Horse" opened at the National Theater. Starring, as the horses, life-size puppets created by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, the play was a huge, emotional triumph, leaving audiences wrung out and weeping. It transferred to the West End, where it is still selling out.

Is the success really untimely? Mr. Morpurgo thinks so:

"All this should have happened 30 years ago," he said recently. "It's all come at completely the wrong time. But better late than never -- although I don't think my wife thinks so, sometimes."

Well, things could be worse. One could always have turned out to succeed in as untimely a manner as Vivian Maier.