Jeopardy by Ron Padgett Sometimes when I phoned my mother back in Tulsa, she would say, “Hold on a minute, Ron, let me turn this thing down,” the thing her TV, and she would look around for the remote and then fumble with its little buttons as an irritation mounted in me and an impatience and I felt like blurting out “You watch TV too much and it’s too loud and why don’t you go outside” because I was unable to face my dread of her aging and my heart made cold toward her by loving her though not wanting to give up my life and live near her so she could see me every day and not just hear me, which is why she turned the TV down and said, “Okay, that’s better,” then sometimes launched into a detailed account of whatever awful show she was watching. Ron Padgett, “Jeopardy” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2007 by Ron Padgett. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, coffeehousepress.org (buy now) It was on this day in 1956 that the musical My Fair Lady opened on Broadway, starring Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. The musical was based on the play Pygmalion by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Pygmalion is the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics living in London. He makes a bet with a friend that he can take a random cockney-speaking flower seller named Eliza Doolittle and pass her off as a perfect lady by teaching her how to speak well. Shaw got the title from the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who makes a statue of a woman who is so beautiful that he falls in love with her. Shaw wrote the play specifically for a famous British actress, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, even though she was 49 years old and his main character, Eliza Doolittle, was supposed to be a young woman. Pygmalion ends with Eliza furious with Higgins, who teaches her to be a lady but then treats her badly once his project is over and he wins his bet. She tells him that he is a tyrant and a bully and that she will marry a young man who adores her. Higgins is too self-absorbed to believe she will leave him, ordering her to buy him a tie and order a ham, but she walks out on him. Shaw was adamant that the play end that way. He wrote an afterword explaining why Eliza would have married the young man, not Henry Higgins, despite the romantic tension between them. Shaw wrote the afterword after he learned that his leading man was softening the ending of the play by having Henry toss a bouquet of flowers to Eliza at the last moment, suggesting to the audience that maybe they had a future together after all. Shaw fought for his ending over and over, but ultimately he lost. He agreed to let the Hungarian film producer and director Gabriel Pascal make some of his plays into films but he insisted that no one would turn Pygmalion into a musical — he had been horrified at the operetta based on his play Arms and the Man. So Pascal produced a nonmusical film of Pygmalion (1938) and Shaw collaborated on it as a writer. The film was a success and won an Oscar for best screenplay. Shaw died in 1950, and Pascal suggested to lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe that they adapt Pygmalion into a musical now that the playwright wasn't around to be disgusted. Pascal died soon after and Lerner and Loewe didn't think it would make a good musical because there was no love story. So they did what others had done before — ended the musical with the implication that Eliza and Henry would end up together. They wrote a lot of Shaw's witty dialogue straight into their songs and they found an unknown actress in her first play, Julie Andrews, and convinced her to audition for the role of Eliza. She starred with Rex Harrison, and the Broadway musical ran for more than 2,700 performances, which at the time was the longest run of any Broadway show. My Fair Lady was made into a film in 1964 and there is talk of a remake. It's the birthday of biographer Richard Ellmann (books by this author), born in Highland Park, Michigan (1918). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father was a lawyer, and Richard's two brothers followed their father into law, but Richard was more inspired by his parents' love of reading and he decided to become an English professor. He got into Yale and studied literature there, then went to graduate school and started to write his dissertation on W.B. Yeats, who had died in 1939 — there wasn't much scholarly work on him. While Ellmann was working on his dissertation World War II broke out and he enlisted. He worked for the Office of Strategic Services in London and he took a leave to go visit Dublin. He wrote a letter to George Yeats, the poet's widow, totally unaware that she was famous for refusing to answer letters or grant visits. But for some reason she changed her mind when Ellmann's letter came along and she wrote back inviting him to visit her at 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines, a suburb of Dublin. She told him stories about Yeats and showed him her late husband's study. He wrote: "There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care by his widow. She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written. When complimented, she said she was just a hen picking up scraps. Among the scraps were all Yeats's letters to Lady Gregory, done up in innumerable small bundles according to year, with ribbons to hold them together. I asked her about Yeats's first meeting with Joyce, and she showed me an unpublished preface to Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) in which Yeats described that singular occasion. I evinced a perhaps unexpected interest in the magical order to which Yeats belonged, the Golden Dawn; she opened a chest and took out his implements and regalia and rituals." After Ellmann was discharged from the Navy in 1946 he got a Rockefeller scholarship to go to Ireland and continue his work on Yeats. He went back to visit George Yeats, and he said, "She produced an old suitcase and filled it with manuscripts that I wanted to examine." More than that, Mrs. Yeats gave Ellmann access to more or less all of her late husband's documents, about 50,000 of them — diaries, letters, notes, poems. Ellmann said, "It is hard to know how revolutionary my ideas are, but I do feel that I shall produce the definitive book on Yeats for many years to come." And so he put together the first comprehensive work on W.B. Yeats. He published it as a critical biography called Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948). In it, Ellmann wrote: "If he was reticent in public, Yeats was indiscreet in private. He confided almost everything to his manuscript books, diaries, and letters, and from them another picture can be elicited, which joins together the disparate fragments and episodes of his life, and reveals him in quite a different light, the embroidered coat removed. But this picture is one which few residents of his home town would recognize, for in Dublin he is too often a subject for anecdotes which reduce him to a pompous, lifeless man, incapable of having written a good line of even of having existed." He followed up his first book with The Identity of Yeats (1954). He considered himself a Yeats scholar, and when he was looking for a new angle on the poet he remembered the unpublished preface Yeats had written about his meeting with James Joyce. Ellmann said he was struck by "Joyce's impudence with his distinguished and much older contemporary." So he decided to write an article about the relationship between Yeats and Joyce. From there he found himself fascinated by Joyce and decided to attempt a biography of him. In 1959 he published James Joyce. It won the National Book Award, and Anthony Burgess called it "the greatest literary biography of the century." Ellmann published many more studies of Yeats, Joyce, and other Modernists. After 20 years of research Ellmann finished his last great biography, Oscar Wilde (1987), just before he died. It was published posthumously and won a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Ellmann wrote about Wilde: "As for his wit, its balance was more hazardously maintained than is realized. Although it lays claim to arrogance, it seeks to please us. Of all writers, Wilde was perhaps the best company. Always endangered, he laughs at his plight, and on his way to the loss of everything jollies society for being so much harsher than he is, so much less graceful, so much less attractive. And once we recognize that his charm is threatened, its eye on the door left open for the witless law, it becomes even more beguiling. He is not one of those writers who as the centuries change lose their relevance. Wilde is one of us. His wit is an agent of renewal, as pertinent now as a hundred years ago. The questions posed by both his art and his life lend his art a quality of earnestness, an earnestness which he always disavowed." The Irish Studies scholar John V. Kelleher met Ellmann in the spring of 1946 and they traveled to Ireland together a couple of months later. Ellmann was on his way to do more work on Yeats: The Man and the Masks. Kelleher said, "It was on shipboard that I really got to know Dick and to appreciate his charm and tact." He remembered an anecdote about his friend: there was a rude woman on board the ship who accosted Kelleher because American college students were playing a game with her and couldn't come up with the name of Bonar Law, a British Prime Minister for less than a year in the 1920s. Kelleher suggested that it might be equally hard for British students to come up with the name of President Benjamin Harrison. The woman was so offended that the scholar was comparing an American president to a British prime minister that she stormed off, and Kelleher was equally angry. He wrote: "A little later, though, I saw her indignantly laying the case before Dick. He soothed her. He listened smilingly and a little pensively, then began to chuckle softly — not at her, not at me, not at the questions, but at the situation. The things people get themselves involved in. Presently she began to laugh too. By the next afternoon she had forgiven me almost fully, though for what I could never quite figure out. That was the first time I saw Dick's tact in operation. It was wholly personal, quite instinctive, and as far as I could observe it always worked." Richard Ellmann said, "Modern writers, for all their variety, were in some sense engaged in a communal enterprise of an imaginative kind." It's the birthday of botanist and horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey (books by this author), born in South Haven, Michigan (1858). By the age of 14 he was helping the neighborhood farmers graft good apple stock onto their inferior trees. Cornell University offered him a position teaching horticulture in 1888. It was the first time they had ever had a professor of horticulture. His encyclopedia of cultivated plants, Hortus, is still considered a standard reference in the field. It's the birthday of blues guitarist Lightnin' Hopkins, born in Centerville, Texas (1912). Hopkins wrote and sang and recorded a monumental catalog of blues songs. He played on street corners, in small clubs, and at Carnegie Hall. It's the birthday of novelist and poet Ben Okri (books by this author), born in Minna, Nigeria (1959). He lived mainly in England until he was seven years old when his family moved back to Nigeria. He grew up surrounded by storytellers; he said: "We are a people who are massaged by fictions; we grow up in a sea of narratives and myths, the perpetual invention of stories. ... Your mother would tell you stories to illustrate a hundred different points, lessons, morals she wanted to get across to you. Or you'd tell stories to one another as a way of making the moonlight more intoxicating, more beautiful." Okri moved to London in 1977, living for a time in subway stations and with friends. He published more novels and short stories but he didn't really get much attention until his novel The Famished Road came out in 1991. It's about a Nigerian child who hovers between the real world and the world of spirits, and it describes the horrible poverty and oppression in modern Nigeria. The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Britain's best novel in 1991.Okri said, "Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. ... The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens' characters are Nigerians. ... Literature may come from a specific place, but it always lives in its own unique kingdom." His latest book is a collection of poetry titled A Fire in my Head: Poems for the Dawn (2021). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® |