I GOT YOU BABE
"FEUD: CAPOTE VS. THE SWANS," "AMERICAN FICTION," AN 80-YEAR OLD JONI MITCHELL AT THE GRAMMYS, AND "MANON"
The Swan by Odgen Nash
Scholars call the masculine swan a cob;
I call him a narcissistic snob.
He looks in the mirror over and over,
And claims to have never heard of Pavlova.
(Above: Joni Mitchell mirroring her first Rolling Stone cover. Issue #33. May 17, 1969. Photograph by Baron Wolman. Joni much later: “Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line. But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: ‘If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.’ What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over. You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.”
(Above: From the archives of Esquire. Thanks to its former Editor-in-Chief, Jay Fielden, who posted this on his Facebook page on February 2, 2024. Jay wrote: “In the old days, Esquire kept a paper record of each story assigned to a writer. When I edited the magazine, I would sometimes go through the archive of these cards, and one that especially stuck out was this one. Notice the fee the magazine paid Capote for his story ‘La Cote Basque,’ the inspiration of the current series ‘Capote vs. the Swans.’ 25k in 1975!!!! I don’t recall any other writer—not Tom Wolfe, not Joan Didion, not Nora Ephron, not James Baldwin, not Norman Mailer, not Saul Bellow—getting close to that. As an example of journalistic deflation, by the way, the most a magazine today would be able to pay to a current member our most illustrious literary crop of talent might be half—half!—and that only if they were very, very lucky.”)
(Above: Truman Capote and Babe Paley. This looks like it was printed in a newspaper and yet it also looks like one of Bill Paley’s myriad photos. Truman: “Babe Paley had only one fault, she was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect.”
(Above: Myra Lucretia Taylor, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction, written and directed by the brilliant Cord Jefferson which he based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett who gave him permission to write a screenplay based on this book without paying for the rights. They agreed to work out the financial details later if the project came together. Cord: “I really liked 12 Years a Slave. I really liked Boyz n the Hood. I really like these quote-unquote ‘stereotypical Black trauma films.’ The more important critique is: Why are these the only works of art that are considered prestige Black art in America? … My literary heroes were always people like Joan Didion and James Baldwin, because what it meant to be a writer to them was very broad.” Percival: “I don’t think meaning exists without form, and certainly form does not exist without meaning. Meaning and story come first. Story is the most important part of fiction. Without it, what’s the point? If all you care about is form, become a critic.”)
(Above: Antoinette Sibley, the original Manon Lescaut , and Anthony Dowell as Des Grieux in the premiere of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon - based on the 1731 novel by Abbé Prévost - at the Royal Opera House in 1974. When it first opened it was mostly savaged by critics and is only now half a century later considered a classic - well, it is to me. The choreoghapher’s widow - Deborah, Lady MacMillan - has had this to say about the accusations of misogyny in MacMillan’s work - especially this one. “Oh, ludicrous. We are feminists because of what happened to those women in past centuries. Kenneth was interested in sexually driven people. You could let rip choreographically. I don't think he ever set out to upset or shock. Having grown up in the Sixties, he found it extraordinary that while all this new life was coming in through television and film, in the ballet world people were still pretending that girls had wings sprouting from their shoulders. Manon was one of the seminal heroines in literature - he was always interested in the social mix of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and one of the few things that could get you from one world to the other was sex.")
“I recognize you,” Strawberry, the usher at the upper reaches of the Royal Opera House here in London, said to me last Saturday night before the evening performance of the Royal Ballet’s Manon. I was arriving after having already seen the afternoon performance of the same ballet but, as a balletomane, know how different each performance can be when the work is led by different dancers. “You’re a regular,” she labeled me and, as far as labels go, I rather liked being assigned such a one in such a place. I too recognized Strawberry from her being posted to other sections of the house since she was correct in her keen-eyed summation of me as having witnessed opera and ballet productions from almost every vantage point there over the last few years. We discussed her love of opera over ballet as I let on to my preference for the latter and the longing it could elicit from me in these upper reaches of my years when longing illicitly seems long gone. I then looked at her own label, the name tag attached to the lower region of her left shoulder. Yes, her name really was Strawberry. I wondered though if it visually needed quotation marks since I was hearing the name with aural ones. But the demarcation of irony I deigned necessary, a distancing there in the most distant rows of the Royal Opera House, had not been imprinted upon her as it had upon the invisible badge I too often wear to remind myself who I am in the world, not an imposter exactly but an interloper, a deeply interested party disinterested in parties, per se, except for the milieu of another foraged-for narrative, a sojourner, (kitted out in a kind of curated separateness) who does not search for what passes for truth but that which is buried beneath it in the revelatory roots that expose its passing itself off as its performative doppelgänger, the doubling that a writer wrenches from lives, mine and those of others, the double-casting of the same production giving a performance distinctions that deepen it into a a subsumed sublimity that those who live with the submerged mistake as libelous for what is instead its liberation. Or, to paraphrase the keen-eyed Truman Capote’s ironic summation above of Babe Paley’s demarcated allure, the perfection of art exists in its imperfection because artists not only exist in ours but rely on our reveling in it. All successful artistic endeavors are failed attempts to perfect that imperfection. All failed artistic endeavors are successful attempts to perfect it. Irony is its sinew; one must heartily grasp its incongruity incongruously with comprehension’s viscera: that heart, this thought, the emotional pelvic pull of wit’s insistence, the blur of blood and the wound of wonder. Black and White? Let’s leave that as the description for a Ball thrown at The Plaza back in 1966.
I thought a lot about the double-casting that exists in life and thus in art - the parallel realities that rely on the relevance of each to the other - this past weekend when seeing not only that double bill of Manon on the same day but also the new film American Fiction, the first couple of episodes of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, and a video of Joni Mitchell having sung her “Both Sides Now,” on the Grammys. Manon is about a courtesan re-inventing the narrative of her own life until the life asserts its right to write itself to a tragically fated end. How dare a poverty-stricken whore to presume she belongs ensconced in a world otherwise based on presumptions? American Fiction is about a prestigious African American writer who comes from an economically privileged family finding even more financial privilege, though of the culturally curdled sort, by his being co-opted by his attempt to co-opt the imposed parallel narrative with which African Americans live ensconced within The White Gaze that doesn’t need economic status to assert its own privilege. How dare a well-off Black man to presume he can belong in a world otherwise based on presumptions about his being defined - ensconced - by the White lie. Feud: Capote vs. The Swans is also about the narrative that an impish, pet-like creature - who cares if he is a writer of renown because he is also a little gay canapé of a companion - imposes on a bunch of lunching society ladies who have always seen the betrayals through which they have had to navigate their marital lives as the transactional traffic of survival within the rarified soft-shouldered byways where they have found themselves but, once they had the upper hand, shunned the betrayer because they finally could. It was the frenzy of a newfound agency in their lives more than yet another betrayal that made them so fraught - unfrozen - with revenge. How dare that gay canapé to presume he could belong in a main-course world otherwise based on presumptions? And dear Joni? She has double cast herself as herself in this late chapter of her revived artistic career after her art itself revived her very life after she suffered an aneurism. In her early career she felt the brunt of her presuming she belonged in a world based on male presumptions. But she has not only outlived most of the males who made them but also that world that no longer really exists. Women ruled the Grammys this past weekend and Joni sitting on her throne with her walking cane as percussive scepter was their - is our - queen. “But now old friends are acting strange,” she sang in a voice that arrived from both the past and wherever it is heading next as it nested in the not-quite-next of that now. “They shake their heads and say, ‘Joni, you’ve changed.’ Well, something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day. I’ve looked at life from both sides now. From win and lose and still somehow it’s life’s illusions that I recall. I really don’t know life … I really don’t know life …. at all ….”
Joan Didion, whose voice so many of us still hear and like Joni’s helps orchestrate our noted lives we really don’t know at all, wrote in The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” Didion claimed that two of the books that had influenced her the most were Go Tell It on the Mountain and Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin who wrote that “the terrible thing about being a writer is that you don’t decide to become one, you discover that you are one … All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up … People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply by the lives they lead.”
Didion paid witness to Baldwin conducting a public conversation between William Styron and Ossie Davis on May 28, 1968, in Beverly Hills at Eugene’s restaurant. Davis detested Styron’s recently published novel The Confessions of Nat Turner and accused it - and him - of helping to foster racism. Styron steadfastly denied the accusation but Davis was not alone for other Black writers and intellectuals and academics and critics were forming a chorus of criticism of the book. Baldwin, an outlier once more, stood up for Styron and parried that “every artist has the right to pick his topics.” Didion, picking hers, wrote of the event and the in-between Black man she so admired who created his own art from the skein of politics and sexuality and skin, a Capote if he had cared about more than himself and used his facility for language and outsider’s sadness to make a difference instead of just highlighting his own. “James Baldwin,” Didion wrote of that debate between Davis and Styron, “sat between them, his eyes closed and his head thrown back in understandable but rather theatrical agony.” And then she found the narrative thread - her own skein skewed toward the nuance of the knowing as if Richard Neutra had designed the rich, spare architecture of her language - that was submerged and pulled it into the open: “[The evening’s] curious vanity and irrelevance stay with me, if only because those qualities characterize so many of Hollywood’s best intentions. Social problems present themselves to many of these people in terms of a scenario, in which, once certain key scenes are licked (the confrontation on the courthouse steps, the revelation that the opposition leader has an anti-Semitic past, the presentation of the bill of participants to the President, a Henry Fonda cameo), the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade. Marlon Brando does not, in a well-plotted motion picture, picket San Quentin in vain: what we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention. Things ‘happen’ in motion pictures. There is always a resolution, always a strong cause-effect dramatic line, and to perceive the world in those terms is to assume an ending for every social scenario… If the poor people march on Washington and camp out, there to receive bundles of clothes gathered on the Fox lot by Barbra Streisand, then some good must come of it (the script here has a great many dramatic staples, not the least of them in a sentimental notion of Washington as an open forum, cf. Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington), and doubts have no place in the story.”
Capote certainly asserted his own right to pick his own topic with the publication of his short story, “La Cote Basque, 1965” in Esquire in which he limned all those lunches he attended with those society ladies to pry the indentured truths from their privilege which was built upon impeccable manners and the blasé cruelty of the blessed never to acknowledge the luck of their lives. It was all buttressed with just enough Bill Blass. A bit of Balencianga still kept in their closets. And smoke signals tribally puffed forth to each other from too many of their damn cigarettes Truman mistakenly thought of them as swans instead of seeing their swanning for what it was: the dance with denial that delivered them all to a seat at the table where his role was to be the filler for the greater narrative of themselves instead of their roles to be his. Theirs was a chilly chariot in which he caught a temporary ride, this homosexual, not of their set, not really, a caste member of the hoi polloi alas but one who at least, or so they thought, understood the suitability of politesse without the need really to be polite.
Before he was captivated with the version of himself that captivated such women, a very young Capote claimed to have been captivated by Willa Cather, a woman of greater stature, who suggested he read another female writer, Sarah Orne Jewett. It is the advice to Cather from Jewett about being a writer that I wish Capote would have kept in mind presuming - and this is my daring to presume to belong to such a world of such writers - that she might have passed it on to him. “You must find your own quiet centre of life,” wrote Jewett in that letter to Cather, “and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia; the city, the country — in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality — you can write about life, but never write life itself. And to write and work on this level, we must live on it — we must at least recognize it and defer to it at every step. We must be ourselves, but we must be our best selves.”
I hope my best self is the one who continues to write this column based on all the different skeins of my own life, the one who continues to attend the ballet here in London where I began this very column by talking to Strawberry, whose parents, I was told when I asked her about her own narrative, bestowed upon her such a name when they saw her in her first sonogram and remarked to each other that she was no bigger than just that, a strawberry. That smallest essence of herself became the beginning of her own story which then became the beginning of this column, another’s narrative folded into mine making yet a third one. I look forward to seeing Strawberry again at the Royal Opera House when I watch several different Odettes/Odiles in the upcoming ballet about obsession and treachery and forgiveness. We all have our versions of swans who are not really swans.
Didion also cited as an influence the poems of Wallace Stevens. Here, of course, is one.
Invective Against Swans
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.
A bronze rain from the sun descending marks
The death of summer, which that time endures
Like one who scrawls a listless testament
Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,
Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon
And giving your bland motions to the air.
Behold, already on the long parades
The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.
And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies
Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.
I always remember the Rolling Stone article about Joni M that referred to her as "Arcane Priestess of Rock and Roll." She remains that forever for me. It is so wonderful that she is back after all these years!
I guess the women in Capote’s whirl forgot that he was a writer.