by Lillian Ross
We asked Miss Yeats what it was like to be the daughter of such a poet as her father.
“You know, when I was young, I didn’t know what it was like not to be,” she said. “I rather thought that everybody was like himself. I intruded upon him and my mother, who was from Devonshire, when Father was fifty-three. I’ve been told that Father saluted my arrival by buying a packet of sweets for me to munch upon. It was a pretty gesture, but at the time I hadn’t enough teeth to appreciate it. He was a poet who never depended upon flashes of inspiration. He kept to a rigid schedule—so much so that once, in my adolescent years, I was encouraged to ease his mind at the end of each day by letting him read some essays of my devising. I think it took more out of him to read them than it did out of me to write them, and after a period of six weeks we were both happy to abandon the project. Part of this essay work was due to the fact that I was drawing five hours a day at the Royal Hibernian Academy, in Dublin, and some of my mentors thought it might be a good idea for me to get some sort of general education. But it didn’t work out that way, for I guess I take after my Uncle Jack, who dedicated his life to painting—and was, indeed, a stimulus to anyone wielding a brush in Ireland. If Uncle Jack had been forty years younger or I had been forty years older, we could have had many a good time together.”
Miss Yeats smiled reflectively, and presently we interrupted her musing to inquire if she herself had ever tried her hand at verse.
“Oh, I did, I did,” she said. “It was all very dramatic and very blank, and when I reached the age of twelve, I decided to let my father handle the poetry in the family, and to concentrate on painting. I’d say it was a wise decision. I’ve studied in Spain and France, and I’m proud of the fact that I used to be the chief stage designer for the Abbey Theatre. But even with theatre décor, and waxes and water colors, I couldn’t find what I wanted, and so I changed to oils, which give me great satisfaction. You know, I’m all fresh and wide-eyed about New York, but I’m still devoted to Dublin. The Yeatses have been there for two hundred years, and Father was a Dubliner, even though he wrote so often about the West Country. We used to have an old Norman tower in Galway, in which we were comfortable, although every spring the waters around the tower would rise, and then we’d have to spend a good deal of time sweeping out the mud and worms. It was a small tower—nothing like as primitive as the one Joyce had in Dún Laoghaire—and Father was very happy there. He died when I was nineteen, but my mother is still robust, and my brother Michael, who is forty-two, busies himself with politics. He likes the agitation, I guess, just as I like circuses and fairs and people disporting themselves around pools.”
As Miss Yeats was talking, we recalled a verse from a cradle song of her father’s:
I sigh that kiss you,
For I must own
That I shall miss you
When you have grown.
And that led us to think of part of a prayer Yeats wrote for his daughter:
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
Miss Yeats was looking very happy, and we thought how right her father had been in his prognostications.
1963
FUGUE — Lillian Ross
MR. GLENN GOULD, the pianist, held a private showing one recent morning, for Mr. Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, of a movie starring himself. The movie, which had been made from an hour-long video-tape recording, was entitled “The Anatomy of Fugue.” It was projected on a screen the size of a pillowcase, in a room the size of an average closet, in the local office of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which had broadcast the tape. Mr. Gould, unslept and unbarbered, was in town for a couple of days from his home, in Toronto. He had on his usual baggy dark-blue suit with outmoded overpadded shoulders, a raggedy brown sweater, and a worn-out bluish necktie. A yellow pencil protruded, eraser end up, from his coat pocket. He was burdened with a baggy brown overcoat, a brown wool muffler, and a navy-blue cap. Mr. Menuhin, pink-cheeked, chubby, trim, and serene, had come to town from his home, in London, to start on a three-month, twenty-eight-city recital tour that would include several benefit appearances and one appearance on the “Bell Telephone Hour.” He was neatly encased in well-tailored pin stripes and well-laundered supplementation. Mr. Gould sat on a straight-backed office chair, with his coat, cap, and muffler on his lap, and with his arms crossed and his hands tucked under his arms. Mr. Menuhin sat on a straight-backed office chair right behind him, his fingers intertwined over his midriff.
“I’m so glad you could come, I’m so glad you could really make it,” Mr. Gould said, turning around, to Mr. Menuhin. “I want you to see this one. This one is a special pet.”
“Such a nice thing to do in New York,” Mr. Menuhin said, in a light, warm voice, and gave Mr. Gould a gentle, warm smile. “Seeing a movie, at eleven o’clock in the morning! I’m so happy you suggested it.”
“I like making these films,” Mr. Gould said. “I’ve always felt this terrible frustration in concerts—you do it and it’s gone. Why not put it on film and have it? So that it will be there.”
“Wonderful idea. Wonderful,” Mr. Menuhin said, his smile broadening and a look of appreciation coming into his eyes.
Mr. Gould grinned.
“I did a television film on Bartók, covering the musical influences in his life, and playing some of his arrangements of Hungarian folk tunes and excerpts from the solo violin sonata he wrote for me, and speaking in between, and I did another one about Yoga,” Mr. Menuhin said. “I find it rather difficult when they put you in front of the camera and say ‘Do something.’ ”
Mr. Gould bobbed his head in agreement. “We had a very good director for this one, and we even built a set, as you’ll see,” he said. “We shot the whole thing in two days. After two months of conferences, of course.”
“Was it dreadfully expensive?” Mr. Menuhin asked. “These things do cost so much.”
“Thirty thousand dollars, about,” Mr. Gould said. “But I wanted to do it right. There’s no point in doing it at all if you can’t get what you want.” He waved a hand at the projectionist, who was peeking out of a square hole in the back wall. “We’re ready any time you want to start,” Mr. Gould said.
Mr. Menuhin gave a little sigh and tightened his hands around his middle. “I hope this will be made available to television in this country,” he said.
Mr. Gould grinned again. “Well, they’ve got Leonard Bernstein,” he said. “I don’t do it the way he does it. Not that I don’t admire the way he does it. He has the ability to communicate on a great many levels at once. My way is different.” He bobbed his head vigorously. “I don’t know if my film is for the mass public. Sometimes I think they don’t know what the hell I’ve said, but they feel elevated.”
Mr. Menuhin’s eyes twinkled.
“Roll it,” Mr. Gould said to the projectionist behind the wall. He turned back toward the screen, and tossed his coat, muffler, and cap on the floor. The lights went out, and the movie started, showing Mr. Gould at the piano playing an improvisation based on “Do Re Mi,” from Richard Rodgers’ score for “The Sound of Music.” When he had finished it, he looked up, on the screen, and said to the camera, “For hundreds of years, musicians have been doing the sort of thing that I was attempting just now. They have been taking little bits of musical trivia, like that theme from ‘The Sound of Music,’ and trying to find complicated equations into which, like a common denominator, these tidbits will fit. In fact, there is some part of almost every musician that longs to experiment with the mathematical quantities of music and to find forms in which these quantities can function most successfully. And perhaps the long-time favorite of such forms is that special musical mix we call the fugue. The fugue is normally conceived in a number of voices, a number of individual lines that, up to a certain point, may lead a life of their own. But they must have in common a responsibility to some special material that is examine
d in the course of the fugue, and consequently each of the voices is first heard announcing, in its most comfortable register, the same theme. . . .”
As Mr. Gould elaborated on the give-and-take between the voices in the fugue—each musical voice, he said, went off on “some pretty wacky tangents of its own”—Mr. Menuhin listened intently, and when Mr. Gould explained that the relation of the subject of a fugue to its counter-subject would be something like that of “God Save the Queen” to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Mr. Menuhin made a soft sound of concurrence. “They ought to combine and complement their personalities in a manner that, as Johann Sebastian Bach once said, suggests three or four civilized gentlemen conducting a reasonable conversation,” Mr. Gould continued. “And the conversation that they carry on does not necessarily always deal with particularly imposing matters. . . . In fact, in certain cases the more ordinary the subject the better.”
“Good,” Mr. Menuhin said. “Very good.”
The offscreen Mr. Gould got up and went right up to the pillowcase screen, shaking his head ruefully. “Can you get a slightly sharper focus?” he called back to the projectionist.
Nothing changed in the focus. Mr. Gould sat down again. Onscreen, he was saying, “When we hear a fugue like the one in E Flat from Volume II of Bach’s ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier,’ we hear a composition that not only disciplines four profoundly beautiful lines but makes them more compelling by having them work within a superbly disciplined harmonic regime.” He then played the fugue on the piano.
“Lovely,” Mr. Menuhin said when he had finished. “Lovely.”
The offscreen Mr. Gould gave Mr. Menuhin a pleased look. Then he got up and went back to see the projectionist. When he returned, a moment later, the image on the screen was sharper. “Better?” he asked Mr. Menuhin.
“Much better, yes,” Mr. Menuhin said.
Both men settled back more easily in their chairs. Mr. Gould crossed his legs. He hunched forward as he heard himself say, on the screen, that he was now going to play a much more intense fugue from Volume II of “The Well-Tempered Clavier”—the B Flat Minor, one of the finest of Bach’s fugues.
“Wonderful,” Mr. Menuhin said at the end of the fugue.
“It’s a great piece,” Mr. Gould said.
Mr. Menuhin commented on the lightness of the piano sound, and Mr. Gould said that this particular piano had almost no aftertouch.
At one point, when the camera zeroed in on Mr. Gould as he was playing, the watching Mr. Gould shuddered. “God, that’s a nasty shot,” he said. “It’s like Cornel Wilde in ‘A Song to Remember,’ with Merle Oberon leaning over the piano.”
“Oh, no, it comes over beautifully!” Mr. Menuhin said.
Every time Mr. Gould finished playing something on the screen, Mr. Menuhin would lean forward slightly, Mr. Gould would turn around to him, and Mr. Menuhin would say, “Wonderful performance, wonderful performance.” Near the end of the movie, Mr. Gould said, onscreen, “Paul Hindemith is one of the few composers of our own time who can undeniably be called a fuguist to the manner born. Hindemith has developed a very special language of his own, a language that is contemporary in the best sense of the word but in its attempt to provide harmonic logic uses what you might call a substitute tonality.” Then he played the fugue from Hindemith’s Third Piano Sonata, which Mr. Menuhin immediately said was a wonderful piece.
“And now!” the offscreen Mr. Gould said, standing up. “We come to what we’ve all been waiting for!” He adjusted a knob near the screen that turned the sound up. “We have to have this louder, that’s for sure,” Mr. Gould said, laughing and shaking with his laughter.
Mr. Menuhin smiled.
On the screen, a quartet—a baritone, a tenor, a soprano, and a contralto— started singing a composition in fugue style by Mr. Gould:
“So, you want to write a fugue,
You’ve got the urge to write a fugue,
You’ve got the nerve to write a fugue,
The only way to write one is to plunge right in and write one.
So go ahead.”
“Lovely, lovely,” Mr. Menuhin commented.
The movie ended. The lights came on.
“Wonderful program!” Mr. Menuhin said. “Beautifully done!”
Mr. Gould suddenly looked shy. “Thank you,” he said. “It was really quite fun to do. But it took a hell of a lot of work.”
“I love your approach to the music and the completely unmechanical way you play,” Mr. Menuhin said, beaming at Mr. Gould with admiration. “And you spoke throughout so smoothly. Was it impromptu?”
“I had it on the TelePrompTer,” Mr. Gould said. “I looked at it often enough to pick up all the cues, but I forced myself to invent phrases as I went along, to keep it sounding natural and not too formal.”
“Yes, wonderful,” Mr. Menuhin said. “Especially if the words are your own.”
Mr. Gould laughed shyly.
“For the one I did on Bartók, I had quite good dialogue, but not quite as good as yours,” Mr. Menuhin said. He gave a little sigh. “Most enjoyable!” he said.
“Next year, if you’re going to have some time, we might do one together,” Mr. Gould said. “You ever done the Schoenberg Fantasia?”
“Oh!” Mr. Menuhin gave a little gasp. “What a splendid idea! I must look at the music.”
“It’s a dry work—one of his last things,” Mr. Gould said.
“I have the music,” Mr. Menuhin said. “You’re not coming to England next summer? We might do it there.”
“I’d love to come and visit you,” Mr. Gould said. “But I’m finished with concerts. You know my feeling about concerts. I’m bored with them.”
Mr. Menuhin smiled wistfully. “On the screen, it does gain dimensions,” he said.
“Some people say that every performance is an experience, but it’s not that for me in concerts,” Mr. Gould said. “It’s animal. It’s all a circus. It’s immoral.”
“Yes, I do know what you mean,” Mr. Menuhin said mildly.
“When I’m onstage, I can shut them out, but I don’t like it,” Mr. Gould said. “I won’t do more than six concerts a year. My view of the future is the end of the concert experience and the revitalization of the home experience. I haven’t gone to a concert in months. When I’m in the audience, I’m completely distracted, I’m acutely uncomfortable. I don’t feel the therapy of private listening.”
“You are recording, though?” Mr. Menuhin said, beginning to look alarmed.
Mr. Gould said of course, and laughed. “I want to send you the Six Bach Partitas that just came out,” he said. “I’m rather proud of that record.”
Mr. Menuhin appeared relieved. “Would you come to England in July?” he asked. “To make the film?”
Mr. Gould bobbed his head and grinned. “The Schoenberg,” he said. “In July.”
Mr. Menuhin got up to go, smiling and looking utterly at peace. He gave Mr. Gould his hand. “It will be lovely,” he said. “We will do it, and then it will be there.”
1963
BECKETT — Jane Kramer
WE have always liked to imagine Samuel Beckett as more the inhabitant of his own wild pages than of any mundane place or time, and we were consequently a bit skeptical, the other day, when we read in a newspaper that he had materialized in our very midst and could be found that morning in a small movie studio on the upper East Side, watching over the production of his first screenplay. We headed straight uptown, and were halfway down the long, dark hall of a converted bakery on Ninetieth Street when we came upon Barney Rosset, the president of Grove Press, Beckett’s American publisher. Mr. Rosset informed us that he had formed a subsidiary called Evergreen Theatre to commission and produce movies by his own authors, and that Evergreen’s first film, now in production but still without a title, was being made from three short screenplays by Mr. Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Eugène Ionesco. He grinned, bounded proudly down the rest of the hall and into the studio, and added that Beckett’s
screen treatment, which contains no dialogue at all, had not only the author as adviser but Alan Schneider as its director, Boris Kaufman as its director of photography, and Buster Keaton playing its major character. Rosset then steered us across the studio, nimbly sidestepping coils of rope and piles of boxes on the floor, and left us at the door of the set of a small, exceedingly Beckettian room. It contained a rusty cot, a mattress smeared with dirt and sprouting chicken feathers through a large rip, a crumpled green blanket, a dingy mirror, an even dingier window hung with tattered curtains and an old air-raid shade, a picture of what looked like a carnival figure, a Chihuahua, a cat, a parrot, two goldfish, a Victorian rocker, a large camera on wheels, forty spotlights, twelve technicians, one script girl, two magazine photographers, Mr. Schneider, Mr. Kaufman, Mr. Keaton, a bearded cameraman named Joe Coffey, and Mr. Beckett, who was sitting in a corner on a Coca-Cola crate, peering intently at the scene. The playwright, materialized, turned out to be tall and quite thin, with soaring eyebrows and graying brown hair that stood straight up and swept back over his head like a wiry crest. He wore small round steel-rimmed glasses, a light-blue shirt rolled up at the sleeves and open at the neck, and tan trousers that were liberally splattered with feathers from the mattress. He was nervously smoking a strong French cigarette, and his forehead was deeply lined.
We were edging across the set to Mr. Beckett’s crate when Mr. Schneider called, “O.K., let’s try it!,” and the technicians dispersed to various posts around the room and on the scaffolding, leaving Mr. Kaufman, his cameraman, his camera steerer, and his camera-cord carrier behind the camera and Mr. Keaton in front of it. Keaton, with all his traditional gloom intact, was wearing an eye patch, baggy black trousers, bright-red suspenders, and an old, battered, pancaked hat. With Mr. Schneider counting and Mr. Beckett shyly watching, Keaton took four slow steps toward the Chihuahua and the cat. The Chihuahua and the cat, who shared a wicker basket, stared curiously at him.