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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Object Lesson
The Christmas festivities in Jamaica in 1835, when the Jewish artist Isaac Mendes Belisario probably created this image, were fraught with tension. In 1831 a massive slave rebellion had begun during the Christmas holidays. The bloody repression of the rebellion resulted in the execution of more than 500 African Jamaicans. When Parliament’s investigation revealed the ghastly realities of West Indian slavery, Britain’s abolitionist movement gathered strength, and in 1833 West Indian slavery was abolished. Belisario’s lithographs—Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population in the Island of Jamaica—reveal emancipation as a cultural moment. This image portrays the principal dancer in the Jankunu (or John-Canoe) rituals, performed every Christmas season since the early 1700s. Jankunu, still performed in parts of Jamaica today, evolved within the community of Africans whose forced labors had, by the mid-1700s, made Jamaica the wealthiest of the British colonies. Based upon West African ritual practices, Jankunu exemplifies the culture of survival that African Jamaicans created during more than 300 years of enslavement. At first, slaveholders banned Jankunu and flogged offenders. But culture is resilient. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, custom dictated that the enslaved be allowed a few days over Christmas to themselves. This small measure of freedom allowed the creativity of unknown artists to emerge. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to know the meaning of the house and costume to those who first performed. But I think we can see in this image the subversive edge that still pervades African Jamaican culture. The elaborate model house balanced on the dancer’s head might represent the planter’s mansion, and by extension the wealth of Jamaica. The intricate beauty and grand architecture of this piece were the work of black Jamaican artists, working in secrecy for several months. As the house was being completed, ceremonial half-filled glasses of rum were left in or near it, offerings to ancestors whose work, creativity, and blood had gone into the houses of previous generations. The masked dancer bearing the house began his performance on Christmas Eve—the same time that the rebellions were plotted. When the model house was unveiled, the singing, drumming, and dancing of Jankunu began. The dancer led a procession from village to village down into the town. All would be beguiled by his rapid footwork, enhanced by the close-fitting striped pants, the colorful ribbons, the cloth wrap in constant motion: his chest and torso straight, balancing the wealth of Jamaica with his head and strong arms. And his mask painted white, with blushed cheeks and an almost-smile, hides more than Belisario could reveal.
You Can Quote Them In my last column I wrote about ghostwriters of the judicial and literary varieties, such as law clerks who draft the first version of judges' opinions. In my writings about quotations, however, I have not generally sought to name the ghostwriters who may be standing in the shadows. Often, these writers are simply impossible to identify accurately. But one kind of ghostwriter is slightly less hidden: speechwriters. Though they are rarely credited for the memorable lines they pen, their professional positions, and sometimes their specific contributions to rhetoric and, by extension, policy, are matters of public record—especially at the highest levels of national politics. Arguably the most famous ghostwriting speechwriter is Theodore Sorensen, who is generally believed to have been the real writer of the Pulitzer Prize–winning 1956 book by then-Senator John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage. In 1957, ABC aired the charge that JFK had not written the book, and the Kennedy family threatened a lawsuit. Sorensen signed an affidavit at the time stating that JFK was the “author.” When Sorensen was interviewed about the book for a 1992 episode of PBS’s American Experience, he said: “The author of Profiles in Courage was John F. Kennedy. The author is the man who stands behind what is there on the printed page. It’s his responsibility to put his name to it and to put it out.” That remarkable statement could be the credo of the ghostwriter. Drawing on information in Safire’s New Political Dictionary and on my own researches, I’ve compiled a list of famous U.S. political quotations and their real creators. It is admittedly an incomplete catalog, but it is probably the first of its kind: I
pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. The
only thing we have to fear is fear itself. In
the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial
complex. Let
both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a
new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace
preserved. All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor
will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this
Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us
begin. In
the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the
role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from
this responsibility—I welcome it. In
your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and
the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. A
spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of
impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals. In
the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of
negativism. In
your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the
temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above
it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history
and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire. We
are a nation of communities, of tens and tens of thousands of ethnic, religious,
social, business, labor union, neighborhood, regional, and other organizations,
all of them varied, voluntary, and unique … a brilliant diversity spread
like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky. Read
my lips: no new taxes. I
want a kinder, gentler nation. States
like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, aiming to
threaten the peace of the world.
Elmer Gantry is ready for his aria Here's a guide for anyone who wants to write the Great American Opera. First, you need an idea. For the composer Robert Aldridge '00MusAD, it arrived one Christmas dinner, when he was sitting with another composer, Herschel Garfein '79, and Garfein’s then-girlfriend, a violist-turned-singer named Lorraine Hunt. The conversation turned to Elmer Gantry, the classic novel by Sinclair Lewis, Class of 1908, attacking hypocrisy in the American evangelical movement—timely in 1927, timely now. Aldridge opined that he could write the music; Hunt, that she could sing the lead role of Sister Sharon. It fell to Garfein, who had arrived at Yale an aspiring comp lit major before running into the brick wall of the Deconstructionists, to write the libretto. Then, you need to make sure your subject is operatic. Elmer Gantry fits the bill. “It’s a story that’s perfect for opera,” Aldridge says. It has “all the ideas: faith, God, huge fires—all great operas have to have a huge fire at the end where everything burns to the ground—betrayal, deception, these things that opera can do so incredibly well.” And you need one more thing. “With opera,” Aldridge said, after Elmer Gantry had been through its second course of workshops with the Boston Lyric Opera, two years after that Christmas dinner, “you learn to be patient.” That was in 1992. This season, Elmer Gantry is finally having its premiere production: after performances in Nashville in November, it continues to Montclair State University, where Aldridge is a professor, in January. Much has changed since Aldridge and Garfein started work in 1990. Hunt married another composer, Peter Lieberson, and became one of the greatest singers of our time before her tragic death last year at 52. Garfein now teaches at NYU and is composing his own opera (a setting of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). And Aldridge went to Yale and got his doctorate. Meanwhile, the story—about “how evangelism moves from being a frontier phenomenon to the city, taking on all of the apparatus of American business, advertising, that sort of thing,” says Garfein—is still timely, but the public face of fallen evangelicals is Ted Haggard rather than Tammy Faye Bakker. And today Aldridge’s populist, gospel-tinged musical idiom, which seemed reactionary in 1990, places him in a pack of recent Great American Opera contenders: The Grapes of Wrath (Ricky Ian Gordon), A View from the Bridge (William Bolcom), Little Women (Mark Adamo), Margaret Garner (Richard Danielpour, based on Toni Morrison’s Beloved), Dead Man Walking (Jake Heggie). Little stigma remains attached to the idea of tonality, although the favorable New York Times review of an excerpt of Elmer Gantry performed earlier in 2007 said that it was “eager to please.” “Which I freely admit,” Garfein says. “I’m very very eager to please.” “The challenge is to write an opera that people love,” says Aldridge. That their friendship has endured is no mean feat, given that they have been through 17 years of work, rewrites, near-misses with prospective productions from New York City to Tulsa, and the basic strain of one composer writing the words while another one writes the music. “I do have one tune in it,” says Garfein, and obligingly sings it. Elmer Gantry seems to have a certain resistance to musical treatment. In 1970, a musical called Gantry, with Robert Shaw and Rita Moreno, closed on Broadway after a single performance. In 1988, another Elmer Gantry musical, by Mel Marvin, ran for five months in Washington, but despite two further productions it never got to Broadway—a relief to Aldridge and Garfein, since a Broadway run would have hampered their efforts to secure the rights for their own piece. But now the opera Elmer Gantry is poised to break a long run of frustration—and flaunts its Yale connections. Elis on the production team include Takeshi Kata '01MFA, the set designer; Camille Assaf '04MFA, the costume designer; and Robert Wierzel '84MFA, the lighting designer. Garfein, perhaps the most Old-Blue-blooded of all, describes himself as an “unofficial” member of the Whiffenpoofs, which prompts a laughing Aldridge to tease him about Mory’s cups while he draws himself up with a show of dignity. “It must be said about the Whiffenpoofs,” he says defensively, “some great musicians have come out of there.” But unlike many things in this carefully planned opera, one Yale connection is accidental. Aldridge wasn’t aware until recently that Sinclair Lewis was a Yalie. “I figured he was a Harvard guy,” he says.
After
109 years, Mark Twain makes it to Broadway It’s practically a given in commercial theater that plays endure a lengthy development process before an audience ever sees them. Even the slowest movers, though, are usually on the boards within a century. Which makes Is He Dead? a fascinating case. Written by Mark Twain in 1898, the play had languished without a single production. When it finally sees its premiere on November 29—on Broadway, no less—this nearly forgotten farce will complete one of the most unlikely journeys in American drama. Those unaware that Mark Twain was a playwright can be forgiven: according to Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin '71, '77PhD, most of his scripts are deservedly obscure. She has written that his dramatic scribblings are “largely unreadable" and summed up the unfortunately titled Death Wafer with a single word: “deadly.” Even she was surprised, then, when in 2002 she read a copy of Is He Dead? in the archives of the University of California at Berkeley and actually enjoyed it. In her introduction to the print edition of the play (published by University of California Press in 2003) she describes laughing out loud in the library as she turned the pages. Soon enough, she was spearheading a charge to get the script staged. “What I found particularly exciting,” she says, “is that when I read this play, I could imagine the fun Twain had writing it.” Though unpolished, the original draft boasts a sturdy comedic plot, in which some cash-strapped artists try to earn their fortune with a high-concept prank. One of them stages his own death to drive up the price of his paintings. Hijinks ensue when he disguises himself as his own sister, watches a bidding war erupt over his work, and generally stirs up trouble. That zany structure fuses with Twain’s satire of the art world to make a play worth remembering. Fishkin quickly found support to back up her enthusiasm. Through mutual friends, she met producer Bob Boyett, whose credits range from broad musical comedy (the Monty Python-inspired Spamalot) to erudite drama (Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia). He agreed not only to back Is He Dead?, but also to tackle the problem of making it stageworthy. Twain himself had acknowledged that his play would need another writer’s input to become successful, so Boyett gave the job to playwright David Ives '84MFA, best known for the comedies Mere Mortals and All in the Timing. Tasked with turning Is He Dead? into a sleek farcical machine, Ives cut more than a dozen roles, shortened three acts into two, and gave a minor female character a cross-dressing subplot of her own. He says his adaptation is meant to sharpen the “wonderful idea” in Twain's original. “The core of this play is an artist, a villain, and a love,” he explains, “and there’s also the simple, old-fashioned pleasure of seeing a man with a big problem get into a dress to solve it.” For all Ives’s work, however, this play is being touted as Twain's, and the great author’s name has added an unusual element to the creative process. Since this production has unique academic and historical value, Fishkin has been representing the Mark Twain Foundation in meetings and rehearsals: it’s her job to make sure Twain’s voice and perspective are preserved. So far, she says, her work has been “a joy.” She adds, “David Ives has a sense of the spirit of Twain's play, and he’s doing things Twain knew somebody would have to do.”
Memoirs of madness and macchiato
One night a couple of decades ago, Elyn Saks '86JD was sitting in the Yale Law School library, working on a memo with two classmates. She suddenly announced: “Memos are visitations. They make certain points. The point is on your head. Have you ever killed anyone?” Then she asked if they, too, saw words jumping around the pages of their books. Later that night, Saks found herself in Yale–New Haven Hospital, bound with leather straps to a metal bed. This was not an isolated incident for Saks—not by a long shot. During her solidly upper-middle-class childhood in North Miami, she experienced irrational fears and (before the designations entered the popular lexicon) anorexia and OCD. Walking home one day from high school, she thought that houses were talking to her. After graduating, she attended Vanderbilt, where she had periodic episodes of irrational behavior and paranoid thoughts, but managed to finish as valedictorian of her class. That established a pattern. In the academic and later the professional world, she was a super-achiever: a graduate degree at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, also with highest honors; a law degree at Yale, with, you got it, highest honors; and, at present, a professorship at the University of Southern California law school, where, she confides, she occupies an endowed chair, “one of the highest honors that a university bestows on a faculty member.” You forgive Saks for continually buffing up her glittering prizes, because of the other part of the pattern: her severe, chronic, and often excruciating mental illness. It erupted in full force at Oxford, when she was hospitalized on two separate occasions. During her second stint, she writes in her memoir, The Center Cannot Hold, she “retreated to the bathroom, where I spent hours on the floor, smoking, rocking back and forth, and moaning softly to myself.” At Yale, after the incident in the law library, she spent months at Yale–New Haven and later the Yale Psychiatric Institute, much of the time in restraints, where she received an official diagnosis: “Chronic paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation." Prognosis: “Grave.” Today her disease is under control thanks to medication and decades of intensive psychoanalysis (normally not indicated for schizophrenia—Saks's enthusiasm for the treatment is a notable feature of her book). But she readily acknowledges that her demons are merely at bay and could erupt at any time. Memoir is the literary form of the moment, the primary medium through which people choose to relate and make sense of their experiences. At its best, it is an intimate mode—the first great memoir, by St. Augustine, was called Confessions—and as such especially suitable for the most painful interior journeys. There have been notable memoirs about depression (William Styron’s Darkness Visible), bipolar disorder (Kay Redfield Jamison’s The Unquiet Mind), and even autism (Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day). Saks’s is an important addition, not so much for any profound insights or literary brilliance, but for her great courage in reliving a painful past and coming forward to tell this story. It’s rare for someone with schizophrenia to function on such a level, as she acknowledges, but her book convincingly and sometimes movingly demonstrates that with the help of medication, dedication, excellent therapists, and good friends, it can happen. At one point, Saks remarks that she is crazy but not stupid—a rare instance of this bromide being literally and extremely accurate. Michael Gates Gill, the author of another new memoir, How Starbucks Saved My Life, isn’t crazy but he sure was, well, clueless. Gill, son of the author Brendan Gill '36, is a member of the Yale Class of 1963. (He did not graduate, a fact he fudges in the memoir.) He aptly terms himself a “spoiled prince”: he eased from college to a plum job with the J. Walter Thompson ad agency—courtesy of a fellow Bonesman with inside connections—and ambled his way up to a fairly lofty spot on the corporate ladder. But then, at the age of 53, he was fired in a cost-cutting move. Then he acquired and impregnated a mistress. Then his wife kicked him out of their large house in Connecticut. Then his consulting business started to go belly-up. (There’s some irony there: Gill’s one previous book was Fired Up!: The Proven Principles of Successful Entrepreneurs). Just as he was about to hit bottom, he serendipitously was offered and accepted an entry-level job at a Starbucks at 93rd and Broadway in New York. This was already out of his comfort zone: “I had never even been to Ninety-Third Street and Broadway—wherever the hell that was. My policy in New York City was never to go above Ninetieth Street or below Grand Central.” Similarly mind-blowing was the fact that all of his fellow workers—“Partners,” in the capitalized corporate lingo adopted in the book—would be African American, including his boss, Crystal, a woman in her late 20s. In due time Gill learned to take direction from Crystal, clean grout, make change, and comprehend some of the present-day realities of life in these United States. Somewhere along the way, he became a happy man. Gill's sincerity and enthusiasm are both the nicest and most annoying things about his memoir. Annoying, because he is such a Starbucks sycophant. I don’t feel it’s Gill’s obligation to, say, investigate its coffee-buying policies, but many people, including not a few Partners, are irked by the company. The dust jacket promises he will tell us “who the baristas are, and what they love (and hate) about their jobs,” but in the book itself, it’s all love. But How Starbucks Saved My Life is so believably heartwarming that you forgive the shilling. A story about a guy who loses his Brooks Brothers suit and sense of entitlement and finds joy making lattes with the brothers and sisters—what’s not to like? Tom Hanks thinks so, too: he bought the movie rights.
In Print Running the Table Innovation Nation The Idea of Cuba A Slave No More
More Books by Yale Authors Mark Antliff 1990PhD George Baker 1992 Ward Blanton 2004PhD Paul F. Boller Jr. 1939,
1947PhD Stephen Burt 2000PhD Antoinette Burton 1983 David Conte 1972MFA and
Stephen Langley Judith Dupre 2008MAR Peter Gardella 1983PhD Rhonda K. Garelick 1983,
1991PhD Peter Gay, Sterling
Professor Emeritus of History Klara Glowczewska 1977 Andrew R. Graybill 1994 James Harford 1945W Thomas R. Holtz 1992PhD Carolyn L. Hsu 1991 Benjamin J. Kaplan 1981 Amalia D. Kessler 1999JD Ben Kiernan, the A. Whitney
Griswold Professor of History David McCullough 1955 Don Metz 1962, 1966MArch Scott Moeller 1976, 1976MA,
1978MBA, and Chris Brady John E. Murray 1981 David Plowden 1955,
Photographer James Prosek 1997,
Illustrator; and Joseph Furia 2000, Wyatt Golding 2006, David Haltom 2004,
Steven Hayhurst 1999, Joseph Kingsbery 2008, and Alexis Surovov 2002, Editors Frederic Roberts 1965,
Photographer Arthur Rosenfeld 1979 David Sandalow 1978 Raphael Shargel 1987 John Silber 1956PhD Daniel J. Solove 1997JD Peter D.L. Stansky 1953 Alan A. Stone 1955MD H. H. Sunro 1972 Harlow Giles Unger 1953 Ann Vileisis 1989 David S. Wilcove 1980BS Max Wilk 1941 Jay Winik 1980, 1993PhD Jonathan R. Zatlin 1985, S.
Jonathan Wiesen, and Pamela E. Swett
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Calendar Trouble in Mind It’s 1957, and an African American actress has finally escaped stereotypical black roles and won a lead role in a Broadway-bound production. But she struggles to maintain her dignity—and her job—when she clashes with the play’s white director. Art for Yale: Collecting for a New Century This major exhibit features more than 300 works of art from every period and geographical area in the Art Gallery’s holdings—a smorgasbord of recent acquisitions. Many of the works are by renowned artists and have never before been seen in public. Yale-Harvard Concert The annual concert on the eve of the Yale-Harvard football game features the Yale and Harvard glee clubs in choral works from the sixteenth century to the present—along with the traditional fight songs. Daniel Read and the Flowering of Sacred Music in New Haven An exhibition featuring early American psalters, manuscripts, and printed music celebrates the 250th anniversary of the birth of New Haven composer Daniel Read, one of the primary members of a group of American composers known as the First New England School. |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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