Letters from Amherst. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ for John Del Gaizo. (Iva: “How come we’re doing everything so fancy, these days?” Me: “Oh, I don’t know. I just feel like it.” Iva: “Me too! Me too—don’t stop. Could I have some more smoked salmon?” Which tickled Big Del Gaizo Fellow, who had another glass of champagne.) Then, a few days later, while in the nest of my office I worked maniacally at finishing up the last section of the Camera Obscura interview for Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (which interview I’m quite proud of!), John came up and packed stuff for me—a twenty-five pound box of journals and manuscripts to be Federal Expressed up to Boston and a hundred-twenty-five pound box of books/clothes/cooking utensils/general-stuff for me in Amherst.

      Then Iva and Bumper (the cat) went back to Iva’s mother’s, and the next morning I went down to the bus below Grand Central, rode out to La Guardia, then flew to Erie, Pennsylvania, to deliver a cut-down version of my “Introduction to Deconstruction” lecture² for the Mercyhurst College “academic celebration.” It went over pretty well—and I kind of fell in love with the blue-collar town.

      What else? Just the lectures I guess, first off in Lowell, then again, last weekend, in Philadelphia at the meeting of the Associated Writing Programs of America—I sent you the booklet. But its dry account of panels and programs masks some interesting happenings. First off, the overall theme was a celebration of Allen Ginsberg. Though I’ve been in the same room with him a couple of times, and though we have many mutual friends (and once a mutual landlord named Chuck Bergman whom both of us, I believe, were occasionally going to bed with), we’ve never been introduced.

      At the upstairs reception after the Gay/Lesbian Panel, then, I was a bit surprised with the scraggly bearded Professor Ginsberg (he’s taken John Ashbery’s place as Professor of Poetry in the City University System), in his modest brown suit and tie, came up to me and simply said: “Hello, Delany. How’ve you been?” then launched into a chat about the Cherry Valley Farm, the Naropa Institute (that he runs with our mutual friend, Anne Waldman), etc.³ Finally he reached into his canvas shoulder bag and handed me a flyer for a series of readings he was putting on, mostly of black poets.

      I give him points.

      It looks like quite a program he and Gwendolyn Brooks have put together there.

      One of the most pleasant people at the AWP was Honor (Memoir) Moore. The first night we were there, after most of the panelists went out to dinner at a very good—but crashingly expensive—Japanese place called, incongruously, “Ziggy’s,” Honor and I snuck off together to the Hershey Hotel’s cabaret, and heard a couple of her old friends from Yale perform some standard show tunes quite brilliantly.

      Then we went to a reception for them, where the food the hotel supplied was far better than the hors d’oeuvres it had gotten together for the school teachers. A lot of old Yale people had shown up for the evening. And in the course of sitting around chatting, I realized I was talking to Rhoda Levine, director of Anthony Davis’s X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which I wrote you about a couple of years back, when I was at Cornell. (I sent you a copy of the interview I did with the composer one Sunday morning at the home of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.).⁴

      Mayhaps you remember, while I very much appreciated the music, I hated the production. In the course of prodding Ms. Levine, who is a very gutsy, New York/Academic theater person, I got some hair-raising stories about the production that certainly put a different light on some of it.

      One of the reasons the thing ever got to Lincoln Center at all was because it came with an assembled cast of pretty professional singers. But the New York State Theater’s stage is huge, and the whole thing had to be revamped for a playing area almost three times the size of any they’d performed on before. And it was assumed that they were also not going to need any rehearsal time to speak of—when what Rhoda actually wanted (she explained to me, as she leaned forward in her purple slacks and purple woolly top) was at least a hundred hours—i.e., two weeks—of rehearsal time in the new theater.

      Well, when the new opera was booked in, there simply wasn’t a 100 hours of rehearsal time available.

      The compromise they struck was arrived at rather dramatically. When they’d used up the 30 hours that was all Lincoln Center would give them, they hadn’t even started on the third act. So Rhoda went to a pay phone and called Beverly Sills and began to explain: “We’ve finally decided the way we’re going to do it.

      “At the end of Act II, we’re going to stop the whole opera. Dead in its tracks, Beverly! The cast is going to gather on the stage, and we’re going to perform the third act as a cantata—no movement, no actions, just characters stepping out of the chorus and singing. Suddenly the whole performance will simply paralyze into total and complete stasis! It’s going to be breathtaking!

      “You know as well as I do, Beverly—people have been complaining about the rehearsal time available here for years; the lack of funding, the lack of facilities. Well, besides being about the economic oppression of the American Black, this is also of course a meta-opera … about that! And what better way to dramatize it? Certainly for the cast, this is really an opera about the oppression of the American opera as a theatrical form. They’re singers, and that’s what they’re really concerned about. It’s about performance standards. It’s about what can and can’t be done in the theater today with a serious work because there’s no money, no time, and no margins for doing it properly. And you’re going to have it, right on your stage—the audience will be devastated, I promise you! People will be talking about it for years!

      “There was,” Ms. Levine went on with her story, “absolute silence on the other end of the phone. Finally, Beverly said to me: ‘Rhoda, how much time do you need?’

      “So I said: ‘Oh, I thought about eighty-three hours.’ And Beverly said: ‘You’ve got it!’” And Rhoda sat back at the crowded round little hotel table, slapping her knees while we laughed.

      I still think it was a thoughtless production. While she certainly delivers a good anecdote, I think she’s a director who has no notion (or possibly experience) of what images will carry in a space that size and what images won’t. Dramatic stage arrangements that are perfectly acceptable on a 25 foot proscenium for a three-hundred seat house can be simply invisible in a thousand-plus seat hall the size of the three major theater spaces at Lincoln Center.

      But I enjoyed her story.

      The next day, I had a very pleasant lunch with Richard Howard, Honor Moore, and Peter (The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty) Klappert, at which Richard told us all about a course he’d taught the previous year, called American Ecstatics: It covered a whole range of people, such as Whitman, Isadora Duncan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Sounded just fascinating.

      At the actual panel, I met an interesting young man, an historian and writer on economics named Walter (Mortal Splendor) Mead. My piece—the one I sent you last week—opened the panel.⁵ But the real winner among the formal presentations was Allan Gurganus’s piece, which, when it’s printed, I’ll send along. It would be unfair to try and reproduce it informally, since it was so carefully done. Later, while the informal part was going on, and after I made my point about [Guy] Davenport, Richard threw in that a few months ago he’d been talking to Hugh Kenner on the phone.

      Kenner has always been one of Davenport’s biggest supporters. But Kenner had been complaining to Richard that he just found the sexual content of Davenport’s more recent material “absolutely embarrassing” and simply didn’t know how he was supposed to deal with it. Richard pointed out that the whole area of pedophilia really puts people off. And I pointed out that Davenport’s characters never cross any real, legal line. Nevertheless СКАЧАТЬ