These days critics aren’t nearly as influential as they used to be, but youngsters who doubt that they once had the power to make a big difference in the small world of art need only pay a visit to “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1978,” which opens next month at the St. Louis Art Museum after a long and well-received run at New York’s Jewish Museum. In this small but potent exhibition, the work of the abstract-expressionist painters who dominated American art throughout the Forties and Fifties is seen from the points of view of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the two critics who did the most to bring it to the attention of the public at large (and who both, needless to say, figured prominently in the pages of COMMENTARY). The genius of this show is that it situates the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and their contemporaries and followers in two separate but related historical contexts. Not only is their work considered as part of the intellectual debate over modernism, but we are also shown how it fit into the wider scheme of postwar American culture-without diminishing in the least the impact of the paintings qua paintings.

If you can’t get to “Action/Abstraction,” I commend your attention to the show’s handsomely designed catalogue, edited by Norman L. Kleebatt (Yale, 332 pp., $65). Though a folio can only hint at the visceral impact of such large-scale paintings as Jackson Pollock’s “Convergence” or Helen Frankenthaler’s “Mountains and Sea,” this one compensates by including ten essays that cover a considerable amount of intellectual and art-historical ground. I especially liked Charlotte Eyerman’s “Abstraction and Representation: A Brief History,” which is so good that I wish she’d expand it into a short book:

For American museum-going audiences today, perhaps no art seems more mainstream, familiar, and appealing than Impressionism. It is perhaps difficult to explain in 2008-as it was in 1948-that Impression was once considered as radical, as unfamiliar, and as abstract as a Jackson Pollock painting.

The illustrations, which include all of the historical ephemera that helped make the show so interesting, are worth the price of the catalogue all by themselves. Remember “The Connoisseur,” Norman Rockwell’s 1962 Saturday Evening Post cover that showed a distinguished-looking gentlemen peering at a Pollock-style canvas? It’s here, along with “How to Look at Modern Art in America,” the wickedly funny Ad Reinhardt cartoon that appeared in PM in 1946.

The only things missing from “Action/Abstraction” are representative essays by Greenberg and Rosenberg themselves. Greenberg’s writings, of course, are well known to critics and scholars, but most of Rosenberg’s work is now more remembered than read, and it would be useful (if not exactly pleasurable) to be able to read what he had to say about the “action painters” he praised so passionately. He was, alas, better at spinning theories than looking at paintings, whereas Greenberg, though he never quite managed to shake off the Marxist habits of mind that inspired his lifelong belief in the historical inevitability of abstraction, had the keenness of eye that Rosenberg lacked. If “Action/Abstraction” were a contest, not an exhibition, Greenberg would win in a walk.

Richard M. Sudhalter, the jazz historian (and sometime COMMENTARY contributor) who died last Friday after a long illness, was that rarity of rarities, a first-class musical scholar who played as well as he wrote. His trumpet playing was renowned for its elegance and wit, and the fact that-unlike most critics-he understood jazz from the inside out added immeasurably to the lucidity with which he wrote about it. Alas, Sudhalter was only able to complete three books before a stroke brought an untimely end to his writing career, but all of them were important.I discussed “Bix: Man and Legend” (1974), the biography of Bix Beiderbecke that Sudhalter co-wrote with Philip Evans, in a 2001 COMMENTARY essay called “Jazz and Its Explainers.” On that occasion I praised it as

a landmark in the development of fully professional jazz scholarship….No previous book about a jazz musician had been so extensively documented, and none had been based exclusively on primary sources. Although few if any contemporary reviewers appreciated its significance, this was the first time the life story of a major jazz artist had been told in the kind of exhaustive detail that would be taken for granted in a scholarly biography of a major classical composer.

The furious controversy attending the publication in 1999 of “Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945″ (about which I will be writing in the November issue of COMMENTARY) made it all but impossible for laymen to appreciate the book’s significance, and so it mostly failed to receive the thoughtful appraisals it deserved. Nine years later, though, this groundbreaking critical study, in which Sudhalter wrote with acute penetration about the work of such noted white jazz musicians as Beiderbecke, Connie Boswell, Bud Freeman, Benny Goodman, Bobby Hackett, Red Nichols, Red Norvo, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Pee Wee Russell, Artie Shaw and Jack Teagarden, has finally won widespread recognition from well-informed scholars as a major contribution to the literature of jazz.

Not only is “Lost Chords” unfailingly insightful, but it is written with a journalistic flair rarely to be found in scholarly studies. Take, for example, Sudhalter’s description of the way the trombonist Miff Mole looked in 1960, not long before his death:

Just an old-looking guy in an old-looking overcoat, standing there beside his big, old-looking trombone case. No mistaking him, though: wire-rimmed glasses just a little askew on a leathery, seamed face. The look-still, so many years later-of a slightly quizzical owl….He was sixty-two and hadn’t played regularly in ten years. Repeated operations on an infected hip had undercut his health and depleted what savings he had. The jazz world of his time, embroiled in its usual intramural squabbling, neither knew of him nor gave a damn.

Vicious attacks on “Lost Chords” by race-obsessed critics incompetent to evaluate its merits were undoubtedly responsible for the fact that Sudhalter’s last book, “Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael” (2003), received so little attention in the popular press. Even though it was the first full-length biography of the composer of such familiar and beloved standards as “Georgia on My Mind,” “Skylark” and “Stardust,” the New York Times Book Review took no note of its publication. Yet “Stardust Melody,” like “Bix: Man and Legend” and “Lost Chords” before it, is a book of the highest significance, one of the very few high-quality biographies ever to be written about a popular songwriter. Biographies are rarely definitive, but this one is unlikely to be bettered.

“Stardust Melody” is still in print from Oxford University Press, and used copies of “Bix: Man and Legend” and “Lost Chords” are readily available via Amazon and other online booksellers. Anyone interested in the history of jazz and American popular song should own all three.

Certain kinds of dishonesty give off a near-irresistible air of glamour, which is why the career of Han van Meegeren continues to exert a strange fascination on people who ought to know better. Fortunately, Jonathan Lopez’s “The Man Who Made Vermeer: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren” (Harcourt, 340 pp., $26) will disabuse all who read it of the notion that van Meegeren’s career was in any way glamorous. Fascinating, yes-but not in the way you might suppose.

Even if van Meegeren’s name rings only the faintest of bells, the subtitle of Lopez’s book will likely prompt you to remember that he was the Dutch art forger whose ersatz Vermeers were so plausible that they fooled Hermann Goering, who “bought” one for his celebrated collection of looted art, a purchase that briefly landed the artist in jail after the war. In order to prove to prosecutors that he was indeed capable of having painted “Christ and the Adulteress,” van Meegeren painted yet another fake Vermeer, and was duly set free.

All this is true enough, but there is a good deal more to van Meegeren’s unsavory story, starting with the fact that he was an ardent Nazi sympathizer whose liking for Adolf Hitler predated his palming “Christ and the Adulteress” off on Goering. And while his forgeries fooled a great many highly knowledgeable people and institutions-including the curators of the National Gallery of Art, which long took for granted the legitimacy of the two van Meegeren “Vermeers” left to the museum by Andrew Mellon-their phoniness is now obvious to all who see them.

How, then, did van Meegeren get away with it? As Lopez explains, he had the perversely ingenious idea of tailoring his fakes to suit the specific cultural interests of the dupes to whom he sold them. Because he was operating at a time when Vermeer’s work was not nearly so well known as it is today, this made it possible for him to confect out of thin air a whole series of late Vermeers whose subject matter was explicitly religious, as well as a portrait reproduced in “The Man Who Made Vermeers” that was far from spiritual:

A variation on “The Girl with the Red Hat,” it is sometimes known today as “The Greta Garbo Vermeer,” as the face of the sitter bears a striking resemblance to movie posters for “Anna Christie” and “Wild Orchids”-an interesting and apparently effective subliminal appeal to the eyes of the 1930s, since the anachronism blended in completely unnoticed with the prevailing tastes of the day. The great connoisseur Max Friedländer…wholeheartedly accepted this picture as a Vermeer when it was brought in for attribution, reportedly calling it “splendid.”

Therein lies the enduring appeal of van Meegeren: anyone with a touch of larceny in his heart cannot but thrill to hear of such feats of expert-foxing legerdemain. It is thus salutary to read in “The Man Who Made Vermeers” that he was not a charming rogue but a twisted, frustrated man whose technique far outstripped his creativity-and that many of the canvases he painted under his own name made explicit use of the same pro-Nazi symbolic imagery that can also be found in more subtle form in his later “Vermeers.”

The only good thing about van Meegeren, as Lopez explains, is that his forgeries have had the perverse effect of teaching a new generation of scholars to know better:

Older books on Vermeer…now make for perplexing-indeed, almost comical-reading because they contain so many weird and unfamiliar pictures. In contrast, pick up the catalogue of the 1996 Vermeer show at the National Gallery of Art, and you’ll find that the chaos has been swept away. With no more than thirty-six paintings now firmly attributed to the master, there are certainly fewer Vermeers, but Vermeer is much the better for it.

So, too, will anyone inclined to romanticize Han van Meegeren’s life and work be much the better for reading “The Man Who Made Vermeers.”

One good movie-star book deserves another, so having enjoyed Robert Nott’s “The Films of Randolph Scott,” I decided to read his first book, “He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield” (Limelight, 354 pp., $27.50). It’s no less readable, albeit in a very different way, just as Garfield was a very different kind of actor from Scott. Whereas “The Films of Randolph Scott” was an annotated filmography, “He Ran All the Way” is a conventional biography, one whose subject, unlike Scott, led an exceedingly interesting and ultimately sad life.

Nowadays John Garfield is remembered, if at all, for having made three good films, “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Body and Soul” and “Force of Evil,” and for having been blacklisted. In his day, though, he was-for a time-a genuine star, and one whose background was the stuff cover stories are made of. A Russian-Jewish immigrant slum kid from Brooklyn, Garfield was as close to uneducated as it’s possible for an actor to be, yet he somehow managed to muscle his way into the Group Theatre, the left-wing stage collective that gave Clifford Odets his start, and played secondary roles in three of Odets’ best-remembered plays, “Waiting for Lefty,” “Awake and Sing!” and “Golden Boy.” But Garfield was never at home in the Group Theatre, perhaps because he was the opposite of an intellectual, a purely instinctive performer who knew next to nothing about the classics, and when Hollywood came calling, he came running.

Garfield made his first film in 1938, worked his way up the rungs of celebrity, and hit the big time in 1946, co-starring with Lana Turner in the film version of James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” The times were right for Garfield, whose rough-edged big-city presence was well suited to the cynical postwar crime dramas that French critics dubbed film noir, and for a few years he was at the top of the heap. At that point, though, his hard-left past caught up with him. A semi-unfriendly 1951 appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (he declared himself opposed to Communism but refused to name names and skated over the edge of perjury) put an end to Garfield’s screen career, and he died of a heart attack the following year.

Like the film-noir chump he plays in “Postman,” Garfield let a dame lead him by the nose into the political crossfire. He appears never to have been a card-carrying Communist, and his politics, Nott writes, were as unthoughtful as his acting: “Julie [Garfield’s lifelong nickname] never quite penetrated the Hollywood liberal community’s depths. Often he would fall asleep at parties when political discussions came up.” But Robbe, his wife, was deeply involved in the Communist Party, and it seems more than likely that she was largely responsible for his own involvement in the front groups that would later bring him to the attention of HUAC.

Nott is admirably frank about all this, and though he portrays Garfield, reasonably enough, as a victim of the blacklist, he also makes it clear that Garfield’s film career was already in trouble by the time his Communist connections started making headlines. He had always been more a character actor than a full-fledged star, and when his rough, youthful glamour started to fade, he inevitably became less attractive to producers and directors. Film noir was his metier, but its popularity was as short-lived as his own vogue as a hero-loser.

In the end, Garfield was as much as anything else a victim of his own limitations. Humphrey Bogart, like Garfield, started out as a stage actor turned tough-guy second banana, but had the intelligence to sculpt a more complex screen persona for himself, the iron determination to seek out interesting roles-and the good luck to be offered the career-clinching parts in “High Sierra” and “The Maltese Falcon” that turned him into one of the iconic figures of the studio system. John Garfield, for all his natural gifts, had none of these things. He was, like so many other screen stars, a handsome, hollow tree, marvelous to look at but incapable of standing up to the high winds of life.

I didn’t know much about New York Review Books’ “NYRB Classics” line when I was invited last year to contribute an introduction to Elaine Dundy’s “The Dud Avocado.” Since then, though, I’ve looked through the NYRB Classics catalogue with close attention and increasing wonder. Whoever picks the titles for this spectacularly eclectic series of stylish-looking reprints of insufficiently remembered books of the past (many but by no means all of which are novels) deserves some sort of prize for good taste. Among the worthy books resurrected in recent years by NYRB Classics are Colette’s “The Pure and the Impure,” Ivy Compton-Burnett’s “Manservant and Maidservant,” Kenneth Fearing’s “The Big Clock,” Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate,” L.P. Hartley’s “The Go-Between,” Murray Kempton’s “Part of Our Time,” J.F. Powers’ “Morte d’Urban,” Jean Renoir’s “Renoir, My Father,” A.J.A. Symons’ “The Quest for Corvo,” Italo Svevo’s “As a Man Grows Older,” Lionel Trilling’s “The Middle of the Journey,” Aleksander Wat’s “My Century,” Glenway Wescott’s “The Pilgrim Hawk,” and a whole batch of alarmingly dark romans durs by Georges Simenon, all of which are eminently worthy of revival. Has there ever been so quirkily adventurous a paperback reissue line? Not in my memory.

I recently started chewing through a boxful of books from NYRB Classics, and the volume on top, Angus Wilson’s “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” (360 pp., $14.95), happened to be an old favorite that I hadn’t reread since my ancient, much-thumbed paperback edition disintegrated a few years ago. Originally published in 1956, “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” was a deliberate attempt to write a novel in the style of Dickens and Trollope whose subject matter was unambiguously contemporary. It tells the tale of Gerald Middleton, a wealthy, washed-up historian who at the age of sixty upends his comfortable but unsatisfying life by investigating a Piltdown Man-like archaeological fraud for which the great friend of his schooldays turns out to have been responsible. “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” is at once deeply felt, brilliantly witty and morally serious to the highest degree, a combination of traits rarely to be found in a single novel.

Of special interest is the cold eye that Angus Wilson casts on humanism in all its mid-century varieties. Neither conservative nor (so far as I know) religious, Wilson was nonetheless acutely aware of the inadequacies of the secular creed to which most of his fellow liberals adhered, and skewered them with the sharpest of sticks. A case in point is his acid portrayal of Frank Rammage, an amateur social worker whose desire to help his fellow men turns out to be rooted in exceedingly strange motivations:

The mention of rent put Frank on his mettle. “That’s all right, dear,” he said; “you pay when you can.”

Each time that he spoke this familiar phrase, and sometimes it was as often as twenty times in a week, he felt overcome by the sadness of the situation. It was seldom, he knew, that any good would come of his sympathy, but it was the hopelessness, the endless hopelessness of the lives with which he had surrounded himself, that awoke his compassion. Frank Rammage’s attitude could hardly be called sentimental, for it went farther than mere feeling-he regarded the dishonest and depraved as almost sacred. As usual, however, the little scene had satisfied the mixture of bullying and masochism that lay on the surface of his strange, Dostoyevskian philanthropy. He felt quite jolly.

Having revisited “Anglo-Saxon Attitudes” with the utmost pleasure, it occurs to me that Wilson’s first novel, “Hemlock and After,” which was greatly admired by both Evelyn Waugh and Edmund Wilson, is very much the sort of book that would suit the folks at NYRB Classics. I’d suggest it myself, but somehow I suspect that they’ve already thought of it.

Film, we’re told, is a serious art form, but it certainly hasn’t produced much of a serious literature, least of all when it comes to books about movie stars. Most Hollywood biographies, for instance, are ill-written compilations of gossip, while “filmographies” (to use the ugly but inevitable neologism) tend to be the work of fawning, obsessively compulsive fans. So it is a treat to report that Robert Nott’s The Films of Randolph Scott (McFarland & Company, 235 pp., $39.95 paper) is as discriminating as it is thorough, a worthy tribute to an insufficiently remembered actor whose best work is much deserving of revival.

As a young man Scott made movies of all kinds, but after 1947 he specialized exclusively in the Western, a once-beloved genre that has all but died out in recent years. His on-screen demeanor, as I wrote in a 2002 essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader, was distinctive to the highest possible degree:

He always played the same character, a lanky, dryly amusing cowboy with a Virginian accent who spoke only when spoken to and shot only when shot at, and you could take it for granted that he’d do the right thing in any given situation. If he’d been younger and prettier, he would have been too good to be true, but Scott was no dresser’s dummy: he had a thin-lipped mouth and a hawk-like profile, and wasn’t afraid to act his age on screen. Nobody in Hollywood, not even John Wayne, looked more believable in a Stetson.

Most of Scott’s later movies were variously satisfying but predictable B- to B-plus Westerns in which he stuck closely to the heroic stereotype that made him popular. In the final years of his screen career, though, he made a number of films, most of them directed by Budd Boetticher, that were tougher in tone and austere to the point of stoicism. Boetticher’s “Seven Men from Now,” “Ride Lonesome,” and “Comanche Station” are all masterly variations on the same no-nonsense theme, terse moral tales of a vengeful drifter who seeks to right a wrong, and Scott’s disillusioned, flint-faced presence is a large part of what makes them so memorable.

Robert Nott, an arts and entertainment writer for the Santa Fe New Mexican, is a Western-loving film buff who has gone to the not-inconsiderable trouble of watching and writing about every surviving film that Randolph Scott made, not a few of which, he freely admits, weren’t worth the trouble: “You can be a fan of Scott’s and yet not be a fan of all of his movies. . . . For diehard Western film fans, part of the challenge of focusing on Randolph Scott’s film canon is sitting through the melodramatic misfires and embarrassing epics he made outside of the sagebrush genre.” Yet he somehow manages to write interestingly and amusingly about even the least of Scott’s efforts, and when the film under consideration is a good one, he always rises to the occasion. No matter how much you think you know about Randolph Scott’s oeuvre, Nott’s unpretentious synopses, which incorporate both original interview material and pointed excerpts from contemporary newspaper and magazine reviews, will point you in the direction of unfamiliar films that are worth watching (I can’t wait to get a look at “Carson City” after reading about it in The Films of Randolph Scott) and enhance your appreciation of the ones you’ve already seen.

It’s currently being whispered in film-buff circles that all of the Westerns Scott made with Budd Boetticher in the 50’s have been transferred to DVD and will be released as a boxed set this fall. I’ll believe that when I see it, but should these wonderful films finally be made available on home video, I strongly suggest that you acquire a copy of The Films of Randolph Scott to go along with them.

Earlier this year I wrote admiringly in this space about “Dirty Money,” the latest thriller from Richard Stark, the pseudonym that comic crime novelist Donald E. Westlake adopts when writing about Parker, a professional burglar with a heart of flint who will do anything to anybody in order to get what he wants:

I wouldn’t care to speculate about what it is in Westlake’s psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that Stark/Westlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.

Back then I pointed out that most of the twenty-four Parker novels are out of print–the earlier ones were published as paperback originals that are now hard to find–and that certain titles in the series, “Butcher’s Moon” foremost among them, fetch alarmingly stiff prices on the used-book market. So I’m delighted to advise readers in need of tough-minded vacation fare that the University of Chicago Press has decided to publish a uniform edition of the first 17 Parker novels, and that the first three volumes are now available.

“The Hunter” (208 pp., $14 paper), “The Man with the Getaway Face” (224 pp., $14 paper) and “The Outfit” (224 pp., $14 paper) can and should be read in sequence as a trilogy–I would have published them in an omnibus volume–rather than separately. In these hard, laconic novels, published in 1962 and 1963, we first make the acquaintance of Parker, who has broken out of a California jail and made his way to New York City to settle a score with a woman who sold him out and left him for dead. We never learn much more about his personal history than that, nor should we, for Parker is a man devoid of introspection who lives exclusively in the present moment, never looking back and thinking ahead only far enough to plan his next crime. He is, I suppose, a sociopath, if you go in for labels like that, and it is the frightening charm of the novels in which he figures that you quickly find yourself cheering him on in his relentless quest to redistribute the wealth of America into his own bottomless pockets by any means necessary, up to and very much including murder.

The early Parker novels are somewhat coarser in literary tone than the ones that came later, but they are still of a piece with the rest of the series. Once you start reading them, my guess is that you’ll find it impossible to stop, for Stark/Westlake is a virtuoso craftsman who knows how to seize and hold the reader’s attention. Each Parker novel, for instance, opens in medias res with a sentence that begins with the word “when”:

When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.

When the bandages came off, Parker looked in the mirror at a stranger.

When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.

How can you quit there?

“The Hunter,” “The Man with the Getaway Face” and “The Outfit” are handsomely designed, tightly bound trade-paperback volumes that have been freshly set from new type rather than reprinted from older editions. All of this strongly suggests that the University of Chicago Press is in it for the long haul, which is a good thing, since the uniform Parker is a multi-year project whose subsequent installments are to be published at unspecified intervals. Be patient.

• So far as I know, no one has ever written a novel about an opera librettist (though I can recommend a witty and knowing novel about the backstage world of opera, Brown Meggs’ “Aria”). But two of my other professions, that of drama critic and biographer, have been the subject of comic novels that are both exceptionally readable—albeit in different ways.

The eponymous anti-hero of Wilfrid Sheed’s “Max Jamison,” published in 1970, is a notoriously crotchety drama critic for a weekly newsmagazine who awakes one day to find himself smack dab in the middle of an excruciating midlife crisis with spiritual overtones: “Closing the Times was the end of his religious observance for the day. He wished real religion wasn’t quite so damn impossible. There was a need for it that the Times didn’t really fill.” Comprehensively unhappy with every aspect of his life, Max resolves to brighten up his pitch-dark point of view by taking up with a much younger woman, a decision that leads with staggering promptness to frighteningly funny grief.

Part of what makes “Max Jamison” so readable is that Sheed is very, very shrewd about the New York literary racket. Needless to say, much has changed since 1970—among other things, the weekly newsmagazines no longer cover Broadway other than sporadically—but the big picture remains all too recognizable four decades later. Max himself is a most interesting figure, a semi-lapsed intellectual who used to write for the little magazines and now pontificates in the mass media (“He had sensed that in educated America, humor was the number 1 language, for criticism, passion, even cooking: and he set about learning it with grim intelligence”). Harold Ross was undoubtedly right as a rule when he said that “nobody gives a damn about a writer and his problems except another writer,” but “Max Jamison” is an exception, a portrait of a miserable writer that is at once sharp-edged and sympathetic.

• If it’s brainy slapstick you seek, I commend your attention to Mark Dunn’s “Ibid,” published in 2004. The conceit of the book is that Dunn himself has written a biography of one Jonathan Blashette, a turn-of-the-century circus freak (he was born with three legs) who invented underarm deodorant for men and later became a noted philanthropist. Then Dunn’s publisher accidentally destroys the typescript of his book—except for the footnotes. Hence “Ibid,” which consists of 253 pages of source notes for a biography that no longer exists. Some are gnomically short, others absurdly long, and all are written in a style best described as deadpan silliness:

17. She was trampled in the Wilmington nylon riot of 1940. Barbara Sadler, Nylon Riots: An Exhaustive History, Volume 3 (Chicago: Sartorial Press, 1953), 255-57. Hiram Diles’ wife, Cassia, recovered within a couple of weeks. Her sister Magda required surgery and two years of intensive psychological counseling.

Such inside foolery is not for everyone, but “Ibid” made me laugh out loud several times in a crowded airport departure lounge, which is a pretty high batting average for a comic novel.

‘Tis the season to see Shakespeare, especially in America, where summer Shakespeare festivals are as thick as fireflies on a hot night. I gallop from one festival to another in my capacity as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, and my calendar is so crowded that I occasionally have to write my reviews in hotel rooms and departure lounges instead of in my book-lined Manhattan office. My knowledge of the Bard is considerable but not infinite, so I’ve been keeping an eye out for a reasonably compact one-volume Shakespearean reference book that I can slip in my carry-on bag and consult as needed on the road. This season I’m giving The Rough Guide to Shakespeare (Rough Guides/Penguin, 532 pp., $23.99 paper) a tryout, and so far it’s passed every test.

The Rough Guide series of reference books, which runs the gamut from jazz to gangster movies, offers its readers attractively designed handbooks packed with useful information and written in a no-nonsense style. I’ve read several Rough Guides and found most of them to be pretty much as advertised (though the travel volumes are written from a British point of view, which can be a problem when you’re relying on them for information about destinations in America).

The Shakespeare volume, written by Andrew Dickson, is exemplary of the series’ virtues. The style is transparent and accessible, the perspective that of an unusually well-informed journalist who has gone to considerable trouble to mug up his subject. Each play is covered in a chapter consisting of a crisp synopsis, an interpretative essay, a brief stage history, and an annotated list of film and TV versions, audio recordings, published editions and critical studies. Newspaper-style “sidebars” are sprinkled throughout the book-the chapter on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, contains a concise introduction to Ovid-and separate chapters are devoted to the sonnets and longer poems. The last section contains a potted biography of Shakespeare, a discussion of the Elizabethan stage, a short glossary, an annotated bibliography and a list of Shakespearean Web sites.

What I like most about The Rough Guide to Shakespeare is that its author grinds no axes of any kind. His purpose, so far as I can tell, is to offer a straight-down-the-center summary of the best current thinking about Shakespeare, and his native good sense shines through on every page. Whenever he recommends books, they’re the right ones (Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life and Park Honan’s 1998 biography head the list).

Above all, Dickson understands that Shakespeare’s plays are plays first and foremost, and while he is aware of and interested in what scholars have had to say about them, his main interest is in how they work on stage:

Sublime though it may be, “Antony and Cleopatra” is well-nigh unstageable-and seems frequently at risk of falling apart. Despite a mere handful of main roles (and no crowd scenes), there are around forty characters in the play, with some 220 entrances and exits, many involving significant groups of people. The stage empties over forty times (scenes are not marked in the only surviving text) and as the action builds, everything gets progressively faster. Even in the fluid, rapid-fire theatre of Shakespeare’s time the effect must have been dazzling, even disconcerting-a constant procession of people across the stage; cross-cutting, filmic scenes that finish practically as they’ve begun.

I know an alarmingly large number of otherwise well-educated people who find Shakespeare intimidating, usually because they were unfortunate enough to have seen tiresome productions of his plays in their youth and never got over the experience. To them–and to anyone else who wants to brush up his Shakespeare–I strongly recommend The Rough Guide to Shakespeare.

One of the things I learned in the course of writing Rhythm Man, my forthcoming biography of Louis Armstrong, is that surprisingly few full-length books about jazz can be read with both profit and pleasure. Serious jazz scholarship is itself a fairly recent phenomenon, and most of the scholars who write about jazz are better at amassing and interpreting facts than in setting them down on paper stylishly. From the beginning, my goal in writing Rhythm Man was to produce a biography of Armstrong comparable in size, scope and literary quality to a “definitive” literary biography like, say, W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson. No such book exists, though Bix: Man and Legend, the 1974 biography of Bix Beiderbecke by Richard M. Sudhalter and Philip R. Evans, comes close. As for the rest, the bibliography of Rhythm Man lists nearly two hundred books, the vast majority of which are about jazz in whole or part. These are the five I most enjoyed reading:

Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (1968). The first fully scholarly study of jazz to see print, and one of the best, though later scholarship has superseded some of Schuller’s findings. The insightful chapter on Louis Armstrong’s early development is still invaluable, but Schuller, a high modernist, never managed to come to terms with Armstrong’s musical populism, a defect of sensibility that mars The Swing Era, his 1989 sequel to Early Jazz.

Otis Ferguson, The Otis Ferguson Reader (1952, reprinted in 1997 as In the Spirit of Jazz). Ferguson, who wrote about jazz and movies for The New Republic in the 30’s, was the first journalistic jazz critic to produce a good-sized body of work that remains readable today. Not only has his Chandleresque tough-guy style kept much of its old-fashioned period charm, but time has proved his musical judgment to be consistently sound.

Max Harrison, Charles Fox and Eric Thacker, The Essential Jazz Records, Vol. 1: Ragtime to Swing (1984). A hard-headed, exceptionally well-written survey of major jazz recordings from the beginning to bebop. Harrison, the best of the three contributors, was one of the finest jazz critics of the 20th century, sometimes a bit cranky but impeccably knowledgeable. I drew on his contributions to this volume time and again in writing Rhythm Man.

Ross Firestone, Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman (1993). Not a scholarly biography in the ordinary sense of the word–Firestone inexplicably omitted source notes–but thorough, vividly written, and meticulous in every other way. Goodman was a famously difficult personality, and Firestone portrays him with skill and sympathy. I can think of no full-length jazz biography that I’ve read with greater pleasure.

Richard M. Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945 (1999). Hugely controversial when it was first published, Lost Chords has since come to be accepted by most (though not all) scholars as a landmark contribution to the literature of jazz. Sudhalter’s critical discussions of the music of such key figures as Red Norvo, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Miff Mole, Pee Wee Russell, Artie Shaw and Jack Teagarden are unfailingly penetrating.

All of these books are still in print except for Lost Chords (which is easy to find) and The Otis Ferguson Reader (which isn’t, alas).

Television can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous. Once the red light goes off, the half-life of the small-screen star is likely to be dismayingly short indeed. A mere quarter-century ago, Harry Reasoner was a famous man, but now he is almost entirely forgotten, though he was one of the brightest people ever to anchor an evening newscast and-when he took the trouble to knock out his own scripts-a stylish writer.

It was Reasoner’s practice to end his TV newscasts with a brief, pithy commentary on some aspect of the day’s events. Usually his “end pieces” were dryly witty, but not always. When Ernie Kovacs died in a car crash in 1962, Reasoner wrapped up “The CBS Evening News” with these poignant words:

All prayer books ask for protection from sudden death. It is nice to think we will have a warning, time to think things out and go in bed, in honor and in love. Somebody dies in an unprepared hurry and you are touched with a dozen quick and recent memories: the sweetness of last evening, the uselessness of a mean word or an undone promise. It could be you, with all those untidy memories of recent days never to be straightened out. There’s a shiver in the sunlight, touching the warmth of life that you’ve been reminded you hold only for a moment.

It’s been a long time since anybody said anything remotely like that on a nightly newscast, which may help to explain why fewer and fewer people bother to watch TV news these days.

A handful of Reasoner’s end pieces made it into Before the Colors Fade, his slight but graceful 1983 memoir, and a few more are to be found in Douglass K. Daniel’s Harry Reasoner: A Life in the News (University of Texas, 270 pp., $29.95), a book that has the distinction of being, so far as I know, the first non-gossipy primary-source biography of a TV newsman other than Edward R. Murrow ever to make it into print. Frankly, I’m surprised that anybody bothered to write such a book about Reasoner, who died in 1991 and is now remembered, if at all, for having been one of the original co-anchors of “60 Minutes,” along with a better-known gent by the name of Mike Wallace. For all his not-inconsiderable gifts, Reasoner’s celebrity was almost entirely a function of the fact that he appeared on TV, and once the appearances came to an end, so did the celebrity. Such is the inevitable fate of all who chooses to earn their livings by talking into a TV camera.

If you’re old enough to recall Harry Reasoner and curious about what he was like off camera, A Life in the News will tell you everything you want to know, along with a fair amount that you’ll be sorry to learn. Reasoner, it turns out, was a lazy, somewhat aimless man who drifted into electronic journalism for lack of anything better to do. His bosses at CBS discovered that his penny-plain Midwestern accent and straightforward, slightly amused demeanor were hugely appealing to viewers, and Reasoner soon became, after Walter Cronkite, the best-loved figure in TV news. He was so popular that he didn’t have to work very hard for a living: all he had to do was show up and read what was written for him, and over the years he grew increasingly willing to let other people ghost-write his scripts. It was, to be sure, a common enough practice-Peggy Noonan got her start writing Dan Rather’s radio commentaries-but I was sorely disappointed to learn that Reasoner was one of the many talking heads of TV news who ended up being little more than just that.

Douglass K. Daniel tells Reasoner’s story plainly and without frills, making no effort to posthumously inflate him into something other than what he was, acknowledging his talent but also making room for the devastating summing-up of George Herman, one of his colleagues at CBS: “He was extraordinarily lazy. Harry was one of the best news readers in the business and, I thought, an excellent writer. But he didn’t have the nose for news and the drive and the inquisitiveness and whatever else it takes to be a good reporter, I don’t think.” All of which strikes me as a not-unjust epitaph for network TV news itself, which even in its glory days was never much more than a headline service and is now fast approaching its well-deserved demise.

As for Reasoner, he died a few weeks after retiring from CBS, perhaps from disappointment as much as anything else. He had been a hard drinker who in middle age turned into a full-fledged alcoholic, no doubt because he found his well-paid professional life to be more than a little bit unsatisfactory. His fate reminds me of the equally bleak tale of the decline and fall of Robert Benchley, a wonderfully witty essayist and drama critic who spent his last years playing himself in Hollywood movies and drinking to devastating excess, no longer capable of writing anything more than bits and pieces of dialogue. Like Benchley, Harry Reasoner must have known better than to believe that a talented writer who lets others do his work for him is anything other than a fraud. After such knowledge, the grave looks good.

The rise of the Internet has transformed the way in which I use the reference books that I keep within arm’s reach of my desk. I own, for instance, the two-volume New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but I can’t remember the last time I opened it. When I want to look up a word, I use an online dictionary. By the same token, my Bible and Complete Works of Shakespeare have long since been relegated to the living-room bookshelves, not because they’re any less valuable under the aspect of postmodernity but because the texts of these oft-consulted books have been made available in searchable online versions that make it possible for me to hunt down half-remembered passages with the greatest of ease.

I still keep Fowler’s Modern English Usage on my desk, though mostly for sentimental reasons, and a half-dozen more books are shelved where I can get at them without rising from my chair. They are Dostoevsky’s Demons, a Modern Library edition of Montaigne’s essays and four ancient hardbound Viking Portables: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Johnson and Boswell. (Once you reach middle age, Boswell’s Life of Johnson is better read in an abridged version.) Again, though, these books are more talismans than tools, and I keep them nearby as a gesture, much as Whittaker Chambers kept copies of Demons, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Franz Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes in the top drawer of his desk at Time. My real “reference library” is my MacBook, with which I can consult anything from the 24,000 public-domain texts that Project Gutenberg has made available in electronic “editions” to a searchable version of the complete run of Time, starting in 1923 and extending forward to this week’s issue.

The only two reference books on my desk that I still consult with fair regularity are David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film and H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources, both of which are more idiosyncratic than their titles suggest. Thomson’s book is a fat collection of essayettes about major figures in film, all written with a strongly personal slant from which a true lexicographer would gallop at full speed. Here, for instance, is Thomson on Humphrey Bogart:

He made few wholly satisfactory films-High Sierra, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place-and failed in a variety of parts outside the narrow range he saw fit for himself. But within that range he had the impact of Garbo or James Dean. Like them, he was a great Romantic. It is harder to see him as such because of the efforts he made to appear anti-Romantic. The implications of his work-as a comment on self-dramatization-are rather more daunting and disturbing than he ever realized.

Mencken’s New Dictionary is a similarly deft piece of literary prestidigitation, a 1,347-page commonplace book disguised as a sober-looking dictionary of quotations, though you don’t have to peruse it much more than casually to realize that the quotations Mencken painstakingly assembled and organized by topic were intended to reflect his own dark skepticism about mankind. One reviewer, Morton Dauwen Zabel, saw at once what Mencken had been up to when the book was published in 1942: “The impression soon becomes inescapable that what Mencken has produced as a ‘Dictionary of Quotations’ is really a transcendend ‘Prejudices: Seventh Series,’ a ‘Notes on Humanity,’ or more expressly ‘Mencken’s Philosophical Dictionary, Written by Others.’”

Now that it’s possible to search the archives of Time on line, I looked up that magazine’s original review of the New Dictionary the other day, and was not disappointed:

The reader may thus trace from start to semi-finish a concentrated history of thumbnail memoranda on such subjects as God, boredom, marriage, work, Government, lawyers, shoals of others. He may learn the Golden Rule not only from the New Testament but from Confucius, Isocrates, Tobit, the Mahabharata, Hillel Ha-Babli; such shy self-revelations as the U.S. proverb: “Do others or they will do you,” or Bernard Shaw’s “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.” The reader can observe that, whereas there is much respectful talk about law itself, human experience with lawyers has been bilious. He can get every sort of opinion of work, from Hippocrates’ sound advice “Never work when hungry” to the African proverb: “Work only tires a woman, but it ruins a man.”

Would that Mencken’s New Dictionary were still in print, but used copies are easy to find and worth acquiring. Rarely does a week go by that I don’t have occasion to consult it, always with profit and often with amusement.

Is it possible to write interestingly about uninteresting art? Of course–good critics do it every day–but the real trick is to write interestingly about a style of art that the reader dislikes. A case in point is Erin Hogan’s “Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West” (University of Chicago, $20), which I read in a single delighted sitting despite the fact that I don’t share its author’s taste for large-scale minimalist art. Part of the reason why I liked “Spiral Jetta” so much is that Hogan, the director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, writes with the infectious gusto of the true believer. To hear minimalism described as “ambitious, beautiful, rigorous, geometric, engaged with questions of form rather than personality, aiming at the eternal without irony” is to wonder–briefly–whether there might possibly be more to Philip Glass than meets the ear. (Answer: no, no, a thousand times no.) But what makes “Spiral Jetta” so readable is not so much the art that is its nominal subject as the quirky, engaging personality of the woman writing about it.

“Spiral Jetta” is the story of an aesthetic pilgrimage taken for reasons having little to do with art. Hogan is a longtime city dweller who, by her own rueful admission, dislikes being alone: “I take comfort in being surrounded by a constant clamor of voices–of strangers, of friends–and el trains and car horns and music from passing cars and the rhythms of the boys drumming on overturned buckets on the sidewalk.” So she hopped in her Volkswagen Jetta, drove west and spent three weeks visiting such giant-sized landmark earthworks of monumental minimalism as Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” and Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field,” not merely to see them for the first time but in the hope of “testing and challenging myself, breaking out of my nine-to-five routine and trying to find something in myself beyond the ability to answer e-mails, attend meeting, and meet friends for cocktails.”

As it happens, Hogan was disappointed by most (if not all) of the works of land art that she saw, and she tells of her dissatisfaction with charming candor. The trip itself, however, proved to be far more satisfying, if not infrequently frightening, and when it was over Hogan realized that she was the better for having plunged heedlessly into the wild:

While I certainly hadn’t managed to free myself of anxiety–getting lost, cougars, mechanical failures–I had come to enjoy the liberating feeling of solitude that had so far eluded me….The life of a drifter–minus the poor hygiene–was beginning to appeal to me. However, as an astrologer once told me, “You are not that kind of person.” He is right, but at least I had become the kind of person who could fully enjoy a trip like this.

In case you’re wondering what Erin Hogan’s neurotic dislike of spending time alone has do with art criticism, she offers this thought-provoking reply:

People visit the Museum of Modern Art to learn about modern art, not about themselves. But would more people come if they thought some sense of personal transformation were at stake? I set out on my trip wanting to learn about art, but I was realizing that the most significant thing I learned out in the west was via art, not about it. Does that make “Lightning Field” more or less valuable than analytical cubism?

No matter how self-evident you think the answer may be, it’s still a good question–and “Spiral Jetta” is a very good book.

Anyone familiar with the war-related films made by the U.S. government during World War II–all of which are in the public domain and can be seen from time to time on TCM and the Documentary Channel–knows that the best of them are priceless cultural time capsules. In recent weeks I’ve watched “Resisting Enemy Interrogation,” “With the Marines at Tarawa,” the first part of Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” and John Huston’s “The Battle of San Pietro” and “Let There Be Light.” I found them all to be both immensely interesting and (if this is the right way to put it) hugely entertaining. Thus I made a special point of requesting a review copy of Instructions for American Servicemen in France During World War II (University of Chicago, 72 pp., $12), a hard-bound facsimile edition of the pocket guide that was distributed to every American soldier in England just prior to D-Day. It is, like the training films those soldiers watched, a powerfully evocative souvenir of an America that no longer exists save in the deeply etched memories of the gray-headed men who long ago risked their lives to save the West.

A Pocket Guide to France (to call the book by its original title) is a concise, clearly written manual that crackles with no-nonsense idealism from the first page onward:

You are about to play a personal part in pushing the Germans out of France. Whatever part you take–rifleman, hospital orderly, mechanic, pilot, clerk, gunner, truck driver–you will be an essential factor in a great effort . . . The Allies are going to open up conquered France, re-establish the old Allied liberties and destroy the Nazi regime everywhere. Hitler asked for it.

Note the utter straightforwardness of that introduction. No moral relativism, no postmodern irony, no doubts of any kind whatsoever: World War II was worth fighting, period.

No less bracing is the Pocket Guide’s equally unequivocal assertion that “the French have what might be called a national character. . . . To them property represents the result of work. To destroy property means to belittle work.” Contemporary readers will doubtless smile at such simplifications, but I was struck by how deftly the anonymous author sketched the bourgeois virtues of prewar France:

If you are billeted with a French family, you will be in a more personal relation than if you were in barracks or a hotel. Remember that the man of the house may be a prisoner of the Nazis, along with a million and one half others like him. Treat the women in the house the way you want the women of your family treated by other men while you’re away….A whole French family would spend less on pleasure in a month than you would over a week-end. The French reputation for gayety was principally built on the civilized French way of doing things; by the French people’s good taste; by their interest in quality, not quantity; and by the lively energy of their minds. The French are intelligent, have mostly had a sensible education, without frills, are industrious, shrewd and frugal.

No doubt there were plenty of “ugly Americans” then, just as there are today, but any soldier who read A Pocket Guide to France and took it to heart would have come away with a realistic respect for the country he was fighting to liberate.

To be sure, one inevitably wonders in retrospect just how realistic it was. The Pocket Guide, as it happens, has strikingly little to say about the French collabos. That was the way we did things in World War II: allies were allies, enemies enemies. Perhaps it was naïve of us to think that way, but a world in which naïveté is no longer possible is one in which it is not very pleasant to live. Small wonder that Americans of my generation (I was born in 1956) continue to idealize the generation that brought us into the world. Our parents, after all, were capable of writing books like “A Pocket Guide to France”–and acting on them.

The novels of John P. Marquand are no closer to a revival than when I last wrote about them in COMMENTARY in 1987. To be sure, Marquand’s melancholy, satire-flecked studies of middle- and upper-middle-class American life were immeasurably popular in the 40’s and 50’s, but they are largely forgotten today, save for The Late George Apley, which won their author a Pulitzer Prize long, long ago. The Library of America shows no signs of taking an interest in Marquand’s oeuvre, and virtually all of his books have gone out of print. Fortunately, they sold so well when they were new that they’re easy to find on the used-book market, and I commend seven of them--Apley, H.M. Pulham, Esquire, Wickford Point, So Little Time, Point of No Return, Sincerely, Willis Wayde and Women and Thomas Harrow–to the attention of anyone in need of high-quality vacation reading.

It happens that I just got back from a visit to the small Missouri town where I grew up. A copy of Point of No Return, Marquand’s best novel, can still be found on the bookshelves of my mother’s house, and so I decided to read it again for the first time in a number of years. Once more I found myself caught up in the tale of Charles Gray, a small-town Massachusetts boy turned Manhattan banker who takes stock of his life to date and finds it inexplicably unsatisfying. I was so impressed that I looked up what I’d written about the book in “Justice to John P. Marquand,” my COMMENTARY essay, and found that I hadn’t changed my mind one bit:

Viewed from a technical standpoint, Point of No Return is quite impeccable. The satirical scenes are for the first time in Marquand’s work wholly integrated into the overall texture of the novel. The framing action has the economy of a short story, while the long central flashback is handled with cinematic fluidity. Moreover, Point of No Return is one of the few genuinely convincing treatments of the business world to appear in [American] fiction. Anyone who has traveled the long road that leads from a small-town childhood to an urban career will immediately appreciate the sympathetic accuracy with which Marquand has portrayed Charles Gray’s transformation into a polished banker.

That last sentence goes to the heart of the matter. When I first read Point of No Return, I was stuck by the precision with which it conveys what it feels like to partake of an experience that was and is central to American life. The Great Gatsby, to my mind the great American novel, tells a similar story more artfully, but also with a heightening touch of melodramatic lyricism that is necessarily less true to life. Not so the plainer-spoken Marquand. Writing in 1949, he suggested with uncanny exactitude much of what I felt when I came to New York as a young man some three decades later.

I especially like the scene in which Charles Gray arrives at Grand Central Station in 1930, having put his troubled past behind him to come looking for a job:

Outside the station, the streetcars and the traffic were already running in a steady stream under the ramp at Pershing Square. The shops on Forty-Second Street, the drugstores, the optical stores and haberdasheries, were already opening for the day. When he reached Fifth Avenue the lions in front of the Public Library looked white and cold and those old buses with the seats on top were moving in lines on the Avenue, but New York was sleepy still. New York had the appearance of having been up very late, and everyone on the streets had a patient, complaining look of having been routed too early out of bed. As he walked up the Avenue the city seemed to him as impersonal as it always did later and he loved that impersonality. Now that he had left his bag at the parcel room there was nothing to tie him. The tides of the city moved past him and he was part of the tide. His own problems and his own personality merged with it.

Point of No Return is by no means a great novel, nor was Marquand a great novelist, but I do think it says something about the American experience that few other writers have succeeded in putting on paper. It deserves to be remembered–and read.

• Thomas Quasthoff’s dark, velvety bass-baritone voice and penetrating intelligence have helped to make him the most talked-about interpreter of German art song since Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was in his unforgettable prime. So have his deformities. Born in 1959, Quasthoff was one of the ten thousand European children whose pregnant mothers unknowingly took thalidomide, a drug that causes severe birth defects. As a result, he is four feet tall and has no arms, a disability that prevented him from pursuing an academic degree in music in Germany, where conservatory students, even singers, were then required to play the piano. But it didn’t stop him from studying law, taking private voice lessons, winning a major music competition, signing a recording contract by Deutsche Grammophon, and becoming world-famous.

A few years ago Quasthoff wrote a German-language autobiography that has now been updated and translated into English as The Voice: A Memoir (Pantheon, 256 pp., $24.95). It is, not at all surprisingly, a remarkable book, and not merely because of the remarkable story its author has to tell. Quasthoff is bristlingly tough-minded and apparently devoid of self-pity. Here, for instance, is how he describes what he saw in the bathroom mirror on the morning that he made his 1998 New York Philharmonic review:

“Crippled arms and legs, no laughing matter.” That’s how a tabloid paper once put it, but I see the situation differently. Here is a four-foot three-inch concert singer without knee joints, arms, or upper thighs, with only four fingers on the right hand and three on the left. He has a receding hairline, a blond pig head, and a few too many pounds around his hips, and he is in a superb mood. All he needs now is a shave.

How can one fail to be impressed by a man capable of writing a paragraph like that?

But The Voice would be worth reading even if Quasthoff were merely a first-rate singer outfitted the normal quota of limbs, for he is also a witty, sharp-eyed observer of the passing scene who has strong opinions and no inhibitions about sharing them with his readers. Nor are his opinions in any way predictable. Unlike many European artists, for instance, Quasthoff appreciates the “fundamentally democratic casualness” of the American classical-music scene:

What strikes me first is the complete absence of that solemn, respectful murmur that has been flowing around German stages since the days of Goethe and Schiller. Instead one enjoys the relaxed atmosphere, the matter-of-fact attitude with which the Americans have-yes, I will put it this way-made use of their cultural temples….Personally, I view Homo Americanus’s habit of valuing the classical arts no higher than other forms of intelligent entertainment-whether film or basketball-as a true achievement of civilization. It does not harm the quality and professional appreciation of artists; rather, the opposite is true.

This openness to the cultural implications of the democratic experience undoubtedly arises from the fact that Quasthoff is a passionate fan of all kinds of American music. Not only is The Voice salted with passing references to such unlikely figures as Robert Johnson, the Golden Gate Quartet, Miles Davis and John Fogarty, but Quasthoff’s most recent album for DGG, Watch What Happens, is a collection of English-language pop standards plausibly sung in a jazz-inflected style. One of the funniest anecdotes in the book is the tale of how Quasthoff auditioned for his first voice teacher by singing “Mack the Knife” and “Ave Maria,” then tossing off an imitation of Louis Armstrong “complete with a swinging throat catarrh.” I would have paid to hear that.

• One good book deserves another, and I’m sorry to say that Daniel J. Levitin, the author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, has not quite lived up to expectations the second time around.

This Is Your Brain on Music, which I reviewed in this space last year, is that rarity of rarities, a lively and informative book written in a clear, straightforward style by a specialist in a field notable for its technical complexity. It was and still is the best introductory discussion of the psychology of musical perception and cognition ever to see print. But Levitin, a musician and record producer turned neuroscientist, has since succumbed to the urge to simplify and theorize, and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (Dutton, 333 pp., $25.95), while full of good things, doesn’t add up to a persuasive whole.

Part of the problem-most of it, really-is that The World in Six Songs makes a promise that it fails to keep. “I have come to believe,” Levitin writes, “that there are basically six kinds of songs, six ways that we use music in our lives, six broad categories of music. . . . They are songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, and love.” This sentence is breathtakingly broad in its implications, and the book appears at first glance to be organized in such a way as to prove the point, though no more than a moment’s thought will leave most readers suspecting that the world of music is rather more complicated than Levitin suggests. What about songs of sorrow? Or story-driven ballads whose subject matter is not romantic love? Into which of his six pigeonholes would Levitin stuff, say, Irving Berlin’s “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer,” or Donald Fagen’s “Morph the Cat”? And his decision to disregard instrumental music is so cavalier as to require far more justification than he offers:

The evolution of mind and music is easiest to follow in music that involves lyrics, because the meaning of the musical expression is less debatable. . . . Because music wasn’t recorded until about a hundred years ago, nor even accurately notated until a few hundred years before that, the historic record of music is substantially lyrics. For these two reasons, music with lyrics will be the predominant focus of The World in Six Songs.

That near-exclusive focus, alas, negates much of the explanatory power of The World in Six Songs, for it is impossible to take seriously any account of “the impact music has had on the course of our social history” that completely ignores the culture-shaping power of abstract instrumental music.

Fortunately, a closer look at Levitin’s book reveals that its purpose is not nearly so sweeping as the title suggests. In fact, the real subject matter of The World in Six Songs turns out to be “the evolution of music and brains over tens of thousands of years and across the six inhabited continents.” According to Levitin, music is “a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.” Thus his six categories of song turn out not to be all-encompassing, but merely to represent the principal ways in which music “influenced the eveolution of human emotion, reason, and spirit.”

That I’ll buy, necessarily conjectural though it is. What I still find hard to accept is the loose organization of The World in Six Songs, which is less a well-structured book than a bagful of factual goodies into which the reader reaches more or less blindly to see which one comes out next. To be sure, I learned a lot from The World in Six Songs, but Levitin’s style is so discursive, anecdote-driven and gratuitously autobiographical (at one point he interrupts the narrative for an eight-page account of the development of his pacifist views) that I found much of the book needlessly difficult to follow. If you read it with patience, you’ll come away knowing more than when you started, but I wouldn’t blame you for giving up well before the halfway point.

• Of all the myriad phrases that should be banned from the vocabularies of critics, “definitive biography” belongs at the top of the list. No such book exists, least of all when its subject is a person of major historical significance. About such rare birds no last words can ever be uttered. I’ve published one large-scale primary-source biography of an important writer and recently finished writing another about an important musician, and in neither case did it ever occur to me that I had said everything there was to say about my subjects.

Even less did Ian Kershaw exhaust the subject of Adolf Hitler in his impeccably researched, coolly well-written two-volume biography, in part because Kershaw, a professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield, sought to describe Hitler’s life in the light of the contemporary historical point of view that emphasizes the power of society over the significance of the individual. Like all such books, Kershaw’s Hitler, for all its great value, sometimes resembles a handsomely crafted picture frame with nothing in it. So it is in certain ways even more profitable to read Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (Yale, 394 pp., $32.50), a collection of essays written between 1977 and the present day and assembled by the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Here we can see Kershaw working out his interpretation of Hitler step by step.

The insufficiently vivid literary portraiture that is the chief weakness of Kershaw’s “Hitler” is by definition less of a problem within the narrower compass of a single-topic essay. Without exception, the 14 pieces collected in Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, which range from an analysis of Hitler’s early speeches and writings to an exceedingly hard-headed essay that asks why “the ultra-violence that characterized the first half of the [20th] century had no equivalent in the second half,” are penetrating and illuminating. The introduction, in which Kershaw offers the reader “a clearer glimpse of the historian behind the history,” is no less worthy of close consideration. What led him to devote the greater part of his adult life to studying Nazi Germany and writing a two-volume scholarly biography of a monster like Hitler? As Kershaw explains it:

I had come to German history via an increased competence in the German language-German was a subject unavailable at my school, so I was able to begin learning it only in 1969, and then for three years purely as a casual hobby-and what really, and increasingly, intrigued me, as a product of postwar British democracy, was how Germany had so completely succumbed to a dictatorship which had brought about world war and, to ratinal minds, a scarcely intelligible persecution and extermination of the Jews.

By such unlikely routes are life-shaping decisions reached.

Kershaw’s prefatory excursion into intellectual autobiography ends with “a rather gloomy look into the crystal ball”:

At least, a replication of the conditions which produced the Holocaust is, mercifully, nowhere in sight. The problems are now very different to those which gave rise to Hitler and genocidal antisemitism. Even so, it is difficult to view the future with great optimism. The threat from an international order in disarray, most obviously in the Middle East, is palpable. And humankind’s capacity to combine new forms of ideological demonisation with bureaucratic refinement and unparalleled technological killing power is far from eradicated. So far, with great effort, the combination, which would be truly dangerous if marshalled by a powerful state entity, has been held in check. Will it continue to be?

To read these words in a book that bears the name “Yad Vashem” on the title page is at once sobering and tonic.

• Anyone who doubts the existence of original sin, or something very much like it, would do well to reflect on the enduring popularity of the novels of Richard Stark. For forty-six years now, Stark has been writing terse, hard-nosed books about a cold-hearted burglar named Parker (nobody seems to know his first name) who steals for a living, usually gets away with it, and stops at nothing, including murder, in order to do so. I couldn’t begin to count the number of people Parker has killed in the course of the twenty-four books in which he figures. His only virtues are his intelligence and his professionalism–yet you end up rooting for him whenever you read about him. Nietzsche knew why: when you look into an abyss, the abyss looks into you.

In real life “Richard Stark” is the pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake, a thoroughly delightful literary craftsman about whose virtues I have previously written in this space.

It’s a permanent puzzlement that Westlake, who is best known for his charming comic crime novels, should also have dreamed up so comprehensively unfunny a character as Parker, which doubtless tells us something of interest about human dualism, the subject matter of all film noir and noir-style fiction. I wouldn’t care to speculate about what it is in Westlake’s psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that Stark/Westlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.

Parker’s latest caper, Dirty Money (Grand Central, 276 pp., $23.99), is a sequel to Nobody Runs Forever, the 2004 novel in which he stole two million dollars from an armored car, then had to stash it in an abandoned New England country church in order to escape arrest. The money, it turns out, is “poisoned,” meaning that the authorities have a record of the serial number on each bill, so Parker has to figure out not only how to get it back but also how to launder it. As always, his task is complicated by the fact that his colleagues in crime lack his chilly singlemindedness–unlike them, Parker always keeps both eyes on the prize–and thus have a way of lousing things up.

Readers familiar with the series of comic novels written by Westlake about a hapless career criminal named Dortmunder will know that they take place in a parallel universe in which the not-so-tough guys are constantly tripping over their own feet. The first of these books, The Hot Rock, began life as a Parker novel, but Westlake changed it when he realized that it was turning out funny. In a later Dortmunder novel, Jimmy the Kid, one of the characters actually gets an idea for a caper by reading a nonexistent Parker novel called Child Heist.

Needless to say, nothing like that happens in Dirty Money–Parker is all business–but you’ll smile from time to time at the spare economy with which Stark/Westlake paints his verbal pictures of life on the wrong side of the law. Imagine, for instance, that you’re a slightly crooked doctor who made the mistake of doing business with Parker’s gang and is now being interrogated by a bad guy. How might you be feeling? Probably a lot like this:

The doctor felt as though invisible straps were clamping every part of his body. He sat tilted forward, feet together and heels lifted, knees together, hands folded into his lap as though he were trying to hide a baseball….The doctor’s mind filled with regrets, that he had ever involved himself with these people, but then regrets for the past were overwhelmed by horror of the present. What could he do?

Answer: nothing.

It’s possible to read and enjoy Dirty Money without having read Nobody Runs Forever, but you’ll enjoy it even more if you know how Parker got into this mess, so I suggest you buy both books and read them in sequence, after which you’ll doubtless want to work your way through Richard Stark’s complete oeuvre. That isn’t so easy to do, alas, since many of his earlier novels are out of print. (My favorite Parker novel, Butcher’s Moon, is currently going for as much as $300 a copy on the used-book market.) Fortunately, a dozen or so of the best ones are quite easy to find. As for the others, you could always heist them.

Is it possible for one person to write a first-rate large-scale reference book? Of course–if he’s Samuel Johnson. But even Dr. Johnson found it famously difficult to bring his Dictionary into being, and though there have been any number of noble successors to that great work, most of the significant reference books to be published in modern and postmodern times have been group efforts. The principal exceptions to this rule are books which, like H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations, or David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, intentionally reflect the idiosyncratic personalities of their authors, and one normally turns to books such as these in search of illumination or amusement, not information.

When it comes to works of pure reference, the opposite rule holds true, and the wider the field of interest, the harder it is for an individual author, no matter how well informed he may be, to produce a book that is both comprehensive and trustworthy. Hence I was more than a little bit surprised to discover that The Oxford Companion to the American Musical: Theatre, Film, and Television (Oxford, 923 pp., $39.95) is the work of a single scholar, Thomas Hischak, and not surprised at all that it isn’t nearly as good as it ought to be.

Unearthing mistakes in a reference book is the sport of pedants, but the whole point of such tomes is that they should be scrupulously accurate, and I regret to say that I didn’t have to dig too deeply in the new Oxford Companion to pick nits, starting with an unacceptably high number of misspelled names (Sherie Rene Scott, Michel Legrand, Casey Nicolaw), missing persons (Conrad Salinger, Twyla Tharp) and mangled song titles (”Public Melody No. 1″). Nor does Hischak have the gift of writing the crisp, informative definitional prose that is indispensable to the lexicographer’s craft. Far more often than not he settles for flabby, anodyne boilerplate, especially when musical matters are involved. Here, for instance, is what he has to say about Leonard Bernstein’s compositional style: “His theatre music uses a variety of forms, from jazz to Latin to classical, and can be explosive and thrilling as well as tender and reflective.” True enough, I suppose, but does it tell you anything about Bernstein’s music beyond the immediately obvious? Another glaring example of his limp descriptive powers is the first sentence of his entry on Cabaret: “Arguably the most innovative, hard-hitting, and uncompromising musical of the 1960s, the powerful music-drama made few concessions to escapist entertainment, yet it was and remains very popular.” Again, this is true as far as it goes, but it is neither notably insightful nor memorably written.

In recent years Oxford University Press has acquired a reputation for publishing ill-edited books, and this one is-to put it very, very mildly-no exception. Somebody really should have stopped Hischak from describing Irving Caesar’s lyrics as “simple, direct, and sometimes contagious,” or referring to An American in Paris as a “symphonic suite.” At times his syntax comes totally unstuck: “Baxter’s career fell apart in the 1940s, suffered a nervous breakdown, and underwent a lobotomy before dying of pneumonia.” Poor career!

All these problems notwithstanding, The Oxford Companion to the American Musical is for the most part a reliable, fact-crammed reference tool, and I expect to keep my copy handy for some time to come. But it isn’t the vade mecum I’d hoped for, not by a long shot.

• One of the many sins for which the baby boomers must someday answer is the extent to which their chronic self-absorption has devalued the memoir as a literary genre. Fortunately, it is still possible to write a good book about an unhappy childhood, and Alyse Myers has done just that with Who Do You Think You Are? (Touchstone, 250 pp., $24).

Part of what is so paradoxically interesting about Myers’ book is that it contains none of the can-you-top-this horror stories (many of which later prove to be fictionalized) that are the stock-in-trade of so many contemporary memoirists. Nor does she write of her youthful sorrows with the chop-licking lasciviousness that is no less endemic to the genre. Her story is simple and straightforward, and she tells it with the laconic, unadorned directness of a hurt child. Born into a working-class family of Jews from Queens who failed to make the economic grade, Myers knew the quotidian heartbreak of being raised by a hard-hearted, seemingly loveless mother and a disillusioned father who had withdrawn his affections from his spouse to seek romantic consolation elsewhere. He died of cancer when Myers was eleven, leaving her in the hands of a now-single parent whose coldness was as puzzling as it was painful.

It is, in short, the old, old story, only ennobled by Myers’ transparent style and given further value by the fact that Who Do You Think You Are? is as much a tale of upward mobility as it is a chronicle of disorder and early sorrow. Such tales are growing less and less common in literary America–most of our writers, it seems, now come from comfortable backgrounds and board the new-class escalator in elementary school–which makes it all the more profitable to read about the way things used to be not so very long ago:

I counted the days until my eighteenth birthday, when I would legally be able to move out and rent my own apartment. And the more I traveled away from her, from her apartment, from her life and into Manhattan-to go to high school, to go to museums, to explore the streets and neighborhoods-the more confident I became and the more I felt I deserved everything my mother thought was out of her league.

That last phrase, it seems to me, is the key to understanding Myers’ mother: she had gone as far as she thought she could go, landing a dull job as a switchboard operator at a girdle factory, and her daughter’s modest ambitions filled her with a volatile mixture of fear and resentment. Not until her daughter had a daughter did Myers mère find it possible to express a kind of love for her own child, and not until she died did Alyse Myers make a discovery that helped her to understand the source of her mother’s angry disappointment. Again, there is nothing especially unusual about all this–Tolstoy was wrong about the alleged variety in the lives of unhappy families–but the art of a memoir is in the telling, not what is told, and the unselfconscious simplicity with which Myers tells her tale conceals no small amount of artfulness.

• By a fortunate coincidence, I read Who Do You Think You Are? immediately after finishing Jeanne Safer’s Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adult’s Life-For The Better (Basic Books, 227 pp., $25). The author is a New York-based psychotherapist who already has three exceedingly readable books under her belt, and this one, like its predecessors, is both sensible and thought-provoking. Don’t be thrown by the honest but macabre-sounding subtitle: Dr. Safer has brought off the hard task of casting a cold eye on the feelings of relief that so often follow upon losing a parent in one’s own adulthood, acknowledging that “the death of a parent-any parent-can set us free” and offering practical suggestions for acting on that insight. I don’t usually go in for self-help books, but Death Benefits is an exception.

In case you’re wondering where I’ve been, I spent most of the past two weeks working on an opera libretto (about which more later) and writing the concluing chapters of my latest book, Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which is now finished (you can read all about it here).

My world has thus been far more narrowly circumscribed than usual, and so it was a relief to read about something completely different the other day, the something in question being the life and music of Sir Edward Elgar, one of my favorite composers.

When I last wrote about Elgar for COMMENTARY four years ago, I speculated that a revival of his music might be in the offing:

My own guess is that Elgar awaits a generation of charismatic young performers who will do for him what Leonard Bernstein did for Mahler in the 60’s. It has long seemed to me that his best music is ripe for revival, not least because of its individuality. “I hold nothing back,” he said, and it was the truth. All that he thought and felt went into his compositions, which are so unguarded at times as to make the reticent listener squirm.

Alas, it hasn’t happened yet, though Hilary Hahn, the most gifted and satisfying young violinist to come along in years, did release a remarkable recording of Elgar’s B Minor Violin Concerto later that year (DGG B0003026-02GM) and play the piece in concert with the New York Philharmonic. I heard her performance and wrote that it was “so beautiful that I expect to remember it as long as I live.” One recording does not a revival make, but it doesn’t hurt, either, and neither did the publication that same year of The Life of Elgar (Cambridge, $26 paper), a penetrating brief life by Michael Kennedy that is the best short discussion of Elgar that has been published to date.

While I don’t expect to see Kennedy’s book bettered any time soon, Elgar was big enough, both as an artist and as a man, to profit from being viewed from multiple perspectives. Elgar: An Anniversary Portrait (Continuum, $33), a collection of essays edited by Nicholas Kenyon, offers several different and provocative points of view from which to consider Elgar’s achievement. I was especially pleased that Kenyon invited a number of performers to contribute to the book. It is always valuable to hear from working musicians about the works they perform, and Tasmin Little’s essay about the Elgar Violin Concerto, in which she talks about what it feels like to play that exceedingly English piece with a foreign orchestra and conductor, is highly instructive. So, too, is Stephen Hough’s thoughtful essay on the composer’s Catholicism, in which he discusses how The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar’s dramatic oratorio after the poem by Cardinal Newman, alienated those who heard its first performance at the Birmingham Festival in 1900: “England was a deeply Protestant country, and such a subject choice would be a little like selecting a Talmudic text for an Islamic festival commission.”

When the critics and scholars speak in Elgar: An Anniversary Portrait, it is to no less valuable effect. Best of all is David Cannadine’s “Orchestrating His Own Life: Sir Edward Elgar as a Historical Personality,” which takes a hard-nosed view of Elgar’s relationship with the British ruling class, with which he claimed, not unconvincingly, to be at odds:

This was the man who married for money (one hundred pounds a year) and status at least as much as for love and reassurance; who sought and cultivated aristocratic and plutocratic friends to promote his music and his cause; who did all he could to ingratiate himself at the courts of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII and King George V; who never refused an honour and who was disappointed not to receive more of them; and who hoped “some day to do a great work-a sort of national thing that my fellow Englishmen might take to themselves and love.”

The only essay in Elgar: An Anniversary Portrait that disappointed me was Yehudi Menuhin’s reminiscence of the composer, which is full of his usual vaporous blather. Otherwise the book is a gem, smart and concise and entirely to the point.

How exasperating can a very short book be? I give you Josh Ozersky’s The Hamburger: A History (Yale, 141 pp., $22). Ozersky, whose official title is “Food Editor/Online for New York Magazine” (love that slash), has contrived in not much more than a hundred pages of heavily leaded text to cram in everything I find most irksome about the postmodern branch of semi-scholarship known as cultural studies: the jaw-breaking jargon, the sniggering coyness, the don’t-take-me-too-seriously irony.

The irritation starts on the second page:

Even before the hamburger became a universal signifier of imperialism abroad and unwholesomeness at home, it had a special semiotic power-a quality not shared even by other great American sandwiches like the hot dog, the patty melt, the Dagwood, the Reuben, the po’boy, or even such totemic standards as fried chicken and apple pie. At the end of the day, nothing says America like a hamburger . . . . Is it a sizzling disc of goodness, served in a roadside restaurant dense with local lore, or the grim end product of a secret, sinister empire of tormented animals and unspeakable slaughtering practices? Is it cooking or commodity? An icon of freedom or the quintessence of conformity?

The Hamburger is like that from start to finish. Is the hamburger a Bad Thing? Well, yes, it must be, if only because it is an American Thing beloved of ordinary folk, and you know all about those pesky ordinary folk, right? But the damn thing still tastes good, so Ozersky writes about its cultural history in such a way as to suggest at all times his superiority to that which he nonetheless allows himself to enjoy–and the benighted Americans who continue to insist on enjoying it unselfconsciously. Like a limousine liberal of fast-food cuisine, he wanders in and out of both camps, nibbling his medium-rare cheeseburgers with just the right amount of ennobling guilt.

The have-it-both-ways trickery of The Hamburger is displayed at length in the chapter devoted to McDonald’s, which Ozersky calls “the most symbolically loaded business in the world,” one that “represents America to the world in a way no other business ever has or likely ever will.” We are simultaneously invited to admire the ingenuity with which the founders of McDonald’s contrived to automate the production of 15-cent hamburgers and to tremble at the larger implications of unleashing such a technology on an unprepared world–yet at no time does Ozersky ever commit himself to the loony leftism of the anti-McDonald’s fanatics who regard Ray Kroc as the source of all evil in the modern world. In describing the experience of Sandy Agate, one of the first McDonald’s franchisees, Ozersky assures us that his story “doesn’t end happily. (Arguably, the same could be said of the McDonald’s Corporation or for that matter America.)” That throwaway parenthesis says everything about The Hamburger.

Robert Warshow first anatomized Ozersky’s politico-literary technique in his 1947 Partisan Review essay on the New Yorker:

The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.

Who could have predicted in 1947 that someone would come along six decades later who could write about the lowly hamburger in such a manner? Of such is the kingdom of cultural studies, where everything is permitted, even the consumption of ground beef on a white-bread bun–so long as you do it with the right attitude.

cross-posted at About Last Night

Moss Hart, who grew up poor and spent a not-inconsiderable portion of his young life riding the subway from deepest Brooklyn to Times Square, swore that if he ever struck it rich, he’d take cabs everywhere, even if his destination was only a block or two away. I’ve never been poor and have yet to strike it rich, but I rode the subway often enough in my first years as a New Yorker to be glad that I can now afford to take cabs. Be that as it may, a true New Yorker who wants to get somewhere at ten on a rainy morning takes the subway, and since today’s Mass for the repose of the soul of William F. Buckley, Jr., who died five weeks ago, was scheduled to start at ten o’clock sharp at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I put on my black outfit and raincoat, descended into the bowels of Manhattan, and made my bumpy way to Rockefeller Center in the midst of a rush-hour crowd.

It’s been quite a while since I walked through Rockefeller Center, even longer since I’ve been inside St. Patrick’s, and a very long time indeed since I last attended a memorial service for a public figure. For all these reasons, I have no standard against which to measure Bill’s funeral obsequies. All I can tell you was that today’s service seemed as splendid as it could possibly have been. The cathedral was full of mourners, the choir loft full of singers, and the music was mostly appropriate to the occasion. Bill was a serious amateur musician who loved Bach above all things–he actually performed the F Minor Harpsichord Concerto in public on more than one occasion–so the organist played “Sheep May Safely Graze” and the slow movement of the Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C Major. No less suitable were the sung portions of the Mass, drawn from Victoria’s sweetly austere Missa “O magnum mysterium,” and the closing hymn, the noble tune from Gustav Holst’s The Planets to which the following words were later set: I vow to thee, my country–all earthly things above–/Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love.

The only thing that made my inner critic smile wryly was the performance during communion of the Adagio in G Minor long attributed to Albinoni but in fact woven out of whole cloth by one Remo Giazotto. It is a preposterously operatic piece of spurious yard goods, and to hear it played on the organ with all stops pulled put me in mind of something Bill wrote after attending a Virgil Fox recital many years ago:

At one point during a prelude, I am tempted to rise solemnly, commandeer a shotgun, and advise Fox, preferably in imperious German, if only I could learn German in time to consummate the fantasy, that if he does not release the goddam vox humana, which is oohing-ahing-eeing the music where Bach clearly intended something closer to a bel canto, I shall simply have to blow his head off.

That was the Bill Buckley I knew, whip-smart and impishly outrageous, the same man that David Remnick had in mind when he described Bill as having “the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat.”

I wish I could say I knew him well, but I didn’t. I dined at his table a number of times but was only alone with him once, when I interviewed him about Whittaker Chambers for an anthology of Chambers’ journalism that I edited in 1989. On that occasion Bill assured me that although they had been close, Chambers never had “any direct historical or intellectual influence” on him. The reason he gave is striking:

I never embraced, in part because subjectively it’s contra naturam to me, that utter, total, objective, strategic pessimism of his. Among other things, I think it’s wrong theologically to assume that the world is doomed before God decides to doom it. So I never drank too deeply of his Weltschmerz.

Indeed he did not: Bill was the least weltschmerzy person imaginable. Henry Kissinger, who eulogized him this morning, alluded to that side of Bill’s personality when he remarked that Bill “was vouchsafed a little miracle: to enjoy so much what was compelled by inner necessity.” I couldn’t have put it better. Bill worked fearfully hard and was deadly serious about what he believed, but he extracted self-evident enjoyment from everything he did, and you couldn’t be in his presence for more than a minute or two without responding to his joie de vivre. If I’d been in charge of the music today, I would have made a point of picking something a good deal more festive–Bach’s Fugue à la gigue, say, or one of the harpsichord sonatas in which Scarlatti turns the instrument Bill loved best into a giant guitar.

Christopher Buckley, Bill’s son, followed Henry Kissinger, and gave just the sort of eulogy I’d expected from him, funny and light-fingered, putting much-needed smiles on our faces. Only at the end did he sound a darker note, quoting the lines from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” that he chose as the epitaph for a man who loved sailing as much as he loved Bach: Here he lies where he long’d to be;/Home is the sailor, home from the sea,/And the hunter home from the hill. Then we all sang “I Vow to Thee, My Country,” pushed our way past the waiting photographers, and returned to the gray, misty day.

I passed up a lunch invitation and went home by myself, preferring to be alone with my thoughts. I was thinking of an evening in the fall of 1985, not long after I moved to New York from the Midwest. I’d been writing for National Review, Bill’s magazine, since 1981, but I’d never met my first great patron face to face, so he invited me to an editorial dinner at his Park Avenue apartment. Back then I was working for Harper’s, whose offices were in Greenwich Village, and the thought of meeting Bill for the first time was so exciting that I walked all the way from Astor Place up to 73 E. 73rd Street (where Bill invariably entertained at 7:30).

It was, of course, a symbolic gesture: I was taking possession of the streets of the city to which I had moved and in which I hoped someday to make a name for myself. At the end of my journey I knocked on the door of Bill’s maisonette, and a few moments later he clasped my hand and said, “Hey, buddy!” It was, I would learn, his standard greeting, always uttered with a warmth that remained disarming no matter how many times you heard it.

Ever since then I have associated Bill Buckley with New York, whose doors he flung wide to me, just as he opened the pages of the magazine he edited. Now New York is my home–but Bill is gone, buried in Connecticut, home at last from the sea. Somehow you never imagine outliving the people who show you through the doors that lead to the rest of your life.

Most Americans are at one and the same time moralists and latitudinarians, and from time to time these tendencies get out of sync and cause a collective convulsion. One of the most interesting and least well remembered of these convulsions took place in 1954, when public concern over the baleful effects of comic books on the juvenile mind reached such a height as to inspire a Senate hearing at which Bill Gaines, the publisher of Crime SuspenStories, assured a roomful of skeptical politicians that his product was “a work of art.” Frederic Wertham, a psychiatrist who had just published a book called Seduction of the Innocent which claimed that violent comics turned their readers into juvenile delinquents, begged to differ: “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. They get the children much younger.”

I know about these hearings because Robert Warshow published an essay in COMMENTARY called “Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham” in which he described with a typically thoughtful blend of wit and moral awareness how his 11-year-old son had become a fan of Crime SuspenStories and its companion publications:

Children do need some “sinful” world of their own to which they can retreat from the demands of the adult world; as we sweep away one juvenile dung heap, they will move on to another. The point is to see that the dung heap does not swallow them up, and to hope it may be one that will bring forth blossoms. But our power is limited; it is the children who have the initiative: they will choose what they want.

Fifty-four years later, David Hajdu, a historian of popular culture, has written a book called The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (Farrar Straus Giroux, 434 pp., $26) in which the clash between Gaines and Dr. Wertham is put in historical perspective. Hajdu’s point of view is fairly standard as these things go-he describes the 50’s as an age of “postwar paranoia” and believes that the comic books of the period deserve to be taken seriously as a species of popular art-but his discussion of the short-lived frenzy over the alleged effects of comics on their consumers is both well written and, for the most part, sensible. You don’t have to share Hajdu’s reflexive distaste for the buttoned-down cultural orthodoxies of the Eisenhower Era to read The Ten-Cent Plague with pleasure and profit.

That said, I was struck by a certain narrowness of perspective on Hajdu’s part. While he appears to know everything worth knowing about the comic books of the period, his suggestion that their critics were cultural McCarthyites fails to acknowledge that the comic-book scare cut sharply across political lines. Close readers of The Ten-Cent Plague will note that the liberal establishment of the day was no less concerned about the effects of comic books on American youth, a fact that Hajdu glosses over a bit too quickly. No less revealingly, he appears to be unaware of the existence of Warshow’s oft-cited essay on horror comics, an omission that makes one wonder what else he has overlooked in his somewhat starry-eyed attempt to portray the creators of Crime SuspenStories and its companion publications as “cultural insurgents” who “helped give birth to the popular culture of the postwar era.”

I was no less struck by the fact that The Ten-Cent Plague contains only a handful of black-and-white illustrations, none of which gives a clear sense of what the horror comics of the 50’s were like. Mere verbal descriptions cannot convey their quality, though Warshow came close:

There is a picture of a baseball game in which the ball is a man’s head with one eye dangling from its socket, the bat is a severed leg, the catcher wears a dismembered human torso as chest protector, the baselines are marked with stretched-out intestines, the bases are marked with the lungs, liver, and heart, the rosin-bag is the dead man’s stomach, and the umpire dusts off home plate with the scalp.

Hajdu tiptoes cautiously past this particular example of the genre, describing it as “a baseball game played with human body parts.” I might have been more impressed by his broad-gauge indictment of 50’s culture had he been more willing to specify the exact content of the publications whose cultural transgressiveness he lauds so passionately.