The Proms, Mark Twain revisited, and summer plumage
With Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Douglas Kennedy, and Jim Moir
What do we want from music? Once, when interviewing Sir Kazuo Ishiguro — who once dreamt of being a musician, and owns a nice collection of guitars — I was fascinated to hear him say that he hoped his novels would have the staying power of a three minute song. It sounds like a throwaway line, but it’s not. Consider how a song can follow us all of our lives; consider the haunting quality of Ishiguro’s work. I’d say he’s right on track.
So I’m delighted to see Douglas Kennedy’s paean of praise to Radio 3 in Boundless. Douglas is a novelist but, as you will discover, his passion for music animates his life. What is called ‘classical’ music (we could get into why it’s called that, but hey, let’s leave that for another day) can still seem forbidding to many people; as if there’s a code to unlock, a secret to be discovered, without which the music will somehow rebuff or refuse you. At least, that’s how it has seemed to me over the years, until I decided to just relax and listen.
I’m a literary critic; it’s my job to read books and then delineate why I like them, or why I don’t. I must be careful and thorough in my explanations. But truly, at least when it comes to fiction and poetry, most books don’t ask for this stringent treatment. They ask, to put in most cleanly, to be loved. They do their very best to sweep you away — and yes, when they succeed, the books or poems themselves seem like active agents, animate and alive.
I’m so fortunate to live in London, where live music is available all the time, and not only for a price. In the last couple of years I’ve become a pretty regular Prommer; I hop on my bike and ride from East London to South Ken. For eight pounds I get the greatest music in the world and an hour and a half’s good exercise. I don’t fret. I lie on the floor of the Royal Albert Hall and let the music surround me. It asks me to love it, and I do. That’s absolutely enough for me.
Erica Wagner
Editor-at-Large
Reader, suppose you were an idiot
Shelley Fisher Fishkin on what Mark Twain would think of today's political predicaments
Every word of the text printed below was written by Mark Twain in novels, speeches, autobiographical dictations, interviews, letters, notebooks, manuscripts, and other sources. The material dates from 1867 to 1909, including material published posthumously — in some cases (by design) 100 years after his death. The objects of his barbs include the venality of so-called public servants, the hypocrisy of so-called Christian legislators, the dishonesty and corruption he saw in Congress and other governing bodies, the way that blind party loyalty sabotaged democracy, and the arrogance and self-importance of a politician like President Theodore Roosevelt, whose imperialist ventures in the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century Twain abhorred.
[…]
My “method” in editing this piece involved channeling the spirit of my dear friend, the late Hal Holbrook. Holbrook, who died in 2021, was one of the greatest actors America has produced. A truly brilliant scholar as well as a consummate artist, Holbrook performed his original one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight!” every year from 1954 to 2017, stitching together bits and pieces of Twain’s writings for each performance in ways that made Twain appear to be addressing whatever issues were current. His method was highly intuitive and associative — an art fueled by his encyclopedic knowledge of Twain’s work. Mark Twain died in 1910. But he continues to speak to our present moment in ways that are as startlingly prescient as they are witty, brazen, and bold.
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Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.
I have often wondered at the condition of things which set aside morality in politics and make possible the election of men whose unfitness is apparent. We have never had a President before who was destitute of self-respect & of respect for his high office; we have had no President before who was not a gentleman; we have had no President before who was intended for a butcher, a dive keeper or a bully, and missed his mission by compulsion of circumstances over which he had no control.
We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet today, and our President stands for us like a colossal monument visible from all the ends of the earth. He is fearfully hard and coarse where another gentleman would exhibit kindliness and delicacy.
He became so expert in duplicity, and so admirably plausible that he couldn’t tell himself when he was lying and when he wasn’t. The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might.
He taught them that the only true freedom of thought is to think as the party thinks; that the only true freedom of speech is to speak as the party dictates; that the only righteous toleration is toleration of what the party approves; that patriotism, duty, citizenship, and devotion to country, loyalty to the flag, are all summed up in loyalty to party. Loyalty is a word which has worked vast harm; for it has been made to trick men into being "loyal" to a thousand iniquities.
It is interesting, wonderfully interesting—the miracles which party-politics can do with a man's mental and moral make-up. In the interest of party expediency they give solemn pledges, they make solemn compact; in the interest of party expediency, they repudiate them without a blush. They would not dream of committing these strange crimes in private life. Where the party leads, they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals. Here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it & out of place—the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
We will not hire a blacksmith who never lifted a sledge. We will not hire a school-teacher who does not know the alphabet. We will not have a man about us in our business life, in any walk of it, low or high, unless he has served an apprenticeship and can prove that he is capable of doing the work he offers to do. We even require a plumber to know something about his business, that he shall at least know which side of a pipe is the inside. But when a representative of ours learns, after long experience, how to conduct the affairs of his office, we discharge him and hire somebody that doesn’t know anything about it.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor English and Professor (by courtesy) of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade, which was just published by Yale University Press.
Shelley is reading The Confession of Copeland Cane by Keenan Norris — ‘a lively, riveting and prescient post-pandemic dystopian coming-of-age novel set in Oakland, California in the near future, centering on an energetic and engaging teenager trying to grow up in an environment in which he has to negotiate racism, incarceration, a police state that surveils his neighborhood, and a generally contradictory and confusing world.’
Want to hear more about Shelley’s editing process, and of Mark Twain’s enduring relevance to world politics?
Have a listen to the latest episode of the Boundless podcast — available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts now
Music heard all around the world
Douglas Kennedy on the global power of Radio 3
It was a moment brimming with modernist irony — waking up in the ever-antiseptic and Calvinist city of Geneva on Sunday morning to the sounds of one of the thorniest keyboard works of the 20th century: Pierre Boulez’s jaggedly remarkable Piano Sonata No. 3. As I immediately sat upright in my hotel bed I reminded myself that (as had been advertised on air for several weeks) this Sunday morning began an all-day immersion into the compositional and conducting legacy of the man who some have called The Count Dracula of Modern Music. And though I had writerly business later that day in that most Swiss of villes, through the wonders of the BBC Sounds app I was able to first work out in a local gym to what the ever erudite and exuberant presenter Tom Service called ‘a thrill ride which takes you to places unknown’: Boulez’s ‘Notations for Orchestra”.
The paradox wasn’t lost on me: doing my daily aerobic thing in the company of what looked like fully paid-up members of the international banking class while listening to music so challenging and transformative – by a composer whose oeuvre is now regarded as a defining one in the postwar musical world. And then there was Boulez’s electrifying body of recorded work as conductor, also broadcast throughout the day, as he married astonishing clarity and rigor with a remarkable ability to bring you into an elucidating sound world of immense orchestral colour and texture.
The very fact that BBC Radio 3 had decided to devote an entire Sunday to Boulez (who would have turned 100 this year) speaks volumes about why it remains the most important classical music service in the world today. Speaking as an itinerant writer — who, after 23 years in London now lives between Paris, Berlin, and Maine — Radio 3 has been a constant in my life ever since I discovered it while a student in Dublin in the 1970s. I am someone who doesn’t just write to music, but who writes exclusively to Radio 3. It has become my companion at whatever desk or table I find myself in the world: this essay is being written on the Milan-Paris Express, with Georgia Mann’s Essential Classics in my ears… and the great American pianist Stephen Kovacevich playing Brahms.
But while an alpine terrain of stern snow-dappled peaks defines the immediate horizon, an appalling thought strikes me: should the BBC go ahead with what appears to be a cost-cutting exercise, I may no longer be able to listen to BBC Radio 3 outside of the United Kingdom.
Douglas Kennedy is the author of 26 books, including The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, and The Moment. A film of his novel, A Special Relationship (for which he co-wrote the French screenplay), just finished shooting in Paris. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
Douglas is reading Jan Swafford’s biography of Johannes Brahms
Ruff Philomachus pugnax
The male Ruff develops its remarkable head and neck plumage in the summer and performs vicious fight-dances with other males to impress the onlooking Reeves (the name for a female Ruff).
Jim Moir’s More Birds was published by Unbound in 2024