The Moscow Art Theatre at Lunch

 And with that Same Fulbright Again....

    The Moscow Art Theatre troupe came to London to do a season of plays at Sadlers Wells Theatre. They did the four big Chekhov and two new plays properly authorized by the Soviet cultural authorities. I saw three of the four Chekhov and one of the social-realist variety. I was so very moved, listening to them in Russian, watching them in my English. All that broken hearted magnanimity. ( Months later, at my second cousin’s home in southern Sweden, I was stunned at how his dinning room resembled the birthday party room in Three Sisters, just across the little Baltic sea, of course.) 

    I somehow or other wrangled an invitation to a luncheon at the Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly in honor of the Muscovites.

From My Miscellany

    To those who will see this posting: warm regards.

     How is it that I feel qualified, even called upon, to advise you to rush to see SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN?  As I sat beside Betty in the theatre yesterday afternoon watching this remarkable movie, I couldn’t but feel our seventy years of throwing flies together at trout-- and salmon-- resting delightfully between us. I would have been willing to bet that Betty was the sole woman in the theatre who had hit an Atlantic salmon on a fly-- one that I had tied.  How is that for qualification for advising you on this movie?

From My Miscellany

     To those who will see this posting: warm regards.

     How is it that I feel qualified, even called upon, to advise you to rush to see SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN?  As I sat beside Betty in the theatre yesterday afternoon watching this remarkable movie, I couldn’t but feel our seventy years of throwing flies together at trout-- and salmon-- resting delightfully between us. I would have been willing to bet that Betty was the sole woman in the theatre who had hit an Atlantic salmon on a fly-- one that I had tied.  How is that for qualification for advising you on this movie?

   I beg to advise that while the film is most certainly about salmon and the ritual of their pursuit, it is much about the vagaries and rewards of romantic love that is more than merely hormonal. It is about many things, in fact, that any close viewer must enjoy and cherish in her own secret way.

    But the McGuffin, the trick of the movie, is to establish a run of Atlantic salmon in a desert river, the Yemen. If the English can transport their farmed salmon to Yemen and get them to respond to their primordial urge to run up river as they do in Britain, then perhaps our own urge to love, throughout the whole and ancient range of love, can be successful too. Every angler who has fished the salmon hopes in his sorrow that his casting, casting, and everlasting casting, may yet, with one more cast, get a strike from that love running ever up-stream of him. If a great fish hits, it could mean his fulfillment-- out in this river that we are tempted to call life.

    I call your attention to the myriad images of streams of pure and living water in both the Islamic and Hebraic literary traditions. The aristocratic sheik in this lovely film wants only to fulfill the destiny of his desert water by planting heroic salmon in it. I wonder if the alpine water piped down to the exquisite fountains of the Alhambra at Granada was home to salmon in those long lost times.   

                                                                                           

The Wandering Fulbright #2

 

                      Two Brechtian Women

    By some hook or crook, on a dark and stormy night, when I was new to London, I found myself in a strange suburban flat at an even stranger party that I found pretty intimidating.

    I can remember none of the details except my general uneasiness, which became specific when a pair of tough-looking German ladies of uncertain years from East Berlin got me into a corner, scaring me half to death with their grinding, gravelly baritone, broken English gospel of Bertolt Brecht.

    They had that Bavarian swarthiness about them, skinny, muscular, dressed in working-class blacks and ready to make short work of me. I, poor bourgeois bastard that I was-- and sometimes still am-- who as yet knew all too little of the revolutionary Bert Brecht or of his politically and aesthetically explosive drama of and for the working class and world politics. Soon, I was to note, everyone in theatre circles was talking “Brecht”. And I got, as they say, with the program.

     But right now, these ladies made it clear that if I cared anything at all about economic and social justice, to say nothing of art and culture In general, I would hie me back to the United States and carry the Gospel According to Brecht to every corner of the nation. I was being intellectually roughed-up. They made me feel almost childish in what I thought was my own commitment to a new theatre.

     Those ladies were really something. I think they nailed me because I must have looked so pathetically vulnerable, a young (30) American who needed their proselytizing. And they did it to me-- in spades.

                                           ~~~~

By the way: I took with me to London a favorite solid red tie, of the most gorgeous red worsted wool by Wembly. Wearing it one day, a friend at the League  pulled me aside and said that in London only members of the “C P”. (the Communist Party) ever wear solid red ties. I needed to be warned.

To Be Compleat

 

                                      

                            WALTON AND THE REST OF US

    I cannot, this morning, think of anything with as fine or more useful a title of anything than Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler. It speaks to me of what can be the wholeness of the angler, of his style, and his accomplishment-- for whatever he fishes. We angle for many things in our lives. I angle for your favor as I write this.

TALES OF A WANDERING FULBRIGHT

Dear Friends-- and valued readers of this stuff,

   I have these five easy pieces of narrative drawn from a Fulbright year in London back in the 50s. I’ve dined out on them time and again and now fear that, if I don’t get them out of here soon, they will rot my hard-drive. 

   I hope they are faintly amusing and with just a bit of the troubles of the world in them. They are all about theatre, its comings and goings, for the innocent abroad that I was back then. And I swear they are true-- or as true as I can make them. They tend to bang me up against my betters, against whom I stumbled somewhat. So you might relish the schadenfreude they offer. I give you leave.

   In any case, I must get them out of here and up into the Cloud where everything is fair game.

   I shall post them, every other week, well into the new spring and intersperse them with heaven (the Cloud) knows what.

   Read them if you want; enjoy them if you can. My hard drive will be relieved just to see them gone.       gordon

TALES OF A WANDERING FULBRIGHT

 

          

Dear Friends-- and valued readers of this stuff,

   I have these five easy pieces of narrative drawn from a Fulbright year in London back in the 50s. I’ve dined out on them time and again and now fear that, if I don’t get them out of here soon, they will rot my hard-drive. 

   I hope they are faintly amusing and with just a bit of the troubles of the world in them. They are all about theatre, its comings and goings, for the innocent abroad that I was back then. And I swear they are true-- or as true as I can make them. They tend to bang me up against my betters, against whom I stumbled somewhat. So you might relish the schadenfreude they offer. I give you leave.

   In any case, I must get them out of here and up into the Cloud where everything is fair game.

   I shall post them, every other week, well into the new spring and intersperse them with heaven (the Cloud) knows what.

   Read them if you want; enjoy them if you can. My hard drive will be relieved just to see them gone.       gordon