Navy Beans

 

                    A GOOD S0UP

    Betty got out a can of beans as part of a routine lunch today.

They were Navy beans, those little white ones, famous in the famous Navy bean soup in U.S. Senate dining room in Washington. For a split instant, the sight of those beans took me back to being there in the Capitol, risking a too short spoon in just that soup, in just that dining room, in an effort to do what we could against the war in Vietnam.

   In that instant, in spite of all our anti-war politics, I was in awe of the undoubted grandeur and the immense integrity of the Congress under that great dome.

    There were all those great men-- and single senate woman-- moving about the place.

   Perhaps it is because I am now almost double that age, that I feel that a visit there today to eat the senate’s bean soup would only fill me with contempt for how small and mean and dumb so many of those people have become.

    I am much better off lunching out of a can of beans with Betty here in Boulder where we know what to think. And think how splendid it was to meet Senator Fulbright going into the men's room that day.

Getting In

 

         Getting  Inside the Drottningholm Court Theatre

    “Go ahead”, he said, in Swedish.

    We had taken a bus out of central Stockholm to Drottningholm to see the perfectly preserved, even with its period scenery, 18^th century theatre in its palace where time had stood still and one could visit a complete, as though in a time capsule, court theatre of the Enlightenment. The only trouble was that we got there minutes too late for the last tour of the day.

   Horribly disappointed, I pled my case, as a professionally interested and now desperate Fulbright Scholar, to the ticket master by way of a nice lady who translated for me.

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.