Gaya Scienza

Thomas Mellon on 'Advise and Consent'

Last December I watched Advise and Consent, the excellent 1962 movie by Otto Preminger. The film is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the same title by Allen Drury published in 1959.

Thomas Mellon, whose last novel, Fellow Travelers, I liked a lot, has written a paper on Allen Drury's Advise and Consent in the New York Times Review of Books for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. The paper is somewhat critical...

Of course, the novel wasn't entirely believable even in its own day. (...) In its preoccupation with the mesh of personality and process, Drury's book resembles not so much any Washington novel by Henry Adams or Gore Vidal or Ward Just as it does one of C.P. Snow's schematic renditions of high drama in the faculty lounge and parliamentary cloakroom. (...) Unfortunately, Drury was the kind of nonfiction-writer turned novelist who remains better at telling than showing. (...) Even reviewers impressed by the plotting and insiderliness of Advise and Consent had doubts about its literary merits...

Despite of that, Advise and Consent

the plot [of which] turns on the blackmailing of Brigham Anderson, a young senator from Utah whose wartime homosexual affair, once exposed by extreme proponents of the nominee for State, leads the senator to shoot himself inside his office on a Sunday afternoon,

remains attractive. Maybe as a summer read?

Disappointment...

The traditional "Best Books of the Year" feature in mainstream newspapers and magazines have been, this year, rather disappointing with the exception of Pilcrow gathered in the Financial Times which I mentioned in my last post. Some books might have been mentioned. I will come back to that next week...

Maybe as a sort of consolation prize, the cover story of Newsweek magazine (dated December 15th) is dedicated to The Religious Case for Gay Marriage. The article by Lisa Miller is a strong case in favor of gay marriage based on... the Scripture: "Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side. (...) Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should." Andrew Tobias, the openly gay author and journalist, adds in his blog (Money and Other Subjects) with a lot of common sense and some humor:

"And by the way, it’s okay for religions to prohibit gay marriage. It’s civil marriage – mundane things like state-issued marriage licenses and the taxation of health insurance benefits, not “holy matrimony” – that’s in question. No one disputes the right of churches to discriminate or to predict who will and who will not be denied entrance to the kingdom of heaven. But in the meantime, can Charles and I have the same Social Security benefits you do? We pay the same tax rates."

Milk has finally arrived in this not-so-remote place of Connecticut. It has started at a small independent theater in Bethel, which reminds me of the Salles d'art et d'essais in Paris, with the exception of the smell and sound of pop-corn, although this custom has been picking up strongly in France, lately... Sean Penn's performance is amazing. The coming-out story of Harvey Milk, who grew up in New York and remained in the closet well into his forties, is moving.

This type of movie, showing in a positive way gay characters, has nothing to do with nonetheless great movies of the past like Advise and Consent (1962) by Otto Preminger, which I recently saw on DVD, where homosexuals are depicted as unhappy, shameful and weak creatures. It was the first time a gay bar was shown in a mainstream film. Preminger's script is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the same title by Allen Drury published in 1959. According to the DVD commentary, the book, which is currently out of print, is better than the movie...

***

Michael Peppiatt has just published a new book, Francis Bacon: Studies for a portrait (Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 272) which, according to a recent issue of the TLS, "contains interviews with and recollections of the artist from the 1960s almost until his death: that is, either the raw materials of Peppiatt's biography or bits of the biography distilled into essays and articles. For completists only, it does include the full, fascinating text of Bacon's answers when he was interviewed for the first time by his future biographer, in 1963, before celebrity began to overtake some of his responses." By the way his great biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an enigma (1995) has been revised and reissued in paperback by Constable.

2008.12.14