There is something a little absurd about watching the weather on TV while it is happening just beyond our windows. Most of what we see is so obvious: Snow comes down, wind picks up, plows roll through. We watch anyway. Toward the end of the segment filmed on Long Island, the newscaster reminds us that it is still very early on, that it is going to be a very long day, that there is still much more to come. We have to stay tuned.
I love the famous story of Julia Child’s dropping a hunk of meat on the kitchen floor, scooping it up and carrying on. It doesn’t matter to me that it never happened — Julia told me that it didn’t when I asked her about it years ago — it’s still fun to imagine the scene. Her timing would be perfect and her movements grand. As she would thump the food back onto the counter, she would smile, and it would have the complicity of a wink, drawing us in. Then, in her breathy voice with her quirky cadence, she would say the lines that are quoted so often: “Always remember: If you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?”
Not many people are able to live this way; not many women or working-class characters get written this way. For the rooted among us, reading Checkout 19 can be utterly jarring. It is a portrait, like Pond; it's also a call to come at least a little undone. Yes, really. It really is.
Traditionally a memoirist’s task is to gather the flukes of her life and marshal them into something resembling a story. But Davis has a different project in mind. She has written a memoir that mimics the atemporal quality of the episodes that give meaning to life. “Aurelia, Aurélia” doesn’t care for the constraints of melody, but is nonetheless an entrancing song.
The known facts of Crane’s life have largely been established by previous scholars. In his new biography, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane, the novelist Paul Auster records the main events and traits, but his emphasis falls on the work. Like the poet John Berryman, whose 1950 Critical Biography renewed a precedent, established during Crane’s lifetime, for appreciation by fellow writers, Auster writes as his subject’s champion. (Whatever the merits of such defenses as a genre, when an author continues to prompt them, it is generally a good sign—of something disturbing, unassimilable, undeniable.) Yet where Berryman wrote against the irresolution of critics, Auster faces the more difficult problem of what he perceives to be neglect among readers. To defend Crane, he must reintroduce him. This he does assiduously and at length, showing that Red Badge, Crane’s “masterpiece,” represents only a sliver of a vast and varied body of writing that includes “close to three dozen stories of unimpeachable brilliance” and “more than two hundred pieces of journalism, many of them so good that they stand on equal footing with his literary work.”
Much of the book chronicles the period after “Torch Song Trilogy,” Fierstein’s groundbreaking gay play, transformed him into a Tony-winning writer and star. He delivers plenty of dish, some of which leaves a bitter aftertaste. But his writing is most alive in the early years, before he becomes a Broadway institution.