The Library of America

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The Library of America has been around for a couple of decades now.  They print little blue-covered books with black paper covers, and they use onion-skin paper. 

 

 

They are assembling the definitive collection of the Essential American Writers.

 

 

They started with the obvious: Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, the letters and speeches and writings of the Founding Fathers.

 

 

Then they started to think about what made someone an “American writer.”

 

 

I own their edition of George Washington, and two volumes of Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson, and Wallace Stevens (everything he wrote fits in one book!), and Flannery O’Connor (ditto!), and Philip K. Dick, and one of their Thoreau volumes, and probably a couple of others I’m forgetting. We have a huge literary history in this country, and LOA is memorializing and perpetuating it in this series.  Their books ain’t cheap, but they’re nice editions, and they're worth owning.

 

 

They are not perfect.  In the Lincoln volumes, I would love to know what Lincoln was responding to when he wrote his letters. Even a summary of the other person’s letter would be good. But, no, they just give you Lincoln.  (I have a collection of Groucho Marx’s letters – no, not from the Library of America, but they should think about reissuing it – and you get everything: not just the letters he wrote, but the letters he received.  Most of the time they are just as clever as his, and you get the context too.  So huh, Library of America.  Get a clue.)

 

 

LOA has covered the nineteenth century pretty completely now, I think.  They are doing the same with twentieth-century lit too (as you can probably tell, with Philip K. Dick included above). 

 

 

They are doing a pretty damned good job of preserving our country’s literature.

 

 

They do a neat little thing online: A Story A Week.  They send an email once a week, with a link to their website, and you can go read a story from one of their publications.  It is invariably something I’ve never read before.  Recently I read a bit of Mark Twain, and a short personal reminiscence by Dreiser, and a very odd thing by Edith Wharton, and a couple of things by people I’d never heard of.

 

 

It’s nice to be reminded that we have such a rich literary heritage.

 

 

And it only took us three hundred years to get there!

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Margaret Dumont

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 TCM recently ran a Marx Brothers marathon.  I caught bits of “Horse Feathers,” and afterward my very favorite, “Duck Soup.”

 

 

I like so many things about the Marx Brothers' movies: the freedom, the cleverness of the dialogue, the stupid obviousness of the slapstick bits, the bizarre/surreal quality of many of the gags, even the sudden lapses into sentimentality when they stop to sing a song.

 

 

And I am always thankful when Margaret Dumont shows up.

 

 

She is the grand dame who reigns over seven of the Marx Brothers’ movies: the hostess, the millionairess, the unlikely love-interest.  She is handsome and stately, like an ocean liner.  She has a rich plummy voice, slipping from reedy alto to fluting soprano.  She is not at all physical; she generally stands in one place and lets the Marx Brothers run around her like squirrels around an oak tree.  She was with the brothers on Broadway in “Cocoanuts” in the 1920s; when they made it into a movie a few years later, she and the brothers reprised their stage roles.  This is how Groucho described the action in 1930, in a letter to his friend Arthur Sheekman:

 

 

“I arise in the morning and before I have had my clothes on ten minutes, I am over at the theater doing the ordering scene.  Then follows thirty minutes of Harpo climbing up Dumont’s leg, and the shirt scene, and then to the dressing room for what I imagine is going to be a good long rest.  I am no more than seated with the Morning World, when the buzzer rings and I am downstairs again doing the ordering scene, and Harpo is back again at Dumont’s leg.”

 

 

Dumont is queenly and oblivious, the perfect foil.  She does reaction shots, seemingly unaware of what she’s reacting to.  Groucho later said that, after filming the “Duck Soup” scene in which Groucho shouts “We’re fighting for this woman’s honor, which is more than she ever did!”, Dumont came over to him and said: “Julie [his real name was Julius], what does that line mean?”  

 

 

(I think Dumont was smarter than this.  She’d been on stage for years, after all, and she was no dummy.  Here’s one of her quotes from IMDB: “I'm not a stooge, I'm the best straight woman in Hollywood. There's an art to playing it straight. You must build up your man, but never top him, never steal the laughs from him.”)

 

 

Film critic Cecelia Ager said it best: “Somebody somewhere should erect a statue to Margaret Dumont, with a plaque reading: “Dedicated to the woman who took an awful lot of guff from the Marx Brothers through the years, and answered it with courage and steadfastness.”

 

 

Dumont passed away in 1965, just days after doing a television reenactment (with Groucho!) of their big musical number from 1930’s “Animal Crackers”: “Hooray for Captain Spaulding.” 

 

 

Her real name was Daisy Baker.

 

 

Rest in peace, Daisy.

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Sunday blog: A little wit

 

 

 

The entertainment industry has generated lots of entertaining quotes. Today, for my Day of Rest blog, and for your amusement, here are a few of my favorites.

 

 

 

“I finally went to the South Pacific, and it was really wonderful. It was almost as beautiful as the back lot of the Paramount studio.”

• Dorothy Lamour

 

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“I have more talent in my smallest fart than you have in your entire body.”

• Walter Matthau, to Barbara Streisand, during the filming of “Hello, Dolly!”

 

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“Honey, kissing you is like kissing the side of a beer bottle.”

• Laurence Harvey, to Capucine, during the filming of “Walk on the Wild Side”

 

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“I could eat a can of celluloid and puke a better movie.”

• Kim Novak in “The Mirror Crack'd”

 

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“Darling, do you have change for a five-dollar bill?”

• Tallulah Bankhead, in need of toilet paper, to the woman in the next toilet stall

 

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“I'm sorry – I didn't catch your name.”

• Groucho Marx, upon being introduced to Greta Garbo at a Hollywood party

 

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“Beatrice, I told you before we left the house: that's not funny!”

• George S. Kaufman, to his wife, after watching her fall through a wicker chair at another Hollywood party