Daily Blague

¶ The current Granta is entitled "The Factory," but there are a few off-topic items between the covers, and no one is to miss Thomas Healy's "Martin and Me." Mr Healy may be a sociable man today, but he spent the first twenty years of his adulthood in a brawling stupor. In 1983, nearly forty, he sold the film rights to a story that he'd written and used part of the proceeds to buy a Doberman pup. This dog, if it did not save Mr Healy's life (as he suspects it did), certainly turned it around. Without overdoing things, Mr Healy presents himself as a man too bent and savage to cope with the complexities of interpersonal stability; hell was other people. Martin the Doberman, however, tugged him gently toward accepting responsibility - for Martin at first, but ultimately, in order to guarantee that he could take care of Martin, for himself as well. By the end of the piece, Mr Healy is sober and healthy, robustly walking twelve or fifteen miles a day in the Scottish open air.

It is surprising how far you can walk when you are walking with a dog. I didn't think of miles or time, but the time flew in and the miles flew by. A man and his dog. It was a simple life, but it suited me, and Martin had to think that it would go on for ever.

And don't miss the picture of the lamp in our foyer, on page 136. Gave me quite a start, it did. The story that goes with it is ultimately a sad one, because it suggests the death of many interconnecting skill sets.

¶ My eye was caught by a cunningly sized simulacrum of and old-time schoolbook or primer, entitled The Modern Gentleman: A Guide To Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice, by Phineas Mollod & Jason Tesauro (Ten Speed Press, 2002). It seemed full of handy tips and pointers, so I bought it with the idea of passing it on to a certain country-bred young relation. I had to read it, first, though, or most of it, to see what kind of advice it was peddling. I don't think that it will do my cousin any harm, because he already has the instincts of a gentleman and won't miss the fact that they're largely absent from the pages of this guide. But as he will probably never be the dandy that the authors are, he may find a lot of the book pretty useless.

The book is billed as "slightly decadent," but that's sheer understatement. Consider the following lagniappe, appended to guidelines for hosting a "bacchanal":

Nice touch: For outdoor bashes, an ice-block booze delivery system is a chilly novelty for encouraging even the timid to do shots. Buy a body-sized block from an ice dealer listed in the yellow pages. Use hot water and a chisel to carve a Y-shaped channel; two tributaries (one delivering alcohol and the other a mixer) feed from the top into a well-excavated central waterway. Finish by chipping out a chin rest at the bottom . Elevate the top end of the ice block to facilitate speedy flow. Invite guests to lay an open mouth at one end as the tender pours a clear spirit down one channel, a juice chaser down the other, meeting at the maw.

Nice touch if you're Nero, perhaps. The thrust of The Modern Gentleman is an exhortation to abandon the grubby, ad hoc indulgences of adolescence in favor of more considered and debonair transgressions, a kind of growing up that brings Hugh Hefner and the old Esquire to mind. There is an unpleasant whiff of Eddie Haskell lurking among the carefully chosen and properly folded garments in the weekend valise.

The polestar of a true gentleman's life is to make the lives of people with whom he deals, on all levels, as comfortable and as pleasant as possible. He does this with assurance and forethought; he does it without obsequiousness and dishonesty. Along the way, he tries to inspire others to be the best that they can be. The gentleman is neither self-assertive nor self-effacing, and the pleasure of his company is apparent, for the most part, in retrospect.

Little of this high-minded guff is of interest to authors Mollod and Tesauro, but if you are a young man, new to city life, looking for handy tips and pointers that will, after all, keep you from looking too big a fool (and out of jail), then you will find their book a helpful guide. By all means follow their meatily masculine reading list, their Mozart-omitting classical music selections, and their Ella-less jazz musts. Follow The Modern Gentleman without fear of feminization. But to make sure of not losing sight of the moral imperatives of gentlemanliness, without which this book's little rituals will take on an arch, perhaps even camp, discoloration, keep something by Anthony Trollope on your nightstand. Even better, read An Autobiography, in which Trollope recounts how, although born to gentry, he actually became a gentleman - the real McCoy.

¶ Ron Hutchinson's Moonlight and Magnolias, which we saw last month at MTC's Stage I, is an amusing, often very funny farce about making movies. The absurdities and improbabilities of a hopelessly collaborative art become the bedroom doors and draped balconies of old Feydeau, and the characters slipping through them are the inconvenient truths that Hollywood's pretences have always found it vital to keep off our minds. It is important to note that the actual doors on the set open and close very infrequently, and the only person to pass through them, in all three of the play's acts, is a beleaguered secretary. The movie in the making is none other than Gone With The Wind, but the play does not take place on a sound stage. We're a few days into production, and already the producer, David O. Selznick, realizes that he needs a new script. He needs a new director, too. Because Gone With The Wind is already the most talked-about movie project in the land, Selznick takes the desperate measure of locking himself up in his office for a week with Victor Fleming (who replaced initial director George Cukor) and Ben Hecht. Hecht, a celebrated script doctor or rewrite man, balks at the assignment and would seem the last man to take it on, because he hasn't even read the book.

Continue reading about Moonlight and Magnolias at Portico.