To each his own
If we read the Bible, we learn that this is a time of "peace on earth, good will toward men." Our newspapers hint, then blast, then blare that there are only a few shopping days until Christmas. Popular magazines advise this is the season for "putting aside a few all-purpose presents, in case someone you have forgotten sends you a gift." The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti bemoans the commercialization of this season, the time when men "praise the Lord Calvert whiskey."
**WHAT IS CHRISTMAS (or Xmas, if you prefer)? Is it 10,000 Santa Clauses (with their diplomas from Santa school) working shifts in department stores and peddling drinks in bars? Is it songs like "Here Comes Santa Claus" or "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" echoing across a shopping center in amplified stereo? Is it a pagan feast of lights, glittering display, eggnog and "Yuletide cheer"?
Yes, Christmas is all of these. Christmas is also a time for remembering those we too often forget—orphaned children, needy families, the sick, the lonely and the unfortunate.
IT IS A marvelous, if brief, resurgence of love, friendship, good will toward men, and a renewal of personal relationships.
It is a time when mentions of the
Have we mentioned that it is also a religious feast?
AND EVERY YEAR it is a time when the sentimental and the religious bemoan the commercialism and crass materialism, and long for a return to the true spirit of the season.
We are an affluent people. We are also a nation of varied interests, religions and attitudes. Christmas should be a time of year for everyone to enjoy. It has, in fact, become a national holiday.
HOW CAN A GROUP of people so endowed with material wealth more logically celebrate a holiday? "To each his own" has long been a favorite phrase. How does the present way of celebrating Christmas contradict this? People of all interests and attitudes can still celebrate it. Those who are concerned with all the commercialization are just plain lazy, if they cannot find a way to celebrate it in their own way. The extension of the season only prolongs a time when all people can find a common denominator.
The Editors
1965 theater brings old, new
Jason Robards started off 1965 in a play called "Hughie," one of the lesser-known works of Eugene O'Neill. Critics liked the show and America's best playwright captured the American audience once again, proving O'Neill is not dead on the professional stage.
Edward Albee contributed a play called "Tiny Alice," a drama of "post-Christian mentality," as Time magazine put it. Even with Sir John Gielgud the play was doomed.
Michael O'Sullivan was a hit in Lincoln Center's production of Moliere's "Tartuffe."
THE MOSCOW ART Theater, the birthplace of Stanislavsky, came to New York in early February with Nikolai Gogol's "Lives." It was the first time since 1924 that the group had visited the U.S. and upon reaching this land they turned in a performance of ham.
Martin Gabel was praised in "Baker Street," a quasi-musical spoof on Sherlock Holmes.
In March, Playwright Albee and Producers Wilder and Barr threw a production out on off-Broadway called "Theater 1965." It consisted of a series of avant-garde presentations. "Balls" featured two ping pong balls; "Up to Thursday" showed two teenagers moving as if they were engaged in sexual intercourse (under an American flag); "Home Free!" was a drama of brother-sister sex; "Pigeons" was about three women involving themselves in others' psyches; and "Conerico Was Here to Stay" was one of those "anti-hero" type works.
"THE ODD COUPLE" was a hit of the 1965 season. It was written by Neil (Doc) Simon and directed by Comedian
Mike Nichols. The comedy opened in March and is still running. Art Carney and Walter Matthau play roommates who are thrown together because their wives have left them. They are a mismatch from the start and, in the end, are overjoyed to get their wives back.
Off-Broadway Arthur Miller has expanded his one-act 1955 "A View from the Bridge" into a much longer production. It is a powerful drama and is still playing in New York.
A really, really, big hit this year is "Fiddler on the Roof," starring Zero Mostel. The musical is a nostalgic visit to a Jewish town in the Russia of 1905.
"The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams came back to Broadway in May after an absence of 20 years. The cast, headed by Maureen Stapleton, lacked in talent but the play was able to shine through.
ON BROADWAY "HALF a Sixpence" has been described as a cut-rate cockney "Hello, Dolly," but the dances and the comedy are zestful.
Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and Albee's "The Zoo Story" were revived off Broadway for the fifth year straight in June. Both plays may go down in theatrical history as classics.
"MRS. DALLY," by William Hanley, opened the Broadway season in October. Arlene Francis starred as a woman carrying on an illicit affair with a mechanic. Time magazine said Miss Francis is "a 21-inch actress on a 30-foot stage. Husband or lover, or playgoer, they are all panel guests to her."
Peace on earth, good will toward men...
An author can't win
Illustrations by Richard Geary
An examination of some of the criticism on fiction published in 1965 reveals that the writer (who might be considered the original man-behind-the-eight-ball) is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. The writer who changes his style and subject matter is accused of getting out of his depth or having lost his touch; the author who writes the same type of story with the same thesis every time is charged with being outdated and boring.
Everything that Rises Must
Books by established writers frequently get the most notice by critics, and by readers as well, because these new books may be handily weighed and measured against previous works. Many readers like to think they can count on a writer for a "good book" (which means a book that that particular reader would enjoy).
A case in point might be James Michener, who recently has been upgrading his image by writing historical novels of some pretension, a far cry from the delightful South Pacific tales which first brought him fame and fortune. His book The Source is at the top of many best-seller lists; it is also one of the longest and all-round dullest books of the year, covering some 909 pages and 11,964 years.
FOR ANOTHER EXAMPLE there is The Lockwood Concern by John O'Hara, again telling (entertainingly and well) his same story of the man who struggles toward the top but is never quite sure that he has made it.
Peter De Vries is such a writer. If you liked his previous books, you'll like the new one, Let Me Count the Ways; he again amuses and horrifies the reader with his comic/tragic inventions of the outrageous predicaments in which his hero/victim is trapped.
Converge gives us our last wide-eyed look at Flannery O'Connor's dark and powerful prose. Her final volume (she died last year) restates her involvement (and Man's) with the nature of sin and salvation, grotesquely played out in Southern Gothic.
William Humphrey's The Ordways perhaps came closest to pleasing the complete reader, and strangely enough he wrote of much the same milieu and kinds of people as did Flannery O'Connor. But he wrote with a sure comic vision that leaves the reader in good humor despite the grisly reminiscences of the Ordway family.
In the non-fiction field, two books about President Kennedy are being read widely. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, wrote more objectively of the man and his times than did Ted Sorenson in Kennedy. Markings, by Dag Hammarskjold, remains high on the year's list of favorite reading, as does Journal of a Soul, the diary of Pope John XXIII.
CREDIT IS DUE PHYLLIIS McGinley for refuting in Sixpence in Her Shoe the widely held idea that a woman is not really a woman, or if she is she
must be dissatisfied with her lot. This book (although published earlier, still on the bestseller lists) is in rebuttal to the image of non-woman projected by the ramblings of Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex and Force of Circumstances), the smirking of Helen Gurley Brown (Sex and the Single Girl), and the carping of Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique).
Miss McGinley's way to fulfillment is certainly not everyone's, but she is a good example of a person who successfully chose a way of life and followed it with no regrets. Her identity "fits."
This quest for identity would seem to be what most fiction is about. The writer will never stop trying to communicate his vision of living and loving on the way deathward, and the reader will never cease trying to grasp it. From the embarrassment of riches provided by the book industry each year, all may choose according to taste with the assurance there will be more books to come next year.
2 Daily Kansan Thursday, December 16, 1965
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