Ten Years in the Tub (68 page)

You know I said that you should view with suspicion any book I'm recommending that sounds dull? Well, James Shapiro's
1599
isn't one of them, honestly. It's a brilliant book, riveting, illuminating, and original (by which I mean, of course, that I haven't read much like it, in all my years of devouring Shakespeare biographies), full of stuff with which you want to amaze, enlighten, and educate your friends. 1599 was the year Shakespeare polished off
Henry V
, wrote
As You Like It
, and drafted
Hamlet
. (I was partly attracted to Shapiro's book because I'd had a similarly productive 2006—although, unlike Shakespeare, I'm more interested in quality than quantity, possibly because I've got one eye on posterity.) Shapiro places these plays in their context while trying to piece together, from all available sources, Shakespeare's movements, anxieties, and interests. Both
Julius Caesar
and
Henry V
are shown to be more about England's conflict with Ireland than we had any hope of understanding without Shapiro's expert illumination; the section on
Hamlet
contains a long, lucid, and unfussy explanation of how Montaigne and his essays resulted in Hamlet's soliloquies. I'd say that
1599
has to be the first port of call now for anyone teaching or studying any of these four plays, but if you're doing neither of those things, it doesn't matter. The only thing you have to care about to love this book is how and why things get written.

The “why” is relatively straightforward: Shakespeare wrote for money. He had a wife, a new theater, and a large theater company to support, and there was a frightening amount of competition from other companies. The “how” is more elusive, although Shapiro does such a wonderful job of accumulating sources and inspirations that you don't really notice the absence of the man himself, who remains something of a mystery.

Claire Tomalin and James Shapiro take different paths to their writers: there is scholarship in Tomalin's book, of course, but she is more interested in the psychology of her subject, and in exercising her acute, sensitive critical skills than she is in history. Both books, though, are exemplary in their ability to
deepen one's understanding for and appreciation of the work, in their delight in being able to point out what's going on in the lines on the page. We're lucky to have both of these writers at the top of their game in the here and now.

Robert Altman's
Nashville
is one of my favorite films—or, at least, I think it is. I haven't seen it in a while, and the last time I did, I noticed the longueurs more than I ever had before. Maybe the best thing to do with favorite films and books is to leave them be: to achieve such an exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be re-created. Sometimes we want to revisit them in order to check whether they were really as good as we remember them being, but this has to be a suspect impulse, because what it presupposes is that we have more reason to trust our critical judgments as we get older, whereas I am beginning to believe that the reverse is true. I was eighteen when I saw
Nashville
for the first time, and I was electrified by its shifts in tone, its sudden bursts of feeling and meaning, its ambition, its occasional obscurity, even its pretensions. I don't think I'd ever seen an art movie before, and I certainly hadn't seen an art movie set in a world I recognized. So I came out of the cinema that night a slightly changed person, suddenly aware that there was a different way of doing things. None of that is going to happen again, but so what? And why mess with a good thing? Favorites should be left where they belong, buried somewhere deep in a past self.

Jan Stuart's
The Nashville Chronicles
is a loving account of the making of the film, and reading it was a good way of engaging with Altman's finest seven hours, or however long the thing was, without having to wreck it by watching it for a fourth or fifth time. And, in any case,
Nashville
is a film that relies on something other than script (which was thrown out of the window before shooting started) and conventional methods of filmmaking for its effects, so a book like this is especially valuable in helping us understand them. There was Altman's apparently haphazard casting—one actor was chosen when he came to another's house to give him guitar lessons, and Shelley Duvall was a student research-scientist before being co-opted into Altman's regular troupe. There was his famous
vérité
sound, which required the invention of a new recording system, and his reliance on improvisation, and his extraordinary
handling of crowd scenes, which required all cast members to improvise at all times, just in case he should pick them out with the camera… Actually, there's no way this film can be no good. Forget everything I said! Revisit your favorites regularly!

It's nice to be back.

May 2007

BOOKS BOUGHT
:

     
  
In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love
—Miranda Seymour

     
  
Collected Memoirs
—Julian Maclaren-Ross

     
  
Light Years
—James Salter

     
  
The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness
—Steven Levy

     
  
Tropic of Cancer
—Henry Miller

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Essays
—George Orwell

     
  
[some of]
The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness
—Steven Levy