PORTABLE MAGIC
‘Book Haul’ by Cecil Robin Singalaoa, watercolor on cotton rag paper, 2020, 4×6 inches
The title, The Poet at the Piano, beckoned to me like a sweetly enticing siren call while I was browsing the secondhand bookshelves at The Last Bookstore at 453 Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles. There was the author’s name, too: Michiko Kakutani, a feared and revered former book critic of The New York Times. That clinched my decision to take down the book, dust it off, and add it to a basket I was lugging around the cavernous building back in 2019.
Another factor pushing me to buy the five-dollar book was the dust jacket—a detail from Gustav Klimt’s Rosebushes Under the Trees. We’re told to not judge a book by its cover, but this was an exemption. Klimt is up there for me alongside Henri Matisse and Georgia O’Keeffe. I am digressing.
This recent Holy Week, I reread The Poet at the Piano with an eye for more telling details that I might have missed during the first cursory reading.
What’s important is this foundling, a rare copy of Kakutani’s first book, published in 1988, gathers her profiles of artists at work. They include authors Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, John Cheever, Joan Didion, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, William Styron, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty and Elie Wiesel; directors Ingmar Bergman, David Byrne, Brian De Palma, Louis Malle, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Billy Wilder; playwrights and producers Jules Feiffer, Arthur Miller, Joseph Papp, Sam Shepard, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Tennessee Williams and Lanford Wilson; performers Mercer Ellington, John Gielgud, Audrey Hepburn, Lena Horne, Liza Minnelli, Paul Newman, Laurence Olivier, and Joan Plowright.
The title takes off from a verse by Wallace Stevens called Mozart, 1935:
Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation
If there is a masterclass in cultural reporting, reading Kakutani is like auditing one. There’s a sense of eavesdropping on intimate conversations.
When reading Kakutani, there’s a sense of eavesdropping on intimate conversations.
Nobel Laureate Bellow, author of Augie March, Humboldt’s Gift, among other novels, confessed to who his idol was—Mozart—because of “this rapturous singing for me that’s always on the edge of sadness and melancholy and disappointment and heartbreak, but always ready for an outburst of the most delicious music. I found Mozart temperamentally so congenial. I’m not claiming the same range of talent, but I often feel an affinity with him.”
The blind Borges revealed to the reporter that “reading has been a way of living…the only possible fate for me was a literary life. I can’t think of myself in a bookless world. I need books. They mean everything to me.”
The “thin, gracious, and very European” Hepburn said in that voice that made one think she was eating mint-flavored chocolate marbles, “Movies have no bearing in my private life. The fact I’ve made movies doesn’t mean breakfast gets made or that my child does better in his homework. I still have to function as a woman in a household.” In short, she is no sheltered modern princess, Princess Anne in Roman Holiday notwithstanding.
Even Scorsese thought aloud in his interview that he had come to understand why people stopped making movies: “…to make films in such an impassioned way, you really have to believe in it, you’ve really got to want to tell the story, and after a while, you may find out that life itself is more important than the filmmaking process.”
Why talk to a reporter, specifically Kakutani, on their motives and technique? She answers that they do “in the hope that such discussions may shed light on their craft, prevent misinterpretations, perhaps inspire or provoke others.”
Most of the interviews were tape-recorded despite the author’s mistrust in such devices (she still took her notebook along). She wrote, “…someone’s voice on tape has its advantages. It helps ensure factual accuracy, and it helps capture elusive verbal rhythms and inflections—and often, the reporter learns, the way people express things can be as revealing as what they actually say.”
On Didion’s “relentless self-scrutiny,” the author wrote, “One suspects that writing holds for her a kind of talismanic power—the process of putting her life on paper somehow helps to exorcise private demons. Writing…is a means of creating a momentary stay against confusion, of making order out of disorder, understanding out of fear.”
Meeting Gordimer, she describes the South African fictionist as “a small woman with a strong voice and clear vision” who “speaks with the same unsentimental precision that animates her stories. While much of her work emerges as an indictment of apartheid, her prose is rarely didactic; rather, her method is to observe, carefully and closely, the consequences that politics has on the lives of individuals.”
Not only does she listen; she prepares way in advance, reading up on the subject’s body of work
Here is Kakutani’s strength. Not only does she listen, and listen attentively at that; she prepares way in advance, reading up on, or viewing, the subject’s body of works. Woe is he/she who comes before a great presence without doing any homework. It just wasn’t done for a certain generation of reporters. How will the conversation take off without a thorough background study of the subject?
When Kakutani, called Michi by colleagues, retired from The Times, it was cause for headlines not just in her home paper. Her executive editor, Dean Baquet, wrote: “Reviewing a book is harder than it looks. It is not enough to read a writer’s latest novel or a single epic biography of a world leader and offer an opinion. To prepare for just one review, Michi and her colleagues read previous work, looking for recurring characters and themes, and to figure out whether a book stands up to its predecessors. They carry entire libraries in their heads.”
Other books of Kakutani available through Lazada Philippines are: Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread and The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.
