The Wild Party (book)

Queenie in "The Wild Party" 
(Art Spiegelman)

In February 1995, I traveled to New York City by train to visit my girlfriend.

My wife and I had separated, half of the furniture in the house we had purchased a little over year before was gone with her, and I had recently been diagnosed with a hernia for which I would receive surgery the following month. I was serving pizzas in an Uno’s in Lyndhurst, I had no theatrical prospects at all. I was twenty-six.

The train was comfortable, and warm, unless I leaned close to the window, which was frosted. The northeast was in a cold snap, NYC that week would be the coldest I have ever experienced. Still on the train, I opened my new laptop (with the last of the black and white screens) and began to write a play about vampires.

My girlfriend worked at the Shakespeare & Company at 81st and Broadway, the one featured in When Harry Met Sally (“Someone is staring at you in Personal Growth”) and while she was on I browsed and read and even bought, or walked around the corner to Café Lalo to sit and sip and write.

One book I picked up at that time was a recently released hardcover edition of the poem The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March, and illustrated by Art Spiegelman (Maus). I’m not sure what caught my eye about it. Maybe it was Spiegelman. Maybe it was the claim that the poem was “lost”. Maybe it was the 20s. Maybe it was my 20s.

At that time I had only a passing interest in the 1920s, though it was piqued that week as we saw the Alan Rudolph film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle at some little theater in the East Fifties which surely doesn’t exist any more. At that time I was into generational theory and turned onto the idea that the Lost Generation and that generation we call “X” had much in common. Aimless, rootless, artistic, unbound, nihilistic, you know … “whatever.”

Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle

As Spiegelman points out in his introduction, the Lost Generation “swilled gin” while ours “gulps Prozac.” Of course, the Lost Generation also experienced the horrors of World War One while ours had to, what? Make our own dinner? Learn about adult relationships from The Piña Colada Song?

Mrs. Parker is a biopic, starring the incomparable Jennifer Jason Leigh, and it was easy to overlook her personal disappointments and misery when she and Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott) were writing away at facing typewriters, creating threadbare stage performances, or trading witticisms in the Algonquin. 

We could do all of this, though standing in the smoldering remains of Guerrilla Theater Co. I no longer knew who “we” were. 

The Wild Party is told in rhyming, irregular couplets, March’s meter is what makes the piece sing, the timing of the rhymes is irreverent, in places obscene, always funny, and very funny. And the subject is so sordid! A showgirl named Queenie and a clown with a violent temper named Burrs decide to throw a wild party, and that’s really it.

There is drink, there is dance. There is an orgy. A teenager is assaulted, and the fighting begins. Burrs discovers Queenie having sex with another man, things go tragic. Then the cops arrive, the end.

Spiegelman doesn’t get in the way of the narrative, just promotes it with his graphic imagery. It has a hard-boiled quality, like Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. Handsome guys have square jaws, Burrs is long and narrow like a villain. I do question why there is so much female nudity, but only female nudity.

The Secret Adversary
(A Tommy & Tuppence Adventure)

The 1920s were transgressive, folks were pushing back against their hopelessness with wildness and pleasure. The 90s were hardly hard times for us, but I certainly felt a little lost. 

I began casting about everywhere for inspiration, though it wasn’t until my two Agatha Christie adaptations, nearly twenty years later, that I took the opportunity to focus on the 20s. Tommy and Tuppence, however, are far too sweet and hopeful, especially as compared to the jaded Queenie and Burrs. 

In 1995, I channeled my nihilistic tendencies into the contemporary milieu of a vampire-themed coffee bar.

Reception

re·cep·tion (n.)
1. the action or process of receiving something sent, given, or inflicted.
2. a formal social occasion held to welcome someone or to celebrate a particular event.
3. the area in a hotel, office, or other establishment where guests and visitors are greeted and dealt with.

During my twenties I was enamored of Alan Rudolph’s Lost Generation duology, The Moderns (1988) and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994). The first is an historical fiction, about American expatriate artists in Paris, the second a bit more fact-based and centering around the character of Dorothy Parker and those of the Algonquin Set.

As one who thought of myself an artist (of what I had not yet come to appreciate) and the member of a generation with much in common with those bright young things of the 1920s (we can have this argument later) the keen wit and desperate romanticism of Rudolph’s characters and the painful longing of Mark Isham’s scores filled this young adult with a deep heart hurt for which I had no actual life experience to deserve. Not yet. Not even close.

When my then-girlfriend Toni moved to Cleveland from New York City, we sat around my house, unbelievably big and comfortable for two people (so it now appears, with two ever-growing teenagers) drinking, smoking, and screwing and having delightful, indulgent fantasies about hosting a salon in our parlor, inviting all our friends who, like those in the Algonquin were not yet but but would someday be famous.

I got shitfaced in the Algonquin the night before I proposed marriage, you know. But that is an entirely other story.

Anyway. It’s like when I directed my first solo performance in 1998 and Chris Johnston said I should write a one-man show for myself to perform and I said, what do I have to talk about on stage by myself for one hour that would interest anyone? Be careful what you ask for.

Regardless, our salon never happened. Then Trump got elected.

Like so many, we wanted to do something, We felt alone, and wanted connection. The intent was not to create a political event, those needs would be satisfied by marches, phone calls and letter writing, and general wokeness. But making sense of the senselessness, to speak but also to listen, to provide a safe space for the free exchange of ideas, to begin and hopefully to continue a conversation.

It was Toni’s idea. I wish I could remember the first names she came up with, they all sounded a bit too clever, like the Be-Sharps -- witty at first, but less funny each time you hear it. I pressed her to come up with something that might last a while, beyond our current emergency, and she soon arrived at the name Reception. A fact, but also clever, but also open to interpretation.

But why this now? Almost two years ago Toni Morrison wrote an article in which she recalled Bush’s reelection in 2004. A friend asked if she was in despair, to which she replied, No! “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.” And so it is today.

Once a week, because once a month would not only be not enough, but would make it all the more likely we would cancel or postpone. Since the first weekend of December we have opened our door every Sunday (Christmas and New Year’s excepted) to share books, stories, articles, rants, scripts, artwork, ideas, poetry, video, song, whatever with whomever arrives.

There are drinks and snacks for pretty much exactly two hours and then we get on with our lives, hopeful in the notion that at least we have been heard.

The Paris Wife (book)

Paris, 1926. There was nothing more modern.

Twenty years ago this spring I was introduced to the soundtrack for the Alan Rudolph film The Moderns. The soundtrack first, not the film. I was couch-living in the apartment of two friends in Los Angeles. One old friend, and one new. The new friend was an aspiring film composer, his CD and cassette collection was overrun with film scores. The Moderns score was composed by Mark Isham (Romeo Is Bleeding, Quiz Show) and features original compositions and a few tracks from the period.
The music is jazz, some played on piano and sung by Charlélie Couture and there are lush, yearning themes, some based on period melodies.  There are twos version of Parlez Moi D’amour (Speak to Me of Love) both “retro” and “moderne”.

I had no reason to be in Los Angeles in the Spring of 1991, except that I had friends there and thought I was supposed to go somewhere.  I couldn’t stay in Athens (well, I could have) and I couldn’t go home (well, I could have) and I had no imagination of my own so I went where my pals were, on the edge of America.

For two months I slacked. It should have been a vacation, a playground. And I tried to make it one, we shot amateur video, I wrote and recorded a few songs, tried to create a new comic strip (always, always trying to create a new comic strip.)  I read novels, I kept fit, I did not smoke, drank little, tried to do the beach thing, tried to do the bar thing … always wearing the wrong clothes, with the wrong hair.  I wrote desperate postcards to my estranged girlfriend back home.  And I listened to music, all the time.  No TV. Only music.

The sound of The Moderns soundtrack was mournfully romantic to me.  It made me want to go to there, and I didn’t even know where there was. I knew nothing of the 1920s, not really, and certainly not expatriate Americans in Paris. I expressed my interest in renting the movie. My friends said that would be a bad idea.

Finally, the night before I was to head home for a conjugal visit with my ex, the guys thought I may be able to deal with it.  And I didn’t like it, the movie. I had created something else in my head, a different picture that the film could not live up to. It seemed too flat to me, too silly.

But I was wrong. I watched it again, a month later, after I had returned home to Cleveland in June 1991. And I saw that it was not silly, it was funny. A cartoon of 20s Paris, or a caricature like the kind the Keith Carradine character draws.  That’s not Hemingway, that’s an idea of Hemingway, of Gertrude Stein.  When I hear descriptions of the Paris as reflected in the new Woody Allen movie I think, that that is also supposed to be Owen Wilson’s character’s idealized version of Paris and not the place itself, I think, well, I’ve seen that already.

And once I accepted The Moderns on its own terms, the more it sunk into my heart. The longing, the painting, the smoking, the drinking. We risk everything, for love and for art, don’t we?

Only I don’t. I never have. I have only risked everything for love, and never for art. I was also reading Tom Robbins’s new novel, Skinny Legs and All at that time. Art and love. And sex. But never art without love, never sex without love, not for me.  I risked everything I had, once, for love. Thank God I was right.

In the coldest snap of early 1995, I was holed up with my lover in New York for a week.  The divorce would not be finalized until later that year.  We were both sniffly and a little feverish, but we got out as often as possible, to see everything, to do everything.  We saw Rudolph’s new picture, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. Soundtrack again by Isham. Same period (more or less) only now New York and not Paris.  Now, writing, instead of painting.  More drinking, more smoking.  Great hats.  Everyone is so fucking witty.

I love that movie, too.  I had a foolish fantasy once upon a time of creating that kind of fascinating life here in Cleveland.  We would have salons and write great novels and plays and created fabulous portraits of each other and so beautiful places and be beautiful people.  Only that’s ridiculous.  There is nothing glamorous about Cleveland, beautiful, sure, but not fabulous.  Important and true and honest and angry and warm and eternally hopeful, that is Cleveland.  I quickly abandoned such pretensions and chose instead in my advanced 20s to concentrate and who we are, in reality. And on, with eternal hopefulness, to be happy.  To have love.

Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, if you were not already aware, is about Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson.  And putting her in the center of a novel about that time in that pace is itself a challenge, and also so ideal. Who is Hadley?  She didn’t write anything, or paint anything, she drank as much as most but not as much as some, she promoted her husband’s work and was honest and devoted and had his first child (you know, that we know of) and was there, always there, for him, even if not anywhere to be found in the pages of In Our Time.

The Hemingway of The Moderns is a hilarious supporting character.  He’s young and giving to outbursts of pique but mostly broods drunkenly at the periphery.  He does not have a wife, or even a girlfriend, because that factual picture does not fit the monument he created for himself in his work.

Hadley’s sole (obvious) artistic endeavor is her talent with the piano, but a scheduled recital is abruptly cancelled when her relationship with Hemingway begins to unravel. (Did I neglect to provide a spoiler alert? We know Hemingway’s first marriage ended, right, that’s why it’s called that.) Because some people cannot perform when they hurt. People like me.

I am Hadley Richardson.

The Paris Wife came to me at just the right time. I don’t think I would have enjoyed it, or the protagonist, twenty years ago, though maybe that is a shame.  I believed The Moderns when I was young, the idealized version of art and love, which makes love look like a game, and that love is an inspiration and the art will pour out of you into the universe. This novel reflects the hard fact that love and trust and acceptance are to me as necessary as food or air, without which I cannot work. And that art is work, that art never pours freely from any orifice, that it must be forced out, and wrought.  Life is work, and love is work, and art is work.

And if you are good at your work, then you may be happy.