Books and Plays That Changed My Life
© 1999, 2003, 2009 David Scott Marley
I wrote this in 1999. I had seen a similar list on a friend's website and was taken with the urge to do the same. These are more or less in the order I first encountered them.
The Bible
For much of my life I rebelled against Christianity. I've now pretty much made my peace with it. I'm not a Christian except in the sense that I live in a Christian culture, and yet that's turned out to be a very important sense. Christian stories and symbols and images are in my blood; they're part of the culture I live in. Whether or not I believe that the story of Noah literally happened (to take a fairly trivial example), the story has been familiar to me as long as I can remember. It's better to make peace with what's indelibly part of you, and find what resonance and strength it has for you.
There's much that is good in the Bible, and we should be reclaiming it from those who have used it for too long to justify their own idolatry and selfishness. Unfortunately there are a lot of such people in this country, and they have a lot of power. And too many others have concluded as a result that Christianity itself must be thoroughly evil because evil people claim to practice it. No. We shouldn't give up our culture without a fight.
This new zeal is a recent change in me, but the Bible is first on this list because I first encountered it in Sunday school when very young.
[Some years later: I now consider myself to be a Christian, of a Gnostic bent, as well as a Taoist and a Buddhist. I no longer think these are incompatible philosophies. I'm also a Jew by birth, though I found that out only late in life.]
Martin Gardner's collected columns from Scientific American
It was a shock to me when Gardner moved on to other things. His "Mathematical Games" column turned me on at a very young age to a lifelong interest both in mathematics and in games. I realized that these books had been part of my earliest memories of reading, and therefore I had started following them just a few years after he started writing them. In other words, my intellectual life and this column were pretty closely tied up to that point. It had always been there, and I'd never really thought about what life would be like without it. Well, things change and we all move on.
I own some back issues of Games and Puzzles magazine that once belonged to Gardner, and tucked into some of the issues are carbon copies of a few letters he wrote. It's nothing terribly important but it's a nice souvenir of a very significant writer in my life.
Which brings me to:
Games and Puzzles magazine
I devoured it all through junior high and high school. I particularly liked anything by Richard Sharp, a good and funny writer. When I was the review editor at Games magazine, I tried to recreate something of the same spirit in my little section of the magazine. (I had the great good fortune to have my dream job before I was 30, so I could get the disillusionment out of the way early.) I made my living much my life as a constructor and editor of puzzles, and for a while it was a good way to pay the rent while I write.
The Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas
A youthful infatuation. I'm deeply appreciative that I went through it, and I'm even more appreciative I long ago left it behind. Not that I don't still enjoy the works, but they belong to a different era. My writing is better for my having imitated Gilbert when I was in high school and college, but it's still better for my having moved on.
Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope and other collections
Twenty-five years later, I can still detect her style in mine. At least I hope so. Not in the content, but in the style. The way she said things in a simple way, stripped down to the minimum. The way the pain of what she wrote about contrasts with the matter-of-fact way she wrote it. It's hard enough in prose; to do it in verse is astonishing. I still admire it tremendously. When I was younger I liked the wittier verses better; now the darker, more serious ones interest me more. There are many other poets I like and admire even more than Parker, but this is about the ones who changed the course of my life in some way and had they not existed my life would not have been much different. Parker's work has limitations, but had she not lived my writing would have been much different.
Another poet I like a lot is Edgar Allan Poe. But I don't hear his influence in my work as a matter of course; only when I'm using a Poeish device deliberately to get a certain effect.
James Branch Cabell, Jurgen
When I was in high school I just liked this book because it was bawdy and picaresque. The older I get, though, the more I return to it and the more it speaks to my life. I only recently realized that it's a comment on Goethe's Faust, too. But then despite several starts I've yet to read Faust all the way through and I've read Jurgen four or five times.
(Some years later: I have now read Faust, Part I, thanks to Randall Jarrell's wonderful translation. Definitely a silent-upon-a-peak-of-Darien experience.)
Because of Jurgen I've read other books by Cabell, and even acquired a fairly rare set of his works. I haven't read them all yet, but I've read some. Some are just entertainments, but in others he melds good storytelling with something deeper. His Figures of Earth, for example, is not only a funny book, but it says much that's painfully true about our existence that I've never heard another author say. The way he mixes satire and humor and wit and a statement about humankind all together is something I aspire to in my own writing.
From Jurgen I got the first outside confirmation that someone other than me found life to be a profound dark comedy. I already felt this, but didn't trust in my own feelings. In school I was encouraged to see life as a very serious affair, and to dismiss the comic point of view as being pleasant but trivial. But I didn't and don't believe any of that in my heart. Jurgen helped me listen to my heart.
As it happens, I don't think there's really anything to be done about it. For better and for worse, my writing is at least somewhat comic even when there are serious issues at stake, and I can't change who I am or how I see things. But I've also learned over the years that comedy and tragedy are very close. The difference is not so much one of subject matter but of attitude. Both can encompass serious issues. And while tragedy is the mode of regret, comedy is the mode of forgiveness.
Without intending it, I find that everything I write turns out to be about folly, illusion, self-deception. I said to my partner Dave a while back that I was pleased that in The Riot Grrrl on Mars I had written the first piece in a long time that wasn't ultimately about self-deception. He asked me if I was kidding, and pointed out that it's all about a Martian who's tricked by his own illusions about Earthlings. I hadn't seen it before. I guess there's some self-deception about my own work, too, even when I'm writing something that light.
Tom Hood, The Rules of Rhyme
This little volume is undated but from around 1870. It contains much good sense about writing verse, and was one of my first and most influential guides. I still believe what it says about verse, and I still hear Hood over my shoulder, pointing a finger at any sign of sloppiness. Incidentally, Parker was also a fan of Hood; she may well have read this book, too. I also own an American copy of its revision, The Rhymester, dated 1882.
Clement Wood, The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book
I don't always agree with Wood's ideas about what rhymes and what doesn't, and my copy is full of handwritten annotations. (Two copies, actually, because I'm now using the revision by Ronald Bogus, but still keep my first copy for the sentiment.) It's been my most important reference book, though. The introduction is a fascinating and detailed essay about verse forms, too. I cross out (in pencil, in case I change my mind later) the words that I don't think really rhyme, add cross-references to words that Wood thought didn't rhyme but which do to my ear, add my own words (especially slang and foreign terms, which are fun to use and which the book tends to miss), and keep a list of trick rhymes on a blank page in the back. (If I'm really really lucky, I'll find a way to work in maybe one of them per libretto. Maybe. I don't know why I bother sometimes. I'll probably never have a situation where it makes sense to rhyme, say, extremity and Yosemite. But the list keeps getting longer anyway.)
Wood's is the rhyming dictionary of choice for two reasons: one is the splendid essay in the front, and the other is because it lists words in columns, making the lists much easier to scan. All other rhyming dictionaries I know list them going across in lines with words separated by commas, which is more space-efficient but not as easy on the eyes.
Theodore L. Shaw, Precious Rubbish
I picked up this tiny volume on a whim from the 95¢ table of a used book dealer when I was about halfway through college. I took it home and read it, and it blew apart my brain. Most of the book is an attack on common ideas about art criticism: that we should always do things in the "best" way or even that there is such a thing, that there is such a thing as the "test of time", that most of what passes for art criticism makes rational sense even on its own terms. I grew up believing what art critics said, thinking that if I just tried harder to understand them, I could get at enlightenment about art. Not after reading this book, though.
It also contains the only statement of why we want art in our lives that has really made sense to me. Though the book is largely about criticism and theory of painting, it's easy to apply it to other art forms, including theater.
I used to say that I had bought the only copy I had ever seen (not just seen for sale, but ever seen), but a few years ago I actually stumbled across another copy of this book at a used book dealer, and of course I bought it and gave it to a good friend who I thought might understand why it was important to me.
Anyway, this little book probably changed my life more than any other.
Floyd Dell, Intellectual Vagabondage
This is another small volume. What ever happened to books that you really could slip into a pocket? Nowadays the same book that used to be a slim Modern Library volume is five times the size.
I'm not so sure this book would be so important to me if I hadn't come across it halfway through college when I was ready to have some illusions blown away. I came across it at a Goodwill or Salvation Army, I forget which. There it was, hiding among all the Reader's Digest Condensed Books and suchlike, just waiting to twist my head around.
I loved its tone. Dell seems not to have been showing off how smart he was, but was just a man concerned that he hasn't seen these ideas explained clearly, and thinks that a basic understanding of the subject makes life a little more comprehensible. The tone is that of a heart-to-heart talk between friends; he has some concerns he'd like to get off his chest, and thinks perhaps you'll profit from hearing them. I think the down-to-earth yet colorful style of the book attracted me even more than the subject matter. In so many ways I was taught in school that pretension was part of what made writing good; this was a beacon saying that there was integrity in stating things plainly and honestly as you saw them, and admitting that you don't know everything. A hard lesson to learn, and all the harder when your whole youth is about maintaining a false front for your own survival. (I grew up gay in Orange County, California, which at the time was a very homophobic place. Maybe it still is; I don't go back much.) I still reread this book every few years, and I wish I had more of its style. But then I'm not Floyd Dell and shouldn't try to be. And I admit after 20 years or so the book seems slighter to me than it once did.
This is a history of intellectual trends, as reflected in the books that became very popular in various times. Dell starts with Robinson Crusoe and ends in the 1920s, when the book was written, explaining why Byron and Ibsen and Darwin and Huxley and the rest were so important to the readers of their times. And he shows how an understanding of what went before helps one understand the way things are now. It's just a social history; he doesn't talk about the aesthetics of literature at all. That's it.
This book was also one of my first encounters with an important truth of art: that your work is powerful not because you convey a new emotion to the audience, but because you tap into an emotion the audience already feels but can't express. That means a work of art isn't good or bad in and of itself; it gets its value from how observers (readers, in the case of literature) relate to it. Literature critics and other academic types don't very often admit to this, because it means that you can't say that Work X is objectively better or worse than Work Y. You can only say that it's better or worse in relation to particular observers, and that's entirely too relative for them. I've learned firsthand with my own writing that this is true: a play is defined both by its writer and by its audience.
George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara
In six years of college I was taught that theater shouldn't be any fun. No one actually said this, but that's what it boiled down to. This play showed me that theater could be fun and still say difficult things. Now we've been working our way through Shaw in our playreading group. I still don't think the very earliest plays completely work. It still seems to me that Mrs. Warren's Profession is badly constructed, and trying too hard to be unpopular for the sake of being unpopular. But from Arms and the Man on, he found a method of saying controversial things while being entertaining. That's what I think theater has to be about. The echoes from my first encounter with Major Barbara (at the South Coast Repertory Theater) still reverberate faintly, some 15 years later. I also saw a wonderful Arms and the Man in Manhattan, twice (I went back), with Kevin Kline, Glenne Headley, and Raul Julia. It was enchanting and disturbing at the same time.
Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
I own several different translations. I've felt very close to Taoism at times in my life, and this book has been a great source of strength and wisdom.
I've also felt close to Buddhism. By the time I first encountered the Four Noble Truths in college, I'd already independently come up with something very like the first three as guiding principles in my life. I had no idea up to then that anybody else in the world felt that way, so it was a shock to find out that what I thought was a private conclusion was in fact believed by millions. And of course there's so much more beyond what I'd already concluded.
I was something of a Buddhist much of my life, but lately I've had to admit to myself that however much I'm attracted to Eastern religions, they're still from somebody else's culture, not mine, and that I'd better work on finding a source of strength and wisdom in those symbols and ideas that have been part of me since childhood. To reject that big and fundamental a part of yourself, whatever you think about it, is not good.
Lehman Engel, Words with Music
A book about writing librettos. I was also in the Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop for several years, but I'd read and reread this book before I ever thought I'd be part of the workshop.
Lehman was talking here specifically about writing musicals, but I've found it useful to bring a lot of the same craft to opera librettos. I still believe in a lot of what he taught: the need for specificity in lyrics, the use of a subplot, how to keep a plot forward-moving. It was Lehman who taught me how to introduce your main characters; I messed up on opening night with the opening to Beatrice and Benedick, but thanks to what I'd learned from Lehman I knew how to fix it quickly after one performance. (See the notes to that opera if you're interested in hearing more about that.)
I've come to have stronger and more specific ideas about how to write a libretto, though. And Lehman was a conductor, not a writer, so he didn't know what details writers really go through. I've toyed with the idea of writing a book about the subject. It would be a small one. The first section would be on how to write a single line of dialogue. The second section would be how to put two lines of dialogue next to each other. (These things are even different from most non-musical playwriting, I believe.) Only from there would I go on to how to write a scene, and only then a whole libretto. Small things first; I think that's how you really learn anything.
Alec Wilder, American Popular Song
An amazing book, teaching me to look at the music of a song in a detailed, thoughtful way, and to realize that even light music involves great craftsmanship. If I'd never read this book, I wonder if I'd have ever seen what's remarkable and even brilliant about, say, Irving Berlin.
A lot of songwriters don't have a very high estimate of Irving Berlin, dismissing his songs as facile without ever looking too closely at them. I shared that prejudice, but this book shook it up. I became more cautious about accepting popular artistic prejudices, learning to admire (not merely enjoy) even such well-known punching bags as Tchaikovsky and Offenbach.
I bought this book on a trip to San Francisco, when I was still living in Orange County. It was my second trip to San Francisco and a friend of mine thought it would be funny to arrange to meet at the Fairmont. I had no idea it was at the top of a steep hill. He didn't tell me, though he knew I was on foot. On the way up Powell Street (pant!) I had a little extra time, so I stopped at Hunter's Books and came across this to read later.
Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, Sweeney Todd
This seems to me to be the best piece for the musical theater ever written, and for a long time I was under its spell, trying like so many to come up with another piece like it. There's a lot of Sweeney Todd in some of my earliest tries at writing musicals. Eventually I discovered that what I wanted to write about wasn't always what Sondheim wanted to write about. Then for a while I defined myself as how I differed from Sondheim. Well, that's the next phase, I guess. Now I don't define my writing in reaction to anyone's, but getting to that place took a lot of writing. I still think this is a magnificent theater piece, and it had its sway over me for several years.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
I'm very fond of all six novels by Austen, but this one also has had great personal resonance for me. This was the last of the six that I read, too. By nature I'm too much like Elinor, and though the novel shows her in a rather better light than Marianne, you see at the end that her extreme "good sense" has also deprived her of the comfort of her friends and family. I tend to be a loner and it's hard to learn that I shouldn't always keep my sorrows to myself.
I think Emma is a more remarkable book, in terms of craft and skill, but this is the one that really speaks to me the most.
Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus
It's hard for me to pick just one of Davies's books. Others are probably greater achievements. I'm dazzled by the rich and complex handling of themes in Fifth Business, for instance, which I don't think he matches here. But it's The Lyre of Orpheus that has come to speak to me most intimately. It's about many things, but mostly about the making of a new opera, from first sketches to opening night. It says a lot of good things about why and how art works on us. A close second would be What's Bred in the Bone, about which the same is true but the art this time is painting. The trilogy, though, is best read in order; The Rebel Angels, then What's Bred in the Bone, and finally The Lyre of Orpheus. Each novel is very much connected to what's gone before.
Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles
Peter: You see, my world gets narrower and narrower. A person only has so many close friends. And in our lives, our friends are our families. I'm actually quite hurt you don't understand that. I'm very sorry you don't find that comforting.
When I saw this play, I realized that without knowing it I've wanted to say that for years to every straight friend I know. I can't be objective about this play. Now, if the speech hadn't been there, I still would have liked the play. I know this for a fact because I was already enjoying it, all through an act and a half, long before I felt the earthquake when Peter spoke those lines.
I must have been ready to hear them, ready to stand up for the validity of what I was doing, to tell my friends that they if they wanted me to make room for them in my life, they had to accept me as I was. I was bitter that so many of my straight friends advised me to cut myself loose from my friend David as he died of AIDS, for example, and yet I hadn't yet admitted those feelings to myself.
I got to speak the lines once playing Peter in a playreading circle. Okay, the speech probably doesn't do anything for you. I understand. Sometimes lightning hits you and someone right next to you doesn't hear the crash at all.
William Finn, Falsettoland
When I was still in college, I picked up the album of a new one-act musical called March of the Falsettos. I didn't like it much; too confusing and unclear. It came to Los Angeles and I was uncertain whether I should go, but about a week before it was going to close I decided it would at least be a learning experience, and I went. And I loved the show and went back two more times the following week. Somehow the staging made everything clear that wasn't clear from the album.
So some 15 years or so later I was living in New York City and William Finn had written a sequel. It was presented with March of the Falsettos as the first half, and the sequel, Falsettoland, as the second. It made for a slightly long evening but once it started, I don't think anyone noticed.
About halfway through Falsettoland something very unusual happened. A part of the audience -- and I'm not talking about a few people, I mean something like a quarter of them -- began sobbing openly and uncontrollably. I was one of them, too; I was dealing with a dear friend's death from AIDS myself, and I was overcome with grief from what I saw onstage. I've never experienced that kind of outpouring in a theater before. I understand from others that this happened at just about every performance.
In retrospect, I realize that -- apart from the catharsis -- I also received a vivid demonstration that, once again, a work gets its power by tapping an emotion that the audience already feels but can't express. I can see a lot of flaws in the show, if I look at it objectively. In the first half we see -- and in quite a lot of psychological detail -- the breakup of Marvin and Whizzer's relationship. In the second half they get back together, and shouldn't it be stated somewhere what exactly has changed to make this possible? They're the same people, and not significantly older and wiser, so it shouldn't make sense; but Finn wanted to write about a loving gay couple separated by AIDS, and he wanted to use the same characters from March of the Falsettos, so we just have to accept it.
Somehow the flaws don't matter. I still cry when I listen to the album, too. I miss you, David.
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Okay, the second half is too long and there are a few too many wisecracks. I still went back to see the whole enormous thing a second time, and have read the play several times since. Once again, saying controversial things yet being entertaining, too. Kushner was consciously following Shaw to some degree; the subtitle of the play alludes to the subtitle of Shaw's Heartbreak House. The things it said need to be said again and again. Homosexuality is part of the national Shadow (in the Jungian sense), more projected upon than known, and bad things are resulting from this society's repulsion of it. Like it or not, it's always been and will always be a part of us as a species, and the sooner we start to deal with it seriously, the better. Few other plays have so much as acknowledged this, and none have done it a fraction so powerfully.
John J. McNeill, Freedom, Glorious Freedom
More than any other (including McNeill's other books, which I've also liked a lot), this book has helped me to find a personal meaning in Christianity. Though I'm not a Christian, it's still my culture, and I'm better off finding those parts of it that mean something to me than rejecting it wholesale.