March 26, 2012 Issue

This week, in the magazine, Judith Thurman and John Lahr revisit the subjects of two of their finest New Yorker pieces. Judith Thurman, in her “Radical Chic” writes about a Prada and Schiaparelli joint retrospective that opens in May at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and John Lahr, in his “Lives In Limbo,” reviews Mike Nichols’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Thurman previously wrote about Schiaparelli in her “Mother of Invention” (The New Yorker, October 27, 2003; included in her 2007 collection Cleopatra’s Nose). Lahr wrote about Death of a Salesman in his “Making Willy Loman” (The New Yorker, January 25, 1999; included in his 2000 collection Show and Tell). It’s interesting to compare their earlier pieces with what they’ve written now.

In “Radical Chic,” Thurman executes a number of minor variations on her earlier “Mother of Invention.” For example, “vagina-shaped fedora” is now “cocktail hats in the shape of a lamb chop, a high-heeled shoe, and a vagina.” “Tree bark rayon” has become “barklike crumpled silk.” And “swagger,” which was previously used in the phrase “racy swagger of the stars,” is repurposed in the new piece to form part of Thurman’s description of Schiaparelli’s “hard chic” (“the swagger of her broad-shouldered suits, the rawness of her furs and embroidery, and a tough attitude toward any simpering or mincing in fashion”). The most interesting variance between the two pieces is Thurman’s redeployment of “scarlet-clawed.” In “Mother of Invention,” “scarlet-clawed” occurs in this delightful line:

Joan Crawford brought her Schiaparellis back to Hollywood and threw them like a gauntlet at Adrian, who made their linebacker shoulders and lavish embellishment his own trademarks, and those of nearly every sinewy, flat-hipped, chain-smoking, man-eating, social-climbing, scarlet-clawed screen temptress of the thirties.

In “Radical Chic,” “scarlet-clawed” is clipped from Joan Crawford and attached to Wallis Simpson:

Dali had painted the skirt with a bright-red lobster, which matched its cummerbund, and Cecil Beaton photographed the future Duchess wearing it serenely, despite – or perhaps to mock – her reputation as a scarlet-clawed predator.

Comparing the two pieces, I think I prefer “Mother of Invention,” mainly because it contains that great “sinewy, flat-hipped, chain-smoking, man-eating, social-climbing, scarlet-clawed screen temptress of the thirties” line. Both articles are beauties.

Turning now to Lahr’s two “Death of a Salesman” pieces, I remember reading “Making Willy Loman,” when it first appeared in the magazine, and finding it fascinating. It describes how Miller came to write Death of a Salesman, the cabin he wrote it in, and his notebook for the play that “soon becomes an expansive, exact handwritten log of Miller’s contact with his inner voices.” I devoured Lahr’s quotations from the notebook and his descriptions of Miller’s use of them, e.g., “Here, as in all his notes for the play, Miller’s passion and his flow are apparent in the surprising absence of cross-outs; the pages exude a startling alertness.”

In “Making Willy Loman,” Lahr shows Miller’s method of composition. He traces the origins of Death of a Salesman back to Miller’s youth. He shows the use Miller made of seemingly stray material (e.g., the moment in 1947 when Miller’s uncle Manny Newman accosted him in the lobby of a theatre). But his interpretation of the play, as a dissection of “cultural envy in action,” strikes me as too brutally reductive. I much prefer the construction he puts forward in his new piece, “Lives In Limbo,” in which he says:

The revelation of this production – drawn out by Nichols’s seamless and limpid orchestration of Willy’s disconcerting flights of imagination (Miller’s original title for the play was “The Inside of His Head”) – is that Willy, for all his fervent dreams of the future and his fierce argument with the past, never, ever, occupies his present. Even as he fights, fumes, and flounders, he is sensationally absent from his life, a kind of living ghost. It is existence, not success, that eludes him. He inhabits a vast, restless, awful, and awesome isolation, which is both his folly and his tragedy.

A kind of living ghost. This is an interpretation of Willy Loman’s character that speaks to me. Lahr’s “Lives In Limbo” is a wonderful companion to his memorable “Making Willy Loman.” Both pieces are brilliant!