The December 31 issue of the New York Times carried an article on the work of psychiatrist Joseph J. Schildkraut. Dr. Schildkraut’s early interest in the paintings of Spanish artist Joan Miro led him to explore the connection between depression and creativity.

Examining the Abstract Impressionists, such as Rothko, Gorky and Pollack, Dr. Schildkraut found that about half of them suffered from depressive disorders and preoccupation with death. He came to the ironic conclusion that it was precisely these suicidal tendencies that fueled these artists’ creative powers. Depression, he wrote, “may have put them in touch with the inexplicable mystery at the very heart of the tragic and timeless art that they aspired to produce.”

The article went on to suggest that Dr. Schildkraut’s theories confront society with a moral dilemma: Does restoring a troubled creative mind to full mental health mean that our culture may lose uncreated masterpieces?

Reading the article reminded me of a time when I heard the poet Richard Wilbur give a public reading of his work. By way of introduction to his poem, “Cottage Street, 1953”, Professor Wilbur explained that he was once asked to counsel a seriously troubled young woman who had shown enormous promise as a poet.

The young woman, a junior at Smith College, was afflicted with severe depression. In her despair, she became obsessed with the idea that a poet had to suffer deeply in order to create. She found the prospect unendurable, and so had attempted suicide.

The young woman’s name was Sylvia Plath.

Mutual friends pleaded with Wilbur –- an established poet who enjoyed both artistic and financial success and a happy home life to boot –- to explain to the poor girl that one could be a poet without paying an intolerable price in mental torment for the privilege.

A meeting was arranged between Sylvia and her mother and Wilbur and his wife at the home of Wilbur’s mother-in-law, Edna Ward. It was a dismal failure, as Wilbur recounts in his poem:

It is my office to exemplify
The published poet in his happiness,
Thus cheering Sylvia, who has wished to die;
But half-ashamed, and impotent to bless,

How large is her refusal; and how slight
The genteel chat whereby we recommend
Life, of a summer afternoon, despite
The brewing dusk which hints that it may end.

For Sylvia, life ended with a successful suicide in 1963. Despite Wilbur’s compassion and common sense advice, she would, in his words,

…study for a decade, as she must
To state at last her brilliant negative
In poems free and helpless and unjust.

Is mental illness inseparable from creativity? Not for every artist, to be sure. But for too many of them, it seems, they must descend to hell before they can scale the heavens.

Mr. Speaker, what is the meaning of that beautiful statue over your clock at the entrance to this hall? Sir, it is the Muse of History in her car, looking down on the members of this House and reminding them that as the hour passes, she is in the attitude of recording whatever they say or do on this floor.

The year was 1834; the place was the old House of Representatives in the U.S. Capitol; the speaker was John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States and the only former president ever to serve in Congress after leaving the White House.

The statue to which Adams referred is still there –- an exquisite representation in marble of the Muse of History in her chariot, tablet in hand, to record events as they unfold. The wheel of her chariot is the face of a clock. When I worked on Capitol Hill, I would often stop to admire the statue whenever I passed by.

The House –- and the Senate too –- have long since moved to more spacious wings on either side of the Capitol, leaving the statue behind. But, whether present in a marble reminder or not, history rolls on, and the Muse still records whatever our elected representatives say or do.

And politicians still appeal to history –- the history that is past, or the history that they hope to leave behind. In an op/ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, President George W. Bush did a bit of both. He said this:

Our Founders believed in the wisdom of the American people to choose their leaders and provided for the concept of divided and effective government. The majority party in Congress gets to pass the bills it wants. The minority party, especially where the margins are close, has a strong say in the form bills take. And the Constitution leaves it to the president to use his judgment whether they should be signed into law.

To the new members of the 110th Congress, I offer my welcome -- and my congratulations. The American people have entrusted us with public office at a momentous time for our nation. Let them say of these next two years: We used our time well.

Only time will tell whether Mr. Bush's offer to work in harmony with the new Democrat-controlled Congress was sincerely meant. And only time will tell if the Democrats will choose to accept it. But we can always hope that civility, wisdom and patriotism will triumph over raw partisanship. History –- and the nation –- will be watching as the next two years unfold.

Technorati Tag: speechwriting, speech

Watching President Bush’s speech last night reminded me of a cartoon from the First World War. Two terrified British Tommies are huddled in a shell hole, with bombs exploding all around them. One says to the other, “Well, if you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it!”

That, I think, was the gist of the President’s message. We’re in a very bad situation in Iraq, but withdrawal is not an option. The Democrats know this as well as the Republicans. If America pulls out prematurely, and Iraq descends into all-out civil war, the whole Middle East may go up in flames. If that happens, America’s oil supplies will not only be interrupted, but terrorist attacks on the U.S. will almost certainly increase.

If the American people then begin to ask, “Who lost Iraq?” the Democrats do not want the finger pointed at them. They want political cover. So Mr. Bush offered it. He made just enough concessions in his speech to allow the Democrats to cooperate with the administration without losing face.

My guess is that he’s bought himself a little more time. But if the proposals he made last night do not produce greater stability in Iraq and fewer American casualties in the near future, the pressures for a U.S. withdrawal will once again begin to mount.

As a speechwriter, there was something else I noticed about the speech, and that was Mr. Bush’s use of alliteration. Whenever I give a lecture to students on speechwriting techniques, I always mention alliteration, and I always use a recent example. It’s never hard to find one. All I have to do is turn to the last major speech given by the President or some other national political figure. Alliteration is always there. It was there last night when Mr. Bush spoke of providing a “hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy,” and again when he said that our cause in Iraq is “noble and necessary.”

Good words, Mr. President. But can you back them up with deeds?

My favorite conservative thinkers were outsiders. Edmund Burke was an Irishman with a Catholic mother. Alexander Hamilton was born a bastard. Disraeli was a Jew. Adam Smith was a Scot at a time (Has that time passed, even now?) when Englishmen regarded the Scots with amusement or contempt. In short, while these political theorists supported order, hierarchy and private property, they were never entirely accepted by the ruling classes of their day.

Given my partiality to mavericks, it’s not surprising that I’m a great fan of Andrew Sullivan. British by birth, American by adoption, Catholic by upbringing, conservative by temperament, and homosexual by nature, Andrew is in a class by himself, which is one reason why he’s one of the most original and insightful commentators on the American political scene today.

Andrew’s blog, The Daily Dish, can be accessed at http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/. But right now I want to talk about his new book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It; How to Get It Back (HarperCollins, 286 pp, $29.95).

As Andrew and others have noted, anti-communism was the bond that united the different strands of American conservatism. With the fall of the Soviet Union, conservatism began to unravel. To hold it together –- or at least to hold enough of it together to win elections –- the Republicans evolved a big-government conservatism that favored corporate interests, massive federal spending, and the political agenda of fundamentalist Christians.

The trouble with this brand of conservatism, says Andrew, is that it isn’t conservative at all. It’s a conservatism that pretends to have all the answers, when in fact, “The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know.”

True conservatism, according to Andrew, is “the conservatism of doubt.” The true conservative is innately skeptical of all utopias, dogmas and philosophical abstractions. He recognizes that human beings are fallible, and that pride goes before a fall. Accordingly, he recognizes the need to limit the power of government, lest that power be abused by people who suppose, in their arrogance, that they know everything.

Our Founding Fathers espoused life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – not the pursuit of virtue. They were willing to let people pursue even a mistaken idea of happiness, rather than trust government with the power to keep them on the straight and narrow path by force.

This is something that our Founders had in common with Edmund Burke, who is generally regarded as the father of modern conservatism. Burke once wrote that “the great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered into the world is by one man pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming a right to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression.”

Narrow religious fundamentalism, therefore, is really anti-conservative. It is also unscriptural. The fundamentalists have forgotten St. Paul’s warning in First Corinthians that “we know in part, and we prophesy in part.” They have also forgotten that Jesus himself wrestled with doubts.

The Republicans abandoned a conservatism of doubt for a conservatism of arrogance -– and were duly humbled for their presumption in the last elections. In his book, Andrew Sullivan offers them a way to return to their roots. It remains to be seen whether they will take it.

In an article published in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Mark Oppenheimer mentions that Dr. Martin Luther King received a C+ in public speaking when he was at seminary.

How then was King able to produce “I Have a Dream” –- one of the greatest American speeches of the 20th Century?

The answer, according to Mr. Oppenheimer, lies in the hundreds of sermons that King wrote, polished, and delivered in the nearly 20 years that led up to the march on Washington in 1963. His speech was not wholly original to the occasion, but drew heavily on the best of his rhetorical efforts up to that time.

Likewise, his delivery reflected decades of practice. Dr. King, undoubtedly, had natural gifts as a speaker, but they took years to perfect –- years that took him from that humiliating C+ at Crozer Seminary to the front rank of American orators.

There’s a lesson here for speakers and speechwriters. Some people may indeed be natural-born orators, but they don’t rise to greatness without years of practice. At the other extreme, some people who are not natural-born speakers –- whether because of shyness, a speech defect or a lack of charisma – can become great speakers through hard work.

Think of Demosthenes, one of the greatest orators of the ancient world. We know that Demosthenes had a speech defect of some kind. He also had a weak voice. There are various accounts as to how he overcame these handicaps. Some say he overcame the stammer by weighting his lower jaw with pebbles. Some say he strengthened his voice by going down to the seashore, where he practiced speaking over the roar of the waves.

These stories may be apocryphal, but what is beyond doubt is that Demosthenes willed himself to be a great orator. So did Winston Churchill. Churchill had a lisp and a stammer that he struggled for years to overcome. But in the end, through hard work and sheer force of will, he reached the point where he was the orator who “mobilized the English language, and sent it forth to battle.”

On the subject of Churchill, it’s also worth recalling that one of his contemporaries said of him that he “spent the best years of his life polishing his impromptu speeches.” That’s because Churchill recognized that there are no good impromptu speeches. When someone is called on to speak without notice and delivers a great speech, that person is almost certainly recycling material that he has used before, and was lying in one of his mental cupboards, ready to be pulled out in an emergency.

In short, there are no shortcuts to success in public speaking. Dr. King started out as a C+ student. Many other great speakers started out with even lower grades. But in the end, it doesn’t matter how much native talent one has, or doesn’t have. It’s hard work and constant practice that make a speaker –- and speechwriters have to work just as hard in perfecting their own craft.

Technorati Tag: speechwriting, speech

In 1929, an American graduate student who was writing her master’s thesis on Somerset Maugham wrote to the eminent English author to ask, among other things, why he chose to depict the “most depraved and abominable individuals” in his fiction.

To this question, Maugham replied: “I think I have described people as I have found them … you say the characters I create are abominable: they are not to me; I am not shocked by many things that shock other people. What fills you with horror only makes me shrug my shoulders or smile. I do not see people all of a piece … I see them capable of every meanness and every heroism: that indeed is why I find them so interesting, sympathetic, and amusing … Remember that I had a very useful training in a large London hospital. It taught me lessons I have never forgotten, and for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. There I saw human nature in the raw.”

This reply is quintessential Maugham. Throughout his fiction, admirable characters do disreputable things and disreputable characters do admirable things. And Maugham -– the cold, detached vivisectionist –- records these aberrations clinically and precisely, expressing neither approval, censure nor surprise. I show you life as it is, he seems to say. If you don’t like what you see, don’t look. What keeps us from turning away is Maugham’s mastery of story-telling. His readers can’t help themselves. Pick up any one of Maugham’s stories, and you’re likely to read it through to the end.

Filmmakers were more squeamish in adapting Maugham’s work for the screen. Often, they tacked on endings that were either happier than the original, or at least had the virtue of being morally satisfying. In the 1940 film version of “The Letter”, for example, Bette Davis’ character does not commit murder and go scot-free, as she does in Maugham’s short story.

So it was with great anticipation that I went to see the latest screen version of Maugham’s 1925 novel, The Painted Veil, which opened a few weeks ago. I had enjoyed the novel, and wondered how closely the film would track the book.

To my disappointment, if not entirely to my surprise, Maugham was given the Hollywood treatment once again. His dark tale of a wronged husband’s brutal revenge on his erring wife was reduced to a period romance, while crowd scenes and political intrigue were added to the mix to inflate a simple story to near-epic proportions.

The Painted Veil deals with an English couple named Walter and Kitty Fane. Walter is a shy, introverted government bacteriologist posted to China, and Kitty is the spoiled, shallow daughter of a London barrister. Walter is home on leave in London when he meets and falls headlong in love with Kitty. Yielding to his entreaties, Kitty –- still single at 25 –- marries Walter for no better reason than to escape the humiliation of seeing her younger sister march down the aisle before she does.

The couple settles in British Hong Kong, where Kitty quickly becomes bored with her reclusive husband and his everlasting microscopes. Recklessly, she embarks on an affair with a dashing colonial officer named Charlie Townsend. Walter learns of her infidelity and, to Kitty’s horror, reveals that he’s not the detached, bloodless creature she had supposed. He’s furious at her betrayal, and confronts her with a pitiless ultimatum: Either she follows him to a remote Chinese village where he’s volunteered to help combat a cholera epidemic, or he will publicly divorce her, causing a scandal that will ruin her lover’s career and make her a social outcast.

Cowed by the threat, Kitty follows Walter to the village of Mei-tan-fu, even though she fears she’s going to certain death. This might be poetic justice, but Maugham recognizes that real life is never that simple. Neither Walter nor Kitty is “all of a piece.” Rather, each is capable of heroism and meanness.

Walter, the “moral” character, courageously battles the epidemic, but he’s not big enough to forgive his wife. Kitty, the "sinner,” discovers a small convent of French nuns in the village, and devotes herself to helping the sisters care for the many children orphaned by the plague. The movie lets Walter and Kitty discover each other’s redeeming qualities and fall in love again. Maugham leaves them lost to each other forever because of their respective flaws.

While the purist in me was offended by this mutilation of Maugham, the movie is entertaining, with gorgeous cinematography and fine performances by Edward Norton and Naomi Watts as the doomed couple. (Don’t miss Diana Rigg as the mother superior of the French nuns, even though she’s rendered nearly invisible by her voluminous habit.)

I came away from the theatre with a question: If Maugham is a second-rate writer, as highbrow critics insist that he is, why is it that even after more than eighty years, so many people can’t look on his view of reality unless it’s through the soft focus of the Hollywood lens?

“It seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people miss,” Maugham wrote in his autobiography, The Summing Up. The better I know Maugham, the more I am inclined to agree.

Technorati Tag: speechwriting, speech

Today’s New York Times carried a story about the travails of chief White House speechwriter Bill McGurn and his fellow scribes as they labored long and hard on the text of President Bush’s State of the Union Message.

Naturally, I sympathize with the frustrations and long hours that White House speechwriters must endure, but I have to say that I laughed out loud at the article’s penultimate paragraph, which declared:

“For his part, Mr. McGurn is a bit tired after a month of 12-hour days and 6:45 a.m. phone calls, and in need of a decent meal. In one eight-day stretch after Christmas, he and fellow writers ate breakfast, lunch and dinner every day in the White House mess, except when it was closed, as it was for dinner on New Year’s Day.”

So –- one can’t get a decent meal at the White House mess? Is that what the Times reporter is saying? I never had any complaints about the menu any time that I was lucky enough to dine there. Perhaps the quality of the food has gone down since then.

Must be tough, having to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner every day at the White House mess!

Bush’s speechwriters should be glad that they are working for the younger rather than the elder George Bush. One of the first things the elder Bush did on becoming president was to revoke the speechwriters’ mess privileges. And this was done not only publicly, but ostentatiously. The Bush team wanted to emphasize the break with the previous administration. Ronald Reagan was the “great communicator;” George H.W. Bush was going to be the “great administrator.” Henceforth, speechwriters were to be regarded as supernumeraries.

Ironically, after making such a show of downgrading the speechwriters, the Bush team later tried to blame the failure of Bush’s reelection campaign on the hapless wordsmiths. Irony indeed: the speechwriters never suspected that they were so important until they were scapegoated.

I don’t know if Bill Clinton’s speechwriters had mess privileges or not. I do recall hearing one of them tell how Mr. Clinton once introduced him to a visitor as “the man who typed my State of the Union message. So I don’t imagine that speechwriters got a lot of respect during the Clinton years, either.

Yes, the hours are long and the frustrations are many for White House speechwriters. But I’m not going to feel too sorry for them –- even if they have to rough it at the White House mess.

Technorati Tag: speechwriting, speech

Remember the priceless moment in the movie Casablanca when Captain Renault (Claude Rains) blows his whistle and closes down Rick’s café?

“I am shocked,” he huffs. “Shocked, to learn that there is gambling going on here!” At which a croupier bustles up to him and presses a wad of banknotes into his hand: “Your winnings, Sir.”

I was reminded of that scene during the opening of President Bush’s State of the Union message last night.

The man who didn’t veto a single spending bill in six years lectured the nation with a straight face on the need to impose spending discipline in Washington.

The man whose own party crammed the biggest number of earmarks into spending bills in the nation’s history wagged his finger at Congress and declared, “The time has come to end this practice.”

The man responsible for the biggest expansion of federal entitlements since the Great Society vowed, “We must take on the challenge of entitlements.”

Well, Mr. Bush is not the first president to have used his State of the Union message to execute a 180–degree policy turn. Little over ten years ago, for example, President Clinton trimmed his sails to the prevailing political winds by announcing, “The era of big government is over.”

Mr. Bush, for his part, insists that it’s possible for the country to balance the budget without raising taxes and for the government to keep its commitments on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid without burdening future generations.

I’ll reserve judgment until I see the details, but I won’t be “shocked, shocked!,” if the numbers don’t add up.

Technorati Tag: speechwriting, speech

January 30 is the anniversary of the execution of King Charles I of England. Charles lost his head because he insisted stubbornly on the divine right of kings. But the Puritans, who won the English Civil War, insisted just as stubbornly on Puritanism, with equally unhappy results.

Under the iron dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, theatres were closed, dice and card games banned, maypoles cut down and stained glass church windows smashed. Even celebrating Christmas was made a crime. Small wonder that after a dozen years of being tyrannized by prigs, killjoys and busybodies, the English people welcomed the restoration of the monarchy with a relief akin to rapture. Some loyal subjects actually drank the king’s health while kneeling in the streets.

Could the gloomy Puritan interlude have been avoided? That is the intriguing premise of A Midsummer Tempest, a 1975 novel by Poul Anderson. Although classed as science fiction because it involves time travel, A Midsummer Tempest is more of a historical fantasy.

Now out of print, it is worth tracking down for the sheer elegance of the author’s style. It is a book to be sipped and savored like a rare wine.

In the novel, King Charles is saved from certain defeat when the spirit of Merrie England comes to his rescue as he makes a last stand at Glastonbury, the reputed site of Camelot. Perhaps I should say the “spirits” of Merrie England, because it is a supernatural army –- fairies, goblins, woodland nymphs and King Arthur’s knights -– that rallies to Charles and turns back the Puritan tide.

In fiction, at least, Charles emerges from the crucible of war a chastened and wiser man. He vows to return to London not as a conqueror, but as a healer. In a moving speech, delivered from his palace of Whitehall, he fulfills his vow.

But I’ll let Mr. Anderson tell his tale in his own graceful words:

Light smote through arched windows and shattered on gems as King Charles raised his hand.

“Toward that end, the Crown must do its share. Uprising, though unjustified, had causes which partly lay in King and Church and nobles. Not simply folly and extravagance, but outright tyranny, archaic use a crust across the growth of a new age, unwillingness to listen or to change – such things from us; and from the Parliament an arrogance, intolerance and haste – unholily engendered civil war. Let us instead join better qualities. Let a new Parliament be called to us, and with us write new laws which may long stand because they serve the welfare of our land.”

I can make but one comment on this speech that was never given: If history didn’t turn out that way, it should have.

Technorati Tag: speechwriting, speech