A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder: A middleclass fantasy.

It’s already been a couple of months since my last visit to New York City.  And one thing that has stayed top of mind comes from an excursion to a Broadway show.  That show is A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.  (Book and lyrics by Robert Freedman, music and lyrics by Steven Lutvak, directed by Darko Tresnjak.) Maybe the reason I’ve spent so much time thinking about this show is that I bought the soundtrack so I’ve had lots of time to get to know the music better. With that additional insight, you realize there’s something else going on here.  Because as you start to understand the show and its lyrics, Gentleman’s Guide starts to deliver a big wallop of social criticism.

It’s misleading at first.  As my friend Kelly Hindley noted after seeing the show, “Gentleman’s Guide was like getting to eat a giant bowl of your favorite dessert with no calories—just pure frothy delightful enjoyment.” And it is enjoyably frothy. But with closer inspection to the themes and ideas expressed in the show,  I felt like the musical might be a commentary on the struggling middle class, a treatise on the widening gulf between the haves and have-nots.

The basic premise of the story revolves around Monty Navarro, who as the show opens learns that his dead mother was a member of Britain’s illustrious D’Ysquith family, although she was disinherited for marrying a common Castilian musician. As the story unfolds, Monty learns that there are just eight people in line ahead of him to become Lord D’Ysquith. Soon, Monty Navarro is finding it surprisingly easy to murder those that stand in his way.

So how does this show embrace themes of rich vs. the middle class.  There are a few ways ways.  Like the way it muses about the privileged.  Some songs are scathing critiques of how clueless and heartless the rich can be.  Take I Don’t Understand the Poor sung by Lord Adalbert D’ysquith, the current Earl of Highhurst.  Here’s just a brief moment from this delightful song:

I don’t understand the poor.

And they’re constantly turning out more.

Every festering slum

In Christendom

Is disgorging its young by the score.

I suppose there are some with ambition.

Say, the pickpocket, beggar, or whore.

From what I can tell

They do quite well.

They’re rising above

And its work they love.

But I don’t understand the poor.

And if that’s not enough, there’s my favorite character in the show, Lady Hyacinth D’ysquith who is perfectly proper and delightfully offensive.  She performs Lady Hyacinth Abroad in which she asks for philanthropic ideas of how she can compete with her rich society lady friends. First, she heads to Egypt to start an orphanage in Cairo. Lady Hyacinth’s hopes are that her largess won’t go unnoticed, “The sniping will be stilled, and the empire will be filled with homes for bastard children in my name.”

When Egypt doesn’t work out, Lady Hyacinth heads to India where she imagines her own leper colony. “When we arrive they’ll hobble out to greet us, their toothless grins would melt a heart of stone! And every dilettante, will envy me and want a colony of lepers of her own!”

Still not satisfied, Lady Hyacinth leaves for deepest, darkest Africa to civilize a village in the jungle. “It can’t take long to learn their mother tongue! Of words they have but six, and five of them are clicks, and all of them are different words for dung!” She gets in one final dig calling out Daisy Greville, Lady Hyacinth’s arch, society nemesis who seems to have cornered all the best charitable opportunities. “It’s Daisy Greville’s loss. She’ll never come across, a tribe of backward natives worse than mine.”

My friends and I love to imagine my inner old lady, Gertrude.  I think Gertie would love to be Lady Hyacinth’s middle-class friend, lunching together at fancy restaurants and then returning to tell friends how "horribly delightful Hyacinth is."

These songs lambasting the rich for their insensitivity and cluelessness about how real people live are a refreshing message for us middle class types.  Maybe that’s because I can imaging Donald Trump or the republican leadership humming songs like I Don’t Understand the Poor as they take their morning showers. But there’s an even sneakier middle-class message being delivered in Gentleman’s Guide. Let's all keep in mind that amidst all this frothy fun, Monty Navarro is a serial killer.  And yet, the audience is on his side the entire show. You kinda want him to succeed.  And even when he’s put on trial for one of the murders (the only one he didn’t commit), he gets off scot-free, as show ends happily and Monty settles into his new life of largesse. Of course, now he has to worry about his demise.

Now I know this show is a send up.  But the fact that the mostly middle-class audience laughed delightedly as one privileged rich old white person after another died says something about the issues we face in the world today, particularly the ever growing divide between the rich and the rest of us.  And while I’m sure plenty of the world’s uber wealthy enjoyed and laughed at this show as much as I did, the message delivered here should at least have them looking over their shoulders at an increasingly frustrated and growing society of poor and middle-class people.

Book thirteen: The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt.

A while back I opened my Sunday New York Times and there was this interesting image on the cover of the Book Review. It looked like something you might see from feminist artists The Gorilla Girls or maybe even Barbra Kruger.  It asks the question, “Would you like this more if a man made it?”  I’ll start with the obvious comment.  It’s a little rich that the Book Review would have this question on its cover since the publication is notoriously bad when it comes to the equal treatment of men and women in its pages, featuring dramatically more male authors and reviewers than female.

Of course, since I’m in the middle of my year of reading books by and about art and artists, the graphic immediately caught my attention.  Because the question of how the art world treats women has always been of interest to me.  So I immediately downloaded The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt.

The novel follows the career of Harriett (Harry) Burden.  She finds herself in a situation many women artists find themselves in: The largely male dominated art world ignores them. Tired of the situation, Harry embarks on a project she calls Maskings, in which she finds men willing to act as masks.  They present her work as their own. The result is a series of three successful shows over a number of years.

When Harry finally reveals the truth, the critics are doubtful, one of the artists denies it, and what was supposed to be Harry’s grand triumph becomes the source of immense depression, frustration, and anger.

This book is masterful in the way it discussed the gross inequalities of the art world, what makes art valuable, and how artists arrive at their vision.  That’s when I liked the book.  And Hustvedt makes some convincing arguments about the gulf between the value placed on art from women vs. men.  Take this passage as recalled by Harry’s grown daughter:

Harry’s face was a reproof. Money is power, she said. Men with money. Men with money make the art world go round. Men with money decide who wins and who loses, what’s good and what’s bad.

I offered the comment that this was changing, slowly perhaps but changing nevertheless; that more and more women were getting their due. I had just read something about it . . .

Harry's expression turned bitter. Even the most famous woman artist is a bargain compared to the most famous man—dirt cheap in comparison. Look at the divine Louise Bourgeois. What does that tell you? Harry’s voice cracked. Money talks. It tells you about what is valued, what matters. It sure as hell isn’t women.

That's a powerful bit of writing. I like The Blazing World best when it engaged in conversations about the value of art and of women’s roles in the art world.

I also liked that the book explored the duality of personality.  Often Hustvedt uses her characters to explore how our sexuality, personality, and gender are probably more fluid than most of us are willing to admit.

There were things I didn’t like about the book.  The novel uses a construct that is quite trendy in the world of recent literary novels.  Each chapter is told from a different perspective and with different writing styles. The premise is that the writer is actually a researcher trying to determine what really happened during the life of Harriett Burden.  The book uses Harry’s journals, interviews with acquaintances, and other transcripts to tell the story.  The result is that some sections (like Harry’s journals) make for great reading. Other sections just seem like interruptions to a better book.  Also, this book has footnotes.  And anyone who regularly reads my book posts knows that I’m baffled by the use of footnotes in novels.  They annoy me. It's a literary trend that I find infuriating.

But it would be unfair for me to end on the things that didn’t inspire me. Because this book is worth reading and explores feminism in an interesting and engaging way. The world can definitely use more conversations like this.