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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/in-memoriam/memoriam-cicely-tyson-1924-2021/"></div>In 1994, I created and ran a show on NBC called Sweet Justice in which Cicely Tyson, whose passing last week has moved me to write up these thoughts, played a civil-rights lawyer in the South. Her junior partner in the office was Melissa Gilbert, and we surrounded them with a talented cast, including the redoubtable Ronny Cox as Cicely’s right-wing nemesis. We shot in New Orleans and Los Angeles, had loads of fun along with the usual stresses and strains, and went down fighting after a year on the air: our fans were too few, but they were passionate.
Perhaps I should rather call them “Cicely’s fans.” She garnered an Emmy nomination for her performance, which was deep and (the inevitable word) graceful, but I must add at once that she fought always to be sure the show was sending the racial/political message which had lured her into the role of “Dorothy Battle” in the first place. I could count on her showing up at my office door whenever a new script was released, to argue for changes, not only in her scenes but throughout the script — and they were nearly always of a kind that sharpened the edge of what we had to say about the issues for the sake of which she’d taken the part, as a Black woman. She was a woman who moved, I would find, in the highest circles of national affairs when it came to race and the arts in general.
Other producers who’d worked with her had warned me I’d be on the receiving end of such office-visits, but I took nothing but pleasure in them, took active pride in how this preeminent actor treated a little network drama that virtually no one was watching (despite the fine writing by such newcomers as Ed Redlich and Gina Prince) as seriously as if she were doing Genet’s “The Blacks” at the Kennedy Center. We took pride, too, when we heard that then-First Lady Hilary Clinton rarely missed an episode, and it won’t surprise you to hear that there was great excitement the day Rosa Parks paid a visit to her friend Cicely on our set in Culver City. I’d like to think Ms. Parks’ reason went beyond their friendship and had to do with the fact that we were saying something worth hearing.
On a lighter note, I’ll never forget her positively girlish delight when we chose the suave, gifted Michael Warren, my friend from our days on Hill Street Blues, to play her love interest. And likewise it makes me smile to remember the day when Cicely was in my office, working over a scene, and I received a phone call from Vernon Jordan, the prominent civil-rights leader then serving as a close advisor to President Clinton. He was trying to reach Cicely, with whom he had, as I was soon to learn, a teasing, brother-sister relationship. When I assured him she was there in my office, he mock-chastened me in ringing tones, “You’ve got Cicely Tyson with you? Young man, didn’t your mama ever tell you you are judged by the company you keep?” Cicely laughed and kept laughing…
But my fondest memory is of a day that came at the end of our season together. Long months earlier, I should tell you, I had learned a painful lesson: she wouldn’t hear a word about Miles Davis, to whom she had been married for a time — unhappily, it is said. Not knowing this, and having wide-eyed, fan-boy reverence for the great man, I couldn’t help, as Cicely and I got to know each other, asking the occasional question about him. Apparently I was too thick to correctly interpret how little she would say in reply. Then one day a set-designer took the liberty of mounting on the wall of our set, in the very office of the lawyer Cicely was playing, a poster which consisted of the enlarged cover of “Sorcerer,” one of Miles’ classic “crossover” recordings, which featured a (beautiful) profile photograph of Cicely from 20 years earlier. When she saw it, Cicely hit the roof. Convinced that someone was deliberately taunting her, she complained to me at full throttle, even after I had the poster removed.
The episode left me shaken — she was good at hitting the roof — and I resolved, as well she knew, never to bring up his name in her presence again, and forbid cast and crew to do the same. A few days after Sweet Justice was cancelled — the show which Cicely and I both loved and into which we had poured so much of ourselves — my assistant came to me in my office late one afternoon to tell me that on the other side of the Sony lot a limousine had arrived to take Cicely to the airport. She was flying home to New York, never inclined, as it happened, to spend more time than necessary in Los Angeles. She would be pleased, I was informed, if I would stop by and say goodbye to her. I hurried as fast as I could.
I can still see the limousine waiting, in the failing light of day, its door hanging open, and Cicely, just past 70 then, standing beside it with her sublime ex-dancer’s stillness, her gloved hands folded before her, as I ran up, rehearsing under my breath some doubtless unremarkable words of parting and a promise to keep in touch. But the words never left my mouth. Before I could utter a sound, she took my arm and led me off on a walk, from the first steps of which she did the talking — all of it — in that melodious voice we all know or can recall. “I first met Miles…” she began, and for most of an hour (I’m guessing, I lost all sense of time) she regaled me unprompted with what she knew I longed to hear, stories of Miles’s recording sessions, of friends like Cannonball Adderley and Coltrane, of nights on the road or in her beloved Manhattan. She even took me into the Sony store, which was opened at her request at that late hour, so she could flip through the legendary CDs in the sales bin (since his label, Columbia Records, was now part of Sony). Every cover brought a different story. She was in no hurry; she was making a present to me of memories which no doubt, in part, were painful, in order to show her appreciation of the year we had spent, and the privilege we had shared of putting on the screen a message of racial equality and the fight for justice, which was our purpose from first to last. I delivered her to her limo driver, quite robbed of any capacity to express how much our “walk &amp; talk,” as we call it when we’re filming, had meant to me. So I only said, “Goodbye and thank you,” and left the full measure of my gratitude unspoken until now.
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In Memoriam: Cicely Tyson (1924-2021)

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/adventures-reading/"></div>When I was growing up, I spoke a language different from those around me, including the members of my own family. It was a language I learned in books.
One day, when I was nine, I was taken to the wake of my Great-Aunt Annunziata, twin sister to my grandmother Elvira on my father’s side. She lived with her sister’s family, helping her raise five sons in a two-bedroom apartment in North Newark until her death at 70. As my father, mother, and I walked together down Orange Avenue, in the shade of its towering maple trees, to Christiani Brothers Funeral Home — a name I remember due to the numerous wakes in store for me there over the next few years — I was rehearsing under my breath what I planned to say when I got there, particularly to my Uncle Sonny, who, as the youngest of Aunt Nunzi’s nephews, had been her favorite. Going up the front steps, I practiced my speech one last time, aloud, so that my parents heard it. Its verbal spirit, if not its exact words, was taken from the book I was reading at the time: David Copperfield. “I am honored, my dear uncle, to offer you my condolences in this unhappy hour.” Or something close to that. Something miserably close to it.
I don’t know why I let my parents hear me; I don’t remember whether I was seeking their approval or just fixing the elaborate sentence more firmly in my mind. My father’s reaction, though, I remember very well. He stopped and muttered a few words to my mother, which I didn’t understand, since they were in the ragged Southern Italian dialett’ they sometimes spoke together, but I could tell that they were dark and dismal words. Then he turned to me and said that when we got inside the funeral home I should just go kneel before the coffin, cross myself the way everybody else was doing, then sit down and keep my mouth shut.
The speech I’d prepared (but never made) was not a typical example of how I expressed myself, which would vary with what I happened to be reading. My father’s reaction reminds of another time, a year or so earlier, when I waited by the door one night for him to return from work. He worked at the sheet metal factory in Bayonne, owned by my mother’s father. I waited, holding to my chest an oversized tome that weighed about two-thirds as much as I did — the complete plays of Shakespeare, illustrations by Rockwell Kent — to ask my father which of the plays was his favorite. My father’s education, as it happened, had stopped in the 8th grade.
I asked as soon as he came through the door. He stood a moment, then sat in a chair while he took off his jacket — slowly, as if he were suddenly more tired than he’d been a moment before. The look on his face was much like the one he might have had if he’d just learned I’d broken some valuable household object. Finally, he said, “I made you.” He said it in a calm tone of voice, without anger, and only a slight trace of emphasis — “I made you” — as if informing me of some obscure fact I didn’t know. That was all. Then he stood up and let my mother know that he was home.
It wasn’t so much that my parents — or uncles or aunts, neighbors or family friends — didn’t understand what I was saying; I nearly always managed to make myself understood. There were times, too, when hearing me speak amused them. Other times, though, in a way they would never let on, they were a little frightened. And nearly always, to one degree or another, put off. This was maybe because my language created a feeling that an alien presence was growing up among them. More likely, though, it was because it carried more than a whiff of self-conscious superiority.
In this they were wrong. My language, even at its most ridiculously inflated, was native to me, in one particular sense: in learning to read, I’d finally found the words to give the world the only shape and meaning it could have, at least for me. The language of books, for all its conventionalism and even artificiality, did for me just what any language, spoken by anyone, does for them. So the reaction of those around me — in particular my father, which would often mount to genuine anger — was unfair.
But it was nonetheless sincere. The feeling that your own child is “looking down” on you is not one you want to have. It’s easy to imagine that such a child is deliberately distancing himself from you — from your love — and this might even make you want to hold back your love in return. As a result I spent a lot of time being afraid of my father. I would lie in bed in the morning until I could hear that he’d finished breakfast. It wasn’t until I heard his car — a DeSoto with an oddly human-sounding cough — start up and go away, that I climbed out of bed.
My mother, too, was afraid — and not, I’m compelled to say, mainly on my account. Rather, she was afraid for herself, that my father would include her in his growing resentment, hold her responsible for my growing and unbridgeable difference. In fact there was something specific, whether he knew it or not, to justify her fear: some of the books I fawned over, so mutinously from his point of view, were leftovers from my mother’s high school days. She’d graduated. I didn’t know to what extent she’d read or remembered them, but they were hers.
There was another way she was responsible for the mounting pile of books beside and beneath my bed, though it wasn’t intentional on her part. Rather, it was an act of kindness. My mother had a brother-in-law, my uncle Hugo. He was Sicilian, dark and dour, in contrast to the noisy, affable Neapolitan brood of uncles on my father’s side. Uncle “Yoolie” had two jobs. He was a small-scale tomato farmer part of the day. He planted and tended an abandoned lot beside his house on Fifth Street and sold the crop in a curbside stall. He was also an old-fashioned junk-man: he drove around North Newark in a horse-drawn wagon, ringing a bell to summon housewives to the street, where he traded with them in used clothes, knick-knacks, pots and pans — and, when the chance presented itself, old magazines and books. He would regularly gift these to my mother. Yoolie himself was illiterate, and not just in English, which he spoke with an accent we kids imitated mercilessly. The illustrated Shakespeare was one of his gifts — a fact which did him no credit with my father, who could interpret my infamous question about which play was his favorite only as a speech-act intended to offend and humiliate him. Copperfield was another, along with a tattered photographic history of World War I, a guide to medicinal herbs, a collection of poems for reading aloud on public occasions, and Les Miserables. In addition, I remember Forever Amber, a memorial volume commemorating Vittorio Emmanuel II (late King of Italy), Two Years Before the Mast, a Brooklyn Dodgers yearbook from around 1950, several prayer books, and Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, author, according to its cover, of Scaramouche.
Concerning Captain Blood — a huge best-seller in its time — I have another, later memory. 20 years would pass before I was reminded of its gaudy narrative and dashing hero who, with glittering eyes and sabre aloft, adorned the faded paper wrapper. Its reappearance in my life is something I can date almost exactly: it would have been the date of a lecture, given in early September, welcoming us, the entering graduate students in English and Comparative Literature, to Yale, given by an eminent historian of the French Revolution who was also a poet in his own right. It was held on the second floor of the building that housed several Humanities departments: an elaborately faux-medieval structure, like many that went up at the university in the 1930s. But it is what I came across on my way to the lecture that I want to tell you about.
Over the entrance to the building, in true Neo-Neo-Gothic style, was an arch decorated with carved beasts and gargoyles, the entwined limbs and leering faces of stone creatures that no doubt had been meaningful in 13th-century Europe but were utterly fanciful in Connecticut now. These decorations, we were told on an introductory campus tour, had been the work of carvers and stonemasons brought from France and Italy after the First World War. Unmentioned on the tour, though, was the unremarked sentence, some 16 words long, chiseled into the granite archway above our heads. Doubtless, like all such inscriptions, it was rarely read by the students who’d been passing under it for decades, and I don’t know what, other than a gawping wonder at all things new in my surroundings, made me stop to read it now. But when I did I was startled to realize I was reading the opening sentence of Sabatini’s lurid potboiler, which declared about its hero — to the sound of trumpets, one is inclined to say — “He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
What this could possibly have been meant to signify to 20th-century graduate students — about to be engulfed for the next few years in speculative discourse on linguistics, literary history, and theory — can only be guessed at. I don’t suppose anyone in the university’s administration ever signed off on its message. Most likely it had been the impulse of a lone carver, perhaps merely mischievous, perhaps proud of its author’s Italian last name. The moment I recognized it, I nearly came out with my own version, however brief and non-heroic, of the laughter that Scaramouche allegedly bestowed on the entire world.
And then, in the following moment, I thought of Uncle Yoolie — of Uncle Yoolie, with the books he gathered for my mother piled in the junk-wagon behind him. And I thought, too, as I trudged up the forbidding grey stone stairs, of what it meant to read, and to remember, and to dream of what you read. I thought of good books and awful ones, and of the language they had bred up in me, both rich and troublesome. I joined my new classmates on the landing of the second floor, as they headed into a crowded hall to hear the lecture that was about to be delivered — the herald, whatever its proper subject, of all the lectures and the books that lay before me, and of the language that would enter into me from them, like the language of the books of my childhood, shaping me for good or ill.
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Adventures in Reading

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Remembering Philip Roth (1933-2018)

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/events/alexander-woollcotts-memorial-father-francis-duffy-new-yorks-69th-regiment/"></div>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/john-romano">John Romano </a>
This piece was written by Alexander Woollcott, New Yorker drama critic and Algonquin wit, one night in 1932, after attending the funeral at St. Patrick’s of Father Francis Duffy, the most famous army chaplain in World War I, who at the age of 46 had volunteered for service in France with New York’s Fighting 69th Regiment. Woolcott’s tribute to Duffy was the more surprising because Woolcott, the model for Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner, was not only notoriously caustic and acerbic but also an outspoken atheist. But: “There were many of us there today,” Woolcott wrote of the funeral, “heathens like myself, who without belonging to his outfit, had nevertheless been attached to him for rations — of the spirit … While we waited, my own thoughts jumped back to that desperate October in 1918 when his regiment, the old 69th of New York, was cut to ribbons in the Argonne …” <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/events/alexander-woollcotts-memorial-father-francis-duffy-new-yorks-69th-regiment/#more-4280" class="more-link">Read more</a>
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Alexander Woollcott&#8217;s Memorial of Father Francis Duffy of New York&#8217;s 69th Regiment

Reginald Rose and the Journey of 12 Angry Men

John Romano is a screenwriter and a writer-producer for television. His features include The Lincoln Lawyer with Matthew McConaughey, the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty, and most recently, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. He's been writer-producer on over 20 TV shows, from Hill Street Blues to Monk, including three of his own creation, among them Sweet Justice starring Cicely Tyson. Formerly he taught English at Columbia and wrote a book on Charles Dickens. He appeared on Charlie Rose with Salman Rushdie for Dickens’s bicentenary, and testified before Congress after 9/11 about Hollywood’s influence on America’s image abroad.

John Romano

“12 Angry Men” Remembered — And Not a Moment Too Soon

“The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.” — Aristotle

<h4>Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Previously, she lived and worked in New York City for more than two decades, writing copy for a variety of clients, including American Express, McDonald’s, and more defunct Internet start-ups than she cares to count. Her nonfiction essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine and Martha Stewart Living.&nbsp;The Nest is her first novel.</h4>

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

Seth Greenland’s first memoir, A Kingdom of Tender Colors, will be published in 2020 by Europa Editions. He is the author of five novels. His 1997 play Jungle Rot won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award and the American Theater Critics Association Award. He was a writer-producer on the Emmy-nominated HBO series Big Love.

Seth Greenland

<h4>Tom Lutz is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest book is&nbsp;<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Born-Slippy-Tom-Lutz/dp/1912248646/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=born+slippy&amp;qid=1574435254&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">Born Slippy: A Novel.</a></h4>
For more, go to <a href="https://www.tomlutzwriter.com/">tomlutzwriter.com</a>

&nbsp;

Tom Lutz

Laurie Winer is a Los Angeles Review of Books founding editor.

Laurie Winer

Radio Hour: Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's 'The Nest' plus John Romano on George Eliot

The Invisible Woman

Acting with Integrity

"Mere flim-flam stories, and nothing but shams and lies." — Miguel de Cervantes

Literary Fiction

Civilization

Culture War

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw

History

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors." — Simone Weil

Cultural Studies

John Romano is a screenwriter and a writer-producer for television. His features include The Lincoln Lawyer with Matthew McConaughey, the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty, and most recently, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. He's been writer-producer on over 20 TV shows, from Hill Street Blues to Monk, including three of his own creation, among them Sweet Justice starring Cicely Tyson. Formerly he taught English at Columbia and wrote a book on Charles Dickens. He appeared on Charlie Rose with Salman Rushdie for Dickens’s bicentenary, and testified before Congress after 9/11 about Hollywood’s influence on America’s image abroad.