Bon Mots Poem by gershon hepner

BONS MOTS


Turning dross of verbal clay
into nuggets of linguistic gold
is poetically the way
this poet grows much younger growing old.
This symptom of his narcissism
not only proves to others that he's smarter
than they are, but with lyricism,
provides poetic shine from this reparter
on all his repartee, which glows
though there's no market for it, since
who now appreciates bons mots,
indeed, whom does his wit not cause to wince?
Even if it's staircase wit,
do not throw him down the stairs from that.
Think it of English lit.,
and purr with it just like a pussycat.

Ben Brantley reviews a roadway revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man, " the 1960 drama about rivals for their party's presidential nomination ("The Masters of Bons Mots Are Alive and Thriving on Broadway, " NYT,5/9/12) :

[E]ven if they have their moral flaws, Mr. Vidal's politicos obviously belong to a higher human order than we do, one for whom conversation flows with the harmony and symmetry of a Haydn symphony. Granted, the evidence would seem to be that Mr. Vidal talks that way in real life. (In a 1981 interview with Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, he let dropp the definition that "a narcissist is someone better-looking than you are.")
But the exalted tribe to which the characters in "The Best Man" belong mostly exists only amid the rarefied oxygen of a certain kind of playwriting, a land where stumbling everyday speech acquires airborne grace and timing. And while there have been rumors that this breed was on the verge of extinction, the Broadway season that ended recently has shown that it is very much alive. Just look to the dramatists Jon Robin Baitz ("Other Desert Cities") , Nicky Silver ("The Lyons") or David Ives ("Venus in Fur") , who all have new plays on the boards this season and who share with Mr. Vidal the gift for turning the dross of common verbal clay into precious gold.
We never go to the theater expecting people to talk just as we do. Whatever happens on a stage must be heightened in ways that keep us listening and watching and not thinking we might as well be back in the apartment with the spouse, children or television.
But during the past half-century or so, dialogue in English-speaking dramas of note has tended to emphasize the failings of our limited vocabularies in the face of (may I be grand?) cosmic indifference. Think of Samuel Beckett (the daddy of that sensibility) , Caryl Churchill, Harold Pinter and David Mamet. (Chekhov, of course, is their great-granddaddy, but let's stick to our — or at least my — native tongue today.)
These are writers who, in very different but equally stylized ways, portray conversation as a series of scattered shots in the dark. So do young American naturalists like Annie Baker and satirists like Bruce Norris, whose triumphant "Clybourne Park" (now on Broadway and up for a Tony for best play) considers how American tongues become terminally twisted when the topic is race.
Even the sesquipedalian Tom Stoppard, I would argue, is ultimately of this school; he builds his many-splendored, polysyllabic words into towers of Babel that ultimately collapse under the weight of their own inadequacy. Such is our consciousness at this moment in history, an age of doubts when we sense that whatever we say will never be quite enough.
Which is why a play like "The Best Man" can be so comforting, if the actors are up to speaking it in the proper style (and mostly, I think, they are in Michael Wilson's current revival) . Even when its characters become conscious of the emptiness of their words, they rarely fail to keep polishing them. (The Adlai Stevenson-esque former secretary of state, cunningly portrayed with diffident arrogance by John Larroquette: "The terrible thing about running for president is, you become a compulsive talker, forever answering questions that no one has asked.")
After all, how many times a day do we all think, "If only I had put it differently"? Diderot identified this syndrome as "l'esprit d'escalier, " or "staircase wit, " referring to that moment after a social encounter when we think of exactly what we should have said as we descend the stairs to the street.
Well, you might argue, aren't people in television series always coming up with the perfect, quippy comeback? (I mean scripted ones, not reality series, which seem to specialize in the verbally challenged.) True, but there's usually something mechanical, and often recycled, about such witticisms.

5/9/12 #10145