Williams as Monroe.

In the weekly grind of seeing, suffering through, and writing about what passes for movies today, perfection is a word I rarely have the occasion to use. A warm, wonderful and enchanting work of artistry such as My Week With Marilyn is the exception to that problem. What an extraordinary thrill to leave a movie exhilarated instead of drained, sated instead of empty, rejuvenated instead of depressed. It’s a magical experience.

This is the moving, cinematically inspired true story of a young man named Colin Clark who, in 1956, went to London to apply for a job as a production assistant on the widely publicized, highly anticipated movie version of Terence Rattigan’s celebrated play The Sleeping Prince, to be called The Prince and the Showgirl, starring and directed by Laurence Olivier and co-starring the most famous and desirable woman in the world, the one and only Marilyn Monroe. Determined and persistent, Colin wouldn’t take no for an answer, and eventually graduated to an exalted go-for position as third assistant director, which included serving tea, soothing jangled nerves, acting as a bodyguard to the Hollywood goddess on her first visit to England, and generally playing the role of a peacekeeper that would tax the combined talents of the United Nations General Assembly. It was a dream come true for a confused, starry-eyed, 23-year-old underachiever, newly graduated from Oxford, whose wealthy, prominent parents considered his job on a soundstage at Pinewood nothing more than slumming. But he got a keyhole closeup of filmmaking at its most glamorous and stressful, and as the long and strenuous film dragged on, threatening to never end, he took copious notes and logged every detail in his diaries, which were finally published in the form of a 1995 memoir called The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me and expanded into a second book called My Week With Marilyn. Totally mesmerizing. This film might not appeal to anyone who has never heard of The Prince and the Showgirl or to those too young to understand the supercolossal charisma and appeal of the tragic Marilyn herself, but for legions of movie buffs like me who grew up on this stuff, My Week With Marilyn opens up a world of wide-eyed wonder while it sweeps away the glitter and the fairy dust to reveal the pain, frustration and sweat behind the scenes. By the time it ends, you feel like you were there, and thanks to the incandescent performance by Michelle Williams as Marilyn, I promise you’ll get to know the conflicted woman behind the diamonds and the sunglasses and the glossy 8x10 fan magazine photos a little bit better than you ever will from the continuing parade of biographies that keep writers fascinated by a legend imitated by many Hollywood wanna-bes through the years but equaled by none.

Eddie Redmayne, the versatile, charismatic and highly praised actor who won a Tony award for the excellent play Red, is a sweet and sexy combination of open-hearted youth and maturing hormones as a boy taking his first tenuous steps into manhood. Some members of the British press have done their best to contest the accuracy of Mr. Clark’s books, labeling him a parasite and a phony, accusing him of embellishing the facts, and claiming that as a third assistant to director-star Laurence Olivier on The Prince and the Showgirl he never got any closer to Marilyn than fetching coffee. Who cares? His memories, no matter how hyperbolic, make for first-rate filmmaking and the script by Adrian Hodges distills every poignant, startling, rapturous and heart-breaking highlight of importance from his two best-selling autobiographical memoirs. According to him, Marilyn took a fancy to a sympathetic boy with no agenda who adored her unconditionally, mainly because he was protective, unselfish and a reminder of her own lost innocence. Also, she was an outsider in a strange country who needed a friend. At first, it was difficult to gain her trust. One by one, her entourage arrives—including photographer and former lover Milton Greene (Dominic Cooper), third husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) and domineering Actors Studio coach Paula Strasberg (Zoë Wanamaker), a gargoyle who feeds on the star’s insurmountable insecurities and holds up the production on a daily basis, exerting control in all the wrong places, butting heads with everyone on the production while she gives Marilyn line readings. Kenneth Branagh is the distinguished Laurence Olivier, whose patience soon plummets into rage and near-madness (“Christ, what have I got myself into?”) as Marilyn keeps everyone waiting for hours on end, including one of England’s most revered character actresses, Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench in an imperial but luminous performance). Among the supporting players, Harry Potter’s Emma Watson is a wardrobe assistant with her own crush on Colin but no competition for Miss Monroe; Julia Ormond is a beautifully realized Vivien Leigh, who excelled in Marilyn’s role onstage but was too old for the screen; and Toby Jones (the one who should have won an Oscar for playing Truman Capote in Infamous, the second and better of the two films about the writing of In Cold Blood, instead of Philip Seymour Hoffman) is Marilyn’s press agent, Arthur Jacobs. It just doesn’t get any better than that.

Williams.

My Week With Marilyn is pure perfection, all right, and even more. Simon Curtis, a seasoned London stage director making his feature-film debut, does a masterful job of handling the most minute moments with delicacy and candor. Like eyes growing accustomed to the dark, it takes a while to adjust to Ms. Williams. I’ve seen drag queens who look more like the real Marilyn. Her eyes are too big, the contours of her face lack the jaw line that stopped traffic, and where are the splendiferous curves when she shakes her booty singing “Heat Wave” and “That Old Black Magic” in film clips Colin watches hypnotized, in the darkness of a movie theater? Ms. Williams does her own singing and dancing and she’s letter perfect. Who knew? And then everything about the legendary sex goddess comes alive too—the breathless voice, the undulating poitrine, the tousled mop of bottle-blonde hair, the insecure body language that translated into control and power—as Ms. Williams grows into the role like new skin. The illusion grows on you, like a lichen. Scene by scene, she melts into the picture. By the end, she is no longer an imposter; she’s the real deal, inhabiting Marilyn’s body, mind, heart and soul.

As production on the ill-fated Prince and the Showgirl dragged on, the frightened American star grew more dependent on the English boy’s sweetness and sympathetic compassion (Mr. Redmayne’s charm and awkward sex appeal don’t hurt either). After she discovers Arthur Miller’s cruel notes on her neuroses and vulnerability that he later turned into The Misfits (a film she hated) and After the Fall (a play that would have killed her) and narrowly survives a suicide attempt, she needs a friend even more. Lonely and desperate to escape, to flee the hangers-on, the grinding pressures of the film, the press that followed her everywhere and the sycophants who falsely praised her even when she flubbed every line of dialogue, she threw caution to the wind and accepted his invitation to take a week off without tension and terror. “You should get out more—you should see the sights,” he says naïvely. “I am the sights,” she sighs wearily. Nevertheless, she disappears from the set without permission and tours the beauty of the English countryside. From Windsor Castle, where Colin’s godfather (Derek Jacobi) gave Marilyn a private tour, to skinny-dipping in a pastoral pond, a platonic relationship took roots. Discovering a freedom of self-expression she never knew, Marilyn’s self-confidence grew. Unfortunately, like countless others who fell under her spell, Colin mistook her childlike sincerity and sex appeal for genuine affection, and made the mistake of falling in love. She got some of her lost youth back, but like everything else in her tormented life, the euphoria was temporary. Miraculously, despite the angst, The Prince and the Showgirl finally wrapped, leaving the boy a sadder but wiser man. Her parting words to him were “Thanks for being on my side.”

I truly love this film, and Ms. Williams’s triumph in it. There was only one Marilyn Monroe and nobody will ever duplicate her unique gifts, but this brave, hard-working actress shows the many contrasting moods of a complex woman with inexhaustible craft. Sleeping with photos next to the bed of her mother, before she was taken away to an asylum, and Abraham Lincoln, whom she pretended was her father, she touches your heart until it cracks. “Everyone looks at me and they see Marilyn Monroe,” confides the woman who used to be a penniless sweater girl named Norma Jean Dougherty. “Then when they find out I’m not her, they run.” I was so focused that the film gave me neck pain, but that’s a good thing. I usually get a headache for all the wrong reasons and none of the right ones. Something moved me deeply watching Ms. Williams as the tragic Marilyn, illuminating the girlish joy, erotic glamour and self-destructive suffering of a public icon who was privately a bottomless pit of need. Whatever else you think of My Week With Marilyn, make no mistake about it—you know you have been to the movies.

rreed@observer.com

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

Running Time 99 minutes

Written by Adrian Hodges

Directed by Simon Curtis

Starring Michelle Williams, Eddie Redmayne and Kenneth Branagh

4/4

“Rachel has nothing

Ms. Wells, 60, is best known for her decade-long, on-and-off love affair with the British author, beginning when they were students at Oxford.

She explained the confusion. “He wrote it while I was with him,” she said, adding that she thought the dedication “was very sweet.”

“I don’t know who she’s based on but it’s not me,” Ms. Wells said. “I know she’s not me, and Martin’s told me she’s not me.”

But Lily, in The Pregnant Widow? Definitely Gully.

FOR THE PAST THREE YEARS, Ms. Wells, an editor of Condé Nast Traveler, has been at work on a book of her own, The House in France, a memoir, to be published June 21 by Knopf. On Thursday night, British journalist Emma Soames will throw a book party for Ms. Wells, at the London apartment of Cathay Airlines Chairman James Hughes-Hallett. Ms. Wells, who now resides in Park Slope, grew up in Fitzroy Square, and maintains close ties to London.

“I met Gully many years ago—it would be not polite to ask how many,” Ms. Soames told The Observer. “We had both been out with Martin Amis, but we also had a lot of other things in common.”

“When Martin dumped Emma she came to cry on my shoulder,” Ms. Wells recalled. Which is not to say that the break-up struck anyone as a surprise.

“She’s one of Martin’s many ex-girlfriends,” Ms. Wells said. “I consoled her and we both survived. She’s a journalist too.”

One result of Mr. Amis’s prolific appetite for young, female writers during the 1970s is that the Martin Amis sex memoir has become a genre of British journalism practically popular enough to merit its own newspaper section.

Ms. Soames has written one. So has her former best friend, Julie Kavanagh, whom Mr. Amis left for Ms. Soames. Other liaisons were no less scandalous for being non-sexual: Ms. Kavanagh’s sister Pat was Mr. Amis’ss literary agent, whom he left for Andrew Wylie.

“It’s very incestuous,” Ms. Wells said.

It’s also very civilized. Mr. Amis has promised Ms. Wells he’ll be at her book party, despite the risk of encountering his entire little black book from years gone by. “We’ll drink too much,” Ms. Soames predicted. “We still do that in England.”

MS. WELLS'S BOOK loosely qualifies as a memoir of Martin as well. But while it lovingly recounts the days when she and Mr. Amis had the same shag haircut and shared a single bed at Oxford, it is more than mere kiss-and-tell.
The House in France combines travel writing, personal narrative and a family history that is brilliant, tragic and dense with boldface names. Ms. Wells’s American-born mother, Dee Chapman, was a headstrong columnist and television pundit who ran away to Europe and seduced her father, Alfred Wells, an American diplomat in Paris. She later married A. J. “Freddie” Ayer, one of the most prominent British philosophers of his time and, in Ms. Wells’s words, an “Aspergian snail.”

Dee and Freddie bounced between Oxford, London, and the titular summer house in Provence, dragging Ms. Wells to every dinner party along the way. Her adolescence was punctuated by encounters with Bertrand Russell, Bobby Kennedy, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Arranged play dates with the children of her parents’ wealthy friends seamlessly transitioned into University friendships.

“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Gully,” Vogue editor Anna Wintour wrote The Observer in an email. “She has, thankfully, pretty much always been a part of my life. Her mother, Dee, and her stepfather, Freddie Ayer, were great friends of my parents’, and even though children in that situation don’t always get along by virtue of being forced to spend time together, we most definitely did.” The two remain close friends.

When Ms. Wells first thought she might write a memoir of  her own, she talked it over with her agent, Irene Skolnick, a friend of 30 years, who knew her mother and was familiar with her travel writing at Conde Nast Traveler. “I thought it was a little presumptuous of me,” Ms. Wells said. “I mean who cares?”

Ms. Skolnick urged her to weave together her knowledge of the history and geography of Provence, which she had written about at length in Traveler—and which has repeatedly proven its allure on best-seller lists.

Publisher Sonny Mehta, another longtime acquaintance and former Londoner, bought the book and quickly found an editor in Shelley Wanger, who understood Ms. Wells’s sensibility. “Shelley is an old friend, we’re on the same wavelength, with a similar sort of background,” Ms. Wells said.

DESPITE THE OBVIOUS BENEFITS of membership, Britain’s intellectual class could be stifling. As a result, Ms. Wells and many of her peers lit out for New York at the earliest opportunity. In 1979, Ms. Wells arrived in the city with her partner—now husband—Peter Foges, who’d been offered the chance to become the BBC bureau chief here.

“New York was an escape hatch for people who got tired of London,” said Lawrence Osborne, a British travel writer and a member of Ms. Wells’s Traveler stable. “London was struggling economically, it was dowdy, it was small and provincial.”

The BBC put the couple up in a brownstone on Bank Street—described, in Mr. Amis’s 1984 novel Money, as a “chunk of sentimental London”—which quickly became a hostel for a migratory flock of Oxbridge writers on the rise. “They were not lower middle-class drop-outs,” Mr. Osborne hastened to note. “They went to private schools and were from a very connected, privileged class. They didn’t need to come to New York except to find a wider audience and more opportunity.”

Christopher Hitchens was one of them. He spent his first six months in New York living at the Bank St. place, where he was beloved for using the bathroom only rarely, but chided for multitasking by smoking when he did. Mr. Amis also crashed in the townhouse when he came through, often dragging the gang to a University Place pinball arcade.

Sir Harold Evans, who had a reputation for recruiting young stars to The Times of London, brought along one of his brightest, Tina Brown, who was by then his wife. When he took over Condé Nast Traveler, he made Gully Wells an editor—a position well suited to her capricious interests as well as her cosmopolitan upbringing.

And there was always room, it seemed, for another London expat in magazine publishing.

Part of what made this re-colonization so alluring for this generation of Britons-of-privilege was the chance to make something of themselves—and for themselves—free from the stratification of the British class system.
“Here they give much more credence to you as a bright person rather than judge you by your accent or your friends or your school,” observed expat author Simon Winchester, another of Ms. Wells’s writers at Traveler and a friend.

Britons may seem one large, well-heeled and attractively accented coterie to New Yorkers, but among themselves, they make dozens of narrow class distinctions. “People don’t pick up on British social nuance, and why the hell should they?” asked Anthony Haden-Guest, who, had his parents been married at the time of his birth, would be known as 5th Baron Haden-Guest. “That’s baggage one leaves at home when one comes here.”

In the robust magazine culture of the ’80s, the group found an exciting new home. According to The House in France, when Ms. Wells and Mr. Foges  ran into Mr. Hitchens and Ms. Wintour at Mortimer’s one night, they declared New York “the only place to be.”

They called it the Pact of Mortimer’s. It was never intended to be binding, but no one from Ms. Wells’s expat group has left New York permanently. Their rapid rise up the city’s mastheads likely had something to do with it. Meanwhile, New York has changed. It’s become safer, more bourgeois, and more closed off—like the London of their parents they left behind 30 years ago.

Ms. Wells—who is known for her osso bucco and for having inherited her mother’s gift for assembling combustible groups of people—revived the spirit of London literary society in Brownstone Brooklyn. “It’s very homely—and I don’t mean that in the American sense,” Mr. Winchester said of Ms. Wells’s Park Slope townhouse. “When you’re inside, in the dinner parties, in the homes, it’s the same as London,” said Hylan Booker, Dee Wells’s former lover. “It’s not pretentious, but there is a patina of formality.”

“It’s like a time capsule from the past,” said Lawrence Osborne. “They’ve preserved themselves—the witty conversation, the urbane manners that you don’t often see anymore. A dinner party is like a duel, you’re expected to say provocative things. They’re very high-spirited people, which is quite unusual in New York.”

If there is no new Oxbridge crew poised to claim New York for themselves, it is in part New York’s fault. The city is no longer the universally acknowledged center of culture.

According to Mr. Osborne, a declining education system is to blame as well. “They were the last generation to get that really Victorian education,” he said. After them it began to sort of fall apart. You just don’t meet those kind of encyclopedic minds, that human type, anymore.”

Not that it bothers Ms. Wells, Park Sloper. “I was never very interested in living in the red hot center of everywhere,” Ms. Wells said. “That’s probably why I’m not Anna or Tina.”

Thanks to her extraordinary family, Ms. Wells tended to find herself there anyway, always longing for something just slightly more conventional. The reason she and Martin Amis split, the memoir reveals, was that while Mr. Amis needed to lock himself in the library in order to achieve academic and literary greatness, Ms. Wells was ready for domestic bliss. Though her mother had expressed ambivalence toward her children in letters, Ms. Wells always knew she wanted to have babies.

MS. WELLS'S MEMOIR chronicles the years when the sexual revolution made London swing, simultaneously documenting its effects on the two generations that straddled it—Ms. Wells’s on one end and her mother Dee’s on the other. Since Ms. Wells was already at Oxford when the fun began, the loosening of social restrictions merely meant that her youthful folly could be indulged without serious consequences. She wore thigh-high boots under her academic gown, was photographed topless in the school paper, and dropped acid on the lawn of Exeter College.

The older generation’s newfound freedom had more harmful reverberations. Ms. Wells’s half-brother, Nick Ayer, twelve years her junior, was just a child when Dee and Freddie began having serious extramarital affairs. Their home was literally broken. Dee lived with fashion designer Hylan Booker on the third floor Tuesday through Friday, while Freddie was at Oxford teaching. While there, he slept with Vanessa Lawson, then wife of Spectator editor turned member of Parliament Nigel Lawson (the father of chef Nigella Lawson). On weekends, Freddie lived on the first floor of the family house.

Ms. Wells hand-picked lessons from her mother’s example. “My main advice to young women is: do what you love and don’t forget to have a baby,” she said. (Ms. Wells had two.) “She taught me that life is fun and part of the fun is being surrounded by very funny, clever people and going to bed with clever, funny men,” Ms. Wells said.

Watching her mother relate to so many different men—all of whom, it must be said, seem to have adored Ms. Wells and actively enriched her life—left her with the impression that men exist to make her happy, if she were nicer to them than her ball-busting mother had been.

“If you think men are great and treat them well, they’re going to give you an interesting and loving and good time,” she said. “I’ve had nothing but good times with men, and I hope I will continue to do so as friends and lovers.”

For the memoirist, this romantic philosophy has yielded an embarrassment of riches. Ms. Wanger and Mr. Foges read early drafts and had the same reaction to the inclusion of one lover in particular: “Oh, please.”

“Superfluous,” Ms. Wells said, “and he was in every sense of the word, in my life and in my book. So we got rid of him.”

kstoeffel@observer.com

That’s the way the world works in Tonyland. It’s nuts. Unless—unless!— The Drowsy Chaperone, the hilarious, loving satire of vintage Broadway musicals, beats the favorite at the post. After all, Chaperone has a sparkling (and very witty) original score by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison. But let me make one thing perfectly clear at the outset: When it comes to a fight to the finish between blue-collar butch and musical queens, I know where I stand.

But, alas, my fear is they’ll give the Best Musical award to Jersey Boys. Best Original Score will go to The Drowsy Chaperone. The award for best actor in a musical is between John Lloyd Young for his miraculously falsetto Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys and Michael Cerveris for his admired Sweeney in Sweeney Todd. The Tony goes to Mr. Lloyd Young in his Broadway debut.

It’s harder to pick the winner in the stronger category for best actress in a musical. Kelli O’Hara is a refreshing delight in partnership with Harry Connick Jr. in the successful revival of The Pajama Game. LaChanze is the scintillating young star of the Oprah Winfrey–backed (though mediocre) The Color Purple. Chita Rivera is, of course, a legend, but her Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life didn’t ignite with the public. Sutton Foster is perfect playing the somewhat narcissistic musical star in my favorite, The Drowsy Chaperone. And I wouldn’t discount the popular appeal of Patti LuPone ( Sweeney Todd) in anything; I wouldn’t dare.

Let’s see … I think the Tony will go to LaChanze in The Color Purple.

The category for best actress in a play has excelled itself this year: All five nominees were in Broadway plays that folded. It seems like a century ago since I enjoyed Souvenir, Stephen Temperley’s fantasia on Florence Foster Jenkins, the society dame with the notoriously deaf ear who became famous for singing opera tunelessly.

But how many Tony voters actually saw Judy Kaye’s wonderful performance as the delusional diva? There ought to be an unbreakable Tony rule that they can’t vote unless they’ve seen all the shows in the category. No ticket, no vote. At least two of the five nominees for best actress are there to make up the numbers (thereby squeezing out the unfortunate Julia Roberts). Cynthia Nixon starred as the grieving mother in David Lindsay-Abaire’s overpraised virtual soap opera, Rabbit Hole—the show that closed most recently. Ms. Nixon is the favorite to win the Tony.

Though I’m anticipating a very good night for Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, one of the boys—Samuel Barnett—must give way to the veteran British character actor, Ian McDiarmid of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. Put simply, Mr. McDiarmid’s portrait of stoic failure is one of the greatest performances we could wish to see, and he’ll win the Tony.

Without the usual suspects—the Brits and the Irish—this season, like many a season, would have scarcely been open for serious business. I anticipate The History Boys winning the Tony for Best Play over the best bloody play I’ve ever seen, Martin McDonagh’s terrific black comedy about terrorism, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Wilson Milam’s direction of the Inishmore ensemble is superb, but so is the work of Nicholas Hytner. Mr. Hytner of History Boys for the Tony.

The strongest category of all this season is for best actor in a play. Oliver Platt as Shining City’s lost soul in desperate need of therapy, or company, made an outstanding Broadway debut. Inishmore’s David Wilmot is another smashing actor in the category that also includes Ralph Fiennes. But if only for sentimental reasons, my money’s on Richard Griffiths for his idealistic and suffering schoolteacher of History Boys. Permit me to tell a story about how Mr. Griffiths came to be an actor in the first place, though the story begins sadly.

Two or three years ago, I learned that a friend of mine from Oxford days had suddenly died and hurried in shock to the memorial service in London, at which Richard Griffiths spoke. Though the shaky pinnacles of fame eluded Doug Fisher, he was the actor of our Oxford generation, and there was not a time when I wasn’t happy to be in his company. Many actors performed in tribute to him at the memorial, including two of his oldest friends from college—Michael Palin and Terry Jones, who became one-third of Monty Python. Among many other of Doug’s friends and contemporaries, David Aukin—who became executive director at the National Theatre—was there, and Doug’s beautiful Oxford girlfriend Annabel Leventon, who became a well-known actress, hosted the evening. But Richard Griffiths was the odd one out: the stranger at the memorial.

When it came his turn to speak, he rose shyly, and firstly gave a brilliant recital entirely from memory of a chunk of William Hazlitt’s “On Actors and Acting.” “The neglected actor may be excused if he drinks oblivion of his disappointments; the successful one if he quaffs the applause of the world …. There is no path so steep as that of fame; no labour so hard as the pursuit of excellence.”

Then he explained apologetically that he hadn’t known Doug Fisher well, but wanted to tell us something. And he told of the time when he was a student at the Manchester Polytechnic and took a chance on a new play with Doug in it at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh Festival. He explained to affectionate laughter that, until then, he could never understand how on earth an actor could perform the same role night after night. He went to see the play three times to find out, and it was Doug’s performance that changed his life. It convinced him to try his luck as an actor.

Mr. Griffiths didn’t name the play, nor did it matter. It was the acting that mattered to him. But I went cold as he told his story. You see, I wrote the play he saw. And I too witnessed the staggering performance when everything in life came together for Doug Fisher and he held up greatness for us.

Such things are not easy for me to write about. But if Richard Griffiths receives the Tony Award, I will be very glad.

That’s the way the world works in Tonyland. It’s nuts. Unless—unless!—The Drowsy Chaperone, the hilarious, loving satire of vintage Broadway musicals, beats the favorite at the post. After all, Chaperone has a sparkling (and very witty) original score by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison. But let me make one thing perfectly clear at the outset: When it comes to a fight to the finish between blue-collar butch and musical queens, I know where I stand.

But, alas, my fear is they’ll give the Best Musical award to Jersey Boys. Best Original Score will go to The Drowsy Chaperone. The award for best actor in a musical is between John Lloyd Young for his miraculously falsetto Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys and Michael Cerveris for his admired Sweeney in Sweeney Todd. The Tony goes to Mr. Lloyd Young in his Broadway debut.

It’s harder to pick the winner in the stronger category for best actress in a musical. Kelli O’Hara is a refreshing delight in partnership with Harry Connick Jr. in the successful revival of The Pajama Game. LaChanze is the scintillating young star of the Oprah Winfrey–backed (though mediocre) The Color Purple. Chita Rivera is, of course, a legend, but her Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life didn’t ignite with the public. Sutton Foster is perfect playing the somewhat narcissistic musical star in my favorite, The Drowsy Chaperone. And I wouldn’t discount the popular appeal of Patti LuPone (Sweeney Todd) in anything; I wouldn’t dare.

Let’s see … I think the Tony will go to LaChanze in The Color Purple.

The category for best actress in a play has excelled itself this year: All five nominees were in Broadway plays that folded. It seems like a century ago since I enjoyed Souvenir, Stephen Temperley’s fantasia on Florence Foster Jenkins, the society dame with the notoriously deaf ear who became famous for singing opera tunelessly.

But how many Tony voters actually saw Judy Kaye’s wonderful performance as the delusional diva? There ought to be an unbreakable Tony rule that they can’t vote unless they’ve seen all the shows in the category. No ticket, no vote. At least two of the five nominees for best actress are there to make up the numbers (thereby squeezing out the unfortunate Julia Roberts). Cynthia Nixon starred as the grieving mother in David Lindsay-Abaire’s overpraised virtual soap opera, Rabbit Hole—the show that closed most recently. Ms. Nixon is the favorite to win the Tony.

Though I’m anticipating a very good night for Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, one of the boys—Samuel Barnett—must give way to the veteran British character actor, Ian McDiarmid of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer. Put simply, Mr. McDiarmid’s portrait of stoic failure is one of the greatest performances we could wish to see, and he’ll win the Tony.

Without the usual suspects—the Brits and the Irish—this season, like many a season, would have scarcely been open for serious business. I anticipate The History Boys winning the Tony for Best Play over the best bloody play I’ve ever seen, Martin McDonagh’s terrific black comedy about terrorism, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Wilson Milam’s direction of the Inishmore ensemble is superb, but so is the work of Nicholas Hytner. Mr. Hytner of History Boys for the Tony.

The strongest category of all this season is for best actor in a play. Oliver Platt as Shining City’s lost soul in desperate need of therapy, or company, made an outstanding Broadway debut. Inishmore’s David Wilmot is another smashing actor in the category that also includes Ralph Fiennes. But if only for sentimental reasons, my money’s on Richard Griffiths for his idealistic and suffering schoolteacher of History Boys. Permit me to tell a story about how Mr. Griffiths came to be an actor in the first place, though the story begins sadly.

Two or three years ago, I learned that a friend of mine from Oxford days had suddenly died and hurried in shock to the memorial service in London, at which Richard Griffiths spoke. Though the shaky pinnacles of fame eluded Doug Fisher, he was the actor of our Oxford generation, and there was not a time when I wasn’t happy to be in his company. Many actors performed in tribute to him at the memorial, including two of his oldest friends from college—Michael Palin and Terry Jones, who became one-third of Monty Python. Among many other of Doug’s friends and contemporaries, David Aukin—who became executive director at the National Theatre—was there, and Doug’s beautiful Oxford girlfriend Annabel Leventon, who became a well-known actress, hosted the evening. But Richard Griffiths was the odd one out: the stranger at the memorial.

When it came his turn to speak, he rose shyly, and firstly gave a brilliant recital entirely from memory of a chunk of William Hazlitt’s “On Actors and Acting.” “The neglected actor may be excused if he drinks oblivion of his disappointments; the successful one if he quaffs the applause of the world …. There is no path so steep as that of fame; no labour so hard as the pursuit of excellence.”

Then he explained apologetically that he hadn’t known Doug Fisher well, but wanted to tell us something. And he told of the time when he was a student at the Manchester Polytechnic and took a chance on a new play with Doug in it at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh Festival. He explained to affectionate laughter that, until then, he could never understand how on earth an actor could perform the same role night after night. He went to see the play three times to find out, and it was Doug’s performance that changed his life. It convinced him to try his luck as an actor.

Mr. Griffiths didn’t name the play, nor did it matter. It was the acting that mattered to him. But I went cold as he told his story. You see, I wrote the play he saw. And I too witnessed the staggering performance when everything in life came together for Doug Fisher and he held up greatness for us.

Such things are not easy for me to write about. But if Richard Griffiths receives the Tony Award, I will be very glad.

At least my bias should convince you of the play’s authenticity. Mr. Bennett’s autobiographical drama is about a group of adolescent schoolboys in a North of England state school who are specially tutored to get into Oxford or Cambridge, and it coincides exactly with the experience of my own schooldays growing up in Manchester, England.

I was taught by a version of Mr. Bennett’s adored teacher, Hector—played by the magnificent Richard Griffiths—who believes in education for its own glorious sake. And I was also taught by a pushy type like his young opportunist Irwin (the excellent Stephen Campbell Moore), who knows how to spin the truth like a glib politician and impress all with his flippant, effortless superiority to beat the class system.

We even had a master who “fiddled” harmlessly with us—as poor old Hector fondles the balls of the boys who ride on the back of his motorbike. The gesture, however, is quite normal in English schools—“more appreciative than investigatory,” as Mr. Bennett delicately puts it. So not to worry. Nobody else did.

Along with six or seven others, I was—to quote the poet Frances Cornford from the play—“Magnificently unprepared / For the long littleness of life.” I was specially tutored in history, as the smart-ass class in The History Boys are. Mr. Bennett wittily adapts one of the oldest jokes in England about it:

“How do I define history?” muses one of the classmates when asked for a definition. “It’s just one fucking thing after another …. ”

When you see The History Boys, imagine the fire these lower-middle-class lads with the wrong accents and the wrong backgrounds are being put to. My Oxford entrance exam, like Mr. Bennett’s, consisted of a major paper in history, plus further exams in English literature, Latin and French, and a two-hour general essay. You opened an envelope with your heart in your mouth to find three subjects listed. “Choose one essay topic only. Do not write on both sides of the paper.” Then, if you were lucky, you were “passed along” and asked to an interview.

This is the extraordinary coincidence: In my first week at Oxford, I saw Alan Bennett, then a professor of medieval history with a First Class degree (the equivalent of cum laude), strolling down the High Street looking very much as he does today, like an owlish student or a vicar (as an actor, he has actually played more vicars than vicars). I even wrote home about seeing him that first week, for this son of a Leeds butcher who would become a national treasure was already famous. Though he went on to teach at Oxford for a while, he was already the toast of Broadway in the early 1960’s with England’s first modern satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe.

Mr. Bennett’s breakthrough as a playwright, Forty Years On, was also set in a school, though it was a posh one, like Eton. (The dotty headmaster was played by Sir John Gielgud, and one of the child actors was Keith McNally, who became New York’s most successful restaurateur). The History Boys continues England’s fascination with schooldays—from the sentimental Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Terence Rattigan’s portrait of cringing, schoolmasterly failure, The Browning Version, to the popular novels the British were all raised on, like Tom Brown’s Schooldays and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

But Mr. Bennett’s achievement with his new play is to make its theme about two rival teachers and educational systems a metaphor for England. Set in the Thatcherite 1980’s, the choices the boys face mirror the state of once-proud Britain itself—real knowledge and values versus cynical success, truth and fun versus humorless, ambitious, pragmatic achievement. The History Boys is about memory and its perversion, and it’s about what it takes to beat the system and win.

“Paradox works well and mists up the windows,” Irwin, the confident phony, advises. Paradox, like foggy British understatement and a superior sense of irony, goes a long way in English circles. It makes you seem clever.

Thus Irwin can announce smoothly, “The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom …. ” Small wonder the handsome, superficial opportunist becomes the successful media pundit and government advisor while his rumpled, idealistic rival Hector is left drowning, though possibly waving.

The History Boys is both an engaging morality tale and part social satire that, in one hilarious scene performed in Churchillian French, becomes purest farce. Mr. Bennett has written a memorable farce or two—among them one about the search for the truth about Kafka, unusually entitled Kafka’s Dick. The new play has a more ambitious canvas than his recent entertaining portraits in damp defeat and embarrassing suburban aloneness, Talking Heads. It’s by far his best play since his tragedy of English history, The Madness of George III.

There’s no fury and resentment in Mr. Bennett, however. He’s more slyly acerbic, and his tone is often one of droll affection. He sides sympathetically with Hector’s world of certain old musty English values, like taking pleasure in the enduring greatness of such poets as Housman, Auden, Larkin and Stevie Smith, or taking time to enjoy the lilting melodies of the music-hall songs that your parents sang and their parents before them—or mimicking the clipped, faux sophistication of Noël Coward’s ludicrously upper-class Brief Encounter, the delights of Cole Porter’s soigné “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and the melodramatic camp of the last cigarette scene in Now, Voyager.

They’re all part of a good liberal education! Hector’s message is that there’s a lesson even in a vintage movie. “Now, Voyager—sail thou forth to seek and find.” Anyone? Walt Whitman, of course. Class, as it were, dismissed!

Teachers like Alan Bennett’s unworldly, hugely enjoyable Hector are essential to us, and they’re becoming as obsolete as stone drinking fountains. The play pays touching tribute to those unsung heroes of our youth who were humane teachers like him. Hector is someone who only hits the students he likes. He is the one who taught us the apparently irrelevant things we never forgot. Lonely, half-wasted, unreconciled Hector is privately and sorrowfully the epitome of “un”: “Un-kissed. Un-rejoicing. Un-confessed. Un-embraced.” But, as played by Richard Griffiths, he is un-equaled.

The production is blessed with two of the finest character actors in England. The genius of Mr. Griffith, who’s quite a presence, resides in his stillness. If theater is eavesdropping on strangers, Mr. Griffith compels us to listen to him with quiet, magical ease and authority. We even find ourselves sitting and listening intently to Hector as he discusses the beauty of a Thomas Hardy poem—of all surprising things. And we enjoy it!

Frances de la Tour—second only to Maggie Smith in her perfect comic timing and dry humor—is the other gift of the production as its only female. Playing the capable, sometimes explicitly frank teacher, Mrs. Lintott, Ms. de la Tour—who’s renowned in England—is the kind of brilliant character actress who can make a small cameo role memorable. She has comparatively little to play with here, yet she makes her indelible mark. To hear her Mrs. Lintott announce to us all halfway through the play, “I have not hitherto been allotted an inner voice,” is an education in itself.

The boys—all eight of them—are a first-rate ensemble and exactly, rudely right. This is how it was, I thought to myself. This is how we were! You might even find yourself rooting for these adolescent know-alls with their whirling hormones and doubt. They don’t seem like Oxford material, though the sexually confused Posner (a very appealing performance from Samuel Barnett) is based by Alan Bennett on his anxious 16-year-old self.

The History Boys is, finally, an affecting memory play. It’s the outcome of those days when the future playwright didn’t know where he was—or where he was going, except perhaps to Oxford—and it’s a delight.

At least my bias should convince you of the play’s authenticity. Mr. Bennett’s autobiographical drama is about a group of adolescent schoolboys in a North of England state school who are specially tutored to get into Oxford or Cambridge, and it coincides exactly with the experience of my own schooldays growing up in Manchester, England.

I was taught by a version of Mr. Bennett’s adored teacher, Hector—played by the magnificent Richard Griffiths—who believes in education for its own glorious sake. And I was also taught by a pushy type like his young opportunist Irwin (the excellent Stephen Campbell Moore), who knows how to spin the truth like a glib politician and impress all with his flippant, effortless superiority to beat the class system.

We even had a master who “fiddled” harmlessly with us—as poor old Hector fondles the balls of the boys who ride on the back of his motorbike. The gesture, however, is quite normal in English schools—“more appreciative than investigatory,” as Mr. Bennett delicately puts it. So not to worry. Nobody else did.

Along with six or seven others, I was—to quote the poet Frances Cornford from the play—“Magnificently unprepared / For the long littleness of life.” I was specially tutored in history, as the smart-ass class in The History Boys are. Mr. Bennett wittily adapts one of the oldest jokes in England about it:

“How do I define history?” muses one of the classmates when asked for a definition. “It’s just one fucking thing after another …. ”

When you see The History Boys, imagine the fire these lower-middle-class lads with the wrong accents and the wrong backgrounds are being put to. My Oxford entrance exam, like Mr. Bennett’s, consisted of a major paper in history, plus further exams in English literature, Latin and French, and a two-hour general essay. You opened an envelope with your heart in your mouth to find three subjects listed. “Choose one essay topic only. Do not write on both sides of the paper.” Then, if you were lucky, you were “passed along” and asked to an interview.

This is the extraordinary coincidence: In my first week at Oxford, I saw Alan Bennett, then a professor of medieval history with a First Class degree (the equivalent of cum laude), strolling down the High Street looking very much as he does today, like an owlish student or a vicar (as an actor, he has actually played more vicars than vicars). I even wrote home about seeing him that first week, for this son of a Leeds butcher who would become a national treasure was already famous. Though he went on to teach at Oxford for a while, he was already the toast of Broadway in the early 1960’s with England’s first modern satirical revue, Beyond the Fringe.

Mr. Bennett’s breakthrough as a playwright, Forty Years On, was also set in a school, though it was a posh one, like Eton. (The dotty headmaster was played by Sir John Gielgud, and one of the child actors was Keith McNally, who became New York’s most successful restaurateur). The History Boys continues England’s fascination with schooldays—from the sentimental Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Terence Rattigan’s portrait of cringing, schoolmasterly failure, The Browning Version, to the popular novels the British were all raised on, like Tom Brown’s Schooldays and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

But Mr. Bennett’s achievement with his new play is to make its theme about two rival teachers and educational systems a metaphor for England. Set in the Thatcherite 1980’s, the choices the boys face mirror the state of once-proud Britain itself—real knowledge and values versus cynical success, truth and fun versus humorless, ambitious, pragmatic achievement. The History Boys is about memory and its perversion, and it’s about what it takes to beat the system and win.

“Paradox works well and mists up the windows,” Irwin, the confident phony, advises. Paradox, like foggy British understatement and a superior sense of irony, goes a long way in English circles. It makes you seem clever.

Thus Irwin can announce smoothly, “The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom …. ” Small wonder the handsome, superficial opportunist becomes the successful media pundit and government advisor while his rumpled, idealistic rival Hector is left drowning, though possibly waving.

The History Boys is both an engaging morality tale and part social satire that, in one hilarious scene performed in Churchillian French, becomes purest farce. Mr. Bennett has written a memorable farce or two—among them one about the search for the truth about Kafka, unusually entitled Kafka’s Dick. The new play has a more ambitious canvas than his recent entertaining portraits in damp defeat and embarrassing suburban aloneness, Talking Heads. It’s by far his best play since his tragedy of English history, The Madness of George III.

There’s no fury and resentment in Mr. Bennett, however. He’s more slyly acerbic, and his tone is often one of droll affection. He sides sympathetically with Hector’s world of certain old musty English values, like taking pleasure in the enduring greatness of such poets as Housman, Auden, Larkin and Stevie Smith, or taking time to enjoy the lilting melodies of the music-hall songs that your parents sang and their parents before them—or mimicking the clipped, faux sophistication of Noël Coward’s ludicrously upper-class Brief Encounter, the delights of Cole Porter’s soigné “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and the melodramatic camp of the last cigarette scene in Now, Voyager.

They’re all part of a good liberal education! Hector’s message is that there’s a lesson even in a vintage movie. “Now, Voyager—sail thou forth to seek and find.” Anyone? Walt Whitman, of course. Class, as it were, dismissed!

Teachers like Alan Bennett’s unworldly, hugely enjoyable Hector are essential to us, and they’re becoming as obsolete as stone drinking fountains. The play pays touching tribute to those unsung heroes of our youth who were humane teachers like him. Hector is someone who only hits the students he likes. He is the one who taught us the apparently irrelevant things we never forgot. Lonely, half-wasted, unreconciled Hector is privately and sorrowfully the epitome of “un”: “Un-kissed. Un-rejoicing. Un-confessed. Un-embraced.” But, as played by Richard Griffiths, he is un-equaled.

The production is blessed with two of the finest character actors in England. The genius of Mr. Griffith, who’s quite a presence, resides in his stillness. If theater is eavesdropping on strangers, Mr. Griffith compels us to listen to him with quiet, magical ease and authority. We even find ourselves sitting and listening intently to Hector as he discusses the beauty of a Thomas Hardy poem—of all surprising things. And we enjoy it!

Frances de la Tour—second only to Maggie Smith in her perfect comic timing and dry humor—is the other gift of the production as its only female. Playing the capable, sometimes explicitly frank teacher, Mrs. Lintott, Ms. de la Tour—who’s renowned in England—is the kind of brilliant character actress who can make a small cameo role memorable. She has comparatively little to play with here, yet she makes her indelible mark. To hear her Mrs. Lintott announce to us all halfway through the play, “I have not hitherto been allotted an inner voice,” is an education in itself.

The boys—all eight of them—are a first-rate ensemble and exactly, rudely right. This is how it was, I thought to myself. This is how we were! You might even find yourself rooting for these adolescent know-alls with their whirling hormones and doubt. They don’t seem like Oxford material, though the sexually confused Posner (a very appealing performance from Samuel Barnett) is based by Alan Bennett on his anxious 16-year-old self.

The History Boys is, finally, an affecting memory play. It’s the outcome of those days when the future playwright didn’t know where he was—or where he was going, except perhaps to Oxford—and it’s a delight.

The story of Willie Morris—the celebrated editor of Harper’s when that monthly was in its highest New Journalism fettle in the late 1960’s—is, above all, a fable of American ambition. A whip-smart native of Yazoo City, Miss., Morris made his name first as a crusading editor and writer for his college paper, The Daily Texan, and then for the state’s noble, perennially broke muckraking political magazine, The Texas Observer. From there—by way of an aimless academic detour to Stanford University—he was plucked for service as the aide de camp and likely successor to Jack Fischer, Harper’s then editor in chief.

At the time—this was the mid-60’s, mind you—Harper’s was marketing itself under the most unpropitious slogan imaginable: “The oldest magazine in America.” Morris’ apprenticeship under Fischer lasted four long years (the maximum leader proved far more reluctant to retire than he’d let on), and so when he at last ascended, Morris moved in short order to clean house and make Harper’s speak directly to the burning issues of the day.

By any measure, he succeeded wildly. At the peak of his game, Morris devoted an entire issue of Harper’s to a 90,000-word dispatch from Norman Mailer, who’d recently been jailed for participating in an anti-war march in Washington. The piece, which later grew into The Armies of the Night, is still the longest ever published in a general-interest magazine. Morris also published early versions of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power, Pete Axthelm’s The City Game and Mr. Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex, among others—a truly amazing four-year track record, now wholly unthinkable in today’s magazine world, rotted to its core with vacuous celebrity profiles, lifestyle attitudinizing and subliterate service twaddle.

Willie Morris’ story, in other words, is part of a much bigger story about the contraction of journalistic imagination, and Larry L. King in many ways is well suited to tell both tales. After Morris took over in 1967, he brought on Mr. King, a former Congressional staffer turned novelist, as one of four contributing editors to help ring in the big changes he had in mind. A native Texan—best known for co-authoring the smash musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas—Mr. King also shared, sometimes to a fault, Morris’ own acute sense of Dixie outsidership in the snobbish circles of New York literary celebrity. In one especially droll set piece, Mr. King recounts how Morris goaded him into singing a camp Texas gospel number, “Jesus on the Five-Yard Line,” at the outset of a meeting full of Fischer loyalists. The idea was that such a flagrant show of yokeldom in their genteel Northeastern midst would drive them all to resign—as, soon enough, it indeed did.

Mr. King can scarcely help telling a good deal of his own story alongside Morris’, which is both a signal strength and flaw of In Search of Willie Morris. Mr. King’s fondness for his subject helps him evoke the heady confidence of the Morris years at Harper’s—where, as Mr. King puts it, “so long as a writer used the space he needed wisely and well … the sky was the limit.” On trips north from D.C., Mr. King writes, “I would almost vibrate with energy, shine with it in my eagerness to reach Harper’s and my colleagues and friends.” Suffice it to say that no one today could speak of a magazine office in Manhattan in such glowing terms without eliciting a chorus of bitter guffaws.

Likewise, when relating how Morris came afoul of the magazine’s new owners, the Minneapolis-based Cowles family—proprietors of a regional newspaper chain that includes The Star-Tribune of Minneapolis and The Des Moines Register—Mr. King effectively summons the alternating moods of puzzlement and outrage of an insider seeing his friend and institutional protector badly overplaying his hand in a corporate power struggle. When the new Cowles-appointed president of Harper’s, Bill Blair, berated Morris for editing the magazine for “a bunch of hippies,” Morris just sulked and stewed; in an additional adolescent funk, he stood up the younger John Cowles—his main defender in the owner’s clan—for a post-board-meeting dinner in Minneapolis, flying back to New York without notice. And in mid-1971, when Morris composed an acid letter to the Cowleses protesting the ways they’d hamstrung and undermined his editorship—essentially an open invitation to fire him—he followed it up with a maladroit offer to resign, which the family promptly accepted. The wunderkind editor was now banished, thanks in no small part to his own unrestrained, inarticulate and alcohol-soaked sanctimony.

From there, Morris went downhill fast. He became a sodden fixture in Bridgehampton, then more of a bohemian retreat than the South Fork Soho it is today. During his nine years on Long Island, he mainly racked up debts and dallied with a couple of rich divorcees. (His first marriage, to his college sweetheart, collapsed not long before his Harper’s tenure did—a casualty of his virtual marriage to the magazine and his incessant midtown carousing.) One of many low points came in 1971, when Morris contrived to kidnap his 12-year-old son’s dog, which he then let loose to be killed by a car on the Sag Harbor Turnpike—a horrifyingly negligent sequence of acts that Morris somehow persuaded himself was really the fault of one of his wealthy inamoratas.

He wrote sporadically, publishing an indifferently received novel, The Last of the Southern Girls (1973), and working obsessively on his never-completed “big novel” Taps. When the English department at Ole Miss came with an offer, Morris—bitterly mourning the death of his Long Island neighbor, the novelist James Jones—took a shot at a homecoming, particularly since the passing of his own, much-resented mother had made the prospect of life in Mississippi thinkable again.

During the Mississippi years, Mr. King’s narrative loses steam—one suspects because the duty of relating a friend’s ongoing dissipation and growing belligerence gets depressing. Morris was greeted as a local hero, with overflowing seminar classes and campus ceremonies of all description. Ole Miss boosters were even careful to supply his faculty house with appliances, food and firewood. (Eventually, they would also forgive his outstanding rent as he sunk deeper into debt as well as drink.)

Mr. King is obviously mindful of his friend’s decline, but records it in much the same way his Ole Miss sponsors treated it—indulgently, as an unfortunate tic of an otherwise charismatic, larger-than-life character. He confines to a parenthesis the protests of Morris’ son, David Rae Morris, that no Oxford friend of his dad ever informed him that the drinking had careened out of control, and euphemistically refers to a drunken episode when Morris took a swing at an Oxford cop as “not a good moment between town and gown.”

Morris was evidently surrounded by enablers on all sides at Oxford, from professors making excuses for his surly assault on the fictional grounds that he had just heard “bad news” of some kind, to city authorities who arranged for Morris’ orders to attend drunk drivers’ school to vanish—and for his revoked driver’s license to be just as magically restored. Matters are scarcely helped here—as throughout the book—by Mr. King’s penchant for folksy Southern idioms and clichés: Morris is a “grass-grabbing drunk”; a good meal is “yum, yum, y’all.”

Thankfully, Morris’ life had a happy ending. He managed to pull himself out of Oxford, and his last decade was remarkably productive—seeing, among other things, the publication of his memoir of the Harper’s years, New York Days (1993), a sequel of sorts to his justly admired 1964 memoir North Toward Home, as well as another Mississippi memoir, My Dog Skip (1995), together with a number of essay collections. He also remarried, which allows Mr. King to end on a jolly note—“the Yazoo kid had quite an exhilarating ride”—and with the cursory, clichéd assurance that Morris’ late-life productivity was indeed largely owed to the love of “a good woman.”

Well, shucks. Can a life as tumultuous as Morris’ be tidied up with last-minute nuptials? All that boozing, and the many foul tempers that came with it – it seems like more than just a cry for a helpmeet. It’s a tall order to write dispassionately about an errant friend—and at the end of Larry King’s appreciative, sympathetic biography, you’re left with the nagging suspicion that In Search of Willie Morris never quite arrives at its destination.

Chris Lehmann is an editor at CQ Weekly and the author of Revolt of the Masscult (Prickly Paradigm).

The story of Willie Morris—the celebrated editor of Harper’s when that monthly was in its highest New Journalism fettle in the late 1960’s—is, above all, a fable of American ambition. A whip-smart native of Yazoo City, Miss., Morris made his name first as a crusading editor and writer for his college paper, The Daily Texan, and then for the state’s noble, perennially broke muckraking political magazine, The Texas Observer. From there—by way of an aimless academic detour to Stanford University—he was plucked for service as the aide de camp and likely successor to Jack Fischer, Harper’s then editor in chief.

At the time—this was the mid-60’s, mind you— Harper’s was marketing itself under the most unpropitious slogan imaginable: “The oldest magazine in America.” Morris’ apprenticeship under Fischer lasted four long years (the maximum leader proved far more reluctant to retire than he’d let on), and so when he at last ascended, Morris moved in short order to clean house and make Harper’s speak directly to the burning issues of the day.

By any measure, he succeeded wildly. At the peak of his game, Morris devoted an entire issue of Harper’s to a 90,000-word dispatch from Norman Mailer, who’d recently been jailed for participating in an anti-war march in Washington. The piece, which later grew into The Armies of the Night, is still the longest ever published in a general-interest magazine. Morris also published early versions of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power, Pete Axthelm’s The City Game and Mr. Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex, among others—a truly amazing four-year track record, now wholly unthinkable in today’s magazine world, rotted to its core with vacuous celebrity profiles, lifestyle attitudinizing and subliterate service twaddle.

Willie Morris’ story, in other words, is part of a much bigger story about the contraction of journalistic imagination, and Larry L. King in many ways is well suited to tell both tales. After Morris took over in 1967, he brought on Mr. King, a former Congressional staffer turned novelist, as one of four contributing editors to help ring in the big changes he had in mind. A native Texan—best known for co-authoring the smash musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas—Mr. King also shared, sometimes to a fault, Morris’ own acute sense of Dixie outsidership in the snobbish circles of New York literary celebrity. In one especially droll set piece, Mr. King recounts how Morris goaded him into singing a camp Texas gospel number, “Jesus on the Five-Yard Line,” at the outset of a meeting full of Fischer loyalists. The idea was that such a flagrant show of yokeldom in their genteel Northeastern midst would drive them all to resign—as, soon enough, it indeed did.

Mr. King can scarcely help telling a good deal of his own story alongside Morris’, which is both a signal strength and flaw of In Search of Willie Morris. Mr. King’s fondness for his subject helps him evoke the heady confidence of the Morris years at Harper’s—where, as Mr. King puts it, “so long as a writer used the space he needed wisely and well … the sky was the limit.” On trips north from D.C., Mr. King writes, “I would almost vibrate with energy, shine with it in my eagerness to reach Harper’s and my colleagues and friends.” Suffice it to say that no one today could speak of a magazine office in Manhattan in such glowing terms without eliciting a chorus of bitter guffaws.

Likewise, when relating how Morris came afoul of the magazine’s new owners, the Minneapolis-based Cowles family—proprietors of a regional newspaper chain that includes The Star-Tribune of Minneapolis and The Des Moines Register—Mr. King effectively summons the alternating moods of puzzlement and outrage of an insider seeing his friend and institutional protector badly overplaying his hand in a corporate power struggle. When the new Cowles-appointed president of Harper’s, Bill Blair, berated Morris for editing the magazine for “a bunch of hippies,” Morris just sulked and stewed; in an additional adolescent funk, he stood up the younger John Cowles—his main defender in the owner’s clan—for a post-board-meeting dinner in Minneapolis, flying back to New York without notice. And in mid-1971, when Morris composed an acid letter to the Cowleses protesting the ways they’d hamstrung and undermined his editorship—essentially an open invitation to fire him—he followed it up with a maladroit offer to resign, which the family promptly accepted. The wunderkind editor was now banished, thanks in no small part to his own unrestrained, inarticulate and alcohol-soaked sanctimony.

From there, Morris went downhill fast. He became a sodden fixture in Bridgehampton, then more of a bohemian retreat than the South Fork Soho it is today. During his nine years on Long Island, he mainly racked up debts and dallied with a couple of rich divorcees. (His first marriage, to his college sweetheart, collapsed not long before his Harper’s tenure did—a casualty of his virtual marriage to the magazine and his incessant midtown carousing.) One of many low points came in 1971, when Morris contrived to kidnap his 12-year-old son’s dog, which he then let loose to be killed by a car on the Sag Harbor Turnpike—a horrifyingly negligent sequence of acts that Morris somehow persuaded himself was really the fault of one of his wealthy inamoratas.

He wrote sporadically, publishing an indifferently received novel, The Last of the Southern Girls (1973), and working obsessively on his never-completed “big novel” Taps. When the English department at Ole Miss came with an offer, Morris—bitterly mourning the death of his Long Island neighbor, the novelist James Jones—took a shot at a homecoming, particularly since the passing of his own, much-resented mother had made the prospect of life in Mississippi thinkable again.

During the Mississippi years, Mr. King’s narrative loses steam—one suspects because the duty of relating a friend’s ongoing dissipation and growing belligerence gets depressing. Morris was greeted as a local hero, with overflowing seminar classes and campus ceremonies of all description. Ole Miss boosters were even careful to supply his faculty house with appliances, food and firewood. (Eventually, they would also forgive his outstanding rent as he sunk deeper into debt as well as drink.)

Mr. King is obviously mindful of his friend’s decline, but records it in much the same way his Ole Miss sponsors treated it—indulgently, as an unfortunate tic of an otherwise charismatic, larger-than-life character. He confines to a parenthesis the protests of Morris’ son, David Rae Morris, that no Oxford friend of his dad ever informed him that the drinking had careened out of control, and euphemistically refers to a drunken episode when Morris took a swing at an Oxford cop as “not a good moment between town and gown.”

Morris was evidently surrounded by enablers on all sides at Oxford, from professors making excuses for his surly assault on the fictional grounds that he had just heard “bad news” of some kind, to city authorities who arranged for Morris’ orders to attend drunk drivers’ school to vanish—and for his revoked driver’s license to be just as magically restored. Matters are scarcely helped here—as throughout the book—by Mr. King’s penchant for folksy Southern idioms and clichés: Morris is a “grass-grabbing drunk”; a good meal is “yum, yum, y’all.”

Thankfully, Morris’ life had a happy ending. He managed to pull himself out of Oxford, and his last decade was remarkably productive—seeing, among other things, the publication of his memoir of the Harper’s years, New York Days (1993), a sequel of sorts to his justly admired 1964 memoir North Toward Home, as well as another Mississippi memoir, My Dog Skip (1995), together with a number of essay collections. He also remarried, which allows Mr. King to end on a jolly note—“the Yazoo kid had quite an exhilarating ride”—and with the cursory, clichéd assurance that Morris’ late-life productivity was indeed largely owed to the love of “a good woman.”

Well, shucks. Can a life as tumultuous as Morris’ be tidied up with last-minute nuptials? All that boozing, and the many foul tempers that came with it – it seems like more than just a cry for a helpmeet. It’s a tall order to write dispassionately about an errant friend—and at the end of Larry King’s appreciative, sympathetic biography, you’re left with the nagging suspicion that In Search of Willie Morris never quite arrives at its destination.

Chris Lehmann is an editor at CQ Weekly and the author of Revolt of the Masscult (Prickly Paradigm).

Earlier this month, invocations of creationism and Holocaust denial were injected into the debate by no less an authority than Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-seller Will in the World. On Sept. 4, The Times published his letter to the editor responding to the most recent (Aug. 30) piece by The Times’ default Shakespeare correspondent William S. Niederkorn, an editor in the cultural department.

Mr. Niederkorn’s coverage has drawn criticism from an array of Shakespeare scholars in the past for a pronounced, tendentious focus on the conspiracy theory that the author of Shakespeare’s plays was a secretive mystery man who used William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon as a front.

If you read his coverage over the past three and a half years, you would be led to believe that this was the most compelling issue in Shakespearean scholarship.

What set Mr. Greenblatt off about Mr. Niederkorn’s recent “Essay” was his concluding rhetorical question: “What if authorship studies were made part of the standard Shakespeare curriculum?”

As Mr. Greenblatt put it in his Letter to the Editor:

“The idea that William Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays and poems is a matter of conjecture and the idea that the ‘authorship controversy’ be taught in the classroom are the exact equivalent of current arguments that ‘intelligent design’ be taught alongside evolution.

“In both cases an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on a serious assessment of hard evidence, is challenged by passionately held fantasies whose adherents demand equal time.

“The demand seems harmless enough until one reflects on its implications. Should claims that the Holocaust did not occur also be made part of the standard curriculum?”

Holocaust denial! As the author of a critique of unfounded Hitler “explanations,” including Holocaust denial, and of a forthcoming book (sometime in the fall of 2006) on what I would call real Shakespearean controversies—about the plays and poems, not the name of their author—I would suggest that “Shakespeare denial” (or “Shakespearean creationism”: the creation of alternate Shakespeares) doesn’t amount to the hateful folly of Holocaust denial. But I think Mr. Greenblatt is making a point about the relativism that giving equal time to “both sides” of the “authorship controversy” entails.

What if, for instance, over the course of three and a half years (the length of Mr. Niederkorn’s Shakespeare tenure), the Times aerospace correspondent had given “equal time” (or more) to those who believe that the moon landings were a staged hoax, say? Many people believe it to be true, after all (48,000 Google hits for “moon landing hoax”). Should the moon-landing hoax theory be taught in schools alongside astrophysics?

Other scholars have expressed concern, embarrassment and anger that the paper of record appears to have given its imprimatur to the belief that the authorship controversy is the central Shakespearean question.

But I think another appropriate emotion might be deep sadness. At a time when schools and colleges everywhere are dropping their requirements that students read any of Shakespeare’s works, we are now told it’s important they take away from whatever time they do have to read the greatest writer in the language in order to focus on fringe beliefs about the secret identity of the author.

I should say that this is not the only view advanced in The Times. I’ve written about the state of Shakespearean scholarship for the Book Review and about productions for Arts & Leisure without ever being asked by any editor whether I was sure who wrote the plays. And the “authorship controversy” doesn’t feature in Ben Brantley’s superbly informed reviews of Shakespearean productions. I have a feeling that many literate Times people are a bit embarrassed by what’s happened with its Shakespeare coverage.

But the fact that continuing coverage of developments in Shakespeare studies has been the province of someone who places the “authorship controversy” at the center of focus has the effect of giving credibility to a conspiracy theory that lacks any positive evidence: any record of any witness, at any time, ever alluding to it. (Were all the witnesses shot or silenced, like the 22 gunmen on the “grassy knoll” in Dallas?)

Another problem with this kind of coverage is that the genuinely consequential controversies in the field are not covered at all. The still-unresolved debate over how to deal with variations in the two versions of King Lear and the three texts of Hamlet, for instance, has profound implications for how these foundational works of Western culture are construed. No coverage of the debate about Lukas Erne’s recent thesis (in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist): whether Shakespeare took the printed texts of his work seriously, or whether he just dashed them off for the stage à la Shakespeare in Love—another argument with important and practical consequences for how we read and stage the plays. Or the debate that Frank Kermode initiated over the difficulty of Shakespeare’s “late language”: deliberately complicated or (in places) carelessly opaque.

These are the kinds of things serious scholars care about and educated readers deserve to know about. Apparently none of these rich debates about Shakespeare’s actual work have been of much interest to Mr. Niederkorn.

Instead, for nearly four years, important developments in Shakespeare studies have been looked at through the lens of the supposedly central “authorship controversy.” One can see, for instance, the way this agenda was pushed into the coverage of the claim that a 1612 “Funeral Elegy” was written by Shakespeare.

Back in June 2002, Professor Donald Foster conceded that he was wrong in attributing a dull and dutiful 578-line “Funeral Elegy” published in 1612 to Shakespeare (after three major publishers had included it in their editions of Shakespeare). Readers of The Times were told in Mr. Niederkorn’s reportage that a really important implication of this development was that it represented a major victory for the “Oxfordians,” that faction of the “anti-Stratfordians” who push Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, as their secret Shakespeare.

Oxford, inconveniently for his supporters’ case that he wrote “Shakespeare’s” plays, died in 1604, before, most scholars agree, “Shakespeare” had written perhaps a dozen plays, including Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

The Oxfordians have had to rely on strained attempts to backdate those plays, and to claim that the Earl of Oxford somehow wrote them all before 1604 and that participants in his Shakespeare conspiracy doled them out for the next eight years or so.

If Shakespeare had written a funeral elegy about a man who died in 1612, it’s unlikely Oxford could have risen from his grave to do it. The retraction of the 1612 “Funeral Elegy” attribution to Shakespeare, Times readers were told by Mr. ­Niederkorn, meant another obstacle had been removed from the Oxfordian path! A substantial portion of the article on the “Funeral Elegy” retraction was devoted to its implications for the “authorship controversy,” and, as a result, Times readers were again given a mistaken impression of the centrality of the “authorship controversy.”

The Family Romance of the Shakespeare Deniers, Or, A Gap Is Different From a Void

The “Funeral Elegy” article prompted the first skirmish between Mr. Niederkorn and Mr. Greenblatt. What particularly disturbed the latter was Mr. Niederkorn’s characterization of the controversy as one between “Stratfordians” (believers that Shakespeare from Stratford wrote the plays) and “anti-Stratfordians” (believers that it was Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford or even Queen Elizabeth).

Mr. Greenblatt objected to this as a tendentious rhetorical trick. Or as he put it in a letter to The Times then: “The so-called Oxfordians, who push the de Vere theory, have answers, of course—just as the adherents of the Ptolemaic system [those who believed the sun revolved around the earth] had answers to Copernicus. It is unaccountable that you refer to those of us who believe that Shakespeare wrote the plays as ‘Stratfordians,’ as though there are two equally credible positions.”

It’s not that we know a lot about Shakespeare. As I wrote in a Publishers Weekly review of Peter Ackroyd’s new biography of Shakespeare recently: “At their worst [Shakespearean biographers] reshuffle old wives’ tales and pile supposition upon conjecture into a rickety house of cards.”

Yes, there are gaps in the record of Shakespeare’s life 400 years ago. And, yes, biographers often overextend their imaginations trying to fill these gaps. They may never be filled in completely. But there is sufficient evidence to link “the Stratford man” (another rhetorical ploy of the “anti-Stratfordians”) to the plays—and I believe there is far more than necessary. A gap is different from a void. Existence of gaps does not license conspiracy-theory speculation without any positive evidence of a conspiracy.

And, in fact, the “anti-Stratfordian” case is based largely on what you might call “negative evidence”: The lack of any surviving letters written by Shakespeare, or reference to his books in his will. There are gaps in Hitler’s biography as well, important ones, but as I suggested in Explaining Hitler, these gaps don’t constitute positive evidence in favor of urban legends such as the one that claims Hitler was descended from a Rothschild. I called such stories “the family romance of the Hitler explainers,” after Freud’s characterization of the fantasy that one is secretly related to royalty or aristocracy.

In biography, the family romance is the wish to endow the apparently humble-born person who became a huge historical figure with secret exotic or noble parentage. The Earl of Oxford theory is the family romance of the Shakespeare deniers, Oxford a precursor of Rothschild.

The Oxford “evidence” I’ve seen is not persuasive. The fact that someone may have highlighted passages in a Bible that was once in the possession of Oxford and that these passages are alluded to in Shakespeare is not, I’m afraid, positive evidence that Oxford is Shakespeare; it may at best be evidence that Oxford read Shakespeare. But this is the kind of thing the Oxfordians get excited about—wishful thinking at best.

Who’s Got the Da Vinci Code?

But let’s look at the way Mr. Niederkorn frames the debate in his recent “Essay” on Shakespeare matters on Aug. 30, the one that prompted Mr. Greenblatt’s Holocaust-denial comparison.

This one was called, in a particularly strained headline: “The Shakespeare Code, and Other Fanciful Ideas From the Traditional Camp.”

Students of the coverage might notice that in the headline and throughout the story a new nomenclature has replaced “Stratfordian” and “anti-Stratfordian,” which are nowhere to be found. Now those who believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare are “the traditional camp” or the “traditionalists,” with the implicit hint of hidebound retro (if not reactionary) views, while those who believe that some other person wrote Shakespeare are said to be in the “unorthodox” camp. And we all know what we think of orthodoxy.

In any case, the thesis of the article was that “traditionalist” believers are so “eager for proof that Shakespeare is Shakespeare,” so desperate—virtually backed into a corner by the ever-strengthening arguments for the Earl of Oxford—that “fantasy has now been firmly established as a primary tool of other, more traditional Shakespeare studies.”

I have to say, having spent six years engaging with Shakespearean scholars on genuinely interesting questions, that this is a fantasy. Particularly if Mr. Niederkorn thinks “Shakespeare studies” consists mainly in trying to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

He cites a new book that asserts that Shakespeare (of Stratford) embedded a radical Catholic “code” into his works, as if the book were in the mainstream of Shakespeare scholarship, thereby, he thinks, discrediting mainstream scholarship. Please—I think we know who the Da Vinci Code types really are in this controversy: The history of “anti-Stratfordian” ­literature is chock-full of books bearing cryptograms.

And Mr. Niederkorn spotlights the decision by Oxford University Press to include in its new Complete Works of Shakespeare edition a play called Sir Thomas More, which some scholars believe contains part of a single scene by Shakespeare. I haven’t seen the Oxford University Press rationale (it could be contextual, for all I know), but merited or not, the decision is utterly irrelevant to the question of who wrote Hamlet.

But Mr. Niederkorn asserts that he is not a partisan, and when someone on the SHAKSPER discussion list called Mr. Niederkorn an “Oxfordian,” he replied to the list that “I am not an Oxfordian, nor a Stratfordian for that matter. I am just trying to keep an open mind and sort things out as well as I can.”

So admirably detached. Of course, in framing the debate that way—that neither one side nor the other has proven its case and that he’s just “sorting things out” between them—he makes it seem as if they were in fact virtually equivalent contenders. By saying you’re not sure one way or the other about the moon landing, that you’re just “sorting things out,” you give more credibility to the moon-landing hoax theory than it deserves (to say the least).

In addition, Mr. Niederkorn conducts a one-way argument with Stephen Greenblatt, quoting Mr. Greenblatt on some matter from his book and then interjecting, like a cross-examiner, “But wait a minute … ” and acting like he’s demolished Mr. Greenblatt’s argument when in fact he hasn’t.

For example, he takes Mr. Greenblatt’s conjectural belief that Shakespeare might have had secret Catholic leanings and then tries to turn them against him by saying, “But wait a minute. Isn’t the Shakespeare canon the cornerstone of secular English literature? How can a radical Catholic have written it in good conscience?”

He seems to have forgotten to reread Hamlet, which gives weight to the Catholic notion of purgatory (it’s where the ghost comes from), despite having been written during the reign of a Protestant theocracy that abolished belief in purgatory. And he seems to believe that “secular literature” is literature that has no reference to religion in it.

Despite Mr. Niederkorn’s claim of nonpartisanship, he certainly gives the impression to knowledgeable readers that he has a partisan agenda: I e-mailed the multifaceted scholar Thomas Pendleton, who co-edits the Shakespeare Newsletter, which is distributed to thousands of Shakespeare scholars and hundreds of libraries throughout the English-speaking world and beyond, asking for his assessment of Mr. Niederkorn’s Aug. 30 “Essay,” since Mr. Pendleton has followed the controversy more closely than I have and has written skeptically about various authorship arguments.

Here’s his reply:

“Niederkorn has no business being the Times’ Shakespeare man. He is obviously an anti-Stratfordian—whether or not that makes him an Oxfordian isn’t worth debating, although many of his arguments seem to come from Diana Price’s Oxfordian work. Thus he operates from a position that almost no professional, academic or scholarly student of Shakespeare takes seriously. There is no serious scholarly ‘debate’ on the question.

“The Stratfordian case isn’t ‘conjecture,’ as Niederkorn says. It’s based on documented evidence that is somewhere between abundant and overwhelming …. There’s plenty of direct testimony from contemporaries that the man from Stratford was the man who wrote the plays (Ben Jonson, Digges, etc.). If Niederkorn can’t tell the difference between this kind of evidence and the fact that Oxford, like Hamlet, was once captured by pirates, he’s not competent to discuss the subject.”

The impoverishment of Mr. Niederkorn’s “authorship”-centered lens for looking at Shakespearean developments can be seen in his treatment of James Shapiro, author of the forthcoming 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

Mr. Niederkorn taxes Mr. Shapiro with the hobbyhorse of the Oxfordians, the “problem” of Shakespeare’s reading, and implicitly characterizes his solution as one of the “fantasies” of the “traditional camp.”

In doing so, he overlooks the real questions raised in Mr. Shapiro’s analysis of the “revisions” of Hamlet (a subject I wrote about for The New Yorker three and a half years ago): which variations in the texts of Hamlet were the product of Shakespeare’s “considered second thoughts” (as the scholarly term of art has it), and which were accidents of transmission, misprints, cuts by theater managers, etc. Mr. Niederkorn’s readers are denied any investigation of such matters at the heart of Hamlet because he’s fixated on Oxfordian irrelevancies.

‘Fire and Brimstone’?

But let’s return to the “direct testimony” question, since this may be at the heart of one of Mr. Niederkorn’s mischaracterizations of the “debate” and the scholarship on “the traditional side” in his Aug. 30 article.

Buried in his piece is a mischaracterization of an essay by Brian Vickers (whom Mr. Niederkorn calls “the dean of Shakespeare scholars”) in the Times Literary Supplement (“Why Not Shakespeare?”, Aug. 17, 2005). Mr. Niederkorn calls the essay a “fire-and-brimstone academic sermon,” as if Mr. Vickers were railing in desperate, incendiary, inquisitional terms against the “anti-Stratfordians.”

In fact, I defy you to read Mr. Vickers’ essay and find the “fire and brimstone.” Instead, Mr. Vickers’ essay (Google it) is a sober, quietly devastating survey of the “authorship debate,” one that cites, by the way, a new book that Mr. Niederkorn somehow forgot to tell his Times readers about: The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question by Scott McCrea. I wonder why?

The most salient passage in Mr. Vickers’ essay—the one dealing with “direct testimony” to Shakespeare’s authorship (there is, of course, no direct testimony to anyone else’s authorship—none; zero), is this paragraph:

“We have a huge number of allusions [to Shakespeare], both laudatory and envious, from fellow-writers and others in the London theatre-world who knew him well (Greene, Meres, Jonson, Heywood, Webster, Marston, Gabriel Harvey, Chettle, Weever, Dekker); an almost continuous series of references from 1592 to his death in 1616, all of which identify him as both actor and author.”

It’s not fire and brimstone; it’s fact and evidence. It’s not fantasy and codes; it’s the names of real people who knew Shakespeare, the actor from Stratford, as the writer of the plays. In any case, should you need further proof on this question, I suggest you consult the authorship chapter of Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare, or go to the Shakespeare authorship Web site (shakespeareauthorship.com) maintained by David Kathman and Terry Ross.

I think it’s time for everyone to go back to reading and rereading those plays. (There’s some good stuff in them.)

Again, what I feel is sadness. I think people should be allowed to conduct inquiries on whatever tangent they wish. Let William S. Niederkorn continue to pursue his hobbyhorse in The Times, just so long as he doesn’t do so under the pretense of detached objectivity. I just think it’s sad that there are people who—given the choice of how they spend their limited time on the planet—choose to spend it on this question, rather than read and reread and deepen their appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.

They don’t know what they’re missing.

Earlier this month, invocations of creationism and Holocaust denial were injected into the debate by no less an authority than Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-seller Will in the World. On Sept. 4, The Times published his letter to the editor responding to the most recent (Aug. 30) piece by The Times’ default Shakespeare correspondent William S. Niederkorn, an editor in the cultural department.

Mr. Niederkorn’s coverage has drawn criticism from an array of Shakespeare scholars in the past for a pronounced, tendentious focus on the conspiracy theory that the author of Shakespeare’s plays was a secretive mystery man who used William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon as a front.

If you read his coverage over the past three and a half years, you would be led to believe that this was the most compelling issue in Shakespearean scholarship.

What set Mr. Greenblatt off about Mr. Niederkorn’s recent “Essay” was his concluding rhetorical question: “What if authorship studies were made part of the standard Shakespeare curriculum?”

As Mr. Greenblatt put it in his Letter to the Editor:

“The idea that William Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays and poems is a matter of conjecture and the idea that the ‘authorship controversy’ be taught in the classroom are the exact equivalent of current arguments that ‘intelligent design’ be taught alongside evolution.

“In both cases an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on a serious assessment of hard evidence, is challenged by passionately held fantasies whose adherents demand equal time.

“The demand seems harmless enough until one reflects on its implications. Should claims that the Holocaust did not occur also be made part of the standard curriculum?”

Holocaust denial! As the author of a critique of unfounded Hitler “explanations,” including Holocaust denial, and of a forthcoming book (sometime in the fall of 2006) on what I would call real Shakespearean controversies—about the plays and poems, not the name of their author—I would suggest that “Shakespeare denial” (or “Shakespearean creationism”: the creation of alternate Shakespeares) doesn’t amount to the hateful folly of Holocaust denial. But I think Mr. Greenblatt is making a point about the relativism that giving equal time to “both sides” of the “authorship controversy” entails.

What if, for instance, over the course of three and a half years (the length of Mr. Niederkorn’s Shakespeare tenure), the Times aerospace correspondent had given “equal time” (or more) to those who believe that the moon landings were a staged hoax, say? Many people believe it to be true, after all (48,000 Google hits for “moon landing hoax”). Should the moon-landing hoax theory be taught in schools alongside astrophysics?

Other scholars have expressed concern, embarrassment and anger that the paper of record appears to have given its imprimatur to the belief that the authorship controversy is the central Shakespearean question.

But I think another appropriate emotion might be deep sadness. At a time when schools and colleges everywhere are dropping their requirements that students read any of Shakespeare’s works, we are now told it’s important they take away from whatever time they do have to read the greatest writer in the language in order to focus on fringe beliefs about the secret identity of the author.

I should say that this is not the only view advanced in The Times. I’ve written about the state of Shakespearean scholarship for the Book Review and about productions for Arts & Leisure without ever being asked by any editor whether I was sure who wrote the plays. And the “authorship controversy” doesn’t feature in Ben Brantley’s superbly informed reviews of Shakespearean productions. I have a feeling that many literate Times people are a bit embarrassed by what’s happened with its Shakespeare coverage.

But the fact that continuing coverage of developments in Shakespeare studies has been the province of someone who places the “authorship controversy” at the center of focus has the effect of giving credibility to a conspiracy theory that lacks any positive evidence: any record of any witness, at any time, ever alluding to it. (Were all the witnesses shot or silenced, like the 22 gunmen on the “grassy knoll” in Dallas?)

Another problem with this kind of coverage is that the genuinely consequential controversies in the field are not covered at all. The still-unresolved debate over how to deal with variations in the two versions of King Lear and the three texts of Hamlet, for instance, has profound implications for how these foundational works of Western culture are construed. No coverage of the debate about Lukas Erne’s recent thesis (in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist): whether Shakespeare took the printed texts of his work seriously, or whether he just dashed them off for the stage à la Shakespeare in Love—another argument with important and practical consequences for how we read and stage the plays. Or the debate that Frank Kermode initiated over the difficulty of Shakespeare’s “late language”: deliberately complicated or (in places) carelessly opaque.

These are the kinds of things serious scholars care about and educated readers deserve to know about. Apparently none of these rich debates about Shakespeare’s actual work have been of much interest to Mr. Niederkorn.

Instead, for nearly four years, important developments in Shakespeare studies have been looked at through the lens of the supposedly central “authorship controversy.” One can see, for instance, the way this agenda was pushed into the coverage of the claim that a 1612 “Funeral Elegy” was written by Shakespeare.

Back in June 2002, Professor Donald Foster conceded that he was wrong in attributing a dull and dutiful 578-line “Funeral Elegy” published in 1612 to Shakespeare (after three major publishers had included it in their editions of Shakespeare). Readers of The Times were told in Mr. Niederkorn’s reportage that a really important implication of this development was that it represented a major victory for the “Oxfordians,” that faction of the “anti-Stratfordians” who push Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, as their secret Shakespeare.

Oxford, inconveniently for his supporters’ case that he wrote “Shakespeare’s” plays, died in 1604, before, most scholars agree, “Shakespeare” had written perhaps a dozen plays, including Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

The Oxfordians have had to rely on strained attempts to backdate those plays, and to claim that the Earl of Oxford somehow wrote them all before 1604 and that participants in his Shakespeare conspiracy doled them out for the next eight years or so.

If Shakespeare had written a funeral elegy about a man who died in 1612, it’s unlikely Oxford could have risen from his grave to do it. The retraction of the 1612 “Funeral Elegy” attribution to Shakespeare, Times readers were told by Mr. ­Niederkorn, meant another obstacle had been removed from the Oxfordian path! A substantial portion of the article on the “Funeral Elegy” retraction was devoted to its implications for the “authorship controversy,” and, as a result, Times readers were again given a mistaken impression of the centrality of the “authorship controversy.”

The Family Romance of the Shakespeare Deniers, Or, A Gap Is Different From a Void

The “Funeral Elegy” article prompted the first skirmish between Mr. Niederkorn and Mr. Greenblatt. What particularly disturbed the latter was Mr. Niederkorn’s characterization of the controversy as one between “Stratfordians” (believers that Shakespeare from Stratford wrote the plays) and “anti-Stratfordians” (believers that it was Marlowe, Bacon, Oxford or even Queen Elizabeth).

Mr. Greenblatt objected to this as a tendentious rhetorical trick. Or as he put it in a letter to The Times then: “The so-called Oxfordians, who push the de Vere theory, have answers, of course—just as the adherents of the Ptolemaic system [those who believed the sun revolved around the earth] had answers to Copernicus. It is unaccountable that you refer to those of us who believe that Shakespeare wrote the plays as ‘Stratfordians,’ as though there are two equally credible positions.”

It’s not that we know a lot about Shakespeare. As I wrote in a Publishers Weekly review of Peter Ackroyd’s new biography of Shakespeare recently: “At their worst [Shakespearean biographers] reshuffle old wives’ tales and pile supposition upon conjecture into a rickety house of cards.”

Yes, there are gaps in the record of Shakespeare’s life 400 years ago. And, yes, biographers often overextend their imaginations trying to fill these gaps. They may never be filled in completely. But there is sufficient evidence to link “the Stratford man” (another rhetorical ploy of the “anti-Stratfordians”) to the plays—and I believe there is far more than necessary. A gap is different from a void. Existence of gaps does not license conspiracy-theory speculation without any positive evidence of a conspiracy.

And, in fact, the “anti-Stratfordian” case is based largely on what you might call “negative evidence”: The lack of any surviving letters written by Shakespeare, or reference to his books in his will. There are gaps in Hitler’s biography as well, important ones, but as I suggested in Explaining Hitler, these gaps don’t constitute positive evidence in favor of urban legends such as the one that claims Hitler was descended from a Rothschild. I called such stories “the family romance of the Hitler explainers,” after Freud’s characterization of the fantasy that one is secretly related to royalty or aristocracy.

In biography, the family romance is the wish to endow the apparently humble-born person who became a huge historical figure with secret exotic or noble parentage. The Earl of Oxford theory is the family romance of the Shakespeare deniers, Oxford a precursor of Rothschild.

The Oxford “evidence” I’ve seen is not persuasive. The fact that someone may have highlighted passages in a Bible that was once in the possession of Oxford and that these passages are alluded to in Shakespeare is not, I’m afraid, positive evidence that Oxford is Shakespeare; it may at best be evidence that Oxford read Shakespeare. But this is the kind of thing the Oxfordians get excited about—wishful thinking at best.

Who’s Got the Da Vinci Code?

But let’s look at the way Mr. Niederkorn frames the debate in his recent “Essay” on Shakespeare matters on Aug. 30, the one that prompted Mr. Greenblatt’s Holocaust-denial comparison.

This one was called, in a particularly strained headline: “The Shakespeare Code, and Other Fanciful Ideas From the Traditional Camp.”

Students of the coverage might notice that in the headline and throughout the story a new nomenclature has replaced “Stratfordian” and “anti-Stratfordian,” which are nowhere to be found. Now those who believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare are “the traditional camp” or the “traditionalists,” with the implicit hint of hidebound retro (if not reactionary) views, while those who believe that some other person wrote Shakespeare are said to be in the “unorthodox” camp. And we all know what we think of orthodoxy.

In any case, the thesis of the article was that “traditionalist” believers are so “eager for proof that Shakespeare is Shakespeare,” so desperate—virtually backed into a corner by the ever-strengthening arguments for the Earl of Oxford—that “fantasy has now been firmly established as a primary tool of other, more traditional Shakespeare studies.”

I have to say, having spent six years engaging with Shakespearean scholars on genuinely interesting questions, that this is a fantasy. Particularly if Mr. Niederkorn thinks “Shakespeare studies” consists mainly in trying to prove that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

He cites a new book that asserts that Shakespeare (of Stratford) embedded a radical Catholic “code” into his works, as if the book were in the mainstream of Shakespeare scholarship, thereby, he thinks, discrediting mainstream scholarship. Please—I think we know who the Da Vinci Code types really are in this controversy: The history of “anti-Stratfordian” ­literature is chock-full of books bearing cryptograms.

And Mr. Niederkorn spotlights the decision by Oxford University Press to include in its new Complete Works of Shakespeare edition a play called Sir Thomas More, which some scholars believe contains part of a single scene by Shakespeare. I haven’t seen the Oxford University Press rationale (it could be contextual, for all I know), but merited or not, the decision is utterly irrelevant to the question of who wrote Hamlet.

But Mr. Niederkorn asserts that he is not a partisan, and when someone on the SHAKSPER discussion list called Mr. Niederkorn an “Oxfordian,” he replied to the list that “I am not an Oxfordian, nor a Stratfordian for that matter. I am just trying to keep an open mind and sort things out as well as I can.”

So admirably detached. Of course, in framing the debate that way—that neither one side nor the other has proven its case and that he’s just “sorting things out” between them—he makes it seem as if they were in fact virtually equivalent contenders. By saying you’re not sure one way or the other about the moon landing, that you’re just “sorting things out,” you give more credibility to the moon-landing hoax theory than it deserves (to say the least).

In addition, Mr. Niederkorn conducts a one-way argument with Stephen Greenblatt, quoting Mr. Greenblatt on some matter from his book and then interjecting, like a cross-examiner, “But wait a minute … ” and acting like he’s demolished Mr. Greenblatt’s argument when in fact he hasn’t.

For example, he takes Mr. Greenblatt’s conjectural belief that Shakespeare might have had secret Catholic leanings and then tries to turn them against him by saying, “But wait a minute. Isn’t the Shakespeare canon the cornerstone of secular English literature? How can a radical Catholic have written it in good conscience?”

He seems to have forgotten to reread Hamlet, which gives weight to the Catholic notion of purgatory (it’s where the ghost comes from), despite having been written during the reign of a Protestant theocracy that abolished belief in purgatory. And he seems to believe that “secular literature” is literature that has no reference to religion in it.

Despite Mr. Niederkorn’s claim of nonpartisanship, he certainly gives the impression to knowledgeable readers that he has a partisan agenda: I e-mailed the multifaceted scholar Thomas Pendleton, who co-edits the Shakespeare Newsletter, which is distributed to thousands of Shakespeare scholars and hundreds of libraries throughout the English-speaking world and beyond, asking for his assessment of Mr. Niederkorn’s Aug. 30 “Essay,” since Mr. Pendleton has followed the controversy more closely than I have and has written skeptically about various authorship arguments.

Here’s his reply:

“Niederkorn has no business being the Times’ Shakespeare man. He is obviously an anti-Stratfordian—whether or not that makes him an Oxfordian isn’t worth debating, although many of his arguments seem to come from Diana Price’s Oxfordian work. Thus he operates from a position that almost no professional, academic or scholarly student of Shakespeare takes seriously. There is no serious scholarly ‘debate’ on the question.

“The Stratfordian case isn’t ‘conjecture,’ as Niederkorn says. It’s based on documented evidence that is somewhere between abundant and overwhelming …. There’s plenty of direct testimony from contemporaries that the man from Stratford was the man who wrote the plays (Ben Jonson, Digges, etc.). If Niederkorn can’t tell the difference between this kind of evidence and the fact that Oxford, like Hamlet, was once captured by pirates, he’s not competent to discuss the subject.”

The impoverishment of Mr. Niederkorn’s “authorship”-centered lens for looking at Shakespearean developments can be seen in his treatment of James Shapiro, author of the forthcoming 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

Mr. Niederkorn taxes Mr. Shapiro with the hobbyhorse of the Oxfordians, the “problem” of Shakespeare’s reading, and implicitly characterizes his solution as one of the “fantasies” of the “traditional camp.”

In doing so, he overlooks the real questions raised in Mr. Shapiro’s analysis of the “revisions” of Hamlet (a subject I wrote about for The New Yorker three and a half years ago): which variations in the texts of Hamlet were the product of Shakespeare’s “considered second thoughts” (as the scholarly term of art has it), and which were accidents of transmission, misprints, cuts by theater managers, etc. Mr. Niederkorn’s readers are denied any investigation of such matters at the heart of Hamlet because he’s fixated on Oxfordian irrelevancies.

‘Fire and Brimstone’?

But let’s return to the “direct testimony” question, since this may be at the heart of one of Mr. Niederkorn’s mischaracterizations of the “debate” and the scholarship on “the traditional side” in his Aug. 30 article.

Buried in his piece is a mischaracterization of an essay by Brian Vickers (whom Mr. Niederkorn calls “the dean of Shakespeare scholars”) in the Times Literary Supplement (“Why Not Shakespeare?”, Aug. 17, 2005). Mr. Niederkorn calls the essay a “fire-and-brimstone academic sermon,” as if Mr. Vickers were railing in desperate, incendiary, inquisitional terms against the “anti-Stratfordians.”

In fact, I defy you to read Mr. Vickers’ essay and find the “fire and brimstone.” Instead, Mr. Vickers’ essay (Google it) is a sober, quietly devastating survey of the “authorship debate,” one that cites, by the way, a new book that Mr. Niederkorn somehow forgot to tell his Times readers about: The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question by Scott McCrea. I wonder why?

The most salient passage in Mr. Vickers’ essay—the one dealing with “direct testimony” to Shakespeare’s authorship (there is, of course, no direct testimony to anyone else’s authorship—none; zero), is this paragraph:

“We have a huge number of allusions [to Shakespeare], both laudatory and envious, from fellow-writers and others in the London theatre-world who knew him well (Greene, Meres, Jonson, Heywood, Webster, Marston, Gabriel Harvey, Chettle, Weever, Dekker); an almost continuous series of references from 1592 to his death in 1616, all of which identify him as both actor and author.”

It’s not fire and brimstone; it’s fact and evidence. It’s not fantasy and codes; it’s the names of real people who knew Shakespeare, the actor from Stratford, as the writer of the plays. In any case, should you need further proof on this question, I suggest you consult the authorship chapter of Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare, or go to the Shakespeare authorship Web site (shakespeareauthorship.com) maintained by David Kathman and Terry Ross.

I think it’s time for everyone to go back to reading and rereading those plays. (There’s some good stuff in them.)

Again, what I feel is sadness. I think people should be allowed to conduct inquiries on whatever tangent they wish. Let William S. Niederkorn continue to pursue his hobbyhorse in The Times, just so long as he doesn’t do so under the pretense of detached objectivity. I just think it’s sad that there are people who—given the choice of how they spend their limited time on the planet—choose to spend it on this question, rather than read and reread and deepen their appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.

They don’t know what they’re missing.