E-Mail This Article to a Friend The end of an era Farewell to the Kendall Café, plus Saul Bellow at the BPL and more

Celebrating Saul Bellow at the BPL

At the age of 88, and frail after suffering a recent stroke, Nobel Prize winner and Brookline resident Saul Bellow was unable to attend the festivities in his honor at the Boston Public Library last Thursday. Which perhaps gave his celebrants more leeway in lavishing praise. The Harvard Book Store–sponsored event was advertised as a 50th-anniversary celebration for the publication of Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Throughout the hour-long reading and chat, the panelists kept returning to the "American-ness" of the venerated author. It was amusing to notice, then, that the panel comprised three soft-spoken Englishmen — and Stanley Crouch.

Crouch, Martin Amis, James Wood, and Jonathan Wilson had been invited because of their closeness to Bellow’s work but also because of their personal friendships with him. Everyone made quick prefatory remarks before reading aloud excerpts from Bellow’s work, though Crouch rambled on, sang (touchingly) the solo from Louis Armstrong’s "Wild Man Blues," read his excerpt, and concluded with an awkwardly told dirty joke that was somehow supposed to be emblematically Bellovian and emblematically American.

In the Q&A that followed the readings, Wilson pointed out that Bellow in fact wasn’t "American-born" like Augie but Canadian-born, in Lachine, Quebec, and that he grew up speaking three languages: Yiddish, English, and French. In that sense, he proved how American he was by becoming one. Wilson added, "No matter how long V.S. Naipaul lives there, I don’t think he’s ever going to be considered an English writer." Or as Crouch put it, "America is the place where everyone can come to and blow it or make it."

Amis was asked, is there an English Saul Bellow? "The answer is no. English writers were never called upon to define their country. England knows what it is perfectly well, thank you very much. That’s why the views of English writers on public affairs and politics are considered slightly less important than those of the man on the street. America has a different view of the writer. It’s had to, because the Americans know, subconsciously or consciously, that the writer is going to tell them who they were, what their country was. So there’s a visionary fusion in American fiction. . . . There has to be, because there’s a whole new world, a new universe to interpret. And that’s a bigger job than any English writer has ever been asked to do."

As for Bellow’s stature, Crouch talked about his "compassion" and "humanity," his intellectual breadth and feel for American life from the highest to the lowest, and put him in a line with Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner as one of the three greatest American novelists, "our Thomas Mann." Amis recalled re-reading Augie over the summer and feeling an unfamiliar sensation — terror. "Terror at what this novelist can do. I think he not only sees more than we see; he hears, tastes, listens, touches. Compared to him, the rest of us are only fitfully sentient. I feel that his sentences simply weigh more than anyone else’s. To me he’s not just the greatest living American writer, he’s the greatest American writer. He belongs with Tolstoy and Proust."

— Jon Garelick

Kendall Café closing

Jewel made her Boston debut there. Elvis Costello played a matinee in the tiny club. Local artists from brawling rockers the Gentlemen to expatriate songwriter Eileen Rose have appeared within its intimate confines. And authors and musicians could be found hobnobbing at the bar and collaborating on its tiny stage. But after almost a decade as one of the Boston area’s music hot spots, the Kendall Café is closing next Saturday, October 31, according to co-owner Mike Tallon.

The club, at 233 Cardinal Medeiros Avenue in Cambridge, has been up for sale since the July 4 weekend, with an asking price of $1.4 million, which includes the Café and four apartments above it within the same building. "I just can’t see us hanging in through the winter for somebody to come and buy it," says Tallon, who owns the club in partnership with Michael Creamer, a Boston-based band manager. So for the rest of this month, the Kendall is saying goodbye to its patrons, and some of its musical regulars, by offering free performances (see www.kendallcafe.com).

"It’s like the Kendall has become an old beautiful car that everyone admires, but it’s gotten harder and costlier to keep it running," Tallon explains. The club’s infrastructure, now 20 years old, needs renovating. Facing that expense, a drop in business, and family issues, Tallon and Creamer decided to sell the establishment. "It just came down to the return not outweighing the time and energy to keep it open," Tallon continues. "We had a great run of popularity, but a few years ago it just became too difficult for us to compete. We’re a small room [capacity: 65], and we can’t get into bidding wars with other clubs. We used to have two national acts a month. Lately we’ve been getting only one or two a quarter. There’s also just too much competition for the entertainment dollar. A lot of people who would go out two or three nights a week to as many different clubs are now going out just one night a week. And we were always a destination room. With our location, nobody’s just going to ramble in.

"Honestly, the hardest part of shutting down is missing the people I’ve worked with every day. It’s glib to talk about how great the music was and all the great shows we’ve had over the years, but hipsters come and go. It’s another ball game to have a good show one night and then get up the following day for work and make it all happen again, and that’s where the staff and management come in. It’s been a family sort of place for me between the people I’ve worked with and the regulars.

"I always thought I would be passing the Kendall on to my son, who’s eight now and needs to have me around a bit more. That’s the saddest part of it, because he grew up here as well. At our first Christmas party, he was 10 months old, and I remember him being handed from customer to customer. And he still comes here now and knows all the regulars."

Tallon says that if a buyer can’t be found soon, he may turn the building into condominiums. He adds, "I’d like to think I’ll be staying in the music business." He and Kendall booking agent Leanne Ghent are looking to establish a weekly live-performance series elsewhere in the Boston area. Meanwhile, he’s gotten involved in the Irish-based Clann Records, helping set up US and Canadian distribution deals for the label. Clann’s biggest artist is singer Tommy Flemming, a former member of the popular Galway-based group Dé Danann.

— Ted Drozdowski

Trinity Rep 2003-2004 (continued)

Providence’s Trinity Repertory Company has revised/completed its 2003-2004 schedule announcement. The previously announced Topdog/Underdog, by Suzan-Lori Parks, has been postponed to the 2004-2005 season. In that play’s place, Trinity will present, in its 300-seat Dowling Theater, the Tony Award–winning actor Brian Dennehy in a double bill of Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie and a one-act by Sean O’Casey. And in its annual new-play slot, whose past occupants have included Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home and Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, the company will present Rinne Groff’s The Ruby Sunrise.

Dennehy has won the Tony for Best Actor twice in the past five years, this year for O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and in 1999 for the 50th-anniversary production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In the company’s press release, Trinity artistic director Oskar Eustis stated that Dennehy’s "matchless range and stature rank him among the great actors in American stage history. He has devoted the heart of his career to the stage in a way that very few of his contemporaries have." Hughie — a one-hour, two-character O’Neill work recently staged in New York with Jason Robards and Al Pacino — and the O’Casey one-act will open February 20 and run through April 3; Katherine Steindler will direct. Trinity subscribers will have first crack at tickets; you can purchase subscription packages of three or four plays by calling (401) 521-1100 extension 225. Remaining tickets will go on sale in January.

Rinne Groff teaches at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; The Ruby Sunrise "follows the story of a mysterious teenage girl who may have invented television in 1927 yet is denied her place in history." It will play in the Dowling Theatre May 14 through June 27. Trinity’s current presentation, O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, runs through November 9; it will be followed by the annual production of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (November 22 through December 27); company member Rachael Warren’s new cabaret show, Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience (December 12 through January 25 in the Dowling Theater); William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (January 30 through March 7); and the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story (April 23 through June 6). For tickets, call (401) 351-4242 or visit www.trinityrep.com.

— Jeffrey Gantz