Aesthetic Realism says that a good anger has like of the world in it, has respect for the world in it; and a bad or hurtful anger has dislike of the world in it, or contempt for the world in it….what differentiates a handsome anger from an ugly anger is whether the anger is narrowly personal, is all for the advancement of ego in its separation, or is for something beautiful and just, sustained by space, time, and history.

Aesthetic Realism teaches a person to distinguish between these two angers, and to criticize the “narrowly personal” anger that weakens us. And through this education, people learn what it means to have anger in behalf of respect for reality, making us proud and strong. That is what happened to me and it’s what now to teach men in Aesthetic Realism consultations.

I am going to speak about what I have learned, and about aspects of the life and work of one of America’s most loved entertainers, who, on The Honeymooners gave humorous form to a puffed up, narrow anger and also showed how much a person wants to change: Jackie Gleason. He was a true artist, but he suffered tremendously because of the unjust anger he had at the world and people.

Anger and How We See the World

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that we have an attitude to the whole world—is it our friend or an enemy? In his definitive lecture, “Aesthetic Realism and Anger,” Mr. Siegel writes:

The desire to be angry comes from the fact that we feel, very early, that what is going on in this world is not what suits us. And the thing that we can do then is to say that the world is a bad place for us, or we can try to find out why it doesn’t suit us. This is not an easy job. To understand is difficult. And yet it is the only thing that will save us from carrying on an anger day after day.

Growing up in Florida, outwardly I did not seem like an angry person. I tried to be cheerful and there were things I honestly liked, such as going to my neighbor’s house to see the new litter of puppies their dog had. But inside I often had that feeling Mr. Siegel describes—that the world was a bad place.

I felt this very much in my family. The Coopermans had many things people want—a nice home, vacations every summer. But the way we cared for each other and then could be distant made me angry. Going out to a restaurant or to a friend’s house, we looked like an affectionate family, but I knew that wasn’t the whole story. At home, my mother and father sometimes seemed bitter and resentful. But I never tried, as Mr. Siegel says, to “understand” what my parents felt. Instead I had contempt—felt their lives were messy, the world was bad and I better keep to myself.

My angers as a boy were personal and vain. Once I went with my mother and father to get my first suit. In the store I hated every suit I saw—they were the wrong color or they didn’t fit right, and there was nothing I liked. But my parents said I needed a suit for a bar mitzvah I was going to, and they bought me one. I threw a fit. Sitting in the back seat of the car I sulked the entire way home. Finally my father stopped the car and my mother turned around and screamed at me “What do you want from us!”

The telling thing is what happened the next week. I put on the suit and I loved it. I couldn’t figure out why I had hated it so much just a few days earlier. One large reason, I learned, is this: I wanted to be displeased and angry. Aesthetic Realism has seen that this contempt drive is in everyone—the hope that nothing will please you. The self can prefer to be disgusted and angry because then you feel superior to everything; but this undermines our lives because it is against our deepest purpose, to like the world.

Jackie Gleason grew up so differently from me. Early he met things that were hard to bear. He was born in Brooklyn in 1916. In The Great One, biographer William A. Henry describes young Jackie as “plucky and adventurous,” yet he lived in grim circumstances—his parents were poor. Jackie Gleason grew up in a way people today are being forced to endure. His own later description of his family’s apartment sounds a little like that spare set of The Honeymooners:

The surroundings were dismal, just a round table and an icebox and a bureau that everything went into. The light bulbs were never very bright and the rooms were always bare.

When he was three Jackie’s sickly older brother, Clemence, died. His parents began to drink and they grew apart. One day, just before Christmas when Jackie was almost ten, his father left work and never came home. He was never seen or heard from again. This affected Jackie Gleason tremendously. I think it solidified the feeling he had early that it was a tough world and he better be tough himself—that a certain kind of aggressive street smarts would take care of him rather than thought about the world. Jackie became rebellious at school and dropped out. By eleven he was hustling pool in his neighborhood.

The place where life seemed best to Jackie Gleason was at the vaudeville house. Henry writes:

The little boy was certain that nowhere was there such happiness as he had seen in the Halsey Theatre. He begged to be taken back again and again. At home he imitated the funny dances he saw and the funny way the actors fell without hurting themselves.

The world at the Halsey did suit Jackie Gleason—it had surprise and order, slapstick and structure. In his teens Jackie was invited to emcee the Halsey’s amateur nights because of his “spontaneity, his ability to be funny off the cuff.” Henry tells how one night Gleason decided to “skid deliberately into some seltzer that had been spilled on the stage and take an extravagant windmilling pratfall.”

I think Jackie Gleason felt throwing his whole self into funny ways of using his body had the world seem likable—he was free. That’s what you feel in that lovely phrase of his that later became so famous—”And away we go!”—the self on the brink of going out of itself.

When Jackie Gleason was 19 his mother died. Now essentially alone, he moved to Manhattan to pursue a career in show business.

The Anger of Art and of the Ego

In his lecture “Poetry and Anger,” Eli Siegel made this surprising and important statement:

All art, in a sense, is anger, because you are taking a situation which doesn’t have form, and you are changing it, that is, destroying the formlessness of it, to make form.

I believe this is what Jackie Gleason unknowingly tried to do as a comedian and actor: give form to what could seem sprawling and formless, to find structure in a world that had seemed ill-made.

In 1950, at age 34, he emceed a show called Cavalcade of Stars on that new thing, the television. With his vibrant personality and his big, graceful body which, when he’s dancing, is like what Eli Siegel once described in an Aesthetic Realism lesson—”To have a mountain skip would be…delightful”; and with his keen instinct for what would honestly entertain, such as the 16 June Taylor dancers, Jackie Gleason filled that small screen.

Gleason did come to a form, a composition new to television: a mingling of reccurring sketches and music, of “pathos and…the broadest baggy pants comedy” as one critic put it. He brought this new form into people’s living rooms, and became an overnight success, soon known as Mr. Saturday Night.

But with all his success Jackie Gleason was troubled and angry. His first marriage was, at this very time, failing. He worried constantly about ratings and could not sleep. He overate, then checked into a hospital to lose weight. And Gleason’s carousing became legendary, as did his excessive drinking. Jackie Gleason did not know his deepest purpose in life was to like the world—that, as Eli Siegel writes in his essay “Alcoholism; Or, You Got To Find the World Interesting,” he needed to see “in the ordinary universe a zip, a tingle, a blandishment.” Instead, Gleason wanted to beat out the world through being a tough show business success. He was competitive and very often mean.

This is vivid in the contemptuous way he treated his writers. His biographer describes how Gleason seemed to get a thrill humiliating them, making them grovel as he passed judgement on their work. He short-changed them on money, and most reprehensible of all, he refused to give them credit for creating the characters that made him famous for decades. All the characters Jackie Gleason played, except for Ralph Kramden, were created in the first shows by his writers—but Gleason insisted he created them himself.

Leonard Stern summed up what most of Jackie Gleason’s writers felt when he said:

I think he resented us because we did something he knew he needed and couldn’t do for himself.

That is a tremendously important statement. Jackie Gleason preferred to be resentful and angry rather than grateful for where the world had been of use to him. The desire to be ungrateful makes us mean and miserable and only Aesthetic Realism explains why. Men learn about this in consultations, to the everlasting benefit of their lives, through hearing questions such as: Would you rather be pleased by the world or resentful of it? When do you feel stronger—when you’re grateful or when you’re angry? If the world did come through for you, are you sure you would only like it?

Jackie Gleason suffered greatly because he did not hear questions like these. I believe unknowingly he didn’t like it that the world had been good to him in such a big way, enabled him to have success in his career—it blew his case that the world was a place that hurt him. What Eli Siegel says in his lecture “Aesthetic Realism Looks at Things: Discomfort” describes Jackie Gleason—that a “problem…drinker” is one who “maintains his anger.”

Anger and Sweetness

In his lecture “Poetry and Anger,” Eli Siegel speaks about opposites every man is trying to put together:

The energy which is our anger ought to find a form which goes along with our benevolence, our sweetness, our warmth.

These opposites are what we find in the various characters Jackie Gleason played—anger and sweetness, toughness and sentiment. For example he played The Poor Soul who is described as a “saintly, wide-eyed innocent…his button eyes as imploring as a beagle’s. Then there is Reginald van Gleason III:

That devil may care playboy [with] a top hat tall enough for a stovepipe, a cape as sweeping as draperies… he drinks relentlessly…He can be as rude as he likes to whomever he wishes to abuse…Reggie wants to be alone with his hostility, his anger oward the world.

A beagle’s eyes and a hostile playboy—that is sweetness and anger. And he didn’t know it but through his work Jackie Gleason was trying to make sense of his two attitudes towards the world: where he wanted to be sweet to it—though even in the sweet characters there was a bent towards being hurt; and where he wanted to stick out his tongue at everything and be a tough guy.

In the movies he played Minnesota Fats, the steely pool shark in The Hustler; and then the title role in the movie Gleason wrote—Gigot, the mute, gentle street person of Paris, abused by ruffians and loved by the cats and dogs, who takes in the child of a prostitute and cares for her.

I think the anger and sweetness of Jackie Gleason are most successfully one in his lovable, irascible bus driver, Ralph Kramden, who shows these two feelings as he clenches his fist and says to his wife, “To the moon, Alice!”; and then says at the end of so many episodes, “Baby, you’re the greatest.”

In his life Jackie Gleason had a purpose that weakened him terrifically—he wanted to conquer the world through show business and he cultivated acquaintances with persons in power like then President Richard Nixon. Yet even when he did get all the trappings of success—fame, money, the affection of America—Gleason felt like a failure to himself. He once said to an interviewer:

You can be ruined by success…Believe me, pal, I know. You no longer have the incentive to give your best. You no longer mix with people who are living real, struggling lives. You are out of it, and life takes its revenge…Success ruined me.

Jackie’s fellow artist on The Honeymooners, Art Carney, once said: “It used to make me miserable to see how little joy he got out of everything he had achieved.” Jackie Gleason needed criticism of his contempt.

There were times he did have an anger that strengthened him. In Self and World, Mr. Siegel writes: “When we have anger which comes from an awareness of ugliness, injustice, this anger we are proud of. It integrates us.” Once Gleason was on a promotional stop of a train taking the cast of a show to the South. In the cast was a black dancer, Mercedes Ellington. When photographers began taking pictures and saw her, one shouted demeaningly, “What are you doing here?” Gleason was furious. He proudly pulled Mercedes Ellington to his side and stood with her for the entire shoot—forcing photographers to take her picture with every one they took of him.

Why Are Men Angry in Love?

In Self and World Mr. Siegel writes: “The purpose of love is to feel closely at one with things as a whole.” But if a man is angry at the world it will interfere with how he sees a particular woman. That is what occurred with Jackie Gleason, who was married three times.

His first marriage to dancer Genevieve Halford lasted 40 years, though they lived as man and wife for only a few. When they first met, Gleason was taken by Genevieve’s soft, pretty appearance and her outward serenity—he was more jagged and rough. Jackie Gleason told friends he was seeing a “serious girl” and he pursued her vigorously. They were married in 1936 when he was twenty.

But Jackie Gleason did not want to think about who Genevieve Halford was. One writer says “He wanted a woman he could.enshrine.” A woman you enshrine is not a real person—she is a possession you use to glorify yourself. From the outset the marriage was rocky. Genevieve Halford was angry with Jackie Gleason, too, because he was clearly more interested in his career than in her feelings or those of the two daughters they had.

Jackie Gleason said plainly that he felt like a failure as a husband and father. Speaking about his late-night partying and his frequent infidelity to his wife, he once wrote, “I have no legitimate argument for my conduct.”

I feel so fortunate to be learning from Aesthetic Realism about love. Jackie Gleason and I are very different, but like him, when I didn’t get my way with a woman I would get angry.

Once, when a woman I was interested in had some criticisms of me, I was furious. In an Aesthetic Realism class, the Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss, taught me what a woman wants most—good will. She said, “You felt a woman should go along with any plan you had. The large question is whether you had good will for the lady.” I said, “I don’t think I did,” and she then asked, “So what right do you have to be angry?”

Ms. Reiss asked as the discussion went on, “Have you thought about what it would mean to strengthen her?” I hadn’t, and Ms. Reiss said humorously, “He who doth not have a purpose he is proud of, ought not to complain. Do you think you need to see women better? “Yes,” I said, and she asked, “Is that such a terrible thing?” No, it wasn’t. I felt so encouraged when Ms. Reiss said, “This is a local stop—go on to becoming a better person.

I am so happy to say that because of Ms. Reiss’ good will that is exactly what happened. She taught me the purpose men need to be proud in love: to want to know a woman, to think about how her life could be stronger. Learning this enabled me to fall in love with the woman who is now my wife of ten years, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman. I feel grateful and proud for the privilege it is to know Meryl, what she’s hoping for in her life.

The Opposites, The Honeymooners and Anger

I think some episodes of “The Honeymooners,” with the superb ensemble work of its principle actors—Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows and Joyce Randolph—are art and illustrate this definitive principle stated by Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

The show at its best puts together fury and tenderness, thick and thin with those bodies of Ralph and Norton, humor and seriousness, ordinary people and universal emotions. Life itself seems to get into that lovely, plain kitchen. The show has a good roughness, and at times you feel something like what Eli Siegel once said in describing the French stage of the 17th century with the comedies of Moliere: “It must have rattled with the pranks of merry bodies, weighing something.”

At some point in almost every episode Ralph gets steamingly angry. Jackie Gleason gives no-holds-barred form to the ego strutting and then enraged when its plans are foiled—he makes anger look ridiculous. In “Aesthetic Realism And Anger” Mr. Siegel writes: “The worst kind of anger is the quiet kind, the kind that is…smooth disappointment.” Ralph’s anger is anything but quiet—it’s all out. Yet Gleason was good, too, at giving outward form to the slow burn. But the crucial thing is this: Ralph inevitably sees his anger was wrong and he is ashamed, and as the show ends he’s sweeter and stronger.

In the episode “On Stage” Ralph and Alice are going to be in a play at the Women’s Auxiliary of the Racoon Club. Ralph, sure he will be discovered by a Hollywood director who will be in the audience, gets very pompous, talking with an affected “actor’s” voice. He is to play Frederick who is in love with Rachel, played by Alice. But Rachel loves Hamilton, whom Norton plays. Scripts in hand, the three rehearse, and when Norton hits a certain word the sparks begin to fly.

Later the play is performed, and afterwards the Hollywood director comes to Ralph’s dressing room, but says it is Alice he wants for his next movie, not Ralph. He leaves and Ralph’s bubble is burst, but just then Alice comes in and speaks to him so movingly, he see’s what really important in life.

I want people everywhere to know the one education that changes unjust anger in us, making us proud of ourselves and happy—the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel.

The post Jackie Gleason & Two Kinds of Anger appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

To be strong and get what you wanted, I felt you had to be strategic and smart. In seventh grade, on the morning of the election for class president, I passed out candy thinking this would boost my chances for victory; but my classmates saw through my obvious scheme and I went down in defeat.

Aesthetic Realism explains the purpose that enables a man be strong and kind at once. It is good will, “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” When a man has real good will he is at his keenest—he’s using his mind, his intellect, to have a good effect on people. I was thrilled to hear Eli Siegel’s conviction when he said in a lecture that kindness is “the most avant-garde virtue of them all!”

Kindness Is Relation

In his lecture Mind & Kindness, Mr. Siegel explained that the idea of “kinship” is in the word “kind.” He said:

Deep in the meaning of the word kind is a feeling that through being born there is a relation to everything… To be kind means that you want good things to happen to what is like yourself. The next question is, is there anything that is in no way like ourselves? I would say there isn’t.

I grew up in Miami, Florida and used our family’s good fortune to be a terrific snob—to feel unrelated to people, better than them. We had a Cadillac in the driveway; other families had “ordinary” cars. I was convinced my mother—and our family by extension—had the best taste in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, I had no clue that my father was often in agony about finances and providing for a family of five.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the very thing I thought would make me strong—building myself up thinking I was better than others—was contempt. That is exactly what makes a man weak, because our deepest desire is to like the world, to know other people and be fair to them. When a man doesn’t have that purpose, he pays the price, and I did. I often felt separate from people, agitated, and even as a boy had a lot of trouble sleeping.

A place I felt at my best was in dancing. Each week, children went to dancing classes where we learned the fox trot, the cha-cha, and one of my favorites, the waltz. Holding a girl in my arms, I felt I could have a good effect on her, could be both firm in taking the lead, and also thoughtful of her as we turned gracefully around in that beautiful 1-2-3, 1-2-3.

But my usual notion of strength was very different. I thought everybody was out for themselves, and while trying to appear like a nice guy, inwardly I thought you had to be calculating and shrewd to get your way. Years later in an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss described accurately and humorously my approach when she said I was “Bennett-what-will-benefit-me.” When a man is looking at other people with that purpose, he cannot like himself.

Strength and kindness are related to other opposites in men, such as toughness and feeling. These were in a stir in me when the Aesthetic Realism Theater Company was rehearsing some years ago for a production of Eli Siegel’s great lecture on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. I had a pronounced tendency to play Huck as a tough kid. When I asked about this in a class, Ms. Reiss said about Huckleberry:

He doesn’t want the wool to be pulled over his eyes and at the same time he wants to be true to everything romantic. Do you have a hard time putting the two together? Your toughness, street-wiseness and calculation is not at one with your sense of awe.

That was true. Then Ms. Reiss put in a sentence the two things that had fought in me: “You are a keen, sharp person, but you also want to see a sunrise.”

Again, so true! In this discussion, I also learned about strength and kindness in love. I was seeing Meryl Nietsch and I was very taken by this lovely woman from Long Island. The more we talked, the more I wanted to be with Meryl. But then I would focus on what I perceived as a flaw in her. Ms. Reiss asked:

Ellen Reiss:  Do you think your suspicion of Miss Nietsch is at one with your big feeling about her?

Bennett Cooperman:  No. An instance of where I was suspicious–the other day we were talking on the phone about Ms. Nietsch’s budget.

ER:  The way you say that, everybody’s trembling.

BC:  I was sure she didn’t want to see something. Then that night when I went to her house, she opened up the door and handed me the budget all typed up. I couldn’t believe it.

Ms. Reiss then asked this crucial question: “Have you hoped to be suspicious of Ms. Nietsch?” The answer was yes, and I’ve seen that determination in a man makes him cruel. You cannot be kind when you’re on the hunt for something not to like in a person. It makes love impossible, and always ends up making a man feel mean, wobbly, uncertain—anything but strong.

I’ve gotten an education about strength and kindness from Aesthetic Realism that is real gold and it’s changed my life profoundly. That includes my marriage to Meryl, who is now an Aesthetic Realism Consultant and whom I love very deeply. I cherish talking with her, trying to know her and learn from her, holding her in my arms.

Strength & Kindness in a Song & Dance Man

I speak now about aspects of the life and work of George M. Cohan—singer, dancer, actor, song writer, producer—because he can have us understand better what real strength and kindness are, and what interferes. From the early 1900s, Cohan had one hit after another on Broadway. Writes Ward Morehouse in George M. Cohan, Prince of the American Theater:

Into the new-century picture came the bounding and brassy George Michael Cohan…with a tempo and style all his own…George M….prepared to show Broadway and the whole wide world that he was the smartest little guy…who ever did the buck and wing and climbed the proscenium arch.

The noted drama critic Alexander Woolcott said Cohan’s “abiding purpose is to entertain royally,” and that’s just what he did, including through writing some of the most loved songs in the American songbook, including: “You’re a grand old flag, you’re a high-flying flag, and forever in peace may you wave…”; and “Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square…”; and “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, A Yankee Doodle, do or die. A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July…”

Eli Siegel defined kindness as “that in a self which wants other things to be rightly pleased,” and this was, I believe, an intense impulsion in Cohan when it came to the theater, where audiences were thrilled by the pizzazz and depth, comedy and sentiment, raucousness and grace in a Cohan show.

But all his life, that kind impulsion in Cohan battled with a false, aggressive notion of strength that made him mean, and, I think, caused him to have great sadness. “He was a lone-wolf,” writes Morehouse, “a brooder.”

George M. was born in 1878 into a theatrical family, making his stage debut at four months old with Jerry, his father, Nellie, his mother, and his sister, Josie. They became known as The Four Cohans, troupers in the vaudeville circuit.

A moving account shows the little boy, George, wanted to be kind. “He wept at the sight of beggars or the infirm,” writes biographer John McCabe. His mother, Nellie, tells how George would put all his coins in his pockets:

He would start up the street for a walk…thoughtfully but observant. ‘What are you looking for, Georgie?’ we would ask him. ‘Poor old people,’ he would answer. If he saw any, he divided…his money among them.

That impulse came from something so different than what developed in Cohan over the years. In his early teens, he became the bane of theater owners and stagehands with whom he fought ferociously about every aspect of a show, convinced he was right and everyone else was wrong. He sometimes caused such a scene that he got his family fired. Morehouse says he was cocky, pugnacious and belligerent throughout his life.

Men have equated fighting with being strong, and sometimes a fight is necessary. For example, life in vaudeville was tough and performers were often treated badly. Cohan felt he had to be combative to take care of his family. He said of his father:

His quiet, gentle manner, and the way they used to take advantage of [him]…taught me that aggressiveness was a very necessary quality…

But the question is—and this goes for men today—did something in him relish doing battle in a way that went beyond what was necessary? Did he equate strength with beating out others? I believe he did, and this made him greatly unsure.

George M. eventually achieved his dream of bringing The Four Cohans to Broadway. And he became one of the earliest to create a new form: The full-length musical, with songs that were integral to the plot. These shows had a new speed, a new snap. At the turn of the 20th century, Cohan’s shows began a shift on Broadway from elegant operettas and European entertainments with a dignified pace to musicals with bustle and energy, a feeling of New York life. There was a new relation of opposites in a Cohan show, opposites akin to strength and kindness: assertion and tenderness, force and grace. There were comic scenes, banter that poked fun at politicians, lively dances; and then lyrical ballads with honest sentiment—and audiences loved it.

What a Man Learns in Consultations

David Hughes leads a team of IT developers who work on new software. At 27, he’s gone far in his career, yet, he said, “A lot of things are going on in my life.”

In a recent consultation, he said he preferred not to think too much about other people. “It’s a lot easier that way. Like, I don’t want to be bothered with that,” he said. We asked:

Consultants:  What does a person get by having feeling, being kind to other people?

David Hughes:  I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s something I’ve never spent much time thinking about.

Cons:  That’s right. Most people feel the answer is “nothing.” “I’ll get things by working on my own behalf—period.”

DH:  I don’t think you can always see something tangible out of caring for others. And I am very results-driven.

Mr. Hughes’ girlfriend, Jenny, has a large interest in social justice, and she’s criticized him for being selfish. He was pretty courageous when he said plainly, “It’s hard for me to care so much about random people I don’t know who can’t provide me with anything.” We asked:

Cons:  Do you think one of the things you would get would be self-respect?

DH:  Yeah.

Cons:  Do you think every person is judging himself all the time?

DH:  I know I am.

Cons:  That’s right. We have what Aesthetic Realism calls an ethical unconscious. Something in you feels you are making a mistake in how you see the world. There’s a self in you saying, “This is not going to work. It’s not in behalf of your strength.” You may have a great job, you may have good health, a good family, a nice girlfriend, but something is missing. Do you feel that?

DH:  Yes.

Later, we asked Mr. Hughes whom he admired in history:

DH:  I would say Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Muhammad Ali.

Cons:  Good. What quality did they have that you care for?

DH:  Um… their ability to get things done.

Cons:  That may be true, but do you think the two people you chose are right on the subject we’re talking about? Do you think both of them had feeling for people in a big way?

DH:   Definitely. Those are two perfect examples.

Cons:  It’s so interesting—you’ve been talking about not wanting to feel too much about others, and you picked those two.

DH:  It’s ironic!

Cons:  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born very fortunately. He never had to do anything. But he said the hell with that, I’m going to use my life to take care of the suffering of people. And in his presidency, he created many programs that helped people. We still have Social Security. He had flaws like everybody, but there was a feeling for people.

DH:  Yeah.

Cons:  Muhammad Ali didn’t go into the Viet Nam draft because it was against his principles. That was really a saying, “I won’t let myself be used in behalf of unkindness to people.” As a sports fan, you know he missed years as a boxer when he could have been great. He was courageous.

DH:  He was.

We asked Mr. Hughes:

Cons:  Do you judge yourself on the same basis as you judge them?

DH:  Well, I’d like to think it’s on the same basis, but it’s probably different. I judge them for definitely caring for others and I don’t judge myself at all with that.

Cons:  Yes, you do! And that’s the best thing in you. When you’re trying to have a good effect on another person, that’s when you are most successful.

Strength & Kindness in Love

George M. Cohan was married twice, first to Ethel Levy, a singer and comedienne he met at 21. She was a critic of him and “stood up to George if she thought he was wrong, and this was not infrequent,” says Morehouse. I think, like men today, Cohan wanted a woman to soothe and serve him, and the marriage ended after seven years.

Cohan’s second marriage was with Agnes Nolan, a chorus girl in one of his shows. Agnes quit the stage after marrying Cohan and remained with him until his death in 1942.

From accounts I’ve read, it seems Cohan wasn’t comfortable thinking deeply about a woman, didn’t see it as strong to try and be kindly within the depths of who she was. He’s often described as a “man’s man,” and it was said “men got to know him better than women ever did.”

Cohan’s way of seeing women affected his work as a playwright, too. Morehouse says his women characters “were usually on the sappy side—superficial, sugary, and in contrast with some of the vital and crackling roles he wrote for men.”

I feel very lucky as a man to have heard questions from Ellen Reiss about love that changed my life. Some of them are:

• Where do you feel stronger, being swept by Meryl Nietsch or feeling you can take her or leave her?
• Which would you rather be lost in, the television or Miss Nietsch? There’s the line from Tennyson’s poem The Princess—“So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip / Into my bosom and be lost in me”—do you like that idea?
• As I was thinking about a woman she said I should ask: “Am I interested in this person in order to have her life stronger? What does that mean?”

Strength, Kindness, & the Actors Equity Strike

A huge happening in the American theater was the Actor’s Equity Strike of 1919. Before this strike, actors were required to give hundreds of hours of unpaid rehearsal time, and contracts could be broken at the producers’ will. Actors paid for their own travel and costumes. Once a show opened and was a solid hit, actors were let go and replaced with less expensive talent.

In 1919, the professional theater was the fourth largest industry in the nation. And so, it was a tremendous event when the actors walked out on the evening of August 7, closing more than half of the shows in New York. Musicians, stagehands and others joined them, and the strike spread to other large cities.

The loudest voice against the strike was that of George M. Cohan. He took it personally that the strike closed a hit show at his Cohan Theater, and immediately co-founded and became president of the anti-strike Actors’ Fidelity League. “I’m going to fight everybody who’s against me,” he said. Morehouse writes that Cohan was determined “to defeat the friends of a lifetime, his fellow actors.”

Cohan’s notion of strength, which he had all his life, led him to make vicious choices at this time. Although he was known to pay his actors well and treat them decently, he felt he was the man in charge of his shows and no union was going to tell him what to do—ever. “His argument,” writes Morehouse, was “with the entire idea of unionism.”

Unions, I’ve learned, are a beautiful oneness of strength and kindness because they fight to have people treated fairly. A large part of my education has been performing in Ethics Is a Force! Songs about Labor—a show The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company has presented at union events around the country. It has been the honor of my life to be in the cast of these historic presentations, standing next to the American labor leader and my dear friend, the late Timothy Lynch, President of Teamsters Local 1205. I learned then and still do from his passion and logic, his joie-de-vivre.

The Actors Equity strike was settled in one month, with the actors getting everything they demanded. But Cohan remained an “Equity-hater” for the rest of his life. He split from his partner of 15 years, Sam Harris, who was on the side of Equity. Morehouse says the strike “changed…his outlook on life immeasurably” and that though Cohan performed for years afterward, “His withdrawal…from life itself…began at the time of his overwhelming defeat by Equity.”

We can ask, why—why did this affect Cohan so centrally? I think his own choices, to squash kindness in himself and make himself tough, hard, and immovable, affected him greatly. “He lost more than the Equity strike in 1919,” writes John McCabe. “He lost heart.” I take that to mean he lost the thing in him which stood for feeling, for real kindness.

My inspiration for writing about Cohan was hearing a tape-recorded lecture in which Eli Siegel discussed poems by the American entertainer George Jessel. One was a soliloquy of Sam Harris, Cohan’s partner. Mr. Siegel felt the lines were close to being poetry and he did a “linear reworking” to make them truly poetic. Here are some of the lines:

One night, in Chicago,
I met George M. Cohan,
The greatest talent of all.
We became partners.
He wrote our plays; acted
In our plays.
I attended to
The business things…
What I added
Was my love for him.
There was hit after hit for us.
We went together everywhere…
When he married
An Irish girl with loveliness,
Look, I married her sister.

Then the poem shifts to the break up:

All of a sudden,
We were friends no longer.
In 1919,
The actors went on strike…
I couldn’t convince him
They were right,
And we should be with them.
He couldn’t see they had been abused
By unfair managers…
God, I missed him!
How it hurt
Not seeing him,
Not talking to him—
Not to be in the sunshine
Of his great talent.

A Song with Good Will

That great talent, and a beautiful oneness of strength and kindness, is in perhaps Cohan’s most popular song, “Over There.” When America declared war against Germany on the morning of August 6, 1917, Cohan “sat down at his desk, took a pencil, and began [writing]. There was a new melody in his head.” Within an hour, he had written “Over There.”

The song was immediately being sung all over the country and it gave courage to the troops. Though the justice and rightness of World War I can be questioned, this song has good will because it’s a saying that what is not oneself, what is “Over There,” is something we should encourage, strengthen. Here is George M. Cohan himself singing “Over There” in a 1936 recording.

Men everywhere deserve to know the education that can make them strong, kind, and happy.

The post George M. Cohan: A Man’s Big Question—Can I Be Strong & Kind at Once? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

There is…a great tendency of the self to be as large as it can be, to be as expansive as one of our own far western states. For a self to be large is that self’s being able to become another self, to have other feeling; to identify itself with whatever is real.

Meanwhile, men have also tried to be “large,” make themselves important, by being superior, using people for one’s own advantage, making other things small. Men have undermined their own lives through having contempt, and in explaining this Aesthetic Realism is extremely kind.

I’m going to tell what I have learned and am proud now to teach men in Aesthetic Realism consultations. And I’ll discuss the fight between large and small in the great 19th century American actor, Edwin Forrest.

A Preference for Smallness

Growing up in Miami, Florida in the 1960s, I felt bigger whenever I heard Cantor Bornstein sing at Temple Israel in his resonant, powerful tenor voice that filled the synagogue. That sound made for a feeling of awe and wonder in me.

And from as early as I can remember I loved seeing and taking part in performances of singing, dancing and acting. Aesthetic Realism shows that art itself arises from the largest thing in a person—the desire to see meaning in things and give it beautiful form. An actor literally tries to do what Mr. Siegel described, “to become another self, to have other feeling.” In seventh grade I was in a school production of Christopher Sergel’s comedy Cheaper by the Dozen, my first full-length play. I was one of 12 children in a family, and on opening night, even though the entire cast lost our place, improvised, and then jumped back in about ten pages ahead in the script—I had a wonderful time, and felt something big had happened to me.

But I also had intensely a desire to arrange a small world I could own and control. Ellen Reiss describes this in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known as a “preference in everyone for a world we can tidily rule rather than a large world we need to understand.” As a boy, I daydreamed about playing with a train set that had a miniature town built around it. It was populated by real, miniature people, and I could make them do anything I wanted.

An important aspect of how I came to see largeness and smallness was how I felt about my shorter size. Rather than seeing it as a deficit, in many ways I thought it was an asset. I felt my build was compact and neat, and equated this with being wily and agile. When I played touch football with other boys in the neighborhood, I could maneuver in and out of the pack quickly, while others couldn’t. I saw bigger people as verging on clumsiness and even a little stupid.

In an Aesthetic Realism lesson, Mr. Siegel spoke to a young man who was shorter than average and said that he had resented people who were tall. He asked the man:

Eli Siegel. How does a smaller person have contempt for another? It’s in the phrase, “The best things come in small packages.”… It’s a great American phrase.

That is a saying I quoted often—and hoped was true! Then Mr. Siegel said, “You feel, then, that small people have, by ordinance of the world and divine ordinance, more intelligence?” That’s just how I saw it. Said Mr. Siegel with logic and charm:

Eli Siegel. It happens that Lincoln and Napoleon both had power and also sense…You can have sense anywhere from four and a half to seven feet.

Meanwhile, that preference for smallness took in many things, including my own emotions. I often felt incapable of feeling anything sizable or passionate, both as an actor and in my life. But I was also desperate to be able to do so, and I think my desire to be an actor was part of that. I am very grateful to Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss who has spoken to me about this in Aesthetic Realism classes. These are just a few of the beautiful, life-changing questions she asked me:

• Do you think everyone is in a fight between great emotion and little emotion?
• If you had a tremendous emotion, do you think you would be a fool? Is it good for oneself, or is that when one is giving in?
• Do you like wonder? It’s related to the opposites of large and small—you want to be large, but when you are, something controls you.

And she asked did I want to have a “sense of awe, the grand feeling.” Questions like these and the education I have received for over twenty five years have changed my life top to bottom. I can certainly see more and hope to, but I have had large, grand feeling—about poetry, what people deserve economically, as an actor, and very much in my happy marriage to Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman whom I love so much. I have a conviction that large feeling is good for me, that if I don’t have it I am missing out on something luscious and bedrock.

Edwin Forrest: Acting Shows a Man Wants to Be Large

“People have acted and people have watched acting,” Ellen Reiss wrote inThe Right Of, “But never before was it seen that when a person takes on a role, the biggest hope of everyone’s life is concerned.” And that hope is in the great sentences by Mr. Siegel she quotes from a lesson he gave to actors:

According to Aesthetic Realism acting shows that you don’t have to be fettered to yourself. You can be other people …. [Acting] is a way of being somebody else for the purpose of coming back home immediately. You take a trip in order to find out who you are.

Edwin Forrest lived from 1806 to 1872, and was the first American-born star of the stage. He was immensely popular and received critical acclaim—and for very good reason. Forrest was, I believe, a great artist, and his work was big. As Richard Moody writes in his life of Forrest, “No actor could match him in shaking the rafters and lifting the spectators out of their boots.”

Forrest did so playing Shakespeare’s tragic heroes such as Othello and King Lear, and persons in history fervently struggling against tyranny, such as Spartacus in The Gladiator, and the role for which he became most famous, about which Mr. Siegel wrote in The Right Of when he commented on “the conspicuously unfettered Edwin Forrest, who stirred America with his portrayal of a sad and expressive Indian chief in Metamora.”

Forrest was impelled as an actor to become another person with all of himself. Moody writes, “Forrest never walked through a part. Either he used full steam or he did not play.” And his “full steam” often had tremendous precision.

In accounts of his acting, one sees the truth of the Aesthetic Realism principle stated by Mr. Siegel, “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” For instance, Moody says that although Forrest was “not of more than average height, spectators invariably were amazed at his seemingly gigantic proportions…and to see a giant move with such matchless grace gave them an uncommon thrill.” These are the opposites of power and grace which, when together, make for a mighty effect—as in Forrest’s portrayal of Jack Cade and Rolla.

There are description of Forrest’s booming and penetrating voice, and yet, “in the…tender passages he could sing in a soft tremolo that would move the hardest heart…The world has probably never seen a more effective speaker of words,” says Moody.

Edwin Forrest’s powerful effect arose from the most careful and exacting intellectual work. Richard Moody tells this—and it is large and small working beautifully together in a man:

He probed the play texts, particularly those of Shakespeare, uncovering the layers of meaning…Other actors marveled at the energy he applied to a microscopic and painstaking examination of a single phrase, or even a single word. No detail was neglected.

Edwin Forrest was born and raised one of six children in Philadelphia, and life was hard for the family who struggled financially. His schooling was irregular, but at fourteen he appeared in a play at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, and from then on ardently pursued a career as an actor. At 20 in Albany, he worked with the great English actor Edmund Kean. He loved Kean’s fire, the way, as Moody writes, he “penetrated the inner life of the characters.” Kean valued Forrest’s work, too, and encouraged him.

One year later, in 1826, at the age of 21, Forrest made his important New York debut at the Bowery Theatre, playing Othello, and was a great success from then on. This is a portrait of him by Thomas Sully. “Forrest,” writes Mr. Siegel, “generally stood for passion in the art of acting.”

Something that made Forrest’s life large was his feeling that there should be plays by American authors. In 1828 he posted a notice in the press offering $500, “To the author of the best Tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero…shall be an aboriginal of this country.”

The winner was Metamora by John Augustus Stone, about the chief of the Wampanoag tribe and his desperate attempt to stave off being overrun by the white man. Audiences were thrilled by a new sight of a native American man—his size and depth. There was Forrest as Metamora, “poised like a bronze statue on a rocky crag, the ships on fire in the harbor,” and the firm, wide way the Indian chief speaks. When he is confronted by the council of Englishmen who have ill-will, Metamora says:

Metamora. Ye had been tossed about like small things upon the face of the great waters, and there was no earth for your feet to rest on…The red man took you as a little child and opened the door of his wigwam. The keen blast of the north howled in the leafless wood, but the Indian covered you with his broad right hand…Your little ones smiled when they heard the loud voice of the storm, for your fires were warm and the Indian was the white man’s friend.

But Metamora’s men are overrun, and in a heart-rending scene near the end, he embraces his lovely wife Nahmeeokee, tells her to look to the sky, and then stabs her so she will never know “white man’s bondage…free as the air she lived—pure as the snow she died.” In the final scene Metamora is shot. So effective was Forrest’s acting that once, when many Indian-Americans were in the audience, they were:

…so convinced of its reality that they rose and chanted a dirge in honor of the great chief who was dying on the stage.

A Mix Up of Large and Small in Marriage

The purpose of love, Aesthetic Realism taught me, is through being close to another person, to like the world itself “as a large and unlimited fact.” A man needs to see, too, that his wife comes from the whole world and has reality’s opposites in her. When he doesn’t, a kitchen implement looms large and everything else is made insignificant.

Eugene Henderson, 32 years old, told us that he and his wife, Linda, had a very good time going out one afternoon, but when they got home they got into an argument:

Eugene Henderson:  It started very small and escalated to really something I didn’t expect—with tears. And I felt bad especially because we had a great time, and then domestic issues pop up…She was cooking, making veggie burgers, and I have a habit, as she’s using a spatula, of putting it in the sink.

Consultants:  Before she’s finished?

Eugene Henderson:  Yes. But she objected and said, “Please don’t put the spatula in the sink.” Then she said why she didn’t like it, that I do this often and it’s a war–she takes it out, I put it in. And I felt, “Why is she going on about this?” So I said, “This is not a big deal.”

Soon, there was a fight. We told Mr. Henderson what we’ve learned—every argument about something seemingly small is really about something bigger. We asked, about the spatula:

Consultants:  Does Linda Henderson have any feeling that you want to neaten her up? Get her in order?

Eugene Henderson:  Perhaps she does.

Consultants:  Men can want to straighten a woman up. Is that an ethical matter—and should a woman object?

Eugene Henderson:  Yes, she should.

Later, Mr. Henderson spoke with feeling about his job at an agency working to have justice come to people, and also about the deeper feeling between himself and Mrs. Henderson. “Have big things been happening in your life?” we asked:

Eugene Henderson:  Yeah, work-wise and then personally. But I don’t like getting into fights.

Consultants:  Well, maybe. But we’ve seen that men and women can have a large feeling, and all of a sudden, an argument. Mr. Siegel said if love is going to go well, people have to study that in themselves which is against loving anything. Do you have that?

Eugene Henderson:  Yes, I do.

Consultants:  The desire not to care for anything, and the desire to care—can those two things be raging in a person?

Eugene Henderson:  Yes, they can. Thank you for explaining that.

Those two things were raging in Edwin Forrest in his marriage to Catherine Sinclair. When they met in London, Forrest was 30, she was 18, and he was taken by her vivacity, her beauty and her keen mind. But soon after bringing his new bride to New York, Forrest made the mistake of many husbands—he wanted a snug haven with her apart from the world. He bought an impressive house on West 23rd Street, which, as Richard Moody writes, “sheltered the…newlyweds in solitary splendor,” and where Forrest “settled in as Lord of the Manor.”

How lucky I was to hear questions just after I was married to Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman about my tendency to be complacent—which was rather intense. In one class Ellen Reiss asked, “Is there anything in Bennett Cooperman that would like to rest now, and feel he’s achieved certain things that are valuable. Rest and get pats on the cheek?” And she asked if I wanted to use Meryl as “a harbor or a lighthouse?” It was too much the first, but I’m very glad to say that has changed!

Much went on with Forrest and his wife. It seems he mainly wanted her at home to serve and soothe him when he returned from the rigors of the theatre. Catherine Sinclair was a cultured woman and she did not like this, writing once to a friend that, “the relative position of husband and wife must be that of companions; not master on one side, and dependence on the other.”

I learned that when a couple use each other to have a separate world, and when a man lessens the largeness of the world in his wife, there will inevitably be distrust and pain. This came to a head when, at home, Forrest found a letter written to his wife by a male friend, expressing ardent feelings for her. She vehemently denied any infidelity, but once this was in Forrest’s mind it “gnawed at him day after day.” He became cold and distant, finally forcing his wife to leave their home. A bitter, scandalous divorce trial followed, which Forrest lost.

The Drama between Cheapness & Grandeur Affects History Too

At the same time that his domestic life was in turmoil, Forrest was making choices in his professional life that, I believe, were in behalf of smallness.

The famous Astor Place Riot of 1849 concerned the rivalry between Forrest and the noted English actor William Macready, close friend of Charles Dickens. Unfortunately, along with something culturally large in both of these men, each had the cheap thing that can make for what goes on between two men in any office today. Writes Ellen Reiss in The Right Of:

Contempt in people hates the idea that anything or anyone should be bigger than oneself. Contempt says…”The way for me to be big is to feel someone else is small. If I can see you as less than I am…that makes me big. But if I have to see you as having largeness, if I have to look up to you, then I’m small—I’m nothing!

Macready and Forrest had very different styles. While Forrest was seen as ardent, rugged and spontaneous, Macready’s acting—also powerful—was more dignified and had a certain finesse.

In London, Forrest was one of the early American actors to be highly praised by the critics, including for his Shakespearean roles. Moody writes that Macready was “enraged” and that he “squirmed when Forrest was praised.” But Macready also criticized himself, writing once in his diary that he knew he condemned Forrest “from a feeling of envy,” and that this was “very narrow and poor and bad.”

Still, Macready’s resentment grew. Then, Forrest felt Macready undermined his performances by having people hiss him from the audience, and he went on the attack. In Edinburgh, he secretly attended a performance by Macready as Hamlet, and during the play, suddenly from the audience came a loud hiss. Forrest never apologized, and later, when Macready came to America, Forrest dogged him in every city, booking himself in rival theatres to play the same roles.

Theatrical managers saw “profits in the rivalry,” and the press licked its chops at the good copy it made for, publishing story after story.

In an issue of The Right Of, in which Mr. Siegel’s lecture “People Have Objected in American History” appears, Mr. Siegel speaks about the Astor Place riot, calling it “one of the strangest uprising.” And saying that “the warfare between Forrest and Macready is part of theatrical history,” Mr. Siegel quotes an account which tells:

Macready appeared in New York in 1849…[Anger at the insult to Forrest,] coupled with the natural antagonism of Irish-born Americans who had see their country destroyed economically by the English, prompted a demonstration against Macready so violent that the Governor of New York called out troops to protect him…The crowd [was]… extremely abusive, and a stupid…officer gave the command to fire…Many were killed.

After this and his contentious divorce, Forrest lived for another 21 years. But he never had the same expansive joie de vivre. Still, he acted as frequently as possible, and in fact seemed driven to do so right until the end—because, I believe, that is where he felt the largest thing in him could thrive. Wrote one critic who saw him as Lear in the last year of his life:

I went last night to see Forrest. I saw Lear himself; and never can I forget him, the poor, discrowned, wandering king, whose every look and tone went to the heart…I could not suppress my tears in the last scene. The tones of the heart-broken father linger in my ear like the echo of a distant strain of sad, sweet music, inexpressibly mournful yet sublime. The whole picture will stay in my memory so long as soul and body hang together.

Studying Edwin Forrest’s life and work makes me immeasurably grateful for Aesthetic Realism and the largeness, integrity and happiness it can give to a man’s life. I believe Eli Siegel himself had the most beautiful largeness—his mind was the most comprehensive and wide-ranging, and he always had the biggest, most admirable purpose with people—to bring out their strength. To study Aesthetic Realism is to become larger—and this is the happy privilege of any man’s lifetime!

The post Edwin Forrest — What Makes a Man’s Life Large or Small? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

If you are important because you feel that what’s real is important, that other people can be important…then your importance is good…Every time we make ourselves truly important, we are making something besides ourselves important, whether we know it or not.

This is utterly different from what I once thought. Real importance arises from being true to our deepest desire—to like the world different from us. Yet every person, I learned, is in a debate between “making something besides ourselves important” and making other things less, which is contempt. In “Mind and Importance” Mr. Siegel describes this state of mind:

You are the only important thing in sight and you are going to get your importance even if other people are made unimportant.

Growing up, I had no idea I had two completely different ways of trying to be important. For instance, when I was seven I planted seeds to grow zinnias by the side of our house. I read about how far apart to put the seeds and how much to water them, and I was so excited when the sprouts first burst through, out into the light. I tended them and soon there were many tall colorful flowers, and I felt proud.

But mainly I thought I would be important if I made a lot of money and was “in” with the right people. I wanted to be “the most important thing in sight” and I was scheming. In seventh grade I ran for president of my homeroom class, and on election morning I passed out candy to everyone so they would vote for me.

Then in college I sold vacuum cleaners. I remember pushing the Jenkins family to buy this expensive vacuum cleaner. They were poor and lived in terrible conditions, and the vacuum cleaner was the last thing they needed to buy. But I didn’t care—I just wanted that signature on the contract, and my commission. I will always feel ashamed of this; it stands for what I learned is like math: every time we go for importance based on contempt we are cruel to other people and we cannot like ourselves.

Aesthetic Realism is great because it educates people to choose the one basis of importance that has us respect ourselves—to like the world. Eli Siegel, Aesthetic Realism and Ellen Reiss have done that for me and I love them for it. I had led a selfish, constricted life and I felt more empty every year. Is my life different now!—happy, rich and useful, and I love the work I am honored to have as an Aesthetic Realism consultant.

To show what true importance is and what interferes, I will speak about my own life and aspects of the life of the great 19th century American actor, Edwin Booth. Edwin Booth is truly important because in a large, beautiful way he saw importance in what was not himself, particularly the plays of Shakespeare. Booth was best known for his portrayal of Hamlet—pictured at right—acting this role with a quiet fervor that had a tremendous effect.

Eli Siegel, who I believe was the most important critic of the drama, comprehended the meaning and beauty of the works of William Shakespeare. In his critical masterpiece, Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Revisited, Mr. Siegel explained this play and its immortal hero. Mr. Siegel loved Hamlet and knew the history of how actors had performed the role. So it has great importance that he wrote in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known#212: “Edwin Booth is our most meditative Hamlet, and, everything considered, our most successful.”

Two Ways of Being Important, Early

Every person, Aesthetic Realism explains, has an attitude to the world, and this begins with how we see the first representatives of the world we meet: our parents.

Edwin Booth was born November 13, 1833, in his family’s log cabin in rural Maryland, the seventh child of Mary Ann and Junius Brutus Booth. A large drama of Edwin Booth’s early life was his relationship with his father. Junius Booth was the preeminent American actor of his day, best known for his King Lear and Richard II. He had a true care for the drama and literature, and his manner was outwardly rough and bold.

But the life of an actor traveling across America in the mid-1800s was tough, and it took its toll on Junius Booth. He began to drink heavily, and had bouts of rage. Then three of his children died in a short span of time, and from then on Junius Booth was, at times, on the brink of insanity.

Young Edwin was “grave, thoughtful…and especially reticent,” writes the critic William Winter. At thirteen he was sent to keep his father company on the road and to stop him from drinking. In her biography, Prince of Players, Eleanor Ruggles writes:

It steadied [the elder Booth] to re-enter his dressing room after a performance and find Edwin there, wan, rather taciturn, but instantly and silently solicitous of his father’s comfort…it was this son’s voice, a quiet voice, that could recall the father when Booth was wound about in melancholy or lost in frenzy.

Edwin Booth went on the road with his father for years. He saw his father’s life as important, worthy of his steady care. Yet I believe he felt something else, too. In The Right Of #137 Eli Siegel writes about Hamlet and his father; as he does I think he describes what Edwin Booth felt:

A father is a most dignified being…but as a person, he can have frailties a knowing or perceptive child may see…Hamlet, like many children, is between seeing his father with respect and as confused, non-admirable.

I think Edwin Booth felt superior to his father’s jaggedness and troubles, and made an unconscious choice early that he would take care of himself by a refined, reserved approach to the world. This was really a choice to have contempt—to feel important being aloof from what he saw as the rough edges of a messy world.

My life growing up in suburban Miami in the 1960’s was very different from Edwin Booth’s. Yet I too made early choices to have contempt. I saw that my mother and father were disappointed with each other, but I didn’t try to know what they felt, to be kind—I didn’t feel that would make me important. Instead, I used what I saw to be superior to these two grown ups and people as such.

I used my family to be a snob. When my father’s company gave him a Cadillac, I liked knowing the neighbors saw that car in our driveway. From then on I pushed him to buy fancy cars even though he didn’t want them. This was so mean; my father worried a lot about money and supporting a family of five. I am so grateful Aesthetic Realism criticized my contempt; I was able to be a kind son to my parents for the first time in my life.

Acting Is for Man’s True Importance

Aesthetic Realism taught me that art, including the art of acting, makes us truly important. In his great lecture “Aesthetic Realism as Beauty: Acting,” Mr. Siegel said:

Th[e] possibility of loving the world that we have through acting is much worthy of study…Everybody wants to be himself, and that means being other things besides himself. And in order to be other things besides ourself, we must put aside our self while still having it. As we do this, whether we go on the stage or not, we honor the principle of acting.

Edwin Booth first acted with his father in Shakespeare’s Richard II, at the age of sixteen. From then on father and son acted together frequently, but in 1852 Junius Booth died. Edwin was despondent for months. Then he began to act on his own and soon he became popular. Booth was dashing and thoughtful. Eleanor Ruggles writes:

People wheeled in their tracks for a sight of him tearing to rehearsal…on a high, white horse…he had a mass of black hair and a face like a cameo.

At twenty-three Edwin Booth met the sixteen year old actress Mary Devlin as they played Romeo and Juliet. Mary Devlin saw something very fine in him, and encouraged him to be serious in a new way. Years later their daughter Edwina wrote: “He has told me that she was always his severest, and therefore his kindest critic.” I respect this in Mary Devlin. She worked with her husband to come to a style of acting truthful to who he was. She once wrote to him:

You must not forget to tell me of your studies; they interest me alike with the movements of your heart. Dear Edwin, I will never allow you to droop for a single moment; for I know the power that dwells within your eye.

Mary Devlin and Edwin Booth were married in 1860 on West 11th Street in New York City. Unknowingly, like men and women everywhere, they had two purposes in their marriage, which only Aesthetic Realism explains—one, a true care for the world that showed in their seriousness about acting. But they also used each other to be exclusive and superior to people. Eleanor Ruggles writes that “the young couple held the world at arm’s length.”

I also think Booth used his wife’s devotion to feel he didn’t need to know her, to see her feelings as important. I am tremendously grateful for questions Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss, so kindly has asked me in Aesthetic Realism classes, such as: “Do you want to know a woman for the means of knowing yourself, or getting as much approval as possible?” “Do you want a woman to be as good as she can be or serve you in some way?”

My purpose was the second—I wanted a woman to make me the most important thing and this made me mean, which I regret. I am so grateful to Ms. Reiss and Aesthetic Realism for what I am learning about love, what it means to really care for a woman—to have good will. And it makes me so happy to continue learning in my nine-year marriage to Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman. I feel important trying to know who Meryl is, learning from her straight and humorous criticism of me, studying together in classes with Ms. Reiss where we learn about ourselves and the world. Aesthetic Realism is beautiful sanity about what makes a person important and love, and I want men and women everywhere to know it.

The Opposites Make One Important

In “Mind and Importance” Eli Siegel says the word “important” means “that which carries something to us,” and continues, “we’re important because we carry much weight.” Booth’s acting took on increasing weight and he had a powerful effect.

For example, when Julia Ward Howe attended a performance in Boston of Richelieu, upon Booth’s first lines she leaned over and whispered to her husband, “This is the real thing!” And Eleanor Ruggles writes about Booth’s acting Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, in the death scene:

As his body thrilled in a horrible spasm and pitched face forward to the floor, the whole length of it seeming to hit the stage at once, and there continuing to twitch and quiver, so strong a sense of evil poured out of it that half the [audience] turned away their eyes . sick and shaken.

In time, along with this passion, Booth’s acting had a terrific sense of control—a quietude invested with such great feeling and meaning, it was arresting.

Eli Siegel stated the most important sentence about beauty and what people are hoping for in their lives in this great principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

In The Right Of #212, subtitled “All the Arts,” Mr. Siegel writes greatly about the opposites of passion and control, and he speaks of two American actors. Edwin Forrest, a contemporary of Booth’s, “generally stood for passion in the art of acting,” writes Mr. Siegel, and “Another Edwin, Edwin Booth… represented meditation.” One critic said that quality in Booth, his quiet intensity, made him seem in the soliloquies to speak “from inside the listener.” Booth began to act with a simplicity that was new in tragedy—he seemed more like a person one might meet. Yet he was never ordinary at the expense of grandeur; he conveyed a great sense of humanity and the soul of man.

At the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, Booth produced a series of classical revivals unlike anything that had been. He played Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Iago, Romeo. He was impelled to have people like Shakespeare, and they did—these sumptuous productions were the hit of the day. Booth insisted on using the original Shakespearean texts, which in the 18th century had been altered and cut into versions untrue to Shakespeare. All his life Booth had a reverence for Shakespeare. He once wrote that Shakespeare “says scarcely anything that is not true and good.” How much he would love Eli Siegel, the person who understood Shakespeare and humanity; and who, I’m so grateful to say, taught me to love Shakespeare honestly, too.

The Fight about Importance

In “Mind and Importance” Eli Siegel explains the thing in us that is against being truly important. I believe this explains a fight which, unknown to him, came to a head in Booth just at the time of his greatest success:

We have to meet this thing which says, any time you say something is good or important which is not you, you are taking away from your unconscious bank account.

Booth loved acting and also had a deep care for his wife. Yet I think he began to feel this care for what was not him took away from his “unconscious bank account.” Also he likely missed something from Mary Devlin who both revered him and had a tendency to patronize him, referring to Edwin as a “genius” with an “untaught mind.” Eleanor Ruggles writes that Booth’s thoughts “turned inward,” he began to drink and even act under the influence. “No one can imagine the call of that desire,” he said. “When it engulfs me I could sell my soul…for just one glass.”

In 1863 Mary Devlin, who had given birth to their daughter Edwina, became ill with consumption and went to their home in Massachusetts to rest. Booth, acting in New York, seemed not to be aware of his wife’s condition, which became grave. He was drinking so heavily that when three telegrams accumulated on his dressing room table about Mary, each increasingly urgent, he didn’t see them. Finally realizing what was happening, Booth rushed to Massachusetts, but it was too late—Mary died just hours before he got there.

His regret was searing. He wrote to a friend “My grief eats me!”:

“My conduct hastened her death, when she heard that I…was lost to all sense of decency and respect.” “I feel now how mean, how thoroughly nothing I am.”

The shock of his wife’s death and the intensity of his guilt did, in time, make for a large change in Edwin Booth. He never drank that way again. From what I read it seems Booth used his regret about her death to be less selfish and more fair to the world. He said he didn’t value Mary while she was alive, the good effect she had on his work. And he became determined to honor this now.

One year later Edwin Booth acted Hamlet with a beauty, an utterness that electrified audiences. Eleanor Ruggles writes:

From his first entrance upstage left every eye was riveted on that forward-drifting…elegant…figure in…black with the dark hair hanging to the shoulders. [In the “to be or not to be” soliloquy]…The audience sat rapt…while the six words on which the actor had lavished as many weeks of labor seemed not to be spoken to, but within each separate consciousness…He was fire and elegance as he fenced with Laertes…[Then, dying]…in Horatio’s arms, [he] breathed his last words in tones…invested with sublime pathos… There was no…applause until the orchestra [began to play]…and snapped the charm.

This was Booth’s most stunning success. Said one critic, “He did not act Hamlet—he lived it.”

A National and Personal Tragedy

A great tragedy in American history was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Edwin’s younger brother, John Wilkes Booth—at left in the photo. This was taken when the three appeared in Julius Caesar in 1864, the only time they acted together.

Lincoln’s assasination came from one man’s horrible notion of importance taken to the extreme, and which is the most ruthless thing in everyone: if anyone else is important I am less—I have to be “the only important thing in sight.”

John Wilkes Booth, an actor himself, was increasingly furious at Edwin’s success which was far greater than his. And the brothers disagreed intensely about which side was right in the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth being fiercely for the South. He felt important making an entire race—black people—unimportant. Lincoln stood mightily for opposition to this; when it looked as if the opposition might become law, John Wilkes Booth became infuriated. Eleanor Ruggles writes:

On April 11th…he…listen[ed] to Lincoln speaking from a balcony in favor of giving the ballot to the Negro…”Now, by God, I’ll put him through!”

Three days later, he did.

The whole world was shocked and Edwin Booth’s life was shattered. Not knowing at first who was responsible, government officials arrested most members of the Booth family. Edwin Booth—who cared deeply for Lincoln and, in fact, had once saved his son’s life—went into hiding and said he would never act again. Eleanor Ruggles writes that afterwards “a little of the savor of life came back to him—but not the whole, ever.”

I feel so much for Edwin Booth. I am sure he would have been so grateful if he could have known what Aesthetic Realism explains, that with a terrible, unspeakable tragedy a person can confirm an inaccurate opinion of the world come to years before. Edwin Booth, I think, felt more than ever the world was messy, cruel and meaningless—a place in which he should act genteel but essentially stay away.

Yet it is greatly to Booth’s credit that he did continue to act and even built the Booth Theatre on 23rd Street, staging again productions of Shakespeare with unparalleled beauty. He founded the Players Club for actors, still on Gramercy Park, where he lived his last years. But Booth seemed to get old very fast, and often spoke of wanting to die, which he did at the age of 60 in 1893.

Edwin Booth’s life and art cry out for the need of people to know Aesthetic Realism. He needed to know the most important thing in him that made for true art: his desire to like the world. And he needed to know the greatest interference to this: contempt.

Aesthetic Realism has enabled me to use my mind to like the world, to be honestly interested in people’s lives, in history, literature, the drama and to feel passionately about what is happening in the world. This has given my life true importance, happiness, sweetness and dignity, and I want everyone to know it.

The post Edwin Booth — What Makes Us Truly Important? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

But we have another notion of power which, though we may not realize it, is ruinous to our lives. It is contempt, described by Mr. Siegel as the “disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.”

Like many men, I thought I would be powerful if I made a lot of money, knew important people, and had a career that others envied. I thought that would equal success and clout—things I was determined to have.

In college I majored in acting and had a true care for it, trying to get within the feelings of a character. But I also had another purpose. Once I saw a casting notice posted in the drama department for a summer stock job, singing and dancing. I wanted that job; but the next second I thought of my chief rival in the department. Seeing no one nearby, I ripped the notice off the board and hurried away so he would never know about the audition. I thought I had pulled a fast one, but I felt sneaky and ashamed. It was this way of going for power that had me often feel so unsure of myself.

And power is what Edna St. Vincent’s play Aria da Capo is all about.

Two Kinds of Power Early

Growing up in suburban Miami there were times when I was “liking…the world on an honest basis.” For example, I loved being at the end of our block at dusk, looking out over the expanse of Biscayne Bay. As the sun was beginning to set, the boats in the distance headed home, and the water lapped against the bay wall in a steady rhythm, I didn’t know it but I was affected by reality’s opposites—rest and motion, near and far—and I was excited and composed.

But also as a child I saw that my mother and father could sometimes seem bitter with each other, and rather than try to understand what they felt I was political. I exploited my parents’ disagreements to get things for myself.

Once, when my father was very worried about money, I convinced my mother I needed a particular item of clothing that was expensive. I knew our buying it would make him angry, but I didn’t give a damn as long as I got my way. My going for this kind of power would have continued and ruined my life, if I had not had the good fortune to study Aesthetic Realism and hear the criticism that enabled me to change.

Power in Aria da Capo

In the historic issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known titled “What Caused the Wars,” Eli Siegel writes:

It is necessary to see that while the contempt which is in every one of us may make ordinary life more painful than it should be, this contempt is also the main cause of wars. It was contempt that made for the trenches of France in 1915…

In her critical, intense one-act play in verse titled Aria da Capo, Edna St. Vincent Millay presented something new about the relation of what goes on between two people in “ordinary life” to what makes for the horror of war. Written after World War I and first performed in 1919 at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street, this anti-war play is so relevant today. It is about power—the suspicion, greed and plotting between two people that, on a larger scale, has made for international tragedy.

The title Aria da Capo is a musical term for a composition in three parts, the last of which is an exact repeat of the first. That is what happens in the play—it ends, dramatically, as it began.

Eli Siegel lectured magnificently on the subject of history. In one lecture, describing the atmosphere prior to World War I, he spoke of the complacency of people. There was a smug feeling that so much progress had been made by man, the world was now “civilized” and the evil of war was a thing of the past. Then, people were stunned by the unexpectedness, horror and massiveness of the war. “People think the shock is over,” Eli Siegel said, “but the world has not recovered yet.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay gets that feeling of complacency in the opening scene of Aria da Capo. The curtain rises and we see the stage “set for a Harliquinade, a merry black and white interior” and a table “set with a banquet.” At the table are a woman and man, Columbine and Pierrot—classical characters from the commedia dell’arte, who here are like any spoiled couple. The scene begins:

Columbine:  Pierrot, a macaroon! I cannot live
Without a macaroon!

Pierrot:  My only love,
You are so intense…Is it Tuesday, Columbine?-
I’ll kiss you if it’s Tuesday.

C:  It is Wednesday,
If you must know…Is this my artichoke,
Or yours?

P:  Ah, Columbine,-as if it mattered!
Wednesday….Will it be Tuesday, then, tomorrow,
By any chance?

C:  Tomorrow will be – Pierrot,
That isn’t funny!

P:  I thought it rather nice.
Well, let us drink some wine and lose our heads
And love each other…

C:  Pierrot, do you know, I think you drink too much.

P:  Yes, I dare say I do….Or else too little.
It’s hard to tell. You see, I am always wanting
A little more than what I have – or else
A little less. There’s something wrong…

Pierrot does not know what day it is and with its seeming innocence we can ask, is this contempt, is there power in trivializing the facts of the world? Also, this scene has what I learned men and women can go for—a power feeling “You and I have each other, we don’t need the outside world.”

In an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss spoke to me about being “exclusive” with a woman, and feeling that our hours together were “holy.” Meanwhile, Pierrot says, “There’s something wrong,” which is quite true. And in his lines, “I am always wanting / A little more than what I have – or else / A little less.”—I believe Edna St. Vincent Millay is showing the honest discontent we feel when our purpose is to lessen things; we can never feel satisfied.

Throughout the scene Pierrot tries to be powerful by making fun of Columbine. He says Columbine could be an actress; she says she cannot act, and then he really gives it to her:

P:  Can’t act!…La, listen to the woman!
What’s that to do with the price of furs?-You’re blonde,
Are you not?-You have no education, have you?-…
You under-rate yourself, my dear!

I am very grateful to Aesthetic Realism and Ellen Reiss for what I’m learning about the true power a man wants to feel in how he sees a woman. Like Pierrot, I have been tyrannical with a woman I cared for—and then felt so ashamed. In an Aesthetic Realism class, Ms. Reiss showed me this was about a notion of power which stopped me from being able to love someone: “You liked [acting] superior to a woman,” she said. And she asked, “Do you think that helped your intelligence?” It definitely didn’t.

I am proud now to feel an utterly different kind of power in love and my thoughts about people—the power of trying to have good will, which Mr. Siegel has described as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” It means very much to me to be able to think deeply about the woman I love, my wife, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, and what will strengthen her. I am grateful for Meryl’s kindness and her criticism of me, which I need to be a better person.

In Aria da Capo, in the midst of this discussion of macaroons and such, a very dramatic thing occurs—into the scene enters Cothurnus, a character from classical Greek tragedy. He is the stage manager and says Pierrot and Columbine must leave so the next scene can be played. They exit and two shepherds, Corydon and Thyrsis, enter. But Corydon, looking about, says to Cothurnus:

Corydon:  …this is the setting for a farce…We cannot
Act a tragedy with comic properties!

And in Cothurnus’ reply—”Try it and see. I think you’ll find you can”—Miss Millay is saying that what can seem light and everyday is not so far from tragedy. “The contempt which is in… ordinary life,” as Eli Siegel said “is also the main cause of wars.”

Corydon and Thyrsis are good friends. They recline peacefully against crepe-paper “rocks,” observing their flock.

The Beginning Fight: Who Will Have Contempt First?

In “What Caused the Wars,” Eli Siegel explains:

In the unconscious, dear unknown friends, it is the other person who will have accomplished contempt for you unless you have first contempt for him.

This is what Aria da Capo illustrates. Corydon suggests that he and Thyrsis make up a song about a lamb, and then Edna St. Vincent Millay introduces a theatrical device that will be throughout. Thyrsis forgets his next line. Cothurnus, as stage manager, holds the prompt book and prods him on:

Thyrsis:  I have forgotten my line.

Cothurnus: (Prompting.) “I know a game worth two of that.”

Thyrsis:  Oh, yes….I know a game worth two of that:
Let’s gather rocks, and build a wall between us;
And say that over there belongs to me,
And over here to you!

Corydon:  Why – very well.
And say you may not come upon my side
Unless I say you may!

Thyrsis:  Nor you on mine!
And if you should, ‘twould be the worse for you!

Corydon:  Come, let us separate
…and lay a plot whereby
We may out do each other.

An imaginary wall is made and they sit, each on his side of it, but soon Thyrsis says:

Thyrsis:  …in spite of the fact
I started it myself, I do not like this so very much.
…I’d much prefer Making the little song you spoke of
About the lamb…

Corydon:  I have forgotten the line.

Cothurnus:  [prompting] “How do I know this isn’t a trick.”

Corydon:  Oh, yes….How do I know this isn’t a trick
To get upon my land?

The subtext here could be “How do I know you’re not trying to have contempt for me? Maybe I better have contempt for you first.” What happens from this point on in the play is described by Eli Siegel when he writes in The Right Of #165 about “the fear of contempt for ourselves making for an accelerated desire to have contempt for someone else”:

Corydon:  Oh, Thyrsis, just a minute!-all of the water
Is on your side the wall, and the sheep are thirsty.
I hadn’t thought of that.

Thyrsis:  Oh, hadn’t you?

Corydon:  Why, what do you mean?

Thyrsis:  What do I mean? – I mean
That I can play a game as well as you can.
And if the pool is on my side, it’s on
My side, that’s all.

Corydon:  You mean you’d let the sheep go thirsty?

Thyrsis:  …if you try
To lead them over here, you’ll wish you hadn’t!
The two men grow increasingly suspicious and angry. But then they feel awful.

Thyrsis says:
Thyrsis:  It is an ugly game. I hate it….How did it start?

Corydon:  I do not know…I think
I am afraid of you!-you are a stranger! I never set eyes on you before!

So this seemingly innocent game has become a deadly contest, and only Aesthetic Realism explains how this happens—in a play or in life. That brutal thing in the self that can make us see another person as an inimical stranger, someone to be defeated, vanquished, is contempt. It makes a person vicious, and it is crucial that people study Aesthetic Realism—the only education which understands, can grapple with and change that hope for contempt to an honest desire to know and be kind.

A Young Man Learns about the Power of Good Will

Tommy Goldman, a second-grader having Aesthetic Realism consultations, wanted to speak about his fights with other boys. When he said about a wrestling match with a classmate: “I nailed him.” We asked:

Consultants:  How did you feel doing that? Was this really a victory for you?
Tommy Goldman:  No.

His friend, Joe Watkins often wanted to fight with Tommy; and Tommy told us with a mingling of swagger and shame, “I boxed him in the face and his lip started bleeding.” We asked:

Consultants:  Why do you suppose Joe is such an angry person?
Tommy Goldman:  I don’t know.
Consultants:  Would it be good to know?
Tommy Goldman:  Yes.

We were teaching him what Aesthetic Realism shows is the greatest power a person can have: good will—to try and see what another feels from within. We asked about Joe:

Consultants:  Do you think he feels other people have gotten the breaks in life and he hasn’t?
Tommy Goldman:  Yeah.
Consultants:  Do you think it’s possible that his parents, like yours, are worried about money and that could upset him?

He thought it could. And we asked:

Tommy Goldman:  What would happen if you said, “Joe, gee you know, you like to fight…and you seem kind of angry. How come? I’m interested in knowing why?” …Could you ask that?

Tommy said “yes,” and was very much affected to think about his friend in this new way. Through his study of Aesthetic Realism Tommy Goldman is changing. He wrote to us:

Thank you for teaching me how to like the world more….I’m grateful to hear criticism from you about my contempt. I’m learning to be more fair to my friends and other people.

Power: Good Will or Owning Things?

In Aria da Capo Corydon finds a bowl of colored confetti—and says they are jewels:

Corydon:  Red stones – and purple stones-
And stones stuck full of gold!
…They all belong to me…
Wouldn’t I be a fool to spend my time
Watching a flock of sheep go up a hill,
When I have these to play with…[I could] buy a city…

I like those lines “Red stones – and purple stones – And stones stuck full of gold” very much. Edna St. Vincent Millay gives form to tight, narrow greed—you almost feel someone licking his chops. Yet the words, the colors sound rich and wide—red stones, purple stones and gold. The “o”s give a sense of width and wonder. So even as Corydon clutches you feel something expansive.

Like Corydon, I used to think I would be powerful if I could buy whatever I pleased. But often when I got home with a new present I had bought myself, I was agitated. In an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss asked me:

Ellen Reiss:  Suppose you had a lot of money, and at the same time, you felt you weren’t kind. Would that be a disadvantage?

Bennett Cooperman:  Yes.

When I said I could be preoccupied with thoughts of buying things, she explained “These things are all substitutes.” And describing what they are substitutes for, she asked: “Will a person ever feel he cares for himself if he doesn’t have good will?” The answer, I’ve seen, is no!

In Aria da Capo Corydon says he’ll give Thyrsis a bowl of jewels, if Thyrsis will give him a bowl of water. They agree, but each secretly plots: Corydon makes necklaces of the jewels as Thyrsis chops up a poisonous root and puts it in the bowl of water. They approach at the wall, and in a dramatic tableau, Thyrsis puts the bowl to Corydon’s mouth, as Corydon puts the necklaces around Thyrsis’s neck. He pulls them tight:

Thyrsis:  You’re strangling me! Oh, Corydon!
It’s only a game!
Corydon:  …only a game is it?-Yet I believe
You’ve poisoned me in earnest!

They die, one lying very close to the other.

Then, I believe, is Edna St. Vincent Millay’s most scathing indictment of people. Cothurnus puts their bodies under the table on which, at the beginning of the play, Pierrot and Columbine had been dining. Pierrot and Columbine return, and on seeing the dead bodies, Pierrot calls to Cothurnus:

Pierrot:  Come drag these bodies out of here! We can’t
Sit down and eat with two dead bodies lying
Under the table!…The audience wouldn’t stand for it!

And in a very meaningful reply Cothurnus says:

Cothurnus:  What makes you think so?-Pull down the tablecloth…And play the farce. The audience will forget.

Here, Edna St. Vincent Millay is saying people don’t want to see evil, they’ll cover it up and try to get on with their comfortable lives. Yet she, as playwright is showing that evil straight, and it makes for drama the power of which is described by something Eli Siegel once said, “The ability to see in ourselves evil…is a kind of strength.” Aria da Capo ends as Pierrot and Columbine nonchalantly begin again their chatter:

Columbine:  Pierrot, a macaroon! I cannot live
Without a macaroon!
Pierrot:  My only love,
You are so intense…

Curtain begins to close slowly.

I am going to quote lines of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay because they are the antithesis to the tragedy of Aria da Capo. The poem isRenascence, and in The Right Of Mr. Siegel said of it, and of the power of Edna St. Vincent Millay:

…it is right to present the self as clearly large. In this century, no one has done this better than Edna St. Vincent Millay in…her poem Renascence…For a self to be large is that self’s being able to become another self, to have other feeling…

Renascence begins:

A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.

… No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
And later Miss Millay writes:

About the trees my arms I wound;
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;

… O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e’er hereafter hide from me
Thy radiant identity!

I love Aesthetic Realism because it is the greatest opposition to man’s contempt, and encourager of what Edna St. Vincent Millay is describing, our true power—to feel what others feel, to have good will, and to like the things of this world. I love what I am so lucky to be learning—as a man, actor, consultant, husband, friend. Aesthetic Realism is the powerful and kind education that all people and nations need.

The post Aria da Capo & What Makes a Man Powerful? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

Yet we are all in a fight between pleasing ourselves this way and through contempt, the “disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.” Contempt can make for something that’s mistaken for pride, and which we see a lot of on the news these days—bluster and cockiness. But it always makes a person deeply ashamed.

Before studying Aesthetic Realism, I felt more unsure of myself with every year. I went from feeling I had the right, cool approach, that I was smart and nobody was going to fool me, to feeling so unsure that often it was painful to be in a conversation, and I was worried that I was starting to stutter. Through the beautiful, logical criticism I heard of my desire to have contempt for the world and people, Aesthetic Realism has enabled me to be a truly proud man.

I’m going to speak about my own life and about a person who wanted very much to feel honestly proud of himself—the man often billed as “The World’s Greatest Entertainer,” Al Jolson. As he sang and danced, Jolson had tremendous, unbounded energy, he gave his all—and his all was great. In 1916, the critic for the Morning Telegraph wrote:

In Boston the audience yelled. In fact, I have never heard such cheering and such genuine enthusiasm…in all my experience as a theatregoer, which covers…more than twenty years. To be exact, Mr. Jolson stopped the show three times, and…the audience simply wouldn’t allow the performance to proceed…Some of the people…stood up, cheered, applauded, and threw hats in the air…

I love to hear Al Jolson sing. Jolson can make you want to dance and he can make you cry. And I believe he was proudest in his life of his singing. In my opinion he was a true artist whose singing is an illustration of this mighty principle stated by Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Jolson’s voice is intense and grand, rough and gentle, deep and bright, forceful and tender.

Eli Siegel placed Al Jolson’s meaning when he said in a lecture:

The important thing about Al Jolson was that he wanted to tear up the stage, and he pranced around as if he were saying to people, ‘Look, people, you haven’t been able to let yourselves go at home, and you’ve all behaved much too restrictedly, and you’ve been seeing No Trespassing signs and Don’t Walk On The Grass signs all over the place; for a while I’ll give you a feeling of what it is to see no No Trespassing signs.’

That’s what you hear in this recording of one of Jolson’s biggest hits—“Toot, Toot, Tootsie.”

Yet in his life, Al Jolson didn’t have the same purpose as when he sang, and he suffered very much. He was a fiercely competitive, lonely man who was tormented about love. Through Aesthetic Realism’s great, particular comprehension of him, Al Jolson’s life—his art and his pain—can be useful to all of us today in seeing how we can have true pride.

Pride Is a Oneness of Ourselves and the World

I learned the biggest thing we’re after is to be in a just relation with the whole world, to feel the world adds to us. I felt this when I was ten and saw the movie “The Miracle Worker.”  I was so moved by Helen Keller’s life that afterwards, though I hardly ever read, I got three books about her from the library and read them one after the other. The life of this woman who had such courage and humanity affected me very much, and I was proud of this.

I was also proud of being able to sing and dance. At the Temple Israel talent show in Miami I sang “My Favorite Things” with Robin Fell and felt so happy. I didn’t know it, but I was desperate, as everyone is, to feel I joined with the world in a deep, exciting way; and when I sang and danced I felt this most. I loved being in school choruses and musical programs, studying notes, harmony, learning the choreography, trying to get the tenor part right, doing a waltz and feeling my partner and I moved well together.

But growing up, I had another completely different notion of pride—feeling superior. I thought the Coopermans were better than everyone in Miami Shores—we had the nicest house, the nicest car. I didn’t use my parents to see what reality was, to try and know, for instance, other families on the block. I used our good fortune for an ugly, puffed-up importance—to be a cool snob. I had no idea there was a direct line between this and why I often felt separate, lonely and agitated.

Years later in an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss asked me if there was a calculation in me as to how much feeling I wanted to have and to show.  There definitely was—I calculated what I would get if I showed a lot of feeling, and adopted a manner which I felt would get me ahead—cool and laid back. I’m grateful this was described and I began to be a better critic of where I went for a fake importance, a false pride that made me deeply ashamed. Through my study of Aesthetic Realism, I have increasingly what we’re talking about tonight—true pride.

Al Jolson’s life began so differently from mine, but like every boy he had two purposes with the world. He was born Asa Yoelson in May 1886, in a log cabin with a floor of hard-packed earth in a small village in Lithuania. He was the fifth and youngest child of Naomi and Rabbi Moshe Reuben Yoelson, an Orthodox rabbi and cantor who originally wanted to sing in grand opera. He felt early that the world was a place in which he had to struggle. His father was very strict and his family was poor. I think the young boy came to feel he would have to fight to take care of himself. His older brother, Harry Jolson, tells in his book Mistah Jolson how young Asa would battle with other boys “like a small tiger.”

When he was eight, his family came to America to find a better life, settling in Washington, D.C. Young Asa was fearful of this strange new country, but soon he discovered something that gave him new hope and made him feel the world was friendly and exciting—American vaudeville, which was booming. Secretly, he went to the theater as often as he could.

Singing was taken seriously in the Jolson household. Mr. Yoelson, Sr. trained Al and Harry rigorously to sing with full, open tones the songs of the Jewish services. Now in America, unbeknown to their father, the two boys began to sing popular songs on street corners for money, and at the age of eleven Al Jolson tried to run away from home to break into show business, something he did often over the next years, living on little food or money and without a bed to sleep in. By the time he was fourteen he got offers in vaudeville.

Mr. Siegel once asked a singer in an Aesthetic Realism lesson: “Do you think all singing, in a way, is a glorification of the world?” That is a purpose that will always make one proud, and it’s what you feel when Jolson sings. It’s in his tone—the intensity, the joy, the warmth of it.

To Have Real Pride You Need Its Opposite

Aesthetic Realism shows that art and the artist’s state of mind have what we want for our lives, a oneness of opposites. And opposites central in everyone’s life are pride and humility. In Eli Siegel’s great essay “Art as, Yes, Humility” is the understanding Al Jolson was yearning for. It begins:

Humility is the willingness to see things other than oneself as having meaning for oneself. This humility makes for pride….The artist is more humble than is customary, because, as artist, he wants…to see more and more….In artistic seeing, humility and submission are pride and grandeur… The relaxation of the ego is its might.

This is tremendous. Mr. Siegel is showing that real pride begins with its opposite, humility. I always thought humility was unappealing, something people occasionally faked but didn’t really feel or want. I never knew it was central in why I liked singing and dancing so much, that I liked the submission of taking orders—which step to do and when, what pitch to sing in what tempo.

Then Mr. Siegel describes the opposition in all of us and the very fight of Al Jolson’s life:

It is more difficult to learn authentic humility than it is to learn Sanskrit or acrobatics…The self gets in the way…and artists have had to learn how to stop the tendency of the narrow, limited, fearful, monarchic self…The artist, like everyone, has had to struggle…

Al Jolson did struggle terrifically with pride and humility, arrogance and depression. In Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life, biographer Herbert Goldman says he was “alternately boastful and self-deprecating,” he would swagger and then be fearful.

Jolson became a great success, star of shows at the Winter Garden Theater in New York and of the landmark first talking film “The Jazz Singer” of 1927, in which he said his famous line that sounds so proud—“You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” But on opening nights he was terrified he would lose his voice. He stood in the wings “trembling and sweating,” and on the night he was to open the new Broadway theater named for him he “practically begged his brother Harry not to let the stagehands raise the curtain.” But Jolson went on that night and was great, and the audience made him take 37 curtain calls.

In the Aesthetic Realism lesson I quoted earlier, the person told Mr. Siegel about a fear of suddenly not being able to sing. What Eli Siegel said Al Jolson would have been so grateful to hear. “When you sing,” he asked, “you’re false to something in yourself? You can’t sing well while you want to curse the world, or insult it.” Jolson did curse and insult the world. Herbert Goldman says he “frequently disparaged others in the entertainment field” and that Jolson’s fierce competitive-ness made him “one of the most disliked men in the theatrical profession.” It is said he kept the faucets in his dressing room running to drown out the sound of applause for other acts.

Yet when Jolson sang he was mighty. Describing him in The Jazz Singer, Mr. Siegel said, “God was shown to come from Jolson’s heart.”

And when he went down on one knee, looking yearningly upward—that has something beautifully high and low, humble and proud. Jolson had, magnificently, the “submission” Mr. Siegel speaks of in “Art as, Yes, Humility”; he yielded to a song utterly. His singing is a resounding criticism of that calculation Ms. Reiss spoke to me about. Jolson’s singing says No!—you’ll take care of yourself, be proud, if you let the world get in you and do things to you, 100 percent!

In “California Here I Come” from the first note Jolson is impelled. A man says he needs something, California and a “sun-kissed miss,” to be more himself. And the way he says it is so proud, it practically struts. Yet there is humility in Jolson’s performance, too. For example, his timing is impeccable—listen to the way he comes in so precisely on “Birdies sing and everything.” He yields to the beat, lets it tell him what to do.

In the reprise at the end, Jolson really lets go, with a spontaneous “Yeah” and “Ah-h-h”—it’s fervent and melting at once. You feel something utterly assertive and also reverent. And in the very last line he both commands aggressively and implores when he improvises “Come on, come on—open up, open up, open up that Golden Gate, California Here I Come.”

How Can a Man Be Proud in Love?

Aesthetic Realism really teaches men the answer to that question, it is teaching me. Writes Mr. Siegel in Self and World: “The purpose of love is to feel closely one with things as a whole.”

Like every man, Al Jolson needed to know this. He was tormented about love and was married four times. There are accounts of Jolson being tyrannical and then penitent.

For instance, there was what happened with his third wife, the dancer Ruby Keeler. When they met Jolson was 42, she was 19, and he was swept by her liveliness and sweetness. After their honeymoon Jolson was in California and Ruby Keeler was opening in her first Ziegfeld show, Whoopee, in Pittsburgh. She was excited, but Jolson began to say he didn’t feel well, and ultimately demanded that she walk out after a performance and take the train west to be with him. Ruby Keeler did this, but felt very bad.

Al Jolson wasn’t interested in whether Ruby Keeler was proud of herself. In fact, he undermined her, managed her ruthlessly. This contempt made for rage and shame in both of them. Once, in a frenzy, Jolson, who was Jewish, went to a church and prayed that things would be alright. He “lit every candle he could find…and…stuffed bill after bill into the money slot.”

After twelve years of marriage, Ruby divorced him. Jolson, who had always presented a confident, upbeat image in public, seemed dazed when reporters approached him. “I don’t know what I can say,” he told them:

What it’s all about, I couldn’t tell you…To me she’s still the most wonderful girl in the world…you’ve seen men go to jail, haven’t you? And they rant and rave and curse. But once they’re in the prison cell…they have to quiet down and take it, don’t they?

Al Jolson died in 1950 at the age of 64. He could have known about Aesthetic Realism and been spared so much pain.

Studying his life makes me very grateful for what I’ve learned, and very much from Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss, about what will make for real pride in a man about love, and what interferes. In a class, I spoke about a song I was working on for a performance and having trouble with, “Annie Laurie.” In it a man expresses large feeling for a woman. Ms. Reiss asked:

ER:  Is there anything in you against it?

BC:  I think so, but I don’t know it well enough.

ER:  What would be against it?

BC:  Not wanting really to be affected by something not me?

ER:  How important is that? Do you think everyone is in a fight between great emotion and little emotion?

BC:  Yes.

Then I spoke about the woman I had been seeing, and Ms. Reiss asked about something crucial that can work in a man:

ER:  How much do you want Meryl Nietsch to mean to you?

BC:  She does mean a great deal to me and I want her to mean more.

ER:  But do you think if you had a tremendous emotion that you would be foolish?

And Ms. Reiss explained something very important:

ER:  There is that in you that feels, “I’m not going to be taken in by anything.” And you shouldn’t be. …In Annie Laurie there is that beautiful soaring and careful feeling. A certain sweep is at one with “I’m careful, I’m thoughtful.” You don’t want to say “It’s because I’m so careful that I’m swept.”

And she said:

ER:  A person is being born right now.  Would it be good for that person to have great feeling or little feeling?

The answer is great feeling!  What I’ve learned about love made it possible for me to fall in love and marry—my wife and friend, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman. She means more to me with every year of our being married. I count on her perceptions about the world and me to be more myself, and I want to do the same for her.

A “Songster of the Universe”

I think the way Al Jolson sings “April Showers” is wonderful. This song is an instance of a person hoping to like the world even when it’s difficult: “Though April Showers may come your way/They bring the flowers that bloom in May.” And this recording has what I found in many attempts to describe the quintessential Al Jolson quality—one critic put it this way, and as you’ll see the opposites are central: “His voice with a tear and a smile wins.”

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #42 Eli Siegel writes: “When Bing Crosby said melodiously, or Al Jolson did…’it is raining violets’…these songsters of the universe were getting the world into their notes and praising it.” That is the purpose for which we can be endlessly, confidently proud, and Aesthetic Realism can teach every person to have it.

The post Al Jolson: True Pride and How We Can We Have It appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

For much of my life I did just that. I remember a typical morning years ago. Getting ready for work, I was sure that later my boss was going to pounce on me and find a flaw with something I did. As I put on my tie and walked to the subway, I planned my counter-attack. But when I saw my boss he looked up and said in the friendliest way, “Oh hello, Bennett. Good morning.” I was shocked.

I am very grateful to Aesthetic Realism for showing me how to criticize my desire to fight with the world and people, and for teaching me that what I want most is to care for things in a large, accurate way. Because of what I’m learning, I have a happy life.

In this paper I’ll speak about my own life and about one of America’s most loved actors, Jimmy Cagney. I’ll show the two ways we fight—how one strengthens and the other weakens us—and how these were in both the life and the art of Jimmy Cagney.

A False Fight Begins Early

Growing up in Florida, the times I saw the world as most likable were through music and dancing. I remember when I first learned how to do a triple-time step in tap—it was so precise and so free! The step begins with a fight—you stamp the floor with your foot. Then you take a little jump, and what follows immediately is lightsome and pattering. Then another stamp, and the pattern begins again. When the dancer gets that rhythm of stamp and patter, something fighting and then almost delicately caressing the floor at once, it is beautiful.

But mostly I felt the world was a place to get, as Mr. Siegel writes in Self and World, “victories for just me.” I was a snob, and competitive with other children. My family had a nice home and cars, and I compared us to every other family in the neighborhood with us coming out on top. I could appear like the friendly boy next door; but inside I was calculating. I avoided fist fights, but in my mind I was constantly arguing with people, scoring points and trying to put them down.

I prided myself on being a sharp person and I couldn’t under-stand why, as time went on, I felt miserable and that something big was missing in my life. In an Aesthetic Realism class years later, Ellen Reiss described so truly my desire to fight the world and the kind of emotion it made me miss when she said, “You are a ‘nobody-is-going-to-pull-the-wool-over-my-eyes’ person. But you also want to see a sunrise.”

The Fight in Jimmy Cagney

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #151, Eli Siegel writes:

To be born is to engage, willy-nilly and constantly, in the great fight between the seeing of the world as uncouth, unwelcome, painful; and as profound, subtle, engaging.

Jimmy Cagney had that fight. He was born July 17, 1899, the second child of James and Carolyn Cagney. They lived first on Avenue D and 8th Street, and then uptown, always struggling to get a decent meal on the table. Then a baby sister and brother died of childhood illnesses. With all this, there was an energy in the Cagney household of four boys and a girl that was admirable. Jimmy Cagney writes in his autobiography Cagney by Cagney, “We were a musical family, with the piano always on the go.”

One of the things that pained Jimmy Cagney was the way he saw his father. James Cagney, Sr. had a hard time holding down a job, and was often not home for long stretches at a time, suddenly reappearing. Cagney was bitter about his father, who was alcoholic. In his mother, however, he saw something steadier. She apparently had a mingling of sweetness and toughness he cared for. “We loved…the great staunchness of her,” Cagney writes. There was a great deal of pain between Cagney’s parents, and then, Carolyn Cagney made the decision to have her husband committed to jail to cure his alcoholism. At his mother’s instruction, Jimmy Cagney served the detention papers on his own father. He writes:

We stood there in the hallway…and he cried when I gave him the papers—we both did. I put my arms around him. ‘I’m sorry, Pop,’ I said…He never forgave us…

That memory haunted Jimmy Cagney all his life. He said years later that maybe this one time he should have disobeyed his mother. I think Cagney felt guilty because this stood for what he was too ready to do in his mind—get rid of a person who he did not understand, who seemed complicated and troubling, and this, I learned, is a way of fighting the world.

Growing up, Jimmy Cagney met the ill-will of economics which has made families have to fight just to live. When he was 15, he held down three jobs simultaneously to bring home money. To his credit he didn’t give in to self-pity or withdraw; in fact he often met tough situations with energy. But I believe there was also a terrific desire in Jimmy Cagney to fight, to swiftly and contemptuously put the world and people in their place. He tells of an incident concerning his little sister Jeanne:

I’ll never forget. She was crying and holding open the ice-box door. I gave her a…kick in the behind, and told her to close the door… She looked at me with those big eyes, tears streaming down her face. I wanted to cut my throat.

Cagney felt awful because he got a sight of how unkind and mean he could be. Like men today, he needed to hear Aesthetic Realism’s definitive criticism of contempt, how it worked in him and how it could change.

Do We Like to Fight?

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that something in us likes and hopes to fight, to find the world an enemy we want to be victorious over. Cagney had this ferociously. In his autobiography he boasts about the many street fights he was in. He says, “I knew how to box from the age of six,” and that these fights were necessary for a boy to get by.

But one feels Cagney leapt to it and could be vicious. In the book Cagney, biographer Doug Warren tells of a three-day battle Cagney had with a neighborhood boy, Willie Carney. Each day the police broke it up:

Jimmy tore into him with fists ripping at his face and body…his…punches [were] venomous…The next afternoon Carney was waiting at the appointed time and place…By the time the police once more arrived, Jimmy’s clothes were crimson from Carney’s blood.

Writes Doug Warren, “By using his fists Jimmy could cut the big kids down to size.” I think it wasn’t just the “big kids” Cagney was trying to cut down to size—it was the whole world, and this contemptuous state of mind is not unlike that in young person who carry weapons in schools today. It is what makes for the fights between family members in ordinary homes across America.

In Aesthetic Realism consultations we have asked men questions such as these: “Which do you prefer—fighting with your father or learning from him, having him be useful to you? When do you feel tough, when you’re grateful or angry? What are you prouder of, intimidating someone or wanting to know them?”

Through consultations, men learn to criticize that dangerous hope to fight; and their deepest desire, to like the world, flourishes.

A Good Fight

Aesthetic Realism explains what Jimmy Cagney was desperate to know: that his acting came from an entirely different source in him than those street fights, including the many roles in which he played a tough guy.

In his great 1965 lecture “What Does a Fight Mean?” Eli Siegel explains a tremendous thing about the self, and, I believe, the reason people love to see Cagney on the screen:

We are looking for a good fight because if there isn’t a good fight which makes for a conclusion, things in us will be annoying each other perpetually. There are two phases of conflict. One is the possibility that conflict changes into a fight which shows something. The other is that conflict go on like a tired worm on a hot day, dragging itself across Fifth Avenue.

Jimmy Cagney was, in my opinion, a great artist. In many of his more than 60 films, Cagney’s acting illustrates Eli Siegel’s mighty principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Cagney did something new in cinema’s portrayal of the “bad guy” who until then had been two-dimensional and flat—only sinister and dark. He put opposites together: good and evil, dark and light, toughness and something unsure. You heard his wisecracks and you felt his depth.

Said one critic:

He is all crust and speed and snap on the surface, a gutter-fighter with the grace of dancing, a boy who knows all the answers…But always this, always: if as a low type he is wrong, you are going to see why.

This audiences saw in the film that first made Cagney a national name, 1931’s The Public Enemy. Cagney plays Tom Powers, who “graduates from juvenile delinquency to gangland rum-running.” Never before had people seen such brutality on the screen. In one close-up, as he seeks revenge on his enemies, there is a look on Cagney’s face of the pleasure of contempt so sheer, it terrifies. He showed outwardly the savage thing in the self most people hide, and this showing was useful.

In Angels With Dirty Faces, as Rock Sullivan, Cagney is in a fight throughout—will he lead a good life, or will he be a gangster? He is tough, and all the while you feel a sense of depth.

In The Strawberry Blonde Cagney was not a criminal. He played someone very different—Biff Grimes, a dentist. Biff is pugnacious, but also has sweetness and wonder. For instance, when he gets his first kiss from The Strawberry Blonde—Rita Hayworth—he “turns ecstatically, vaults into a handspring and kisses a nearby horse.”

These opposites in Cagney’s roles, the “nobody’s going to make me a sucker” and honest wonder, I was so fortunate to learn about in an Aesthetic Realism class. Ms. Reiss saw they were fighting in me, and she asked:

Do you have a hard time putting the two together? Your toughness, street-wiseness and calculation is not at one with your sense of wonder, the grand feeling?

“No, it isn’t,” I said. I am so grateful for what Ms. Reiss explained as the discussion continued: this split in me between having honest wonder and also wanting to be a sharp, tough person interfered with my whole life—including how I saw love.

The False Fight That Ruins Love

Aesthetic Realism is definitive and so kind about love. It shows that we will be more by caring honestly for what is not ourselves. And in the class discussion I learned that much of what I saw as being “sharp” was really the hope to have contempt, and contempt makes us incapable of love.

Ellen Reiss spoke to me about a big interference with my loving truly the woman I cared for very much—and who now, I am very grateful to say, I am married to—Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, who is studying to teach Aesthetic Realism. She asked, “Do you like the idea of feeling wonder?” I answered, “I think I’m too suspicious.” And Ellen Reiss made this distinction, on which my happiness would depend: “You should be suspicious if it’s warranted. But have you hoped to be suspicious of Meryl Nietsch?” “Yes,” I said. And she continued: “Does that make you unsure of yourself? Are you more comfortable being affected by her—or finding things wrong with her?”

Then the Chairman of Education asked me this, about a grand emotion for a woman: “How would you do with the Marlowe line about Helen of Troy, ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’?” I answered, “I think I’d like it.”

She asked: “How about the line, ‘Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss’—do you like that idea?” I said, “I do, but I’m a little afraid.” Then Ellen Reiss explained: “The purpose of life is to have a large, true feeling about the world. Bennett Cooperman wants to have those two things together: sweeping feeling, and simultaneously the feeling he has never been more accurate.”

I felt described, relieved, and tremendously grateful. I love Meryl Nietsch! I am very proud to need her.

Jimmy Cagney was married to Willard Vernon for 64 years, and I believe there was something kind in their relation. They met in the chorus of a Broadway show in 1920. She was 16, from Iowa, and Jimmy Cagney was affected by her prettiness and the freshness of her mid-west background, so different from his tough city life. He saw strength in her, too, and speaks with gratitude for her “rock solid honesty,” her encouragement. She believed early that Jimmy Cagney had true art in him, and when things were tough and work was scarce, she would not let him sink or give up.

I think it is possible that Cagney, as men have been, was uncomfortable with the more feminine and delicate aspect of woman. For all their married life he called his wife Bill. It is notable, too, that in his films his relations with women are mostly battling and sparring. In no film I saw did he have a deep, full and rich relation to a woman, and perhaps he wasn’t cast that way because the fighter in him seemed so predominant, rather than the grateful man, melting and strong at once.

Fighting Injustice Is a Fight for Kindness

Aesthetic Realism shows that when we fight injustice and want the goodness of the world to win, we are kind and strong. Cagney was contracted to Warner Brothers and though he was a star, felt he was being exploited financially. “It became apparent to me,” he writes:

that the studio was…interested in paying me only a very small percentage of the income dollar deriving from my work. Therefore I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I walked away [and] filed suit against Warner’s… [He said:] The major studios had a…very elemental point of view about their actors: anybody they paid a dollar to belonged to them, but body and soul.

Cagney would not schmooze the studio executives—Jack Warner called him the “professional against-er.” He joined the Screen Actors Guild in its first months of existence, even when the studios tried to frighten actors away. Jimmy Cagney was also angry at what other people endured economically. He said:

If you’ve never been poor, you’re automatically a stranger to more than half of the men and women in the world…

He made headlines when he gave money to striking cotton pickers in 1935, and to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys—black men unjustly accused of a crime—in 1936. With others, he donated ambulances to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, made up of American young men fighting for the democratically elected government of Spain against the dictator Franco in 1936.

For these activities Cagney was called before the Dies committee, a forerunner of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Cagney was cleared, and then when he made the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy—a choice partly and strategically made for this very reason—narrow-minded politicians never touched him again.

Yet because he didn’t know clearly what to fight for or against, over the decades Jimmy Cagney’s ethics changed tragically—he became increasingly selfish. Certainly he was frightened by the blacklisting of people in Hollywood, but he also changed his purpose. His kindness and feeling for people took a back seat as his salary skyrocketed to make him, year after year, the top money maker in America. Writes Doug Warren, “He did not become happier as his income increased,” and I believe the reason is he used that income to be colder.

Sadly, Jimmy Cagney sold out one of the best things in himself—he lost the fight. He said years later—and horribly—that he contributed those ambulances to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade because he had been a “soft touch.” Patrick McGillian, in Cagney, writes:

Once good friends, Cagney and Spencer Tracy ultimately almost stopped talking to each other—over Tracy’s disappointment at Cagney’s shifting…disposition. Spencer observed that the richer Jimmy became, the more right wing and intolerant he became.

In the latter part of his life Jimmy Cagney retired from the movies and lived a somewhat reclusive life with his wife for twenty years on his farm in upstate New York. After a brief comeback to the movies, he died in 1986. Had the press not boycotted Aesthetic Realism, he could have studied it and learned about that battle in him between the respect that made for art and the contempt that had him increasingly sad, lonely, and bitter.

Art: The Greatest Opponent of Contempt

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #151, “The Fight,” Eli Siegel says that art is:

…the most successful agency of anti-contempt so far, is love of the world or reality, arising from its not being seen just personally or narrowly, but in terms of all space, time, and possibility.

“Space, time and possibility”—Jimmy Cagney did new things to these when he sang and danced. I love Cagney’s dancing—in his power and grace, the sturdiness and delicate precision of his movements, he gets to grandeur. Cagney had been in vaudeville in the early days, and felt his training there was a key part of who he was.

Time and again critics noted that Cagney—even in his non-musical roles—moved with grace and elegance, and more than other actors, directors shot him full frame, showing his entire body, because the way he moved said so much about his character. When he played a prizefighter in one film, a critic said Cagney’s believability in the ring came from his background in dance; it “made the fight scenes so real. The footwork was flawless.” There again—fight with form.

Cagney’s singing and dancing as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy is great. He gives all of himself in that jaunty, beautifully awkward gait which he worked to get to be true to Cohan’s style, and the way he talk-sings the songs from his very soul.

I want people everywhere to know the greatest man and beauty that have ever been—Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism.

The post Jimmy Cagney — or Does the Way We Fight Make Us Strong or Weak? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

The thing that stifles true expression in us is also explained for the first time by Aesthetic Realism. It’s in this principle, “The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is Contempt.”

I’ll speak about what I’ve learned, about a young man having Aesthetic Realism consultations, and about some aspects of the life and work of the great English actor who, in the early 1800s, electrified audiences with his passionate, intelligent, sincere performances: Edmund Kean. Kean’s acting stands for the expression men want today in ordinary life – to be both all out and tremendously exact in behalf of fairness to the world.

Expression Is a Oneness of Inside and Outside

In his 1949 lecture “Aesthetic Realism and Expression,” Eli Siegel the founder of Aesthetic Realism, said:

In every instance of expression the self must be put outside…The business of the self doing a murky job in itself is not expression. In fact, it’s poison…To express means that you see yourself as an outside thing, and you send yourself abroad.

And so, when a person expresses himself truly, he puts together inside and outside – what is deep within him comes out and joins with what Mr. Siegel called a “friendly outside.” But the self can object to this, can want to stay inside and hide. Discussing this lecture in a class, Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education, asked: “Do we have a self to hug and caress it, and stay in the self armchair? Or do we have a self to go forth, to see meaning in what is not ourselves?”

Growing up in South Florida I was in that debate. In the early love I had for acting and performing, my self did “go forth.” At Pine Crest High, I was excited to be in The Singing Pines, putting on shows of songs and dance at school and hotels around Ft. Lauderdale. I relished our rehearsals, learning the tenor parts and the choreography. I didn’t know then that I felt proud and deeply expressed because I was trying be fair to what was not me – notes, rhythms, dance steps, my partner.

But most of the time, I felt stuck in myself, lonely and moody. I used my family’s affluence to be a snob and look down on other people. There was an unspoken agreement between my mother and me – which I now see as very hurtful to both of us and unintelligent – that people who expressed themselves outwardly were vulgar and gushy, and lacked refinement. I saw any showing of large feeling, being pleased or angry, as distasteful and embarrassing. Secretly, I envied people who could show large emotion, but mainly I lived by what Mr. Siegel described:

One thing people do is imagine that they are expressing themselves by restraining themselves…They think that by keeping themselves to themselves…they are expressing themselves. About that, Aesthetic Realism says very carefully, even solemnly, and most decidedly: Phooey!

I went for that restraint which is really contempt – taking the life and vigor out of things and people – and it nearly took the life out of me. When I was about 20, I found it so hard to talk with people I’d get stuck on the words and was afraid I was beginning to stutter. With every year, I felt more locked up inside.

Studying Aesthetic Realism, I’ve had the richest education about expression that any man could hope for – as an actor, a husband, a man. My life as an expressed human being has turned around 180 degrees – and that’s still continuing! I’m very thankful for what Ellen Reiss has taught me and feel so fortunate to be her student. Once, preparing for a musical event here, I was having difficulty singing a song in which a man has passionate, tender feeling for a woman. In a class, Ms. Reiss asked if showing a large emotion would make me feel foolish?  I did feel that, and she explained:

The important thing here is accuracy – it isn’t so much tremendous emotion, but accurate emotion. And if there is that in the world that deserves [large emotion], the only accurate thing to do is to give it.

And she said that in having feeling and expressing it, I needed to feel “never was I so tough, so savvy. A person is being born right now,” she continued. “Would it be good for that person to have great feeling or little feeling?” Hearing this question articulated, it is so clear the answer is great feeling. And this is true in every aspect of my life – in the work I love as an Aesthetic Realism consultant, as an actor, husband, son, friend. This has me feel expressed in a way I once thought would be impossible, and I am enormously grateful.

What Can Acting Teach a Man about Expression?

In his 1951 lecture, “Aesthetic Realism as Beauty: Acting,” Eli Siegel describes acting as “the known showing of another feeling than you, as you see yourself, are disposed to have.” This has every man’s hope in it, whether he goes on the stage or not: to see the feelings of another person as to be known and mattering. Mr. Siegel continues:

The actor on the whole in England who most electrified audiences, and who got the most intense reaction, is Edmund Kean. There is something unexplainably amazing about him….as we read what Kean could do, we feel the strange power, the power which is like an oak, and the power in sparks.

That power came from a life-long drive in Edmund Kean that, I feel strongly, men today are desperate to have. Kean felt he would take care of himself if he gave his all in being just to a character he was playing, and that giving was the same as terrific precision and his own bedrock integrity. He didn’t hold back. He shows the truth of what Aesthetic Realism taught me: Great, accurate feeling about the world is the same as selfishness, stature, expression.

Edmund Kean had a tough childhood. He was born at Gray’s Inn, London, in 1789, the out-of-wedlock son of Ann Carey, a poor young woman who led a turbulent life in the streets of London. At two years old, when, according to Giles Playfair in his biography Kean, “he would…have died of starvation and neglect,” he was taken to live with Charlotte Tidswell, an actress at the Drury Lane Theatre who took a deep interest in the little boy’s life. His biographer writes that Miss Tidswell:

had him taught singing…and fencing by…masters at Drury Lane….She gave Edmund his first groundings in the study of Shakespeare, encouraging him to feel as well as understand the lines he repeated after her and making him rehearse his speeches for hours on end in front of a mirror.

In the plays of Shakespeare, the young Edmund Kean found a beauty, a structure in the world that made sense. As a child he became known in London for his readings from Shakespeare. Then, when he was nine, his mother, seeing that her boy could make money, reclaimed her son and again, says Playfair, “he became the child vagabond.”  She had him travel with shows to fair-grounds where he learned tumbling and clowning, and had to scrape together whatever food he could find.

By fifteen Edmund Kean “had been buffeted and caressed… praised and insulted and in sum he had learned that the world was cruel and relentless and had to be fought back hard.”  It’s understandable that unknowingly Kean came to see the world as an enemy, an opponent he had to beat. Here he was like many men.

Over the next years Kean and the woman he married, Mary Chambers, were strolling players in the provinces of England, often penniless and hungry, trying desperately to feed and clothe their two young sons who performed with them, one of whom died later. Yet Kean maintained a burning desire to express himself with grandeur, and in his biography, Howard Hillebrand quotes Kean’s wife saying that he “studied…beyond any actor I knew.”

Aesthetic Realism Consultations & the Self-Expression Men Are Looking For

Jonathan White, a young man of today, cares for sports and is studying the art of acting. In Aesthetic Realism consultations, he’s spoken deeply to us about hoping to express himself with sincerity as a son, an actor, and with the woman he cares for. But like many men he’s felt hemmed in, unable to give his thought to people and things in a steady way. Instead, he’s banked on charm, good looks, and kidding people along. He once wrote to us, “I have betrayed myself thousands and thousands of times because I wanted to get people’s approval.”

Mr. White told us he was having a hard time with his father. His parents had been quarreling and he was bitter, somewhat blaming his father, who worked in a non-profit company and was not a “go-getter” in business as he, Jonathan, thought he should be. In a document for a consultation he wrote:

My relationship with my father…is not something of which I am proud. I feel like a cold person almost every time someone asks how my father is doing…because…I have put him out of my mind so much….I feel terrible saying this, but I often think of him as a downer, a loser.

We asked, “Why do you think he chose work that is more in behalf of justice to people than in making profit? Do you think there is something to respect there?” Hearing this, he nodded. “Have you been a snob about your father?” we asked. “Do you want him to feel he’s a success or a failure?” We gave him assignments, such as “A soliloquy of James White at age twenty-two” and “10 places I am the same as and different from my father.”

In a later consultation he told us, “I’m happy to say my relationship with my father has improved a lot in the last weeks.” He said he’d been talking more with his father, trying to know him, and he looked forward to these conversations. Mr. White’s life as a whole began to bloom, and he wrote to us:

I’m extremely excited by the world that’s opening up to me, or I should say that I’m opening up to, as a person and an actor. I feel very fortunate to be studying Aesthetic Realism – it is enabling me to see so much more than before.

The Whole Self Taking An Outside Form

In his lecture on expression, Mr. Siegel says:

Expression is never expression until it’s complete and also accurate…True expression is that which shows the whole self taking an outside form.

That is what audiences saw in Edmund Kean. After years of hardship that had him destitute and frantic, Kean made his debut at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in January 1814. At a time when a more formal, restrained style of acting had been predominant for decades, Kean astonished the audience with his fire and subtlety, his spontaneity and naturalness, all of which brought new honesty to his Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

Shylock, a Jewish money-lender, had traditionally been played as a villain, instantly recognizable as such in a stock red wig and dirty costume. Kean refused this convention, making Shylock ordinary in appearance in a black wig and clean costume, a choice other actors thought was courting disaster. He saw in Shylock’s evil, “the human touch that made him kin to all men,” said one critic. As Hillebrand tells, Kean was:

…alive, alive with energy, in every muscle, glance, and intonation. The arms and hands were eloquent, the whole face spoke before the words were uttered, the eyes, the marvelous black eyes which were Kean’s most precious instrument, darted intelligence. As the familiar lines fell from his lips they seemed to be rediscovered, as though for the first time was revealed their true meaning.

In the audience was the young William Hazlitt, who became one of the most noted critics of all time. He loved what he saw that night and for years afterward, saying that Edmund Kean displayed, as no other could, “the tumult and conflict of opposite passions in the soul.”

Here, Hazlitt points to what Eli Siegel made clear for the first time when he said: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”  Two great opposites in Edmund Kean’s acting were passion and control. Eli Siegel pointed to these as the essence of Kean’s appeal when he said, “He makes us feel art consists of hanging about necessary precipices that you never jump over.”

Kean played Shakespeare’s Richard III, Shylock, Iago, Othello, Hamlet and Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts. The poet Byron was at a performance of this latter role when, near the end of the play, Sir Giles is cornered by his enemies, lashes out and goes mad. Kean’s acting was so sincere the audience thought he was “possessed by the devil.”  There was a shocked silence, and then writes Giles Playfair, “the pit rose up in a body and cheered and went on cheering.” “By God he is a Soul,” said Byron.

Here I want to say I feel very fortunate to be an actor in the noted Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company, giving performances with my colleagues of magnificent literary works – Eli Siegel’s lectures on world drama. Just last month, it was a big experience for me to play Torvald Helmer in our production of Mr. Siegel’s lecture on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, trying fully to become a vicious husband who wants to own and run his wife and does not want her to be expressed at all. It did me good to feel that from within and try to give it outward form, and I’m grateful for the critical artistic and life encouragement I got to do so.

Should We Be Impressed by the World or Fight It

“Expression,” Mr. Siegel said, “is activity, but it begins with how we think.” And he says this which I love: “We have to be impressed before we can be expressed.”

The post Edmund Kean – How Can a Man Have Real Self Expression? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.