THE YEARS BEST, OR, THERE IS ROOM AT THE TOP

MAN is a tireless maker of lists. He catalogues sins and virtues, victories and defeats, laws of nature and properties of beauty, the noblest thoughts and the fastest athletes, the richest men and the best-dressed women. The habit is not universally applauded. Kierkegaard, for instance, a little contemptuously compared categorizers to Leporello, Don Juan's servant, who merely kept a list of his master's conquests while the Don enjoyed them. But listmaking remains popular, perhaps because it creates the impression, however illusory, that it imposes order on a chaotic world, establishes a hierarchy of values, and somehow fixes passing achievement, if not time itself. Amid the turbulence of U.S. culture, lists are inevitable. They are, in a sense, a matter of self-defense, a small aid in keeping track of the almost overwhelming rush of cultural "products." All such lists are arbitrary and endlessly debatable. But the act of making them, or attacking them, at least has the virtue of requiring judgments of quality rather than mere measurements of quantity. Herewith some lists for 1965, together with the background against which they were drawn.

BOOKS: No Taxi to Greatness

Publishers poured out so many titles that Humorist Richard Armour suggested that it might be time to return to book-burning--or begin author-burning. In fiction, the big commercial names--Du Maurier, Morris West, Kerouac, Hersey, Ruark, Shaw, and Burdick and Lederer--all fell flat. In his Of the Farm, John Updike, always on the verge of being the finest writer around, retreated a bit from the verge. John O'Hara wrote a new title over the same novel. So successful was James Michener's 1959 Hawaii that he transported it to Israel: The Source was the year's biggest seller. It was also one of the dullest, and at 909 pages, it was outweighed only by Marguerite Young's 1,198-page pseudoJoycean, plaster of Paris monument, Miss Macintosh, My Darling or by that 1,046-page bore, Hurry Sundown.

The Jewish writers who have recently become mainstays of American fiction remained silent. Fiction's field was dominated by Southern writers, mostly derivative of Faulkner: William Humphrey's The Ordways was a sunnier, mellower As I Lay Dying, and the late Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge was a collection of brilliant short stories with all the Faulknerian sense of Southern Gothic horror. About the only fictional challenger to these was At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiesen, a young man who is an anthropologist and an allegonst-and a bit too much of both to be a really good novelist. Brian Moore, memorable for the brilliant Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, was only slightly off his form in The Emperor of Ice-Cream, about a Belfast boy's emotional coming of age. And at a time when American humor languishes, Peter De Vries--though far more than a humorist--contributed in Let Me Count the W.ays an irresistible epic of a piano mover with a twelve-year hangover. Speaking of hangovers, Norman Mailer's widely overpraised but undeniably well told An American Dream was more reprehensible for its absurd naivete than its repulsiveness.

In nonfiction, which was generally more distinguished, it was indisputably the Year of the Kennedys in which Arthur Schlesinger Jr. with his A Thousand Days made an art form out of instant history. Not too far behind--and duller because more self-consciously definitive--was Ted Sorensen's Kennedy. But for every excellent Kennedy book, there were at least seven sloppily sentimental ones, and the surfeit went so far that Monocle magazine's Victor Navasky struck home with his satirical suggestion for a brand-new title: "Taxi to Greatness, the story of the cab driver who drove young John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier to the movies on their first date."

Quite apart from Kennedy, it was a vintage year for biography, ranging from George Painter's brilliant but specialized Proust: The Later Years to Richard Dillon's Meriwether Lewis, in its own way an equally special and rather Proustian account of an imaginative, ultimately ravaged figure in U.S. history. For those who remain fascinated by Dylan Thomas, Constantine FitzGibbon retold the life of the doomed Welshman, warts, work, women and booze. In a more sedate mood, Lady Longford, in her Queen Victoria: Born to Succeed, presented the best biographical portrait of the Queen and her age since Strachey.

Among more general historians, Daniel Boorstin's second volume of a projected trilogy, The A mericans: the National Experience, defined the driving American character as it developed between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Samuel Eliot Morison's 1,150-page The Oxford History of .'he American People was impressive but quirky. Will a, d Ariel Durant's series on Western civilization continued to be a marvel of readable scholarship with the Age of Voltaire, and Kenneth Stampp's Era of Reconstruction put the blame back on the South's unreconstructed rebels instead of on all those Yankee carpetbaggers. Among minor but intriguing miscellany, Intern, by "Doctor X," was unsettling but fascinating to anyone who has ever been in a hospital and suspected the worst about the way it was run.

THEATER: Beddy-Bye for Grownups

On the whole, writers for the stage performed more poorly than writers for the page. Despite some hopeful regional attempts at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Arena Stage in Washington, American theater is irrevocably centered in Manhattan. And Broadway continued to be beset by urban blight. Part of what was wrong was the audience itself--too old, too prosperous, too complacent to be bothered about the basics of the human dilemma. These playgoers and, to a degree, the daily New York critics who reflect their likes and dislikes, demand beddy-bye stories for grownups--the Theater of Reassurance. This is the audience that barely kept alive the season's best serious new play, John Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence, a scathing indictment of the opiates of the middle class, notably sex, told in Osborne's splenetic, scornful, grieving, whining, raging voice.

Lowering Broadway's and off-Broadway's ruinously high prices might lure back some of the disaffected audience--the young, the educated middle- or lower-income people. Not that American playwrights were exactly bursting with new ideas. Significantly, some of the season's best plays were revivals, notably The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams (1945), the best American play of the last two decades, a drama of the human spirit that moves from death toward life; and You Can't Take It with You, by Kaufman and Hart (1936), which now came as a reminder of the virtues of human comedy in an era of black comedy and nihilistic spoof. The best new comedy was The Odd Couple, an uproarious situation farce about two middle-aged newly de-weds, directed by Mike Nichols, who has temporarily defected to the movies.

Off Broadway, the members of the avantgarde, some ot them now pushing 40 and haunted by that panicky postdeb feeling produced mostly slavish imitations of Pinter, Beckett and Ionesco. The once exciting off-Broadway houses staged only about 60 plays, as against more than 100 two seasons ago In its third season, as in its first two, Manhattan's Lincoln Center put on only two kinds of productions: total disasters and qualified disasters. And the APA -Phoenix company scarcely managed to stay in business, though it is by far repertory's best, ranging intrepidly from Giraudoux's Judith to War and Peace.

CINEMA: Screening the International

The movies continued to be more interesting than the staRe--and the chief movie characteristic continued i internationalism. So mixed were stars, directors, writers, moneymen--and styles--that it was virtually impossible to nail down a film's nationality.

The Italians, once known for their stark, rubble-strewn neorealism, were becoming increasingly Hollywoodish and slick in their technique. Reflecting prosperity, their main theme seemed to be the ennui, of the affluent society. In this category was Red Desert, in which Antomom used a stunning new vocabulary of color to describe 20th century anxiety and Fellini's latest work, Juliet of the Spirits, a bauble of fantasy that went nowhere but was enchanting to look at The Moment of Truth, by Italian Director Francesco Rosi was a brutal, bloody elegy to a great bullfighter. Not that the Italians had lost their skill for sex farce, as demonstrated in Marriage--Italian Style, rare old slush transformed into earthy, ebullient folk comedy.

The British also were preoccupied with the easy lite and sex In Darling, the delightful English newcomer Julie Christie played a jet-set playgirl who sleeps her way from pad to palazzo. Perhaps the strongest fad, springing from England was a kind of deliberate attempt at improvisation, as in Richard Lester's The Knack, a style that is in danger of turning moviemaking into an In joke about moviemaking.

Some Hollywood movies tried for foreign forms; for example, Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker, self-conscious despite Rod Steiger's virtuoso performance. Ship of Fools, by the overrated Stanley Kramer, was saved by the performances of three foreign stars, Simone Signoret, Vivien Leigh and Oskar Werner. Nothing But a Man, on the other hand, was persuasively unpretentious: it took a stronger, warmer, more objective look at contemporary Negro life in the U.S. than any other film to date.

For sheer fun, the top movie was Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, a nostalgic, slapstick, visual comedy closely followed by Cat Ballon, with Lee Marvin in a sidesplitting parody of all the drunken, woolly bad 'uns ever portrayed. For sheer horror it was Repulsion, by Poland s young Roman Polanski, the new master of the monstrous. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was the spy thriller to end all spy thrillers--and perhaps about time.

MUSIC: There Was an Old Man Named Ives

It was still the Beatles on top, with their innumerable shaggy imitators from the Rolling Stones to Herman's Hermits to the Pharaohs. On the whole, the music was improved, the lyrics slightly more comprehensible. With Bob Dylan, rock also blossomed into a hybrid called folk-rock, but folk itself stayed with its perennial purist, Joan Baez (Farewell, Angelina) and the young American Indian Composer Buffy Sainte-Marie, who as a singer is a sort of Cree Callas, with more conviction than voice.

There was lots to be found in the wholesome bag, too, notably Julie Andrews and the tinkly, tweeting movie track of the Sound of Music, the year's big bestseller. The newest sound was produced by Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, a trumpeting mixture of mariachi and Dixieland. Jazz continued to flail around in various directions, not knowing how seriously to take itself. Perhaps the year's best jazz record was Miles Davis' E S.P., combining a thoughtful questing with virtuosity.

On the classical side, the great calliopes of the big-city symphony orchestras boomed right along. One of the more intriguing events: the first performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 10, reconstructed by musicologists from a sketch left by the composer at his death 51 years ago. If any major new contemporary composers made their appearance, the news is not yet out.

During its last season in its storied and gloried old house, New York's Metropolitan Opera offered some superb new singers, including Italian Soprano Mirella Frem, Spanish Soprano Montserrat Caballe and Bulgarian Basso Nicolai Ghiaurov. The Met also launched its new national touring company, whose performances ranged from a fine Cinderella to a terrible Carmen. Opera companies in other cities tirelessly found out-of-the-way things to do, for instance, the Kansas City production of Handel's 241-year-old Julius Caesar and the Boston premiere of Italian Composer Luigi Nono s starkly modern Intolleranza.

An average 200 new classical records appeared each month, which encouraged even cautious giants to stray from the standard repertory. RCA Victor, for instance, rescue from oblivion an obscure 19th century composer named Charles-Henri Alkan. The energetic smaller companies like Nonesuch went for broke with baroque, scouring the mountains and valleys of Europe and bringing back recordings , every fanfare and trio sonata written before 180(1 Records unveiled several monuments to durability. Artur Rubinstein at 76 played Chopin's Eight Polonaises and Four Impromt tus (RCA Victor) more nobly than ever; and Vladimir witz 61, returned to the concert stage after a twelve-year absence, an event which Columbia captured in an exciting disk, Horowitz at Carnegie Hall.

Other remarkable items included Janaceks Glagohtic Mass (Deutsche Grammophon), an incendiary work written by a 72-year-old agnostic; and A Purcell Anthology (Angel), offering many antique gems in lapidary performances The rarest find was Charles Ives's Symphony No. 4 Columbia), a hitherto unplayed 1916 work of the insurance man who was also one of America's greatest Composers A premiered by Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra, it proved a wild, exhilarating romp, required two assistant conductors to help keep the rhythms distinct.

In opera, the top attractions were Goetterdaernmerung (London), the next-to-last in Conductor Georg Solti s; heroic uncut Ring cycle, with Birgit Nilsson as a larger-than-life BrSnnhnde8 and Alban Berg's Wozzeck (Deutsche Grammophon) a modern masterpiece of doom. There was also Mana Callas, who sounded at the end of her voice during a brief return to the Met, but in a recorded Carmen (Angel) she was undefeated and magnetic as ever.

ART: Op Goes the Easel

The password in art was "anything goes"--and a lot of it went Pop pooped out, op faded, but only after causing national astigmatism. Canvases crawled out of their frames and became "shaped," oils moved over for acrylics, pamt-mgs blinked with colored lights or glimmered fluorescently in the dark, sculpture climbed down from pedestals and if someone felt like hanging his coat on the wall and calling it "art," well, that was all right too.

It was the year of superscale. James Rosenqmst exhibited an 85-ft.-long painting with, among other objects, light bulbs, hair dryers, tires and a larger-than-life view of an F-lll fighter-bomber. Larry Rivers did an assemblage-only 33 ft long--on the Russian Revolution. And from Los Angeles, now o'ne of the major art capitals, Edward Keinholz sent a prop man's re-creation of a Santa Monica Boulevard artists' hangout titled The Beanery, complete with the smell of bacon grease. The newcomer of the year was Cleveland-born Ronald B. Kitaj, 33, who won acclaim with collages of blatant colors and contorted figures. There was also a score of bright, dramatic new artists from Britain.

The oldtimers had their day too. Hans Hofmann greeted his 85th birthday with a spate of splendid poetic new work Marcel Duchamp, 78, hailed as pop's Dada, was treated to his first Manhattan retrospective. Alberto Giacometti, 64, led the viewer into a petrified forest of wasted figures.

The latest fad was kinetic sculpture. Swinging in Manhattan's Guggenheim as the year began were the mobi^ of Alexander Calder, who started it all almost four decades ago with a tiny wire circus in which the trapeze artists reacted to the movement of air. Raising the roof m Manhattan's Jewish Museum at year's end were Jean Tinguely's motorized contraptions, which bump and grind with deafening effect and Nicolas Schoffer's audio-visual cybernetic contrivances. Kinetic sculpture not only entertained with movement but provided music, chatter and clatter, ite limits defined only by the artist's imagination. In fact, that just about described the whole U.S. culture scene in 1965.

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