One man's 17 million words inspire an opera
A man sits in a dark room in his Back Bay apartment and writes. He is writing a diary, one that will eventually grow to some 17 million words that cover in exhaustive detail his life, times, and individual pathologies, as well as those of several people he has invited into his gloomy domicile to talk.
This may not sound like promising material for drama, let alone opera. Yet the diary of Arthur Crew Inman, a notorious recluse and one of Boston's great eccentrics, has already been transformed into a play: "Camera Obscura" by Lorenzo DeStefano. Tonight the chamber opera company Intermezzo premieres "The Inman Diaries," an opera by Thomas Oboe Lee based on the play and on Inman's colossal diary.
Lee, a biography fan, stumbled on a two-volume edition of the diary while browsing in a Cambridge bookstore; the complete edition runs to 155 volumes. The further he read, the more Lee thought, "This thing might work," he recalls by phone from his home in Cambridge.
Born in 1895 to wealthy Southerners, Inman suffered some sort of breakdown while at Haverford College. Though he always claimed his ailments were physical rather than mental, he developed serious phobias to light and noise, and he spent virtually his entire life in a heavily curtained room on Garrison Street. (He also rented the three surrounding apartments to ensure quiet.)
His family's wealth made it unnecessary for him to work, so he could concentrate on his life's ambition, which was to become famous. Having failed to secure his immortality through writing poetry, he set out in 1919 to keep a journal of himself and his times, complete and completely candid.
There was an obvious problem: How does a recluse and self-described "semi-invalid" gather material beyond his own penchants and propensities? Inman hit on the idea of advertising in Boston papers for "readers": men and women who would come to his apartment and tell him about their lives. Their stories are mundane, exotic, tedious, and often weirdly absorbing; they also offer a fascinating portrait of a world and a city that were experiencing profound and often calamitous changes.
The readers allowed Inman pleasures both vicarious and immediate. (He seduced some of the female participants, a situation his long-suffering wife knew of and accepted.) And the readers, along with a succession of doctors and domestic servants, fill out Inman's strange world in a way that makes it suitable for dramatic treatment.
"For an opera character, here's this guy who's larger than life in terms of what he did with his diary," says Lee, who acknowledges that the diary makes for disturbing reading, as randomly chosen quotations bear out: "Last night, lying awake, I was wondering just why I do fall so thoroughly for young girls"; "My Lord, but that Hitler is an astute man."
Lee says he tried to find depth to Inman's character, driven by his mania for recording everything in his sight. "What I try to portray in the opera is not just a portrait of this creepy guy, but I also try to find the humanity in him - this complex person who in many ways was honest with himself, at least," he says.
To create "The Inman Diaries," Lee, librettist Jesse Martin, and Intermezzo artistic director John Whittlesey sat down with a one-volume edition of the diary called "From a Darkened Room," as well as DeStefano's play, and plotted the sequence of scenes. The action is largely concerned with Inman's interactions with his motley supporting crew, though Martin's text also interweaves his thoughts on current issues, such as his contempt for Roosevelt's New Deal and unease at the prospect of the new Prudential Center across the street from his apartment.
Lee composed the entire 100-minute opera in about four months. The chamber orchestra has seven instruments, and there are nine vocal roles. Lee's music is tonal and liberally spiced with elements of jazz, which lies deep in his musical background, as well as inflections of blues, tango, and bossa nova. "American composers don't appreciate the advanced harmonic language jazz has provided for this culture, and I think it's to their detriment," he says.
Inman committed suicide in 1963. The legacy he left is troubling and unwieldy, yet also strangely foresighted. In an age when people spill their entire lives into blogs and YouTube videos, Inman looks almost like a prophet. "The Inman Diaries" gives his confessions another chance to reach the public he so desperately craved.
Tonight through Sunday at Tower Auditorium Theater, Massachusetts College of Art. 617-899-4261, intermezzo-opera.org
