Cultural Amnesia Read online

  Donne and Marvell get the beloved into bed, but lavish all their lyricism on reassuring her that she remains as attractive as she was when she played it coy. Pope’s poetry might seem to scorn courtly love, but the poet’s mockery of trivial young ladies is a clear attempt to offset the boggling effect of their beauty on a mind deprived of the bodily means to do anything else about it. His prattling sweethearts are so interchangeable that a part will do for the whole. The Rape of the Lock comes close to fetishism: a lock of hair has the same effect that a curved shape under the bed-covers had on Casanova if he thought it might be female. Pushkin felt the same way about a pretty woman’s feet. Yeats, the great self-examining poet of modern times, fell in love often and with ease, granting his wife the cold comfort that he was unworthy of her steadfastness. On the strength of their appearance he would attribute qualities to his young companions that they did not really have: a common response, which would hardly happen unless the emotion were so complete in itself that the imagination had to be called in to help supply its object. The tendency for the love object to grow younger as the genius grows older was exemplified with embarrassing clarity by Goethe, who was in his seventy-fourth year when he fancied his chances with the nineteen-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow. The embarrassment was enormous, but one of the results of the embarrassment was the great poem we call “The Marienbad Elegy.” The most intelligent man of his time was obviously in the grip of a soul-consuming passion that had not much to do with the intellect, which was an accomplice—he thought her mind as beautiful as her face—but scarcely the instigator. Instinct looks the more likely culprit: an instinct that can draw on the complete aesthetic apparatus of the brain. The greater the mind, the bigger the fool. Hazlitt’s Liber amoris is an anatomy of the subject: an operation on himself, without anaesthetic.

  Men who fall in love easily and often should do the world the favour of not taking their own passions personally. Above all they should do that favour to womankind. Albert Camus, in the week before he was killed, wrote to five different women and addressed each of them as the great love of his life. He probably meant it every time, but had long ago learned the dire consequences for those he adored of making them pay the emotional price for his laughably transferable fixation. His women forgave him because his unforced charm was infinite and when it came to a scene he was ready to concede that he was frivolous. A realistic self-appraisal brought with it the blessing of a fair-minded benevolence: he might cast a pretty young actress in one of his plays because she had gained his favour, but he never threw one out because she had lost it. George Balanchine, pitiably, was less civilized. The great choreographer ruled the New York City Ballet as a feifdom, with the droit de seigneur among his privileges. The older he became, the more consuming his love affairs with his young ballerinas. Often, by their own testimony, it was to their benefit, but his behaviour towards the sublimely gifted Suzanne Farrell was despicable. When Farrell fell in love with and married a young dancer, Balanchine dismissed her from the company, thereby injuring her career for a crucial decade. By the time she came back, it had become clear that he had injured his own as well. Still vivid in the dance world, the memory of Diaghilev’s artistically ruinous paroxysm of jealousy about Nijinsky—previously Diaghilev’s obedient lover, Nijinsky went straight in order to marry a ballerina, whereupon Diaghilev dismissed him from the company, thereby irretrievably weakening its future—should have told Balanchine he was making an unforgivable mistake. It probably did, but he made the mistake anyway. Balanchine being an undoubted genius, the fact that he could let even one among his many idealized passions dislocate his creativity is a sure measure of the brain-curdling intensity with which an old man can be drawn to a young woman. His great ballet for Farrell, Don Quixote, in which he cast himself as the Don, was a clear attempt to lay the ghost. The pas de deux in which the raddled hidalgo declares his hopeless love is sad beyond expression, although insufficiently expiatory: he should have lashed himself for penitence.

  In our own day, Philip Larkin had the least courtly, or anyway least courtly-love, of mentalities: enslaving himself by handing his heart and soul to a female was the last thing on his mind. The submissiveness that began with the troubadors ended with him. When it came to love (or “love again” as he called it in his last years), he saved himself in advance, by writing a poem. Writing the poem was not his way in, it was his ticket out. But the revelatory power of love at first sight was one of his constant themes. “Latest face” meant what it said: just one more in a succession of beautiful faces was enough to make the whole tumult start again. Throughout history, all the literary evidence suggests that men are fools for beauty and will attribute every virtue to comeliness until experience disabuses them of the illusion. Acumen is no protection, because the initial effect is not assembled from particular judgements: it happens all at once, with the holistic suddenness of a baby reacting to its mother’s voice. Female beauty has always been interpreted by men as the earthly incarnation of a divine benevolence. The occasional evil angel, from Salome to Kundry and from Lilith to Lulu, is a consciously perverse thematic variation, and would have no artistic value if the expectation were not the opposite. For men, the first and shamefully unthinking flood of worship is the opposite of casual. It is monumental, and Peter Altenberg got it in a phrase. What’s so only? He had self-knowledge. He could have added the lack of it to his long list of the two things that can ruin a man’s life.

  LOUIS ARMSTRONG

  Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans in 1900 and died at home in New York in 1971, having done, in the intervening years, as much as anyone since Lincoln to change the history of the United States. The theory that art can have no direct impact on politics has the advantage of staving off wishful thinking, but it takes a beating when you think of what Armstrong did, or helped to do. Jazz would not have been the same without him, and the whole artistic history of the United States in the twentieth century, quite apart from the country’s political history leading up to the civil rights movement, would not have been the same without jazz. There was no easy conquest, and Armstrong himself was the object of prejudice right to the end. He had to be brave every night he went to work. All the more edifying, then, that he himself was colour-blind when it came to the music he had helped to invent.

  Those pretty notes went right through me.

  —LOUIS ARMSTRONG, TALKING ABOUT BIX BEIDERBECKE

  BEFORE WE LET these words stir up bad memories, we should console ourselves with how they once started the long process of putting fallacies to rest. The first fallacy was that white men could not play jazz. Bix Beiderbecke was white; Louis Armstrong was the strongest creative force in the early history of the music; so if Armstrong thought this highly of Beiderbecke, it follows that at least one white man could play jazz. Everything was against Armstrong’s forming an objective judgement. Armstrong had good cause to believe that jazz had been invented by black musicians, who had been systematically robbed of the rewards. Segregation dictated that it would have been inconceivable for Armstrong to hold Beiderbecke’s chair with the touring orchestra of Paul Whiteman, whose very name might have been chosen by a satirist to illustrate what black musicians were up against. Armstrong and Beiderbecke would never have been allowed to play together in public. The magnitude of the insult would have excused a bitter view. Yet Armstrong thought Beiderbecke was wonderful, and said so.

  Nevertheless, and sometimes all the more, the fallacy lingered on until long after World War II. At Sydney University in the late fifties I was introduced to New Orleans jazz by well-heeled college students who had been brought up listening to the shellac record collections of their well-travelled fathers. These were still the early days of vinyl. The definitive Jelly Roll Morton LP had just come out and was used as a teaching aid by proselytes for New Orleans jazz, with the Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven collections waiting further up the line for advanced students. It was held to be axiomatic that you had to appreciate the drive and syncopatio
n of Morton’s Red Hot Peppers playing “Black Bottom Stomp” and “The Chant” before you could move on to the challenging, ensemble-shattering solo subtleties of Armstrong playing “West End Blues.” It went without question that jazz was black music. One of the set books of our informal jazz faculty actually said so: Shining Trumpets by Rudi Blesh. In retrospect, Blesh’s book is a touching example of inverse racism: a white scholar, himself from a beleaguered minority, he was claiming, on behalf of blacks, exclusive rights to an art form. The white clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow had done the same by immersing himself in a black culture: he did everything but black up. It was Jim Crow in reverse. Mezzrow’s barely coherent book Really the Blues was on the course. Fated to supply the dull passages in some of the finest records Sidney Bechet ever made, Mezzrow was an average player and a worse than average writer, but his sacrificial passion was food for thought.

  Unfortunately the thought was likely to be scrambled by self-indulgent, unearned empathy. The emotion was admirable—disgust at racial inequality—but the speculative edifice that arose from it was painfully shaky on its base. Later on, Terry Southern questioned even the emotion, when he wrote a short story about a white jazz fan trying to make up for his inadequacies by hanging out with the black musicians. But it didn’t need Southern to put the whole idea into doubt. The idea was Jim Crow—white prejudice against blacks—stood on its head, and would have seemed so from the beginning if there had not been such a concerted effort on the part of white liberal commentators to play a role in fighting Jim Crow when it was standing the right way up. The effort was commendable, but it depended on the suppression of evidence. Black creativity in jazz was everything the inverted racists said it was, and more. But white creativity was real, and could be discounted only at the cost of obfuscation—a high price to pay for feeling virtuous. By the end of my Sydney University years, the pre-war Benny Goodman small group recordings had been collected onto an LP and were among my regular listening. The crisp ensemble playing and the lilting sequences of short solos were just as dazzling as anything from Morton or Armstrong. Goodman was white. End of argument. But the argument had been over for more than thirty years. It was over when Armstrong went to hear Beiderbecke at the Savoy. If Armstrong hadn’t known something was up, he would never have gone.

  Even without Armstrong’s generous testimony, it would be foolish to admit unquestioned the assumption of automatic black supremacy in a given musical art-form. It cuts out too much white achievement. You can still hear, from black ideologues and their white sympathizers, that Fred Astaire couldn’t really dance. He is held not to have possessed the proper, syncopated improvisational skills of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who could lead and drag the beat with different strata of his body simultaneously. There might be something to it. Astaire rarely swayed a hip. Even in mid-miracle, the armature of his body was upright: underneath, he was strictly ballroom. But when you consider what Astaire could do, the idea that he should be measured by what he couldn’t is absurd. It should have been patently absurd, but there was a political aspect, which applied beyond the kingdom of the dance to the world of American music in general. White men were in control, and they robbed the blacks. Armstrong never saw a dollar of royalties from all his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings: there were more than sixty of them, they sold in the millions, but for too much of the rest of his life they didn’t save him from a single week of one-night stands. His Hollywood earnings bought him the occasional vacation, but the royalties from his early masterpieces never materialized.

  The white men not only took the money, they took the opportunites. Bojangles never got the chance to be Fred Astaire. Billie Holiday bravely refused the demeaning coon-turn roles that Hollywood offered her. On top of the ravages of her abused childhood, her frustrations as an artist drove her to drugs, and her whole tragedy—the tragedy of black talent in a white business—was part of the picture evoked by her signature tune “Strange Fruit.” The song is about lynch law but so was her life. Bessie Smith, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian—you could make a long list of victims just on the level of genius, let alone of mere talent. Even when you take due note of the equally long list of those who never lost control of their lives—Ella Fitzgerald is a long list all by herself—the cruel scope of the injustice still shrieks to heaven. The joy of the music is populated with unsleeping ghosts, and anyone who doesn’t see them isn’t using his eyes. But it’s a bad reason not to use our ears, which will hear, if we let them, an awkward truth. Nothing can redress the flagrant inequalities of the past.

  We can, however, refrain from compounding the insult. A man like Benny Goodman, for example, can’t possibly be fitted into a schematic history that would base itself on the white exploitation of a black invention. He carried within himself the only answer to the conflict, and, as things have turned out, he presaged the outcome: a measure of tolerance and mutual respect, and at least a step towards a colour-blind creative world. He was born as poor as any black; he was Chicago, meat-packing poor; as poor as you could get. Being white, he was able to translate his prodigious talent into economic power: the very power to which black musicians, however successful, were always denied access. But Goodman used his power to break the race barrier. Though his mixed small groups existed mainly in the recording studios and only rarely on stage—the Carnegie Hall appearance with Count Basie was strictly an interlude—the music they made was the emblem of a political future, and in the aesthetic present it was a revelation. It is still a revelation, because in aesthetics the present is the only tense there is. There will always be a few diehards who deduce from those three-minute masterworks that Goodman’s clarinet was metronomic compared to Charlie Christian’s guitar. But the diehards were born dead. They have had no living thing to say since Armstrong heard Beiderbecke’s pretty notes and saluted an equal.

  If the two avatars had the same stature, how could they sound so different? It raises another question. Armstrong, with everything against him, knew how to lead an ordered life. Beiderbecke put as much energy into self-destruction as into creation. His father didn’t want him to play jazz. Trying to prove to his father that his music would get him somewhere, the prodigal son sent home copies of all his records. His father never listened to them. You could call that a psychological obstacle: but there were no other obstacles that began to compare with what Armstrong had to put up with every day. The main reason Beiderbecke could not stop drinking was that he was an alcoholic. His short adult life was a long suicide. But the cautionary tale had an awkward corollary: his underlying melancholy got into his tone, and helped to make it unmistakable. Armstrong could play blues with unmatched inventiveness, but his soul moved in jump-time: a sharp, staccato attack was basic to him. Crackling excitement was his natural mode. Beiderbecke, on the other hand, was blue to the roots. Even his upbeat solos were saturated with prescient grief, and the slow numbers remind you of Ford Madox Ford’s catchline for The Good Soldier: this is the saddest story ever told.

  I listened to most of Beiderbecke’s Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman sides before I left Sydney (even the most fanatical New Orleans purists among my friends seemed to have them on hand), but it wasn’t until I was down and out in London in the early 1960s that I first heard “I’m Coming, Virginia.” An Australian homosexual ballet buff—a lot of Australian homosexuals were still prudently sending themselves into exile in those days—persuaded me to sit down and listen to a piece of music he held to be the most beautiful thing in his life: better even than Swan Lake. (I wonder if he lived long enough to see Swan Lake danced by boys: I hope so.) For a while “I’m Coming, Virginia”—I used to make rude jokes about the title, but they conveyed my appreciation—became the most beautiful thing in my life too. The coherence of its long Bix solo still provides me with a measure of what popular art should be like: a generosity of effects on a simple frame. The melodic line is particularly ravishing at its points of transition: there are moments when even a silent pause is a perfect note, and always ther
e is a piercing sadness to it, as if the natural tone of the cornet, the instrument of reveille, were the first sob before weeping. Armstrong could probably have done that too, but he didn’t want to. He wasn’t like that. Beiderbecke was, always: his loveliest-ever outpouring was an example of the artistic freedom that can be attained through being trapped in a personality. Perhaps for personal reasons, I took it as an encouragement. I wanted to write prose sentences that way, and lines of poetry: as a shining sequence of desolate exuberance, of playful grief. I loved the spareness of his technique: a wordless song with one note per syllable and no lapses into mere virtuosity. It helped me to conceive the notion that the only permissible obscurity is an excess of vividness, or the suggestive hiatus that comes from removing the connecting tissue between transparencies. In my last two years before I left Sydney I had moved on to bebop and modern jazz in general, but although I tried to enjoy some of the headlong sprezzatura stuff I always thought that it was only in the slow numbers that the virtuosi really showed what they could do. I liked it best when Thelonious Monk dragged his hands like tired feet in “Round Midnight,” and my favourite Charlie Parker number was the last-ditch, half-ruined but drenchingly lyrical “My Old Flame.” At Cambridge I was still listening to that one almost every night.