That Genius of Joie de Vivre

Terry Teachout’s new piece for Commentary considers that genius of joie de vivre, Fats Waller (pictured). An accomplished stride pianist, organist, popular composer, and jazz singer, Waller nevertheless harbored classical ambitions. The confusion & conflict born of these ambitions undermined his career, the critic Gunther Schuller once wrote, because it turned him into a “pianist-singer-clown” rather than a fully realized artist. To which Teachout responds:

This appraisal would be less convincing had it not been shared by Waller himself, who played Bach, Chopin, and Debussy privately for his own pleasure and studied with the legendary piano virtuoso Leopold Godowsky. He told numerous colleagues that he regretted the turn his career had taken, and he both admired and envied his friend George Gershwin for writing both popular songs and jazz-influenced concert works, something the less disciplined Waller was never able to do. His sole gesture to conventional musical respectability, a 1942 Carnegie Hall recital appearance, was a fiasco. By then he had become a full-fledged alcoholic—he was drunk on stage at the recital—and it was this, coupled with his chronic obesity, that led to his death from pneumonia at the untimely age of thirty-nine.

Waller’s problems, both artistic and personal, parallel those of Bix Beiderbecke, who also admired Debussy and who also seemed to long for the respectability of a symphony. Whether he was more interested in the respectability or the symphony is an open question. Either way, more than one writer has implied that the artistic conflict caused his drinking and killed him. Of course, more than one writer has claimed that’s rubbish.

Teachout, meanwhile, is hard at work on his much-anticipated Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. The latest little chunk he’s shared at About Last Night name-checks another famous Iowan of the ’20s, the novelist, photographer, and gadfly of the Harlem Renaissance Carl Van Vechten:

Carl Van Vechten, who would celebrate Harlem two years later in his controversial novel Nigger Heaven, was already bringing parties of nightclubbers there, both to revel in the black entertainment and, as often as not, to troll for sex. Though he was a true believer in the Harlem Renaissance, Van Vechten was also a gay man in search of adventure, and there was no lack of it in Harlem, no matter what your tastes might encompass. Langston Hughes would later write sardonically of how “thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses. . . . The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any. As for all those white folks in the speakeasies and night clubs of Harlem—well, maybe a colored man could find some place to have a drink that the tourists hadn’t yet discovered.”

Van Vechten is & was a troubling figure: Was he sincerely interested in black culture or was he feeding off of it to fulfill his own rebel & sexual fantasies? Class figured into the equation, too. As a rich white boy, he was pretty easy to resent. His portraits, meanwhile, don’t really settle the issue, but I greatly admire them anyway. He liked to match his subjects up with interesting backgrounds. For instance, in this photo of Zora Neale Hurston, the design in the backdrop creates a kind of tense movement paralleled by the cock of her head & hat. Other times, he shamelessly posed his subjects, as in this photo of Cab Calloway. And there were times when he was less than politically correct, as in this photo of Bessie Smith.

PS—I’m out for the rest of the week visiting (on unrelated business, unfortunately) the stomping grounds of these folks.