The Beiderbecke Affair

Score One for Norman

Speaking of Vidal, one of the great literary feuds of our time was waged between Vidal and Norman Mailer. Here is a letter the latter sent to Women’s Wear Daily back in the ’70s:

Sirs:

It has come to my attention that Gore Vidal has been speaking in your pages of my hatred of women. Let me present the following items.

Number of times married:  Mailer 5    Vidal 0
Number of children:           Mailer 7    Vidal 0
Number of daughters:        Mailer 5    Vidal 0

These statistics of course prove nothing unless it is to suggest that the reason Vidal may have married no lady and fathered no child is due perhaps to his love of women and his reluctance therefore to injure their tender flesh with his sharp tongue.

Yours sincerely,
Norman Mailer

'All that I could think about was dominion of the earth'

I spent Memorial Day weekend, among other things, reading Lincoln by Gore Vidal. I bought this particular paperback in 1987, when I was in high school. I am just reading it now. (Listen up, Kate. This is why we don’t get rid of books.) Anyway, it’s every bit as good as what you’d expect from Vidal’s political novels.

The London Review of Books recently offered up a snarky but interesting consideration of Vidal’s work, and came to the conclusion (one that I share, by the way) that his political novels & essays are his best.

The political Vidal dominates. If you don’t believe that every human action is motivated either by politics or considerations of personal gain, then Vidal’s writing, his novels especially, will be less rewarding. His protagonists are forceful, knowing, rational, sometimes monsters. Power and fame, getting ahead: these are essential American themes; and the lengths some go to achieve power and, once in possession of it, go about protecting and expanding it the better to coerce others, these are Vidal’s favourite subjects. His versions of Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Emperor Julian are all more or less dictatorial. ‘How candid I am,’ Vidal’s Julian says. ‘I have never admitted to anyone that in my first encounter with Constantius, all that I could think about was how much I should like the dominion of the earth.’

Speaking of essays, are they a dying breed these days?

He doesn’t show his feelings, but he doesn’t hide himself either. He is at his fullest as a memoirist. His essays are his achievement, but Palimpsest is his best book. You can’t help wondering if he isn’t gloomy about the essayist’s reputation and its fragility. Essays are addressed to the times in which they are written, as they must be, alive one moment, often inert the next, but he has little reason to be concerned about that: Vidal knows as well as anyone that in America things have a habit of repeating themselves; many of his old essays have more life than recent ones.

I love Vidal’s essays, even if I don’t always agree with some of their more strident conclusions.

One question Vidal asks of his readers is: how American are you if you aren’t in two minds about the US? Another is: how well can you know the US if you’re not? These two questions tended not to be asked in the patriotic boom that followed 9/11, a time that allowed for authoritarian measures and actions that Vidal has warned Americans about for years. It is astonishing that the best American critics of the Bush administration have been successful, well-known novelists and writers over the age of 70: Vidal, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Arthur Schlesinger, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion among them. Jaundiced about American good intentions, unaffected by the roar of sentimentality after 9/11, they saw what armies of better informed, younger journalists couldn’t or refused to see.

Singin' the Blues

“Singin’ the Blues,” the most famous side by Bix Beiderbecke & Frankie Trumbauer, was recorded on February 4, 1927. Today, The Wall Street Journal belatedly celebrates the 80th anniversary of the event by reporting that this particular recording “changed American music.” How? It was the first jazz ballad, proving that the music could be both hot & slow. Writer Tom Nolan also points out Lester Young’s affection for Trumbauer’s solo in particular.

In the winter of 1927–28, in a hotel in Bismarck, N.D., a teenage saxophonist named Lester Young heard a record being played in the room of fellow traveling musician Eddie Barefield, and knocked on the door to ask what it was: “Singin’ the Blues.” Young, who would become one of the most important figures in jazz, a primal influence on at least two generations of saxophonists, both black and white, is said to have carried a copy of that Okeh 78 in his tenor-saxophone case for years. Those who listened could often hear whimsical traces of Trumbauer and little bursts of Bix in Young’s driving, ethereal playing.

What players such as Young responded to in “Singin’ the Blues” was the way both Bix and “Tram” constructed their solos—not out of disconnected “hot licks” and tricky ’20s gimmicks, but with thoughtful, balanced phrases that “said” something. “Trumbauer always told a little story,” Lester Young observed. In 2003, a 93-year-old Artie Shaw said: “Listen to Trumbauer’s solo on ‘Singin’ the Blues.’ It’s like a poem.”

True enough, I suppose, although it might have helped if Shaw had specified which poem. Perhaps Bix scholars should get on the case . . . In the meantime, the article ends with a sideswipe delivered by another Iowa-born legend, Glenn Miller:

Bix Beiderbecke, a compulsive drinker, died in New York in 1931, at the age of 28. Ten years later, when Bill Challis, who’d done much to preserve and perpetuate Beiderbecke’s music, brought some Bix-evoking arrangements to Glenn Miller, the popular bandleader rejected Challis’s charts: He said people didn’t know or care about Beiderbecke anymore.

On the Bixography forum, one Bixophile finds this last bit to be “upsetting” and “disturbing,” while another suggests that “the Glenn Miller hagiographers . . . reject anything that besmirches or speaks the truth of their hero!” This is not behavior limited to Glenn Miller types. For instance, I’ve always particularly enjoyed this inventive way of denying the claim, by Ralph Berton, that Bix may have had a gay affair with Berton’s brother Gene:

Possibly Ralph could have fabricated the Eugene incident as a rhetorical “what if” scenario as a means of coping with having had a gay brother.

Irony is a Bix fan’s best friend.

PREVIOUSLY: Enjoy five versions of “Singin’ the Blues.”

The Seamier Side of Collecting, or Whither Now Napoléon’s Bonaparte?

The owner of Napoléon’s penis—or what was thought to have been Napoléon’s penis—died earlier this month in New Jersey. He also owned Lincoln’s blood-stained collar. Which is creepy, and which leads Judith Pascoe of the University of Iowa to comment on the “pathos of Napoléon’s penis.” It is “barely recognizable as a human body part,” she writes, and looks something like “a maltreated shoelace, or a shriveled eel,” yet people’s “Rabelaisian delight” in the artifact

conjures up the seamier side of the collecting impulse. If, as Freud suggested, the collector is a sexually maladjusted misanthrope, then the emperor’s phallus is a collector’s object nonpareil, the epitome of male potency and dominance. The ranks of Napoléon enthusiasts, it should be noted, include many alpha males: Bill Gates, Newt Gingrich, Stanley Kubrick, Winston Churchill, Augusto Pinochet. Nevertheless, the Freudian paradigm has never accounted for women collectors, nor does it explain the appeal of collections for artists like Lisa Milroy, who paintings of cabinet handles or shoes, arrayed in series, animate these common objects.

I’m surprised that Pascoe, an English professor, failed to mention the 1991 novel Peter Doyle by John Vernon, which actually follows Napoléon’s penis on its travels across the world. In particular, it ends up in a small bag hung around the neck of the sexually ambiguous, cross-dressing title character, who hangs out with (wink wink) the equally ambiguous likes of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. This novel simply wasn’t possible without Freud.

According to Publisher’s Weekly, “the penis is hotly pursued by fortune hunters and Napoléon’s would-be heirs across New York City to Amherst, Mass., to the Wild West. Vernon’s canvas takes in the great robber barons, the flailing idealists and the penny-ante con men that lend the 19th century such color. The author’s research is impressive, his pastiches of Whitman and Dickinson are convincing, and his intensely florid prose recalls Patrick Suskind’s Perfume—and yet his overdetermined plot makes one suspect that his undertaking has been an exercise in, well, mental masturbation.”

Ouch. The book, which I read more than ten years ago, was fun. But very, very, very weird.

Pascoe, though, never gets around to asking, let alone answering, the most important question: whither now Napoléon’s Bonaparte?

IMAGE: Napoléon on his deathbed

Scully. Skull. Drill. Sean. Shine.

Colm Tóibín channels Beckett and Joyce:

As I walk to the bank I am not thinking about any of this at all. There are other more pressing matters, such as the office on 11 Clare Street of Flair Travel, to which I probably owe money; I should pay them, or at least ring them up or email. And then there is Bernardo’s restaurant, closed up now but easy to remember the taste of the scampi, the weekly lunches and the dental hospital around the corner where I was tortured once by a student. Someone told me that they have paintings now, a Sean Scully even. I wonder how they got that. Make drilling easier, all those coloured squares. Did he know where it would end when he was making it: Scully. Skull. Drill. Sean. Shine. An eye for an eye, a painting for a tooth. A little wider. Must go into the Kerlin Gallery later. And then the turn into Westland Row, hope to bump into no one between here and the bank, especially not Gerald Dawe or Vincent Browne, who both have offices there. Nothing against them really, but it’s mid-December, no time for meeting anyone. Pass by Sweney’s Chemist. Lemon soap. Viagra nowadays, Bloom would buy. Lemon Viagra. Mr Beamish the old bank manager gone now, gave me money when no one else would. Throwaway. The money. Loved his name. Beer and the bank. The counter and the bar. Drink Beamish. George Beamish. Loves his round of golf. Laughed at my jokes. Once anyway. Beckett too had a friend called Beamish, Noelle Beamish, an Irish lesbian lady who lived in the same French village during the war and left her long, utilitarian drawers out to dry beside her younger companion’s little frilly knickers.

FOR THE RECORD: A letter writer wants the London Review and Tóibín to know that it’s Sweny’s, not “Sweney’s.” “The last chemist in the line,” he writes, “Frederick William Sweny, was my great-grandmother’s cousin.” Joyce got it right, at least.

AND BY THE WAY: Gerald Dawe was a professor of mine at Trinity College in Dublin (I studied there a mere summer). But I hadn’t seen his name in a while. The professor once wrote a book that was, in part, about his countryman Van Morrison. (He signed a copy for me.) A reviewer (on this site) was not impressed by all the academic gobbledygook:

Dawe may have best summed up his book in his own words when, on page 77, describing a play he once wrote, [he] says it was “a short incoherent thing”. Overall rating: don’t bother; read a cereal box instead.

FINALLY: Beamish was not really the drink of choice in Dublin, at least while I was there. They drink Beamish in Cork (a lot) and Guinness in Dublin.

IMAGE: James Joyce Making Molly out of Nora by John Jones

Einstein’s Plumbing & World Repair

Late in his life, in connection with his despair over weapons and wars, Einstein said that if he had to live it over again he would be a plumber. This was a balance of seriousness and jest that no one should now attempt to disturb. Believe me, he had no idea of what it was to be a plumber; least of all in the United States, where we have a joke that the typical behavior of this specialist is that he never brings his tools to the scene of the crisis. Einstein brought his tools to his crises; Einstein was a physicist, a natural philosopher, the greatest of our time.

– Robert Oppenheimer, 1966

Chabon & The Frozen Chosen

John Leonard considers the unexpected Jewishness of  Michael Chabon, whose new novel imagines a Jewish state in Alaska. Here’s a taste:

Here The Yiddish Policemen’s Union reminds me of the only other north-of-the-border Jewish novel in its major league, Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here (1990). In Richler’s razzle-dazzle, where the Gurskys bore a startling resemblance to the Bronfmans from whom all Seagram’s flows, we got 150 years of arctic sky, black ravens, caribou bones, Old Testament loonytunes, Lévi-Strauss creation myths, Karl Marxist confabulations, and Gimpel the Fool on permafrost. Everything that wasn’t Oedipal would prove to be cannibalistic. And Solomon Gursky himself would seem to have agreed with Landsman, in his last word—IN CAPITAL LETTERS, NO LESS!—to an increasingly dubious biographer in 1978: “THE WORLD CONTINUES TO PAY A PUNISHING TOLL FOR OUR JEWISH DREAMERS.”

Am I the only one who hears everything Leonard writes in that laconic Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt/Charles Osgood voice of his?

TOP REASON TO READ THE WHOLE REVIEW: Jim Rockford and Jesus Christ appear in the same sentence.