The Beiderbecke Affair

Happy Halloween

And a sad goodnight to Giornale Nuovo, which provided this day-appropriate engraving, The Vision of Ezekiel (early 1500s) by Giorgio Ghisi.

‘Jimmy Caan had the tiniest little ass’

It’s somewhere between fall and winter here in Charlottesville, which means that the haze of summer has finally lifted and I can see the Blue Ridge Mountains from my front porch. That’s reason enough to live in this town. (And it helps make up for the lame tailgating and the boys who wear neckties to football games.) But New York film reviewer David Edelstein reminds me of another: the Virginia Film Festival.

This year, Edelstein will be on stage interviewing John “Nobody fucks with the Jesus!” Turturro and Tamara Jenkins. Last year, he spoke to Robert Duvall:

Duvall was an amazing interview because he was such a wily comedian. I asked him about The Godfather—I’d read that during the shoot, he and James Caan and Marlon Brando had engaged in a mooning contest. Duvall evinced embarrassment and barely responded, so I moved on to the next question. Before I could finish, he broke in. “Jimmy Caan had the tiniest little ass, and it went ‘twitch-twitch,’” he said, opening and closing his fingers. “Brando, God, what a huge ass”—his hands were wide apart—“You wouldn’t believe it.” A little later, I carefully broached the subject of Tender Mercies and Duvall’s well-known battles with director Bruce Beresford and Beresford’s wife, the actress Tess Harper. Ever the southern gentleman, ever discreet, Duvall shrugged off the question. Again I moved on. “You had great chemistry onscreen with Ellen Barkin,” I said and he replied, without hesitation, “We had great chemistry in bed, too. Wow. Wow.”

It was one of the happiest nights of my life.

SPEAKING OF . . . Tender Mercies . . . God I love that film.

'The greatest cornet player that ever drove a llama'

Hoagy Carmichael (above) loved to tell stories about his friend Bix Beiderbecke. “The only time I ever met Carmichael,” Benny Green once wrote, “he had half a dozen Bix stories at his fingertips, stories I had never heard before, and I confess I found myself wondering whether Carmichael had either.”

Here’s one of the stranger. It comes from Carmichael’s 1946 memoir, The Stardust Road. In it, Hoagy tries to describe Bix to his oddball surrealist friend William “Monk” Moenkhaus. In the process, he seems to mistake King Oliver for Louis Armstrong while treating Bix as both a god and a “little boy.”

I remember trying to explain Bix to Monk. I remember trying to put Bix together for Monk, so that he would see him and hear him and feel him the way I did. It was like the telling of a vivid dream and knowing that it wasn’t making sense.

“A man put the mark on him, Monk, marked him for greatness.”

“A man with a horn. . . . What is man but a puny thing. . . . Best forgotten, all but the I. . . . The I as in Beiderbecke,” Monk said.

“He was a black man with a golden horn and he played the boats, those floating palaces, that plied the rivers in the warm moon drenched nights of summer. The man was King Oliver . . . he played a trumpet.”

“Not in this world?” Monk said, but he was listening.

“The boats came and tied up and the townspeople would go aboard and the boat would go down the river, ten miles or so, and the come back while the people danced or just sat on the upper deck and stayed cool.”

“And little boy Bix, he blew his horn!”

“Yeah, he went on one of those boats one night and King Oliver was playing. After that he never was quite the same. He knew from that night on that the horn was for him, and he could say what he had to say on it.”

“As a matter of fact,” Monk said, “I am perhaps the greatest cornet player that ever drove a llama.”

IMAGE: Hoagy composing, from the Hoagy Carmichael Collection, Indiana University

Dr. Strangelove in the Hands of Tolstoy?

My friend Rick connects War and Peace, Dostoevsky, and the Cold War:

Brendan, Read your last two postings with interest. I agree with the writer that Dostoevsky appeals more to younger readers; his characters have twisted yearnings, and the dark inner forces at work on his characters’ lives is informed by D.’s religious mysticism that borders on gnosticism, or a belief in the doom of material things and individual beings.

I wouldn’t say that Tolstoy is indifferent to the fate of his characters. His relationship with Prince Andrei and the prince’s war wounds and eventual death have a powerful effect on a mature (and patient) reader. And the development of Pierre, a fop and fool in the early sections of W&P who becomes the wise and happy family man at novel’s end was perhaps Tolstoy’s hopes for his own life. In other words, Tolstoy invested his own character in Andrei and Pierre as D. invested his life in his characters’ struggles.

The stuff about the Korean War and the innocence of certain writers and their characters reminds me of James Carroll, who I’m reading now. Carroll was the son of an FBI man turned Pentagon general, and the author became a priest to make his father proud. They later had a falling out when Carroll became an anti-war priest and protégé of Daniel Berrigan. Carroll writes about this in An American Requiem, his 1996 memoir which won a National Book Award. In his long scholarly House of War (2006), he continues his story with a study of the Pentagon and how it promoted nuclear war and proliferation in spite of the tragic consequences.

Carroll is hard on generals such as Curtis LeMay, who was caricatured as the war-crazy general in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Carroll is equally hard on U.S. amnesia concerning our war crimes, such as dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the equally devastating fire bombing of Germany and Japan that preceded Hiroshima. By the Korean War, the Soviet Union had the bomb, and the Cold War was a doomsday story line that destroyed the author’s innocence and his conception of his father’s heroism. Carroll’s two books relate to the current madness over Iraq and Iran, and lead us back to the nature of warfare and violence that gripped Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

HEAR HEAR: An American Requiem is a beautiful and heartbreaking book.

'He couldn't go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers'

The great country singer Porter Wagoner has died. According to The New York Times:

For 21 years, appearing on television in flashy suits and a cotton-candy pompadour, he was the host of “The Porter Wagoner Show,” which was eventually syndicated in 100 markets, reaching 3.5 million viewers a week.

Mr. Wagoner recorded some of country music’s earliest concept albums, in which individual tracks combine in a thematic whole. On one, titled “What Ain’t To Be Just Might Happen” (1972), he explored insanity with songs that included “Rubber Room,” derived from his experience in a psychiatric ward. He won three Grammys for gospel recordings he made with the Blackwood Brothers.

For more than half a century, Mr. Wagoner was a fixture of the Grand Ole Opry; in 1992, after the death of Roy Acuff, he became its unofficial spokesman. And if Mr. Wagoner did not exactly discover Ms. Parton, her regular appearances on his television show were the foundation of her career. They won the Country Music Association’s award for duo of the year three times.*

Though Mr. Wagoner never achieved the sort of country music sainthood accorded Hank Williams, Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson, his pure adherence to traditional forms became esteemed. Waylon Jennings once said, “He couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers.”

Just last week, Wagoner came up in a conversation with a friend. She grew up in Nashville listening on the radio to the Grand Ole Opry, back when it broadcast from the old Ryman Auditorium. When her family suddenly moved overseas, these sounds of home became all the more dear. Wagoner was one of the singers she mentioned and one she saw in person years later at a huge Opry anniversary event.

He’ll be missed.

• Rubber Room – Porter Wagoner [Mp3]

• Julie – Porter Wagoner [Mp3]

* Here’s a great YouTube video of the two together. And be sure to read the rest of the obituary for a run-down of the “trouble” to which Dolly refers.

IMAGE: For whatever reason, Wagoner had some of the best album covers in Nashville.

Tolstoy v. Dostoevsky

From a great essay on War and Peace by Michael Dirda in Sunday’s Washington Post:

Some of these same polarities recur in another classic juxtaposition: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Young people nearly always prefer the latter—Dostoevsky’s alienated heroes are anguished intellectuals, often murderous and dangerously attractive. But then Dostoevsky is fundamentally romantic. By contrast, Tolstoy possesses an almost Homeric indifference to his characters’ fate. His only interest is truth. This is Natasha, this is Pierre, he seems to say, I am not creating them so much as simply recording what they felt and did. As Isaac Babel once observed, “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”

IMAGE: Dostoevsky x 3 (from the portrait by Vasily Perov, 1872)

This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.

A Recommendation: War Trash

On the dust jacket of War Trash, journalist Robert B. Kaplan declares that Ha Jin’s 2004 novel about Chinese prisoners during the Korean War “is not just a novel. It’s a historical document about a forgotten part of a forgotten war.”

He’s wrong. It’s not.

War Trash is just a novel, albeit a very good one. In it, Yu Yuan—who, as an old man, is writing a memoir of his captivity—vividly describes the horror and absurdity of war. The setting is Korea, but the high casualties will remind you of World War II; the napalm and the politics of Vietnam; and a particularly gruesome beheading scene of the current conflict in Iraq. If you don’t know much about the Korean War, fine. But what matters most is this: War is war is war is war.

Yu is as innocent as Adam. Despite having graduated from a military academy, he is unprepared for the reality of battle. His shock is almost poignant. “Never had I thought that the war could be so chaotic and bloody,” he writes after his unit crosses the Yalu River into North Korea in March 1951. When, after an artillery barrage, a soldier is diagnosed with shell shock, he laments, “Never had I thought a man’s mind was so easy to destroy.”

Cut off from the main Chinese army and surrounded, Yu and a handful of comrades slowly starve. Foraging for food proves to be dangerous work. “On average every twenty pounds of rice cost one man, so we mainly ate herbs, grass, and mushrooms, waiting for the fall when the wild chestnuts would ripen,” Yu recalls with characteristic reserve.

Eventually, he is captured and shipped to a POW camp in Pusan. There, the Chinese prisoners organize themselves within their compounds according to Nationalist and Communist sympathies. With American assistance, the Nationalists take control and ruthlessly set about strong-arming their fellow prisoners into refusing repatriation to the mainland. Those who balk, like Yu, are tattooed with anti-Communist or pro-Taiwanese slogans. Others are not so lucky.

Yu has no love for Mao. He only wants to return home to his aging mother and his lovely fiancée. But neither is he completely welcome among the Communists because of his Nationalist ties back home.

Yu’s disillusionment with the ideologues on both sides forms the knotty and sorrowful center of the novel. They use him for his knowledge of English—which conveniently provides him access to much of what goes on in the camp—only to betray him later. Although the novel doesn’t hide where Yu will eventually end up, readers will wonder how he’ll ever get there.

A critic once remarked on the “radical naiveté” of Jin’s fiction. A native of China, Jin has lived in the United States since 1985 and now teaches at Boston University. In his novels, like the National Book Award-winning Waiting, or 2002’s The Crazed, the prose style and characters are simple and unadorned, especially when compared to the complex sweep of history. Never is that more true than in War Trash. Yu’s wide-eyed amazement can be almost laughable. When the camp’s Communist boss orders a symbolic protest that costs the lives of dozens of inmates, only to reward them afterward with “medals,” Yu is skeptical.

“I had been awarded three already,” he muses, “but never had I seen a medal, and I couldn’t help but doubt their value . . . These awards might just be a hoax.”

Really, Yu? Do you think so?

Such naiveté, however, sets Yu (and the reader) up for a series of ironic twists and makes them all the more devastating. Even shopworn truths carry new force, as when a prisoner levels this charge against the Communists: “History has shown that the Communists always treat their enemies more leniently than their own people. Only by becoming their significant enemies can you survive decently.”

It is a testament to Jin’s skill as a writer that old news can seem fresh again.

The Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld once said that “without the naiveté still found among the children and old people and, to some extent, in ourselves, the work of art would be flawed.” In Appelfeld’s novels, which are generally set prior to the Holocaust, the Jews are educated and world-weary, yet completely oblivious of their impending doom.

In War Trash, the full weight of history has arrived, and it methodically feeds itself on the lives and spirits of Yu and his Chinese countrymen. That we already know how it must end is beside the point: War is war is war is war.

IMAGE: Chinese soldiers taken prisoner during the Korean War

This is one in a series of recommended books. The unbearable pathos behind the series is explained here.

A Post About Posts About Posts

This is just to say that I won’t be around much the rest of the week. I’ve got a lot of unpacking, setting-up, putting-together, sweeping, dusting, washing, folding, arranging, rearranging, breaking-down, trashing, recycling, and porch-painting-type stuff to do. But I figured that as long as I was doing one of these meta posts, I’d also check off a few other items that appear to be necessary if you want to retain your license to operate in the blogosphere: post a kitten picture (give it up for Gus & Ida!), whine that bloggers are always getting picked on and don’t get nearly enough credit (waaaaaaaa!), and declare, once and for all, that the book review sections of all major newspapers suck. They hate literature. Oh, and they’re probably racist, too.

Whew. I feel a lot better.

‘She’s the one always reading War and Peace’

From Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth:

My Uncle Max came home and while I dialed Brenda’s number once again, I could hear soda bottles being popped open in the kitchen. The voice that answered this time was high, curt, and tired. “Hullo.”

I launched into my speech. “Hello-Brenda-Brenda-you-don’t-know-me- that-is-you-don’t-know-my-name-but-I-held-your-glasses-for-you-this- afternoon-at-the-club . . . You-asked-me-to-I’m-not-a- member-my- cousin-Doris-is-Doris-Klugman-I-asked-who-you-were . . .” I breathed, gave her a chance to speak, and then went ahead and answered the silence on the other end. “Doris? She’s the one who’s always reading War and Peace. That’s how I know it’s the summer, when Doris is reading War and Peace.” Brenda didn’t laugh; right from the start she was a practical girl.

This is one in a series of occasional posts about my reading of War and Peace.

'Walking Negro walks'

A footnote to my review of Stephan Talty’s Mulatto America:

Talty writes that jazz music is not merely an amalgam of sources—blues, ragtime, classical, brass band—but “that the music is comfortable playing all these musics from the inside. The borrowings are not mocking or unsure but marked by total confidence.”

Here, Talty owes at least an attribution to Ralph Ellison, who famously attacked LeRoi Jones’ argument in Blues People (1963) that blues and jazz were black artistic responses to cultural alienation. In a scathing review of that book (reprinted in Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings [2001]), Ellison wrote: “The master artisans of the South were slaves, and white Americans have been walking Negro walks, talking Negro-flavored talk (and prizing it when spoken by Southern belles), dancing Negro dances and singing Negro melodies far too long to talk of a ‘mainstream’ of American culture to which they’re alien.”

In other words, black people helped create the American cultural mainstream, even if they didn’t always get full credit for their contributions or reap the monetary rewards. And they didn’t, of course. This has been true from Elvis to Eminem. But this is hardly to say that Elvis was, or Eminem is, a thief. To the contrary, they’re participating in the same cultural mix as black artists. Neither would exist without the other. Said Ellison, “the most authoritative rendering of America in music is that of American Negroes” (emphasis added).

That argument  casts doubt on what has always been, for sentimental reasons, a favorite quote of mine from Blues People. Jones gives Bix Beiderbecke credit for transforming jazz from a black music to an American music.

The point is that Afro-American music did not become a completely American expression until the white man could play it! Bix Beiderbecke, more than any of the early white jazzmen, signified this development because he was the first white jazz musician, the first white musician who brought to the jazz he created any of the ultimate concern Negro musicians brought to it as a casual attitude of their culture. This development signified also that jazz would someday have to contend with the idea of its being an art (since that was the white man’s only way into it). The emergence of the white player meant that Afro-American culture had already become the expression of a particular kind of American experience, and what is most important, that this experience was available intellectually, that it could be learned.

I always liked the idea of giving Bix credit for making jazz into an art form, but from Ellison’s perspective, this is hogwash, even self-loathing hogwash. Jazz didn’t need white people playing it to become art. But it did need white people to exist. American culture has always been a wonderful mixture of influences. Black people borrowed from African and European music to create jazz, and players like Bix felt right at home for that reason. Far from being interlopers, Bix and his fellow white innovators were participants in American music. (See Richard Sudhalter’s Lost Chords [2001] and the controversy surrounding its publication for more.)

IMAGE: Chick Webb on drums, Artie Shaw on clarinet and Duke Ellington on piano in a 1937 jam session at the Brunswick recording studio in New York. Photograph by Charles Peterson.