The Beiderbecke Affair

Obey Obama

Obama (Hope) by Shepard Fairey (2008)

Emancipated woman – build up socialism! by Strakhov-Braslavskij A. I. (1926)

Mao Poster by Dashiell Hermann (date unknown)

Obama (Progress) by Shepard Fairey (2008)

• String Quartet No. 3 in F major, Op. 73: III. Allegro non tropo – Dmitri Shostakovich [Mp3]

Composed in 1946; performed by the Borodin String Quartet, Moscow, 1983

IN ADDITION: “I don’t like it at all!” “SCARY!!!!”

Am I Writing Away My Book?

I recently received a kind note from an anonymous reader who, while complimenting the writing she found here, wondered if I wasn’t “writing away” my book. You remember, my book, the one about Bix Beiderbecke. And it’s true: I haven’t written a chapter in several months. “I know some use their blogs for various means, including sanity, or order, or neither,” she continued, “but just as one heart to another, I hope you are spending 10x the time writing your book as you are writing the blog.”

Not even close. In fact, there are times when The Beiderbecke Affair seems to be a giant excuse not to write. I even quit for a spell, lest this diversion prove a little too diverting. But then, while drafting a response to this reader, I realized something important—that this blog, which was so ferociously mocked by a couple of my closest friends when it began, has become indispensable to my book. Here are a few reasons why:

• Through these pages I met Terry Teachout, who graciously set aside an afternoon to speak to me for and about my book.

• Through these pages I came to the attention of Ted Gioia, who offered me a gig writing about Bix for jazz.com.

• More than once, commenters have pointed me in the direction of critical sources.

• The Bix-related writing I have done here has served as a kind of first draft for at least two chapters in the book.

• Through these pages I have been able to gauge that, yes, there is interest in such a book as mine about Bix Beiderbecke.

• Finally, through these pages—and through unexpected emails like the one from my anonymous reader—I have received the sort of encouragement writers dream of.

So thank you for that, and thanks to everyone else who has made this project so much fun over the past few years.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Nothing

I’m just following a line of thought that began with a quote from Colm Tóibín’s collection of short stories Mothers and Sons, “that behind everything lay something else.” This led to some quick thoughts on secrecy and silence in Irish literature. Which led to a passage from another Tóibín book about the magic of ancient stones, which are as unadorned as Tóibín’s own prose. Which led to the idea of adorning—filling up white space—as magic (see Kells, Book of or Brooch, Tara).

You get the idea. And let’s face it, those early Irish monks were amazing. In order to spread the Gospel in word-obsessed Ireland, they literally invented the written form of Old Irish. For poets and priests, it was designed to replace what was called “the blessed white language” of the written Scriptures. Which makes the Irish language itself a kind of magical illumination: it fills up the white of silence.

Or something like that. For what it’s worth, the historian Peter Brown is impressed. He says that during the sixth and seventh centuries, “Irish went into letters with surprising rapidity and speed.” Which is to say fast. “Nothing like it had happened before in Europe.”

Which prompts me to pull another book off my shelf, this one by another Irishman, Seán de Fréine, who writes of another event, more than a thousand years later, that also occurred with “surprising rapidity and speed”: the loss of Irish.

The linguistic upheaval was of such scope and intensity that it is quite without compare among any other people enjoying as strong a sense of historical continuity and national consciousness as the Irish. Within the space of a century the language spoken by the great majority of a people became the badge of a scattered minority ; and within a further fifty years a tongue which had been habitually spoken by literally millions shrank to a bare two or three per cent of its former strength.

“The cataclysm,” de Fréine moans, “was unique in its intensity.”

So while I’m not inclined to trust people who insert spaces before semicolons, I’ll accept his word that this was, in fact, unique. And devastating. One can only imagine the sorts of cultural upheavals & instabilities that lurk below the surface of a society that so quickly—and so recently!—lost its language, which is to say its way of seeing and understanding itself and the world.

Oh, and the title of de Fréine’s book?

The Great Silence.

But wait. What does this have to do with Mothers and Sons again? Silence is everywhere in Tóibín. It’s there, for instance, at the end of the first story, “The Use of Reason,” when an art thief takes his Rembrandt out into the country, “to the great barren emptiness which lay south of Dublin,” where “there was absolute silence, a silence that came to him like power”—and he burns the thing, all the while imagining the “vivid emptiness in the space where it had once hung.”

There is power in silence, just as there is great fear. Whatever you say, say nothing.

IMAGE: Sorcerer by Gerard McGourty

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

‘They caused the honor of God to blaze from the page’

Colm Tóibín’s used the word magic to describe ancient stones, which he suggested were without artifice, without religion, and without history. Ironically, his description reminded me of the Book of Kells, and that, in turn, brings me to this passage in Peter Brown’s definitive history of the early Middle Ages, The Rise of Western Christendom. It seems that magic was very important, even to the monks of Ireland.

In a Christian region where books of any kind were rare objects, the Christian mystique of copying the Scriptures was yet further tinged with the magical awe that had always surrounded the áes dana, the “people of the skill,” the master-craftsmen whose legendary cunning provided secular rulers with the ornaments and jewelry appropriate to their status.

The writer as jeweler . . .

In the same way, the craftsmen of the great monasteries covered the vellum  pages of the Gospel books with exquisite illuminations. These craftsmen were the áes dana of the “High King of Heaven.” They caused the honor of God to blaze from the page. They were not simply copying a text. They were turning parts of the holy text into the equivalent of jewelry.

IMAGE: The Tara Brooch, illustration from The Early Christian Architecture of Ireland by Miss M. Stokes

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

‘For once a history which could do us no harm’

I quoted the other day a passage from Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons in which a character surmises “that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark.”

This is a persistent theme in Irish literature, as perhaps it is in any literature that is the product of a society so long occupied and divided. A professor of mine in college liked to point out the elaborate embellishments in the Book of Kells—so detailed that some of the Irish monks went blind painting them—and wonder what it was about white space, about silence, that the Irish are so afraid of. “Whatever you say, say nothing,” as Seamus Heaney famously put it.

But Tóibín’s prose, as I mentioned, is perfectly unembellished. And I was thinking of this as I read from his 1987 travelogue Walking Along the Border, when Tóibín happens upon an ancient stone circle in Beltany:

I started to think about that moment, that second when the final stone was put in place and the circle formed, what difference it would have made to the people who placed it there: something new, powerful, complete. That there was no artifice involved, that they had merely carried them there and made them into a circle gave the stones a greater spirit. I moved around touching them, looking at the land down below. Beltany must have come from Bealtaine, the Irish word for the month of May; I said that to James Bradley. ‘No, no’ he answered. ‘It’s even older than that, not Bealtaine, but its root, Baal Tine the fire of Baal.’ Baal was a Celtic god. Tine is the Irish for fire.

Indeed, the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland has always been a place of magic and fire, of smuggling, secret identities, and the promise of violence. Tóibín continues:

We walked down the hill, leaving the stones to their magic, away from the reminder that there was once a time in this place when there were no Catholics or Protestants; the dim past standing there on the crown of the hill, for once a history which could do us no harm, could not teach us, inspire us, remind us, beckon us, embitter us: locked up in stone.

It’s the wish for silence. No more embellishment. Whatever you say, say nothing.

IMAGE: A detail of Folio 129v., from the Book of Kells (ca. 800)

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

That Old Ugly Beauty

When I was a kid, I was briefly in love with bridges in much the same way I was briefly in love with dinosaurs and outer space. My bridge of choice—while in elementary school I proclaimed it “the Mona Lisa of bridges”—was the I-74 bridge, a relatively rare identical-twin suspension bridge crossing the Mississippi River. Over the years, however, I’ve come to appreciate that the defining landmark of my hometown is in fact the ugliest of its three bridges: the Government Bridge.

Above, you can see the GB as it was drawn on a gorgeous but not-to-scale map from 1888. Built thirty years earlier, in 1856, the bridge connects Davenport, Iowa, with the government-owned Rock Island Arsenal. Below you can see how it looks today, looking from Rock Island toward Davenport.

The Government Bridge (or Arsenal Bridge, as Davenporters also call it) was the first to span the Mississippi and, because it served a federal installation, was approved by the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis. As you might imagine, Davis was a loyal southerner, and he became worried that that the bridge’s construction all but guaranteed that a transcontinental railroad would go through the North. So in a fit of never-mind, he briefly stopped work on the project, but to no avail. It opened anyway. Oh, and another would-be Confederate helped to scout the bridge’s original location: Robert E. Lee, an engineer just out of West Point.

Here’s another image that shows how the bridge manages both rail and auto traffic.

The bridge’s spans swing open for river traffic (regularly and frustratingly backing up auto traffic). But in 1856, the whole process still needed some work. On May 6, the steamer Effie Afton slammed into the spanking new structure, destroying the steamer and with it one of the bridge’s spans. Steamboat companies predictably sued to tear down the bridge. And who was the lawyer the Rock Island Line hired to defend its river-crossing? Abraham Lincoln.

Here’s the bridge in 1940.

What I like about this photograph is the sense that you don’t need to see the whole bridge to understand its presence and importance. It has become iconic.

Finally, here’s an image of the old beauty that you have to squint to see. (In fact, I’d suggest clicking on the photo for a larger image.)

The shot is taken from a riverside parking lot in 1920s-era Davenport. The Indian that Abe Lincoln and his Illinois militia once battled has ingloriously given his name to a candy company, and Fort Armstrong, where Lee was first stationed and where Dred Scott first stepped onto free soil, can be seen jutting squarely up from the bridge’s Arsenal terminus.

I’m a little sentimental, I know, but I can’t get enough of this . . .

CORRECTION: The Government Bridge was the first railroad bridge to span the Mississippi.

‘Here, have a book contract’

Wistar Watts Murray, whose website reminds visitors that she is available for parties, confesses to being ginned up for this year’s Virginia Festival of the Book:

And this year I do not have to love the luminaries from afar because I . . . am attending . . . the Authors . . . Reception! In fact, anyone with $25 is attending the Authors Reception, but I plan to make a powerful impression. I have been studying the headshots and bios of the Festival participants so I will be able to approach them confidently at the party:

Me to Famous Author – Hello, aren’t you so-and-so who wrote such-and-such, my favorite book of all time?

Famous Author – Why yes! Aren’t you lovely! Here, have a book contract. [In my fantasy, authors give each other book contracts and cash advances.]

Me to Another Famous Author – Hello, aren’t you so-and-so who wrote such-and-such, my favorite book of all time?

Other Famous Author – Send your novel manuscript to my Manhattan office right away. Let’s get you a book contract!

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

‘It’s difficult to capture a subject’s voice’

The Washington Post Book World has been fast and fierce with its exposés of the Founding Fathers. On Feb. 3, for example, Post reviewer Michael Grunwald wondered if Jefferson might have been a hypocrite (yawn) but also “a deadbeat and arguably a swindler” (interesting), a man who, in his twilight years, obsessed with keeping meticulous meteorological records while inflicting casual cruelties upon his own family.

Ouch.

This week’s head on the block belongs to George Washington, another ivory-toothed hypocrite who believed in freeing his slaves—but only after he and the Missus were safely dead. And what of those slaves? That’s the question Scott E. Casper asks in his new book, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon. Turns out that many of them stuck around to work on the plantation even while Washington’s descendants, one of whom was a Confederate officer, continued to enjoy their own slaves.

Not surprising, I suppose, but Casper’s approach to the story is intriguing for its focus on a single freed slave named Sarah Johnson. From the Post’s review:

Like most former slaves, Johnson was illiterate, which presents a challenge in telling her story; she did not leave behind any letters or diaries. The details of her life are drawn from the papers of people who owned her and those who eventually employed her, as well as documents and agreements that may have been read to her but that she could sign only with an “X.” For a historian, it’s difficult to capture a subject’s voice without her own words. But Casper deftly uses the limited sources available to depict Johnson’s life with an authenticity that is moving.

I’m interested to hear more about how Casper accomplished this, and what holes his story must necessarily concede. For instance, how much can we know about a person—let alone an enslaved person—if all of our information comes only from her employers? Without meaning to sound glib, it might be interesting to contemplate a biography based on nothing more than a lifetime’s worth of employee records: I work, therefore I am. The whole idea is just so very American.

Remember that you can see Casper talk about these issues on March 27 at the Virginia Festival of the Book.

IMAGE: Mount Vernon Slave Workers

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

‘Behind everything lay something else’

I’m reading Mothers and Sons (2007), a gorgeous collection of nine short stories by Colm Tóibín. The Irish writer has always been one of my favorites, although I’d forgotten how much I loved his prose until this weekend. His sentences are deceptively plain; they don’t get in the way, as my mother might put it. And certainly they’re the stylistic antithesis of, say, Michael Ondaatje, whose novel The English Patient Anthony Lane memorably judged to be “so finely written that I found it, to all intents and purposes, unreadable.”

Instead, you might read Tóibín’s writing in the same way that one of his characters in Mothers and Sons reads the world—

with the feeling that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark, that a person was merely a disguise for another person, that something said was merely a code for something else. There were always layers and beyond them even more secret layers which you could chance upon or which would become more apparent the closer you looked.

Behind this post, I should say, lies a hidden motive: to tell you about Tóibín’s planned appearance next month at the Virginia Festival of the Book, a five-day event sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (of which I am an employee in good standing). In the weeks to come, I’ll happily be reacquainting myself with Tóibín’s novels and his nonfiction.

I’ll also be writing about To Conquer Hell, a great new history of the World War I Battle of the Meuse-Argonne by Edward G. Lengel. In a session moderated by yours truly, Lengel will be joined by historian Scott E. Casper to talk about “Finding the Story in History.” Casper’s new book, Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon, is well reviewed in this morning’s Washington Post Book World.

IMAGE: Colm Tóibín © Craig Abraham 1998

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

‘He would have adored to run a secret police’

The above image of the Magna Carta came from the marvelous blog BibliOdyssey, and it inspired me to pull out my Who’s Who in the Middle Ages (1971) by Dr. John Fines. The book is almost stubbornly image-free, but the good doctor’s writing more than makes up for it. Here is Fines on the notorious English monarch about whom it was written: “Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the presence of King John.”

John was a paunchy little man, five feet five inches tall, with erect head, staring eyes, flaring nostrils and thick lips set in a cruel pout, as his splendid monument at Worcester shows. He had the tempestuous nature of all his family, and a driving demoniac energy: Professor Barlow says that ‘he prowled around his kingdom’, which is an evocative phrase, but it would be truer to say that he raced around it. He was fastidious about his person—taking more baths than several other medieval kings put together, and owning the ultimate in luxury (for that time), a dressing-gown. He loved good food and drink, and gambled a great deal (though he usually lost—the results of his typical impatience and carelessness are recorded on his expense rolls); above all things he loved women.

Fines does not skimp on the various failings and casual cruelties that marked John’s reign and even quotes a Dr. Warren, who “says with some justice that if (John) had lived in the twentieth century he would have adored to run a secret police.”

In the end, though, this thoroughly British writer sums up his thoroughly British king in terms of, what else, grammar school: “John reminds me of nothing so much as the type of person who is brilliant in many ways, and has many gifts, but leaves after two terms ‘not suited to teaching in this type of school.’”

IMAGE: King John Signing Magna Carta from The Comic History of England (1847-1848), a two-volume collaborative effort by Punch magazine contributors Gilbert Abbott À’Beckett (text) and John Leech (20 hand-colored steel plate engravings together with  approximately 200 woodcut vignettes)