The Beiderbecke Affair

The Difficulty with Reenacting

Last Saturday, I sat through a two-hour panel discussion on slave housing. I’ll admit that it was a tiny bit tedious, eighteenth-century building techniques not being my primary interest, but I was taping it as a favor for my absent friend, the historian Henry Wiencek. Anyway, a scholar from Mount Vernon was explaining how he had supervised the reconstruction of a slave house at the plantation when a member of the audience piped up.

“Your house looks too nice,” he objected, pointing to the photo on the screen. “It should be more run down.”

“Everything’s new once,” the Mount Vernon guy responded curtly.

Okay, so things were finally getting interesting. Still, what fascinated me about the photo was not the house but the people next to it, two reenactors, or “interpreters,” pretending to be slaves. The photo below is from Mount Vernon’s website:

To me it was the interpreters, more than the house, who looked too nice. I’ll admit that I have a built-in skepticism when it comes to reenacting (you can read all about it here), but there’s something unsettling about pretending to a be a slave. I don’t mean to say that these particular interpreters are in any way inauthentic; it’s just difficult for my imagination to play along. We can know the scholarship and understand that the clothing’s correct (which, as Henry assured me, it is), but in the end, they’re not, you know, actually slaves.

And doesn’t that make all the difference?

Turns out that the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has been worrying over this same question on his New York Times blog. His context has been photographs and film—not real-life interpreters—but the questions are the same. How do we know what is real? Critics have long been skeptical of reenactments in documentary films, like Morris’s own The Thin Blue Line (1988), because of their ability to too easily manipulate our understanding of reality. Of history. The viewers, these critics seem to imply, are too credulous.

Take that photo from Mount Vernon. Those people stand out for me. They look relaxed. They look well fed, well dressed, almost happy. At the very least they look content. It’s an image that sticks to the mind in the way that only photographs can. The mind rebels, struggling against Mount Vernon’s demand that we suspend disbelief—these aren’t really slaves, after all—and yet, on some level seeing is believing.

This is a real danger in reenacting, and Morris confronts it head on. “The difficulty with images,” Morris writes, “is not suspending disbelief but rather the opposite—suspending our natural tendency to believe in their veracity. The seeing-is-believing principle.” He continues:

The kind of re-enactments I have in mind are not based on trying to fool you into believing that something is real that is not. Nor are they based on the suspension of disbelief. They are not asking us to suspend your disbelief in an artificial world that has been created expressly for their entertainment; they are asking the opposite of us—to study the relationship of an artificial world to the real world. They involve the suspension of belief—not disbelief. The audience is being asked the question: did it happen this way? The kind of re-enactments I have in mind makes us question what we believe and brings us deeper into the mystery of what happened.

Fine, Errol Morris. You go ahead and challenge what people believe. You delve into mysteries. But is this really what flesh-and-blood interpreters are able to do?

According to my friend Henry, yes. He suggested I read the chapter “A Scheme in Williamsburg” from his book An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003). In it, he writes of slave interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg who reenact a slave auction—one Washington helped to organize—in which families were separated. For the interpreters and audience alike, there was nothing fake about the drama of that moment when wife was separated from husband. People broke down into tears.

“The emotion was real,” Henry wrote, “and the woman who played Lucy later said she could not enact such a thing again.”

To come to grips with the feelings they had stirred in themselves by the reenactment, the Williamsburg staff invited a historian who had studied the psychology of slavery to give a lecture to the staff. She said that in the collective memory of African-Americans, there were five areas that were “ultra-sensitive,” and Williamsburg had ventured into two of them: one was auctions and the other was separation of families. In the oral histories of black families these events continued to echo and inflict pain. Families rarely spoke of such matters except among themselves because the humiliation they felt, even with the passage of time, was so great.

After reading that, I felt like my cynicism about reenacting—born from my experience as a Johnny Reb—had been put in its place. Still, it’s ironic that what makes this reenactment work is that the pain is real, and the pain is at the heart of what’s being reenacted. It’s not a byproduct; it’s the whole point. But in a Civil War battle reenactment, killing and being killed is at the center of everything, but it’s not real. It can’t be real. So the Williamsburg auction reenactments were discontinued while Civil War reenactments are going strong.

Go figure.

ELSEWHERE: Cross-posted here.

In Gabriel’s Band

Satch on Bix, from the former’s obituary in the Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1971:

In 1959 after recovering from a serious illness he reported to Down Beat magazine that “Bix [Beiderbecke] tried to get me up there to play first horn in Gabriel’s band, but I couldn’t make the gig. It hadn’t been cleared with Joe Glaser [his manager], the union or the State Department.”

‘It moves men mightily’

Wouldn’t you know, all the action is somewhere else. At the Encyclopedia Virginia blog—which you should definitely check out—a series of posts considers that well-traveled intersection of myth and history, and in particular the case of Robert E. Lee. (Seeing the old man’s visage on a World War II recruiting poster is alone worth the click.)

This, by the way, is Confederate Heritage Month, and while some commentators have an understandable desire to mock that fact, Bruce Catton—the great Civil War historian and, I believe, Michigan native—was more sympathetic to the usefulness of the Lost Cause mythology.

 The things that were done during the Civil War have not been forgotten, of course, but we now see them through a veil. We have elevated the entire conflict to the realm where it is no longer explosive. It is a part of American legend, a part of American history, a part, if you will, of American romance. It moves men mightily, to this day, but it does not move them in the direction of picking up their guns and going at it again.

These observations are followed by an acknowledgment—vis-à-vis that awesome Lee poster—that some traditions are invented out of whole cloth. Or poster board, or whatever.

An additional post takes a look at this Lost Cause mythologizing up close—and shivers.

[Douglas] Freeman is, shall we say, genteelly elliptical when it comes to matters of race. The Virginian, he tells us, is by his nature superbly considerate, this having to do with “the first law of the South—that a white man is a white man and must be treated as such regardless of his station.” As for those men who are not white: “The Virginia Negro is the blue-blood of his race” and “lynchings are rare”; in fact, he enjoys “the moral support of nearly all the whites.”

Never was a nearly more necessary!

Finally, Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory has gotten in on the fun by responding at length to a question of mine concerning myth, memory, and General Lee. He writes:

What I am suggesting is that while I understand the need to use Lee as a point of reconciliation and reunion I have to ask whether or not the way in which it was done involved too great a price.

It’s an interesting question, an interesting discussion, and I urge you to weigh in.

‘Ain’t had a bath for a year, dig me!’

In the Chicago Tribune on Feb. 24, 1974, the incomparable rock critic Lester Bangs reviewed Remembering Bix, a memoir by Ralph Berton.

But in the end the lapidary triumph of Beiderbecke’s art may be as significant and, ironically, a direct refutation of the appalling waste of his life. Because Bix proved, five decades ago, that sleaze and destruction, the brandishing of the degrade and déclassé, are not necessary concomitants of an alternative art form: “What was Bix saying that no other musician had ever said? Simply that this jazz wasn’t on the bottom looking up any more. It was out on the level now, reaching for the heights; not grinning sardonically or defiantly at itself as black and poor and dirty and barefoot: Yeah, baby, I’m ugly, ain’t I, I’m evil and lowdown and funky, ain’t had a bath for a year, dig me!”

That’s a lesson that far too many white jivesters, from the Rolling Stones on down, have still not learned.

It can be tough to tell where Bangs ends and Berton begins . . .

A Pulitzer to the Monitor

I’m excited to say that a former colleague of mine has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Congratulations to Preston Gannaway, who was just starting at the Monitor when I left. The honor is much deserved.

A Hero’s Death

I’m reading Dead Certainties by Simon Schama, a rather odd book that explores the often uneasy boundary between history and fiction. Schama is particularly interested in the death of James Wolfe, the British general whose army stormed Quebec in 1759—although his interest is less in the details than in how those details are lost, or, more to the point, how they are transformed into myth. Consider the 1770 painting by the American Benjamin West, Death of General Wolfe (above).

From its first conception, West rejected literalism and embraced rhetoric. “Wolfe must not die like a common soldier under a Bush,” he wrote. “To move the mind there should be a spectacle presented to raise and warm the mind and all should be proportioned to the highest idea conceivd of the Hero . . . A mere matter of fact will never produce the effect.” Accordingly, throughout the composition, from top to bottom, mere fact is overwhelmed by inspired, symbolically loaded invention. It was this unapologetic hyperbole which set West’s painting off so dramatically from the prosaic versions that preceded it, none more painfully feeble than Edward Penny’s effort of 1763. Where that product of honest toil conscientiously had the General attended only by two officers and set down in a shrubby clearing apart from the battlefield, West produced the grandiloquent lie the public craved: a death at the very centre of the action; the firing of guns still sounding at his back; the St. Lawrence that he had finally conquered to his right; three groups of officers and men arrayed like a Greek chorus to witness the tragedy.

Schama goes on to explore the treatment of Wolfe in a history by the Bostonian Francis Parkman, and then veers into a long, sometimes fictional treatment of the 1849 murder of Parkman’s uncle, followed by the trial and hanging of a Harvard professor. It’s an odd book, but fascinating.

‘The band blared. Bix Beiderbecke blew.’

From “Quartet” by David Glines, in the autumn 1978 issue of Chicago Review:

Whiteman, in blackface, wearing a straw hat and bow tie, burst in on Gershwin, who was listening to Milhaud’s La Creation du Monde, enjoying the blues parts. The raucous din of garbage can lids drifted up tinnily from elevator shafts, the click of dice was heard from alleys where men were playing craps. All the way from Brooklyn you could smell the cabbage cooking.

“Cabbage!” Gershwin choked out, approaching tears.

“Mississippi Mud,” Whiteman responded.

“Whiteman,” Gershwin crooned rhapsodically, “I was walking down Broadway today and the Blues hit me.”

“Wang Wang, Washboard or Weary?”

“Let’s go to Paris, Whiteman.”

“What would an American do in Paris, Georgie?”

“Dance! Get the Blues!”

They broke into a soft shoe shuffle then into a full scale Broadway production tap dance routine without even having to change their shoes. Taxicab horns honked out rhythms for them.

All night they danced, played poker, told jokes, smoked Havanas, wore visors and arm bands, Broadway babies near their ears. They were too hot to cool down. Then . . . the Blues hit Gershwin right there, in the wee hours on Fifth Avenue! “Man, the Blues!” Gershwin wailed. It all happened outside an all-night diner—inside a man sitting at the counter, wearing a fedora, hunched over a cup of coffee as the last Uptown bus was pulling out with nobody on it.

Whiteman, singing in a clown suit, was ascending a stairway to the Stars. New York looked like a thirty-minute etch in a nitric acid bath. Gershwin, his hair falling out, was imitating Al Jolson on bended knee. The band blared. Bix Beiderbecke blew. The stars were out in the Bronx. The wind whistled through the gray canyons of buildings. John Sloan, in his studio, was painting a nude. Pots and pans flew out the windows of the tenement buildings. Bix blew. The nude put on her clothes. They all had the Blues. Whiteman was chasing his hat along a gutter on 42nd Street. He never came back. The Blues had settled in.

IMAGE: Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street (New York City) (oil, 1928; original in color) by John Sloan

Bix, the Blitz, and Condoms (Two)

From a story in the Independent of London about the radical theater director Joan Littlewood and her protégé Howard Goorney:

Devoted to Littlewood’s style of work, Goorney remained crucial to her ensemble ideals for over 30 years, while she in turn was like a surrogate mother to him when adolescent. On one occasion [during the Second World War], she and the girls in the company decided that his melancholy appearance (a lifelong trait) was because he had just fallen in love but was likely for immediate call-up; they arranged a love-nest with a gas fire, Guinness, Bix Beiderbecke record and condoms (two) thoughtfully provided. Anxious next day for the result, they were disappointed when Goorney shook his head: “The sirens went just as I was getting down to it. I had to make for the hospital—I was on fire-guard duty.” What Goorney kept from all but Littlewood was that the nurses’ home had been hit and that all night he had been bringing out the dead.

Ouch

From Pauline Kael’s For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (1994):

Rain Main is Dustin Hoffman humping one note on a piano for two hours and eleven minutes. It’s his dream role.

VQR: Iowans Still Have Essential Dignity

I was checking out the new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review online earlier today and ran across a short review of a new collection of black-and-white photographs: Driftless: Photographs from Iowa by Danny Wilcox Frazier. According to VQR, the subjects of Frazier’s work—migrants, slaughterhouse and factory types, people who live in trailers—“haven’t been defeated”; rather, they get their pleasure “in the form of deer hunting and pool halls, cigarettes, beer, and”—wait for it—“love.”

In the end, the magazine assures us, these poor Iowans manage to hold on to their “essential dignity.”

Christ Almighty. How much more condescending and clichéd can a review get?

Still, the photos are gorgeous. And bleak. And make me miss home. Find a whole slideshow here and another exhibit here.

IMAGE: Dirt Road, Near Lone Tree, 2003 by Danny Wilcox Frazier