than in the use he has made of the jazz orchestra; for although nearly
every negro jazz band is better than nearly every white band, no negro
band has yet come up to the level of the best white ones, and the
leader of the best of all, by a little joke, is called Whiteman. The
negro’s instinctive feeling for colourful instruments in the band is
marked; he was probably the one to see what could be done with the
equivocal voice of the saxophone--a reed in brass, partaking of the
qualities of two choirs in the orchestra at once. He saw that it could
imitate the voice, and in the person of Miss Florence Mills saw that
the voice could equally imitate the saxophone. The shakes, thrills,
vibratos, smears, and slides are natural to him, although they produce
tones outside the scale, because he has never been tutored into a
feeling for perfect tones, as white men have; and he uses these with a
great joy in the surprise they give, in the way they adorn or destroy a
melody; he is given also to letting instruments follow their own bent,
because he has a faultless sense of rhythm and he always comes out
right in the end. But this is only the beginning of the jazz band--for
its perfection we go afield.
We go farther than Ted Lewis, whom Mr Walter Haviland calls a genius.
M Darius Milhaud has told me that the jazz band at the Hotel Brunswick
in Boston is one of the best he heard in America, and stranger things
have happened. The best of the negro bands (although he is dead, I make
exception for that superb 369th Hell-fighters Infantry Band as it was
conducted by the lamented Jim Europe) are probably in the neighborhood
of 140th street and Lenox avenue in New York and in the negro district
of Chicago. Many hotels and night clubs in New York have good jazz
bands; I limit myself to three which are representative, and, by their
frequent appearances in vaudeville, are familiar. Ted Lewis is one of
the three; Vincent Lopez and Paul Whiteman are the others. There is
a popular band led by Barney Bernie (as I recall the name, perhaps
incorrectly) which is an imitation Ted Lewis, and not a good one. Lewis
must be prepared for imitators, for he does with notorious success
something that had as well not be done at all. He is totally, but
brilliantly, wrong in the use of his materials, for he is doing what he
cannot do--_i.e._, trying to make a negro jazz orchestra. It is a good
band; like Europe’s, it omits strings; it is quite the noisiest of the
orchestras, as that of Lopez is the quietest, and Lewis uses its (and
his) talents for the perpetration of a series of musical travesties,
jokes, puns, and games. I quote a eulogy by Mr Haviland:[11]
For instance, there is his travesty of the marriage ceremony.
To the jazzed tune of the good old classic “Wedding March”
Lewis puts a snowy, flower-decked bridal veil on the sleek,
pomaded head of the trombone player. He puts it on crooked,
with a scornful flip of his slender, malicious hands. Then
he leads forward the hardest-looking saxophone player, and
pretends to marry “Ham” and “Eggs”--and incidentally draws
the correct conclusion as to marriage as it exists in America
to-day. Perfect satire in less than three minutes.
Well, this is extraordinarily tedious and would be hissed off the
stage if it were not for the actual skill Lewis has in effecting
amusing orchestra combinations. His own violence, his exaggeration
of the temperamental conductor, his nasal voice and lean figure in
excessively odd black clothes, his pontificating over the orchestra,
his announcement that he is going to murder music--all indicate a lack
of appreciation of the medium. He may be a good vaudeville stunt, but
he is not a great jazz leader. Again Mr Haviland:
It is not music. It has the form of music, but he has
filled it with energy instead of spirituality. What is the
difference? You’ll understand if you hear his jazz band. It
interprets the American life of to-day; its hard surface, its
scorn of tradition, its repudiation of form, its astonishing
sophistication--and most important, its mechanical, rather
than spiritual civilization.
And again no. Lewis may have a perfectly trained orchestra, but the
_sense_ of control which one absolutely requires he does not give.
He has violence, not energy, and he cannot interpret those qualities
which Mr Haviland so justly discovers as being of our contemporary life
because he isn’t hard and scornful and sophisticated himself--he is
merely callous to some beauties and afraid of others, and by dint of
being in revolt against a serene and classic beauty pays it unconscious
tribute. (I fear also that Lewis imagines the “Wedding March” classic
in more senses than one.) It may be noted also that the tone of
travesty is not correct for contemporary America; we require neither
that nor irony. Parody, rising to satire, is our indicated medium--Mr
Dooley, not _Ulysses_.
The orchestra of Vincent Lopez I take as an example of the good,
workmanlike, competent, inventive, adequate band. It plays at the
Hotel Pennsylvania and in vaudeville, and although Lopez lacks the
ingenuity of Lewis in sound, he has a greater sense of the capacities
of jazz, and instead of doing a jazz wedding he takes the entire score
of “that infernal nonsense, _Pinafore_,” cuts it to five characteristic
fragments, and jazzes it--shall I say mercilessly or reverently?
Because he likes Sullivan and he likes jazz. And the inevitable
occurs; _Pinafore_ is good and stands the treatment; jazz is good and
loses nothing by this odd application. The orchestra has verve and, not
being dominated by an excessive personality, has humour and character
of its own. I trust these moderate words will not conceal a vast
admiration.
Jim Europe seemed to have a constructive intelligence and, had he
lived, I am sure he would have been an even greater conductor than
Whiteman. To-day I know of no second to Whiteman in the complete
exploitation of jazz. It is a real perfection of the instrument, a
mechanically perfect organization which pays for its perfection by
losing much of the element of surprise; little is left to hazard and
there are no accidents. Whiteman has been clever enough to preserve the
sense of impromptu and his principal band--that of the Palais Royal in
New York--is so much under control (his and its own) that it can make
the slightest variation count for more than all the running away from
the beat which is common _chez_ Lewis. Like Karl Muck and Jim Europe,
Whiteman is a bit of a _kapellmeister_; his beat is regular or entirely
absent; he never plays the music with his hand, or designs the contours
of a melody, or otherwise _acts_. I know that people miss these things;
I would miss them gladly a thousand times for what Whiteman gives in
return. I mean that a sudden bellow or a groan or an improvised cluck
is all very well; but the real surprise is constructive, the real
thrill is in such a moment as the middle of Whiteman’s performance of
_A Stairway to Paradise_ when a genuine Blues occurs. That is real
intelligence and the rest--is nowhere. The sleek, dull, rather portly
figure stands before his orchestra, sidewise, almost somnolent, and
listens. A look of the eye, a twitch of the knee, are his semaphoric
signals. Occasionally he picks up a violin and plays a few bars; but
the work has been done before and he is there only to know that the
results are perfect. And all the time the band is producing music with
fervour and accuracy, hard and sensitive at once. All the free, the
instinctive, the wild in negro jazz which could be integrated into his
music, he has kept; he has added to it, has worked his material, until
it runs sweetly in his dynamo, without grinding or scraping. It becomes
the machine which conceals machinery. He has arrived at one high point
of jazz--the highest until new material in the music is provided for
him.
* * * * *
The title of this essay is provoked by that of the best and bitterest
attack launched against the ragtime age--Clive Bell’s _Plus de Jazz_.
(In _Since Cézanne_.) “No more jazz,” said Mr Bell in 1921, and, “Jazz
is dying.” Recalling that Mr Bell is at some pains to dissociate from
the movement the greatest of living painters, Picasso; that he concedes
to it a great composer, Strawinsky, and T. S. Eliot, whom he calls
“about the best of our living poets,” James Joyce whom he wofully
underestimates, Virginia Woolf, Cendrars, Picabia, Cocteau, and the
musicians of _les six_,--remembering the degree of discrimination and
justice which these concessions require, I quote some of the more
bitter things about jazz because it would be shirking not to indicate
where the answer may lie:
Appropriately it (the jazz movement) took its name from
music--the art that is always behind the times.... Impudence
is its essence--impudence in quite natural and legitimate
revolt against nobility and beauty: impudence which finds its
technical equivalent in syncopation: impudence which rags....
After impudence comes the determination to surprise: you shall
not be gradually moved to the depths, you shall be given such a
start as makes you jigger all over....
... Its fears and dislikes--for instance, its horror of the
noble and the beautiful are childish; and so is its way of
expressing them. Not by irony and sarcasm, but by jeers and
grimaces, does Jazz mark its antipathies. Irony and wit are
for the grown-ups. Jazz dislikes them as much as it dislikes
nobility and beauty. They are the products of the cultivated
intellect and jazz cannot away with intellect or culture....
Nobility, beauty, and intellectual subtlety are alike ruled
out....
... And, of course, it was delightful for those who sat
drinking their cocktails and listening to nigger bands, to be
told that, besides being the jolliest people on earth, they
were the most sensitive and critically gifted. They ... were
the possessors of natural, uncorrupted taste.... Their instinct
might be trusted: so, no more classical concerts and music
lessons....
The encouragement given to fatuous ignorance to swell with
admiration of its own incompetence is perhaps what has turned
most violently so many intelligent and sensitive people against
Jazz. They see that it encourages thousands of the stupid and
vulgar to fancy that they can understand art, and hundreds of
the conceited to imagine that they can create it....
It is understood that Mr Bell is discussing the whole of the jazz
movement, not ragtime music alone. I do not wish to go into the other
arts, except to say that if he is jazz, then Mr Joyce’s sense of form,
his tremendous intellectual grasp of his æsthetic problem, and his
solution of that problem, are far more proof than is required of the
case for jazz. Similarly for Mr Eliot. It is not exactly horror of
the noble that underlies Mr Joyce’s travesty of English prose style,
nor is it to Mr Eliot that the reproach about irony and wit is to be
made. In music it is of course not impudence, but emphasis (distortion
or transposition of emphasis) which finds its technical equivalent in
syncopation, for syncopation is a method of rendering an emotion, not
an emotion in itself. (Listen to Strawinsky.) Surprise, yes; but in
the jazz of Lewis and not in that of Whiteman, which does not jeer or
grimace, which has wit and structure--_i.e._, employs the intellect.
Nobility--no. But under what compulsion are we always to be noble? The
cocktail drinkers may have been told a lot of nonsense about their
position as arbiters of the arts; precisely the same nonsense is taught
in our schools and preached by belated æsthetes to people whose claims
are not a whit better--since it doesn’t matter what their admirers
think of themselves--it is what jazz and Rostand and Michelangelo are
in themselves that matters. I have used the word art throughout this
book in connexion with jazz and jazzy things; if anyone imagines that
the word is belittled thereby and can no longer be adequate to the
dignity of Leonardo or Shakespeare, I am sorry. I do not think I have
given encouragement to “fatuous ignorance” by praising simple and
unpretentious things at the expense of the fake and the _faux bon_.
I have suggested that people do what they please about the gay arts,
about jazz; that they do it with discrimination and without worrying
whether it is noble or not, or good form or intellectually right. I
am fairly certain that if they are ever actually to see Picasso it
will be because they have acquired the habit of seeing--something,
anything--without _arrière-pensée_, because they will know what the
pleasure is that a work of art can give, even if it be jazz art. Here
is Mr Bell’s conclusion, with most of which I agree:
Even to understand art a man must make a great intellectual
effort. One thing is not as good as another; so artists
and amateurs must learn to choose. No easy matter, that:
discrimination of this sort being something altogether
different from telling a Manhattan from a Martini. To select as
an artist or discriminate as a critic are needed feeling and
intellect and--most distressing of all--study. However, unless
I mistake, the effort will be made. The age of easy acceptance
of the first thing that comes is closing. Thought rather than
spirits is required, quality rather than colour, knowledge
rather than irreticence, intellect rather than singularity,
wit rather than romps, precision rather than surprise, dignity
rather than impudence, and lucidity above all things: _plus de
Jazz_.
It is not so written, but it sounds like “Above all things, no more
jazz!” A critic who would have hated jazz as bitterly as Mr Bell does,
wrote once, alluding to a painter of the second rank:
But, beside those great men, there is a certain number of
artists who have a distinct faculty of their own, by which
they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we
cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in
general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who
have felt their charm strongly, and are often the objects of a
special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just
because there is not about them the stress of a great name and
authority.
--and beside the great arts there is a certain number of lesser arts
which have also a pleasure to give; and if we savour it strongly and
honestly we shall lose none of our delight in the others. But if we
fear and hate _them_, how shall we go into the Presence?
_Mr Dooley,
Meet Mr Lardner_
MR DOOLEY, MEET MR LARDNER
One of the most illuminating things Van Wyck Brooks ever said, about
himself, was that Mr Dooley is already forgotten. It was particularly
illuminating because Mr Brooks was in England when he made that
statement, and it was some time before 1914--and it happens that it was
in England, in 1917 that I was made to understand how living Mr Dooley
is, how relevant to affairs and situations of the moment, and how much
English men and women consider him as one of the better items in the
heritage of Americans. The writer of _The Ordeal of Mark Twain_ is an
invaluable critic for America; yet one wishes that he, too, could see
Mr Dooley’s place in our literature; one still hopes that he will begin
to enjoy Ring Lardner.
The juxtaposition of these two names would be reasonable even if both
of them did not write in slang, for one is the greatest of our retired
satirists and the other has every chance (if not every intention) of
becoming the greatest of our active ones. I should like to say at once
that I am not addressing an open letter to Dear Mr Lardner, bidding
him, while there is yet time, to think on higher things. I do not want
him to forswear for a moment his hold on the popular imagination, nor
to write for a more judicious _clientèle_. I am satisfied to have Mr
Lardner amuse me; if the strain of satire in him is an accident and he
prefers to go on with his slang humour--I can always read Mr Dooley or
Dean Swift. But if the growing vein of satire in all of Lardner’s work
is what I think it is, he has much to learn from Mr Dooley. I shall
presently come to Mr Dooley and indicate what it is Lardner can learn
in those beautiful pages; the main thing is that he is probably the
only man in America with the capacity of learning the lesson of the
master, and happily he can learn it without ceasing for a moment to
live in his own world. I do not wish to force upon him the ordeal of
being worried about.
There may have been a time when Mr Lardner gave cause for worry.
Perhaps when _You Know Me, Al_ had run as long as it needed to run,
one might have feared that Mr Lardner, having discovered the American
language as his medium, simply didn’t know what to do with it. If his
humour was going to depend for ever on “1-sided” and “4-taste” and odd
misspellings, it might cease to be funny. It was necessary, in short,
that Mr Lardner should have something personal to say. He has answered
the question of his future by showing the beginnings of a first-rate
satirist, continuing the tradition of Mark Twain and Mr Dooley. And
having these tentatives in mind we can begin to look back and wonder
whether he wasn’t always something of a satirist, unconsciously.
The dates may confound my argument, so I will omit them; substantially
Lardner began writing the letters of a busher just when the more
serious magazines were exploiting the intellectual idea of “inside
baseball.” Those were the days--and they must have been funny, we feel
_circa_ 1923 when the bought and sold world’s series and the letters
of the fishing pitcher and suchlike scandal are in our memories,
carefully tucked away because the honour of the national game is safe
in the hands of a dictator--those were the days when the manager
of a baseball team was regarded as a combination of a captain of
finance (later events rather justified that assumption) a Freud, and
an unborn Einstein. A fine body of college graduates, clean-living,
sport-loving, well-read boys were the players; and a sport-loving,
game-for-the-game’s sake body of men the enthusiasts. Hughie Fullerton
and Paul Elmer More might be seen any day in the same column, and
John J. McGraw, who allowed himself to be called Muggsy to show what
a good democrat he was, lunched daily at the President’s table. Into
this pretentious parade Mr Lardner injected the busher--and baseball
has never recovered. The busher was simply a roughneck and a fool, a
braggart and a liar; he was on occasions a good ball player, and he
seemed to be inflated with the hot air which had been written about
him. He pricked the bubble, and I do not wonder that Heywood Broun,
despairing of making interesting his accounts of a recent world’s
series, publicly prayed to God to change places with him for duration.
Nothing short of divine power could save them.
It is a long time since the days of the busher and when Lardner
returned to baseball it was clear that the subject interested him in no
degree, and that he had changed much as a writer. It is not necessary
to belittle the earlier work; only to note that in 1922 the Lardner
touch was much more deft, that the language was both richer and more
accurate, and that he was continually writing parodies, sometimes of a
phrase, often of a whole style. Three or four of the reports he wrote
for the New York _American_ were jewels--and, although they had little
to do with baseball, they must have been written in the few hours which
intervene between the end of a game and the moment of going to press.
The whole series of articles ought to be reprinted; I am limited to
snatches from two of them. The first set the theme: that Lardner had
promised his wife a fur coat from his winnings--he had bet on the
Yankees. The headline was
Rings’ Mrs.
_Outa Luck_
On Fur Coat
and then followed:
Well friends you can imagine my surprise and horror when I
found out to-night that the impression had got around some way
another that as soon as this serious was over I was planning
to buy a expensive fur coat for my Mrs. and put a lot of money
into same and buy a coat that would probably run up into
hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
Well I did not mean to give no such kind of a impression and
I certainly hope that my little article was not read that way
by everybody a specially around my little home because in the
first place I am not a sucker enough to invest hundreds and
hundreds of dollars in a garment which the chances are that
the Mrs. will not wear it more than a couple times all winter,
as the way it looks now we are libel to have the most openest
winter in history, and if women folks should walk along the st.
in expensive fur coats in the kind of weather which it looks
like we are going to have, why, they would only be laughed at
and any way I believe a couple can have a whole lot better time
in winter staying home and reading a good book or maybe have a
few friends in to play bridge.
Further and more, I met a man at supper last night that has
been in the fur business all his life and ain’t did nothing you
might say only deal in furs and this man says that they are a
great many furs in this world which is reasonable priced that
has got as much warmth in them as high price furs and looks a
great deal better.
For inst. he says that a man is a sucker to invest thousands
and thousands of dollars in expensive furs like Erminie,
mule-skin, squirrel skin and Kerensky when for a hundred
dollars, or not even that much, why a man can buy a owl skin or
horse skin or weasel skin garment that looks like big dough and
practically prostrates people with the heat when they wear them.
So I hope my readers will put a quietus on the silly rumour
that I am planning to plunge in the fur market. I will see
that my Mrs. is dressed in as warm a style as she has been
accustomed to but neither her or I is the kind that likes to
make a big show and go up and down Fifth ave. sweltering in a
$700 hog-skin garment in order so as people will turn around
and gap at us. Live and let live is my slocum.
If this were not funny its secondary qualities would not be worth
noting. The single sentence which makes up the second paragraph is a
miracle of condensation, for it contains the whole mind and character
of the individual created behind it (it is not Ring Lardner, obviously)
and at the same time it is a miracle of the ear, for the rhythm and
intonation of the American spoken language is perfectly caught and
held in it. What is the use of _Babbitt_ in five hundred pages if we
have Lardner in five hundred words? The fur episode was continued two
days later, the Yankees continuing to lose and three kittens--“three
members of what is sometimes referred to as the feline tribe”--out at
Mr Lardner’s “heavily mortgaged home in Great Neck ... is practically
doomed you might say ...” because Mr Lardner has met a man “who has
did nothing all his life but sell and wear fur coats” and who assured
him that catskin garments no bigger than a guest towel were all the
rage and had been seen on “some of the best-dressed women in New York
strolling up and down Tenth avenue....”
“These 3 little members of the feline tribe is the cutest and best
behaved kitties in all catdom, their conduct having always been
above reproaches outside of a tendency on the part of Ringer to bite
strangers’ knuckles. Nowhere on Long Island is there a more loveable
trio of grimalkins, and how it pierces my old heart to think that some
day next week these 3 little fellows must be shot down like a dog so as
their fur can be fashioned into a warm winter coat for she who their
antics has so often caused to screech with laughter.”
The annihilation of the whole Black Beauty-Beautiful Joe style of
writing in the last sentence is complete, and is accomplished with the
retention of Lardner’s own peculiarities. It may shock Mr Lardner to
know that he has done in little what Mr Joyce has done on the grand
scale in _Ulysses_.