Talking of books
Music, maestro
Benny Green
I have sometimes thought what a good idea it would be for somebody to write a book analysing the various motives people have for writing books, especially as Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise has already written a book analysing the various motives people have for not writing books. Of course naked ambition would feature prominently; so would vanity and so would romanticism. Money is always a factor, which is ironic indeed when you come to think of the amount of it you are likely to get for writing a book, and we must not allow our jaded sensibilities to overlook one other motive, the genuine outflow of creative energy which poor Dr Johnson apparently knew nothing about ("No man but a block-head ever wrote, except for money"), and yet must really have known better than most ("A man will turn over half a library to make one book").
This question of what makes an author's tic has been in my mind all week, planted in that barren soil by a book called, Gershwin, His Life and Music by Charles Schwartz (Abelard-Schuman £4.90). A new book on Gershwin is always welcome because it might turn out to be a good book on Gershwin, and we could certainly do with one of those. In the past Isaac Goldberg's scholarly but necessarily incomplete study of 1931 did some useful pioneer work, and in the 'sixties there was aroutine affair from Robert Payne which i filled n a few gaps and created a great many others. Jablonski and Stewart's The Gerswin Years provides easily the best professional portrait, and I understand that later this year, only sixteen years after the event, that excellent volume is to be published in this country. (There is also the extended chapter on Gershwin in Oscar Levant's A Smattering of Ignorance, but that essay, delightful as it undeniably is, hardly qualifies as a biography.) If there is one fault which all these books share, it is the failure to synthesise the life and the music. Now you will note that Mr Schwartz's new book claims to do precisely that in its title, which was why my hot hands closed around it so eagerly when it appeared. Then I read the cover blurb on Mr Schwartz's professional qualifications and my heart began to sing. Composer, professor of music, compiler of a Gershwin thesis, it all seemed very promising. Admittedly Mr Schwartz also confessed to having once been a jazz musician, and nobody knows better than me the impediments to coherent thought which that particular occupation can offer. I must admit that I never heard of Mr Schwartz as a jazz musician, but I have no doubt he never heard of me either, so that proves very little. Which brings me to the actual book and my original question about why a man sits down to write a book in the first place. I suppose in this case it was to put between the covers of a single volume all the relevant facts about a great man, together with a reasonable interpretation of those facts. This Mr Schwartz has not done. He tells us that George liked frequenting brothels and that sometimes all was not well between the sons and their mother. He hints darkly at George's inability, or lack of inclination to, or fear of, marrying the succession of attractive young ladies who threw themselves at his reputation, but he tells us fractionally less than nothing about the amazing structural ingenuity of 'The Man I Love,' a song which I have always used as a litmus test of the depth of insight of all Gershwin's biographers and analysts. Now a great many men enjoy frequenting brothels, and a reasonable number of men get tired of young ladies who desire to be swept off somebody's feet. But nobody writes music like Gershwin. That is the one unique thing about him, that he wrote the songs he did. For a biographer to neglect the uniqueness at the expense of the ordinarinesses seems to me pointless and most unfortunate.
I admit that no previous Gershwin book has been so well-researched as this one, indeed Mr Schwartz has gone so far in this direction that he actually includes in the bibliography an item by me, a magazine piece written in 1962 and of whose contents I have no recollection, although I would lay odds that I left out the bits about the brothel and the girlfriends. Mr Schwartz's book is beautifully printed and many of the illustrations are sumptuous. The cover design is outstanding; it is what is between the covers that makes me feel uneasy.
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