REVIEW OF BOOKS
Christmas gift books
Benny Green on the Gershwin years
In that exotic compromise between backstage gossip and dialectical immaterialism I Thought of Daisy, Edmund Wilson uses as his touchstone of popular musical taste a non-existent melody called 'Mamie Rose', which recurs at significant points in the action. In the closing sequence of the book, the narrator, hearing 'Mamie Rose' for the last time, wonders about its genesis, and particularly how its unidentified composer could have arrived at his definitive melody. In his commentary on Wilson's work, Sherman Paul suggests that perhaps the composer Wilson had in mind was George Gershwin, and certainly Gershwin fills the bill as well as anyone. If we ignore the technical solecisms in Wilson's account, and brush aside the faintly patronising hint that popular composers all have some seoret source of inspiration which is not their own, we find many parallels between the writer of Wilson's 'Mamie Rose' and the composer who said, in 1926, the very year of much of the action of I Thought of Daisy, that "true music must repeat the thougtit and aspirations of the people and the time. My people are American. My time is today." The quotation, whose importance can hardly be exaggerated, turns up in the frontispiece to what is probably the most honest, the most level-headed, the most useful Gershwin biography so far.
Admittedly that is not saying much; few major artists this century — and that is what Gershwin was, as Schoenberg Was shrewd enough to see — can have been martyred with such depressing frequency on the cross of biographical imperception, for all the Gershwin chroniclers, being either insuperably unmusical or congenitally unliterary, have been reduced either to poking around among the dirty underwear, or burbling conservatory quackery about unresolved discords. More than forty years after the event, Isaac Goldberg's A Study in American Music, despite its breathless paternalism, remains the clearest picture of the composer at work, and is at any rate light years ahead of David Ewen's Journey to Greatness, a work whose oversights of observation are surpassed only by the incoherence of its judgements, and which may safely be left to the tender mercies of those movie moguls whose sensibilities are so well attuned to the excrescences of its prose style. There is the book by Robert Payne, who, being apparently deaf to the march of harmony, falls back on the racial heritage flapdoodle so persistently as to read the entire Pentateuch into `Swanee' and leave the reader with the impression that George must have been circumcised at least twice. Earlier this year there were two further volumes, an unfortunate outburst of crazed Pinkertonian scopophilia from a Mr Schwartz, also one of those superbly produced coffee-table scrapbooks whose fascinating contents cannot conceal the fact that the book'has been put together with those readers in mind for whom the effort of reading more than a The Gershwin Years Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart (Robson Books, £6.95) paragraph a day is an intellectual ordeal too arduous to be contemplated. The one chronicler who remotedly qualifies on both musical and literary grounds is Oscar Levant, who, in A Smattering of Ignorance includes a long chapter on Gershwin which makes an honorable attempt to place the man in his social and musical context.
Mr Jablonski and Mr Stewart, being literary rather than musical, make a few elementary mistakes, for instance using "harmonics" when they mean harmonies, and referring several times to a figment of their lay imagination called a "jazz song." But for the most part Jablonski and Stewart do a highly creditable job, blending text and pictures to create strong period atmosphere and a sense of their subject's personality. As a matter of fact the book's belated publication in Britain sixteen years after its American appearance tends to conceal a very important truth about it, which is that it was something of a pioneer work in the field, compiled at a time when the Gershwin-KernBerlin school of songwriting was still buried deep under the dunghill of cultural snobbery. Few authors can ever have approached a subject so fascinating and yet so neglected, for there is a very real sense in which George Gershwin is the definitive musical figure of his epoch.
Let us return for a moment to the hypothetical 'Mamie Rose'. Wilson refers to a distant homeland and a forgotten native tongue; Gershwin's parents left St Petersburg at the end of the last century, to become members of that classic minority, the foreign parents of American children, martyrs to the widest generation gulf of modern history, from klobyoshe and lemon tea to handball and highballs. Leo Rosten has told the touching story of how he gave English lessons to his own
father ("The President of the United States must be an American citizen unless he was born here"), and the steady advance of Pa Gershwin over the years to his present mythical eminence as a kind of hamishe Malaprop who persisted in referring to 'Fascinating Rhythm' as "Fashion on,the River" has been one of the most charming comic developments in the history of modern music. ("Of course 'Rhapsody in Blue' is important; it lasts fifteen minutes, don't it?"). But though the predicament of a parent versed in one culture unable to appreciate the achievement of a genius child born into quite another has its comic moments, it also indicates the great truth about Gershwin, which is that the prodigious vitality and apparently inexhaustible melodic resource of his art had much to do with the
hybrid nature of his environment.
The myth of the poor Jewish East Side boy who conquers Broadway has been pushed s° hard over the years that we tend to forget that it was not always quite like that. The history of American popular music has its academics like Jerome Kern as well as its miraculous naturals like Irving Berlin. The significance of Gershwin is that within the compass of a tragically brief but staggeringly prolific life (1898-1937) he reconciled Kern's academicism with Berlin's pragmatism to achieve the perfect balance between the contrived and the unselfconscious. It comes as no surprise to those who know their Gershwin to learn that Kern and Berlin were his two great heroes, for there is no more rewarding sport in all popular art than to take the extremes of those two patrons and watch how they come to an unpredicted synthesis in, Gershwin. Kern, with his grand strategies 0' modulation, Berlin and his bold refusal t° prepare his modulations at all, two poles which meet on the centre ground of Gershwin's superlatively poised compromise in moment! like, say, the movement from F major to r' minor in 'They All Laughed', a movement hY, the way, which Gershwin had already deploye° before in `Somebody Loves Me' and tooltin,g, for a Boy'. The point is worth making because " reminds us that Gershwin's art is neither 3 product of mean streets and pluggers' booths nor of the conservatoire, but of a fusion of the two. In a sense the best Gershwin book of an remains the utterly charming comprornise between primer, notebook, diary and reminiscence achieved by Ira himself with Lyrics ari Several Occasions. One of the other quotes Jablonski and Stewart's frontispiece is this from Ira: From Gershwin emanated a new American music ri'Dt written with the ruthlessness of one who strives t° demolish established rules, but based on a new Ilativ,,e gusto and wit and awareness. His was a moderritti that reflected the civilisation we live in as excitine as the headline in today's newspaper.
The claim sounds a shade over-ambitious until we remember that the Tchaikovskiesclu` main theme of the 'Rhapsody' is the best-knoWn concert theme in all twentieth century lionsic{ that The Mart I Love' is not only a fragment exquisite beauty but also a formal masterpiec`:.:
that 'Of Thee I Sing' is the only work eel
remotely to approach the spirit of the musicat pasquinades of Gilbert and Sullivan, and th,a., when you stop for a moment and let tilt,'
cumulative effect of the Gershwin oeuvre was,' over the sensibilities, a confused but deell
endearing vision starts to form of identica, twins and bogus butlers and penitent ex-con_ss of heiresses posing as waitresses and waitress',, masquerading as heiresses, of Fred and Ginge' of Pa Gershwin proud of that line in 'Emlortt ceable You' that goes "come to poppa, come e' poppa do", of 'I Got Rhythm' and Summerte and that definitive male invocation of "id Twenties, "oh, sweet and lovely, lady be to me", And then, as you study the last chapte'd of Jablonski and Stewart's invaluable book read what happened to them all after July 1937, you realise the starkest of all the Stark truths about George Gershwin. He had hal." begun.
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