From the issue dated May 14, 2004
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White Negroes and Native Sons: Jazz and Writing in America
Literature has scarcely told the story of relations between African-Americans and Jews in America. Irving Howe thought he could tell Ralph Ellison how to be black, and Saul Bellow asked where he could find the Zulu Tolstoy. Langston Hughes hardly achieved tikkun with the 1927 Fine Clothes to the Jew, and Amiri Baraka ranked high on the Anti-Defamation League's most-wanted list. Literary exchanges between African-Americans and Jews were often oppositional: Mailer vs. Baldwin, Baraka vs. the States of Israel and New Jersey. The musical exchanges, however -- Thelonious Monk's adoption of Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies" and George Gershwin's "I've Got Rhythm"; the call and response of Artie Shaw's clarinet and Roy Eldridge's trumpet -- were true collaborations. The least understood yet most salient dialectic between African-Americans and Jews was represented not in literature but in music, where song provided solace before integration became law. When Jewish immigration to America surged at the beginning of the 20th century, African-Americans provided the most appealing identity to emulate. By 1927, when Al Jolson blacked up for The Jazz Singer, music was the decidedly dominant path to cultural assimilation, and the ensuing sounds reverberated from ghetto to ghetto. Louis Armstrong got his first trumpet from the Jewish Karnofskys and wore a Star of David to the grave; Irving Mills helped Duke Ellington negotiate New York show business; Charlie Parker died in the arms of a Jewish patroness; Benny Goodman led Billie Holiday's first session; and Stan Getz, a disciple of Lester Young, said that, for a Long Island Jew, he could swing pretty hard. The stories of Armstrong, Ellington, and Parker -- central figures of American music -- would be incomplete without acknowledging these Jewish alliances, and the debt was reciprocal. Gershwin borrowed from African-American Harlem musicians, and they returned the favor: His 1-6-2-5 chord structure in "I've Got Rhythm" midwifed the birth of bebop. That's not to suggest that before the dawn of the civil-rights era it was not also necessary (as Ira Gershwin put it) to ask for anything more. But because African-Americans lived in segregated America, the music was an avenue for a genuine collaboration with Jews -- documented in recordings, if largely unacknowledged by the literati. Recordings, according to Max Roach, are the textbooks of jazz, and for the dialogue between African-Americans and Jews there is no better primer. In 1951 J.D. Salinger thought black music could save Holden Caulfield from phonies. Twenty years later, he lost his faith, complaining to Joyce Maynard that "a lot of jazz is outright fraud." Salinger's musings on jazz are significant not because he was in any way an authority on the subject, but because The Catcher in the Rye, which has sold over 60 million copies, captured what was missing from the life of a white, privileged American teenager sneering in an economic boom. Salinger, like Holden Caulfield, was raised Jewish, and his "sorrow king" looked to the blues for a jargon of authenticity. One of Holden's few prized artifacts is a record by Estelle Fletcher, "a terrific colored blues singer" and her "Dixieland and whorehouse" rendition of the fictional "Little Shirley Beans." The blues record played a small but crucial role in The Catcher in the Rye, but Salinger explored his jazz sensibility in greater detail in the 1948 short story "Blue Melody," published in Cosmopolitan and never anthologized. The story opens insisting that it is not "a slam against one section of the country. It's not a slam against anybody or anything. It's just a simple little story of Mom's apple pie, ice-cold beer, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Lux Theater of the Air -- the things we fought for, in short." The narrator should not be trusted. "Blue Melody" is, in fact, a resounding slam not only against that "one section of the country," but against white fetishizations of black performance. The story recounts Rudford's childhood memories of visiting Black Charles's Café, an "unsanitary" hole in the wall that appealed to a young man in search of one final taste of transgression before going off to boarding school. There, Rudford courts Peggy Moore by listening to Black Charles's music and beating him. "You can't just shove him around and get anywhere," Rudford instructs Peggy. "You gotta really haul off. Get him right under the kidneys." Violence and black music whet their passion. Rudford first kisses Peggy after she falls on her head, both still giddy from a spitting contest and the dizzying piano strains of Black Charles, whom they have beaten into inspiration. Black Charles never complains about this treatment or even shows any signs of pain, uttering "My, my! Ain't that fine!" When Black Charles's niece, a singer named Lida Louise, makes her debut in the small town, she causes a stir and is soon recording with Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, and "all the boys." During a farewell picnic seeing Rudford off to boarding school, however, Louise suddenly buckles over with a pain in her side -- the very place where Black Charles was hit. In a feverish state of acute appendicitis, she mistakes Rudford for a former black lover when he says, "I'm right here, baby." They drive frantically through Agersberg, and after being turned away from two segregated hospitals, she dies. Salinger's source for Louise's death was surely John Hammond's 1937 Down Beat article, "Did Bessie Smith Bleed to Death While Waiting for Medical Aid?" Smith, like Lida Louise, was a Tennessee blues shouter, and like Salinger's singer had her commercial ups and downs. As later testimonies revealed, Smith died from injuries received in a car accident, not untreated appendicitis, but Hammond's martyrdom narrative provided a convenient hook for Salinger. There is no reason why Salinger would have been aware that this account of Smith's death was, as he called much of jazz performance, "outright fraud." Nevertheless, placing Smith in an infantilized victimhood was less daunting than confronting the ferocious figure she was. Smith exuded a raunchy, confident exuberance that was precisely the opposite of Salinger's precocious nymphettes. It's no wonder that the feminist scholars Hazel V. Carby and Angela Y. Davis claimed Smith as an icon. Smith didn't write the lyrics, "You've been a good old wagon, honey, but you done broke down," but she nonetheless owns them with her performance. Rudford and the narrator of "Blue Melody" agreed that Lida Louise's voice "couldn't be described," but what Salinger really could not fathom was Smith acting as sexual predator, judge, and jury. Unlike the jazz singers she influenced, Smith was not distinguished by her flexibility, but by her persistent rhythmic throttle. Smith does not sing off the beat; she zeroes in on it and makes her presence unmistakably felt. Amiri Baraka's play Dutchman imagines the repressed rage of Bessie Smith at the worship of a million white hipsters who "don't even understand that Bessie Smith is saying, 'Kiss my ass. Kiss my black unruly ass.'" That invective would be fair enough if it were directed at Salinger, who can only enshrine Smith as a martyr and fetish object. But not all Jewish guys fit Baraka's caricature of "ofays popping their fingers." On Smith's raunchy 1933 "Gimme a Pigfoot," Benny Goodman can be heard in the background blowing soulful clarinet lines that merge effortlessly with her growls. Goodman is welcome at Smith's raucous session, and, unlike Lida Louise's death scene, in which Rudford's parting line for her -- "I'm right here, baby" -- is more like minstrelsy without blackface, Goodman's absorption of her rhythm, cadence, and articulation is no mere mask. Six years after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, Norman Mailer's essay "The White Negro" found a way to extend the trope of passing that Salinger entertains only briefly. Written as a wake-up call for the New York Intellectuals, "The White Negro" exploded conventional wisdom about bebop by treating it as unreconstructed black masculinity appropriated by white hipsters, startling Irving Howe, who commissioned the essay for Dissent, and offending everyone from Norman Podhoretz to Ralph Ellison. An investigation into what was actually happening on the bandstand would have contradicted Mailer's argument. He needed jazz musicians to be tough, black, hypersexual men. He preferred being known as a tough guy who served in the Second World War than as a Brooklyn Jew who went to Harvard, and for him, black masculinity represented the ultimate triumph over his existential dread. While Mailer was taking notes on "The Hip and the Square" in 1956 and working on "The White Negro" in the spring of 1957, he spent a considerable amount of time taking in Thelonious Monk's quartet at the Five Spot. Mailer was transfixed by Monk's music, but he did not understand it, remaining on the outside. He felt that Monk was hip in the way that homicide and rape were hip: The music was transgressive, dangerous, linked to drugs and crime. Demystifying its origins or analyzing its structure was for squares. Mailer was said to be tone deaf, but he rented a saxophone to play along with Monk records anyway. Indiscriminately honking along with Monk may have seemed "hip," but Mailer was surely oblivious that "In Walked Bud" adapted Berlin's "Blue Skies" and that "Rhythm-a-Ning" riffed on Gershwin. "Negro," in Mailer's lexicon, was hip, and "white" was square. Yet mastering Gershwin's "Rhythm Changes" was how beboppers made the cut uptown at Minton's. By 1957, the Jewish saxophonists Stan Getz and Lee Konitz had as much of a chance to be hip as the black popularizer Ramsey Lewis had to be square. No good jazz musician wants to sound white, a criterion that is not biological but aural. Getz was a Jew who internalized the language and style of Lester Young; musicians knew the difference, but to the undiscerning Mailer, Getz might have seemed like just another White Negro. Mailer had so many of his own riffs to release in "The White Negro," he did not have time to pay attention to the actual riffs produced by the jazz musicians who inspired the essay. There are no references to Monk or any other jazz musicians in "The White Negro." Instead, jazz is an attitude of "really cool cats" in which orgasms are apocalyptic and atom bombs and atheism are "Crazy, man!" Mailer is against anything that gets in the way of phallic sex and Reichian orgasms, but, according to his essay, "jazz is orgasm." Mailer's jazz was black and phallic, and, in typical self-hating fashion, Jewishness was its animus. He practiced what he preached. He grew a goatee and sometimes affected black dialect, and he married Beverly Bentley, a former lover of Miles Davis. According to Mailer's biographer, part of his fascination with Bentley was her history with Davis, and he always felt himself to be an inferior follow-up, an anxiety that haunted him all the way to their divorce in 1980. If "The White Negro" offended many readers, that was really part of its purpose. James Baldwin published "Sonny's Blues" in 1957, shortly after Mailer's essay, and their literary feud was so sweeping, an entire book was devoted to the subject. "Sonny's Blues" has become the most anthologized jazz short story, and while Baldwin's racial dynamic is more nuanced and his firsthand knowledge of the music greater than Mailer's, his reading of jazz is similar. Mailer and Baldwin both characterized jazz as the lingua franca of hip, and while "Sonny's Blues" is obviously more racially nuanced than Mailer's essay, like "The White Negro" it is at heart about a divide between instinct and intellect. Baldwin sets up that divide between an unnamed narrator, a math teacher, and his brother Sonny, a bebop pianist. On the first page of "Sonny's Blues," a tabloid reports that Sonny has been arrested for heroin, and most of the tale is an attempt to find out what went wrong. The narrator, not exactly a White Negro in Reverse, would have certainly fit Mailer's definition of a "square." Sonny is in a perpetual state of mourning, for his daughter Gracie, for his mother, and, metaphorically, for the brownstone Harlem of community (also, although he does not realize it, for the swing era). For most of "Sonny's Blues," the narrator casts Sonny's music in a dour light, as his journey into jazz is chronicled as a descent into addiction. The narrator learns to equate music with self-destruction after his mother tells him about an uncle he never knew he had who lived fast, died young, and was, of course, a musician. And so it is with great horror that the narrator learns that Sonny is headed down the same ominous path. When Sonny tells his brother, "I want to play jazz," it is treated as a statement of rebellion, as if he were saying, "I want to be a junkie." For Mailer, jazz is orgasm, and for Baldwin, bebop is transgression. Baldwin, like Mailer, was explaining jazz for New York Intellectuals. As one of the few black writers who could get into the pages of the Partisan Review, where the story was published, Baldwin was the native informant, but his story's perspective is nearly as removed from 52nd, or Swing, Street as were PR editors William Phillips and William Rahv. "All I know about music is that people never really hear it," the narrator says. The narrator finally hears what he's been missing during a performance of "Am I Blue?" written by the Jewish Tin Pan Alley tunesmith Harry Akst. Hardly a bebop staple, its most well-known version, in addition to Ethel Waters's, was Louis Armstrong's, which is dismissed by Sonny as "that down-home crap." Sonny's music inspires prose as rapturous and eloquent as anything Baldwin ever produced, but it is not about how jazz musicians actually formulate their ideas or communicate with one another, but rather about how an outsider might impose a narrative on them. The narrator witnesses a catharsis, but he cannot imagine how bebop's labyrinthine language would have a logic as complex as the high-school algebra he teaches. Baldwin does not necessarily think that jazz is orgasm, but he does not think that it is bebop, either. It would take a few generations of historical perspective before bebop could be discussed beyond narcotics. When it comes to race, "Sonny's Blues" offers more variation than "The White Negro," but not much. Mailer's essay imagines only one kind of black man, and Baldwin's story depicts two: a bourgeois schoolteacher and a junkie bebopper. Bebop's central figures were black, and many of them were junkies, but race and drugs were peripheral to their legacy. Sonny's transformation of "Am I Blue?" into a bop reverie is, like Monk's rewrite of Berlin's "Blue Skies" as "In Walked Bud," a transfiguration, but Monk's is boundary-breaking while Baldwin's is boundary-making. Mailer's White Negroes found something appealing to appropriate at the Five Spot, but Monk's rewrite of Berlin was more subtle, using a tune by a Jewish composer to teach a jazz history lesson, inspiring the vocalist Jon Hendricks's lyrics: "In walked Bud/And then we got into something." It was a place Mailer and Baldwin never ventured. Most American writers haven't ventured there since, either. Even though Philip Roth's vitriolic The Human Stain contained a black hero passing as Jewish (whose favorite sexual memory is accompanied by a Roy Eldridge-Artie Shaw polyphany), the actual dynamics of musical interaction between African-Americans and Jews went unaddressed in fiction until the 2003 publication of Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing. In Powers's inimitable fashion, the novel yokes together heterogeneous intellectual elements: Einstein's theory of relativity, Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain, the Metropolitan Opera's politics, and the March on Washington's aesthetics. He brings together a black-Jewish couple to produce three extraordinary children at a turning point in American culture. They meet on an auspicious Easter in 1939, when the great contralto Marian Anderson, banished from Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, gives a stirring outdoor performance, the largest solo recital in American history. David Strom, a Jewish physicist just escaped from Hitler's Europe, meets Delia Dailey, a promising African-American singer whose family embodies Du Bois's "Talented Tenth." Their union produces a trio of gifted children who go beyond the fractional bar set by Du Bois in 1903: the eldest, Jonah, whose "voice was so pure, it could make heads of state repent"; the middle child, Joseph, everyone's accompanist; and Ruth, a deadly mimic as a child and an angry activist as an adult. With a tenured appointment at Columbia and an apartment in the ethnic limbo of Hamilton Heights, Professor Strom attempts to raise his prodigies in a controlled experiment "beyond race." At first their realm is a familial paradise filled with Schubert lieder, mathematical puzzles, and literary games. What could go wrong? The answer, of course, is America, with its collision between the ideal world of artistic shelter and the brutal world of racial politics. In 1950s New York, these black-Jewish children excel at everything they do, and they are instructed to refuse racial classification. Delia tells her children, "You can be anything you want to be." It's easy to imagine the obstacles they confront from there. Jonah shows unlimited promise as a tenor, but halts his musical ascent when he rejects a critic's assertion that he may become one of the "great Negro tenors" of his generation. Joseph -- the anxious but passive narrator -- is more racially indeterminate, a Hans Castorp-like blank slate vacillating between post-racial self-portrait and 1960s blackness. Ruth, the youngest and darkest, passionately adopts those racial signifiers and abandons her musical talent to use her considerable rhetorical gifts in the service of radicalism. As Jonah and Joseph barnstorm the country on the classical-music circuit, and Ruth goes underground with the Black Panthers, they collide with history at every stop, watching Birmingham's water cannons on hotel television and recording "The Erl-King" in LA while Watts burns. And it is in such cloistered circumstances that the Strom brothers make their discoveries of jazz. Like Ellison's Invisible Man, they might even be said to possess minds. Coming to jazz from a classical background, they confront the music not through instinct but through intense and rigorous study, and Joseph is baffled by his emotional response. While jazz was having one of its most fertile decades in the '50s, it was mostly ignored in the halls of Juilliard, where the avant-gardists Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter signaled the only future taken seriously. Wilson Hart, one of the conservatory's few black students, shows Jonah otherwise when he encourages him to depart from the score of Joaquín Rodrigo's 1939 Concierto de Aranjuez with a startling improvisation. "What you just made?" Joseph blurts. "That was better than the stuff you made it from." When Joseph hears the theme again on Miles Davis's 1960 Sketches of Spain, he realizes American music is as improvised as American identity. "There's not a horse alive that's purebred," Wilson tells Joseph, confronting his own ambiguous relationship to blackness through Miles Davis. Joseph, brushing off a knowing White Negro who says, "That's my man, Miles," cathects with the music in solitude. The tumult that surrounds the Stroms indicates that the world outside the music is unable to accept this musical diversity. Joseph describes Davis as "a man so dark, I'd cross the street if I saw him coming." But it is Joseph, torn between a Jewishness he never knew and a blackness he never understood, who runs back to his black identity at the book's end to imagine what new sounds could be awaiting him. As a musician, Joseph can veer between shades until he finds his own hue. Powers himself crossed over when he took it upon himself as a WASP intellectual author to narrate the story of a black-Jewish family to reopen the question of race in America, and many of the book's reviewers were resistant. New York reported that "Powers does manage, as few have, to get down in words the excitement of making music," but claimed that, with his biracial geniuses, he "has taken a shortcut to making them singular -- he's made them gifted." The New Yorker lauded Powers for capturing "what feels like the innermost sanctum of the singer's art," but faulted him for failing to provide characters worthy of a racial theme. "Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas," the review argues, "though much blunter as a character, managed to leave the print of his pain, the pounding echo of his blues. Powers achieves a subtler music, but, for all its fascination, it tends to fade as the pages are turned." "A subtler music": Astonishingly, this is a dismissal. As daring as Bigger Thomas was when Richard Wright created him in 1940, the murderous black man has since become a familiar figure in our movies and television -- the Notorious BIG, Tupac Shakur. But who has ever put Marian Anderson in a novel, or imagined in narrative what Jessye Norman or Kathleen Battle must have encountered as they climbed the long stairway up to the Kennedy Center? "Richard Wright imagined Bigger Thomas, but Bigger Thomas could not have imagined Richard Wright," observed Ralph Ellison over 30 years ago. Ellison was calling for fiction to realize a black consciousness that could envision success as well as victimhood. But apparently, many of today's most visible reviewers felt no need for fiction that could imagine African-American genius. Indeed, it is the "subtler music" that has been missing in Salinger's blues martyr, and Mailer's and Baldwin's junkie beboppers. Powers, a trained oboe player and cellist, was able to do something Salinger, Mailer, and Baldwin could not: describe with learned precision musical production and cultural response. There have been many collaborations between African-Americans and Jews in music, but until Richard Powers's novel came along, no American novelist had captured it in prose. The Time of Our Singing demonstrates how a novel can make America look back at itself and its improvised ethnic identities in new and unexpected ways, a call and response stranger than fiction. David Yaffe is a writing fellow in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, Fascinating Rhythm. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 36, Page B7 |
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