by Clive James
Driven by that sweet stampede of rhythm to a belated acquaintance with what Ellington had done before, I realized only in retrospect that the rot had already set in. The possibility of more room for the band to breathe was tempting him away from the delicious intricacies he had been forced into when time was tight. Though the large-scale suites from the past all turned up on vinyl along with their more recent companions—“Such Sweet Thunder” began its life that way—it was all too evident that three minutes on shellac had been his ideal form from the start: he was a sonneteer, not an epic poet. The standard was set in the Cotton Club days, when cars still had running boards. As the LP Ellington anthologies came out, I built up a library that went all the way back to his recorded beginnings. Bar by bar I drank in the wa-wa sonorities of Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton, for both of whom the effect would have been dissipated if they had gone on longer than a chorus or two. As Ellington’s various ensembles succeeded each other, with the personnel always changing but a few always seeming to come back at the right moment, the soloists provided one of the connecting threads. There was a particularly tremendous Ellington band in the mid-thirties, with Rex Stewart playing open horn to complement Cootie Williams and his sour manipulation of the plunger mute: two different kinds of shining trumpet, one a golden bell, the other a wail in the night. The way those two voices would call to each other was quintessential Ellington, for whom the sounds of the city—“Harlem Airshaft,” “Take the A Train”—were a collective inspiration for a melodic urban speech that no poet could ever match, not even Hart Crane in The Bridge, or Galway Kinnell in his wonderful mini-epic The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World. But Ellington’s toughest connecting thread was the compactness of the head arrangements: as precise as if it had been scored yet as loose and easy as a jam session, the section work never even riffed without varying and developing the figure. The word “development” fitted for once, and in the only way it should: to mean a deepening, an enrichment. Those inspired soloists, each of them a composer in himself, built the transparent bridges between the dense passages of ensemble voicing, and always with an unfaltering, rhythm-driven melodic surge even when the pace was slow. When he was holding down a chair for Ellington, the most lingering alto sax solo from Johnny Hodges was never boring for a moment. Anyone who thought that Hodges’s honey sweet tone could never be boring anyway was at liberty to find out otherwise by listening to the space he gave himself on recordings of the orchestra he made the capital mistake of trying to lead under his own name.
Ellington gave his superbly self-trained horses enough time—just enough time and no more—to perform every trick they knew, but they had to do it inside the corral. The result would have sounded like confinement if the rhythmic pulse, the swing, had not made it sound like freedom. As Nabokov said of Pushkin’s tetrametric stanza, it was an acoustical paradise. The 1940–1941 band was Ellington’s apotheosis, and as a consequence contained the materials of its own destruction, because all those star soloists wanted bands of their own. Hodges wasn’t the only one who found out how hard it was to be the man in charge, and ever and anon the chastened escapees would make their way back to Ellington, but never again were enough of them available at once to recapitulate the hallucinating complexity of those beautiful recordings. I memorized every bar of every track, and without trying. Vintage Ellington was a language: many-voiced, a conversation in itself, but a language none the less, or rather all the more. The most wonderful thing about the Ellington language was that it could be listened to only in the way it was created, through love.
Scholarship and biography, too often twinned in this regard, are always trying to break up Ellington’s language by analysing it to pieces. In his later years, Ellington became more and more the subject of learned enquiry, and on the whole it did him little good. (He had long before tried to warn the world against too much analysis: “That kind of talk stinks up the place.”) Once it was established that Billy Strayhorn’s contribution as an arranger had been underestimated, it was soon discovered that Ellington’s contribution had been overestimated. Out on the road, Ellington had freed himself from the dominance of any single woman by sleeping with them two at a time. Now they were old and ready to talk. Thus we heard of the barbarism behind his suave façade. It could now be deduced that, as a cynical stroke of self-exculpation, male chauvinism had expressed itself as sentimentality: “Mood Indigo” was a midnight flit by Don Giovanni. But scholarship and biography could never add enough irrelevant nuance to dilute the truth, which was that the great man had no flaws within himself which he could not transmute into a living song. The flaw that he could not control was in the country he lived in. Even he, a man born to rule, had to fight for prestige, the only armour against perpetual insult. He did it by expanding the lateral scope of his inventiveness beyond its natural compass, in the effort to become yet another American composer, like Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber or Charles Ives. He felt that as a necessity, but the necessity was merely political. Acting from an inner necessity, he was already the American composer, having taken jazz to the point where no further satisfactions could be added in order to make it different. They could only be subtracted. The new boys had to go somewhere. Ellington was too generous not to realize that one of the reasons they went there was because of him, so he was careful never to criticize them too hard. He made a joke of it: it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. But the joke was true, and by extension it is true for all the arts.
F
Federico Fellini
W. C. Fields
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gustave Flaubert
Sigmund Freud
Egon Friedell
François Furet
FEDERICO FELLINI
Federico Fellini (1920–1993) was born in Rimini but dreamed of Rome, where he arrived in time to see the Fascist regime launch itself on the final adventure that ensured its ruin. His gift for drawing caricatures was his ticket to the big smoke. Mussolini banned American comic books in 1938 but for Fellini’s generation the damage was already done. Fellini’s early work in the comic-strip medium was heavily influenced by American models: he drew bootleg versions of Flash Gordon and Mandrake. After the war the American comic strip, no longer officially frowned upon, became more powerful in Italy than ever, to the extent that not even Communist intellectuals, in the 1960s, saw anything incongruous about poring over the monthly comic-strip anthology called Linus, after the Peanuts character. It remains a safe bet, however, that Fellini’s ability, in his formative period, to fight off the siren call of the revolutionary left, had something to do with his mental immersion in an imaginary America. All of Fellini’s movies, whether sooner or later, culminate in his masterpiece 81⁄2, and the hallucinatory imagery of 81⁄2 begins in the comics: one of the most conspicuous examples of how, in the twentieth century, the popular and high arts established an intimate connection. Other low-life forms that Fellini scraped a living from early on were vaudeville and radio drama. The story of the great director’s unsophisticated origins is told well by John Baxter in his Fellini (1993). My own essay “Mondo Fellini,” collected in Even as We Speak (2001) and As of This Writing (2003), is an attempt to record the formative impact that a man accustomed to pleasing millions of people at a time could have on a single life.
When I was a little boy I believed I looked a little bit like Harold Lloyd. I put on my father’s spectacles and to make the resemblance even closer I took out the lenses.
—FEDERICO FELLINI, Intervista, P. 76
ONE WOULD LIKE to have seen Fellini’s Harold Lloyd impersonation. Did he do stunts on the dizzying cornice of a palazzo? Most of Harold Lloyd’s apparently death-defying stuff was done with camera angles and false perspectives, and at least once he used a double; but it is easy to imagine the young Fellini trying it for real, not yet having figured out that cinema is an illusion. On a similar impulse, at the age of eleven I almost killed myself imitating Batman leaping from th
e roof of a building site into a sand-pit. If I hadn’t landed flat on my back I might have been worse than winded, but at least the world would have been deprived of no more than a writer, a species of which there are always many. A world deprived of Fellini would have had something more rare to mourn: a true director, il regista, the master of the revels. “È una festa, la mia vita,” says Guido in 81⁄2: my life is a party. It was true, and he invited everybody.
Fred and Ginger is merely the most obvious case of Fellini’s debt to American popular culture. Even when they don’t look it, his works are saturated with its influence, right down to their visual style. After Italy pulled out of World War II, Fellini had his beginnings in Italy’s teeming subculture of comic strips and fumetti, which were essentially comic strips made up from posed photographs. Before the war that whole subculture had been inspired by America’s example, and not even the Fascist regime, when it put an end to the syndication of American comic strips, felt it had the power to cancel Mickey Mouse. Under his Italian name Topolino, Mickey continued his adventures. (After the war, his name was given to Fiat’s most popular small car.) Near the end of his career, Fellini cooperated with the brilliantly accomplished pornographic cartoonist Marinara to produce a bande dessinée called Voyage à Tulum, a sort of free-form sequel to 81⁄2 and La Città delle Donne. Marinara’s phantasmagoric style took a lot from the American comic-strip tradition that started with Little Nemo and ran right through the parodic Mad magazine period in the 1950s to its self-consuming apotheosis in the extravagant layouts of the head comix in the 1960s. But in Voyage à Tulum, when he celebrated Fellini’s big-screen extravaganzas, you can see how well Marinara found a match between the initial purity and the culminating sophistication. He found it by getting back to their common ancestor. Fellini, too, started with the American visionary tradition that grew from the restless mind of Little Nemo. The big pictures of Fellini’s mature period, from La Dolce Vita through to E la Nave Va, all look like something that Winsor McCay’s little boy Nemo dreamed of, and could wake from only by falling out of bed. In his introduction to the published script of 81⁄2, Fellini said that the Marcello Mastroianni character, vis-à-vis the same actor’s character in La Dolce Vita, had to grow in stature because his enemies were more dangerous. But the enemies were all in his mind: his obsessional neuroses.
When Fellini said that in 81⁄2 he found a pretext for putting in everything that had been tormenting him for years, he meant everything that had been tormenting him all his life. Critics have searched in vain for literary precursors of Fellini’s grandiose Freudian dreams. Proust? Joyce? The answer lies much closer to hand. In 81⁄2, Mastroianni is dressed like that because his director is remembering Mandrake the Magician. The American comic strip was the first art-form to exploit the image-generating possibilities of a sleeping mind on its endless journey through the caves and hallways of dreamland. (Tenniel had merely illustrated Lewis Carroll: he didn’t take off on his own.) Fascism was a kind of dreamland too, as Fellini emphasized in Amarcord. But the dreamland turned to a nightmare while he was growing up. Nazism and Soviet communism combined to drown the ceremony of innocence. Fellini kept his innocence, but it was bound to look like childishness. It was Italy’s fate to have its social fabric poisoned first by the Fascists, then by the Nazis and finally by the Communists, whose propaganda campaign against the liberating allies, and especially against the Americans, attained a level of virulence hard to imagine from this distance: reading what the Communist newspapers said about the bombing of Cassino, you would have thought that Guernica had been bombed again, and never have dreamed that the war against Germany was not yet over. Post-war Italian cinema was left-wing because the left was almost all there was: under the pressure of Communist ambitions, the intelligentsia as a whole was polarized between party-line orthodoxy and the independent left, but further to the right there was next to nothing except the wilfully eccentric. Nominally an alumnus of neo-realism, Fellini looked as if he had gone to school in a party frock. Even among those who lauded him for the richness of his imagination, it occurred to nobody that he was the director with the most penetrating social vision. Such an estimation became possible only in retrospect, after it became apparent that no universal plan for society could be compatible with the autonomy of art. The artist who made it most apparent was Fellini himself. The advantage of those lensless spectacles was that he could see an untinted reality. He might have looked like a clown, but from his side of the empty frames he could see the world as it was, and so transform it into fantasies that would last.
W. C. FIELDS
William Claude Dukenfield (1879–1946) was known to the world as W. C. Fields. He began as a carnival juggler. As the magicians Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett discovered in a later era, the accompanying patter was more in demand than the act, although Fields, until the end of his career, was still able to do some of the most difficult conjuring tricks in the book. But there were other conjurers who could do them too. Nobody could equal him for his patter. He was a success in silent movies from his debut in Pool Sharks (1915) until sound movies arrived, but when they did, he was one of the few silent stars who actually gained from the change. It was because he could both write his own material and speak it inimitably: a winning combination. The Bank Dick (1940) is the movie that his admirers know line by line. In real life he was a self-destructive drinker, but he would have been the first to discourage any large theories about his essentially subversive talent having suffered in the context of Hollywood conformity. He had a drinks trolley at the side of his tennis court.
Is Mr. Michael Finn in residence?
—W. C. FIELDS, The Bank Dick
WOODY ALLEN AND Steve Martin have a common ancestor, and his name is W. C. Fields. A greater prodigy of comedy even than Chaplin, Fields could create dialogue for himself that was as funny as his physical presence. (Chaplin’s abiding limitation was that he couldn’t: the real reason that he wanted to stay silent forever.) In The Bank Dick, the question about “Mr. Michael Finn” is Fields’s way of advising the barman in the Black Pussycat Saloon that a Mickey Finn should be slipped to the visiting bank inspector, Pinkerton Snoopington. The pesky Snoopington having been duly rendered incapable, Fields helps him through the foyer of Lompoc’s leading and only hotel, The New Old Lompoc House. (Once having established the name of this hostelry, Fields abbreviates it to “the New Old”—a typically bizarre stroke of verbal economy.) From the right of frame, Fields ushers the barely mobile Snoopington across the foyer and up the stairs on the left, which lead to the room where Snoopington will be safely stashed. The camera doesn’t move. Nothing happens. Then Fields, alone, rushes across the frame from left to right. After a pause, he once again slowly propels Snoopington across the frame from right to left, heading for the stairs. We in the audience deduce that Snoopington must have fallen out of the window of his room once Fields had got him up there. Without having seen it happen, the audience is convulsed at the phantom spectacle of the paralytic Snoopington plunging into the street.
The scene is all action with almost no dialogue, but Fields could write wordless physical comedy the way he wrote words: with unequalled compactness and suggestiveness. The direction is already there in the script, and there is every reason to think of Fields as one of the great directors of comic films, even if he seldom took a formal credit. He certainly knew more than the producers: one of them wanted to cut the moment in The Bank Dick when Fields shows his minion Og Ogilvy the warning signal he will use if Snoopington threatens to queer the pitch. If that preparatory moment had been cut, Fields’s later use of the signal would have lost half of its effect. (A sure sign of a director who should not be fooling with comedy is when he gets the urge to cut the preparation so as to increase the pace.) Fields knew everything there was to know about comic construction: an important point to remember. Even his appreciators tend to think that because his life was an inspired chaos his work was too. In fact he was disciplined to the roots. The same effort he
had put into his vaudeville juggling routines—he would practise until his hands bled, hence the kid gloves—he put into his inventions for the cinema. The most portable of those inventions was his way with the single subversive line. Every Fields fan can recite at least half a dozen of them, and make a fair show of imitating the master’s drawling delivery, which could make even an abstract fragment of surrealist delirium as funny as a crutch. (“Rivers of beer flowing over your grandmother’s paisley shawl.”) It is easy to think that the lines came to him in a dream, but the awkward truth is that they were poetically crafted. When the top hat that fell off Fields’s head ended up standing on the edge of its brim on the point of his shoe, it didn’t happen by magic, and neither did a line like “What do you mean, speak up? If I could speak up, I wouldn’t need a telephone.” Just think of all the ways that idea could be written down differently, and not be funny. Magicians do not use magic. “Thou know’st we work by wit and not by witchcraft,” says Iago, “and wit depends on dilatory time.” Iago’s business was duplicity, but one of his weapons was straight sense.
Everyone knows that censorship closed off the future for Mae West. Less well-known is that it did the same for Fields. It wasn’t alcohol or old age that ensured his decline, but a sudden, fatal limitation on what he was allowed to say. (Nevertheless alcohol helped: one of his best throwaway lines in My Little Chickadee was written from the heart. “During a trip through Afghanistan we lost our corkscrew and were compelled to live on food and water.”) The Bank Dick is a great movie, but it might have been greater still if the censors hadn’t read the script first; and there would almost certainly have been more Fields movies to equal it. When a poet is denied one word, it casts a pall for him on all the others; and Fields was a poet—a poet of innuendo. In private life, nobody cared if he said “Filthy stuff, water: fish fuck in it.” But in the movies he was not allowed to go on getting away with advising little girls against playing “squat-tag in the asparagus patch.” Nor could he any longer say to his Little Chickadee, “I have a number of pear-shaped ideas I would like to discuss with you.” Restricted by the new regulatory codes, the Hollywood film-makers did not necessarily abandon their intelligence. Some of the screwball comedies, made when studio censorship was in full force, remain among the most intelligent films ever. The terse eloquence of films like My Man Godfrey and His Girl Friday has been matched since the lapse of censorship but not exceeded. There was, however, a certain range of verbal playfulness that went disastrously into abeyance. It became impossible to be suggestive about sex. One could be amusingly evasive about the broad fact of it, but never suggestive about its detail. For Fields, especially in his later years, being suggestive about sex was at the heart of speech, because the discrepancy between his raddled body and his intact lusts was the secret of his screen personality. All his best dialogue came from a mental underworld of sensual indulgence. Hence we have to live with the cruel paradox that sound movies silenced him. What we see of him on screen is just the beginning of what he might have done: a daunting thought if you are one of those people who find his every audible moment even funnier than the way he looked when struggling with a wilful hat, or walking upstairs on the wrong side of a banister. Though he exaggerated his early deprivations when he told tales of his upbringing, Fields was certainly the man out of place: one of those people who are born exiles even if they never leave home. For some reason such misfits seem to favour the notion of verbal economy, as if turning ordinary language into the kind of compressed code that unfolds into a wealth of meaning when you have the key.