The Revolt of the Pendulum

by Clive James

  Stokowski conducted the first performance in America of Mahler’s 8th Symphony. Brought up on the Solti rendition, I had never got around to seeking out a recording of Stokowski’s later live concert performance of the work. Now I will. Similarly, Horowitz recommends the recording of Stokowski with the Boston Symphony on the night of January 13, 1968. The way Horowitz raves learnedly about the great Eurofraud’s treatment of Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet Fantasy Overture (‘such lightning velocity, hair-trigger intensity, and opulent upholstery . . . the plush but tensile string choir’) should send any reader diving into Amazon like Lara Croft into a tomb. I couldn’t find the recording listed, but now I know it exists. eBay next stop.

  Horowitz’s book, always interesting, starts looking essential when it lights up like that, evoking a specific subject of his enthusiasm with sufficient vividness to make the reader want to get in for a share of the delight. I would still recommend the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1997 catalogue album Exiles + Emigres (published in conjunction with Abrams and edited by Stephanie Barron) as the indispensable first book on the subject, but it is narrated by many voices, and there is always room for a single voice that knows how to register informed excitement. After all, any big picture we might have is bound to have started among those small responses, none of which seemed small at the time – each of them, in fact, was so all-consuming that it drove any question of a big picture clean out of our heads.

  Individual works of art can make it hard to get a big picture even of the single mind that produced them. Forty years into its life and still the epitome of international American chic, the iced refinement of Balanchine’s ‘Jewels’ for the New York City Ballet began with the raunch of his ‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue’ routine for the Broadway show On Your Toes in 1936. Balanchine didn’t create music directly but he had a means of interpreting it that made his influence profound. He could remake American ballet in his own manner because America didn’t have much ballet in the first place. Once again, a sophisticated American elite’s fondness for Europe was a big help. Balanchine’s impresario, Lincoln Kirstein, didn’t want a Martha Graham-style company. He wanted New York to have a European-style ballet corps. Balanchine, always mad for the girls, was glad to oblige. Crucially, however, Balanchine himself was no longer European. He loved Jack Benny, he had seen the Western movies, he had driven across the country. And he had seen the cheerleaders. The embodiment of high aims yet uninhibited by hierarchy, he could lend style even to the vulgar: his tribute to its energy. It wasn’t Walt Disney, it was Balanchine, who first put elephants in tutus so that they might dance to music by Stravinsky. The commission came from Ringling Brothers Circus.

  Horowitz sensibly leaves the question open of whether Balanchine brought Europe to America or else helped America develop something it already had. Our author would have been wise to show similar openness when talking about the movies. He tries to, but can’t help suggesting that such eminent Europeans as Murnau and Fritz Lang had a hard time adapting to the new populist idiom. He fudges the question of whether the new populist idiom might not have had a narrative power far in advance of expressionism, symbolism or any other ism that the refugees had been forced to leave behind. One gets the sense that Horowitz, worthily brought up in the concert hall, missed the chance to waste his early years in the movie house, and has only recently been catching up with the filmed masterpieces.

  But there were plenty of second-rate Hollywood movies that would have told him how the studio moguls often had first-rate tastes. (They were continually spatchcocking operatic arias into musical comedies otherwise uniformly dire.) Stuck with nothing except quality, Horowitz can appreciate the achievements of Wilder and Lubitsch. He appreciates Lubitsch so well that he crosses his own wires when he calls Lubitsch ‘a clever middlebrow craftsman mistaken for a highbrow genius.’ After spending a whole book usefully arguing that the refugee highbrows seldom got the point about democratic art, it seems Quixotic to belittle Lubitsch for not having been one of them.

  Still, Horowitz can see that Ninotchka is an extraordinary example of America projecting a liberal vision of Europe back into its own ruins. He just might have made more of the possibility that it wasn’t only a case of the refugees changing the American arts, it was a case of the American arts changing the world, refugees included. Through the movies, a single refugee, Rouben Mamoulian – the star of the book’s useful chapters on theatre – opened the way for the most globally influential trend of the lot: the Broadway show expanded for the screen. One could only wish that Horowitz had seen Luxury Liner the year it came out, and had therefore seen Lauritz Melchior singing from Aida for Jane Powell. But he has seen and remembered every frame of a much earlier movie, Love Me Tonight, in which Mamoulian created, almost in its entirety, the cinematic language for the Hollywood musical, at a time when, many critics will tell you, the sound-proofed camera was still confined to its booth. Mamoulian made it fly.

  The result was a marvel. How Horowitz says so will set his younger readers clamouring to see it. The book thus once again fulfils an aim that it didn’t know it had. Meanwhile the principal aim, to give the big picture, retreats further into the distance, as was inevitable. European and American culture have always been a two-way interchange and to talk about either of them exclusively is like trying to cut water in half with a knife. Horowitz says that Stokowski’s dream of a democratic high culture never arrived. But it couldn’t, because such a thing can exist, as an aim, only in theory. In practice, a successful artistic event deals with the anomaly by removing it. On radio, Stokowski conducted the Mahler 8th Symphony for an audience bigger than the population of old Vienna. On screen he shook hands with Mickey Mouse. Yet there was talk of a movie about Wagner with Stokowski in the leading role. You can bet that he worked on the accent, waiting for the green light. Stokowski, like Gatsby, believed in the green light. So did they all, even when their ambitions came to nothing. A least they were free to try.

  TLS, July 9, 2008

  Postscript

  The critic with aspirations to scope should always be aware that a sideswipe might dismiss a life, but I must try to forgive myself when it comes to the case of Adorno. He has enough champions, especially in the academy, but there are too few independent voices ready to admit how tremendously wrong he was about popular music. A pianist good enough to play Bach at concert level, he had solid qualifications for promoting serious music as the only kind that counted. But as a sociologist, he had no business peddling the idea that the American popular music industry imposed bad taste on the public as a matter of deliberate engineering. The tastes of the public shape the industry, and not vice versa. Only a sociologist could believe anything different. Hit songs, no matter how bad, come from inspiration, not calculation. Luckily it was only a tiny minority of refugee artists and intellectuals who managed to convince themselves that they had fled one tyranny only to end up in another. Adorno, however, was that minority’s key man, and his vision of capitalism’s infinite powers of repressive calculation infects the academy to this day, making its views on how popular culture actually works almost useless. Adorno, by and large, was a chump. But I still would like to have written Minima Moralia.

  SAYING FAMOUS THINGS

  Nobody knows who said it, but it was no accident, as the more pompous academics say, that the magnificent cod-Latin joke Sic transit Gloria Swanson was cracked somewhere in the vicinity of Billy Wilder. The professionally witty Viennese master had the blessed gift of making amateurs funny too. He heightened the atmosphere; everybody wanted his respect; people wanted to be remembered the next day for having said something funny the previous night, with Wilder listening.

  According to legend – i.e. the facts are almost certainly otherwise – the line was delivered in the foyer after the premiere of Sunset Boulevard. According to likelihood, it was probably first delivered in a Paramount screening room at an early stage of assembling the rough cut, and might even have been said by Wilder himself. Not all of Wi
lder’s best ideas were hatched in tandem with I. A. L. Diamond: only most of them. Wilder’s wit benefited from collaboration, which graces you with the presence of an editor.

  Judging from his interviews, Wilder noticed everything, but rarely narrowed the focus of his observation to the point where an epigram flared into independent life. It was because English was not his first language. When hearing it, he was sensitive to every nuance, but when speaking it he was only as quick as he spoke, and to construct a striking remark as you go you have to be ahead of the game. Working with Diamond, Wilder could realize his potential. In their best lines, nobody will ever puzzle out which of them did what: they were like songwriters. In one of their minor comedies, there is a whole scene which they probably dreamed up just for one line. The pretty girl is given a knee injury just so that the hero can examine it and say: ‘What’s a joint like this doing in a girl like you?’

  It doesn’t really matter which movie it is. Ideally, Walter Matthau should have said it to Kim Novak in Kiss Me Stupid. But Walter Matthau got sick and couldn’t play the lead in that one. He played the lead in The Fortune Cookie, but I can’t remember a pretty girl with a bad knee. (Since you can’t yet Google on that deep level, I will have to go right though both DVDs to track down the line: but one day I’ll nail it.) Still, you don’t have to imagine Matthau saying the line. It’s enough to imagine Wilder saying it: perhaps saying it just after Diamond whispered it in his ear. Nobody ever heard Diamond say much. It seems safe to conclude that he spent most of his time listening. In Hollywood, there was always a lot to listen to.

  In Hollywood, ‘The son-in-law also rises’ is a remark that was already part of the culture before World War Two. Like the original author of ‘Sic transit Gloria Swanson’, the original author of ‘The son-in-law also rises’ has never been tracked down, possibly because the joke was first made before David O. Selznick ever met Louis B. Mayer’s daughter, after which it was on everybody’s lips, the name players being on everybody’s mind. But although the prospect of their marriage might possibly have inspired the remark, it is much more likely that the marriage simply made an already circulating witticism current.

  The same remark about the son-in-law became current all over again when Count Ciano married Mussolini’s daughter Edda, and was rewarded with an exalted portfolio as Foreign Minister for Italy. In other words – or, rather, in exactly those words – everybody was saying it. All we can be reasonably sure of is that nobody said it before Hemingway first published a book called The Sun Also Rises. Like all of Hemingway’s book titles, this one continues to be a surefire draw in the book shops. Part of its charm, however, is in its indeterminacy, as with a beautiful woman who might be smiling specifically at you or just happen to be smiling in your direction.

  When correctly emphasized – on the word ‘rises’ – Hemingway’s title tells us that the sun does one of two things. The joke, therefore, depends on a misreading. In the joke, there is no suggestion that sinking is the other thing that the son-in-law does. The joke means that the son-in-law rises like the son. It could have been the lurking ambiguity in the title, incidentally, that encouraged Hemingway’s English publishers to insist on a change, to Fiesta: clean and neat, but nothing like as haunting. The American title worked so insidiously on the memory that it was widely recognizable even to people who had never read the book. Having attained such currency, it attracted variations: hence the success of the joke.

  After World War Two, Edward Albee’s title Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? attained a similar currency. Albee’s title was already a joke, depending on the neat substitution of ‘Virginia’ for ‘the big bad’. But in several thousand titles for magazine articles – it still happens today – that point, which was the only point, is blithely ignored, and little is kept except the ‘Who’s afraid’ and the concluding question mark. In ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wade?’ the joke was still there, if only at two removes, but a title like ‘Who’s Afraid of Varicose Veins?’ tells you nothing except the name of the subject. Who’s afraid of a clapped-out trick? No magazine editor. The wittiest variation on the standard line was a title by Alan Bennett – ‘Me: I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ – but it was a crucial one word too long to catch on.

  Every smart remark has to be made for the first time, but we should be suspicious when a famous person gets the credit, unless the famous person is also a famous wit. An obvious example is Marilyn Monroe’s reply to the set-up question about what she wore in bed. ‘Chanel No. 5,’ she is reputed to have said, but even at the time there was a wide-spread assumption that a publicity man had both prompted the question and supplied the answer. The chances are good, however, that Noel Coward actually did make up on the spot his famous remark about the very large Queen of Tonga and the very small man who was in the open carriage with her at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II: ‘That’s her lunch.’ Nowadays the joke needs a health warning on grounds of its flagrant political incorrectness, but at the time it was thought hilarious, and not least because the fastidious Coward had said it.

  Though Coward was not, at that time, generally known to be homosexual – the acknowledgment came only after his death – he was universally recognized as being dainty in his ways, so the brutalism was all the more delightful. (Robert Helpmann got the same reaction for his reputed reply to a New York cop who called him a fairy: apparently Helpmann took to the air, touched the cop with an imaginary magic wand, and squealed ‘Disappear!’) The best reasons for thinking that Coward made up the line about Queen Salote’s lunch was that he had a reputation to protect, and would not have wanted to be caught borrowing. But there is also the possibility that, even if he thought of it on his own, he might not have been the first to do so. White imperialists visiting Tonga might long before have noticed the discrepancy in size between Queen Salote and any attendant male. Most people who recount the story now – usually as part of a roster of Noel Coward anecdotes –supply the information that the small man in the carriage with her was the king.

  If somebody else made the remark first, the remark still didn’t come into its own – into its life – until it was heard from Noel Coward, because at last it had found someone famous enough to be its author, even if, as it were, he wasn’t. The same might apply to Liberace’s supposed authorship of a classic response by an artist to his hostile critics: ‘I cried all the way to the bank.’ Prey to the delusion that a candelabra on the piano would add something to Tchaikovsky, Liberace over-delivered his signature wisecrack as he over-delivered everything, and that should have been a tip-off, because the phrasing belongs to someone who understands understatement. It sounds, in fact, like New York humour (i.e. Jewish humour) and was almost certainly already old in the nineteenth century, let alone the twentieth. All it needed for immortality was a sufficiently famous mouth to say it. Liberace’s mouth got the job, and took the credit.

  A full sixty years after his suicide, every article written about the unspeakable Hermann Goering still gives him respectful acknowledgment for the crack about reaching for his gun when he heard the word ‘culture’. (The respect comes from the fact that the journalists themselves secretly rather fancy the idea of armed philistinism.) Though Goering reached for the cyanide when he heard the word ‘rope’, his lasting reputation as a wit was already secure. The real author of the remark was the official Nazi writer Hanns Johst, but he was never remembered for saying it, mainly because he was an official Nazi writer, and therefore never remembered for saying anything, even at the time.

  The dim bulb Johst’s solitary flash of inspiration – far more successful than any of his plays and poems – refused to stick with him. A smart saying is usually as anonymous as a sucker fish in search of a shark. When it finds one, it begins its long ride in a tunnel of reflected glory, while the source of the glory gets the credit for powers of invention equal to its prominence. By now more than forty years have gone by since Lyndon Johnson added to his fame for an acutely foul mouth by giving the press an exclu
sive on why he hadn’t fired J. Edgar Hoover. ‘I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.’ It’s the perfect smart remark, but that’s exactly the reason to suspect that LBJ didn’t think of it first. No amount of harping on the point, however, will ever again get such a saying separated from the celebrity who is reputed to have said it. Does this anomaly matter? Only as a reminder that even the written record consists almost entirely of distortions. One of the basic things a young writer about any branch of history needs to learn is that if a quote sounds good, the person quoted is saying something that somebody else said first.

  The Monthly, March 2007

  Postscript

  The treasuring and propagation of smart remarks is a tribute we pay to an ideal. We would all like to take part in conversations where things that neat are said. In reality, they seldom are. Most conversations are babble. A tape-recording of all the conversations at a book launch, with all the cleverest authors in town duly present and striving to impress, would sound not much better than Christmas Eve in a mental hospital. Every year, some aspiring young television producer gets the idea of shooting a dinner party. It never works, not because the dinner party in a studio doesn’t sound like a real dinner party, but because it does.

  INSULT TO THE LANGUAGE

  In which English-speaking country is the English language falling apart fastest? Britain. Are things as bad in Australia? I hope not. In Britain, in 2006, the Labour government is still trying to fix Britain’s education system, but surely one of the reasons it’s so hard to fix is that most of the people who should know how are themselves the system’s victims, and often don’t even seem to realise it. They need less confidence. Even when they are ready to admit there might be a problem, few of them realise that they lack the language to describe it.