Disquiet, Please!
Page 37
Lillian Hellman: “There’s nothing wrong with a little housework.”
Leslie Fiedler: “Everybody’s always asking me which comes first, my career or having fun. Honestly, I’m never sure what the right answer is!”
André Malraux: “I’m a pretty lucky guy. I mean, when you’ve got your health (santé), that’s pretty much the whole ball of wax, isn’t it?”
Henry Steele Commager: “Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I sneak down and make a bacon-and-onion sandwich. Just a lot of bacon, raw onion, mayonnaise, and white bread. Before morning I’m nauseous, but I can’t help myself!”
QUICKIES:
… Izzy Stone and Nancy (“Zelda”) Milford sweating it out on adjoining rowing machines at the 92nd St. “Y.” …
… Gallic publishing dreamboat and pioneer pornster Maurice Girodias at the Gotham Book Mart for a Joyce Society meeting, thumbing a Portable Emerson. How’s that, Maury? Going transcendental on us?…
… Tom (Gravity’s Rainbow) Pynchon lobbing hot chestnuts at the tourists on Fifth Avenue from the Brentano’s penthouse, on a dare by William (Fiction and the Figures of Life) Gass. “What a gass, Bill!” chuckled Tom.…
KEEP YOUR EYE ON:
Robert Penn Warren (“Incarnations”). Bob hates the idea of dating dull models or secretaries. Warren, who rarely dances, describes an ideal evening as a leisurely dinner, followed by lively discussion, coffee, then some late-night nit-picking. Bob’s favorite bedside reading: Paul Tillich’s Grooming Tips.… Alvin Toffler. Future Shock Al eschews expensive hair-styling salons, does all his own tonsorial chores at home with a bowl and pinking shears. He calls his sexy new pompadour “the wave of the future.”
DOWN MEMORY LANE WITH:
Rainer Maria Rilke. Lyric-poetry buffs will have no trouble remembering the main man of postsymbolist wordsmithery, “His Nibs,” the fantastic “Rags” Rilke. Born in romantic Prague (near Czechoslovakia), the young, handsome Rilke went to Paris to become secretary to famous chipsmith Auguste Rodin (who put his Kiss on everyone’s lips!). One day, Rilke noticed that certain words sounded alike. “Words such as ‘mice’ and ‘advice,’ ” he was later to recall. “It was right then that I got into my poesy bag.” A familiar figure in Saint-Germain, “Rags” cut a wide swath in the unofficial uniform of the vagabond versifier—suede knee-boots, a puff-sleeved raw-silk bolero shirt, green velvet breeches, and a large wooden hat. A favorite in rhyme circles for years, Rilke hit it really big in 1906 with his narrative poem Die Weise von Liehe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke. Occasionally scored for being stodgy, Rilke loosened up toward the end of his life, and, with the encouragement of Thomas Mann, once mailed some sneeze powder to Sylvia Beach.
THE MAILBAG:
Dear Editor:
Where can I get the Martin Buber sweatshirt advertised in your last issue? Also, anyone having any pictures or interviews with Pär Lagerkvist, please contact me.
Nan Sloat
Maspeth, L.I.
Dear Nan:
The Martin Buber sweatshirts, pot holders, and ice-crushing bags, plus a glamorous 8 × 10 glossy photo of Pär Lagerkvist in a dwarf suit, are all available through the Buber-Lagerkvist Fan Exchange, Kungsgatan 72, Box 3, Stockholm, Sweden.
Dear Editor:
I have always been worried by the abruptness of Gerald’s death in Chapter 5 of E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey. What happened? Why did Forster do that?
Hadrian Kornbleet, Ph.D.
Reed College
Portland, Oregon
Dear Professor Kornbleet:
We’ll bet you didn’t like Leonard’s seduction of Helen in Howards End, either. If surprises turn you off, better lay off the belles-lettres and get into something certain, like insurance.
Dear Editor:
What’s Gunnar Myrdal’s secret of always looking so fresh? Everybody I know thinks he’s the absolute tops in sociohistorical analysis, too.
Dmitri Reutershan
Prairie du Chien, Wis.
Dear Dmitri:
Before lecturing or undertaking any serious talking, Gunnar always pops a clove into his mouth and puts one under each arm. As a result, he’s the only Swedish economist around who emits an aroma of mince pie.
Dear Editor:
One day recently, I saw Letty Cottin Pogrebin wearing a pair of black slacks. Less than a week later, I saw Susan Sontag wearing what appeared to be identical slacks! Realizing the importance of individuality in attire as well as prose style, I must ask, Do you feel Susan was trying to “make it hot” for Letty?
Sri Murtiswammy
Trenton, N.J.
Dear Sri:
No, it was probably just a coincidence, as Letty and Sue are “best of friends.” Looks like you’re guilty of what Lionel Trilling would call “the Intentional Fallacy”! (Incidentally, criticism fans who have not already done so may still order the NYRG durable vinyl tablecloth, clearly imprinted with a refutation of the Intentional Fallacy, in Professor Trilling’s own words. The text is cogent and aesthetically pleasing, and, like the professor himself, can be wiped clean with a damp cloth.)
1975
IAN FRAZIER
THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP LIVE AT THE APOLLO
(LINER NOTES FROM THEIR NEW BEST-SELLING ALBUM)
I.
Live albums aren’t supposed to be as exciting, as immediate as the actual stage performances they record, but (saints be praised!) the Bloomsbury Group’s newest, Live at the Apollo, is a shouting, foot-stomping, rafter-shaking exception to this rule. Anyone who has not seen John Maynard Keynes doing his famous strut, or Duncan Grant playing his bass while flat on his back, can now get an idea of what he’s been missing! The Bloomsbury Group has always stood for seriousness about art and skepticism about the affectations of the self-important, and it has been opposed to the avowed philistinism of the English upper classes. Live at the Apollo is so brilliantly engineered that this daring Neo-Platonism comes through as unmistakably as the super-bad Bloomsbury beat. A few critics have complained that the Bloomsbury Group relies too heavily on studio effects; this album will instantly put such objections to rest. The lead vocals (some by “Mister White Satin” Lytton Strachey, the others by Clive Bell) are solid and pure, even over the enthusiastic shouts of the notoriously tough-to-please Apollo crowd, and the Stephen Sisters’ chorus is reminiscent of the Three Brontës at their best. There is very little “dead air” on this album, even between cuts. On Band 3 on the flip side, there is a pause while the sidemen are setting up, and if you listen carefully you can hear Leonard Woolf and Virginia Stephen coining withering epigrams and exchanging banter with the audience about Macaulay’s essay on Warren Hastings. Very mellow, very close textual criticism.
Lytton Strachey, who has been more or less out of the funk-literary picture since his girlfriend threw boiling grits on him in his Memphis hotel room in March of 1924, proves here that his voice is still as sugar-cured as ever. In his long solo number, “Why I Sing the Blues,” he really soars through some heartfelt lyrics about his “frail and sickly childhood” and “those painfully introverted public-school years.” The song is a triumph of melody and phrasing, and it provides some fascinating insights into the personality of this complex vocalist and biographer.
Much of the credit for the album’s brilliance must go to G. E. Moore, who wrote Principia Ethica, the group’s biggest hit, as well as to Lady Ottoline Morrell, the sound technician and backstage mama. The efforts of professionals like these, combined with Bloomsbury’s natural dynamism, have produced that rarest of rarities—a live album that is every bit as good as being there.
II. SAILCAT TURNER REMINISCES ABOUT THE FOUNDING OF THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP
People will tell you nowadays, “Well, the Bloomsbury Group this or the Bloomsbury Group that,” or “Bertrand Russell and Sir Kenneth Clark were members of the original Bloomsbury Group,” or some such jive misinformation. I don’t pay ’em no mind. Because, dig, I knew the Bloomsbury Group before there ever wa
s a Bloomsbury Group, before anybody knew there was going to be any Bloomsbury Group, and I was in on the very beginning.
One night in ’39, I was playing alto with McShann’s band uptown at the old Savoy Ballroom—mostly blues, ’cause we had one of the better blues shouters of the day, Walter Brown—and Dizzy Gillespie was sittin’ out front. So after the set Diz comes up to me and he says, “Sailcat, I got this chick that you just got to hear. Man, this chick can whale.” So he takes me over to Dan Wall’s Chili Joint on Seventh Avenue, and in the back there they got a small combo—two horns, some skins, and a buddy of mine named Biddy Fleet on guitar. They’re just runnin’ some new chords when from this table near the stage this chick steps up. She’s got what you might call a distracted air. She looks around the room nervous-like, and then she throws back her head and sound comes out like no sound I ever heard before. Man, I sat there till eight o’clock in the morning, listening to her. I asked Diz who this chick was, and he says, “Don’t you know? That’s little Ginny Stephen.” Now, of course, everybody talks about Virginia Woolf, author of To the Lighthouse, and so on. When I first knew her, she was just little Ginny Stephen. But man, that chick could whale.
I liked her music so much that me and Diz and Billie Holiday and Ginny and Ginny’s sister Vanessa started hanging out together. So one day Ginny says to me, “Sailcat, I got this economist friend of mine, he’s really outta sight. Would you like to meet him?” So I said sure, and she took me downtown to the Village Vanguard, and that was the first time I ever heard John Maynard Keynes. Of course, his playing wasn’t much back then. Truth is, he shouldn’t have been on the stage at all. Back then he was doin’ “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” but it sure didn’t sound like the hit he later made it into. Back then he was still doin’ “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” as a demonstration, with charts and bar graphs. Later, of course, he really started cookin’ and smokin’. That cat took classical economic theory and bent it in directions nobody ever thought it could go.
Now, Ginny and John, they were pretty tight, and they had this other friend they used to run with. This was a dude named Lytton Strachey, that later became their lead singer. He also won a wide reputation as an author and a critic. After hours, they used to sit around and jam and trade aphorisms. Me and Cootie Williams and Duncan Grant and Billie Holiday and Leonard Woolf, who later married Ginny, and Ella Fitzgerald, who had just taken over Chick Webb’s band, and James (Lytton’s brother) and Dizzy and the Duke and Maynard Keynes and Satchmo and Charles Mingus and Theodore Llewelyn Davies and Thelonious Monk and Charles Tennyson and Miles Davis and Ray Charles and Hilton Young (later Lord Kennet) all used to sit in sometimes too. We smoked some reefer. Man, we used to cook.
Well, that was the beginning. Later, a lot of people dropped out, and Lytton and Ginny and Vanessa and Maynard and Leonard and Duncan and some of the others started to call themselves the Bloomsbury Group, after their old high school over in England. They asked me and Diz to join, but Diz was supposed to go on tour with Billy Eckstine’s band, and as for me, well, I wasn’t too crazy about the group’s strong Hellenic leanings. Now, of course, I wish I’d said yes.
III. VIRGINIA WOOLF TALKS FRANKLY ABOUT THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP
Being a member of the Bloomsbury Group has brought me out of myself and taught me how to open up to other people. At the beginning, all of us—Leonard, Clive, Vanessa, Lytton, Duncan, Maynard, and me—we were like different states of mind in one consciousness. It was like we each had one tarot card but it didn’t make sense until we put all the cards together, and then when we did—it was beautiful. Like in 2001, when that monkey figures out how to use that bone. Everything was merged.
Of course, we still have our problems. The interpersonal vibes can get pretty intense when we’re touring, going from one Quality Court to another and then to another and then another. Sometimes I wonder if I have room to grow as an artist. But usually it works out okay. Like the time I told Lytton that our new reggae number “Mrs. Dalloway” might work better as a short story or even a novel. We talked it out, and Lytton told me I was thinking too linear. Later, I had to admit he was right.
The hardest thing about being a member of the Bloomsbury Group is learning how to be a person at the same time you’re being a star. You’ve got to rise above your myth. We’ve reached the point where we’re completely supportive of each other, and that’s good. But at the same time we all have our own separate lives. I’ve been getting into video, Maynard recorded that album with Barry White, Duncan’s been doing some painting—we have to work hard to keep in touch with each other and ourselves, but it’s worth it. The way I figure it, there’s really nothing else I’d rather do.
1975
IAN FRAZIER
KIMBERLEY SOLZHENITSYN’S CALENDAR
Two years have passed since the Russian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn left the Soviet Union to take up residence in the West. —News item
May 1—Derby Day buffet at Andrei and Bev Sakharov’s. Bring cranberry ketchup for the ham.
May 2—Twins to band camp. Drinks with André and Nan Malraux.
May 8—Welcome Wagon visit in A.M. Remind Al to drain dehumidifier pan again.
May 9—Sunday dinner at the Lévi-Strausses’. (Claude and JoAnn. Children: Sean, 7, and I think Jason, about 4.) 1003 Red Fox Trail, Walden Estates.
May 10—Pick up twins at band camp. Take Al’s old Siberia clothes to Fire Dept. Rummage Sale.
May 11—Crêpes Club here: Mimi Sartre, Megs Ionesco, Barb Dubuffet, Wendy Szent-Györgyi, Tracy Robbe-Grillet, Gail Miró.
May 12—Remind Al—bring patio trays up from basement. Nobel Prize winners’ Spaghetti Dinner. Get Al’s marimba fixed.
May 15—Al’s Rotary Meeting: Brown Derby. 8:00 P.M.: To P.-T.A. Mummers’ Barefoot in the Park with Mikhail & Candy Baryshnikov.
May 17—Ecology Day. Al’s old Cancer Ward notes to recycling center. Twins’ swimming lesson—2:30: Leisure Time Pool.
May 20—Leave Subaru at the shop: oil &lube. Twins to the Sakharovs’. Sam & Patsy Beckett for lunch and paddle tennis.
May 21—Hog roast at the Lévi-Strausses’.
May 24—Get twins’ band uniforms cleaned for Memorial Day Parade. Al’s slide show at Church Guild—“Russia: Land of Contrasts.”
May 26—Blocked Writers’ Benefit Car-Wash & White Sale: Church parking lot, 9:00 A.M. Evening: Gals’ poker night at Cindy Böll’s.
May 31—Memorial Day Horse Show: 2:00 P.M. Bring covered dish.
1976
VERONICA GENG
RECORD ROUNDUP
The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by former President Richard M. Nixon from a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals under which large portions of some 6,000 hours of White House tape recordings will eventually be released to the public.
—The Times, November 30, 1982
PICK HIT:
The Benefit Concert
MUST TO AVOID:
Bad Rap
Nixon, Haldeman & Dean: Blunder Down the Road (District of Columbia) Not up to their Smoking Gun debut, though audio-wiz producer Alex Butterfield’s notorious “walls of sound” remain serviceable. The B side is dismissable on the merits, but with Dick’s country-bluesy growl on “Can of Worms” and Brushcut Bob’s proto-new-wave incantation of “$900,000,” side one will pass as professional heat-taking at its baddest. But bad is as good as they get on this outing. Which is as it should be, and the profundo-paranoiac high of Nixon/Dean’s smoochfest-asdialectic “They Are Asking for It / What an Exciting Prospect” didn’t change my mind. Bet they didn’t change theirs either. B MINUS
Nixon & Dean: Bad Rap (Panmunjom import) The biggest ripoff of this or any century, with no less than eleven of twelve cuts mere soup’s-on rephrasings of Nixon’s own ’50s and ’60s anthems (all six extended-play “Crises” plus “Pumpkin Papers,” “Communist Issue,” “Anna Chennault,” “Hoover Told Me,” and the man’s all-purpose signature
tune, the self-fulfilling “This Thing Burns My Tail”). Besides which, when Tricky isn’t covering himself he’s covering Janis Joplin’s “Bobby Was a Ruthless (Characterization Bleeped),” a charisma-grab not half as perverse as smoothie Dean’s foray into faux-gospel backup antiphonies (“Absolutely!” “Totally true!” “That’s correct!”), musically okay—Tormé meets Torquemada—but commercially misguided. D MINUS
Nixon, Dean & Haldeman: The Benefit Concert (Creep) You can’t play jailhouse mariachi with church-charity-bazaar chops, but these guys can—and did, in the definitive March 21, 1973, concert to aid prisoners of conscience victimized by Sirica-style justice. Unified by the rhythmically haunting Latinfluence of former house band Liddy & His Cubans while aspiring to the bigger, cleaner sound of Vesco & the Mexican Laundry, the gang finds its groove in a three-route statement melding socio-folkie concern (“How Much Money Do You Need?”), absurdist riffs (“Who Is Porter?”), and spiritual smarts (“As God Is My Maker / We Need More Money”)—for sheer ride-this-thing-out staying power, the greatest album of all time. Dean, in superb voice (shoo-in airplay hit: “Cancer”), comes into his own as a soloist forever peerless even by the standard later set in the legendary Capitol Hill sessions. El Tricko, feeling his Quaker oats, pours on that baritone cream and serves up instant classic (“It Is Wrong That’s for Sure”), while Haldeman brings home the metaphysical bacon with late-breaking roboticasardonica, viz. “fatal flaw / verbal evil / stupid human errors / dopes,” and none dare call it doowop. Not that all this means I have to like it, but I love it. And they almost get away with it. A