The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Hawkins, in fact, is a super jazz musician, for he has been an originator of the boldest sort, a masterly improviser, a shepherd of new movements, and a restless, steadily developing performer. A short, dapper, contained man, whose rare smiles have the effect of a lamp suddenly going on within, he was the first to prove that jazz could be played on the saxophone, which until then had been largely a purveyor of treacle. He did this with such conviction and breadth of imagination that by the mid-thirties he had founded one of the two great schools of saxophone playing. (The other, which was to have fewer members, because of the inimitable style of its leader, Lester Young, arrived later.) Its pupils, many of the more recent ones now diluted by other products, include such performers as Herschel Evans, Chu Berry, Ben Webster, Don Byas, Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, Lucky Thompson, Charlie Parker, and Sonny Rollins. In 1939, Hawkins set down, as an afterthought at a recording session, a version of “Body and Soul” that almost achieves the impossible—perfect art. A few years later, he repeated this success with superlative refashionings of “Sweet Lorraine” and “The Man I Love.” Unlike many other celebrated jazz musicians, who are apt to regard anything new with defensive animosity, Hawkins has always kept an ear to the ground for flutters of originality, and as a result he led, in 1944, the first official bebop recording session, which involved men like Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and the late Clyde Hart. Soon afterward, he used the largely unknown Monk in some equally important recordings. Then his playing inexplicably began to falter and he went into semi-eclipse, from which he rocketed up, without warning, in the early fifties, landing on his feet with a brand-new style (his third), which, in its occasional all-embracing febrility, suggests the exuberance of a man several decades younger.

  Hawkins’ early style was rough and aggressive. His tone tended to be harsh and woody, and he used a great many notes, which bumped up and down the scale in the unremitting, staccato manner of a pneumatic drill. Unlike a similar contemporary trumpet player, Jabbo Smith, whose musical pyrotechnics grew more and more gaudy, Hawkins eventually simmered down, and by the mid-thirties he had entered his second and most famous phase. His heavy vibrato suggested the wingbeats of a big bird, while his tone, which grew to alarming proportions, suggested enormous rooms hung with dark velvet and lit by huge fires. He was now the despair of his imitators, who often sounded like old bellows. His technique had become infallible. He never fluffed a note, his tone never shrank or overflowed—as did Chu Berry’s, say—and he gave the impression that he had enough equipment to state in half a dozen different and equally finished ways what was in his head. This proved to be remarkable, particularly in his handling of slow ballads, a lyrical approach largely originated by him and equalled by only a handful of musicians on any instrument.

  Hawkins would often begin such a number by playing one chorus of the melody, as if he were testing its resilience. He would stuff its fabric with tone to see how much it would take, eliminate certain notes, sustain others, slur several, and add new ones. Then, satisfied, he would shut his eyes, as if blinded by the vision of what he was about to play, and launch into pure improvisation with a concentration that pinned one down by its very intensity. (Hawkins’ total lack of tentativeness—the exhilarating, blindman tentativeness of Pee Wee Russell or Roy Eldridge—invariably suggested that he had written out and memorized his solos long before playing them.) He would construct—out of phrases crowded with single notes, glissandos, abrupt stops, and his corrugated vibrato—long, hilly figures that sometimes lasted until his breath gave out. Immediately refilling his lungs, often with an audible wind-tunnel ferocity, he would be off again—bending notes, dropping in little runs like steep, crooked staircases, adding decorative, almost calligraphic flourishes, emphasizing an occasional phrase by perversely allowing it to vanish into puffs of breath. He often closed these solos with roomy codas, into which he would squeeze a stream of fresh and frequently fancy ideas that gave the impression of being worthy material that had simply been crowded out of his earlier ruminations. If another soloist was to follow him, he might terminate his own statement with an abrupt ascending figure that catapulted his successor neatly into space. When Hawkins had finished, his solo, which had been anchored directly and emphatically to the beat (as opposed to the method of Lester Young, who was always pulling the beat inside out, as if he were hunting lost change in it), had been worked into a tight yet elaborate super-version of the original melody, as though he had fitted a rococo Victorian mansion over a modern ranch house. At fast tempos, Hawkins merely forced the same amount of music into a smaller space. There seemed to be no pause at all between phrases or choruses, and this produced a thunderhead intensity that appeared to thicken the beat and whose vehemence was occasionally indicated by sustained sandpaper growls. Yet for all this teeming, agile enthusiasm, Hawkins’ playing during this period often left the listener vaguely dissatisfied. Perhaps it was because his style had an unceasing—and, for that time, unusual—intellectual quality, with the forbidding glint of perfection and a viselike unwillingness to let any emotion seep out, lest it spoil the finish on his work. At any rate, one kept waiting for the passion pumping away beneath the surface to burst through, but it never did—until five years ago.

  Like a man fresh out of prison, Hawkins can now be volcanic. His present style is marked primarily by a slight tightening of tone, which occasionally resembles the sound he achieved at the outset of his career; the use of certain rather harsh and inflexible notes and phrases that, not surprisingly, suggest aspects of Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins; and an open display of emotion that, when it does not go awry, can rock foundations. But this exuberance has been costly. In his pursuit of pure flame, Hawkins sometimes misses notes or plays them badly, and he falls back, perhaps out of temporary middle-aged fatigue, on stock phrases of his own, such as a series of abrupt, descending triplets, which sound like a hard-rubber ball bounding down a hall. When everything is in mesh, however, the results are peerless.

  This happens more than once in two recent Hawkins recordings—The High and Mighty Hawk (Felsted FA J 7005) and Coleman Hawkins Soul (Prestige 7149). Despite a few flat spots, the first recording, in which Hawkins is joined by Buck Clayton, Hank Jones, Ray Brown, and the drummer Mickey Sheen, is one of his superior efforts. There are a blues, three originals, and two standards. The blues, taken at a pleasant medium tempo, is a tour de force in the best sense of that expression. After the opening ensemble, Hawkins slides, with another-day, another-dollar casualness, into a soliloquy that lasts for no less than seventeen unbroken choruses, each of them totally different and each giving the feeling that it could fit only where it happens to fall. All of the best qualities of his present work are in evidence—the gradual, unremittingly logical development of a three- or four-note figure (the first five choruses), the near-parodying reflections of the work of the modern tenor saxophonist John Coltrane (tenth chorus), the tremendous bustle (eleventh and twelfth choruses), and the emotion (fifteenth and sixteenth choruses). It is remarkable improvisation. Hawkins matches this perfection in “You’ve Changed,” a slow ballad, which, however, does not receive the glossy, ten-gun treatment he might have offered it a decade ago. Instead, for only a chorus and a half, he pokes at the melody in a soft, cautious, exploratory way, savoring its pleasant design, making minor improvements here and there, and infusing it with a warmth and a lyricism that are wholly affecting. Clayton and Brown, in particular, play with considerable beauty. Indeed, Brown’s long solo in the blues number has an ingenious mixture of darting runs, exaggerated pauses, and half-time retarding phrases that very nearly top Hawkins’ solo.

  The second record is aptly named. Hawkins is accompanied by Kenny Burrell on guitar, Ray Bryant on piano, Wendell Marshall on bass, and Osie Johnson on drums. There are seven numbers, most of them blues. The longest is a very slow one, which is so blue—it is filled with swollen tremolos, gospel rhythms, stirrings of rock-and-roll, and screaming blue notes—that it becomes at once the epitome of all sl
ow blues and a caricature of all slow blues. Hawkins takes a short, plaintive solo near the opening and returns later for an extraordinary chorus, in which, after some quiet, moody, chantlike phrases, he abruptly emits an astonishing wail that sounds like an exhalation from the bottom of Hell. No more unsettling moment has occurred on a jazz record. The shortest number on the record is totally dissimilar—a classic revitalization of the sixteenth-century “Green Sleeves.” Hawkins simply plays embellishments on the melody, but with such pathos and blueslike feeling that one constantly fears he will break down before it is finished. Instead, instantaneously plumbing his three and a half decades of playing, Hawkins turns it into a kind of Gettysburg Address on improvisation. It’s an indelible statement.

  A NOTE BY PAUL MULDOON

  HEN THE FEBRUARY 16, 1957, issue of The New Yorker ran a Profile of Marianne Moore, with the title “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto,” it was clear, if only from the deployment of that serial comma, that Harold Ross was still in his heaven and all was still fairly right with the world. “The serial comma is important because it is almost exclusively The New Yorker’s, and is a mildly controversial thing,” Ross once wrote. “But we’re right, and all the rest are wrong.”

  Although William Shawn had now taken over from Ross as editor, with Howard Moss as poetry editor throughout the decade, the poems from the 1950s suggest only subtly that the lines between right and wrong might be blurring. Some of the era’s predilections and aspirations could be read in the magazine’s advertisements. Jules Kuti was ensconced at the piano in Café Nino, at 10 East Fifty-second Street. At Hutton’s Murray Hill, meanwhile, Charles Albert was at the piano “nitely.” Readers were invited to try the new, extra-rich, 97 percent caffeine-free Sanka Coffee, “delicious in either instant or regular form,” and to eat Birds Eye fish bites, “also salubrious as a main course.” It was an era in which the Asti Restaurant, at 13 East Twelfth Street, could unself-consciously advertise “gay singing from 7:30 P.M.” in a program ranging from “Pagliacci to Tin Pan Alley.” Other cultural currents remained subterranean.

  Moss’s taste as poetry editor was quite wide-ranging, extending eventually even to publishing his own work. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman may have been questioning his catholicity in their famous squib:

  TO THE POETRY EDITOR OF THE NEW YORKER

  Is Robert Lowell

  Better than Noel

  Coward,

  Howard?

  The cod couplets in which this is written are the mainstay of much of the verse of the era, be it Hayden Carruth’s Pagliaccian “Sparrows” or Ogden Nash’s Tin Pan Alley–esque “Just How Low Can a Highbrow Go When a Highbrow Lowers His Brow?” with its splendid wordplay:

  For the most part, my feelings about him I silently conceal,

  But when he comments that The Power of Positive Thinking burns with a hard, gemlike flame, I can only cry that he is robbing Pater to paw Peale.

  The couplet continues to be a mainstay of Marianne Moore’s “The Arctic Ox,” the rhyme at the end of each stanza clinching the deal on the animal’s admirable constancy and self-containment. Another great formalist, Richard Wilbur, is already adept in combining tact with surprise tactics in “Boy at the Window,” while Karl Shapiro shows himself to be a poet of startling unconventionality working within a conventional form. In “Voices from the Other World,” James Merrill lets loose “a horde / Of voices gathered above the Ouija board” to upset any rhyme scheme that attempts to establish itself.

  It’s clear from this selection of poems that in the fifties free verse was very much in the ascendant. William Carlos Williams offers for our delectation a wonderfully elegant poetic “entrechat.” Theodore Roethke has given up his sub-Yeatsian mode for the bright and breezy tone of “Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze.” Sylvia Plath, a poet much influenced by Roethke, is in terrific form in “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” as she describes crabs:

  Each wore one

  claw swollen to a shield large

  as itself—no fiddler’s arm

  grown Gargantuan by trade,

  but grown grimly, and grimly

  borne, for a use beyond my

  guessing of it.

  We may detect trace elements of Elizabeth Bishop in Plath’s poem, yet she is very much her own woman. Bishop herself is represented by “Questions of Travel,” a poem beginning to question what is meant by “home.” Other things were coming into question, too. In “Living in Sin,” Adrienne Rich registers the tremors of the seismic shift in sexual mores. And, at the end of the decade, Anne Sexton brilliantly summons the mood of disquiet over “that thing in the sky” that has forced itself into the 1950s consciousness. In 1957, indeed, the thing in the sky had become more than merely metaphorical when the Russians tested an intercontinental ballistic missile. Now, Sexton sensed, a looming threat to survival was “going around / like a persistent rumor / that will get us yet.”

  Seeing the snowman standing all alone

  In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.

  The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare

  A night of gnashings and enormous moan.

  His tearful sight can hardly reach to where

  The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes

  Returns him such a godforsaken stare

  As outcast Adam gave to Paradise.

  The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,

  Having no wish to go inside and die.

  Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.

  Though frozen water is his element,

  He melts enough to drop from one soft eye

  A trickle of the purest rain, a tear

  For the child at the bright pane surrounded by

  Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

  —Richard Wilbur

  January 5, 1952

  (SCENE: A GREENHOUSE IN MY CHILDHOOD)

  Gone the three ancient ladies

  Who creaked on the greenhouse ladders,

  Reaching up white strings

  To wind, to wind

  The sweet-pea tendrils, the smilax,

  Nasturtiums, the climbing

  Roses, to straighten

  Carnations, red

  Chrysanthemums; the stiff

  Stems, jointed like corn,

  They tied and tucked—

  These nurses of nobody else.

  Quicker than birds, they dipped

  Up and sifted the dirt;

  They sprinkled and shook;

  They stood astride pipes,

  Their skirts billowing out wide into tents,

  Their hands twinkling with wet;

  Like witches they flew along rows,

  Keeping creation at ease;

  With a tendril for needle

  They sewed up the air with a stem;

  They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep—

  All the coils, loops, and whorls.

  They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves.

  I remember how they picked me up, a spindly kid,

  Pinching and poking my thin ribs

  Till I lay in their laps, laughing,

  Weak as a whiffet;

  Now, when I’m alone and cold in my bed,

  They still hover over me,

  These ancient leathery crones,

  With their bandannas stiffened with sweat,

  And their thorn-bitten wrists,

  And their snuff-laden breath blowing lightly over me in my first sleep.

  —Theodore Roethke

  March 29, 1952

  Two hands lie still, the hairy and the white,

  And soon down ladders of reflected light

  The sleepers climb in silence. Gradually

  They separate on paths of long ago,

  Each winding on his arm the unpleasant clew

  That leads, live as a nerve, to memory.

  But often, when too steep her dream descends,

  Perhaps to the grott
o where her father bends

  To pick her up, the husband wakes as though

  He had forgotten something in the house.

  Motionless he eyes the room that glows

  With the little animals of light that prowl

  This way and that. Soft are the beasts of light

  But softer still her hand that drifts so white

  Upon the whiteness. How like a water plant

  It floats upon the black canal of sleep,

  Suspended upward from the distant deep

  In pure achievement of its lovely want.

  Quietly then he plucks it and it folds

  And is again a hand, small as a child’s.

  He would revive it, but it barely stirs,

  And so he carries it off a little way

  And breaks it open gently. Now he can see

  The sweetness of the fruit, his hand eats hers.

  —Karl Shapiro

  October 4, 1952

  Mr. T

  bareheaded

  in a soiled undershirt

  his hair standing out

  on all sides

  stood on his toes