Young Man With a Horn

by Dorothy Baker

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Smoke said, wide-eyed. ‘Couldn’t he take the cure?’

  It wasn’t that. He took the cure fine, at least they gave it to him, but he turned out not to be in such good shape in other respects. He had had a bad cold when he came in, and now it looked like either pneumonia or double pneumonia.

  ‘You’re a doctor, which do you think?’ Smoke said, and the one in the smock said he was a special kind of doctor; he just gave alcohol and narcotics cures, and he wouldn’t say anything for sure, but his guess was that that boy should be taken to a hospital; they had begun to think so two days before, but there wasn’t anything to identify the patient, after Smoke took his suit, and they couldn’t find anyone to give them an authorization.

  ‘Why didn’t you authorize yourself?’ Smoke said. ‘You didn’t need to worry. I’d have paid you anyhow.’

  ‘My own feeling is,’ the cure doctor said, ‘that we’d better get him out of here quick.’

  He called an ambulance, and Smoke went in to see Rick.

  It was a small room with white walls, one barred window, and a hospital bed. No other furniture, nothing to break. It was simply a cell, a place to suffer in while the conflict raged. The late sun poked through the bars. It was one of the first days of spring, a good day to ride on top of a bus, a rotten day for an ambulance.

  Rick’s head lay flat against the sheet; the covers were pinned close by his ears with huge safety pins, so that nothing but his head was outside.

  His eyes flicked when Smoke came in. They stayed open for a moment and burned like lighted rum. He twisted violently and the sheet tore a little where it was pinned. Then he lay perfectly still and moaned low, but didn’t speak.

  Smoke tiptoed to the side of the bed and whispered: ‘Take it easy, baby; I’m going to get you out of here. It’s a quack joint, and the doctor doesn’t know his business from a hole in the ground. He’s not even a doctor.’

  Rick’s eyes came open halfway and the flames jumped out when they caught the draft.

  He looked up at Smoke and said: ‘I worked for him, but I couldn’t get along. Can’t get along in a band.’

  Smoke couldn’t make out the words. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Just forget it.’

  He closed his eyes again. He had a three weeks’ beard, and there was a bright red circle on each cheek. His hair fell in rings over his forehead. The prophet in his homeland is not supposed to be taken seriously. Let him cut loose and go someplace else, or have done with prophesying. What do we know about this young man with the beard and the spots on his cheeks, this young man pinned down in a strange bed in a barred room, out of his head with a fever? What do we know except that he had a way of doing a thing, and that he had a love of the thing so strong that he never in his life compromised it, or let it down, or forgot it?

  Rick twisted sharply against the sheet, but this time it didn’t tear. His mouth was scarlet and he opened it and said: ‘I don’t see why we couldn’t. Just call it the Memphis Ten or some name, same bunch all the time, do up a lot of good ones, all the ones we used to play.’

  He said it, but the words he used didn’t mean anything, and when Smoke bent down close to try to hear him he only heard sounds—sounds that should have meant: ‘If I had been born into a different kind of world, at another place, in another time, everything changed, the name Martin might have lasted along with the names of the other devout ones, the ones who cared for music and put it down so that it’s still good and always will be. But what chance has a jig-man got? He plays his little tune, and then it’s over, and he alone can know what went into it. This is sad; but so is everything, and in the end there is another thing to say about it. The good thing, finally, is to lead a devoted life, even if it swings around and strikes you in the face.’

  Smoke stayed there, close, trying to get anything he could, but the sounds just didn’t mean anything.

  The cure doctor came in with two ambulance men wearing white coats and carrying a stretcher between them. They took the pins out and turned back the covers and Rick lay quietly, his arms crossed unnaturally far over on his chest. The thing they had on him was a strait-jacket.

  ‘Loosen it up and leave it on him,’ one of the stretcher men said. ‘This boy don’t need restraining.’

  They rolled him onto the stretcher and carried him to the ambulance. Smoke got in and sat beside him on a jump seat. They drove slowly between streets, but they put on a little speed at intersections and went across with the siren wide open.

  The sun was in Rick’s face. Smoke reached up and pulled down the blind. Then he settled back and said, ‘I knew a guy once that took a cure and he said…’ But he stopped it there because he suddenly knew that it wasn’t getting over. He looked down and saw Rick’s face. He watched, stunned, and while he was watching, Rick died. He could tell when it happened. There was a difference.

  AFTERWORD

  “THE GOOD thing, finally, is to lead a devoted life, even if it swings around and strikes you in the face.” Rick Martin’s last words might have been Dorothy Baker’s. She was a chronicler of obsession, and of the fluid, hazardous nature of identity as shaped by art, race, gender, sexuality, family, chance, and stimulants—in a word, life. Music figures prominently in all four of her novels, as does suicide or attempted suicide and, to the dismay of her contemporaries, sexual uncertainty in the form of a seductive homoeroticism. Only in her final triumph, Cassandra at the Wedding, does gayness emerge affirmatively and hopefully into the light of day. At her best, Baker is essentially a comic novelist, a canny and caustic ironist. Yet reviewers, from the 1930s through the 1960s, often acknowledged her virtuoso technique and disciplined craftsmanship while slighting or completely missing the humor, and the psychological acuteness from which it springs. Many of them cringed at her focus on disreputable subjects such as jazz, blacks, lesbians, and Mexicans. Despite social progress, her critical reputation waned and her novels and uncollected short stories disappeared.

  At the time of her death, in 1968, at sixty-one, Baker was remembered almost exclusively for her dazzling debut, Young Man with a Horn, which was no longer widely read. In the 1970s, the omnivorous critic Martin Seymour-Smith lamented that Baker “never had her critical due and is absent from most surveys.” The tide has not quite shifted, but her cult of readers holds steady and is evidently building. It’s hard to believe how long Young Man with a Horn has been unavailable. It arrived, in 1938, with fanfare, escorted by a $1,000 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, the prize that helped to launch an uneven cluster of recipients of whom the most enduring include Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Roth, and Robert Stone. Baker was the fourth to win and the first to score a bull’s-eye with the critics and the public.

  Reviewers were dazzled, to a degree. Writing in The New Yorker, Clifton Fadiman proclaimed Young Man with a Horn “practically perfect,” the best first novel he had read in three years—although, he cautioned, as it deals “with the life and death of a swing trumpeter,” it won’t “carry much emotion a decade from now.” The New York Times reviewer found Baker “brilliant in reproducing the spoken words of people whose real language is music,” and praised her work as a “clear-minded, informed, coldly rational study of a swing addict,” despite “the irrationalism” of swing itself: “For if the swing audience is occasionally mad, the swing player is always mad.” Two months after Fadiman’s review, The New Yorker ran the first but by no means last parody. The tagline for “Young Man on Stilts,” by Wolcott Gibbs, reads: “Dorothy Baker, who gave us the life and death of a swing musician, discovers pure art in another unlikely profession.” The laughs taper off from there.

  Indeed, the reviewers proved her premise: that a real jazz artist was up against a granite wall of ignorance and condescension. (For one thing, her book has absolutely nothing to do with swing, the big-band style that ruled the music business at the time it was published.) In the most incisive review, the jazz and film critic Otis Ferguson, writing in The New Republi
c, faced that issue more in sorrow than in anger: “So while I know this to be a good book for any man’s money, I cannot report on just how good it will be to those who, not having seen the beauty it talks of as it was passing [that is, 1920s jazz], will merely read, digest, and file away some bit of its wide range of knowledge.” Even so, the novel quickly went through several printings and landed on the New York Times best-seller list. It was instantly optioned as a Broadway musical (Baker and a producer collaborated on an adaptation, and at various times the actor Burgess Meredith and the composer Hoagy Carmichael were attached to the project, which never got far) and soon after as a film, which did get produced nine years after it was initially acquired. Hollywood tried to option Baker, too, as a screenwriter. She declined: “I’d much prefer taking chances doing my own kind of work than get mixed up with formulas and story conferences.”

  As jazz found acceptance as a proper literary subject, Young Man with a Horn earned, for good and bad, a status of a different sort: It was the first Jazz Novel, and, as such, the foundation for a small but persistent genre. Before Baker, there were passages about black music in novels by Claude McKay (Home to Harlem, 1928) and Langston Hughes (Not Without Laughter, 1930), but the only novel I know of that treated the life of a dance-band musician was W.R. Burnett’s The Giant Swing (1932). Baker likely read Burnett’s novel about a self-taught, orphaned, Midwestern pianist whose music is transformed by a chance encounter with En Bateau by Debussy (a transfiguring influence, incidentally, on Bix Beiderbecke). Inspired to study composition, he achieves international renown with a new, mongrel style of music—part jazz, part classical, part Broadway glitz. Burnett had nothing to say about jazz per se as an art rather than a resource; it was written when jazz could denote anything with a pinch of toe-tapping rhythm. Baker’s story, published six years later, is set in the same period, and by contrast is resolutely fixed on the strain between jazz as a serious pursuit and the blandishments of society-band rubbish. She knows the music and the musicians, and is frankly dismayed by the notion of gussying up jazz to make it more acceptable. After Young Man with a Horn, the deluge: movies such as Birth of the Blues and Blues in the Night, novels such as Dale Curran’s Piano in the Band and Henry Steig’s neglected, due-for-revival Send Me Down. Even Burnett got on board with an exceptionally fine (modern) jazz novel, It’s Always Four O’Clock (1956), set on Baker’s turf, Los Angeles. He had undoubtedly read her.

  By the 1960s, when I started listening to jazz and reading about it, Baker’s endlessly parodied and mimicked title had become a joke, not least in the hands of Lenny Bruce, who wove it into a riff on Hollywood’s perpetuation of jazz clichés: His young hipster with a horn signs on to the band of über-square Lawrence Welk and confesses he’s got a monkey on his back. “That’s okay,” Welk tells him, “Rocky’s got a duck. They can play together!” I emphasize title, because I soon learned that many of those who were most derisive had not read the novel—not recently, anyway. Their disdain reflected a bias born of Michael Curtiz’s successful movie (1950), which has its own virtues and failings, and by elements in Baker’s book that curdled into a formula in the hands of lesser novelists. The Jazz Novel, especially as produced by white writers, was not simply a novel set in the jazz world. It became associated with a rote cycle of banalities centered on a doomed, misunderstood genius, white or black; a wise black mentor or worshipful white acolyte; competing women (nice and marriageable versus evil and sexy); and friends who try in vain to impede his tragic demise. The hero is usually fixated on hitting a fatal high note, consumes alcohol or drugs, and is given to shuffling alone in the rain. None of those bromides infect Young Man with a Horn, which continues to feel fresh, vital, and smart. It wears lightly its historical mantle while maintaining its place as an indispensable American novel, one of the best ever written about jazz.

  So much of what made Young Man with a Horn archetypal was impressively original, including Baker’s incessantly misjudged tip-off about her source of inspiration: the music, not the life, of the luminous and, in 1938, generally obscure trumpet player and pianist Bix Beiderbecke. Type the title in a search engine, and almost every item that comes up says the novel is based on Bix’s life. It is not. Rick Martin’s music is surely that of Bix, who showed that jazz was a music of universal expression and not an exclusively African American phenomenon that whites could only mimic. We can assume that when Rick stands up to solo with the Phil Morrison band, which is shrewdly based on Paul Whiteman’s band, right down to the hot vocalist Harry Cromwell (read: Harry “Bing” Crosby), his trumpet rings with a Bix-like pealing timbre, fluid phrasing, effortless lyricism, and knowing rhythm. Like Bix, Rick takes to drink and dies obscenely young. The resemblance ends there. It may all sound like a clef, but Rick’s upbringing, character, and dilemma are largely antithetical to that of Bix, and for a writer as concerned with psychological precision as Baker, those distinctions mean everything.

  Rick is essentially an orphan, raised neglectfully by two teenage siblings in Southern California, a region that produced no major figures in the 1920s jazz movement. Left to his own devices, he discovers his talent for music, teaching himself piano at fourteen, and finds a surrogate family in a group of black musicians not much older than he is. Given the endemic racism that defines the parameters of his life, he constantly has to check his own feelings against the social strictures regarding “a bunch of coons,” and he triumphs: The first person he loves is Smoke Jordan, “his first, last, and always friend.” When comforting Smoke after inadvertently offending him, he calls him “honey,” underscoring the reversal of the Huck/Jim template. The black guys know who and where they are; Rick is the one on the run, literally, from truant officers and, figuratively, from his ignorance of how to behave. Baker notes that neither of the boys are embarrassed by the “wrong terminology”; after all, they learned it from pop songs. Still, they quickly man up by lighting cigarettes, their established ritual. Baker’s subtle control of terminology is exemplified in a passage where she casually turns the rudest of epithets into an honorific. In the splendid Balboa sequence (Book Three), Rick proudly tells the hack bandleader Jack Stuart that Art Hazard, the trumpet master who instructed him, is “black as your hat.” Jack says, “So Art Hazard’s a nigger?… Next thing you’ll be telling me Red Nichols is a nigger.” To which Rick responds, “Oh, no, Red Nichols isn’t.” They laugh at Rick, since everyone knows Red Nichols, one of the most successful men in the business, failing to get Rick’s implication that he isn’t good enough to be a black player. At the end of this episode, Jack sells Rick upriver to another bandleader: “He had become, overnight, the property of Lee Valentine.” Eventually, when he joins with Morrison’s band, he becomes a star.

  In contrast, Bix Beiderbecke was one of three children born into a prosperous German American family in Davenport, Iowa. He studied music formally and gave his first recital at age seven. His adolescence was beset by his tenuous rebellion against his father, who despised jazz and never opened the recordings Bix made and faithfully mailed to him. Bix heard and, after he achieved some renown among musicians, occasionally jammed with black musicians—King Oliver and Louis Armstrong championed him. But his career was almost entirely circumscribed by white players. Rick is constantly integrating his bands, since a man’s color is invisible on a recording. For Bix, that would have been unthinkable; his mentor, his Smoke, was a white musician of his own age from New Orleans, Emmett Hardy, who spent three months in Davenport. Bix was idolized by musicians, but never became a star; instead, thanks in part to Dorothy Baker, he became a legend. He never married, and he drank uncontrollably from an early age, insulating himself from his father’s harsh disapproval and his own sexual confusion. In some respects, a closer parallel to Bix may be found in the character José Richter, in Baker’s third novel, Our Gifted Son (1948). A budding concert pianist and Harvard junior, he is summoned home to Mexico by his monstrously authoritarian German Mexican father, who doesn’t tell him that his mother com
mitted suicide. José is stultified by too much parenting.

  Baker’s black characters had few if any precedents in white American literature. They are human beings and artists; they don’t say “gwine” and “suh” or roll their white eyes, as they do in Hemingway and most of his contemporaries. They are middle class; they are not victims or symbols. The first line of Book One—“maybe he shouldn’t have got himself mixed up with negroes”—is sardonically ironic. These Negroes are Rick’s emotional and cultural kinfolk, specifically the players in Jeff Williams’s band and Smoke Jordan’s family—the scene in the church and Rick’s ensuing encounter with Smoke’s mother are among the most charming Baker ever wrote. When five years pass (the gap between Books Two and Three), and Rick has to find work with white Collegians, we miss Smoke and Jeff and Art Hazard and the rest almost as much as Rick does. Unable to let go, he (very un-Bix-like) vainly tries to re-create the brassy sound of the Williams band. He lugs their records everywhere.

  The narrative structure is itself innovative. Who is the narrator? White, yes; not a musician; probably a man as he concedes ignorance about only one character, Rick’s bisexual neurotically destructive wife, whose mother committed suicide. He is learned (he offers parallels in Mann and Pascal) and claims to be one of only three people who mourned Rick at his death. He intrudes at odd moments (he knows what tunes run through Rick’s head, but says he isn’t sure if he played “Swinging Down the Lane”). Yet he plays no role in the narrative beyond providing it. Unlike the narrator who introduces Charles Bovary as the new boy in class and then morphs into a ubiquitous storyteller, or Ishmael, who is there and not there, Baker’s narration is an exercise in sustained elegy, the account of a biographer masquerading as a memoirist. It can be very funny in its commentary: remarks like “Shorty’s fifths never came sealed; they never came fifths, for that matter, but those were uncritical times in this country”; or Rick’s description, “Nice outfit,” of the outlandish “peacock” getup modeled by the gay singer and Smoke’s sister Josephine; or regarding Rick’s addiction to Turkish baths; or in recreating long monologues by Rick and Amy (“But, I digress”) that gradually slur into gin-soaked gibberish.