by Helen Dewitt
It is clear that, just as the overtones led to the 12-part division of the simplest consonance, the octave, so they will eventually bring about the further differentiation of this interval. To future generations music like ours will seem incomplete, since it has not yet fully exploited everything latent in sound, just as a sort of music that did not yet differentiate within the octave would seem incomplete to us. Or, to cite an analogy—which one has only to think through completely to see how very relevant it is: The sound of our music will at that time seem to have no depth, no perspective, just as Japanese painting, for example, affects us as primitive compared with our own, because without perspective it lacks depth. That [change] will come, if not in the manner that some believe, and if not as soon. It will not come through reasoning (aus Gründen) but from elemental sources (Ursachen); it will not come from without, but from within. It will not come through imitation of some prototype, and not as technical accomplishment; for it is far more a matter of mind and spirit (Geist) than of material, and the Geist must be ready.
I thought this was one of the most brilliant things I had ever heard in my life. The comment on Japanese art was obviously wrong—I no sooner read it than I saw in my mind an image of Lord Leighton’s Greek Girls Playing at Ball, with its irreproachable, its even masterly use of perspective in the handling of the girls, the antique landscape, the airborne drapery, no sooner did I see this than I started to laugh, so shallow and superficial and even artless did it seem in comparison with (say) a print by Utamaro. But the basic argument was absolutely brilliant.
Before reading this brilliant book I had thought that books should be more like the film The Godfather, in which at one stage Al Pacino goes to Sicily and the Italian is all in Italian. Now I thought that this was a rather simpleminded way of looking at the question.
If you say that in a book the Italians should speak Italian because in the actual world they speak Italian and the Chinese should speak Chinese because Chinese speak Chinese it is a rather naive way of thinking of a work of art, it’s as if you thought this was the way to make a painting: The sky is blue. I will paint the sky blue. The sun is yellow. I will paint the sun yellow. A tree is green. I will paint the tree green. And what colour is the trunk? Brown. So what colour do you use? Ridiculous. Even leaving abstract painting out of the question it is closer to the truth that a painter would think of the surface that he wanted in a painting and the kind of light and the lines and the relations of colours and be attracted to painting objects that could be represented in a painting with those properties. In the same way a composer does not for the most part think that he would like to imitate this or that sound—he thinks that he wants the texture of a piano with a violin, or a piano with a cello, or four stringed instruments or six, or a symphony orchestra; he thinks of relations of notes.
This was all commonplace and banal to a painter or musician, and yet the languages of the world seemed like little heaps of blue and red and yellow powder which had never been used—but if a book just used them so that the English spoke English & the Italians Italian that would be as stupid as saying use yellow for the sun because the sun is yellow. It seemed to me reading Schoenberg that what the writers of the future would do was not necessarily say: I am writing about an Armenian grandfather Czech grandmother a young biker from Kansas (of Czech & Armenian descent), Armenian Czech English OK. Gradually they would approach the level of the other branches of the arts which are so much further developed. Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases or lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes, & having first thought of that would then think of some story about Hungarians or Finns with Chinese.
An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind, and all afternoon I kept hearing in my mind snatches of books which might exist in three or four hundred years. There was one with the characters Hakkinen, Hintikka and Yu, set provisionally in Helsinki—against a background of snow with a mass of black firs, a black sky & brilliant stars a narrative or perhaps dialogue with nominative genitive partitive essive inessive adessive illative ablative allative & translative, people would come on saying Hyvää päivää for good day there might be a traffic accident so that the word tieliikenneonnettomuus could make an appearance, and then in the mind of Yu Chinese characters, as it might be Black Fir White Snow, this was absolutely ravishing.
I had not really wanted to go to the party, and now in this distracted state I wanted to go less than ever—but I thought it would be rude not to go when the invitation was such a favour, so I thought I could just go for 10 minutes and then leave.
I went to the party. As so often it was much easier to come with the plan of leaving after 10 minutes than to leave after 10 minutes, for instead of making a polite excuse to leave after 10 minutes I found myself describing now to this person now that the brilliant Theory of Harmony. Who publish it, they would say, Faber, I would say and they would say Oh. Some people did not seem interested and I naturally dropped the subject but others did and I did not and I ended up staying three hours.
Schoenberg would say: This scale is not the last word, the ultimate goal of music, but rather a provisional stopping place. The overtone series, which led the ear to it, still contains many problems that will have to be faced. And if for the time being we still manage to escape those problems, it is due to little else than a compromise between the natural intervals and our inability to use them—that compromise which we call the tempered system, which amounts to an indefinitely extended truce
& in my mind I would hear languages related like a circle of fifths, I would see languages with shades of each other, like the colours of Cézanne which often have a green with some red a red with some green, in my mind I saw a glowing still life as if a picture of English with French words French with English words German with French words & English words Japanese with French English & German words—I was just about to leave when I met a man who seemed to know quite a lot about Schoenberg. He had lost his last job through a merger and now the writing was on the wall so he was rather distracted but still he started telling me about the opera Moses and Aaron.
He said Of course you know what it’s about
& I said Well presumably
& he said No musically, musically it’s about, & he paused, & he said in this opera Moses spoke directly to God and he did not sing his part was in Sprechgesang it was speech, harsh speech over music and the Children of Israel could not understand; he had to communicate through Aaron, who was an operatic tenor, it was a beautiful lyric role but of course it’s Aaron who proposes the Golden Calf, he doesn’t himself understand—
I said what a marvellous idea for an opera the plots were usually so farfetched and contrived
& he said he rather liked that but yes it was a marvellous idea, and he began to tell me in a low-key English way a terrible story about the opera which he described as one of the great lost works of the 20th century. Schoenberg had composed most of the first two acts between 1930 and 1932; then the Nazis had come into power and he had had to leave in 1933 and it had been rather disruptive. He went to America and kept applying for grants to work on it but the foundations did not care for the atonal music. So he had to support his family by teaching, and he went back to composing tonal pieces in support of his grant applications so that his time when he was not teaching was taken up with the tonal compositions. Eighteen years later he had still not composed the music for Act Three of Moses and Aaron. As death drew near he said that perhaps the words could be spoken.
He said: Of course he could be quite a difficult character
& he suddenly said—Will you excuse me? I really must catch Peter before he goes.
He walked off and it was only after he had gone that I realised I had not asked the crucial question, which is Do we ever hear God?
I hesitated and then hesitantl
y followed but he was already saying Peter!
& Peter said Giles! Good to see you! How are you keeping?
& Giles said Exciting times.
So it was not a good time to intrude. I mingled casually with a nearby group.
Peter said something and Giles said something and Peter said something and Giles said Good Lord No not at all in fact if anything and they talked for quite a long time. They talked for half an hour or so and suddenly they paused, and Peter said Well this is hardly and Giles said Quite, and they paused again and without another word left the room.
I had meant to leave after 10 minutes; it was high time to leave. But now there was more noise by the door and Liberace appeared smiling and kissing women on the cheek and apologising to people for being so late. Several people in my group seemed to know him and tried to catch his eye, and I hastily murmured something about a drink and slipped away. I was nervous of heading for the door, because I was afraid someone might introduce me to Liberace as a special favour, but it seemed safe enough to stand by the buffet. Phrases from Schoenberg kept coming back. At this time I had never heard any of his music but the book on harmony seemed a real work of genius.
I stood by the buffet eating cheese sticks, looking up from time to time at the door—but though Liberace moved gradually into the room he was still between me and the door. So I stood thinking about this brilliant book, I thought, I must buy a piano, & after a while who should come up but Liberace.
He said Are you as bored and frustrated as you look?
It was not easy to think of a reply which would not be rude or flirtatious or both.
I said I never answer trick questions.
He said It’s not a trick question. You look completely fed up.
I realised that, faced with coming up with a reply, I had thought of the question and not the questioner. Some people would see that until you have determined how bored and frustrated you look you have no way of knowing whether your sentiments match your appearance—but Liberace had proved himself so innocent of logic in all his written work—was it likely that he would marshal greater powers of reasoning in casual conversation at a party? No.
I said I was thinking about leaving.
Liberace said So you were fed up. I don’t blame you. These things are horrible aren’t they?
I said I had never been to one before.
He said I thought I hadn’t seen you before. Are you with Pearce?
I said Yes I am.
I had a brilliant idea. I said I work for Emma Russell. Everyone in the office was so excited when they heard you’d be here. You must let me introduce you.
He said Would you mind if I didn’t?
And he smiled and said I was just about to leave when I saw you. You know misery loves company.
I knew nothing of the kind but I said So they say.
And I said If we leave we won’t have any misery to share.
He said Where do you live? Maybe I can give you a lift.
I told him where I lived and he said it was not far out of his way.
I realised too late that I should have said I did not need a lift. I said it now and he said No I insist.
I said That’s OK and he said Don’t believe everything you hear.
We walked along Park Lane and then along various streets of Mayfair, while Liberace said this and that, in a way that seemed intentionally flirtatious and unintentionally rude.
I realised suddenly that if the Chinese characters were the same as the Japanese I knew the characters for White Rain Black Tree: ! I put these provisionally into the mind of Yu and laughed out loud and Liberace said What’s funny. I said Nothing and he said No tell me.
At last in despair I said You know the Rosetta Stone.
What? said Liberace.
I said The Rosetta Stone. I think we need more.
He said One’s not enough?
I said What I mean is, though I believe the Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity. You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival.
What we should do, I said, is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island. The great thing is that people who were put off Greek at school would then have another chance, I think they’re put off by the alphabet but if you’ve learned one at the age of six how hard can it be? It’s not a particularly difficult language.
Liberace said When you get the bit between your teeth you really get carried away don’t you? One minute you’re so quiet I can hardly get a word out of you, then all of a sudden there’s no stopping you. It’s rather engaging.
I did not know what to say and he said after a pause What’s funny about that?
Nothing, I said and he said Oh, I see.
I asked after a pause where his car was. He said that it should be here. He said that it must have been towed, and he swore The bastards! The bastards! and then he said abruptly that it would just have to be the Tube.
I walked with him to the Tube, and when we got to his stop he said I must come back to his place to take his mind off his car. He said I could not imagine the horror of going to a party such as the one we had left and then discovering that it had cost you fifty pounds or so plus the sheer horror of going to West Croydon or wherever it was they kept the cars to get it back. I said something sympathetic. I had left the train to continue the conversation and now I found myself leaving the Tube station and walking through the streets with Liberace to his place.
We walked up the steps and upstairs inside and Liberace started up a little conversational medley on the subject of cars and towing and wheel clamps. He improvised on the subject of the depot for the towed-away cars. He improvised on the officials who obstructed attempts to reclaim a car.
His way of talking was a little like his writing: it was quick and nervous and anxious to seem anxious to please, and every so often he would say Oh God I’m talking too much I’m boring you you’ll walk out on me and leave me alone to brood on my you know I don’t personally consider my car I mean if you could see it you’d see I couldn’t possibly consider it a phallic but the meaning’s out there isn’t it there’s something potentially horribly symbolic isn’t there about having it towed away just when you’ve offered a lift to I mean you may think that’s too obvious I couldn’t agree more but fuck, and he would say Tell me if I’m boring you. No one had ever asked me if he was boring me who wasn’t, and I never knew what to say, or rather it always seemed as though the only possible answer was No and so I now said No not at all. I thought it would be better to change the subject so I asked for a drink.
He brought drinks from the kitchen and talked about this and that, showing me souvenirs from his travels and making comments by turns cynical and sentimental. He had a new computer, an Amstrad 1512 with two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives and 512 kilobytes of RAM. He said he had installed Norton Utilities to organise his files, and he turned it on to show how Norton Utilities worked.
I asked if it could do Greek. He said he didn’t think so, so I didn’t ask whether it could do anything else.
We sat down and to my horror I saw on a nearby small table a brand new book by Lord Leighton.
By Lord Leighton, of course, I don’t mean the Hellenising late-Victorian painter of A Syracusan Bride Leading Wild Beasts in Procession and Greek Girls Playing at Ball,
but the painterly American writer who is the spiritual heir of the artist. Lord Leighton (the painter) specialised in scenes of antiquity in which marvellous perplexities of drapery roamed the canvas, tarrying only in their travels to protect the modesty of a recruit from the Tyrone Power school of acting. His fault was not a lack of skill: it is the faultlessness of his skill which makes the paintings embarrassing to watch, so bare do they strip the mind of their creator. Only the pen of Lord Leighton the writer could do justice to the brush of Lord Leighton the painter, for just so did Lord Leighton (the writer) bring the most agitated emotions to an airless to a hushed to an unhurried while each word took on because there was all the time in the world for each word to take on the bloom which only a great Master can give to a word using his time to allow all unseemly energy to become aware of its nakedness and snatch gratefully at the fig leaf provided until all passion in the airlessness in the hush in the absence of hurry sank decently down in the slow death of motion to perpetual stasis: a character could not look, or step, or speak, without a gorgeous train of sentences swathing his poor stupid thoughts and unfolding in beautiful languor on the still and breathless air.
Liberace saw my glance and said Are you a fan and I said No and he said But he’s marvellous.
He picked up the book and began to read one lovely sentence after another—
& I said in despair How beautiful, as one might say Look at that feather! Look at the velvet! Look at the fur!
I have naturally often thought that it would be nice to get some money from Liberace for Ludo, and I have sometimes thought that even apart from the money I should tell him. Whenever I think this I think of this conversation and I just can’t.
I would say But he is like a man who plays Yesterday on the piano with Brahmsian amplitude & lushness and so casually kicks aside the very thing which is the essence of the song he is like the Percy Faith Orchestra playing Satisfaction