`No One Steals Books'

For Christmas last year my wife gave me the new, annotated edition of Letters I Never Mailed: Clues to a Life, by Alec Wilder (1907-1980), originally published in 1975. Wilder was an impossible-to-pigeonhole composer who blithely ignored attempts by critics and listeners to demarcate the jazz, pop and classical idioms. For years, I’ve kept a cassette in my glove compartment of the octets Wilder started composing and recording in the late nineteen-thirties, with titles like this: “It’s Silk, Feel It,” “Jack, This Is My Husband,” “Neurotic Goldfish,” “The Amorous Poltergeist” and “Sea Fugue, Mama.” In 1946, Frank Sinatra, of all people, conducted an album of Wilder’s compositions, and they remained lifelong friends. Wilder composed many songs for Mabel Mercer, including the bittersweet and lovely “Have You Ever Crossed Over to Sneden's?” and his best-known standard is probably “I’ll Be Around.” Whitney Balliett christened Wilder the “President of the Derriere Garde.”

As his song titles suggest, Wilder possessed a gift for words second only to his musical gift. His American Popular Song, 1900-1950, published in 1972, is a masterpiece of learning, love and invective. In Letters I Never Mailed, Wilder invented a literary genre. The book’s subtitle is suggestive, because Wilder in fact is composing a veiled autobiography in the form of letters, many to correspondents he left unidentified in the original edition. The annotated edition, published by the University of Rochester Press and edited by David Demsey, reveals the identities of most of the correspondents, including Aaron Copland, anthropologist Robert Ardrey, Civil War historian Bruce Catton, Eric Hoffer, Montgomery Clift, Thornton Wilder, Graham Greene, Benny Goodman, Harold Arlen, Balliett, Marian McPartland, and many others less well known and sometimes fictitious.

In his literary tastes, as in everything else, Wilder was eccentric. Desmond Stone writes in his biography Alec Wilder in Spite of Himself:

“Music was Wilder’s bedrock, but literature was also integral to his life. `I’m better fed by a well-written book than by an extra dividend (though I own no stock). I am better fed by Dylan Thomas than by the products of General Motors (I don’t own a car).’ When the New Heritage Dictionary was published in 1969, he bought copies for all his close friends. He wanted to open up the world for those he loved. Books were his constant companions. Although he would countenance only hard covers in the beginning, he broke down later and began to buy the paperbacks he had once abhorred. They were easier to carry. Hard cover or soft, he only wished that more people would do more reading. He once said sadly to [a friend], `Don’t bother to lock the car, there are only books in it, and no one steals books.’”

Among Wilder’s favorite writers, according to Stone, were James Thurber, Lawrence Durrell, Albert Murray, P.G. Wodehouse and Georges Simenon. Stone adds: “It sometimes seemed that he admired craftsmanship more than genius.” He dismissed as boring such books and writers as Moby-Dick, War and Peace, most of Dickens and James, Kafka, Kierkegaard and “quite a lot of Shakespeare.” Stone writes:

“For the most part, Wilder kept his distance from academe and from the books and music that no well-educated person could supposedly survive without. Sometimes, he was playing the role of the heretic, something he always enjoyed doing. In music and literature both, he refused to do any genuflecting.”

I sympathize. I know which books I enjoy and admire, and usually why I enjoy and admire them, but it’s always fun to play the clodhopper among the sophisticates. Besides, can a man who loves P.G. Wodehouse be deemed anything less than well read and civilized? Wilder prized John Cheever and Peter De Vries, and composed letters to both in Letter I Never Mailed. To Cheever he wrote:

“Thank you very, very much for those permanent people in my life and memory, the Wapshots. Their slam-bang eccentricity, their devil-take-the-hindmost insistence on their way reminds me of the Wilder side of my family, though Aunt Emma’s collecting and then gold-plating olive pits isn’t on a par with Honoria’s sitting there drinking and waiting for death.”

This is from a letter to De Vries:

“I seem to pester you, don’t I, for each new book. It’s only because I need your irresistible, wry and resigned wit, your precise and explosive commentary on suburban society and the general malaise of the middle class.”

In her Foreword to the new edition of Letters, Marian McPartland writes of her old friend:

“Emotionally, Alex was very complex. He made wild swings from an almost childlike gaiety to deep depression. The word `curmudgeon’ might have been invented for him. When he was in one of those low moods, it was as if a mistral were blowing.”

I spent an hour with McPartland on a summer afternoon in 1997. We sat in a club in Schenectady, N.Y., while the piano was being tuned. Her manner was patrician with a plebian touch. Tears came to her eyes only when I asked about Alec Wilder.