`No One Can Do It Better'

“A sure sign of a masterpiece in any field of art is the feeling we get, when listening to it, looking at it, or reading it, that this – and no other – is the way things should be done. When reading Henry James we feel that no one can do it better, until we read Tolstoy, when we feel the same thing; when watching a Balanchine ballet we feel that this is precisely the way it should be done until we watch a ballet choreographed by Pepita…”

One of Joseph Epstein’s gifts as a writer is the way he identifies, often parenthetically, some quirk we believed was solely our possession. The paragraph above comes from his most recent book, Fred Astaire, published by Yale University Press. In his chapter on Astaire the singer, Epstein lauds the Verve recordings he made in the early nineteen-fifties with Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and other jazz musicians. Astaire was returning to the songs he had performed with heavy orchestration 20 years earlier in his movies. Epstein much prefers the studio-recorded jazz settings, saying they “have a sweet brilliance made possible by the high order of musicianship he and the ensemble he is working with bring to them.”

At this point he digresses on masterpieces and one idiosyncratic way to identify them. Epstein’s novelistic succession, from James to Tolstoy, mirrors mine. With stories, it’s Chekhov; with plays and sonnets, Shakespeare. This is not a critical stricture; rather, testimony to the seductive power of great works of art. To say Tolstoy was the greatest novelist as though it closed a door on something or sealed an argument is simple-minded. All Epstein is saying is that great art recruits us and, while we’re engaged, moves us to willingly sign a loyalty oath -- “the way things should be done.”

I share Epstein’s love of Astaire as dancer, singer and actor, and his book is the best I’ve read on the subject, but he casually spins off digressions that offer deeper pleasures than the customary show-biz biography. Epstein is, by temperament and experience, an essayist, with an essayist’s taste for the discursive. He ignores the less-than-interesting and follows trails blazed by his curiosity and imagination. In the final chapter, “Dancing on Radio,” Epstein attempts to define and analyze Astaire’s style and, by extension, artistic style in general. He begins by distinguishing style from mere fashion, and then offers a tentative definition: “a way of viewing the world – a way of viewing the world that at the same time exhibits a strong indication of what one thinks of the world.” He briefly looks at style in painting and literature, and then refines his definition:

“To have style is to be original. Style and originality are one: true style is originality, true originality is style. One can as soon copy another style, in the sense in which I have been describing it, as one can take over another person’s precise way of looking at the world. One can try, I suppose, and even to some appearances succeed, but the result will be something different from style and very far from originality.”

This sounds like a not-so-oblique swipe at what passes for style and originality in the arts today. I can’t think of a single actor who possesses style, in the sense suggested by Epstein, the way Astaire did – and Jimmy Cagney, Robert Mitchum and Alec Guinness – and don’t even think about literature and painting. Using Epstein’s novelistic examples, who supplants Tolstoy as embodying “the way things should be done?” Proust, of course. In his discussion of the Astaire/Ginger Rogers pairing, Epstein implies as much (and who else, writing of Fred Astaire, could carry off a Proust reference?):

“In pursuing Ginger Rogers in the movies they did together, Astaire may have been going a bit down-market, in the way that Charles Swann goes after Odette de Crecy, the cocotte of Marcel Proust’s great novel. Not that the Ginger Rogers roles resembled in the faintest the character of Odette in Proustian complexity, but there is a common masculine fantasy about the pleasures promised by girls of a lower class than one’s own: the fantasy being that they are more passionate, somehow wilder than those of one’s own class; there is the accompanying fantasy that one can bring such a girl up to one’s level and show her, as they say, the finer things. There is, of course, nothing to any of this, as poor Charles Swann learns to his chagrin, but the presence of hard evidence rarely kills a fantasy.”

Just to dispel the suggestion that Epstein may be a bit stuffily professorial when it comes to Astaire, consider this summation of the dancer’s sister Adele:

“Her spirit is nicely captured in a needlepoint cushion she made for her brother and sister-in-law: on one side there was a floral design, on the other the words `Fuck Off.’”