'The Most Incisive Conversationalist of Them All'

“The two great writers who have never let me down over the years are Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde. They always manage to brighten my life with something new, full of flavor, and to the point.”

Both, of course, were wits, remembered, if at all today, less for their writing than their brilliance as conversationalists. Their admirer’s fate is similar. As Ted Gioia reminds us in “The Greatest Wasted Musical Talent of the Century,” Oscar Levant, along with being a world-class concert pianist was a “film composer, dance band pianist, conductor, movie actor, Broadway musical collaborator, and talk show host.” I first heard of Levant when he appeared as a guest on Jack Parr’s talk show in the early 1960s. As often happens with popular culture figures dating from the preceding generation, I reacted against my parents’ judgment of Levant. They detested him, perhaps for his pose of stylized masochism. I thought he was hilarious. Gioia writes:

“Yet what eventually brought him fame were none of these pursuits, rather his wit and capacity for biting one-liners.”

The sentences quoted at the top are from the third of his three memoirs, The Unimportance of Being Oscar (1968). The others are A Smattering of Ignorance (1940) and The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965), all combining gossip with Levant’s neurotic shtick, and all worth tracking down and reading. On the same page as the Johnson/Wilde observation, Levant likens Robert Lowell, whom he met for dinner, to “a Gentile Clifford Odets” and describes how his wife sang “Who Put the Overalls in Mrs. Clancy’s Chowder?” to the poet in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel. “My wife,” he writes, “can sing about four bars on key. After that, the song sounds like an Arnold Schoenberg composition.” Schoenberg was Levant’s friend and teacher. Later in the same chapter, Levant writes:

“Another enthusiasm of mine—and a personal revelation—were the books with one-word titles (Loving, Nothing, etc.) of Henry Green, the pseudonym of the Birmingham businessman-author. I read them in 1952 when I was convalescing form my heart attack and found them brilliantly amusing.”

Ted Gioia is becoming one of the most interesting, knowledgeable and entertaining writers around today, with an instinct for interesting people and subjects. I’ve been reading him since 1988 when he published his first book, The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. Along with the Levant piece, Gioia has written recently about Whitney Balliett and Yvor Winters. In the Levant essay he writes:

“If I could ever assemble one of those dream dinner parties with a guest list drawn from anybody in history, I would pack the table with those impressive self-made authorities, such as Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, Orson Welles, and—probably the most incisive conversationalist of them all—Oscar Levant.”

Along with a supplemental guest list of Johnson, Wilde and Gioia.