'Humor Lights Up Dark Literature'

“H. James earned his later style through process of long growth. He (James) knew how to write simply too.” 

In her December 15, 1940, letter to Allen Tate, Louise Bogan is defending her recent criticism of R.P. Blackmur for the “self-indulgence” of his prose. Her approach remains applicable to much academic writing today:

 

“We all have been forced to learn how to write prose clearly, forcefully, and without fanciful and baroque curves, because we have written for an audience; and have had to sell our stuff. Blackmur has been coddled in this respect . . . . [He] has not learned that one proceeds step by step toward complexity: both of thought and expression.”

 

I’ve always found Blackmur’s prose gratuitously impenetrable and dull, not worth the effort required to decrypt it. He had a professorial way with words, in the contemporary sense. Some accuse Henry James of a similar sin when they attempt to read his later work. Even his brother William, after reading The Golden Bowl (1904), criticized his “method of narration by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference (I don’t know what to call it but you know what I mean).” We all do, in fact, but with James our efforts are rewarded. The Golden Bowl, for my money, is his finest novel, rivalled only by another late one, The Ambassadors (1903). Bogan is right. Virtually any reader can appreciate Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880) and The Princess Casamassima (1886) without working up a sweat. These are highly entertaining books. Simplicity and depth are not mutually exclusive. Neither are profundity and clarity.

 

We’ve all encountered lousy writing about music. At one extreme we find muddled fanboy gush; at the other, pretentious preening. Gene Lees (1929-2010) was a Canadian critic, biographer and lyricist. Few have written better about jazz and its practitioners. Experienced as a newspaper writer and one-time editor of Down Beat, Lees founded his monthly, pre-digital Jazzletter in 1981. It ran, sporadically in the latter years, until 2008. The entire run is available online here. I recommend it not only to jazz lovers but to music lovers in general and to anyone interested in first-rate writing about any of the arts. Lees’ prose is a model of intelligence and clarity, bolstered by an insider's understanding of music and musicians.

Take his profile of Paul Desmond (1924-1977), the alto saxophonist, longtime colleague of Dave Brubeck and composer of “Take Five” (in this clip, pay particular attention to the drummer, Joe Morello, one of the masters). Desmond and Lees were close friends. Lees is good at narrating the life in a fairly traditional manner but isn’t afraid to digress when a subject interests him. Take this passage from the profile, which is also included in his first collection of Jazzletter essays published by Oxford University Press, Meet Me at Jim & Andy’s: Jazz Musicians and Their World (1988). After noting that Desmond’s musical romanticism is “sardonic,” Lees writes:

 

“It is impossible to write tragedy without a sense of humor. Humor lights up dark literature, like Rembrandt’s underpainting. Without it the work is merely heavy, turgid. Make ’em laugh before you make ’em cry. Shakespeare does this deftly — the gatekeeper’s scene in Macbeth, the gravedigger’s scene in Hamlet. How smoothly Stravinsky does it in the Firebird Suite. Sibelius lifts your spirits before laying that tragic trombone melody on you in the Seventh Symphony. It is irony, mockery even, that makes Lorenz Hart the greater lyricist than Oscar Hammerstein. “My Funny Valentine” -- Hammerstein could never have conceived such a thought. Without an inner humor, tragic art becomes like the pathetic you-gotta-hear-my-story lapel-grabbing of a barroom drunk. Here is one of the distinguishing differences between Tchaikovsky and Mozart. Mozart’s restraint in sorrow makes his music only the more poignant. And Paul had that kind of elegance.”

 

I love that passage, in part because Lees can introduce such a digression, inessential to the life and career he is recounting, without distractingly breaking the flow of his narrative. That takes writerly confidence and a deft touch. Not a single obscure or pretentious word is present. It’s about the subject at hand, not the writer.     

 

[For the Bogan letter quoted above, see A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, ed. Mary Kinzie, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2005.]