'The Crisply Empirical, Immediately Accessible Tone'

Since his death in January I’ve been incrementally rereading Terry Teachout’s books and realizing that while he was alive I too readily categorized him as a nice guy with whom I enjoyed exchanging thoughts – not the shabbiest of verdicts. True, as an online acquaintance I met in person only once, he was reliably friendly and encouraging. He enjoyed sharing his gift for enjoyment. 

Seven or eight summers ago when my middle son, a trombonist, was attending a jazz clinic in Houston, I sent Terry a photo of Michael and the other band members giving an outdoor concert. He congratulated me on having a musically gifted son – the name Jack Teagarden came up – but seemed happiest with the fact that my son was the only white kid in a group of twenty or so young musicians. The others were black. Terry found encouragement in that – something that hadn’t occurred to me. Though created more than a century ago by blacks, the music’s audience today is largely white. Leave it to Terry to find an unexpected reason to be cheerfully optimistic.

 

Now that the man is gone, his books and other writings must speak for him, and I’m realizing how unpretentiously smart and learned this guy was. We’ve grown accustomed to criticism having been shanghaied by academics more interested in self-promotion than in championing the best in books, movies, music and painting. Dreary provocation has usurped pleasure.

 

My favorite among Terry’s books is probably The Terry Teachout Reader (Yale University Press, 2004). I remember buying it at Borders back in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., soon after it was published. It bears my favorite book cover illustration of all time – Fairfield Porter’s Broadway (1972). Terry was a smalltown kid from Missouri who fell in love with New York City after moving there in 1985. On the left Porter includes a sign hanging in front of a business, “Typewriters Ideal,” which Terry must have found pleasingly affirming.

 

The Reader collects more than fifteen years’ worth of essays, articles and reviews first published in newspapers and magazines. Terry possessed a hyper-sensitivity to the past – his own and the world’s – while consciously working to fend off nostalgia, that opium of the aging. In his “Introduction: Across the Great Divide,” he notes that since his career in journalism had started, “the world of my childhood disappeared, and America crossed a great cultural and technological divide.” So his collection of pieces, written under editorial and deadline constraints, may serve as “a chronicle, a road map of how we got from there to here, and what we lost – and gained – in the process.” He goes on to acknowledge he (like me) grew up in what he calls “the Age of the Middlebrow, that earnest, self-improving fellow who watched prime-time documentaries and read the Book of the Month.” Terry was among the least snobbish of critics. He reveled in American art without being a jingoist. I don’t remember anything Terry had to say about Marcel Proust but I do remember his love for James Gould Cozzens’ great novel Guard of Honor:

 

“[T]ime and again I find myself returning to the work of those artists who spoke in the crisply empirical, immediately accessible tone of voice now acknowledged by the whole world as all-American. Louis Armstrong, Budd Boetticher, Willa Cather, Raymond Chandler, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, Chuck Jones, Bill Monroe, Fairfield Porter, Dawn Powell, Frank Sinatra, Stephen Sondheim, Paul Taylor, Tom Wolfe: surely these and other like them rank high among our exemplary figures, the ones whose work is indelibly stamped ‘Made in U.S.A.’”