Quote of the Day (Clive James, on the Ghastly Barbara Cartland)

“Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”—Australian man of letters Clive James (1939-2019), on a TV appearance by romance novelist Barbara Cartland (pictured), “Wedding of the Century,” in Clive James on Television: Classics From the Observer, 1972-1982 (2017)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Clive James, on the Scriptures as a Standard Against ‘The Language of Illusion’)

“For me, the scriptures provided a standard of authenticity against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic politics—all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion.”—Australian-born TV personality, critic and poet Clive James (1939-2019), “Czeslaw Milosz,” in Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007)

Quote of the Day (Clive James, on Why Culture is Not a Matter of Credentials)

“Culture is a matter not of credentials, but only of intensity, and sometimes you find things out from fans and buffs that you won’t from a tenured professor.”—Australian critic-poet-memoirist Clive James, Latest Readings (2015)

Quote of the Day (Clive James, on U.S. vs. Foreign Talk Shows)

“In Britain and Australia, most of the talk shows go on the air once a week for a limited season. In America it is more like once a day forever. The host's huge salary is his compensation for never being free to spend it. The schedule is crushing, and the top-of-the-show monologue, if the host were to write it on his own, would need a full day’s work, with no time left over for all the other preparation he has to do.”— Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007)

Quote of the Day (Clive James, on Louis Armstrong)

“The theory that art can have no direct impact on politics has the advantage of staving off wishful thinking, but it takes a beating when you think of what [Louis] Armstrong did, or helped to do. Jazz would not have been the same without him, and the whole artistic history of the United States in the twentieth century, quite apart from the country’s political history leading up to the civil rights movement, would not have been the same without jazz. There was no easy conquest, and Armstrong himself was the object of prejudice right to the end. He had to be brave every night he went to work.”—Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007)

Louis Armstrong, who died on this date in 1971, used his musical gift to transcend what crushed (and often has continued to crush) so many other African-Americans since the end of reconstruction—birth in the worst slum in turn-of-the-century New Orleans to a prostitute, childhood neglect, a stint in a juvenile home. Somehow, he overcame all that, expressing his irrepressible joy of life in his cornet and trumpet and, later, that equally distinctive voice.

In the 1950s, the musician became known as "Ambassador Satch" for his constant tours around the world. But all of this merely confirmed the fact that three decades earlier, he had been instrumental in creating one of America's few truly original art forms.

Quote of the Day (Clive James, on Benny Goodman, Jazz and Race)

“A man like Benny Goodman, for example, can’t possibly be fitted into a schematic history that would base itself on the white exploitation of a black invention. He carried within himself the only answer to the conflict, and, as things have turned out, he presaged the outcome: a measure of tolerance and mutual respect, and at least a step toward a colour-blind creative world. Being white, he was able to translate his prodigious talent into economic power: the very power to which black musicians, however successful, were always denied access. But Goodman used his power to break the race barrier. Though his mixed small groups existed mainly in the recording studios and rarely on stage—the Carnegie Hall appearance with Count Basie was strictly an interlude—the music they made was the emblem of a political future, and in the aesthetic present it was a revelation.” --Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts (2007)

All hail Benny Goodman, the “King of Swing,” born 100 years ago today in Chicago, one of 12 siblings in a dirt-poor Russian emigrant family.

The Clive James quote above refers to Goodman’s integration of jazz, what is often called America’s unique contribution to culture—a full decade before Branch Rickey did the same thing for America’s pastime by hiring Jackie Robinson. The big-band leader had already recorded with the African-American pianist Teddy Wilson as part of a trio (along with regular Goodman drummer Gene Krupa; the three are pictured in the image accompanying this post) when he was convinced by Helen Oakley, a young jazz writer, to have the small group play in concert.

The chemistry on that Easter Sunday in 1936 was perfect—“The three of us,” Goodman recalled, “worked together as if were had been born to play that way”—and the audience in the Urban Room of Chicago’s Congress Hotel clapped and roared approvingly. The later addition of virtuouso vibraphonist Lionel Hampton made it a quartet.

At this point, it becomes necessary to interject with what, to his contemporaries in the music world, was the obvious: Goodman was a driven, excellence-demanding professional entertainer, but not a saint. In a PBS “American Masters” documentary on his life broadcast some years ago, his daughter remembered how, brusquely, even brutally, he had discouraged her from a career as a musician by saying point-blank that she had no talent.

Gary Giddins’ “The Mirror of Swing” essay in the great anthology Reading Jazz, while celebrating his musical achievements, also depicted an ironic juxtaposition: a galaxy of jazzmen, gathered together for a tribute in Goodman’s honor, yet overwhelmingly carping about his “legendary cheapness, absentmindedness, mandarin discipline, rudeness to musicians, and various eccentricities.”

That’s not the end of it, by any means. Dan Morgenstern’s essay in Living With Jazz: A Reader puts the matter within a larger framework by quoting another musician, Mel Powell, that Goodman was “one of the very, very few white people I’ve known who had not a single fiber of racism in him. He was absolutely, authentically color-blind….One of the real giveaways to his outlook was that he could be as rude to a black man as to a white man. He did not get patronizing or suddenly gentle. Not at all. And I always found that admirable.”

Longtime devotees of professional football will recognize the same attitude in a man four years Goodman’s junior, Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. “He treats us all alike,” one of his players supposedly said, “like dogs.”

Scions of immigrant families, the two men also burned to succeed, driving themselves perhaps more mercilessly than anyone else. Professional triumph came at something of a price in both cases. Goodman, as we’ve seen, was more admired than loved, while Lombardi’s ferocious, inward-turning anxiety probably fed the cancer that killed him at age 57.

Two last aspects of the James quote are left for me to remark on. The first is race. James was reacting to several critics and musicians who have downgraded Goodman in comparison with black musicians and band leaders. This seems to me churlish. Just as it is inconceivable to deny the central African-American contribution to jazz, it is also impossible to deny Goodman’s part in the story. He excelled on the clarinet in the jazz, pop and classical realms—something that few other musicians of any race could match.

Second, though the occasion for this post is Goodman’s birth, I’d like to close by going full-circle: to his death. His daughter, hurt as she was by her father’s thoughtlessness, could also only marvel at his perseverance in the face of cancer, making sure to practice every day, no matter how awful he felt. Goodman died, in fact, rehearsing for a Mostly Mozart festival in June 1986.

Fans of the jazz legend might want to listen to WKCR, the radio station of my alma mater, Columbia University, as they air, through June, a tribute to Goodman in celebration of his centennial.