Odd Jobs (18 page)

Yet we do not read fiction for information, informative though it can be. Unlike journalism, history, or sociology, fiction does not give us facts snug in their accredited truth, to be accepted and absorbed like pills, for our undoubted good; we
make
fiction true, as we read it. Fiction can poison our minds, as it did those of Madame Bovary and Don Quixote. It offers to enlarge our sense of possibilities, of potential freedom; and freedom is dangerous. The bourgeois, capitalist world, compared with the medieval hierarchies it supplanted and with the Communist hierarchies that would supplant it,
is
a dangerous one, where failure can be absolute and success may be short-lived. The novel and the short story rose with the bourgeoisie, as exercises in democratic feeling and in individual adventure.
Pamela, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe
—what do they tell us but that our entrepreneurism, on one level or another, may succeed? If fiction is in decline, it is because we have lost faith in the capacity of the individual to venture forth and suffer the consequences of his dreams. Myself, I feel that this most flexible and capacious of artistic forms still holds out its immense space to our imaginations, still answers to a hope within us of more adventure. What is important, if not the human individual? And where can individuality be better confronted, appraised, and enjoyed than in fiction’s shapely lies?

L
IKE MANY ANOTHER
would-be practitioner in the arts, I caught the bug from popular culture: coloring books, animated cartoons, comic books, songs on the radio, radio drama and comedy, the so-called slick magazines, and the movies. These, in the era before television, filled my waking and dream life with images of glamour, heroism, grace, droll
resilience, and doomed beauty. To get on the mysterious other side of this veil of illusion and become, like Frank Morgan’s foxy Wizard of Oz, a producer of it, seemed self-evidently worth aspiring to. I began by copying comic-strip characters from the daily newspaper and have ended up by writing novels and book reviews, but the causes of this deflected career—opportunity, aptitude—seem merely accidental compared with the seminal impulse toward pretense and performance; I would not have minded becoming a movie star like Errol Flynn or a pop comedian like Jack Benny or a dancer like Ray Bolger. Just as long as it wasn’t a real job, that took place in the world I could see around me, where my father and the fathers of my friends labored.

Since popular culture nurtures us as children and serves lifelong as culture enough for the majority of our fellow countrymen, it seems ungrateful to seek out what distinguishes it from “high” art. In the field of fiction, the distinction seems especially elusive, since all fiction is designed to be read and, before that, to be bought. Producing a best-seller does not utterly disgrace a “serious” novelist—Nabokov, Pasternak, Philip Roth, E. L. Doctorow have all done it—but a consistent best-seller producer like James Michener and Stephen King makes us uneasy; there must be something wrong with him. The novel, but a few centuries old, began as a form of popular culture, and the large and weepy publics of Dickens and Dostoevsky are part, though not the “highest” part, of their greatness. This century brought with it a disdain for the crowd-pleasers of the previous, and if Henry James never quite realized that the price of excellence is a large neglect, James Joyce and Marcel Proust certainly did; the publication of their masterpieces required, respectively, heavy patronage and a private income. Yet Mann’s
Buddenbrooks
was widely enjoyed, and the taint of popular success clung to Hemingway, for all his purism, and commercial dealings pursued the hectically modernist Faulkner.

No convenient market distinction exists in fiction like that in art between commercial illustration, created for reproduction, and easel painting, created for single sale and museum display. Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy is popular culture; Andy Warhol’s copy of Gould’s Dick Tracy is high art. A more complicated appeal is essayed by the latter—ironical, self-referential, and aimed at connoisseurs. High art, we might say, is art which presumes knowledge of other art; popular culture is prepared to deal with the untutored. The difference is not very deep, it seems to me, and crossovers and problematical instances are not hard to find. The
thrust—the basic exploitation of our human weakness for color and rhythm, story and spectacle—is the same, and while popular culture need know nothing of high art, a high art entirely detached from popular culture would be as sterile as Esperanto or the Enlightenment religion invented by the
philosophes
.

F
OR MANY
, popular music is more pain than pleasure, and any of us, trapped on a subway car with a ghetto blaster or in an elevator leaking old Mantovani, might admit there is much too much of it. That hypothetical visitor from Mars we used to talk about, before Mars was exposed as a spherical pink desert lightly frosted at the poles, would surely be struck by this incessant and apparently inutile accompaniment to earthly lives, as we move from musical alarm clock to car radio to a workplace insidiously saturated with psychologically programmed Muzak through a lunchtime stroll amid mendicant buskers and break-dancers and, after work, to a tinkling drink in a bar with an old-fashioned jukebox and, if not home to a suburban house where teen-age children have their tapes turned way up, then on to a romantic rendezvous orchestrated by a gypsy band at the restaurant, a cocktail pianist with the nightcap, and sleepy old Sinatra records in the dimmed apartment. What do they
mean
, all these tunes, as miraculously as snowdrops no two quite alike but again like snowdrops melting over the days into gray slush and then into air, thin air?

Hormones, the answer must be. Popular music, save for the small fraction designed to excite martial or religious ardor, has to do with mating and break-up, with love and its losses, with the anticipation of love reaching deep into childhood (Lollypop Pop) and its recollection extending far into senescence (Golden Oldies). We dance, we touch, we shut our eyes, we become the song. From the decades’ massive flow of technologically broadcast songs we each extract an emotional autobiography. The first popular songs that memorably impinged upon my evolution were “Playmates,” with its oddly thrilling invitation to “look down my rain barrel, slide down my cellar door,” and, in 1939, “Oh, Johnny!” The little girls chanted “How you can love!” at me on the way
to second grade and back, my ears and cheeks burning and all my conscious desires simply bent upon getting to my next balsa-wood model airplane.

Then came the Great Patriotic War, and “Sleepy Lagoon” and “Paper Doll” and “That Old Black Magic” (icy fingers up and down my spine!) along with the relatively asexual “Mairsy Doats” (but what did it
mean
, to “kiddley-divey, too”?) and “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” Postwar, there was high school, and dances in the gym, and drooping crêpe paper affixed to the basketball backboard, and plump white strapless shoulders in the violet lights, and “Tenderly,” and “They Say It’s Wonderful,” and six boys on the stage doing our local small-band version of the big-band sound, saving (what else?) “Star Dust” for last. The hormones had the tune down pat, though the lyrics still wondered why they spent the lonely nights dreaming of a song. The big-band sound was an erotic engine, a soft machine of sax-throb and phallic clarinet moving down its tracks as irresistibly as the Chattanooga choo-choo. That certain party at the station, in old satin and lace, we used to call Funny Face turned into Doris Day announcing a sentimental journey (“never thought my heart could be so yearny”) whose final prolonged syllable “ho-o-o-ommmmme” pulled open a delicious abyss of female power. On the jukebox at Stephens’ Sweet Shop, the sly laid-back melodiousness of Bing Crosby and the Ink Spots gave way to big, twanging voices: Frankie Laine and Patti Page, “That Lucky Old Sun” and “Tennessee Waltz.” Laine was especially thrilling, hollering to his mules and his ghost riders in the sky and wanting to go where the wild goose went and mincing out the exact specifics of his “dee-zy-yuh” (“we’ll sip a little glass of wine, I’ll gaze into your eyes divine, I’ll feel the touch of your lips, press-
sing
on mi-yun”). His voice was gutsy; it rubbed those secret spots within.

The popular music of the late Forties and early Fifties, falling between the fading of the big bands and the beginning of rock, is generally forgotten; no jazzomaniacs or rock addicts or show-tune nuts visit its files, and Golden Oldie disc jockeys rarely touch it. But it has preëmpted millions of my neurons with half-remembered titles and lyrics. Girls’ names: “Peg o’ My Heart” and “Amy” and “Laura” and “Linda” (“when I go to sleep, I never count sheep, I count all the charms about Linda”). Strange little men: “The Old Lamplighter” and “Nature Boy” and that old master painter from the faraway hills whom we teen-agers so inevitably recast as the old masturbator. Who could get moony over “Golden
Earrings” or “Tree in the Meadow”? We could, that’s who. In 1948 James C. Petrillo called every orthodox musician out on strike and left us to dream along with ununionized sweet potatoes, banjos, bones, whistling choruses (“Heartaches”), and musical saws; we dreamed on anyhow. “So Tired,” made great in Russ Morgan’s arrangement, was, with “Star Dust,” the epitome of violet-spotlight chic, the draggy end of the high-school dance, the fag end of our sophisticated smoky days—“so tired, so tired of living” and all of seventeen.

Then came college and, for me, a kind of pop silence. There was no music in the libraries then, and little in the dorms—it was believed to interfere with thought processes, rather than (as now) to be essential to them. I do seem to recall, from those four lost years, incredulously auditing in a humble Cambridge eatery Johnny Ray’s “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” I knew it was the end of something, but I didn’t know of how very much. Rock ’n’ roll began to shake the Eisenhower chapel; Elvis Presley suddenly achieved divinity—but all out of my earshot. The first song I remember distinctly getting to me, post-grad, was “Blueberry Hill,” where Fats Domino claimed to have found his thrill. Was finding your thrill anything like kiddley-diveying? No matter: I knew in my hormones what he meant, and just why Chubby Checker wanted to twist again like we did last summer. We had become suburbanites and wage-earners and parents, but our glands were less quiescent than they should have been: the sounds of revolution (Baez and Dylan; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Sonny and Cher) trickled through the Marimekko curtains, and our children taught us to frug. Oh, those glorious piping sugar-harmonied Supremes records before Diana Ross became a law unto herself! And of course the Beatles, who were intellectually ambitious even, and kept going deeper, just like Beethoven. I suppose my heartfelt farewell to popular music came in England, at the end of the Sixties, crooning and thumping and blinking back tears through the endless chorus of “Hey Jude,” in which the Beatles could be heard dissolving. Take a sad song and make it better.

But you never really say goodbye; popular music is always there, flavoring our American lives, keeping our mortal beat, a murmuring subconscious sneaking up out of the car radio with some abrupt sliding phrase that hooks us into jubilation, into aspiration. I like it when, say, Madonna’s “True Blue” comes on: catchy. Long ago, driving to school with my father on cold winter mornings, I would lean into the feeble glow of the radio dial as if into warmth: this was me, this yearniness
canned in New York and beamed from Philadelphia, beamed through the air to guide me, somehow, toward a wonderful life.

F
ORTY YEARS AGO
and four hundred miles from Boston, I sat in my father’s Chevrolet, in the Shillington (Pennsylvania) High School parking lot, and listened to the seventh game of the 1946 World Series, the Red Sox versus the Cardinals. Eighth inning, score 3–3, Cardinals up, Enos Slaughter on first base, Harry Walker at the plate; there’s a hit to center field, Culberson (substituting for the injured Dom DiMaggio) throws to the infield, shortstop Johnny Pesky cuts it off—Slaughter is being waved around third! Pesky hesitates, the throw is late, Slaughter scores!! The Cardinals hold on to win the game and the World Series. I don’t know if I cried, sitting alone in that venerable Chevrolet, but I was only fourteen and well might have. Dazed and with something lost forever, I emerged into the golden September afternoon, where my classmates were nuzzling their steadies, sneaking smokes, and shooting baskets in a blissful animal innocence I could no longer share.

What had led me, who had never been north of Greenwich, Connecticut, and didn’t know Beacon Hill from Bunker Hill or Fenway Park from Park Street Under, to attach my heart to that distant aggregation? Ted Williams had made a dent in my consciousness before the war, but it was the ’46 Sox that made me a passionate fan. What a team that was!—Ted in left, Dom in center, Doerr at second, Pesky at short, big Rudy York having a great twilight season at first, Boo Ferriss and Tex Hughson on the mound. Though the Cardinals squeaked by them in that series, the Sox looked sure to cruise to pennants at least until I got out of high school in 1950. But in fact they didn’t, coming perilously close in ’48 and ’49 but not quite having it in the clutch. The postwar pattern of thrills and spills was set, and whenever they came to Philadelphia, there I was, hanging by the radio.

With its nine defensive men widely spaced on the field, baseball is an easier game to visualize than a fast shuffle like basketball and hockey, and until girls and a driver’s license got me by the throat I spent many an idyllic summer day indoors huddled on the easy chair next to the hoarse
little family Philco. The announcers’ voices in their granular shades of excitement, and the wraparound crowd noise, and the sound in the middle distance of the ball being hit, not to mention the uproarious clatter when a foul ball sailed into the broadcast booth, made a vivid picture in ways superior to what I would see when, once or twice a summer, I was bused the fifty miles to Shibe Park’s bleachers. I even kept box scores of my audited games, and listened on the rainout days when the play-by-play of some remote and feeble contest like the Browns against the Senators would be verbalized from a teletype whose chattering could be heard in the lulls. The two Philadelphia teams were pretty feeble themselves, and created the vacuum into which my irrational ardor for the Red Sox nicely filled.