Ten Years in the Tub (133 page)

Authors: Nick Hornby

BOOK: Ten Years in the Tub

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My constant companion during the Jazz Age has been the magnificent
Penguin Guide to Jazz
, and it was while browsing through the early pages (it works chronologically) that I came across a reference to Artie Shaw's “extraordinary life.” A few days later, a quick search for “best jazz biographies” on the internet threw up a recommendation for Tom Nolan's book, and the one-two punch resulted in a one-click. It was a serendipitous buy:
Artie Shaw: King of the Clarinet
describes the life of a man who seemed to let the twentieth-century entertainment industry flow through him. Born in 1910, he was a professional musician by 1925; he was old enough to see Bix Beiderbecke play, and he employed Billie Holiday. He married, among others, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Kathleen Winsor, the woman who wrote
Forever Amber
; he married Turner in the middle of the night in Las Vegas, after a first date that also somehow managed to find room for Shaw's friend Phil Silvers. The date only took place because Shaw's lover, Betty Grable, was out of town and he was bored; conveniently, Turner was free because she'd just had a fight with her fiancÃ©. (Oh, and by marrying her, Shaw also managed to break Judy Garland's
heart.) He hung out with Jack Kerouac, and bailed Arnold Schoenberg out of a financial crisis. He appeared on a chat show with Richard Burton and Lee Harvey Oswald's mother. He bought the film rights to
The Man Who Fell to Earth
and, appalled that Americans weren't able to see it, turned distributor for the British thriller
SÃ©ance on a Wet Afternoon
âthe lead actor, Kim Stanley, ended up with an Academy Award nomination. If the book sounds nuts, it's because Shaw's life was nuts.

He quit music, apparently bored and intellectually frustrated, when he was in his mid-forties, and he spent the rest of his long life trying to write and becoming embroiled in increasingly unlikely lawsuits: the unfortunate director of a 1985 Oscar-winning documentary about him found herself in litigation for many years, with Shaw claiming that the film was “collaborative” and demanding half a million dollars for the co-labor. But for a quarter of a century Shaw was a brilliant, and enormously popular, bandleader, earning tens of thousands of dollars a week in the 1930s, playing six shows a day to frenzied jitterbugging teenagers. Nolan's book is a riveting picture of a world that you can hardly believe ever existed, and I would never have found it if it hadn't been for Will Hermes's mighty shove.

I cannot give him any credit, I think, for the two works of fiction I've read recently. Harriet Lane's first novel,
Alys, Always
, was a recommendation from a friend, and it was a good one: Lane's book, reminiscent of ZoÃ« Heller's equally gripping
Notes on a Scandal
, is a disquieting, brilliantly observed, and admirably patient psychologicalâ¦Well, it's not a thriller in the conventional sense. There's an accidental death, in the first chapter, but there are no guns, and there are no crimes, and it's set in the world of literary London, so there are only so many thrills that even a writer as good as Lane can wring out. One of her real achievements, in fact, is to exert a grip without ever bending out of shape what can be, let's face it, a pretty sleepy world. (And before American readers start feeling smug, I've spent some time in literary New York and literary San Francisco, too, and there aren't nearly as many uzis and orgies as you'd assume in those milieus, either.) (Unless I haven't been invited to the right parties, which is, I grant you, always a possibility.) Lane's narrator is an apparently harmless assistant on the books pages of a national newspaper who is given the
chance to worm her way into the family of a famous writer, a chance she takes with a quease-inducing sangfroid;
Alys, Always
is about ambition and class and the sort of amour propre that is very particular to a certain kind of famous author, and Lane really nails it all.

I didn't know how to read my other novel, Padgett Powell's extraordinary
The Interrogative Mood
. I finished it, and loved it, but I have absolutely no idea if I did it right. There are, it seems to me, two ways of getting through it. There's the conventional, read-a-few-pages-in-the-bath-and-at-bedtime way; it's not long, and you'd be done in a few days. And then there's the other way, the way that it probably deserves: you think about the questions, the ones that are asking to be thought about, anyway, in which case this may well be the last novel you ever read.

The Interrogative Mood
consists of nothing but questions, literallyâparagraph after paragraph after paragraph of them. It is a novel, though, and not some kind of self-help questionnaire, because a character emerges from the relentless probing, and even a narrative, of sorts. Sometimes the questioner, Powell's fictional creation, lets slip a personal detail, through his personal interests, and the idiosyncratic phrasing of his queries. Some of them are cranky: “Is good amateur theatre oxymoronic?” “Wasn't the world better when the word âhaberdasher' was current?” Some of them make you laugh: “Do you credit that a man seriously advanced âCogito, ergo sum' with a straight face?” “Would you rather play a board game with a child all day or go over Niagara Falls in a barrel?” Some of them make you feel dumb and incompetent: “Do you know how gyroscopes function aeronautically?” “Can you take apart a clothes dryer and get it going right?” And some of them send you off into a reverie from which, were it not for jobs and children and the need to watch TV, you might never come back: “What period of history most interests you?” “Do you know the names of your first three lovers?” “Whom do you regard as a bona fide intellectual, and have you known anyone personally that you regard as a bona fide intellectual?” “What is the loudest noise you have ever heard?” “Would any particular failing on your part today be more painful than all other failings?” “Are you aware of a more likable kind of person than yourself that you would like to be like?” It's distracting, isn't it? It's just as well most literature
doesn't make you think like that, over and over again, three or four times a page, or we'd never get anything read. I'm similarly grateful that most literature doesn't change your life, otherwise you'd be spun round like a sock in a tumble-dryer every time you sat on a bus or a toilet or wherever you do your reading. Does anyone know whether Lee Morgan made another decent album after
The Sidewinder
?