Book by Book (14 page)

At his own best, the highly opinionated B.H. Haggin was nearly Shaw's American counterpart: “It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.” Hag-gin adopted a kind of New Critical approach to music, focusing his attention strictly on what he heard with his own ears, utterly disdaining received opinion. He was absolutely self-confident about his draconian judgments (and, not surprisingly, grew querulous and paranoid in his old age). His
Music for One Who Enjoys Hamlet
and
New Listener's Musical Companion
remain among the most exhilarating and provocative introductions to classical music ever written.

Composers themselves have often brought out first-rate musical commentary. Think of Hector Berlioz's
Evenings in the Orchestra
or Claude Debussy's writings as Monsieur Croche, the dilettante hater. In the United States we can look to such masters as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Ned Rorem, all of whom produced essays and books for a general audience. Thomson and Rorem are my own favorites.

In the early 1970s I bought a used paperback (seventy-five cents) of Thomson's
Music Reviewed: 1940-1954
in a ramshackle bookshop near the bus station in Oneonta, New York. (It became one of my sacred texts, up there with William Empson's
Seven Types of Ambiguity
and Randall Jarrell's
Poetry and the Age)
Early in the book Thomson blasts the then revered Vladimir Horowitz as
not so much a virtuoso as a showman: “He is out to wow the public, and wow it he does. He makes a false accent or phrasing anywhere he thinks it will attract attention.” The roly-poly Thomson, who worked with Gertrude Stein
{Four Saints in Three Acts)
and knew James Joyce, was also a superb letter writer: “I did not notice the misprint ‘Angus Dei.' Theologically the cow might as well have been adopted by the Deity as the lamb. Both are peaceful beasts.” In a beautifully mean epigram, Thomson once compared composers Elliott Carter and Aaron Copland in the role of Great Man: “When Aaron reached the top, at least he sent the elevator back down.”

Thomson's longer essays on music are just as thoughtfully amusing. Take this passage from
Music Right and Left:

If a lady of means really wants an artistic husband, a composer is about the best bet, I imagine. Painters are notoriously unfaithful, and they don't age gracefully. They dry up and sour. Sculptors are of an incredible stupidity. Poets are either too violent or too tame, and terrifyingly expensive. Also, due to the exhausting nature of their early lives, they are likely to be impotent after forty. Pianists and singers are megalomaniacs; conductors worse. Besides, executants don't stay home enough. The composer, of all art-workers in the vineyard, has the prettiest manners and ripens the most satisfactorily. His intellectual and his amorous powers seldom give out completely before death. His musical powers not uncommonly increase.

In our own day, Ned Rorem is nearly as famous for his youthful “amorous powers” as for his music. (He has been generally
acclaimed as our leading composer of art-song.) Once an enfant terrible and now a grand old man, Rorem is worldly, witty, a confirmed Francophile, and deliciously immodest, in both his witty diaries and waspish criticism. Once when recalling Georges Au-ric's music for Jean Cocteau's
Orphee
, he punned (think
Hamlet)
,“Alas, poor Auric.” He notoriously acclaimed Paul McCartney and John Lennon as serious composers. Above all, he gossips wonderfully well: The composer Francis Poulenc “never chased . .. pretty boys. . . . Poulenc's taste ran to overweight gendarmes with handlebar mustaches and to middle-aged businessmen. Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Poulenc once told me, was his ideal.” Just the titles of Rorem's “best of” collections suggest his verbal astringency:
Setting the Tone
and
Settling the Score.

What follows is a baker's dozen of classic works of music that everyone should know. It was wrenching to leave out so much— Thomas Tallis's
Spem in Alium
, Haydn's joyful London symphonies, operas as wonderful as Monteverdi's
Orfeo
, Verdi's
Otello
, and Benjamin Britten's
Billy Budd
, Samuel Barber's haunting
Knoxville: Summer of 1915
, and even such warhorses as Dvo
ák's Cello Concerto and Sibelius's Second Symphony. Still, the masterpieces below are just that—timeless and inexhaustible.

1. Bach,
The Goldberg Variations
(Glenn Gould, 1981)

2. Mozart,
The Marriage of Figaro
(Rene Jacobs)

3. Mozart,
Don Giovanni
(Carlo Maria Giulini)

4. Beethoven,
Late String Quartets
(Vegh Quartet)

5. Beethoven,
Fourth Piano Concerto
(Leon Fleischer, George Szell)

6. Berlioz,
Symphonie Fantastique
(Colin Davis)

7. Schubert,
Winterreise
(Fischer-Dieskau/Moore)

8. Wagner,
Tristan und Isolde
(Wilhelm Furtwangler)

9. Stravinsky,
Le Sacre du Printemps
(Igor Stravinsky)

10. Debussy, solo piano music
(Images, Preludes
, etc.) (Walter Gieseking)

11. Bernstein,
Candide
(Leonard Bernstein)

12. Ella Fitzgerald,
The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books
(Fitzgerald/Nelson Riddle)

13. Compilation disc of ballads, torch songs, and standards: “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” (sung by the Platters); “Cry Me a River,” (Julie London); “Maybe It Was Memphis” (Pam Tillis); “I Was the One” (Jimmie Dale Gilmore); “Somewhere over the Rainbow” (Eva Cassidy); “The Way You Look To-night” (Margaret Whiting).

And, sigh, many others.

There are books . . . which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences. —R
ALPH
W
ALDO
E
MERSON

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks. Those journeys, with their serendipitous discoveries and misguided side trips, allow us to probe our characters, indulge our passions and prejudices, and finally choose books for which we possess a real affinity. Why turn, with wan languor, the pages of the current Brand Name Author when you might grow truly excited by the work of Jean Toomer or Jean Stafford, Djuna Barnes or Jeanette Winterson?

So why are people in general so sheepish, so lemminglike when it comes to the books they will spend hours with? The best seller list deserves much of the blame, because too many of us simply follow its imperious and arcane dictates. Rather than visiting a bookshop or library, rather than actually picking up a new novel or biography and skimming a few pages, we automatically buy the latest hot or fashionable title.

The best seller list tends to distort the character of entire genres. Mention fantasy, for example, and the world thinks elves, magic swords, quests, and Tolkien rip-offs, often set down in a language the likes of which was never heard on land or sea. Similarly, science fiction means
Star Wars
tie-ins or bloated works of space opera. But, as with crime fiction (Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, K. C. Constantine), true artists work in these fields, and they should be better known. Read Ursula Le Guin's
The Left Hand of Darkness
, Gene Wolfe's
Book of the New Sun
, Jack Vance's
The Dying Earth
, or Jonathan Carroll's
The Land of Laughs.
For many readers, these are already established American classics. None of these authors produces the kind of prose only an engineer could love.

If we undercut the hegemony of the fashionable, people might be more willing to try older books from the past. As the Victorian man of letters Samuel Butler observed, “The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.” In a sensible world, those of us with a yen for chills wouldn't simply read Stephen King; we'd also slaver over the strange stories of Robert Aickman and the haunting ones of Vernon Lee. One of the ancient goals of criticism was called the correction of taste. No one
should grow world-weary thinking that John le Carre alone defines the British spy thriller, not in a century that has also produced John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Geoffrey Household, Michael Innes, Len Deighton, and Ian Fleming. But when was the last time you heard anybody talking about Ambler's
A Coffin for Dim-itrios
or Household's
Rogue Male}

Consider major works of intellectual history written in the 1990s. Richard Fletcher's
The Barbarian Conversion
, John Hale's
The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance
, Peter Conrad's
Modern Times, Modern Places
, Peter Washington's
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America
, and John Brewer's study of eighteenth-century England,
The Pleasures of the Imagination
—all proffer the same sort of engaging anecdotes and easygoing didacticism we associate with Dava Sobel's
Longitude.
But these more substantial books go largely unnoticed because they are judged too scholarly, too ambitious, too long. Rather than cutely packaged, bite-sized finger food, these histories spread out like holiday smorgasbords. Think tomes, not totes. Yet anybody who enjoys a best-selling charmer like Simon Winchester's
The Professor and the Madman
would certainly revel in Charles Nicholl's
The Reckoning
, a sus-penseful historical reconstruction of the murder of Christopher Marlowe.

How can the ordinary reader find out about such work? Look through the review sections of newspapers and magazines. Talk to friends about their favorite books. Whenever you meet someone in an interesting profession, ask him or her about the important works in that field or the best introduction to it. Check out the acknowledgments,
blurbs, and bibliographies of books you like. The historian Anthony Grafton led at least one reader to Frances Yates's literally marvel-filled
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
and
The Art of Memory.
Essay collections are often useful: John Updike's several capacious volumes offer introductions to writers both celebrated and neglected. There's even a whole sub-genre of books about books, from Clifton Fadiman's
Lifetime Reading Plan
to his daughter Anne Fadiman's
Ex Libris.
And, of course, the Internet offers an ever-changing array of blogs, author Web sites, Listservs, and online chats. Most of all, though, just go to libraries and bookstores. Browse. Make such visits a regular part of your life. Ask for guidance, or be adventurous. Trust your instincts, not fashion, and, to paraphrase the poet Philip Sidney: Look in thy heart and read!

Most serious novels are machines for producing anxiety. Pick up a classic or a current best seller, and you'll find people in trouble: At the very least marriages break up, serial killers strike, World War III threatens. What, we wonder, will happen next—and to whom? We riffle through the pages with, as reviewers used to say, our pulses racing, stomachs in knots, hearts pounding.

Profound emotion is upsetting; it overturns our lives, uses up our psychic energies and defenses, leaving us vulnerable and more tenderly sensitive to the shocks of life. Well, almost none of us
enjoys
feeling as though we've just been batted around like a tetherball.
Yet this is what most serious novels aim to do, and why we sometimes have to steel ourselves to crack one open.

In fact, the rapport between a reader and his or her book is almost like that between lovers. The relationship grows, envelops a life, lays out new prospects and ways of seeing oneself and the future, is filled with moments of joy and sorrow; when it's over, even its memory enriches as few experiences can. But just as one cannot psychically afford to fall in love too many times, suffer its gantlet of emotions too often and still remain whole, so the novel-reader cannot read too many books of high purpose and harrowing dimension or do so too often. Burnout, a failure to respond with the intensity literature demands, is the result. As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.