Cultural Amnesia (32 page)

Listening in much later from a long way across the Pacific, I was very glad to agree with him. I found
bebop a fascinating area when I began to explore it, but I was always worried by how seldom I felt compelled to tap my foot. I loved the Thelonious Monk slow numbers and even some of the fast
ones, but it was partly because they swung. (In his last phase, which I saw something of, Monk was so stoned that he would occasionally grab for a chord and miss the piano altogether, but in
better times his left hand rocked along no matter how oblique his right hand got in its dialogue with the infinite.) The bop that didn’t swing drove jazz towards the unflowering graveyard
where pretension gets the blessing of academic approbation. It was a destination towards which the exhausted higher arts had spent a hundred years looking for refuge, but what was disconcerting
was the way the popular arts headed for the same terminus almost as soon as they were invented. Even without the politically inspired character of bop—let’s play something they
can’t steal—jazz would probably have taken the same course as the movie musical, in which a magically equipped performer like Gene Kelly sadly proved that if he were left to himself
he would ditch the self-contained show numbers and turn the whole movie into a bad ballet. The fatal urge to be taken seriously would still have been there even if the musicians had all been
white. But the best of them were black, and status was a matter of life and death.

Not even Ellington was immune to its lure. He was a superior being, but it took the
Europeans to treat him like one. In Europe he sat down with royalty, as if his nickname were a real title. In America no president before Nixon ever invited him to the White House. In America he
had to keep his orchestra on the road, and some of the roads led near enough to the South for Jim Crow to be waiting. Ellington did his best to stay out of all that, but it remained disgracefully
true that there was plenty of humiliation available even in the north. It had to be faced: the tour was the key to his economics. He met the payroll as a bandleader, not as a composer. It was
understandable that composition should become, in his own mind, his ticket to immortality. As a lover of his creative life I tried hard to agree, but on the evidence of my ears I found the
large-scale works smaller in every way than the three-minute miracles. For one thing, the large-scale works didn’t swing, except in selected passages that seemed to have been thrown in as
sops to impatient dancers who shouldn’t really have been in the hall. The set-piece suite of his last years on the world tour, the Sacred Music Concert, was the etiolated culmination of his
adventures in large-scale composition—the end point of a long development in an art-form for which his own best work had proved that “development” was an inappropriate word. I
attended the Sacred Music Concert in Great St. Mary’s at Cambridge while I was an undergraduate. It was a privilege to see the grand old man still in command of his destiny and his charm,
but there was too much sacred and not enough music. When the sidemen rose for their solos, showers of notes were no substitute for the carved phrases of their forgotten ancestors. Ellington must
have known it: he was conducting a tour of his own tomb. Later on, outside in King’s Parade, I saw him ease himself into the limo with his old-time bass saxophonist Harry Carney, sole
survivor from the days of glory, the only Ellingtonian sideman who was ever allowed to ride in the car with the chief, instead of in the bus with everyone else.

From the limo before it pulled away, Ellington smiled and twiddled his fingers at the fans, the bags under his eyes like
sets of matched luggage. (I got a wink from him, which I filed away among my best memories.) He had seen mobs in his time who would have wanted his blood if he had shown his face, but there was
no wariness in his glance. There was not much energy either. I guessed that it was goodbye, and indeed
Ellington retired not long afterwards; but the sad truth was that the
creative spirit I had so admired was long gone. It had already started to go at the time when I first heard his music on record, in the late fifties. At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, the
Ellington band’s long disquisition on the theme of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” with its marathon tenor solo from Paul Gonsalves, had made world headlines on the music
pages. A rejuvenation for Ellington’s career, the performance was transferred to a long-playing record—it was pretty well the first time that the LP had been exploited to show what a
jazz band could do in a space longer than three minutes—and in Sydney we played “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” over and over, making learned comments. Scholars among us knew
which Joe Jones it was, plain Joe Jones or Philly Joe Jones, who was slapping the edge of the stage to flog Gonsalves onward for yet another chorus. The debating points were made in mid-dance:
nobody listening was stationary, even if he was sitting down. The whole number swung so hard that you had to hit something: sometimes it was your neighbour.

Driven by that sweet stampede of rhythm to a belated acquaintance with what Ellington had done before, I realized only in
retrospect that the rot had already set in. The possibility of more room for the band to breathe was tempting him away from the delicious intricacies he had been forced into when time was tight.
Though the large-scale suites from the past all turned up on vinyl along with their more recent companions—“Such Sweet Thunder” began its life that way—it was all too
evident that three minutes on shellac had been his ideal form from the start: he was a sonneteer, not an epic poet. The standard was set in the Cotton Club days, when cars still had running
boards. As the LP Ellington anthologies came out, I built up a library that went all the way back to his recorded beginnings. Bar by bar I drank in the wa-wa sonorities of Bubber Miley and Tricky
Sam Nanton, for both of whom the effect would have been dissipated if they had gone on longer than a chorus or two. As Ellington’s various ensembles succeeded each other, with the personnel
always changing but a few always seeming to come back at the right moment, the soloists provided one of the connecting threads. There was a particularly tremendous Ellington band in the
mid-thirties, with Rex Stewart playing open horn to complement Cootie Williams and his sour
manipulation of the plunger mute: two different kinds of shining trumpet, one a
golden bell, the other a wail in the night. The way those two voices would call to each other was quintessential Ellington, for whom the sounds of the city—“Harlem Airshaft,”
“Take the A Train”
—
were a collective inspiration for a melodic urban speech that no poet could ever match, not even Hart Crane in
The Bridge
, or Galway Kinnell in his wonderful mini-epic
The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New
World
.
But Ellington’s toughest connecting thread was the compactness of the head arrangements: as precise as if it had been scored yet as
loose and easy as a jam session, the section work never even riffed without varying and developing the figure. The word “development” fitted for once, and in the only way it should:
to mean a deepening, an enrichment. Those inspired soloists, each of them a composer in himself, built the transparent bridges between the dense passages of ensemble voicing, and always with an
unfaltering, rhythm-driven melodic surge even when the pace was slow. When he was holding down a chair for Ellington, the most lingering alto sax solo from Johnny Hodges was never boring for a
moment. Anyone who thought that Hodges’s honey sweet tone could never be boring anyway was at liberty to find out otherwise by listening to the space he gave himself on recordings of the
orchestra he made the capital mistake of trying to lead under his own name.

Ellington gave his superbly self-trained horses enough time—just enough time and no more—to perform every
trick they knew, but they had to do it inside the corral. The result would have sounded like confinement if the rhythmic pulse, the swing, had not made it sound like freedom. As Nabokov said of
Pushkin’s tetrametric stanza, it was an acoustical paradise. The 1940–1941 band was Ellington’s apotheosis, and as a consequence contained the materials of its own destruction,
because all those star soloists wanted bands of their own. Hodges wasn’t the only one who found out how hard it was to be the man in charge, and ever and anon the chastened escapees would
make their way back to Ellington, but never again were enough of them available at once to recapitulate the hallucinating complexity of those beautiful recordings. I memorized every bar of every
track, and without trying. Vintage Ellington was a language: many-voiced, a conversation in itself, but a language none the less, or rather all the more. The most
wonderful
thing about the Ellington language was that it could be listened to only in the way it was created, through love.

Scholarship and biography, too often twinned in this regard, are always trying to break up
Ellington’s language by analysing it to pieces. In his later years, Ellington became more and more the subject of learned enquiry, and on the whole it did him little good. (He had long
before tried to warn the world against too much analysis: “That kind of talk stinks up the place.”) Once it was established that Billy Strayhorn’s contribution as an arranger
had been underestimated, it was soon discovered that Ellington’s contribution had been overestimated. Out on the road, Ellington had freed himself from the dominance of any single woman by
sleeping with them two at a time. Now they were old and ready to talk. Thus we heard of the barbarism behind his suave façade. It could now be deduced that, as a cynical stroke of
self-exculpation, male chauvinism had expressed itself as sentimentality: “Mood Indigo” was a midnight flit by Don Giovanni. But scholarship and biography could never add enough
irrelevant nuance to dilute the truth, which was that the great man had no flaws within himself which he could not transmute into a living song. The flaw that he could not control was in the
country he lived in. Even he, a man born to rule, had to fight for prestige, the only armour against perpetual insult. He did it by expanding the lateral scope of his inventiveness beyond its
natural compass, in the effort to become yet another American composer, like Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber or Charles Ives. He felt that as a necessity, but the necessity was merely political.
Acting from an inner necessity, he was already
the
American composer, having taken jazz to the point where no further satisfactions could be added in order
to make it different. They could only be subtracted. The new boys had to go somewhere. Ellington was too generous not to realize that one of the reasons they went there was because of him, so he
was careful never to criticize them too hard. He made a joke of it: it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. But the joke was true, and by extension it is true for all the
arts.

Federico Fellini

W. C. Fields

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gustave Flaubert

Sigmund Freud

Egon Friedell

François Furet

FEDERICO FELLINI

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) was born in Rimini but dreamed of Rome, where he arrived in
time to see the Fascist regime launch itself on the final adventure that ensured its ruin. His gift for drawing caricatures was his ticket to the big smoke. Mussolini banned American comic
books in 1938 but for Fellini’s generation the damage was already done. Fellini’s early work in the comic-strip medium was heavily influenced by American models: he drew bootleg
versions of
Flash Gordon
and
Mandrake
. After the war the American comic strip, no longer officially frowned upon,
became more powerful in Italy than ever, to the extent that not even Communist intellectuals, in the 1960s, saw anything incongruous about poring over the monthly comic-strip anthology called
Linus
, after the
Peanuts
character. It remains a safe bet, however, that Fellini’s ability, in his
formative period, to fight off the siren call of the revolutionary left, had something to do with his mental immersion in an imaginary America. All of Fellini’s movies, whether sooner
or later, culminate in his masterpiece
8
¹
⁄
2
, and the hallucinatory imagery of
8
¹
⁄
2
begins in the comics: one of the most
conspicuous examples of how, in the twentieth century, the popular and high arts established an intimate connection. Other low-life
forms that Fellini scraped a living
from early on were vaudeville and radio drama. The story of the great director’s unsophisticated origins is told well by John Baxter in his
Fellini
(1993). My own essay “Mondo Fellini,” collected in
Even as We Speak
(2001) and
As of This Writing
(2003), is an attempt to record the formative impact that a man accustomed to pleasing millions of people at a time could have on a single
life.

When I was a little boy I believed I looked a little bit like
Harold Lloyd. I put on my father’s spectacles and to make the resemblance even closer I took out the lenses.

—FEDERICO FELLINI,
Intervista
, P. 76

O
NE WOULD
LIKE
to have seen Fellini’s Harold Lloyd impersonation. Did he do stunts on the dizzying cornice of a
palazzo
? Most of Harold Lloyd’s
apparently death-defying stuff was done with camera angles and false perspectives, and at least once he used a double; but it is easy to imagine the young Fellini trying it for real, not yet
having figured out that cinema is an illusion. On a similar impulse, at the age of eleven I almost killed myself imitating Batman leaping from the roof of a building site into a sand-pit. If I
hadn’t landed flat on my back I might have been worse than winded, but at least the world would have been deprived of no more than a writer, a species of which there are always many. A
world deprived of Fellini would have had something more rare to mourn: a true director,
il regista
, the master of the revels. “
È una festa, la mia vita
,” says Guido in
8
¹
⁄
2
: my life is a party. It was true, and he invited everybody.

Fred and Ginger
is merely the most obvious case of Fellini’s
debt to American popular culture. Even when they don’t look it, his works are saturated with its influence, right down to their visual style. After Italy pulled out of World War II, Fellini
had his beginnings in Italy’s teeming subculture of comic strips and
fumetti
, which were essentially comic strips made up from posed photographs.
Before the war that whole subculture had been inspired by America’s example, and not even the Fascist regime, when it put an end to the syndication of American comic strips, felt it had the
power to cancel Mickey Mouse. Under his
Italian name Topolino, Mickey continued his adventures. (After the war, his name was given to Fiat’s most popular small car.)
Near the end of his career, Fellini cooperated with the brilliantly accomplished pornographic cartoonist Marinara to produce a
bande dessinée
called
Voyage à Tulum
, a sort of free-form sequel to
8
¹
⁄
2
and
La
Città delle Donne
. Marinara’s phantasmagoric style took a lot from the American comic-strip tradition that started with Little Nemo and ran right through the parodic
Mad
magazine period in the 1950s to its self-consuming apotheosis in the extravagant layouts of the head comix in the 1960s. But in
Voyage à Tulum
, when he celebrated Fellini’s big-screen extravaganzas, you can see how well Marinara found a match between the initial purity and the
culminating sophistication. He found it by getting back to their common ancestor. Fellini, too, started with the American visionary tradition that grew from the restless mind of
Little Nemo
. The big pictures of Fellini’s mature period, from
La Dolce Vita
through to
E
la Nave Va
, all look like something that Winsor McCay’s little boy Nemo dreamed of, and could wake from only by falling out of bed. In his introduction to the published script of
8
¹
⁄
2
, Fellini said that the Marcello Mastroianni character, vis-à-vis the same actor’s character in
La Dolce
Vita
, had to grow in stature because his enemies were more dangerous. But the enemies were all in his mind: his obsessional neuroses.

When Fellini said that in
8
¹
⁄
2
he found a pretext for putting in everything
that had been tormenting him for years, he meant everything that had been tormenting him all his life. Critics have searched in vain for literary precursors of Fellini’s grandiose Freudian
dreams. Proust? Joyce? The answer lies much closer to hand. In
8
¹
⁄
2
, Mastroianni is dressed like that because his director is remembering Mandrake the Magician. The
American comic strip was the first art-form to exploit the image-generating possibilities of a sleeping mind on its endless journey through the caves and hallways of dreamland. (Tenniel had
merely illustrated Lewis Carroll: he didn’t take off on his own.) Fascism was a kind of dreamland too, as Fellini emphasized in
Amarcord
. But the
dreamland turned to a nightmare while he was growing up. Nazism and Soviet communism combined to drown the ceremony of innocence. Fellini kept his innocence, but it was bound to look like
childishness. It was Italy’s fate to have its social fabric poisoned first by
the Fascists, then by the Nazis and finally by the Communists, whose propaganda campaign
against the liberating allies, and especially against the Americans, attained a level of virulence hard to imagine from this distance: reading what the Communist newspapers said about the bombing
of Cassino, you would have thought that Guernica had been bombed again, and never have dreamed that the war against Germany was not yet over. Post-war Italian cinema was left-wing because the
left was almost all there was: under the pressure of Communist ambitions, the intelligentsia as a whole was polarized between party-line orthodoxy and the independent left, but further to the
right there was next to nothing except the wilfully eccentric. Nominally an alumnus of neo-realism, Fellini looked as if he had gone to school in a party frock. Even among those who lauded him
for the richness of his imagination, it occurred to nobody that he was the director with the most penetrating social vision. Such an estimation became possible only in retrospect, after it became
apparent that no universal plan for society could be compatible with the autonomy of art. The artist who made it most apparent was Fellini himself. The advantage of those lensless spectacles was
that he could see an untinted reality. He might have looked like a clown, but from his side of the empty frames he could see the world as it was, and so transform it into fantasies that would
last.

W. C. FIELDS