Southern Bookman

I Got Rhythm (At Least a Little)

My piano education has progressed recently. A mention in a Wall Street Journal piece of the "I Got Rhythm" chord sequence, the basis for many jazz songs, led me to a Google search and an outline of the sequence. The sequence, in the key of C major on the piece I printed out from the Internet, is great for improvising. And, I love the sound of the chords. Also, with help of a fakebook, I've been going through many of the great old standards of the so-called "American Songbook."

On a recent visit to the library, I found an old George Gershwin musical book, and looked up "I Got Rhythm." The piece, in the key of E (not E flat as I had exprected - many of the standards are in that key, easy for singers, I suppose), followed the seminal chord sequence, but the music looked a bit too daunting for me. Instead, I picked up an instructional book and a collection of Beatles songs. Despite their ability to rock hard, the Beatles often followed the tradition of writers like Gershwin and Cole Porter, especially in wistful tunes like "Michelle" and "Yesterday." I've been wanting to learn "Penny Lane" for quite some time.

As with the Beatles, so many of the standards of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s depended on the lyrics. Some composers, like Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, needed someone to write the words. Gershwin's brother Ira did a commendable job, especially with numbers like "Summertime," and Rodgers partnered with the witty Lorenzo Hart and then the more operatic and sentimental Oscar Hammerstein. One odd fact I remember: With Hart, Rodgers wrote the music first, and with Hammerstein, he wrote the music to Hammerstein's words. Composers like Porter and Irving Berlin wrote music and words.

In the last few years, book publishers have been printing the words of famous lyricists, as if they were poetry. I've looked at several of these collections. With all of their wit and verbal sophistication, such lyrics generally lose something on the page. Without the music, they can appear flat and wooden. But the best of them retain their power and lilt. When I read work like Ira Gershwin's "Summertime," my inner mind recalls the music  and restores it to the words. It's as if the words are lost ghosts, calling for their soulmates to join them.

The Face God Had Given Shakespeare?

The discovery of a possibly new portrait of William Shakespeare, younger and more attractive than the most familiar ones, had the Shakespeare world buzzing this week. The bard's fans find it hard to accept that the balding, ill-shaven, nondescript-looking fellow in the usual portraits could be the greatest genius in the English language. And, those who doubt that Shakespeare really wrote the plays and poems point to the portrait as proof that someone who looks like the neighborhood grocer couldn't have produced such masterpieces.

The newly surfaced portrait (at left) shows a young, dynamic man, resembling Joseph Fiennes, who played the bard in "Shakespeare in Love," rather than, say, Tom Wilkinson, also in the movie. Stanley Wells, the noted Shakespeare scholar, believes the new portrait, the only one apparently painted during the playwright's lifetime, is the right one.  Detractors say that the portrait could just be an idealized Elizabethean portrait of anyone. The nondescript portraits of Shakespeare match the odd-looking statue over his grave at Stratford-Avon.

I have a portrait of Shakespeare on my work-room wall, the one I've seen in folio collections of his work. The Folger Shakespeare portrait shows a middle-aged man with sloping forehead, whiskers, and sad eyes, with heavy bags beneath them. I can imagine this to be a true portrait of Shakespeare, a careworn, compassionate, world-weary man, acutely aware of man's tragic and comic selves.

I've always found this search for an accurate portrait of Shakespeare somewhat off-base. It's fun to speculate how he might have looked, but is it really that vital? We know relatively few  details of Shakespeare's lives, and we don't even have true versions  of his plays. His great masterpieces as performed and read today are the product of the mixing and matching of the multiple surviving copies we have. Countless editors and academicians have puzzled over these remants in trying to come up with "standard versions." Yet, his work lives, despite this fragmented quality; his words, images, metaphors and characters remain vital. To me, what matters is not how he looked, or even who might have created this endlessly vibrant world. The work is what counts.

I was glad to see that John Burns wrote the New York Times story on the Shakespeare portrait. I've been reading Burns' work for years, from war zones all over the world. He covered the fall of the Soviet Union, the civil wars in Bosnia-Herzegovnia and the Iraq war. The Shakespeare wars are surely intense, but so far rather less violent and deadly than other conflicts Burns has covered. Burns has seen enough suffering and death to match Shakespeare. I'm glad that he now has such a fun and less-stressful beat (although London, like the rest of the West, remains under the risk of terrorism).

  

 

Communing With the Ghost of Allen Tate

I've discovered several treasures recently in the free-book rack at my friendly neighborhood library. First, I found the first few volumes of n + 1, the fresh literary journal founded several years ago by the no-longer so young Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Benjamin Kunkel and Marco Roth. I enjoyed reading the journal's amusing and stirring pieces, including one that ruffled the feathers of the pretentious literary critic James Wood. Now, I find Gessen, Geif, Kunkel and Roth frequently appearing in the journals to which I subscribe in my lonely effort to keep print alive - the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

On a subsequent visit to the library, where sweet and charming ladies check out my books, often having to apologize about "the system" being down, I found two issues of one of my favorite literary journals - the Sewanee Review. Last night, I finally got around to reading the winter 2008 issue, which included an enjoyable biographical essay on Allen Tate (photo at left) by Robert Buffington.

The piece covered several months in 1937 and 1938, when Tate and his wife, Caroline Gordon,  encountered a number of literary luminaries of the time. For those not familiar with Tate, he was a major figure in the Southern Agrarian movement, a fine poet, essayist and novelist. Gordon was an outstanding novelist, edited by Scribner's ace Maxwell Perkins along with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. While the Agarians were considered parochial, Buffington's piece shows that Tate and Gordon were members of a vibrant, international literary community. During the months covered, he encounters Theodore Roethke, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, T.S. Eliot, Albert Erkine, Cleanth Brooks, Andrew Lytle, John Crowe Ransom and many others.

The piece also recounts one of my favorite stories about one of my idols, Robert Lowell. Ford, about to visit Tate and Gordon at their home, Benfolly, in Clarksville, Tenn., invited the young Lowell to come along and learn poetic craft from Tate. Lowell showed up one day, and Tate, hoping to discourage Lowell from staying, told Lowell that he could pitch a tent on the front lawn if he wished to remain. Lowell, taking him at his word, went to Nashville and bought a tent from Sears and Roebuck, and put it up on the lawn.

Buffington evokes a great time, when Tate, Gordon, Ford (and his wife and sister-in-law) and Lowell all lived together, working on their poems or novels in separate rooms. All the while, letters came in from around the world, deals were made with literary magazines and publishers, gossip was banded about. The piece made me long for that kind of life, although I found distasteful their condescension to the black women whom they hired to cook. Although times were tough, like now, they seemed better able to cope, doing their own chores, catching fish and growing their own food, doing their work.

The piece paints too positive a picture of Tate, a notorious womanizer, although one of his affairs is mentioned. He wrote a biography of Stonewall Jackson, and tried to emulate the values of the Southern aristocracy. 

 I value Tate as a poet, writer and literary thinker. His "For the Confederate Dead" holds a place in literary anthologies, and he is one of the great critics/theorizers. He also intersected with an astounding number of poets, from Hart Crane to Roetke, Lowell, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell.

When the Agrarians published their manifesto, "I'll Take My Stand," in the 1930s, they appeared reactionary; some even called them fascist. The truest believer of them, Donald Davidson, refused to accept the Confederacy's defeat. But the rest of them, including Ransom, Tate and Warren, moved on to adjust to the modern world. Now, the Agrarians' criticism of rampant industrialization, unbridled capitalism, and the destruction of the natural world and local traditions looks prophetic.

Tate is buried in the old graveyard on the Sewanee campus. Among his many literary jobs was the editorship of the Sewanee Review. When I was at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, which I attended in 1990 and 1991, I joined other attendees in gathering around Tate's grave by candlelight at midnight for a reading of "For the Confederate Dead." Later, during a time of personal turmoil, I drove from Atlanta to Sewanee to commune at  the grave of Peter Taylor, recently buried at a site close to Tate's.

About a year ago at the Buckhead Borders bookstore in Atlanta, I was happy to see Tate's Collected Essays, and bought it. When I came home, I discovered the very same collection on my bookshelves. I'd forgotten that I'd bought the book about 10 years before, the first time it was reissued. Amused at my forgetfulness and happy that Tate continued to appeal to me, I gave him silent homage. He's an essential writer, worthy of continued rediscovery by new generations.