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Bad Mother: This Lovely City

06 Monday Mar 2023

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Review: This Lovely City, by Louise Hare
Anansi, 2020. 384 pp. $18

Lawrence (Lawrie) Mathews, a young Jamaican whose brother died fighting with the RAF in World War II, has emigrated to London, believing the blandishments from the British government that he can make his fortune in the mother country. But he hasn’t reckoned on the racism, expressed in the most vicious, direct terms; or that most desirable material goods are still rationed in 1948; or that housing is in short supply, thanks largely to German bombs.

Nevertheless, by 1950, when the story begins, things are looking up. He plays clarinet with a jazz band, which he loves, and which brings in a little cash. As a day job, he delivers mail for the Post Office. And he’s found lodging with a kind, motherly woman who treats him with fond respect. Not just that: Lawrie digs the girl next door, who likes him back. What could go wrong?

Plenty. One day, while making a drop of black-market merchandise to help a friend (and make ends meet), he happens on a dead infant by a pond. Since the child is “coloured,” as the kindest word in common use puts it, an accusation against Lawrie fits all too neatly, especially since he can’t explain his presence at the pond without revealing he’s an accessory to illegal activity. But even a more legitimate excuse probably wouldn’t have helped Lawrie, for Detective Sergeant Rathbone hates Black people, immigrants, and most anyone else on two legs.

Worse, the case creates a sensation in the press, arousing white Londoners itching to blame outsiders for the hardships that haven’t eased much since V-E Day. Lawrie and his Jamaican friends must now watch themselves carefully on the street, while patronizing stores and—most especially—when the jazz band plays dance music for a hard-drinking crowd.

Nelson’s column, London, seen through the Great Smog, December 1952. The climatic disaster lasted five days and caused many thousands of deaths. (Courtesy N T Stobbs via Wikimedia Commons)

My favorite aspect of This Lovely City is the plot, which twists in unexpected ways, particularly in the final third. Both Lawrie and his girlfriend, Evie Coleridge, have secrets from the other. Evie also has a hard-hearted mother, an apt parallel to England. Mrs. Coleridge has suffered its whips and scorns herself, though that’s why—at least in part—she’s as tough as she is.

I also like how Hare re-creates postwar London, pinched and yearning to let loose, but also violently racist, in which what we would call micro-aggressions quickly flame into just plain aggression. The prose, though simple, occasionally rises to illumine emotional moments particular to that environment, as with this passage about Lawrie playing jazz before an audience:

The nerves would pass soon enough, but the moments before they started playing, before the music took over, always made him feel like one of the tigers at London Zoo. He’d gone there with Evie the previous autumn. She had leaned against the railing and stared in awe at the big cats, lounging lazily in their compound, but all he could think of was how sad they looked, those magnificent beasts now tamed and cowed by their conquerors. If anyone could understand the tigers it was him, trapped in a foreign land and reduced to parading himself before a paying audience. But then he’d raise his clarinet, the reed rough against his lips, and feel like a king.

I wish the characterizations worked with any consistency. Lawrie and Evie seem too good by half, and the terrible secrets they possess never credibly threaten their happiness. At times, quick resolutions—much like Lawrie merely lifting the clarinet to his lips, in the above passage—make me wonder whether Hare’s trying too hard to rescue her characters.

She also portrays Lawrie as a sexual innocent in ways I find hard to believe, particularly when a young woman invites him to take a bath at her house (in the days before he moves next door to Evie), and he has no idea she has plans other than cleanliness. At times too he seems generally clueless about his surroundings, as with his surprise that so much of London was bombed. Not much of a secret, that. What did he think his brother was doing in the RAF?

The two principals often have trouble locating their spines, to the extent that I lost patience with them and wondered what they saw in each other. Wouldn’t each lover seek out someone more forceful than themselves? They’re trying to be pleasant, sure, perhaps hiding behind that to avoid confrontations. Or maybe they confuse asking for what they want with meanness; it’s hard to tell. But whatever the explanation, I wanted more push from each of them, the lack of which might just be convenient to the plot.

As for the villains, the cops are faceless and horrid, without a single redeeming feature, including intelligence, so it’s a surprise to discover they actually know a thing or two. The most complex character in the book—perhaps the only one with sharp edges and kind impulses, both—is Mrs. Coleridge. She’s a piece of work, yet I understand her.

For all that, though, This Lovely City provides a glimpse of London as I’ve never read of it. Despite its flaws, the novel depicts the struggle to get by and dreams of a fuller life in real, day-to-day terms. That’s worth something.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Song of Worry

01 Thursday Sep 2022

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Here’s another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

After the Armistice in November 1918, Americans worried that exposure to big, bad Europe would change (corrupt?) their boys. A hit song of 1919 addressed that fear: “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” In the song, which strikes a lighthearted mood, a farmer grins slyly as he tells his wife their boy will come back restless, thirsting for what he’s glimpsed in France.

Albert Wilfred Barbelle’s sheet music cover, 1919 (courtesy http://libx.bsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ShtMus/id/725 via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But you have to ask whether the father’s good-humored acceptance reflects rural attitudes or those of city slickers who wrote popular music.

The slickers in question were composer Walter Donaldson and lyricists Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis; the publisher was Waterson, Berlin & Snyder Co.—Berlin, as in Irving Berlin, who gave us “Easter Parade,” “White Christmas,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and a bazillion other standards.

“How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em” appeared on the vaudeville stage and at the Ziegfeld Follies; an early jazz band, James Reese Europe’s 369th Infantry Band, performed the song regularly and cut a hit record. Two well-known singers followed suit.

But not every soldier thought Europe a swell place (or, as Twenties slang later would have it, the gnat’s eyebrows). In April 1919, the Seattle Times interviewed a Washington infantryman who said he was glad to come home to a “real country” and criticized the Belgians for not “dressing like us” and “clinging to their old ways.”

However, if he ever wished to buy an alcoholic drink or a condom, he might have paused to reconsider Europe’s advantages: Both transactions were criminal acts in his home state.

Oh, Kay!: Rhapsody

27 Monday Sep 2021

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Review: Rhapsody, by Mitchell James Kaplan
Gallery, 2021. 342 pp. $27

In 1924 Paul Whiteman, legendary impresario and consummate schmoozer, attempts to persuade Katherine Warburg to attend a musical extravaganza at which George Gershwin has “consented” to play his latest composition. Katherine resists. After all, she’s a remarkably gifted, classically trained pianist and knows little of jazz or Gershwin besides his penchant for popular songs, about which the less said, the better. It’s not her type of music, thank you.

But as James Warburg’s wife — the banking Warburgs, known for generous hospitality to literary and musical celebrities — she’s an important target in Whiteman’s publicity campaign, and he’s a difficult man to refuse. Besides, Jascha (Heifetz), Igor (Stravinsky), and Sergei (Rachmaninoff) will be there. So Katherine attends and gets an earful:

George Gershwin strolled out, a tall man with pomaded black hair and a prominent nose. Attractive, certainly, but it was not about his features. It was the way he held himself; his bemused, blasé expression barely masking an underlying restlessness; his dark, soft eyes. All in all a coolness tinged with vulnerability and warmth. He wore his tuxedo like a shroud of sobriety. The finest evening attire, however, could not transmute a Tin Pan Alley tunemeister into a classical pianist.… Whiteman raised his baton and that klezmer clarinet embarked upon its crazy discourse, complaining, wheedling, sulking.

Hearing “Rhapsody in Blue” turns Katherine’s world upside down. A deep friendship forms with Gershwin, later an affair, and a musical collaboration as well. For “Kay,” as Gershwin nicknames her, knows lessons about orchestration and harmony he’s never learned, while his restless, roving musical imagination jolts her from preconceived notions, and he encourages her efforts to compose. Not only does she feel that Gershwin understands her in ways that Jimmy Warburg doesn’t, the lovers enjoy the physical passion missing in her marriage. With a brashness typical of the man, he publicizes their liaison. He writes a musical using her name in 1926: Oh, Kay!, whose hit song, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” remains a standard.

Unfortunately for Kay, Gershwin’s roving imagination takes him into other women’s arms. Warburg, who’s never been faithful to Kay and often disappears for months on end to Europe, has little to complain about. Their daughters sympathize with him, however, a reflection of the sexual double standard and the relative discretion he maintains by conducting his affairs in other countries. They’re both indifferent parents, at best, but Kay bears the brunt. Meanwhile, her composing career takes off — she becomes the first woman to write a complete Broadway score — but she pays a terrible price. And Gershwin will never marry her, she realizes.

I wish I could say that Rhapsody does this story full justice, especially because I’ve loved Gershwin’s music all my life. (To insert a personal note, my wife and I walked down the aisle to strains of “An American in Paris,” because that city is where we got engaged.) I also love the theater, that of the 1920s and 1930s above all; and Kay Warburg (née Swift) makes an excellent protagonist with whom to explore the musical and theatrical happenings of the time. At its best, Rhapsody shows why and how music evokes feeling, and Kaplan astutely analyzes Gershwin’s in particular.

Yet I find the novel a cluttered hodgepodge, stuffed with anything and everything. Instead of beginning at the musical premier of “Rhapsody in Blue,” or even Kay’s life before she met Warburg, the story starts with a needless prologue and hops about like a grasshopper, seldom remaining long in one place. Further, if I listed every famous name that floats through the narrative, from Fred Astaire to Duke Ellington to Dorothy Parker, I’d have no room to review the book. In a way, the name-dropping has a point, because Kay knows nobody before she marries Warburg and barely has two pennies to rub together. Money buys glamor, and she soaks it up. But the People magazine approach wears thin, and the army of famous, or soon-to-be famous walk-ons distracts attention from the key players and the issues they face.

First performed in 1924, this piece, which Gershwin said he’d begun composing on a train to the rhythm of the wheels, captured Katherine Warburg’s imagination. She’s not alone. (courtesy http://riverwalkjazz.
stanford.edu/#bonus-content/george-gershwin-20s via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Rhapsody poses several cogent questions, not least about the influence of money on art and the artist, whether genius excuses bad behavior (especially negligent parenting), and what shapes or creates popular taste. But other themes and ideas bury these under a blizzard of famous names, scenes that seem to exist only to reach a certain biographical plot point, and sound bites about current events. There’s a cartoon psychiatrist I could have done without, even though he was a historical figure, and the pastiche of scenes from New York life never amounts to a lived-in atmosphere. By contrast, Gershwin seems much more likable than his legend would suggest, and though that interpretation may be justifiable, in the composer’s latter years, we see nothing of the nightmare he visited on his intimates, misbehavior resulting from an undiagnosed brain tumor.

Passionate Gershwin fans will find pieces here and there in Rhapsody to enlighten and perhaps delight them, and Kay Swift’s story deserves a hearing. But this novel is one of those in which a lot less would have yielded a lot more.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Murder Jambalaya: King Zeno

11 Monday Jun 2018

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Review: King Zeno, by Nathaniel Rich
FSG, 2018. 386 pp. $28

During the final year of the First World War, three narratives and a hell of a lot of dead bodies converge in New Orleans. The main story line belongs to Isidore (Izzy) Zeno, the best young cornet player no one’s ever heard of, who believes he has a new style of jass, as it’s then called, but can’t get gigs. To make ends meet, he aids a friend who’s a stickup artist, but the risks are far greater than the rewards, and that sort of sideline is destined to cause trouble.

Then there’s Bill Bastrop, a police detective assigned to deal with the stickups but switches to homicide detail when a friend and mentor on the force is killed one night in a setup. That, in turn, leads Bill to probe the rash of ax murders that the dead detective was investigating. However, Bill can barely hold it together, suffering from what would today be called post-traumatic stress from his wartime service. He received a hero’s acclaim, but he knows he’s a coward, and he lives with it every second. How Bill managed to be released from the army with the war still going on is a mystery itself. But suffice to say that he’s miserable, obsessed with breaking a case that will redeem him in his own eyes, for which he neglects the wife he loves.

Finally, there’s Beatrice Vizzini, a widow from an underworld family who wants to leave the “shadow business” and go straight. To that end, she’s managing the effort to build a canal that will split New Orleans in two and, the city fathers hope, restore the port to its erstwhile glory. Her sociopathic son and heir, Giorgio, may have other ideas about her business strategy, and to say he’s a loose cannon is an understatement.

New Orleans shantytown during the war years (courtesy National Library of Medicine via University of Michigan)

Meanwhile, with all that, influenza ravages the city, so plenty happens in King Zeno. Too much, in fact, and it burdens the novel. The three narratives coincide only toward the end, when it takes a fair amount of contrivance to make that junction. The mystery hardly qualifies as a puzzle, for the solution is pretty clear early on, though the bodies keep piling up, in the streets and at the canal excavation site. The Vizzini narrative, easily the weakest of the three because the characters are neither engaging nor sympathetic, could drop out entirely. That would also remove the tendentious, thematic passages in which Rich tries to convince you that the canal is a metaphor that links this narrative to the other two. I don’t see it.

What King Zeno does have going for it is the atmosphere of New Orleans. You get the mosquitoes, the heat, the wealth alongside poverty, the racism, sainted past that was never glorious. The vigorous prose lets you hear the music, too:

Isidore pressed the cornet to his lips and the old chemical combustion — oxygen plus metal times flesh — blew everything else out of his head. He’d heard other players describe performing as a jubilant mindlessness, a physical sensation as ecstatic as sexual euphoria, but that wasn’t quite right. He used his mind too, running through scales the way Mr. Davis at the Waifs’ Home had taught him, calculating fourths and fifths; adding crooks, slurs, and drags; scanning ahead four bars in anticipation; posing and, within milliseconds, resolving questions of harmonic density, chordal patterning, and understructure…

More importantly, the narrative conveys implicitly the crime and corruption that pervade every human interaction, the fear with which African-Americans cope constantly, and the subterfuges they must embrace. For instance, Izzy may not visit his wife, Orleania, except in secret, for she’s a live-in nanny in a white home. Even to try is dangerous, for security guards patrol the streets, looking to abuse people they consider interlopers.

Izzy’s story therefore makes gripping reading, as does Bill’s, often, but only as separate entities. As a whole, King Zeno doesn’t feel like a satisfying literary dish as much as a jambalaya of varied flavors. Some stand out, some I can do without, but they don’t go together.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Scarred Lives: The Jazz Palace

04 Monday May 2015

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Review: The Jazz Palace, by Mary Morris
Doubleday, 2015. 245 pp. $26
It’s 1915, and Chicago’s South Side has its clubs where black musicians assume that the very few white patrons must be there to steal their secrets. But that’s not why young Benny Lehrman hangs around, using the money intended for his piano teacher to bribe his way past the door. Jazz, whose name Benny doesn’t even know at first, reaches him because it says everything the tongue-tied, soulful teenager can’t put into words.

Jazz speaks of loneliness bred in the bone, of having to drag yourself to a job you hate, of desire for the kindness, attention, and sympathy he can never have and believes he doesn’t deserve. Underlying his pain is a family tragedy: Several years before, his younger brother, the family favorite, died in a blizzard. Ever since, Benny has unfairly taken the blame.

However, the novel opens on a different catastrophe. Three of Pearl Chimbrova’s brothers die when the S.S. Eastland rolls over and sinks just after leaving the dock. Benny, who happens to be watching from the same footbridge as Pearl, dives into the water and tries to help, but the bodies he pulls out are already dead. Even without reading the jacket flap, you know Pearl and Benny will meet again.

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

S.S. Eastland, ca. 1911. (Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Pearl’s mother never recovers, leaving her eldest daughter to pick up the pieces. As the years pass, Pearl takes over more and more responsibility for running the family saloon and mothering her younger sisters. Like Benny, she believes that she doesn’t deserve care or attention. Only routine keeps her going.

For Benny, it’s music, as he pursues learning jazz with a single-mindedness and energy he has never shown toward anything else. When he hears Napoleon Hill on trumpet, he knows why:

Everything he’d ever known about the world–that gravity holds you down and mothers are there when you get home, that baseball has nine innings, and sleep awaits you at the end of the day–was turned upside down. He forgot about his brother lost in the snow and the dead girl he’d danced with when the Eastland went down. . . . He even forgot he was a person in a crowd, not a very old person at that, just a boy. His arms and legs all melted into one. He wasn’t anywhere but inside the music he was hearing.

Napoleon and Benny, African-American and Jew, become close friends and musical partners, drawn together in part by vulnerability. With the advent of Prohibition, Pearl’s saloon has turned into a speakeasy, and Napoleon plays there from time to time, a great risk for a black man to take in a white neighborhood. Naturally, Benny sits in one night, but if you think you know the rest, you’ll have to read this book to see why Morris is too good a novelist to take the low road.

The Chimbrovas, the Lehrmans, Napoleon, every character in this book, even Al Capone, has been emotionally (if not physically) scarred. In this world of pain, in which warm currents drift through–sometimes within reach, sometimes not–there are no answers, only doing what you have to. But there are dreams, for those who dare, whether it’s just to be able to keep going, or to reach for something that might, one day, feel like happiness.

As I’ve said recently, I generally dislike novels about crossed paths, but The Jazz Palace nails it. I could explain that by saying that Morris opens up her characters’ inner lives, gets beneath their skins, and writes lyrically in the bargain. But it’s also that these people, like their creator, know they can’t afford cheap sentiment, and that whatever they want must be earned.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Burdened by History

12 Monday Jan 2015

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Review: Night in Shanghai, by Nicole Mones
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. 277 pp. $30

What’s that, an American jazz musician who can’t improvise? A Western-educated Shanghai beauty sold by her father to a crime lord? Put them together, and you have a romance as atmospheric as they get. Throw in the Japanese invasion of China, and you have Night in Shanghai, a late 1930s tale of back-stabbing politics and love against tall odds.

A girl scout, Yang Huimin, smuggled a Nationalist flag into a Shanghai warehouse besieged by Japanese forces in 1937. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

A girl scout, Yang Huimin, smuggled a Nationalist flag into a Shanghai warehouse besieged by Japanese forces in 1937. (Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Thomas Greene is a classically trained pianist, an African-American from Baltimore recruited by the agent of a Chinese mafioso to lead an all-black jazz orchestra. Jazz is a very big deal in Shanghai, and Thomas is startled and pleased to earn a good salary and live where his race doesn’t matter, or, as he puts it, “no one looked at him twice, for the first time in his life.” However, the music comes hard (he must have a written score, or he’s lost), and his struggles are so obvious that the more experienced jazzmen he’s supposed to lead look down on him. I liked this touch, which I thought made his character more sympathetic as well as unusual.

As Thomas gets the hang of his job, his eye falls on Song Yuhua, translator for the crime boss, who’d kill both of them if he (or his many henchmen) saw them together. But Song has her own secret: She’s a Communist, in a city where Nationalist thugs working for Chiang Kai-shek regularly murder Party members. She believes fervently in the cause, and she expects her superiors to share her ideals, because, after all, they’re on the same side. But history is working against her, just as it’s working against Thomas.

I liked the prose in Night in Shanghai the best, redolent as it is of the local food, manners, and metaphors. “To bring it up now would only create fear, just as speaking of a tiger makes one pale.” Or, of a person privileged by birth, “the waterfront pavilion gets moonlight first.” The physical descriptions are vivid too, as with this passage about Suzhou, adjacent to the city outskirts:

 

Beyond the gate, cobbled streets unwound beneath overhanging willows, soft in summer with green-dappled light. Canals were crossed by stone bridges whose half-moon arches made circles in the water. From the ponds and fields and wooded hills came peddlers with live flapping fish, caged ducks, bundles of freshwater greens, and tender shoots of baby green bamboo.

Unfortunately, the other aspects of the book didn’t always measure up, especially when compared with A Cup of Light, Mones’s gentle mystery novel about a porcelain expert. In that story, the tension never lapsed, even with nothing earthshaking at stake. But Night in Shanghai, for all its sound and fury, lets the protagonists off too easily, at times, diluting its power and promise. Writing so close to history is partly to blame–many secondary characters actually existed–so fact restricts what may or may not happen. I admire Mones’s commitment to the record, yet, after such a fine setup, history works against the narrative instead of for it.

Even so, I can recommend Night in Shanghai as a story about an unusual place at a crucial time. I learned more about China and the Japanese invasion, Shanghai as a city flooded by refugees (it required no entry visa), and, most particularly, that many African-American jazz musicians flocked there. The novel opened up this world to me, which I wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.