1929
By Frederick Turner
Counterpoint, 390 pages, $25
In “Remembering Song” (1982), one of the beautifully crafted non-fiction books by which Frederick Turner has till now made his name, he laments that most good writers about the Jazz Age tend to underplay the jazz. They choose instead, he observes, “to expend their energies chronicling the lives and deaths of murderers and movie queens,” relegating jazz to mere background coloration, as though there were “something in the music itself that is intimidating.”
In “1929,” his superb first novel, Turner takes up his own challenge. His chronicle of the 1920s has real-life murderers and movie queens, but in keeping with his own credo he focuses his story on the music made by one elusive man: cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931), famous for playing exquisitely and dying young.
That second fame inflects the first. Heard now, the astonishing melodies Beiderbecke made at his peak are shadowed by the ghosts of those unheard: all the rapt, unrecorded improvisations he produced at dances, clubs and concerts (where, earwitnesses testify, his tone and power surpassed anything records ever captured); all the innovative music–a blend of jazz, Americana and Impressionism–he had barely begun to explore, on piano as well as horn, when alcohol, illness and exhaustion ended him at 28.
Beiderbecke’s life and art have long exerted the fascination of the equivocally recoverable. They have furnished the materials of quick melodrama (Dorothy Baker’s 1938 novel, “Young Man With a Horn,” later a movie with Kirk Douglas), prodigious scholarship (Richard M. Sudhalter’s “Bix: Man and Legend,” the source for many of Turner’s facts), ardent re-creation (recordings by Bobby Hackett, Randy Sandke and others of the solos Beiderbecke played and the ones he might have), and ongoing idolatry. In Beiderbecke’s birthplace, Davenport, Iowa, a fervent annual festival acknowledges the hero’s mortality (at a ritual graveside concert) and cheerfully defies it by the joy inherent in the music (10 bands in three days) and by a brisk traffic in caps and T-shirts bearing the Beiderbecke Memorial Society’s motto: “Bix Lives!”
Turner achieves resurrection by other means, tracking the luminous, ruinous interplay between the musician and the world for which he plays. He puts Beiderbecke’s sounds, and his silences, at the center of the ’20s’ roar.
In a novel spanning the decade and the nation, that choice makes sense and magic. Sense, because Beiderbecke, who spent his boyhood solitary and self-taught in Davenport, soon joined some of the ’20s’ most successful touring bands and ended up traveling everywhere. Simply by tracking him, Turner can bring whole constellations of real-life characters into play: Al Capone, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn and all the other “brutal businessmen from the vast dark city” of Chicago who run the speakeasies where jazz, like liquor, flows addictively; Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Buster Keaton, Clara Bow and other demigods of Hollywood who hire the bands to play their parties; Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Bing Crosby and other emergent masters, in New York and on the road, busy reshaping the world in sound.
Turner fills his pages with these people, playing the familiar (what we know of them already) off against the fresh. He depicts gangland killings now mostly known from movies (tommy guns at a black-tie banquet, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Capone bashing skulls with a baseball bat), but retells them so arrestingly, so disturbingly, as to make words, for once, seem worth a thousand pictures rapidly projected.
He crafts his many cameos not as perfunctory walk-ons but as authentic glimpses-in, brief encounters with complex lives. A compact description of a party at Keaton’s plumbs all the misery of what the comedian once called his “marriage of inconvenience” to a fellow film star. A drunken conversation between Beiderbecke and bandmate Crosby, just starting out as a singer, captures the blend of smoothness, self-possession and opacity that will soon become hallmarks of the crooner’s huge career. An account of Chaplin hearing Beiderbecke for the first time makes beautiful sense of both men’s artistry: listening to the cornetist’s fresh-minted melody, the silent clown “can feel the skin along his jaws and on the back of his neck tighten and prickle, and then he knows for certain he’s in the presence of something rare. Some evenings, in the privacy of his theatre at home, he gets this visceral reaction watching sequences from his own films, and then he sees which portions of them will outlast any fad or new technology.”
A book so populous could easily feel overcrowded. Turner’s doesn’t. His prose, precise and spacious, unfolds meditatively in the present tense; the point of view shifts gently every few pages so that we see many of the key characters inside and out. For all the novel’s plenitude, for all the phenomenal research behind these resurrections, the leisure and economy of Turner’s narrative produce, as if by alchemy, a sense not of facts crammed, but of lives lived.
That alchemy works best with Beiderbecke himself. Turner shows him moving among these multitudes, adored and oracular while playing his music, passive and preoccupied when away from it. Counterpointing his stillness against his hearers’ agitations, “1929” replicates at novel’s length the mystery in Robert Frost’s wonderful two-line poem: “We dance round in a ring and suppose,/But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
What does Beiderbecke know, though, and why does so much remain secret? He knows how to make a matchless sound. (“Lots of cats tried to play like Bix,” remarked his idol Louis Armstrong. “Ain’t none of them played like him yet.”) But because “[e]ven at his best he’s never been very articulate,” he has difficulty explaining what everyone wants to know of him: how he makes the sound, and where he wants to take it.
In conversations with his friends, occasional clues burst forth. In Lawrence of Arabia’s fate-defying credo, “Nothing Is Written,” he finds a pleasing shorthand for the freedom he treasures in improvisation. In Bessie Smith’s melodic inventiveness he finds a mirror of his own:
” ‘The whole song’s right there in that one phrase. . . . Right there in that phrase–hear it?’ “
When he tries more directly to explain his art, he becomes tongue-tied. Hoping to teach a fellow cornetist some of his musical secrets, Beiderbecke soon realizes that he “can’t remember distinctly” and can’t transmit effectively what he discovered about his instrument during “the Golden Age of his self-creation” back in Davenport. “[T]he mystery of the man’s special sound remains as impenetrable as ever.”
To himself as well as others. In Turner’s treatment, this puzzlement about the music becomes an affliction of the soul. As the book progresses, sound increasingly gives way to silence. On a visit home to Davenport (a real-life event that Turner exquisitely reimagines), Beiderbecke happens upon packages of his recordings that he has proudly posted to his uncomprehending parents over the years, still wrapped and stamped, the discs unheard. At a sanitarium near Chicago, trying to dry out, he walks with a fellow patient past cornfields emptied by the harvest and answers her straightforward question about his music (” ‘What is it, Mr. Beiderbecke, that you aspire to?’ “) with an odd gesture:
“His hands make a small, brief offering in the direction of the field. ‘I don’t know. This, maybe.’ “
Back in New York, at work for months on a new set of piano pieces, he cannot find the mix of chords and melody that will bring any of them to a satisfactory close. And in Chicago, weary of the treacly pop tunes he has for years made transcendent with his solos, he suffers what amounts to a terminal epiphany: “I don’t want to play.”
Out of the push of the articulate (Beiderbecke’s gorgeous speaking sound) against the inchoate (his insistent confusion, about his music and his life) arises the novel’s pain and beauty. And perhaps its documentary precision too. The real Beiderbecke, Turner persuades us, may well have been like this. Acquaintances adored him but found no access. Drawn by the music, they were stymied first by the self-containment, then by the self-destruction.
To play out their experience, Turner makes his fullest foray from documentary into fiction, creating a brother and sister, Herman and Helen Weiss, each differently devoted to Beiderbecke and differently despairing of him. Both are enchanted by his music, and both move with him through the same bruising worlds, Herman as a henchman to the mob, Helen as the mistress of a mobster. Herman functions as the story’s Ishmael, its sole survivor and chief witness (the book begins and ends with him, now an old man in present-day Davenport, sifting through his memories of Beiderbecke).
His sister’s role is more intricate, a blend of obscure fact and sustained imagination. In real life, Beiderbecke fell in love with someone new just months before his death; aside from her name (actually Alice O’Connell, and not, as jazz historians long thought, Helen Weiss) little is known of her. Turner lengthens and deepens this relationship into the most tender of the book. His Bix and Helen meet early, then re-encounter each other at every stage of their raucous, weary pilgrimage, as the damage deepens, hers from the violence of her mobster boyfriend, his from drink and inner darkness. In Hollywood, at the book’s midpoint, he takes care of her; in New York, near his life’s end, she takes care of him, and their reciprocal kindness measures the merit in them both–a mixture of affection and futility.
In Beiderbecke, helplessness gradually suffocates artistry; in Turner’s novel, the two abet each other. As readers we are always helpless: We cannot jump into the book to meddle with the characters or fix their fates. Turner applies this general principle to particular predicaments. He makes our helplessness mirror that of Beiderbecke and of those in the story who care for him, and he renders it, for us as it is for them, not so much a source of exasperation as a conduit for feelings of love and loss.
As its title insists, “1929” is a book of endings. The year that closed the decade brought the stock-market crash that closed its culture; afterward, almost everything was different. In a crossplay that Turner delicately monitors, the movies advance from silence to sound, while Beiderbecke lapses from sound to final silence. “Bix,” a friend of his once said, “died of everything.” At the end of the book, Turner makes deft use of the line, but from the start he has made good on all that it implies. He conjures up the 1920s’ “everything” so convincingly that it seems instead to have brought itself back into being, and thereby to resurrect the dazzling musician whose art it shaped and stopped. In “1929” Turner does brilliantly what the records still do best: He makes Bix Beiderbecke live again.
