Reviewers were dazzled, to a degree. Writing in
The New Yorker
, Clifton Fadiman proclaimed
Young Man with a Horn
“practically perfect,” the best first novel he had read in three years—although, he cautioned, as it deals “with the life and death of a swing trumpeter,” it won’t “carry much emotion a decade from now.” The
New York Times
reviewer found Baker “brilliant in reproducing the spoken words of people whose real language is music,” and praised her work as a “clear-minded, informed, coldly rational study of a swing addict,” despite “the irrationalism” of swing itself: “For if the swing audience is occasionally mad, the swing player is always mad.” Two months after Fadiman’s review,
The New Yorker
ran the first but by no means last parody. The tagline for “Young Man on Stilts,” by Wolcott Gibbs, reads: “Dorothy Baker, who gave us the life and death of a swing musician, discovers pure art in another unlikely profession.” The laughs taper off from there.
Indeed, the reviewers proved her premise: that a real jazz artist was up against a granite wall of ignorance and condescension. (For one thing, her book has absolutely nothing to do with swing, the big-band style that ruled the music business at the time it was published.) In the most incisive review, the jazz and film critic Otis Ferguson, writing in
The New Republic
, faced that issue more in sorrow than in anger: “So while I know this to be a good book for any man’s money, I cannot report on just how good it will be to those who, not having seen the beauty it talks of as it was passing [that is, 1920s jazz], will merely read, digest, and file away some bit of its wide range of knowledge.” Even so, the novel quickly went through several printings and landed on the
New York Times
best-seller list. It was instantly optioned as a Broadway musical (Baker and a producer collaborated on an adaptation, and at various times the actor Burgess Meredith and the composer Hoagy Carmichael were attached to the project, which never got far) and soon after as a film, which did get produced nine years after it was initially acquired. Hollywood tried to option Baker, too, as a screenwriter. She declined: “I’d much prefer taking chances doing my own kind of work than get mixed up with formulas and story conferences.”
As jazz found acceptance as a proper literary subject,
Young Man with a Horn
earned, for good and bad, a status of a different sort: It was the first Jazz Novel, and, as such, the foundation for a small but persistent genre. Before Baker, there were passages about black music in novels by Claude McKay (
Home to Harlem
, 1928) and Langston Hughes (
Not Without Laughter
, 1930), but the only novel I know of that treated the life of a dance-band musician was W.R. Burnett’s
The Giant Swing
(1932). Baker likely read Burnett’s novel about a self-taught, orphaned, Midwestern pianist whose music is transformed by a chance encounter with
En Bateau
by Debussy (a transfiguring influence, incidentally, on Bix Beiderbecke). Inspired to study composition, he achieves international renown with a new, mongrel style of music—part jazz, part classical, part Broadway glitz. Burnett had nothing to say about jazz per se as an art rather than a resource; it was written when
jazz
could denote anything with a pinch of toe-tapping rhythm. Baker’s story, published six years later, is set in the same period, and by contrast is resolutely fixed on the strain between jazz as a serious pursuit and the blandishments of society-band rubbish. She knows the music and the musicians, and is frankly dismayed by the notion of gussying up jazz to make it more acceptable. After
Young Man with a Horn
, the deluge: movies such as
Birth of the Blues
and
Blues in the Night
, novels such as Dale Curran’s
Piano in the Band
and Henry Steig’s neglected, due-for-revival
Send Me Down
. Even Burnett got on board with an exceptionally fine (modern) jazz novel,
It’s Always Four O’Clock
(1956), set on Baker’s turf, Los Angeles. He had undoubtedly read her.
By the 1960s, when I started listening to jazz and reading about it, Baker’s endlessly parodied and mimicked title had become a joke, not least in the hands of Lenny Bruce, who wove it into a riff on Hollywood’s perpetuation of jazz clichés: His young hipster with a horn signs on to the band of über-square Lawrence Welk and confesses he’s got a monkey on his back. “That’s okay,” Welk tells him, “Rocky’s got a duck. They can play together!” I emphasize
title
, because I soon learned that many of those who were most derisive had not read the novel—not recently, anyway. Their disdain reflected a bias born of Michael Curtiz’s successful movie (1950), which has its own virtues and failings, and by elements in Baker’s book that curdled into a formula in the hands of lesser novelists. The Jazz Novel, especially as produced by white writers, was not simply a novel set in the jazz world. It became associated with a rote cycle of banalities centered on a doomed, misunderstood genius, white or black; a wise black mentor or worshipful white acolyte; competing women (nice and marriageable versus evil and sexy); and friends who try in vain to impede his tragic demise. The hero is usually fixated on hitting a fatal high note, consumes alcohol or drugs, and is given to shuffling alone in the rain. None of those bromides infect
Young Man with a Horn
, which continues to feel fresh, vital, and smart. It wears lightly its historical mantle while maintaining its place as an indispensable American novel, one of the best ever written about jazz.
So much of what made
Young Man with a Horn
archetypal was impressively original, including Baker’s incessantly misjudged tip-off about her source of inspiration: the music,
not
the life, of the luminous and, in 1938, generally obscure trumpet player and pianist Bix Beiderbecke. Type the title in a search engine, and almost every item that comes up says the novel is based on Bix’s life. It is not. Rick Martin’s music is surely that of Bix, who showed that jazz was a music of universal expression and not an exclusively African American phenomenon that whites could only mimic. We can assume that when Rick stands up to solo with the Phil Morrison band, which is shrewdly based on Paul Whiteman’s band, right down to the hot vocalist Harry Cromwell (read: Harry “Bing” Crosby), his trumpet rings with a Bix-like pealing timbre, fluid phrasing, effortless lyricism, and knowing rhythm. Like Bix, Rick takes to drink and dies obscenely young. The resemblance ends there. It may all sound like a
clef
, but Rick’s upbringing, character, and dilemma are largely antithetical to that of Bix, and for a writer as concerned with psychological precision as Baker, those distinctions mean everything.
Rick is essentially an orphan, raised neglectfully by two teenage siblings in Southern California, a region that produced no major figures in the 1920s jazz movement. Left to his own devices, he discovers his talent for music, teaching himself piano at fourteen, and finds a surrogate family in a group of black musicians not much older than he is. Given the endemic racism that defines the parameters of his life, he constantly has to check his own feelings against the social strictures regarding “a bunch of coons,” and he triumphs: The first person he loves is Smoke Jordan, “his first, last, and always friend.” When comforting Smoke after inadvertently offending him, he calls him “honey,” underscoring the reversal of the Huck/Jim template. The black guys know who and where they are; Rick is the one on the run, literally, from truant officers and, figuratively, from his ignorance of how to behave. Baker notes that neither of the boys are embarrassed by the “wrong terminology”; after all, they learned it from pop songs. Still, they quickly man up by lighting cigarettes, their established ritual. Baker’s subtle control of terminology is exemplified in a passage where she casually turns the rudest of epithets into an honorific. In the splendid Balboa sequence (Book Three), Rick proudly tells the hack bandleader Jack Stuart that Art Hazard, the trumpet master who instructed him, is “black as your hat.” Jack says, “So Art Hazard’s a nigger?… Next thing you’ll be telling me Red Nichols is a nigger.” To which Rick responds, “Oh, no, Red Nichols isn’t.” They laugh at Rick, since everyone knows Red Nichols, one of the most successful men in the business, failing to get Rick’s implication that he isn’t good enough to be a black player. At the end of this episode, Jack sells Rick upriver to another bandleader: “He had become, overnight, the property of Lee Valentine.” Eventually, when he joins with Morrison’s band, he becomes a star.
In contrast, Bix Beiderbecke was one of three children born into a prosperous German American family in Davenport, Iowa. He studied music formally and gave his first recital at age seven. His adolescence was beset by his tenuous rebellion against his father, who despised jazz and never opened the recordings Bix made and faithfully mailed to him. Bix heard and, after he achieved some renown among musicians, occasionally jammed with black musicians—King Oliver and Louis Armstrong championed him. But his career was almost entirely circumscribed by white players. Rick is constantly integrating his bands, since a man’s color is invisible on a recording. For Bix, that would have been unthinkable; his mentor, his Smoke, was a white musician of his own age from New Orleans, Emmett Hardy, who spent three months in Davenport. Bix was idolized by musicians, but never became a star; instead, thanks in part to Dorothy Baker, he became a legend. He never married, and he drank uncontrollably from an early age, insulating himself from his father’s harsh disapproval and his own sexual confusion. In some respects, a closer parallel to Bix may be found in the character José Richter, in Baker’s third novel,
Our Gifted Son
(1948). A budding concert pianist and Harvard junior, he is summoned home to Mexico by his monstrously authoritarian German Mexican father, who doesn’t tell him that his mother committed suicide. José is stultified by too much parenting.
Baker’s black characters had few if any precedents in white American literature. They are human beings and artists; they don’t say “gwine” and “suh” or roll their white eyes, as they do in Hemingway and most of his contemporaries. They are middle class; they are not victims or symbols. The first line of Book One—“maybe he shouldn’t have got himself mixed up with negroes”—is sardonically ironic. These Negroes are Rick’s emotional and cultural kinfolk, specifically the players in Jeff Williams’s band and Smoke Jordan’s family—the scene in the church and Rick’s ensuing encounter with Smoke’s mother are among the most charming Baker ever wrote. When five years pass (the gap between Books Two and Three), and Rick has to find work with white Collegians, we miss Smoke and Jeff and Art Hazard and the rest almost as much as Rick does. Unable to let go, he (very un-Bix-like) vainly tries to re-create the brassy sound of the Williams band. He lugs their records everywhere.
The narrative structure is itself innovative. Who is the narrator? White, yes; not a musician; probably a man as he concedes ignorance about only one character, Rick’s bisexual neurotically destructive wife, whose mother committed suicide. He is learned (he offers parallels in Mann and Pascal) and claims to be one of only three people who mourned Rick at his death. He intrudes at odd moments (he knows what tunes run through Rick’s head, but says he isn’t sure if he played “Swinging Down the Lane”). Yet he plays no role in the narrative beyond providing it. Unlike the narrator who introduces Charles Bovary as the new boy in class and then morphs into a ubiquitous storyteller, or Ishmael, who is there and not there, Baker’s narration is an exercise in sustained elegy, the account of a biographer masquerading as a memoirist. It can be very funny in its commentary: remarks like “Shorty’s fifths never came sealed; they never came fifths, for that matter, but those were uncritical times in this country”; or Rick’s description, “Nice outfit,” of the outlandish “peacock” getup modeled by the gay singer and Smoke’s sister Josephine; or regarding Rick’s addiction to Turkish baths; or in recreating long monologues by Rick and Amy (“But, I digress”) that gradually slur into gin-soaked gibberish.
The narrator is scrupulous about not giving dates, beyond the general fact of Prohibition, but there are clues in the litany of real-life musicians and especially songs. At the final recording session, Morrison recites the day’s workload, four tunes, which he happens to name, against all odds, in the order they were composed. Their dates of composition, 1924 to 1928, handily cover the five years Rick has been with him (Bix played with Whiteman less than two). Three of the tunes are reasonable selections for Morrison to record. The fourth, “I Wonder What’s Become of Joe,” enjoyed a slight vogue in 1926, and a top bandleader like Morrison would not have bothered with a passé novelty. So it seems fair to surmise that Baker recognized this number as one associated with the Josephine-like Ethel Waters and the white conglomerate that recorded as the California Ramblers, and that the lyrics include the lines: “I wonder if he wonders, too, / Whether I’m gay, / Or if I am feelin’ blue, / What would he say? / Gee, but we were happy, / Not long ago, / I wonder what’s become of Joe.” Rick’s decline is precipitous and histrionic, but convincingly ordained: The obsession that allowed him to negotiate a blighted childhood and brought him briefly to the mountaintop could sustain him only as long as he honored it.
Baker, for her part, liked to enumerate her obsessions. She spoke of her “fifteen-round bouts” with her piano in the vain hope of achieving a miracle; of her daily horseback riding with her husband and their two daughters on the California orange-grove ranch where she spent much of her life; of her devotion to cooking; and, above all, of climbing the hill to her study every morning at eight to write for five hours. Yet the devotion of more than thirty years yielded a small, fastidious oeuvre: four (short) novels, a handful of stories, and the play and teleplay she co-wrote with her husband, the poet Howard Baker. A cache of manuscripts—stories, essays, letters—remains to be explored in the twenty-two-carton archive of the Bakers’ work stored in the Department of Special Collections at Stanford University. They married a year after her 1929 graduation from UCLA, and spent a season in Paris. When they returned, Howard published an indifferently received novel,
Orange Valley
, while Dorothy worked on a story about a coed torn between the ardor of her domineering lesbian French lit professor and her secret fiancé, a young man who loves jazz and plans to work in the theater.