She put it aside to get a master’s in French and, after a brief stint teaching, began to submit short stories mostly concerning jazz: “the only thing, except writing, that I had a consistent, long-term interest in.” Although she later wrote astutely about the importance of change in jazz, she does not appear to have written about how jazz came into her life. Beiderbecke visited Los Angeles once, during the summer she graduated, but it is unlikely that she got to see him play. In those days, jazz, as opposed to the rhythmically genteel ballroom music popularized by Whiteman, was the province of a wised-up few.
In 1937, she published “The Jazz Sonata,” in which a classical pianist wrestling with Beethoven’s last sonata (the one with the strangely jazzy arietta) finds her own spark by listening to the improvisations of a dance-band pianist who has quit his job, refusing to entertain dancers. “He might have been Mozart,” she thinks, “it was the same thing.” The year after
Young Man with a Horn
appeared, she won an O. Henry Prize for “Keeley Street Blues,” a story about a girl in a reformatory whose sights are raised by her fantasy of singing with Duke Ellington. She also returned to her abandoned novel. For a while the Bakers worked at transforming it into a play, but the subject made a production unlikely, and Dorothy revised the material as the novel
Trio
(1943). The reviews were as divided as her protagonist. Fadiman confessed that lesbians bored him, “but my prejudices are overcome by Miss Baker’s superb craftsmanship. [She] momentarily enchants me into caring.” Writing in
The Nation
, Diana Trilling reproved Baker for not having “a fully adventuring intellect,” but acknowledged she could not put the damned thing down: “swift and tight, polished to the point of brilliance, and plotted with the kind of dramatic suspense which makes it impossible not to race to its end.” Raymond Chandler loved
Trio
, and implored Paramount Pictures to buy it for him, boasting to a friend that when he got done, no one would know there were any lesbians in it.
The movie didn’t happen, but after months of controversy and accusations of censorship that turned it into a cause célèbre, a Broadway theater agreed to mount the play. It opened to disapproving reviews at the end of 1944, lasted sixty-seven performances, and is remembered, if at all, as a notable credit for Richard Widmark. By this point, Howard, who had taught at Berkeley and Harvard, and tried to mount a musical of his own, with an all-black cast reenacting the myth of Orpheus, quit teaching and the Bakers returned to California and their ranch. Dorothy’s droll portrait of him as a brandy-imbibing, philosophy-spouting, unflappable father in
Cassandra at the Wedding
is one of that novel’s most delectable conceits, though we don’t know how he felt about it. Her third novel,
Our Gifted Son
, was largely ignored and never reprinted, a shame because it amplifies her themes and finds a linguistic frame to stretch the borders of identity, as José navigates between English, Spanish, and German. In a period of postwar ruminations and accelerated modernism, her novel seemed insular and irrelevant; Edmund Wilson dismissed it as “spurious melodrama.”
The trouble with
Trio
and
Our Gifted Son
, both of which end with melodramatic suicides, is the absence of Baker’s dry humor and ventriloquial accuracy, sacrificed to a relatively conventional third-person voice. She was now forty-one, with three novels and a few stories to her name, along with a declining reputation. The success of the film of
Young Man with a Horn
must have raised her spirits, but she was little heard from for fourteen years: She wrote with Howard a teleplay for
Playhouse 90
, in 1957, called
The Ninth Day
, and, if the Internet Movie Database can be trusted, acted in an episode of
Dragnet
. She rebounded in grand style with her astonishing
Cassandra at the Wedding
, in 1962, an utterly original work, with two decisively different narrative voices. This time, suicide is thwarted and homosexuality is casually accepted. Appearing two years before Christopher Isherwood’s
A Single Man
, it was a groundbreaker, admired by most reviewers (increasingly so over the years), though
The New Yorker
pummeled it as “monotonous and irritatingly vague.” One of the novel’s central symbols is a Bösendorfer piano, but there is no jazz here, except by way of one sly joke. Learning that her twin sister is engaged to a fellow named Finch, Cassandra muses, “Where’d she meet him—Birdland?”
By then, her daughters were grown and her marriage apparently in trouble, though Dorothy and Howard never divorced. She was diagnosed with cancer and died six years later. In his posthumous
Journals
, Alfred Kazin tells a harrowing story of visiting Dorothy, who lived with the actress Mercedes McCambridge, and interrupting “the most shrieking, screaming case of hysteria I had ever seen,” as McCambridge accused her of using her illness as a threat. “Anyway, I went over again after Dorothy had asked me to leave, and found her standing on the corner of 64 and 5th with her suitcase. Brought her back here for dinner and the night.” Howard died in 1990. His obituary in the
Los Angeles Times
did not mention his wife of thirty-eight years; the credit for the play
Trio
was assigned solely to him. It is a pleasure to see Dorothy Baker getting her own back again.
—G
ARY
G
IDDINS
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Copyright © 1938 by Dorothy Baker
Afterword copyright © 2012 by Gary Giddins
All rights reserved.
Cover painting: David Park,
Jazz Band
, 1954 (detail); courtesy of David Park Estate
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Baker, Dorothy, 1907–1968.
Young man with a horn / by Dorothy Baker ; afterword by Gary Giddins.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 978-1-59017-577-4 (alk. paper)
1. Jazz musicians—Fiction. 2. Trumpet players—Fiction. 3. Self-destructive behavior—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. 5. Musical fiction.
PS3503.A54156Y63 2012
813’.52—dc23
2012013560
ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-594-1
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014