Mon 5 Jun 2023
Reviewed by Tony Baer: DOROTHY BAKER – Young Man with a Horn.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[9] Comments
DOROTHY BAKER – Young Man with a Horn. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1938. Reprinted many times. Basis for the 1950 film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.
Fictionalized biography of jazz trumpet player Bix Beiderbecke (named Rick Martin in the novel).
Rick Martin was an orphan who spent his teens and the teens of the 20th century at a black jazz club in Los Angeles.
There he learned the two styles of jazz: “Memphis style and New Orleans style. The difference between the two is something like the difference between the two styles of chow mein: in one you get the noodles and the sauce served separately, and in the other sauce and noodles are mixed before they are served.â€
He snuck into a church to practice on their piano and “pecked at those keys like a chicken going for corn….making music was on him like a leech……You don’t learn it, you make it…..his eyes were as hard and bright as copper in the sun.â€
He got really good at the horn. A player just starting out has to fit in with the rest of the players. “There are various ways of showing off, and one of them is not to show off.†But “when that thin blond boy stood up in his place and tore off sixteen bars in his own free style, filling in the blank that was allotted to him on the score, it was surprise forever, like seeing an airplane take off from the deck of a good solid ship. To hell, please, with the law of gravity.â€
“At one they quit for the night, and he was always just hitting his stride, so he went somewhere else. He lived his life after hours. After his good work was done he did better work.â€
And then he met a girl. “She looked like an English girl about to go out for a day’s shooting, but she was American, and I don’t think it was very clear to her then what she was out to do……The earth was turning well off center, so that time was forever and not made of minutes. The real world (the street lights, the flask, Rick’s trumpet case) was as vague as the sound of tires whirling through water beneath them, but even then it seemed that the mind could slice like a knife through all the knots of syntax to make anything…..You can’t know anything unless you’ve got the kind of hands that can feel it, unless you’ve got the kind of eyes that never see the outside of anything, just cut straight down under…..He’d never known a really complicated woman, the kind who knows how to strip the nerves and kick the will around, the kind whose voice can say anything. he couldn’t let himself look at her; the sight of her twisted him…..She was born cagey. And yet she signed the marriage license legibly and with a steady hand, and when, under oath, she said ‘I do,’ almost anyone would have thought she did. They were crazy about each other, and crazy.â€
He kept playing and drinking and sleeping as little as possible so he could stay up all night playing the clubs. It “burns a man to tear music out of himself for a long time; it dries him out, leaves salt in his mouth, dust in his throat.â€
He hears a note in his mind that he tries to hit on a record. But he missed it and ruined the record. The first time he’d ever failed. “I don’t know what the hell that boy thinks a trumpet will do. That note he was going for, that thing he was trying for — there isn’t any such thing. Not on a horn.â€
After that, he quit his band. “He stayed in the joints with his own kind, the incurables, the boys who felt the itch to discover something…..[booze] gave him a way out, a means of pushing out beyond the actual, banal here-and-now, …stretched tight to play the way he wanted to.“
And he pushed his frail body til his “eyes flicked…They…burned like lighted rum.â€
And he burnt himself out.
But maybe it’s not a tragedy. “The good thing, finally, is to lead a devoted life, even if it swings around and strikes you in the face.â€
——
The writing is impressionistic, vague, syncopated and smudged. There’s no judgment. Just a life of a jazz trumpet player. Neither comic nor tragic. It just is. Like a jazz trumpet. If there’s tragedy, it’s the tragedy of Icarus, wings melted by the sun. I’m with Baker on this one: “To hell, please, with the law of gravity.â€
I liked it. But I would’ve liked it more had I not just started reading Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues — which reads like mainlined Bix Beiderbecke to the brain. Young Man with a Horn is more Seurat, dotting the landscape with seemingly abstract colors from up close, forming images into view from a distance. It’s subtle and tasty. But it ain’t Bix. It ain’t dangerous. It won’t explode in your hands and die on the vine. Which is fine. They can’t all do that.
June 5th, 2023 at 10:55 pm
Tony,
Good, bad, or indifferent, you make it seem good, and the film, while well done, really is not.
June 6th, 2023 at 12:54 am
Swell review. But I agree about the movie adaptation. I found it reasonably watchable; but mostly for the unusual subject matter. Kirk Douglas gives his usual hoarse, teeth-gritting, veins-standing-up-in-neck performance. But I didn’t learn all that much about music. At the end of it all, it was just a bit wearying and exhausting.
June 6th, 2023 at 1:14 am
Barry,
I’ve not seen the film—and based on what I’ve heard about it I have no interest in doing so due to substantial changes in the story. To wit:
1. In the book he drinks himself to death by age 28; in the film he lives.
2. In the book, his best friend ‘smoke’ is a black drummer. In the film, ‘Smoke’ is a white pianist played by Hoagy Carmichael.
3. In the book, he marries Amy North, a crazy, slumming, damned debutante who slicks Rick Martin’s road to perdition with her poisonously fickle, ambivalent love. In the film, Amy North is a cold, heartless bitch (Bacall).
4. In the film, Rick Martin is saved by the angelic Doris Day (jo Jordan—nightclub singer). In the book, Jo Jordan is Smoke’s sister—a black singer who has no romantic interest in Rick Martin. Miscegenation isn’t much of an issue in either the book or film. In the book, when Rick Martin is dying Jo Jordan is nowhere to be seen. In the film Io Jordan nurses him back to health. In the book, he dies in the ambulance with Smoke Jordan by his side.
5. Worst of all, in the book Rick Martin is a great jazz musician who shines above everyone else by his sheer genius. He ‘shows off by not showing off’. Think Chet Baker—not Maynard Ferguson. But in the movie he’s a hotshot, constantly getting kicked out of bands for showboating. In the book he’s never fired for showboating—only for being drunk.
Anyway—until I hear someone tell me I must see this treacle and tripe, I’m planning to abstain my eyes from its caste.
June 6th, 2023 at 1:25 am
One additional thing—while sexual miscegenation doesn’t come up in the book—musical miscegenation does. And a major piece of the book involves showing how Rick Martin’s lack of racism and embracing of his black jazz friends from age 12 truancy onwards, fosters his development as a musician—learning to play with a freedom and feel few white players developed at that time. One of the main messages is that real jazz aficionados don’t care what color you are. They only care about making great music. Gravity be damned.
June 6th, 2023 at 8:18 pm
The book catches that love of the music which is enough for me. I agree it is not a tragedy, not exactly, because Rick accomplishes what he wanted. He dies young, but not unfulfilled. His youth is tragic, but the heights he reaches in his music for him outweigh the normal concept of a happy life.
Some people would rather burn bright and fast, and the book captures that kind of individual.
June 8th, 2023 at 4:29 am
I think I’d enjoy the book, just as I enjoyed the film — bad as it is — for Curtiz’ self-assured directing. I don’t know where he found Katharine Kurasch to play Lauren Bacall’s lesbian girlfriend, but her few seconds in the film suggest all sorts of things, the kind of things Kirk Douglas’ character calls “sick.”
And the ending is so obviously tacked on, I almost laughed out loud.
June 8th, 2023 at 5:10 pm
Has anyone thought about Libby Holman Bacall’s inspiration?
June 8th, 2023 at 5:28 pm
Barry,
Could be. All I know is that Bacall’s inspiration didn’t come from the book. Her character in the book has no suggestion of the Isle of Lesbos.
June 8th, 2023 at 5:59 pm
I know, Tony, but believe that is the root here as it is in Written On The Wind.