The Meaning of Recognition (14 page)

Malouf has a reason for disliking the present: it wants to murder his memories. In ‘Great Day’ a folk museum – one of those typically Australian amateur collections of
bricolage
and natural wonders – burns to the ground, obviously as a symbol of the modern world having its way. In ‘Jacko’s Reach’ he is explicit about what he has
spent so long saying goodbye to:

It would be a more persuasive threnody if he could first persuade himself, but there are encouraging signs that he can’t, quite. Australia’s future is unlikely to be settled on such
predictable lines, and one of the reasons is the country’s by now firmly established status as a creative powerhouse. Though the Gold Coast of Malouf’s beloved Queensland looks more
like Las Vegas every year, Australia is not in much danger of becoming too Americanized while there are writers like him around. Its cosmopolitan artists, of whom some of the most prominent have
spent their lives abroad, have served their country well by pursuing their own ends. An insulated nationalist culture would have been no culture at all, and very easily displaced by the American
mass-media influence that Australia’s intellectuals, with some reason, fear can leap oceans at a single bound.

Instead, we have been given what we scarcely expected, or we would not have hoped for it so vocally: a world-embracing cultural identity, stated in our own version of the English language, with
a vocabulary enriched by the collective memories of a population that came from everywhere, the earliest part of it across thousands of years of time. This is the uniquely vivid language that David
Malouf speaks with such fluency, although I wish, when he so deliciously evokes the mid-century childhood some of us shared with him, that he wouldn’t say ‘all over’ to mean
‘everywhere’. We used to say ‘everywhere’. ‘All over’ – he may remember – is what the Yanks said.

New York Review
, 21 December 2000

Postscript

Critics can’t influence the course of artists, and look foolish trying. There is no magnet that powerful. If I could alter the course of an artist like David Malouf,
however, I would bring the focus of his attention closer to here and now. His historical novels and stories are richly imagined, but they are all too easily employed as referential ammunition in
sterile battles fought about the supposedly formative experiences of colonial Australia. The experiences undoubtedly did happen, but it was minds, not events, that were formative. It didn’t
take unusually sensitive young men on the land, for example, to realize that there was something wrong about killing Aboriginals: Governor King knew it before he arrived in Sydney, and one of his
first initiatives was to post a law that said so. There is an element, in much of Malouf’s work, of being mired in Arcadia. Imagine, for an equivalent, a modern American literature in which
Saul Bellow wrote about General Custer, Philip Roth wrote about the Gold Rush, and even Gore Vidal wrote less about Lincoln and Aaron Burr than about the Lewis and Clark expedition. The mismatch of
time and attention is made all the more piquant by Malouf’s startling gift for talking about the complexities of modern history. If I were to say that he was hiding in the far past, however,
it might well be an impertinence. A talent does what it must, and Malouf is as talented as a writer need be. His memory, in particular, is a poetic instrument which I tried to praise in this piece
but still didn’t praise enough. In my own book
Unreliable Memoirs
I thought I had done something to evoke the house I grew up in. Then I read Malouf’s
12
Edmondstone Street
and realized I had got no further than the bricks and mortar. Malouf gives you the feeling of the carpet under your sunburned bare feet, the itch of blistered skin about
to peel. I think it fair to say that he would have been less sensitive to these nuances if he had not had an immigrant background, and that the emergence of the post-World War II multicultural
Australia, with all its new concentrations of power and social prestige, is the even greater tale that remains for him to tell. There are touches of it in his short stories, especially the
autobiographical ones, but so far the novels have been informed by it more in the rind than at the core. There is always the chance, of course, that Malouf’s next book will render this
footnote nonsensical at a stroke. I look forward to that.

From its bare billing in
Radio Times
,
Bing, the Greatest of Them All
doesn’t sound like the kind of event that might win gangsta rap fans away from
their alleged interest in gun crime. But for anyone who has ever wondered how a simple-seeming song lyric can invade the mind with such poetic force, here is some essential listening. Going to air
in three parts on BBC Radio 2, the series manages to raise most of the issues about what happens when a superficially ordinary, non-operatic voice shapes and guides the words of a song so that they
get into your head and stick there. The most niggling issue of all is raised by the choice of presenter. In the enforced absence of the actual Bing, his story is told by Pat Boone. It would be fair
to say that Boone himself is by now heading for the last round-up, yet his voice still sounds young. It always did. When he was on top of the hit parade half a century ago, his voice spelt
unspoiled youth. It was pure and pretty: far prettier than Bing’s. So what did Bing’s voice actually do, if it couldn’t do the whole job just by itself ?

The answer is that a popular singer’s voice should have a lot more going for it than just its quality. Too much natural beauty, indeed, can get in the way, flooding the aural reception
system of the listener before the actual song gets a chance to register. Pat Boone was lucky with his biggest hit,
Friendly Persuasion
: the archaic diction (‘Thee I love’)
injected some aural roughage into his usual effect of squirting the audience with perfume. Leaving even Boone sounding rugged was Johnny Mathis, who made angelically soaring journeys up the charts
in the fifties with the kind of big ballad that enabled him to show off his effortlessly gorgeous upper register. (In its land of origin, the Mathis approach fell into the category of
‘make-out music’, meaning that it could be safely left to sound vaguely romantic in the background without diverting any of the attention necessary for the unhooking of a bra.) By the
time I was old enough to be in control of the Bakelite knobs on our lounge-room radio in Sydney, Bing, across the Pacific in Los Angeles, was getting into his next to final phase. After more than
twenty years of averaging three movies and forty records a year on top of a radio show every week, he was finally slowing down enough to look like the lazy son-of-a-gun he had always cannily
pretended to be. But I didn’t have to do much research to find out what he had that the newer fellows hadn’t: or, rather, what they had that he wasn’t burdened with. They were
doing it the pretty way. He was just doing it, although ‘just’ is a word we will need to dismantle with care.

‘I have just an ordinary voice,’ he said in one of his carefully uninformative interviews. ‘Anyone who can carry a tune thinks he can sing as good as I do.’ His use of
the word ‘good’ for ‘well’ is a tip-off that his gift for the common touch could sometimes lapse into the common lunge. Sinatra was a more typical band singer in having no
book-learning to speak of, or with. In high school Crosby learned elocution from the Jesuits. He went on to a college education. He was so at home with a twelve-cylinder vocabulary that his radio
and film writers later poured on the polysyllables in full confidence that he could handle anything. But he was saying exactly what he meant when he said he had an ordinary voice. He could do
extraordinary things with it, but regarded as a mere sound it was just the noise of a nice man speaking. He put most of his art into making sure that he still sounded like that even when he was
performing prodigies. The secret of great success in the popular arts is to bring the punters in on the event, and you can’t do that if you are manifestly doing something they can’t do.
You have to be doing something they can do, so that they can dream. It’s just that you do it better, so that they can admire. Essentially they are admiring themselves: it’s a circuit,
and too much obvious bravura will break it.

Bing had the bravura, but except in his early days it wasn’t obvious. Starting his career in the 1920s, he was the man on the spot when the microphones got good enough to be canoodled
with, as if they had hair to be stroked. Released from the necessity to project, he could concentrate on shaping a sung note so that it sounded like speech. Other singers were slower to catch on,
and some of them never caught on at all. In any film musical starring Dick Powell you can hear – and what is almost worse, see – what happened to a singer when, even if miming to
playback, he continued to project as if he weren’t being amplified. He looked as if his vocal cords hurt like piles. Bing went in the other direction, as if the microphone could hear him
think. In this endeavour, he was lucky with the natural attributes of his voice. Often characterized as a pleasant light baritone, it had a tenor top to it, conferring the precious gift of allowing
him to relax into the upper register. A singer can have a note-perfect two and a half octave range and no flexibility at all. What counts is the capacity to negotiate the tricky intervals, and Bing
could do an instantaneous octave jump that left the second note ringing as clear and open as the first.

Admirers of the cornet player Bix Beiderbecke would describe the resonating clarity of his attack as bullets hitting a bell. Bing could do what Bix did and often did it with him. They were both
in Paul Whiteman’s huge jazz band. Often derided in retrospect by jazz purists as a lumbering rip-off of the black man’s heritage, the Whiteman organization had some funkier components
than its name taken literally might suggest. An outfit within the outfit was called the Paul Whiteman Rhythm Boys. Singing sprightly tongue-twisters with the Rhythm Boys, Bing proved that he could
string notes together like Bix playing a triple-tongued glissando. ‘There Ain’t No Sweet Man Worth the Salt of My Tears’ was supposed to be a woman’s song but Bing turned it
into an athletic event. Sometimes he and Beiderbecke performed together, like two instruments, or two voices, vying for supremacy. Bing showed that he could smear a note without blurring it. He
could make it dip in the middle like a Chinese vowel, and it would still sound as if it had been spoken. These were prodigious amounts of know-how for a crooner to have, and they were the real
secret behind the later success in which he seemed to repudiate them. You have to have it before you can throw it away.

Later on, Bing was as careful not to attract attention with his technique as a hired assassin is with his luggage. He attracted attention to the song, and there he was lucky in his timing,
because the American song was in the full flight of its creative energy, still establishing the repertoire whose presence does most to explain the absence of a considerable modern American opera.
(Sondheim is exceptional only in proving the rule to its limit: his work is not the dilution of opera, but the furthermost development of the musical show.) Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and the big jazz
bands added up to a powerhouse working flat out to supply its own demand for product, and the product was a solidly rhyming, singable lyric personal only in the sense that a singer could adapt it
to his or her style. When Crosby sang direct from the Coconut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel in LA, his audience, stretching up beyond San Francisco on the West Coast, weren’t hearing the
barely articulated words of a personal anguish as they would be today, they were hearing a skilful interpretation of a national literature. The same would later be true for Billie Holiday.
‘Strange Fruit’ was rare in her repertoire for expressing the black condition. More typical was ‘Pennies from Heaven’, which expressed anybody’s condition. Bessie
Smith and the other blues singers had sung the stock songs of black experience, but although the black experience was almost incomparably awful when set beside the white experience, the stock was
restricted. The white repertoire of lovelorn standards dealt with a far narrower range of suffering, but offered a far wider range of opportunity to sing a commercial hit. In anticipation of Ella
Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday sang mainly from the standard song-book, and worked few variations that could be called black. She hardly even bent the notes. She is hard to parody because she had few
mannerisms. Today, Mariah Carey, the culmination of a soul-shouting line that began with Aretha Franklin and started going haywire with Dionne Warwick, gives us nothing but mannerisms: the song is
a notional presence in a cloud of melisma.

Clean-cut respect for the song was also the mark of Nat King Cole. A jazz man of stature whose voice was as well schooled as his piano style, Cole won enough general acceptance to live in a
white neighbourhood without getting lynched. But he remained a white man’s ideal black. He was so keen to keep up orderly appearances that when he put on his trousers in the dressing room of
his TV show he wouldn’t sit down again until he was on the set, in case he broke the crease. Almost all his material came from the repertoire of the romantic song. Treating the bathroom
mirror to my version of his monster hit ‘Mona Lisa’, I copied the articulation of his lips, not because I hankered after a black style but because I thought that was how he was getting
his mellow tone, from the movement of his mouth rather than from the subtle flexing of his abdomen. Similarly I hoped to get Crosby’s tone by letting my mouth hang loose at the corners. I
rather wished that my ears stuck out, like his.