Making a note of the songs in his heart
Wilfrid Sheed provides a fan's guide to the greats
The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty, By Wilfrid Sheed, Random House, 352 pp., $29.95
Now 76, Wilfrid Sheed has had a long and varied literary career, publishing eight novels, including two National Book Award finalists, and a dozen works of nonfiction focused on his personal passions: sports (particularly baseball), the arts (particularly literature), and family (particularly his own). Sheed's approach is that of a devoted, learned fan, critical but also seeking the miraculous heart of difficult human achievement. He writes as a compiler of small observations rather than a teller of long, intricate narratives, relying on witty, erudite prose to knot up his findings.
In "The House That George Built," his first book in a dozen years, Sheed gathers his views on the music of the great American songbook. Since childhood, he has been listening to and loving the jazz songs of George Gershwin (the "George" of this book's title), Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Jerome Kern, Burton Lane, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and some 50 other composers of the 1920s through 1950s. Finally, at an editor's behest, he decided to write about them.
Sheed tells readers at the outset that his book "is a labor of love, not a work of scholarship," something he has "been researching for most of my life without knowing it." He likens the book to a "bull session, with its overtones of the tall story and the overconfident assertion," and it does have an intimacy and charm rare in writing about the arts. Rather than a technical study, or an attempt to define thematic connections or chains of influence among composers, it is a collection of informal disquisitions. Each composer included wrote more than 50 standards, "tunes that are still popular enough over fifty years later for most cocktail lounge pianists to have a rough idea of them, and for their copyrights still to be worth fighting for."
While the songwriters' names may no longer be as familiar as they were to Sheed's contemporaries, their songs probably are. On this season's "American Idol," for instance, contestants sang "Stormy Weather" (Arlen), "Cheek to Cheek" and "Steppin' Out With My Baby" (Berlin), "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" (Ellington), "I Got Rhythm" (Gershwin), "On a Clear Day" (Lane), "Night and Day" (Porter), and "My Funny Valentine" (Rodgers).
The book's introductory chapters trace the evolution of the jazz song form with its "familiar thirty-two-bar" structure. A confluence of factors were involved, including massive immigration at the turn of the 20th century, World War I and Americans' mobility in its aftermath, and the development of radio, microphoned records, talking pictures, and Broadway. In the 40-year period Sheed writes about, these composers were responsible for "an astonishing achievement that would more than double or triple the world's supply of singable tunes."
Subsequent chapters focus on individual fig ures, beginning with Berlin, whose "housebroken jazz" did more than anyone else's "to secure the beachheads of the dance floor and the music rack for his own kind of lightly syncopated, semi-black, and faintly Jewish melodies." These chapters incorporate biographical and character sketches, brief comments on songs and trends, and suggestions about musical legacy. Berlin, "our most gifted original musician," legitimized the music, giving "his whole life and whole gift entirely to popular songs." Gershwin is notable not only for his "musical genius" and number of enduring hits, but for "the extraordinary aura and the magnanimity that seemed almost to flow out of the music, in the direction of other songwriters." In writing "Stardust," Hoagy Carmichael, who sang his own songs, "became both our most and least commercial composer" by proving he "could actually make money being himself, keep his integrity, and eat his cake, too."
Sheed, like the typical participant in a bull session, aims to score points with memorable, provocative, attention-grabbing statements. About Gershwin's lyricist-brother Ira, whose talents Sheed finds limited, he writes, "If there had been no George, the odds seem good that Ira would have become an English teacher with a sideline in light verse." That is surely an argument-starter. Of Arlen, Sheed says, "Whatever the essence of this music is, Harold Arlen had the most of it." A reader can just picture Sheed smiling after that one, anticipating a combative comeback. What about Cole Porter!
The book, while great fun to read, has real weaknesses. Sheed's referential, knowing approach assumes a reader's familiarity with each composer and his work. Not all his phrase-making succeeds. He misuses Yiddish words, such as "schlamozzel," and occasionally strains for humor, as when he writes that Hollywood, "the home of divorce," is so contentious "even Siamese twins are likely to wind up just good friends." He also can sound pedantic, as in this comment about Porter: "By adding the mystery ingredients of jazzness and bluesness, he reached a new depth in himself that hadn't been previously accessible to the public."
Opinionated, quirky, informative, this book will have most readers humming, singing, seeking out recordings of the standards, "the official sound of America right through World War II." It will also have readers arguing back. Whaddya mean "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is Kern's "greatest song ever "? What about "The Way You Look Tonight "?
Floyd Skloot received the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction for his memoir "In the Shadow of Memory." His 12th book, the novel "Patient 002," was published this spring. 