Collected Stories, page 40
Sue is clapping her hands in intense slow strokes under her chin. “Isn’t that something?” she says. “That’s one thing he’s been working on a lot. I just don’t see how anybody plays it at all—all those minor ninths and major sevenths, and no key signature at all.”
“Or why anybody plays it,” I am compelled to say. But when her hands start another flurry I join in. Kaminski sits, spiritually exhausted, bending his head. Encore, encore. For Sue’s sake, try. My arms begin to grow tired, and still he sits there. A full minute after my impertinent question, her hands still going, Sue says, “I admit I don’t understand that kind of music, but because I’m ignorant is no reason to throw it away.”
So I am rebuked. She is a noble and innocent woman, and will stoop to beg Kaminski and leave a door open for Schoenberg, all for the disinterested love of art. Well, God bless her. It’s almost over, and she can probably feel that it was a success. Maybe she can even think of it as a triumph. Later, when nothing has come of all her effort and expense, she can console herself with a belief that there is a conspiracy among established musicians to pound the fingers of drowning genius off the gunwale.
“Well, anyway, he’s terrific,” I say like a forktongued liar. “Marvelous.” Rewarded by all the gratitude she puts into her smile, I sit back for the encore that is finally forthcoming. And what does Kaminski play? Some number of Charles Ives, almost as mad as the Schoenberg.
Probably there might have been enough politeness among us to urge a second encore, but Kaminski cuts us off by leaving the piano. Matches flare, smoke drifts upward, the moonlight dawns again, Bill Casement appears from somewhere, and a discreet white coat crosses from the barbecue end of the cabaña and opens the folding panels of the bar.
VI
It seems that quite a number of times during the evening I am condemned to have Sue at me with tense questions. She is as bad as a Princeton boy with a manuscript: Have I got it? Is it any good? Can I be a writer? “What do you think?” Sue says now. “Am I wrong?”
“He’s a good pianist.”
Her impatience is close to magnificent. For a second she is Tallulah. “Good! Good heavens, I know that. But does he have a chance? Has he got so much talent they can’t deny him? They say only about one young pianist in a hundred …”
“You can’t make your chances,” I say. “That’s mostly luck.”
“I’ll be his luck,” she says.
The crowd is rising and drifting inside. Trapped on the lounge, I lean back and notice that over our heads, marbled by the lights, white mist has begun to boil on some unfelt wind. The air is chilly and wet; the fog has come in. Ruth stands up, shivering her shoulders to cover the significant look she is giving me. I stand up with her. So does Sue, but Sue doesn’t let me go.
“If you’re his luck, then he has a chance,” I say, and am rewarded by one of her smiles, so confident and proud that I am stricken with remorse, and add, “But it’s an awful skinny little chance. Any young pianist would probably be better off if he made up his mind straight off to be a local musician instead of trying for a concert career.”
“But the concert career is what he wants. It’s what he’s been preparing for all his life.”
“Sure. That’s what they all want. Then they eat their hearts out because they miss, and when you look at it, what is it they’ve missed? A chance to ride a dreary circuit and play for the local Master Minds and Artists series and perform in the Art Barn of every jerk town in America. It might be better if they stayed home and organized chamber groups and taught the young and appeared once a year as soloist with the local little symphony.”
“Joe, dear,” Sue says, “can you imagine Arnold teaching grubby little unwilling kids to play little Mozart sonatas for PTA meetings?”
She could not have found a quicker way to adjust my thermostat upward. It is true that I can’t imagine Kaminski doing any such thing as teaching the young, but that is a commentary on Kaminski, not on the young. Besides, I am the defender, self-appointed, of the good American middle-class small-town and suburban way of life, and I get almighty sick of Americans who enjoy all its benefits but can’t find a good word to say for it. An American may be defined as a man who won’t take his own side in an argument. “Is Arnold above Mozart?” I ask. “For that matter, is he above the PTA?”
She stares at me to see if I’m serious. “Now you’re being cute,” she says, and blinks her eyes like a fond idiot and rushes inside to join the group around Kaminski. I note that Kaminski now has a highball in his hand. The Artist is only mortal, after all. If we wait, we may even see him condescend to a sandwich.
“Shall we get out of this?” I ask Ruth.
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Manners,” she says. “You wouldn’t understand, lamb. But let’s go inside. It’s cold out here.”
It is, even with the radiant-heated magic carpet. The patio is deserted already. The air above boils with white. Between the abandoned chairs and empty lawn the transparent green-blue pool fumes with underwater light as if it opened down into hell. Once inside and looking out, I have a feeling of being marooned in a space ship. Any minute now frogmen will land their saucers on the patio or rise in diving helmets and snorkels from the pool.
Inside there are no frogmen, only Kaminski, talking with his hands, putting his glass on a tray and accepting another. The white head of the critic is humorously and skeptically bent, listening. The dour accompanist, the velvet-coated Mr. Budapest, the solid Ackermans, Sue, three or four unknowns, the little piano teacher, make a close and voluble group. Kaminski pauses amid laughter; evidently these others don’t find him as hard to take as I do. As if he feels my thoughts, he looks across his hearers at Ruth and me, and Ruth raises her hands beside her head and makes pretty applauding motions. Manners. I am compelled to do the same, not so prettily.
Sam Shields goes past us, winks sadly, leaving. His wife is crippled and does not go out, so that he is always among the first to leave a party. This time he has five or six others for company, filing past Bill and being handshook at the door. To us now comes Annie Williamson, robust dame, and inquires in her fight-announcer’s voice why we don’t join the Hunt. They have fourteen members now, and enough permissions so that they can put hurdles on fences and get a run of almost fourteen miles. Of course we’re not too old. Come on … Herman Dyer will still take a three-bar gate, and he’s five years older than God. Or maybe we’d like the job of riding ahead dragging a scent or a dead rabbit. Make me Master of the Hunt, any office I want. Only come.
“Annie,” I tell her sadly, “I am an old, infirm, pathetic figure. I have retired to these hills only to complete my memories, and riding a horse might cut them untimely short. Even art, such as tonight, can hardly make me leave my own humble hearth any more.”
“What’s the matter?” she says. “Didn’t you like it? I thought it was swell. The last one was kind of yowly, but he played it fine.”
“Sure I liked it,” I say. “I thought it was real artistic.”
“You’re a philistine,” Annie says. “An old cynical philistine. I’d hate to read your memoirs.”
“You couldn’t finish them,” I say. “There isn’t a horse or a beagle in them anywhere.”
“A terribly limited old man,” she says, and squeezes Ruth’s arm and goes off shaking her head and chuckling. She circles the Kaminski crowd, interrupts something he is saying. I see her mouth going: Thank you, enjoyed it very much, blah blah. She first, and now a dozen others, neighbors and unknowns … so much … envy Sue the chance to hear you every day … luck to you … great treat. Some more effusive than others, but all respectful. Kaminski can sneer at his overfed alcoholic audience, but it has listened dutifully, and has applauded louder than it sometimes felt like doing, and has stilled its laughter in embarrassment when it didn’t understand. If he had played nothing but Chopin they would have enjoyed him more, but he would have to be even more arrogant and superior and cross-grained than he is to alienate their good will and sour their wonderful good nature. Luck to you … And mean it. Would buy tickets, if necessary.
“Madame,” I say to my noiseless wife, “art is troublesome and life is long. Can’t we go home?”
For answer she steers me by the arm into the musical circle. Except for four people talking over something confidential in a corner, and the white coats moving around hopefully with unclaimed highballs on their trays, the musical circle now includes the whole company. Kaminski, we find, is still doing most of the talking. His subject is—guess what? The Artist. Specifically, the Artist in America.
I claim one of the spare highballs in self-defense. I know the substance of this lecture in advance, much of it from Murthi. And if Kaminski quotes Baudelaire about the great gaslighted Barbarity that killed Poe, I will disembowel him.
The lecture does not pursue its expected course more than a few minutes, and it is done with more grace and humor than I would have thought Kaminski had in him. A couple of highballs have humanized his soul. Mainly he talks, and without too obvious self-pity, about the difficulties of a musical career: twenty years or so of nothing but practice, practice, practice; the teachers in Boston and New York and Rome; the tyranny of the piano (I can’t be away from a piano a single day without losing ground. On the train, and even in an automobile, I carry around a practice keyboard to run exercises on). It is (with a rueful mouth) a rough profession to get established in. He wonders sometimes why one doesn’t instead take the Civil Service examinations. (Laughter.) But it is understandable, Kaminski says, why the trapdoor should be closed over the heads of young musicians. Established performers, and recording companies and agencies clinging to what they know is profitable, are naturally either jealous of competition or afraid to risk anything on new music or new men. (That charming little Ives that I used for an encore, for instance, has practically never been played, though it was composed almost fifty years ago.)
The case of Kaminski is (with a shrug) nothing unique. The critic and the Ackermans know how it goes. And of course, there is the problem of finding audiences. Whom shall one play for? Good audiences so few and so small, in spite of all the talk about the educational effect of radio and recordings. People who really know and love good music available only in the large cities or—with a flick of his dark eyes at Sue—in a few places such as this. Oh, he is full of charm. The little music teacher bridles. But generally, Kaminski says, there is only the sham audience with sham values, and the whole concert stage which is the only certain way of reaching audiences one can respect is dominated by two or three agencies interested only in dollars.
“Shyme, shyme,” says old Joe Allston from the edge of the circle, and draws a startled half-smile from his neighbors and a second’s ironic stare from Kaminski.
“What, a defender of agents in the crowd?” the critic says, turning his white head.
“Literary only,” I say. “And ex, not current. But a bona fide paid-up member of the Agents’ Protective Association, the only bulwark between the Artist and the poor farm.”
“Are agents so necessary?” Sue says. “Isn’t it possible to break in somehow without putting yourself in the clutches of one of them?”
“Clutches!” I say. “Consider my feelings.”
Ruth gives me an absolutely expressionless, pleasant look in which I read some future unpleasantness, but what the hell, shall a man keep quiet while his lifework is trampled on?
“Would you admit,” says Kaminski with his tight dogfish smile, “that an agent without an artist is a vine without an oak?”
The little music teacher brings her hands together. Her eyes are snapping and her little pointed chin, pebbled like the Pope’s Nose of a plucked turkey, quivers. Oh, if she were defending the cause of music and art against such commercial attacks, she would … She is listening, comprehending, participating, right in the midst of things. Kaminski turns to her and actually winks. As a tray passes behind him he reaches back and takes a third highball. Joe Allston collars one too. The benevolent critic pokes his finger at old Joe and says encouragingly, “How about it, Agents’ Protective Association? Can you stand alone?”
“I don’t like the figure,” I say. “I don’t feel like a vine without an oak. I feel like a Seeing Eye dog without a blind man.”
This brings on a shower of protests and laughter, and Sue says, “Joe, if you’re going to stick up for agents you’ll have to tell us how to beat the game. How could an agent help Arnold, say, get a hearing and get started?”
“Any good agency will get him an audition, any time.”
“Yes, along with a thousand others.”
“No, by himself.”
“And having had it, what does he get out of it?” murmurs Mr. Ackerman. He has winesap cheeks and white, white hair, but his expression is not benevolent like the critic’s, mainly because his whole face has come loose, and sags—big loose lips, big drooping nose, a forehead that hangs in folds over his eyebrows. He reminds me of a worried little science-fiction writer I used to know who developed what his doctor called “lack of muscle tone,” so that his nose wouldn’t even hold up his glasses. It was as if he had been half disintegrated by one of his ray guns. Mr. Ackerman’s voice sags like his face; he looks at me with reddish eyes above hound-dog lower lids.
They all obviously enjoy yapping at me. Here is the Enemy, the Commercial Evil Genius that destroys Art. This kind of thing exhilarates me, I’m afraid.
“That’s not the agent’s fault,” I say. “It’s a simple matter of supply and demand. A hundred good young pianists come to New York every year all pumped full of hope. They are courteously greeted and auditioned by the agents, who take on anyone they can. Agents arrange concerts, including Town Hall and Carnegie Hall concerts, for some of them, and they paper the hall and invite and inveigle the critics and clip the reviews, and if the miracle happens and some young man gets noticed in some special way, they book him on a circuit. But if ninety-nine of those young pianists slink out of New York with a few pallid clippings and no rave notices and no bookings, that isn’t the agents’ fault.”
“Then whose fault is it?” cries Sue. “There are millions of people who would be thrilled to hear someone like Arnold play. Why can’t they? There seems to be a stone wall between.”
“Overproduction,” murmurs old Devil’s-Advocate Allston, and sips his insolent bourbon.
Mr. Ackerman’s face lifts with a visible effort its sagging folds; the critic looks ironical and skeptical; Kaminski watches me over his glass with big shining liquid eyes. His pitted skin is no longer pale, but has acquired a dark, purplish flush. He seems to nurse some secret amusing knowledge. The music teacher at his elbow twists her mouth, very incensed and impatient at old commercial Allston. Her mouth opens for impetuous words, closes again. Her pebbled chin quivers.
“Overproduction, sure,” I say again. “If it happened in the automobile industry you’d blame it on the management, or the government, or on classical capitalist economics, or creeping socialism. But it’s in music, and so you want to blame it on the poor agent. An agent is only a dealer. He isn’t to blame if the factory makes too many cars. All he can do is sell the ones he can.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Allston is pulling our leg,” the critic says. “Art isn’t quite a matter of production lines. Genius can’t be predicted and machined like a Chevrolet, do you think, Mr. Casement?”
He catches Bill by surprise. Evidently he is one of those who like to direct and control conversations, pulling in the hangers-on. But his question is no kindness to Bill, who strangles and waves an arm. “Don’t ask me! I don’t know a thing about it.” Even after the spotlight has left him, he stands pulling his lower lip, looking around over his hand, and chuckling meaninglessly when he catches anyone’s eye.
“So you don’t think a New York concert does any good,” Sue says—pushing, pushing. After all, she held this clambake to bring us all together and now she has what she wanted—patrons and critics and agents in a cluster—and she is going to find out everything. “If they don’t do any good, why bother?”
“Why indeed?” I say, and then I see that I have carried it too far, for Sue’s face puckers unhappily, and she insists, “But Joe …”
The critic observes, “They may not do much good, but nothing can be done without one.”
“So for the exceptional ones they do do some good.”
“For the occasional exception they may do everything,” the critic says. “Someone like William Kapell, who was killed in a plane crash just a few miles from here. But Kapell was a very notable exception.”
I cannot read Kaminski—it is being made increasingly clear to me that one of my causes of irritation at him is precisely that I don’t know what goes on inside him—but I can read Sue Casement without bifocals, and the look she throws at Kaminski says two things: One is that here, just five feet from her, is another Notable Exception as notable as Kapell. The other is that since Kapell has been killed on the brink of a brilliant career, he has obviously left a vacancy.
“A lot of young pianists can’t afford it, I expect,” she says—hopefully, I think.
The critic spreads his hands. “Town Hall about fifteen hundred, Carnegie two thousand. Still, a lot of them find it somewhere. It’s a lot of money to put on the turn of a card.”
Determination and resolve, or muscular contractions that I interpret in these terms, harden in Sue’s rosy face. “Is it hard to arrange?”
I can’t resist. “Any good agent will take care of it for you,” I say. She throws me a smile: you old devil, you.
“But no one can count on one single thing’s coming from it,” the critic says, and he looks kindly upon both Sue and her protégé. I respect this benevolent old creature in spite of his profession. He is trying to warn them.
