An Interesting Life, So Far

In Junior High School new students arrived by bus from Brooklawn and other suburbs. They were less violent and I became friends with a small group that had a sense of humor. We mocked the platitudes of popular songs. “I love you for seventy mental reasons”. We sang to the tune of the “Blue Danube”

I like Rival Dog Food,

ARF ARF,

ARF ARF

Such parodies were common to an era of Spike Jones and his City Slickers. During the 1990s my wife taught a student from Montreal who could also remember singing to the melody of “Jealousy”

Leprosy, my god I’ve got leprosy,

There goes my eye ball into your highball

Leprosy, my god I’ve got leprosy

I still cannot keep distinct the original lyrics of some songs from their parodies. “Laura, the face on the bar room floor” has long ago become the original in my mind.

Our sexual jokes were signs of anxieties and inexperience. A group of male students are late for class and say that they were outside “blowing bubbles”. A female student arrives and announces that she is “Bubbles”. A girl is driven further and further outside of town in her boyfriend’s car and when told to “put out or get out” says that’s her “legs are her best friend”. Eventually she is driven so far away that she decides “even the best of friends must part.”

I was good at sports, although disappointing at track and field meets where, instead of living up to my practice records, I performed terribly. I still shy off from competitions. In high school I even had a doctor’s excuse to avoid Physical Education although I played as a guard on an amateur football team that included the best players from the school’s team. I hated the culture that sports involved. There was always something homoerotic going on in the shower room after practices. Team members thought it amusing to step on your running shoes with their own spiked shoes. I remember once being selected to box with the class bully, someone larger and several years older. I hated boxing and expected to be murdered. Instead he whispered to me that he had sinus problems and “please do not hit my nose. Could we just pretend to fight?” It is sometimes true that freedom is to be free of fear itself.

My alternate life was in literature. I found such journals as Atlantic and Harper’s in the magazine shelves of my father’s pharmacy. When I was ten or eleven I asked for a two volume edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s works for a Christmas present. I progressed to borrowing books from the public library. My tastes were at first limited, mostly middlebrow, but I was impressed by any sophistication, wit, or clever malice. Later I would discover Saki and Ronald Firbanks, but in my early teens I thought the novels of Thorne Smith highly amusing and loved the Mr and Mrs North crime stories of Frances and Richard Lockridge. I tried to write my own but after hearing a gun shot while drinking many cocktails at a country club I did not know what my characters were to do next.

I discovered a book shop in Philadelphia—was it called the Ben Franklin?-- where someone kindly explained that when I was older I would prefer Stendhal to Kenneth Patchen’s The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, and Henry Miller’s The Air Conditioned Nightmare. Other books I bought and read included Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, translations of Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Plague, and such works of Jean-Paul Sartre in translation as The Respectful Prostitute, No Exit, The Flies, Nausea, and Being and Nothingness (of which I could make little sense)

Meanwhile I hung around with my friends at a garage at night and discussed how members of the local police force were related to the criminals who held up the gas station recently, how the police told us that the way to handle the situation was to get the criminals in an alley and dump them in the river afterwards, and how someone had died in an automobile accident and was revenged by his friends through trick driving that forced the guilty one off the road and left him a physical wreck near dead. I sometimes carried during those nights a pocketknife as a form of self-protection. I also sometimes carried a copy of a book of works by Friedrich Nietzsche that I had found among my father’s four or five books. This was another kind of self-protection. I knew little of the world outside Gloucester except what I read; I assumed everyone lived by trying to avoid being beaten up, knifed, insulted. I was surprised when I met the son of one of the other three Jewish families who was visiting after they had moved to New York. In Gloucester he played center in the high school football team; he told me of his school in New York where there was a chess club (no one in Gloucester played chess) and classmates read books and discussed ideas. I was stunned. There was life elsewhere without constant assertions of manhood, threats, anger, rudeness.

I did have another life in Gloucester besides reading. Being an only child with parents usually working in their pharmacy I drifted to other homes like a stray dog. Wanda Morrison had been at school with my mother in Camden and also moved to Gloucester. She was from a Polish immigrant family and married a Scots. Cheerful, amusing, outgoing, gossipy, she was connected to local civic life and such celebrations as Easter and July 4th; he was a caricature Scots, withdrawn, quiet, serious. He worked in Philadelphia as a printer, she usually had a professional link with the schools in Gloucester as would her daughter Pat. From Wanda I learned bits of my family’s history, of the relationship between my mother and father, and gossip about others. She spoke to me as if I were an adult and told me that as X’s wife was frequenting bars he made her pregnant to stay at home. Y had her tubes tied which shocked the other teachers, but why should she not enjoy herself? It was at Wanda’s I learned to garden (an interest that was useful in Nigeria where I grew European vegetables for my family as well as teaching; I was the mad white man out in the afternoon sun), had my wartime Victory Garden, and learned how to color and decorate Easter eggs, for which I won a few prizes. Around her life seemed normal and after I married I several times took Adele to meet Wanda and then Pat and her husband as if I wanted to show that I had a real family.

By then the Schroeders had left. I did not know where they had gone. I was told that he had had a stroke and Betty gave up her New York trips to care for him. My mother, who had protectively bought the property after the Schroeders claimed they could not anymore afford the rent, felt that she had lost the opportunity to expand the pharmacy to make it more appealing to buyers before she retired.

They were our next-door neighbors and where I first wandered seeking family. The husband worked as a mechanic in Philadelphia where the two daughters, Betty and Jean, worked in offices. The wife stayed home, cleaning house, baking, preparing evening meals. Every New Year she made a delicious orange cake, moist and intensely flavored, for my birthday. People remarked that she used natural ingredients including fresh oranges. The husband had a dartboard in the basement where I brought my friends. He built the large folding table with legs on which I mounted annually a prize winning train and lighting display in our apartment for the Christmas season. Although I stopped having model trains before I left school, I still feel attracted when I hear of a display. I understand the story about the famous jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden who carried a train set in the trunk of his car when touring. A tall handsome man of American Indian origin he attracted women who when invited back to his motel room found they were expected to watch model trains.

Betty Schroeder, the elder daughter, introduced me to jazz music. She had been a Gene Krupa swing band fan and graduated to following jazz in New York where she would visit for weekends once or twice a month to hear musicians on 52nd Street and later, after she had become part of the scene, in Harlem. An attractive, dark haired and dark eyed slender woman, Betty was about ten years older than me and had an erotic charge. Whenever she returned from work she would be greeted by approving wolf whistles from the war vets who seemed perpetually to mill in front of our drug store at night. Although she had no interest in them I could see her appreciative smile. She knew that she was a desirable woman. She had, however, no one in Gloucester with whom she could share and brag about her prized photographs taken in New York with such famous black musicians as Buck Clayton, Teddy Wilson, Roy Eldridge, Don Byas, Big Sid Catlett, and Jo Jones. No one else, besides me, listened with her to her increasing collection of 78 rpm jazz records, discussed the difference between Dixieland and Swing and the new Be Bop. There was no one else to whom she would recount her musicians’ gossip about this drummer being heavy footed, that drummer appearing always relaxed and unperturbed on stage. Once she returned from New York with stitches above an eyebrow from an automobile accident and I assumed her relationships had progressed beyond being a listener and fan of black jazz music.

I used to listen with her family to Superman, The Shadow and other radio series. I spent Christmas nights with them listening to radio announcements of Santa’s coming arrival. Betty quizzed me on my readings for school tests. She had taught me such mnemonics as “A rat in Tommy’s house may eat Tommy’s ice cream” as a way of spelling “arithmetic “. For a history test I learned “Columbus sailed across the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety two”, which rapidly was parodied as “Columbus sailed the deep blue sea in fourteen hundred and ninety three”. I progressed with her from Gene Krupa to a knowing jazz fan. Her skin darkened as she spent more time in New York. Was she taking some pill, was it her make up? I assumed that even in New York a pretty young white woman in the company of older black musicians might bring police attention. I was by then reading Down Beat and knew of the arrests of many musicians for using drugs and the brutal pistol-whipping of musicians, such as Miles Davis, with little cause. Police were enemies to be avoided.

Although jazz was a minority taste there was a continuing audience for big bands and renewed interest in small combos. In school we danced to Artie Shaw, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman. There were interesting arrangements by such bands as Claude Thornhill on the jukeboxes. The jazz world was dividing into traditionalists and Be Boppers. The rediscovery of older jazz was as much a revelation as the strange chords and choppy rhythms of the boppers. A weekly radio show began called “This is Jazz”, which broadcast live jam sessions that I recorded on a machine I acquired for just that purpose. Because of ‘This is Jazz” I travelled to New York one weekend in April 1948 to hear Kid Ory’s Creole Jazz Band at Carnegie Hall during its short visit from California where it broadcast regularly on a radio program introduced by Orson Welles. I went to Stuyvesant Casino, then a jazz venue, and I went on a “river boat” jazz concert where I spoke with Pops Foster about his slapping the strings of the bass. I returned to Philadelphia and to Gloucester with a suitcase just in time to go to school. I was then 15 years old and in tenth grade. I had been out of my depth in the hotel one night when a crying woman began banging on the door mistakenly pleading to be let in. She had left her man over an argument and was trying to return. If she had wanted to discuss jazz I would have known what to do.

I can see now that jazz significantly shaped my life. It led to an interest in black American and then African art, music and culture that took me to Africa and the new African writing and eventually into Commonwealth and postcolonial literatures. If I became a literary critic and scholar of Indian, African and Caribbean literatures, it was partly an extension of my interest in American jazz. Jazz also led to dancing to live music, the source of many acquaintances over the decades. My first publications were reviews and articles in jazz magazines.

I was discovering that there was plenty of good jazz to be heard in Philadelphia. (Even around Camden there were good jazz clubs although I did not know them.) Besides touring groups like Louis Armstrong, and a few bars for jazz fans (one of which was owned by Red Rodney, a well-known white bebop trumpeter), there were occasional big modern jazz concerts at the Academy of Music where I heard Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Billie Holiday, Tiny Grimes, Slam Stewart and other living giants when I was 15–16 years old. More often on Sunday afternoons there were Dixieland concerts in the Academy’s Foyer with such musicians as Sidney Bechet, Danny Barker, Wild Bill Davidson, Muggsy Spanier, Willie the Lion Smith, Sammy Price, Jimmy Archie, Baby Dodds, Pops Foster, James P Johnson, and Danny Alvin. I even sat in one time with the Wilbur and Sidney de Paris brothers’ band when their drummer was late getting on stage. I had no idea I was listening to and meeting musicians who when I was older would be legends.

Through the Foyer concerts I met Walter Bowe, a black trumpet player my age who lived in Camden, and through Walter I came to know other musicians in the Philadelphia area, several of whom would figure in my life during the next decade or more. There was the clarinetist Dick Hadlock already modeling his playing on the eccentric great Pee Wee Russell, and a trombonist Norman Finkelstein, both studying in the business school at Penn. Dick’s father, a jazz fan, worked for an American company in Brazil where Dick was brought up and studied saxophone. Hadlock drove an antique chain-driven Rolls Royce in which we once made a trip to Bridgeport, Connecticut where he had lived until he was 12. He still had friends there in, was it?, the White Eagle Jazz Band.

He would move to New York, live in a Greenwich Village loft owned by the black painter Beauford Delaney, made famous by Henry Miller, would buy and edit The Record Changer, a then obscure jazz publication to which I contributed from Europe. Like much that he did, The Record Changer became part of American cultural history. The complete run was republished some years back by the University of California Press

Dick studied clarinet or saxophone at various times with Sidney Bechet, Garven Bushell and Lee Konitz, three greats. He wrote the often republished Jazz Masters of the Twenties and for decades had radio jazz programs in California while he continued to play clarinet in or lead different groups. Although as a critic and broadcaster his range was wide his personal tastes were limited mostly to the white Dixieland of the so-called Chicago school of the twenties. He admired Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer. He intensely disliked the New Orleans jazz revival that started in the late 1930s and which had a strong influence on many, including Walter Bowe and myself.

He travelled to Paris one year and was given a demonstration of over-blowing and other “free jazz” post-modern reed techniques by Steve Lacy, whom he knew in New York during the 1950s and who had also taken lessons with Sidney Bechet. Lacy had famously been asked by pianist Cecil Taylor around 1955 “why such a young man as you should be playing such old man’s music” and followed Taylor into the free jazz movement, although the main influence on Lacy’s evolution as a musician and composer was Theolonius Monk, in whose group he worked for a time. Lacy was now a famous avant-gardist and composer, who lived in Paris since 1970 until in 1992 he was awarded a five year MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. The French government’s attempt to tax the money eventually drove him back to the USA. The meeting between the former students of Bechet was not a success. Hadlock told me that he was not impressed by what Lacy showed him on clarinet, and Lacy told me he was surprised that his old friend had changed so little in his music.

Another of our jazz circle was J Norton-Smith, the son of a wealthy industrialist and conscious of his genealogy. The family house on Philadelphia’s Main Line was large; outside old stables were converted into a garage to hold many automobiles. Norton played banjo and piano very well, and was then attending Haverford College, the elite men’s college often paired in one’s mind with nearby Bryn Mawr College for women, Swarthmore making the third of the exclusive colleges in the Philadelphia suburbs. Norton was brilliant, eccentric, learned, impossible. He lead his own traditional jazz band consisting of musicians from good colleges who lived or had been raised in or near Ardmore, and was proud that they included no Jews, until he decided that I had a much better press roll than his usual drummer. I remember once we auditioned for the Paul Whiteman TV show. I had not realized that Whiteman was still alive. Norton was a follower of Ezra Pound and dressed as eccentrically—he had a belted tweed Norfolk jacket that buttoned high in front, a black velvet cape—while making malicious comments on the clothing of others. He had a nervous breakdown directing Sartre’s Huit Clos in French at Haverford. Between his third and fourth year he went to New York, had a French mistress, and supposedly played professionally at Stuyvesant Casino to support himself. I sometimes wonder could he really have been accepted into the New York musicians union so effortlessly.

After Haverford he studied with C. S. Lewis at Magdalen College, Oxford, and with Lewis’s backing moved through various English departments in England and Scotland before being made Professor at Dundee University. He was a famous mediaevalist; besides editing texts he was series editor for several publishers.

He had also become a parody, said to be more British than the British. He did not drive an automobile but had an ex-colonial wife who did. Few academics in England and Scotland seemed to know much about his past except that he had once been a professional jazz musician who played in New York with Sidney Bechet and other greats. When I was a visiting Professor at the University of Stirling (1979) it was thought possibly amusing to have Norton and me meet, but this was not to be. A pity. I really would have like to see him again. We need not have talked about old times. He died during 1988.

Walter kept meeting and introducing me to other musicians from the area and we would often jam at Walter’s mother’s house in Camden. One, Tony (I can never remember his other name), a pianist from beyond the area, came through the black section of Camden asking if there were any old 78 rpm recordings in the attic or basement he could see and perhaps purchase. Following the tradition of older jazz record collectors he had a black bag filled with bananas to eat when hungry as you could peel the skin and have a clean fruit even if your hands were filthy from the dust. I remember a very good, somewhat older trumpet player from Pennsylvania who introduced me to Surrealism and who claimed to himself be a surrealist. I did not know that there were surrealists in small Pennsylvanian towns.

This was the period when the New Orleans jazz revival had even reached some high schools. We were envious of the Scarsdale High Band led by clarinetist Bob Wilbur. Wilbur studied with Bechet, and the band made commercially sold recordings of their music. There was also a group in Baltimore with a good trombonist, but it was surprising when Walter heard on the radio the Pennsauken Ramblers of Merchantville, New Jersey, where my Aunt Florence lived, playing “Stumbling” on a Saturday afternoon Horn & Hardart (a quick food chain) talent show. He soon made contact with them. They were indeed high school students, their leader was an accordionist, and I even played drums for them at one of their high school dances. We sometimes borrowed their string bass player, although that required my mother being willing to pick him up and drive us to Walter’s.

Walter lived in an old wooden house in what was thought the black part of Camden. His mother was one of those blacks who still voted Republican because “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves”. She was a nurse or medical officer at, was it, RCA Victor or Campbell’s Soup, both major employers in Camden. Old fashioned in dress and appearance she had a quiet dignity although Walter once told me that she had twice been raped returning from work. There was an up-right piano in the small living room where we had jam sessions. One time Walter returned with a well-known white revivalist ragtime pianist from the Pacific North West. Portland? We made an acetate duo of “Maple Leaf Rag” on which I played on my wood block and cowbell throughout. I was proud of my six-stroke roll that I had copied from Baby Dodds and which I liked to use behind piano solos. I had long forgotten about the evening until decades later when visiting San Francisco Hadlock played the recording for Adele.

Another acquaintance was “Jazz” Friel, a clarinetist in Philadelphia who held radical libertarian views. We jammed sometimes at his apartment in Philadelphia where through Walter I briefly met Richard T Gibson, the controversial writer who according to some was a black radical and according to others worked for the CIA. He would be co-founder of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, to which Walter would belong.

When I was at Columbia Friel came to New York where with Walter we sat in one night with the pianist Champion Jack Dupree. I felt honored but Friel complained that Champion Jack was musically illiterate and impossible to play with, as he was inattentive to the length or structure of a composition (his 12 bar blues could be 11 or 13 as he felt like it and he changed chords as erratically).

Drafted into the Army Friel was sent to Japan where he became famous for recordings of his own compositions and married a Japanese woman from an aristocratic family who followed him to Levittown Pennsylvania where he worked for the Army as they were the only employers who would accept someone unwilling to join a union. To make matters worse he demanded that his wife only serve meat and potatoes and he took no interest in her kimonos and tea ceremonies that fascinated their neighbors.

Walter and I would attend films that had scenes with jazz musicians, such as New Orleans, a real cornucopia with Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Kid Ory, Zutty Singleton, Woody Herman, Meade Lux Lewis and many others. We would go to movie houses in Camden and Philadelphia that still had touring black swing bands on weekends. We would pretend to be of drinking age and go to jazz clubs in Philadelphia; I remember once meeting Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington’s son. I sat in with banjoist Elmer Snowden’s band one afternoon and he told me that similar to many younger drummers I played behind the beat as I was used to practicing to records. He was probably right, but I could have replied that I purposefully entered late as I was imitating Baby Dodds, whose drum rolls filled space between beats and the phrases of the horns.

Baby Dodds was my hero. He had been one of the early jazz musicians and played on classic jazz recordings by King Oliver and Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. He was still playing regularly in New York, Philadelphia and was on some of the Bunk Johnson records made in New Orleans trying to recapture early jazz styles. I had asked him about his tuning of his drums; he had showed me “nerve beats”, a technique of holding two drumsticks together so that they rattled as the arm’s nerve muscles are made to contact and tremble. I could have cried when he had a stroke and could hardly hold his drumsticks in his hands. I wanted to offer to assemble and carry his drum set. Decades later in Paris I would be stunned by an aging, smiling Art Blakey, going deaf, playing drums badly in the wrong tempo while supposedly leading his Jazz Messengers.

It was partly because of Walter I transferred for my final year of high school to Camden. There were other reasons as well. Most of my Gloucester friends had already graduated. One punched a teacher, was expelled, and joined a travelling circus. During my junior year I had found another family with which I could take refuge, the Salines in Camden.

I do not remember how I was related to or met them, but I became indebted to their friendship and used their address as my home when I changed schools. If I missed a day and the truant office came he would be told I was upstairs ill and could not be disturbed. Through the Salines I met an educated middle-class Jewish community of people my age or a bit older who went to good universities, read books, and were not part of warring gangs. Through the Salines I learned not to always blame “the ref” for the defeat of the team I supported (the father was a “ref”), not to brag about fights and toughness, not to speak like a thug.