Читать книгу Long Long Ago - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 9

The young man from Romanoff

Russia who—assisted early in his

career by an anonymous Irishman

—gave America something to sing

about.

Friends and Neighbors: IV

THE STORY OF A REFUGEE

Table of Contents

HIS is the story of a refugee, the life of a fugitive from Romanoff Russia who came to this country because it was a free one. It is, therefore, a true story. But, since that life is still being lived to the hilt, it will have to be an unfinished one. Now just as a graph can be plotted from given points, so one might sketch a biography by looking at its subject on four or five widely scattered days. Let us start this one with our hero’s first day in business.

1895

He is the youngest son of a frail rabbi named Baline, who, having come to America in the hold of a ship, has found a close-packed haven for all his brood in a tenement on New York’s swarming East Side. Now Izzy Baline has somehow managed to reach the age of seven and must go to work. So all of this May afternoon he has been offering for sale the shrill newspaper being introduced to New York by a disturbing newcomer named Hearst. With five pennies (his gross receipts) clutched for safekeeping in his right fist, he should be hawking the rest of his stock. But he cannot resist loitering, saucer-eyed, to watch a reeking merchantman set sail for China. Little yellow men grin and squeal along her rails when a crane, which has been loading coal all afternoon, catches the abstracted newsboy in its swing and knocks him into the East River. Some nameless Irish wharf-rat, bless him, pulls off his shoes and dives to the rescue. While the unsold papers float out to sea, leaving their red headlines legible on Izzy’s shirt, an interne from a nearby hospital pumps a considerable portion of the East River out of the kid and notes one clinical detail as possibly prophetic. Although he was rescued just as he went down for the third time, his right fist still holds all five of those pennies.

1902

Now our hero is fourteen and he has gone on the bum. Hopefully his rabbinical father had schooled the boy’s sweet, true voice in those synagogue chants which are the lament of a people oppressed since time out of mind. But his Benjamin had run away from home and pays for his food and lodging with the pennies and nickels tossed him for singing current ballads in saloons along the Bowery. It is dawn in one of these saloons and he has lingered after the marked-down ladies of the evening have gathered up their sailors and departed. While the waiter is swabbing the befouled floor, the young minstrel is allowed to pick out on the deserted piano the tunes he has heard that day on the hurdy-gurdies of Chinatown. His musicianship does not yet go beyond the use of one slightly soiled finger but already he is on his way.

1912

Next watch him on the first night of his first visit to London. He is only twenty-four but already he has put forth something new and strange—a song glorifying the rhythm called ragtime. As the singing waiter at Nigger Mike’s in Chinatown, he and the crippled pianist who used to play there had concocted a tinkly ballad and though its publication was followed by a great silence, Izzy had been optimist enough to cast aside his tray and napkin. A musical ignoramus with a head full of tunes, he had knocked timidly on all the doors of Tin Pan Alley. But soon a song all his own was circling the world and now he himself is traveling in its wake. Outside the station in London he has hailed a cab and a small Cockney has jumped to open its door for him. Since all Americans are known to be both crazy and rich, such meager service is always good for sixpence and sometimes even a shilling. But though that boy will doubtless always remember the dressy young American tourist who on this evening has just given him a pound for merely opening a cab door, he will never know why. He will scarcely guess it was because, as he stepped to the curb, he did happen to be whistling—what a welcome to London!—just happened to be whistling “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” For this is the story of Irving Berlin. To the words of that first song evolved at Nigger Mike’s, he had signed the name I. Berlin and he has kept it ever since as a talisman.

1917

America has gone to war. Still young enough to be caught in the first draft, Private Berlin has been marched off to the camp at Yaphank on Long Island and, as a good excuse for getting out of reveille, has welcomed an order to write the words and music for the camp’s first soldier-show. As a busker on the Bowery and later as a Broadway nighthawk he had always gone to sleep at daybreak, with the result that in all our armed forces none has found the morning-music of the bugler so little to his taste. Wherefore, as he toils away at something for the boys in olive-drab to sing with real emotion, he has only to listen to the bugle notes for a motif (and only to look into his own heart for the words) of the theme song. He calls it “Oh, How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning.”

Let us take our last look at him on a day in the past August. In the twenties, year after year, the songs poured from him. They came in such abundance that he had to hold them back lest one compete with another and he glut his own market. Thus while “What’ll I Do?” held sway, “All Alone” and “Always” and “Remember” and “Say It With Music” were already written, but had to wait their turn in the icebox. But at last in the thirties there came a time when even his incredible fecundity seemed to have spent itself. And why not? After all, the melodic gift, which has been Irving Berlin’s as surely as it was Franz Schubert’s and Stephen Foster’s, is traditionally a short-lived one. Now he was rich and married and happy and had a houseful of children and no more could be expected of him. Thus his silence was explained in Tin Pan Alley. Irving Berlin had had his day and it was a long one. But it was over. Yes, said the wiseacres, the old boy’s finished. They were interrupted by the sound of all the country singing “Cheek to Cheek.”

Then when the next war came, the old boy—well, he was fifty-four in May—looked in his icebox, found a song to suit him, fixed it up and, lest he be reproached for selling his love of country at so much a copy, gave it to the Boy Scouts. The sale of nearly a million copies has already enriched their treasury. The song is called “God Bless America.”

1942

But it’s time for us to look at him (and bid him Godspeed) on the August day aforesaid. The hand which once sternly retained those five pennies is now doing better. This time it’s a check for half a million and he is turning it over to the Army Emergency Relief Fund. It represents the profits after the first eight weeks of This Is The Army, the soldier-show which Berlin wrote for the sons of those who sang and danced in Yip, Yip, Yaphank long ago and in which, every night as it tours the land from Washington to San Francisco, he himself still sings, for old time’s sake, “Oh, How I Hate To Get Up In The Morning.”

On the day after the first performance of This Is The Army the New York newspapers lifted a hymn of praise. Out of a letter written me from hospital by the author of The White Cliffs I quote two sentences. “I hope you didn’t miss the Tribune’s review of Irving’s show,” said Mrs. Miller. “It seems to me he has got where he deserves to be, and that by nothing more than doing what he thought his duty.”

Well, that is the story of Irving Berlin—to date. It is, as I said, the unfinished story of one who—like Einstein since or, for that matter, like the Pilgrim Fathers before him—came to this country as a refugee. His life, therefore, is part of the American epic and if the young folk here are enviable above all others in the world, of course it is because that epic is also an unfinished story.