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SHINING HOURS / FORGIVING RHYME

On a Saturday morning when I was eight or nine years old, my dad and I set out in our old Chevrolet to play some music at a friend’s house. Actually, my dad was going to play music, but he let me carry his horn cases, and both of us were decked out in jazz-dude apparel: penny loafers, khakis, and Hawaiian shirts with the tails out. First, though, we had to pick up our new neighbor, Magda, who had only moved to Texas about three months before. We had become friends with her because people left their windows open back then, and we heard each other playing Duke Ellington 78s. Now, Magda and my mother went shopping together and hung out, so I knew her as this nice, relaxed German lady who sat around in the kitchen with Mom, dicing things.

When Dad beeped the horn in front of her house, however, a different Magda came out. She was all gussied up, with her hair in a bun, wearing this black voile dress, a rhinestone pin, and little, rimless spectacles that I associate to this day with “looking European.” She was also carrying an armload of sheet music, and as she approached the car I whispered to my dad that this must be Magda’s first jam session—because nobody looked at sheets at a jam session. Dad said to shut up, dammit, that Magda was a refugee, that she was a Jew who fled the Nazis, first to London and then, after the war, down here to Texas. So cool it! he whispered, and I cooled it. Problems with the Nazis were credentials enough for me. I hopped in the back seat, let her ride up front with Dad.

Then we had to stop and pick up Diego, who worked at the Jiffy Dry Cleaners where we took our clothes. We beeped, and Diego came trotting out with his bongo drums in a paper sack—a really cool-looking guy, I thought, with his thin black mustache and his electric-blue, fitted shirt with bloused sleeves. Usually, Diego played percussion in Latino bands on the North Side, but he loved to sing jazz, so he was fairly bouncing with excitement as he ducked into the back seat beside me. Then all the way out to Ron’s, he flirted so outrageously with Magda that my dad and I kept cracking up.

Magda blushed down into her dress, but she seemed not to mind Diego’s attention. At one point, she turned around and scolded him good-naturedly: “Herr Diego,” she said, shaking her finger at him, “You are a stinker!” And that cracked us up too, so we laughed all the way out to South Fort Worth where Ron lived in this redneck subdivision, in a ranch-style house with a post-oak in the lawn. As we pulled up in front, two black guys, Butch and Julius, were advancing warily across the lawn. They were dressed in white dress shirts and high-waisted zoot-suit slacks, carrying instrument cases, and glancing around them at the neighborhood.

Butch and Julius were beboppers, but, like my dad and Ron, they played pick-up gigs with dance bands around town, so I saw them all the time. I waved, and Butch, who was carrying a guitar case, waved back. Julius was lugging his stand-up bass, so he just grinned, and Ron, who stood in the front door holding the screen, waved too. Ronno was my dad’s best friend, and as usual, he was barefoot, wearing a sleeveless Marine Corps T-shirt and camouflage fatigues. “Not many jazz fans in this neighborhood,” Butch remarked when we were all in the living room. Ron allowed there weren’t, but the VA had approved his loan so he took it. Julius just smiled and took his bass out of its case. Then he took a Prince Albert tin out of the string pocket inside it, flopped down in Ron’s easy chair and began rolling a joint.

Magda’s eyes got big at this, but I could tell she wasn’t upset. She was tickled to death. You could almost hear her thinking, "Oh boy! I have made it all the way from Birkenstrasse to this! I am out in the Wild West—at an American Jazz session with Negroes smoking marijuana!" To cover her excitement, she marched over to Ron’s baby grand, set her music on it and began striking octaves and fifths, checking the tuning. Butch gave her an appraising sideways glance. Julius just grinned and lit up his reefer. After he had taken a couple of hits, Ron’s wife Mary stuck her head out of the kitchen, sniffing the air. “Guess y’all are gonna be wantin’ cookies,” she said. “I am!” I said, and everybody laughed.

Ron took a hit from Julius’s reefer and climbed behind his drum kit, clanging his ride cymbal as he did. Butch and Diego took up positions on the couch—Butch with his Gretsch guitar, Diego with his bongos between his thighs. My dad opened his horn cases on the floor. He fiddled with the saxophone, then took out his clarinet, wet the reed and leaned back against the piano with his ankles crossed, examining the instrument, blowing lint off the pads. They all tweaked and twanged for a minute, getting in tune, then Ron counted off Artie Shaw’s “At Sundown.” Magda was really shaky at first, pale with fear, but Diego just kept grinning at her and nodding, and she started to firm up.

Then, Dad swung around, aimed his clarinet at her, and she seemed to wake up. In less than a bar, she found herself and started hitting the note, crisply; and the lady had some chops, you know. She could play jazz music, but it was strange to watch, because here in this smoky, shadowy room full of swaying, agitated beboppers was this nice German-Jewish lady in a black voile dress with her back rigid and her eyes glued to the sheet, her wrists lifted in perfect position, playing in such a way that, if you couldn’t hear the music, you would have guessed Schumann or something like that. But Magda was really rapping it out, and she had such great attack that Diego had to sit up straight to sing the choruses. Mary even came to the kitchen door to listen, which she rarely did.

After that, Magda got into it, even bouncing her bottom on the bench once or twice (much to Butch’s whimsical delight). But she wouldn’t solo. They would give her the space, nod in her direction and say, “Take it, Maggie!” but she would shake her head and vamp through her sixteen bars. Then Butch or Dad would come in and solo. But I was really proud of them. They always gave her the space—in case she changed her mind. And I was proud of Magda too, for getting her confidence up, and letting it build, so the best thing they played all afternoon was the very last thing: “Satin Doll” by Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Johnny Mercer.

By this time, the room was very mellow and autumnal. Ruby light angled through the windows, glowing in the drifting strata of second-hand ganja as Ron counted off the song. He and Julius started alone, insinuating the Duke’s sneaky, cosmopolitan shuffle. Then Magda laid down the rhythm signature, Butch and my dad came in, and they played the song straight, flat out. Then they relaxed the tempo, moved back to the top and let Diego croon his way through the sublime economy of Johnny Mercer’s lyrics—calling up for all of us (even me) the ease and sweet sophistication of the Duke’s utopian Harlem, wherein we all dwelt at that moment:

Cigarette holder,

Which wigs me,

Over her shoulder,

She digs me,

Out cattin’

That satin doll.

As it turned out, that satin doll was that. There were no more jam sessions, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, and, within three years, my dad was dead. After that, our life remained improvisational, but it was never as much fun. So I kept that musical afternoon as a talisman of memory. I handled it carefully, so as not to knock the edges off, keeping it as plain and unembellished as I could, so I could test the world against it, because it was the best, concrete emblem I had of America as a successful society and remains so. My dad is a part of it, of course, but I see him differently now—not as my dad, so much, but as this guy who would collect all these incongruous people around him and make sure that everybody got their solos.

So, I have always wanted to tell this story, because it is a true story that I have carefully remembered, but frankly, it is a sentimental story, too—as all stories of successful human society must be—and we don’t cherish that flavor of democracy anymore. Today, we do blood, money, and sex—race, class, and gender. We don’t do communities of desire (people united in loving something as we loved jazz). We do statistical demographics, age groups, and target audiences. We do ritual celebrations of white family values, unctuous celebrations of marginal cultural identity, multiethnic kick-boxer movies, and yuppie sit-coms. With the possible exception of Roseanne, we don’t even do ordinary eccentricity anymore. In an increasingly diffuse and customized post-industrial world, we cling to the last vestige of industrial thinking: the presumption of mass-produced identity and ready-made experience—a presumption that makes the expression, appreciation, or even the perception of our everyday distinctions next to impossible.

When I wrote the narrative that introduces this essay, I wanted to do one thing: I wanted to tell you a little story about ordinary, eccentric citizens coming together to play some extraordinary music in a little house on the edge of town—to communicate some sense of my own simple wonder—to have you appreciate its majesty. When my wife read what I had written, however, she immediately (and quite correctly) pointed out that my narrative would not be read this way. Most likely, she suggested wryly, it would be read as an allegory of ethnic federalism in which two African-Americans, a Latino, four Irish-Americans, and a German Jewess seek refuge from the dominant culture in order to affirm their solidarity with the international underclass.

But it was not that way at all! I squealed. My dad and his friends were musical people in postwar Texas, in the nineteen forties, and that was really special in its quiet way. Imposing the cookie-cutter of difference onto their society not only suppressed their commonality, it suppressed their differences, as well—and these people were very different people. All of the people I had known in my life had been very different people, I argued. I had just assumed. . . . Assuming, my wife explained, never won the pony.

So having failed in my portrayal, I began wondering who could have portrayed that scene. Who could have captured that room in ruby light—the benign whimsy of Butch’s glance at Magda’s sturdy bottom bouncing on the piano bench—my dad and I in our jazz-dude threads—Magda turning in the front seat, good-naturedly shaking her finger at Diego? And to my own surprise, I came up with Norman Rockwell of the Saturday Evening Post. For worse or for glory, I realized, he was the dude to do it—that, in fact, he probably had done it—had painted that scene in my head, because when I was eight years old, Johnny Mercer was teaching me how to listen, and Norman Rockwell was teaching me how to see. I was a student of their work, and they were good teachers. Years before I heard of John Donne, I learned about the intricate atmospherics of “metaphysical conceits” just by walking down the sidewalk singing: Fools rush in / Where wise men fear to tread. / And so I come to you my love, / My heart above my head.

Moreover, I have no doubt that Rockwell taught me how to remember that jam session, because I could never polish it. I clung to the ordinary eccentricity, the clothes, the good-heartedness, the names of things, the comic incongruities, and the oddities of arrangement and light. So, it has always seemed to me that Rockwell and Mercer must certainly be important artists, not so much because people love them (although that is a part of it) but because I had learned so much from them—and because they both denied it so strenuously. Still, for a long time, I really didn’t know what kind of art they made, or what it did. I only knew that it wasn’t high art, which is defined by its context and its exclusivity—and is always, in some sense, about that context and that exclusivity.

I decided that, if high art is always about context and exclusivity, the art of Rockwell and Mercer, which denies both with a vengeance, must be about that denial. To put it simply: Norman Rockwell’s painting, like Johnny Mercer’s music, has no special venue. It lives in the quotidian world with us amidst a million other things, so it must define itself as we experience it, embody itself and be remembered to survive. So it must rhyme, must live in pattern, which is the mother of remembering. Moreover, since this kind of art lacks any institutional guarantee of our attention, it must be selected by us—and since it aspires to be selected by all of us, it must accept and forgive us too—and speak the language of acceptance and forgiveness. And since it can only flourish in an atmosphere of generosity and agreement, it must somehow, in some way, promote that atmosphere.

Thus, there is in Rockwell (as there is in Dickens) this luminous devotion to the possibility of domestic kindness and social accord—along with an effortless proclivity to translate any minor discord into comedy and forgiving tristesse—and this domain of kindness and comedy and tristesse is not the truth, but it is a part of it, and a part that we routinely deny these days, lest we compromise our social agendas. We discourage expressions of these feelings on the grounds that they privilege complacency and celebrate the norm as we struggle to extend the franchise. But that is just the point (and the point of our struggle): Kindness, comedy, and forgiving tristesse are not the norm. They signify our little victories—and working toward democracy consists of nothing more or less than the daily accumulation of little victories whose uncommon loveliness we must, somehow, speak or show.

The wicked norm, like the name of a vindictive God, is never spoken or shown, not by human beings, whose acts are necessarily willful, who only speak and show to qualify that norm, to distinguish themselves from it, to recruit more dissenters, to confirm some area of mutual dissent from its hegemony. So if, for no apparent reason, I tell you “The sky is blue,” you will not believe I am telling you that. You will read for the subtext of dissent, for the edge of qualification. You will suspect that I am indulging in lyrical effusion, perhaps, trying to awaken your dulled senses to the “blueness” of the sky at this moment. Or, if you are more suspicious, you will suspect that by saying “The sky is blue,” I am inferring that whatever you have just said is too fucking obvious to qualify as human utterance. If, on the other hand, you receive a memorandum from the government officially stating that the sky is blue, you will shrug, but you will believe it, since the government labels things, then counts them, and averages them out. Defining the norm is its instrument of control over idiosyncrasy.

So here is my point again: Human art and language (as opposed to institutional art and language) always cite the exception, and it was Norman Rockwell’s great gift to see that life in twentieth-century America, though far from perfect, has been exceptional in the extreme. This is what he celebrates and insists upon: that “normal” life, in this country, is not normal at all—that we all exist in a general state of social and physical equanimity that is unparalleled in the history of humans. (Why else would we alert the media every time we feel a little bit blue?) Yet, we apparently spend so many days and hours in this state of attentive painlessness that we now consider it normal—when, in fact, normal for human creatures is, and always has been a condition of inarticulate, hopeless, never-ending pain, patriarchal oppression, boredom, and violence—while all our vocal anguish is necessarily grounded in an ongoing bodily equanimity, a physical certainty that we are safe enough and strong enough to be as articulately unpleasant as we wish to be.

Most artists understand this, I think, and consequently, most of the artists I have known actually like Norman Rockwell and understand what he is doing. De Kooning loved Rockwell’s pictures and admired his paint-handling. Warhol reverently stole from him, extending the franchise of Rockwell’s face-to-face domestic set-ups by copping them for paintings and Factory films. My pal Jeffrey Vallance actually lent me the Rockwell book I am looking at now. The people who hate Rockwell, however—the preachers, professors, social critics, and radical sectarians—inevitably mistake the artist’s profession for their own. They accuse him of imposing norms and passing judgments, which he never does. Nor could he ever, since far from being a fascist manipulator, Rockwell is always giving as much as he can to the world he sees. He portrays those aspects of the embodied social world that exist within the realm of civility, that do not hurt too terribly. But it is not utopia.

People are regularly out of sync with the world in Rockwell’s pictures, but it is not the end of the world. People get sick and go to the doctor. (Remember that!) Little girls get into fights. Puppies are lost, and jobs too. People struggle with their taxes. Salesmen languish in hotel rooms. Prom dresses don’t fit. Tires go flat. Hearts are broken. People gossip. Mom and Dad argue about politics. Traffic snarls, and bankers are confused by Jackson Pollock. But the pictures always rhyme—and the faces rhyme and the bodies rhyme as well, in compositions so exquisitely tuned they seem to have always been there—as a good song seems to have been written forever. The implication, of course, is that these domestic disasters are redeemed by the internal rhymes of civil society and signify the privilege of living in it, which they most certainly do.

You are not supposed to forget this, or forget the pictures either, which you do not. I can remember three Post covers from my childhood well enough to tell you exactly what they meant to me at the time. One is a painting of a grandmother and her grandson saying grace in a bus-station restaurant while a crowd of secular travelers look on. The second depicts an American Dad, in his pajamas, sitting in a modern chair in a suburban living room on a snowy Sunday morning. He is smoking a cigarette and reading the Sunday Times while Mom and the kids, dressed up in their Sunday best, march sternly across the room behind him on their way to church. The third depicts a couple of college co-eds changing a tire on their “woody” while a hillbilly, relaxing on the porch of his shack, watches them with bemused interest. The moral of these pictures: Hey! People are different. Get used to it.

So let me insist that however strenuously ideologues strive to “normalize” popular art, popular artists like Rockwell do not create normality. Governments, religions, and network statisticians create normality, articulate it, and try to impose it. Artists like Rockwell celebrate ordinary equanimity for the eccentric gift that it is—no less than the bodily condition of social justice in a society informed by forgiving rhyme and illuminated by the occasional shining hour. Because if social justice is a statistical norm, everybody at that jam session fell short of it—Magda, Butch, Ron, Julius, Mary, Diego, Dad, myself, all of us. Nor did we believe in statistical norms. We believed that social justice resides in the privilege of gathering about whatever hearth gives warmth, of living in a society where everyone, at least once, might see themselves in a Norman Rockwell, might feel themselves rhyming with Johnny Mercer as he sings:

This will be my shining hour,

Calm and happy and bright,

In my dreams your face will flower,

Through the darkness of the night,

Like the lights of home before me,

Or an angel watching o’er me,

This will be my shining hour,

Till I’m with you again.