On Music

Shostakovich Revisited

The composer as a young man

All it takes is a pair of new stereo speakers and Shostakovich is newly alive. Long a favorite, I've had trouble hearing him and his quiet modulations. Loud parts are recognizable enough. Severe hearing loss in my right ear (thanks, U.S. Army), plus the composer's predication for long silences and quiet passages written for a symphony hall, where listeners are bound to their chairs, caused his music to simply disappear as I moved about the room, about the house, listening with half an ear, one might say. And even when I planted myself in a deep chair and gave him 90% of my attention--say, when I was reading--I missed much of what he had to offer me.

Not no more, as we say here in America.

Once years ago I attended a New Year's Eve party at the home of Jack and Maggie Leahy. Quite a crowd of nearly sober people as the magic hour drew near. I found myself talking to Cordelia Miedel, the wife of the famed symphony conductor, Rainier, and in her own  right a well-known cellist. Like a fool I began to prattle about my love of the cello and classical music. I made the mistake of fatuously stating that we always had music playing around the house.

Big mistake. She told me—in a thick German-accented English—that when classical music was played, one must be seated and give the music his FULL attention. One did not work, clean, read, or any one of myriad other domestic tasks: one LISTENED, listen with one's full, undivided attention.

Right, Cornelia. But--hey--I'm an American, Chicago born and bred. And we live differently over here. And we are too busy.

But she was right. Try and find the time, however. Certain pieces of Shostakovich's great works--sixteen string quartets, 15 symphonies, countless preludes for the piano, at which he composed—all benefit from rapt attention. And with some of them, one will not hear the best passages unless one gives them one's with full attention.

It is true. Good speakers help, though.

*     *    *

Now the famous Seventh Symphony is hard not hear in its full magnificent splendor. It celebrates the siege of Leningrad in 1942-3 and the Russian heroic response to the German occupation of the historically rich city. It has booming passages and is robust throughout. Not the Eighth, however, written just afterwards and in many people's opinion just as good or better. But it has its quiet passages as the music moves from orchestral section to section, and often from soloist instrument in the strings or woodwinds, one to another.

I never heard this before until the Seattle Symphony, under Gerald Schwartz, not Miedel, performed it for PBS, and I could sit quietly in my padded chair and hear the subtle tonalities and wonderful sonorities. But still I had not bought the new speakers and listened with half-an-ear, one might say, Cordelia. And then after suffering from what I did not know what I didn't hear, I took a flier on buying the Sony speakers to go with my old (but excellent) Pioneer receiver.

It was like being musically reborn.

*    *    *

Probably the most important composer in the Twentieth Century, Shostakovich was paid tribute to in a movie based on his autobiography, Testimony, the Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, with the actor Sir Benjamin Kingsley playing the lead part. The movie is surreal and done in stunning black and white. Even if you've read the book, as I have, the movie is confusing, but it delineates well the ideological battle the composer had with Dictator Joseph Stalin.

Much of his adult life the composer lived in illness and fear. His music was deemed "counter revolutionary" and often publicly ridiculed. He was identified as "an enemy of the people." After many years he was accorded moderate acceptance politically, but he was not recognized publicly as great in Russia, as he was around the world, until the time of Nikita Khrushchev. It took Stalin's death.

He took out of the desk drawer those symphonies and chamber music scores he had hidden for decades and saw them performed in dear Russia. But by then he was aging, seriously ill, and confined to his dacha.   Soon he died.

*   *   *

Shostakovich wrote his memoirs to reflect on the people he knew who influenced him, many of them friends and teachers of the years past. He wanted himself known only through his reactions to them and (more indirectly) them to him. And this method of indirection is more revealing than than if he had written directly about himself and his opinions. The obliqueness is characteristic of Shostakovich and his life. Of course, he and his opinions are everywhere in the book. A bit of irony there, folks.

The memoir states candidly his attitude in writing Symphonies 7 and 8--perhaps his best known works.

"I had to write a requiem for all those who died, and had suffered. I had to describe the horrible extermination machine and express protest against it. But how could I do it? I was constantly under suspicion then. . . ." (P. 135, Limelight Editions.)

A bit later in the book, the composer, states: "I couldn't write an apotheosis to Stalin. I simply couldn't. I knew what I was in for when I wrote the Ninth [Symphony]. But I did depict Stalin in music in my next symphony, the Tenth. I wrote it right after Stalin's death, and no one has yet guessed what the symphony is about." (Page 141.) The book is full of such penetrating personal revelations that relate to the genesis his compositions.

There are technical musical clues in the memoir, as well. They are relegated again obliquely, as when he speaks of Stravinsky explaining to journalists some of the techniques Stravinsky employed in Stravinsky's work: "So what if I inform you that in my Eighth Symphony, in the fourth variation, in measures four through six, the theme is harmonized with seven descending minor triads ? Who cares?" And then he suggests that such revelations be left to the musicologists.

Ha! Ah, yes, but in his own case, in his memoirs— written years later than the symphony itself—he is explicit in stating how and what he accomplished in technical terms understandable only by musicologists. Such is the composer's mien. It is oblique and amusing.

Much of the memoir discusses the oppression in Russia in the early decades of the century and the personalized, particularized persecution of certain individuals such as himself by Stalin. It is a wonder that Shostakovich could write as many major works as he did under such terrible conditions. We in the Western World are the beneficiaries of those years, that prolonged hard effort.

But the music always reminds us of their hard times and the legacy of Russian history. Once prompted, it is impossible to listen to the work (the symphonies in particular) that Shostakovich dedicates to those long years of siege, oppression, and tyranny without a recurring and overpowering sense of wonder at his accomplishment.

Richard Ford talks about his writing, his reading, and his life

(From an interview in Salon Weekly by Sophie Majeski, April 1996.)

See: http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960708.html

John Marshall also interviewed Ford about his latest book on November 3, 2006. Once again, Ford is candid about his life and his work.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/290933_ford03.html

Seattle P-I: When did you decide this would be the last Frank Bascombe novel, and why?

Ford: It happened during the period when I was editing the book. It seemed such an exhaustive book that I thought to myself: I could never mount this effort again for this character. I guess I want to follow the model of Sandy Koufax (Hall of Fame pitcher for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers) -- leave when you feel you are at the top of your game. I felt that I was working as hard as I could on this book. It made me ill for a year from the stress of trying to get all the words and thoughts in the right place. I was shocked when my body went into a tailspin, but I plowed on.

Were you relieved when you finished the book and figured out that this was indeed the end for you and Frank?

There was no ah-ha moment where I thought: I'll never write other words about Frank again. But then I've learned that the real test of a book is not the finish but in the middle -- that's the place where you can do the most to make it better.

You write in such detail in the novel about Frank's prostate cancer and his treatment at the Mayo Clinic. That raises the question: Do you have prostate cancer? Or how did you come up with all that detail?

No, I don't have prostate cancer. I read some books on the subject, but I am a living and breathing guy who, like everybody else, is scared to death about that stuff. Plus, I'm hypochondriacal -- I get obsessed about such things -- so one of the things I wanted to do was let Frank take over those traits.

Seattle P-I: When did you decide this would be the last Frank Bascombe novel, and why?

Ford: It happened during the period when I was editing the book. It seemed such an exhaustive book that I thought to myself: I could never mount this effort again for this character. I guess I want to follow the model of Sandy Koufax (Hall of Fame pitcher for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers) -- leave when you feel you are at the top of your game. I felt that I was working as hard as I could on this book. It made me ill for a year from the stress of trying to get all the words and thoughts in the right place. I was shocked when my body went into a tailspin, but I plowed on.

Were you relieved when you finished the book and figured out that this was indeed the end for you and Frank?

There was no ah-ha moment where I thought: I'll never write other words about Frank again. But then I've learned that the real test of a book is not the finish but in the middle -- that's the place where you can do the most to make it better.

You write in such detail in the novel about Frank's prostate cancer and his treatment at the Mayo Clinic. That raises the question: Do you have prostate cancer? Or how did you come up with all that detail?

No, I don't have prostate cancer. I read some books on the subject, but I am a living and breathing guy who, like everybody else, is scared to death about that stuff. Plus, I'm hypochondriacal -- I get obsessed about such things -- so one of the things I wanted to do was let Frank take over those traits.

In what ways are you most similar to Frank, and in what way most different?

He's a lot nicer than I am, at least until his illness. There are some similarities -- we're both Democrats, both Southerners who left the South to go to college. And we both use narrative as a form of reflection.

Do you know Frank so well that you could answer questions for him in his voice?

No, and I'll tell you why. Frank is not there for me in the way that he is for the reader who sees him fully formed on the page. But I always have to be willing to change things about him, sometimes small, sometimes not. I do not participate in his reality. ... Without me, there's no him.

You and your wife, Kristina, now live mostly in Maine after many years of living in New Orleans. Have you been back in the city and what are your thoughts on its plight?

That was our home and we try to be of use in that city, but we're very disheartened. On the day after Katrina, we took an apartment there, then we rented a house and now we are buying another one. The situation in New Orleans is tragic and infuriating and particularly depressing for someone with a long-term stake in the city. With everyone who is still there, it's like living on after someone very close to you dies.

What writing do you still want to do?

I'm working on a small novel set in Canada. I've long been a Canada enthusiast -- Kristina and I were just hunting birds in Alberta and then down in Montana where we used to live. The novel is about a man who was involved in the right-to-work movement in Washington state in the 1950s and 1960s and is involved in a bombing. He flees to Saskatchewan where he runs a small hotel. Two decades later, two men are dispatched to assassinate him. It's more plotted, much shorter than "The Lay of the Land," maybe 200 pages. That will be my tenth book and may be enough

BOOKS

Kingfisher Journal Salutes:

Richard Ford and His Frank Bascombe series

On a personal note

1

Back in 1980, I sold a short story to Esquire, a magazine then considered to be the best fiction market in the US; the only contender for the title was The New Yorker. I was more than pleased with myself; quickly I grew insufferable.  The magazine was sent to the press on the same day that my father died. That makes the day doubly memorable and took a bit of the shine off my small accomplishment.

I had bought a subscription to Esquire and read every issue—well, the fiction, anyway. My story came out between Tennessee Williams and Tom Robbins, and I briefly exalted in being in such a sandwich. Another writer appearing with some regularity was Richard Ford. My, how good he was. After reading another short story of his, I learned that they were components of a novel. The Sportswriter was soon published. I bought and read it, of course. Ford had become a favorite of mine. Though I was loathe to admit it, my writing became a kind of poor man's imitation of the fiction of Richard Ford.

Big mistake. Nobody bought any more of my stories or novels. Evidently I was a one-shot fiction writer. My short story was a chapter from a book on flyfishing. On the banks of my favorite river, the North Fork of the Stillaguamish, I met a visiting fisher, Richard Sylbert, whom I soon got to know  well. He was from NYC, then Hollywood. He made movies; he was in charge of production design on some of the best movies of our time. (Look him up.) And he wanted to get to know me because, among all the steelhead fly fishers, very few were literary nuts and well read.

When he told me he had drunk whiskey with William Faulkner in a teashop in Mississippi, I was doubtful, but the story proved factually accurate; he knew James Jones and had met him in Paris, while he was making Reds with Warren Beatty. This was no fib, either. I saw the movie and he was listed in the credits. And he was a friend of Writer Richard Ford. They had had dinner together at the Palmer House in Chicago recently. Perhaps they had shot pheasants or grouse together in Wisconsin, because both were bird hunters. (See recent photo below.) It was a simple dinner, with Dick picking up the tab, I suppose, in the quick-handed manner that  he had.

Fast forward. Ford's book, The Sportswriter, was the first volume of what turned out, over the decades to come, of a trilogy. It's been a long wait for it to be completed. The second volume was Independence Day. It came out in 1996. That was a long spell—1986-l996, an exact ten years.

It was a long book, too, coming in at 451 pages, and proved to be a significant piece of American fiction. Of course I bought and read it. Dick and I were fishing together on the Wenatchee River for upriver fall steelhead, and I spoke repeatedly of my enthusiasm for Independence Day as we cast repeatedly into a bleak, gray riffle. Fishing was slow. Dick wasn't much interested in the novel, from what he had heard about it, but I pressed my case. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year.

Dick phoned me from Hollywood. I was right, he said, and  he thanked me for bullying him into reading it. It was a great book. We fished one or two more times over the next couple of years. Then Dick became secretly ill. He phoned me a couple of times. Then he died from a serious relatively short illness he had kept to himself. I remembered his last phone call from Los Angeles, not knowing that it was the last, and then I saw the obit in the paper. That last call must have been from the hospital, I figured.

When Ford's final book in the series was published last year, it proved to be a numbing 486 pages of densely packed fiction. It was fascinating, but took me a while to read it. Afterwards, there was no Dick Sylbert to chat with about Ford, his accomplishment, and of course recent fishing.

But now I had Kingfisher Journal in which to pack my literary enthusiasm. For fiction tells us things about ourselves, our lives, and our society that cannot be expressed in ordinary language. It uses the techniques of narrative, dialogue, author reflection, and quick time summary. This has been true since the time of Fielding and Richardson, or even earlier, and remains true today, in times that are much different and more complex.

Richard Ford and his hunting dogs, weary after a day afield
Fred R. Conrad, The New York Times

2

Early in The Sportswriter, the novelist tells us, in response to a question he posed to  himself, "Why
. . .  would a man give up a promising literary career. . . to become a sportswriter?" And reflectively responds for the main character, Frank Bascombe, "for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined."

"I believe I have done these two things. Faced down regret. Avoided ruin. And I am still here to tell about it." [page 4, Vintage Contemporaries Edition.]

And what follows is the life of Frank Bascombe, sportswriter turned realtor after a lot of misadventure and wives and mistresses. Children, too. In this sense, Ford's protagonist is much  like John Updike's in his "Rabbit" series. It is about a representative American non-hero meant to be a  man for our time.  Updike's series of four novels include:  1960, Rabbit Run; 1971, Rabbit Redux; 1981, Rabbit Is Rich; and 1990, Rabbit At Rest. (In 1991, Updike published a fifth story in the sequence, Rabbit Remembered, a novella, in his collection of stories, Licks of Love, which may not truly count as part of the series but act as a coda.)

Updike is senior in his portrayal of American life by about 20 years. His choice of a representational businessman brings to mind (but only briefly) Sinclair Lewis and his novels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit,_Run

Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is a former high school basketball star who, after a series of sexual exploits, settles down to run his father's Toyota dealership and grows "rich," or rather middle-aged and prosperous. His life falls apart: he grows fat, depressed, his marriage grotesque, his affairs numerous and sad. There is incest and complex tumultuous family situations. Rabbit dies of heart disease in late middle age.

Frank Bascombe does not. The trilogy ends with Frank seemingly surviving prostate cancer. Ford says he is done with Bascombe and the series, but then he was exhausted from the effort and may, some of us hope, resume the series. After all, Updike did. And Ford has left himself a loophole: Bascombe is still alive. And we must remember, novelists often kill off their main character with relish, in hopes that, if the character is dead, the next novel in the series cannot be written. If it happens to be, it is not the next novel in the series but something new and hopefully different.

Interestingly, Ford places each of the three novels on a traditional American holiday: The Sportswriter, on Easter weekend; Independence Day, of course over the Fourth of July; The Lay of the Land, on Thanksgiving weekend, and just after the first election of George W. Bush by the Supreme Court. Interesting to me, anyway, because it makes a statement about life in America being centered around the celebration of national occasions.

 Ford has spoken about this aspect with book reviewers. He seems to say that holidays define and confine American life today.

It is tempting to say that Frank Bascombe is Archetypal Twentieth Century American Man, but I won't press the point, no more than making such a case for Rabbit Angstrom. All the same the series of novels can clearly be seen as steps in that direction. The books have much to tell us about the times we live in, at the close of the Twentieth Century, and the start of the next. The complex forces that shape us and our society can perhaps best be seen in a fictional context. This makes them more dramatic and relevant than they otherwise might appear.

Children in the novels of both men seem particularly challenged and troubled by life today. Maybe that has always been the case, if observed closely enough. These indeed are disturbing times to try to understand and live through, which brings to mind the ancient Chinese curse, "May you  live in interesting times." Well, of course; what other choice to we have, except death?

The personal drama of daily life in contentious, often chaotic, violent America sometimes seems too much to bear individually and collectively. We turn to fiction for both insight and explanation—perhaps even help. It is good to know that we  have a few sound minds around like Updike and Ford to give us their personal fictional perspectives.

If they are able to define the morass we live in, they may be able to help us lead ourselves out of it. 

Robert Arnold,
Editor

(Go to page 2 to read about what others are saying about Ford and his books.)

See also the hyperlinks below:

Independence Day and earlier

http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/reviews/ford.cfm

http://www.pub.umich.edu/daily/1996/jun/06-19-96/arts/arts2.html

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/
isbninquiry.asp?z=y&isbn=0679735186

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