As is natural, I’ll write a review of tonight’s concert tomorrow for Jazz. But now at intermission, with this short-hand scrawl on my knee, I don’t feel exactly like talking like a critic, no comparative criticisms. I know very well that, for me, Johnny has ceased being a jazzman and that his musical genius is a façade, something that everyone can manage to understand eventually and admire, but which conceals something else, and that other thing is the only one I ought to care for, maybe because it’s the only thing really important to Johnny himself.
It’s easy to say it, while I’m still in Johnny’s music. When you cool off … Why can’t I do like him, why can’t I beat my head against the wall? Pickily enough, I prefer the words to the reality that I’m trying to describe, I protect myself, shielded by considerations and conjectures that are nothing other than a stupid dialectic. I think I understand why prayer demands instinctively that one fall on one’s knees. The change of position is a symbol of the change in the tone of voice, in what the voice is about to articulate, in the diction itself. When I reach the point of specifying the insight into that change, things which seemed to have been arbitrary a second before are filled with a feeling of depth, simplify themselves in an extraordinary manner and at the same time go still deeper. Neither Marcel nor Art noticed yesterday that Johnny was not crazy to take his shoes off at the recording session. At that moment, Johnny had to touch the floor with his own skin, to fasten himself to the earth so that his music was a reaffirmation, not a flight. Because I feel this also in Johnny, he never runs from anything, he doesn’t shoot up to get out of it like most junkies, he doesn’t blow horn to squat behind a ditch of music, he doesn’t spend weeks in psychiatric clinics to feel protected from the pressures he can’t put up with. Even his style, the most authentic thing he has, that style which deserves all the absurd names it’s ever gotten, and doesn’t need any of them, proves that Johnny’s art is neither a substitute nor a finished thing. Johnny abandoned the language of That Old Fashioned Love more or less current ten years ago, because that violently erotic language was too passive for him. In his case he preferred desire rather than pleasure and it hung him up, because desire necessitated his advancing, experimenting, denying in advance the easy rushing around of traditional jazz. For that reason, I don’t think Johnny was terribly fond of the blues, where masochism and nostalgia … But I’ve spoken of all that in my book, showing how the denial of immediate satisfaction led Johnny to elaborate a language which he and other musicians are carrying today to its ultimate possibilities. This jazz cuts across all easy eroticism, all Wagnerian romanticism, so to speak, to settle firmly into what seems to be a very loose level where the music stands in absolute liberty, as when painting got away from the representational, it stayed clear by not being more than painting. But then, being master of a music not designed to facilitate orgasms or nostalgia, of a music which I should like to call metaphysical, Johnny seems to use that to explore himself, to bite into the reality that escapes every day. I see here the ultimate paradox of his style, his aggressive vigor. Incapable of satisfying itself, useful as a continual spur, an infinite construction, the pleasure of which is not in its highest pinnacle but in the exploratory repetitions, in the use of faculties which leave the suddenly human behind without losing humanity. And when Johnny, like tonight, loses himself in the continuous creation of his music, I know best of all that he’s not losing himself in anything, nothing escapes him. To go to a date you can’t get away from, even though you change the place you’re going to meet each time. And as far as what is left behind, can be left, Johnny doesn’t know or puts it down supremely. The marquesa, for example, thinks that Johnny’s afraid of poverty, without knowing that the only thing Johnny can be afraid of is maybe not finding the pork chop on the end of the fork when it happens he would like to eat it, or not finding a bed when he’s sleepy, or a hundred dollars in his wallet when it seems he ought to be the owner of a hundred dollars. Johnny doesn’t move in a world of abstractions like we do; the reason for his music, that incredible music I’ve listened to tonight, has nothing to do with abstractions. But only he can make the inventory of what he’s taken in while he was blowing, and more likely, he’s already onto something else, losing that already in a new conjecture or a new doubt. His conquests are like a dream, when he wakes up he forgets them, when the applause brings him back from his spin, that man who goes so far out, living his quarter of an hour in a minute and a half.
It would be like living connected to a lightning rod in the middle of a thunderstorm and expecting that nothing’s going to happen. Four or five days later I ran into Art Boucaya at the Dupont in the Latin Quarter, and he had no opportunity to make his expression blank as he gave me the bad news. For the first second I felt a kind of satisfaction which I find no other way of qualifying except to call it spiteful, because I knew perfectly well that the calm could not last long; but then I thought of the consequences and my fondness for Johnny, thinking of them, made my stomach churn; then I downed two cognacs while Art was telling me what had happened. In short, it seems that Delaunay called a recording session to put out a new quintet under Johnny’s name, with Art, Marcel Gavoty and a pair of very good sidemen from Paris on piano and drums. The thing was supposed to begin at three in the afternoon, and they were counting on having the whole day and part of the night for warmup and to cut a number of tunes. And what happened? It started when Johnny arrived at five, Delaunay was boiling already, then Johnny sat down on a chair and said he didn’t feel very well and that the only reason he came was not to queer the day’s work for the boys, but HE didn’t feel up to playing.
“Between Marcel and me, we tried to convince him to lie down for a bit and rest, but he wouldn’t do anything but talk about, I don’t know, he’d found some fields with urns, and he gave us those goddamned urns for about a quarter of an hour. Finally, he started to haul out piles of leaves that he’d gathered in some park or another and had jammed into his pockets. The floor of the goddamned studio looked like a botanical garden, the studio personnel were tromping around looking as mean as dogs, and all this without laying anything down on the acetate; just imagine the engineer sitting in his booth for three hours smoking, and in Paris that’s a helluva lot for an engineer.
“Finally Marcel convinced Johnny it’d be better to try something, the two of them started to play and we moved in after a bit, better that than sitting around getting tired of doing nothing. After a while I noticed that Johnny was having a kind of contraction in his right arm, and when he began to blow it was terrible to watch, I’m not shitting you. His face all grey, you dig, and every once in a while a chill’d shake him; and I didn’t catch that moment when it got him on the floor. After a few tries he lets loose with a yell, looks at each of us one by one, slowly, and asks us what the hell we’re waiting for, begin Amorous. You know, that tune of Alamo’s. Well, Delaunay signals the engineer, we all start out the best possible, and Johnny opens his legs, stands up as though he were going to sleep in a boat rocking away, and lets loose with a sound I swear I’d never heard before or since. That goes on for three minutes, then all of a sudden he lets go with a blast, could of split the fuckin’ celestial harmonies, and he goes off into one corner leaving the rest of us blowing away in the middle of the take, which we finish up best we can.
“But now the worst part, when we get finished, the first thing Johnny says was that it was all awful, that it came out like a piece of shit, and that the recording was not worth a damn. Naturally, neither we nor Delaunay paid any attention because, in spite of the defects, Johnny’s solo was worth any thousand of what you can hear today. Something all by itself, I can’t explain it to you … You’ll hear it, I guess. I don’t imagine that either Delaunay or the technicians thought of wiping out the acetate. But Johnny insisted like a nut, he was gonna break the glass in the control booth if they didn’t show him that the acetate had been wiped. Finally the engineer showed him something or other and convinced him, and then Johnny suggest
ed we record Streptomycin, which came out much better, and at the same time much worse, I mean it’s clean and full, but still it hasn’t got that incredible thing Johnny blew on Amorous.”
Breathing hard, Art had finished his beer and looked at me, very depressed. I asked him what Johnny had done after that, and he told me that after boring them all to tears with his stories about the leaves and the fields full of urns, he had refused to play any more and went stumbling out of the studio. Marcel had taken his horn away from him so that he couldn’t lose it or stomp on it again, and between him and one of the French sidemen, they’d gotten him back to the hotel.
What else was there to do except to go see him immediately? But what the hell, I left it for the next day. And the next morning I found Johnny in the Police Notices in Figaro, because Johnny’d set fire to the hotel room during the night and had escaped running naked down the halls. Both he and Dédée had gotten out unhurt, but Johnny’s in the hospital under observation. I showed the news report to my wife so as to cheer her up in her convalescence, and dashed off immediately to the hospital where my press pass got me exactly nowhere. The most I managed to find out was that Johnny was delirious and had enough junk in him to drive ten people out of their heads. Poor Dédée had not been able to resist him, or to convince him to not shoot up; all Johnny’s women ended up his accomplices, and I’m sure as can be that the marquesa was the one who got the junk for him.
Finally I ended up by going immediately to Delaunay’s place to ask if I could hear Amorous as soon as possible. To see if Amorous would turn out to be Johnny’s last will and testament. In which case, my professional duty would be …
But not yet, no. Five days later Dédée’s phoned me saying that Johnny is much better and that he wants to see me. I’d rather not reproach her, first of all because I imagine it’d be a waste of time, and secondly because poor Dédée’s voice sounds as though it were coming out of a cracked teakettle. I promised to go immediately, and said that perhaps when Johnny was better, we could organize a tour through the provinces, a lot of cities. I hung up when Dédée started crying into the phone.
Johnny’s sitting up in bed, in a semi-private with two other patients who are sleeping, luckily. Before I can say anything to him, he’s grabbed my head with both paws and kissed me on the forehead and cheeks numerous times. He’s terribly emaciated, although he tells me that he’s got a good appetite and that they give him plenty to eat. For the moment the thing that worries him most is whether the boys are bad-mouthing him, if his crisis has hurt anyone, things like that. It’s almost useless to answer him, he knows well enough that the concerts have been canceled and that that hurt Art and Marcel and the others; but he asks me like he expected that something good had happened meanwhile, anything that would put things together again. And at the same time he isn’t playing me a trick, because back of everything else is his supreme indifference; Johnny doesn’t give a good goddamn if everything goes to hell, and I know him too well to pay any attention to his coming on.
“What do you want me to tell you, Johnny? Things could have worked out better, except you have this talent for fucking up.”
“Okay, I don’t deny that,” Johnny said tiredly. “And all because of the urns.”
I remembered Art’s account of it and stood there looking at him.
“Fields filled with urns, Bruno. Piles of invisible urns buried in an immense field. I was wandering around there and once in a while I’d stumble across something. You’d say that I’d dreamt it, huh? It was just like that, believe it: every once in a while I’d stumble across an urn, until I realized that the whole field was full of urns, that there were miles and miles of them, and there were a dead man’s ashes inside every urn. Then I remember I got down on my knees and began to dig up the ground with my nails until one of the urns appeared. Then I remember thinking, ‘This one’s going to be empty because it’s the one for me.’ But no, it was filled with a grey dust like I knew all the others were I hadn’t seen yet. Then … then that was when we began to record Amorous, if I remember.”
I glanced discreetly at the temperature chart. According to it, reasonably normal. A young intern showed up in the doorway, acknowledging me with a nod, and made a gesture indicating food to Johnny, an almost sporty gesture, a good kid, etc. But when Johnny didn’t answer him, when the intern had left, not even entering the door, I saw Johnny’s hands were clenched tight.
“They’ll never understand,” he said. “They’re like a monkey with a feather duster, like the chicks in the Kansas City Conservatory who think they’re playing Chopin, nothing less. Bruno, in Camarillo they put me in a room with another three people, and in the morning an intern came in all washed up and all rosy, he looked so good. He looked like the son of Tampax out of Kleenex, you believe it. A kind of specimen, an immense idiot that sat down on the edge of the bed and was going to cheer me up, I mean that was when I wanted to kill myself, and I hadn’t thought of Lan or of anyone, I mean, forget it. And the worst was, the poor cat was offended because I wasn’t paying attention to him. He seemed to think I should sit up in bed en-goddamn-chanted with his white skin and beautifully combed hair and his nails all trimmed, and that way I’d get better like the poor bastards who come to Lourdes and throw away the crutches and leave, really jumping …
“Bruno, this cat and all the cats at Camarillo were convinced. You know what I’m saying? What of? I swear I don’t know, but they were convinced. Of what they were, I imagine, of what they were worth, of their having a diploma. No, it’s not that. Some were modest and didn’t think they were infallible. But even the most humble were sure. That made me jumpy, Bruno, that they felt sure of themselves. Sure of what, tell me what now, when a poor devil like me with more plagues than the devil under his skin had enough awareness to feel that everything was like a jelly, that everything was very shaky everywhere, you only had to concentrate a little, feel a little, be quiet for a little bit, to find the holes. In the door, in the bed: holes. In the hand, in the newspaper, in time, in the air: everything full of holes, everything spongy, like a colander straining itself … But they were American science, Bruno, dig? White coats were protecting them from the holes; didn’t see anything, they accepted what had been seen by others, they imagined that they were living. And naturally they couldn’t see the holes, and they were very sure of themselves, completely convinced of their prescriptions, their syringes, their goddamned psychoanalysis, their don’t smoke and don’t drink … Ah, the beautiful day when I was able to move my ass out of that place, get on the train, look out the window how everything was moving backward, I don’t know, have you seen how the landscape breaks up when you see it moving away from you …”
We’re smoking Gauloises. They’ve given Johnny permission to drink a little cognac and smoke eight or ten cigarettes a day. But you can see it’s not him, just his body that’s smoking, and he’s somewhere else almost as if he’d refuse to climb out of the mine shaft. I’m wondering what he’s seen, what he’s felt these last few days. I don’t want to get him excited, if he could speak for himself … We smoke silently, and occasionally he moves his arm and runs his fingers over my face as though he were identifying me. Then he plays with his wrist watch, he looks at it tenderly.
“What happens to them is that they get to think of themselves as wise,” he said sharply. “They think it’s wisdom because they’ve piled up a lot of books and eaten them. It makes me laugh, because really they’re good kids and are really convinced that what they study and what they do are really very difficult and profound things. In the circus, Bruno, it’s all the same, and between us it’s the same. People figure that some things are the height of difficulty, and so they applaud trapeze artists, or me. I don’t know what they’re thinking about, do they imagine that you break yourself up to play well, or that the trapeze artist sprains tendons every time he takes a leap? The really difficult things are something else entirely, everything that people think they can do anytime. To look, for instance, or
to understand a dog or a cat. Those are the difficult things, the big difficulties. Last night I happened to look in this little mirror, and I swear, it was so terribly difficult I almost threw myself out of bed. Imagine that you’re looking at yourself; that alone is enough to freeze you up for half an hour. In reality, this guy’s not me, the first second I felt very clearly that he wasn’t me. I took it by surprise, obliquely, and I knew it wasn’t me. I felt that, and when something like that’s felt … But it’s like at Atlantic City, on top of one wave the second one falls on you, and then another … You’ve hardly felt and already another one comes, the words come … No, not words, but what’s in the words, a kind of glue, that slime. And the slime comes and covers you and convinces you that that’s you in the mirror. Sure, but not to realize it. But sure, I am, with my hair, this scar. And people don’t realize that the only thing that they accept is the slime, and that’s why they think it’s easy to look in a mirror. Or cut a hunk of bread with a knife. Have you ever cut a hunk of bread with a knife?”
“I’m in the habit of it,” I said, amused.
“And you’ve stayed all that calm. Not me, Bruno, I can’t. One night I shot all of it so far that the knife almost knocked the eye out of a Japanese at the next table. That was in Los Angeles, and there was such a fantastic brawl … When I explained to them, they dumped me. And it seemed to me so simple to explain it all to them. At that time I knew Dr. Christie. A terrific guy, and you know how I am about doctors …”
One hand waves through the air, touching it on all sides, laying it down as though marking its time. He smiles. I have the feeling that he’s alone, completely alone. I feel hollow beside him. If it had occurred to Johnny to pass his hand through me I would have cut like butter, like smoke. Maybe that’s why once in a while he grazes my face with his fingers, cautiously.