As Irving Berlin IS American music, this biography is as much the story of the development—or rather, the birth of national music—as it is of its creator. It is more a panegyric than a biography. The fact that Irving Berlin, Izzy Baline, was born in Russia and brought to this country when he was a few years old, after his village had been destroyed by fire, makes him all the more an American figure. He had, blended in him, the characteristics of his race which have given to his music the touch of sadness and the occasional suspicion that its author is feeling sorry for himself—self-pity being, in Mr. Woollcott’s idea, one of the fundamental qualities of the Russian Jew—and he has added to his inherited qualities the “pep” the “jazz” and the optimism of his adopted country.
The Story of Irving Berlin has been written by a friend, and friends despite the adage have a way of being kind and indulgent which is all to their credit, but which lessens somewhat the value of the adjectives of praise they are tempted to use. According to Mr. Woollcott’s study, Irving Berlin is as nearly perfect as a human being can be. He has the detachment, the disinterestedness, the temperament, the lack of sense of time and the etherealness of the artist. With those, he combines a business acumen, a practicality, a flair and a knowledge of the value of publicity of one who is determined to make a success in business, and to have an income larger than he can spend. These qualities do not clash in Irving Berlin; they make concessions to each other, and the result is a quiet, keen, sensitive looking young man, who seldom raises his voice and never hurts the feelings of any one—whose eye surveys the acting of his characters on the stage and the credit and debit list of his company’s returns with equal comprehensiveness, whose ears are sensitive to good music but refuse to be “sold” to a piece that will not be popular, and whose soul is everlastingly travelling from Florida to Europe, from Virginia to Atlantic City. He is a composer and a musical publisher. The two functions can be made to work hand in hand: Irving Berlin has done it. As a composer he publishes his own music, and as a publisher he accepts only his own compositions: they are sure to sell.
Mr. Woollcott lingers lovingly on Irving Berlin’s youth. These early years, spent in the tenement house of Cherry Street, are well pictured. We like the devoted mother who had a sense of responsibility and a sense of humour. She had to laugh at this absurd country which was paying handsomely for her youngest child’s music while she, industrious and economical, had a hard time to keep together the bodies and souls of five hungry children. When she went after much effort to hear Irving Berlin play on Broadway—after he had shed for good his waiter’s coat—and heard the applause and saw the little figure of her son on the stage, she went home with the impression that somehow New York was “picking” on her Benjamin. These years were hard ones for young “Izzy.” He had to contend with the sense of inferiority engendered by his meagre earnings; he had to stand the rebuke of the young emigrants who feel as Sophomores feel toward Freshmen; they have just been through the period of acclimatisation, and no sooner have they found their way about in the new land than they turn and scowl at those who come after them.
A characteristic trait of Irving Berlin was the manner in which he was accidentally drowned in the East River. When he woke up in Gouverneur Hospital, his fist was firmly closed on the five pennies he had just obtained from the sale of newspapers. This is the story of Irving Berlin in miniature. He would be drowned mentally in the composition of his music—at the same time, he would never lose sight of his material achievement. His music must sell.
Mr. Woollcott has no timidity about saying that Irving Berlin is a genius, and we are nearly ready to agree with him when we hear that the greatest of American composers can neither read nor write music. Some who have heard his compositions will say “I knew it.” Homer could neither read nor write, and his poetry has stirred the hearts of thousands of generations. But if Carlyle was right that genius is unconscious of its excellence, Mr. Berlin would not qualify. Yet it is genius more than art which has made Irving Berlin so popular. And his popularity is due, largely, to his sense of the apropos. He catches a familiar American expression, he allows it to say itself in music in his mind, and when he has caught the rhythm that will make feet, young and old, want to beat time to it, he has created a “best-seller.” His genius rests on his musical interpretation of American everyday life. His songs are a monument to American language; they are as national as baseball and chewing gum; Irving Berlin is the pioneer of modern American music, and not only Mr. Woollcott, but a few of the great musical critics are hoping that his composition in the form of an operatic score may some time be heard in the Metropolitan House. But, of course, that would be in the distant future, and those who love real music will be thankful that they will be spared the ordeal. Mr. Woollcott would never call it that, however. He believes in Irving Berlin, not only as a successful interpreter of a passing craze, but as one who will live. He thinks that the musical historian of the year 2000 will find the birthday of American music and that of the creative ignoramus Irving Berlin to be the same. And if it be objected that he was born in Russia and can not be really American, his admirers will reply, probably, that if the musical interpreter of American civilisation came over in the foul hold of a ship, so did American civilisation.
Little of the qualities of heart and mind of Irving Berlin are discussed in this biography. Mr. Woollcott has been so intent on the cortex of Mr. Berlin’s life that he has forgotten to show us the marrow of it. He is too young, says his biographer, to be loaded with the usual embellishments that human kindness lavishes on those who have just passed away, to give him as Philip Guedella said somewhere “the studied discourtesy of a premature obituary,” but throughout we can feel that Irving Berlin’s qualities of heart are numerous, that his kindness is great, that his friends are many and his friendship valuable.
When Mr. Woollcott gets into his subject, he becomes less and less self-conscious, and more and more likeable. He has touches of sentiment, of humour and of keen observation which come on the reader unaware and are therefore the more delightful. The story might have been entitled, “From Rags to Riches,” undoubtedly; but it would have given an idea of something spectacular, and that was unnecessary.
But like all biographers who are prompted by friendship while their subject is still alive, and who are chiefly preoccupied with the personal side of their effort, Mr. Woollcott has lost a real opportunity to point out the value of the contribution of the negro to ragtime music; this would have afforded a certain amount of colour, of which the book is sadly in need. He is a musical critic and undoubtedly has definite views about the subject, and he could readily have got an incentive from the preface to James Weldon Johnson’s book, The Book of American Negro Poetry. He might equally well have attempted a summary of the birth and growth of jazz. Opinions are widely split on the value of such music. To some it appears as part of the American nation, and they can see beyond it, a taste for achievements higher than mere material comfort; but others shake their heads, discouraged. They do not believe that jazz is the way to anything worth while or lasting; they lament the efforts of American composers to deprave the taste of their countrymen, and shudder at the success attending the efforts. Mr. Woollcott would have earned our gratitude, had he expressed some views on the question. But then, he might have had to admit that the only picture he could give of Irving Berlin was that of a business and social success.
It is the fashion among the famous artists and actors of our time to write their lives which, appearing while they are at the apogee of their success, promote their artistic and business interests, and reveal the personality of the writer at the time when his name is constantly in the eyes of the public. As Maria Jeritza says in Sunlight and Song there is no denying that reminiscences are fresher when “the laurels are green, and personalities and events described are alive in the public mind.” Why should an artist wait until his career is finished to write his memoirs? But the point which might be contested is the desirability of publishing such writing when it is without merit and when it can interest only the person who writes it, or those mentioned or discussed in it.