Book Review: The House That George Built - With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty by Wilfrid Sheed - Page 2

Berlin’s no-nonsense hard-knocks career climbing called for a few short cuts and detours, which Sheed duly notes — his primitive pianism, a serious middle-age slump, an historically hindsighted revisionist twist or two — but there can be no doubt that Berlin, who once told his friend Cole Porter “Never apologize for a song that sells a million copies,” claimed to write for commercial success more than art. That’s where the ambitious, generous, tragic phenomenon George Gershwin comes in, a man who not only adventurously fluctuated between his pop impulses and his classical ones — he's “Got Rhythm” and “Rhapsody in Blue” — but didn’t always understand the genesis for either: “What comes out of that piano frightens me,” he’s alleged to have once said, and that was only regarding the musical fun and games at other people’s parties.

As Sheed remarks, its not even clear how George — who would go on to write arrangements that looked like Jackson Pollock paintings — came by his musical immersion. There was no music of any kind in the Gershwin homes as he (and his lyricist brother Ira) was growing up. But then, at about age eleven: “Where Berlin had grown up with and his ears assimilated the melody of the streets, Gershwin found his ears flooded simultaneously with both Berlin and Beethoven, the latest and the oldest.”

Whatever the cause, Gershwin made the most of his genius in his short but prolific life before dying suddenly at age 38 of a brain tumor. As much as Sheed provides a overview of Gershwin’s life and work, he devotes as much to his legacy and impact upon his contemporaries, and the influence for all that is here to stay.

With the Berlin-to-Gershwin Pop ‘n’ Art pendulum from which the American standard would swing in its best-of-both-worlds sweeps of accessibility and craftsmanship, a loose structure of sorts frames Sheed’s explorations of the great jazz songwriters, and stage and screen songsmiths. For example, Harold Arlen was depressive enough that it is unclear he had the ability to “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” (that probably included latching onto the affirmative writing experience with lyricist Johnny Mercer, in this case), but Sheed makes the case that Arlen is the songwriter "you have to hear if you want to know exactly what the vague but necessary phrase 'jazz song' meant, and where the Gershwin wing of it went next, and where it wound up.”

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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