There are big and little anniversaries. The one I’m going to talk about in this “Almanac” may seem small, but I don’t consider it so, if it’s true that songs hold an indelible place in people’s lives and memories.
Twenty years ago, at a clinic in Palm Springs, California, Hoagy Carmichael died. He was 82 years old, the author of Stardust, which a 1949 survey called “the best song of all time.” And now the reader is asked to accompany me into a living room in the late 1930’s, where some students are dancing. If you think the kid I’m going to talk about was me, you’re fairly close to the truth. The dilemma was not easy to resolve. Romantically brushing his lips against the girl’s flushed cheek, breathing in the fragrance of jasmine in her hair, how could he keep the conversation going? The approach had started (the kid was an insatiable reader) with a summary of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and the girl had shivered in fright. Ah, that America full of violent criminals and maniacs, of long, loose jackets and tattered caps.
The plan seemed to work: the girl seemed to cling tight to him to ward off the threat. But now Stardust was complicating things. Gone were the pioneers, gone were the stockaded villages and the suburbs, gone were the old plantations, the racial nightmares, the rickety carriages. The record turned, the living room table was pushed against the wall, the chairs stacked on the table, the only source of light coming from the next room. “How do the lyrics go?” the girl asked, sighing. He had trouble recovering, between Steinbeck and Stardust. He had started off on the path of realism, even making his voice sound evil to heighten the effect.
And now his morale was crushed; he was defenseless and ready to give in. He stopped brushing against her cheek. Steinbeck disappeared. Enough of that story about a mouse petted and crushed in a pocket. He answered, “I only know the start,” and sang softly, “Sometimes I wonder why / I spend the lonely nights / dreaming of a song....” This is just one possible memory associated with the indestructible song by Hoagy Carmichael. I think millions of other men and women around the world could tell their own brief fable based on Stardust.
Places that I can’t even imagine would come up, young people’s rooms, winters or summers in who knows what climes. If it’s true that certain signs of destiny can be assigned to a song, the tune by Carmichael is in its own way an immense book of the Zodiac. Stardust reached Italy around 1937. We were familiar with the stars that were reflected in Florence’s “silvery” Arno,” or that led to metaphysical adieus: “What will become of me? / Don’t ask me because / I will fall like a star / and perhaps one day I will return to the void....” But these were domestic constellations, firmaments that closed over the roof of home. That idea of “stardust,” however, seemed to throw open to a song the milky ways that dominated summer nights, those teeming, burning skies that gave us long dreams. Carmichael composed Stardust in 1928, during a homecoming at the University of Indiana where he had taken a degree in law years before. In his autobiography, he wrote: “I spent whole nights in solitude imagining a song. I wanted it to be soft and strange like adolescent fantasies.” Just two years later a lyricist, Mitchell Parish, set words to the music. The legend was set in motion. The song was recorded by Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como, and by jazz greats like Louis Armstrong. In 1933 a girl who had been fatally injured requested that Stardust be played at her funeral. Giving up law, Carmichael became a musician. He interspersed his music career with secondary roles in movies. He played the role of a pianist (and wrote some of the songs) in a 1944 film, To Have and Have Not, taken from a Hemingway novel, alongside Humphrey Bogart and the then-debuting Lauren Bacall. Another film was Young Man and a Horn from 1950, with Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall.
On the screen, Carmichael displayed a long-limbed skinniness and a wooden face. If I had to talk about the distant years when Stardust came into my memory, Carmichael must have appeared almost angelic, not with the unbuttoned shirt, the loosened tie, a cigarette dangling from the lips. Looking like someone who, in fact, had created on the keyboard a melody “soft and strange” as adolescence: a far-distant melody, descended from a more secret America, from the depths of which that great poet Emily Dickinson asked to be brought the “sunset in a cup.” A song holds the secret to millions of lives. This was my thought twenty years ago when old Carmichael died. His name (we might have predicted as much) didn’t make it down to the new generations, and there are only a few lines in the encyclopedias: “Carmichael, Hoagy 1899-1981; American composer, pianist, singer.
But the song remains, and that’s what counts. In the vague universe of identities, songs play the same role as proverbs. They transmit an unchanging wisdom, but we don’t know who the wise man was who formulated them. This happens with certain slow, smooth notes that dwell in the attics of memory. Any little thing can set them off, they brush off the patina of the past, they move among cast-off objects, old school photographs, forgotten albums, love letters full of enthusiasm and jealousy.
The notes seem to want to cast open the windows to immerse themselves in sunshine, or in an old snowfall, or among leaves and flowers. Sometimes it happens, even when you have gray hair, that you look up and “wonder why.” Of Stardust, Time magazine wrote that it was “comfortable like an old shoe, but precious as a glass slipper.” I prefer the sweet image of the old shoe: even our children can put it on and dance to it.