Remembering Bix
Doyle, Mary Jo
"Remembering Bix" disobedience—namely, that one should have the "right" to violate "immoral" laws without subjecting himself to punishment. Yet public discussion of Mr. Ford's qualified amnesty proposal among the...
...And so, at twenty-eight, one of the greatest popular musicians of the century was dead...
...almost certainly he didn't care...
...They were musicians and were pleased when he showed musical talent...
...It wasn't until Bix was seventeen and in high school, though, that he finally began to taste the freedom from his family's traditions that he so desperately sought...
...Soon, however, they realized that Bix had to do things his own way...
...Ford's) about "binding up the Nation's wounds" notwithstanding...
...THRiblic Interest Name Address City State Zip THE PUBLIC INTEREST • BOX 542 • OLD CHELSEA POST OFFICE • NEW YORK, N.Y...
...The pardon of Mr...
...1 Please open the following subscription RD THE PUBLIC INTEREST and bill me...
...Possibly he didn't really know himself...
...I suggest that we could profitably quit indulging this penchant for dramatic themes, and relax a bit...
...It was then that he bought his first horn and was on his way to immortality...
...For Bix, the ultimate retreat was music and booze...
...In general, he could not accept the standards which had been laid before him...
...Ford finds himself assailed on all sides for what the good R.E...
...Bix was a constant source of aggravation to his family...
...He refused to learn to read music and preferred to pick out the complicated tunes by ear...
...The conflict was evident even when Bix was a child...
...Nor is the whole Watergate period a trauma equivalent to the Civil War, all talk (including Mr...
...Nixon centers mainly around whether we should exact any price from those who deserted—and to date, there has not been a peep from any one of them about whether these worthy gentlemen should be "above the law...
...And the President himself is not some tragic hero who started to save us, only to fall victim to that one fatal mistake...
...For more than a week Bix had lain alone in the dusty furnished flat like an ownerless dog, his life ebbing away, drinking up what was left in a few bottles of bootleg rum and bathtub gin...
...This subscription will begin with the next issue...
...Hence he was forced to retreat from that world: "What we have in Bix Beiderbecke is exile...
...Nixon, important as it is, is simply not the great ethical issue of our times that all this frenzied breast-beating of late would indicate...
...Much like Willa Lather's sculptor, Bix was thrown into a world which could neither understand nor appreciate him...
...The business of the nation will probably proceed a bit more smoothly if we do, and we will certainly be able to discuss it with more intelligence and equanimity.^ Mary Jo Doyle Young Man With a Horn BIX BEIDERBECKE'S short life was governed by two conflicting drives: the need to gain acceptance from his traditional middle-class German family and the desire to play jazz in a way that it had never been played before...
...Essentially he had been dying for a long time...
...10011 28 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974...
...As one of Bix's teachers, Miss Robinson, remembers, "He was a dreamy little fellow and was happy finding his own niche rather than joining the larger group...
...It is past time, I think, that we brought back a little perspective to our consideration of such matters...
...The remainder of Bix's twenty-eight goo4 Rev:t4v Remembering Bix: A Memoir of the Jazz Age by Ralph Berton Harper and Row $10 years can be seen as a constant pursuit of music and as the struggle to overcome the guilt which he felt for deserting his family's ideals...
...For them that is the real, and what the rest of us call reality is the dreamlike, a glimpsed chaos...
...One must wonder, however, whether Bix ever had a choice between roads, or whether his fate was sealed from the first moment he became aware of the power of a musical note...
...It can also be seen as the struggle of a shy, tortured young artist at large in the world...
...The alienation of the artist has been a common theme in fictional literature, but here biography contributes a vivid real-life example: Bix's day-to-day anguish in attempting to cope with what to him was a foreign society...
...I-1 one year $7.50 r) two years $14.00 Shouldn't you be reading this intelligent quarterly edited by Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer...
...Perhaps Bix's death best exemplifies his alienation...
...Tyrrell has described, in the Wall Street Journal, as his "untimely venture into Christian charity," and we are told that this one act has cost the President not only his credibility, but (shudder) his "honeymoon" as well...
...There are certain temperaments that seem to be at home only in that queer inner world...
...And no one perceives any irony in the situation at all...
...It didn't occur to him to let anyone know...
...In Remembering Bix, Beiderbecke's friend Ralph Berton has woven a -beautifully poignant biography around the struggle between these drives...
...Berton uses as his epigraph a stanza from Robert Frost's famous poem of human decision, "The Road Not Taken": ". . . I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence:/ Two roads diverged in a wood, and I/ I took the one less travelled by,/ And that has made all the difference...
...He could sit alone in a corner with his horn and a glass of gin and be completely satisfied, totally oblivious to the world around him...
...Ford's qualified amnesty proposal among the same people who so abhor granting clemency to Mr...
...Meanwhile, Mr...
Vol. 8 • December 1974 • No. 3
