Heroic Struggle

...He sets such a value of rare and precious on many small memories-his first piano teachers, the woman who taught his sister to paint-that they become to the reader nearly as fascinating as his conversations with Picasso, or Stravinsky, or Gertrude Stein...

...Whatever a Harvard education did for him, or his careers in Paris, New York and the wide world, his central strength is local and weirdly reminiscent of Harry Truman's...

...When the great get into the story, it is they who are related to him, existing essentially as part of his vast accumulation of acquaintances...

...The book as a whole, being the story of Thomson's really heroic struggle in the cause of American music, of French music, of his own music, against the preposterous weight accorded to anything German or Italian, is very dramatic indeed...

...The elegance, without recourse to gossip, might weaken or narrow the play of wit, but instead it heightens and broadens it, rather in a 17th century or Regency manner...

...But it has been good for so much more than amusement that one must reckon it as a major national asset...

...With so much to gossip about, and having spent a lifetime in the world of music and the arts, where the gossip is unlimited and unsparing, Thomson rarely if ever gossips...

...And it is a special American product, begun in his parentage, a middle-class Southern Baptist family in Kansas City...

...They have their astringency, since the friendship was enlivened by quarrels and the fatal haggling over percentages between librettist and composer, but all of it is remembered with high good humor and enchantingly written...

...As a critical discourse on her work it is second to one...

...With a very civilized mixture of candor and discretion, he tells the terrible story of the death of his friend Emmanuël Fay and then refers to him as an "ever-so-touching young man...

...those of the very best worldly conversation...

...Whatever Thomson may make of people, music is sacred to him, a first reality which he takes religiously, and his endless battles are part of a holy war, conducted with Baptist fervor...

...In life, too, he can do extravagant kindnesses almost on the sly or couch enthusiastic praise as a taunt...

...The intellectual vivacity is of course high and mercurial, the opinions erudite as well as amusing, the individual manner very rich, but most wonderful is the tact...

...His politics, which can seem extremely trivial, much too easily contemptuous of liberals and the Left, are perfectly practical strategy in the cause of creative music, whose best patronage is unhappily, but I think undeniably, somewhere to the Right...

...There are great compensating virtues to this relative lack of literary imagination...

...Politics is about the only issue which finds me not on Thomson's side, and I cannot say that he is practically mistaken...

...The chapters are sometimes hilarious, sometimes quite solemn, and rightly, since the collaborations of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson are important in the history of American opera and song...

...So handsome a restraint, all but extinct in our time, is motivated, I should guess, not by Christian charity, or pagan magnanimity, or the mellowness of years, but by an instinct for elegance, on which Thomson is long...

...author, "Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work" As the title goes to show, the vehement egocentricity of Virgil Thomson, which has been entertaining enough as part of his performance over the years, still works charmingly in this book of memoirs -at 70...

...His rigid severity toward other composers is, I think, quite impersonal, like that of a general toward other generals or colonels on his side, should they slacken in the onslaught...

...He naturally and natively makes no bones about it...

...He does tell factual truth, with the pungency and objectivity of an excellent journalist, and his imagination of the lives of other people is slight-at least as expressed in words, however well his portraiture in music renders the presence of personalities...

...The book is genuinely his own life remembered, in its individual continuity, not his innumerable relations to the great...

...Under the schematic elegance of many of his accounts of people there is sometimes felt a fullness of substance like that under the reticence of Satie or of Virgil Thomson's own music or of Gertrude Stein's irreducible styles of wording, so that, throughout, there may be much more humanity under his bright surfaces than I can detect...

...In any case, his chapters on his long friendship and collaboration with Gertrude Stein are written with a full and outright fondness...

...So he was, but On the other hand, Thomson refuses to "try" the violently melodramatic case of his friend Bernard Fay, and this ellipsis I find a simple mercy, both because the facts are so appalling and because they belong, by artistic right, to a great novelist or tragedian, not to a writer of memoirs...

...A writer for whom writing is primary would convey, even with the same brevity and the same cool stance of worldly wisdom, (compare the recent autobiography of Anita Loos) a greater sense of other lives being lived, whether tragically, absurdly, happily or whatever...

...For the writing of memoirs his egocentricity is also a great advantage, since he has had an acute sensitivity to everything that has happened to him from babyhood on, and a sound middle-class or churchly possessiveness toward it, as toward an old investment with steadily increasing interest...

...His retention of detail, usually the very telling detail, however slight what it tells, is one astonishing gift among many...

...Indeed, the influence of his music on the melodiousness and phrasing of her later writing, even when not for music, reaches into the history of literature proper, and his invention of the portrait in music was suggested by her special form of portraiture in words...

...The tough independence, the conviction of his own rectitude and the perfect zeal in a dissenting cause, which have served the intellectual eventfulness of the musical world with such distinction and for so long, were formed quite naturally at home...

...His account of his family and formative years, allowing a very temperate nostalgia, is a businesslike review of his resources, delightful as much for its simple Missouri knowingness as for its cosmopolitan wit...

...He has the same cockiness, the love of a fight, and a gift for political machinery, which, in our musical world, is deadlier and more devious than the national government...

...I would say the relative aloofness of this manner, or of good manners, also accounts, with the Missouri hardness, for his exteriority to people, but this last is not by any means entire...

...This part of the book, therefore, is a valuable document as well as rich reading...

...In writing, Thomson reduces people consistently to their careers, which are successes or failures, stalled or evolving, or else to an amusing anecdote...

...Other readers will certainly differ with him on many other grounds and find obvious faults in him-snobbery, injustice, captious-ness, etc.-but if they read carefully they will find these all shrewdly chosen and cultivated for use in an excellent cause...

...Applying his characteristic lucidity to himself, he says he has no gift for imaginative writing, but simply uses the language for telling the truth...

...Thomson's fine connoisseurship of people has served him remarkably well in musical politics, as a man of action and as a man of the world, but in writing it is often inadequate to the case...