In the pit
Benny Green
in reading Ronald Pearsall's admirably lucid and concise Victorian Popular Music, it occurred to me that whatever their shortcomings the Victorians did at least produce the one major novelist capable of putting on to paper the true psychology of the average working musician. A fortnight ago in this space I reviewed the gruesome fate of the jazz musician, which is to be mistaken for either a dope or a dope fiend by writers able to maintain reasonable sanity on almost any other subject. Well, if ever there was a creative writer born too soon to explain the modern musician to us, he was Charles Dickens, who at least once leaned forward a hundred years to produce the Most perceptive account I know of the working musicians of my own generation.
The most reassuring thing about Frederick Dorrit, the one fact which Dickens loses no time in establishing, is that he has no talent. From the moment of his entry it is clear that he is a dud, that he almost certainly Plays out of tune, which is bad, in an orchestra so abysmal that to play out of tune doesn't Matter, which is worse. Dickens tells us that Dorrit "played a clarinet as dirty as himself " in the pit of a theatre so obscure that the author never even bothers to give it a name. The vital fact which Dickens grasps and almost nobody else has grasped since, is that to a musician an orchestra pit is no more romantic than a betting Slip to a book-maker, Dorrit, though he has sat in that pit six nights a week for many years, " has never been observed to raise his eyes above his music book," and it certainly never occurred to him, as it did to his niece Fanny, that backstage there was "such a mixing of gaslight and daylight that they seemed to have got on to the Wrong side of the pattern of the universe."
Later when he practises at home, suggesting that though senil€ he still clings to the myth of an artistic routine, Fanny shuts him up by tugging the instrument from his mouth. Even this indignity fails to animate him, and we know that Fanny's appraisal of his ability is cruelly shrewd when, craving silence, she confiscates not his clarinet but his music, proving his inability to improvise. Eventually his brother's inheritance releases him from the need ever to play again, and it is now that the family shows its profound misunderstanding of the forces motivating him. When the Dorrits embark on the Grand Tour, they put Fred's clarinet 'in the luggage, against the day when the ennui of retirement should prove unbearable, for Fanny and the rest of them actually believe that playing the clarinet gives Fred pleasure, thereby showing that classic imperception the outside world still displays towards musicians, whose work they assume to be no work at all.
Dorrit also personifies the crowning paradox which is that despite the layman's tendency to see the musician as enviably romantic he also sees him as something vaguely subversive, Fanny says that Fred is " socially speaking, shocking," a statement which, if you remember that Fanny worked in the same theatre as her uncle, sums up all the detestability of the Dorrits once they have come into their fortune.
Observe that old Dorrit, a decrepit musician, who endures countless nights of mechanistic reaction to the baton without once striking the compensatory spark of artistic gratification, still summons from somewhere the pride to upbraid his sanctimonious brother, which brings us to a legend quite different from the one fostered by the pulp romantics of our era. It may well •be that the experience of the working musician, educated at least to some extent in worldly wisdom by the ordeal of selling something vaguely artistic in a world frankly commercial, is perfect revolutionary material. Frederick Dorrit is a lightning sketch of the kind of man who, seventy years later, might well have become a branch secretary of the Musicians' Union. Nor is his type all that remote. Twenty years ago you could still find him sitting in some provincial theatre, blowing an instrument only marginally dirtier than himself, or crouched behind a gargantuan bass drum whose face showed a mountain range suffused with the roseate glow of a hand-painted sunset. There remain also those musicians whose eyes are never raised above their music books, although this is often due less to professional diligence than to a healthy curiosity about the contents of the Sporting Life.
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