All this is by way of a preamble to a discussion of Joseph Szigeti’s performance, with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony last Thursday night, of the Alban Berg Concerto for Violin and Orchestra and the Bach G-Minor Concerto. Mr. Szigeti is not a glamour violinist. He is a large man who crouches over his violin, and he occasionally draws from it sounds that scratch and whistle. He lacks the formidable and immaculate polish of Mr. Heifetz. But he is, despite his mechanical faults, my favorite violinist. He never allows the unwieldiness of the bow to interfere with the justness of his phrasing. He never wallows in beautiful tone for the sake of beautiful tone. He is always intent on communicating the inner substance of the music he interprets, and he accomplishes this task with the most scrupulous regard for emphasis and other subtleties of melodic contour. When listening to him, one can forget that one is listening to a violin and listen to the music.
Nothing could have offered a more convincing test of Mr. Szigeti’s qualities than the juxtaposition on the program of Bach’s serenely classical concerto and Berg’s modern, expressionist score. Mr. Szigeti’s playing in the first work was here and there a little thin in tone, but he gave both pieces performances of great musical insight, providing each with its own spectrum of musical coloring and making evident the two centuries of change in violin style that separate them. Dimitri Mitropoulos, who conducted, kept the Philharmonic players in unusually intimate rapport with Mr. Szigeti, and the result of this collaboration was, in the case of the Berg concerto, among the most memorable events the musical season has thus far offered.
The Berg violin concerto is, I think, one of the few important symphonic compositions written since the First World War. Finished in 1935, just before Berg’s death in Vienna, it has most of the technical features of the atonal style that was popular there at the time, but, unlike most atonal music, it seems to have a sense of poetry that lies beyond its interest as a mere collection of notes. The lack of propulsion that is characteristic of atonality has been compensated for here by a gloomy and intensely dramatic atmosphere that gives the work continuous momentum and excitement. A good deal of this atmosphere is created by Berg’s uncanny artistry as an orchestrator and by a stream of dour romantic passion that breaks through the abstract formality of the idiom and brings it to life. Berg has proved in this work that a composer of sufficient genius can make even atonality convey a human message.
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Last week, two symphonies by the contemporary British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams were presented here. One of them, the Fourth, was included on the Philharmonic program I have been discussing; the other, the Sixth, was played earlier in the week by the Philadelphia Orchestra, under Eugene Ormandy. To me, both symphonies are respectable, dignified, and slightly dull compositions, written with obvious sincerity but exhibiting the outward gestures of tragic emotion rather than the true substance. Mr. Ormandy also brought along the well-known violinist Erica Morini, who played the Brahms Concerto for Violin with great sturdiness, fine tone, and impeccable technique but without that understanding of purely musical values that I found in the performances of Mr. Szigeti.
A NOTE BY JUDITH THURMAN
Until the 1940s, American fashion was as much of a colonial backwater, in relation to France, as Gaul was under the Romans. Seventh Avenue took its marching orders from the Paris couture houses, whose hegemony was nearly absolute. Even a socialist-feminist-Yankee patriot like Margaret Fuller—America’s first female public intellectual—couldn’t resist, when she got to France, in 1846, going on a spree for some chic clothes. And this was the dress pattern for a century to come: the grandes dames of the Gilded Age bought their ball gowns at Worth; the bohemian rebels of the Belle Époque wore Poiret’s harem pants; the Daisy Buchanans got their madcap shimmer at Patou.
But when the Second World War began, and women of fashion were confined to North America by German U-boats, a new generation of designers, many of them female upstarts (Claire McCardell and Bonnie Cashin, to name two), suddenly had the field to themselves. McCardell produced inventive leisure wear for a youthful client with a sense of humor who may even have held down a job. Charles James proved that an American couturier could design evening wear that rivaled the French in refinement. Adrian, out in Hollywood, made a specialty of Amazon queens. At the other end of the social spectrum, Elizabeth Hawes, a Paris-trained couturier turned champion of fashion for the people, was designing uniforms for Red Cross volunteers and writing about “girls in slacks” for the left-wing daily PM. By the end of the decade, when commerce with Europe resumed, France did reassert its dominance (first with Dior’s New Look, of 1947, and later with Courrèges, Cardin, and Yves Saint Laurent.) But by then two iconoclasts from New York, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, had forever transformed the way that clothes were modeled and photographed.
Lois Long’s New Yorker columns on “Feminine Fashions” hardly seem to register the decade’s seismic shifts. Fashion criticism as we know it did not yet exist, and rather than looking at the big picture, or the emerging picture, of an enterprise in flux, Long approached her work as a pointillist. Her tightly focused columns surveyed the clothes of a new season shop by shop and garment by garment, in meticulous detail. Seventy years before the advent of smartphones, Long pioneered the fashion app: a consummately savvy, user-friendly tool that helped her readers navigate a daunting environment. “I am more concerned about the fate of the poor, bedraggled, bewildered retail customer (which is every one of us),” Long wrote, “than about any other breed of forgotten man—or woman.”
Long spent her professional life indefatigably pounding the pavement in a few square blocks of Manhattan around Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue (she never seems to have visited the Garment District) and rattling the hangers in a handful of emporia with genteel cachet. But, at that treacherous intersection of price and value, she had a keen sense of the absurd; she couldn’t be seduced by luxury for its own sake, and she prided herself on being a bargain scout. Her taste, like her prose, was wary of fantasy, if not always of improbability. One of the outfits she recommends is “a black-and-green plaid wool jumper dress ($25), accompanied by a long-sleeved tangerine wool jersey blouse ($9.95) and tangerine knickerbockers.” You never discover—perhaps mercifully—the name of the hack who designed them.
No one who writes about fashion year after year is immune from ennui, and Long seems to have fought it by becoming a consumer advocate for the hapless Everyshopper, whose ordeals impassioned her. These included being “ritzed” by snooty salesgirls and run ragged by haphazard merchandising. Why, she fumed, should a parasol be sold on a different floor from the outfit that it accessorizes? (Here, though, her innocence of a common subterfuge speaks to her own high-mindedness. She seems not to have suspected shopkeepers of purposely drawing their customers into a labyrinth of temptation.) Long was, above all, a valiant trooper, reporting tirelessly from the front lines of a consumer revolution. Occasionally, though, her battle fatigue wears through. Rather than fighting “a mob in a big store,” she recommends “joining other harassed women in an air-cooled apartment and playing Canasta.” (There was no need to mention the frosted martini shaker; New Yorker readers took it for granted.)
Long knew her way around a martini. In the 1920s, under the pseudonym Lipstick, the wild and worldly young Lois (born in 1901) had covered Manhattan nightlife for the newly founded magazine, and had cut a racy figure in New York café society as the quintessential flapper. She had sometimes turned up at the office the worse for wear, at five in the morning, still in her scanty evening togs. Harold Ross, the editor-in-chief, was often scandalized by Long’s outré wardrobe and behavior. One of the pleasures of Long’s writing is a suppressed energy—something caged and seething—which suggests that, in middle age, she both bowed to and bristled at a misogynist prejudice that has still not quite been transcended in certain quarters of the media: that fashion is a beat not worthy of a “real” journalist.
This is not to say that Long’s writ
ing lacked wit and authority, or her opinions bite. She always had an impious little riff on fashion and society in her opening paragraphs. The former party girl could smile with benign disdain at a generation of bobby-soxers in burlap and denim, trying to shock mothers who had “survived the Scott Fitzgerald era” by dressing like “serfs under the Hapsburgs.” And she always came to life on the subject of hats.
The greatest irony of these columns is that the life they conjure, of literate women condemned to wifely or filial conformity, was alien to the experience of their author. Long, who was married to the New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno (they divorced in 1931, after four years of marriage), was a self-supporting single mother, serial monogamist, social maverick, and modern woman ahead of her time. Yet, when one reads between the lines, her columns also evoke the modern woman’s struggle with conflicting imperatives—to self and others. In her last column, on the fad for novelty furs, written in 1969, Long gives her readers some parting advice: “Marry well.”
LOIS LONG
APRIL 13, 1940
It is quite possibly true, since so many fiery Hearst editorials have said it is, that the lot of the modern businessman is a sorry one. However, I am more concerned about the fate of the poor, bedraggled, bewildered retail customer (which is every one of us) than about any other breed of forgotten man—or woman. Incessant polls, surveys, and other spurious means of consulting our wishes have all but made it impossible to buy the simple things we want. In offices all over the country, high-priced, alert people keep on deciding what we humble souls should be made to buy, which is usually something entirely different from what we yearn for. Despite the writing on the wall proclaiming that the great American public has grown up, the legend persists that it is moronic and incapable of making a decision.
The movies, though still far from perfect, have shown signs now and then of realizing that the average citizen likes good things and isn’t flattered by having his lowest tastes condescended to. The studios used to turn out pictures tailored exclusively to the taste of the muggs; now occasionally they go out and hire a Raymond Massey to act his best in a picture, and, to their amazement, the public flocks to see the result. The radio has hardly caught on at all, as anyone who has ever listened to daytime serials will tell you, and its sturdy right arm, the advertising industry, can be equally dense at times. Both have surveyed the human being until he has become, in their minds, simply a piece of machinery, dangerous if not kept under control. Everywhere bright young men sit at their desks and shudder as they try to outwit that mysterious ogre, the American Housewife; hundreds of underlings sort out questionnaires and charts, compiled at vast expense, from which to prepare copy that can sizzle across billboards and into magazines and over the air and supposedly lull American women into docility. In vain, a young lady pleads that she’d like to know how to make last year’s evening dress look new for a special occasion. The survey experts chorus that she’s crazy and that what she really wants, if she hopes to haunt a reluctant man, is a bottle of perfume that costs ten dollars. It is all most constructive and efficient. In vain, dear old ladies plead that they would prefer a bottle of My Sin to the nicest gray shawl ever knitted. They don’t know what they want, say the boys back of the surveys, rustling around in their statistics to prove that old ladies want shawls and think perfume is a criminal waste of money. I often wonder how much longer women, who for years have been deferred to as a potent factor in our national economy, will take these insults to their intelligence and good nature.
OCTOBER 27, 1945
The war must be over. Arrogance is beginning to strut again among the shoppes. The customer is again being ritzed by salesladies and a lot of well-heeled but timid customers are apparently buying whatever is thrown at them. And it looks as if the average woman, the one with a mind of her own and a pocketbook to consider, is going to be kicked around. In other words, the postwar world is just more of the same. None of this, happily, applies to the great veterans of the trade. No initiative, I guess.
For instance, Bergdorf Goodman’s third floor, as well behaved as ever, houses a comprehensive collection of ready-to-wear clothes, priced at from $40 to $70 and with lines so suave that Bergdorf must have shopped around quite a bit to find them. The late-afternoon and informal dinner dresses are particularly notable. There is an invaluable black or brown rayon-crêpe one, with a V neck that can be fastened right up to the throat and front drapery that looks like a huge bow, one loop of which makes a deep pocket. This drapery also gives a rounded-hipline effect. At least, that’s the way it looks to me. Other black dresses, these with square necks, have long, tight sleeves and a bow on the left shoulder; darts and drapery give that same rounded-hipline effect in the back. A black matelassé dress is cut with deep armholes, long, tight sleeves, and drapery in the skirt that makes it look like a tunic. A long-bodiced dress has a cap-sleeved, round-necked, black jersey top and a gathered black rayon satin skirt; superb, and $40. Next, there’s a black moiré two-piece number with a high, keyhole neck, a basque top descending in back, folds over the shoulders, and an easy, swinging skirt. Mustard-yellow rayon crêpe is used to make a top with a turnover collar; this goes with a gathered skirt of black rayon velvet, with black bengaline edging the high, notched waist and the hemline. And if you want lamés, there are lacquer-red, bronze, or green-and-gold affairs with high necks that tie at the throat, cap sleeves, and drapery at the hip that looks like a pocket. All of these are lovely even if you haven’t a mink coat to wear over them.
JULY 27, 1946
American milliners, who are sometimes referred to as “mad geniuses” in their lush little world, are notoriously perverse folk and unpredictable in direct ratio to their prosperity. The custom hats they have devised for this fall and winter are a challenge to psychiatrists. John-Frederics solemnly speak of fashions that stem from the “landscape of America.” But to judge by their offerings, John and Fred think that we slaves to steam heat plan to shake off our bonds and spend the winter on the plains of North Dakota, and they’re afraid we’ll freeze. So they have put in a lot of time on hats that may start as turbans, cloches, derbies, or whatever, and end up with vast scarf appendages which you wrap tight under your nose (they don’t tell you what to do when you want to smoke, have a drink, or kiss somebody—even just a mild goodbye). These flowing businesses, having thus forced your chin deep into your chest, either pin up into casual drapery at the back of the head or, more often, descend over the back of the neck to produce a silhouette that a turtle would consider an infringement on his patent. When the idea turns up in Technicolor white, an ivory shade that I would just as soon not try to describe, the effect is of a person with bandaged facial burns; in dark colors, it suggests, to go on with the boys’ elaborate conceit, Oriental rather than Grant Wood landscapes. Then, Lilly Daché, a specialist in the spun-sugar, or wedding-cake, sort of frivolity, has come forth with some of the simplest, most youthful silhouettes to be seen in town. And Sally Victor, idol of the night-life set, has shown up with striking untrimmed shapes and with felts cunningly draped, in a very suave way, like turbans. It is all most inconsistent and surprising.
The milliners, of course, are subjected to terrific temptations this season. Because they have been short of luxurious fabrics for years, it is understandable that they should go wild now that they again have at hand all the aigrette-type feathers, ostrich plumes, birds’ wings, velvets, and other gaudy ingredients they want. Some of the results make me beg you to proceed with caution. It should also be noted, in all fairness, that the temptation of fine felts and French ribbon has not been resisted, either, and usually the results of this are happier.
As for line, the shops show a leaning toward hats with tiny brims that either shoot forward or are turned back, with high, narrow, squarish crowns that slant toward the rear. (You had better see how your profile looks in one of them before you take any definite steps.) There are wonderful adaptations of derbies and what are called “rollers” at Bergdorf Goodman, bo
nnets at Sally Victor, enchanting tilted contraptions at Daché and Florell. Most of them show the forehead and a bit of hairline, but there is an ominous tendency in some of them to ripple low over the forehead in the style of the twenties. That period is also hinted at in John-Frederics’ circlets for evening, that go straight around the head like the band of a wedding veil, and I must admit that they are charming affairs. One is made of brown glycerined ostrich, which trails down the back; others start with diamond (not real, of course) circlets and have soft, spangled scarves coming down over the shoulders. A definite and fearfully elaborate trend is evening hats in the Gaby Deslys style—toques or big velvet hats adorned with ostrich feathers, birds, or velvet ribbon, and sometimes all of them. John-Frederics, who always like to stun their public, have lots of these, often accompanied by boas of curly ostrich or of frail glycerined feathers of the aigrette type. Other examples are simpler; Sally Victor makes vast inverted saucers in felt, absolutely unadorned, and Lilly Daché has a lovely big-brimmed felt with glycerined ostrich clouding the severity of the brim and giving a misty look to the whole thing.
APRIL 19, 1947
It is always interesting to see which way the wind is blowing in Paris. This year, as always, American buyers over there have been cautious about abandoning veteran designers, but they also have suffered their usual schoolgirl crushes on talented newcomers. The hero of one season can be the dullard of the next in this uncertain world, but no one can say fashion designers hold a franchise on that particular complaint. At Bergdorf (to get this discussion down to cases), where a lot of new French clothes are being shown to the custom trade, Balenciaga is the old tried-and-true party and the new darling is Christian Dior, who has got away to such a fine start that he must tremble at the thought of what will be expected of him next season. Balenciaga leads off with a black wool day dress that has sloping shoulders, long, slender sleeves, a deep tuck around the bodice to give the effect of a bolero, and a jabot down the front of the longish, slender skirt. He follows that up with a greenish-blue wool topcoat that is extraordinary—the draped back falls in deep folds and then curves in behind the knees, and the wrapped front has a much shorter hemline. Next, he tosses in a more conventional suit of navy wool, which has a straight skirt and a rather long, fitted jacket, made slightly hippy by three tiered flaps on each side at the waist. And so forth.
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 68
