Oscar Wilde once observed that "the public is wonderfully tolerant; it forgives everything but genius." Yet the plot of Frank Conroy's irresistible new book suggests quite the opposite. A rich novel of development with the somewhat familiar title "Body and Soul," it shows that the world can be wonderfully forgiving of genius, so forgiving as to prove a handicap.
From earliest childhood, Claude Rawlings's gift for music is recognized and rewarded. Though he spends most of his days dreamily roaming his Upper East Side neighborhood while his unmarried mother drives a taxi, his budding interest in the piano attracts the patronage of a local music-store owner, Aaron Weisfeld. Weisfeld steers Claude to the right teachers, who help him develop skills that lead to a job as an accompanist to the child of a Park Avenue family.Claude's exposure to wealth prompts him to apply successfully for a scholarship to an exclusive private school, which leads to admission to a prestigious college, where he meets a rich woman whom he marries after they graduate. His fame as a pianist spreads, and he even begins to compose music. But in a reversal of his mounting good fortune, he wins no competitions.
When he complains about this lack of success, one of his former teachers tells him: "You should understand that only so much can come in the form of gifts. Gifts can take you only so far. Eventually we are thrown back on ourselves. It's a cliche, but it's true."
And then, almost providentially, Claude's life comes apart. His marriage founders and his creativity dries up. He feels a sense of fraudulence common to artists, worsened by his never having learned who his father is. Then through a wonderfully inventive complication, he inherits the Third Avenue building that houses Aaron Weisfeld's music store, and he ends up holding out against a real-estate developer determined to demolish his building and put up a block-wide high-rise. As the wrecking ball crashes against a nearby structure, causing an E-flat silver bell over the door of his store to ring faintly, Claude finds his inspiration.
"At the precise instant of the crash, followed a split second later by the bell, he hallucinated the full sound of an orchestra and a piano playing two chords in succession, the first chord dissonant and the second consonant. The hallucination was clear and precise, complete in every musical detail, which he instantly memorized." He begins to compose a concerto, the double meaning of which word is "to join together, to work in concert, but also, from the Latin, to fight, or to contend." For Claude, "the E-flat silver bell represented the solo instrument (piano) engaged in a battle for survival with the more powerful sounds of demolition representing the orchestra." Needless to add, the concerto proves a crowning success.
It is tempting to read from this some message about Mr. Conroy's own artistic output. It has taken him some 26 years to publish just three books; the first a finely written memoir of growing up, "Stop-Time" (1967); the second a somewhat thin, sketchy collection of stories, "Midair" (1985), and now this remarkable outpouring of compulsive storytelling.
Yet the events surrounding Claude's breakthrough to creativity are no more than developments in the novel's story, and plot is not really the point of "Body and Soul." Repeatedly, the author pricks holes in the story's tension by leaping ahead in time and giving away the solution to some incipient problem. Several times he breaks the spell of his narrative by switching his story's point of view.
What comes across more forcefully than Claude's creative crisis is the inevitability of his musical genius, which is conveyed in lyrically rendered prose that reflects a painstaking analysis of classic musical scores. "The piano seemed to disappear and somehow the lines themselves filled the boy's consciousness, the architecture of the music lucid in every small detail, the whole statement sealed, floating, and folding into itself, and into silence. Claude ached at the beauty of it. He wanted to leave his body and go chase the music into whatever hyperspace had swallowed it."
More powerful still is Mr. Conroy's belief in the demotic source of musical art. The rich people in "Body and Soul" are arid, desiccated, even incestuous. As Aaron Weisfeld muses: "Music is a decoration. A diversion to take their minds off their troubles. Maybe a hobby. To them, the artist is a high-class entertainer. They don't even know they don't know anything, those people. It can drive you crazy."
But music is not decoration to Claude. It's his body and soul. And its sources are universal. In some of the novel's better passages, Claude draws his inspiration from so-called lower forms of music: be-bop, boogie-woogie, barrelhouse and blues.
These are set off against the abstractness of 12-tone music, which Claude, try as he will, has difficulty understanding. At one pinnacle of his adventures, he meets Aaron Copland, who pays his concerto a most appropriate compliment: "It was strong and fresh. I liked the way you drew from all directions. It was good to see that."
Here may lie the secret of why Mr. Conroy has written such an apparently traditional story, full of rich characters and tricky twists, drawing (sometimes outrageously) on popular devices of storytelling. "Body and Soul" may be old-fashioned -- realistic, eventful, almost Victorian in its obsession with class and paternity -- but it is always aware of its being so. That its title is the same as the 1947 John Garfield movie about a champion boxer, which young Claude could have seen during his dreamiest stage, is probably no coincidence. And at the heart of the novel lies a forceful defense of such appropriation of popular art.
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In addition to writing, Conroy was an accomplished jazz pianist, winning a Grammy Award in 1986. His book Dogs Bark, But the Caravan Rolls On: Observations Then and Now includes articles that describe jamming with Charles Mingus and with Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. The latter session occurred when Conroy was writing about the Rolling Stones for Esquire. Conroy had arrived at a mansion for the interview, found nobody there, and eventually sat down at a grand piano and began to play. Someone wandered in, sat down at the drums, and joined in with accomplished jazz drumming; then a fine jazz bassist joined in. They turned out to be Watts and Wyman, whom Conroy did not recognize until they introduced themselves after the session.
Conroy died of colon cancer on April 6, 2005, in Iowa City, Iowa, at the age of 69.
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