At the age of 94 Studs Terkel finally sat down and wrote his memoir “Touch and Go” –a book so capacious in its varied carols and its assemblages of American curios that reading it is like falling down a flight of stairs while pasting rare stamps in an album. One is astonished by the worlds revealed and simultaneously affected by the simplest details. One is tempted to cry out: “Let me too be 94 if by God I can sound like the American Henry Mayhew.”
But its the small details that really get me. Writing of one of his brothers Terkel points to an American street tradition born in Italy and Ireland which has utterly vanished today. The street song which persisted until the 1950’s but which is now gone forever like the Studebaker. Here’s Terkel on a casual street corner opera and a local boxing match without rules:
“My brother Ben was a true neighborhood boy. Schooling was not his true love; his mentors and patrons were the big guys on the corner. There was little doubt that of all the kids Ben was their runaway favorite. I can still hear their requests for his throbbing rendition of “Break the News to Mother.” They tossed nickels and dimes at him, though there was nothing patronizing about the gesture. It was as though sentimental passersby were paying tribute to a street singer. He picked up enough change in that manner to occasionally take me to a Saturday feature and a Pearl White serial. The Civil War song was to Ben what “Casey at the Bat” was to DeWolf Hopper, or “Over the Rainbow” to Judy Garland. Just break da noos to mudder Y’know how deah I love ‘er Tell her not tuh wait fer me F’r I’m not comin’ ho-o-me. Now and then, Dutch or Irish or Greek would engage Ben and Quinton, the ten-year-old wonders, to box a wild round or two. Winner take all–a dime. It would usually wind up in a draw and each warrior would be a buffalo nickel richer. Neither Ben nor Quinton knew of the Marquis of Queensberry rules nor did they much care. They aimed for each other’s groin; they rabbit punched. And even pivot punched, a maneuver that was outlawed a half-century before.”
Of course this isn’t a good paragraph and yet I couldn’t care less.The man is talking aloud on audio tape and he’s remembering the vitality of provincial culture–we were a land of neighborhoods until the auto really took over and for the sake of argument I’ll say that you can’t find anyone singing on a street corner in America nowadays unless perhaps they’re selling something out of desperation like religion or spurious free merchandise. No one has permission to be moved in public anymore though fighting persists but not as sport.
IN fact what you feel reading Terkel’s Mayhew-esque reminiscences is nothing like nostalgia but more a wonder or a fear that local culture can’t be resuscitated in a time of ear buds and i-phones. Nowadays if a crowd assembles on the street they’ve been told to go there by Fox news or they’re hoping to see a celebrity but no one’s going to stand on a soapbox and talk about anthroposophism or anarchy or sing a slave song or even something by the Coasters.
But you canread Terkel’s memoir the way I read Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” as a literary museum in which you can see how America was supposed to be.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 