The 40s: The Story of a Decade (98 page)

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.

· · ·

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

U
ntil 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 writing 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