The All-Round Man: Selected Letters of Percy Grainger, 1914-1961.
Ross, Robert L.
Edited by Malcolm Gillies and David Pear. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994. [xxvi, 301 p. ISBN 0-19-816377-0. $39.95.]
Examples of the expatriate Australian artist abound. To name a
few: actress Judith Anderson, singer Joan Sutherland, writers Christina
Stead and Peter Carey, painter Sidney Nolan. And there are those who
went to New York or London, failed, and returned home. Usually these
transplanted Australians develop equivocal attitudes toward their native
country. Such was the case with composer Percy Grainger, born in
Australia in 1882, educated in Germany, after which he moved to England
where he established his career. When World War I broke out, he came to
the United States, took citizenship, and settled in White Plains, New
York. He died there in 1961. Ironically, the English source of his
best-known work, "Country Gardens," often leads the casual
observer to consider him British.
Although Grainger complains in The All-Round Man about
Australia's provinciality and artistic desolation, at the height of
his career in 1932 he initiated and thereafter oversaw the establishment
of the Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne. It is from this
museum's collection of several thousand Grainger letters that
editors Malcolm Gillies and David Pear, both Australians, have drawn
seventy-six letters written during the composer's American years.
The book serves as a sequel to Kay Dreyfus's The Farthest North of
Humanness (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985), which contains correspondence
from Grainger's British period.
Like the title for this new collection, Grainger called himself an
"all-round man," whose interests and abilities went far beyond
music--"any suggestion of specialisation," he wrote, "is
naturally insulting to an Australian" (p. 257). The editors
apparently chose letters to reinforce this claim by unabashedly
including ones full of questionable opinions, theories, and assumptions
on a wide range of subjects. Many of these observations are offensive,
especially Grainger's nationalistic outbursts and his promotion of
Nordic and Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. This stand manifests itself
partly through what Grainger called "blue-eyed English," which
excludes all words with Latin and Greek roots--that is, words derived
from people with dark skin and eyes. Attempting to put this revised
diction into practice, not always successfully and consistently, he
invents some linguistic oddities, such as "lack of
mind-energy" (p. 89), "wordpaint" (p. 99),
"Anglosaxonised lowerdog" and "Normanised upperdog"
(p. 45), "speechified" (p. 18).
Other subjects emerging from this selection of letters have also
made dedicated admirers cringe--particularly members of The
International Percy Grainger Society. They see no reason to rehearse the
details of Grainger's close relationship with his mother, whom as
an adult he addressed: "O, my own Mumsey," "my adorable
adoredest mum" (p. 18). Nor do they find an exposition of his
sexuality relevant to musical appreciation. For example, in one letter
to his future wife he describes vividly erotic preferences and
fantasies, especially flagellation--"As far as my taste goes, blows
are most thrilling on breasts, bottom, inner thighs, sexparts" (p.
99). The editors point out that Grainger associated bizarre sexual
practices with his broader personality traits, including cruelty,
exhibitionism, and what he called "life-wildness," qualities
that he believed helped to inspire his music (p. 9).
Whether or not this evidence of the man as an occasional bigot and
debauchee should be left in the library files raises unanswerable
questions. Yet the book certainly does not focus on these matters alone.
In addition to providing an inside look at a professional
performer's trials and triumphs, the letters offer theoretical and
technical discussions of Grainger's approach to composition;
needless to say, these passages are the most informed. One letter
explains how he aspires to invest his work with "the bodily force
of life itself ... the unbeatable freshness and undowned every-trying,
ever-daring life instinct of men and beasts" (p. 29).
Grainger's expressed belief in music's universality and
healing power contradicts the rampant nationalism he at times espoused:
"The worthwhileness of all races & all cultures is proved by
all the world's music" (p. 217).
Finely produced and superbly edited, the book includes
illustrations and photographs, a detailed chronology, a helpful
biographical register of letter recipients--including figures such as
Benjamin Britten, Frederick Delius, and Edgar Lee Masters--a readable
introduction, explanatory notes that identify events and persons, and an
index. These aids help to open up the letters, which in turn reveal all
sides of an intriguing man.
