[View Titles on Goodreads.com: pavlic -- douglas]
Reviewed by Keith Mitchell
Douglas, Mitchell. Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem. Granada Hills, CA: Red Hen, 2009. 112 pp. ISBN 1597091405. $19.95 (paper).
Pavlic, Ed. Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2008. 208 pp. ISBN 0820330973. $19.95 (paper).
The importance of African-American music to literature is pretty much a given; The number of novels, short stories, plays and poems in which African-American music is essential is staggering. Poetry has been particularly ripe for the exploration of connections between music and the genre. Usually individual poems in a collection are devoted to black musical artists. Sometimes, on rare occasions, whole collections are devoted to a particular black musical artist, especially jazz and blues artists. Who can forget Michael S. Harper’s furiously experimental Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1985) or Alexis De Veaux’s heart-rending Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1980)? Rarely, however, has an entire poetry collection been devoted to a black musical artist who’s work many might consider certainly slight in light of musical icons John Coltrane and Billie Holiday. Yet, Ed Pavlic’s Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway and Mitchell H. Douglas’ Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem are two very fine praisesongs for the ’70s and ’80s R&B singer and musical genius, Donny Hathaway.
Today, primarily music insiders and those who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s listening to his music know how profoundly influential Hathaway’s work has been to many of today’s so-called superstars. Many, however, only know the sweet sound of the music, and not the man himself. Both Pavlic’s and Douglas’ collections seek to resurrect Hathaway and his legacy as a musical genius, though in very different ways.
In Winners, Pavlic takes us on a journey that is not so much about Hathaway’s music as it is about his life as a kind of psycho-musical composition, a life that many might see as a failure. After all, what little the general population knows about Hathaway probably revolves around misreadings and misunderstandings of his unexpected suicide on January 13, 1979 in New York City, at thirty-four years of age. His suicide is a fact; what Pavlic gives us in Winners is an exploration of Hathaway’s life, mind, and music leading up to this fact: just why did he do it; and in the long run, does the why even matter given the rich corpus he left behind?
The fact is that Hathaway greatly suffered with depression and suicidal thoughts throughout the last decade of his life. Pavlic demonstrates this in his structuring of the collection. Winners is divided into seven sections that often contain a number of subsections consisting of interviews with Hathaway and conversation with various interlocutors, including musical collaborators. From the beginning we get a sense of Hathaway’s psychological anguish. In the first interview titled “Cause of Death,” one of Donny’s friends states: “Sure, you could say I knew it, we all knew it all along. Or did we? It hit me somehow, different, when they showed me the report: ‘multiple fractures and internal injuries’ [...] I mean we all knew how he died. Didn’t we?” (4) What is interesting here is Pavlic’s implied connection between Hathaway’s corporeal disintegration and his psychological disintegration-that great genius often accompanies unwanted and unexpected madness.
Pavlic employs prose poetry as a literary device to render his Donny Hathaway more real, more believable than if he were to use other established poetic forms. Yet, Pavlic’s Hathaway is not particularly accessible and the rendering of Hathaway’s increasingly fragmented mind sometimes gets in the way of fully experiencing the narrative. His rendering of Hathaway’s descent into madness is convincing yet dizzying with no respite from the swirl of Hathaway’s increasingly fragmented thoughts and erratic behavior. Hathaway’s musical, cultural and historical erudition is duly noted, but it is an erudition that often leaves the reader grasping for air: “look, s, how’d Monteverdi put it ‘either the delicate, instruments that is, will be improper or the proper ones not delicate.’ It has to be that way, we untie the knots. The knots are us. Each other. So, back to the assignment: history of music” (22).
What is ultimately left out of the equation in Winners is Hathaway’s earthiness, his rootedness, not so much to black culture, but to the man’s concreteness. Pavlic’s Hathaway is an exploration of the life of a musical mind.
Mitchell Douglas’ Donny Hathaway in his collection Cooling Board: A Long Playing Poem is much more grounded than perhaps Pavlic’s Winners. In rendering Hathaway’s extraordinary life, Douglas presents us with rich and thought-provoking snapshots of the musical genius’ childhood and his uneasy relationship with his status as an R&B and later a pop music icon. It is an extraordinary polyphonic achievement in conversation with a host of Hathaway’s friends and acquaintances. Central to Hathaway’s development, Douglas makes clear, is Donny’s grandmother, Miss Martha, a formidable and admired gospel singer in her own right, and his vocally talented and often long-suffering wife, Eulaulah and his friend and indomitable recording partner, Roberta Flack. In the poem “The Amazing Donny Pitts and His Magic Ukulele,” Hathaway’s grandmother notes: “He can play that ukulele/ like he made that ukulele/ tap a foot to keep time/When’s the last time/ you seen something like that?” (26). The narrator implies that Hathaway’s genius embodied the instruments that he loved to play and the inert soul of his instruments came to life within him. In other words, they spoke to one another; he could communicate with his music the way that perhaps he would have later liked to communicate with his audiences and the people that surrounded him.
When he meets his future wife Eulaulah at Howard University, in the poem “Meeting Eulaulah, Howard University (Alternate Take”), Donny asks: “What happens when a voice makes you fall?/ Not forgotten alto on a scratched 45/ but five feet of pink sweater/ plaid skirt, singing/like freshman chorus was her invention” (48). In this instance, Donny’s love of music becomes the music of love that Eulaulah inspires in him. However, this verse also foreshadows the tragedy to come, because, indeed, it will be other voices, one within his fractured mind that will prompt him at the age of thirty-four to commit suicide by jumping from the thirteenth floor of his New York hotel. “In Essex House (Alternative Take”), he laments, “I can’t record/ No one/ To play these blues for/ When I land/ Oh, the sound” (106).
In approaching Winners and Cooling Board, one is advised to read these two collections as companion pieces. For those who prefer a more abstracted approach to Hathaway’s life (especially the last ten years) and music, Pavlic’s book may be preferred, while those who seek a more chronological and concrete rendition of Hathaway’s life should find that Douglas’ book certainly fits the bill. Both collections give the reader wonderfully nuanced approaches to Hathaway as subject; both have created testimonial records of the life and music of one of the most complex enigmatic artists of our time. Let the music play on.
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KEITH MITCHELL is Assistant Professor of English and Ethnic Literatures at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Currently, he is working on an edited collection of essays on Percival Everett and a manuscript on violence as a legacy of slavery in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone literature.
