Interview with Mitchell James Kaplan, author of RHAPSODY

I had a great conversation with my friend and superb author, Mitchell James Kaplan, about his book Rhapsody, which explores the relationship of musician and songwriter Kay Swift with George Gershwin. Mitchell has some fascinating insights about music, especially the nature and genesis of American music, and the story of what inspired him to write this book is especially moving! Check him out at https://www.mitchelljameskaplan.com. 

Transcript

Susanne 0:31

So I'm here today with Mitchell James Kaplan. Who's a wonderful author. Who's written three books. Now I have three published novels and his latest one Rhapsody is a story about Kay swift, who was the longtime lover, collaborator, whatever of George Gershwin and It's a really gorgeous book and I'm so happy to have Mitchell here. And I can't wait to talk to him

Mitchell 0:58

about thank you, Suzanne. Yeah.

Susanne 1:01

you're a musician, I'm a musician. I could tell that a musician wrote this book. I could really tell. And so I watched it maybe talk a little bit about how you approached that whole musical side of

Mitchell 1:14

things. Yeah, that's a, that is a wonderful question because part of my motivation to write the book was about music. I start, when I start writing or even thinking about writing a book there, I have questions in my mind about the characters, the setting. And in this case, when I knew I was writing about a woman who was not only Brilliant musician, but who had the ambition of being a composer? I, and also George Gershwin, of course, being a major character in the novel. That, those questions about music, the nature of music. What is music? What is music for, how does this particular kind of music work? Where does it fit in terms of the history of music in terms of the culture? Those questions were important to me and I wanted really a novel for me is a search. When I'm writing a novel, I'm looking. For something. I'm getting to know the characters and their world and what bothers them and why it bothers them. And these questions are a big part of that. So it was my own personal search, but I think also it reflects probably what most musicians feel or musicians in the world of case swift and George Gershwin might've felt. for example, when you're talking about the early days of jazz, even before it was called jazz, when you're talking about this coalescing of musical currents. ragtime, blues, klezmer music Irish music, folk music, all these different currents coming together into something that people were thinking of as an American idiom, as a new American idiom. It it just, it, the question that I think jumps out. What is, what are the particular features of the city and what purpose does it serve culturally? And how is it different from the other musical strains of the time? is that an answer?

Susanne 3:26

Yes, no, it is. It's a great answer. Yeah. Thank you. and I was very aware of that as I was reading and especially the things that Gershwin himself says in his approach. and that sort of leads me to another thing, which is, I know this is a novel about Kay swift, more from her point of view, but I felt so much that it was. K Swift's view into George Gershwin. That is that it was about, can you tell

Mitchell 3:52

exactly, that is exactly right. And I have to tell you that some people who don't like the book don't like it for that reason. And they have ever, they have every right not to like it. And they have every right to feel that should have been a different book, but this is the book I wrote. And but One negative review. And I guess I need to say defensively that most of the reviews are favorable even very favorable, but there are some people that don't like it. And for those of you who are aspiring novelist, steal yourself because that happens. But I'd say maybe the majority of those people seem to feel that I should have written a biography of caseload. and that isn't exactly what I wrote. I wrote about Kay swift in her relationship with these two men, James Walberg and George Gershwin, which I find to be a compelling, interesting love triangle, unusual. we're talking about brilliant, gifted, ambitious people all around and even people who had in their own different ways lofty ideas. About themselves and about their relationships to each other and how those things have working ideas that didn't mesh perfectly with each other's ideas, but and especially about how USIC fit into that picture. but yes, I came to it. I, the starting point, as I've mentioned in some other interviews, the starting point was couple of years after my father died, I'm sitting. My early morning table, which you could call my breakfast table. but it's pre-dawn and have a cup of coffee in front of me. And my CD player is on and it's set to shuffles. I've got 300 CDs in there and wraps in blue comes on and I just I had not been able to attend my father's field. I was in a different part of the world when he died, but I had seen him just days before he died and he had hugged me and he was out summers advance outside. He had hugged me and while hugging the head and it was the most eerie and moving thing I've ever experienced. And he was a musician, his whole life. He identified as a jazz clarinetist, even though he was a cardiologist is a professor at UCLA. In the medical school. but he, his identity was jazz clarinetist and it played on weekends. It played in evenings. He played in clubs. He played at home. We played along with records and this drops in blue comes on and I'm sipping my coffee and I start crying and yeah, that opening, which I call a klezmer wipe or whatever I called the klezmer glissando. It's this clarinet scale, that all, it's a slide up this, a couple of octaves or a few off. And my father used to play it. He would be sitting in the living room when I was a little boy with the stereo on and the record on the turntable. And he'd play along with it, which is something for a little boy to it. Yeah, it looks like I'm moving you and yeah, that's fine. And that's what happened to me that's it happened to me and I knew that was going to be the centerpiece of my next normal. And I've actually described that moment to you better and more moving live than I've ever described it to anybody else. More completely, really to you just now. yes, that was the spotlight was on Gershwin and it was through my father's spirit that it was directed to Gershwin. And I started reading biographies of Gershwin. And then I happened upon this love of his life was that was such a complex multi, multi-pronged you might say relationship and the characters are just also interesting, right? And I just felt KA K swift was the point of entry as much as in my first novel by fire, by water. I first that novel, which has to do with the Spanish inquisition and the discovery of America, it actually came about when I learned that that there was this one person on Columbus's ships, who he identified as his Jew, who was his translator, the job. Cause Columbus started is going to go someplace, and that they'd have, they'd be able to speak. Hebrew is a common mother tongue of all languages. And in that worldview of that period, and it's false, but that's a Columbus thought. And so he had this Jewish converser whose name was Louis Torres. But prior to that, he lived in Moore. Southern Spain. And so I was fascinated that there was this Jew on these boats, after the Jews were just had just been expelled from Spain and I started reading about, and then I found out, wow, there was this guy who financed the trip, who had been involved, possibly. It was accused of being involved with the murder of the chief inquisitor of Aragon. I thought. And I ended up making him my point of entry, Luis to Santa Ana, and he becomes the protagonist. Of by a fire by water. It's the same thing with case within Gershwin it's I guess I find that the person whose point of view is most interesting, may not be the person whom the spotlight is pointing out. and my second novel has multiple protagonists and it's more complicated. It's not like that. Exactly. But yeah, those two of the three novels evolved in that way in other long complicated. Yeah

Susanne 9:32

no, it's good. but still at the same time, as you say, K swift is this very complex, interesting individual. You really get a sense of her as a human being as well, and all the complexities and all the things that all the missteps, all the things that go wrong, all the things that go right. And her relationship with George Gershwin.

Mitchell 9:53

I think I identified with K most strongly actually. And some people say, oh, a man can't write for a woman. in any case that wasn't my feeling. And I th what I identified with about Kay is just that her, it feels to me like especially professionally, her ambition and the stumbling box and the kinds of challenges that she faced and her desire. Or desire to go about this in a certain way is very much similar to the way I think about my own professional ambitions as a writer and very different from those of a George Gershwin or from those of Ks husband and lyricist James Warburg. Yeah. They had very different attitudes about what they were doing. Jimmy Warburg is. Was writing these lyrics. It's partially, I think unconsciously or consciously a way to help save his marriage and another on another level, it's him learning to loosen up and just have fun with words. And George Gershwin hardly needs to be told to loosen up because he's all over the place. he's like this. There's autodidactic genius and he's all over the keyboard. And and Ks is very disciplined person who comes to this, comes to jazz and comes to this writing from a discipline classical background. And again, in terms of my identification with K I come to write it. novels that I like to think of as being very accessible and readable from a background as a, as an English literature major who focused on British poetry, going back to circle Wayne and the green Knight. And, they loaf up through Shakespeare and Milton and I love going back Chaucer and going forward to Keats. All of whom I regardless. Unparalleled greatness. inevitable greatness and I don't come to it, although I love, I love popular literature. I love Dickens and I love Balzac and so forth. But that's not, let me just stop you for a minute.

Susanne 12:06

A modern reader might not think of that as popular literature.

Mitchell 12:10

Yeah. But they were certainly was yeah. In their time. And for that matter you might talk about the great writers of the pop-up boilers during that period. there are some great writers in there, but they were writing popular literature. And I mean, when, I mean, Papa as mystery, detective stories kind of formulaic, when, Papa as mystery, detective stories kind of formulaic, with the with, murders and, but great stylists, great spare writing, a great story. Construction. I don't know really, if I'm making it, I'm not really making any kind of cogent statement here about my aesthetic purpose, but I just feel like K swift came from one place and ended up somewhere else. And I feel the same way. I initially wanted to be a poet. That was my ambition. And then I have a brother

Susanne 13:06

who's a poet. I have a brother who's a poet. I could not write poetry to save my life. I don't know.

Mitchell 13:12

I write poetry. I love poetry, but it's for me, I never even, I have never even tried to get one poem published. I haven't sent a poem anywhere ever. I've put some of them on Facebook because they, I want them, I want to communicate something with the poems that I can't communicate in a novel, which is just, but but I just don't think of them as commodities. Whereas I do think of a novel as a commodity.

Susanne 13:37

Yeah. Fortunately we're forced to do that these days. it is what it is and I'm awfully glad that you produced this novel. Cause it's, it is really lovely and there's a lot of stuff that sticks with me and that I'm that I think about. And one interesting thing. actually for me, one of the most fascinating passages places, and it was the whole, everything that happened around 40 and.

Mitchell 14:02

Yeah. yeah.

Susanne 14:02

nowadays I used to be I used to be an executive in a S in a regional opera company and our artistic director was this amazing black man who Willie Anthony Waters, who was just lovely. Every year. So we'd come, we'd think about doing Porgy and Bess and there was always something problematic about it and we never managed to do it. So can you talk a little bit about the whole Genesis of that and how you dug into Gershwin's feelings about it?

Mitchell 14:36

I will say that I spoke with a friend of mine who was a director of an opera company. And a major opera company, just a guy I went to college with and who ended up being a director of an opera company. And I talked to him about, and he said that in his experience, this question, the question that has haunted Porgy and Bess, that basic question today, that is one of the problems that people encounter is this question of, was it right for a white person? An all black opera where the entire cast is black, where the music is very much influenced by black music jazz, the blues and my friend who is a director of the opera company who really knows opera singers and knows and knows opera, Great depth, as you surely do. It said to me that among black opera singers, it is a beloved work that the resistance is not coming from them. That's what he told me. And I was reassured to hear that But going back several steps from there the problems Gershwin had were not those problems, the problems, the initial problem that he had was that he wanted to be the first he called it a folk opera. I think you might call it. There are a lot of ways you could describe the music. it does have. Like everything, George Gershwin wrote, it has influences a lot of different kinds of music. but he thought of it as an opera for sure. and he wanted it to be produced at the metropolitan opera and they would not allow black singers on their stage period. that was the policy. and and Gershwin at that point had the choice. Do we make it an opera about black people performed by white people in black face, which is what the metropolitan opera proposed or or do we do it in a way that is going to be less satisfying for George Gershwin in terms of his personal vision and just perform it elsewhere and don't give it that grand stage. The big orchestra, the big concert hall, all the big sets and the funding that goes along with an opera production and he opted for the latter. So they produced it in a Broadway theater. And I think that came about because. George Gershwin's first major hit in 1919 was a song called Swanie performed by Al Jolson in blackface. And George Gershwin was friends with a lot of black musicians, very close friends, and he had studied with black musicians way before any other white people were studying with black musicians. He had zero, in my opinion, from everything I can see. Absolutely zero racism in him. you could deduct the other things if you read things that he, that if you listen to some of his radio broadcast or whatever you might think otherwise, but you have to put everything in the context of how people spoke in those days. And in my opinion, I know for a fact he had nothing but respect. He and fats Waller were great friends. And George Gershwin helped boost the career of people like fats Waller. And in fact, that's what I ended up studying with one of George Gershwin's teachers. and it influenced fats Waller style and he wrote some of his later pieces were in a style. That sounds a lot like George Gershwin, but they were influencing each other big time, not just fats Waller, of course. so I think that I think George Gershwin felt very bad when he found out that people were offended by the fact that Al Jolson had performed Swanee in black face. And when he heard from these black musicians that they're not offended that a white person is writing music in this idiom necessarily, but they are offended that they can't go and perform this music. On the same stages like Carnegie hall and a white person can. and I think he took that very much to heart from everything. I can see that was he was very moved and touched and he refused to allow organ invest to be performed in blackface and he put it in his room. It is only ever to be performed by an all black cast.

Susanne 19:00

I know that was just amazing. really. Okay. it's so funny because there was a point around them. I don't even remember where about where you mentioned Ziegfeld and I can't remember what the context was, but I had, I have a man, an unpublished manuscript about Lillian, Lorraine, who was his great sort of passion that he never actually married, but he. Was the first person to persuade producers on Broadway to allow a black person to perform in one of his Follies. And yeah.

Mitchell 19:34

Did you know that Benny Goodwin is the first jazz combo, white jazz combo to have a black musician as a member?

Susanne 19:43

I did not know that. Yeah.

Mitchell 19:47

People on both, whatever, both sides of the of the color barrier, if you want, if there is such a barrier up there isn't, but who were militating for this? and a lot of jazz musicians who respected and admired and worked with musicians of different skin tones felt very strongly about this. And of

Susanne 20:05

course the, white people were going up to Harlem to the music halls there and,

Mitchell 20:10

and listening and sitting in the audience. yeah, it was at the cottony Colombia, the exact opposite situation from the metropolitan opera for black people could be on stage, but couldn't be in the audience.

Susanne 20:26

Yeah, it's bizarre, but it is fascinating. It is but a theme, this whole idea of what makes American music, what are the influences and how it really became this quote unquote melting pot and yet not at the same time, because there was so much, it was also loaded with Implications with whatever with prejudice and all that sort of thing. But

Mitchell 20:51

yeah, and it still is. And I don't know that, perfect solutions are ever going to be founded that we will ever become the nation that we hope to be. I don't know. I think people were very much working toward that in the twenties. Some people and people are working toward that today. That's where that's, where we're trying to go as a whole, as a whole culture, I believe. and I do think, in that period it was very much at the top of people's agenda that America should be a melting pot, should be a place where different cultures influence each other and create something great together. make America great again.

Susanne 21:31

Oh no.

Mitchell 21:35

In a

Susanne 21:36

different way. But anyway I've been asking you the questions that arose for me. Is there anything you want to talk about that has to do with this book that I haven't thought of asking you?

Mitchell 21:46

I would have to give that some thought, Suzanne, I don't off the top of my head. What do I want to talk about? Yeah. I guess I would ask you I've been intrigued by some of the comments I've read about the book. Some or that I've heard, from people who've read the book. some people have, a lot of people have told me and I really was surprised. That their favorite cab character was Jimmy Warburg.

Susanne 22:08

Yeah. That can happen. But yeah, I liked him, but now like Kay was my favorite character along. Yeah.

Mitchell 22:16

I think I found all the characters to have flaws and to have qualities that I appreciated and I love characters like that. That's the kind of character I like writing. Some people don't want that. Some people want characters who are pure mobility or pure grace or pure whatever. And I'm afraid I'm not able to give those people what they will. Suzanne, you know, as well as I do, it's very frustrating when you're creating a work that reflects your ideas about what a novel should be. And then it goes out there in the world and it meets up with people that have very different ideas about where novels should be. Yeah.

Susanne 23:01

But you know, that's, that is the thing. despite what the publishing industry tries to tell us that everybody wants the same basic kind of book and that's what they're going to put out often. Not always, but Different strokes. different people like different things. And also I like lots of different things. I've read historical romances that were fabulous. And I just, but on the other hand, I just finished reading whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri. Have

Mitchell 23:27

you heard about that? But of course, I've heard that. Wow.

Susanne 23:32

Wow. Yeah. What a book. And it's I even wrote a blog post about it because I'm like, if one of my clients came to me and said, but I want to write like that. I'd have to say to them, You can't only one person can write like that. And she breaks all of the sort of rules of storytelling, it's there's no character arc there's no, it's incredible. You have to read it because it's short. I like gulped it down a

Mitchell 23:58

couple of nights, so that'll be my next book. Yeah. And I have to ignore several in-between books. That's the problem

Susanne 24:06

I would have gotten to this much sooner if I didn't have a lot of other things. That I had to do and,

Mitchell 24:11

whatever. No, I wasn't. I don't keep tabs on those things, I'm not aware of who has read my book and who hasn't, but people who read it and like it I'm deeply appreciative, including a view. And the fact that, I love the fact that you seem to like the book. Thank you.

Susanne 24:26

Oh, no. I thought it was fabulous. I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in that time period or. Loves a good historical level, yeah. I think, I can't really think of anything else that I wanted to know. Oh, except for one thing, maybe. have you gotten anything coming along next?

Mitchell 24:44

Yes, but actually let me backtrack because I did think, and you might have to edit this a little bit to make it fit together or not. but I did think of something else I'd like to say about the book, which is that I. In all my novels I have tried to, and I am trying to bring in a big sense of the world that these characters are moving in and dwelling in and growing in. And I like to think of that as a trademark of my work that I really like to write novels. Don't focus narrowly on, for example, perhaps marital problems with domestic issues or things like that. Not that those are irrelevant. They're very relevant to people's stories, but I believe, person is a part of a fabric of of a culture and a society. And I love. To evoke as much of that and bring as much of that into story as possible. And again, some people don't like that. some people maybe feel I provide too much detail and what I would like to call narrative richness perhaps, but that's really, so I want to bring in in addition to. The characters and their issues. I want to bring in a sense of the history of what's going on in the culture of what things look like and what the architecture looks like of what, how, how what wristwatches look like, et cetera. And that's the other point I wanted to make about this book and my other books, as far as the new book, the book I'm working on right now It's set in 1967 and 2019 just before COVID. so it's a book really. That's asking, it's looking at the aspirations of the baby boomer generation. when the baby Booner boomer generation was he was young and idealistic. And then, so looking at the world today and asking questions about whether this is anything like what was envisaged and if not, what went wrong. But through obviously through specific characters and their experiences,

Susanne 26:53

Eagerly awaited and read it as I have read. I read two of your books. I think one of them I haven't read yet, but yeah,

Mitchell 26:59

you're excused.

Susanne 27:02

Yeah. But anyway I just want to thank you. And I will put links into. Into the notes for this, where people can get this book.

Mitchell 27:12

And I'll obviously I'll I'll tweet them and so

Susanne 27:14

forth. Oh yeah. Yeah. And it's, is there any place in specific people can find you? Do you have a website or are you using sure.

Mitchell 27:22

Yeah. Www dot Mitchell, James kaplan.com. certainly. Yeah, they can go there and find out about my books and how they've been received and they can contact me through that portal and they can also find some articles I've written. So if that's of any interest to people, otherwise I'm on Facebook. Yeah. Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. struggling with Instagram.

Susanne 27:47

Yeah. I took me awhile to get to Instagram too, but I'm learning, but yeah. thank you so much for talking to me. This has been a fabulous conversation. I really have

Mitchell 27:58

enjoyed it. Yeah. Oh, it's been a pleasure. Anyway, Suzanne, thank you so

Susanne 28:03

much. It's a pleasure.