Gershwin

“... (Payne) has the gift, as does John Keegan, of using prose to elevate facts, figures, dates and events into the realms of the dramatic.” 

—Book Reviewer


 NO ONE LIVING IN NEW YORK CAN escape from George Gershwin. His music still comes in unrestrained and sometimes paralyzing abundance through the radio. Its gaiety, its flippancy, its violence, its electrifying “blues” passages, though written in the twenties and early thirties, still reflect the prevailing mood of New York. No other city could have produced  him, and no other city has taken  him so much to its heart.

   Robert Payne’s first motive for writing his story was because he planned to write a long novel about New York, and wanted to get to grips with that strange, effervescent period when New York was  still young and reckless. Gershwin was, he thought, the best symbol of the twenties. In the novel someone very like him was to grow old  and grey with the weariness of his eternal youth, dying at last in a quarrel in a Bowery doss-house. It was a satisfying ending, but Gershwin’s ending was still more satisfying.

   George  Gershwin was larger than life, and no one was ever so demanding. They said of him that he was like a young Prince, and nothing he ever asked for was refused him. Perhaps that was the tragedy, for certainly the stereotype of  the brilliantly successful composer was not entirely satisfactory. So Robert Payne has painted him in the limelight, but also as he  walked through the Shadows.


Robert Payne (1911-1983) was born in Cornwall, U.K.  His father was English, his mother French.  He was educated at St. Paul's School in London and at the universities of Liverpool, Capetown in South Africa, Munich and The Sorbonne.  During his lifetime he had over a hundred books published on a wide range of subjects, the widest range of any known author.  He was known chiefly for his biographies and history books, among them Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Gandhi, Leonardo, Chaplin, the Christian Centuries, The World of Art.  He also wrote novels and poetry. Librarians loved him; critics raved about him.  Orville Prescott of The New York Times referred to him as “a literary phenomenon of astounding versatility and industry.”