On and off the record

In A Lasting Record, journalist and food writer Stephen Downes recounts the serendipitous tale of an eccentric music lover from Melbourne who, with a primitive home recording device, captured the only extant recording of American pianist William Kapell’s final performance. Downes vacillates between biography, literature, diary, and musicological critique. People who lead dramatic lives invariably make the most attractive subjects for the sort of biographical dramatisations that Downes peppers throughout A Lasting Record. The more sensational the reality of a subject’s life story, the less the author is obliged to invent in order to maintain a compelling narrative. Moody but brilliant William Kapell, classical piano’s answer to James Dean, is a perfect candidate for this approach to biography. Along with his rock-star good looks and meteoric rise to fame from a poor New York upbringing, his tragic early death in a plane crash after a lengthy Australian tour for the ABC cements the attraction by conferring upon him a life story straight from Hollywood. The other subject of Downes’s biography, however, could not be more different. Roy Preston, record collector, cosmetics salesman, and pipe organ enthusiast, seems to have led a life remarkable only for its banality; his hobby of transcribing radio broadcasts alone granting him an unlikely place in music history. Suggesting the intrigue of a detective novella, Downes’s account of how Preston’s unique recordings came to be discovered examines the parallel but essentially unconnected lives of his two protagonists with equal weight and intensity. In so doing, A Lasting Record curiously becomes as much a biography of the obscure Mr Preston as it is of Kapell, the world-famous concert pianist. The characterisations of Kapell gild the lily more than is necessary. Indeed, Downes is a researcher of formidable thoroughness, a characteristic which often leaves his dramatisations feeling less like a naturalistic exchange between real people and more like a series of ‘product placements’ for esoteric facts; a similar extra-narrative gesture to those moments in Hollywood films when the camera lingers on the hero’s expensive Swiss watch. Interestingly, however, perhaps because they resonate more closely with the nature of his character, the imagined scenes featuring the pedantic and detail-obsessed Preston seem to wear their colossal amount of factual detail somewhat more comfortably than do those concerning the brooding and artistic Kapell. At their most sensitive, dramatised scenes of biographical fiction can give the reader a unique insight into a particular moment in history; just as a picture is said to be worth a thousand words, a few well-chosen lines of dialogue or literary invention can allow for a far better ‘peek behind the curtain’ than a whole chapter of scholarly prose. For this type of writing to be successful, however, it must maintain the fine balance between literary fantasy and academic rigour. Thus, when the entire opening chapter of Downes’s book is devoted to a litanous description of life on board the Douglas DC-6 airliner Resolution (named after Captain Cook’s favourite ship, so an appendix note informs us), in which Kapell was travelling when he died, with its four Pratt & Whitney engines, its 270-knot top speed, its tartan-upholstered armchairs below Pullman-type bunk beds (complete with sheets, blankets, and pillows), and a one-way fare to the United States costing £285 in an age when the average Australian weekly wage was £11, the whole scene begins to feel less an invitation into the young pianist’s world and more an opportunity for the author to unload the fruits of his considerable research into early 1950s airliners. Likewise, Downes’s account of Preston, including a potpourri of such wide-ranging miscellany as the colour and make of his first car (a ‘Tudor Red’ Honda Accord), at times appears less an insightful account of his record-making hobby and more like a dossier that might have been compiled by J. Edgar Hoover. Certainly, this sort of close attention to essentially irrelevant detail, even in the more traditional biographical form which the majority of Downes’s book adopts, can occasionally assist the reader to immerse himself in a particular world, spoonfeeding him with a sense of the wider universe and contextualising the subject. Yet if this world is to feel natural and the main subject of the biography brought into sharp focus, after a time a certain measure of trust in the reader’s imagination needs to be granted. Surely, for example, Downes’s noting of both the serial number and typeface on the cheque with which the ABC paid Kapell for his 1945 Australian tour interrupts rather than enriches the depth of the narrative? There is a positive aspect to Downes’s pedantic writing style. The same pedantry that makes his dramatisations feel artificial and his biographical accounts leaden lends his writing on the qualities of Kapell’s playing an extremely refreshing lucidity. The sensuous art of musical performance is notoriously difficult to characterise in print – too often the critic takes refuge in generalised romanticisms – but Downes’s passionate analytical reflections of Kapell’s extraordinary playing illuminate, whereas most musical criticism is content only to emote. Stephen Downes reveals himself to be an enviably honest and thorough writer, but despite, or perhaps because of, the tremendous rigour with which he approaches A Lasting Record, the result is a work that reads as though it is simultaneously twice as long and ten times shorter than it wants to be.

Alistaire Bowler

From the New Issue

The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on effective altruism, engaged Buddhism, and how to build a better world by Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei

‘When we talk about the Middle Ages: Revisiting the power of periodisation’ by G. Geltner

Expanding Mindscapes: A global history of psychedelics by Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock

The Pulling: Essays by Adele Dumont

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