Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,87
gathering.”
INTERVIEWER: Critics have not always been kind to you. Do you mind?
EZRA BLAZER: I try as best I can not to have any contact with what’s written about my work. I don’t find it does me any good and if it’s laudatory or negative I have to conclude it’s all the same thing. I know my work better than anybody. I know my shortcomings. I know what I can’t do. By this point I certainly know what I can do. In the beginning, of course, I read every word I could find about myself. But what did I get from that? Sure, there are intelligent people who have written about my writing, but I’d rather read these intelligent people on writers other than myself. Maybe praise does something for your confidence, but your confidence has to be able to exist without it. The review of your last book doesn’t help you eighteen months into the new book that’s driving you crazy. Book reviews are for readers, not writers.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your childhood.
EZRA BLAZER: I think everyone’s heard enough about my childhood.
INTERVIEWER: You were the youngest of three children—
EZRA BLAZER: Really, I’d rather talk about how music came into my life. I never heard classical music growing up. In fact I had a kind of ignorant boy’s disdain for it. I thought it was all phony, and especially opera. But my father liked to listen to opera, strangely, although he wasn’t educated—
INTERVIEWER: He was a steelworker.
EZRA BLAZER: He was an accountant for Edgewater Steel. But on weekends he’d listen to opera, on the radio, I think it was on Saturday afternoons, and . . . Milton Cross, that was the name of the announcer. He had a deep, mellifluous voice, and the opera was broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House, and there’d be my father, on the sofa, with his dog-eared copy of The Story of a Hundred Operas, listening to La Traviata or Der Rosenkavalier on the radio. And, well, I found it all a little strange. We had no phonograph, and no books, so the center of our entertainment was the radio, and on Saturday afternoons my father monopolized it for hours.
INTERVIEWER: Was he himself a musical man?
EZRA BLAZER: Sometimes he would sing in the shower, arias, little passages of the arias, and my mother would come out of the kitchen with a dreamy smile on her face and say, “Your father has a beautiful voice.” Unlike my protagonists I’m from a happy family.
INTERVIEWER: Did he have a beautiful voice?
EZRA BLAZER: He didn’t have a bad voice. But I was in the thrall of the popular music. I was eight when the war began, in 1941, so I heard all the songs from the war years, and then when I got to be an adolescent it was all that romantic stuff—
INTERVIEWER: For example?
EZRA BLAZER: [Pauses, then sings:] “A small café, Mam’selle. A rendezvous, Mam’selle. La-da-da-da-da-da-da—” Or: “How are things in Glocca M-o-o-o-r-r-r-a-a-a-a?” And that song I remember because it was popular just before my older brother went into the army. At dinnertime we were always listening to the radio and whenever “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” came on, my brother would sing along in a not-bad Irish accent that just thrilled me. And then he left for the service and whenever that song was played my mother cried. She’d start to cry and I’d stand up from the table and say, Come on, Ma, let’s dance.
INTERVIEWER: How old were you?
EZRA BLAZER: In 1947? Thirteen, fourteen. So that’s my first record. “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” sung by Ella Logan, the Irish Ethel Merman.
INTERVIEWER: She’s Scottish, actually.
EZRA BLAZER: Really? Does everyone know that?
INTERVIEWER: I think so.
EZRA BLAZER: Ella Logan is Scottish?
INTERVIEWER: She is.
INTERVIEWER: That was “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” from the musical Finian’s Rainbow, performed by Ella Logan. But tell me, Ezra Blazer, surely you didn’t dance only with your mother. What were the origins of your romantic life?
EZRA BLAZER: Well, as you imply, I soon began dancing with girls. At the prom. At parties. One of my friends had a finished basement, for parties. The rest of us didn’t have much money and lived in flats, but his parents had a one-family house and a finished basement and we had our parties there. And the singer who drove us wild at those parties was Billy Eckstine. He had a rich baritone voice, and his blackness, which enchanted us. He wasn’t a jazz singer, though