John McPhee, at the outset of his lively “Frame of Reference” piece this week, tells of his bewilderment when a student in his Princeton writing class in 2000 employs the word “sprezzatura.” McPhee has never heard of it, nor has the class, nor has anyone he asks, including a Florence-born Italian. When he goes back to Abe Crystal, the originating student, Crystal says he picked the word up from a 1528 text, “The Courtier,” by an Italian author named Castiglione.
I’ve been a friend and colleague of McPhee since the Eocene, and he should have come to me. George Frazier was a dazzling fixture with the Boston Globe in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. His column, “Sweet and Lowdown,” which started at the Boston Herald, covered books, sports, the media, jazz, night life, popular and classical culture, everything. He found “sprezzatura” somewhere—it meant spirit and nonchalance: cool—and laid it as a laurel on people he particularly admired. Later on, he dropped the word in favor of “duende,” which meant just about the same thing. Ornate scholarship came naturally to him: he was a member of the class of 1932 at Harvard, where he won an ancient honor, the Boylston Prize for Rhetoric, while an undergraduate. One of the people he beat out for the prize was Harry Levin, later a famously erudite Harvard English professor.
George and I went back a way, to 1940, when he began writing “Sweet and Lowdown”—the first jazz column in any American newspaper. I was ten years younger, a Harvard junior, and I must have written him a mash note or a minor correction, which brought about a meeting and, somehow, an instant friendship. George—tall and lean, with a slight polio limp—and his wife, Mimsi—major lipstick, great looks, dirty mouth—had an apartment in Cambridge next door to the Harvard Crimson, on Plympton Street, and soon my girlfriend Evelyn and I were staying up late there, drinking and laughing and listening to Roy Eldridge and Billie Holiday and Blind Lemon Jefferson and others to be found on Blue Note and Okeh records. We also became regulars at the Boston jazz clubs, where George knew all the musicians. Our hero was Frankie Newton, a trumpeter with a delicate touch on the mute.
A year or so later, George was offered a job as night-club editor of Life, a well-paid, unlimited-expense-account sinecure. The Fraziers moved to New York (and an apartment on Beekman Place) and our evenings resumed at the Blue Note and the Famous Door and Condon’s. (One night, at some spot, the fabled elder drummer Zutty Singleton asked to examine an old pocketwatch I had just consulted; cradling it in his hands for a minute or two, he announced, “This will run till next Neveruary.”) Another night, George and I went to Count Basie’s birthday party, at the Basies’ apartment on Fifth Avenue and 109th Street: the only social event I’ve been to that started at 1 A.M.
Time moved on, the war arrived. I graduated and went into the Air Force, and Evelyn came out to Denver, where we got married. Before she left, she gave her enormous, haired-over dog, Topper, to the Fraziers—the first Old English Sheepdog to become a habitué of the Copacabana and 21 and Café Society downtown, where the Fraziers always reserved a table for three.
We four resumed after the war, soon with a couple of children each, and then, not too much later, all divorced and older and more distant from each other. George, back in Boston, took up his altered column in the sixties, and soon struck off sprezzatura and duende—many thousands of New England readers must have puzzled over, then got used to, the elegant usage. More than once, George embarrassed me by writing that William Shawn, the revered editor of The New Yorker, should give up the job and hand it over to a duended pro, me. Dying of cancer in the Cambridge Hospital in 1974, George was discovered by a nurse one afternoon sitting by a window in his room and looking out over the Charles. “Why, Mr. Frazier, you’re very ill—get back in bed this minute,” she said.
“No, no,” said George, smiling. “I’m here for The Yale Game.”
Sprezzatura.
