So this is Artie Shaw's garret, tucked up beneath the eaves of a Newbury Park tract home surrounded by some of the most benignly uninteresting architecture you'll find anywhere. The neighborhood is basic California suburbia, circa 1966, with long sloping roofs that give Shaw's cul-de-sac a sleepy feel, as though the energy of young families has seeped away.
Shaw, the jazz legend, moved here a quarter-century ago for the view, not the home styles. The back of the house overlooks his pool and on the other side the hill drops away to Ventura County's Conejo Valley. Shaw lived in Spain for five years in the 1950s and the clear-day vista here of the distant San Gabriel Mountains reminded him of Catalonia, so he bought the place and settled in to work on what had become the consuming passion of his life.
A novel. About himself.
It was a long life -- Shaw died here last month at 94 -- so "The Education of Albie Snow" is a long manuscript, running 1,900 double-spaced pages over about 100 chapters. It was meant to be part of a trilogy, and Shaw kept at it longer than any of his eight marriages. So huge is the manuscript that even with Shaw's celebrity the work has yet to entice a publisher, although Ida Giragossian, a member of Knopf's editorial department, has been carving away at it on her own time for more than two years.
She's only half done.
"It's time-consuming, but I think it's eminently worth it," Giragossian said, adding that she hopes Knopf or another Random House imprint eventually will publish it. "It covers from ages 15 to 24, with a couple of flashbacks to age 7 and the first anti-Semitism he encountered [growing up] in Connecticut. It's wonderful because it has a coming-of-age quality to it, the young teenager and how he teaches himself to play the saxophone and clarinet."
Others who have seen the manuscript were less enamored.
"He wasn't a bad writer but he was an undisciplined writer," said publisher Lyle Stuart, a friend of Shaw's since the early 1970s who waited in vain for Shaw to write an autobiography. "I told Artie, you don't do a 1,900-page novel."
But would Artie listen?
Not often.
Shaw was an irascible character. Even his friends use words like "feisty" and "difficult" to describe him. Shaw traced his gruffness to the hard emotional shell he formed at age 7 to blunt schoolyard threats and taunts, the lone Jew in a working-class Catholic neighborhood. He hid himself in books and music. His father walked out when Shaw was 13 and by age 15 Shaw left too, landing gigs in jazz bands in the Roaring '20s.
He was an exacting perfectionist, as hard on himself as on others. He had two sons whom he barely acknowledged and he burned through wives like candles. "All I got out of my marriages," Ava Gardner said in 1954 of her time wedded to Shaw and then Frank Sinatra, "was the two years Artie Shaw made me spend on an analyst's couch."
Shaw made his mark on the 20th century by weaving magic with a clarinet, expressing the inexpressible with a few quick exhales and a flourish of fingerings. Then he famously quit. An old friend was once quoted as saying Shaw gave up being a great musician to become a mediocre writer. Critics were less harsh but not by much.
Shaw published three books, a 1952 autobiography called "The Trouble With Cinderella: An Outline of Identity," and two slim and idiosyncratic works of fiction -- "I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead! Variations on a Theme" in 1965, and the collection "The Best of Intentions and Other Stories" in 1989. The memoir was well received. The fiction found fewer enthusiasts.
As a musician, he explored themes and structures no one had touched before, an inventiveness that is largely absent from his fiction. Some of the plots in his published short stories, where the Albie Snow alter ego first appears, can be found in his 1952 autobiography, with only slight changes. And the unpublished manuscript covers some of the same years and some of the same themes.
Shaw wanted to write about his own experiences and styled the work as fiction to free himself from the constraints of time and details. Since the fiction is based on his life, the pool of experience is self-limiting. But as with the music that made him famous -- and earned enough royalties for Shaw to coast for half a century -- Shaw wrote to his own vision and satisfaction. Take it or leave it.
"He said fiction allowed you to tell the truth," said Larry Rose, 46, Shaw's personal assistant for the last 11 years. "He said, 'If I told the truth, I'd get sued.' But that's what Artie knew about. It's not necessarily a biography. He said, 'Some of the things that happened to Albie Snow might have happened to me, or to people I knew.' The real purpose was to share with people life lessons. How to live. How to think."
And writing his life as a fiction gave Shaw distance, Giragossian said.
