Oysters Rubinstein: An Afterword

Abstract

An Afterword When Gavin Campbell first shared this vivid anecdote with us at Southern Cultures, it touched off a mixed response. Some of us saw it as a funny story in the vein of southwestern humor, popular from frontier days through Mark Twain and on down to Hollywood's fling with Gomer Pyle and The Beverly Hillbillies. Nobody disagreed with that, and Campbell's apt introduction makes clear that Jud's ambivalence about classical music was not a private idiosyncrasy but a real historical experience for many southerners of his own and subsequent decades. But a couple of us thought there was something else at work in Bagby's energetic sketch, and much discussion ensued. The fact that the lead essays in this issue debate Gone with the Wind as part of an ongoing crisis in southern gender relations only made the conversation livelier. So, Gentle Reader, we leave it to you to decide. Is George William Bagby another southern author who is hiding something in plain sight? The case for a double meaning in How Rubenstein [sic] Played starts with the problem of how to make longhair music seem palatable to southern countrymen. The author sets up the situation by eavesdropping on the conversation of Jud Brownin, cracker barrel philosopher, talking with a group of friends. Since this is 1873, the middle of Reconstruction, the men are undoubtedly ex-Confederate soldiers, still smarting from defeat. Jud has just been to New York to hear Anton Rubinstein, the great Russian concert pianist, and the good ole boys want to know what it was like. In popular stereotype, however, the artist and his music are effete, and the last thing these boys want to hear is another northern-inspired invitation to give up more of their war-wounded manhood. Even so, Jud liked the concert, and wants to say so without sounding like a sissy britches. What's his narrative strategy? Jud decides to tell his story as the tale of a powerful man, a feminized piano, and a listener who is almost feminized too. starts off with the lyrical beauty of the concert, so exquisite it moves him to womanly tears. The brief appearance of Cupid (the little white angel boy) hints at what is to come, and makes Jud [want] to love somebody. But this pastoral prelude is really just deceptive foreplay, for the onset of tender desire triggers a violent mood swing in the pianist. He got mad, Jud tells us, and turns on his instrument in a shocking reenactment of domestic violence. Sir, just went for that old pianner, Jud remembers. As if to punish his partner for tempting him with softness, he slapt her face, boxed her jaws, pulled her nose, pinched her ears and scratched her cheeks, till she farly yelled. …