Nineteen ten was also a schizoid year for Berlin, the last year of apprenticeship and subservience. His salary came from his employer, the man whose name was on the door, the tall. bony fellow who sat at the piano, smiling at the world and grinding out tune after mediocre tune. The big money in Izzy's bank account, though, was his and his alone. The question was whether he could make more of it, enough to light out on his own. He must have felt he could; on the other hand, there were his mother and occasionally unemployed sister in that nice apartment in the Bronx, and the monthly grocery bills and rent. And so for the time being he played by Ted Snyder's rules, reporting to work each day in suit and tie, turning out the product with fountain pen and paper, though bubbling with words and music of his own - no, words-and-music; with him it was almost always a unified entity - and drawn irresistibly, treacherously, to that Weser Brothers transposing piano. The Ted Snyder Company was, like every other successful publisher on Tin Pan Alley, a mill: a warren of small noisy chambers where not only the house talent but song pluggers and postulant composers pounded out would-be euphonies on battered uprights in cacophonous chorus. It would have taken a powerful imagination, not to mention an ironclad will, to conceive fresh musical ideas under such conditions: Berlin had both. One day in the summer or fall of 1910, a ragtime-flavored melody came to him, at work, "right out of the air," as he recalled a few years later. "I wrote the whole thing in eighteen minutes, surrounded on all sides by roaring pianos and roaring vaudeville actors." The "thing" - the understatement is nothing short of colossal - was the tune (apparently lyricless at first) that would become "Alexander's Ragtime Band."
There is more than a touch of braggadocio to Berlin's account, and his word choice is interesting. I WROTE THE WHOLE THING IN EIGHTEEN MINUTES. Most songwriters did their writing in musical notation, on staff paper. Irving Berlin did not, because he could not. Instead, when a new tune occurred to him, he hummed it or played a rudimentary piano version of it in the presence of a musical secretary (soon the Snyder Company would hire a brilliant young pianist named Cliff Hess for this express purpose), who then wrote down the notes. That was the melody. Getting the harmonies right was a more complicated process. This time the secretary would sit at the keyboard and play chords while Berlin, who inwardly knew precisely what sounds he wanted, would either approve or disapprove. The secretary would note the correct chords, and by and by, a full song would emerge.
But despite his later boasting, Berlin was unimpressed -enough at first by this new Thing he'd "written" that he didn't take the trouble to have it transcribed. Instead, he jotted a memo to himself about the melody, summing it up in a few words, then filed it away and forgot about it. It was only several months later, as he prepared to go on a winter vacation to Palm Beach - and here we must pause for a moment to consider the miracle of a twenty-two-year-old who in recent memory had sung for pennies in dives and slept in flophouses becoming a prosperous-enough businessman to vacation in Palm Beach - it was only as Irving Berlin puttered around the office before leading uptown to the newly built Pennsylvania Station to catch the Palmetto Limited, that he pulled from memory the that had popped out of the air months before. As a songwriter and journalist named Rennold Wolf wrote in a 1913 magazine article, "The Boy Who Revived Ragtime,"
"Just before train time he went to his offices to look over his manuscripts, in order to leave the best of them for publication during his absence. Among his papers he found a memorandum referring to "Alexander," and after considerable reflection he recalled its strains. Largely for the lack of anything better with which to kill time, he sat at the piano and completed the song."
Wrote the words, in other words. Amazingly, not only could "Alexander's Ragtime Band" have easily been lost to oblivion but for a phenomenal act of musical memory on Irving Berlin's part; he also managed to throw the whole thing together while he waited for a train.
This was the exception that proved the rule: with the majority of his compositions, Berlin toiled for many hours, often through the deep watches of the night, sweating to come up with the right notes, the right words, the simplest essence of the song. Nothing, he discovered, was so complex as simplicity. "I sweat blood," he said. "Absolutely. I sweat blood between 3 and 6 many mornings, and when the drops that fall off my forehead hit the paper they're notes."
The reality was less poetic. Woollcott said that Berlin suffered from "nervous indigestion" - a catchall that could have covered any number of disagreeable symptoms. "Most of his songs," he wrote, "always postponed to that last minute and then turned out in a kind of frenzy of application, had been written by a small composer twisted with pain. This was so well known that whenever his neighbors in Tin Pan Alley saw him looking especially wan and spent and frail, they would exclaim bitterly: 'Ah, hah, another hit I suppose!' "
James Kaplan " Irving Berlin: New York Genius" (2019)
