Radio review #3: Bohemians in T-Shirts

Cool cotton tops in a gilded age

REVOLUTIONS often hinge on catastrophic military defeat or massed popular uprising, seismic rumbles that crumble the very pillars of the regal state or collapse the towers of the dictatorial palace. But rarely, I’m sure we would agree, are such disruptive insurrections premised on a domestic garment so innocuous that most of us wear but barely clock.

Michael Goldfarb’s 2022 radio series, which earned a repeat run this week, makes a powerful case for the place of the humble white T-shirt in the re-configuring of Western culture in the immediate post-war years, choosing five key examples where the crew-necked, short-sleeved top came to symbolise a new age in the arts.

He argues that, in Manhattan of the later 1940s, the sporting of this basic undershirt, often without the addition of any other layer, spoke quiet volumes about the shifts in US society in the wake of victory on a global battlefield, a new form of casualism which brazenly challenged the formal garb – suits and ties – that had still dominated up to the Great Depression.

But in Bohemians in T-Shirts, his five-part BBC Radio 3’s survey flagged under the station’s regular slot The Essay, Goldfarb claims that this move towards a more relaxed take on the male wardrobe was less Zeitgeist, less a general trend, less a widespread casting off of the stays of conformity in the slipstream of Euro-Pacific triumph, and more the result of sartorial choices made by a small number of radical and influential innovators.

With this hypothesis in mind, the American commentator now long-based in the UK, focuses on five areas of New York artistic practice, all cracking open fresh ground in fascinating ways during this period, changes embodied in the projects and behaviours of an avant-garde quintet of visionary makers and shakers.

Yet Goldfarb only lightly interrogates the T-shirt’s signifiers. Minimal? Functional? Utilitarian? Democratic? Non-aspirational even? Or simply the vest? Certainly, as Robert Rauschenberg a little later confirms, the blank canvas is full of meanings. But the focus in this sequence of crisp oral sketches is on genres and on significant individuals.

So, the first of these 15-minute portraits concerns ‘Actors’ and homes in on Marlon Brando. The second chases ‘Writers’ and pinpoints James Baldwin as its talisman. The third turns the microscope on ‘Painters’, with Jackson Pollock as its poster boy. The fourth concerns ‘Musicians’ and Charlie Parker is the soloist on the bandstand. Finally, the instalment entitled ‘Beats’ foregrounds Jack Kerouac as its principal hook.

Goldfarb writes elegantly, speaks smartly and weaves in skilfully constructed connections with, yes, the T-shirt, not necessarily an ever-present in every paragraph of this broadcast novella, but evident enough to tie together the socio-cultural threads of an original and enticing overview.

Brando pulls on a shrunken version of the garment across his Adonis-like body for a seminal stage performance; Baldwin pairs such an item with khakis as an emigré in Paris; Pollock lies inebriated in the Cedar Tavern gutter with his cotton top no doubt ragged and paint-flecked; Parker flees a burning hotel clad only in his underwear, while Kerouac hides his regular white vest under a lumberjack shirt.

But, of course, it is not the T-shirt that is changing Greenwich Village or Harlem or 52nd St, soon amazing America and eventually astonishing the world, but the incredible outputs – plays, novels, pictures, records – of these grippingly interesting, often difficult and sometimes doomed, individuals.

There are other players – Miles, Anatole Broyard, Ginsberg, to name a few – in this compressed yet compelling drama, which largely happens around the fulcrum of 1947, and some of them are even women. Stella Adler teaches Brando the Stanislavski method, Lee Krasner sacrifices her own artistic career to aid Pollock’s ascent and a millionaire heiress called Peggy Guggenheim also helps ‘Jack the Dripper’ to become the major star of the new abstraction.

Not much ends perfectly. After A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando never appears on stage again. Parker’s auto crash back injury leads him to morphine, then heroin and a premature demise. Baldwin is at first fêted but later, as a homosexual African American, sneeringly dubbed ‘Martin Luther Queen’ by his own people. Pollock fatally smashes his head against a tree while racing a fast car drunk. And Kerouac, as we know, dies a desolate and discredited alcoholic.

Goldfarb is a good man to take on this rich, rolling swirl of creative brilliance and frequent indulgent self-destruction. In the mid-1970s, he was both an actor and cabbie based in New York City and he brings some of that first hand experience to this guided tour of a volatile yet dazzling cavalcade.

On nights, he would park his yellow taxi outside MoMA, energised by the hypnotic power of a Pollock painting then set in the foyer of that famed institution. He would also see Ginsberg in the supermarkets of the East Village where they both lived at that time.

His stories are therefore infused with a certain streetwise chutzpah: through the eyes of a man who came within touching distance of the golden moments of these extraordinary talents, he dreams the past with an appealing authenticity but not without a little knowing reflection and thus avoids the curse of breathless hagiography.

Editor’s note: Bohemians in T-Shirts, Radio 3, can be found at BBC Sounds