Baker, Dorothy Dodds

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BAKER, Dorothy Dodds

Born 21 April 1907, Missoula, Montana; died 17 June 1968, Terra Bella, California

Daughter of Raymond Branson and Alice Grady Dodds; married Howard Baker, 1930

Dorothy Dodds Baker is best remembered for her ability to describe the excitement of music, especially jazz. She grew up in California, studying violin until she went to college. While studying in Paris in 1930, she began writing Trio—published as her second novel—and met and married poet Howard Baker. She earned an M.A. in French at UCLA and taught languages in a private school until her first short story was published; then she began writing full-time. All her early stories portray women in career situations.

In 1937, Baker won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship to complete Young Man with a Horn. This widely acclaimed novel follows the career of jazz musician Rick Martin, from the time he first cuts school in order to practice piano at an abandoned Los Angeles mission, till he dies at the peak of his fame in a quack "drying-out" hospital in New York.

The hero overcomes his racial prejudice in order to learn from black musicians who befriend him. In New York he meets and marries Amy North, a medical student and "a complicated woman, the kind who knows how to strip the nerves and kick the will around." Characters similar to Amy recur in Baker's work, but this is the type's most vivid incarnation. When Young Man with a Horn (1938) was filmed (1950), scriptwriters turned most of the hero's black friends white, including the singer Jo Jordan, played by Doris Day. Romance with Doris gives the film its happy ending. Amy North, played by Lauren Bacall, suffers from the self-conscious Freudianism sweeping Hollywood at that time.

Trio (1943), Baker's second novel, presents the conflict experienced by Janet Logan when a young man evoking heterosexual love enters her life. Hitherto, she'd had a long-standing relationship with a domineering woman professor, whom she assisted while doing graduate work. Reviewers faulted it as overworked and lacking in humanity. Nevertheless, it won the Commonwealth Club of California medal for literature. The novel was developed out of an earlier story "Romance" (Harper's Bazaar, 1941), which achieves a compelling tension the longer novel lacks.

Baker and her husband rewrote Trio as a stage play, which opened in Philadelphia in 1944. A run on Broadway was dogged by censorship that triggered industry-wide protest and also attracted many reviewers. Most found it moral to the point of moralizing (the lesbian villain is disgraced and shoots herself), but dull. The controversy over its forced closing outlived the play by several years.

Cassandra at the Wedding (1962), Baker's last novel, recalls Trio in its triangular conflict between a dominant woman, a compliant woman, and a man; but the failures of the earlier work are recouped in this recasting. In Cassandra, the dominant woman overcomes her dependency on her supportive twin sister; her suicide attempt is thwarted. The novel ends with a gesture, not a debacle. "The mastery of technique here," said a New York Times reviewer, "is just about absolute."

Baker published many excellent short stories. Her vivid, precise style and knack for capturing human gesture became her hallmark. Her characters are often bent on some singleminded obsession: classical music in "The Jazz Sonata" (Coronet, 1937), boxing in "Private Lesson" (Yale Review, 1940), and gambling in "Grasshopper's Field Day" (Harper's, 1941). Though she received a National Institute of Letters Fellowship in 1964, Baker published little after Cassandra.