Books
solutely forbid any form of sexual behavior, regardless of circumstances? What is one to make of an interpretation of St. Paul's straightforward condemnations as random remarks on...
...As Bleikasten says, Quentin is "the locus of alienating identifications rather than the location of identity...
...Benjy's "polylogue" shows that he confronts the eventual absence of Caddy in a way that is inflexible, rigid, fragmented, where none of the elements in his life add up to a meaningful whole...
...I should have it all done by Oct...
...budget...
...When Feather fears he goes precipitously out on a critical limb, he retrieves his equilibrium with the qualifying clause, "It is arguable" and lets musicians do his talking for him...
...And besides, there would always be a next time, since there is only one truth and endurance and pity and courage...
...I don't know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel...
...creadive and crmca, thinker with vision and Jove for Church...
...I have had to put the ross...
...It is unlikely that officialdom will recognize the ruse, so it is unlikely that jazz critics will have the luxury to relax on sticky issues like the so-called "heroin problem" or the relationship between sexuality and jazz...
...The remaining Compson brother, the one who physically survives the family's decline longer than the other two, is a travesty on Faulkner's notion of endurance...
...C l a s s i f i e d RATES: 60c a word, one time...
...111), twenty who are still actively drinking and forty-five who are maintaining sobriety, but the author overlooks this significant difference...
...one suspects, however, from the nuances of the word "bitterweeds" in the title, that Franklin could have shared other, more dramatically personal reminiscences of Faulkner, had he wanted to...
...Letter to Random House...
...Professor Blotner has judiciously selected those letters which, for the most part, are not available to the general public and provided suitable notes so that the reader can easily trace Faulkner's preoccupations from one letter to the next...
...Few childhoods are well documented...
...One traditionalist among jazz critics, though by no means a mummifier, is Dan Morgenstern...
...Where Morgenstern makes confident declarative assessments as ontological historian and Hentoff quotes ambiguities as jazz man's fellow traveler, Feather strikes a compromise_9 He integrates avant-gardists like Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard and pays tribute to older masters like Billy Eckstein so rightly esteemed as a "virtual founder of modern jazz...
...All the letters, diaries, interviews with surviving friends and relatives, fill in a picture that is inevitably a surface: the face becomes clearer and more detailed, but the more we stare at it the more mysterious become the motives of action, the source of values, what Camus calls the "two or three great and simple images" in whose presence the heart first opened...
...During Faulkner's career in Hollywood, he had a close relationship with Meta Carpenter beginning in 1935 when he started working with Howard Hawks...
...Bleikasten, professor of English literature at the University of Strasbourg and no stranger to Faulimer studies, incorporates in his methodology a sensitivity to the critical developments on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Faulkner's Selected Letters, edited by Joseph Blotner, presently William Faulkner Lecturer at Ole Miss and author of the excellent Faulkner: A Biography, come at a time when serious Faulkner research and scholarship are reaching new heights...
...And it is a fact that a major part of the Soviet budget goes for strictly defensive purposes for which there is no corresponding outlay in the U.S...
...Classified payable with order...
...Bumper Sdeker SPEAK OUT for life bumper sticker says "let's quit killing baby seals baby humans too--stop abortion" $1 ee...
...All three brothers, however, center their relationships with Caddy on various aspects of sex and death...
...Caddy, who assumes the aspects of sister, mother, virgin, whore, angel, and demon, is often present to her brothers when they summon up the images of trees, water, twilight, and honeysuckle...
...Between the preservative solidity of Morgenstern's Jazz People and the radical nebulousness of Hentoff's Jazz Is exists the centrist liberalism of Leonard Feather's The Pleasures o/ Iazz...
...DOUOLAS ~TTLqN OOOOOOOOO REVIEWERS RALPH MCINEID~Y teaches in the philosophy department at the Univermty of Notre Dame and is the author of several novels...
...Commonweal: 511...
...The haunting voices of the past, without the pastness of the past, dominate Quentin's consciousness as his death wish accelerates...
...Though Benjy reports to the reader discrete images and pieces of dialogue, he does not grasp the significance of his life...
...He interprets the same music differently each time ("I wouldn't play it again the same way--even if I could, which I can't...
...For box numbers add S0c per Insertion...
...Even though the data base is much too thin and disparate and non-representative to verify the "typology" (p...
...The subject emerges only when he does something distinctive, publishes, develops a public identity...
...Rothschild: courtly, ascetic, well-connected, in on the discovery of the Peking skull, the very embodiment of the conflict between science and religion and in some ways the first of the hyphenated priests, samizdat writer, intellectual martyr at the hands of Vatican curialists and nervous Jesuit superiors, and, what is more to the point for us, a protoype of that contemporary phenomenon, the faithful dissenter...
...It is at stake for the avantgardist who aims to keep his revolutionary art radically alive...
...man or woman religious...
...DTeilhard warfare he experienced as a stretcherbearer in the French army--and be all the more convinced that there must be some point of view from which physical evil would disappear and matter "be absorbed into Spirit...
...FATHER JOSEPH A. APPLEYARD, S.J., is presently working as a hospital chaplain m Boston, on leave from Boston College...
...PATHER JOSEPH H. PIcH'I~R, S.J., teaches in the Sociology Department of Loyola University in Hew Orleans...
...In contrast to Benjy, psychological and moral issues are examined with excruciating persistence and Quentin eventually loses control of language, as the final few pages of his section reveal...
...ST~ i INSIGHT: A Quarterly of gay Catholic Opinioa published by gays.for ~ ..non-gul~-~?.L make gay experience unaorstanoeom...
...Mr...
...To reverse this trend--before it is forever too late--requires exposing all the motivating factors, ineluding the distorted claims of the Pentagou and the incredible greed of the arms industry...
...In the higher evolution of things, Feather appears to concur with the late alto saxophonist, Cannonball Adderly, that "the most advanced rock listeners . . . will, given the exposure, probably defect to jazz...
...But each admission would indicate the end of cultural genocide against the only high art--haute culture --America has produced, and such celebratory anti-philistinism from the academy does not appear close at hand...
...Descriptions of the geography of his birthplace, the situation of his family, the temper of the age, don't compenADULT VOCATIONS special program for men over twenty-one, Write: ADULT VOCATIONS Oex 41H, Comlnenweal sate...
...He believes that jazz has a future, an issue made imminent by the jazz musician's not infrequent defection to the far more lucrative medium of electronic rock...
...As Bleikasten rightly suggests, the sermon raises the novel to a new literary level without automatically injecting a theological solution into the problems of the Compson family that have been so dramatically portrayed...
...Paul's straightforward condemnations as random remarks on the Corinthian waterfront...
...the fundamental choices seem to have been made...
...Morgenstern solves this critical dilemma for himself by siding with the displaced revolutionary and solidifying the cyclical process, theorizing its cohesive unity, advocating its respectability, protecting its accruing hall of fame, and insisting that the music is high art...
...They are already printed as short stories, will need some rewriting...
...He is impervious to audience demand ("Don't play what the public wants--you play what you want and let the public pick up what you are doing, even if it takes them fifteen, twenty years...
...Typically Compson, Jason substitutes money for genuine affection and he, too, becomes inextricably involved in the process of self-estrangement...
...FATHER PATRICK SAM'V4AY, S.J., is Chairman of the English Department at LeMoyne College in Syracuse...
...Her Paris Review interview with Eudora Welty appears in Writers at Work, Fourth Series...
...To Morgenstern's mind, Armstrong was the "original source for every single important artist in jazz"---the "genius" who "transformed jazz from an interesting and even remarkable folk and dance music to an art form, a medium for individual expression...
...As Joan Williams has recently written about this book, it will unfortunately be read "largely by people who never have read or will read, any of his [Faulkner's] words that come from anguish...
...Box Sll0, Grand Central ~e., Now York 10017 a publication of DIGNITY/Breokqn...
...As liberal jazz critic, Feather's premise is progress...
...Many of these letters, written between 19181962 to friends, relatives, agents, and editors, tend to focus on two of Faulkner's more pressing concerns: his desire to place his works-in-progress and his need for money to support his family...
...T e i l h a r d : The Man, The P r i e s t , The S c i e n t i s t MARY LUKAS and ELLEN LUKAS Doubleday, $10 J . P . APPLEYARD Biographies promise what they can't deliver...
...LU~X~ EuEm...
...Then I will get back at the ross...
...Little in the books is of value, certainly nothing to do with Faulkner as a novelist, and had the author felt a greater sense of sacrifice and restraint, an eighth of what she has written would have sufficed...
...Though Feather, Morgenstern and Hentoff demonstrate contrasting temperaments and, therefore, varying points of emphasis and view, they share an evangelism common to the jazz critic who champions an art form that has always been ignorantly and ignominiously dismissed by official American culture...
...Their summary Overviews of certain religious and philosophical controversies tend towards oversimplification, and some readers might be put off by the novelistic descriptions of Peking streets and Red Sea sunsets and accounts of how persons in the story thought and felt...
...Faulkner's letter to Joan Williams, Wednesday [29 Apr...
...What leads them to drink as they do" (p...
...He makes minute comparisons among six small sub-groups, none of which is a representative sample...
...In this purpose it does not succeed...
...Faulkner to Warren Beck, 6 July 1941] In many of these letters Faulkner alerted his editors and agents to the story or novel he was then writing, partly I think, as a way of indicating schematically to himself the outline of the story, as his December 1938 letter to Robert Haas indicates concerning the plan of the Snopes trilogy, and partly as a way of setting up a work schedule which would serve as a tangible reminder: There are two more chapters after this...
...For Bleikasten, this sermon places the mythic into the fictional, the nonliterary into the literary...
...Franklin relates his versions of the familiar Faulkner stories (the Judith Shegog episode, the scary Halloweens, the excursions on Sardis reservoir...
...aside twice to rewrite short stories to keep pot boiling, will have to hammer out another one now...
...Language Sekool ".SUTTINO'S LANGUAGE SCHOOL...
...And just for that reason we want to know why...
...Although the fourth section of the novel presents the same imagery of destruction and exhaustion as the first three sections, Bleikas~en shows with tremendous clarity and analytic concern that the Dilsey section gives an Commonweal: 507 equilibrium to the novel without having it fall necessarily into the category of a "Christian novel...
...The reader absorbs that the jazz man is a romantic egoist ("Everything I've lived is in my music...
...Bleikasten reads the novel as one might approach an orchestral score, reading it both vertically and horizontally or (paradigmatically and syntagmatically as he puts it), in an attempt to focus on the internal development of the novel and capture its movement and momentum, particularly as the novel relates Caddy Compson to the lives of her three brothers...
...The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner's "The Sound and t h e Fury" ANDRE BLEIKASTEN Indiana U. Press, $12.50 A ]Loving Gentleman META CARPENTER WILDE & ORIN BORSTEN Simon and Schuster, $9.95 B i t t e r w e e d s : l a t e w~h WURam Faulkner a t Rowan Oak MALCOLM A. FRANKLIN Soc...
...Nor is there a discernible "alcoholic personality" until alter the individual has become an alcoholic...
...thirteen times, Twelve words minimum...
...Ironically, the most interesting section of the book deals with the author's marriage to the pianist, Wolfgang Rebner, and her subsequent trip to Germany as a Gentile who had married a German Jew whose family was under scrutiny by Hitler's SS guard...
...1879-64 St., Brooklyn, NY 11204...
...This book, like poorly written nineteenth century hagiography, records in exaggerated detail intimate conversations between these two lovers, conversations that even a saint could not possibly have remembered...
...If we look for some clue to his deepest vision, it seems to have been his capacity to look closely at human suffering--the early deaths of his much-loved older brother and two sisters, the trench '"The fundamental beating of my life has always been to prove that the love of God iustities and exalts, rather than destroys, earthly powers of knowing and loving . . . . I dream of going to God under the pressures of the strongest and most violent currents of the earth...
...OOOOOOOOO IN BRIEF ALCOHOLIC PRIESTS: A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY, by Andrew A. Sorensen, Seabury, $8.95...
...i Phumind .A~Jate PLANNING ASSOCIATE--4vlIflma position..t...
...These have a legitimate purpose, however, in a book whose aim is not scholarly understanding of its subject but imaginative identification with him...
...Benjy's chapter serves as a prologue to the book, as Faulkner said: " . . . like the gravediggers in Elizabethan dramas...
...and Hentoff takes his cue...
...Exhilarated by such authentic Existentialism, as well as by the laughter, irony, sensuousness and deep blues he loves in jazz, Hentoff submits to the artist who creates in a perpetual "state of becoming...
...Though I think that the Lukases are finally unable to explain how Teilhard kept faith, and perhaps my point is that no one can, they have written a very readable account of his life...
...He embraces an avant-garde, chiding traditionalists for trying to preserve a "spirit-music" under glass...
...It seems clear that he never expected, at least for a good part of his life, that his letters would be a matter of public interest...
...monthly in advance for more than three times...
...Along with the Chinese threat on their border, many of the surrounding countries have extensive U.S...
...Contact: flay...
...William C. Harms, Office of Re~urch end Planning, Archdiocese of Newark, 3l Mulberry St., Newark, HJ 071...
...In fact, if Teilhard had suffered less, had cheerfully reconciled his allegiances and satisfied his critics, he would be far less interesting to us, less of a model from which to discover how to live out our own versions of faith and doubt...
...The jazz man warns him, "You just can't keep the music unless you move with it," and Hentoff moves...
...The purpose of the research study underlying this book was to find the sociological and psychological factors explaining why some priests become alcoholics (p...
...His mind cannot understand the life Caddy had chosen for herself and he slides from one conception of her to another until he ultimately decides to accept the logical, final solution to his anxiety: suicide...
...French, Spanish, Portuguam, Latin, etc...
...Bleikasten manifests a sense of proportion, taste, and intellectual discernment that few critics ever possess...
...team uppreach in planning for mission of Archdiocese...
...The "control" group of 56 non-alcoholics falls into three subgroups (Episcopal priests, Catholic diocesan and religious priests) as does the study group of 65 alcoholics...
...they have interviewed many of those who figured in Teilhard's story, have researched in fascinating quarters, and they present their subject against the intellectual and social background of the age...
...On rare occasions, Faulkner rose above his daily problems, such as his troublesome contractual relationship with William Herndon, the bother of being surrounded by "snow, dogs, Indians, Red Coats, and Nazi spies" while working on the film called Northern Pursuit, or the task of discussing with his nephew the nature of the inscription for his mother's tomb, to express his feelings about his own talent: I have written too fast, too much...
...The two powers of Eros and Thanatos which tore apart Quentin's life are reconciled in the "cosmic motherhood of Thalassa...
...201) 4834S00 Ext...
...All his fears are realized...
...The alcoholics themselves are two very different kinds of people (p...
...What we would really like to know for our own instruction, why he acted as he did, what made the later choices so compelling, remains buried in those early years...
...In The Ordeal o/ Gilbert Pin/old, Waugh writes that there was a phrase, common at the time, It is later than you think...
...But by the end of the second chapter Teilhard is already an amateur paleontologist, an ordained Jesuit, and an admirer of Bergson's Creative Evolution...
...I don't know how much...
...They have to...
...He takes a "great man" perspective on jazz history, refuting the popular myth that jazz was born exclusively in New Orleans ("Jazz evolved whenever African and European musical practices impinged upon each other, which is to say wherever black and white Americans came into contact...
...in some ways, Shegog is an analogue of the author, the novelist himself, he allows the power of the Word to capture his audience...
...But he does grant that city "honorable title as the birth-place of jazz" because on July 4, 1900, Louis Armstrong was born there...
...I should not be surprised if there are some who will regard this book as a breakthrough...
...He once wrote, "It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and 5 August 1977:508 epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died...
...Bleikasten's extended study of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury masterfully explores each chapter of one of Faulkner's more difficult novels, in addition to providing an analysis of Faulkner's literary apprenticeship leading up to the creation of this novel...
...It indicates the challenge of a revolutionary music which--by the internal logic and necessity of its inherent lawlessness--changes direction mid-decade virtually every ten years...
...The main point of my article, however, is to demonstrate that all of us - - t h e entire world communityware increasingly threatened by the nuclear arms race...
...Commonweal: 309 J a z z Is NAT HENTOFF Random House, $10 J a z z People DAN MORGENSTERN Abrams, $25 The Pleasures a t J a z z LEONARD FEATHER Horizon, $7.95 The Encyclopedia o f J a z z i n t h e S e v e n t i e s LEONARD FEATHER & IRA GITLER Horizon, $20 LINDA KUEHL Nat Hentoff is a left-wing jazz critic, mystic of a radical mystique, self-admitted worshipper and proud hangout partner of the jazz man whose only law is change...
...they oversimplify, and they imply a determinism which is at odds with the uniqueness the biographer sets out to explain...
...This division between critics on the avant-garde is perennially significant...
...He serves his purpose and is gone...
...Reverend Shegog, a monkey-like minister who initially disappoints the congregation, transfigures Dilsey and the other blacks in church, not because of his own personality, but because he allows them to be transformed by the power of God's word...
...156) of the alcoholic priest, or to support the sociological generalizations, this book is the best we have so far as a social science approach to the delicate problem of clergy alcoholism...
...Ironically, his rationality works against him and unwittingly he traps himself in a living death...
...As the time lag between innovation and acceptance accelerates beyond the progression of any other art form, the burden rests upon the critic to commit himself to one or the other inevitably warring factions...
...it is at stake for the displaced jazz musician who is displaced--and rendered reactionary-within five or ten years of his own radical thrust...
...he does not break out of the confines of his linguistic enclosure and, unlike Quentin, speculate about his future relationship with his sister...
...The jazz man tells Heatoff that no critic can translate his music into words ( " I f the music doesn't say it, how can words say it for the music...
...Morgenstern finds the music and legacy of its spiritual leader, John Coletrane, "abrasive," where Hentoff finds it "frontier-expanding...
...Dilsey can face the future and not be duped by time...
...They set out to explain the hidden roots of a person's life, hut all they can really tell us is what he or she did, what happened to them...
...it is based on sound, critical methods and extensive reading and careful evaluation of prior criticism...
...si4, Tucson, Ariz...
...As encyclopedist, mini-biographer and Los Angeles Times daily reviewer, he places further faith in the verifiable achievements and successes that he updates in his Encyclopedia o! Jazz in the Seventies with co-chronicler, Ira Gitler...
...These letters, many of them quite pedestrian and matter-of-fact, do not give us a sense that Faulkner was using the epistle or brief note as a place for experimenting with style...
...I decided what seems to me now a long time ago that something worth saying knew better than I did how it needed to be said, and that it was better said poorly than not said...
...Exhaustive previous research has found that there is no background sociological profile that can predict the future alcoholic...
...he is exploited, robbed, victimized by the one person he tried to control and dominate...
...Morgenstern sees no progress since Coletrane's mid-I960s "increasingly ecstatic, incantatory, extended improvisation," while Hentoff is awed by his "harmonic language [that] has gone beyond chords to tone clusters, diverse fusions of pitches and timbres, and spirals of colors for which there is as yet no harmonic nomenclature...
...mih'tary installations...
...He invents by taking risks ("taking chances every goddamned session, going out there naked every night _9 . . on a very high wire without a net...
...The genre is hagiography--a model of someone coming to a faith, keeping it when others didn't, and suffering for it...
...In Jazz Is, he lets the cool cats speak for themselves, providing biographical contexts for their inchoate phrasings, and giving the reader an education by osmosis...
...The situation is paradoxical: how to keep the revolution alive without destroying the tradition that was born out of and is perpetuated through revolution...
...He takes heart that jazz, since the Fifties, has received "belated recognition . . . as serious music for listening," and is encouraged in his optimism 5 August 1977:510 by the Sixties' and Seventies' phenomena of classes, clinics and workshops that have "established jazz education as a vital force for progress in an area that had long seemed impregnable...
...or the Study o/ Traditional Culture (Irving, Texas), $20 S e l e c t e d L e t t e r s o f William Faulkner EDITED BY JOSEPH BLOTNER Random House, $15 PATRICK SAMWAY And now I realize for the first time what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made...
...UlNCrlI~.-IT S me only way to get iti $i.00 a year, $9.00 outston the U.S.A.P.O...
...Malcolm Franklin, on the other hand, Faulkner's wife's son by her first marriage, gives a down-home view of Faulkner as a quiet man who cared for his family at Rowan Oak...
...But how this conviction sustained him in his personal life is not so clear, and it is the story of the man that the Lukases have set out to tell...
...It was a'truth he seems to have grasped early on, and everything he later did--his geological and anthropological studies at Paris, his field work in China between the wars, the early "noncontroversial" Divine Milieu, his major work The Phenomenon o/Man, the researches of his last years in New York --filled it in and expanded its meaning for him...
...Little is documented, however, and so it is impossible to challenge their interpretation of events...
...JOSEPH H. P/CHTER OOOOOOOOO CORRESPONDENCE (Cominued trom page 483) duces a $50 billion Soviet manpower budget which exists only in the Pentagnn's imagination...
...They would not have to prove, for example, that jazz musicians do, indeed, study in conservatories, teach in universities, play together in concert halls and solo with "long-hair" symphony orchestras, though for those jazz musicians who do not do thus: so what...
...Bleikasten stresses that Caddy serves as a "fiction within the fiction, her presence in the novel being rendered in such a way as to make her appear throughout as a pure figure of absence...
...The genesis of this novel can be compared to a Trauerarbeit, a work of mourning, reflecting Faulkner's statement, "So I, who had never had a sister and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl...
...or $2.S0 for 3. Roy-co Distributors, P.o...
...Noone has very little knowledge of the Soviet Union if he honestly believes they do not feel threatened...
...Italian...
...The choice is urgent because the future of jazz seems always to be at stake...
...Sorensen has produced an informative book about clergy alcoholism although relatively little reliable information comes from the 121 priests he interviewed...
...The strength of their book is in its narrative details...
...August 1939] In all, these letters reveal Faulkner as a private individual who did not shrink from the challenges and responsibilities that were part of his life...
...what does that prove or disprove...
...COMMONWEAL, 232 Ivladison Ave., New York...
...1953] These four books are representative, for good or for bad, of the recent material concerning Fanlkner's life and fiction...
...this, in itself, gives a tremendous insight into the everyday Faulkner who did not divorce himself from the demands of the immediate...
...The Most Splendid Failure is the best single analysis of The Sound and the Fury...
...It is a fascinating story, bec~se even without a motorcycle Teilhard was every bit as romantic a figure as Evelyn Waugh's legendary Fr...
...is working on a biography of Billie Holiday for Harper & Row...
...k, seven times...
...Quentin, too, suffers from the acute loss of his sister as she leaves the family unit to seek a life of her own...
...And best of all, Faulkner's letters never call attention to themselves, but serve instead as a valuable prologue to his fiction...
...I don't know where it came from...
...three times...
...Both Meta Carpenter Wilde and Malcolm Franklin have written books which attempt to reveal the non-literary dimension of Faulkner's life...
...Were they to relax, they might not have to act as advocates and apologists...
...It does this quite well...
...Believe me, this is not humility, false modesty: it is simply amazement...
...unfortunately, the first is unduly inflated and the second disguises more than it reveals...
...it is her involvement with the word of God, however, that reveals the redeeming aspect of her personality...
...It is not a study of the growth of his ideas, as Claude Cuenot's biography (1965) was...
...10016...
...inevitably, one would like to know more about certain matters...
...In the years to follow, when Faulkner had to remain away from Oxford, Mississippi, in order to earn money to pay his nagging debts, he turned to Meta for affection and emotional support...
...One reason is that biographies begin too late...
...Nonetheless, he adds, it was never later than Gilbert Pinfold thought...
...This absorbing new biography of Teilhard de Chardin presents the problem all the more clearly because it is such a lively study of the man, his friendships, the circumstances of his Jesuit life, and the crises and sufferings his writings and ideas brought him...
...opporlhunDy to take Initiative and work Indol~ndentiy...
...Traditionalist Morgenstern departs from Hentoff on the decisive issue of the current avant-garde conveniently termed the "free-jazz" movement...
...moreover, the scar of 20 million killed in the World War H invasion runs deep in the Russian soul...
...He subscribes to no particular school of criticism, whether it be Freudian, structuralist, or psychoanalytic, but has been genuinely open to all the possible, and reasonable, dimensions of the text...
Vol. 104 • August 1977 • No. 16
