Dear Editor
Dear Editor Scornful Asides There were two very good articles concerning France in the July 17 issue of The New Leader. But while both Norman Jacobs' remarks about the French Communists ("France's...
...who played the clarinet on the Hot Five sessions...
...Usually, when people pick you apart on points of fact, they are doing so as a preliminary to attacking your thesis...
...1 suppose Orwell could be called a Trotskyite sympathizer during the Spanish Civil War (though William Herrick, in his review in the same issue, "Spain's Other War," is closer to the mark when he mentions the "anti-Stalinist Communists" of the poum...
...By stressing the need for tightly disciplined revolutionary "cadres" and the establishment of a dictatorship, Lenin made these the key features of the Communist structure, both in theory and practice...
...Jerome S. Shipman Bruce Cook replies: From the precarious position Jerome Shipman has placed me in, I would like to respond briefly to his letter...
...That was the case within the German Communist Party in the '20s and early '30s...
...Potomac, Md...
...So Cook could be right after all...
...This is also why we should keep pressing the Soviets for human rights observance, despite setbacks and official Soviet indignation: What is at slake is an opportunity to assail Communism in its quintessential creed...
...I would be more persuaded by his report, however, if he hadn't described Baby Dodds as "the drummer on the Armstrong Hot Five recordings" (the earlier Hot Fives had no drummer, the later ones had Zutty Singleton), Lee Collins as "the trumpeter on most of the old Jelly Roll Morton Hot Pepper sessions" (he didn't play on any of them), and if Cook had given more indication that he knew where to look for jazz in the city...
...True Nobility Like Selden Rodman, I also admire Papa Doc Duvalier ("Haitian Patterns...
...As for Lee Collins...
...What Jacobs, however, in his sharp observations perhaps overlooks is how integral this dilemma is to the whole of Leninist theory, and therewith to modern Communism in general...
...But while both Norman Jacobs' remarks about the French Communists ("France's Communists in Turmoil") and Ray Alan's about the consequences of May 1968 ("Let Them Eat Sugar-Cane") were pertinent and instructive, 1 must say that Alan first startled me and then made me leap up in protest with his two successive and peremptorily scornful asides—one on a French-writing Irishman, the other on an India-born Englishman...
...New York City Andki-w Ciihron...
...Fundamentally, I think we're in agreement: Things ain't what they used to be...
...At least one did some years ago...
...I doubt that any intellectual who at one time passed through the party apparatus is unaware that freedom of expression is really at the core of the individual's problematic relationship with the "movement": While the encounter with Marxist theory stimulates a unique brand of critical thought, all the resulting intellectual development is cut short as soon as the critique conflicts with party strategy, or—as it can hardly fail to do—with the more questionable aspects of the theory itself...
...Together with Albert Camus' "1940-ish journalism," it represents the best, most penetrating, and most durable journalistic writing since World War 11...
...He is probably right...
...No doubt those places are long gone, the musicians unsympathetic critics said 30 years ago were too old to play really are too old now, or dead, and the younger musicians who were taking up the torch have disappeared...
...What was really intolerable, however, in Alan's smug asides—which distorted his otherwise thoughtful article—was the contemptuous appraisal of George Orwell's "1940-ish Trotskyite journalism...
...But Orwell's writing then was 1930-ish, and what he wrote was Homage to Catalonia...
...52nd Street isn't what it used to be either, and neither is Kansas City...
...Orwell's "1940-ish journalism" was completely foreign to Trotskyism...
...tried to find a public occasion (a funeral or dedication of some sort) to listen to such marching bands as the Eureka or the Young Tuxedo in their natural habitat...
...New York City Leo Sauvaoe Communist Weak Spot Norman Jacobs' timely report on the French Communist crisis should highlight the fundamental vulnerability of international Communism, including the Soviet Union, to the issue of human rights...
...Not since Stalin has one man been vilified by so many second-hand sources unable to appreciate the achievement of surviving in a hostile world...
...Well...
...Thus, although 1 agree with Alan about the general superficiality of post-1968 French higher education, the fact that first-year students of English at the University of Toulouse had even "three scraps" of Orwell before them means that the situation is not entirely hopeless...
...It is, I believe, one of the basic "inner contradictions" motivating the Eurocom-munist experiment...
...It used to be that one seeking quality jazz in New Orieans studiously avoided Bourbon Street...
...and caught the dance bands in places like Luthjen's, Mama Lou's, and San Jacinto Hall...
...And, together with the historic significance of people everywhere increasingly insisting on their right to think for themselves, it is probably the major force behind the Soviet dissidents...
...It's much easier to follow, in the same issue, Dean Valentine's intelligently critical three pages on "Beckett's Unhappy Days...
...But why does this author, too, throw in a no less flippant remark about lonesco being "a second-rater...
...I'm almost certain that he recorded with Jelly Roll Morton, though perhaps not with the Hot Pepper Band...
...New York City Thomas Goldstein All That Jazz The traditional jazz scene in New Orleans may indeed be as dismal as Bruce Cook says it is ("Way Down Yonder," NL, June 22...
...This is, I believe, why continued pressure on the Eurocommunists for more freedom of expression is likely to hurt them—they worry lest their "democratic" concessions should lead them to the point of surrendering their identity...
...This Shipman does not do...
...I must have confused Baby Dodds with his brother Johnny Dodds...
...I am not a raving admirer of Samuel Beckett's but it requires an extraordinary amount of pre-sumptuousness to dismiss Wailing for Codol in three words as a "shallow high-school charade...
Vol. 61 • July 1978 • No. 16
