When my brother and I were growing up, books about the sort of music we liked – blues, jazz, country, some rock – were hard to find. Today, of course, the market is flooded with everything from fanboy gush to unreadable academic tracts. An exception in the sixties was the English writer Paul Oliver, who published, among other titles, The Story of the Blues, in 1969. Two suburban white boys, we were hungry for details. Who were these black musicians—Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt? They seemed more myth than flesh and blood, and Oliver relieved some of our ignorance. Philip Larkin begins his review of The Story of the Blues, published in the Daily Telegraph on August 9, 1969, like this:  “Behind the blues spreads the half-glimpsed, depressing vista of the life of the American Negro. At almost any level the houses are shoddy; at worst, they are hardly more than lean-to sheds standing on dirt among weeds. The landscapes are the flat plains that border the national highways and are traversed by the south-running railroads, the Louisville-National, the Texas and Pacific. In the scattered townships the only recreation to be found is in the ‘Coloured Café’, with its beer and Coca-Cola advertisements and juke-box, or, in the grim chimney-packed towns, in the blues cellars, where there is hardly headroom for performers to stand upright.”   In his review Larkin chooses to concentrate on the miseries of the Jim Crow South rather than on the bluesmen and their music. One would love to hear his assessment, for instance, of Lightnin’ Hopkins, whose guitar playing he described elsewhere as “vividly pessimistic.” Larkin writes of the illustrations in Oliver’s book:   “A grim advertisement for Ramblin’ Thomas’s ‘No Job Blues’ [1928] is next to an Insect Life drawing of the boll weevil, the creature that devastated the post-plantation cotton crops in the early years of the century. Anyone curious about the blues, their players and the conditions that produced them, will find this book endlessly fascinating.”   As a poet, Larkin’s finest tribute to the blues and blues-infused jazz was “For Sidney Bechet,” devoted to the great New Orleans-born clarinet and soprano saxophone player (1897-1959): “On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes.” Listen to Bechet’s achingly beautiful “Blue Horizon.”   Larkin was born on this date, August 9, in 1922 and died in 1985 at age sixty-three. His review is collected in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1971 (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985).

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-47), died at the age of thirty-one after a life spent mostly as a soldier, though he lived for some time in Paris and was befriended by Voltaire. His health was never good. No longer in the army, Vauvenargues died of complications from the frostbite he suffered during the War of the Austrian Succession. Not as well-known as fellow French moralist-aphorists La Bruyère, Chamfort and La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues’ thinking is informed by a soldier’s experience and is rooted in a pragmatic view of life:  “It is not bringing hunger and misery to foreigners that is glorious in a hero’s eyes, but enduring them for his country’s sake; not inflicting death, but courting it.”   The Reflections and Maxims of Vauvenargues (Oxford University Press, 1940) is translated from the French by F.G. Stevens. I’m using the copy borrowed from the Fondren Library. It is yet another volume previously owned by Edgar Odell Lovett, president of Rice University from 1908 to 1946. Again, one can hardly imagine an American university president today buying and reading such a book. In 1746, Vauvenargues anonymously published his only book, Introduction à la connaissance de l'esprit humain, which included Reflexions and Maximes. Here is a sampler:    “People don't say much that is sensible when they are trying to be unusual.” “We condemn strongly the least offences of the unfortunate, and show little sympathy for their greatest troubles.”   “There would be few happy people if others could determine our occupations and amusements.”   “We should expect the best and the worst from mankind, as from the weather.”   “Those whose only asset is cleverness never occupy the first rank in any walk of life.”   “We have no right to make unhappy those whom we cannot make good.”   “War is not so heavy a burden as slavery.”   Vauvenargues is often gentler, less cynical than La Rochefoucauld. One tends to think of him as a boy. C.H. Sisson published an essay on him in the Winter 1987 issue of The American Scholar (collected in In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers, Carcanet Press, 1990) that begins: “Vauvenargues is hardly the most fashionable of writers. He has a further distinction, that there never was a time when his work was fashionable, yet for some two hundred and fifty years there has never been a time when he might not have been said to have friends and admirers.” Sisson places him among the “observers who lived in the world and recorded their findings in more or less summary fashion.”   Sisson makes a useful comparison: “Vauvenargues is one of those writers, like George Herbert, whose life--and indeed death--cannot be satisfactorily separated from their works.” He adds: “A profound and vulnerable diffidence marks the thought of Vauvenargues as it marks his life,” and we recall how young and “unsuccessful” he was in life. Never married, no children, always fending off poverty. Sisson also wrote a forty-six-line poem titled “Vauvenargues” (Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1998), saying the aphorist “found no resting place on this earth.” He writes:   “They say the boy did not learn much Latin But got drunk on Plutarch—perhaps Amyot? How many years of barracks after that, Inspecting guards, collecting up the drunks, Trailing his pike in the muddy streets, Garrisoned at Besançon, Arras, Reims? There were campaigns, though nothing much perhaps Historians would really care much about . . .”

In general, however, he [Louis XVI] preferred writing down his thoughts instead of uttering them by word of mouth; and he was fond of reading, for books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader. (Stefan Zweig, Marie Antoinette, 1932, p. 77 of the 1933 American edition, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul)   Soon I will put up a schedule of my autumn Not Shakespeare reading, just in case anyone wants to join in.  In effect it will be a lot of Christopher Marlowe with a few contemporaries.  Marlowe is a lot of fun. FICTION Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team (1955), Jessamyn West – Reading Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) I wondered what else the New Yorker readers of the time were reading along with “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”  One answer is Jessamyn West.  These stories seemed good to me.  “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (1948) is easy to recommend as a sample, for one thing because it is only six pages. The Holy Innocents (1981), Miguel Delibes – A famous Spanish novel, just translated, that uses its post-Franco freedom to indulge in a little revenge on the powerful.  Modernist and unconventionally punctuated, but I do not want to say it was too surprising.  New to English – what took so long? That They May Face the Rising Sun (2003), John McGahern – I am not sure what a quiet novel is but this is likely one of those.  Irish people lives their lives.  Seasons pass.  There is agriculture.  I have not read McGahern before; my understanding is that the novels that made his names are not so quiet.  But Ireland in 2003 had quieted down a lot, which I think is one of the ideas behind the novel.  Quite good.  The American version was for some reason given the accurate but dull title By the Lake. The Director (2023), Daniel Kehlmann – Discussed over here.   NON-FICTION Brazilian Adventure (1933), Peter Fleming – A jolly, self-conscious romp written in, or let’s say approaching, the style of Evelyn Waugh.  Young Fleming’s river trip in the Amazon is more dangerous and a bit more substantive than Waugh’s Mediterranean tourism in Labels (1930), but still, useless, except for the pleasures of the resulting book. Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (2003), Yoko Tawada – Tawada publishes fiction in both Japanese and German.  This book is an extended essay about the creative relationship between the two languages, based on Tawada’s education, travel, and writing.  It is perhaps especially fresh because English plays so little part in the book. How the Classics Made Shakespeare (2019), Jonathan Bate – Outstanding preparation for my upcoming reading.  The title describes the book exactly. Marie Antoinette (1932), Stefan Zweig – Just the first 80 or 90 pages.  I have wondered what Zweig’s biographies, still much read in France, were like, and now I know a little better.  Not for me.  Badly sourced and rhetorically dubious.  Obtrusive!  At times trying to hustle me!   POETRY Selected Poems (1952-68), Vasko Popa Helen of Troy, 1993 (2025), Maria Zoccola – This Helen lives in Sparta, Tennessee.  The up-to-date formal poems are interesting: American sonnets, and golden shovels, a form invented in 2010, incorporating lines from Robert Fagle’s Iliad.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE La rage de l'expression (1952), Francis Ponge – More thing poems. Literatura Portuguesa (1971), Jorge de Sena – Long encyclopedia entries on Portuguese and Brazilian literature now published as a little book.  So useful. A Bicicleta Que Tinha Bigodes (The Bicycle that Has a Moustache, 2011), Ondjaki – An Angolan boy wants to win a bicycle by borrowing a story from his famous fiction-writing uncle.  Specifically by borrowing the letters that he combs from his moustache.  That’s not how it works, kid. A Biblioteca: Uma segunda casa (The Library: A Second Home, 2024), Manuel Carvalho Coutinho – I have now read all the books I brought home from Portugal last year.  This one is literally a series of four-page profiles of Portuguese municipal libraries.  Why did I buy it (aside from loving libraries)?  It is at times as dull as it sounds, but sometimes, caused by the authors skilled or desperate attempt to write a less dull book, shimmered with the possibility of another book, a Calvino-like book, Invisible Libraries.  Visit the library full of obsolete technology, the library with books no one wants, the library for tourists, the library, most unlikely of all, where everyone goes to read books.

A blunt fact of modern life: When young, everyone we knew – family, friends, neighbors – lives nearby. Our lives are well-populated. With age, that alignment of geography and acquaintance attenuates. Live long enough and our birthplace turns incrementally, across the decades, into a ghost town. I’ve just learned that the last high-school teacher I remained in touch with has died. No surprise. She was eighty-three. She introduced me to Yeats. I introduced her to Nathanael West. In September I’m returning to Cleveland for my fifty-fifth high-school reunion, and I had planned to meet with my teacher for coffee, as we last did in 2016. The good news is I will spend time with my nephew, my niece and her baby, and one surviving friend. I haven’t lived in Cleveland since 1977 and not in Ohio since 1983, though they remain “home” in some primal sense.  In his Rambler essay for August 7, 1750, Dr. Johnson writes: “[T]he images which memory presents are of a stubborn and untractable nature, the objects of remembrance have already existed, and left their signature behind them impressed upon the mind, so as to defy all attempts of erasure or of change.”   In other words, people and places persist in memory as we knew them, not as they are. Inevitably, there’s a clash of expectation and reality. The old map is no longer reliable. Familiar scenes seem somehow “wrong,” not quite accurate. Johnson understands this discordance, though he was only forty when writing his essay:   “The time of life, in which memory seems particularly to claim predominance over the other faculties of the mind, is our declining age. It has been remarked by former writers, that old men are generally narrative, and fall easily into recitals of past transactions, and accounts of persons known to them in their youth. When we approach the verge of the grave it is more eminently true . . .”