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Tuesday 26 June 2012

The Write Advice 015: MARGARET DRABBLE


If it’s all right, it’s all right.  Sometimes whole paragraphs or pages come out absolutely fine, and they come out very fast, which I’m sure is how Dickens used to write, just very, very fast.  They’re fine and you don’t need to look at them.  But then there are other bits, where what you were trying to do hasn’t worked out or that sound clumsy.  And sometimes if you work and work and work at a passage, you realize in the end that there’s something deeply wrong with it, and you’d better just throw it away.

Quoted in The Sound on the Page by BEN YAGODA (2004)



Use the link below to read an excerpt of a 1978 interview with British novelist and critic MARGARET DRABBLE:

 

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3440/the-art-of-fiction-no-70-margaret-drabble 


 

 

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The Write Advice 028: IAN McEWAN

 
The Write Advice 029: ANNIE PROULX

 
The Write Advice 042: ANNE FINE

Monday 18 June 2012

The Buddha Tree (1956) by FUMIO NIWA


Tuttle Classics, 2000


 

 

 

It was soon obvious to Mineyo that he was trying to keep away from her.  Then again –– it's too selfish to begin to avoid her so suddenly, he would remind himself.  Yet he no longer felt the temptation to take the easiest way, to give way wholly to his lust till it should free him at last by burning itself out.  There had been other such moments of repentance in the past; but on every occasion his courage had failed him, even when the break would have been easiest –– at the time of his marriage.  That was why he was still so weak even now, when his wife's flight, the result of all his previous failures, was forcing a decision upon him.

 



Translated by  
KENNETH STRONG  
(1966)




 

 

The NovelSoshu is a thirty-nine year old Buddhist priest of the True Pure Land Sect, whose Butsuoji temple is located in the small Japanese farming community of Tan'ami.  The clergy of this sect, which was founded by the 12th Century Buddhist saint Shinran, are permitted to marry, eat meat and live normal lives outside of their duties as priests, which include the regular reciting of sutras, or prayers, in the homes of parishioners who wish to honour their dead ancestors.  

 

Soshu is well-liked by his parishioners and considered a suitable guardian for the temple along with his wife Renko and mother-in-law Mineyo.  It was Mineyo, then a childless widow of thirty-four, who originally decided to adopt him into the temple family and pay for his education and ordination into the priesthood.  But her motives for doing so were less pure than they seemed.  She soon began to sleep with Soshu and, in time, arranged his marriage to Renko to ensure he would always be available to satisfy her lust.

 

Years pass and Renko gives birth to a son, Ryokun.  But all is not well within the self-enclosed world of the Butsuoji temple.  Renko, tired of Soshu's infidelity and his habit of ignoring her, seeks refuge in the arms of a famous kabuki actor and flees the claustrophobic life she's forced to live as a member of the temple family, leaving her son in the care of Mineyo who, at fifty-four, continues to seek sexual gratification from her reluctant, morally compromised lover.  Soshu is disgusted by the lust he feels for Mineyo but remains too weak-willed to end their affair, suffering continual attacks of guilt because he knows his behaviour makes him spiritually unworthy to advise his parishioners who, in their igonorance, continue to view him as their social and moral superior. 

 

The situation appears hopeless until Soshu meets Tomoko, a young widow who has recently moved to Tan'ami at the request of Yamaji, her wealthy businessman lover.  Tomoko hates Yamaji – a cruel man whose treatment of her borders on the bestial –– but is trapped, as is Soshu by the misperceptions of his congregation, by her dependence on her lover's generosity to keep her fed, clothed and housed.  Tomoko falls in love with Soshu, in whom she recognizes a kindred spirit desperate to regain his dignity and self-respect, and her feelings are eagerly returned.  Soshu dreams of marrying her –– in fact, his parishioners are anxious for him to remarry in the wake of Renko's flight from the temple –– but realizes he must marry one of their daughters as a means of retaining his position as the community's long-serving spiritual leader.  Doing this, however, will not only be a betrayal of the intense love he and Tomoko now feel for each other but will also result in Mineyo, whom he no longer despises and no longer has sexual relations with, being forced to leave Butsuoji to make way for his new bride.

 

Tomoko, in the meantime, has her own problems to confront.  Although her resolve has been strengthened by her love for Soshu, she finds herself unable to make a clean break with Yamaji, who continues to treat her like a whore in exchange for paying her bills and keeping a roof over her head.  Although she and Soshu are able to meet in secret and spend an evening together at an inn (where they resist the urge to have sex to protect their rediscovered purity), she still baulks at taking the irrevocable step of leaving Yamaji and abandoning everything his lust and, by extension, his wealth have given her.  They go on a trip together, during which Yamaji treats her more like his wife than his mistress, her pining for Soshu gradually diminishing as she realizes she will always lack the courage needed to abandon her supportive if domineering older lover.

 

Soshu, unaware of what Tomoko has finally admitted to herself, reaches an important decision while she's away.  He calls a special meeting for the purpose of making what he hints to his parishioners will be a very important announcement.  The announcement takes the form of a long and startling confession, in which he blames himself and Mineyo equally for their affair (which has been an open secret in the town for twenty years) and for driving his former wife Renko from the temple.  He tells his congregation that he can no longer serve as their priest because he's morally unworthy to hold such a respected position in the Tan'ami community.  He regains his dignity by publicly confessing his sins and privately renouncing his love for Tomoko who, lacking his willpower if not his honesty, chooses to place financial security and the needs of her young daughter above those of her own tortured heart.

 

This long, morally complex, occasionally melodramatic tale of lust, jealousy and unrequited love remains as strangely relevant today as it must have been in what was the still tradition-bound Japan of 1956.  The struggles Niwa depicts through the characters of Soshu and Tomoko –– between lust and renunciation, acceptance of human weakness and our clumsy efforts to deny it, the desire to preserve traditional values in the face of rampant materialism –– call into question the ongoing value of religion in societies, Occidental as well as Oriental, in which spirituality has become increasingly subordinate to the demands of the flesh and the self-interested seizing of the moment.  Soshu happens to be a Buddhist clergyman, but he could just as easily be a Baptist, a Catholic or a North American television evangelist, publicly preaching virtue while privately indulging in a life of sin his parishioners are fully aware of but willingly turn a blind eye to for the sake of making their own lives less complicated.  While The Buddha Tree is not an easy book to read (or even to find nowadays) –– it contains a lot of Buddhist theology which, while sometimes interesting in itself, isn't strictly essential to its plot –– its premise that a life of compassionate self-acceptance is preferable to a life of self-imposed damnation remains a difficult one to ignore.  

 

 

 


FUMIO NIWA, c 1945

 

 

 

The WriterBorn on 22 November 1904, Fumio Niwa was the descendant of a long line of Buddhist priests and, as the eldest son of the eldest son, was expected to carry on the tradition of temple life just as his ancestors had done for centuries before him.  After earning a degree in Japanese literature from Waseda University, Niwa dutifully returned to the family temple in the town of Yokkaichi and began to study for the priesthood –– studies he abandoned in 1932 so he could return to Tokyo and pursue a career as a writer.

 

He first rose to prominence with the story Ayu [Sweetfish], which was serialized in the literary magazine Bungei Shinju.  In 1933 he published his first novel, Zeiniku [Superfluous Flesh] – an erotic tale of an adulterous affair based on an affair he himself had recently concluded with a married woman.  It was to be the first of eighty novels, many of which, like Bodaiju [The Buddha Tree], drew their inspiration directly from the circumstances of his own, often very turbulent life.  The character of Renko in Bodaiju, for example, was based on his mother –– a woman who abandoned him and his clergyman father to run off with and eventually wed a kabuki actor.  Niwa's relationships with women were forever clouded by this childhood trauma and perhaps explain his incredible success as a seducer in his adult years.  The character of Ryokun –– the son and future heir to the priesthood who struggles to understand why his mother has fled the family home — was identified by many critics as being a realistic self-portrait of the writer during his own uncertain childhood.

 

Niwa served as a war correspondent during World War Two and in 1942 published the novel Kaisen [Naval Engagement], based on the time he spent aboard the Japanese flagship Chokai and his subsequent wounding during the battle for Savo Island.  The book, like its sequel Kaeranu Chutai [Lost Company], were both heavily censored by Japan's military government – neither the first nor the last time that Niwa's work would bring him into conflict with the authorities.  Although he feared he might be prosecuted as a war criminal during the US Army's post-war Occupation of Japan, Niwa was never arrested or even questioned by the country's temporary rulers.  He went on to win every major Japanese literary award and to serve for many years as the director of the Japanese Writer's Association –– a position that allowed him to purchase the land required to build a writer's cemetery and create a health fund to ensure his fellow authors would always have access to medical treatment when they needed it.

 

 

FUMIO NIWA, c 1960

 

 

Although Niwa's work was often criticized for what was seen as its immorality and its over-emphasis on the erotic side of life, it was his story Iyagarase no Nenrei [The Hateful Age], published in 1947, that proved to be his most controversial work of fiction.  Its depiction of a senile grandmother who becomes the bane of her family's lives went very much against the grain of Japanese society at the time, calling into question its long-standing traditions of venerating and caring for the elderly.  His attacks on post-war Japan's materialism and greed met with similar controversy.  His last great works were a five volume biography of the Buddhist saint Shinran and an eight volume life of Rennyo, a 15th Century Japanese monk who died during a pilgrimage to India.  The last of these works appeared when the author was well into his eighties.

 

Ironically, Niwa himself would live to be one hundred years old, dying from the combination of old age and Alzheimer's Disease on 20 April 2005.

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the (English) obituary of Japanese novelist FUMIO NIWA (1904-2005):

 

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/fumio-niwa-526422.html

 
 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 14 December 2023 §

 

Friday 1 June 2012

J is for Jazz 003: ANDREW HILL


ANDREW HILL 
1967
  





In listening to other people you absorb their thoughts, however unconsciously, and as I said, right now I have to concentrate on finding my own way.  If I were playing regularly, I could listen to records because I'd be able to find ways each night to apply what I hear in all kinds of different ways.  But since I'm not working regularly until I can get my own group going, I'm sort of forced into solitude.

 

ANDREW HILL
from the liner notes for 
Point of Departure, 1964




 

Throughout his career, Andrew Hill seemed to be the living embodiment of the hackneyed phrase 'ahead of his time.'  A composer of extraordinary gifts, not to mention a pianist of occasionally frightening virtuosity, he remains an enigmatic –– some might even say obscure –– figure in the history of modern jazz.  He was a victim, not of the alcoholism or drug addiction which compromised the talent and prematurely ended the lives of so many of his contemporaries, but of the fact that he was too original to be pigeonholed as easily as the critics and the jazz-buying public apparently needed their artists to be pigeonholed even at the height of the supposedly 'free' 1960s.

 




ODE TO VON (1963)
ANDREW HILL (piano)
RICHARD DAVIS (bass #1)
EDDIE KHAN (bass #2)
ROY HAYNES (drums)
Recorded 13 December 1963
From his second Blue Note LP  
Smokestack 

   

 

Hill was born in Chicago on 30 June 1937 (not in Haiti as he mischievously informed some critics early on in his career) and at a young age was already singing, playing the accordion and tap-dancing in talent shows while supplementing his family's meager income by selling newspapers on the street.  Earl 'Fatha' Hines, the great pianist who performed on several landmark sessions with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s, allegedly heard him perform at one of these amateur events and encouraged him to take up the piano.  By the age of thirteen he was leading what he described as his own 'baby band,' copying the solos of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Art Tatum – pianists who would all go on to serve as major influences on his own inimitable playing style –– note for complex note.

 
     

Warwick Records, 1955

 

 

In 1950 he was introduced to German-born composer Paul Hindemith who informally tutored him in composition and harmony for the next two years.  In 1953 he played his first professional gig, doubling on piano and baritone saxophone in the rhythm and blues outfit led by saxophonist Paul Williams.  (Williams's biggest claim to fame was performing a song called The Hucklebuck which inspired its own shortlived dance craze at the end of the 1940s.)  Hill subsequently played in many Chicago bands and also in the pick-up bands put together by visiting 'name' musicians like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins and Detroit-based pianist Barry Harris.  In 1955 he recordedSo In Love with the Sound of Andrew Hill, his first album as a leader, for the tiny independent Warwick label.  Copies of the LP, which featured an interesting mixture of standards and his own apprentice compositions, eventually became highly prized collector's items as only a few dozen were ever pressed before the company filed for bankruptcy.

      

In 1961 Hill's trio was hired to be the backing band for singer Dinah Washington and soon moved to New York City with her.  For the next two years, using New York as his base, he worked as a sideman for a variety of musicians including saxophonists Johnny Griffin, Clifford Jordan, Roland Kirk and Jackie McLean, trumpeter Kenny Dorham and singers Al Hibbler and Johnny Hartman.  It was in 1962, while working with Roland Kirk in Los Angeles, that he met Laverne Gillette, house organist at a club called the Red Carpet.  In 1963 they married and Hill took her back to New York with him, where Alfred Lion, the founder of Blue Note records, soon offered him a recording contract.  (Lion once described Hill as 'his last great protégé.')  Black Fire, Hill's first album for the label, was recorded in November of that year.  

 
     


PUMPKIN (1963)
ANDREW HILL (piano)
JOE HENDERSON (tenor sax)
RICHARD DAVIS (bass)
ROY HAYNES (drums)
Recorded 8 November 1963
From his first Blue Note LP
Black Fire



 
It wasn't until 1964 and the release of his fourth Blue Note album – the groundbreaking Point of Departure that Hill began to make his unique mark as a composer.  As Bob Blumenthal so aptly put it in his liner notes for the 1999 CD reissue of the album, the LP is '…even greater than the sum of its magnificent parts, because Hill prepared a program of music in which each composition both stood on its own and reinforced the larger statement.'  Hill's compositions are dark, turbulent and haunting, driven by a formidable rhythm section and marked by astonishingly inventive solos, possessing an elegance of form and structure almost unknown in the free-form experiments which had come to dominate jazz by the middle of the 1960s.  Each of the six musicians who feature on the album, including future superstars Eric Dolphy and Tony Williams, seemed to find their individual voices through their playing of Hill's matchless music, creating an album which is justifiably considered to be the pianist's masterpiece. 
 
  

     

DEDICATION (1964)
ANDREW HILL (piano)
KENNY DORHAM (trumpet);
ERIC DOLPHY (alto sax, flute)
JOE HENDERSON (tenor sax);
RICHARD DAVIS (bass)
ANTHONY WILLIAMS (drums)
Recorded 21 March 1964
From his fourth Blue Note LP  
Point of Departure
 

 

Hill continued to work for Blue Note until 1970, recording other classic LPs including Andrew!! (1964), Compulsion (1965) and Grass Roots (1968) in addition to the equally magnificent but unreleased Dance With Death (1968) and Passing Ships (1969) –– albums which inexplicably languished in the company's vaults, unheard, for close to thirty years.  In 1970, either unable or unwilling to re-sign with Blue Note, he accepted a post as Composer in Residence at Colgate University, which led to him joining a jazz performance program sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.  This allowed him to take the music into parts of North America –– rural areas, prisons, small culturally isolated towns –– which had rarely if ever been exposed to it before.  'I'm trying to make music a sensual expression,' he said, 'not an academic experiment.'  During this period, which ended with him taking his now terminally-ill wife to live in the small town of Pittsburg in northern California, he also found time to become an associate professor of music at Portland State University, play the occasional gig in both the United States and Europe, and record brand new group and solo albums for the independent Freedom, Steeplechase and East Wind labels.  He also traveled to Berkeley to record close to three hours' worth of new solo piano music, some of which was issued by the soon-to-be-defunct Artists House label in 1978.  These recordings show his music moving in a quieter but by no means less adventurous or insistently compelling direction.  (They were subsequently reissued by Mosaic Select as Andrew Hill–Solo in 2006 and rank among the greatest and most moving work of his career.)  

 

 

    

EAST 19TH STREET (2004)
ANDREW HILL (solo piano) 
The original version of this track appeared    
on the 1975 East Wind LP 
Hommage 



 

Following his wife's death in 1989, Hill returned to New York where it seemed that a long overdue re-appraisal of his work was set to begin.  The last eighteen years of his life were probably his busiest, with many new albums of new and sometimes re-visited material being released on a variety of labels both locally and internationally.  In 2005 he re-signed with Blue Note, which released what would be his final album Time Lines the following yearHe performed for the last time at Trinity Church in New York a month before his death in April 2007.  He was survived by his second wife Joanne Robinson Hill, a dancer and fellow music educator whom he married in 1992.    

 

The last word on Andrew Hill should rightfully belong to his friend Michael Cuscuna, the producer and jazz historian who compiled and wrote the liner notes for Mosaic's reissue of his complete 1960s Blue Note output:

although [Hill's] music had melody, harmony, and rhythm, his conception of each was so unique that he was categorized with the avant-garde.  This music was avant-garde in the strictest sense, but it was anything but free form.  As Monk was lumped into the be-bop movement because he was there, so was Andrew put into the freedom bag.  His music was free of cliché, but that was about the extent of it.

 
 
 
Use the links below to visit the ANDREW HILL website and read a 2006 interview he gave to the website All About Jazz to promote his final album Time Lines:
 
 
 
 
 
    

 
 
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.
 
 
 

 
ANDREW HILL, c 2002

 
 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 1 October 2021 §