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Thursday 31 January 2013

The Write Advice 029: ANNIE PROULX


A lot of the work I do is taking the bare sentence that says what you sort of want to say — which is where a lot of writers stop — and making it into an arching kind of thing that has both strength and beauty.  And that is where the sweat comes in.  That can take a long time and many revisions.  A single sentence, particularly a long, involved one, can carry a story forward.  I put a lot of time into them.  Carefully constructed sentences cast a tint of indefinable substance over a story.

The Art of Fiction #199 [The Paris Review #188, Spring 2009)

 

 

Use the link below to read more about the work of North American novelist ANNIE PROULX:

 

https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Annie-Proulx/8544

 

 

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The Write Advice 043: DORIS LESSING

 
The Write Advice 041: MAYA ANGELOU

 
The Write Advice 039: DEBORAH EISENBERG

 

Thursday 24 January 2013

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) by GEORGE MEREDITH


Random House/Modern Library edition, c 1940



 

 

'In our House, my son, there is peculiar blood.  We go to wreck very easily.  It sounds like superstition, –– I cannot but think we are tried as most men are not.  I see it in us all.  And you, my son, are compounded of two races.  Your passions are violent.  You have had a taste of Revenge: You have seen, in a small way, that the Pound of Flesh draws rivers of Blood.  But there is now in you another power.  You are mounting to the Table-land of Life, where mimic battles are changed to real ones.  And you come upon it laden equally with force to create and to destroy.'  He deliberated to announce the intelligence, with deep meaning:  'There are women in the world, my son!'



 

 

The NovelSir Austin Feverel, Baronet, is the owner of Raynham Abbey, a stately manor 'in a certain Western County folding Thames: a man of wealth, and honour, and a somewhat lamentable history.'  His wife has left him, run off with his best friend, the poet Diaper Sandoe.  His only consolations are his infant son, Richard, and the book of witty aphorisms he has recently had published under the pseudo-religious title The Pilgrim's Scrip –– a philosophical work intended to illuminate the System of 'scientific humanism' he has invented with the aim of preventing other men from falling into the trap of allowing their emotions to overwhelm their reason.

 

Sir Austin's book makes him famous, especially among the creatures –– women – he neither understands nor can ever fully bring himself to trust again.  Determined that Richard should not grow up to repeat his mistakes, he diligently applies his System to the boy's education, deliberately keeping his son separated from the mass of humanity in the belief this will make him a creature of reason and morality and prevent him from falling victim to treacherous female tricks.  He is particularly determined to keep Richard away from girls of his own age, believing that the only 'sure' way to protect him from his inherited male 'weaknesses' is to raise him in a completely male-dominated environment, with each phase of his social, physical and emotional development planned for in advance and overseen exclusively by himself. 

 

The System proves to be effective until Richard reaches adolescence, making him strong-willed if rather arrogant boy who is blessed (or should that be cursed?) with an inflexible sense of right and wrong.  Cracks begin to show when he meets Lucy Desborough, the beautiful niece of the irascible Farmer Blaize whose hayrick he deliberately set fire to as a child after being chastised (and rightly so) for shooting at game birds on the farmer's land.  Richard falls deeply in love with Lucy and declares his intention to marry her –– a plan, needless to say, Sir Austin finds shocking if not downright abominable.  Richard is so respectful of his father, so much in awe of his status as the universally adored author of The Pilgrim's Scrip, that he agrees to give Lucy up and move to London to gain some experience of the world beyond the socially limited confines of Raynham.  By sending him away, Sir Austin hopes to train him to forget Lucy and marry someone more suitable to his own lofty station in life.  Again, Sir Austin's plan succeeds, but only until Richard receives word that Lucy –– who in the meantime has been packed off to a French convent to complete her education has been betrothed to her boorish cousin and is set to marry him upon her return from France.

 

Richard acts upon this information and, in doing so, reveals the hypocritical self-absorption that underpins the ridiculous philosophy Sir Austin has created and foolishly expects the boy to live by.  With the help of his childhood friend Ripton and his former nurse, now turned London landlady Mrs Berry, Richard is reunited with Lucy and marries her in secret, fleeing to the Isle of Wight with her before their marriage can be legally annulled.  His father is predictably shattered by this news and refuses to see him or have anything to do with his new daughter-in-law.  Yet Richard still craves his approval and, with the help of his uncles and Sir Austin's most devoted female admirer, Mrs Blandish, returns to London hoping to arrange a reconciliation, leaving his young bride to fend for herself until he sends word that it is safe to rejoin him.  

 

Sir Austin stands firm in his refusal to see Richard, driving his confused and penitent son into the arms of another woman –– the same type of beautiful society 'enchantress' whose clutches his own deeply flawed System was designed to shield him from.  Meanwhile, the innocent Lucy, alone and missing her husband dreadfully, nearly succumbs to a failed seduction attempt from which she is rescued, just in the nick of time, by the ever-faithful Mrs Berry.  Husband and wife are reunited, while father and son are eventually reconciled when Sir Austin learns that he's soon to become a grandfather.  But there are clouds on the horizon.  Richard's guilt at what he perceives to be his unforgivable betrayal of Lucy prompts him to confess his infidelity to her.  Lucy forgives him, but is forced to say goodbye to him again so he can go off and fight a duel with the man, Sir Austin's old friend Lord Mountfalcon, whose plan to seduce her was foiled by Mrs Berry.

 

 

Penguin Classics UK, 1998

 

 

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is a classic three volume Victorian novel, filled with surprising (some might even call them ludicrous) plot twists and larger-than-life characters whose exploits grab you by the throat and refuse to let you go for close to six hundred rivetting, action-packed pages.  It is also one of the funniest and most ironic explorations of the parent-child relationship ever written and marks the birth, according to Meredith's great admirer JB Priestley, of the modern English novel.  

 

Unlike his more famous contemporary Charles Dickens, Meredith never allows his characters –– even the relatively minor ones like Richard's hypochondriac uncle Hippias, Sir Austin's gloomy butler Heavy Benson or the loyal but brokenhearted Mrs Berry –– to descend to the level of caricature.  He's careful to make their behaviour –– whether it be loyal, ardent, humorous, parasitic, misogynistic or wilfully blind –– psychologically credible even when the twists and turns of the plot suggest he may be pushing the boundaries of novelistic verisimilitude a tad too far.  The 'ordeal' Richard undergoes is not so much the System his father invents and selfishly subjects him to (an injurious enough tactic in itself), but rather his father's thinly disguised paranoia, misanthropy and misogyny.  

 

In seeking to prevent Richard from being 'controlled' by his emotions, Sir Austin makes himself his son's controller, placing the boy in an untenable position which threatens to destroy not only his happiness but also that of Lucy and his own newborn grandchild.  Richard becomes the scapegoat for Lady Feverel's reckless desertion of her husband, a guinea-pig used to test theories which are the product of an event he played no role in and had no means of predicting or preventing.  He is watched and studied by Sir Austin, his behaviour endlessly probed and analysed for any signs of weakness or dissent, but he does not really learn to live until he begins to make his own decisions and, inevitably, his own mistakes.  Are we the property of our parents, Meredith asks, or should our first duty be to ourselves and, by extension, to those we in turn choose to make the objects of our heart's devotion?  

 

It is no surprise that the book was banned for obscenity by Mudie's Circulating Library, then the most powerful book distribution organisation in England and one upon which every novelist, good or bad, was utterly dependent if he or she expected to earn a reasonable living from their work (meagre though that living may have been).  Few things would have seemed more 'obscene' to the Victorian male mind than the notion that a man's wife and children were not his personal property to be exploited, abused, tormented and oppressed as he saw fit.  Today we would probably classify the ordeal Richard Feverel is forced to undergo as a subtle but irreparably damaging form of child abuse, a philosophy of denial and repression that's as impractical as it is misguided and morally bankrupt

 

 

 


GEORGE MEREDITH, 1863

 

 

 

The Writer:  The defining moment of George Meredith's life came in 1858, when his wife Mary ran off with his friend, the painter Henry Wallis.  The marriage, which had been faltering for some time, had never been a particularly happy or rewarding one, with neither partner feeling they had received enough love or support from the other.  While Meredith never forgave his wife for deserting him –– she only lived another three years, having been abandoned by Wallis in the meantime – the pain her actions caused was something he was able to put to effective use in his work, particularly in the best-known of his poems, the devastatingly honest sonnet cycle published in 1862 under the irony laden title Modern Love. 

 

Meredith was born in the English city of Portsmouth on 12 February 1828.  His mother died when he was five and his father, a tailor who had inherited nothing from his own father except a failing naval outfitter's shop (which Lord Nelson allegedly once patronized), was forced to move to London to earn his living, sending George to the country to be cared for by relatives until he was fourteen, when he was sent to boarding school in Germany.  The two years Meredith spent at the Moravian school at Neuwied-am-Rhein – the only formal education he would ever receive – were probably the happiest of his life, instilling in him a love of rationality, self-respect and all things Teutonic.

 

On his return to London, Meredith was apprenticed to a solicitor named Richard Charnock.  Charnock was more interested in literature than the law and encouraged his young apprentice in his desire to become a published poet.  He also introduced Meredith to his own literary friends like Edward 'Ned' Peacock, son of eccentric poet and novelist (and friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley) Thomas Love Peacock.  Ned Peacock and Meredith founded a self-published magazine together called The Monthly Observer.  It was in this magazine that Meredith's earliest poems appeared.  His friendship with Ned Peacock also resulted in him meeting his future bride – Peacock's beautiful, witty and recently widowed sister Mary.  

 

 

GEORGE and ARTHUR MEREDITH, c 1860

 

 

The couple married in 1849, when Meredith was twenty-one and Mary was twenty-nine. Despite producing a child together – his name was Arthur and he was born in 1853 –– the Merediths found themselves frequently at odds with each other as their equally demanding personalities, Mary's many miscarriages and their unpromising financial circumstances combined to gradually but irrevocably extinguish whatever faint spark of love may have once burned between them.  During this period, Meredith struggled to support his family (Mary had a previous child, a daughter, by her first husband) by publishing the occasional poem, essay and article in literary magazines.  He also wrote translations of German literature which likewise failed to earn him much in the way of ready cash.

 

His first self-published book of poetry, Poems, appeared in 1851 and four years later he published his first novel, the satirical fantasy The Shaving of Shagpat.  Although it was generally well-reviewed, the novel was not popular – a situation that repeated itself with his second novel, Farina, published in 1857 and with his third, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, its subsequent banning by Mudie's guaranteeing that it would not be widely read.  It was only with the publication of his fourth novel, Evan Harrington, that Meredith was able to earn anything resembling a steady income from his writing.

 

In 1860 he was offered the job of reader for the London publishing firm of Chapman and Hall.  He kept the job for the next thirty-four years, personally reading and evaluating every new fiction manuscript submitted to the company, which in time would include the first novels of Samuel Butler, George Gissing and his most famous 'discovery,' fellow poet turned novelist Thomas Hardy.  He advised Hardy to destroy his first novel and write one with a stronger plot –– advice, Hardy could not resist the urge to point out toward the end of his life, which Meredith himself had blithely and consistently ignored throughout his career, writing novels – including his masterpieces The Egotist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885) –– in which the plot was often subordinate to the older writer's interest in exploring the finer points of philosophy, psychology and the controversial (and, it should be remembered, highly unpopular) cause of female emancipation.  It was one of the great ironies of Meredith's character that, while he was genuinely fond of women and wrote sympathetically of their plight as a repressed underclass in a male-dominated society, he remained, outwardly at least, a typical Victorian male in his dismissive everyday treatment of them.  It was only in his work, it seems, that he was able to confront and express his true feelings about women and the socially, politically and morally compromised positions England's patriarchy continued to place them in.

 

Meredith remarried in 1864 and settled at Box Hill, near Dorking, which was to remain his home for the rest of his life.  Unlike his first marriage, his second marriage was successful, perhaps because he chose –– in the thoroughly domesticated Marie Vuillamy –– a wife who was willing to put his needs first and meekly accept his desire to be in charge of every aspect of their lives.  The success of Diana of the Crossways brought him financial independence, while his job at Chapman and Hall continued to bring him into contact with many of the leading writers of the late Victorian period, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf) and Robert Louis Stevenson.  While his later novels are not considered the equal of earlier novels like The Egotist in terms of their comedic tone and biting social commentary, he nevertheless found himself cast in the role of the 'Grand Old Man of English Letters' as both critics and the English reading public began to appreciate his message that ego does more to harm humanity than war, disease and our collective stupidity combined.

 

 

GEORGE MEREDITH, c 1890

 

 

Marie Meredith died in 1886, followed in 1890 by Arthur, the writer's son by his first wife.  Increasingly crippled in his later years by the degenerative spinal disease locomotor ataxia, Meredith nevertheless continued to entertain a steady stream of visitors who dutifully made the pilgrimmage to Box Hill each year to pay homage to him.  Nor did the declining state of his health prevent him from receiving the Order of Merit, succeeding Tennyson as President of the Society of Authors or overseeing a new collected edition of his work prior to his death, at the age of eighty-one, on 18 May 1909.  His last book was a new collection of poems titled, fittingly enough, Last Poems.  One of the more interesting comments on his work came from Oscar Wilde, another Victorian poet (and occasional novelist) whose unorthodox social views were similarly ahead of their time if, in Wilde's case, far more damaging to him personally and professionally.  'Who can define him?' the soon to be disgraced Irishman asked in his famous 1891 essay The Decay of Lying.  'His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.'   

 

 
 
Use the links below to read a free online selection of poems by GEORGE MEREDITH and obtain a free digital copy of The Ordeal of Richard Feveral:
 
 
 
 
 


 

 

 

The standard biography is The Ordeal of George Meredith by LIONEL STEVENSON, published in 1953.  An interesting (and controversial in its time) critical biography by a young JB PRIESTLEY, simply titled George Meredith, was published by Macmillan and Company in 1926.

 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 19 September 2021

 

Thursday 17 January 2013

Poet of the Month 002: MARIANNE MOORE


MARIANNE MOORE
c 1918





 
 
 
 
SILENCE



 

My father used to say,
'Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
or the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self-reliant like the cat
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint'.
Nor was he insincere in saying, 'Make my house your inn'.
Inns are not residences.
                                                                                    

 
(1924)   




 
 

Marianne Moore was born in Missouri on 15 November 1887, attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and worked briefly as a teacher in that state before relocating to New York where she became –– along with her friends Ezra Pound, HD (the pseudonym of Hilda Doolittle) and Wallace Stevens –– one of the most striking and talked about of the 'new' North American poets.  She was also an avid baseball fan and was once invited by the Ford Motor Company to contribute potential names for a new model it was planning to produce, none of which – Mongoose Civique, Varsity Stroke, Utopian Turtletop – it chose to use.  (I can't imagine why.  Is 'the Edsel' really a better name for a car than 'the Utopian Turtletop'?)  She won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and wrote the liner notes for I Am The Greatest!, a 1964 poetry album by Muhammad Ali (when he was still known as Cassius Clay), before dying of a brain aneurysm on 5 February 1972.

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of MARIANNE MOORE (plus a few more of her poems):

 

 

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/marianne-moore

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 051: MARIANNE MOORE 

 

 
Poet of the Month 035: EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY


 
Think About It 012: RUMER GODDEN

 

 

 

Last updated 18 March 2021 

 

Thursday 10 January 2013

The Write Advice 028: IAN McEWAN


Well, the joy [of writing] is infrequent.  Sometimes one just hits those easy stretches, moments of extended felicity when every sentence tells you how to write the next oneIn the course of a single novel, maybe it happens, if I’m lucky, a dozen times in two yearsAnd then the rest of the time –– for me, it would be ridiculous to call it joyBut it would be wrong and self-dramatizing to call it agonyMore like a brute determination to push on, but often against the grain, something that makes me not want to not doI was reading a book about consciousness the other day, and the very first sentence said something like ‘My mind appears to have a mind of its own.Which I rather likedBecause every time I try to get on with my work, my mind wanders –– I’m always standing up and fleeing from it, as though it’s almost too muchOr do I mean too little?  I don’t even think I know.

Interview [Vanity Fair, April 2005]

 


Use the link below to visit the website of British writer IAN McEWAN:


https://www.ianmcewan.com/

   

 

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The Write Advice 045: AMY HEMPEL

 
The Write Advice 039: DEBORAH EISENBERG

 
The Write Advice 038: NICK HORNBY

 

Thursday 3 January 2013

J is for Jazz 006: CHARLES MINGUS


CHARLES MINGUS 
1959



 

For God’s sake, rid this society of some of the noise so that those who have ears will be able to use them some place listening to good music. When I say good I don’t mean that today’s music is bad because it is loud. I mean the structures have paid no attention to the past history of music.  Nothing is simple. It’s as if people came to Manhattan and acted like it was still full of trees and grass and Indians instead of concrete and tall buildings. It’s like a tailor cutting clothes without knowing the design, it’s like living in a vacuum and not paying attention to anything that came before you.

 

CHARLES MINGUS 
from the liner notes for
Let My Children Hear Music 
(1971)


 

 

As a young man growing up in the black Los Angeles neighbourhood of Watts, Charles Mingus dreamed of becoming a cellist and performing with one of the world's great symphony orchestras.  It was the classical world's loss and the jazz world's gain that color prejudice prevented him from following this unorthodox career path.  He went on to become a virtuoso of the double bass and one of the most uncompromisingly original North American composers of jazz or of any other style of music of all time. 

 

Charles Mingus Jr was born on 22 April 1922 on a US army base in Nogales, Arizona.  His father and stepmother relocated to Watts when he was still very young and this was where he attended school and discovered what, by his teenage years, had become his life's ruling passions – the cello, the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach and Claude Debussy, gospel music and jazz.  Like his future role model Duke Ellington, much of what Mingus composed and recorded was an attempt to combine the 'high art' of classical music with the down home, blues-based 'soul' of black jazz and gospel music.  Rhythmically driving and melodically complex, his music was also intense, demanding and, at times, heartbreakingly tender.  Playing it, either live or in the recording studio, continually challenged him (and the musicians he hired) to push harder and dig deeper, venerating the jazz tradition even as he occasionally sought to question and subvert it.




WEDNESDAY NIGHT PRAYER MEETING       
CHARLES MINGUS [bass]; 
JACKIE McLEAN, JOHN HANDY [alto saxophone];      
BOOKER ERVIN [tenor saxophone]; 
PEPPER ADAMS [baritone saxophone]    
JIMMY KNEPPER, WILLIE DENNIS [trombone];     
HORACE PARLAN, MAL WALDRON [piano]    
DANNIE RICHMOND [drums]  
From the 1959 Atlantic LP  
Blues and Roots
     

 
 
At the age of six Mingus began to learn the cello, but was hampered in his study of the instrument by uncooperative teachers who felt it pointless to devote too much time to a black student who, in the pre-civil rights era, had no chance of going on to pursue a successful concert career.  As a consequence of this openly prejudicial attitude, Mingus was not taught to read music properly and allegedly had to teach himself to do so, further limiting his chances of gaining acceptance as a classical performer.  This lack of formal training did not, however, prevent him from composing his own music.  By the age of twenty he had already composed several highly-sophisticated pieces of so-called 'concert music,' including the piece Half Mast Inhibition which he would later record, with Gunther Schuller conducting, on his 1960 Mercury LP Pre-Bird.         

 
Some time in 1937 Mingus switched to double bass and began taking lessons from the legendary jazz bassist/tuba player Red Callender.  It was Callender who encouraged him to take further bass lessons from Herman Rheinschagen, former principal bassist of the New York Philharmonic, and composition lessons from LA-based jazz/gospel composer Lloyd Rees.  Callender also worked as a session musician for most of the leading black musicians of late 1930s and early 1940s – Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Erroll Garner and Nat Cole to name just a few – and under his tutelage Mingus went from being a promising if temperamental student to being a highly sought after if temperamental prodigy.  
 
 
In 1943, following a brief stint in the band of New Orleans legend Barney Bigard, Mingus joined Louis Armstrong's big band –– a job which ended when the young bassist made it clear to his bandmates that he would definitely not be taking any racist crap from white people when the band toured the south.  This was far from being the last controversial statement that Mingus would make –– statements which, in later years, would earn him the enmity of concert promoters, impolite audiences and even uncommitted fellow musicians who refused to give him and his music the full quota of respect he felt they were entitled to.          

 
Mingus made his first record in 1945 as a member of Russell Jacquet's sextet and his second a few months later as a member of a band led by influential be-bop trumpeter Howard McGhee.  Perhaps frustrated by the lack of creative input that was the bane of being a sideman, he joined Lionel Hampton's band in 1947, contributing tunes and several fine arrangements to its repertoire until this too began to stifle him creatively.  (Hampton wanted to record his tune Mingus Fingers but would only do so, his wife told Mingus, if the bassist agreed to sign all his rights in the composition over to the bandleader in perpetuity.  It was a common practice at the time but one the always feisty Mingus resented and characteristically refused to accept.)  He continued to perform with a variety of small bands – sometimes led by other musicians and sometimes led by himself performing as 'Baron Von Mingus' – until 1950, when he joined a trio consisting of himself on bass, Tal Farlow on guitar and Red Norvo on vibes.  It was with this group that he firmly established his reputation as a bass virtuoso, astonishing club audiences and record buyers alike with his fluid, piano-influenced fingering technique and soulful, gospel-tinged phrasing.  He left the group in 1951 –– he got sick of it being boycotted by white club owners who failed to realize that, unlike Farlow and Norvo, he was black –– and moved to New York City.
 
 
        
THIS CAN'T BE LOVE 
RED NORVO TRIO
TAL FARLOW (guitar); 
RED NORVO (vibraphone);       
CHARLES MINGUS (bass)
From the 1951 Realm LP  
Move     



 

New York was where Mingus really came into his own as a performer and a composer.  He played with most of the city's best musicians, including Billy Taylor, Art Tatum and Stan Getz, and soon came to the attention of be-bop pioneers Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach.  It was with them that he performed, on 15 May 1953, at Toronto's Massey Hall –– one of the most famous concerts in jazz history and one which was thankfully recorded for posterity by the new label Debut Records which Mingus and Max Roach had recently co-founded.  (Although their primary aim was to record the wealth of unknown and unrecorded African-American jazz talent, the two volume 10 inch set Jazz at Massey Hall would become Debut's biggest-selling release.)  Co-running a record label did not prevent Mingus from participating in New York's Jazz Composer's Workshop or starting his own workshop, which he dubbed the Jazz Workshop, where he could test and rehearse his increasingly complex compositions with musicians –– white trombonist Jimmy Knepper and an up-and-coming young black saxophonist named Eric Dolphy among them –– whose musicianship was equal to what could sometimes prove to be a very demanding task. 1953 also saw him accept an offer to join the orchestra of his idol Duke Ellington – an experiment that ended with him being fired following an on-stage argument with valve trombonist Juan Tizol.  He was reputedly the only musician ever to be fired in person by the bandleader, who normally preferred to leave such tasks to his manager.    


 
Mingus himself was no stranger to the idea of firing musicians.  On several occasions he did so in the middle of performances, ordering them to leave the stage when they lacked either the skill or the will to meet his musical expectations.  He once punched his close friend the trombonist Jimmy Knepper in the mouth during an argument sparked by Knepper's refusal to take on more arranging work for an important concert he was planning.  The punch broke two of Knepper's teeth and permanently affected his embouchure, subsequently robbing him of the ability to play in the top octaves of his instrument.  He charged Mingus with assault, and while the incident and the suspended jail sentence Mingus received for it caused a rift in their friendship they continued to work together up till Mingus's death. 

 
Violence, it seems, was as much a part of the composer's life and personality as it was of his music, an outlet for the festering rage provoked by the racism he encountered – despite having English, Scottish and even Chinese ancestors – from whites and blacks alike (some blacks took issue with him for appointing himself their 'spokesman' when he was so light-skinned) and angrily refused to ignore.  This anger was reflected in many of the deliberately provocative titles he gave to his compositions –– Fables of Faubus (named after Governor Orval Faubus who tried to block the desegregation of Arkansas' segregated school system in 1957), Remember Rockefeller at Attica (named after New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller who, in 1971, sent the State Police into Attica State Prison to end a riot, resulting in the deaths of thirty-nine people) and Dear Lord Don't Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me (the meaning of which should be obvious). The flipside of his natural belligerence was a gift for irony and satire, reflected in titles like If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger There'd Be A Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers and All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother the latter perhaps an oblique reference to the period he spent under observation in the psychiatric ward of New York's Bellevue Hospital.
 
 


  
 DON'T LET THEM DROP THAT ATOMIC BOMB ON ME
 CHARLES MINGUS [piano, vocal]; 
ROLAND KIRK [ tenor saxophone, flute, siren etc]
BOOKER ERVIN [tenor saxophone]; 
JIMMY KNEPPER [trombone]
DOUG WATKINS [bass]; 
DANNIE RICHMOND [drums]
From the 1962 Atlantic LP  
Oh Yeah
 

 
 
Mingus's career reached its peak between the years 1956 and 1963, during which time he recorded the bulk of what are now considered to be his classic albums for a variety of labels including Atlantic, Columbia, Impulse, Mercury and RCA.  Always prolific, he astonished fans and critics with the sheer quantity of material he managed to compose, record and release during this amazingly fertile period –– a period which saw the release of now-classic LPs like Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956) The Clown (1957), Tijuana Moods (1957), Mingus Ah-Um (1959), Tonight at Noon (1961) and what many consider to be his dual masterpieces Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (1963) and its successor, his 'ballet for big band' titled The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963).  A trio album Money Jungle, recorded with Duke Ellington and Max Roach in 1962, proved to be another highlight (and incidentally featured some of the  
most compelling small group piano performances ever recorded by Ellington).  

 
With each new project Mingus seemed to take everything he had previously accomplished as a bassist and composer and build on it, breaking new compositional ground as he boldly combined elements of flamenco and even mariachi music with jazz, gospel, extended spoken word recitations (often with psychological or civil rights themes) and several of the more avant-garde elements of modern so-called 'art' music.  Many of his albums also featured striking new versions of Ellington material, including classic tunes like Take The 'A' Train, Flamingo and Mood Indigo.  Mingus's love of and deep respect for the jazz tradition were also evident in the fine tribute pieces he wrote in honour of dead musicians like Lester Young and in pieces like My Jelly Roll Soul which saw him playfully re-invent 1920s jazz for a contemporary audience.
 
 




GOODBYE PORK PIE HAT
CHARLES MINGUS [bass];   
JOHN HANDY [alto saxophone]    
BOOKER ERVIN [tenor saxophone]; 
SHAFI HADI [alto saxophone] 
WILLIE DENNIS [trombone];   
HORACE PARLAN [piano]  
DANNIE RICHMOND [drums]    
From the 1959 Columbia LP  
Mingus Ah-Um
  


 

Unfortunately, the bassist's unwavering insistence on retaining his artistic freedom, plus several poor business decisions which saw his efforts to create and promote a 'musician managed' alternative to the Newport Jazz Festival fail due to lack of money and foresight, meant that he was in severe financial trouble by 1966 – trouble compounded by his failure to find a publisher for his (largely fictional) 'tell-all' autobiography Beneath The Underdog and his ongoing personal, psychological and weight problems.  (He was married five times, finally and most successfully to Sue Graham, who now runs the Jazz Workshop he started and has made it her life's work to ensure that his music is still regularly performed by contemporary ensembles like The Mingus Orchestra, the Mingus Big Band and Mingus Dynasty.)  While he continued to record into the 1970s –– the albums Reincarnation of a Lovebird and Let My Children Hear Music are two notable standouts from this era –– he was increasingly hampered by ill health, obesity and, from 1977 onwards, by the degenerative neurological condition known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Motor Neurone Disease or 'Lou Gehrig's Disease') which, by 1978, had robbed him of the ability to play the bass.          

 

His final project, which he did not live to complete, was a collaboration with folk/pop singer Joni Mitchell titled Mingus, featuring Mitchell performing her own lyrics to several of his most famous compositions.  The album was released in June 1979, six months after Mingus's death in Mexico on 5 January of that same year.   Thanks to the efforts of his widow and many of his former collaborators, his legacy did not die with him.  The performance of Epitaph at Lincoln Center in 1989 –– an inter-linked suite of nineteen of his most challenging pieces conducted by Gunther Schuller which appeared as a double CD the following year – marked the beginning of what has proven to be an ongoing revival of interest in his music.      

 

To say that Charles Mingus was a musician ahead of his time would be a gross understatement.  He certainly was that, of course, but he was also uniquely of his time and like any truly great artist, be they a jazz musician or otherwise, eternal.  He never bowed to fashion and vociferously insisted that the true purpose of music was to express emotion, not to make money or gain fame for its creators.  He never stopped trying to express his own emotions as honestly, and as passionately, as he could.      
 

He summed it up best in An Open Letter to Miles Davis, published in the November 1955 issue of DownBeat

 

Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me.  I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever.  Music is, or was, a language of the emotions.  If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music, and I would begin to worry about my writing if such a person began to really like it.  My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil.  It's angry yet it's real because it knows it's angry.


 
 
 
Beneath The Underdog, the autobiography of CHARLES MINGUS, was originally published by Knopf in 1971 and has been reprinted several times.  It may still be available and remains essential reading for anyone interested in learning what inspired his music, the struggle for black civil rights and the history of jazz between the late 1930s and the fusion era.  Be warned, however, that it is less a factual document than a sometimes fanciful exploration of its author's opinions, hang-ups, hopes and fantasies.  Mingus: A Critical Biography by BRIAN PRIESTLEY is one of the better known and possibly still available 'straight' biographies.      

 
 
 
 
 
Use the link below to visit THE OFFICIAL CHARLES MINGUS WEBSITE created and maintained by his third wife SUE MINGUS:
 
 
 

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

 
 
 
 
 
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TRIUMPH OF THE UNDERDOG
1 hr 17 min documentary by DON McGLYNN about 
the extraordinary life and work of  
CHARLES MINGUS
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Last updated 2 October 2021 §