Louis Dudek: Essays on His Works ed. by George Hildebrand (review)

humanities 533 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 beret, among other things, and he inspired a lot of writers to excel themselves. How fortunate that is. Interviews were the favoured form of jazz writing in Monk=s time, but Monk had little faith in words, and seldom used them. The few interviews that he sat still for were mostly notable for their vacuity (and five of them are included here, counting a >blindfold test,= which Monk fails miserably). There is a natural tendency for interviewers to try to edit Monk into articulateness, but the best interview by far, by Ira Gitler, is a straight report of their one-sided conversation that reveals B dramatizes, really B Monk=s maddening but apparently genuine diffidence whenever he was asked a question. Incisive commentaries and sharply drawn profiles more than make up for Monk=s own failings with words. Van der Bliek includes the celebrated essays (André Hodeir, Martin Williams, Whitney Balliett, three by Orrin Keepnews) but he has also dug up some obscure ones that shine light on Monk and should now join the list of essential reading (especially by Mary Lou Williams, Robert Kotlowitz, and Gary Elder). There is a judicious selection of contemporary reviews. Only two articles undertake technical analysis of Monk=s music, but one of them, by the pianist and professor Ran Blake, is comprehensive. The book is an indispensable resource for specialists and fans, but it will be a shame if they are its only readers. Van der Bliek reprints the Time magazine cover story on Monk from 1964 (>The Loneliest Monk=). Its supercilious tone appalled the jazz world at the time. (For starters, the Time man writes, >Aside from his hat and the incessant shuffle of his feet, he looks like a perfectly normal neurotic.=) Reading it again, after so many years, it seems like a pretty good popular introduction, pitched at intelligent readers and calculated to make them curious about Monk=s music, whatever their tastes coming into it. Armed with this book and a couple of Monk CDs (Brilliant Corners on Riverside, say, and Monk Alone on Columbia), a new generation of intelligent readers could keep Monk=s music rising as it has been ever since Monk=s bleak early days at Minton=s Playhouse in Harlem. (JACK CHAMBERS) George Hildebrand, editor. Louis Dudek: Essays on His Works Guernica. 134. $10.00 Louis Dudek=s reputation now enters its critical phase. The ten to fifteen years after his death will bring him the fuller acclaim he deserves or consolidate and finalize the indifference he faced while living. This volume, in production during the last months of his life, was not designed as the first entry in that posthumous assessment, but it will by sad chance be reviewed as such and has a special responsibility. It certainly makes plain the dearth of Dudek criticism to date. Editor George Hildebrand could hardly pick and choose, but he acknowledges a few discriminations, such as 534 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the exclusion of moderately useful criticism by Douglas Barbour and Terry Goldie in favour of ephemeral encomia from Tony Tremblay, Stewart Donovan, and Sonja Skarstedt. The two last mentioned were in Dudek=s coterie with Hildebrand in the last years of the poet=s life, and this gives the selection a clannish quality that should have been avoided, especially for the easy consensus it encourages. Dudek=s champions take their core principles from Frank Davey=s excellent Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster (1980) and repeat them with evident pride. That Dudek was a great poet and critic grossly neglected in his time is foremost of these, and almost all here affirm it (although the possibility of his greatness never occurred to Dorothy Livesay, the earliest commentator included). Second, that he showed remarkable courage in rejecting all forms of literary acclaim so as to remain true to his austere philosophical vision (see Michael Gnarowski=s biographical survey, Tremblay and Donovan=s reviews, and Hildebrand=s foreword). Third, that Dudek passionately and wisely advocated the >functionality= of poetry, which is a medium for the...