Larkin's Blues: Jazz, Popular Music, and Poetry (review)

REVIEWS among sculpture and literature, during roughly the first half of the period in question: the pervasive 'dream ofstone,' that saw literature as a heroic enterprise, analogous to the public monument in its grandeur and potential durability. This vision—manifest in the monumental ambitions of nineteenth-century authors (roughly Chateaubriand to Proust), the extraordinary apotheosis ofVictor Hugo's state funeral, or the scores ofmonuments erected to authors around Hiefin-de-siècle —declined irrevocably in the wake of the First World War, yet vestiges have persisted in French literary culture, from leather-bound Pléiade editions to the would-be immortals ofthe Académie Française. In addition to these shortcomings, there is some unevenness in both content and style, including some careless copyediting (e.g. "justaposition" [10], or "connected together" [203]), and unfortunate remnants ofthe contributions' original, oral form (e.g. "To sum up," as a one-'sentence' paragraph [132]). On the whole, however, the volume is a useful one that, in asking more worthwhile questions than it purports to answer, invites further reflection in this long-neglected yet promising field, so rich in its potential for interdisciplinary inquiry. Michael D. GarvalNorth Carolina State University B.J. LEGGETT. Larkin 's Blues: Jazz, Popular Music, and Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. ix + 227 pp. After writing extensively on Wallace Stevens, B.J. Leggett turns to one ofthe more provocative figures in twentieth-century poetry, Philip Larkin. Leggett makes no attempt to redeem a poet whose stock plummeted in the 1990s after the publication of a volume ofhis letters and Andrew Motion's biography. Although revelations in both books about Larkin's sordid ways with women shocked many ofLarkin's readers, some werejust as disturbed to discover that Larkin may actually have been a philistine rather than a cultivated man ironically hiding behind that persona. Reading Larkin's poetry alongside his jazz writings, Leggett finds the sources for that Philistinism, and although he makes no excuses for the poet's values, he explains Larkin's anti-modemist stance with a good deal of compassion. For Leggett's Larkin, the music made by exuberant Americans in the 1920s and 30s is about as good as it gets, even though it remains hopelessly outside the world of a dour British librarian: what is best in life is always happening somewhere else. Except perhaps in his poems, Larkin aired his own unique poetics most extensively in hisjazz writings. The introduction to All WhatJazz, his collected record reviews from the 1960s, is one of the most stinging attacks ever launched on modemjazz. Although he grew up under the spell of"the great coloured pioneers and their eager white disciples"—Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Muggsy Spanier , Pee Wee Russell, et al.—Larkin despised Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and virtually everyone who followed them (Larkin , All WhatJazz: A Record Diary [New York: Farrar Straus, 1985], 31). Nevertheless , Larkin often praised Parker and the beboppers in his published reviews. Most memorably, he responded to those critics who heard Parker's innovations as a mere reaction to the platitudes of the old big band jazz. "As well call leaping salmon a reaction," Larkin wrote (All What Jazz, 41-42). Only later when Larkin added an introduction to his collected reviews did he disavow such generous characterizations ofjazz modernists. Vol. 26 (2002): 158 THE COMPAKATIST Leggett persuasively argues that more attention be paid to what Larkin said as a working reviewer rather than to the metacommentary in the introductory remarks, pointing out that Larkin ultimately took up the cudgel against bebop and its aftermath as part ofa larger attack on modernism in the other arts. "Parker, Pound, and Picasso" was his alliterative shorthand for all those twentieth-century artists whose sterile pursuit ofmere technique led them to abandon the large audience that had once taken great pleasure in pre-modem poets, painters, and musicians. The attack does not hold up, but it suited Larkin's goals as a writer ofpoetry and criticism. In his anti-modernism, Larkin labored to address "common readers" who once relaxed with a volume of Thomas Hardy or a 78 rpm recording of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. While...