Illinois Books

I am intrigued by the continuing controversy over Aosdana's election to the office of Saoi of my cousin Francis Stuart, author of Black List. Francis is the cousin I didn't know I had, at least until last year. The family black sheep, the skeleton in the cupboard, he has been the family member that everyone found so hard to deal with that it was easier to deny his existence completely and since the war he has been written out of the family history, both in Burke's 1958 Landed Gentry of Ireland and in their 1978 Irish Family Records. It was not until I found the rather obscure 1930 family history "Three Hundred Years in Inishowen" by our mutual cousin Amy Young (nee Stuart) that I started to fill in the gaps and realised who he was. Francis has said (Irish Times,November 14, 1996, "Nothing But Doubt") that "the Stuart family, however, never forgave Francis's mother and blamed her for Henry's death." That's probably only a partial truth; rather, Henry's suicide shattered the family in ways that have resonated down the generations. The collective failure of the Stuart family, including, but not only, Francis, to integrate the trauma were surely a factor in the 1993 suicide of his and my cousin, travel writer Miles Clark, and so it continues. I confess I read Black List Section H at least in part neither as a literary masterpiece nor as a justification for Francis' wartime actions, but as a family history. Where he writes of how "he'd imagined his cousin Stella coming to his room at night to initiate him into the sexual mystery" I read of my godmother, later Stella Greer, who used to send me 5 quid at Christmas, and was said to be a bit of an old dragon. I presume she was the cousin whose love-letters Francis kept in the pigeon-holes of his roll-top desk at Rugby (Things to Live For (1934) ,page 17) and mentions again on the first page of Black List. And I suspect that, despite two marriages and a divorce, her cousin Francis was in some ways the unrecognised love of her life. I didn't meet her until she was eighty, but as Francis confirms, she must have been young once!

The claims against Francis of anti-semitism are a malicious nonsense. Francis's biographer J.H.Natterstad (Irish Writers series, 1974) notes that "There is no evidence whatever that he saw the Jew as part of an international conspiracy or as the incarnation of evil. Although he was not sympathetic to what he saw as the Jewish obsession with money, the Jew was, as the archetypal outcast, a natural ally and was treated as such in "Julie" (written in 1938, a year before he went to Germany). Natterstad also notes that at Rugby, "There were others, he discovered, who felt themselves outsiders, and they formed their own clique, which insulated them to some extent against the life around them: 'Well, we Irish and a Jew and a Pole,' he recalled, 'we made a little group, and it was good.' " Francis has said that "I have spoken and written several million words in my life. No one could ever point to a sentence of mine that was or is anti-Semitic." In fact he could go further than merely denying any expression of anti-semitism; he has firmly nailed his colours to the mast and they contain nary a shred of racial or other prejudice. The only circumstance in which I could imagine Francis being anti-Jew is if he went to live in Israel, when he would no doubt quickly identify with the downtrodden Palestinians.

But it should be remembered that Francis was not the only member of his family to spend the war in Germany, the other being his cousin's son, my uncle Bob Stewart-Moore. Bob,brought up on the same Queensland sheep station where Francis Stuart was born, and traumatised not by the suicide of Henry Stuart but by the accidental death an elder brother Henry Stewart-Moore, was in bombers, shot down over Germany and,rather than being "passionately involved in my own living fiction", as Francis Stuart claims to have been, spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war at Lamsdorf, some fifty kilometres from Auschwitz. He then walked 500 miles in three months through Poland and Germany in the middle of winter to freedom at the end of the war, eventually being picked up by American troops near Muhlhausen. The group of Australians with whom he was imprisoned recently published a book on the experience, titled "The RAAF POWS of Lamsdorf", which is certainly anything but fiction, and in it Bob recounts the experience of being shot down, crashing in the Elbe canal, getting out of the plane underwater, and being imprisoned by the Germans. Certainly a different way of entering Germany to that chosen by his cousin Francis! One can only hope that the account in Black List of Francis's meeting with a POW at Frankfurt is not a (heavily disguised) description of a wartime meeting with his cousin. The age is wrong, as is the nationality and the rank. In fact the flying boots are about the only thing that is right. But the overtly and quite unnecessarily sexual references he ascribes to Captain Manville are something that this encounter has in common with Francis's descriptions of his cousins Maida and Stella: Are they a device he has used to distance himself from a connection uncomfortably intimate? Do I read too much into this encounter, or are there some subjects too tough even for Francis Stuart's brutal brand of honesty? The Aosdána award seems richly deserved, awarded as it is on literary merit, and I congratulate him on it. But now that he has done the easy bit and made his peace with Ireland and the world, perhaps it's time Francis tried something a little more challenging, and started to reintegrate with his family, starting with Bob Stewart-Moore in Sydney? I would have given Francis a ten for a book that I found to be quite enthralling (and not only for the family connections), but subtract one point for what appears to be his apparent failure to confront this most difficult of issues.

I had the honor of having Dr. Clark as a professor at George Mason University. What seperates his work from a lot of others is that he just doesn't argue his point but shares it with you and challenges you to use your mind and think. A great read.

Black Metropolis is perhaps the founding document of African-American studies, a classic work of sociology that still resonates today. It is a paradigmatic expression of the Chicago School of sociology, however, a school that today stands in some disrepute, at least in some circles. Indirectly, it was the target of James Baldwin's famous attack on Richard Wright in his essay, Everybody's Protest Novel. The claim of the criticism has been that the Chicago School, due to its insistance upon using a "scientific approach", merely reproduces the very terms under which African-Americans have been oppressed--a claim that has proceeded under the warrant of European intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno. Still, Black Metropolis is a landmark study, and, unfortunately, many if not most of its observations and conclusions remain true today, and in fact it could be argued that conditions in the Black Belt of Chicago have gotten worse, not better, since 1945, the year of Black Metropolis' publication--which lends a certain credence to the criticisms mentioned above, though perhaps it should be qualified by saying that they are not so much criticisms of the Chicago School as they are criticisms of American society. Since then, as we know, we have witnessed a great shift in American public opinion away from what some consider to be the excesses of those days; so much so, in fact, that the work of Black Metropolis may again be regarded as a profoundly useful book. Embodying American liberalism as it does--which counted as a grave sin thirty years ago--Black Metropolis may possibly be due for a fresh look.

Excellent, one of the most forgotten histories of this country; the political struggles of Freedman in South Carolina, one of the most populated areas of the country. Read and study a political history the state where the Civil War was started.

The history of the Floridas and its Black peoples has for many years been relegated to the back pages of American history. Jane Landers' important work will move the history of Black Florida before 1820 to the forefront of American history. She presents the people of color of Eastern Spanish Florida free and enslaved, as active participants in shaping 500 years of American history. Landers helps to dispell the one dimensional template (and inaccurate) of slavery taken from the central Southern states: cotton fields, the big house, field hands and the few and despised priviledged house slaves. Life during Spanish rule was similar but different. Landers certainly doesn't let the Spanish off the hook, but brings another dimension to Blacks living enslaved or free in the eastern Floridas. These were multi-lingual people Blacks, who traveled throughout the ports in the Caribbean, or interacted with the many cultures of the Florida's port cities. Landers forces the reader to look at Blacks in Florida in a different light. The early sons and daughters of Florida "MET" the immigrants from Europe, the Upper South and the Caribbean at the docks of St. Augustine, Tampa etc.

Jane Landers' thorough research of St. Augustine unearths fascinating histories of Black families who live in present day Florida.

Hopefully the readers of this book will look for the imprint of Florida Blacks beyond the Spanish Rule.

For historians, or fans of African-American history, or American history, Lander's style will captivate and compell them to search for more histories on the Afro-Caribbeans of Florida.

Black Women and Music: More than the Blues is an anthology of interdisciplinary essays by an eclectic selection of expert authors discussing the experiences of African-American women in a diversity of musical genres throughout history, from classical music to contemporary blues. Essays include "Hip-Hop Soul Divas and Rap Music: Critiquing the Love That Hate Produced," "Black Women Electric Guitarists and Authenticity in the Blues", "Langston Hughes and the Black Female Gospel Voice in the American Musical", "Black Women and 'Women's Music'", and much more. An astutely researched and presented collection, shedding light on the all-too-often overlooked contribution of black women to American music history and modern music performance.

Grazian presents the world of Chicago's blues scene with the loving touch of a real fan, and the critical eye of a deep-thinking sociologist. His exploration of notions of "authenticity" in blues is penetrating and insightful, as he examines what it is in the blues experience that makes us think of it as "authentic" -- is it the color of the musician? The world-weariness in his voice? The ambience or clientele of the club? Or is it simply a construct of audience expectations, differing from person to person? Grazian, a blues player himself, skillfully points out how and why the authenticity we seek in our music is a reflection of our search for authenticity, the desire to "keep it real," in culture itself.

The fifth volume of poetry by author Martha Collins, Blue Front:Poems relays the horror that Collins' father witnessed as a five-year-old boy, while selling fruit in front of the Blue Front Restaurant of Cairo, Illinois in 1909. Along with an estimated 10,000 spectators, Collins' father saw the vicious lynching of a black man, and afterward, a white man, both of whom were abandoned to the frenzied violence of the participants. The free-verse poetry narrative varies its rhythm, style, and meter from page to page, and explores human hate, mob mentality, culpability, and what it means to be white in a nation with a racist history. Once picked up, Blue Front cannot be put down. He wanted to know / everyone in the end / he was a kind // man did errands / for old people younger / than he helped kids // with school met people / in stores on the street / please may I help // And the last day / he said You know / this world could be // a better place just / promise me that you / will help he waited // he made change may / I help you please / make change

I thought this was an excellent book. The epilogue alone is worth the price of the book. Builds on what Polsky started with his book. Quite interesting.

Edward D. Ives provides a fascinating study of a ballad. He first gives us a history of the Bonny Earl of Murray and then explains the political tensions that lead to his slaying by the Earl of Huntly. He makes excellent use of a variety of sources to place this history within the socio-political context of Renaissance life. This history is exceptional because there simply isn't that much good information about the Bonny Earl. The story is also fascinating. It involves political rivalry, complicity, if not conspiracy, by a king, and rumors of illicit affairs. In sum, it contains all of the elements of a ballad, including the sordid details of gothic romance. Following this historical background, Ives writes an thorough history of the ballad. He carefully demonstrates how the tune came from different sources, and he shows how it became part of F. J. Child's canon of 305 English and Scottish ballads. The analysis is an interesting look at the aesthetics of ballad composition, and Ives provides some intriguing insights into this ballad's history. He shows, for example, that it apparently wasn't commonly performed within the Scottish and English oral tradition yet it was occasionaly documented in the USA by folksong scholars working in the field. Ives moves out a limb, by his own admission, and even suggests how the original composer of the ballad may have come from a particular social background. One intriguing tidbit to this book is his discussion of "Mondegreens," or what is sometimes referred to as "Lyrics Misheard." This ballad is the source of the term, and Ives' witty writing includes some good ones that he has collected from students.