Southern Bookman

Julian Jackson's "France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Petain" examines democratic perils

In one of France's worst moments, World War I hero Philippe Petain shook hands with German dictator Adolph Hitler on Oct. 24, 1940.

Addressing the French nation a few days later, Marshal Petain exclaimed "I enter today down the road of collaboration."

Petain, who had witnessed the surrender of Germany to end World War I, was chosen by Hitler's Nazi regime to lead France's puppet Vichy government, which ostensibly ruled a part of France not occupied by the Germans.

After Hitler's downfall and the end of World War II, liberated France under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle tried the 89-year-old Petain and other Vichy collaborators on charges of treason.

British historian Julian Jackson's critically acclaimed "France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Petain" examines the trial, in which Petain was sentenced to death. De Gaulle, his former close friend, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and Petain was held prisoner on a small island, where he died in 1951.

As the title indicates, Jackson's book explores how Petain's collaboration with Germany implicated the entire country. After the war's end, France's resistance movement began a wave of harsh punishment for collaborators, including killings.

Petain claimed that he was a "shield" for France, saving it from the more extreme Nazi occupation suffered by Poland and other countries.

The Vichy regime repealed France's liberal laws, restoring a pro-Catholic conservatism. France's right-wing political groups until recently extolled Petain as a national hero.

Under Petain, French Jewish citizens were captured and sent to Nazi camps, although at a lower percentage than in other countries, likely because of the success of the resistance movement in protecting Jews. Jackson documents that the Vichy government independently acted against Jewish citizens as much as from German coercion.

Jackson has written a series of definitive histories of France's World War II experience and its aftermath, including a highly praised biography of de Gaulle ,who led France after World War II and returned to power as head of the Fifth Republic from the late 1950s through 1969.

"France on Trial," published by Harvard University Press in August, is a major work that holds deep lessons for the United States and its imperiled democracy.

Henry Kissinger's death reflects divisiveness of his foreign policy actions

Henry Kissinger established the world order that's crashing today.

Kissinger, who dominated global politics as Richard Nixon's national security adviser and secretary of state, died Wednesday at age 100.

Reactions to his death ranged from human rights advocates who consider him one of  history's worst war criminals to members of America's foreign policy establishment who hailed him as master statesman defending U.S. power.

As Nixon's consigliere, Kissinger with his heavy German accent, dark-framed glasses and raptor's beak acted as the grand puppet master of global events. His "shuttle diplomacy" established the United States as the main power broker in the Mideast.

Disrupting the communist-capitalist stalemate, Kissinger engineered Nixon's ground-breaking trip to China, spurring the communist country's emergence as the United States' major economic partner and rival. Chinese President Xi Jinping's repressive regime has raised conflicts to Cold War levels.

In countering Soviet power in the Mideast and elsewhere, Kissinger set the clock ticking on the communist empire's demise. Peaceful relations with Russia following the end of the Cold War have steadily worsened during Vladimir Putin's reign, collapsing with Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Kissinger's achievements came with a heavy cost of blood. His "realpolitik" machinations led to the murder of millions in Cambodia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Angola, Chile, East Timor and the Mideast. 

Leaving office after the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, Kissinger enhanced his reputation by writing his memoirs and other books, giving speeches and advising leaders as a foreign policy consultant.

Ironically, Kissinger's death followed that of New Orleans singer Jean Knight, known for her hit "Mr. Big Stuff."

Countries across the world ravaged by Kissinger's policies would echo Knight's refrain, "Mr. Big Stuff, who do you think you are?"

 

 

Smithsonian's "Biography of a Phantom" details musicologist "Mack" McCormick's Robert Johnson quest

Troubled musicologist and folklorist Robert "Mack" McCormick called his massive collection of blues artifacts "the monster."

Following McCormick's death of esophageal cancer in 2015 at age 85, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington acquired his archive.

The files include 590 reels of sound recordings, which now reside with the Smithsonian's Folkways label. 

McCormick amassed 165 boxes of material that total more than 70 cubic feet of unpublished manuscripts, original interviews and research notes, thousands of photographs and negatives and playbills, posters, maps and business records.

The material is housed in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which recently exhibited McCormick's recorded interviews with Lightnin' Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb and other blues artists.

McCormick was a nationally known member of the "blues mafia," an eccentric group of white males obsessed with the black blues artists who made pioneering records in the 1920s and 1930s.

While McCormick's stockpile of artifacts overwhelmed his home in Houston, the self-taught musicologist sought to write the first definitive biography of  Mississippi blues legend Robert Johnson as McCormick battled mental illness, financial difficulties and health problems.

From 1969 through 1975, McCormick visited small towns in rural Mississippi, knocking on doors and visiting pool halls and small cafes to talk to elderly black people who knew or were related to "the king of the Delta blues." 

MCormick also traveled to Memphis, small towns in Louisiana and Arkansas, and Washington, D.C. seeking details about Johnson's brief, dynamic life.

While McCormick never completed his major Johnson book, he turned to writing a first-person narrative about his journeys into the Delta. He kept revising the book-length manuscript through the years.

McCormick's dream of book publication has been realized with the release earlier this year of "Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey" by Smithsonian Books.

The Smithsonian has also released "Playing for the Man at the Door, Field Recordings From the Collection of "Mack" McCormick, 1958-1971," a three-CD, six LP set that includes a 128-page book of photographs and essays from blues scholars.

John W. Troutman, curator of music and musical instruments at the National Museum of American History, edited "Biography of a Phantom," compiled from McCormick's manuscripts.

The book portrays the virtuoso musicianship, community dances and agricultural rituals of southern blacks, which endured despite poverty, racial violence and white supremacy.

McCormick also analyzes the Delta's cotton economy, which he documents developed after the Civil War and the end of slavery. Instead, blacks were forced into oppressive sharecropper arrangements with white owners of huge plantations, which were really small towns with stores and entertainment centers.

Johnson, who mainly performed in plantation homes and rural "juke joints," gained international fame with the 1961 release of his handful of recordings, "The King of the Delta Blues." His work inspired a generation of white musicians, ranging from Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger and John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen.

The book raises troubling issues of cultural appropriation, including by the Smithsonian itself. Record companies and white scholars have profited at the expense of black musicians and their families, which Troutman details.

An intriguing section of "Biography of a Phantom" describes McCormick's unsuccessful effort to solve the crime of Johnson's death. Johnson died at age 27 in rural Mississippi, poisoned by either a jealous girlfriend or a lover's jealous husband or boyfriend.

The increasingly mentally ill McCormick in later life falsely claimed to have identified Johnson's killer. In "Phantom," he gives a chilling fictional account of how Johnson might have been poisoned by someone bringing him whiskey during a performance.

While the book portrays McCormick as a perceptive, resourceful investigator with a deep appreciation of black creativity, Troutman in an afterword reveals the paranoia, depression and manic periods that plagued McCormick in later life.

Troutman also gives disturbing details of McCormick's threatening, duplicitous and fraudulent interactions with Johnson's two half-sisters,whom he found living in suburban Washington, D.C.

As Troutman notes, the phantom of the book's title applies to McCormick as much as the blues singer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remembering John F. Kennedy, on 60th anniversary of assassination

After 60 years, I remember how vibrant he was.

John F. Kennedy projected wit, charm, eloquence. He possessed a special glow, even on black and white TV.

Then on a bright Friday afternoon in late November, he was gone.

Some kids in seventh grade math class were happy. I was stunned and confused. The school buses arrived early to take us home.

The memories of that dark weekend stay with me. Through the years, I've revisited the assassination. I've read accounts of that day in Dallas, and studied the conspiracy theories.

Alll of that can wait until another time. On the 60th anniversary, I think about the man we lost that day.

 

 

 

The Library of Congress a cathedral of book culture

The Library of Congress' Gutenberg Bible sits in a glass case in a dark hallway.

Two rows of perfectly aligned type line the open pages of the revolutionary book, a masterpiece of artistry and innovation.

Gutenberg's 15th century technical marvel began the book culture now endangered by the digital age.

Entering the Libary of Congress' main reading room, with its soaring shelves of books and statues of famed Western authors, composers, inventors and explorers, gives the reverential feeling of a medieval cathedral.

As visitors circle a gallery below the reading room's monumental dome, researchers work at desks below, gathering information for new books to come.

Sadly, those works likely will reach a smaller and smaller audience.

Distracted by social media, younger generations appear to be losing the concentration required to read books, newspapers and journals. Yet, books have undergone a small revival in recent years, as reading on digital devices has waned. 

While the book renaissance is welcome, studies show that fewer and fewer people enjoy reading for pleasure or knowledge. More books are probably being printed than ever before for a shrinking readership.

The digital age brings a new era in the transmission of knowledge and the telling of stories.

Historians believe Homer composed "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" as works performed orally. The epics were not written down until centuries later.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, medieval monks writing by hand preserved books from ancient civilizations.

Gutenberg's invention of movable type and the printing press made books broadly accessible, leading to widespread literacy.

We're now experiencing the twilight of Gutenberg's era, which began nearly 600 years ago. Generations to come will see what follows.

Mavis Gallant's "Paris Notebooks" gives enduring portrait of French life

Another gift for readers has arrived this fall: The re-release of Mavis Gallant's "Paris Notebooks."

Gallant, a Montreal native who moved to Paris in 1950 and died in 2014, is best known for her incisive short stories, published by The New Yorker.

She was also an intrepid journalist, reporting on French life for the magazine with dispatches as insightful as those of Janet Flanner, the New Yorker's longtime Paris correspondent.

Along with journalism and short stories, Gallant wrote witty and perceptive book reviews regarding  Vladimir Nabokov, Gunter Grass, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Colette  Marguerite Yourcenar, Louis -Ferdinand Celine and the now lesser known Paul Leautaud and Jean Giraudoux.

First published in 1986, "Paris Notebooks" collects Gallant's reporting, literary reviews and journal entries. The new paperback edition published by Godine Nonpareil books comes with a foreword by biographer and critic Hermoine Lee, who calls Gallant "an impeccable transcriber of French life for North American readers."

The centerpiece of the collection is Gallant's on the scene diary of May 1968, when a student revolt spread to Parisian blue-collar workers and brought a violent crackdown by the French government. Gallant fearlessly witnessed the conflicts, even patrolling the streets at night.

Monitoring media reports and talking to friends and strangers, she compiled a comprehensive record of the crisis that shook French society to its foundations. Gallant's vivid account reclaims the historical significance of then worldwide important events.

Gallant's writing brings back the urgency of that Paris spring, and the daily vibrancy of French life.

 

 

 

Gay Talese revisits brilliant writing career in "Bartleby & Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener"

Gay Talese's "Bartleby & Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener" traces a brilliant writing career not yet finished.

After a series of reminisces about his apprenticeship at The New York Times and later Esquire magazine triumphs, the 91-year-old closes the collection with a new non-fiction classic: "Dr. Bartha's Brownstone," a 102-page account of a man blowing up a townhome at 34 East 92nd St. in Manhattan rather than giving it to his estranged wife in a divorce settlement.

Dr. Nicholas Bartha killed himself in the explosion, which shook surrounding buildings in the neighborhood. Showing that Talese hasn't lost any of his reporting skills and writing vitality, the article recounts the building's history dating back to the 19th century and the construction of a new home on the site.

Along with giving a compelling portrait of Bartha and his immigrant family, and the reversals that led to his decision to destroy himself and his home, Talese looks at the city's criminal justice system, real estate business and construction and architectural professions.

The Bartha saga is preceded by a 124-page recollection of how Talese conducted his reporting for the new journalism masterpiece "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," which ran in Esquire's April 1966 issue.

Talese recalls his efforts over several weeks to interview Sinatra on the West Coast. Sinatra, involved in the taping of his famous "A Man and His Music Special" for the NBC television network and suffering from a cold, kept avoiding Talese, except for a few brief encounters. Instead, Talese talked to Sinatra's associates and family members to write the profile, later voted Esquire's all-time best non-fiction work.

The account of Talese's efforts should be taught in journalism schools in tandem with the finished Esquire piece. Ranging from Las Vegas casinos and the heavyweight fight of Floyd Patterson and Muhammad Ali to Palm Springs resorts and Los Angeles hotels, nightclubs and TV studios, "In Sinatra's Shadow" rivals "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" in its wealth of details and colorful personalities.

Earlier in the book, Talese gives brief accounts of his career at the Times and later life as a magazine writer for Esquire and its audacious editor Harold Hayes.

Talese recalls how he persuaded Hayes to allow him to write a profile of New York Times obituary writer Alden Whitman, a former copy editor who began the now standard practice of interviewing well-known people for their obituaries.

Hayes agreed to run the Whitman piece if Talese would do the Sinatra profile, which Talese was reluctant to do. The Whitman article led to several other Times profiles for Esquire, and Talese's acclaimed history of the newspaper, "The Kingdom and the Power."

Talese cites Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener as the type of unknown person he's sought to give attention to during his career.

Unlike Bartleby, Talese's little-known heroes generally sought to make a mark in the world. Talese has also given vivid portraits of famous people like Sinatra and New York Times publishers, editors and reporters, along with lesser known newspaper workers.

As with Melville, Talese in his work reveals our shared humanity.

 

 

 

 

High Museum's "In The City of Light" gives haunting view of Paris' golden age

The horse-drawn carriages careen down the Paris boulevards, their passengers engaged in the city's life.

Giving haunting witness to a vanished era, Paris traffic in the early films rush toward the viewer. The 19th century Parisians traveling to work or play reveled in a city transformed by Georges-Eugene Haussmann's new boulevards that erased squalid medieval neighborhoods.

As with the parallel exhibit "A Long Arc: Photography and the American South Since 1945," the High Museum of Art's "In the City of Light:Paris 1850-1920" draws upon the museum's collection to illuminate extensive historical change.

In contrast to the American South show, the Paris exhibit displays art, film and sculpture, while offering a narrower focus.

Works by Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet give a hint of the major exhibit of the artists' work that recently opened at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art to great fanfare.

While the Met excites crowds with Manet's still shocking nude "Olympia," the High offers enticing works by the artists, along with charming pieces from the era like Jules Cheret's lithograph "Folies Bergere: Fleur de Lotus,: Jacques-Henri's Lartique's "Avenue du Bois to Boulogne" and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's "Madame Rejane in Madame Sans-Gene."

The High exhibit as the title suggests emphasizes Paris' image as "the city of light," rather than its wrenching social change and political turmoil during the era. No attention is given to the Dreyfus Affair, the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune or even World War I.

A bust of Victor Hugo and brief mentions of Charles Baudelaire and George Sand are the sole renderings of Paris' rich literary culture. Proust, Rimbaud, Zola and Flaubert are absent. 

Chronicling Paris' rise to global eminence, the exhibit gives witness to human transience. The Peachtree Road traffic will also pass away.

 

 

 

 

Acclaimed historian Peter Brown's "Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History" generates intellectual excitement

Historian Peter Brown's joy at intellectual discovery glows through "Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History."

Brown, Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, pioneered a new field of historical study, reconstructing the strange world of "late antiquity" through ground-breaking books that discovered dynamic social change and cultural creativity in the era from 200-700 A.D. rather than civilization's collapse.

While Brown in his autobiography published by Princeton University Press looks back on his intellectual adventures and collaborations with esteemed colleagues, he also expresses delight at simple pleasures: beer and pizza, meals in Oxford dining rooms, Pacific sunsets.

Along with "journeys of the mind," he gives exciting accounts of trips to Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Rome and Venice. As a child, he made frequent sojourns to Sudan, where his father was a railroad engineer for the colonial-era British government.

He recalls his excitement at perusing obscure books and documents found on dusty library shelves. To aid his research, he learns a variety of languages, from German to Arabic.

An Irish native who grew up in a Protestant family, Brown gained entry to Oxford, where he won an All Souls Fellowship and began his academic career. He later held professorships at The University of London's Royal Holloway College and the University of California at Berkeley before coming to Princeton in 1983.

Brown received renown for his groundbreaking biography of St. Augustine and the book "The World of Late Antiquity." His subsequent books on holy men and the cult of sexual renunciation during the era further revolutionized the field of classical research. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982.

In clear language free of academic jargon, Brown brings his readers along on his thrilling journeys.

 

Remembering the anniversary of Keats' writing "To Autumn"

John Keats wrote "To Autumn" on this date in 1819, ending his poetic career with a last flowering of genius.

Keats in the spring of the year wrote his famous odes in a remarkable burst of creativity. In late summer, he left London to stay in the old cathedral city of Winchester, 60 miles away, hoping to finish several projects he hoped would prove lucrative.

On a walk along the River Itchen on Sept. 19, he basked in the late summer weather, finding a strange beauty in the stubble fields after the harvest. In a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, he commented "how beautiful the season is now - How fine the air," and noted that he'd composed the poem.

Sadly, he abandoned the epic "Hyperion" and other work he'd wanted to finish in Westminster. Outside of the fragmentary "The Living Hand," Keats had written his final poem with "To Autumn." Suffering from tuberculosis, he died in Rome two years later. 

Keats in "To Autumn" asks "Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?"

The young poet didn't know that he'd written his last songs of spring.

 

To Autumn

 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

   Steady thy laden head across a brook;

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.