Vol. 31 No. 1 1964 - page 131

BOOKS
131
applicability to
Don Carlo
of Tovey's observation that "the highest
qualities attained in important parts of a great work are as inde–
structible by weaknesses elsewhere as if the weaknesses were the ac–
cidents of physical ruin," and that "neither Shakespeare nor Schubert
will ever be understood by any critic or artist who regards their weak–
nesses and inequalities as proof that they are artists of less than the
highest rank."
There are additional failures-with Moussorgsky, with Stravinsky–
but no magazine could provide the space to deal with all the errors of
perception, fact and reasoning in these collections of Newman's critical
writings.
B. H.
Haggin
MORE EXILES
BLUES PEOPLE: Negro Music in White Americe. By LeRoi Jones.
Williem Morrow. $5.00.
TIME OF ARRIVAL AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Dan Jecobson. Macmillan.
$3.95.
The exile is no stranger to history, and certainly not to our
time. The story of the Jews is so familiar that it is difficult for anyone
to try to tell it again. The exile of the Negro in America
is
just be–
ginning to be known by the society which once allowed him little
travel and no entrance to its social or cultural life. Whether the exile is
enforced or claimed, its very definition is its detachment, and from
this condition arises both the yearning and the anger.
Blues People
is a book of large ambitions. LeRoi Jones, poet, es–
sayist, story writer and jazz critic, will not confine himself to the history
of the development of the blues as music. He will not simply talk
about blues people, how they felt in their double exile-as Negroes and
as artists-from a country they never left. He subtitles his book
"Negro Music in White America" and from the first page we are in–
formed of his larger sociological and anthropological interests and of
his intention to show us the roots of blues in a people and their fate.
Yet the book
is
at its best when Jones is less concerned with
these large questions, and traces the history of early blues and their
relationship to early jazz, purely instrumental blues
l
then the more
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