Note: So much else has dominated the news in the USA that the death of Stanley Crouch is not so conspicuous. A number of articles on his passing can now be found, more or less saying the same thing, some including personal associations and memories, and all mentioning his irascibility and controversial views. However, there are limitations to what has been said. If you do not know who Stanley Crouch is, here is a reasonably accurate if incomplete introduction:
Stanley Crouch (December 14, 1945 - September 16, 2020)
A serious of Crouch's political and cultural views cannot be found there, but the basic facts are there. As with most of the other treatments coming down the pike, there is an element of diplomacy in all this. That is, his 'greatness' is balanced against his ostensibly objectionable qualities. With this in mind, I think the best take on Crouch to read is this, because it is so damning, and, if the inside information is truthfully presented, shows Crouch to be much worse than I knew:
The Tragedy of Stanley Crouch by Ishmael Reed, Counterpunch, October 16, 2020.
I have had issues with Ishmael Reed as well, but this would explain a lot, not only about Crouch if it is accurate, but about Reed's contempt for the New York literary establishment, which I imagine to be justified, except for his irrational disdain for James Baldwin.
Well, I had my own experience with Crouch, seeing him speak in person but also personally. In 2002 he emailed me out of the blue for my writing on jazz, and we had a few email exchanges and he sent me a copy of his novel with the inscription you see below. The email interchanges below are all I could find and hopefully nothing has been lost. (The last follows up on comments I made at a speaking engagement.)
These few interchanges are not damning, but they provided a bit of input into my judgment of him, which was critical but never nearly as harsh as Reed's. I did not follow Crouch consistently and lost track of what he was up to after a while, but I could see upon occasion (in the press and on television) further manifestations of his skewed judgments. Still, I never thought of him as a conservative in the usual mold of Uncle Tom Black conservatives. It seemed to me that if we could turn the clock back to 1963, he would fit in perfectly as a liberal of the time. But that liberalism is dead as a doornail, so this is what you get. If Reed has provided an accurate account, Crouch was much worse than I suspected.
Greg Harrison finally published his dissertation himself in 2018 with the title Strains of Freedom: A Philosophical History of African American Music and Slavery, in which I and my late colleague and friend Jim Murray received a special acknowledgment.
The emails below have been slightly reformatted, email addresses have been removed, links have been updated, and a few passages and paragraphs [indicated by brackets] have been elided.
2002 / January 31
To Ralph Dumain —
who is moving along in a special lane, reexamining how different modes of order, recognition, contemplation, and execution rise into the mountains of Americana – rise from the puddles, the lakes, the ocean.
Victory Is Assured,
Stanley Crouch
[Inscription in gift copy of Crouch’s novel Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome (2000)]
1 February 2002
Subject: STANLEY CROUCH EMAILING
To: Ralph Dumain
Dear Mr. Dumain:
When my colleague Greg Harrison wrote his unprecedented dissertation The Dialectics and Aesthetics of Freedom: Hegel, Slavery, and African American Music (Dept. of Art History, University of Sydney, March 1999, iv + 463 pp.), he received no support or even understanding from the academic world. Does this suggest something about just how little the Cultural Studies boom has actually accomplished?
By the way, my novel, DON'T THE MOON LOOK LONESOME, is sort of a treatise on intelligence—among MANY other things—in which the central character encounters many different kinds intellectuals, or people who think and think deeply, whether well schooled or not. If you have not seen it, I will send you a copy. If you are interested.
VIA (Victory Is Assured)
Stanley Crouch
To: Stanley Crouch
From: Ralph Dumain
Subject: Re: STANLEY CROUCH EMAILING
Dear Mr. Crouch:
Who knew that this would be my first encounter with the outside world today? When I awoke, I started my day by reading two of three lectures C.L.R. James delivered at the Institute of the Black World circa 1970, which involved attempting to teach his audience in those overheated militant days how to think about history. What a world.
I love your remarks about jazz and I'm sure you are correct. Ralph Ellison, as you know, has some remarkable things to say about knowledge in America (in his many anecdotes) about which I wish to write. America regularly produces genius anonymously and spontaneously, promiscuously and out-of-wedlock and outside of the recognition structures of official society. This I think is the one aspect of human experience that the knowledge industry has not yet successfully colonized. It could easily be turned into a gimmick in a land where the self-made man is legend, but its more profound aspects remain as evanescent as ever, because all Americans believe in fame and not in themselves.
Greg Harrison came to the USA to do his research. I met him both in DC and New York and helped him along his way. He travelled to several other cities to research the archives and consult various people. He found support of course for his specific research, but nobody wanted to hear about Hegel, except perhaps for Paul Gilroy, who was then still in England. Greg was a blues guitarist before he went for his PhD. As an Australian he is rather saucy and cynical much like Americans. He finished his dissertation but has since gone back to playing music. He tried for awhile to find a publisher for his dissertation, but did not get adequate support, perhaps because of a lack of appreciation for his intellectual approach, not unlikely due to the nationalist strand in black American intellectual circles, I'm not sure. My contact with him over the past year has been intermittent at best, but recently I offered to put his dissertation abstract on my site as a way of promoting his work. My web site has proven an effective way of promoting a number of people and ideas. I can see I will have to pursue this more aggressively.
My first step is to e-mail Greg and hope his account is still active. I will forward your request, and perhaps he will be able to send you his dissertation himself. If you deem it a significant work, you might well know someone in the publishing industry who would support his work. In any event, I will get back to you to make sure this gets into your hands one way or another.
I have a few other jazz-related pieces (mostly quotes) on my site:
Two quotes of related interest:
Among my writings, the one most apropos is on another site I maintain
On C.L.R. James's 'On the Spiritual'
continued at [Postscript on C.L.R. James's "On the Spiritual"]
Please do send me your novel. My mailing address appears as my signature at the bottom.
All best,
Ralph Dumain
To: Stanley Crouch
From: Ralph Dumain
Subject: Re: STANLEY CROUCH EMAILING
Dear Mr. Crouch:
Late last night I returned home from New York and today your book arrived. Thanks for the book and the generous inscription.
I won't be able to read it right away, though. Now I'm reading MOBY DICK, in preparation for a study I'm doing on Melville and CLR James that will end up in a book. This will keep me busy for two months, just to be able to deliver my talk on the subject. And I've got a stack of fat books to review, beginning with THE HUBERT HARRISON READER. I wish I had thin books to review. A month ago I broke my neck hurrying through 600 pages of Hazel Rowley's definitive biography of Richard Wright, in order to get a review done on deadline, which is going to be delayed anyway and undoubtedly boiled down by an editor before it reaches the light of day. Whatever happens to it, eventually I will put up the draft on my web site. My review, I might say, is a remarkable statement about Wright and Wright reception.
I'm sure I forgot to mention other relevant pages on my web site. For example, I have a bibliography on Anthony Braxton. Plus, my general bibliography, which includes a section on black intellectuals (a highly idiosyncratic, hardly comprehensive selection), includes people not always thought of as intellectuals. For example, I'm interested in Graham Lock's BLUTOPIA (on Ellington, Braxton, and Sun Ra), which I also need to read and review. My interest in Braxton in this regard is not as a musician, but as an autodidact philosopher. It's not that I buy into his philosophy (or Sun Ra's, for that matter), but that I believe there is a historical significance to these home-made mysticisms that nobody has yet decoded sociologically (for lack of a better term): by this I mean, analyze this phenomenon in terms of a meaningful historical process, rather than accept it at face value, or just dismiss it as gibberish.
That is, it's time to move beyond gullibility, cultism, and mysticism (racial mysticism included) and advance the process of secular decoding of densely packed symbolic phenomena. Such a conception is not exactly a novelty: Ralph Ellison prescribed such a project in 1943/1944, with the famous remark about the zoot suit. But everybody has drawn the wrong conclusions; certainly Robin Kelley f---ed up. Curiously, though, Ellison himself seems to have spent more time in coding than decoding. He advanced the project of symbolism considerably, beyond the stage achieved by Richard Wright, who has mistakenly been pigeonholed as a naturalistic writer. (Not to mention a host of falsehoods and defamations, perpetrated inter alia by Skip Gates and Cornel West.) However, the question remains, whether Ellison reached the point of no return in this process, the further his interminably worked over second novel strayed from the historical moment that gave his project life.
Excuse these digressions. Now, on to Greg Harrison. I've managed to reach him, and my guess is he will e-mail you directly. I think he's willing for you to have a copy of his dissertation, which, given that it is Australian, is a rare commodity in the USA. I haven't tried to buy a dissertation from University Microfilms for years and years, and back then their price for a hard copy was at least $60. Greg's is not likely to be available in the USA. We at the CLR James Institute could tear off the binding of our copy and have it copied and mailed, but my guess is this would cost $75 as a bottom figure. So perhaps Greg will be able to reproduce his dissertation more cheaply, if not mail it more cheaply. We shall see what develops.
I think he had given up hope of getting it published in the USA after his bad experience the first time around. Of course dissertations have to be rewritten anyway for public consumption. I need to read the finished product myself. I don't know if it is sexy enough for a general readership, but given what else is out there, there should be some niche for it.
One interim step, both for him and for you, involves my web site. Greg will cooperate with me to put up his abstract, introduction, and table of contents on my site, so that interested parties can get at least a general idea of what his dissertation is about. I am sure it is the first of its kind. I was about the only person on the planet he could find who also advocated the application of Hegel to the analysis of black cultural phenomena and would support his project. I suppose this reveals something about time lags in the intellectual development of the English-speaking world. For example, the relationship between Du Bois' THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK and Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT should not be a state secret, but only in the 1990s was attention seriously focused in this direction. (Another example: only a few years ago, with the biography of Frederick Douglass' squeeze, the German-Jewish radical Ottilie Assing, we finally got the story of Douglass' connection to Ludwig Feuerbach.)
I think maybe I've overdone it this time. Can't stop my leg. I'll keep you posted about anything we do with Greg's dissertation.
Best,
Ralph
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002
Subject: STANLEY CROUCH EMAILING
To: Ralph Dumain
Mr. Dumain:
I must say that your piece on Richard Wright and "Pagan Spain" contains two remarkable errors for a man of your engagement. Those have to do with Ellison and Hemingway. Hemingway was a man devoted to the idea of tragedy, no matter how wildly he interpreted his own media persona. His work does not celebrate so-called "macho" attitudes because, as he writes over and over and over, time and death are always going to win, meaning that no amount of posturing of any sort will hold back those forces. As with many conflicted people, Hemingway was many things in public; but as an artist, he was very consistent at showing how, behind it all, we are terribly frail and that if we are able to do something that others will learn from or provide material that may be remembered and used, we have done about all that can be done in an enterprise that proves us all flesh and blood variations on the big ship Titanic, bound for an iceberg at night, destined to be mortally pierced, going down fast and leaving stone cold dead corpses in the water, floating in their lifejackets as flag stones of our demise, soon to rot away themselves. As for Ellison, what he referred to was the Hemingway story "Fathers and Sons" in which he learned, as he made no less than very clear, to wing shoot, which allowed him to bring down birds for he and his younger brother to eat during those impoverished years of the Depression. His point was that when Hemingway wrote how something worked, you could count on it—even to keep you from starving. What I find most interesting about Wright and Ellison is that so many miss the connection between the full "American Hunger" and "Invisible Man," which is a literary set of variations on that sad and dazzling memoir, moving from the South to the North, from one instance of disillusionment to another. Anyway, a man of your interests shouldn't even use the word "macho," since those third rate hurlers of rubber darts have made it an impossible term based more in their contempt for all things masculine rather than a critical attempt to free the masculine from those things that define its distinctions through ignoble means and ideas—e.g. brute force used for no purpose than to maintain unfair privilege.
VIA
To: Stanley Crouch
From: Ralph Dumain
Subject: Re: STANLEY CROUCH EMAILING
Dear Mr. Crouch:
I see you have discovered my Richard Wright pieces on your own. Thanks for your careful consideration of my work. Today and tomorrow are so congested, I may not be able to reply at length until the weekend, which I definitely want to do.
I also understand that you are making arrangements with Greg Harrison regarding his dissertation, so I trust that will go well.
Best,
Ralph
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004
To: Stanley Crouch
From: Ralph Dumain
Subject: Politics & Prose postmortem
Greetings. I've seen you at bookstores a number of times over the years. This evening I made a few remarks in the Q&A following your reading at Politics & Prose including the comment about being outraged at Tavis Smiley's interview of black astrophysicist Neil Tyson. As it was not appropriate for me to deliver a lengthy harangue in the context of your book talk, I didn't take the time to tell the full story of what really offended me about this interview. Anyway, we corresponded by e-mail before, in February 2002, about Coltrane, jazz, Ralph Ellison, my friend Greg's dissertation, and related matters. Perhaps now you can connect the name with the face. Anyway, it was not a convenient situation in which to hang around and engage in a lengthy conversation while you were signing a whole lot of books, so here I am once again via e-mail.
Odd that you would finger me for a writer, since after all I was speaking. Others do the same. I suppose so few in this society take the trouble to articulate any thoughts it is automatically assumed that only writers do so. In any event, any time I run my mouth in Politics and Prose, or elsewhere, people always crowd around me to comment. And they get especially excited whenever the subject is race. I'm guessing this is because people who regularly attend events at Politics & Prose are trying so hard, with only partial success, to break through layers and layers and layers of mystification. I also find that whites and blacks customarily struggle with somewhat different formulations of the problem, though both get excited when someone attempts to cut through the crap. It also shows how starved people in this country are for serious conversation of any kind, which they never get. I had a similar experience this summer when Sheryll Cashin, author of The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream, had her gig at this bookstore.
I have a number of personal reasons for chafing at the totalitarianism of racial stereotyping. Among them are that popular culture has nothing at all to say, and much to cover up, about what I am experiencing, the observations I make about people, and the conversations I have on a daily basis. And while I don't keep up with fiction, I know very well the mentality that you excoriate in your essay about the spinelessness of American fiction in which everyone is supposed to keep to his own narrow demographic niche. I have some unpublished exchanges I want to polish that details this minimalist mentality. It is of course not limited to literature. It's everywhere. And it's an excuse for white people to keep their distance, with that hands-off attitude—who am I to judge, it's not my experience. Which all comes down to a pretext for remaining gullible and naive and stupid and never engaging anything honestly or using one's common sense.
There are just a few other notions I want to reinforce right now. Self-stereotyping is not only mental laziness as I said, it's also presenting a mask to the world, creating a fictive solidification of fluid experience, and engaging in ritualistic behavior for want of vital communication with others. It's so patently obvious I don't know why people can't see it. But they're not fooling me. They're covering up a lot of painful emotions they would rather not confront about how they really feel about their lives. In addition, there is no public language, no conceptual lexicon, with which to intelligently discuss the real state in which we find ourselves now. Our concepts are behind the actual time in which we are living.
From my perception of what I see going on around me, I find myself frustrated at times even when looking at your book. I missed most of your interview with Tavis Smiley, and I haven't read through the relevant chapter, but I'm mystified at your praise of Quentin Tarantino, and, I might add, of John Singleton, whose "Baby Boy" I detested as well as that other awful film he made (Boyz in the Hood?). I see no escape anywhere from the fraudulent racial pornography that infests movies, television, and music. There are several people whose real lives, and even perceptions of their world, have transcended the ideological structures that pop culture poisons our minds with, but I don't see a visible presence of an alternative perspective, nor any respect for individuality or individual perception, of anyone, certainly not of black people.
Best,
Ralph
To: Greg Harrison
From: Ralph Dumain
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: STANLEY CROUCH EMAILING
Hello again at last, Greg.
Crouch is a curious character: a black quasi-neoconservative (not quite, but to the right of Skip Gates), cultural critic, jazz critic, TV commentator, enforcer for Wynton Marsalis (inheritor of the Ellison-Murray mafia), recipient of Macarthur genius grant. While he hates some of the same people I do, he has become a caricature in recent years upon his rise to fame. I’ve seen him in person in a variety of contexts, even talked to him (though he wouldn’t remember). He can be a pompous ass, but as you can see, when he turns to certain subjects that matter to him, he can be intelligent as well. In sum: he can’t be trusted, but he serves a useful purpose in certain cultural respects.
As to your dissertation and Crouch, there are two approaches to consider. One is the means of getting it to him, the other is negotiating his support.
All American dissertations are deposited with University Microfilms International and made available for very expensive reproduction. Am I wrong in supposing that Australian dissertations are outside this system? If so, this makes your diss a rare and valuable commodity in the U.S.
Do you have extra copies lying around? If not, there are options for making copies. You could arrange to copy it yourself, and send it to Crouch. Given how much money he is making, you should definitely charge him for all expenses. We have a copy here, and I presume Jim could tear off the binding and get it copied and send it to Crouch, in which case we would charge handsomely for this service. Actually just covering the cost of reproduction would be expensive: probably US $75 at the minimum.
Another option on your end is to reformat your diss on disk to produce a more condensed and readable and cheaply reproducible print format.
The second consideration is what Crouch wants to do with it. Is it just intellectual curiosity, or is he likely to exploit your ideas in some way? Does he really want to pay for the whole diss or does he just want a flavor of it? It’s worth thinking about this in advance.
But the second part of your direct or indirect relationship with Crouch involves your own publication plans for your diss. I still haven’t read it, so I don’t know how it reads for a general audience. If you want to follow through, you might want to get Crouch to use his influence to gain a publisher.
I think you should be in direct contact with Crouch yourself. You can decide whether to have a copy sent to him (via you or us), and ask him about eventual support for publication. All depends on your ambition. If you are blasé, you lose your one big chance. If you are ambitious, there’s no guarantee, but if you can make the diss readable as a book, maybe at least you can get it out there. Crouch has considerable clout—he’s a major major player—and if you take your own position of provisional strength seriously, you can try to exploit this connection yourself. I can make no promises, but I’ll do for you what I can.
I’m returning to DC tomorrow night (I’m at Jim’s now), and afterwards I’ll look at your diss to see what should go up on my site. Whatever segment I put up from your dissertation on my site, I would copyright it in your name.
[Final paragraph omitted.]
Best,
Ralph
To: Jim Murray
From: Ralph Dumain
Subject: Crouch
There's something a bit odd about Stanley Crouch's sudden admiration for me. I think there is a lesson in here, and I think I know what it is. But for the record, here is his inscription on the flyleaf of his novel:
2002 / January 31
To Ralph Dumain —
who is moving along
in a special lane, reexamining how different modes of order, recognition,
contemplation, and execution rise into the mountains of Americana – rise from
the puddles, the lakes, the ocean.
Victory Is Assured,
Stanley
Crouch
To: Richard H. King
From: Ralph Dumain
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: STANLEY CROUCH EMAILING
[Three paragraphs on other topics omitted.]
Crouch's on-the-fly admiration for me is intriguing, though I am hardly seduced by it. I have a hypothesis about it, and I am conscious of the duality which must be competing for his attention: his genuine investment in an intellectual project vs. his alienated status as a quasi-neocon celebrity propagandist. So I'm doing a little dance with him. I want to appeal to the scholarly side of his temperament while sidestepping any direct contradiction or confrontation. Still, there are implicit challenges, such as my remarks about Ellison, which will surely jar him if he picks up on my insinuendoes.
Do note my cryptic remarks about Ellison, Crouch's hero (and once mine). Do you see what I am hinting at about coding and decoding? Some of the essays in SHADOW AND ACT involve cultural decoding, but ultimately Ellison just wants to pile on the symbolism as he gets more detached from the concrete reality of the contemporary situation, beyond Ellison's own historical moment of the 1940s. (INVISIBLE MAN sums up a period which is reaching its conclusion.)
You'll note the mystification that imbues Ken Burns' JAZZ even while it is so explicit in other respects in unravelling history. Crouch plays a role in this, though minor compared to Wynton Marsalis' ideological input. (The lineage, again: Ellison, Murray, Crouch, Marsalis.) Examples: (1) The overblown metaphor of jazz as democracy, fine if not taken too literally, but preposterous when elevated both to myth and the literal truth. (2) the falsification of the last four decades of jazz history: the avant-garde, fusion, the neo-traditionalist revival. (3) The romanticism of thuggery of times past (Sidney Bechet's violence), which contradicts Marsalis' disavowal of hiphop thug chic.
Moral of the story: the riddle of Ellison's relation to symbolism. Before his own disavowal of the CP, Ellison says let's look into the symbolism of daily culture and see what makes it tick and how it can be capitalized on. (Robin Kelley falsified the meaning of Ellison's statements, for which Adolph Reed justly mocked him.) This way of thinking may have been new in the (African)American context (not that new actually—it's in Du Bois), but it goes back to Hegel. INVISIBLE MAN to a certain extent follows up on this project, full of enigmatic situations: the rich white Northern benefactor obsessed with the poor Southern black incestuous father, the mystery of white paint, etc. etc. Here Ellison engages in some pretty intense symbolic coding, far beyond what Wright was willing to do (it seems to me), inviting a decoding of our own. But then what? Rather than merely criticize Ellison's politics as the left and the black nationalists stupidly did, the key to Ellison's unravelling, from a standpoint internal to the nature of creative work, is Ellison's relation to his symbolic universe.
Best,
Ralph
The Theory & Practice of John Coltrane
John Coltrane on Black Music and Affirmative Philosophy
The Dialectics and Aesthetics of Freedom: Hegel, Slavery and 19th Century African American Music
Ishmael Reed: Literary Ambulance Chaser? by R. Dumain
Ishmael Reed, William Blake, and the '60s According to Shamoon Zamir by Ralph Dumain
Review of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo by R. Dumain
Black Studies, Music, America vs Europe
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Uploaded 22 October 2020
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