Saturday Links
Mack McCormick’s lost biography of Robert Johnson, Camus in America, the early work of Marguerite Duras, and more.
Good morning! In his latest Substack, Ted Gioia tells the wild—and sad—story of Mack McCormick’s “lost” Robert Johnson biography, which was published on Tuesday. One excerpt doesn’t do the article justice, but here’s one anyway:
Robert Johnson (1911-1938) profoundly influenced later generations of blues, rock, and folk performers—impacting everybody from Bob Dylan to the Rolling Stones. But what little we knew about his own life was more legend than reality. We heard crazy stories about him selling his soul to the devil, or showing up in unlikely cities under assumed names, or finally getting poisoned by a jealous husband who literally got away with murder in the racist South.
But it was hard to know what was true and what merely rumor or conjecture—until McCormick started making lengthy field trips into Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and elsewhere, going anywhere or everywhere even a speck of information might be found. While others speculated about Robert Johnson, McCormick was determined to uncover the truth—at whatever the cost . . . He claimed that the Mississippi guitarist named Robert Johnson—admired all over the world today—didn’t actually make those famous blues recordings. In fact, the man we all honor as the “King of the Delta Blues” didn’t record a single note. Somebody else made that music.
Edward Short reviews Peter Heather’s revisionists Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300–1300: “He has written the book to contest the claims of continuity in Christian profession and practice and to show that many ‘alternative choices of religious allegiance’ existed to which Europeans might have turned. The problem with the first claim is that, starting his chronicle as he does in 300 A.D., Heather does not treat the wellsprings of the Christian faith in any depth. There is little here about the early Church, about which Henry Chadwick wrote so brilliantly; little about the life of Christ, the evangelists, the martyrs, the saints, or the early Church Fathers, whose elucidation of the deposit of the faith continues to animate the continuity of Catholicism. Heather dismisses early Christian accounts of the faith as the crowing of ‘winners.’ He gives St. Augustine’s Confessions a nod but adjudges it too rarefied to be representative of Christian conversion. The author’s treatment, later in the book, of the work of Thomas Aquinas is even more superficial: he barely touches on the Scholasticism that gave Europe so much of its creative zest. Aquinas, in Heather’s estimation, did little more than ‘play a vital role in preparing preachers for the job of selling the theological package to massed parish laity.’ That the historian insists on referring to the Christian religion, which is, after all, a system of faith and worship, as an ‘ideology’ shows his misapprehension of his subject.”
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