A popular writer, a writer who gains a broad and sustained contemporary audience, I guess, like any other writer wants to know he's good, and the bestseller lists and the talk shows and his annual income all repay whatever faith it was that sat him down in front of his typewriter in the first place. But if he's a serious writer that's got to come second... Much more common, and I think the case is mine, [is when] the good work is its own reward and you share it with as many readers as you can and it stays alive, and has some hard-won clarity and richness, some distillation of human investment, that continues to claim some kind of permanent interest no matter what angles fashion may dispose new readers towards... My first book made a big, popular splash and that kind of success was intoxicating, and I was in the racket, in the race, but the down that followed it was miserable, and the real success has been a quieter, more solid kind of thing. I know the book's good. It's there. It wins new readers. That level is there to be reached, and I don't need a cheering crowd to tell me that it's worth it. It would be nice to be the fashion, to be recognized for what I'm trying to do –– in the sense that Mailer is, for instance –– life would be easier in a lot of ways –– but the price of doing something difficult and honest, something true, as April Wheeler learned, is doing it alone.
From the transcript of a July 1972 interview found in YATES' papers following his death
Use the link below to read the long article about RICHARD YATES by novelist STUART O'NAN that originally appeared in the October 1999 issue of The Boston Review:
'Feed Fred and sit with him
and mind he doesn’t walk about.
He falls. Tell him his ute is safe
back home. Thinks someone’s pinched it,
peers around the carpark all the time.
His family brought him in it and
he thinks it’s gone.
He was a farmer once…'
I take the tray. The ice-cream’s almost
melted round the crumbled orange jelly
and the soup’s too hot. I know
I’ll have to blow on it.
Hunched, trapped behind a tray,
he glances sideways, face as brown
and caverned as the land itself,
long thin lips droop ironic
at the corners, gaunt nose.
The blue and white pajamas cage
the restless rangy legs.
In and out they go, the feet
in cotton socks feeling for the ground.
'Are you a foreigner?'
'Not exactly. Just a little sunburnt,'
and I put the jelly down. I mustn’t feel
a thing: my smile has come unstuck.
I place a paper napkin on his lap. He winces. 'You’re a foreigner all right,' he says. 'OK,' I say. What’s one displacement more or less,
wishing I were a hearty flat-faced Fenian
with a perm and nothing doing in the belfry.
Someone like his mother. Or a wife who
spared him the sorrow of himself.
Now he grabs the spoon. 'I’ll do it.'
'Right,' I say, 'You go ahead. Just ask me
if you want some help.' The tone’s not right.
I watch the trembling progress of the spoon
for what seems years, paralysed with pity
for his pride.
How does a dark-faced woman give a man called Fred
who cropped a farm and drove a battered ute
a meal of soup and jelly?
Outside the window, clouds are swelling
into growing darkness and there’s a man
hard on his knees planting something in the rain.
Ask Me
(1990)
Fay Zwicky (née Rosefield) was born in Melbourne on 4 July 1933, the daughter of fourth generation Australian-Jewish parents whose families had originally emigrated from Eastern Europe. Already an accomplished pianist by the age of six, she began performing with her sisters in a chamber music group known as 'The Rosefield Trio' and continued to work as a concert performer for over a decade, in both her native Australia and overseas, after gaining her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Melbourne in 1954.
In 1972 she and her Dutch-born first husband Karl Zwicky re-located to Perth, where she became Senior Lecturer in American and Comparative Literature at the University of Western Australia –– a post she retained until her retirement from academic life in 1987. Her first book of poetry, Isaac Babel's Fiddle, appeared in 1975 and she went on to publish four more poetry collections between 1982 and 1999, including a 1993 retrospective volume titled Fay Zwicky: Poems 1970-1992. In addition to her poetry she has also published many essays and, in 1983, the short story collection Hostages. What she has declared will be her final book,the poetry collection Picnic: New Poems, was published by the Giramondo Press in 2006.
Zwicky has received numerous awards for her work, including The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Western Australian Premier's Book Award (which she has won three times), the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award, the Christopher Brennan Award of the Fellowship of Australian Writers and, in 2005, the Patrick White Award – an annual prize of $25,000 awarded to a writer who has made 'a significant but inadequately recognised contribution to Australian Literature.' She was also named 'a State Living Treasure' by the Western Australian government in 2004, an honour she deemed, in her frank uncompromising way, to be 'most repulsive.'
Use the links below to read more poems by Australian poet FAY ZWICKY and a 2005 article about her posted in the online archive of Melbourne newspaper The Age:
Claude Nougarowas born in the southern French city of Toulouse –– a city he would later immortalize in his 1967 chanson of the same name –– on 9 September 1929. His French father Pierre Nougaro was a well-respected opera singer while his Italian-born mother, Liette Tellini, was a noted piano teacher. Despite this strong musical background, Nougaro himself never learned to play an instrument nor to read music. Still, his lack of formal training did not prevent him from developing a lifelong admiration for the work of French composers such as Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré.
His 'real' musical training came in the form of the American jazz, blues, and swing recordings he heard as a boy on Radio-Toulouse, with performers like Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and Glenn Miller becoming firm favorites as well as crucial influences on what would become his future singing style. He was also inspired by French chansonniers Charles Trénet and Edith Piaf, the latter of whom launched his career as a songwriter when two of his poems, Méphisto and La Sentier de la guerre [The Path to War], were recorded by her in the early 1950s. Before this could happen, Nougaro first had to fail his baccalauréat (equivalent to the American SAT exam, the British GSCE A-Level exam or the New South Wales HSC exam, depending on which part of the world you call home) and begin a career as a journalist, working first for Le Journal des curistes de Vichy, an in-house trade publication produced for those involved with prescribing and promoting the 'Vichy water cure,' and then for the French-based Algerian pied-noir newspaper L'Echo d'Alger.
Nougaro's careers as journalist and fledgling poet/performer were interrupted by his national military service, which saw him inducted into the Foreign Legion in 1949 and posted to the Moroccan city of Rabat for the next two years. After returning to France he resumed his poetic activities and, from 1954, regularly recited his poems at the Montmartre cabaret Le Lapin Agile (once patronized by, among others, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and the young Pablo Picasso) and other Paris nightclubs. During this period he began to work as a lyricist for other artists, with several of his songs being recorded by popular French singers of the day including Colette Renard, Marcel Amont, Philippe Clay, and Richard Anthony. Important friendships were also formed at this time with the Absurdist poet, novelist, and playwright Jacques Audiberti and with chansonnier Georges Brassens, who became his musical mentor.
It seemed natural for Nougaro to go from writing lyrics for others to performing them himself, a progression which, in 1958, saw him enter the studio to record his debut LP Il y avait une ville [There Was A City] –– an interesting mixture of jazz motifs and chanson-inspired lyrics created with the help of future Gallic songwriting legend Michel Legrand. But it was not until Nougaro signed with the Philips label in 1962 and released the songs Une petite fille [A Little Girl] and Cécile ma fille [To My Daughter Cécile] that his music truly began to find an audience, his jazz and Bossa Nova influenced style making him the ideal performer for the coming decade and, as many have suggested, a pioneer of what's since come to be known as 'World Music.'
Following a serious 1963 car accident which kept him out of concert halls and the recording studio for most of the year, Nougaro travelled to Brazil where, in addition to meeting and working with some of that country's finest musicians, he also found time to father a son. (His daughter Cécile had been born in 1951 to his first wife Sylvie, a former waitress whom he'd met when both had been working at Le Lapin Agile. His son was the product of a shortlived liaison with a Brazilian woman.) His return to France saw him perform to sell-out crowds at iconic venues like L'Olympia and Le Théatre de la Ville in Paris. In the meantime his music continued to be heavily influenced by modern jazz and began to feature performers like renowned French organist Eddy Louiss, bassist Pierre Michelot, and saxophonist Michel Portal as well as visiting US superstars like Ornette Coleman. The late 1960s saw Nougaro go from strength to strength as a performer, with albums like Petit Taureau [Little Bull, the nickname given to him by his recently-deceased friend Jacques Audiberti] and Une Soirée avec Claude Nougaro [An Evening with Claude Nougaro] topping the charts in France and becoming popular in many parts of Europe as well as South America.
The late 1970s were less kind to Nougaro, with his second label Barclay ultimately choosing to drop him from its roster in 1985 –– a move which caused him to sell his Paris home and relocate to New York where he recorded a successful 1987 'comeback' LP, Nougayork, for his new label WEA. For four consecutive years, beginning in 1993, he won the awards for both Best Album and Best Artist at the Victoires de la musique, the French equivalent to the Grammy Awards. In the mid 1990s, however, his health began to fail, seeing him enter hospital in 1995 to undergo open heart surgery –– the first of several operations that would lead to a gradual deterioration of his condition over the next nine years, forcing him to cancel concerts and finally abandon stage work altogether so his limited time and energy could be put to more effective use in the studio. This policy allowed him to record what would prove to be his final and possiblygreatest album, La Note Bleue [The Blue Note], in 2002-2003. This album, releasedby the US jazz label of the same name, featured him and others performing stunning new versions of some of his most iconic songs including Dansez sur moi [Dance With Me], Armstrong, and, of course, his signature tune Toulouse (albeit in a completely reworked instrumental arrangement). Unfortunately he didn't live to see the October 2004 release of La Note Bleueor read its universally positive reviews, having died of pancreatic cancer in March of that year.
Thankfully, the legacy of Claude Nougaro lives on. Le Prix Claude Nougaro [The Claude Nougaro Prize] was established in 2007 in the Midi-Pyrénées, the région where he was born, to help nurture and encourage young talent while 2009 was declared L'année Nougaro [The Year of Nougaro] in honor of what would have been his eightieth birthday. The July 2014 Bastille Day celebrations in his home city Toulouse saw him publicly honored againand were followed, two months later, by the unveiling of a statue of him in that city's Square de Gaulle.
Use the link below to visit the (French only) website of French singer-songwriter CLAUDE NOUGARO:
