In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• The DepartedBlues for Mister Stanley
• Clifford Thompson (bio)

I met Stanley Crouch in 1994. He was nearing fifty, stocky, balding, at or near the peak of his fame and his bull-like force. Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990), the first of his five essay collections, had cemented his reputation as a cultural critic, and among other major awards, he had received the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant. With the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the writer Albert Murray, he had co-founded Jazz at Lincoln Center, a living monument to the music he loved and championed so fiercely.

At the time I was a thirty-one-year-old associate editor at a Bronx, New York–based reference publication called Current Biography. I wrote a profile of Stanley for CB, largely as an excuse to bond with the man whose work had given me answers to questions I hadn't fully formed. To a limited extent, it worked: we kept in occasional touch, and I was once a guest at a Jazz at Lincoln Center concert, seated between Stanley and Murray as they traded observations across my lap. But the most memorable thing Stanley communicated to me during those years came to me through my wife, who met Stanley at Roger Straus's memorial service and told him she was married to me. He told her, "Oh yeah, Cliff. He's a friend—but he's too respectful. Tell him to do something about that."

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Since Stanley's death at seventy-four, on September 16, 2020, I've thought about that remark and how it represents what was best and worst in his public persona. That persona helped save me. Those questions I had not fully formed: What does it mean to be a black American? What attitude do you take toward the only home you've ever known, one built on the degradation of people who looked like you? How do you love that home without hating yourself? How do you express your defiance, the way black nationalists did, without leaving yourself, in a sense, homeless? The answer—growled to me from between the lines of Stanley's prose—was that you do it by claiming your American birthright with the fury and acid of the most furious and acidic of America-damning black separatists. You do it, particularly if you're Stanley, by both insisting on the interrelation of all Americans and celebrating black people's special contributions to America; you do it, particularly if you're Stanley, by setting jazz as the bar of black American excellence, grit, and imagination; and you do it, most particularly if you're Stanley, by shooting to kill in encounters with those who think differently. My reluctance to do that last part probably explains Stanley's comment about me, and Stanley's refusal to do anything else made his heroism inseparable from his villainy.

Stanley's ideas, in the main, came from Murray, whose dozen books include the 1970 essay collection The Omni-Americans. But Stanley might be said to have been the Malcolm X to Murray's Elijah Muhammad, the fiery disciple who spread his mentor's ideas farther than the mentor himself. Oh, how all four men would have hated that comparison. But I will (disrespectfully!) extend it long enough to add that Stanley, like Malcolm, was an exciting figure to some for the same reason that he angered others. I used the word "villainy" above, but a more accurate word may be "fanaticism," bright and shining with its dark flip side of intolerance. Stanley's modus operandi as a cultural critic, for good or ill, was to find fault with the part and then take a shotgun to the whole. So rap music, that self-expression of the marginalized, some of which has very unfortunate leanings toward misogyny and romanticizes the "gangsta" life, was all worthless in Stanley's view, a celebration of the worst aspects of black life. Rock music was to Stanley the inexplicably adored idiot grandchild of the blues, besmirching the family name. Toni Morrison's novels, in which Stanley perceived a black wallowing in victimhood, were "bottles of bathtub corn liquor" given "high...

中文翻译：

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逝者：斯坦利先生的忧郁

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 斯坦利先生的逝世蓝调
• 克利福德·汤普森（生物）

我在1994年遇见了斯坦利·克劳奇（Stanley Crouch）。他的名气和类似牛势的高峰接近或接近50岁，矮胖，秃顶。他的五篇论文集的第一篇，《悬空法官》（Hanging Judge，1990年）的记录巩固了他作为文化评论家的声誉，在其他主要奖项中，他获得了麦克阿瑟基金会的“天才”资助。他与小号手温顿·马萨利斯（Wynton Marsalis）和作家阿尔伯特·穆雷（Albert Murray）在林肯中心共同创立了爵士乐，这是他热爱和拥护的音乐的活生生的纪念碑。

当时，我是纽约布朗克斯的参考出版物《当代传记》的一名31岁的副主编。我为CB撰写了Stanley的个人资料，主要是作为与该人交往的借口，该人的工作为我提供了我尚未完全解决的问题的答案。在一定程度上，它奏效了：我们保持着不间断的联系，我曾经是林肯中心爵士音乐会的嘉宾，坐在斯坦利和穆雷之间，他们在我的腿上交换观察数据。但是，斯坦利在那几年传达给我的最令人难忘的事情是通过我的妻子来的。我的妻子在罗杰·施特劳斯（Roger Straus）的追悼会上遇见了斯坦利，并告诉他她已嫁给我。他对她说：“哦，是的，克里夫。他是朋友，但是他太尊重了。告诉他为此做点什么。”

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自斯坦利于2020年9月16日七十四岁去世以来，我一直在考虑这一言论，以及这在他的公众人物中代表了什么是好事。那个角色帮助救了我。这些问题我还没有完全形成：成为黑人美国人意味着什么？您对您所知道的唯一一所房子的态度是什么，那是建立在看起来像您的人的堕落基础上的？您如何在不讨厌自己的情况下爱上这个家？您如何表达自己的反抗，就像黑人民族主义者所做的那样，在某种意义上没有离开自己，无家可归？答案是从斯坦利的散文中得出的，对我来说，答案是，您通过拥有最愤怒和最恶毒的美国黑人分离主义者的愤怒和酸来主张自己的美国出生权。您可以这样做，特别是如果您是斯坦利，和庆祝黑人的美国特殊贡献; 您可以通过将爵士乐设定为美国黑人卓越，勇气和想象力的标准来做到这一点，特别是如果您是斯坦利。而且您可以做到这一点，特别是如果您是斯坦利，则可以通过枪击与想法不同的人相遇而杀死。我不愿做最后一部分可能解释了斯坦利对我的评论，并且斯坦利拒绝做任何其他事情使他的英雄主义与他的反派密不可分。

斯坦利的思想主要来自默里（Murray），他的著作包括1970年的杂文集《全美黑人》（The Omni-Americans）。但是可以说，斯坦利是穆雷（Murray）的伊利亚（Elijah Muhammad）的马尔科姆X（Malcolm X），这是一个火热的门徒，他将导师的思想传播到比导师本人更远的地方。哦，四个男人都讨厌那个比较。但我会（无礼地！）将其延长足够长的时间，以使斯坦利和马尔科姆一样，对于某些人来说是一个令人兴奋的数字，原因与他激怒其他人的原因相同。我在上面使用了“ villainy”一词，但更准确的词可能是“狂热主义”，它带有不容忍的黑暗反面。斯坦利作为文化批评家的作案手法，无论是好是坏，都是先找部分毛病，然后将a弹枪运用于整体。如此的说唱音乐，使边缘化群体的自我表达，其中有些不幸地倾向于厌女症，并使“黑帮”生活浪漫化，斯坦利（Stanley）认为，毫无意义的庆祝活动是对黑人生活最恶劣方面的庆祝。摇滚音乐给斯坦利（Stanley）带来了一个莫名其妙的蓝调白痴孙子，并涂上了这个姓氏。托尼·莫里森（Toni Morrison）的小说中，斯坦利（Stanley）感到受害者深深地陷入了黑暗。