James Joyce and Ben Webster

This piece ultimately concerns Ben Webster, but it requires setup. The setup has to do with books.

The book discussion group to which I belong operates a bit unconventionally. We don’t use outlines or lesson plans. There is no discussion leader. We are a sort of freewheeling literary cooperative. Sometimes, the discussion goes far afield from the book at hand, although we usually manage to get back to it. We laugh a lot. We live in one of the great wine producing regions of the world, so we drink wine—moderately, of course—as we discuss the book at hand. There are eight of us, four men, four women, none married to one of the others. We alternate meeting at one another’s houses. The host provides the wine, coffee and dessert.

Ordinarily, we select a slate of six or eight books for the coming year. Last year, this was the list:

The Conservationist: Nadine Gordimer
The Moviegoer: Walker Percy
Light in August: William Faulkner
My Name is Red: Orhan Pamuk
The Canterbury Tales: Geoffrey Chaucer
Robinson Crusoe: Daniel Defoe
Kim: Rudyard Kipling/Candide: Voltaire (a twofer)
Wise Blood: Flannery O’Connor

This time around, we are devoting an entire year to James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s only fair; Joyce devoted nine years to writing it. Last night, in addition to discussing the book, we watched an installment of the 1967 Irish film of Ulysses starring Milo O’Shea as Leopold Bloom. Then, we had coffee and dessert. As we ate, I noticed that the host had on a table next to my chair a copy of the CD box set of Duke Ellington at Fargo, 1940. He saw me staring at it as lustfully as Blazes Boylan contemplating Molly Bloom and asked if there was something I’d like to hear.

“Of course,” I said, “Ben Webster playing ‘Stardust,’” He put it on.

“My God,” one of the women said about halfway through, “It’s as if he doesn’t have a horn, as if he’s just breathing the music.”

A good deal has been written about that imperishable tenor saxophone solo, but I can’t imagine a finer description of it. Joyce couldn't have put it better.