My previous piece in 2018 on my friend Stanley Booth, whom I knew for 64 of his 82-plus years, had concluded with his revelation to me that he’d become a Catholic, achieving what he called “the greatest pleasure of my life … a complete redesign.”
It was surely appropriate, then, for Stanley’s funeral to be a Roman Catholic mass, which took place at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Central Avenue on Saturday, December 28th, more than a week after his death at Harbor View Nursing Facility on North Second Street.
The attending group of communicants was smaller than I would have anticipated and scattered throughout the venerable high-ceilinged Midtown church. A mass was a mass, after all, and this one kept pretty much to the standard litany, without allowances for the kind of open memorial that people of consequence so often receive these days.
And Stanley Booth was very much a person of consequence. His authorship of The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Outlaw Band (published in 1984 as Dance With the Devil after years of dedicated effort and familiarity with the band) was arguably the War and Peace of the rock era. There were other notable books, like Rythm Oil, a compilation of shorter pieces about the people, places, and things of that era, which, after all, is still very much with us. (The purposely misspelled title was typical Boothian waggishness.)
My favorite single piece of Stanley’s, a brief review of a Janis Joplin concert in Memphis during the mid-’60s, a failure through no fault of the singer’s own, somehow manages to encompass all the rights, wrongs, misadventures, and pretensions of the time.
A memorial for Stanley will be scheduled for later on, or so promises our mutual friend David Less (no slouch as an author himself), who had made a point of looking in on Stanley in his last days. According to David, Stanley had been lonely and depressed at the nursing home, where he had grown progressively more physically incapacitated, even as his mind strained, as writers’ minds do, toward articulation and purpose.
All that striving had ceased mere days earlier, as Stanley, after consultations between David and Stanley’s daughter Ruby, was entered into hospice care per se. He had become mute and incommunicative, hovering on the edge of vegetative.
Very regrettably, I had not gotten around to seeing Stanley as he neared his end. Many reasons for that, including a newly acquired auto that couldn’t be depended on to start and resisted all efforts to fix. The basic reason, though, was that our relationship, like the car, famously had its fits and starts.
A few years ago, after a reasonably longish period of keeping close company (which meant, significantly, carting Stanley around and making sure he had things — e.g., wheelchair, TV, what-have-you — and passing on periodic feelers from music media types trying to connect with him), we’d had a bizarre interruption. Out of the proverbial blue, he’d asked me why, some 60 years earlier, I’d referred to his girlfriend of that time as “simian.”
I remembered no such shocking incivility toward a lady whom I had in fact admired and, reasonably enough, therefore, could offer no explanation. Many protests and back-and-forths later, there had been an exchange of over-the-edge remarks between us, resulting in a breach. Inevitably, there would have been a healing, something we’d gone through more than once during those aforesaid 60-odd years, but — time ran out.
Sadly, this kind of thing was not atypical for Stanley. His persona, like his sense of language, filled all the obvious, and most of the imaginable, spaces. Though he had reservoirs of charm, many of his relationships ran into stormy weather. Long on talent and short of stature, he had his share of the Napoleon syndrome. He could be modest, but never exactly humble. Or maybe that should be stated the other way around. His earliest literary model had been Ernest Hemingway, that paragon of basic English and exact phraseology.
At a public function some years ago, the late George Klein introduced him, molto con brio, as a celebrated music writer. No, Stanley objected, for better or for worse, he was a writer, pure and simple. This was an echo of Hemingway’s famous late-career admonition to his overly self-concerned contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald, “You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers.”
Over the years, I’ve known numerous highly talented individuals whose abilities transcended various categories of the usually recognized earthly disciplines. Even as we speak, I could name you a handful, right here in Mempho. Would-be Renaissance men (and women).
Though he was not without a generous amount of self-regard (as the high proportion of references to himself in all his work indicates), Stanley Booth was not among these across-the-board pretenders. A writer is all he was. No scatterer of loose energy across the lines. No diluter of his essential being.
And for that he deserves to be called a Master.
I did not mean to confer, earlier in this article, any slight upon the reach and scope of the Roman Catholic litany. Its very universality and subordination to a (lowercase) catholic whole may have been the aspect of the religion that most appealed to Stanley and caused him to embrace it.
“I am not after any pie in the sky,” he would tell me, by way of an awkward attempt to account for his conversion. In this piece, I have not listed any of the earthly honors conferred upon him, and there were many, including a lifetime achievement award from the Smithsonian Institute. But as Stanley once said, wistfully, “You can’t eat reputation. If I had a nickel for every good review I’ve had …” letting that sentence fade out rhetorically.
As the aforesaid litany notes, “we know partially, and we prophesy partially.” But it holds forth the idea for the striver of attaining the company of the saints, and that ain’t hay.