Monday, February 25, 2013

Fiction into Film


Transformation of Black Fiction into Film

 

Transformation of fiction into film necessitates deformations. Some transformations may enhance a flawed story, but they frequently cheapen the nuances of strong fiction. Viewers who have not read the source may logically think the film is excellent. Readers who move from the source to the film may have a quite different opinion, for they know that the probable intentions of the fiction writer have been murdered.

Such is the case with the television film of Richard Wright’s novella “Long Black Song.”  Sarah’s husband Silas is figuratively castrated by the film; his agency to extract a cuckold’s revenge is erased by magnifying his submissiveness to a white merchant and to his wife’s imperatives.  Wright’s intentions are spun 180 degrees. His purposeful depiction of Silas’s act of violence and resolve to die bravely for his beliefs are minimized for the comfort of genteel television viewers.

A screening and discussion of the film “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” at the 2013 Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration shed light once again on transformative reduction.  First, the fictive editor of Miss Jane’s oral autobiography, her neo-slave narrative, is not the novel’s teacher of history but the film’s magazine journalist.  This gesture dislocates the educational context for reading Gaines’s novel and obligates us to use a magazine’s context for viewing the film.  In the film, the folkloric richness of Miss Jane’s clairvoyance about the death of her husband Joe Pittman isn’t balanced by her refusal to use hoo-doo to ensure that Albert Cluveau dies in extreme agony for murdering her “adopted son” Ned. His death is as erased from the film as is the relationship the “brothers – half-brothers,” the black Timmy and the white Tee Bob.  Absent too are Miss Jane’s keen remarks about Creoles.  Tee Bob’s passionate love for the Creole teacher Mary Agnes LeFabre, his rape of Mary Agnes, and his subsequent suicide never appear on the screen. The added scene of Miss Jane’s drinking from the “White Only” water fountain in Bayonne robs us of the exercise of imagination Gaines demanded from readers of the novel.

Transformation of African American fiction into film is a ripe subject for a monograph or a master’s thesis. We have to account for additions and omissions. We have good reasons for exploring the reductive politics of entertainment.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                                            PHBW BLOG

February 25, 2013

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Draft of a forthcoming interview


An Interview with Jerry W.Ward, Jr.

Wang ZuyouProf[O1]  Jerry Ward, I am very glad that you grant me such a rare opportunity [O2] to interview you. We know that you and Richard Wright’s daughter, Julia Wright, were among the founders of the Richard Wright Circle in 1990, an organization dedicated to the study of Wright’s life and work. Among your many writings on the subject some of the most significant are: the introduction to the Harper Perennial edition of Black Boy; Black Boy (American Hunger) Freedom to Remember, a work you coauthored with Maryemma Graham; Richard Wright and the Common Reader, written for Black Magnolia[O3] ; and an entry for the Mississippi Encyclopedia. Will you please illustrate your main thought on Richard Wright study?

Jerry Ward:  Let me begin with a debatable claim.  Among twentieth-century American writers, Richard Wright is the one who disturbs readers in a unique way. He forces readers to think.  When we read his published works, we find ourselves thinking about the long history of intrusion, resistance, and conquest that pertains to the Americas, to what Europeans called “The New World.”  It is not the case that other American writers, especially historians, have not addressed those issues.  Wright, however, deals with the issues in his fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and essays by asking hard questions, by challenging us with moral imperatives. James Baldwin, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, W. E. B. DuBois, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Walt Whitman are other writers who entangle us with moral imperatives, but they seem to be less forceful than Wright in exposing the wounds of history that will not heal.  I may be the only person in my country who holds this opinion.  Wright fully understood the nature and consequences of the endless suffering human beings must endure.  He understood mankind’s hunger. As Wright put it, he was not concerned with making people happy, with entertaining them. He was concerned with forcing people to look directly at whatever it is we believe “Truth” to be.  His works are unsettling.  Wright understood that the primitive instinct of man and woman to be brutal in their interactions with other men and women is one of the major aspects of human existence on this planet.  He knew what material and spiritual poverty is and how such poverty is related to dehumanization, to ethnic or racial hatred, to the psychological grip of religious beliefs and practices, to capitalism and class warfare.  His perspectives were not always right, but he was brave enough to have perspectives and to share them with the world.  He paid for his pursuit of truth, what Michel Fabre called his unfinished quest, with his life.  We study Richard Wright in order to become more honest, to become brave and critical thinkers.

Wang ZuyouRichard Wright is one of the most important African American writers. He is also one of the most prolific. Best known as the author of Native Son[O4] , he wrote 7 novels; 2 collections of short fiction; an autobiography; more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays; some 4,000 verses; a photo-documentary; and 3 travel books. By attacking the taboos and hypocrisy that other writers had failed to address, you[O5]  revolutionized American literature and created a disturbing and realistic portrait of the African American experience. The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (American Mosaic)[O6] , of which you and Robert J. Butler are co-editors, is a guide to his vast and influential body of works. What prompts you into such a giant project?[O7] 

Jerry Ward:  Robert Butler and I undertook the project because it was necessary to provide a reference book for students, teachers, and the general public.  We wanted people to have a resource for discovering basic facts about Wright and his works, and we believe that good critical work on writers must start with facts rather than with theoretical speculations.  Like Keneth Kinnamon’s two magnificent bibliographies of critical responses to Wright, the Richard Wright Encyclopedia is an integral part of what the Richard Wright Circle was established to accomplish. I should mention that I have another big, ongoing project.  I am writing Richard Wright: One Reader’s Responses, a study of Wright’s mind and his writings. I am not certain that I shall ever finish that project.

Wang ZuyouYour countless [O8] works are expressions of your endless love of literature, esp. [O9] Afro-American [O10] literature. Besides Richard Wright, who are those writers that absorb your passion and devotion?

Jerry Ward: To use your words, I am passionately devoted to many writers, particularly to writers other critics may have chosen to overlook –Asili Ya Nadhiri, James E. Cherry, Sterling D. Plumpp, Harold Clark, Julius E. Thompson, Eugene Redmond, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Tom Dent come immediately to mind. Ishmael Reed and Lance Jeffers are at the top of my list. I am passionately interested in writers who share all or a significant portion of my commitment to struggling with whatever “Truth” might be.

Wang ZuyouShow more

Will you expound upon them respectively?

Jerry Ward: That is impossible for me to do in this interview. I would need to write several essays to expound.  I will say a little about Reed and Jeffers to give you a preview of my thinking. I first read Reed when I was a soldier in Vietnam.  I later had the privilege of serving with him on the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and of conducting extensive interviews with him in the early 1980s. In his own way, Ishmael Reed continues and takes to a new level the work Richard Wright did. I reject the idea which circulates like HIV/AIDS and cancer among American intellectuals that Wright and Reed are “protest writers.”  All American writers protest something. I value Reed for his sustained efforts since the late 1960s to promote genuine multiculturalism in our discussions of the literature and culture of the United States. His efforts as a novelist, poet, dramatist, musician, essayist and cultural critic, publisher and editor are special and unsurpassed. He is dedicated to providing the grounds or the rich, always expanding matrix for the delayed conversation about what it means to be an American.  He does not merely give lip-service to multiculturalism and diversity.  He is profoundly engaged in the practice of inclusiveness. For this reason Reginald Martin (University of Memphis) and I have begun to work on a book to be entitled Ishmael Reed’s Conversation with America. Lance Jeffers, with whom I enjoyed a most rewarding friendship during the last decade (1975-1985) of his life, was an excellent poet and critical thinker. He was a man who had absorbed what Jean-Paul Sartre was talking about in Qu’est-ce que la literature? (1947). He was engagé. Engaged. Committed. For him, as for Reed, writing is an act of social responsibility. I learned much from him about poetry, cultural nationalism, and how to be a responsible person. I wrote the introduction for his novel Witherspoon, a novel that John Oliver Killens commended highly. One of my former students, Howard Rambsy II, published a most thoughtful essay on Jeffers and the Black Aesthetic in Kevin Powell’s anthology Step Into A World (2000). I intend to revise and expand a paper I wrote many years ago on “Racialized Morality in Lance Jeffers’s Witherspoon.” You remind me that I have so much work to do in fitting the writers for whom I have a passionate devotion into literary history.

Wang ZuyouShow more


In The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery, you fuse autobiography, politics, spirituality, history, and poetry in a highly inventive and unusual trip through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Your house and the university campus where you worked as a professor were both flooded in the storm. It is from this trauma that you scramble to find hope and sanity in a world ruled by the fact that thousands have been abused by Nature and revenge is impossible. What is the mission there [O11] that you seem to try to fulfill in this memoir?

Jerry Ward: I do not think The Katrina Papers has a mission. The book has purpose. The initial purpose was to examine and document my mind as I dealt with the trauma of loss.  I wrote the book as a journal, but if people wish to call it a memoir I do not object.  It is journal about what was happening in my mind. The first publisher to whom I submitted the manuscript said I needed to revise it to incorporate a narrative arc.  I did not want to include a narrative arc.  If my readers find one, that is an accident, a fortunate accident. The ultimate purpose of the book is to inform readers that they too can write their own stories and account to some for their historicity, their participation in the making of social history.  All of us have to deal with the wounds of history that cannot be healed.  What I tried to do in The Katrina Papers was to minimize the agony of the wounds.

Wang ZuyouShow more

I know that you also wrote[O12]  poems, which you may have forgotten, though you have a good memory. Do you think we should give special attention to your poem "Jazz to Jackson to John"?

Jerry Ward:  Yes, you should. “Jazz to Jackson to John” is my signature poem. Of all the poems I have written, it represents best my interests in history, music, and state of existence. It addresses what I think the function of memory should be.

Wang ZuyouIn discussing the poetry of Natasha Trethewey, you call us attention to [O13] Trethewey’s strategies for recovering history in Domestic Work, Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Native Guard [O14] and how her poems are aesthetic warnings against post-racial delusions. To put Trethewey’s being named Poet Laureate of the United States in proper perspective, one must read Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s brilliant essay “The Subjective Briar Patch: Contemporary American Poetry.” What is its special use in understanding contemporary American poetry?

 

Jerry Ward: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s essay is infused with honesty and integrity. It is a generous, scholarly and civilizing statement about internal struggles within the field of contemporary American poetry. Jeffers challenges us to be logical and sober about how those struggles or negotiations among poets, critics, and readers of poetry are so frequently racist, sexist, and, to be extremely candid, “bitchy.”  Her essay bids us to meditate on poetry and modernism as an asymmetrical affair, an affair that is saturated with conflicts, taste and discrimination, desperate measures to protect privilege and maintain hegemony and the mountains poets must conquer as they practice their craft. Jeffers illuminates the conflicts, and her essay can be used as a powerful guide for moving through the combat zone.  Her essay helps us to discern how political the position of Poet Laureate of the United States might actually be. In an indirect way, the essay also can be useful when we read Trethewey’s most recent collection Thrall (2012) and Brenda Marie Osbey’s History and Other Poems (2012). Osbey’s is a rare book that secures our participation in and control of the dialogic imagination.

 

 

 

Wang ZuyouYour commentary The Cambridge History of African American Literature and the Limits of Literary History “[O15]  seeks to explain the inevitable absence in literary historical narratives of writers who are of equal merit with and sometimes of greater importance than those who are discussed. Why do you believe so?[O16] 

 

Jerry Ward: No literary history can account for all of a nation’s writers or for all of the writers who have contributed something valuable to an ethnic tradition within a larger national tradition of literary production. A definitive accounting would be nothing more than an enormous listing of names, a literary telephone directory.  The population of people who can make some legitimate claim to be writers has grown exponentially within the last thirty years.  Population size is one reason for absence. Another reason has to do with how literary histories are constructed and with the choices made by people selected to write chapters of a literary history.  In the United States, most of the scholars and critics who write literary history work at colleges and universities.  Although some well-informed literary historical comments might appear in blogs or in social networks, it would be indeed rare to find any of those comments in a literary history sponsored by a prestigious university press or a first-rate commercial publisher.  Academic circles in the United States tend to be conservative and unwilling to take risks.  Tenure and promotion depend greatly on one’s publishing articles in the right peer-reviewed journals, publishing books with the leading presses in one’s field, and publishing chapters in books that are deemed to have great merit.  Excellent writers who are not canonized or strong candidates for canonization tend to be ignored.  The tyranny of the academy is powerful.

 

Wang ZuyouAs an overseas professor at Huazhong Normal University (Central China Normal University) in Wuhan, you have deep interest in exchanges between the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America, in promoting the mutual destruction of stereotypes. A lecture you give there [O17] on “American Literature and Digital Humanities” involves a series of speculations on how new technologies may change the study and teaching of literature, especially of African American literature. Right?

 

Jerry Ward:  That is correct. Digital humanities is not a panacea or cure-all, but it is a crucial element in how literature and culture will be written about and evaluated in the future. There are still well-founded reservations about what digital humanities can achieve.  I think for some time we will continue to combine traditional methods with those emerging in the field of digital humanities.  Ultimately, our scholarly practices as well as our scholarly questions will be altered by new technologies.

 

Wang ZuyouYou have been involved with many professional organizations, such as the College Language Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Southern Black Cultural Alliance.[O18]  You have played a decisive role in the Mississippi Humanities Council and were recognized for your contributions to that organization by being given the Humanities Teacher Award, the Humanities Scholars Award, and being elevated to an executive position in the Council. Aside from your academic affiliation you served on the Mississippi Advisory Committee to U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Jerry Ward:  I have profited intellectually from my diverse professional involvements, because they have enabled me to have exchanges with leading scholars, writers, and artists.  Many of these people are more than names on a page.  I have had long-term correspondence with some of them; others have become friends; some of the younger people have chosen me to be an informal mentor. During my career as a teacher from 1970 to 2012, working with professional organizations and such cultural organizations as the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration and the Zora Neale Hurston Festival in Florida has been meaningful. And I have worked with the Project on the History of Black Writing since its inception in 1983.

Wang ZuyouYou received numerous honors and awards throughout your career. What are your most cherished awards? Why?

Jerry Ward: My most cherished awards are the Darwin T. Turner Award of Excellence for Contributions in Research, Scholarship and Mentoring; the “Teacher of the Year” award from Tougaloo College in 1992; the Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award from the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration; my induction as Honored Girot and Lifetime Member of the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent; and my induction into the Tougaloo Hall of Fame. In January 2013, Tougaloo College designated me Professor Emeritus. From 2002 to 2012, I was the Distinguished Eminent Scholar and Professor of English at Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. [O19]  I retired from Dillard in August 2012 and now enjoy the life of an independent scholar. I appreciate the awards, and I thank the people who thought I deserved them. I admit, however, that awards frighten me.  They are reminders that what I have done in the past is less important than what I am doing in the present.  Making worthwhile contributions depends on my continuing efforts to work harder and better. I do hope some of my accomplishments provide ideas and models for invested behavior for younger generations.  I do remind myself daily that if I stopped to admire accomplishments, I would become either a failure or an arrogant fool.

Wang ZuyouWe know that African American Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of the history, culture, and politics of Black Americans. Taken broadly, the field studies not only the cultures of people of African descent in the United States, but the cultures of the entire African diaspora but it has been defined in different ways[O20] . The field includes scholars of African-American literature, history, politics, religion and religious studies, sociology, and many other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. As an expert in African American studies and a bridge between American and Chinese literary academic circle[O21] , what are your suggestions for the younger generation of scholars concerning their research and communication[O22]  in the realm of African American studies?[O23] 

Jerry Ward: You are referring to the broadest field, to the one called Black Studies or Africana Studies or African Diaspora Studies.  African American Studies is an ally to the larger field, but it focuses more precisely on studies of work produced in the United States. All of these studies are like the threads of a spider’s web.  They are part of a larger design.  As a bridge between Chinese and American academic circles, I try to promote cross-cultural discussions that are very necessary in the twenty-first century. I am also something of an iconoclast. I like to knock down the false idols of the mind that Sir Francis Bacon identified centuries ago. I have the onus of providing viable alternatives to what I virtually destroy.  Be wary of people who talk stridently about revolutions and who have no rational programs to replace what they would eradicate. They do more harm than good. I advise the younger generation of Chinese scholars who do work in African American and American literatures and cultures to arm themselves with in-depth knowledge about the history of the United States.  They must know that history to prevent their being misled and mis-educated by either Eurocentric or Afrocentric extremes. They should develop skills in making sharp critiques of African American Studies.  If they want to publish their work in the United States or other countries outside of China, they have to master the rhetoric and protocols of scholarship that may be vastly different from scholarship published in Chinese. I urge these younger scholars to remember that cultural expressions and everyday life exist in symbiotic relationships, to remember that we are dealing with literary or intellectual ecology. 



 [O1]Professor

 [O2]..you granted me an opportunity ….

 [O3]These are articles not books, so you should not italicize the article titles ---“Black Boy (American Hunger): Freedom to Remember,” a work you coauthored with Maryemma Graham; “Richard Wright and the Common Reader,” written for Black Magnolias;

 [O4]

 [O5]Richard Wright revolutionized….

 [O6](Greenwood Press, 2008)

 [O7]What prompted you into undertaking such a giant project?

 [O8]many

 [O9]especially

 [O10]African American

 [O11]delete

 [O12]write

 [O13]…you call our attention to….

 [O14]Italicize the book titles

 [O15]Note the change in punctuation

 [O16]Why do you believe this is true?

 [O17]…gave there…

 [O18]..such as the College Language Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Modern Language Association, the Southern Conference on African American Studies, and the Southern Black Cultural Alliance….


 [O20]Delete

 [O21]…as a bridge between American and Chinese academic circles,…

 [O22]publications

 [O23]Studies

 

 

 

 

 


 

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Wesley Brown Revisited


Wesley Brown Revisited

 

Like the walking bodies in our country that are in a slow hurry to advertise the fine art of tattooing,  we best be asking hard questions about keeping Black real compared to what. Or can we defamiliarize an answer to Roberta Flack’s explicit question by saying Pink passing for White ain’t real?

In a pure fantasy that lacks referentiality, Wesley Brown’s second novel Darktown Strutters (New York: Crane Hill Press, 1994) is the inspiration for Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled ( 2000).  Fantasy precludes proof. But we can have a noisy shock of recognition by juxtaposing the mumbling surrounding the film with the silence that engulfs the novel.  Lee addressed the history of blacking up from the outside, from the vantage of an imminent present, and his satire sticks like water on Teflon.  Brown, on the other hand, dealt with the racecraft of minstrelsy in America from the inside, from the interiors of its languages by allowing his characters Jim Crow and Jim Crow Two to be the partial narrators of the story. His fiction informs a consciousness of American class and caste formation; Lee’s film trivializes that consciousness and cashes in on entertainment values.

We should note also that Wesley Brown has credentials in terms of cultural nationalism that Lee must envy.  In 1965, Brown worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; he became a member of the Black Panther Party in 1968, a year marked by the publication of the landmark anthology Black Fire and a year that the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History so richly documented ( read  In Black America: 1968: The Year of Awakening ). Brown became a political prisoner in 1972 for refusing to be inducted in the military and spent eighteen months of his three-year sentence in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. We have a conflicted romance with incarceration in America, but Brown’s excellence as a fiction writer and dramatist and editor is to be measured both because of his political sacrifices and despite them.  His mastery of craft is not innately wed to his ideology.  Let us be clear about that. The separation of realms is no excuse, however, for failing to honor those who teach us that art and ethos are united.

It helps greatly to suggest that Darktown Strutters is to African American fiction what Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) is to Euro-American critical theory. The books do the work of enlightenment.  Eric Lott tells us much that we do need to know about the centrality of race in the whole history of American entertainment, although he carefully avoids outing who now controls the entertainment industry in America.  Wesley Brown is exempt from having to deal with that vexed and dangerous subject in his novel, because his objective was to liberate the languages of minstrelsy to speak for themselves.  His superior artistry is implicated with a difference that Gayl Jones noted between Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Gaines in Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) -----“Gaines has carried us beyond Hurston’s illusion of Janie’s voice to the full value and reality of Miss Jane’s tall-telling” (169).

We have too long denied ourselves the pleasure of Wesley Brown’s company and denied that he is one of our national treasures, and we have squandered much too much of our literary energy in consuming what the Idols of the Marketplace have hoodwinked us into believing is Black.  Do we have to remind ourselves that American Kente cloth is “made in China”? One purchases the real thing in Ghana.  Wesley Brown’s novels Tragic Magic, Darktown Strutters, and Push Comes to Shove may have been tossed under the bus by marketplace politics in twentieth-century African American literature, but we do know they survived the accident and are well. If it is probable that we can have a renaissance of intelligence about what is Black and real, we will find ourselves teaching young African Americans how to write well by reading Wesley Brown as we sing to them a memorable line from Darktown Strutters: “Our people pass the word more regular than we pass water”(47).

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                                            PHBW BLOG

February 12, 2013

Sunday, February 10, 2013

50 Years Ago in February


Fifty Years Ago in February

 

Fifty years ago, F. W. Dupee reviewed The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and John Thompson reviewed Sissie by John A. Williams in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 1, 1963. With Richard Wright being dead and Ralph Ellison playing possum, Baldwin and Williams were the leading black male writers of 1963, competing with Martin Luther King, Jr. for the ears of American Negroes.  John Oliver Killens was doing what he did best; he was writing take-no-prisoners prose and fiction and waiting for retarded Americans to catch up with him. A young person named LeRoi Jones was swimming with genuine conviction toward fame.

One did hear of Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Petry, Margaret Walker, and Lorraine Hansberry in 1963, but black women writers had to wait a full decade until the Phillis Wheatley Festival at Jackson State University, conceived by Margaret Walker, accorded them overdue attention and secular apotheosis.

 Dupee, a founding editor of The Partisan Review, was a white male in extremis, and he struggled like a Hebrew slave to give an Egyptian a fair reading. Thompson was an English sociologist, and his three point tendentious statement on Williams’s novel  was about as good as one could expect from a white male British sociologist who might have better spent his ink on a rigorous study of how swiftly the British Empire was dissolving in 1963.

Fifty years later, one finds it most bracing to read the comments of Dupee and Thompson and to have confirmed  one’s suspicion that “white”  white male writers are perpetually blessed by God to be wrongheaded.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                                            February 10, 2013

 

 

 

·        

James Baldwin and the “Man”



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The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin
The Dial Press, $3.50

As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro question James Baldwin has no equals. He probably has, in fact, no real competitors. The literary role he has taken on so deliberately and played with so agile an intelligence is one that no white writer could possibly imitate and that few Negroes, I imagine, would wish to embrace in toto. Baldwin impresses me as being the Negro in extremis, a virtuoso of ethnic suffering, defiance, and aspiration. His role is that of the man whose complexion constitutes his fate, and not only in a society poisoned by prejudice but, it sometimes seems, in general. For he appears to have received a heavy dose of existentialism; he is at least half-inclined to see the Negro question in the light of the Human Condition. So he wears his color as Hester Prynne did her scarlet letter, proudly. And like her he converts this thing, in itself so absurdly material, into a form of consciousness, a condition of spirit. Believing himself to have been branded as different from and inferior to the white majority, he will make a virtue of his situation. He will be different and in his own way be better.

His major essays—for example, those collected in Notes of a Native Son—show the extent to which he is able to be different and in his own way better. Most of them were written, as other such pieces generally are, for the magazines, some obviously on assignment. And their subjects—a book, a person, a locale, an encounter—are the inevitable subjects of magazine essays. But Baldwin’s way with them is far from inevitable. To apply criticism “in depth” to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, for him, to illuminate not only a book, an author, an age, but a whole strain in a country’s culture. Similarly with those routine themes, the Paris expatriate and Life With Father, which he treats in “Equal In Paris” and the title piece of Notes of a Native Son, and which he wholly transfigures. Of course the transfiguring process in Baldwin’s essays owes something to the fact that the point of view is a Negro’s, an outsider’s, just as the satire of American manners in Lolita and Morte d’Urban depends on their being written from the angle of, respectively, a foreign-born creep and a Catholic priest. But Baldwin’s point of view in his essays is not merely that of the generic Negro. It is, as I have said, that of a highly stylized Negro, a role which he plays with an artful and zestful consistency and which he expresses in a language distinguished by clarity, brevity, and a certain formal elegance. He is in love, for example, with syntax, with sentences that mount through clearly articulated stages to a resounding and clarifying climax and then gracefully subside. For instance this one, from The Fire Next Time:

Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.

Nobody else in democratic America writes sentences like this anymore. It suggests the ideal prose of an ideal literary community, some aristocratic France of one’s dreams. This former Harlem boy has undergone his own incredible metamorphosis.

His latest book, The Fire Next Time, differs in important ways from his earlier work in the essay. Its subjects are less concrete, less clearly defined; to a considerable extent he has exchanged prophecy for criticism, exhortation for analysis, and the results for his mind and style are in part disturbing. The Fire Next Time gets its title from a slave song: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign,/No more water the fire next time.” But this small book with the incendiary title consists of two independent essays, both in the form of letters. One is a brief affair entitled “My Dungeon Shook” and addressed to “My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.” The ominous promise of this title is fulfilled in the text. Between the hundred-year-old anniversary and the fifteen-year-old nephew the disparity is too great even for a writer of Baldwin’s rhetorical powers. The essay reads like some specimen of “public speech” as practiced by MacLeish or Norman Corwin. It is not good Baldwin.

The other, much longer, much more significant essay appeared first in a pre-Christmas number of The New Yorker, where it made, understandably, a sensation. It is called “Down At the Cross; Letter From a Region of My Mind.” The subtitle should be noted. Evidently the essay is to be taken as only a partial or provisional declaration on Baldwin’s part, a single piece of his mind. Much of it, however, requires no such appeal for caution on the reader’s part. Much of it is unexceptionably first-rate. For example, the reminiscences of the writer’s boyhood, which form the lengthy introduction. Other of Baldwin’s writings have made us familiar with certain aspects of his Harlem past. Here he concentrates on quite different things: the boy’s increasing awareness of the abysmally narrow world of choice he inhabits as a Negro, his attempt to escape a criminal existence by undergoing a religious conversion and becoming at fifteen a revivalist preacher, his discovery that he must learn to “inspire fear” if he hopes to survive the fear inspired in him by “the man”—the white man.

In these pages we come close to understanding why he eventually assumed his rather specialized literary role. It seems to have grown naturally out of his experience of New York City. As distinct from a rural or small-town Negro boy, who is early and firmly taught his place, young Baldwin knew the treacherous fluidity and anonymity of the metropolis, where hidden taboos and unpredictable animosities lay in wait for him and a trip to the 42nd Street Library could be a grim adventure. All this part of the book is perfect; and when Baldwin finally gets to what is his ostensible subject, the Black Muslims or Nation of Islam movement, he is very good too. As good, that is, as possible considering that his relations with the movement seem to have been slight. He once shared a television program with Malcolm X, “the movement’s second-in-command,” and he paid a brief and inconclusive visit to the first-in-command, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, and his entourage at the party’s headquarters in Chicago. (Muhammad ranks as a prophet; to him the Black Muslim doctrines were “revealed by Allah Himself.”) Baldwin reports the Chicago encounter in charming detail and with what looks like complete honesty. On his leaving the party’s rather grand quarters, the leader insisted on providing him with a car and driver to protect him “from the white devils until he gets wherever it is he is going.” Baldwin accepted, he tells us, adding wryly: “I was, in fact, going to have a drink with several white devils on the other side of town.”

He offers some data on the Black Muslim movement, its aims and finances. But he did a minimum of homework here. Had he done more he might at least have provided a solid base for the speculative fireworks the book abounds in. To cope thoroughly with the fireworks in short space, or perhaps any space, seems impossible. Ideas shoot from the book’s pages as the sparks fly upward, in bewildering quantity and at random. I don’t mean that it is all dazzle. On the cruel paradoxes of the Negro’s life, the failures of Christianity, the relations of Negro and Jew, Baldwin is often superb. But a lot of damage is done to his argument by his indiscriminate raids on Freud, Lawrence, Sartre, Genet, and other psychologists, metaphysicians and melodramatists. Still more damage is done by his refusal to draw on anyone so humble as Martin Luther King and his fellow-practitioners of non-violent struggle.

For example: “White Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.” But suppose one or two white Americans are not intimidated. Suppose someone coolly asks what it means to “believe in death.” Again: “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Since you have no other, yes; and the better-disposed firemen will welcome your assistance. Again: “A vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white.” You exaggerate the white man’s consciousness of the Negro. Again: “The real reason that non-violence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes…is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.” Of course they don’t, especially their lives. Moreover, this imputing of “real reasons” for the behavior of entire populations is self-defeating, to put it mildly. One last quotation, this time a regular apocalypse:

In order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

Since whole cultures have never been known to “discard nearly all their assumptions” and yet remain intact, this amounts to saying that any essential improvement in Negro-white relations, and thus in the quality of American life, is unlikely.

So much for the fireworks. What damage, as I called it, do they do to the writer and his cause—which is also the concern of plenty of others? When Baldwin replaces criticism with prophecy, he manifestly weakens his grasp of his role, his style, and his great theme itself. And to what end? Who is likely to be moved by such arguments, unless it is the more literate Black Muslims, whose program Baldwin specifically rejects as both vindictive and unworkable. And with the situation as it is in Mississippi and elsewhere—dangerous, that is, to the Negro struggle and the whole social order—is not a writer of Baldwin’s standing obliged to submit his assertions to some kind of pragmatic test, some process whereby their truth or untruth will be gauged according to their social utility? He writes: “The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.” I should think that the anti-Negro extremists were even better placed than the Negroes to precipitate chaos, or at least to cause a lot of trouble; and it is unclear to me how The Fire Next Time, in its madder moments, can do nothing except inflame the former and confuse the latter. Assuming that a book can do anything to either.

 

New Novels



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Eternal Fire
by Calder Willingham
Vanguard, $6.95

Occasion for Loving
by Nadine Gordimer
Viking, $5.00

Sissie
by John A. Williams
Farrar, Straus, $4.50

Calder Willingham has always been a spellbinder, and in his sixth novel, Eternal Fire, he is absolutely shameless about it. He has always been a knowing sort of fellow, too. He knows how thing work, how people talk, he knows the insides and outsides and the undersides. You won’t catch him up anywhere.

But, if there is one thing he knows best of all, it is his reader. Oh, the shameless tricks he plays on that reader’s nerves! Such cliffs, believe me, have not for years been hung from. All the way between the first page and, literally, the last page of this long novel the story races on cheerfully, dreadfully, from foreboding to disaster to foreboding. And because of this knowing way about things that Calder Willingham has, the reader does not have to forgive, as we usually have to for the sake of excitement and surprise, quantities of false morality and real ignorance. The novel is melodrama, but we are not required to transform ourselves either into schoolgirls or sadists to enjoy it. The novel is something of a fairy tale, too, but once we have accepted that premise, we find, I believe, that to our most instructed consciousness the surprises are truly surprising, the depravities of the villain truly outrageous, the hearts of the innocent as we feel their beats here are as the hearts of little birds caught in rough hands.

In addition to being a fairy tale, Eternal Fire is all the Southern novels there are, done up in one master recipe—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Light in August, and yes, even a little lick of that lollipop, To Kill a Mockingbird. The setting is that familiar Southern small town, the time, the nostalgic days of the thirties,. The heroine is the town Cinderella, Laurie Mae Lytle: young, poor, beautiful, sweet. The Prince is Randolph Sudderland Shepherdson III, young, rich, handsome, sweet. these two are about to marry, imagining that their only problems are a little opposition from the Prince’s guardian, and the stirrings of passion that trouble their old-fashioned innocence. But the wicked Judge is bringing into action against them all the forces of evil, in the person of Harry Diadem. This sublimely wicked young man, who was brought up in that mean Tennessee orphanage with Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, has the body of a Greek statue, the eyebrows of Mephistopeles, and the abilities as a seducer that would have made Don Juan, had he heard of them, ashamed to send off a valentine after that. To defend Cinderella and the Prince there are only their own two hearts and Cinderella’s pet dwarf, feeble-minded but in a pinch as strong as King Kong. Theft, blackmail, incest, suicide, and murder ensue, complete with a classic double-double-crossing trial scene.

It is all very grand, struggle upon struggle; good and evil become powerfully entangled with one another. Shameless as Calder Willingham may be, though, I do not like to think that he has not somewhere drawn the line. I believe he calls it quits just on the safe side of allegory. He seems much too good-humored and sensible to go over that edge. Furthermore, although the plot turns on questions of color, and there are Negroes and racists here embroiled, the theme of black man and white man is not of much real moment in Eternal Fire. One could make a moral from it if he wished, a version of the current much-moralized involvement of the black man, sex, and the white man’s failed instinct. But, again, basically Calder Willingham is too good-humored to do more than let this be there in the book as one more of the things he knows so well and brings so gleefully to life in his story.

The black man in the white man’s society is of very much moment in Nadine Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving. This, her sixth book of fiction, takes place like most of her work in her country of South Africa. The story concerns two couples of the Johannesburg intellectual class and a black South African artist. Jessie and Tom Stilwell supplement his university pay by boarding in their big old house the young newly-married Boaz Davis and his Ann. Boaz has lost interest in composing and is trying to collect the ancient tribal music of Africa before it disappears. Ann is an adventurous young lady who has to try everything once. After the fashion of their kind in Johannesburg, these four are much in the company of Africans.

The African in the story is Gideon Shibalo. He has been awarded a fellowship to study painting in Rome, his government has denied him a passport, he is in a slump over it. Ann tries a love affair with him. They all accept this, even the husband, on high sexual and racial principles. The affair gets serious and the lovers plan to run off together. That is the story.

In the telling, the story is all quiet intelligence and art. It is seen chiefly through the eyes of Jessie Stilwell, a good-willed, middle-class intelligent woman. She lives the familiar life of the more-or-less successful and more-or-less worthily occupied middle class, the life which seems somehow to have gone hollow the world over today. Jessie’s life is hollow until she gets some curious fulfillment from her relation to the love of Ann and Gideon.

The story itself moves rather dully until the black man appears, although everything is well told and beautifully understood. Author and narrator are absolutely full of observations and reflective generalizations, good ones, too. (Some little thing one day reassures Jessie when she has been upset: “It had the same effect on her as the sight of one’s feet in familiar shoes may have when one sits down rather drunk, among the press at a party.”) Nadine Gordimer is very intelligent. These wise statements connect her characters—and they aren’t really very vivid, these people—with humanity. But they also convey a certain weariness as of foregone actions and feelings.

Without the drama of Johannesburg white-and-black behind it, this could be only another chronicle of the suburbs. As the story itself needs Gideon, the people in the story need him. The Stilwells and Davises, emancipated and intelligent, are dead on their feet. Family love is not enough. Jessie Stilwell, who knows too much about sexual love to believe in it very much—as do all the people in this story—yet gets caught up in it. And for its sake the whole show must go on, applecart and all. The whole show doesn’t go, of course, and the system destroys the love of Ann and Gideon.

Is this the final worst thing about it, worse than the black children starving so the white masters may dine well? Yet did not the system create this occasion for loving, did it not, this system, at the same time make Mrs. Stilwell’s heart empty? We know that for the most intense kinds of love, the occasion must be something like that which Johannesburg affords. Where love is most utterly forbidden it is most, at every moment, a possibility. In its quiet and thoughtful way, Occasion for Loving moves among the troubling depths of these questions. If it has a conclusion, it is the author’s own statement that one day her heroine will be out blowing up power stations. No more questions, then, when the blood bath comes.

John A. William’s Sissie is a good novel about an American Negro family. This is a tendentious statement in several ways. First, I think one of the reasons the novel is good is that it is about Negroes: in novels, subject matter counts. We read novels partly to confirm or to extend our own experience. And all of us need desperately to extend our knowledge of the life of American Negroes. Naturally, I do not exclude Negroes when I say “us.”

Second, I assume that this knowledge can be extended by a novel like Sissie. There are those who would contend that competent documents in the conventional forms of modern fiction cannot serve to discover or to convey this experience. They say this experience is unique and demands unique forms, developed like jazz, from Negro culture itself. Perhaps these forms may indeed be developed. But I would hope that the experience, though extreme, is human and can be made available to other human beings in the form that has, for modern Western society, worked best.

The experience recorded in Sissie is archetypal, that of the Negro family in the North cruelly hurt by American society. This society condemns most Negroes to the worst consequences of its reckless refusal to share among its members the fantastic riches they produce. For many of them this means, simply, death. Children die of this deprivation. The survivors are scarred, by the brutal struggle to live, by the guilt of survival, by the lunatic sadism of the American racial system. Sissie shows this directly and clearly. It is not sentimental and it is not apocalyptic. It records the facts with honesty, modesty, and craft. This novel will remain as one of the permanent records of the deadly shame of the America we live in. No solution. The power stations here, as in the Union of South Africa, remain intact.