Henry Dumas: Visible Man/Invisible Art
Leak, Jeffrey B. Visible
Man: The Life of Henry Dumas.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014.
He was brilliant. He
was troubled. He was dead at the age of
34. Like many males of his class and
generation, he was a death-bound-subject, a player in the game regulated by the
racial contract of the United States of America. “While he certainly should be
understood in the context of the cultural and political movements of the 1960s –Black
Arts, Black Power, and Civil Rights---,” according to the in-house promotional
statement from the University of Georgia Press,” his writing, and ultimately
his life, were filled with ambiguities and contradictions” (University of
Georgia Press Spring/Summer 2014 catalogue, 6).
The 1960s, a transformative decade in our history, was also pregnant
with other movements not begat by black Americans, and that fact is unavoidable
in constructing a biography of Henry Dumas (1934-1968).
In “Confessions of a Burned-Out Biographer” (The Seductions of Biography. Ed. Mary
Rhiel and David Suchoff. New York:
Routledge, 1996), Phyllis Rose reminds us that “the school of literary
biography, whether or not the subject is a literary figure, tends to see all
facts as artifacts and to see context and argument as co-partners of fact”
(131). The public, Rose claims, prefers “objective
biography” to the artistry of literary biography. Jeffrey B. Leak seems to have embraced the
alleged preferences of the public sphere in writing Visible Man: The Life of Henry Dumas.
Leak’s signifying on the title of Ralph Ellison’s
masterpiece in his own title is a signal, a red flag: subject the biography of
Henry Dumas to very critical “close reading.”
Doing so yields a discovery. When
a literary figure is encased in “object biography,” the subject becomes
overwhelmingly visible, but the sterling values of the subject’s contributions
to the republic of American letters become muted or downright invisible.
My response to Leak’s Visible
Man is ambivalent. I am sensitive to
Leak’s frustration that many crucial documents of fact are beyond recovery at
present or were destroyed. I respect his
fidelity to academic rigor and constraints of objectivity. I am critical of an effort he did not make in
writing the biography. Unlike Margaret Walker who dared to take risks in her
biography of Richard Wright, Leak hesitates to explore the genuinely literary
expression of Dumas’s daemonic genius.
The creative torment which manifested itself in his “giving the Black
Experience a core and a basic set of symbols/myths that connect it to the
original labyrinth of African thought,” as Eugene B. Redmond, Dumas’s literary
executive, argued in introductory remarks for Rope of Wind and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1979) is
the location of Dumas’s primal value for contemporary readers. If one substitutes “black experiences” for “the
Black Experience,” the value rises. So
too does the necessity of enfolding substantive literary analysis with quantitative
contextual analysis of life history.
Leak does use references to literary works to buttress and illustrate
key points about the life journey. He does not bring into full view the
aesthetic features of Dumas’s poetry and prose that could validate our claiming
(or seeing why) Dumas was one of America’s most extraordinarily gifted writers
and thinkers, a fit companion for such troubled geniuses as John Coltrane, Bob
Kaufman, Amiri Baraka, and Cecil Taylor.
How can one bid a new generation of readers to rediscover
Henry Dumas without weaving literary analysis of his works, of his uncanny
innovations and imagination, with the chronological threads of his life? Especially if one likens Dumas to Countee
Cullen and frames his life and art in the ambience of mystery. Despite the
praise in blurbs from Keith Gilyard and Yusef Komunyakaa, Visible Man is troubling in this regard. Leak’s treatment of Dumas’s
marriage and extra-marital adventures ----artifacts begging for integration
with the facts of art ----is problematic. What leaks from the book is a
subjective correlative with the portrayal of Cross Damon and Eva Blount in The Outsider. This draws attention to
one of the qualified witnesses for Dumas, namely the equally gifted poet Jay
Wright. Wright’s 1969 introduction for Poetry
for My People (retitled Play Ebony,
Play Ivory for the Random House edition) is evidence of his unique insights
about Dumas’s poetics. Wright exercised
ethical prudence in not giving Leak an extensive interview about Dumas. His silence in 2014 must be accounted an act
of integrity and love, one that is rare in a time that has zero tolerance for
privacy.
To be sure, we must respect Leak’s scholarship in reaching
into an ark of bones and bringing forth a skeleton upon which one can paste
fragments of skin. It would be ungenerous to minimize Leak’s achievement. Nevertheless, literary history demands a
supplemental study of Dumas’s art. Leak concludes that “in a sense, the
mainstream literary world is finally catching up with this most visible man”
(166). The statement is premature.
Imprisoned by its habits of benign neglect, the so-called American mainstream
will only botch the job of catching up. On the contrary, it is a critical
consciousness of world literature that must reclaim Henry Dumas and pay
appropriate tribute.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
April 12, 2014
