Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction. (Costerus New Series)

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Author: A. Robert Lee

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Gothic to Multicultural

Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction

Costerus New Series 178 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper


Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction

A. Robert Lee

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2009

Cover photography © 2008 Andy Sotiriou Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2499-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction: Pathways, Bearings

9 11

1

A Darkness Visible: Gothic and the Case of Charles Brockden Brown

23

2

Making History, Making Fiction: Cooper’s The Spy

45

3

Impudent and Ingenious Fiction: Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

61

4

Like a Dream Behind Me: Hawthorne’s “The CustomHouse” and The Scarlet Letter

83

5

The Mirrors of Biography, The Mirrors of Fiction: Henry James’ Hawthorne

103

6

Moby-Dick as Anatomy

119

7

Voices Off, On, and Beyond: Ventriloquy in The Confidence-Man

141

8

Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: The Novella as Moving Box

159

9

Hell’s Loose: Apocalypse in the Early and Modern African American Novel

177

10 Woman’s Place? The Landscapes of Jewett, Chopin, Cather, Hurston, Welty, Chávez, Yamashita, Silko

197

11 Odd Man Out? Henry James, The Canon and The Princess Casamassima

223

12 Watching Manners: Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence

243

13 A Quality of Distortion: Imagining The Great Gatsby

259

14 Everything Completely Knit Up: Seeing For Whom the Bell Tolls Whole

279

15 Modernist Faulkner? A Yoknapatawpha Trilogy

299

16 The View from the Rear Window: The Fiction of Cornell Woolrich

317

17 Richard Wright’s Inside Narratives

335

18 Violence Become a Form: The Novels of Chester Himes

361

19 Flunking Everything Else Except English Anyway: Holden Caulfield, Author

389

20 The Place We Have Come To: The Late Fiction of Robert Penn Warren

407

21 Harlem on My Mind: Fictions of a Black Metropolis

427

22 Down Home: Mapping The South in Contemporary African American Fiction

457

23 I Am Your Worst Nightmare: I Am an Indian with a Pen – Fictions of the Indian, Native Fictions

481

Index

525

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Looking back over a four-decade career as a university teacher and critic, and the span of geographies that career has entailed, Britain, USA, continental Europe, and Japan, I am in absolutely no doubt of debts incurred. The essays that make up this book, and the arguments they carry, have been honed across a lifetime’s international sites and discussion. In the UK, where I first bowed in as an intending Americanist at London University in the early 1960s before taking up longtime tenure at the University of Kent at Canterbury, that requires mention first of a roll-call sadly no longer with us: Eric Mottram, Tony Tanner, Harold Beaver, Howell Daniels, Malcolm Bradbury, Graham Clarke and Tony Hepburn. I am also aware of what I owe to Andrew Hook, Denis Donoghue, Clive Bush, David Murray, Richard Gray, Herbie Butterfield, Stephen Fender, David Seed, Nick Selby, Robert Giddings, Judie Newman, Susan Castillo, Steven Price, Colin Samson, Barry Lewis, Peter Dempsey, Mary Condé, Justin Wintle, Andrew Gibson and Colin Butler. In the USA it means the late Willard Thorp, Harrison Hayford and Laurence B. Holland; a writer-cadre of Gerald Vizenor, Ishmael Reed, John A. Williams, John A. Wideman, Frank Chin, Rex Burns, Wick Downing, Ron Loewinsohn, John Yau, Gary Pak, Anne Waldman, Carter Revard, Jim Barnes, Tino Villanueva, Carmen Tafolla, Patricia Clark-Smith, and the late Leon Forrest, Ted Joans, and Louis Owens. I especially acknowledge the stalwart support of Sanford E. Marovitz and John G. Cawelti, together with that of Gerald Graff, Werner Sollors, Richard Hutson, Donald McQuade, Charles Altieri, Joe Lockard, Amritjit Singh, Ling-chi Wang, Jennie Skerl and John

10


Bryant; and in Canada William H. New. In Europe I have been equally a beneficiary: Viola Sachs, Bernadette Rigal-Cellard, Helmbrecht Breinig, Wolfgang Binder, Gunter Lenz, Ole O. Moen, Hans Bak, Wil Verhoeven, Jaap van der Bent, Theo D’haen, John G. Blair, Deborah Madsen, Paul Taylor, Elvira Pulitano, Franco La Polla, Mario Maffi, Mariella Stefannelli, William Boelhower, Javier Coy, Juan José Coy, Angel-Luis Pujante, Juan Antonio Suarez, Rocío G. Davis, Isabel Durán and Felix Martín. In Japan I have had the great support of my departmental colleagues at Nihon University, especially Kimitaka Hara, Ichitaro Toma, Takeshi Onodera, Takeshi Sekiya, Yuko Noro, Stephen Harding and Tomoko Kanda. Others, both Japanese and gaijin, include Shoko Miura, Arimichi Makino, Hideyo Sengoku, Yuji Nakata, Kaoru Murata, Nicholas Williams, Mark Gresham, Dorsey Kleitz, Sandra Lucore, David Ewick, Paul Rossiter, James Tink, Jim Vardaman and Jared Lubarsky. Further Asia has afforded me Robert Yeo and Robbie Goh in Singapore, Kee Thuan Chye in Kuala Lumpur, and Yu-cheng Lee, Wen-ching Ho and Te-hsing Shan of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica. Most of these essays have known earlier publication, but none has escaped revision, at times radical heart surgery. In this respect I need to acknowledge permissions from Palgrave-Macmillan, Manchester University Press, G.K. Hall and Edinburgh University Press. I also thank C.C. Barfoot unreservedly as academic editor: he has been a model of good suggestion and keen eye. My gratitude, too, goes to Andy Sotiriou for his cover image, one of many in his professional archive to reflect his long-time interest in the USA. Above all there is Josefa Vivancos-Hernández without whom this would be a wholly lesser enterprise and to whom it is dedicated with love and quite transnational gratitude

INTRODUCTION: PATHWAYS, BEARINGS There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick 1 The world is a welter and has always been one: but though all the cranks and the theorists cannot master the old floundering monster, or force it into their neat plans of readjustment, here and there a saint or genius sends a little ray through the fog, and helps humanity stumble on, and perhaps up. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance 2 I began to realize that being black or Chicano or Native American, you are forced to see and be aware of disparate cultures. We had to become multicultural, and I think this will be a major factor in determining who finally survives in this country. It’s like evolution – if you have a limited point of view you are at a disadvantage. Those who have incorporated other perspectives and allowed their vision to embrace other ways of looking at the world have a better chance of surviving. Ishmael Reed, Afro-American Writing Today 3

Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining. The double-hinge of my title is meant to carry both the span and the working focus for the present volume. If that is to give deliberate regard to American literary authorship broadly within one or another evolving genre, there has equally, and throughout, been deliberate regard for the shaping 1

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale (1851), in The Writings of Herman Melville, The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, eds Harrison Hayford, Herschel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle, Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988, 361. 2 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934), NY and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1984, 379. 3 Ishmael Reed, Interview with Mel Watkins, in Afro-American Writing Today, ed. James Olney, Anniversary issue of Southern Review, Baton Rouge, LA: University of Louisiana Press, 1989, 26-27.

12


individual accent of voice. The frames are several, early and late roman noir in Charles Brocken Brown and Cornell Woolrich, Cooper and Poe as adepts in narrative code, reflexive manoeuvre in Hawthorne and Melville, Henry James’ self-mirroring biography of Hawthorne, the novella at the hands of Stephen Crane, apocalypse in African American fiction, a women’s sequence of self and landscape fictions, and culture and anarchy in James. There follow text-into-film in Edith Wharton, design in Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway, the limitations of protest categorization for Richard Wright and Chester Himes, autofiction – life-writing as fiction – in J.D. Salinger, and the ideas novel in Robert Penn Warren, together with different sweeps of African American and Native American fiction. A series of bearings like this, to be sure, can throw up the necessary caveat. Is there not too ready a presumption that overall they will segue into readily connecting lines of argument? Well, yes and no. Novel or novella, story or story-cycle, along with the various interpretative-critical maps, I have sought both span and individual idiom, and with due abetting reference to popular culture, film, or context. Concourse for concourse, author for author, I hope they will all so be seen to refract the shared emphases of my title. Each account recognizes connections of genre or frame while at the same time seeking to elicit the discrete particularity, the given pendulum, of the text at hand. To that end the three headstone quotations are meant to offer further confirmatory indicators of route. Careful disorderliness. Herman Melville’s inspired, not to say agreeably oxymoronic, phrase supplies a remit to extend well beyond his own writing into the larger sway of American writing. Has not there always been an interplay between the modernist and often enough fractious self-fashioning of American cultural life, and yet always, the necessity for discernible imaginative order in its literary articulation? The world is welter. Edith Wharton’s formulation gives added emphasis to the point, “the old floundering monster” of reality, American or not, to be caught if only for a moment by the act of literary saint or genius and beyond the rigidity of any one mastering theory. Disparate cultures. Ishmael Reed, Afro-America’s ranking postmodern gamester, calls attention to how American literature, indeed America itself, despite well-known traditional coterie privileges of class or race or gender, ever eludes the one canonical order.

Introduction

13

Given the challenge of this breadth I indeed hope it is not selfillusion to think a coalescing thread is to be found in what follows, not only the spatial notion of America as “ample geography” to cite Emerson’s “The Poet”, but the requisite dynamics of imagining it has entailed. Each well-known operative term – city upon a hill, errand into the wilderness, machine in the garden, American Adam, and under latter-day auspices, ethnicity and hybridity – has filtered into almost all contemporary literary-critical discussion. The stellar earlier names of these American typologies richly, often contentiously, ensure that there has been no want of the thematic to the interpretation of American literature, whether F.O. Matthiessen, Alfred Kazin, Henry Nash Smith, Perry Miller, Richard Chase, Leo Marx, Leslie Fiedler or Roy Harvey Pearce.4 A subsequent age of theory, in turn, has ushered in new sway, the profound re-envisioning of how ideology, cultural power-structure and pattern, has shaped both the primary texts of American literary tradition and, quite as radically, the terms in which its interpretation might best be cast. It would be hard, likely impossible even if it were in any way desirable, to now step free of the debates as to American literary canon formation, or recognition of how styles of class and region, or the different waves of feminism, or the debate around subject position, have made their impact. Latterly the shift has been to recognizing America’s actually longtime ethnic-multicultural powers of word, a notice of eviction to conceiving its literature as written into some pre-ordained white monochrome. Euro-America itself, in truth, increasingly has come to be seen, and heard, less as some composite one inflection but many, be they Anglo (in all its own plurality) or Euro, straight or gay, citied or rural, and with whiteness as cultural ideology put under new 4

Representative work by each is as follows: F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Experience in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, NY: Oxford University Press, 1941; Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature, NY: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950; Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition, Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1957; Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, NY: Criterion Books, 1960, revised edition NY: Stein and Day, 1967; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, NY: Oxford University Press, 1964; Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.

14


scrutiny. Overdue attention has been won for a multi-America of cultural genealogies and locations variously African American, Native American, Latino/a, Pacific Islander, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino American, Indo-Pakistani South Asian, and Arab, Iranian and other Muslim American. The critical roster, both in theory and critique, looks to names taken up with each of these dispensations like Henry Louis Gates, Barbara Christian, Louis Owens, Elizabeth CookLynn, Nicolás Kanellos, José David Saldívar, Elaine Kim, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, Werner Sollors, David Palumbo-Liu and Epifanio San Juan.5 Due anthologies, college and high school courses, interethnic journals like MELUS, sharply as they reflect their American gravity of interest, more and more have also come to tie into the discursive expression of a transnational global order. If the essays gathered here act on awareness of these more inclusive perspectives they also do so, of necessity, with a view to manageable limits. The American literary spectrum in view, even so, chronological for the most part and across twenty-plus chapters, will hardly be thought parsimonious. *** Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe serve as inaugural round, opening idioms. Brown comes under scrutiny for a homegrown gothic repertoire of fiction set in 5

Again these are representative writings by each: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the “Racial” Self, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987; Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 18921976, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980; Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding The American Indian Novel, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992; Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996; Nicolás Kanellos, Thirty Million Strong: Reclaiming The Hispanic Image in American Culture, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1998; José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, Berkeley, CA, 1997; Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1982; Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993; Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986; David PalumboLiu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999; Epifanio San Juan, Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Introduction

15

Independence-era Pennsylvania, the human light and dark of millennial religion, city fever and Lockean sensation thrown into relief by Enlightenment reason. But what conscious seamings of voice, imagery, or patterned deception inscribe these issues in his novels? For Cooper in his first American novel, The Spy, the War of Independence is disclosed less as revolutionary triumphalism than a carefully staged pageant of hidden niche and mask. War and Peace vie ambiguously. The Neutral Ground becomes a night and day fog-land, the novel’s varyingly raised and lowered curtain between Anglo loyalist and American patriot. Harvey Birch, spy-peddler, serves as but one in a whole litany of disguised figures. The upshot is its own narrative peddler’s pack, Birch’s self-authoring tied into that of America as newly authored republic and Cooper as out-setting novelist. Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym may well turn upon adventure, a pattern of escape and rescue, and, at least ostensibly, literal geographic exploration. But if assuredly the novel offers circumstantial southward ship itinerary from the East Coast to the Antarctic, with a plotline of often startling reverses, in kind with his prose-poem Eureka it also embodies Poe’s quest for nothing less than the genesis and decipherment of the world’s codes. The reading to hand, in response, seeks to open the text in terms of it own narrative codings, the textual connections of cipher and inlaid doubling, and whether convincingly or otherwise on Poe’s part, the overall visionary purpose he seeks to have them serve. Hawthorne affords the American Renaissance a fiction infinitely of American time and place, the Anglo-Puritan Massachusetts of The Scarlet Letter. But much as that is to recognize New England for its seventeenth-century ancestry of Bible Christianity and magistracy, Election and Covenant, it is also to take measure of how Hawthorne subjects that timeline and that association of site to wholly singular conjuration. The issue is voice, the “I” of “The Custom-House” as proffering his guilty heirship to the Ha[w]thorne dynasty of the Salem witch-trial but also his masked authorial custodianship of the iconographic A and its New England human radius of Hester, Chillingworth, Dimmesdale and Pearl. “The Custom-House”, and its narrator-persona, thereby, are to be seen as also wholly implicit in The Scarlet Letter, sketch and main text folded into each other as reflexive and inextricably mutual writ.

16


That the author behind this kind of artfulness finds his ensuing American biographer in the Henry James of Hawthorne could not be more apposite: the earlier literary career told fondly, admiringly, but also archly, and from a certain self-positioning custodial loftiness. James evidently recognizes all manner of strengths, especially in The Scarlet Letter and key stories. But he does not shy from bespeaking Hawthorne’s limits as he sees them, the provincialism of imaginative appetite, the unwillingness to tackle those theatres of consciousness conspicuously to be the données of his own fiction. For amid all the local observation, the working judgements, another facet is to be discerned. Is not this a biography, however obliquely, that also silhouettes James’s own creative autobiography, the portrait of Hawthorne as antecedent romancer, the very pointer to his own imaginative bearings as arising American novelist? Even before the celebrated 1920s revival Melville had been accorded the status of ocean epicist, principally on the basis of the Pacific fictions launched with Typee and culminating in Moby-Dick and its journey into the whale fisheries. In turn, and however small the initial readership, The Confidence-Man has joined the roster for its use of the arterial but always trickster Mississippi. How, then, best to insist upon a craft of fiction, Melville ever the increasingly more adept ventriloquist? In tackling Moby-Dick as anatomy, a narrative of Nantucket whaling but also imperious epistemology, the aim is to dissolve the notion of Melville’s narrative as somehow fatally bifurcated. That, customarily, sees Ahab, the Pequod crew and the whale as inhabiting one kind of story-dynamic, and Ishmael, thinkerphilosopher, and from “Loomings” to the Epilogue, quite another. “Anatomy” develops a gloss as to how, in fact, these coalesce, each inseparably overlapping within the composite text. With The Confidence-Man ventriloquy takes on the role not just of register but its very subject, a book of river voices actually about voice, the act of colloquy as feint and counter or competing standpoint. In this crossspar of confidence and no-trust Melville contrives a fiction virtually the analogy for his own canniest triangulation of writer, text and reader. Little wonder that for all that the novel has been thought maverick, it deserves to rank as one of America’s great prophetic works of literary art as referential self-circle, postmodern virtuosity, dare it be said, ahead of its time.

Introduction

17

Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage has every claim to be thought American fiction’s landmark early novella, its episode of Civil War close-encounter and the gradations of soldier impatience, fear, death or elation held in impressionistic miniature. To that end the notion of the Union regiment as moving box takes on more inclusive implication, that of Crane’s novella itself as a species of narrative box. Is not, affectively, a relevant sense of claustrophobia created by Crane’s text, its framed picturings and sound, its controlling geometries, a means to reader enmeshment in the delays and release of the action? At quite a different reach there follow two literary mappings which move forward from the nineteenth-century into the contemporary. “Hell’s Loose” inscribes the call to, and resistance against, apocalypse as scenario in African American fiction. Given the unconscionable moral rot, yet existential availing, of slavery and its colour-line aftermath from Dixie to the cities, it perhaps can little surprise that the notion of an American apocalyptic-racial alpha and omega has engaged a considerable line of black authorship. In names spanning Martin Delany and Sutton Griggs to John A. Williams and Toni Morrison the imagining of worlds turned about finds its own narrative incarnation, the one story of another story’s end. “Woman’s place”, a necessary irony to the phrase, explores the implications of different kinds of landscape in a circuit of fiction from Sarah Orne Jewett to Leslie Marmon Silko. The accent falls upon the stylings of interacting consciousness between self and site, Creole Louisiana to the border Southwest, a serial of female identity in its different locales and rites of passage – childhood, family, love, marriage, society, region, ecology, creative art – all dispensations, actual and magical, of America, and the larger Americas to which it belongs, as hemisphere. Henry James and Edith Wharton have long attracted the soubriquet of novelist of manners, each the observer-eye as to the turnings of class etiquette, the play of social conformity and transgression. In this regard James’ The Princess Casamassima has been thought the odd man out, a political James alert to the kind of London from below that would also beckon Conrad in The Secret Agent. But does that say enough or even the beginnings of enough? If James was looking to the metropolis under threat, the grotesquery of bomb or assassination by the assorted denizens of the Sun and Moon hostelry, was he not in fact also looking at the Arnoldian equilibrium (or disequilibrium) of

18


culture and anarchy, the role of the artist in an extreme time of politics? For Wharton in The Age of Innocence, upper-tier New York society is imaged as in-house spectatorial arena, the one round of family or sexual comportment relentlessly seen, watched, by another. This is strikingly taken up in Martin Scorsese’s film version, Wharton read, or more aptly seen, by a director himself long taken up with notably different New York class mores. Scorsese insistently, and with genuine éclat, puts watcher and watched, forms of visuality itself, at the very centre of his version. As the film moves through opera house, each Manhattan interior, the opening-season ball and the banquets, and upper-state New York and the Newport of leisure-class summer recreation, it does more than merely supply the necessary sightline for the Archer-Ellen-May triangle. Scorsese acts on Wharton’s cues as to the manners of Old New York, and their inhouse dynastic patrolling, while at the same time using his lens to create for The Age of Innocence a visual screen idiom commanding in its own right. *** Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner by no means lay exclusive claim to the modernist pantheon of American fiction. Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos or Jean Toomer clearly also belong there. But theirs has been a benchmark, the literary succession to James and Wharton. The Great Gatsby, American Dream parable or Jazz Era portrait as may be, has always invited fuller recognition of its artifice, a novel as equally bound up in the very nuance of its own telling as the tale it puts on offer. To that end Nick Carraway’s idea of “a quality of distortion” wonderfully holds. Fitzgerald manages just the right accommodating idiom, imagistic, a touch surreal, far from dispassionate or uncompromised on Nick’s part, as he unveils Gatsby’s magical rise to wealth along with the Daisy Faye grail-story, the Long Island parties and New York as business “gonnection”. Hemingway can almost be said to have undergone a critical volte face, at prime the literary man for all seasons, at his death or shortly after the supposed macho fossil. Both versions do a disservice. He was never of a scale with Tolstoy, say, or Stendhal, but nor is he simply to be discarded as cheapskate existentialist or declarative pseudo-stylist.

Introduction

19

For Whom the Bell Tolls offers a testing ground for these contending versions. Whatever the excoriation it has attracted for its women, María especially, does it not also organize its Spanish Civil War canvas with genuine dispatch, the Aristotelian three-day time frame, the bridge as centrifugal image? In Faulkner’s case matters turn on the balance of ancient story and modernist story-telling. Given focus in three Yoknapatawpha classics, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner’s different kinds of narrative lever, to include Benjy’s sensedata, the Bundren family dialogics, and Quentin Compson’s selfincarcerating rhetoric, inscribe a force of human consciousness. Faulkner’s dynasties of Mississippi backcountry and township in both white, black and mix, the power of bible religion, a south of magnolia and soil, have infinitely vindicated his view of Yoknapatwapha as mythical kingdom. But just as equally his mark derives from his fiction’s unique structures of disclosure, the interstitial play of memory, the galleried multiples of voice, the very syntax and paragraphing, in sum and whether locally or at large Faulkner’s own modernist turn. American roman noir, like American film noir, has had few more avid or prolific begetters than Cornell Woolrich. Fitzgerald protégé, writer under a run of pseudonyms, doyen of modern city gothic, he embodies the very pathology of street and shadow. His best known fiction, its origins in 1930s crime pulp, its footfalls(and visual style) in Hitchcock or Orson Welles, Louis Malle or Roman Polanski, might have won him a better standing alongside the classic names of mystery, Chandler or Hammett. Certainly his command of the deathplots in life, each frenetic surge of panic, revenge, mistaken identity, and theft or killing gone awry, finds exactly the right speed across a simply unyielding output of stories. Drawing upon Woolrich’s perhaps best-known title this is the condition of things, and the accelerated idiom he created for it, of his own overall fiction’s view from the rear view window. Convention, almost from the start, situates Richard Wright as preeminently an heir to Dreiserian or like naturalism, Afro-America’s memorial literary protest figure. Without for a moment wanting to detract from his critique of each subordination of black liberty to white supremacism, Dixie colour-line or city ghetto, there has always been a subtler, if more fugitive, Wright. Neither the stories of Uncle

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Tom’s Children and Eight Men nor his centrepiece novel Native Son and the other longer fiction were ever in truth to be wholly accounted for under naturalist-realist rules. To that end Herman Melville’s “inside narrative”, the half-title to Billy Budd, profitably can be brought to bear, a Wright whose fiction’s situating complexity of image or voice to the point at times of the near phantasmagoric lifts him quite beyond easy platitude as to protest or anger. A better sense of his language of story, the symbolist register as well as the footfalls from black vernacular to Poe or Faulkner, has to be the least of his due. Through most of his lifetime Chester Himes, Wright’s fellow European expatriate, one time jewel thief and ex-con, yet the creator of still the best-known American black detective series, shared a similar fate. Not the least of it, ironically, was being taken as a leading acolyte in the School of Wright. In truth Himes was not only ever his own man, but a writer endowed with powerful riffs of imagining, a versatility at once serious, graphic, and always abundantly capable of corrosive wit and black humour. The range embraces not only the Coffin Ed-Grave Digger Harlem stories he launched with For Love of Imabelle (later re-titled A Rage in Harlem) and completed in Blind Man with a Pistol and the posthumous Plan-B, but If He Hollers Let Him Go and the other earlier novels, his French-published Une Affaire de Viol /A Case of Rape, a spoof like Pinktoes, the stories of Black on Black, his two considerable volumes of autobiography The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity, and his different essays and interviews. Appraisal invites every note of this energy and mix of output. Yet it also needs to take on how a vaunted concern like the racialization of violence, pathologies whether black or white and be the effect upon body or mind, actually metastasizes into a style itself. For Himes’ connoisseurship of the violence of race as both hurt and absurdity, to invoke the title phrases of the autobiographies, and yet also blackness as always a source of cultural style or inventiveness, could hardly have better sought, or found, a more determined chronicler. However chance the sequence of J.D. Salinger and Robert Penn Warren they do share at least one dimension, a sense of the world taken head-on, a will to viewpoint. For Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye that is retailed into Holden Caulfield, postwar American adolescence given bravura voice, a landmark double performance of life and text. Whatever else Holden typifies, if typify he does, his

Introduction

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greatest act amid each vaudeville self-invention and as he travels from Pencey Prep to Manhattan to his California psychiatric ward, is that of writer-in-waiting. A Copperfield, a Huck, a Sherlock Holmes of sorts, his sleuthing bears most on his will to counter the fear of selfdisappearance by his own writing-in, fugitively and literally. This call to saving literary inscription binds him, reflexively, to the dead Allie and his poetry covered mitt, the detective writing Phoebe, and even his Hollywood scriptwriter sibling Buddy, one last Caulfield story to find and fulfill the self of the storyteller within. Robert Penn Warren’s two final novels, Meet Me In The Green Glen and The Place We Have Come To, both philosophic narratives in kind, round out a career of genuine distinction as novelist, poet, critic, teacher. But if they reveal his vigour of enquiry, as of plot, the one with its Tennessee Valley love-triangle, the other with its up-fromsouthern-roots odyssey of mind, they also point to the risk of flaw. Does Warren achieve the right balance of story and idea or are these novels more a species of seminar in narrative guise? Professor-writers have long won their place as makers of American fiction, Warren no less than his compeers. But a focus on ideas in fiction, the novels of Saul Bellow offer a notable comparison, can always put at risk the overall imaginative story dynamic. Warren, eclectically well-read, clearly possessed of a presiding intelligence, offers a case study. *** The three concluding literary maps, however busy, even so still amount to no more than selective multicultural landscape. I have also allowed occasional shared reference to stand, literary fiction that readily belongs under more than the one heading or typology. “Harlem On My Mind” tracks Manhattan’s city-within-a-city as both pre-eminent black metropolis and the prime motif of an evolving line of fiction by authorship spanning James Weldon Johnson and Toni Morrison, Ann Petry and Ralph Ellison. “Down Home” undertakes a similar task for the black fiction of the South, sharing a number of Dixie to the North references (not least Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada) but insisting on a fashioned black sense of region, from slavery-time to Civil Rights, and whether Albert Murray’s Alabama, Ernest Gaines’s Louisiana or Alice Walker’s Georgia. “Indian with a Pen” takes up the burgeoning of Native-written fiction since M. Scott

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Momaday’s 1960s House Made of Dawn, tribe and city, trickster and earth, a vast, necessary oral legacy of story re-inscribed as written narrative, and at the hands of generational fictionists to embrace James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, Thomas King, Linda Hogan, Louis Owens, Sherman Alexie and Betty Bell. *** Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction seeks to negotiate a number of working pathways, linkages of genre or time-span in one trajectory, the resonance of individual narrative in another. That entails scrutiny of latitudes and longitudes, a broad canvas of American authorship, but also of the given signature, each specific compositional energy of design. Their shared emphasis, I hope clearly marked, turns upon a recurring axis: American fiction to be sure as carrying a history, a geography, a people, and of necessity each larger implication of the human condition, yet always, and at the same time, the insistent search for new accents of authoriality. Has not American literature’s tradition of the new always spoken as both theme and befitting genre and idiom? In these respects the present work, under the pen of a reader-critic from across the Atlantic and currently from across the Pacific, offers what I hope will be taken as fresh critique to reflect not only long engagement but an ongoing sense of debt.

1 A DARKNESS VISIBLE: GOTHIC AND THE CASE OF CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN In niches and pedestals, around the hall, stood the statues or busts of men, who, in every age, have been rulers and demigods in the realms of imagination, and in kindred regions. The grand old countenance of Homer; the dark presence of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais’s smile of deep wrought mirth; the profound, pathetic humour of Cervantes; the all-glorious Shakespeare; Spenser, meet guest for an allegoric structure: the severe divinity of Milton; and Bunyan, moulded of homeliest clay, but instinct with celestial fire – were those that chiefly attracted my eye. Fielding, Richardson, and Scott, occupied conspicuous pedestals. In an obscure and shadowy niche was reposited the bust of our countryman, the author of Arthur Mervyn. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Hall of Fantasy” (1842)1 All was astounding by its novelty, or terrific by its horror …. My understanding was bemazed, and my senses were taught to distrust their own testimony. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn (1899) 2

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s celebrated inclusion of Charles Brockden Bown in “The Hall of Fantasy” sets him, to be sure, infinitely among his betters, at first glance a truly discrepant name to be found in so 1

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Hall of Fantasy” (1842), in Mosses from an Old Manse, The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Centenary Edition, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1974, X, 173-74. 2 Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn (1799), The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown, Bicentennial Edition, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1980, III, 107. Subsequent quotations from Brown’s novels are taken from this same edition: Wieland (Vol. I), Ormond (Vol. II), Arthur Mervyn (Vol. III), and Edgar Huntly (Vol. IV).

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august an assembly. But, if duly assigned a place at the periphery, “an obscure and shadowy niche”, Brown does have at least one legitimate cause for being named in this roll-call of the great and the good. Like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, or any of the rest – especially his fellow novelists Richardson, Fielding and Scott – he was despite all his limits an essential founding presence, a figure of departure. For it fell to him to take his place as America’s first fiction writer of consequence, a begetter of that line of romance or gothic that leads directly to Hawthorne himself and an American compositional span from Poe or Melville to Faulkner and even beyond.3 Brown’s claims in fact go infinitely further. He was from the start possessed of his own substantial and truly singular imagination, one worthy of attention in terms which step outside mere antiquarian or historicist interest. To encounter him, at least, through his four ranking gothic novels, in turn Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (1799) and Arthur Mervyn … Second Part (1800), and Edgar Huntly (1799), is to be faced with the recognition that, beyond all his shocks and melodrama, there lies a far subtler set of designs upon the reader, the upshot of Brown’s nothing if not inveterately Enlightenment speculative turn of mind. In this he anticipates by a generation his fellow spirit in gothic, if such it be, Edgar Allan Poe, not that any more than in the case of Poe, such has protected him from the charge of being a “bungler”, the barest survivor of “defects that would have wrecked an average writer”.4 Yet whatever his excesses, the overdone plot lines, the proliferation of characters, the too-frequent reversals and fades, even the suspicion that he has in mind to keep us reading no matter 3 Situating Brown as an inaugural American literary novelist has rightly been the subject of scholarly focus. Standard accounts include: Arthur Hobson Quinn, American Fiction, an Historical and Critical Survey, NY: D. Appleton-Century, 1936; Alexander Cowie, The Rise of The American Novel, NY: American Book Company, 1948; R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1955; Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition, NY: Doubleday, Anchor, 1957; Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958; Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in The American Novel, revised edition, NY: Criterion, 1966; and Richard Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and The Novel, Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1976. 4 These terms are used by Cowie in The Rise of The American Novel to characterize the case against Brown.

Charles Brockden Brown

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whatever the cost, he also manages to persuade that he is about altogether more consequential purposes. He may never quite have managed any single, decisive masterpiece, but the grounds are there for thinking that one never lay too far outside his imaginative grasp. However unlikely, in Hawthorne’s terms, his elevation “in the realms of the imagination” to a “ruler” or “demi-god”, he compares favourably with more established adepts in the art of gothic, whether Horace Walpole, Monk Lewis, Ann Radcliffe and, of later vintage, Bram Stoker. In large degree, moreover, he does so because to confuse his gothic for the whole account does him a genuine disservice. *** For Brown’s gothic embodies an authentic force of ideas, his unremitting will to knowledge. Despite Independence in 1776, and its accompanying new-born American rhetoric of hope and belief in the perfectibility of mankind, he saw himself as looking out upon a world everywhere still beset by darkness – and darkness as much within as without. Time and again he probes the otherness of much of human experience, the play of the unpredictable and random, the deceptiveness of appearance, the self as stranger or exile which without seeming reason can turn willfully against itself and others. Brown’s gothic is thereby put to greater purpose than mere thrill or titillation. Indeed, in the Preface to Edgar Huntly, “To the Public”, he actually takes it upon himself to castigate traditional gothic as “puerile superstition”, “exploded manners” and mere “chimeras”. He speaks of favouring “a series of adventures, growing out of the country”, and of himself as “moral painter”, an analyst both of “the heart” and of “the most wonderful diseases or affectations of the human frame”. Milton’s “darkness visible”, however, does additional duty. It directs us to the basic impetus behind his writing, the aimed-for philosophical elucidation of nothing less than our own endemic and phenomenological mystery. Which is hardly to say that a list of his key interests will necessarily warm the appetite of a first-time sampler of his wares. Among other things, Brown felt moved to explore religious mania, ventriloquism, the dangers of a reliance on sense data, secret international conspiracy, the spectacle of city life besieged by yellow

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fever, sleepwalking and the loss of mental self-control. Murders, both random and calculated, make a plentiful appearance, as does a full show of different phobias and frights. In addition, Brown borrowed much from the radical programmes of William Godwin, and in turn found himself borrowed from in the latter’s Mandeville (1819), his novel of the English Civil War. Not the least of Brown’s Godwinian leanings as a good Enlightenment American is his interest in feminism, especially in his first publication, Alcuin: A Dialogue, Parts 1 and 2 (1798), a series of epistolary debates about the right of women to economic and sexual autonomy. Women’s power, or its absence, also marks out his three of novels of sentiment, essentially given to courtship and social role. Memoirs of Stephen Calvert, only latterly made over from its original magazine form into a novel, works a compound plot of crossed love, twinning, false claims to identity and appearance. 5 Yet within the play of masquerade, Brown shows an early interest in the gender politics of women subject to male control. Clara Howard; or, The Enthusiasm of Love (1801) treats again treats women’s sovereignty, but at the price of a weakly conceived and weakly written tale of courtship. Jane Talbot (1801) does better, linking the issue of women’s rights to the clash of religious belief with agnosticism as embodied in the heroine and her suitor Henry Colden. All of these novels follow Stephen Calvert in kind: picaresque or epistolary style, the exploration of sentiment, and foreshadowing not only Godwin but Mary Godwin Shelley, the gendering of manners. Brown’s strongest suit, however, remains Wieland and the other 1799-1800 novels, even given the penchant for plot-making and digression. Godwinian ideas take on more convincingly thought5

Memoirs of Stephen Calvert was initially serialized in Brown’s Monthly Magazine and American Review in 1799-1800. Its reconstitution as a novel in its own right has been as a work of German scholarship: Memories of Stephen Calvert, ed. with an introduction and notes by Hans Borchers, Studien and Texte zur Amerikanistik, Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 1978. Brown’s other endeavours also invite recognition: essays such as “The Rhapsodist” in the Columbian Magazine, 1789; his contributions to the Philadelphia Weekly Magazine, 1798; his editorship of the Monthly Magazine and American Review, 1799-1800 and of The Literary Magazine and American Register, 1803-1806; his various political and nationalistic pamphlets; his translation in 1804 of Volay’s A View of The Soil and Climate of The United States; and his semi-annual The American Register, or General Repository of History, Politics, and Science, 1807-10.


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through expression, as does Brown’s measure of the changing currency of ideas from the Age of Reason to the Age of Romanticism. Hawthorne’s placing of his bust in “an obscure and shadowy niche” may do relative justice to his place in literary history, but notions of obscurity and shadow inscribe more than just reputation: they call attention to his key thematics. For these are novels that make the darkness within human make-up the very grounds of narrative, the obscurity and shadow of being in itself a narrative plot to be unravelled and held up to the light. *** Brown’s interest in darkness was not lost upon a run of early admirers on both sides of the Atlantic. In the English column John Keats was perhaps foremost. Writing to Richard Woodhouse in September 1819, he likens Brown both to German and English contemporaries: And don’t forget to tell Reynolds of the fairy tale Undine – Ask him if he has read any of the American Brown’s novels that Hazlitt speaks so much of – I have read one called Wieland – very powerful – something like Godwin – Between Schiller and Godwin – More clever in plot and incident than Godwin – A strange American scion of the German trunk – Powerful genius – accomplished horrors …6

Although Hazlitt did not in fact altogether share Keats’s enthusiasm, he had no doubt of Brown’s intensity of effect. A decade on, in the Edinburgh Review for October 1829, he spoke guardedly but with genuine respect of Brown’s “conclusive throes”, his “banquet of horrors”. 7 To hand, likewise, is Thomas Love Peacock’s taste for Brown and, as importantly, his report of the impression Brown’s novels made upon Shelley. In his Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Peacock testifies that “nothing so blended with the structure of

6

John Keats to Richard Woodhouse, 21-22 September 1819, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, 297. 7 “Sermons and Tracts ... by W.E. Channing”, Edinburgh Review, Vol. L., October 1829, 125-28.

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[Shelley’s] interior mind as the creations of Brown”. 8 Not only Shelley’s voyage and dream poems, but also his several early prose romances, confirm the affinity. Mary Shelley, if not explicitly in Frankenstein (1818) then in her dystopian and futuristic plague novel The Last Man (1826), similarly acknowledged Brown’s influence, or as she puts it “the masterly delineations of the author of Arthur Mervyn”.9 In his own country Brown’s fortunes, initially at least, were mixed: he was a figure always to be recognized but not always favourably. Earliest biographies also borrow one from another, a vexed cross-ply of opinion and debt. The first, commissioned by his widow, Elizabeth Brown, was drafted by Paul Allen and then rewritten by William Dunlop, the Connecticut wit and intimate friend of the novelist, as The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: Together with Selections from the Rarest of his Original Letters, and from his Manuscripts before Unpublished (1815). The second appeared in Biographical and Critical Miscellanies in 1865 as a life-and-works portrait by William Prescott, the Brahmin New England historian, entitled “Memoir of Charles Brockden Brown, the American Novelist”. Prescott had earlier contributed an approving entry on Brown to Jared Spark’s American Biography (1834). Although these versions of Brown differ (complicatedly in the case of the Allen-Dunlop Life, as Dunlop toned down a number of the unflattering observations made by Allen), they yield the necessary ground materials for the man behind the fiction, Brown as Quaker-born, bookish, the resolute Philadelphian. Whatever else the biographies direct us to Brown as a Wunderkind of sorts: America’s first would-be professional novelist, prolific, an intellectual mover and shaker in the tradition of Franklin even if, in later years, he found himself the reluctant businessman and struggling publisher of magazines and almanacs. That Brown as the prodigy behind Wieland and the novels close to it in time of composition he never again

8 Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, Vol. III, London: Richard Bentley, 1875. 9 This is taken from the Preface. Missing from the list is Sir Walter Scott’s appreciation of Brown’s “wonderful powers”, though he thought the American had given way to “unwholesome” subjects. See Cowie, The Rise of The American Novel, 99.


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matched, quantity or quality, hardly surprises. It was quite the fiercest, most irrepressible outburst of creative energy.10 Literary reaction to Brown among his countrymen indeed has amounted to every kind of shift and turn. James Greenleaf Whittier, New England’s veteran abolitionist poet and doyen of the fireside or domestic style, was typical. He could acknowledge that Brown had not had full critical due, but express reservations as to his best known novel – “Wieland is not a pleasant book. In one respect it resembles the modern tale of Wuthering Heights: it has great strength and power, but no beauty.”11 Whittier showed considerable acuity in bracketing Wieland with Emily Bronte’s English moorlands drama of passions driven to the edge. But he clearly felt unease at the wildness, the show of extreme emotion, no doubt a jar to his own ancestral gentility. Hawthorne, in one of the later sketches in Mosses From An Old Manse, “P.’s Correspondence”, is far less equivocal. He suggests that “no American writer enjoys a more classic reputation on this side of the water” while, for his part, Poe refers in his Marginalia for 1844 to both Brown and Hawthorne as “each a genius”. R.H. Dana Sr. showed fellow-professional sensitivity to Brown’s trying to make a living by authorship, not least in a commercial New World, arguing “that Brown produced works at such a time shows clearly the power of his genius over circumstance”. James Fenimore Cooper, with more than a touch of rivalry, could be acerbic about Brown’s treatment of Native materials while acknowledging the mark he had already made in America, his “high reputation”. 12 Brown also elicited two slightly askew tributes from lesser-known American contemporaries. Writing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1824, John Neale, author of Logan, A Family History 10

There are also two modern biographies of Brown: David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1952; and, far more definitive, Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist, Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1949. To call Brown America’s first professional novelist is in no way to ignore the importance of other pioneer Americans, notably Susanna Rowson in Charlotte Temple, 1791. 11 The National Era, 1 June 1848; reprinted in The Prose Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1889, Vol. VII. 12 For a complete listing of reviews and essays on Brown, see Patricia L. Parker, Charles Brockden Brown: A Reference Guide, Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1980. Cooper’s response, and competition with, Brown is given in further detail in “Making History, Making Fiction: Cooper’s The Spy”.

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(1822) and other patriotic American stories, pictured Brown as “a spirit absolutely crushed”. Leaning heavily upon this version of Brown, George Lippard, Jacksonian radical author of Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1845), his daringly near-pornographic satire of the Philadelphia bourgeoisie, also alludes to him as an admired predecessor. In “The Heart-Broken”, a sketch Lippard contributed to Nineteenth-Century: A Quarterly Miscellany for 1848, Brown is seen as physically frail, a martyr to his age’s unfeeling and neglect. Affecting though this is, it falls considerably short of the truth. Hardly less rhetorical but more accurate is the tribute of Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalist poet and feminist and, always, working critic. For her Brown holds sway as a “man of the brooding eye, the teeming brain, the deep and fervent heart”.13 These reactions help situate Brown in his time. But a far subtler measure of his importance lies in the way his pioneer conceptions of theme, type and setting have worked themselves into the grain of American fiction, as modern criticism has increasingly come to recognize. For who, in truth, has a better claim to have inaugurated the American romance form, with its light and dark women (an adapted legacy from Richardson), the allied stereotype of the gothic male adventurer, the emphasis upon the self as interiority, and the spatial framings of nature or city as regions in which every extremity of feeling or mind can exist? Brown’s imprint may be tacit but it is shows itself throughout. “The Fall of the House of Usher” takes up the theme of the doubleself or at least the self given to its own haunting, while The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym makes as much a voyage into symbolist moi intérieur as into the polar whiteness of hitherto unexplored Antarctica. Occasionally, as in Poe’s debt in “The Pit and the Pendulum” to the chiaorocuro cave scene in Edgar Huntly, the influence becomes wholly explicit. The Leatherstocking cycle quite evidently amplifies materials also found in Edgar Huntly, not least, and for all Cooper’s reservations, the frontier myths of Native American savagism. Washington Irving’s two best known stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, in their envisioning of reality and 13

These quotations, and those of R.H. Dana Sr., Hazlitt and Whittier, may be found in Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Bernard Rosenthal, Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1981. Rosenthal’s Introduction offers a greatly helpful account of Brown’s early reputation.


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even history as trance, stand at only one remove from the exhibitions of delusion in Wieland or of sleepwalking in Edgar Huntly. Key Hawthorne pieces, especially those using versions of his vaunted Unpardonable Sinner, “Ethan Brand”, “The Birthmark”, and The Scarlet Letter, time and again call up Brown’s fictional repertoire of Wieland Senior, Carwin, Ormond, or Welbeck. Brown’s interest in the man of intellect driven by the single or manic grand design takes on new personification, with an Esther, Georgiana or Hester Prynne at once victim and object of desire. Melville can be said to share this focus in the gothic labyrinth of Pierre and the 1853-56 Piazza Tales like “Bartleby” with its portrait of the self enwalled and blanched and “Benito Cereno” whose core lies in both literal enslavement and esnslavement to ruling illusion. Henry James adds formidably to the line of descent in Doppelgänger stories like “The Jolly Corner” and “The Turn of the Screw”, not to mention the longer novels of conspiracy and psychological distress like The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of The Dove. Brown was the first American novelist to make psychology his abiding subject, the dark contrariety and selfabsorption of human behaviour under pressure. Modern gothic maintains Brown’s legacy, however transformed or attenuated. Is there not a residue of Brown, as there is of Hawthorne, in Faulkner, be it in each family mansion setting or figures like Sutpen as thwarted maker of dynasty, Quentin Compson as divided by word and self, or Popeye as gargoyle? Later southern gothic adds its plenty, whether the religio-comic Georgia parables of Flannery O’Connor, the psychosexual dramas of Carson McCullers, or the wistful early stories of Truman Capote. New England supplies a matching lineage, rarely more evident than in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Not only do his spooky tales and novels do service but his important study Supernatural Horror in Literature where he explicitly pays homage to Brown’s “uncanny atmospheric power” and “extreme vividness”. 14 This archive, as it were, with New England as a history sedimented in bible Puritanism and heresy, theological orthodoxy and sexual dissent, can be said to continue from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle as regional witchcraft

14

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, NY: Dover, 1973.

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to John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick as spoof seduction and devil-lore.15 Finally, what of pop gothic, be it in the guise of Alfred Hitchcock or Roger Corman film noir, a Cornell Woolrich mystery, or Rod Sterling’s TV classic series The Twilight Zone? A generation of moviegoers raised on the horror conventions of, say, of Psycho, from its origins as Robert Bloch’s two stories of menace “Lucy Comes to Stay” and “The Real Bad Friend” and novel through to the Hitchcock screen landmark of 1960, or the novels-into-film of William Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971) and Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), might find any amount of pre-figuring in Brown.16 Patently he wrote out of different period values, but whatever the circumstances of time and place his writings carry persistent and often unexpected reverberations. The darkness he took as his great theme, and indeed sought to make visible, continues its hold on the imagination in high as in popular American culture, nothing other than the “obscure and shadowy” recesses in the human equation.17 *** Towards the end of Wieland or, The Transformation, an American Tale, to give Brown’s first novel its full title, the narrator-heroine, Clara Wieland, describes a dream she has had: Sometimes I was swallowed up by whirlpools, or caught up in the air by some half-seen and gigantic forms, and thrown upon pointed rocks or cast among the billows. Sometimes gleams of light were shot into a dark abyss, on the verge of which I was standing, and enabled me to discover for a moment, its 15

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, NY: Viking, 1959 and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, NY: Viking 1962. John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick, NY: Knopf, 1984. 16 The lineage into Hitchcock’s Psycho is further explored in “The View from the Rear Window: The Fiction of Cornell Woolrich”. 17 Helpful accounts of Brown’s include Larzer Ziff, “A Reading of Wieland”, PMLA, LXXVII: 1 (March 1962), 51-57; Donald A. Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown, New York: Twayne, 1966; Arthur G. Kimball, Rational Fictions: A Study of Charles Brockden Brown, McMinnville, OR: Linfield Research Institute, 1968; Norman S. Grabo, The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981; and Alan Axelrod, Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1983.


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enormous depth and hideous precipices. Anon, I was transported to some ridge of Etna, and made a terrified spectator of its fiery torrents and its pillars of smoke. (264)

She could not have found apter imagery to express the events that she has experienced. For hers is nothing if not a story of “whirlpools”, “hideous precipices” and “fiery torrents”, in all and throughout “a dark abyss” (264). Yet in the act of inscribing her narrative, done as a series of letters, she also indeed finds “gleams of light” (264), a way into and through an otherwise seemingly inexplicable round of calamity. As she writes herself out of puzzlement though not sorrow, so she enables Brown’s reader to establish light from out of a drama that has been beset by the most violent and encircling dark. This alternating cycle of darkness and elucidation begins early for Clara. In infancy, with her brother Theodore, she witnesses her father’s seeming self-combustion in the summerhouse he has built by Philadelphia’s Schuykill River. Wieland Senior, a scion of aristocratic Saxony, has become the follower of an esoteric Protestantism, would-be missionary to the Indians, and a man whose messianic delusions will be of dire consequence to his offspring. He dies almost literally blasted to a cinder, the very incarnation of a mystery. The son Theodore Wieland, after a peaceable upbringing and his marriage to Catherine Pleyel, in turn begins to yield to his father’s example. Increasingly morose, and secretive, and having read the same Albigensian text which held his father, he gives himself to the belief that he is commanded by God to murder Catherine, their young children and their adopted friend Luisa Conway. He also comes close to murdering Clara, after escaping the jail in which he has languished like a demented American prophet after his trial for butchering his family. That Clara survives, Job-like, to tell the tale, involves both horror and her own uncertain attempts to understand its causes. At work is reality as maze, conundrum, crime scene, meaning as closed system. A sequence of voices, some real and others imagined, plays into these “extraordinary and rare” incidents as Brown calls them in his “Advertisement”. Each, one way or another, connects to the wizardly figure of Carwin, wanderer-scholar whose secret art is that of ventriloquism or, as it is termed in Wieland, biloquism. To compound matters furthers, Clara finds herself unjustly accused by her would-be

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lover Henry Pleyel of a sexual liaison with Carwin, thereby denying still further any healing of the disaster brought on by her brother’s murder of Catherine Pleyel and their children. From a world of almost blissful intimacy she is finally driven to exile in France. Her story, in other words, take on the same flux and displacement as dream itself, a kind of nightmare velocity. Summarized thus Wieland risks sounding merely histrionic, an assemblage of effects. In fact, it reads with considerable agility, high drama for certain but also a story anything but formulaic. In the first place, Clara tells her narrative as one who interrogates her own version of things even as she commits it to the page. The upshot transforms story-telling itself into self-contemplative drama. “Why should I protract a tale which I already begin to feel is too long?” she asks reflexively. She owns up to “the hideous confusion of my understanding”, implicating the reader as much as herself in the business of seeking the light of order from the dark of disorder. The resulting novel, for its part, can be given over to mystery, “chimeras” as Brown calls matters, but not at the expense of a credible and actual Pennsylvania. Citied Philadelphia acts as centre, a social hierarchy of gentry, country people, surrounding farms and hamlets. Most of all, Wieland deploys a strikingly figurative inner idiom, an inlaid texture of lights and darks. In Brown’s fashioning, the dark abyss of chaos that eventually the gleams of light will elucidate is actually built into the writing itself, the languages of story and story-telling fused to mutual good purpose. Horror, even so, abounds. It begins with the death of Wieland Senior as witnessed by his wife, a veritable son et lumière explosion: Her eyes were fixed upon the rock; suddenly it was illuminated. A light proceeding from the edifice made every part of the scene visible. A gleam diffused itself over the intermediate space, and instantly a loud report, like the explosion of a mine, followed. She uttered an involuntary shriek, but the new sounds that greeted her ear quickly conquered her surprise. They were piercing shrieks, and utterly without intermission. The gleams, which had diffused themselves far and wide, were in a moment withdrawn; but the interior of the edifice was filled with rays. (18)


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The edifice in question is Wieland Senior’s temple, his retreat. In fact, as the passage underscores, it serves as a metaphor of the human mind, a site in which reason tussles with unreason, illumination with darkness. The father’s pursuit of some godly right reason has caused him, it seems, to implode, to combust into a “human cinder” (had Dickens read Wieland when he created Krook in Bleak House?). As a recurring point of reference, the temple, and later Clara’s own house, is used by Brown as the image of that kind of self ever beset by its own inability to separate dark from light. Existence descends into the schizophrenic, an un-manageable division or multi-polarization of impulse. The point is taken up, neatly, in the Socratic jousting that goes on between the Calvinististic Theodore Wieland and Henry Pleyel as “champion of intellectual liberty”. In the event the pair of them will be deceived by both religion and reason, and also, more than a little tellingly, by the seeming evidence of their senses. Horror, mystery, works in similar terms throughout Wieland. It may seem heavy handed to have an actual ventriloquist play a part in a novel which relies for its main plot upon having a father and son hear voices. But Brown nicely manages to have Carwin’s voice echo, even mimic, his own, the one ventriloquy for the other. As to Carwin’s false voices, they act as at once mainstays of the plot and its chorus. First, Wieland hears, as he thinks, Catherine’s voice warning him of danger, a quite disastrous event for so readily suggestible a man whom Catherine herself thinks “of an ardent and melancholy character”. Pleytel, in turn, imagines he hears his sister announcing the death of Theresa, his German fiancée. Clara, for her part, thinks she hears a Macbethian voice warning of murder at home, a voice which recurs when she strays too near a cliff-edge and which calls up “a train of horrors in my mind”. This same voice fools Pleytel who thinks it Clara’s in conversation with Carwin, the biloquist truly in vocally double-mode as both heroine and himself. Lastly, it speaks directly to the deranged Theodore Wieland, causing him mistakenly to believe it the very voice of the God in whose name he has killed his family and plans to kill Clara. In commanding Wieland to “hold”, Carwin’s false voice blends perfectly into the false voice that Wieland believes himself bound to answer in his deluded role as God’s instrument on earth. In each of these instances, be the voice Carwin’s or that which operates inside Wieland’s madness, Brown situates things in the play of light and dark,

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each twilight, dusk or night-time and the inner condition they signify irradiated only sometimes and then by shrieks, gleams and rays. The point takes on further illustration in Carwin’s final confessional appearance before Clara in the wake the family disasters. Her house becomes the very condition of her being, the mansion and self riven by “ruin and blast” as she later calls it: I have said that the window-shutters were closed. A feeble light, however, found entrance through the crevices. A small window illuminated the closet, and the door being closed, a dim ray streamed through the keyhole. A kind of twilight was thus created, sufficient for the purposes of vision, but, at the same time, involving all minuter objects in obscurity. This darkness suited the colour of my thoughts. I sickened at the remembrance of the past. The prospect of the future excited my loathing. I muttered, in a low voice, “Why should I live longer? Why should I drag a miserable being? All for whom I ought to live have perished. Am I not myself hunted to death?” (217-18)

“This darkness” is at once hers, the narrative-at-large’s horror, and the mystery that has brought on Wieland’s madness and Carwin’s hubristic meddling. Lights, rays, vision, obscurity, darkness, yet again feed into, and texture, the voicing of Clara’s account. A life, a human order, once un-obscured has become obscured, its very embodiment “hunted” and occlusion where once it was light. Even Carwin, the very spirit of transformation as an Englishman turned Spanish and Catholic before settling in America, emerges as other than Clara has thought. “Darkness rests upon the designs of this man”, she says before he explains that it has been “curiosity”, the irresistible daring of “imposture”, that has led him to play the playactor. This Brown confirms in his Memoirs of Carwin The Biloquist (published in Dunlop’s Life in 1815 and as a separate “fragment” in 1822). Carwin, as Brown explains him, is less to be thought stage villain than the experimentalist in the extremes of human behaviour, a figure of dark enlightenment at once “restless” and given to “unconquerable” curiosity. Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters lies not too far away. In Brown’s own country Hawthorne’s Roger Chillingworth or Ethan Brand can also be seen not far ahead. Carwin fully recognizes within himself this Enlightenment-era tension of light and dark of mind, the uncertain balance of unbounded-ness


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and boundary in the will-to-knowledge: “I saw in a stronger light than ever the dangerousness of that instrument which I employed, and renewed my resolutions to abstain from the use of it in the future; but I was destined perpetually to violate my resolutions” (231). Wieland thus dissembles and tells at the very least a double story. Ostensibly it offers horror fiction par excellence: a man’s murder of his family in answer to the imagined voice of his God – no undue flight of fancy given the episode in Tomhannock, New York from which Brown took his story or, in recent times, the Charles Manson, Jonestown and religious slaughters in Waco and Utah. But within the horror, the delusion, lies Brown’s greater story, that of the “perversions of the human mind”, to use a further phrase from his “Advertisement”. For, if Brown is thought only the horror writer, America’s own founding practitioner of gothic, that does him infinitely less than justice. Wieland underscores the human capacity to make un-reason of reason, religions of love into religions of hate. His fiction deserves its recognition in making that kind of darkness visible. *** Ormond, or The Secret Witness, Brown’s second novel, more than anything offers intrigue, the pursuit by the unscrupulous, hypnotic Ormond, a member of the malign utopian alliance known as the Illuminati, of Constantia Dudley, a young woman in the mould of Clara Wieland and in whom the author once more expresses his feminist commitment. The plot turns upon the ruination of the Dudley family by Thomas Craig, embezzler and devil’s apprentice to Ormond, and then upon Ormond's dark resolve to conquer Constantia sexually whatever the cost. A chase melodrama ensues, not without genuine pace or its own brand of eroticism. The story, as told by Constantia’s friend Sophia Westwyn Courtland, unfolds a conspiracy, a trail of killings and criminal manoeuvres. The cast looks to an intellectual villain and a varied gallery of women, in which Constantia contrasts with the fey, quiescent mistress of Ormond, Helena Cleves, and his quite opposite sister, Martinette de Beauvais, veteran combatant in nothing less than the French Revolutionary War. Each of these several mysteries takes on its own darkness, underwritten throughout by Ormond as the centre of a conspiracy quite international in proportion.

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Brown could hardly be accused of timidity in matters of intrigue or plot. But, as in Arthur Merwyn, the novel to follow, the main operative image of the novel has to do with darkness, and more than anything Philadelphia as city of plague. This Brown manages to greatest effect, better in fact than nearly all Ormond’s talk of his “adventurous and visionary sect” or the allegations against him of “excesses of debauchery”. Lively scenes abound: Ormond’s different schemes and circlings; the suicide of Helena; the death of Constantia’s father, Stephen; the closing drama as Ormond descends upon his prey, a figure at once “singular” and beset with “incomprehensible evil”. Brown keeps his plot turning even if, on occasion, it can truly creak. But it best serves him in the scenes of yellow fever, Philadelphia as the site of double contagion: that of Ormond and that of literal pestilence. The drama of the plague, to which Constantia is witness, is registered early: Night was the season usually selected for the removal of the dead. The sound of wheels thus employed was incessant. This, and the images with which it was sure to be accompanied, bereaved her of repose. The shrieks and laments of survivors, who could not be prevented from attending the remains of an husband or child to the place of interment, frequently struck her senses. Sometimes urged by a furious delirium, the sick would break from their attendants, rush into the streets, and expire on the pavement, amidst frantic outcries and gestures. By these she was often aroused from imperfect sleep, and called upon to reflect upon the fate which impended over her father and herself. (58)

As elsewhere, Brown blends the actual and gruesomely well-observed plague into the Ormond-Constantia relationship, the one darkness pitched with considerable shrewdness to give emphasis to the other. Ormond may disappoint readers who compare it to vintage mystery in Dickens or even Wilkie Collins. Brown’s Philadelphia is no fog-bound, unreal city. His plot line can be laboured, the effects too stagy. But he does establish a powerful and credible connection between the surface plot and the enclosing yellow fever. When Constantia observes that “Every day added to the devastation and confusion of the city”, she equally implies the parallel “devastation”


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and “confusion” in her own life, subject as it has become to “the incredible reverses” visited on her and her family by Ormond. The plague, thereby, adds its own circumstantiating witness to that of Ormond in distancing Constantia from the light, a life caught in both man-made and natural maze. *** “Astounding by its novelty”, “terrific by its horror”. Appropriate as these phrases are to much of Arthur Mervyn, they still do not encapsulate the entire two-part narrative. For Mervyn clearly aims higher and wider, beyond initiation or intrigue into the fully fledged Bildungsroman. Arthur’s departure from his country roots, vexed progress through any number of scrapes and turns, close-encounter with the yellow fever in Philadelphia, apprenticeship to the conspirator Welbeck, and even eventual suit for the Jewish widow Mrs. Achsa Fielding, all bespeak an unfolding life-history. Not that the plot, even if it engages, always helps -- it zigzags almost beyond summary. Told in the voice of Dr Stevens, it relies upon long interpolations by Mervyn himself and others. But, granting these odds, and more graphically even than in Ormond, Brown pulls off no small coup: Philadelphia’s pestilence of 1790 as authentic horror. In this respect his novel is not to be thought out of place in the roster of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Poe’s spoof story “King Pest” and Camus’s La Peste, all related portraits of fever as invading darkness. To call attention to the plague scenes of Arthur Mervyn is not to disown the multiple lesser plots. Welbeck’s story calls up the city and its stalkers as underworld, preying and preyed upon. The various love stories and courtships, especially that of Clemenza Lodi, reflect Brown’s continuing interest in women placed unfairly under pressure. Quaker life, within Pennsylvania, has its expression in the Hadwin family. But the novel best secures its effect in the plague material, Brown’s quite startling ability to portray a city under siege and the yellow fever as virtually animate presence in its own right. This efficacy finds expression in Mervyn’s return to Philadelphia where, as throughout Wieland, the patterning of light and dark again are of essence:

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Gothic to Multicultural The market-place, and each side of this magnificent avenue were illuminated, as before, by lamps; but between the verge of the Schuykill and the heart of the city, I met no more than a dozen figures; and these were ghost-like, wrapt in cloaks, from behind which they cast upon me glances of wonder and suspicion; and, as I approached, changed their course, to avoid touching me. Their clothes were sprinkled with vinegar; and their nostrils defended from contagion by some powerful perfume. I cast a look upon the houses, which I recollected to have formerly been, at this hour, brilliant with lights, resounding with lively voices, and thronged with busy faces. Now they were closed, above and below; dark, and without tokens of being inhabited. From the upper windows of some, a gleam sometimes fell upon the pavement I was traversing, and shewed that their tenants had not fled, but were secluded or disabled.These tokens were not new, and awakened all my panicks. Death seemed to hover over this scene, and I dreaded that the floating pestilence had already lighted on my frame … (139-40)

This passage, vivid storytelling in the first person, represents Brown at his best even if, a few pages later, Mervyn finds himself by accident “inclosed in a coffin”, black farce too close for comfort. The plague account approaches fiction of fact, documentary witness persuasively made over into narrative. Widening the vista, Brown depicts the city at large as “effluvia”, its households stained by “gangrenous or black vomit”. Infected himself and then carried off to the hospital, Mervyn acts as Brown’s well-managed participantobserver as to waiting coffins, death’s-head victims, predatory hearse carriers along with acknowledgement of certain medical heroism. But if the plague embodies one kind of malignancy, the city harbours others. Philadelphia is figured as the deadlock of special interests, cadres of the rich and powerful, manipulators in property and money. This darkness involves acts of forgery, cheating, financial connivance, the concealment or destruction of important wills and letters. Night-time stealth and robbery become a norm. Horror yields to intrigue. Mervyn himself, no longer the neophyte, transforms from innocent abroad into citied veteran. Unquestionably Brown’s plot contrivances in the later scenes can grow tiresome, over-spun. But the novel’s achievement, its anatomy of the city at once literal and figurative fever ground, is not be denied. In depicting “yellowish and


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livid” Philadelphia, Brown conveys genuine menace, a darkness of both body and city as the always vulnerable under-side of the human condition. *** Brown’s fiction, to repeat, can almost will resistance to summary, Edgar Huntly; or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker no less than its predecessors. In the guise of letter-writer to his fiancée, Huntly tells how he has come upon Clithero Edny by the graveside of her murdered brother Waldegrave. An Irish immigrant servant, Edny in fact is also a deeply disturbed somnambulist acting out his past life, unaware of his actions. But, in telling this story, Huntly reveals another, that of his own breakdown, his own sleepwalking and apparent recovery. The upshot is mixed. On the one hand, and not helped by the assumption that Wieland has come to rank as front runner in Brown’s repertoire, the usual encumbrances feature: coincidence, lengthy flashback, interpolation, unintended near-parody. On the other it attempts yet another foray into psychology and, even allowing the exception of the memorable Queen Mab the Indians are stock savages, a genuine attempt in the Delaware Indian-settler conflict at new novelistic fare. Cavils duly registered there is a case for thinking Edgar Huntly contains some of Brown’s most original work, quite belying its ostensible plot.18 For, beyond all the adventure, the novel attempts a striking portrait of psychosis, catatonia even, the darkness of a self spiralling into madness and the inability to make the world cohere. Time after time, Huntly misreads both himself and the signs about him. He deceives himself in thinking the Irishman Waldgrave’s killer (a renegade Indian is responsible). He supposes, again wrongly, that his own family and friends have been massacred by Indians. He thus sleepwalks as much when sane as when unhinged, the symptoms of his own downward fracture and division. He proves wrong to think he can cure Edny. Brown’s touch may not always be secure in depicting this double self, or indeed the double-plot that contains it. But the play of Huntly and Edny as each other’s alter ego, the twinned other, 18 In this respect Leslie Fiedler judges it “the most successful and characteristic of [Brown’s] gothic romances” (Love and Death in the American Novel, Revised Edition, NY: Scarborough Books, 1966), 156.

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invites not un-favouring comparison with later accounts of the divided self, Poe’s “William Wilson” to Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde or Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Opening his story Huntly proclaims, “What light has burst upon my ignorance of myself and mankind! How sudden and enormous this transition from uncertainty to knowledge!” (3). To achieve this light, the price has indeed been heavy. Not only has Huntly’s “benevolism” been misplaced, but Edny has turned truly mad, dangerous, the would-be murderer and a suicide. Huntly has risked the life of his friend Sarsefield’s wife, Mrs Lorimer, who belongs not only to his own story but also to Edny’s. In giving the insane Edny her address in New York, he causes her to miscarry, and can write only a feeble letter of warning about his actions. He is mistaken, too, when he thinks Waldegrave’s papers (and his own) have been purloined and hidden by others. But the larger price, supremely ironic in a narrator who boasts his rationality and certainty of the world’s order, is that of the stunning breakdown he suffers, the sleep-walking that leads him into the wilderness cave first found by Edny. The topography is made by Brown to serve also as a landscape of mind or dream, not least in Huntly’s assertion that “I love to immerse myself in shades and dells” and his talk of the forest wilderness as “maze” and “labyrinth”.19 For the cave, hidden, oneiric, could not be a more arresting image of darkness visible, the psyche lost and turned in on itself. Huntly undergoes symbolic death and rebirth, the necessary new envisioning of all that is about him: The first effort of reflection was to suggest the belief that I was blind; that disease is known to assail us in a moment and without previous warning. This, surely, was the misfortune that had now befallen me. Some ray, however fleeting and uncertain, could not fail to be discerned, if the power of vision was not utterly extinguished … The utter darkness disabled me from comparing directions and distances. (160)

19

A colloquium on Gothic as darkness is to be found in Emerson Society Quarterly: A Journal of the American Renaissance, XVIII/1 ( Spring 1972). See especially Robert D. Hume, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Uses of Gothicism”, 10-18. A greatly relevant recent study is Peter Kafel, Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.


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Light as against dark, rays that may or may not illuminate -- it would be inattentive not to recognize the idiom. As Huntly works his way, uncertainly, out of “utter darkness”, there emerges yet greater emphasis to Brown’s overwhelming theme. The true “power of vision” visits only in moments, oddly, unpredictably. More often, as Brown gives it fashioning in his fiction, the world assumes more dark than light in which still better powers of reason are required to decipher contradictory “directions and distances”. In this, and in other indicative respects, Brown’s novels offer fare both American and far beyond.

2 MAKING HISTORY, MAKING FICTION: COOPER’S THE SPY By persuasion of Mrs. Cooper I have commenced another tale to be called the “Spy” scene [set] in West-Chester County, and [at the] time of the revolutionary war...My female Mentor says it throws Precaution far in the background – I confess I am more partial to this new work myself as being a Country-man and perhaps a younger child…The task of making American manners and American scenes interesting to an American reader is an arduous one – I am unable to say whether I shall succeed or not. Letter to Andrew Thompson Goodrich, 28 June 18201 The “Spy” goes on slowly and it will not be finish’d until late in the fall – I take more pains with it as it is to be an American novel professedly – I think it far better than “Precaution” – more interest – and better writing Letter to Andrew Thomson Goodrich, 12 July 1820.2

James Fenimore Cooper’s bow into American literature rests upon a well enough known irony, that of having written a first novel almost assiduously given to imitation of English “manners and scenes”. Although a work important for its anticipation of later Cooper interests, and not without its ingenuities – the near misalliance of Jane Moseley with Colonel Egerton and related other family mistakes of apparent over actual character – Precaution delineates a world known only second-hand, a society written into being from an Atlantic away 1

Letter to Andrew Thompson Goodrich, 28 June 1820, in The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard, 6 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960-68, I. 44. Letter to Andrew Thompson Goodrich, June 28, 1820. 2 Letter to Andrew Thompson Goodrich, 12 July 1820, in Letters and Journals, I, 49.

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and thus from the margins of the historical world it seeks to re-create.3 The upshot could not be more evident, a kind of socially un-particular, even inert, shadow text. Why, then, the choice at all of an English theme and setting? What implications, beyond the given shift of national locale, arise out of this transition from Precaution to The Spy: A Tale of The Neutral Ground, Cooper’s truly first American novel?4 A number of related kinds of insecurity initially might be said to have come into play. First, as a putative American writer, Cooper was faced with breaking free of so determining an imaginative legacy as Britain and helping inaugurate a literary culture fully the equivalent of political independence. Second, he would need hitherto untested powers of creativity, subject and voice, if he were in due course to do more than rework a plot-line from the domestic English novel. Emerson’s call, a few years ahead in “The American Scholar” (1837), to abandon “the courtly muses of Europe, to “write [our] own books”, or Melville’s in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850) to “let America … prize and cherish her writers; yea, let her glorify them”, inspirational, and even epochal, as both might have been thought, could not at the same time have bespoken a greater anxiety of influence.5 Cooper’s replacement of the Moseley Hall of Precaution with the Westchester of The Spy anticipates in some degree the literary nationalism to be adumbrated by Emerson and Melville. Yet in so doing another paradox arises. For however short-term, not to say ironic, this assumed mask of Englishness in so self-vaunting an American patriot as Cooper, would not the footfalls of a nostalgic Toryism play into virtually all his eventual fiction, be it the 3

James Fenimore Cooper, Precaution, NY: Goodrich, 1820. The initial publication was James Fenimore Cooper, The Spy: A Tale of The Neutral Ground, NY: Wiley and Halstead, 1821. 5 The following criticism has been of immediate benefit in writing this essay: William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1968; George Decker: James Fenimore Cooper: The Novelist, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967; Donald A. Ringe, The Pictorial Mode: Space and Time in The Art of Bryant, Irving and Cooper, Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1971; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of The American Frontier, 1600-1869, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973; James D. Wallace, Early Cooper and His Audience, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986; and Charles Hansford Adams, “The Guardian of The Law”: Authority and Identity in James Fenimore Cooper, University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. 4

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Leatherstocking narratives, the no less than eleven sea-novels from The Pilot (1824) to The Sea Lions (1849), the Littlepage Anti-Rent and land-ownership trilogy of Satantoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845) and The Redskins (1946), or the late, quasi-religious, utopian writing of The Crater (1847), The Oak Openings (1847) and The Ways of The Hour (1850)? This same conservativism, unlikely as might have been expected in so nationalistic a body of polemic, recurs throughout Notions of The Americans (1828), A Letter To His Countrymen (1834), and, axially, Home as Found (1838) and The American Democrat (1838). To add to the roster there can be little doubt of the thoroughly patrician officer’s eye viewpoint within his History of The Navy of The United States (1839). For despite his lifelong republicanism, Cooper never ceased to be a true-believer in a hierarchy of natural worth for which Old England, along with Anglo-Dutch Old New York, the latter to count Washington Irving, Herman Melville and Edith Wharton in its legacy, had long supplied the working social and cultural models. Little wonder he found himself increasingly out of sorts with the levelling sway of Jacksonianism, increasingly more cantankerous and litigious from the 1830s onwards, and to many of his countrymen eventually a kind of Rip Van Winkle. His conservative instincts could not but also draw impetus from his seven-year sojourn (1826-33) on the upper-crust European circuit of England, France, The Low Countries, Switzerland, Italy, and France again (where he renewed his friendship with Lafayette), and that came to an end with a last British Summer before he once more embarked in September 1833 for the United States. Arduous may have been Cooper’s term for writing in general, but it also signals the immediate problem he had before him. How to write himself out of Precaution, with its echo of Jane Austen’s Persuasion both in its title and in its story of the well-bred English family of the Moseleys exercised as to the right and wrong suitors for the two daughters, and into, as he himself said, “an American novel professedly” – a tale born of his own first-hand observations and past? How, in other words, to bring to bear an American historical or social round, a world drawn anything but from afar, thereby making good in The Spy on the absence of local texture which had so debilitated Precaution?

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Even then he still had to win over a readership accustomed to looking across the Atlantic for its literary fiction, to Henry Fielding or Samuel Richardson, to Maria Edgeworth or Amelia Opie, or, supremely, to Sir Walter Scott. Other Americans had made one kind of show, whether Susanna Haswell Rowson in her Charlotte Temple (1791, 1794), a seduction narrative by appearance but in fact a protofeminist text, or Hugh Henry Brackenridge in Modern Chivalry (1792-1815), Cervantean picaresque turned satirically upon the foibles and crudities of frontier democracy. One name, however, came even closer, that of Charles Brockden Brown, precursor, rival novelist, yet fellow participant in the forging of an American republic of letters. Cooper’s feelings towards Brown were rarely less than ambiguous, half-admiring but full of caveats and rejoinders. Wieland, he more or less saw, went considerably beyond the gothic surface. The dramatization of messianic self-delusion and of too ready a trust in Lockean sense data arose out of Brown’s own authentic, fiercely Enlightenment curiosity. On the one hand, whether out of patriotic solidarity or some buried irony, he could write in Notions of the Americans “This author … enjoys a high reputation among his countrymen”. Yet so much acknowledged it is hard to resist the conclusion that Cooper felt other than a deep sense of competition with the Philadelphia author whose annus mirabilis of 1798-99 had produced no fewer than five full-length novels. A decade later, as he makes clear in Home As Found, gothic in general as against “ordinary American life” evidently was to be thought a source of dismay.6 There can be no mistaking the slight he intends towards Brown when he dubs him “not the rival that every man would select”.7 Brown’s Edgar Huntly, even more notoriously, brought matters to a head. A sop to “English critics” Cooper goes on to call it dismissively, an “account” not of “American manners” but spurious, merely crowd-pleasing “Indian manners”, especially on the basis of the famous cave scene containing “an American, a savage, a wild cat and a tomahawk, in a conjunction that never did, or ever will occur” (8). All these same Indian factors, ironically, bear directly upon Cooper’s sense of himself as an American writer. He held to the 6

James Fenimore Cooper, Preface to Home as Found, Philadelphia, PA: Lea and Blanchard, 1838. Preface. 7 Preface to The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, NY: Popular Library, 1972. Preface, x. All references are to this edition.

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conviction that he knew Native America infinitely better than Brown, almost as a birthright, and wrote of a frontier personally remembered from his New York youth. He also saw himself as possessing a clear sense of how this clash of white and Native civilization, and the birth of America as a nation, coincided perfectly with his own call to full-time literary life. As to the first issue, had not his father, Judge William Cooper, Federalist. settlement-founder in upstate New York and self-made man of wealth for all his lowly Quaker heritage, acquired formidable tracts of land around Lake Otsego, the source of the Susquehanna River where as a boy Cooper doubtless saw the few remaining tribal peoples? Cooper himself would later write an Introduction to William Cooper’s A Guide in the Wilderness; or the History of the First Settlements in the Western Countries of New York, with Useful Instructions to Future Settlements (1810), with its references to original Mohawk, Mohican, Mingo and other Iroquoian Confederacy habitations.8 The Leatherstocking-Chingachgook cycle, in fact, seems to have taken root extraordinarily early in his mind, certainly the “descriptive tale” published as The Pioneers (1823), and even, conceivably, The Last of The Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827). Yet even before “Indian” America, and Cooper’s momentous transformation of it into frontier epic, there were the materials he would make over into The Spy, America’s War of Independence as history to underwrite fiction, war and peace to be re-told as fable. *** In correspondence and elsewhere, Cooper confessed beginner’s nerves. There could be little doubt of his grounds for social confidence – heir to the landed New York patrimony of Cooperstown, study at Yale however brief (1803-1805), and after, at his father’s insistence, a stint as common sailor and also a naval officer aboard the Sterling (1810). There had been the squirarchical grand-alliance marriage in 1811 to Susan DeLancey, of Dutch patroon stock, and his farmergentleman management of the two family properties at Cooperstown and Angevine Farm, Scarsdale. But as an outsetting writer, Cooper had reasons to think himself up against odds. How, with matching 8

Reprinted in , V (1960), 308-39.

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confidence, to set himself up as literary founder, the maker of New World literary art to do justice to New World history? How to alight upon credible innovations not only of subject but of voice, design, viewpoint, all the necessary requisites of mature narrative? The Spy, with good reason, has long come to be recognized as indeed marking his advertence to “American manners and American scenes” and as signifying literally enough his first “American novel professedly”. Among the “pros”, as Cooper designates matters in his Preface, for choosing “his own country for the scene of his story”, he mentions “untrodden ground” and “the charms of novelty” (9-10). A great theme unquestionably lay to hand, the Birth of the Nation, 1776, and the more so given the novel’s closing perspective of “thirty-three years after” and “The War of 1812”. Herein lay the very inscription of America in terms of a history, a polity. Where more appropriately to begin an American literary career than with the War of Independence, Washington’s patriot soldiery cast against the army of the British Crown and its loyalist supporters? Whether by chance or not, two beginnings come together – America as a political dispensation free as for the first time of the ancestral British yoke (and by force of arms no less) and Cooper as an American author equally aiming to win free as for the first time of British literary pre-emption. For however much is to be acknowledged about the Americanness of subject in The Spy, and that angle has tended to hold sway in critical discussion of the novel, Cooper himself from the start points to the equally consequential shaping impetus behind this first of his novels set in his own country. The indications lie in terms like “I am more partial to this new work”, “[it] goes very slowly”, “I take more pains with it”, “more interest”, and above all, “better writing”. The Spy carries not only the inscription of his nation’s genesis, its revolutionary beginning history, but also nothing other than Cooper’s own writer’s genesis, the first, most fully engaged awakening and realization of his imagination. In The Spy, as had been possible only in silhouette in Precaution, he intuited that he himself might make history, that is, take upon himself to invent or fictionalize fact, an impersonation, so to speak, whether obliquely or otherwise, that in every way underwrites all the true-to-life roles played out in the novel. For like the Wharton home of The Locusts, and around it, The Neutral Ground, The Spy positively abounds in acts of self-invention, whether the different masquerades,

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or passes of the kind held by Harvey and Henry, or each metamorphosis or false show of appearance. “Great numbers wore … masks”, Cooper discloses early on: those on the one hand assumed by “useful agent[s] of the leaders of the Revolution”, and those on the other hand those assumed by “divers flaming patriots” (12). Not the least of Cooper’s strengths in The Spy lies in the imaginative wherewithal to dramatize precisely these masks. The game of impersonation so itself becomes impersonated. The Spy cannot have more claimed for it than in truth it merits, Cooper’s first American novel with a seeming proneness to formula symmetries (Mr Wharton-Mr Henry, Henry Wharton-Peyton Dunwoodie, Sarah-Frances) along with related other flaws and longueurs. Yet at the same time it also displays a virtual relish of the art of impersonation both as the novel’s theme and in the reflexive process of Cooper’s own narrative inventions and creations. In upshot, linked and overlapping, they give a truly individuating animus to the story as a whole. In this respect Cooper’s “new work”, for which in his letter of June 1820 to the publisher-bookseller Andrew Thompson Goodrich he figuratively, and revealingly, declares himself “partial … as being a Country-man and perhaps a younger child”, invites more than it has perhaps sufficiently received in the way of interpretative acknowledgement. *** Consider, first, the quality of imagining behind Cooper’s “history” in his opening chapter. “Chilling dampness”, “increasing violence”, “darkness”, “the approach of a storm” (11) all indicate climate. But they speak coevally, and figurally, to both the history, the Revolutionary War in process, and to geography, the Neutral Ground as America’s miasma or labyrinth, through which Harper as “solitary traveler” traverses en route to his rendezvous with the spy-peddler, Harvey Birch. Westchester, a “midway” valley, could not be better conceived, an actual yet mythical kingdom, state-of-the-nation yet also state-of-nature, which draws into the one single configuration of time and place both the disguised American patriarch (George Washington) and the disguised English-Loyalist patriarch (Mr Wharton).

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Parallel dispensations can immediately be seen to come into imaginative reckoning: Imperium against Colony, Old Authority against New. Yet, as in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”, each amounts to more than a simple binary. They play against each other obliquely, disguisedly, hedged about with an ambiguity to reflect the anxiety of crossed or uncertain loyalties as America ceases to be English domain. Within these apparent antimonies, appropriately, still more disguise proliferates: the coded interchange between Harper and Wharton about tobacco with its pointers to the troop dispositions of the two sides; the competing, love-affected political loyalties of Sarah and Frances Wharton; the “weather-beaten”, red-wigged, and falsely stooping Henry Wharton who has crossed lines on a forged pass, a spurious sign of identity; the black manservant Caesar Thompson with his “putt’n on ol’ massa” routines; and the references to the double-dealing of the Skinners. Little wonder Cooper returns, at the chapter’s end, to the violence of the storm, the perfect synecdoche for all the radical and interwoven displacements – the guises and disguises – of the Anglo-American historical order whose break-up his novel seeks to explore and inscribe. “Are you what you seem?” (233). So, infinitely to the point, Captain Lawton interrogates the peddler-spy. For as title-figure, Harvey Birch follows in suit, the true patriot masked as false patriot and doubly suspect given how he is regarded by both armies. To the loyalist Lawton he ranks as a “spectre”, an “inexplicable man”, who, before “plunging into the darkness”, yet also (even if Birch acknowledges not a little bitterness at the matter) to be thought “a royal spy” (233). To the American Major Dunwoodie having first captured Birch, then himself been made his prisoner and freed, he equally ranks as a “mysterious being” (189). To Katy Hayes, housekeeper to the Birch famly, Birch likewise signifies “a mystified body”, “a man that no calculation can be made on” (255). Betty Flanagan, having come upon a golden guinea at his hands and in a nice touch of two-way Irish brogue, calls him an “honest devil” (239). To Caesar Thompson, in African-American patois and as the welltaken perception from a one player acting out his part for another doing the same, he ranks accurately enough as a “berry clebber man” (219). On his own reckoning, Birch remains his own “true character”, “truly alone – none knows me but my God and Him” (189). The

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isolate, par excellence, it adds to the irony that he is thought even so to be one of a “multitude of agents” (345). The very words of George Washington nominating Birch as “unrequited servant of his country” (350) stay hidden, an honorific literally en-boxed until accidentally discovered by later generations. The “veil which conceals your true character” (343), as Washington writes, thus holds from start to finish, Birch’s self-masking an integral part of the novel’s plot yet also at every turn, a kind of stalking-horse for Cooper’s own powers of invention. For all these several identities (“Necessity”, says the peddler, “has made me a dexterous pilot among these hills” [299]) bespeak Cooper’s encompassing larger authoriality. How to invent Birch as a spy whose very own business is invention? In this respect it can be said that Birch, shape-shifter, abrim in survival wiles and savvy, also likely represents a first shy at none other than Natty Bumppo, the Leatherstocking. Birch operates throughout as self-authoring riddle, the very spirit of “the imperfect culture of the Neutral Ground”. Firstly he carried his pack in true Bunyan fashion, the bearer not merely of goods for trade but secrets, espionage, things seen and yet concealed. An un-masker of others, the bigamous Wellmere notably, he wears always a mask himself, most right when most wrongly accused. As rogue frontiersman, the seemingly white Indian, he speaks almost always with his own forked tongue, first and symptomatically in the early Harper-Wharton scenes where with “knowing looks and portentous warnings” (52) he plays out a linguistic charade, the game of doubleentendre and cipher. Whatever his straightness of purpose, his spy’s doublespeak is intuitively exploited by Cooper as the very staple of the novel overall. In these respects Birch as concept scores from the outset, a living fiction in himself obliged to self-invent and re-invent at almost every turn. Cooper’s portrait of the inner man hidden inside the outer guise becomes a comment in itself on a world historically turned inside out, or, almost literally, about-face. Harvey Birch undoubtedly can look to his fictive betters in American fiction, Dirk Peters, the Herculean yet bald and dwarf-like “singular being” in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or Queequeg as “a wondrous work in one volume”, “living parchment”, “a riddle to unfold” in Melville’s Moby-Dick. But if lesser kin, especially of that supreme Proteus, Melville’s The Cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man (“QUITE AN ORIGINAL” as the

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text capitalizes him provocatively), does he not belong at least somewhere in this American gallery? This is not to pretend that Birch does not irritate at times. Like Hardy’s Diggory Venn in The Return of The Native, his omniscience and habit of turning up just in time, repeated “bird’s eye view of the valley”, and mournful recitations of duty (especially to Washington/Harper – “Your grace” or, in the commander’s absence, “Him”) can edge into self-parody. The murmurings (“Have I not been the hunted beast of these hills for three years past?” [296]) suggest maunder. Equally he undergoes suspiciously top-heavy doses of misfortune, the death of his father, the twice-over loss of his possessions and savings, the burning down of his house, and his own final eclipse by history. The “melancholy smile” he exhibits might be its own far from intended under-statement. But Cooper is not to be denied other virtuosity in conceiving Birch. The first full bead on his spy shows a nice line in their shared powers of dissimulation: In person, the peddler [sic] was a man above the middle height, spare, but full of bone and muscle. At first sight, his strength seemed unequal to manage the unwieldy burden of his pack; yet he threw it on and off with great dexterity, and with as much apparent ease as if it had been filled with feathers. His eyes were grey, sunken, restless, and, for the flitting moments that they dwelt on the countenances of those with whom he conversed, they seemed to read the very soul. They possessed, however, two distinct expressions, which in a great measure, characterized the whole man. When engaged in traffic, the intelligence of his face appeared lively, active, and flexible. though uncommonly acute; if the conversation turned on the ordinary transactions of life, his air became abstracted and restless; but if, by chance, the revolution and the country were the topic, his whole system seemed altered – all his faculties were concentrated; he would listen for a great length of time, without speaking, and then would break silence by some light and jocular remark, that was too much at variance with his former manner, not to be affectation. But of the war, and of his father, he seldom spoke, and always from some very obvious necessity. (33-34)

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This makes for shrewdly managed portraiture. Birch’s heavy pack, peddler ambiguity, and seeing eyes all add weight to the impression of a figure more than he might at first appear. Cooper imagines him as the one physiology and yet another, one speaker yet another, double in body as in speech. Equivocation played for true, the feigned for the authentic: Cooper clearly relishes acting on his novel’s prospectus. The same double-play in Birch Cooper extends to his capture and then escape from the Skinners, his closeness to being shot or hanged, and interventions like that which exposes Wellmere or his help in freeing the masquerading Captain Wharton. The latter episode offers a classic instance of Cooper’s reflexive touch: Birch as royal spy guides Wharton, one-time neighbour and officer in the opposing army, to the safety of the British navy. Things have turned perfectly about, as underscored in the Wharton family view that “it was no new intelligence … that Harvey Birch was distrusted and greatly harassed by the American officers” (110). Birch’s equivocation, his veiled assertions of self-authoring, becomes the perfect surrogate for Cooper’s own. “I thought you knew me too well”, he says at one point, “to be uncertain which part I favoured” (325). “Paying mysterious visits”, “lingering”, “a strange figure that had been seen gliding by in the mists of the evening”: the novel’s phrasing for Birch give its supporting index to his role-within-role. The various disguise scenes add their emphasis. Early into the text Birch plays ghost as a ruse to escape the Skinners. This invention, clever enough in itself, gains from being modulated through Caesar – Birch’s father as Afro-folk spook, “a being from another world” (117), one more episode in the novel’s round of invented acts of invention. Birch, at another point, eludes his captors in the guise of Betty Flanagan, an ingenious cross-dressing and ventriloquism caper with the Irish washerwoman paid off with her guinea into the bargain. In the rescue of Captain Wharton Birch plays the Calvinist divine with supporting props of wig, powder, gown and mock-hellfire bible idiom. Dressed to suit, and with Wharton as Caesar (white become black and vice versa), Birch could not better ape the whole contextual drama of impersonation in The Spy, the one charade imaginatively pitched at the behest of the other. ***

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A shared doubling underwrites all the other principals and their mutual encounters in the novel. Even Harper/Washington, whom many readers find wooden, too obvious or staid, Cooper actually signals as a conscious making-over of the historical commander-inchief into an imagined creature of his own. The key lies less in the opening episodes with the Whartons, or in Harper’s subsequent disguised appearances, than in the episode where Frances Wharton makes her way to his hut, “this singular edifice” (306), to seek his help in the reprieve of her brother. Harper/Washington, in one sense, fulfils to perfection his role as Father of the Nation, stately, benign. He also doubles as a true father to Frances as against her own false father. At the same time Cooper leaves little doubt that Harper as Washington knows that he belongs to historical theatre, the pageant of emblematic as actual politics. Frances sees as much when she makes her way to his hut: Against the walls and rocks were suspended, from pegs forced into the crevices, various garments, and such as were apparently fitted for all ages and conditions, and for either sex. British and American uniforms hung peaceably by the side of each other; and on the peg that supported a gown of striped calico, such as was the usual country wear, was also depending a well-powdered wig – in short, the attire was numerous, and as various as if a whole parish were to be equipped from this one wardrobe. (307)

That the Washington-Harper of The Spy has resort to a literal wardrobe of disguise also refracts how Cooper points to his own fiction-making of Washington. The idiom, to that end, again is wholly indicative – “various garments”, “uniforms”, “wigs” and “attire”. This self-costuming of the novel’s only historical figure might be said to shadow Cooper’s imagining costuming overall, the portrait fashioned to carry both truth-to-life and truth-to-fiction. Cooper’s play of costume persists. In Mr Wharton, his family coach bedecked in British armorial arms as against Harper on his lone horse, Cooper develops the masquerade of the Loyalist who pretends to be a “political neutral”. Wharton’s balancing-act, American yet given to “the manners of England” and “aristocratic notions of blood and alliances”, (23) proves a nice challenge for Cooper. How to portray, in line with the name of the house, a Locust, yet also the

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feigned moderate? As a study in weakness, vacillation, Mr Wharton is to be seen as another kind of invented identity at the behest of Cooper’s own consciously inventing powers. Each of the other Whartons, in turn, act out parts that hide their actual selves while at the same time stand-in selves as it might be thought in Cooper’s repertoire of invention. Captain Henry Wharton, principled, brave, becomes the literally twice-over disguised son (initially when he crosses lines to visit The Locusts and again as Caesar in Birch’s rescue). His trial, particularly, stands in for the novel itself as imagined theatre. There gather the “different actors in the approaching investigation” (259); Henry is accused of disguise; it is said of him that “deceit never formed part of his character” (263); one of the American military judges asks “Was he in disguise?” (262); and he is indicted and sentenced as “a spy – artful, delusive and penetrating beyond the abilities of any of his class” (266). Much as these exchanges serve the drama of Henry’s capture, they cannot be mistaken as other than loaded up with self-reference, Cooper’s reflexive fabling. Sarah and Frances Wharton are both led into mistaken perceptions of love – Sarah with the already married Wellmere and Frances over the misconstrued Isabella Singleton. Sarah will undergo transformation into an American Ophelia, a “lonely maniac”, her madness the perfect upshot of Perfidious Albion in the form of Wellmere (244). Frances has to work through her mis-perception of Peyton Dunwoodie, as true a lover, in truth, as he is American patriot (“you know not yourself nor me” [197] he tells her in her jealousy). Even the aunt, Miss Jeanette Peyton, has her equivocations, the matching interest she has in General Montrose and in Dr Sitgreaves. For Cooper they are players all, both on their own terms yet also on his own. The minor presences operate no less reflexively. Katy Haynes goes through life self-deludingly the would-be wife to a supremely unuxurious Harvey Birch, a love nicely counter-pointed in the playful Betty Flanagan-Sergeant Hollister liaison. Cooper’s shy at creating the eccentric in Dr Sitgreaves (with his leitmotif of the unsurgical swordplay of the American troopers) depicts an outward bluster yet inner sensitivity, as in his reaction to the death of Jack Lawton and to the truly wounded Singleton and falsely wounded Wellmere confirms. Wellmere, as bigamist, plays the perfect double, the deceiver, yet at

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Birch’s hands, eventually finds himself un-costumed as the actor husband. The Skinner leader, too, in one of the more graphic scenes in the novel, mistakes his own all too likely actual hanging for a ruse by the Cow-boys, one more mistaken charade of many. For his part, Caesar Thompson veers, however awkwardly to modern taste, between stereotype and something better, and always, whatever else, one of the first white-written black portraits in American fiction. His jibes to the soldiery, his insistent servant role (especially in the dinner scene of “American profusion” at The Locusts), and above all, his actorly parts in the ghost and Wharton rescue episodes, again shadow the designing hand behind them. Caesar adds more figuration, at once impersonation again impersonated, and Cooper’s implicit recognition of his own will to invention. *** “At the time of which we write, we were a divided people” (132). The narrator’s observation typically serves a number of ends at the same time in The Spy. For the divisions so ingeniously exploited and not a little complicated by Cooper – America and Britain, Patriot and Loyalist – are matched by the different internal styles of divisions of Birch, the Whartons, Harper, Wellmere and the rest. If the novel delineates divided political loyalties, it does the same for the men and women who live inside that history, mask against anti-mask. The set-pieces work likewise, notably the central battle with Washington and Howe as overall commanders, Lawton and Wellmere as the field officers, and Henry Wharton aided in escape by Caesar only to be recaptured almost immediately. In the trial scenes first of Birch, then of Wharton, with the gallows threateningly close to hand, Cooper clearly seizes the opportunity to imagine the dialectic of life and death, sentence and execution. Nowhere more graphically does he do so than in the dispatch of the Skinner chieftain. This same dialectical tension the novel widens to advantage: the mirroring opportunism of both the pro-American Skinners and pro-British Cow-boys; the repeated allusions to the twin eminences grises of Anglo-American espionage, Benedict Arnold and Major André; and The Neutral Ground as mythic America itself, a landscape and climate full of competing niches and crevices and as given to the shadow of

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night with its warring “noises and profusion” (30) as to the prospect of the historic coming light of day. To every good imaginative purpose the novel speaks of Westchester as “intersected with roads of every direction”. Cooper might well have gone on to write stronger fiction, but The Spy achieves its own genuine singularity. For in this first of his American works, the making of his country’s history intersects with the making of his own fiction, a cross-over not only of subject but of creative imagining whose interaction perhaps too readily has been overlooked.

3 IMPUDENT AND INGENIOUS FICTION: POE’S THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM OF NANTUCKET

The perception of Pym as an essential American literary landmark has come about only recently, and not without cavils and different shows of reluctance. Its latter-day new lease of life, in fact, can be dated precisely – from W.H. Auden’s inclusion of the full text in his Rinehart Selected Prose and Poetry of 1950 and his canny, greatly perceptive Introduction.1 Previous to that, and even in France where Baudelaire’s Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym had been an admired translation since 1858, Poe’s original cannot be said to have enjoyed much more than a fugitive existence, eclipsed by his better-known short stories and poetry and frequently out of print. Auden’s intervention, therefore, was as unexpected as it was discerning. He took it upon himself to proclaim Pym “one of the finest adventure stories ever written”, nothing less than “an object lesson in the art”.2 No doubt there was some over-pitching in this, necessary insistence to win attention. Yet whatever his means, Auden deserves immense credit. Almost single-handedly he had rescued Pym from an obscurity even the considerable anti-Poe lobby came to recognize as having been unfair. So singular an act of reclamation, nonetheless, has not led to smooth sailing for Pym. Debate about its worth continues, contentious to the point of impatience and bad temper.3 Not the least of it has been Poe’s being taken to task for having apparently flouted his own rules 1

Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. W. H. Auden, NY: Rinehart, 1950. Auden, Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Prose and Poetry, vii. 3 For a useful summary of Pym criticism up to the 1970s in this respect, see J. V. Ridgely, “Tragical-Mythical-Satirical-Hoaxical: Problems of Genre in Pym”, American Transcendental Quarterly, XXIV: 1 (Fall 1974), 4-9. 2

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about objectionable length in the novel as expressed in his celebrated “Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales”.4 As his only full-length work (with the exception of the unfinished Journal of Julius Rodman), did not Poe avail himself of a length of narrative that by his own appointed standard could not fail to be flawed? It was he, after all, who wrote: As [the novel] cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense benefit derivable from totality. Worldly interests, intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or lesser degree, the impressions of the book.5

To a later age more keenly exercised on reader-response theory and Rezeptionästhetik, this might signify a point of departure rather than of conclusion. But it remains a fact that Poe is still called to account for his own apparent inconsistency. *** The point is said to count more than usually in the case of Pym. If, in fact, no novel can manage “totality” is not Pym especially vulnerable, too conspicuously a zigzag of separate reversals and escapes? The surface high drama, each shipwreck, imprisonment, mutiny, treachery, and assuredly the cannibalism, points the text towards the episodic where it should be better integrated into a sequential whole. The issue also bears on Poe’s mixed-means fashioning, the novel as a verisimilar adventure fiction yet a species of the fantastical and speculative. This, however, has been only one side of the account. Pym has also won a later generation of proponents, often dazzlingly ingenious admirers of precisely its mystery and imagination. Not a few of these propose Pym as worthy company with the canonical texts of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick to The Scarlet Letter, Emerson’s 4

The review, in fact, appeared twice, first in Graham’s Magazine (April-May 1842), and then with slight changes in Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1847. For the two versions, see The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, NY, 1902, reproduced, NY: AMS Press, 1965, XI, 102-13, and XIII, 141-55. 5 “Review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales”, Complete Works, XI: 108.

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essays to Walden and Leaves of Grass. The accent is made to fall upon Pym’s visionary interests, its “prophetic glimpses” (57) into terrain far beyond historic nineteenth-century South Seas time and place.6 Poe’s narrative enacts an emblematic journey, a stunning cycle of metamorphoses which refers as much to inward psychic or dream life as to any supposed circumstantial literal Antarctic exploration. The voyaging, first out to sea and then inexorably southward, signifies an endemic human need to decode each and every encyclopaedic world-sign as if we ourselves were figures of otherness marooned on some un-chosen planet. The “INCREDIBLE ADVENTURES”, as the title page will call them, as much represent the oneiric as the actual. Pym himself serves as both plausibly real yet also the psychic self, travelling uncertainly through disaster, reversal of circumstance, a whole circuit of exits and entrances. The world he inhabits becomes displacement, entombment, narrow escapes, sensations of falling and transformation, and strangely enciphered signals and happenings. Only some final, polar revelation at a degree-zero white Antarctic south will unlock the world’s talismanic mystery, its hieroglyphic final code or truth. In this Pym is also to be likened to Poe’s own Eureka, his self-nominated Book of Truths and inquiry into First Principles as the will to Unity over Diffusion. What, in turn, of Poe’s much-vaunted hoaxing? Does it win through or remain simply mischief, more show than the writing of a mature writer? To those who favour Pym for its self-acknowledging textual invention, Poe amounts to a virtuoso imaginatively the forerunner of Joyce, Nabokov or Borges. Poe shares with them a radical taste for reflexivity, the text as mirror of itself, though by no means at the expense of a powerful story-line or a demonstrated familiarity with the facts of navigation and South Seas history. The matter, of course, can still be put unflatteringly. Is not Pym too clever for its own imaginative good, given over to routines of tease at the expense of all things else? 7 Put more neutrally, and in Poe’s own 6

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, ed. Harold Beaver, NY and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975. All subsequent page references are to this edition. 7 The classic formulation of this view is that of T. S. Eliot in “From Poe to Valéry”, Hudson Review, 2: 3 (April 1949) 327-41. “That Poe had a powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty. The forms which his lively curiosity takes are those in which a pre-adolescent mentality delights: wonders of nature and of mechanics and of the

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phrase from the Preface, in designating Pym an “impudent and ingenious fiction” (43), was he speaking to its better or worse effects?8 Impudence, or ingeniousness, or both, come engagingly into play in Pym even as the eye runs down the title-page. Poe’s uppercase inventory of things to come does honest-seeming duty, the promise indeed of nothing less than true if spectacular adventure. But as the list unfolds, one cannot but suspect the put-on, Poe the counterfeiter. THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM is to comprise THE DETAILS OF A MUTINY AND ATROCIOUS BUTCHERY, a SHIPWRECK AND SUBSEQUENT HORRIBLE SUFFERINGS FROM FAMINE, and were that not enticement in plenty, INCREDIBLE ADVENTURES AND DISCOVERIES STILL FURTHER SOUTH. Mock-epic title-pages of the kind deployed by Fielding or Smollett may have gone out of fashion, unless as overt pastiche in contemporaries like John Barth or Kurt Vonnegut. But Poe’s title-page for Pym plays matters most ways at once, an authentic advertisement of coming epic, indeed mock-epic, and even mock-epic itself mocked. Poe’s narrative, in other words, operates as one of multiple hype, companionable double-dealing. INCREDIBLE ADVENTURES will refer not only to Pym’s own southward pilgrimage, but to the entire manner of the story’s self-marking imposture from start to finish. Given that two instalments of Pym had first appeared under Poe’s name in the Southern Literary Messenger (for January and February 1837), how to make the transformation into a completed and book length text appears to have been written by Pym himself? Poe’s answer again depends upon subtly letting the reader in on the supernatural, cryptograms and cyphers, puzzles and labyrinths, mechanical chess-players and wild flights of speculation. The variety and ardor of his curiosity delight and dazzle; yet in the end the eccentricity and lack of coherence of his interests tire. There is just that lacking which gives dignity to the mature man: a consistent view of life. What is lacking is not brain power, but that maturity of intellect which comes only with the maturing of the man as a whole, the developement and coordination of his various emotions”. 8 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. The full passage, ostensibly and ingratiatingly in Pym’s own voice, reads: “Another reason was that the incidents to be narrated here were of a nature so positively marvelous that, unsupported as my assertions must necessarily be (except by the evidence of a single individual, and he a half-breed Indian), I could only hope for belief among my family, and those of my friends who have had reason, through life, to put faith in my veracity – the probability being that the public at large would regard what I should put forth as merely an impudent and ingenious fiction”. (43)


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subterfuge, the supposed true hoaxing behind “this ruse” (44), as he has Pym call it. The account, one after all of facts, we are enjoined to believe had been given by Pym to “Mr. Poe” (44) to tell as if “pretended fiction” (44), partly to meet Pym’s own lack of name as a writer and partly to ensure his story’s “better chance of being received as truth” (44). “Under the garb of fiction”, thus, Pym’s “series of adventures” have been told by “Mr. Poe” in his role of amanuensis and collaborator, “my adventures” offered “without altering or disturbing a single fact” yet to be granted a certain understandable allowance for their “air of fable” (44). Any “difference in point of style”, a readership insinuatingly termed “shrewd” and “full of common sense” should have no difficulty in perceiving (43-44). This would-be “exposé” (44), plausible, honest as need be, obliquely shows its own fakery. The true ruse at issue is not at all that of Pym or/and of “Mr. Poe”; it is Poe’s, manipulating at every turn the ostensible deceit practised a year before in the columns of the Messenger. Poe again so seizes the advantage on several counts. He manages to simulate an explanation of the pre-publication of parts of Pym in Thomas White’s Richmond magazine, invent himself as a figure in his own fiction, anticipate a later age’s controversies about fictions of fact and, obliquely to a degree, indicate the larger tactics at work in Pym overall. The juggling of terms of reference like “truth”, “the garb of fiction”, “this ruse”, and “the air of fable” (44), especially helps in all these respects. Each, to be sure, plays its part in the further mock of what is already a mock-confession. Each points forward to the artifice, the systematic hoax and falsification, of Pym in its entirety. But each, too, gives a clue to the text’s concealed, and more consequential, purposes, the visionary journey that lies always just out of sight. It is to this end that Poe has the very figure of Arthur Gordon Pym appear to step free of his story to thank his collaborator and mentor, the Richmond “late editor” of the Messenger, “Mr. Poe”. For as “Mr. Poe”, Poe plays to the hilt his part as modest retainer, the reluctant ghost-writer of another’s narrative. Whether, accordingly, understood as having been written by “A. G. PYM”, or “Mr. Poe”, or some shrewdly calculated mix of the two, or indeed by Poe in propria persona, the Preface again is able to lay down its marker for Pym at large (45). The storytelling mask (or masks) are allowed to slip just enough. However plausible the “exposé” (44), and that it did its work

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is confirmed by contemporary response, it actually serves to underline Poe’s careful acknowledgement of the contrivance behind all of Pym. The Preface, in fact, offers exactly the same factitious kind of text as the narrative that follows. *** Letting us in on the act, through Poe’s own sleight-of-hand, applies in like manner to the Ariel episode. At a first level, Poe’s opening chapter indeed offers the “maddest freak” (47), a midnight caper and near death aboard Augustus Barnard’s sailboat as it heads into an October gale off the Nantucket shoreline. It also perfectly anticipates the voyages aboard the Grampus and Jane Guy, each a voyage into and through extremity, each a venture towards the un-riddling of the world as hermetics, a dynamic code or kaballah. Initially, and typically, Poe enciphers the very surface of his text. Arthur Gordon Pym mimics his own name in sound and syllable. Edgarton (47), at whose bank his grandfather has made his cash, allows him another Hitchcock-like appearance. Old Mr. Ricketts (47), one- armed and “known to almost every person who has visited New Bedford” (47), blends the commonly shared childhood memory of a first teacher into rickets as an ailment. Augustus Barnard suggests Pym’s ratiocinative alter-self even as he behaves in a manner wholly un-Augustan, being given to drunken, cataleptic urges to sail into an ocean storm. The name of the sailboat, Ariel, similarly hints of other realms, Shakespeare’s mercurial spirit in The Tempest and Shelley’s death-boat. Augustus’s stories of “the Island of Tinian” (47) lay down future track, one set of nocturnal stories to anticipate those of the “blackskin warriors” of Klock-Klock and Tsalal (205). All of these passing touches afford an ironic gloss to the actual adventure of the Ariel as it is run down by the Penguin under the command of the aptly named Captain E. V. T. Block. The Ariel adventure serves indeed as one of Augustus’ “maddest freaks”, but also “by way of introduction to a longer and more momentous narrative” (48), that which aboard the Grampus and Jane Guy will voyage into southernmost Antarctica. All that happens on the Ariel simulates adventure, but it is also a dream story, exactly abrupt in its reversals and changes of fortune and typically referenced as “ecstasy”, “madness”, “terror”, “destruction”, and perhaps above all,


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“the mystery of our being in existence” (51). Storm, waves, a monster ship bearing down on Barnard’s sailboat, call up stories like “MS Found in a Bottle” in which Poe uses extreme states of agitation as a means of edging towards a condition of visionary clarity. The rescue is accordingly explained as total paradox. Pym survives by being seen upside down on “the smooth and shining bottom” of the Penguin, and Augustus (like Melville’s Ishmael in his coffin) by having been tied umbilically to a timber of the Ariel’s deck and so found “buoyed up” (53-54) The extraordinary, the mad, the terrible invert back into the explicable. Night-time ecstasy and intoxication give way to re-birth into the reasonable (51). Each transformation enacts Pym’s double-voyage: the one familiarly adventuresome -- almost high jinks, the other essentially oneiric and shot through with what the text repeats are prophetic glimpses. The explicit voyages take up these cues in full, accelerated high action yet dream voyage. Pym, as narrator, is made to give even more of a hint as to his begetter’s tactics when he mentions the return home to the Barnard household the next morning. Both he and Augustus pretend to a surface of ordinariness, the cover-up of the everyday. “Schoolboys ... can accomplish wonders in the way of deception” says Pym (56). Quite the same, the text surely implies, might be said of Poe’s own story-telling wiles, their author’s own wonders in the way of deception. *** With one “wild adventure” and “miraculous deliverance” in place, the text quickly advances to another, also “sheer fabrication” in the manner of one of Augustus’ stories (57). Pym first sets out the “visions”, the “destiny”, which most compel him, and which in fact the text of Pym will enact: My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death and captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown. Such visions or desires – for they amounted to desires – are common, I have since been assured, to the whole numerous race of the melancholy among men – at the time of which I speak I regarded them only as

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Gothic to Multicultural prophetic glimpses of a destiny which I felt myself in a measure bound to fulfill. (57)

Determined “at all hazards” to meet this “destiny”, Pym falls back on “intense hypocrisy”, as he calls it, “an hypocrisy pervading every word and action of my life for so long a period of time” (58) as if to say that everyday life for him has become no more than secondary role-playing, a cheat, an outward shell. Only in “my long cherished visions of travel” (58) can the true, essential drama of his life take shape. To “fulfill” this true “destiny”, he virtually shows himself the self-actualizing performer of his own script. He “contrives[s] a hiding place” by stowing away in the Grampus under Captain Barnard’s captaincy (59). He relishes his imposture of a “good-for-nothing salt water Tom” before his baffled grandfather, “Old Mr. Peterson” (60). Burying himself deep inside the coffin-like labyrinthine hold of the Grampus (itself, suitably, a fish name), he is linked to escape Cretanly, only by a “piece of dark whipchord”, a thread also to link sleep and wakefulness, inner vision and outward fact (62). He remains there, biblically, “three days and nights”, the as-yet un-risen self. Around him all is seeming decay, dissolution (63). Time runs down in the form of his stopped watch. His cold mutton turns to “a state of absolute putrefaction” (64). He passes into catalepsy, highly animated trance. His dreams belong to a Dalí or Max Ernst canvas, dreams of “the most terrific description” (65). He repeatedly imagines his own immolation by in turn smothering, “immense serpents”, “forlorn” deserts, humanoid trees, the “burning sand plains of Zahara”, and finally, “a fierce lion of the tropics” (65-66). Poe leaves very little doubt that in all these visions, Pym’s voice serves at his own authorial secret sharer, the one voice situated inside the other. As ever, Pym’s dreams, also a purposive overlap, cleverly segue into reality. The lion turns out to be none other than “my Newfoundland dog Tiger” (66), a dream inverted back into actuality. Yet he wakes only to find that actuality turn right back on itself and re-enact fiction. His lion-dog-tiger has aroused him to his situation of being literally “entombed”, “blocked” – with its echoing of Captain Block of the Penguin – and the possessor of a still to be de-encrypted half-message tied by string to the dog’s body, “blood – your life depends upon lying close” (76), These half-messages, along with the


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novel’s series of abbreviated engravings and signs, collectively point to an order of reality finally only to be deciphered through visionary confrontation and reasoning. The beginning Grampus journey thus fuses one journey into another, a multiple layer of voyaging, the very pattern of Pym as a whole. Locked amid “innumerable narrow passages” and in “a tantalizing state of anxiety and suspense” (61), Pym embarks on a first self-rescue, a first would-be deciphering, from circumstance as incarceration. He fathoms Augustus’ message by the use of phosphorus (a “momentary” message); witnesses his own dog indeed become a tiger as it maddens through want of water; drinks his “single gill of liqueur” out of “perverseness”; and against odds hears his name called by Augustus. Out of “incarceration”, real yet dreamlike, he has been called back, “redeemed from the jaws of the tomb” (78-80). Pym, yet further, has played out Poe’s script of voyage within, and through, the world as imprisoning semiotics, the one vast cipher of contradiction. *** “The brig put to sea” (81). So Pym launches into a next phase, that of the insurrection aboard the Grampus. Pym awakens this time from “slumber ... of the most tranquil nature” to find, however, and yet again, a world turned upside down (82). Captain Barnard has been usurped by the mate and is close to death. Punishment is administered by the gargoylish black cook with to ensue “horrible butchery” (84). And a new alter ego emerges, successor to the Augustan Barnard junior, namely Dirk Peters, the dwarfish “son of an Indian squaw of the tribe of Upsarakokas” (84) and a one-time Lewis River and Missouri fur-trader. If Melville’s Queequeg can be described as “a wondrous work in one volume”, “living parchment”, and “a riddle to unfold”, Peters invites being thought of the same company. The fictiveness is almost palpable: “one of the most ferocious-looking men I ever beheld” and with “bowed and Herculean limbs” (84), he wears a dog or grizzly-bear wig to cover his domed baldness, the stunted phallic dwarf par excellence (84). Given his wide-gapped mouth and “exceedingly long and protruding” teeth, he indeed amounts to a “singular being”, the perfect witness, and participant, in all of Pym’s subsequent doings (85). His singularity plays perfectly into the journey-ahead, the hitherto un-mapped polar terrain as a white canvas

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upon which all or anything literally can be inscribed. Poe insists on Peters as apt companion in spirit for Pym’s text: I shall have frequent occasion to mention (Peters) hereafter in the course of my narrative a narrative, let me say, which will be found to include incidents of a nature so entirely out of the range of human experience, and for this reason so far beyond the limits of human credulity that I proceed in utter hopelessness of obtaining credence for all that I shall tell, yet confidently trusting in time and progressing science to verify some of the most important and most improbable of my statements. (85)

Following on the mutiny and with Pym and Augustus temporarily reunited, two selves in one though utterly at risk from the mate, Poe again guys his own narrative, first through the reduction of numbers in the opposing parties, and then through the crew names which contain a number of in-jokes about American types like William Gilmore Simms, Horace Greeley, and Poe’s own Allan family. Finally he gives the illusion of documentary in the mock-meticulousness of dating events, as if the text were transcribing history not fantasy. Another digression puts in an appearance, on ship routines of lying to, not in itself inaccurate but, again anticipating Moby-Dick and Melville’s literal-figurative cetology, a form of pastiche information. The shock-horror death of Hartman Rogers, “one of the most horrid and loathsome spectacles I ever remember to have seen” (111) adds just the right touch of Grand Guignol camp. For it is this same Rogers that Pym brings back to life, a Ghost Scene played for all its worth “in imitation of the horrible deformity of the swollen corpse” (112). Pym’s white chalk face, bloated false stomach, blood-streaked eye, in all “a most shocking appearance” (112) by which to haunt the mate and his fellow mutineers, serves as Poe’s give-away as to the fiction-maker’s magic box. This is the script-within-a-script, conscious actorly spectacle, but fashioned to Poe’s usual double-purpose. For Pym’s ghostly impersonation advances the plot surely enough. But it also provides still another pointer to the text’s willingness to reveal its own artifice. For in insisting on this very scriptedness, and as in stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “Ligeia” or “The Pit and the Pendulum”, Poe acknowledges the illusion-creating procedures of his text at large. Pym’s realism, if its


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frame of ship and voyage amounts to that, more than usually flatters to deceive. Even Pym’s reflexive role-playing half turns back on itself. When he looks in the “fragment of a looking glass”, he experiences “a sense of vague awe at my appearance”, and is “seized with a violent tremor” as he recalls “the terrific reality which I was thus representing” (113). So theatrically kitted out, the perfect fake cadaver, he overhears the “piratical plans” of his adversaries and duly unleashes “the terrific appearance of Rogers’ corpse” (113). The violent swinging of the cabin lantern causes a play of light and shadow. The mate falls “stone dead” and “without uttering a syllable” (117). The other conspirators, “pitiable objects of horror” (118) in turn are killed by Peters, Pym himself, Augustus and Tiger, and there remains but the unfortunate Parker – soon to be cannibalized with the break-up of the Grampus. A livelier mise-en-scène would be hard to find. At one level, Poe puts before us pure hokum. Yet at another, he engages by giving away the game to perfection. He offers just the key to his own effects. He speaks of Pym’s imposture, and by implication the imposture of all art, as “sudden apparition” and with it “the reality of the vision” to the beholder (115). He even goes as far as to speculate upon the strange but familiar process of life imitating art and art life. Could it be that “the apparition might possibly be real” (116)? Does not art always tease in its appeal to credulity, the reference to some confirming and objective standard of truth? In acting out his revenge drama, Poe as ever invites belief and the suspension of belief, the situating of his reader both inside and at the margins of his text. The ensuing events aboard the sinking Grampus – Augustus rotting into death through his gangrenous arm, Pym’s delirium as to motion, the near-bisection of Peters by the rope about his waist, the ravages of hunger and thirst, and the repeated diving below only to encounter locked cabins and blocked corridors – give further momentum to the novel’s play of shadow and substance. Pym might again be both the subject and object of his own dream, the maker and yet principal player within his own life-as-script. Perpetually, at least, he must serve as witness to things turned inside out, the one thing always another and actuality its own charade. Nowhere more emphatically is this the case than in the meeting with “a large hermaphrodite brig” (130), a companion vessel to the San Dominick in Melville’s “Benito Cereno”, and like Melville’s

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vessel, the total opposite of what it appears. A death-ship rather than a ship of rescue, its crew are found to be smiling death’s-head smiles, fatal imitations of benignity. Rather, too, than giving off the balmy scent of the South Seas dreamed up by Pym, the ship gives off “a stench, such as the whole world has no name for”. All “twenty-five or thirty human bodies” represent not rescuing health but “the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction” (132). To complete the horror a gull drops before them not real food but a half-eaten “clotted and liver-like substance” (133). All the signs again have overwhelmingly cheated and Pym has again played the inadequate code-breaker. “Deliverance”, a word that recurs in the text, has yet to come about, and in nothing more than this “most appalling and unfathomable mystery”(134) of death-in-life as projected in this apparitional floating cemetery. Hunger, thirst, Pym’s hope for “our common deliverance” (135), continue to take the form of contradiction. Like T. S. Eliot’s drowned Phoenician, Augustus deliriously asks for fish-scales to be combed out of his hair. All four, Pym, Peters, Parker and Augustus, regress into “a species of second childhood”, “simpering” expressions, “idiotic smiles”, and “absurd platitudes” (139). The ship they spot sails in the opposite direction. In the midst of ocean life, human or amphibian, both Pym and Peters could not be closer to death. Yet to survive further they must kill, a reversion to the saving transgression of cannibalism. Parker it is who picks the short straw (and is promptly dispatched by Peters), but not before Pym – grateful but fearing chance might have selected him – experiences for the Grampus sailor “the most intense, the most diabolical hatred” (145). Parker’s flesh keeps them going but temporarily, a mere staving-off of the inevitable end. But reversal again comes into play when the Galapagos turtle is discovered in the storeroom, a living sea-larder of food and water taken paradoxically from the very ocean that has threatened them with storm, wave, shark and tempest. None of which prevents the Grampus from heading into a last Coleridgean fate. Augustus rots and is given to the ravening sharks. Pym and Peters again endure “great agony”, “no prospect of relief”, and an impending end to their “struggle for life” (157). But things, as ever in Pym, move into a turn-about zigzag pattern, confuting the predictable and denying the expected. As the boat keels over, Pym finds himself deceived in thinking this the end of his life. He is spun


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under, then up again, a whirling breach-birth which quite literally whirls him out of disaster and back into life and consciousness. If Melville’s Ishmael will survive in a “coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea”, the Grampus also transforms itself from coffin into a buoy, not to say a supply-ship, when “excellent and highly nutritious” barnacles are found on its bottom as well as crabs that afford “several delicious meals” (158). The improbable survivors of an upside-down New England whaler water-logged in the Pacific, Pym and Peters are then improbably found by an equally improbable “rakish-looking topsail schooner”, the Jane Guy (another hermaphroditically named craft?) which will take them still further down their contradictory passage into the polar south. *** All of the Grampus journey, the patterns of reversal, Poe tells as adventure that mocks its own verisimilitude – telling which as cannily as ever folds back and in on itself. Ahead lies a still further circuitry of false fronts, snares, coded and eminently mis-readable information, and all of it, under Poe’s scripting, so narrated as again to manoeuvre our complicity in its artifice. From the provisional safety of the Jane Guy, he has Pym give his Grampus experiences a typical equivocal gloss as “a frightful dream from which we have happily awakened, than as events which had taken place in sober and naked reality” (163). Poe, as it were, dissolves his own text, dream not reality, a story from start to finish emphatically the self-consuming artifact. Aboard the Ariel Pym has all but drowned and then been saved. Aboard the Grampus he has been entombed and resurrected, caught up in revolt and then counter-revolt, and nearing death by hunger ended up saved by barnacles from an upside-down hull. Pym’s glimpses or some overarching pattern point inexorably onwards and southward: an ultimate, white-perfect source of meaning, order, godhead. Can it be doubted that Poe’s impudent and ingenious story-telling has been adapted to suit neither fiction of fact nor factual fiction, and at once drawing the reader in close while at the same time actually encouraging readerly circumspection and doubt? With the entry of the Jane Guy, introduced by Poe mid-way through the text, the cycle begins again. Poe first surrounds the rescue and the ship in the most copious detail. He gives dates, latitudes and

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longitudes, a whole inventory of goods, crew, mate and captain, in all yet another instance of persuasive but nevertheless mock circumstantiality. Even Captain Guy, “a gentleman of great urbanity of manner” (162), and a scion of the Guy family who own the ship, seems deliberately pitched by Poe to lack three-dimensional presence. He is described as wanting “energy”, “that spirit of enterprise,” in all the inner, visionary compulsion Pym himself embodies (162). For all that the Jane Guy is actually embarked upon a trading voyage, to Pym it signifies less a voyage for commercial goods than global truths, less goods or cargo than the encounter with an overwhelming destiny. To presage this last phase of double voyage no sooner has the Jane Guy got under way with its two extra crew than conditions revert to extremities, “one of the most tremendous seas I had then ever beheld”. The ship heaves and yawls until “we were hurled on our beam-ends as if by magic, and a perfect wilderness of foam made a clear breach over us as we lay”, an escape Captain Guy construes as “little less than miraculous” (164-65). Once more Poe sets his story to enter a next domain of the hyper-real, his register plausible enough even as it lays open its evident fabrication. Progress accordingly, Poe discloses as though a southwards descent, a serial of Pacific islands. He mentions in turn the “deceitful” Desolation Island, first discovered by Captain Cook, the isle of Tristan d’Acunah, and the fabled, paradisial Auroras replete with details of bird and plant life and still other discoveries and exploration. Pym places himself among the ranks of prior South Pacific voyagers, Magellan and Cook foremost, the Russians Kretzenstern and Lisiausky, the Britishers Weddell and Briscoe, and the American Benjamin Morrell. To these, crucially, he adds the name of J. N. Reynolds, the great advocate of an expedition to test out the “hole at the Pole” or Hollow Earth theories of John Cleves Symmes. In the Reynolds-Symmes connection Poe invokes not only an actual but a fantastical Antarctica, the white polar South as genuine terra incognita and so his own wholly imaginable place of revelation, his own last but as yet unwritten synoptic version of things. In listing “the principal attempts which have been made at penetrating to a high southern latitude” and confessing to “feelings of most intense interest” at the news of Captain Guy’s “resolution of pushing boldly southward” (181), Pym also confirms the fiction of his own magnetized condition, the pull towards the south pole.


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*** To cross over into the Antarctic circle, in consequence, marks not only a next phase in Pym’s adventuring but a matching reflexive next phase in Poe’s story-telling. For in descending “to a point southward of all the known facts” (186) or on Poe’s terms mock- or pseudo-facts, Poe’s text, also, becomes the perfect blank to be inscribed as for the first time entirely to his own invention and in which all story-telling and speculative bets are in play. So, legitimately, he may invent treacherous, fantasized “blackskin warriors” (205), or new dramas of entombment and release, or Gulliverish aboriginal customs and cries, or walled hieroglyphs which reach back to Genesis and Solomon and speak of a racially hierarchic world-order, or unprecedented animals and sights and colour patterns each apparently at variance with but revelatory of the hemisphere left behind, or a warm South Pole, or, finally, a huge, white, God-like figure. Nowhere in Pym does either Poe’s story or story-telling operate to more energetically impudent or ingenious effect. Poe wastes little time getting under way. He gestures towards the circumstantial by again scrupulously dating Pym’s ever more southerly course. Details pile up about climate, terrain, “immense icebergs” and “field ice” (183). A valued sailor becomes “a man overboard” (183), an evident omen or death-warning. But authenticating as these matters seem, others of a more exotic, fantasized and imaginary, kind take over. “A large bird of a brilliant blue plumage” (183) flies close, an almost painterly vision. The freezing air gives way to “mild and pleasant” temperature, a transposition of heat for cold (188). Peters kills a huge, bear-like creature, with “blood red” eyes, a “bulldog” snout, and a “rank and fishy” taste, a kind of mis-evolved warning (185). On land they discover “a species of prickly pear”, out-of-place fruit, then a mysterious canoe that Captain Guy thinks carved, emblem-like, with “the figure of a tortoise” (186). Pym, throughout, exults in having now gone closer to the Antarctic pole “than any previous navigators”. He presses Guy to go ever further, and makes his own cryptic reference to having met with “one of the most intensely exciting secrets” ever opened “to the eye of science” (183-87). As transitions each offers yet another double signpost, the changing habitation of water-and-land equally a change in the realm of textual imagining.

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Yet more in kind follows, especially “the carcass of a singular-looking land animal”, its claws “of a brilliant scarlet”, its body covered in “straight silky hair, perfectly white”, its tail long and “peaked like that of a rat”, and its head that of a cat but with “flapped” ears like those of a dog (188). Evolution once more has followed a different course, a biology hitherto unseen. This dead, white-bodied but mongrel beast, with teeth and claws blood red as if it had fought some fatal last battle, makes the perfect forerunner to the “jet black savages” (189) who now appear aboard four canoes. They strike Pym as grotesque evolutionary parodies – the exaggeratedly Negroid features, the “thick and woolly hair”, and the clothes made from the “skins of an unknown black animal” (189). They keep “black stones” in their boats, “jabber”, have “never before seen any of the white race”, believe the Jane Guy “a living creature”, and worship the ship’s tools as deities (190). Poe’s story-telling positively thrives on the challenge of fashioning a literally unprecedented and enciphered world. White on black, black on white. Poe’s southern, racially phobic, imagination also plays into this Antarctica, a displaced Deep South and fantasy Eden despoiled and hexed by brute, carbon tribesmen. Not only the temperature, but all assumed order, and especially racial order, has been put under transposition. Trees, for instance, resemble none previously witnessed. Rocks are “novel in their mass, color and stratification” (193). Above all, the stream-water yields a warning against tampering with decreed hierarchy. It is made up of “distinct veins, each of a distinct hue”, none meant to “commingle” (194). Pym observes of the water that it provides “the first link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be encircled”. He has, at last, entered magic Antarctica, “encircled” by “apparent miracles” (194), his anticipated destiny finally within reach. Poe, for his part, has made the one fiction generate another, the Antarctic circle as also a species of text or topographical scripture in which (and in black and white) the enciphered essence of the world-at-large is to be both written and read. First the blackskin warriors provide the basis of a whole system of totem and taboo. They are projected with Swiftian animus, sly incarnations of total blackness. Their dwelling-places are covered with “a large black skin”; their domestic hogs have “black wool”; “black albatross” make the village of Klock-Klock their home; “black gannets” dwell among the bird population; the rest of the tribe appear


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in “dresses of black skin”; and the Wampoo leadership dwell in “black skin palaces” (198-9). They eat the innards of their hogs, pastiche sweetbread, in all outlandish “black” food. Their black sexuality is carried in the appetitive, sensuous oral consumption of the biches de mer, a source of renewal for “the exhausted system of the immoderate voluptuary” (204). Behind all the seeming welcome, fawning even, lies ominous “black” impersonation, the masking of “the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe” (205). Chaos, fallen humankind, appears in Poe as black devilry, fearsome insurrectionists who most surely derive from slave-haunted Southern fears of racial Armageddon as led by a Toussaint l’Ouverture, a Nat Turner or a Denmark Vesey. These blacks, in effect, are super-blacks, less African than extra-planetary, ebony devil figures. In order to move Pym and Peters still deeper into this Antarctic “region of novelty and wonder” (208) Poe again reverts to more fades and dissolves. First the ship’s party is buried alive by the perfidious Klock-Klock tribesmen. Then the remaining shipmates aboard the Jane Guy are overwhelmed and massacred by the natives, a thousand of whom in turn are blown up by dynamite. Meantime, having been saved by access to “the mouth of [a] fissure”, yet once more “entombed alive” (208), Pym and Peters survive, willed into necessary invented continuance by Poe. To this ever-widening circle of inventedness Poe adds a fictive philology, a language whose mystery exists at one with the terrain. He develops a whole register of Klock-Klock idiom, echoic-mimetic words like Anamoo-moo, Lama-Lama, Wanpoo, TooWit, and the great warning cry of Tekel-li, Tekel-li!. To these is added the name Tsalal, to be pronounced in the manner of a hiss, a corruption of Solomon, and so the augury of a fallen, black counter-world. Poe’s neologized blend of Hebrew, Coptic, and Hamitic (there have been guesses of some Maori) telegraphs a dire Solomonic message: white over black represents a first of all laws and has been fatally transgressed. All the words mean darkness in one way or another, language that confirms how eternity’s sanctioned hierarchy has been inverted and that curse is upon the land. The same, too, applies to the “alphabetical characters” (225) engraved upon “very black and shining granite” of the “vast pit” (222) into which Pym and Peters take flight. These figures, or logos, add further hieroglyphic warning. Tsalal represents the black other

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half of the world’s polar order, its counter-language at once tied into the novel’s discovery theme and yet, as always reflexively, another of Poe’s fictions within a fiction. The one world again yields violently to the other. Pym actualizes a classic falling dream, the “rushing and headlong descent into the abyss” (229) yet, in fact, a fall down the pit face into the arms of Peters, himself momentarily transformed into “a dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure” (229). Given time for recovery, Pym feels “a new being”, once more re-born. And so it is, with their own captive Man Friday, Nu-Nu, Peters and he sail a yet further “vast distance to southward”, three emblematic world figures, a black bodied, black toothed Tsalal islander, a Native American mixedblood, and a white New Englander. Poe’s polar seascape grows yet more dream-like, yet more fictive. It gives off “continual light”, becoming iceless, smooth, marked by “unusual phenomena”, and “streaked” by the Aurora Borealis (236). The surrounding water turns hot and milky. Pym speaks of his “numbness of body and mind – a dreaminess of sensation” (237). NuNu expires, having revealed something of his people’s history – their King Tsalemon, their warrior dress (“from an animal of a huge size”), and their cult rituals of black and white. “One of the white animals” which has caused a “wild commotion” in Klock-Klock floats by (238). “White ashy material falls” and the vapour begins to form into a “gigantic curtain”, as if indeed this ending were the one vast theatrical imagining (238). Interpretation of the “figure … of the whiteness of snow”, the “shrouded” form that appears from within “the embraces of the cataract” (239), has to remain open. It may assuredly be some whited guardian of a Symmsian hole, or the personification of Unity over Diffusion, or Pym’s projected image of self-perfection, or some emissary and numinous God-figure. But in all of these is it not also yet another massive blank to be given signification as much by the reader as by Pym? For in a way, Poe is handing over to the reader his story and storytelling, the imagining of the hitherto un-imagined, the challenge of identifying this numinous force. The novel moves towards closure as openly and speculatively as possible, its protagonist’s consciousness slowly eviscerated and put up for transfer. The reader is so enjoined, even defied, into taking on the next stage of imagining, the text (as yet) not written.


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Even so, Poe’s ending, or rather double-ending has often been advanced against him, first the gigantic white figure who bears down on Pym and his companions (an “effect” which “fails” according to Henry James because it aims simply “at the horrific in itself”), and then the report of Pym’s own death which puts the text on orphan status as it were, a body without a head. 9 Does Poe’s stagemanagement, as his mystery and imagination, outrun his text’s ability to manage more than gothic? Or is this the stroke of a Poe uncannily ahead of the postmodern turn, his Pym the very instance of a world 9

Henry James, Preface to The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace and Other Tales, NY: Scribner’s, 1910-1917, XVII. James, to be sure, was using Poe as a touchstone for his own kind of suspense narrative. The observations in the New York Edition Preface, Scribner’s, XXIII: Vol. 2, 22, run as follows: “the safest arena for the play of moving accidents and mighty mutations and strange encounters, or whatever odd matters, is the field, as I may call it, rather of their second than of their first exhibition. By which, to avoid obscurity, I mean nothing more than I feel myself show them best by showing almost exclusively the way they are felt, by recognizing as their main interest some impression strongly made by them and intensely received. We but too probably break down, I have ever reasoned, when we attempt the prodigy, the appeal to mystification, in itself; with its ‘objective’ side too emphasized the report (it is ten to one) will practically run thin. We want it clear, goodness knows, but we also want it thick, and we get the thickness in the human consciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and interprets it. That indeed, when the question is (to repeat) of the ‘supernatural’, constitutes the only thickness we do get; here prodigies, when they come straight, come with an effect imperilled; they keep all their character, on the other hand, by looming through some other history – the indispensable history of somebody’s normal relation to something. It’s in such connexions as these that they most interest, for what we are then mainly concerned with is their imputed and borrowed dignity. Intrinsic values they have none – as we feel for instance in such a matter as the would-be portentous climax of Edgar Poe’s ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’, where the indispensable history is absent, where the phenomena evoked, the moving accidents, coming straight, as I say, are immediate and flat, and the attempt is all at the horrific in itself. The result is that, to my sense, the climax fails – fails because it stops short, and stops short for want of connexions. There are no connexions; not only, I mean, in the sense of further statement, but of our own further relation to the elements, which hang in the void: whereby we see the effect lost, the imaginative effort wasted” (xix-xx). These comments contrast interestingly with those spoken by Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl where Pym is described as “a wonderful tale by Allan Poe … a thing to show, by the way, what imagination Americans could have; the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further towards the North Pole – or was it the South? – than any one had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light one, concealing as darkness conceals, yet the colour of milk or of snow”.

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caught in its own reflexive idioms, the loss of the real, and truly without any one master narrative? *** Poe’s concluding Note, accordingly, provides all the more of a jolt when it refers us back to the actual, historic world, a last dissolve told in the put-on style of the Preface. Pym’s “late sudden and distressing death” is reported as being “well known through the medium of the daily press” (240). The very notion of a daily press after such oneiric polar voyaging, carries its own irony. Poe himself, presumably as “Mr. Poe”, “declines” to believe “the latter portions of the narration” (240). Even Peters, whose fate has not in fact been given, “cannot be met with at present” though “alive, and resident in Illinois” (240). All these past narrators, so to speak, have stepped down, ceded authority; nor is their escape and return explained. Any suggestions, therefore, that the text’s “statements in relation to these regions” may soon be “verified or contradicted” by a forthcoming “governmental expedition now preparing for the Southern Ocean” (240), can only be parodic. Pym ends as it began, a ficción or artifice, not least in the guise of a seemingly posthumous and disowned piece of writing. These adroit gestures of abdication again throw the burden of bringing off the text as a whole even more than usually upon the reader, most especially the prophetic glimpses. As it stands, the Note purportedly adds a further scholarly gloss on the language of Tsalal together with an epitaph from the Book of Job as evidence of God’s warning curse upon the realm. But in fact it says still more about Pym’s textual status. If ambiguously authored, Pym is also ambiguously incomplete, a text whose last two or three chapters have been “lost” (240) and therefore looks to us to supply, or like Jules Verne in Le Sphinx des Glaces (1897) even write, its ending. Whoever can be assumed to have written the Note makes reference to Tsalal’s language and iconic wall-markings as “a wild field for speculation and exciting conjecture” (242). So much, and more, might all have been Poe’s remit in Pym. Few narratives, nineteenth-century American or otherwise, can quite so resourcefully have shown the en-fabling of their author’s own will to “speculation and exciting conjecture” (242). However unlikely to win over all tastes, in this respect if no other,


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Poe’s only full-length fiction represents him as much as any of his stories at his most impudently and ingeniously inspired.

4 LIKE A DREAM BEHIND ME: HAWTHORNE’S “THE CUSTOMHOUSE” AND THE SCARLET LETTER

I have thus far omitted all mention of his “Twice-Told Tales,” and “Scarlet Letter.” Both are excellent; but full of such manifold, strange and diffusive beauties, that time would all but fail me, to point out the half of them. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” 1 This sketch of the Custom-house is, as simple writing, one of the most perfect of Hawthorne’s compositions, and one of the most gracefully and humorously autobiographic. It would be interesting to examine it in detail... Henry James, Hawthorne 2

If on publication The Scarlet Letter stirred an almost comic outburst of Mrs Grundyism in Salem and other narrower New England circles, its reception on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the later nineteenth century was generally greatly more discerning. Given the mean local politicking that led to Hawthorne’s dismissal in 1849 from his Surveyor’s post in the Salem custom-house with the changeover from a Democratic to Whig Presidency, and the un-looked for financial necessity it imposed on him to seek a serious livelihood from his writing (not to mention the upbraiding he received from many local Salemites for having written a truly scarlet book and treated with 1

Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, Literary World, 17 and 24 August 1850. Republished in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1960, The Writings of Herman Melville, The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, eds Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougal and G. Thomas Tanselle, Evanston and Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987. 239-53. 2 Henry James, Hawthorne, London: Macmillan, 1879. Reprinted Hawthorne, Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956. 84.

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disrespect, even calumny, his fellow customs-men), he must have reacted with wry added pleasure to the praise his first major romance brought him. Though on occasion he believed himself grievously less than understood – this from a man whose masks include the authorial M. de l’Aubépine of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” – he in fact won considerable interest. The Scarlet Letter quickly drew admirers as did the two earlier story-collections Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from An Old Manse (1846). In America that meant the emphatic approval, among others, of Poe (granted he also disliked Hawthorne’s moralizing turn), Longfellow, Emerson and Evert Duyckinck, the astute editor of the Literary World.3 Even Fanshawe (1828), for all that it had been written during his Bowdoin College years, and an early romance he came to think abortive, did not go without reviews. Hawthorne may well have felt himself neglected, an author at the margin, but in fact he met with a not inconsiderable, steady, and often well-disposed readership. No American acclaim, of course, could have been quite as startling, or as unstinting, as Melville’s pseudonymous “Hawthorne and His Mosses”.4 There, both to Hawthorne’s and Sophia’s delight, he found himself proclaimed “a man of a deep and noble nature”, “this Portuguese diamond in our American Literature”, an indissoluble New Englander by birth yet a man of letters to be spoken of with no less than Shakespeare and the wider community of established literary masters. Doubtless “Hawthorne and His Mosses” reveals as much about Melville’s own soaring imagination in the forging of Moby-Dick and his need to recognize, and in turn be recognized for, a fellow voice of dissent from the prevailing Transcendentalist good cheer of the age. But it was an act of formidable intuitive insight, a reviewessay also tricked out as a story and in due course to become as notable a sight-line as any in later estimations of Hawthorne. Melville speaks of The Scarlet Letter in particular as “full of manifold, strange and diffusive beauties”. But the review as a whole shows him famously drawn not only to Hawthorne’s “power of blackness”, the dark, Calvinist accent to his view of mankind, but also to Hawthorne 3

A selection of these reviews is to be found in The Recognition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. B. Bernard Cohen, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969. 4 Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Literary World, 1850.

“The Custom House” and The Scarlet Letter

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the artificer whose lights and shades embroil, and frequently dazzle, an artfulness as honed, and unstinting, as that to which Melville himself aspired. In England, Hawthorne equally won admirers for his craft, and in perhaps unexpected quarters. Anthony Trollope found himself powerfully affected by the “concentration of energy” at work in The Scarlet Letter, an imagined world of “severe” ancestral Puritanism that likely fascinated him as the very contrast with as he called them his “beef and ale” novels, a domain to leave the reader “entranced, excited, shuddering and at times almost wretched”. 5 Henry James, shrewdest of all transatlantic literary intermediaries between New and Old worlds, provides a bridge in his Hawthorne. Despite reservations about Hawthorne’s symbolism he pays The Scarlet Letter, if less so the other romances, considerable due. Hawthorne, for him, clearly foreshadows not only an American fiction to earn its keep but his own part in that eventuality. The voice is already internationalist as it lauds “the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country…a novel that belonged to literature and to the forefront of it. Something might at last be sent to Europe…”.6 D.H Lawrence offers the more operatic view, Hawthorne as inspired literary beguiler-devil (“The blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knew disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise”).7 These, together with the vast subsequent scholarship on Hawthorne’s romance-form as strategy and on his sources in New England lore and typology and the allegories of Spenser and Bunyan, deservedly have given The Scarlet Letter canonical ranking. 8 Hawthorne enters the American Renaissance as one of its necessary players, the literary heir but always the out-runner of Brockden Brown and Washington Irving, the contemporary of Melville, Emerson, 5

Originally published as “The Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne”, North American Review, CCLXXIV, (September 1879), 203-22. 6 James, Hawthorne, 88. 7 D. H. Lawrence, “Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter”, in Studies in Classic American Literature, NY: Thomas Saltzer, 1923. Reprinted Anthony Beal, ed., D.H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism, London: Heinemann, 1956, 347. 8 Long standard formulations are to be found in Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, NY: Dutton, 1936; F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance:Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, NY: Oxford University Press, 1941; and Q. D. Leavis, “Hawthorne as Poet”, Sewanee Review, Vol. 59 (Spring and Summer 1951), 179-205, 426-58.

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Thoreau and Longfellow, and the precursor of James and Faulkner. Yet oddly, given this wide eclectic approval, even warmth, together with a multitude of readings of the romances and stories, critique still leaves thing to be said about Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House”. *** Although it runs to almost a fifth the length of the main narrative, it is as if Hawthorne’s cunningly disingenuous disclaimers in “The Custom-House” are wholly to be believed and it indeed serves as no more than antiquarian footnote, a beginning piece of pleasantry. The famous definition of romance, especially when taken with his other Prefaces and the rich quarry of annotation in his different Notebooks, to be sure has not wanted for attention. But the utter organic importance of the piece, the links of voice and organizing vision to The Scarlet Letter as narrative and the way Hawthorne parlays not only his authorial but family complicity into the portrait of Hester Prynne and the A, has by no means met with full acknowledgement. “The Custom-House”, on this argument, invites being thought quite on a par with anything in his best fiction, tightly seamed, nothing if not self-mirroring, a model of fabulation. James’ “graceful” and “humourously autobiographic” assuredly could not be more on target, the verbal shading and obliquity, the use of first-person persona. But he is also rather typical in moving forward to an account that begins with the throng awaiting Hester Prynne’s emergence at the oak and iron-spiked prison door. That threshold cannot be thought other, on its own both actual and liminal terms, than central, but it is not the first in the narrative. “The Custom-House” lays prior claim and indeed invites every attention and in detail as to the manner Hawthorne gets us, and himself, into his romance. For not to meet The Scarlet Letter fully on the custom-house terms offered would be akin to entering Moby-Dick only through “Loomings” without the most scrupulous account of “Etymology” and “Extracts”. Both Hawthorne and Melville use their prefacing brilliantly as tactics to create their reader, indicate the kind and aim of their fiction, and set up the play of voicing to be acted upon, and to reverberate, throughout the main sequences.


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Strictly, even “The Custom-House” is not the first item to be encountered in The Scarlet Letter.9 Hawthorne’s Preface to the Second Edition, written amid the local hullabaloo caused by his “official sketch” in newspapers like the Salem Register and which spoke of him as “a despicable lampooner”, the maker of “calumnious caricatures of inoffensive men”, exhibits, however unintended, a vein of irony not unworthy of “The Custom-House” itself. 10 In speaking of the “unprecedented excitement” and “public disapprobation” (1) brought about by his picture of official life in the custom-house, Hawthorne, in response, guys the irritation of his one-time Salem neighbours and their sheer uncomprehending of his book, and of yet greater importance, establishes his persona as unwitting literary man drawn through no fault of his own into the hurly-burley of public life, the scribbler stumbled into politics. Cartooning this Hawthorne as a species of mad arsonist, some Jacobean revenger who might be imagined to have poured the blood of his chief victim over the dying embers of the custom-house he has just burnt down, in the same breath he insists on his posture as holy innocent, the creator of a sketch remarkable only for its “frank and genuine good-humor” (1). The good-humour can be taken with any number of grains of salt. The sketch is certainly in no way unduly malicious. But its tone can hardly be thought other than ironic, even accusatory. Although to an extent himself the beneficiary of a spoils appointment, Hawthorne clearly bristled at being in turn caught out by the whim of political manoeuvre. Yet in pooh-poohing the sorry provincial outcry “The Custom-House” had aroused in Salem he resorts to exactly the same deflationary irony that gave offence in the first place. He at once plays up to, and gently derides, his townsfolk critics in suggesting that “The Custom-House” might be omitted “without loss to the public, or detriment to the book” (1), something for which he has too often been taken literally. The sting lies in his would-be modest proposal that it should remain in place on the grounds that he could not have managed “a livelier effect of truth” (2). Hawthorne knew well enough, and without doubt recognizably looks to the reader “The Custom-House” so carefully endeavours to 9

All citations are from The Scarlet Letter, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, The Centenary Edition, 1962. 10 The controversy in the Salem Register during March 1850 is usefully reprinted in Studies in the Novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne Special Number, II/ 4 (Winter 1970).

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create, and then cultivate, to know, that altogether subtler justifications than mere effects exist for the sketch’s continued inclusion. But under the pretext of general accuracy and keeping faith with his original well-meant intention of doing little more than memorialize an endangered New England seaboard round of life, he alleges himself obliged to re-offer his sketch “without a change of word” (2). The Preface, winningly, embodies disingenuousness writ small, Hawthorne as knowingly wide-eyed authorial innocent. *** “The Custom-House” to follow typically begins with Hawthorne professing himself a figure of passivity, a private, normally unforthcoming man “disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs”. He writes as if to affect having been affrighted by the “autobiographical impulse” that, “inexcusably, and for no earthly reason”, has prompted him twice in his life to address the public – on the present occasion and earlier in “The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with his Abode”, his Preface to Mosses From An Old Manse, a composition wholly as teasing and double-edged as “The Custom-House” itself. In recalling “my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse” (3) Hawthorne harkens back to both a literal prior sense of location, but also to the inward chamber of his creative imagination in which were conceived and nurtured his storymosses. Thus, in again reaching out, a man possessed it is to be remembered, to “the few who will understand him” – on the evidence of “Hawthorne and his Mosses” he would surely have counted Melville among that number – his own “circle of existence” seeks completion (4). Even so, and however much is revealed by the author and understood by his reader, there remains an “Inmost Me”, the private reaches of the actual historical self Hawthorne appears never to have wholly disclosed, including, perhaps, to Sophia. Melville’s observation when visited by Hawthorne’s son, Julian, in 1883, that Hawthorne “had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career”, might indeed


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have contained a kernel of truth.11 At any rate, the self to be disclosed in “The Custom-House”, from the outset, will be a self fashioned ultimately by this same “Inmost Me”, yet essentially different and derivative from it. The “true relation with his audience” can be no more than yet another agreed fiction, a contract of understanding between the two consenting parties. The “rights” (4) of each, thereby, almost pseudo-legally as it were, are so best to be respected. Hawthorne will play author, and the reader, correspondingly and in like spirit of contract, is equally invited to play just that, reader. This benign mutual charade, charm but with a fundamental strategic purpose, continues as Hawthorne purports to offer in what follows the “Proofs of the authenticity of the narrative therein contained”. If taken at face value he is to be thought as having written merely “in my true position as editor” (4), a shuffler of papers, the altogether minor archivist. This first in a serial of deftly assumed masks beckons perfectly. Is not the reader indeed to be left with an edited text, but a story so deviously pitched as to make all process of interpretation seemingly always fall upon his or her critical shoulders with Hawthorne disingenuously somewhere off in the middle distance? Who, as the story unfolds and thereafter, is to make the right judgement call? Cleverly understating his account of life in the custom-house as no more than “a faint representation” (4). Hawthorne then begins the process of linking himself, the actual latitudes and longitudes of his Ha[w]thorne dynasty, into the imagined life of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth and Pearl. In this configuration the story to be extricated from deep within the custom-house becomes personal, more than passing interested-party authorship. The Nathaniel Hawthorne descended from the ancestral Hathornes acknowledges his own shadowed history to be also accusingly refracted in the story of Hester Prynne, her crime, imprisonment, wearing of the scarlet A, and gift to the world of Pearl. This moves “The Custom-House” on from “faint representation” to complicity, confession, the author as seeming plea-bargainer for history’s forgiveness.

11

Julian Hawthorne, “Hawthorne at Lenox”, Booklover’s Weekly, 30 December 1901. Reprinted in The Melville Log, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951, II 782.

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In no more emphatic a fashion could the main procedures of The Scarlet Letter have been indicated: author and reader, more than usually, to become actor-players, co-makers in taking measure of the story to hand. This holds first in the matter of the proliferating A itself, whether the gorgeously embroidered red and gold worn by Hester in its repudiation of Puritanism’s would-be punitive single meaning, the vegetal green version assumed by Pearl, the different spectral appearances of night-time and sky, or Arthur’s psychosomatic A of guilt upon his chest. Each tableau works to participating effect, an ocular plenty of light and shadow in which perceiver and perception are caught up in the same working prism. The upshot is one of picture, a whole serial of intense visuality. The connected scaffold and forest scenes become almost day-for-night encounters, one frame within another. Hester’s first visit to Governor Bellingham has the A dilate and contract when mirrored upon the armour breast-plate (108). An accusing and ironic marital parallel is implied in the Gobelin tapestry of David, Bathsheba and Nathan insinuated into the minister’s room by Chillingworth (126). Joseph Conrad’s later desideratum that the author “make you see” might be said to take on unexpected directions of meaning. Yet the description of the custom-house and how it has led on to The Scarlet Letter as romance, if Hawthorne in the role of editor is to be taken at his apparent word, offers no more than “a few extra touches” (4), a minor, indeed wholly accidental, site for the discovery for the A. Hawthorne in this respect could not more affect his own double as “Hawthorne”, the author as himself imagined, a to-the-life persona or fictional replicate. It can hardly be a source of surprise that Melville, no mean authorial confidence-man himself, should find himself speaking of Hawthorne in his Literary World review-story as the master of “soft ravishments”.12 *** “A spacious edifice of brick”, tracks, points of exit and entry, sailors “outward bound” and “recently arrived”, and “custom” of every kind both human and commercial (5-6). In these and similar terms Hawthorne begins his picture, “scene” is his word, of the daily 12

Ibid. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 241.


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round at the Salem custom-house. The language, evocative of busy commercial life in the port and amid the wharfs, carries yet further freight and freight of a kind that again links into the main text. This house of custom, with its collectors, history, secret recesses and architecture, its sense of present and past, Hawthorne will have serve, obliquely or not, as the very analogue of The Scarlet Letter as a house of fiction. The latter house, also with its entrances and exits, different rooms, carefully spaced scaffold scenes, juxtaposed pictures of forest and town, builds into a like symmetrical form (twenty-four chapters to be precise). The voice within the text, even as it purports to keep distance, more than implies the link in the edifices. From the first chapter onwards it would be hard not to be struck by the recurring pattern of thresholds: spatial, as the ones which lead into and out of the forest and prison; temporal, as the rose which stays alive through history and embodies the link between Hester and her antinomian predecessor Ann Hutchinson; and sexual, as in the line which divides Puritan and forest realms in matters of the body and its pleasures and temptations. Entrance into the Custom House entails the one kind of threshold; departure lead directly from the nineteenthcentury present into the seventeenth-century past; and the story-line opens with Hester Prynne about to issue from a prison doorway itself latticed by different tracks and boundaries and closes with a shared but not shared grave as the very last threshold. Beyond lies the Atlantic threshold the Puritans have crossed, with Chillingworth in their wake, and the kind of theocratic Bible-rule threshold Hester is alleged to have transgressed; and Pearl will finally re-cross back to a Europe of “armorial seals … unknown to English heraldry” (262) and whose beckoning emissaries are to be found in the Spanish sailors at the close of the book. Hawthorne cannot forbear, either, a characteristic piece of connecting playfulness with the idea of the custom-house as Americain-small, the house of the nation, its entrance guarded by “an enormous specimen of an American eagle” (5). But no guardian prince of Nature this creature; rather it can bite its own, an “unhappy fowl”, fierce, mischievous, out of sorts. Or so it has come to seem to the Hawthorne the sketch will reveal to have been dismissed from office, a “federal eagle” apt to “fling off her nestlings”, a thing of claw, beak and “barbed arrows” (5). In dallying with this emblem

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Hawthorne anticipates his similar, more serious, equivocation in matters like the A and each mutually positioned mirror or picture. In recalling the custom-house’s “row of venerable figures” (7) Hawthorne steers his text increasingly back into time, a slow, almost static, Matthew-like Biblical dimension. These customs-men, in fact, could as easily pass for Hebrew tax collectors or Greek chorus. Their general office, a repository of fossil law-books, more suggests morgue than a site of day-to-day activity. It is here, amid age and venerable infirmity, that Hawthorne again conjures up himself as the one-time begetter of Mosses from an Old Manse. He proposes himself now to have become a dimly remembered figment, yet another shadow self, the self now swept from office by “the besom of reform” (8). Hawthorne in life, or the Hawthorne of his imagining, he cagily solicits understanding for he can have no alternative but to dwell broodingly upon the Salem of forbears, the attachment as he calls it “of dust” (9). But in parlaying the way back into New England’s settlement “The Custom House” exactly paves the way for The Scarlet Letter. Inexorably dynasty calls up Hawthorne’s first ancestor, William Hathorne, and his son, John Hathorne, Salem magistrate in the witchcraft trials of 1692. The son, “a bitter persecutor”(9), notorious for his severity towards a Quaker woman, blends Hawthorne’s history into the history of Hester Prynne, with Hawthorne or his family lineage as the personification of the Puritan severity which has struck hard and punitively at the defiant selfhood incarnated in some other Hester. It is this ancestral footprint that Hawthorne takes upon himself to excise, the author not only as editor, or excavator, or local historian, but a crossover of exorcist and latter-day penitent in quest of atonement. “The Custom-House” and The Scarlet Letter ply one into the other as historical schema, Hawthorne’s family history reflexively insinuated into the intimacies – and the mutual betrayals – of Hester, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth. Yet whatever the forgiveness sought for the crimes of his forbears, that is not to imagine they cannot still issue chastisements. Who better than the original Puritans to condemn art’s waywardness, speak dismissively of mere storytelling, especially to an heir who has strayed from sermon and tract into the modern idolatrous distraction of fiction-writing? Where the Puritans, and all puritan cast of mind, can see unambiguously with, as it were, their own one bible rules as


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template, Hawthorne ensures that The Scarlet Letter allows far from any one-for-one standard. As he tells it the human drama operates always more contingently, its equations of love and hate steeped in necessary and far greater ambiguity. To find the right “sweet moral blossom” (48) in consequence defies any one ready pathway. The Scarlet Letter subverts all human binary: devil and apprentice in Roger and Arthur, sinner or saint in Hester, Pearl as forest elf-child yet American heiress as she evolves past New England into Europe and into love, marriage, society, and art. This refusal of static decipherment, and the serial relativity built into the text’s unfolding scenes and image sequences, undercuts the singularity of all Puritan judgement. More than usually the reader is consciously summoned to the duty of negotiating a whole bandwidth of competing interpretation. Above all that embraces the A as primeval first letter, together with plait of meanings as adulterer, angel, accused, adult, authority, and by feminist criteria, autonomy, and not least as mediated through Pearl, art. In wearing it Hester, in fact, gives off a profound human and feminine embroidering, at once Salomé and the Madonna, the might-have-been destined prophetess but eventual sage-femme. For his part as he thinks back to the father and son continuity that sent successive Hathornes to sea from Salem (his own father died on a voyage to the Dutch East Indies in 1808) and to a Salem for him become drear in its familiarity – the unchanging perspective of its Main Street, the almost conspiratorial predictability of the weather – Hawthorne appeals for understanding of his need to step free of New England as necessary origins yet also as confinement in geography and habit. The search for fresh roots would lead him increasingly to Europe, first to the consulship in Liverpool and then Italy. Hester, by contrast, however daringly she makes the A her sumptuous countermand (a “fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread”[53]), sees out her days in New England. Even so author and character have much they share: the gap of actual and attributed identity, the self of history and the self of art. Hawthorne’s own psychodrama in life can also be said to overlap Hester’s in fiction, the red letter of desire (“so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy”[53]) as against the black flower of constraint (“the sumptuary regulations of the colony” [53]).

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In these respects, too, the township Salem of “The Custom House” anticipates the puritan Boston of The Scarlet Letter. Both lack the larger horizon, the metropolitan density of society. Each of the customs-men – notably General Miller, the Chief Collector, the “certain permanent collector” (16), even the one efficient soul about the place – belongs within a kind of institutional straightjacket. Hawthorne shows himself perfectly aware that he, too, could go a similar way into immuration, a Poe-like premature burial, a menu of infirmity and fad. The list could almost be Hogarth, one of gout, rheumatism, near-paralysis, the memory of far-off meals, even implied flatulence. Change, of any kind, carries threat, the unwelcome turn of clock. The writing of The Scarlet Letter thereby confers a yet next role on Hawthorne, that of escape artist, the return to literary life as rejuvenation, a new order of time. But first he needs circumstance, the arbitrary change of administration and with it a fresh Customs hierarchy, to bring about extrication from the place of custom in which he has become stilled. General Miller, “our gallant old General” (20), the benign, geriatric figure with his “I’ll try, Sir!” (23), personifies in his slowness of gait the shared temperamental pace of Hawthorne’s own custom-house life. Affected by imaginative dullness, his slowed-down creativity, Hawthorne must again, as he recognizes he once did in Mosses From an Old Manse, try to make the past rouse itself into life. In evoking the General’s “toilsome progress across the floor” (20), he implies the creaks and groans of his re-awakening, dead winter into imaginative spring. But “The Custom-House”, even so, engages to deliver no work of derring-do. At one with its contemplative temper, this will be a narrative (or more accurately a portrait) of people and objects watched through a glass darkly, the main event of Hester’s love with Arthur a prologue, its consequences the action-to-hand. The transition back from custom-house employment to literary life causes Hawthorne to summon his circle of New England literati who, both at Brook Farm where he bought stock, hoped to take Sophia and lived from April until November 1841, and at the Old Manse, had been regular visitors and companions. Among them rank Emerson as “subtile influence” (25); Ellery Charming, nephew of the great Unitarian preacher with whom he shares his name, poet, and Thoreau’s first biographer; Thoreau himself; George Stillman Hillard (his actual name was Hilliard), lawyer and literary man; Longfellow,


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Hawthorne’s one-time classmate at Bowdoin college; and Bronson Alcott, the most volatile of all the Transcendentalists. Much as he professes that life in the custom-house has somehow once been a relief he also recognizes, amid the very routine of surveyor duty, his inescapable affinity with these fellow-writers, the biding promise of his own will to story. Ruefulness lies behind the ostensible reportage – a “gift, a faculty, if it had not departed, was suspended and inanimate within me” (26). Things, however, fall together to help raise the dead author, be it Salem as a fate to be surmounted, the inspiration of New England literary contemporaries, or the happy recognition of being able to bracket himself with Chaucer and Burns as fellow literary customs-men (Melville after 1866 would become another). To whatever degree factual this account of his individual circumstances at one and the same time gives a superb figurative glimpse into Hawthorne’s creative resuscitation, the pendulum from guilty stasis into revival. The custom-house, its torpor, dust, voices, fixed rituals and idiom, becomes the outward form of inward hibernation. Yet once again paradox holds. This very dust, the hitherto undisturbed history it embodies, gives Hawthorne his means to a transcendent fable, the challenge of a “riddle” (31), in all not unlike Henry James’ notion of a beginning germ. It is in the making of that fable, the romance that is The Scarlet Letter, and its departure-point in the discovery of the A under the reams of old paper, “rubbish” as he calls it, that the artist at last takes imaginative hold over the hitherto imprisoning materiality about him. *** “The past was not dead”, “the habit of bygone days awoke in me” (27). So Hawthorne adverts to his former life as a writer, and his proven capacity of reviving the past imaginatively. From the ground floor of the custom-house, he moves to a second storey, noting that the edifice as a whole “contains far more space than its occupants know what to do with”. The space is literal, but always increasingly figural, an “airy hall” that serves both as a store-house for “bundles of official documents”, “rubbish”, “musty papers” and a kind of echo-chamber for the past, a place of inner as well as outer memory and history (28). The talk of manuscripts nicely modulates between historical and literary transcripts of past custom. Within the second storey, as if

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ransacking his memory and causing his creative faculty to start into action, Hawthorne imagines himself “poking and burrowing”, “unfolding one and another document”. Under the composite persona he has established, he sets himself to make present order of past disorder, working sequence of the apparently random. The “small package” of the A, a bequest from an earlier time when “clerks engrossed their stiff and formal chirography on more substantial materials than the present” (29) arouses anything but condescension. Quite the opposite. He positions himself, or at least positions the Hawthorne in view, as a wholly lesser kind of chirographer. As he mock-guiltily surmises, his role this time becomes one of frivolous romancer, the trifler or fiddler of his imagined admonitory Puritan ancestors. The package could hardly not excite. Bound in red tape, bureaucracy’s preferred colour but also the link to Hester’s A, issued under the seal of Governor Shirley (Massachusetts’ Governor 1741-49 and 1753-56), and given over to one Mr Surveyor Jonathan Pue (a name that in fact does appear in Felt’s Annals though not as the figure elaborately evoked by Hawthorne’s designing imagination), the mystery stands before us and its intending unraveller. Pue, the “ancient Surveyor”, and Hawthorne, the modern romancer, belong as doubles, the one bequeathing the story and the other his bounden heir. Ancient and modern, Puritan and son of a Puritan line, both serve as custodians of human custom, their separate but shared destiny to observe and transcribe. The “mysterious package”, with its “certain affair of fine cloth”, embroidered in gold but whose glitter has faded, adds its weight as the expression of “a now forgotten art” (31) – Hester’s embroidery reflexively of a kind with Hawthorne’s storytelling. Like other talismanic objects in American literature, Poe’s raven or Melville’s doubloon, Thoreau’s pond or Twain’s raft, Hawthorne’s A gathers into itself all the kinetic loadings of the text, at once centrifuge, koan and epiphany. The text duly speaks of it as “riddle”, “a mystic symbol”, art which burns its holder yet whose circumstantial detail purportedly lies in the historic account passed down by Mr Pue, the story of Hester Prynne as a woman best-known to her community as a “noteworthy personage” (32). Hawthorne’s tactic of fauxauthentication, his genially obligatory handing over of proof to those


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who would seek it, adds again to beguiling mockery, fact for fiction, life for art. From the “deserted chamber of the Custom-House”, at last and as if coyly, Hawthorne suggests he has “the groundwork of a tale”, a platform from which to take hold of the different kinds of past intrinsic in his present. Yet another authorial identity comes into contention, that of necromancer, the summoning force who speaks across the intervening centuries to the ghost of Surveyor Pue. Theirs is utterly a contract of word, a scriptural marriage pact entered into across time and body and built around the alphabet’s opening letter (“And I said to the ghost of Mr. Surveyor Pue, – ‘I will’ ”[33]). The persuasive ease of Hawthorne’s mock-solemnity should not, however, obscure the deeper tale he is telling. His antics with the ghost, relics, and the “mouldy and moth-eaten lucubrations” (33) all serve to explain his own return from his premature burial to his calling of writer. But there is further necromancy to be done. Pacing the customhouse, utterly given to contemplation, he makes vivid the onerous and mysterious task of making materiality yield imaginative life, a trope not a little audaciously to call up Christian transubstantiation. The necromancy is to work not only upon Pue but Hawthorne as the text’s fictive Hawthorne, and through him upon the A and the past as events and figures whose combined resistance to art taunts like the death’s-head grin of a skull. He speaks of “wretched numbness”, the “tarnished mirror” (34) of his imagination, the haunting thought that in having taken the world’s silver, he has forfeited not just his talent but his very right to make art. But given his pacing and contemplation, “sea-shore walks and rambles into the country”, he finally crosses one more threshold, that of the Salem family home.13 In two further chambers, first his study, then “the deserted parlour”, amid solitude, effervescent transfiguring moonlight and stillness, the powers of former alchemy slowly begin to make their hesitant return. The “striving to picture forth imaginary scenes” (35) irresistibly triumphs, image over fact. It is in these 13 On his marriage to Sophia Peabody in 1842 Hawthorne rented the orginal Emerson home which he named “The Old Manse”. In 1845 he moved the family to a rented house in Salem where they were joined in 1847 by his mother and two sisters. In the summer of 1850 he took a house in Lenox, western Massachusetts, and where Melville, living in nearby Pittsfield, became friend and neighbour.

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conditions, night-time in a lonely room, that Hawthorne begins the transformation of his “affair of fine cloth” into the narrative of The Scarlet Letter. The scene localizes a rare, privileged glimpse into Hawthorne as literary creator and artificer, the writer as his own utter familiar and yet somehow always his own fugitive. Hawthorne’s terms of reference for the romance as literary kind have long won their place in discussion of American narrative, the neutral territory neither wholly realist in the line of the social English novel nor wholly fantastical in the line of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto or Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. His “moon-lit room” gives exactly the right intermediary locale, daytime made night-time, the solid become the evanescent. The transfiguring “unusual light” that “spiritualizes” the family room, however, is to continue throughout The Scarlet Letter, each coming scene of street, forest, scaffold, house and square. The effect, vintage chiaroscuro if ever there were, become a perfect juncture, the one text taken into the other: If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figure so distinctly, – making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility, – is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall; – all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child’s shoe; the doll seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse; – whatever in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. (35-36)


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This passage, rightly celebrated as Hawthorne’s most enduring account of the romance, in fact offers itself as precisely the thing it describes. Each detail in the picture – chairs, table, basket, picture, lamp, sofa, shoe, doll, hobby-horse – belongs wholly to actual and lived-in domesticity, yet at the same time becomes subject to Hawthorne’s own moonlight. In speaking of “all the gleam and shadow of the picture” (36) he could hardly have found a better phrase to indicate the sense of imaginative remove that he has settle upon life as given in The Scarlet Letter. As in his “familiar room” we are made to see the very metamorphosis of actual into imaginary things, so in The Scarlet Letter we are enjoined to see the historic time and place of Boston in a shared change of imaginative light. Having for a moment illuminated this territory, and indicated how it cannot be regarded with any accuracy from a daylight perspective, Hawthorne immediately draws back, careful not to allow his reader too firm a vantage-point. In the familiar, self-deprecating irony that marks out most of “The Custom-House”, he surmises how a better story might have been that of “a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors” (37), a story of sea-going adventure told perhaps by some custom-house Melville. Such is not to be. Rather his attention lies snared, inescapably, in the deep residual shadows of the American Puritan past, a literary New Englander dutifully, though at the same time mock-dutifully, bound by name to its legacy. Hester Prynne’s story, handed to him in ghostly succession, foreshadows his own in yet another fashion. For having indeed dwelt among ghosts – Surveyor Pue, his Hathorne ancestors, Hester Prynne herself (and Anne Hutchinson behind her) – he now imagines himself of their company, himself become a ghost, a beheaded phantom like Washington Irving’s Headless Horseman. Hawthorne’s teasing again plays lightly across the account of his dismissal, its geniality easing an otherwise painful memory (“The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never…the most agreeable of his life” [41]). Accordingly forgiveness this time round is sought for the customhouse sketch as “intrusion” on the exquisite grounds of having been written by a decapitated surveyor “one beyond the grave”, “a politically dead man” (43). The real self, however, beset with paper, ink, steel-pens and “longdisused writing-desk” speaks as the amanuensis of history, partly the live, actual three-dimensional Hawthorne, yet still in equal part the

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Hawthorne of the moonlit room, a “citizen of somewhere else” (44). He finally affects to call upon a last voice to add to those of editor, antiquarian, parish pump scribbler, necromancer, chirographer, oath-swearer and unemployed customs-man. He puts himself forward as that of a headless dead man speaking from shades well beyond (“the realm of quiet”), a high-toned giver of benediction (“Peace be with all the world! My blessings on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies!” [44]). His romance, in like spirit, is to be regarded as more Pue-like necromancy, words sent “beyond the grave”, in all the “POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED SURVEYOR” (43). The custom-house phase of Hawthorne’s own life may well have come to seem “like a dream behind”, yet not so “The Custom House” itself: its play of virtuosity stands at one with the fable ahead even as it appears merely to give a context and serve as a sign-post for that same fable. All that remains, as the reader turns the page, is to gather with the Puritan throng at the prison-gate and await the emergence of Hester Prynne whose tale, and the manner of its telling, have been so thoroughly pre-enacted in “The Custom-House”. *** It is a great and major tribute to The Scarlet Letter that we speak of it as the most poised of his longer romances. In none of the others, certainly, is there the distancing ease to the overall pattern, the geometry of parts. In The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun, along with the posthumous story-fragments, Hawthorne turns increasingly to a death, in two cases to violent murder, not only as thematic high drama in itself but as a way of freeing his plots of the entangling knots which have threatened to choke them, to stifle their imaginative life. In other words, where plots get over-burdened or ambiguity obscurantist, Hawthorne edges into violence, be it Zenobia’s death or Donatello’s act of murder. Correspondingly, the later Prefaces, each far sparer than “The Custom-House”, take on a somewhat desperate air. Hawthorne seems to want to define romance more provisionally and with less of the confidence and imaginative colour of his “moonlit room”. But where both the equations of these later romances look less certain, the equipoise “The Custom-House” and The Scarlet Letter could not be


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more assured, “the gleam and shadow of the picture” strikingly controlled and of a balance. This effect derives as much as anything from the way The Scarlet Letter frames its story in just the same way as “The Custom-House”. A meticulous liminality holds throughout, the one threshold aligned with another from the opening prison door to the closing family grave. Each portal, edifice, house or chamber so refracts the text’s own demarcations and domains. Nowhere is that better established than in “The Prison Door” with its regulated community in one figuration, its “wild rose bush” and Hester Prynne-Anne Hutchinson figuration in the other. The rose, moreover, marks not just a boundary in space but time by “being kept alive in history” (48). For as “The CustomHouse” transports its reader from one century to another, one New England to another, so the rose-bush carries meaning not only for the Puritan seventeenth-century Puritan world but Hawthorne’s own nineteenth century: This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, – or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door, – we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow. (48)

The style, almost Augustan in its periodical sentence structure, is deliberately pitched to cultivate evasion, delicate authorial withdrawal, typically the posing of each alternative (“whether … whether”), the succession of subjunctive “might”s and “may”s, and the phrasings like “by a strange chance” and “as there is fair authority for believing”. A disavowal of the order of “we shall not take upon ourself to determine” could seems almost too explicit, the author positively unable to offer guidance in the ways of his text or its moral import. Hawthorne’s concluding sentence (“It may serve, let us hope…”)

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could be said to risk toppling into coyness, too knowing a reliance upon his reader’s complicity. But like all that goes before it pulls just short. The whole paragraph, in fact, works with absolutely the right degree of tact. For its part “The Custom-House” indeed yields far more than mere prolegomenon, nothing if not a self-same voice, a self-same text, at one with The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne in truth indicates from the very beginning how, throughout, The Scarlet Letter will act upon all pointers. That in certain editions “The Custom-House” has been dropped altogether, or made the epilogue, must have caused him to rise from his own graveyard repose. For both sketch and main text belong anything but merely the one alongside the other, rather as inextricably bound, mutual and determining parts, of the overall narrative.

5 THE MIRRORS OF BIOGRAPHY, THE MIRRORS OF FICTION: HENRY JAMES’ HAWTHORNE In 1883, when I was writing a biography of my father, I called on Melville in a quiet side-street in New York, where he was living almost alone. He greeted me kindly, with a low voice and restrained manner; he seemed nervous, and every few minutes would rise to open and then shut again the window opening on the yard. At first he was disinclined to talk; but finally he said several interesting things, among which the most remarkable was that he was convinced Hawthorne had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career. Julian Hawthorne, “ Hawthorne at Lenox”1 To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and make it one’s own. Henry James, Preface, What Maisie Knew 2

In his American Notebooks for 1836, Nathaniel Hawthorne has an entry whose suggestion of his life’s seclusion, and essential privacy, might, even now, serve as a caution to would-be biographers. Listing possible storylines, as became his custom, he writes: “A recluse, like myself, or a prisoner, to measure time by the progress of sunshine

1

Julian Hawthorne, “Hawthorne at Lenox”, Booklover’s Weekly, 30 December 1901: reprinted in The Melville Log, ed. Jay Leyda, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1951, II, 782. See also Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, NY and London: Harper and Brothers, 1903, 32-3. 2 Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew, In the Cage, The Pupil, NY: Scribner’s, 1908, xix.

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through his chamber.” 3 It is the “like myself” that lays down the marker. For whether out of his own nineteenth century, or of a later date – B.F. Traven, J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon come to mind – few American literary figures can have made the seclusion he was born to, and the self-guardedness that came in its wake, quite so insistently their insignia, an almost all-pervading taste for keeping the self hidden from the inquiry of others. Melville may or may not have had it right in speculating to Julian Hawthorne about his father’s concealment of “some great secret”, but the aptness of the idea is striking: a Hawthorne for ever distanced, self-masked, not unlike his own fictional creations from Hester Prynne to Zenobia, Arthur Dimmesdale to Ethan Brand.4 The persistence of his feeling on this score can be gauged from a later jotting in the American Notebooks for August 1851, after a visit to the Shaker village of Hancock, Massachusetts. He excoriates as “hateful and disgusting” the Shakers’ “utter and systematic lack of privacy; their close junction of man with man, and supervision of one man over another”.5 This will to privacy, if not always as vehemently expressed as in the Shaker episode, held twice-over. In life, it points to the reclusive New Englander who dwelt deep and ancestrally in, or around, Salem, Massachusetts (most notably from 1825 to 1837 in the “chamber under the eaves” at house mother’s house), before his blissful marriage to Sophia Peabody in 1842 and the family’s later residences in England and Italy. In art, it speaks to the tactics of indirection, the truly singular obliquity, of his fiction -- foremost The Scarlet Letter as his best-known work but no less so his other principal romances and stories. In life, and despite Hawthorne’s canonical rise to fame or even the spate of modern biography, the “Inmost Me”, as he invokes it in “The Custom-House”, remains no doubt infinitely to his posthumous satisfaction a kind of bequeathed knot or riddle.6 3

Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Notebooks, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1972, VIII, 24. 4 Melville’s relationship with Hawthorne has long been a major source of speculation in itself. Apart from “Hawthorne and His Mosses” his part in the encounter includes the effusive letters of 1850-51, the dedication of Moby-Dick to Hawthorne, the portrait of Vine in his verse-epic, Clarel, and the late poem “Monody”. 5 Hawthorne, American Notebooks, VIII, 465. 6 Key modern biographies include Newton Arvin, Hawthorne, Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1929; Robert Cantwell, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years, NY:

Biography and Henry James’ Hawthorne

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None of which is to underplay the laconic, deeply Yankee sportiveness with which he himself habitually wrote of his life and call to authorship, including the kind of early times he recalls in his Preface to the 1851 edition of Twice-Told Tales where he announces himself to have been “the obscurest man in American letters”. 7 It amounts to a nice irony, accordingly, that so determinedly hidden an American author should have inspired two of the keenest of all literary studies, biographical or critical, to have arisen out of his own time and country. Neither Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, published as a two-part review in The Literary World for 17 and 24 August 1850, nor Henry James’ Hawthorne (1879), however, could read more disparately. 8 The former resounds with heady apostrophes (“this Portuguese diamond in our literature”, “[this] man of a deep and noble nature”). The latter, by contrast, insists far more upon Hawthorne’s “charm”, his “exquisite” provincialism. Yet even in their difference, both pay tribute to Hawthorne’s “language of potency and fixation” as it has been called.9 Divergent in temperament as were Hawthorne, Melville and James, they all nonetheless deploy a genuine fine touch in covering their tracks. Hawthorne, whose two story-collections, Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses From An Old Manse (1842), as well as The Scarlet Letter, from the start enjoyed a real popularity on both sides of the Rinehart, 1948; Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948; Mark Van Doren, Nathaniel Hawthorne, NY: Sloane, 1949; Vernon Loggins, The Hawthornes: the Story of Seven Generations of an American Family, NY: Columbia University Press, 1951; Edward Wagenknecht, Hawthorne: Man and Writer, NY: Oxford University Press, 1961; and James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, Boston, MA; Houghton Mifflin, 1980. 7 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice Told-Tales, Boston: American Stationer’s Company, 1837; 2nd edn, Boston, MA: James Munroe and Company, 1841; 3rd edn, Boston: Tickner and Fields, 1851. For modern purposes see Twice-Told Tales, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, Centenary Edition, IX, 1974. The phrase comes from the third edition of Twice-Told Tales. 8 The full references are as follows: “Hawthorne and His Mosses: By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont, The Literary World, 17 and 24 August 1850; Henry James, Hawthorne, English Men of Letters, London, Macmillan, 1879. The original Macmillan text is not currently in print. For ease of access see Henry James, Hawthorne, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956. Second printing 1965 and reissued with Foreword by Dan McCall, 1997. 9 Richard Brodhead, “Hawthorne, Melville, and the Fiction of Prophecy”, in Nathaniel Hawthorne: New Critical Essays, ed. A. Robert Lee, London: Vision Press, 1982, 229-49.

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Atlantic, would insist in “The Custom-House” upon being always “disinclined to talk much of myself and my affairs”. Melville, in the guise of a “Virginian Spending July in Vermont”, the indolent, dozy Southerner unexpectedly “seized” by the northern and Puritan “spell” of the stories in Mosses as he (or his Virginian persona) reads them “stretched on this new mown clover”, in fact was mid-way into the “hell-fired” Moby-Dick. When it came to deploying the voice within a voice, or indeed to recognizing this use of guise in a fellow author, neither needed much by way of guidance. *** As to James, still only in his thirties at the time of writing Hawthorne yet already the cosmopolitan who had chosen London as against Paris his base, and with The American (1877) and a run of stories and travel pieces already winning him acclaim, his, too, amounts to the double, if not quite multiple, stance. Born Hawthorne’s fellow countryman as may have been, he more or less insists upon the display of a European hand at every turn. In consequence, despite all his recurrence to Hawthorne’s “genius” (2), his “beautiful, natural, original genius” (144), he lowers a severe though professedly sympathetic eye upon his subject’s history-starved, or “thin” and “negative” American heritage. In consequence the question that arises asks whose biography, if the term indeed can be said to hold for Hawthorne, James in truth was writing, Hawthorne’s, or by an array of deflections, his own or at least that of the creative self within. Nor does the doubling rest there. Taking “intellectual possession” along the lines of his Preface to What Maisie Knew points up another two-way process in Hawthorne: the appropriation of “the criticised thing” as masking his own self-appropriation as writer-critic. Teasingly or not, too, and whatever the promise of a biography, he also designates his “short sketch” less a “life” than a “critical essay” (1). Well he might, ran the opinion of more than one wry observer. For, in a sense, had he not ceded his own biographical authority to Hawthorne’s son-in-law, George Parsons Lathrop, to whose A Study of Hawthorne (1876) he acknowledges at the outset “my large


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obligations”. 10 Without Lathrop’s help, indeed, “the present little volume could not have been prepared”. But that said a very Jamesian sting-in-the-tail follows. “Mr Lathrop’s work is not pitched in the key which many another writer would have chosen”, he confides, adding, presumably both to keep his own distance and to indicate the kind of life he wishes to convey, “his tone is not to my sense the truly critical one” (4).11 Any one of Hawthorne, Melville or James, had they been able to see how this confluence of interest, albeit fortuitous, might well have thought it something of their own devising. More than a century on, and backed by a mine of scholarship, history requires us to know better. Yet seen through writings like Hawthorne’s “The Devil in Manuscript” (1835), with its play on the combustible properties of storytelling when a writer’s manuscript literally sets the town on fire, or Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener” (1853), in which the anorexic Wall Street clerk becomes the very figura of the writer-creator scorned for turning in inappropriate copy, or, much to the immediate point, James’ “The Real Thing” (1892) with its play of artist and model, the story of the Monarchs and Oronte and Miss Chum as a vintage foray into portraiture’s reality-illusion axis, the speculation has an irresistible appeal. For if “The Custom-House” dissimulates in seeking to pass itself off simply as a Preface, or Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” as mere seasonal book-review rather than the story-making it is, or still more to immediate purposes, James’ Hawthorne simply as biographical sketch, each on closer inspection reveals itself to be about far weightier business. The issue to hand, cannily replete in reflexive signpost and metaphor, is that of its writer’s own imaginative inclinations and needs. Such, to be sure, might always be said in some degree to hold for one literary figure’s account of another. 10

George Parsons Lathrop, A Study of Hawthorne, Boston, MA: James R. Osgood and Company, 1876. 11 Lathrop’s biography soon had company, however, typically Annie (Mrs James T.) Fields, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Boston, MA: Small, Maynard, 1899; Moncure Daniel Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, NY: Scribner and Welford, 1890; the memoir of his great friend, Horatio Bridge, Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne, NY: Harper, 1893; and the several volumes by Julian Hawthorne. Surprisingly, James appears not to have known the accounts given by Hawthorne’s publisher, James Fields, Yesterday With Authors, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1872, and Hawthorne, Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1876.

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Classic cases would be Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte, George Gissing’s Charles Dickens: A Critical Study or D.H. Lawrence’s “A Study of Hardy”.12 But in the case of Hawthorne the argument gathers added force when Hawthorne is likened to those of James’ stories and novels that make the Portrait of the Artist their centre of interest. For does not Hawthorne, however ostensibly literal a Portrait of the Artist, at every turn indeed invite comparison with stories like “The Real Thing”, or, to draw from the overall James roster where the subject is art, “The Madonna of the Future” (1873), “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884), “The Lesson of the Master” (1888) and “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), not to mention novels like Roderick Hudson (1875) or The Tragic Muse (1890), the former with a sculptor and the latter a painter as their principal figures? The House of Fiction, James’ classic international theme of American as against European life and culture, authorship and art as subjects wholly in their own right – these interests express themselves in Hawthorne quite as much as the fiction. Likewise Hawthorne is not to be detached from James’ formulations in his better-known critical essays, whether landmarks like “The Art of Fiction” (1884) and “The Future of the Novel” (1899), collections like Partial Portraits (1888) and Notes on Novelists (1914), or the great, valedictory Prefaces to the New York Edition (1907-9) with their clues as to story “germ” and process. In this connection, further, James’ only other biography, William Wetmore and His Friends (1903), cannot be overlooked, a relatively circumstantial portrait of the renowned American lawyer-turned-sculptor and his expatriate circle in Rome. Even so it would be hard to miss the passing asides on creativity and the relationship of image to world. However much James acknowledges of the actual, historical contour of the New Englander’s life, Hawthorne also becomes in one of James’ much favoured phrases a kind of invented case. But case or not, and given all the other freight James’ account carries with it, the Hawthorne that appeared under the Macmillan imprint in 1879 came about prosaically enough. In the wake of his much acclaimed French Poets and Novelists (1878), James had been 12

Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Bronte, London: Smith, Elder 1957; George Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, S.I. Blackie, 1898; D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix, NY: Viking 1936.


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invited by John Morley, the statesman, essayist and biographer of Burke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Cobden, Cromwell and, above all, Gladstone, to write for the English Men of Letters series – the only American contributor so to be requested and on the only American author to be chosen. James would always insist upon Hawthorne as having been not only the best but also the most inevitable choice. His reasons, in what they led him to emphasize about Hawthorne himself, about Hawthorne and the equations of art and history, and about America and Europe, invite every consideration. They do so, however, in terms which bear throughout upon James’ own practices as a novelist, the career in life and art so foreshadowed by Hawthorne before him and that resulted in his decision to choose Europe over America as both his domestic and spiritual base. *** First, what kind of Hawthorne does James most depict? There can be little doubt of a Hawthorne hedged about with novelistic touches. “Out of the soil of New England he sprang – in a crevice of that immitigable granite he sprouted and bloomed” runs the typical opening flourish. Moving on seamlessly from an imagery of topography to one of climate and temperature, James continues: “The cold, bright air of New England seems to blow through his pages” (3). None of this, of course, amounts to biography but a kind of companionable, if ornate, impressionism. Hawthorne has sprung “from the primitive New England stock”, and “a very definite and conspicuous pedigree” (4), but few of the particulars in their own right actually detain James. Rather they serve as situating detail for an interest in Hawthorne centred in “the play of Hawthorne’s intellect”, his “imagination” (8). James readily enough invokes from his reading of Lathrop and the Notebooks something of the dynastic tree, the seventeenth-century witch-finder ancestor William Hathorne, Hawthorne’s adding of a “w” to the family name, the death of his shipmaster father in Surinam in 1808, his Manning legacy through his mother’s line, the childhood and early Bowdoin College years in Brunswick, Maine, and, to use James’ second chapter-title, the cloistered Salem existence of his early manhood. But these supply no more than scaffold. James’ more essential purpose lies in the anatomy, if need be the advocacy, of

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Hawthorne as “the most valuable example of the American genius” (2). Yet, granted Hawthorne’s “admirable compositions” (20), it also lies in establishing James’ own perspective on Hawthorne’s limits as well as strengths, the “something stiff and mechanical” in certain of the story-telling. He has in mind, against the modern grain, “The Birthmark” and “The Bosom Serpent” [sic]. The stress, praise or censure, throughout falls unerringly not only upon Hawthorne’s art but upon James’ custodial view of it – the interest, as it were, of a literary fellow toiler but one who interprets from a self-appointed and already fuller resumé. This, it is hard not to be mindful, is biography from a James for whom “the ordeal of consciousness” will become all or nearly all. The account of the notorious twelve years during which Hawthorne secluded himself in the isolated gable room of his mother’s Salem residence offers a key case in point. As he extrapolates them from the Notebooks, these years for James become above all a “period of incubation”, (20) the very “solitude” and “silence-loving” less of note for themselves, or indeed for Hawthorne’s actual life, than for their impact upon “all his writings”. (21) From there, it requires no very great transition to move once again into an estimate of the impact on Hawthorne’s imagination both of his own “state of solitude” and “the conditions of intellectual life … in a small New England town fifty years ago” (23). A barbed sympathy runs through James’ gloss: “There is in all [the writings] something cold, and light, and thin – something belonging to the imagination alone – which indicates a man but little disposed to multiply his relations, his points of contact, with society” (21). Salem, especially, he imagines to have been “intolerably narrow” (22), and New England beyond Salem not a great deal better. He even extends the vista to America as a site, a culture, for all its writers, and, by implication, not least for himself. The picture he arrives at, in a telling phrase as to the visibility of literature in an America essentially about the business of nationhood, again both lightly mocks as it appears to sympathize: “The profession in the United States is still very young, and of diminutive stature; but in the year 1830 its head could hardly have been seen above-ground” (25). “Common and casual things” (32), thus, James takes to characterize Hawthorne’s Notebooks, “an extraordinary blankness – a curious paleness of colour and paucity of detail” (33). Their “serenity” and “simplicity” he thinks “in certain portions almost childlike” (21),


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in all no more than “memoranda” and “a minute and trivial chronicle” (32). James’ own Notebooks, certainly, provide a dramatic contrast, a record of interior animation in which art, as it were, almost becomes life. So, at least, his teeming notations and possible story “germs” indicate. Whether James’ strictures in fact hold, the emphasis as ever falls upon Hawthorne as the exemplary literary out-setter faced in new-born America with finding not merely a right subject but a right literary form and readership. There he receives James’ respect and praise and, the slightly jarring note of patronage or not, a real indication of his own indebtedness. Others in James’ pantheon, like George Eliot, Turgenev or Flaubert, eventually exert a deeper influence, and indeed point up Hawthorne’s limitations, but he clearly commands a most singular place in James’ affections. That may well have reflected their mutual American birthright. James may even have felt his own fiction a line of succession, albeit one he took himself as ordained to renew and better. It may, on a contrary note, have been the suspicion that, despite The Scarlet Letter or the better tales, Hawthorne’s New England meant the kind of American parochialism that he himself had to avoid at all costs or at least make subject to benign exorcism. Whichever the case, all the signals point to a figure James regarded with exceptional and adoptive intimacy. Hawthorne offers biography less as a life than the projection, the mythification, of how in James’ estimate the most considerable American literary imagination to date – his own secret sharer or not – can be said to have functioned. The implications for James’ personal situation, which in life led to a remedying self-expatriation and in art to the predilection for the international theme, surely lie close to the surface. This kind of emphasis grows the more evident as Hawthorne unfolds. Hawthorne’s stay at Bowdoin College (1821-5) becomes an occasion for James to dwell, not again without some condescension, upon his subject’s limited intellectual opportunities (“Poor Hawthorne … thousands of miles from Oxford and Cambridge” [16]). It also leads him to call attention to the denser, more textured, human order denied to Hawthorne as a fiction-writer (“the ‘world,’ in its social sense, had not disclosed itself to him” [19]). But more important still it leads him on to Fanshawe (1828) as Hawthorne’s first-ever “short romance”, whose mannerisms he offers for sampling in an extract from Lathrop. Even though unread in its entirety by James himself (“I

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know nothing of Fanshawe but what the writer just quoted relates” (18) he says rather grandly), it becomes the testing-ground of Hawthorne’s life, his “homely, simple, frugal” college years gothicized for want of access as he sees it to richer imaginative fare (15). Yet other components in Hawthorne’s early personal and cultural formation – “the Puritan conscience” (46), his access to “the early annals of New England” (52), even his courtship and marriage into the Peabody family – James likewise measures less in terms of Hawthorne’s life than of their literary upshot, notably the short stories of Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842), Mosses From An Old Manse (1846, 1854) and The Snow-Image and other Twice-Told Tales (1851). Whether “little masterpieces” (44) like “Malvin’s Burial” [sic], “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “Young Goodman Brown”, or “the little tales of New England history”(45) like “The Grey Champion”, “The Maypole of Merry Mount” and the “Legends of the Province House” – “the only successful attempts at historical fiction which have been made in the United States” he judges them – the test, for James, invariably lies in how well, or otherwise, Hawthorne avails himself imaginatively of the materials he inherited. If the historical storytelling works best, partly because it comes closest to realism, that which addresses evil, shadow or other worlds at least, reveals its built-in limits. There James can discern no real “metaphysics”, no “philosophy of human nature”; rather “what pleased [Hawthorne] in such subjects was their picturesqueness, their rich duskiness of colour, their chiaroscuro” (47). The arising question then becomes irresistible. Could America ever furnish enough depth of history or society for a would-be, and certainly for a Jamesian novelist-romancer of the kind who would write What Maisie Knew, or the great trilogy of the major phase, The Wings of The Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904)? Part of the engaging indeterminacy of Hawthorne as biography lies as always in this reflexive duality, a biography of the imaginative workings in Hawthorne, and by the same token, and however tacitly, a shadow biography of nothing less in James himself. *** Each subsequent stage in Hawthorne’s life attracts like attention. The custom-house post as Surveyor of the port of Salem (1846-49), or


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rather, and infinitely more to the point, Hawthorne’s version of it in “The Custom-House”, which he designates “the most perfect of [his] compositions”, “would be interesting to examine in detail” (84). The removal, without Sophia, to the Fourier-inspired Brook Farm Community in West Roxbury, Massachusetts (1841) leads him to the abbreviated but symptomatic observation “The Blithedale Romance is the main result of Brook Farm” (61). Of the Concord residency (1842-45), with to hand the likes of Emerson and Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller and the Peabody sisters (Elizabeth Peabody or her kind likely supply the source of Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians), he writes: “A biographer of Hawthorne might well regret that his hero had not been more mixed up with the reforming and free-thinking class, so that he might find a pretext for writing a chapter upon the state of Boston society forty years ago” (65). James’ own authorial instincts, with The Bostonians and its story of “Boston society” and abolitionist and feminist reform indeed no more than a half-decade ahead, stand clearly indicated. The chapter James devotes (with passing reference to Hawthorne as a children’s writer) to “the three American novels” (83), The Scarlet Letter, The House of The Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, goes about business in shared manner. “Beautiful, admirable, extraordinary” (88) he calls The Scarlet Letter, but adds the rider that its faults lie in “an abuse of the fanciful element”, “a certain superficial symbolism” (90). The comparison he then draws with Adam Blair, by Sir Walter Scott’s biographer John Gibson Lockhart, turns on a familiar Jamesian axis – Lockhart as “dense, substantial Briton” and Hawthorne as “thin New Englander, with a miasmic conscience” (92). The House of The Seven Gables can be “rich, delightful, imaginative”, but “always seemed to me more a prologue to a great novel than a great novel itself” (97). As to its strengths they rest in have “more literal actuality than the others” (98). The Blithedale Romance also falls short. It can be “very charming” (104), its use of Coverdale as narrator “comparatively humorous” (105), and its “finest thing” Zenobia (106). But overall, and that much allowed, “we get too much out of reality” (108). Given these judgements, and the kind of imagination at work in his own fiction, James cannot but be said to face as much in his own direction as that of Hawthorne. Hawthorne, for his part, however, is hardly to be denied terms of reference of his own making, not least as they bear upon “romance”.

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As set forth in “The Custom-House”, with its “neutral territory somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet”, this is terrain for a reader not necessarily won over by James’ pre-requisites and strictures. The issue, moreover, and not a little ironically, deepens when attention is drawn to the impact in issues of portraiture, the play of viewpoint, even plot, Hawthorne exerts on James’ own fiction. Does not the concealed adultery of The Scarlet Letter anticipate the Isabel-Mme. MerleOsmond imbroglio of The Portrait of a Lady, or the expatriate Rome of The Marble Faun the metropolitan Paris of Strether in The Ambassadors? James tackles the English years (1853-57), in the main, through Hawthorne’s Our Old Home (1863), yet not without actually adding the demur: “I shall not attempt to relate in detail the incidents of his residence in England” (117). The Italian years (1857-59) emerge, likewise, and with more than a hint of censure, first through the Italian Notebooks (“his contact with the life of the country, its people and its manners … was extremely superficial” [125-26]), and then through The Marble Faun (“a charming romance … with intrinsic weaknesses” [132]). Compared with the boundless curiosity, the search for nuance, which produced James’ own England or Italy, especially in a novel which bridges both like The Portrait of a Lady, once more James’ criteria are not hard to infer. Even the remaining four years (1860-64), Hawthorne’s odd, premature physical depletion and eventual death, he pursues through an uncompromisingly literary-textual angle. First, he cites an article Hawthorne published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, a mere year into the Civil War, on how “a sober town in Massachusetts” (139) would have reacted to a Southern invasion. The piece in itself James adjudges slight, near speculative whimsy. But it arouses his authorial interest as “an example of the way an imaginative man judges current events – trying to see the other side as well as his own, to feel what his adversary feels, and present his view of the case” (140). The stress on viewpoint as much reflect his own way of proceeding as Hawthorne’s, be it the historicist James of The Bostonians or, to invoke a less attended political novel, of The Princess Casamassima. For the rest he alights on the two unfinished “rough sketches”, The Dolliver Romance (“so very brief that little can be said of it”[140]) and Septimius Felton (“as it stands ... [it] gives us very little of


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Hawthorne’s full intention” [141]). James appears not to have known about Dr Grimshawe’s Secret and The Ancestral Footstep, any more than he knew about Hawthorne’s actual early life with his mother and sisters, the relationship with Melville in 1850-51, or much about the Hawthorne marriage to Sophia or the consular life that followed. Both fragments, however, allow him a last round of literary-biographical commentary and in line with the rest of the biography as much self-markers as not. He inveighs against the pitfalls of allegory. He chastises Hawthorne’s over-use, as he determines it, of “the whole matter of elixirs and potions” and “moonshine” (142). He regrets Hawthorne’s never having turned to a major canvas like slavery or the Civil War for his fiction, the more so given the campaign biography he issued in 1852 of his Bowdoin classmate, President Franklin Pierce. The subtext surely reads: in Hawthorne’s place, would not James himself have met, not to say overcome and subtilized, each of these potential calls to imagination? The dualism of Hawthorne as biography, thereby, concludes in the terms it began – Hawthorne’s life as mirrored in his art, and that, from a perspective effortlessly assumed to be the larger one, the self-same mirror for James’ own life and art. *** These refractions of biographer caught in his subject, and vice versa, however, yield a crucial further dimension. For still another biography lies silhouetted within James’ Hawthorne. The Hawthorne he depicts becomes no less than the very synecdoche of the American writer at large, of, for him, that writer’s historical situation in the New as against the Old World. If Hawthorne stands at the head of the “three or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic growth”, among whom he mentions Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Lowell and Motley, for James the terms of reference could not be less propitious (76). The point is encapsulated in two related observations: “it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature” and “it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion” (2). The names he involves as touchstones, no doubt with French Poets and Novelists fresh in mind, are Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, a social literary tradition par excellence. Hawthorne, by contrast, “had certainly not

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proposed to himself to give an account of the social idiosyncrasies of his fellow citizens” (3). The implications James makes plain. How does the American writer proceed deprived of this necessary quiddity, the repository of human experience borne down and textured through time and place? Is all that remains merely phantasmagoria à la Poe, de-historicized fabling, tricks and hoaxes? Would he or not have thought eccentric a canon, besides The Scarlet Letter, of Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, Walden, Emily Dickinson’s slant poetry, even Emerson’s essay sermons? He makes clear, too, that despite a rising career like Mark Twain’s, he derives little pleasure or compensation from “American humour”, about which he observes archly, “of late years we have heard so much” (35). When he comes on to history, and its uses for the novelist, James repeats his familiar misgivings: History, as yet, has left in the United States but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature; and nature herself, in the Western World, has the peculiarity of seeming rather crude and immature. The very air looks new and young …. A large juvenility is stamped on the face of things … (15)

It is in line with this viewpoint that James offers his classic formulation as to the deficits in American historical experience for the American writer: If Hawthorne had been a young Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of genius, the same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the world around him would have been a very different affair; however obscure, however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his fellow-mortals would have been almost infinitely more various …. Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life-especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect of which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably, as a general thing, be appalling. (34-35)


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William Dean Howells’ riposte that all that remained after these “absent things” had been aggregated was America itself, may or otherwise have been the right one. Given, too, the romance-novel axis, as set out in “The Custom-House” and the other Prefaces with their implications as much for Melville as Hawthorne (if not for James himself), or the necessary modernist impulse in all American writing from Poe to Faulkner, or the alternative American histories of space, landscape, frontier, or gender in the American as against European imagination, James may be said to have revealed no more than his own elective affinities. There, it has often been argued, lies a nonJamesian perspective for the American writer, one taken up with a different America, or in Henry Adams’ appealing term, with an America as multiverse. James, however, opts for his own kind of pathway, that of the American writer so to speak Europeanized. The art, the fiction, he himself seeks and aims to write, therefore, and on the argument of Hawthorne, will be a social or psychological realism indeed fashioned in the footfalls of the European Grand Masters. It becomes James’ both symptomatic and highest praise for Hawthorne that he should write of The Scarlet Letter that “Something might at last be sent to Europe” (88). For would not James himself, in life as art, above all pick up on that last Hawthorneian direction – an American literary career but lived in Europe? John Morley, in common with other celebrated contributors to the English Men of Letters series such as Leslie Stephens, took his remit as essentially one of narrative biography. James, throughout Hawthorne, signals a range of further possibilities, above all the finding, the secreting even, of his own biography in that of Hawthorne. Whether done instinctively or by design, in good faith or something rather less, he becomes the incubus within the biographical host. Another version, to give matters and image not quite so theatrical or predatory, would be to say that Hawthorne discloses James as teller in equal proportion to Hawthorne as tale. Under these rules of the game, and in phrasing that echoes James himself, the literary biography – the literary fiction – of one writer by another could rarely, if ever, be other than a house of mirrors.

6

MOBY-DICK AS ANATOMY Concerning my own forthcoming book – it is off my hands, but must cross the sea before publication here. Dont you buy it – dont you read it, when it does come out, because it is by no means the sort of book for you. It is not a peice [sic] of fine feminine Spitalsfield silk – but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables & hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book – on risk of lumbago & sciatics. Melville to Sarah Huyler Morewood (1851)1 He writes with the energy of a man who is tirelessly alert. Carl Van Doren, “Mr. Melville’s Moby-Dick” (1924)2

Genially mock-apologetic and as haphazard as always with his spelling and punctuation, Melville’s warning letter to a local Pittsfield, Massachusetts favourite like Sarah Morewood about the possible consequences for her health of tackling Moby-Dick, could not be more engaging. In casting himself as some craggy Ancient Mariner likely to inflict “lumbago” with his “polar” whale narrative, he reveals great neighbourly charm and an instance of the playfulness never far absent from his make-up. At quite the same time, however, he confirms how perfectly well from the outset he understood the darker subversive purposes behind his “forthcoming book” which would indeed “cross

1

Melville to Sarah Huyler Morewood [12?] September 1851, The Letters of Herman Melville, eds Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960, 138. 2 Carl Van Doren, “Mr. Melville’s Moby-Dick”, New York Bookman, 59, April 1924. Reprinted in Herman Melville: Critical Assessments, ed. A. Robert Lee, Robertsbridge, East Sussex: Helm Information, 2000, I, 554.

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the sea” before American publication to appear in England as The Whale.3 In this respect Evert Duyckinck, the much seasoned co-editor (with his brother George Dyckinck) of the Literary World, offers a symptomatic early measure. Genuinely responsive to Melville’s weights and measures in Moby-Dick (“let any one read this book with the attention it deserves”) he at the same time demurs at the story’s “piratical running down of creeds and opinions”. 4 Whatever the flourish of the review otherwise, this falls short on the massive actual radicalism of spirit that had conceived Moby-Dick. For in casting himself as Yankee courtliness itself for Sarah Morehead – a year later and in similar vein he would describe the dark citied labyrinth of Pierre as “a rural bowl of milk” for Sophia Hawthorne – Melville was playing more than just one part, diplomatic literary interlocutor as may be, but also the savviest of conjurors.5 Such, if nothing else, would be reasonable inference given the imagery of his letter with its beguiling sea-talk of a tale “woven of ship’s cables & hausers”, “blown through with a Polar wind”, and threateningly hovered over by “birds of prey”. Yet if “by no means the sort of book” for a Sarah Morewood, or other similar “gentle fastidious people”, what exactly was the sort of book Melville had written? The interpretations have multiplied dizzyingly, beyond quite anything he himself could possibly have anticipated. Even so, and as he contemplated this sixth full-length narrative since he became the season’s find in 1846 with Typee and its fact-fiction sailor escape into the hidden valley Polynesia of Nuku Hiva, and extrapolating from the hints in his correspondence and elsewhere, there can be little doubt that he knew himself to have produced in Moby-Dick far more than derring-do or sea-escapade. For within the lore of the Pacific whale fisheries, and assuredly within the great seams of apparent cetacean digression, he had written nothing less as he confessed to Hawthorne in his effervescent letter of June 1851 than a “hell-fired” and “wicked” book whose truest impulse 3 All citations are from Moby-Dick or The Whale, The Writings of Herman Melville, The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, eds Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle, Evanston and Chicago, IL Northwestern University Press, 1988. 4 Evert Duyckinck, “Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale”, Literary World, 15 and 22 November, 1851, 381-83 and 403-404. 5 Letters, Melville to Sophia Hawthorne, 8 January 185, 146.

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lay hidden from any immediate view. 6 This Melville, given to “ontological heroics”, to “crazy” correspondence as he dubbed it, and even to the brandy he asked the Hawthorne household at Lenox to have on hand for one of his saunterings from nearby Pittsfield, has more than a little to do with the wary, and often startled early reception of Moby-Dick.7 Not unreasonably many readers, even now, have best preferred the Pequod’s journey as lavish serial event, American venturing-out. From this perspective Melville appears to have gone off-track in adding each speculative discourse, the adventuring lost in having the sea become philosophical womb or tempest. Ishmael might well be the literal sea-goer, carpetbag in hand, but what price Melville’s positioning of him as a Hamlet, some trickster figure of mind and narrative? Ahab, likewise, plays double, veteran whale-hunter and yet also myth, sea-Faust or overreacher and branded like Cain. Even the Pequod straddles two realities, working New England whaler while at the same time daedal world craft navigating the fisheries as though in dream. In consequence it has sometimes been thought better, certainly easier, to believe the book best goes about business with Ishmael’s arrival in New Bedford, then Nantucket, and in the Coffin Inn overnight shenanigans with Queequeg and the signing-on with Bildad and Peleg. The ensuing story can then be said to preside over every apparent digression, its trajectory if not quite always explicit then nevertheless inexorably headed towards the final “drama’s done” (573) of the Epilogue. Whaling itself, its literal weight and density, can be said to abet in this version, from the close-in risk depicted in “The First Lowering” (Chapter 48) through to the three-day final chase with Ahab roped to the whale’s body and the crew spun to their deaths in the whale’s ocean vortex. Melville’s summary in “MobyDick (Chapter 41) reflects the dynamic perfectly: “Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals” (186). Forward motion is to

6

Ibid., Melville to Hawthorne, 29 June 1851, 133. Ibid, Melville to Hawthorne, 29 June 1855, 133. The full sentence reads: “Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together”. 7

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be thought all, be it Ahab’s dynamic impatience, the crew’s growing apprehension, or each shipboard process of hunt, capture and oil. The nine successive gams, themselves in three triads, serve as carefully spaced markers, first the ghostly, Coleridgean Goney, The Town-Ho as fable-within-a-fable, and the Gabriel-dominated Jeroboam, then the three national ships, the German Jungfrau, French Rosebud and English Samuel Enderby, and finally the oil-filled Bachelor, the sorrowful and “devious cruising” Rachel and the dire, ill-named Delight. These meetings, with their insistent single question from Ahab about Moby-Dick, fallen trumpets, silences, lost voices, allusions to hearses and other omens, establish a necessary sightline, route-markers as it were, for the impending clash of whaler and whale. Similar markers are to be met with in paintings such as those of the chiaroscuro whale impaled on the Cape-Horner in “The Spouter Inn” and the “gallant ship beating against a terrible storm” (39) behind Father Mapple in “The Pulpit” (Chapter 8). “The Try-Works” (Chapter 96), with its fiery blubber-burning, carries more omen, at once circumstantial night-scene of try-pots, barrels, “smoke and sweat” and, as it might be, Dantean hell. The all-reflective, zodiacal and Andean “riveted gold coin” of “The Doubloon” (Chapter 99), in doubling as the “white whale’s talisman” (431) and “ship’s navel” (435), gives further prophecy (an old maritime saw holds that if you unscrew your navel your backside drops off). Further markers run from Fedallah’s Macbeth-like prophecies in “The Whale Watch” (Chapter 117) to the inverted needles in “The Log and Line” (Chapter 125). Eventfulness itself in Moby-Dick, actual or anticipated, can hardly be said to go missing, a working impetus from Ishmael’s embarkation and the Pequod’s New Year’s Day departure, through Ahab’s mesmeric appearance and fiery blessing of the harpoons, and on to the culminating final chase for the whale (Chapters 133-35).To this purpose Melville also supplies a gallery of anticipatory voices. Early on, and out of the shadows and mist, is to be heard dockside Elijah with his “Very dim, very dim” (99) in “The Prophet” (Chapter 19) and “Going Aboard” (Chapter 21) and summarized in “The First Lowering” (Chapter 48) as “the enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah” (220). Others include the sailor chorus singers and speakers of “First Night-Watch” (Chapter 39) and “Midnight, Forecastle” (Chapter 40), those of Captain Mayhew and the crazed

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Gabriel of the Jeroboam in “The Jeroboam’s Story” (Chapter 71), the “begrimed, blistered old blacksmith” (484) Perth with his sad domestic tragedy in “The Blacksmith” (Chapter 112), Pip as Holy Fool in “The Doubloon” and “The Cabin” (Chapter 129), the forlorn Captain Gardiner in search of his lost mariner sons in “The Pequod meets the Rachel” (Chapter 128) and, as intimate as any, the voice of Starbuck (“let us fly these deadly waters” [544)]) in “The Symphony” (Chapter 132). All underline, even as they counterpoint, the advance of the hunt, pointers as the Pequod makes its way down the line (Ahab’s pipe, hat and quadrant all thrown to the sea) to the necessary, not to say quite inescapable and predestined, rendezvous with the white whale. *** But what of the other Melville of Moby-Dick, centred in Ishmael, full of double-talk, self-aware and notoriously indeed given to socalled digression (“I try all things; I achieve what I can” [345]). This is the Moby-Dick upon whose whale the crew bestow every kind of myth and meaning, from Ishmael’s “portentous and mysterious monster” (7) to Ahab’s “nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing” (545) and from Gabriel’s “Shaker God incarnated” (316) to Starbuck’s “dumb brute” (163). Why the interstitial sequences, the discursive probings, the different increments of delay before Pequod crew and whale join in climactic ocean duel? What was Melville actually up to? For within Melville’s High Seas adventure there can indeed be little doubt of carefully inner piratical narrative, his investigative poetics in Anne Waldman’s well-taken phrase.8 Could it be that the ostensible plot-line might itself almost be the digression, the book’s true adventure more elsewhere than not? In rendering down whale blubber for the oil that literally brought light to America, the Pequod serves Melville’s resolve upon altogether more figurative light. That is the light, as Ishmael suggests, to illuminate each and all of the elusive, often contradictory, hieroglyphics of Truth. To this end we have Ishmael’s deposition in “The Monkey-Rope” (Chapter 72): 8

Anne Waldman, Vow To Poetry: Essays, Interviews, and Manifestos, Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1981, 121.

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Gothic to Multicultural In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene. (319)

Palpably the novel offers a busiest ship repertoire of journey, crew, ocean and leviathan. But equally, perhaps more than equally, the text pledges itself to explore the larger epistemological “description of the scene”, nothing short of the world’s competing overlaps of classification and code. Moby-Dick bids for attention, from this perspective, as Melville’s omnium gatherum of how Truth in all its linked processes and filaments goes on being endlessly enacted and how tauntingly it eludes any single scheme of definition. The effect, again paradoxically, makes for anti-allegory rather than allegory. The design, accordingly, of his “mighty theme” (“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme” [456]) says Ishmael in “The Fossil Whale” (Chapter 104), requires a matching patience and flexibility of response. For Moby-Dick works as neither quite cause-and-effect story-line nor as some masonic-numerological key to all mythologies. “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method” (361) runs Ishmael’s celebrated gloss in “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” (Chapter 82), self-reference at once knowing yet suitably proportionate. In one sense Melville wrote reflexively right from the outset of his career. Typee speaks disingenuously of telling “the unvarnished facts” as he calls them of his Polynesian Wanderjahr. But neither it nor Omoo (1847) does any such thing. Mardi (1849), Melville’s flawed attempt at a more philosophical canvas, not a little wearingly exhibits its self-awareness as a would-be map of Truth in the form of a sixteen-island odyssey. Even Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), for all that Melville dismissed them as no more than “two jobs which I have done for money”, “cakes and ale”, in their allusions to the patching and weaving of different garments hint at the analogous

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process whereby literary texts are patched and woven into their author’s version of Truth.9 Despite the reputation he acquired as true life sailor-turnedromancer, nearly all of Melville’s fiction embodies the necessary conviction that Truth rarely discloses itself other than in knots, walls, chimerae and shadows. Art negotiates its relationship with reality obliquely, or as he deliberately understates it in The Confidence-Man with “variability in expression”. 10 Billy Budd gives the succinct version in the observation “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges”.11 *** As to Moby-Dick, and within the gladiatorial clash of ship and beast, the Pequod’s journey envisions the quest for Truth as indeed endlessly enactive, a theatre of pursuit full of motion yet resistant to static or totalized definition. “Ragged edges”, “variability in expression”, greatly apply. Speaking of the “habits of sperm whales” Ishmael, again to the point, observes “I care not to perform this part of my task methodically” (203). Even the story’s ending can be said to share this indeterminacy. In one sense the submerging of Ahab, crew and ship might be conclusion writ large, a last dramatic catharsis, with the novel itself a form of requiem. Yet as sole survivor, and having been rescued by the Rachel, Ishmael figurally embarks upon the renewing cycle of story. Ending so becomes beginning. The narrative refuses to conclude, its last event but a stay before the circling continuity of further voyage.

9

Letters, Melville to Lemuel Shaw, 6 October 1849, 91. “Worth the Consideration of Those To Whom It May Prove Worth Considering” (Chapter XIV). The Confidence-Man, The Writings of Herman Melville, The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, eds Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle, Evanston and Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1984. 11 Billy Budd, Chapter 28. See Billy Budd Sailor (An Inside Narrative), eds Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1962. The full quotation reads: “The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having to do with fable than fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.” 10

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The relationship with Evert Duyckinck yields a further bearing. In a letter to him for 3 March 1849, and after hearing Emerson lecture in Boston, Melville writes: … I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr. Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish…And frankly, for the sake of argument, let us call him a fool; – then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. – I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more … I’m not talking about Mr. Emerson now – but the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.12

Dissent as he did from Emerson’s transcendental good cheer, his optative ethos, he clearly recognized a fellow diver. But diving as a trope in fact runs right through Melville’s writing, one of his key operative terms. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, the canny story-review he published in the Literary World for 17 and 24 August 1850, ostensibly “By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont”, he both offers the necessary desideratum of “You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in” and links Hawthorne to Shakespeare in diver-imagery to match. The American author of Mosses From An Old Manse possesses “a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plummet” just as England’s bard possesses “far-away things … occasional flashings forth of intuitive Truth…short, quick probings at the very axis of reality”.13 Who, in turn, more than Melville himself also to be thought the incarnation of the literary thought-diver surfacing with bloodshot-eyes with Moby-Dick as his own “down stairs” ocean classic? Certainly the diver image gathers augmenting resonance throughout Moby-Dick. “Loomings” has Ishmael observing crowds of water-gazers “seemingly bound for a dive” (4). “Wheelbarrow” 12

Letters, Melville to Evert Duyckinck, 3 March 1849, 78-79. “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, Literary World, 17 and 24 August 1850. Republished in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860, The Writings of Herman Melville, The Northwestern-Newsberry Edition, eds Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougal and G. Thomas Tanselle, Evanson and Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987. 239-53. 13

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(Chapter 13) shows him vowing a barnacle friendship with the South Seas harpooner to last “till poor Queequeg took his last long dive” (61). In “The Whiteness of The Whale” (Chapter 41) he laments that explanation of Ahab’s mesmeric hold over the crew would be “to dive deeper than Ishmael can go” (187). “The First Lowering” (Chapter 48) invokes whales making “one of their regular soundings, not a temporary dive from mere fright” (222). In “The Hyena” (Chapter 49) he mock-legally makes Queequeg his executor as he contemplates being lowered as oarsman to face the whale – “here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost” (228). Queequeg himself will dive to Daggoo’s rescue in “Cisterns and Buckets” (Chapter 78). Ahab, in Shakespearean fashion, swears of the whale in “The Chase – Second Day” (Chapter 134) that “I’ll ten times girdle the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I’ll slay him yet” (561). In “The Chase – Third Day” (Chapter 135) the whale, finally, destructively, “diving beneath the settling ship” is said to have run “quivering along its keel” (570). At story’s end the diving whale, we can be sure, will re-surface. All of these take summary form in “the Honor and Glory of Whaling” (Chapter 82) in which Ishmael implies the altogether more ancestral diver-enquiry embodied in the whale hunt: “The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it, so much more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity …” (361). If, however, Melville’s diving has won celebration, this is not to deny misgivings. Edward Said, for one, shrewdly aligns pluses and minuses. The novel can be variously “undomesticated”, “unruly in its energies”, even “[the] most eccentric work of art produced in the United States”, and yet “prodigiously endowed” and “strenuously crafted”. 14 Oddities and leftovers from likely earlier drafts can be thought marring, whether Bulkington as Ishmael’s perhaps intended companion (with Queequeg simply one of the three harpooners) or Peleg as the Pequod’s original captain and Ahab initially not in the frame.15 The charge persists of over-pitched 14

Edward Said, Introduction, Moby-Dick, NY: Alfred Knopf, 1991. Reprinted in Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, 356-71. 15 The definitive article on this pattern is Harrison Hayford, “Unnecessary Duplicates: A Key to the Writing of Moby-Dick”, in New Perspectives on Melville, ed. Faith Pullin, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978, 128-61.

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rhetoric with Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus an influence for the worse. Does Melville, notably, not lose Ishmael to some omniscient urvoice? In like vein what of the text’s seeming discontinuity or its often arch humour? The historic actual whaling industry with its base in New England Yankee capitalism, and documented from Melville’s own experience in all its rituals and argot and danger, is thereby said to ill comport with the text’s wholly more inward and mythopoeic journey of mind, the forbidden seas of “Loomings”. In other words, once launched through the tripartite opening of “Etymology”, “Extracts” and “Loomings”, does or does not Melville balance the journeys to hand? Under the more favouring light both journeys are argued to interweave brilliantly, the one the utter condition of the other, whale hunt and philosophic enquiry, Moby-Dick as literal pursuit and as Melville’s own textual circle of pursuit. Ishmael so indeed begins with his own end and ends with his own beginning as he “escapes alone” to tell his story. How best, then, for critique to come to terms with this interacting quest for oil as mundane light or energy yet also round-theworld transcendent illumination? For not only in Moby-Dick but right through from Typee to Billy Budd, to repeat Melville’s assertion in “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, Truth reveals itself only by “cunning glimpses”, “covertly” and “by snatches”.16 It is here that the notion of Moby-Dick as story-anatomy best enters the reckoning, the book’s “queer proceedings” to quote Ishmael on Queequeg’s religious observances, as calling from him nothing less than his own greatest, eye-bloodying dive. *** Anatomy, for its part, can look to a veritable lineage of its own, literary, scientific, philosophic. Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism both incorporates the term into his title and offers a literary definition of anatomy as Menippean satire, “a form of prose fiction … characterized by a great variety of subject-matter and a strong interest in ideas” of which he instances Swift, Carlyle and Lewis Carroll. 17 16

Ibid. “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces”, 244. 17 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, 365.

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The register has been wide, from Robert Burton’s wondrous miscellany of maladies in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) to Henry Gray’s medical classic Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical (1918), commonly known as Gray’s Anatomy. Who, too, would doubt that Moby-Dick, given its elasticity of narrative form, has long become its own hunting-ground for anatomists of genre – epic, mock-epic, allegory, documentary, fiction of fact, early modernist, even postmodern, textual landmark? The range of literary anatomies calls up worlds well beyond America. Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschift (The Ship of Fools, 1494), with its religious world-allegory, or Melville’s admired Luis Vaz de Camões’s Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads, 1572) with its Vasco da Gama exploration-epic, need to be entered in the lists. A further compendium, taken across time, could look to John Lyly’s The Anatomy of Wit (1578) cast in the euphemism that has become the standard term for indirect usage, through to Holbrook Jackson’s An Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930), a rare, witty genealogy of books as “ennobling affliction”, “a genial mania, less harmful than the sanity of the sane”, and to latter-day footfalls like Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson (1996), with its inspiration in Rembrandt’s 1632 painting and reflexive, unsparing portrait of Nathan Zuckerman, or Shelley Jackson’s inversely titled story-collection The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002) with its explorations of the body as existential and gendered site. 18 Within Melville studies Samuel Otter’s Melville’s Anatomies takes a compelling physiological bead, the author’s “corporeal fascination” with skin, eye, skull and heart as literal taxonomy and yet working tropes for humankind.19 Anatomy, even so, is not itself to be invoked as some inflexible genre, but more as a conveniently approximate description aimed at capturing both story and the encyclopedic impulse and play of speculative intelligence at work in Moby-Dick. Melville claims his own necessary elasticity of method, typically advanced with mocksolicitude by Ishmael in “Cetology” (Chapter 32): 18 The list extends considerably. There might plausibly be included Otto Preminger’s classic courtroom film drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) or an essay-collection like Bruce Chatwin’s The Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969-1989, NY: Viking, 1996. 19 Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999, 3.

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It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet it is no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. (134)

To speak of Moby-Dick as anatomy first requires the fullest consideration of how Melville establishes the whale as the book’s essential lodestone and point of radius. For the whale it is, and not Ahab, nor Ishmael, nor the Pequod and crew, that acts as the centre to which all else is periphery. Unfortunately, a great deal of the criticism of Moby-Dick has moved off from that perception, whether in the study of Ishmael’s role as narrator or of Ahab as Byronic persona. For from the outset Melville leaves little doubt that it is the whale that compositely must carry the book’s centre of gravity. To that purpose Leviathan is first encountered through “Etymology”, ingenious lexical and grammatical mimicry that lists whale in different languages, beginning with the ancient tongues like Hebrew, Greek and Latin, moving on to those of the west like English, French and Spanish, and arriving in the Pacific with Feegee and the playful-sounding Erromangoan. The sheer differences of register, a kind of composite sound poem, dramatize the gaps between naming processes, the different tics and assumptions of ear, eye and voice behind each vernacular tradition. The whale itself, “round”, “rolling” and “wallowing” according to the etymologies for Swedish, Danish, Dutch and German (and cited by Melville from canonical dictionary sources in Webster’s and Richardson’s) lies ever more elusively within this plethora of word and classification. The LATE CONSUMPTIVE USHER invoked by Melville as supplying these etymological whale-words, “pale”, “threadbare”, loving to “dust his old grammars”, is to be imagined as having met with his bodily and metaphysical ill-health by constantly seeking to extract organizing sense from sound and from the related discovery that language endlessly and conflictingly delivers “that which is not true”. Melville’s quotation borrows from yet another explorer-diver, the great Elizabethan geographer Richard Hackluyt. According to Hackluyt, he confides, to leave out the h from whale, is to leave out the very process of aspiration, the whale and the world-as-whale as live, “breathing” reality. Without the h is lost precisely the aspirated – that is the breathed and living – truth of things.

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“Extracts”, supposedly given by another “mere painstaking burrower”, the un-thanked and under-esteemed Sub-Sub Librarian on Melville’s tongue-in-cheek testimony, offers successive quotations we are invited to believe no more than “a glancing bird’s eye view” of the whale – the implication clearly being the necessity of infinitely yet more “diving” and “plummeting” (and “extracting”) to get at Leviathan. Even in sum, and read serially the one upon the other, these “Extracts” serve as no more than working classificatory and insmall indicators for the whale. The Sub-Sub, library-diver, offers an opposing pair of terms for the text ahead and its awareness of a necessary degree of randomness and approximation when he speaks of his labours as “higgledy-piggledy whale statements” as against “veritable gospel cetology”. The litany built up by the “Extracts” extends across time and space, from the Book of Genesis to ongoing whale-songs, a thesaurus of whale-allusions from the Bible, Histories, New England Primers (grammars again), Prefaces, Parliamentary Speeches, Lives, sea-ditties, selected authors both ancient and modern, and even “Something unpublished”, another low-key piece of palindromic Melvilleian whimsy. Extracts indeed they are, just as for all its scale and density, Melville acknowledges Moby-Dick to offer no more than extracts of Truth, and just as by extension and if we choose to act on his tipping the wink, all language no more than extracts parts from Truth’s whole. Melville’s imagery of Etymology and Extracts, and his clever personae of schoolteacher Ushers and consumed Sub-Sub Librarians, point utterly to the challenge of Moby-Dick as anatomy. Anatomizing the world’s truths, by “Etymology” or “Extraction”, clearly also implies for Melville in Moby-Dick a journeying towards, if not actually into, both the perceivable and the “wonder-world”. Ishmael’s Noah’s Ark metaphor in “Loomings” perfectly confirms the point – “two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale” (7). In “The Blanket” (Chapter 68), however, he hints that his difficulties in decoding the whale, and reality at large, go even beyond problems of lexis or even epistemology. He suggests that the world’s different languages, alphabets, hieroglyphs and vernaculars indicate sources that transcend all human co-ordinates. To this end he invokes the Sperm Whale’s skin which, he has Ishmael allege, carries the insignia of

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“mystic-marked” realities, a thread of global enciphering from Egypt to the Mississippi: In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical: that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. (306)

The Sperm Whale, and again the world, as “obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array” suggests near un-decipherability, reality as a vexed and vexing phenomenology subject only to provisional interpretation. However energetic the will to anatomize the world, it eludes and defies, always given to inviting “far other delineations”. At best there emerge “Extracts”, each partial, or multiple, and always in different degrees a conflict of hermeneutics. In “The Prairie” (Chapter 79) Melville takes the point still further, speaking of the Sperm Whale’s Egyptian “pyramidical silence” (347). Concentrating on the whale’s face and brow Ishmael advances the speculation that the wrinkles encode some strange elusive hieroglyph, some language akin to Erromangoan or Chaldee, each resistant to decipherment. To this end he invokes two great pioneer decipherers, Champollion and Sir William Jones, the one a landmark French Egyptologist who first deciphered the Rosetta Stone, the other the British philologist-unraveller of Asiatic religions and languages: Champollion ciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s

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and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can. (347)

Unlettered or not Ishmael implies that read the whale’s brow as one chooses, and not just its brow but its whole anatomical being, it will rarely yield up its “profounder and more subtle meanings” (347), even (or especially) to the scholars. Anatomies, Egyptological or Asian, medical or literary, these quests but touch surfaces, however at first sight persuasive. So the whale, so the world: yet the compulsion to dive and seek to establish against the odds likely best categories remains irresistible both for Ishmael-as-narrator and, behind him, Melville-as-author. Furthermore, it is a compulsion dramatized right from the start in “Loomings” – “as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts” (7). The unquenchability of that voice, Ishmael-Melville’s, points up the book’s overall ambition, its appetite, and to whatever the limit, to anatomize the whale-world’s meanings. Carl Van Doren’s observation wholly applies, a consciousness, a voice, tirelessly alert. It pervades every aspect of Moby-Dick, at once restless, diver-inquisitive, and endlessly inviting. *** Moby-Dick in truth acts as an anatomy overall. But it can be said to develop smaller constituent anatomies, those of chapter-length or so and those that Melville builds out from some specific detail into paradigms of challengingly larger implication and meaning. The longer anatomies especially take their cue from the “Etymology”, “Extracts”, “Loomings” triangulation, each reflective of Melville’s own decoding procedures, the world read as it were according to the author’s grammar. With the Pequod launched, and Ishmael and Queequeg ritually pseudo-married and put through their ceremonial signing-on with the wittily contrarian “fighting Quakers” (73), Bildad and Peleg, Melville offers the first of the longer anatomy sequences, “Knights and Squires” (Chapters 26-27). A literal cast-list of sorts it is

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deployed as to suggest that the Pequod carries other and more emblematic travellers and seafarers all by their own different lights bound upon a quest to name, dissect and pursue the whale. The overt purpose of “Knights and Squires” is to introduce the mates Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, along with the harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo, and in turn Pip and the rest of the crew. But just as “The Ship” (Chapter 16) makes clear that the Pequod doubles as both a real New England whaler and more daedal craft, a kind of mythical sea-beast itself (“an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her” [69]), so the crew double as seasoned actual mariners and personae of a kind with the warrior-clans of the Aeneid or the soldiery of Shakespeare’s history plays. In “Knights and Squires” Melville carefully transforms both officers and men into heraldic figures: They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which not many of them ever came back. (121)

Enrolled upon their New England whaler, a commercial factoryship yet also ship of fools and death-ship, the crew resemble the argonauts of legend, “each Isolato” yet part of federated humankind pledged under Ahab’s aggrieved command to hunt down the ineffaceable and all-encompassing white whale. Melville’s anatomy moves strikingly between the actual and the exactly marvellous, the real as also fantastical, whereby yet again a perceptibly nineteenth-century search of oil becomes in the mind’s eye a journey for more transcendental fare. “Knights and Squires” blends story and anatomy, the very pattern of Moby-Dick overall. That pattern invariably emerges as one in which ostensible whaling fact is made to resonate with other implication and ballast. In “Cetology” (Chapter 32), as notably as anywhere in Moby-Dick, the categorization of whales comes over accurately enough. What writer has provided a livelier compendium of the ocean’s marine population of leviathans, sharks, porpoises, squid, crustacea, brit, algae and other life? But in no way can it be thought simply a literal cetological

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system. It offers exhilarating bibliographical pastiche, a sublime mock-catalogue, in which each whale, filed tongue-in-cheek under Folio, Octavo or Duodecimo, teases both definer and purported definition. Not for nothing does Ishmael confide at the beginning of the chapter: “The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed” (134). He also avers that his object “is simply to project the draught of a systemization of cetology” (134), as if cetology were the world’s plenitude and impossibly un-amenable to any one system of tabulation, even a literary whaling narrative. All systems of naming for Melville work partially and out of their own governing languages and assumptions. His achievement in “Cetology” is to make the point with virtuoso reflexivity, texts as a library classification system for the larger text of the whale itself. In shared manner each longer anatomy explores reality as harbouring yet other schema and other classificatory agendas. Each builds on its predecessor, widening the book’s allusive range and reaffirming the general anatomical design. In “Moby Dick” (Chapter 41), the whale’s legend of being thought ubiquitous in time and place is given minute attention, a perfectly visible, literal whale yet also an emissary life-form from other realms (“the gliding great demon of the seas of life” [187]). It is this whale that sponsors “unearthly conceits”, “fabulous narrations”, the proliferating versions and counter-versions conceived by whalemen each “wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth” (181). To account in any final way for such profusion and fiction-making indeed would be “to dive deeper than Ishmael can go”.20 In “The Whiteness of the Whale” (Chapter 42), the whale is anatomized from another perspective, the massive “colorless, all-color” of whiteness itself, whiteness as one of the world’s great mystic keys or languages that runs through day and night, appearance 20 This observation ties in to Melville’s later definition of whaling: “One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things” (“The Advocate”, Chapter 24). The reference to the Nut-Isis-Osiris Egyptian fertility deities is well-enough known. The point to be stressed, however, is that whaling – in both its literal and symbolic meanings – yields no mastering definition but rather whole chains of dynamic meaning in which whalemen, however important, serve as but the one collective source among many.

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and void, totem and taboo. In mapping out “the incantation of this whiteness” (195), a quite astounding anatomical paradigm, Melville constructs yet another detailed chain of analogies and links. “The Whiteness of the Whale” reads bracingly on its own terms, a massive and symbolist colour taxonomy to embrace “marbles, japonicas and pearls” and Jove’s “snow-white bull”, “the white shark of the tropics” and the “white” city of Lima, not to mention questioning whether white is a colour at all (“the visible absence of all color”), and eventuating in the question “of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye at the fiery hunt?” (195). But it again utterly reaffirms the diver-energy of mind behind Melville’s curiosity. Moby-Dick abounds in kindred sequences. “The Mat-Maker” (Chapter 47) looks to loom, warp and woof as Fate, Free Will and Chance. “The Honor and Glory of Whaling” (Chapter 82), a further “dive into this matter of whaling” (361), develops a tour-de-force of how whaling’s different heroes and avatars reflect the will-to-myth endemic in human imagination. As legend is made of the whale, and of its pursuers and worshippers, so inferentially the process holds for the world and its would-be definers. “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales” (Chapter 55), Ishmael’s list of whales delineated in painting and sculpture becomes an enquiry into the psychology of picturing itself. “The Grand Armada” (Chapter 87), a portrait of “young Leviathan amours in the deep”, whale-birthing, the sea as “enchanted pond” (187), becomes also poetic tribute to Nature’s massive feminine and generative reservoirs of life to be contrasted with the masculine and literally enflamed technology of “The Try-Works”. “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish” (Chapter 89), a pseudo-legal tract on whaling rights yields far headier discourse to do with Freedom and Necessity, the self poised as sovereign yet inextricably tied into the greater social and historical whole. “Heads or Tails” (Chapter 90), an anatomy of male and female sexual ties, anticipates some of the phallic jocularity and double-talk of “The Cassock” (Chapter 95). “A Bower in the Arsacides” (Chapter 102), the depiction of a Tranque whale-skeleton, elaborates into a composite image of life amid death, homage to the cyclical ebb and flow of energies he associates with the Weaver God. A contrasting pair of anatomies can be found in the two sermons, that of Father Mapple in the Whalemen’s Chapel, New Bedford, and explicitly termed “two-stranded” (“The Sermon”,

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[Chapter 9]) as against Fleece’s black-vernacular address to the sharkinfested sea (“Stubb’s Supper,” [Chapter 64]). All of these anatomies deserve fullest consideration, intricate, fecund, and full of provocative play of meaning. But they also have to be seen for their linkage as skeins in the overall texture of Moby-Dick. Melville’s world in the book could not more be stupendously linked in a great chain of hieroglyph. The search for meaning, for Truth, persists throughout, invoking, comparatively, Graeco-Roman myth, Egyptianism, Judeao-Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, not to say folklore, song fable, superstition, engraving, or all manner of popular culture. Joke, too, plays its anatomical role. Bildad’s Quaker-Christian and two-way sabbatarian injunction in “Merry Christmas” (Chapter 22), “Don’t whale it too much a’ Lord’s Day, men; but don’t miss a fair chance either, that’s rejecting Heaven’s good gifts” (105) offers an instance. The larger view is to be met with in “The Hyena” (Chapter 49) – “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke …” (226). Melville’s achievement lies in the imaginative effort of decipherment, the resolve to meet the challenge of interpretation both of world and wonder-world, the world of seeming order and the world turned upside-down. *** The smaller anatomies in Moby-Dick, no less than those which brace the book as a whole, invite due recognition, whether Ishmael’s opening vista of “thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries” in “Loomings”, or the Pequod as “a cannibal of a craft”, or the doubloon (“There’s another rendering now; but still one text” [434]). The Spouter Inn ante-room, a museum-in-small of whaling trophies and bric-a-brac, might call up Hawthorne’s moon-lit room in “The Custom-House” for how it hints of the house of fiction ahead. The Spouter Inn” yields its “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly” subsequent to Ishmael’s oxymoronic first view of it as the “Black Sea in a midnight gale” with to follow his belief that it might be the primal elements, Hyperborean winter or the break-up of time. That it reveals itself as a Cape-Horner with an impaled whale upon its masts follows only after so richly anatomical a paradigm, “the diligent study” Ishmael alleges involved.

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For his part, Queequeg under western eyes might almost appear outlandish enough to be credible, whether, to cite “A Bosom Friend” (Chapter 10) and “Biographical” (Chapter 12), “George Washington cannibalistically developed”, a “sea Prince of Wales”, a kilted Scotsman, or Peleg’s “Quohog” and “Hedgehog”. Little wonder he is said by Ishmael to emanate from “Kokovoko…It is not down on any map; true places never are” (55). “Queequeg In His Coffin” (Chapter 110) figures him in Ishmael’s appropriately bookish metaphor as the very embodiment of human text, “in his own proper person a riddle to unfold”, “a wondrous work in one volume”, “living parchment” (48081). Queequeg both personifies an anatomy in himself and carries a one anatomy of his world in the “interminable Cretan labyrinth” of his body’s chessboard tattoo. It is a copy of this that Ishmael watches him transfer to his coffin with the surmise that it likely amounts to “a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth” (480). Detailed anatomies-in-small of this order yield link upon link. Where Ahab’s is the great promethean penetrative intelligence, even if it comes up with a fatally absolutist reading of the whale and its meaning, Ishmael’s is the more speculative, pondering each object, teasing out meaning as yarned, dialectical spin. A typical instance lies in “The Monkey-Rope” (Chapter 72) where the slicing of whale blubber and the roped crew become a species of literal yet also metaphysical “Siamese ligature” in a threatening world of sharks and spades. Sign becomes signal, the one field of meaning metamorphoses into the other. “The Spirit Spout” (Chapter 51) especially does service for the other shorter anatomies. It was a chapter that caught the fancy of Sophia Hawthorne and in which she sharp-sightedly intuited something of the larger design of Moby-Dick. In his letter to her of 8 January 1852 about the “part-&-parcel allegoricalness of the whole”, Melville gives generous thanks for her contention of the “subtle significance in that thing”.21 “The Spirit Spout” ostensibly addresses itself to the whale’s spouting “silvery jet” (232) rising from the sea, which as quickly then disappears, and which lingers in each sailor’s mind as seen the once but never twice. The spout, Ishmael witnesses, gives the impression of being both actual phenomenon and yet “flitting apparition”. Real, or imagined as real, the spout again 21

Letters, Melville to Sophia Hawthorne, 8 January 1852, 146.

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exemplifies Meville’s art of anatomy. If, chapter upon chapter, the focus falls upon the whale’s skin, brow, mouth, face, ambergris, spermaceti or genitalia, the text in line with “The Spirit Spout” continues to invite the double-reading of its semiotics. Given the self-acknowledging mighty theme of Moby-Dick as a whole, Ishmael can justifiably own up to inadequacy in the task of deciphering in any entirety the both the whale itself and the whaleworld. In “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales” (Chapter 55) he says plaintively but also warningly: there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan. (264)

In “The Tail” (Chapter 86), with its dilation upon whether the whale in fact does have a tail or is rather some trompe l’oeil, he expresses himself almost exasperatedly, asking fellow sympathy in the unending business of dissecting the whale-world’s leviathanic detail: “Dissect him how I may … I but go skin deep; I know him not and never will” (379). As Melville’s simple sailor, yet his surrogate masthead philosopher of Truth, Ishmael could hardly say otherwise. Melville himself, be it his letters or logs, in like vein repeatedly confesses the defeat and yet necessity of uncoupling truth from outward show. For however custodially Ishmael acts in narrating Moby-Dick’s anatomies no one dissection is to be thought all-encompassing or final. Each phenomenological version competes, whether Ishmael’s own emotions presumably recollected in tranquillity, or Ahab’s fatal solipsism that he alone can strike through to total unmasked Truth, or the triple and mutually modulating perceptions of the Pequod’s mates, or Queequeg’s arcanely tattooed and corkscrew cartographies, or Fedallah’s dark Zoroastrianism. For a world so encrypted, so inside out, runs the implication, perhaps only Pip’s holy dementia can hold together the contending perceptual process of both looking and seeing. Ishmael, to a degree, acknowledges that gap in “The Battering-Ram” (Chapter 76), in which the whale’s forehead is

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likened to “a dead, blind wall” (336-37), a wall to recall that enclosing Pierre Glendinning in The Tombs and Melville’s fellow scrivener Bartleby in Wall Street. Behind that wall, the whale’s, the world’s, reality’s, hidden and only glimpsed through occasional cracks and apertures flies Truth. Among its other purposes, the chapter underscores the frustrations of any enrolled Truth-seeker: For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? (338)

By this standard to fully engage in Truth-seeking is to forgo all provincialism, to brave heat and flame. Salamander giant protection may indeed be necessary and even then offer no guarantee of success. However much, for his own part, Melville believed his anatomical quests in Moby-Dick to have fallen short, history rightly has not been obliged to take him at his own word. The grounds for admiration of his diver boldness are many, the power of his story’s conception, the play of his careful disorderliness. For as Melville’s anatomical storychart, his polar whale-book, the one kind of diving in Moby-Dick indeed operates as quite the other. Given all the familiar caveats -- the book’s size, Ishmael as sustained voice, the supposed digressions -this due kind of imaginative recognition, if nothing else, could not be more in order.

7 VOICES OFF, ON, AND BEYOND: VENTRILOQUY IN THE CONFIDENCE-MAN “What sort of a bamboozling story is this you are telling me?” Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man 1 For who will meddle with a book professing to inculcate philosophical truths through the medium of nonsensical people talking nonsense -- the best definition of its scope and character that a somewhat prolonged consideration has enabled us to suggest. A novel it is not, unless a novel means forty-five conversations held on board a steamer, conducted by personages who might pass for the errata of creation, and so far resembling the Dialogue of Plato as to be undoubted Greek to ordinary men. Looking at the substance of these colloquies, they cannot be pronounced altogether valueless; looking only at the form, they might well be esteemed the compositions of a March hare with a literary turn of mind. It is not till a lengthening perusal – a perusal more lengthened than many readers are willing to accord – has familiarized us with the quaintness of the style, and until long domestication with the incomprehensible interlocutors has infected us with something of their own eccentricity, that our faculties, like the eyes of prisoners accustomed to the dark, become sufficiently acute to discern the golden grains which the author has made it his business to hide away from us. The Literary Gazette (1857) 2 1

Ishmael to the landlord of the Spouter Inn, in Moby-Dick, “The Spouter-Inn”, Chapter 3, Moby-Dick, The Writings of Herman Melville, The NewberryNorthwestern Edition, eds Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle, Evanston and Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1986, 18. 2 Review, The Literary Gazette, and Journal of Archaeology, Science and Art, London, 11 April 1857, 348-9. Reprinted in Watson G. Branch, ed., Melville: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, 373-4.

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Gothic to Multicultural “There speaks the ventriloquist again …” Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man3

“QUITE AN ORIGINAL”. It hardly surprises that Melville several times capitalizes his phrase for the Cosmopolitan, the chief among the astonishing gallery of voices that make up The Confidence-Man (238). It applies with equal aptness to the book itself, a fictional world as singularly conceived and executed as any in his previous repertoire. That embraces the “magic, cabalistic, tabooistic Typee”, as Melville once described it to his English publisher John Murray, 4 Mardi as fiction-of-fact island odyssey drawn from source materials as diverse as Spenser, the Romantic poets and William Ellis’ Polynesian Researches (1833), and each of the camouflaged scenarios of “Bartleby”, “Benito Cereno” and “The Encantadas” which together with “The Piazza” and other Putnam’s and Harper’s shorter pieces of the mid-1850s make up Piazza Tales (1856).5 As Melville directs each feint and counter-feint in The ConfidenceMan, it becomes virtually impossible not to acknowledge our ensnarement in a most rare and protean double-masquerade: that witnessed as the ostensible sunrise to midnight journey of the Mississippi steamship the Fidèle bound downriver from St Louis for New Orleans on All Fools Day, and that taking place actually within, or as an analogue of, our own brilliantly put upon and in every likelihood traduced, reading experience. There can be few works of fiction, certainly of those written in the nineteenth century before the landmark modernist narratives, in which author, text and reader are more surreptitiously brought into conscious relationship, or in which they are more made to challenge and even undermine each other in the very process of seeking mutual recognition. Original, then, The Confidence-Man was, and is, and for admirers, wholly as consequential as anything Melville wrote. It demonstrates 3

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, The Writings of Herman Melville, The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, eds Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle, Evanston and Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1984, 222. 4 Melville to John Murray, 2 September 1846, in The Letters of Herman Melville, eds Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960, 45. 5 These in sequence are “Bartleby”, “Benito Cereno”, “The Lightning Rod Man”, “The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles” and “The Bell-Tower”.

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an originality that asserts itself at each unflagging turn. Whether one settles upon the opening (and seemingly magus-like) metamorphosis of the Christ-like “man in cream-colors” (3) into the diabolized “grotesque black cripple”(10), or Black Guinea’s testificatory list of six or so “ge’mmen” (13) through whom the narrative draws out all the other successive passenger voices, or the five mock-parabular stories-within-stories (those of Goneril, the Cripple, John Moredock, Charlemont and China Aster), or the pseudo-authorial voice of Chapters XIV, XXXIII and XLIV which chimes in about the necessary artfulness of fiction in matchingly artful apologies, or indeed upon almost any page of Melville’s mots clefs of “confidence”, “charity”, “trust”, “charming”, “shaving” and the like, the effect comes over as wholly of a piece. The Confidence-Man wilfully, or knowingly at least, eschews plot, character in any conventional sense, even action; it offers instead talk, irrepressible, necessary human talk, as plausible yet as equivocal as humankind at large, and all of it worked into a superb dissonance of voices, a colloquium at once literal-seeming and fantastical and enacted with startling verve against the backdrop of steamboat and frontier. For in this last of the full-length prose narratives published in his lifetime, Melville projects a view of history as utterly particular, life on the Mississippi at mid-nineteenth century, yet also, and well beyond any mere allegory, a waking-dream masquerade of recurrent human type and illusion. In serving these ends The Confidence-Man calls throughout on nothing short of the most adept, and purposive, ventriloquy. Underpinning the history, and the surface maze of sign and countersign of The Confidence-Man, Melville posits his solar metaphysics, a cosmos glimpsed dimly from the Fidèle’s “gentleman’s cabin”, one of “barren planets” with lights either in process of being extinguished or actually out (240). This is a cosmos whose riddles, transformational energies and sheer unknowable otherness, indeed appear evidence of directionless-ness. The whole bent of The Confidence-Man is to suggest dark not only during but before and after life, bookend shadows as it were, to an already shadowed comédie humaine. In this Melville can be said to look for company in Heidegger and the eschatology of Sein und Zeit/Being and Time (1927), an indeterminable universe, and within it the unbidden arrival, existence and expiration of human consciousness. Melville

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shows himself not a little the Victorian-American man of doubts when he sites the closing scenes of the book under midnight darkness and the “waning light” (251) of the Fidèle’s world-cabin (in Hawthorne’s succinct and greatly perceptive phrase able neither to “believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief”).6 If, just previously, Melville has the Cosmopolitan tell the barber “You can conclude nothing absolute from the human form” (226), little more, he everywhere implies, can anything absolute be concluded from human discourse. The very medium of language, however brilliantly deployed, or precisely by being brilliantly deployed, comes back to a form of self-locking, the Chinese box. The more readily expressive the language-system the more reality goes on being fictionalized and mankind yet further walled out from that overarching Melvilleian desideratum, Truth. Melville takes immense pains to show how ruling illusions, of which The Confidence-Man offers an abundance, bring into play their own self-serving voice; how each of these in turn become fictions for others to believe or not; and how such beliefs (or un-beliefs to reiterate Hawthorne’s language) in their respective turn beget subsequent fictions. Melville writes a text more the assemblage of petits récits than narrative river-run and always slyly subversive of the comforts of easy sequence. In this it reflects the Mississippi itself, even more so than that of Mark Twain one of eddy and counter-eddy, ambiguous landings and boardings. The double-start, the Mute and Guinea, the double-end, lights extinguished and “Something more may follow of this masquerade” (251), point the way. In embodying this echo-chamber of metaphysics and language, The Confidence-Man can be thought to have run well ahead of the game in matters of postmodernism.. But whether that, or something (and blessedly?) less heady, it can hardly go on being regarded as simply ready-made satire of Christianity, or the cash-nexus, or American optimism in all its uplift and traditional benignity. In as much as it does offer this satire, it does so only as the explicit outward guise of far more fundamental and ontological probing. Thematic readings, nonetheless, have persisted, despite Melville’s dexterously implanted warnings about one-for-one meaning and 6 Nathaniel Hawthorne, English Notebook, 12 November 1856. Reprinted in The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, ed. Jay Leyda, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co., II, 1951, 529.


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despite the enactive volatility of the narrative’s every fade or exchange. Most of the stopping-off places since Elizabeth S. Foster brought out her indispensable Hendricks House Edition of The Confidence-Man in 1954 are by now familiar: it allegedly represents Melville’s vision of how the Devil in the guise of different confidence-men hoists Christianity by its own petard; it indicts the spirit of the west as no more than a bogus rationale for the American acquisitive appetite; it sees mankind as endlessly whistling in the philosophic dark and the dupe of false panaceas, beliefs and millennial credos, none more for Melville’s own age than Emersonian transcendentalism; it casts its net even wider to embrace the trickster-gods not only of American but world folklore and of religions from Judaeo-Christianity to Buddhism, Native American belief systems to Hinduism; and it signals Melville’s leave-taking after the comparative failure of his previous books, the embittered Last Testament of an author unable to win intelligent understanding.7 All of these, to be sure, deserve their hearing, and cast varying degrees of light on the text. Yet, even taken together, they cannot be said quite to meet the full contrapuntal energy in operation throughout The Confidence-Man. For by the very nature of its compositional tactics, its vortex in a term from the Epilogue of Moby-Dick, Melville’s novel insistently seeks to slip free from any one mastering interpretation. Its entire inclination is to work more deviously, a cat’s cradle of voice in which all ostensibly authoritative word – offered in good or bad faith – forces readers back on their own mettle, eager to collaborate but uncertain of ground. For some this undoubtedly has the effect of diminishing, even of nullifying, the book. Melville intended no clear final meanings at all, runs the argument. The narrative stops and starts at random, interrupting the attention and at risk of becoming merest episode; the equivocations begin to cloy; the prose become selferasing, at times strangulated or mere bricolage.8 The suspicion has 7

Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Elizabeth S. Foster, NY: Hendricks House, 1954. 8 “Self-erasing” is R.W.B. Lewis’s phrase in his Afterword to the Signet edition of The Confidence-Man, NY: New American Library, 1964, 261-76. A revised version appears in Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition, New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 1965, where, discussing the Goneril section, he writes: “The whole tone, purpose,and strategy of

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even arisen that the voices almost prise free of their author’s control, virtuosity for its own sake. Yet to others The Confidence-Man triumphs exhilaratingly. Melville rarely falters, tricksterism indeed always purposive whether comic or serious, especially when linked to the mood described in “The Hyena”, Chapter 49 of Moby-Dick, in which “a man takes this whole universe for a practical joke” (226). In some measure, this approbation indeed has to do with the narrative’s Life on the Mississippi world, the bustling, theatrical vitality of the frontier. But even more it has to do with the razor-sharp juxtapositions and compound ironies of each verbal encounter. For as lifelike as Melville implies his river journey to be, the passing use of actual geography or the movement about the decks and berths and cabins, he also distances the narrative from its immediate material, as Chapter XXXIII declares it “another world” yet one always “to which we feel a tie” (183). Far from yielding some random “forty-five conversations”, the number of chapters in the book, as the understandably perplexed though far from unintelligent Literary Gazette reviewer surmised, however, The Confidence-Man invites us, with great deliberateness, to hear echoed our talking selves in action. Voices work within voices. Contradiction piles upon contradiction. The upshot is to underscore how we are rarely either wholly master or servant of the words we use, whether the intention or not is to dupe and whether, as in the case of Pitch, the duping happens despite every avowed resistance. In this sense The Confidence-Man performs a dark but valuably therapeutic function, irrigating (or seen another way absorbing into itself) a whole rhetoric of confusion about absolute and relative Truth, about that which unequivocally should be so and that which most equivocally is so. Melville consciously organizes his novel as lattice, as equivocal and inter-layered as the very Mississippi human order it purports to describe. Melville’s personal mood after the failure of Pierre (1852) and the falling sales of his earlier work may justifiably have propelled him to near-despair, none of it helped by his patrician self-guilt at falling short on the family obligations he believed due his wife Elizabeth, his young children, and his mother and sisters. But if despair, and as the The Confidence-Man, are in those sentences, with their parade of notations, and the final flurry of phrases that modufy, hesitantly contradict, and then utterly cancel each other out, leaving not a rack of positive statement behind.” (65).


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evidence suggests nervous desperation to the point of threatened violence to his wife, did press close, it emphatically did not damage his acuity of mind. Given the domestic strains, where more did he show himself cannier, or more assiduously honed, than in the best of the 1850s stories (“I and My Chimney” even makes his household difficulties into a story in its own right)? The “inside narrative” of Billy Budd, as he half-titled the story and a manuscript to be recovered three decades after his death, can well be thought by its compression a carry-over from this earlier period. The Confidence-Man clearly witnesses to the benefits that accrued to Melville from writing to the shorter compass: the tough, elliptical phrasing, the concentration of aim in his satiric targeting, and the narrative’s propulsive rhythm through each transposition of voice. Far from issuing out of some simply eve-of-career melancholy on Melville’s part, the novel positively revels in its appetite for creating an American As You Like It (whose “All the world’s a stage” the Cosmopolitan calls into play in his dexterous game of double- and triple-bluff with the Practical Disciple Egbert). That the action takes place against the Mississippi as arterial waterway, America’s father of rivers abrim in shifting currents and banks, adds its own weight. Melville assuredly wrote with his powers inspired and fully intact. *** Voices, then: and the first of them, a wholly apt paradox, belongs to the Deaf Mute who comes aboard “at sunrise on a first day of April” and who “speaks” only through New Testament quotation, a deific, blanched Jesus-like figure who may (or may not) be the first of the confidence-man incarnations. Immediately, he is also likened to the miraculous founding Godhead of the Incas, appearing “suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca” (3). But if some composite Godhead, Christian or Inca, he is also “in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger” (3). Fair-cheeked, flaxen-haired, passive, he might be a latest Bartleby, barely in life, the etiolated, and eventually vanishing, silhouette of any messiah. At a contrary angle, Melville suggests he could not more be in life, the Yankee artful dodger, also “recently arrived from the East” and “an original genius in his vocation” whose manner deviously secularizes the word “vocation” (3).

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The choice immediately engages and defies. Who, what, is the Mute? He could be the messenger of a Christianity the world neither wants nor believes, some protean avatar who by his every gesture and word mocks the possibility of absolute faith (or absolute anything) aboard the world-ship. He could be the first of the decoys who will become Black Guinea and his “gemm’en” successors, a metaphysical shape-shifter, Hermes or Janus. He could be a home-grown Jeremy Diddler to whom The Confidence-Man makes several allusions, a Ben Franklin become riverboat sharpster. As Mute he incorporates all of these, his ghostly white blankness and “lamb-like figure” the human match of the slate he holds up and by which beholders reveal themselves in how they interpret the Corinthian Scripture. The image leaves everything to be negotiated: Christ and Devil, cosmic godhead and Mississippi river con-man, white and black, the one voice and the many. The choices hardly stop there. In chalking up 1 Corinthians, 13 with its ordinances that Charity thinketh no Evil, Suffereth long, and is kind, Endureth all things, Believeth all things, and never Faileth, the Mute would seem to offer working absolutes. But straightaway Melville brings into contention the seeming opposite working absolute, the sternly forbidding “NO TRUST” written up by the barber on a “gaudy sort of illuminated pasteboard sign” (5) and to which the narrative returns at the closing midnight hour. For as the Mute’s charity can refer both to Christian-Utopian ethics and to the parodic and unedifying game that follows when Black Guinea catches coins thrown by the passengers in his mouth, so NO TRUST inscribes both a nay-saying to the cosmos at large and the more terrestrial message of no financial credit, an act of local prudence in a Mississippi frontier arena in which the hype, the con, the rip-off and the quick deal take place almost by rote. These two-fold inscriptions, absolute in one way, relative and open to competing readings in another, Melville situates within a further minefield of word-play – “fleecing” (the Mute has his “long fleecy nap”, Guinea his “knotted black fleece”), “credit”, “faith” (the Fidèle could as readily be the Infidèle), and above all, like a great linguistic beacon of ambiguity, the word “confidence” itself. Between Guinea’s “Charity” and William Cream’s “NO TRUST” the contrary utterances augment and widen, an ever gathering concourse. Each confidence-man voice jostles for ascendance with each passenger-colloquist, word against word, yea-saying turned nay-


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saying. To a post-Melville readership exercised on the writings, say, of Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett or William Burroughs, the response to this equivocating din of speech (and the metaphysics it assumes) may well be to opt for minimalism, language pared down in hopes of reaching some functional degree zero. To the Melville of The Confidence-Man, however, the direction lies elsewhere, the talkingout of the word, at every speed and in every accent. The effect, paradoxically no doubt and even as it rolls ever onward, is actually to chasten the word, to drain and still if only for a moment its capacity to mislead and obfuscate. For to talk, however ensnaring, indeed is human, and given the book’s opening dumb-show, almost extravagantly necessary when, in response to the Mute, the following cataract of voices breaks out: “Odd fish!” “ Poor fellow!” “Who can he be?” “Casper Hauser.” “Bless my soul!” “Uncommon countenance.” “Green prophet from Utah.” “Humbug!” “Singular Innocence.” “Means something.” “Spirit-rapper.” “Moon-calf.” “Piteous.” “Trying to enlist interest.” “Beware of him.” “Fast asleep here, and, doubtless, pick-pockets on board.” “Kind of daylight Endymion.” “Escaped convict, worn out with dodging.” “Jacob dreaming at Luz.”

These mosaical passenger voices, “epitaphic comments” (7) Melville calls them, perform several duties at once. Against the Mute’s “pathetic telegraphing” (6) they offer their own vivid telegraphese. They help locate the Fidèle as talk-fest, a shipboard platform of chorus and anti-chorus. More still of moment their paradigmatic guesswork mimics our own uneasy and understandably guarded responses to the Mute and his message, a changing mix of

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disbelief, wonder, shame and likely sheer confusion. Other voicing adds to the challenge, that of each of the different avatars moving forward to their apotheosis in the Cosmopolitan, that of the fauxauthor of Chapters XIV, XXXIII and XLIV, or that behind the several palindromic chapter-headings. In each we need to be about our wits, counter-nimble, keenly attuned in ear and understanding. The collective effect is one of literal and figural co-embarkation on this dawn-to-midnight journey, one in its own way as double and transcendent as those of Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad” or Thoreau’s A Week on The Concord and Merrimack Rivers. To that end it can be small wonder that Melville describes his company as a “pilgrim” parade, a “piebald parliament”: As among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers, and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists; deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man. (9)

To embark upon The Confidence-Man, book and Mississippi journey, entails pilgrimage of all kinds – Chaucerian, hemispheric, frontier-exploratory, multicultural, riverboat, entrepreneurial, opportunistic, religious. The Fidèle, at the same time, acts as a congress alive in “multiform” pilgrim voice, at once busy, even febrile, yet matched (and clearly overmatched) by avatar voices, and those in turn given gloss or commentary by the text’s occasionally intervening


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voice, and beyond all of these, deafeningly out of reach, Melville’s own. So layered a voicing, full of interactive play, looks to the reader to play the most utterly alert and cautious listening-post. It means responding as much for what is not being said as for what is, for the gaps between messenger and message, the spoken and the heard. “Parliament” and “congress” supply the working gloss, ventriloquy immediately to be heard and yet with more always implied as taking place off-stage and beyond, an “Anacharsis Cloots congress” indeed, a whole Mississippi of voice. The larger design of The Confidence-Man so indicated in the two opening chapters, it remains only for Black Guinea’s list to set the narrative’s talk even more actively into motion. Each guarantor of Black Guinea’s identity will propose a validation of Guinea himself (though as what we might well ask), of the proposition that the world is what it seems and harbours no discrepant, untoward figuratively black secrets, and that Charity every time win over No-Trust. Such the word to be supplied by the guarantors. Nothing, of course, could be further from what the narrative actually reveals. Ahead lies more ventriloquy, misapplied quotation, dubious commentary and parable. All, to one or another degree, point to the word as apocrypha, from which at midnight, the very witching hour, there will quite literally be extracts (about another Jesus, another wisdom, that of Jesus, Son of Sirach). In giving their word, word both literally spoken and as credit, Guinea’s guarantors – whether each a different avatar or incarnations of some single master-voice – draw out by their sure, plausible, sweetest confidence a darkness everywhere within and about them. It is a darkness as entangled as the Gordian knot aboard the San Dominick in “Benito Cereno”. Even more it bespeaks Guinea himself, named for English coinage, mock-slave, the hyper-black human knot. The list runs as follows: “Oh yes, oh yes, dar is aboard here a werry nice, good ge’mann wid a weed, and a ge’mann in a gray coat and white tie, what knows all about me; and a ge’mann wid a big book, too; and a yarb-doctor; and a ge’mann in a yaller west; and a ge’mman wid a brass plate; and a ge’mann in a wiolet robe; and a ge’mann as is a sodjer; and ever so many good, kind, honest ge’mmen more abord what knows me and will speak for me, God bress ‘em; yes, and what knows me as well as dis poor old darkie knows hisself, God bress him! Oh, find ’em, find ’em”,

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Gothic to Multicultural he earnestly added, “and let ’em come quick, and show you all, ge’mmen, dat did poor ole darker is werry well wordy of all you kind ge’emmen’s kind confidence”. (13)

First, Guinea himself speaks in the fake, obsequious voice of Putt’n on Ol’ Massa, passive-aggressive slave idiom, somewhat that of Fleece or Pip aboard the Pequod, more still that of Babo acting out his own prior servitude in “Benito Cereno”. Each guarantor (the only two not met with are the “ge’mman wid a yeller west” and the “ge’mann as is a sodjer”, unless Melville intended the ex-prisoner from the Tombs who masquerades as a Mexican War veteran to be one of the avatars) indeed proves “werry well wordy”. The play of sound and meaning, wordy-worthy, “kind ge’mmen” and “kind confidence”, enwrapped within Guinea’s meticulous fawning could hardly better anticipate the massive duplicities of voice ahead. Guinea’s slave-argot plea for “confidence” paves the way for the further importunings to come, against which even the book’s toughest nay-sayers, the Wooden-legged Man, the Miser, the “invalid Titan in homespun”, and above all, Pitch, the inveterate boy-hater and seeming misanthrope, all finally prove insufficient match. No one of Guinea’s list more cajoles, or better and more plausibly argues for universal confidence, than the “ge’mann in a wiolet robe”, the Cosmopolitan as ultimate upholder of the worth of all things – mankind, the universe, God, “talk”. By his every ingratiating word he at once arouses doubt and seduces, the great enlightener as by the same measure the giver of dark. He it is, the masquerade for the moment played through and the Fidèle’s voices temporarily hushed on this mock-apocalyptic All Fool’s Day, who says to the “clean, comely old man” loaded up in counterfeit self-protection and portable latrine, the very image of aged but still Adamic humankind, “let me extinguish this lamp” (251). Whether it is a voice triumphant in its exposure of gullibility or weary at its ventriloquy, it brings to an at least momentary rest Melville’s river-drama of life as ever the uncertain speaking part. The voices that gather about Black Guinea indicate the colloquia in store. In one column are to be found the doubters, beginning with the Wooden-legged Man, a Hawthorne-like “discharged custom-house officer” (12) who thinks Guinea “some white operator”, “a decoy” (14), and his believers a “flock of fools, under this captain of fools, in


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this ship of fools!” (15). In another Melville sets the believers, beginning from the young Episcopal clergyman, ingenuous and willing to think the best. In their wake the chorus swells and ebbs, negative and positive, unconditional and conditional, one voice the echo of the other. The list offers a plenitude, from the “soldier-like Methodist”, a one-time “volunteer chaplain to a volunteer rifle-regiment” (14) and Melville’s pillorying embodiment of the Christian militarist in the vein of Peleg and Bildad as the Pequod’s “fighting Quaker” owners, who true to paradox shifts from believer to doubter and designates Guinea “some sort of black Jeremy Diddler” (16), through to the duped merchant Mr Roberts. Each widens the spectrum, adds to the auditorium. One typical pairing lies in the Wooden-legged man and Mr Ringman (“the ge’mman wid de weed”). The former can provoke jibe and skepticism about Guinea – “We ain’t agoing to trust him”, “What an example”, “Might deter Timon”, “Something queer about this darkie, depend upon it” (16), all of which chime in and out in counterplay with the comments of Guinea himself. An addendum is given in the voice of a “gruff boatman” (17) who proposes Guinea find his guarantors himself, a nice touch if Guinea is but one and all the guarantors. Guinea’s reply is to invoke “dat good man wid de weed”, and he, on cue, and under the due nomenclature of John Ringman, adds his voice to the fray but whose tale of Goneril is not actually heard until a dozen chapters later. For the story in full, with its pastiche of the sentimental novel and wife-victim heroine, Melville tells as if to deliberately test our patience through its impact on the caught-in-the-spider-web if vacillating Mr Roberts, Country Merchant. The weave of voice, eliding confidence into doubt, surprise into sympathy, confirms more in the pattern: discourse as power, voice as manoeuvre. This competition of trust against no-trust become the novel’s paradigm in each ensuing encounter: the “ge’mann in a gray coat and white tie” as the un-dissuadable and darkly Mrs Jellyby-ish agent for a “Widow and Orphan Asylum recently founded among the Seminoles” who would “quicken…missions”, as he says, “with the Wall Street spirit”(40); the Man of Charity perfectly doubled as the Man of Business; the “ge’mman wid a big book”, the “president and transfer-agent of the Black Rapids Coal Co.”, whose successive enrollment of the Merchant and the Miser (and by implication others)

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amounts to a signing-on for Hell; the “yarb-doctor”, whose bland, allnatural physic with its grandiose huckster-rhetoric of the “OMNI-BALSAMIC REINVIGORATOR” and “Samaritan Pain Dissuader” (84) wins over even the Injured Soldier, the Old Miser and the ursine nay-saying Pitch; and the “ge’mman wid a brass plate”, the Agent of the “Philosophical Intelligence Office”, who finally does break through Pitch’s resistance, sell him a boy, and promptly disembark at Devil’s Joke, his confidence trade as triumphantly dispatched in word as deed. Each of these proves a masterly adept in the business of persuasion, patient, ingenious, and utterly able to grasp and exploit the other point of view. By their insistent spirit of uplift – American to the core yet universalized – they time and again play on hope over frailty, whether greed, the willingness or need to believe the best, the quest for robust health and eternal vigour, and assuredly the wish for Everlasting Life. Melville offers their rhetorical spells as part New World hope, and part New World bill of goods, an American metaphysic of hope but also sales-pitch. The appeal everywhere falls on ready ears, passengers in search of balm, gold, happiness, instant solution, the New Jerusalem. Be the goods material or cosmic, the blandishments remain the same, overcoming doubt, securing confidence. Pitch himself, tarred to reality as he has believed himself, after holding out, waveringly but finally falls into the trap. *** The final apotheosis arrives in the Cosmopolitan, Melville’s sublime, costumed and confidence-spouting pentecostalist who indeed speaks in tongues and offers himself as the Emerson’s perfect Representative Man (“Francis Goodman”). Who better to make New World fraternity incarnate, a public relations act of human perfectability? His every word sounds the note of Charity and Trust. Yet at the same time, and more embodyingly than anyone previous, he serves as Pitch’s “most extraordinary metaphysical scamp” (136). In him the text proffers the ultimate vanquisher, or so it would seem, of the Barber’s No-Trust Universe, yet equally the double-dealer who, by way of example, uses Charity and Trust to get himself shaved yet shave the barber of his fee. His very plumage, that of a near fantastical trickster-deity (“a vesture barred with various hues … a florid show”


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131-32), guys our wish-to-believe, his ability to out-dress, and out-fee, the entire colour-chart of human self-deception even if, initially, the Bachelor fires a warning-shot about “”Toucan fowl”, “fine feathers on foul meat” (131) and “Mr. Popinjay-of-the-world” (133). Whether in the matter of the Moredock Indian-hating parable, or the play-withina-play charade with Charlie Noble, or Mark Winsome and Egbert as the Master and Practical Disciple Emerson-Thoreau parallel with its ensuing send-up colloquy on Friendship and Self-Reliance, he continues like a winning metronome to speak the double-speak of Transcendental confidence in all. He does so, moreover, against all-comers and evidence, through Pitch’s doubts, the Titan’s groan, the China Aster and Indian-hating stories, the barber’s shrewd but unavailing sense that he is being taken for a ride and the Old Man’s pathetic trustfulness. As he “kindly” leads the old man away, having hinted that Jehovah himself might be nothing other than the ultimate godly reference-point for all false confidence, he keeps up this banner motif of hope. But to hand only are the Apocrypha, sleepy cabin voices, useless devices like the Counterfeit Detector or the excremental life-preserver, the young Faustian boy peddler and his sales-pitch, and the waning lights of the Fidèle. The Cosmopolitan’s is the last avatar voice we hear, except for Melville’s apparent own with his “Something more may follow of this Masquerade” (251), plausible to the end, still calling for Trust – for confidence – yet arousing as may be, or may be not, the accusing suspicion of No Trust. *** Deceptive and double as unquestionably are the avatar voices, from the Mute/Guinea to the Cosmopolitan, overlaying them and to deepen the complication Melville supplies yet others, those of the five parables and those of the pseudo-authorial chapters. The former have long provoked competing interpretation: the Goneril story as false, the opposite of its appearance and actually a parody of ceremonial grief and mourning used to win the cash (and sympathy) of the unwary listener; the Cripple’s story as a comment on those formulas of charitable appeal which best flatter the largesse of the alms-giver; the Indian-hating as a frontier chronicle adapted to indict all forms of chronic absolutism, whether Indians as Devils or other moral and

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theological systems of Heaven and Hell; Charlemont’s story as actually an inverse Prodigal Son parable; and the China Aster narrative as that of the trusting light-giver betrayed by friends, and like “Bartleby”, in no small part a portrait of the artist plunged into dark and death by the refusal to be credited. Much as each story plays both ends at once, their ironies inlaid and as particular as need be, they contribute utterly to the general strategy of The Confidence-Man. They say what they do not mean and hide what is most there to be revealed. *** No less applies to the three authorial interfoliations. “Worth The Consideration Of Those To Whom It May Prove Worth Considering” (Chapter XIV) takes beadiest aim at notions of consistency of character in fiction, full of inventive double-talk about flying-squirrels and the metamorphoses of the caterpillar. This first of Melville’s digressions bears down on all notions of rules and genera in the matter of art, Aristotelian or otherwise. “Which May Pass For Whatever It May Prove To Be Worth” (Chapter XXXIII) takes the matter further: art as more real than life, and life as itself nothing less than art. The speculation, as usual, goes several ways at once, though the voice beyond the chapter comes as close as any to Melville’s own, especially in The Confidence-Man, that fiction always “should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie” (183). “In Which The Last Three Words Of The Last Chapter Are Made The Text Of Discourse, Which Will Be Sure Of Receiving More Or Less Attention From Those Readers Who Do Not Skip It” (Chapter XLIV) argues that character in fiction should never be static or merely spatial, but open to time, mutability, as paradoxically and necessarily inconsistent as is required to be consistent with human nature (“like a revolving Drummond light” [239]). All three of these chapters point to wider compositional debate: character, genre, reality, imagination. True to form, however, Melville also cagily makes his observations fictions in their own right, in part a justification for his self-acknowledged man-show throughout The Confidence-Man, in part his wish to display of how even supposed critical discourse can assume invented form. The voicing in these three chapters, much as it would seem to direct us towards a grand


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Theory of Fiction, in fact operates as more of Melville’s sleight-ofhand. No less than the passenger voices, or each avatar voice, or the voice in play throughout each story-parable, this authorial voice also solicits and at the same time again challenges readerly confidence. The Author, no less, becomes one more contributing partner in the masquerade, the life imagined in the text and the text as its own kind of imagined life. He purports to be authoritative but gives every grounds for suspect credentials, be it the tail-in-mouth chapter titles, the willed extravagance of the illustrations, or the faked earnestness of tone. The true authorial voice, as against those on or off, we never actually hear, for it lies beyond, the voice of Melville’s creative consciousness so consummately responsible for quite all the working ventriloquy of The Confidence-Man.

8 STEPHEN CRANE’S THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE: THE NOVELLA AS MOVING BOX One of the most enduring memories of my literary life is the sensation produced by the appearance in 1895 of Crane’s Red Badge of Courage in a small volume belonging to Mr Heinemann’s Pioneer Series of Modern Fiction …. Crane’s work detonated on the mild din ... of our sensibilities with the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell charged with a very high explosive. Unexpected it fell amongst us; and its fall was followed by a great outcry. Not of consternation, however. The energy of that projectile hurt nothing and no one (such was its good fortune), and delighted a good many. It delighted soldiers, men of letters, men in the street; it was welcomed by all lovers of personal expression as a genuine revelation, satisfying the curiosity of a world in which war and love have been the subjects of song and story ever since the beginning of articulate speech. Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Red Badge of Courage1 There was no real literature of our Civil War, excepting the forgotten “Miss Ravenall’s Conversion” by J.W. De Forest, until Stephen Crane wrote “The Red Badge of Courage”. Crane wrote it before he had seen any war. But he had read the contemporary accounts, had heard the old soldiers, they were not so old then, talk, and above all he had seen Matthew Brady’s wonderful photographs. Creating his story out of this material he wrote that great boy’s dream of war that was to be truer to how war is than any war the boy who wrote it would

1

Joseph Conrad, “His War Book: A Preface to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.” Republished in Joseph Conrad, Last Essays, London and NY: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1925, 175-83.

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Gothic to Multicultural ever live to see. It is one of the finest books of our literature because it is all as much of one piece as a great poem is. Ernest Hemingway, Introduction, Men at War 2

Had he lived beyond his brief span of twenty-nine years (1871-1900) and found himself reading these tributes, Stephen Crane might have derived quite considerable satisfaction. It could hardly be said that The Red Badge of Courage had not in fact won immediate and widespread attention, both the newspaper serial and then the book that came out in 1895 under the imprint of D. Appleton and Company.3 Indeed, over time, Crane actually came to fear that his other principal writings, work like “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets”, key collections such as The Open Boat And Other Stories and the Whilomville Stories, his voluminous war reportage, and the dark, acerbic poetry of The Black Riders and Other Lines and War Is Kind, risked almost permanent eclipse. Yet he would readily have recognized that both Conrad and Hemingway spoke from credentials of no simple order, but rather as writers profoundly taken up with a shared vision of men at war. In Conrad he would no doubt also have thought warmly of the friendship developed across several interludes in England during the 1890s and of a body of fiction whose mastery in depicting human beings caught at the edge he had been quick to learn from and value. Nor would he have failed to see in Hemingway not only a fellow American war writer and journalist but one given to fashioning a style resolutely, and unmistakably, his own. For in common with both of them, and beyond the issue of his naturalism as it was thought, or his controversial life and marriage with Cora Taylor, or even his legend as yet another literary figure cut short before his time by consumption, it is Crane as himself the stylist who before all else establishes his claims to attention, and nowhere more decisively than in The Red Badge of Courage.4 2

Ernest Hemingway, “Introduction,” Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, NY: Crown Publishers, 1942; republished London: Fontana, 1966, 10-11. 3 The Red Badge of Courage has had a changing textual history since the novella’s first appearance. Page references throughout are to The Red Badge of Courage, ed. Henry Binder, NY: W.W. Norton, 1982. 4 Among the standard Crane biographies are Thomas Beer, Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923; John Berryman, Stephen Crane, American Men of Letters Series, NY: William Sloane Associates, 1950; Eric Solomon, Stephen Crane in England: A Portrait of The Artist, Columbus, OH: Ohio

Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

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That is not to imply that both Conrad and Hemingway fail to anticipate much of the terms of debate prompted by Crane’s classic novella. Conrad, for instance, rightly comments on its appearance as “unexpected”. Who would have thought a “war book” at once as he calls it “so virile” yet “so full of gentle sympathy”, in all “a gem”, even to have been in the offing? More particularly still, who would have anticipated a major new imagining of the American Civil War three decades on from the surrender of the Confederate forces at Appomattox and from the pen of a writer never previously within earshot of actual military combat? Conrad’s implicit reference-back, too, in phrasing like “war and love”, to the Aeneid (and by implication the Iliad and the Odyssey) were hardly amiss. Behind the telling of The Red Badge of Courage lies the memory of older, more ancestral battles. Hemingway, too, hits the mark in crediting Crane with having dramatized a conflict that as has often been noted might well have become America’s unwritten war.5 Besides the De Forest novel, which truly did draw upon its author’s battle experience, one can justifiably cite verse like Whitman’s Drum Taps (1865) and Melville’s Battle Pieces (1866), or the great war passages in the autobiographies of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Alexander H. Stephens – each memorably analysed by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore (1962), or cryptic story-telling like Twain’s “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed” (1885) and Ambrose Bierce’s laconic vignettes “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “Parker Adderson, Philosopher”, both reprinted in his Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). Later popular culture classics enter the reckoning, notably Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, both the best-seller of 1936 and the MGM’s Clark Gable-Vivien Leigh screen extravaganza of 1939, and MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville (1955) as an epic of the Confederacy’s infamous prisoner-of-war camp. But

State University Press, 1964; R.W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A Biography, NY: George Braziller Inc., 1968; and Edwin H. Cady’s revised Twayne’s United States Authors Series volume, Stephen Crane, Boston, MA: G.K. Hall and Co., 1962, 1980. See also Theodore L. Gross and Stanley Wertheim, Hawthorne, Melville, Stephen Crane: A Critical Bibliography, NY and London: Collier-Macmillan, The Free Press, 1971. 5 The definitive study in this connection is Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and The Civil War, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.

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given these, or virtually any other contributing literary Civil War text, none truly achieve the voice (or eye) of The Red Badge of Courage. As to subsequent American war writing it would be remiss not to re-emphasize quite how much is owed to Crane. Despite possible other starting-points, Cooper, say, or Melville, in Crane it has an essential fountainhead. In the first place, there has to be Hemingway himself, whether the Nick Adams stories, A Farewell To Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls, or any of his prolific battle-line newspaper and periodical work. It is not difficult to discern Crane’s impress in a tradition stretching line from key World War I novels like John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers and e.e. cummings’ The Enormous Room through to World War II in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, with a transition into apocalypse or the absurd in the fictions of Kurt Vonnegut, John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, Thomas Berger, Tim O’Brien, Robert Stone or Bobbie Anne Mason. Where Crane likely found his prime source in the 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville, his successors have turned to the Verdun trenches, the Japanese-held Pacific, Dresden, Italy, Korea and Vietnam. Yet different as has been the locale, both inside and beyond America, or the idiom at work, rarely in Crane’s own phrase has “the sweep and fire” (3) of men fighting under arms been better caught at essence. The Red Badge of Courage has long invited yet other comparisons. One has been national, Crane as realist-naturalist literary countryman of William Dean Howells, Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser. Another has been European. Crane has not unfairly been likened to the English Great War poets, Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg, though debate has swung about as to whether The Red Badge of Courage yields a vision of irony or pity or somehow both. A still grander European direction is to be found in his letter to John Northern Hilliard in which he basks in the praise accorded him by no lesser a dignitary than an English cabinet minister: I have only one pride – and may it be forgiven me. This single pride is that the English edition of “The Red Badge” has been received with praise by the English reviewers. Mr George Wyndham, Under Secretary for War in the British Government, says, in an essay, that the book challenges comparison with the most vivid scenes of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” or of Zola’s


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“Downfall”; and the big reviews here praise it for just what I intended it to be, a psychological portrait of fear.6

Tolstoy and Zola as standards of comparison understandably aroused his pride, high company for a writer who goes on in his letter to allege that his aim amounts to little more than “a slice of life”, though one free of “preaching” and “moral lesson”. The phrasing, for better or worse, and often with untroubled confidence, has been used to situate Crane inside categories like realism and naturalism. The other great affinity that seems positively insisted upon in his work is with painting, Crane as a writer of acute visual and painterly accomplishment. His play of colour, of hues and shadings, points to a shared impressionism with Monet, Pisarro, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne, not to mention countrymen like Thomas Eakins with his iconic canvases (Whitman, or as well-know as any, The Watering Hole) and the great Civil War photographer Mathew B. Brady. The latter Hemingway would aptly invoke as an inescapable force in Crane’s fiction. 7 Note has duly also been taken of the illustrations Crane saw in Battles and Leaders of The Civil War (1884) and other popular accounts of the national conflict. But whatever the sources, there can be few readers for whom Crane’s novella does not register through its pictorialism, sight and sound as it were, absorbed and held within the prose upon the page. In this respect The Red Badge of Courage makes visual Henry Fleming’s every current of feeling, the nostalgic home-leaving, the boredom with military drilling, the rising panic, the calm then shock, and the final elation. Colour, almost subliminally, becomes drama in itself, the text as a revolving prism of sensation cast in reds, browns, blacks, greys, purples, whites and greens. But in giving full due to Crane’s powers of visuality, it remains also to his credit that he neither overdoes the effects nor puts mere coloration ahead of the story’s own necessary propulsion. 6

This celebrated letter was written to John Northern Hilliard in January 1896: see Stephen Crane’s Letters, eds R.W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes, NY: New York University Press, 1960, 31-32. George Wyndham’s original review appeared as “A Remarkable Book” in the New Century, January 1896, 30-40. 7 On the connection with Eakins, see Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

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Gothic to Multicultural ***

Acknowledgement of the textual controversy about The Red Badge of Courage equally invites note. Here, the names of Fredson Bowers as General Editor of The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane (1969-75) and of the textual scholars Hershel Parker and Henry Binder assume prominence. The latter advocates a reconstituted Red Badge that puts back all the deletions (and much of the slang) originally to be found in the manuscript first submitted to Appleton. The effect of this reconstituted version in fact may not be entirely, as Binder originally titled his influential article of 1978, “The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows”, not at least compared in detail with the more generally agreed text (Norton, 1982). But assuredly it does make a difference. The irony looks still more uncompromising. Henry’s war-shaped manhood veers more discernibly towards parody as much as heroism. In consequence the indictment of war takes on still heavier emphasis. 8 *** To one degree or another all these perspectives come into play in any due estimate of The Red Badge of Courage. But another offers itself, that of why of all storytelling forms the novella so suited Crane’s purposes. In this, Conrad’s emphasis upon “a small volume”, “a gem”, and Hemingway’s upon The Red Badge as “as much of one piece as a great poem is”, despite the versions of the text they were working from, serve as points of departure. For there is about the work a virtual geometrical precision of design, a sense of story told to and within strictest limits and co-ordinates. Crane, reflexively, comes up with his own formulation: soldiery enclosed “in a moving box” (17), men caught literally, and figurally, in two opposed cubes in which fear, 8

The recent sequence is as follows: The University of Virginia Press Edition of The Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1969-75; Henry Binder, “The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows”, Studies in the Novel, 10 (1978), 9-47; The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War, ed. Henry Binder, NY: W.W. Norton, 1982, and NY: Avon Books, 1983 – this edition reprints and revises his “The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows”, 111-58; Hershel Parker, “Getting Used to the ‘Original Form’ of The Red Badge of Courage”, in New Essays on “The Red Badge of Courage”, ed. Lee Clark Mitchell, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986.


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injury, panic and death are likely at any time, as, to be sure, are selflessness and heroism. For it is also the text itself, I suggest, which can equally be thought “a moving box”, an analogizing enlistment of the reader into the action’s claustrophobia. The novella for Crane could not have been more apposite, longer than the short story with its emphasis upon the single event and shorter than the novel with its complication of span and depth. Henry’s jolts from stasis to euphoria, becalming to panic, choice to no-choice, and the ironies that attend upon it, Crane so fashions as to make the reader feel drawn into, boxed, within this “Episode of the American Civil War”. The sub-title, its implications at least, could hardly be more purposive. Crane’s opening in The Red Badge of Courage works to clear space and underline the transition from one time and climate to the other: The cold passed reluctantly from the earth and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green the army awakened and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet and at night when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness one could see, across, the red eye-like gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.

Without ado, cinematically, Crane shows boundaries, situating latitudes and longitudes, actually in process of coming into being. Night gives way to dawn. Fogs lift. Cold eases. Brown yields to green. “Liquid mud” hardens into “proper thoroughfares”. As a sleeping army awakens silence gets replaced by “the noise of rumors” and from its nocturnal “sorrowful blackness” the river becomes “amber-tinted”. The two encampments are revealed to lie within sight of each other, Union men on one hill, Confederates on the facing hill. The latter’s camp-fires have glowed overnight “red” and “eye-like”, a kind of malignly opposing fixed gaze (1). Within these parameters the soldierly talk can indeed be thought to belong to men boxed by circumstance, by as yet unknown orders, by the hazards of weather and climate, and by the very battle-terrain itself. The talk, vernacular and contrasting, is of movement, change, maybe

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“’t’morrah” and “up th’ river” as “a certain tall soldier” says. But immediately he is countermanded by “another private”, who complains “I don’t believe th’ derned ol’ army’s ever goin ’t move …. I’ve got ready t’ move eight times in th’ last two week an’ we aint moved yit (1-2).” A corporal, similarly, feels himself and his comrades to be “in a sort of eternal camp” (2). The impulse towards movement is so checked, the will-to-action action caught in stasis, the one impulse held against the other. The matter Crane then transfers to Henry Fleming himself, a conscript who believes himself as yet only “a part of a vast blue demonstration”, a victim of “drill” and “reviews” (6). Ironically he both craves the action that will transform him from novice to veteran yet endures the terror that he might “run from a battle” (7). Not to fight, to fight, to run from the fight: these apprehensions in turn Crane underwrites in Jim Conklin’s talk of past “scrimmages”. If a soldier indeed is to run, says Conklin, let him “run like th’ devil an’ no mistake”; if not, “stand an’ fight” (9). The imagery of impulse and counter-impulse join perfectly, the one resolve matched and undermined by the other. The regiment waits on through yet another night, “the youth” as Crane describes him “clamoring at what he considered to be the intolerable slowness of the generals” (10). Orders arrive as if by unknown decree and “a moment later” the regiment “went swinging off into the darkness” (11). Other regiments march ahead and behind, nothing if not the perfect box formation. Against the free-flow idiomatic banter, the horseplay and sarcasms, the text counters with “Whole brigades grinned in unison” (12). As backdrop to both, warningly, “black”, then “purple”, streak the sky (15). The youth finds himself caught mid-way. And in his interior musing he supplies one of the key operative images for the book as a whole: But he instantly saw that it would be impossible for him to escape from the regiment. It enclosed him. And there were iron laws of tradition and law on four sides. He was in a moving box. (17)

For as the Army “encloses” Henry, holds him in its will, so right across its twenty-five chapters The Red Badge of Courage seeks to enclose the reader within its own narrative, story and story-effect


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fused into one and the same. Henry himself becomes a cipher of “the line”, the en-squared “ranks” (17), deviating only to step around the prophetically dead soldier whose boot soles have “been worn to the thinnest of writing-paper” (18). Without pressing for too undue a reflexivity, it can be said that not only does Henry march at risk where other young soldiers have gone before but does so from within a story of battle itself previously written thin by prior other authorship. As the first battle for Henry comes up, Crane adds weight, a necessary interiority, to his box imagery. Having depicted Henry as first dug in, then promptly ordered to move, he refers to the youth’s sight of “horizontal flashes” ahead, the markers for “the red animal, war, the blood-swollen god” (19). As he awaits initiation, Henry thinks of the “common personality” of an army, its “single desire” for victory (26). The terms of his meditation could hardly be more to the point: He was at a task. He was like a carpenter who has made many boxes, making still another box, only there was furious haste in his movements. He, in his thoughts, was careering off in other places, even as the carpenter who as he works, whistles and thinks of his friend or his enemy, his home or a saloon. And these jolted dreams were never perfect to him afterward but remained a mass of blurred shapes. (27)

Not only has Henry been boxed by the army, by his enlistment and training, he now chooses to accept and work inside his box. Only the onset of panic, blind intuitive panic, will cause him to seek extrication. Where to the one hand he has become “not a man but a member”, when he runs he will think of the enemy as “machines of steel”, of his fellows as “machine-like idiots”, and of himself as the “proverbial chicken” (32). But escape proves an illusion. He runs only from one part of the box to another, ironically to be thought by his comrades honourably wounded in the line of duty rather than having been stunned by the random swing of a rifle. Henry’s box, the box of war, in Crane’s scheme permits no escape but mere shifts of location within an overall military control.

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Of all the boxes-within-boxes delineated in the story, Crane offers none more chilling than Henry’s encounter with the cadaver. As he flees for a moment the “brittle blue line” and “the rumble of death”, he enters “thick woods”, a kind of Nature’s stage-set situated off-track. Crane’s terms are appropriately architectural. The copse he likens, not un-ironically, to “a chapel”, replete with “green doors”, “a gentle brown carpet” and “a religious half-light” (33-37). Henry has indeed found the “dark and intricate place” he thinks of himself as having once sought. The surrounding eddies of life again take on a bitter irony: the “swishing saplings”, the “embraces of trees and vines”, the “rhythmical noises” of insects, the “impudent head” of the woodpecker, the “light-hearted wing” of a bird, the “jovial squirrel”, and even the “small animal” which pounces upon “a silver-gleaming fish” (37). If these can be thought life-forms, at once kinetic and various, on crossing the inmost threshold Henry comes upon a quite counter form, the inversion of the quick and the dead: He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a column-like tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was opened. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the grey skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle across the upper lip. The youth gave a shriek as he confronted the thing. He was, for moments, turned to stone before it. He remained staring into the liquid-looking eyes. The dead man and the living man exchanged a long look ... At last, he burst the bonds which had fastened him to the spot and fled, unheeding the underbrush. He was pursued by a sight of the black ants swarming greedily upon the grey face and venturing horribly near to the eyes ... The trees about the portal of the chapel moved sighingly in a soft wind. A sad silence was upon the little, guarding edifice ... He thought as he remembered the small animal capturing the fish and he greedy ants feeding upon the flesh of the dead soldier, that there was given another law which far-over-topped


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it – all life existing upon death, eating ravenously, stuffing itself with the hopes of the dead. And nature’s processes were obliged to hurry. (37-38)

The horror of the encounter scarcely needs be insisted upon so sure is Crane’s touch. The exchange of looks, the blue uniform fading into a melancholy green, the “appalling” yellow of a once red mouth, and above all, the ants close to the dead soldier’s eyes, all combine to indicate that “other law” which sets the living not only upon the living but even upon the dead. Human war is also Nature’s war by extension, scavenging, predatory; not for Crane some Wordsworthian moral Nature but a Nature operating to near mercantilist rules of supply and demand. Henry leaves this box to flee back to the larger one, that which “was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to him” (38). Having seen the very corpse of death he immediately finds himself listening to a ditty that serves up its own cryptic commentary: Sing a song ’a vic’try A pocketful ’a bullets Five an’ twenty dead men Baked in a – pie (40)

Baked, or boxed – Henry, like his soldier compeers, operates within enclosure, the regulated, inescapable space of advance and retreat, battle-line, and officer order. Crane ensures that his reader, in responding kind, is also drawn into this geometry of release and check. *** The return to “the place of fighting” and Henry’s mock-glorious apotheosis as a soldier begins with his witness to Jim Conklin’s death and ends in his taking hold of the regimental flag. Conklin’s death-dance, a doomed pirouette or square-dance under the “red sun”, transfers itself to Henry’s own physical sensations, not unlike the spasm in Melville’s Billy Budd which passes from the young Foretopman to Captain Vere at the hanging from the yard-arm aboard the Bellipotent. Henry has no choice but to take into himself Conklin’s grotesque transition from life to death. He both witnesses and inwardly re-enacts this descent from movement into stasis, motion into motionlessness.

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He first thinks longingly of his own wish for “a red badge” (42), a wound, to match that of Jim Conklin. He then stands transfixed by Conklin’s running into a nearby clearing, himself also the veteran of having run and just as absurdly. He experiences a matching strangeness in his own momentarily static body as Conklin hits the ground “in the manner of a falling tree”. His last sight is of Conklin’s death’s-head grin, mouth open and teeth clenched “in a laugh” (45). The ritual is both highly particular yet also another marker for the novella at large: a veteran dying inside the box watched by his successor, the one enclosed soldier watched by another equally enclosed soldier. Crane has Henry cling, nonetheless, to the illusion that he is in possession of a separate, unique existence, one somehow exempt from “universal laws” and “system” (54). Henry also looks to make good on his self-estimation as a Cain branded by “the marks of his flight” (54). He has become the newly willing member of “that mighty blue machine” (53) who will find his nemesis as the miles gloriosus. No sooner, however, has he so resolved than the box closes in on him once again as he meets Union soldiers heading back from a skirmish with the enemy: Presently, men were running hither and thither, in all ways. The artillery booming, forward, rearward, and on the flanks made jumble of ideas of direction. Landmarks had vanished into the gathered gloom. The youth began to imagine he had gotten into the centre of the tremendous quarrel and he could perceive no way out of it. From the mouths of the fleeing men came a thousand wild questions but no one made answers.

Fleming indeed knows only “the tremendous quarrel” and “no way out of it” (58). Even as he joins up with his own regiment, “Th’ 304th N’York”, he has no clear control of any self-willed “direction” (60). Crane’s imagery again bespeaks enclosure, the boxed-in arena of death: “The forest seemed a vast hive of men buzzing about in frantic circles …” (61-62). Hived, frantically circled, is precisely what Henry and his fellows have become, bees, insect men, driven by orders they can neither fully understand nor control. The talk about the enemy contains its own familiar image: “All th’ officers say we’ve got th’ rebs in a pretty tight box” (68). Returned to his regiment Henry may


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be, re-linked with his friend Wilson and ironically honoured for his wound, he in fact has done no more than join precisely his own side’s box. He sleeps as if “he had been asleep for a thousand years” (66), the sleep of the dead-in-life. In waking he envisions himself, and the other soldiery, as though in yet another variation of the box, the army as charnel house, some fantastical morgue. The language to hand appropriately turns upon immuration and burial: About him, were the rows and groups of men that he had dimly seen the previous night. They were getting a last draught of sleep before the awakening. The gaunt, care-worn faces and dusty figures were made plain by this quaint light at the dawning but it dressed the skin of the men in corpse-like hues and made the tangled limbs appear pulseless and dead. The youth started up with a little cry when his eyes first swept over this motionless mass of men, thick-spread upon the ground, pallid and in strange postures. His disordered mind interpreted the hall of the forest as a charnel place. He believed for an instant that he was in the house of the dead and he did not dare to move lest these corpses start up, squalling and squawking. (66)

Hieronymus Bosch might have found his text here, soldierly death seen in terms of baroque interment. Onwards Henry and the others march “in a spread column”, the talk in one respect all of military initiative, seizing the momentum. In contrast, however, one of Henry’s soldier-youth companions speaks of being object as against initiator: “Good Gawd”, …“we’re allus bein’ chased around like rats. It makes me sick. Nobody seems t’ know where we go ner why we go. We jest git fired around from piller t’post an’ git licked here an’ git licked there an’ nobody knowswhat it’s done fer. It makes a man feel like a damn’ kitten in a bag …” (77)

A kitten bagged adds one more entry to the text’s lexicon of enclosure. As they get ready for the next engagement, and acting on that cue, Henry’s companions are said to stand like “men tied to stakes” (78). As throughout the text draws us into these alternating pulses, fixity and release within the enclosing box, and whose rhythm works doubly, and overlappingly, to implicate the reader in its very theme.

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In acceding to the regiment’s “forward movement” Henry is said to fight “like a pagan who defends his religion” (80) and in despite of the “shaggy man” who says to him “We’ll git swallered”. He sees only “the land in front of him” (84) while behind lies “a coherent trail of bodies” (85). Crane’s language again draws on linear demarcation, the army held within a template of prescribed rut and groove. Henry lurches onward with the others as though “involved like a cart involved in mud and muddle” (89). The regiment as a whole becomes a “scurrying mass”, falls back temporarily “to the stolid trees”, and Henry and Wilson tussle for who will carry the flag (89-90). In winning Henry takes the flag as the spur to a regiment that has become “a machine run-down” (90). Crane’s irony sharpens to a fine point: the would-be escapee from the box has become the very emblem-bearer of its control. The focus pulls back slightly but also again to enclose the observer in the same situation as the soldiers: The way seemed eternal. In the clouded haze, men became panic-stricken with the thought that the regiment had lost its path and was proceeding in a perilous direction. Once, the men who headed the wild procession turned and came pushing back against their comrades screaming that they were being fired upon from points which they had considered to be toward their own lines. At this cry, a hysterical fear and dismay beset the troops. A soldier who heretofore had been ambitious to make the regiment into a wise little band that would proceed calmly amid the huge-appearing difficulties, suddenly sank down and buried his face in his arms with an air of bowing to a doom. From another, a shrill lamentation rang out filled with profane allusions to a general. Men ran hither and thither seeking with their eyes, roads of escape. With serene regularity as if controlled by a schedule, bullets buffed into men. (91)

“Roads of escape”, like “no way out of it”, offers the perfect gloss. To become “men” the troops must fight “in the manner of a pair of boxers”, two “bodies of soldiers” whose “fast, angry firings” compel them to a fixed antagonism (92). Both in terms of space and time they are locked one into the other, “scheduled” bullets dropping them “serenely” into death. They hear, too, other engagements in the distance, other lines of conflict taking place within the box. And through it all “the youth” keeps “the bright colors to the front”, the


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moving box’s forward herald and standard-bearer. The regiment becomes “a flying regiment”, its different “sides” and “walls” geometrically welded into a whole. No matter that as a regiment it has “bled extravagantly”, nor that Henry has foresworn all thoughts of escaping the “entrapment” he associates with the four captured Confederate soldiers (100). The box has claimed him, and for the moment if we enroll in the text’s momentum, ourselves. “The regiment marched until it had joined its fellows” (105). So, in the novella’s last chapter, Crane reminds that this one box belongs inside a succession of others. The regiment fits inside “the brigade”, and the brigade inside the Union army as a whole. “Dust-covered” troops re-assemble “in column” and “parallel to the enemy’s lines” (105), once again a squared configuration to continue the conflict. Henry, and his companion Wilson, however, now embrace the boundaries. They bathe in “the gilded images of memory” as to their first “successful” battle. Henry feels a “little coronation” in the lieutenant’s praise that he has fought like “a wildcat”. Even the “shoutings in his brain” about his temptation to run and possible “shame” are silenced. The once “novice who did not understand” has become the triumphant figure, ironically the veteran beneficiary of “fate” (106). Crane’s cryptic summary runs: “it was suddenly clear to him that he had been wrong not to kiss the knife and bow to the cudgel” (107). The would-be fugitive from the box has become its most incarcerated resident, a promoter of its supposed manhood-conferring powers. To argue the claims of the box, to embrace and proclaim them, in Crane’s angling suggests an even more fatal form of enclosure. What Henry has ceased to see, but Crane requires his reader to see, is the price of this new stage of self-enboxment. Manhood has come to mean acceptance of a militarized universe, the squared and paired-off divisions of war. Henry, at first shadowed by memory of the tall solder and his own would-be desertion, converts them into the making of his own “quiet manhood”, “scars” which have faded to “flowers” (108). Crane also returns to where the novella began, a picturing frame for “the red sickness of battle” whose meanings for Henry bear not on war as diminution but the test and glorification of “a world for him”:

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Gothic to Multicultural It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort, in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking-sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry night-mare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst, to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks; an existence of soft and eternal peace. (108-109)

Crane’s frame for his story, as it were, lowers and closes in upon Henry. The “low wretched sky” joins the ground-level “liquid brown mud”. This reducing scale, the literal touching of heaven and earth, all again confirm Crane’s sureness in directing parts into whole, detail into form. That form, of course, is for him the novella, deployed as purposefully as can be to his needs of proportion, height and depth. Crane matches his storytelling to his story as if instinctively, the intensity and duration of his young soldier’s rite of passage pressed into exact narrative mould. *** “In a moving box”: the phrase works in every way to the two principal ends above. On the one hand it captures Henry's experience in having signed up with and having been absorbed into the regiment, and then his subsequent demarch into battle. Equally, and correspondingly, it underlines how The Red Badge of Courage operates as itself a kind of fictional “box” which encloses the reader within its own precisely drawn and regulated boundaries. Both have been the object of observations by Crane’s fellow novelists. The first returns us to Conrad, who praised Crane not only for a powerful war story (he calls Henry “the symbol of all untried men”) but for The Red Badge of Courage as a vindication of storytelling craft: But as to “masterpiece”, there is no doubt that The Red Badge of Courage is that, if only because of the marvellous accord of the vivid impressionistic description of action on that woodland battlefield, and the imaged style of analysis of emotions in the


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inward moral struggle going on in the breast of one individual the young soldier of the book, the protagonist of the monodrama presented to us in an endless succession of graphic and coloured phrases.9

Conrad’s use of terms like “marvellous accord” and “monodrama”, albeit in their own way, speak directly to the qualities of narrative concentration that make the novella for Crane so right a choice of form. A similar set of judgements is to be found in Ralph Ellison’s Introduction to his 1960 selection of Crane short stories. Having praised Crane’s “courage” in resisting the “noisy clamor” of late nineteenth-century American war fever and jingoism, he goes on to speak of Crane’s work as “a triumph of art”. In part, this has to do with its “realistic poetry”; even more, it has to do with its success as a tale “unerringly” told. 10 For Ellison, as for other readers, The Red Badge of Courage achieves that rare thing, the unmistakable integration of theme – the war and peace within the human breast cast as the sub-title’s “an episode of the American Civil War” – and story-telling design. 11 Both dimensions coalesce perfectly in the phrase “in a moving box”, Crane’s own aptest marker for the workings of his landmark novella.

9

Conrad, Last Essays, 177-78. Ralph Ellison, Introduction to The Red Badge of Courage and Four Great Stories by Stephen Crane, NY: Dell Publishing Co., 1960. Reprinted in “Stephen Crane and The Mainstream of American Fiction,” Shadow and Act, NY: Random House, 60-75 and The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, NY: Random House/The Modern library, 1995, 122. 11 Crane scholarship, predictably, has been prolific. But I want to acknowledge, especially, the following: James T. Cox, “The Imagery of The Red Badge of Courage”, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 5/3 (Autumn 1959), 209-19, and Mordecai Marcus, “The Unity of The Red Badge of Courage”, in The Red Badge of Courage: Text and Criticism, eds Richard Lettis et al, NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1960, 189-95. 10

9 HELL’S LOOSE: APOCALYPSE IN THE EARLY AND MODERN AFRICAN AMERICAN NOVEL We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake …. What to an American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals more to him, more than all the other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy licence; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of the United States at this very hour. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852)1

Frederick Douglass, slavery’s early ascendant voice of abolition, implies a Final Reckoning, storm, whirlwind and earthquake as the inevitable human consequence of a continuation of “the peculiar institution”. Who better so to speak to an America celebrating Independence Day 1852? Everything he brought to bear, his oratory, his activism and magazine work, his landmark Narrative with its 1

Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852”, reprinted in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay, NY and London: W. W. Norton, 1997, 388.

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account of slaveholding and life inside and escape from the plantations of Maryland, gave him credential. Douglass sets down a touchstone, a challenge to the ages not only of slavery but all white supremacism. Marcus Garvey, the 1920s Harlem luminary and prime mover in the Back to Africa nationalist movement as embodied in his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and then in the ill-fated Black Star Line by which he thought to take returnees to Liberia and elsewhere in the mother continent as he often took to calling it, envisages worlds at binary racial opposites: “Whilst we are bordering on a future of brighter things, we are also at our danger period, when we must either accept the right philosophy, or go down by following deceptive propaganda which has hemmed us in for many centuries.”2 Imamu Amiri Baraka, his name newly Islamized from the LeRoi Jones of his Newark, New Jersey upbringing and recent Greenwich Village Beat phase, publishes “State/meant” in 1965, the same year as his arrest by the FBI for allegedly using Federal funds intended for his Harlem theatre-work to build a gun arsenal in furtherance of Black Power. He declares “The Black Artist’s role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.”3 Rita Dove, America’s poet laureate 1993-95, in “David Walker”, her biographical poem of 1980, looks back to the black Boston clothier-author of the 1820s revolutionary pamphlet literally smuggled in the pockets and linings of used garmentry into the slave south and beyond – Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (1829):4 On the faith of an eye-wink, pamphlets were stuffed into trouser pockets. Pamphlets transported in the coat linings of itinerant seamen, jackets 2 Marcus Garvey, “The Future As I See It” (1932), reprinted in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, ed. Amy Jacques-Garvey, NY: Atheneum, 1969. 3 LeRoi Jones/Imamu Amiri Baraka, “State/meant” (1965), in Home: Social Essays, NY: William Morrow and Company, 1966. 4 David Walker, Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very expressly for Those of The United States, Boston: David Walker, 1829. The standard edition is Walker’s Appeal, ed. Charles M. Wiltser, NY: Hill and Wang, 1965.

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ringwormed with salt traded drunkenly to pursers in the Carolinas, pamphlets ripped out, read aloud: Men of colour, who are also of sense. Outrage. Incredulity. Uproar in state legislatures. We are the most wretched, degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began.5

Each of these voices gives witness and representative continuity to the seams of apocalypse within the literature of Afro-America. They also introduce a context for the black-written novel which, amid every other variety of interest, has long found itself drawn to a vision of worlds turned (or to be turned) upside down by slavery and its aftermath. The tradition runs from Martin R. Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America; a Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba, issued only as installments in the Anglo-American Magazine in 1859 and the Weekly Anglo-American in 1861-62, to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and into a body of contemporary fiction as different, and distinctive, as John Wideman’s portrait of revolutionary anachronism in The Lynchers and Toni Morrison’s narrative of phantasmagorical slave-haunting in Beloved.6 *** Whatever their differences of styling, the novels involved bespeak the American racial order brought to the edge of, even actually to be seen having crossed into, quite momentous un-order. Theirs is the imagining of an Atlantic dispensation if white alongside black, then also in the light of slavery-to-ghetto supremacist equations, often enough white over black. Subterfuge, escape, exile all feature but, so, at different times, and in extremis, has the call, and risk, of apocalypse. At one pole there has been messianic religion, ex-slave chiliastic Christian communities and the more recent Black Muslim movement. At another the issue has taken political form, slave insurrection to city 5

Rita Dove, “David Walker (1985-1830)”, in Selected Poems, NY: Pantheon-Vintage, 1993, 6 For the first reconstituted edition of Delany’s novel, see Blake Or the Huts of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952), 30th Anniversary Edition, NY: Random House, 1982; John Wideman, The Lynchers, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1973; and Toni Morrison, Beloved, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

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shoot-out. Historic overlaps of activism there may have been, white Union soldiery in the Civil War to cross-racial work in the NAACP, Quaker and other New England abolitionists in the nineteenth-century to 1960s Civil Rights freedom-riders. But equally there has been the hate, the will to apartheid, with the Ku Klux Klan as segregationist flag-bearer. Given the span of communal history, slaveholding to segregation, Dixie lynching to citied poverty and imprisonment, how could the radical discrepancy between American promise and reality not at times have produced a dream of apocalypse, the once and for all reversal of America’s racial status quo? An enduring trope for this contradictory, massively spiralled drama duly appears in Clotel by William Wells Brown, himself an ex-slave author and begetter of one of the earliest ever published African American novels.7 His account of Clotel as tragic mulatto, daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress and driven to her own drowning in the Potomac, calls attention to a begetting irony at the heart of the American story. If, in 1620, the freedom-seeking Mayflower lands in Massachusetts with its Anglo-Puritans, so a year earlier, in 1619, a Dutch man-of-war sells its “twenty negars” to Captain John Smith in Jamestown, Virginia. However much the backward glance, as Brown shrewdly emphasizes, these near simultaneous events bear also dark forward prophecy, ships and voyagers as the emblems of a paired and yet at the same time ominously un-paired America. That dream, or anti-dream, in fact begins early. So otherwise peaceable a founding slave poet as New England’s Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) make a notable early contribution. Her “Goliath of Gath” pietistically reworks the biblical epic of David and Goliath based on 1 Samuel XVII. 8 Yet at the same time there can be no mistaking its more oblique pointer to a possible war of slave liberation ahead. A pioneer text like The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah 7

William Wells Brown, Clotel or, The President’s Daughter, a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, London: Partridge and Oakey, 1853. The novel was twice revised as Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States, Boston, MA: James Redpath, 1964; Clotelle: Or, The Colored Heroine. A Tale of the Southern States, Boston: Lee and Shepherd, 1867. Reprinted in Three Classic African-American Novels, ed. William L. Andrews, NY and Harmondsworth: Mentor-Penguin, 1990. 8 Phillis Wheatley, The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John Shields, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988.


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Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African even more confirms the note, at once of captivity and escape story, travelogue and proto-novel.9 For as much as Equiano offers a life full of voyage, and an equally adventuresome play of mind, he at no time holds back on his own livetime’s witness to the incarcerating horror of slavery as he calls it. Slave narratives, estimated to run to well over a thousand, yield a more explicit apocalyptic signature, be it as personal suffering, the religious dream of Zion, or, failing abolition and suffrage, the call for insurrection. Is not the Covey fight in Douglass’ Narrative, which he designates the turning point of his career, an apocalypse in miniature? How best to read the seven-year loophole hiding out, separation from her children, and sexual menace of Dr Flint as slave-holder, but as deepest trauma for the author-protagonist in Harriet Jacobs/Linda Brent’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl? Is not the well-known conciliatory temper of Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery underwritten by a searing memory of bare childhood survival and indigency?10 Slave narrative, nonetheless, has not been the only vehicle of remembered insurrection. The Amistad shipboard slave mutiny of 1839 acts as a major source in Jones/Baraka’s play Slaveship: A Historical Pageant. The seizure of the mutineers and their leader Cinque, the New Haven trials of 1839-40 with John Quincy Adams in the legal team, the freeing of these one-time slaves, and the Sierra Leone aftermath, in would become a modern flm in 1997 from Steven Spielberg. The insurrections of Denmark Vesey in South Carolina in 1822 and Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831 caused massive panic, sometimes incredulity, throughout the 9 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written By Himself, London: Printed for and Sold by the Author, No. 10, Union-Street, Middlesex Hospital; and may be had of all the Booksellers in Town and Country Entered at Stationer’s Hall, 1789; The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, London: 1790; The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself, New York: Printed and Sold by W. Dureel at his book-store and printing office, No. 19, Q Street, 1791, 2 vols in 1. For a current edition, see The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Gates. 10 Frederick Douglass, Narrative, Boston, MA: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845; Harriet Jacobs/Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself , ed. L. Maria Child, Boston, MA: Published by the author, 1861; Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, An Autobiography, NY: A. L. Burt, 1901.

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slaveholding south. The latter, especially, supplies a continuing source of black spoken legend and, later, yet further controversy for its alleged white sexual and other distortion when made over by William Styron into his “meditation on history”, the half-title of The Confessions of Nat Turner. Slavery into novel, in fact, has another precedent: Frederick Douglass himself used the Creole affray of 1841, a slave-ship take-over led by Madison Washington, as the grounds for his magazine novel, The Heroic Slave.11 *** The Civil War equally, and inevitably, bears its own apocalyptic nuance – the national fissure of North and South, John Brown’s killings at Harpers Ferry in 1859, each major battle and slaughter and, of most immediate relevance, the sacrifice of black troops fighting under Union colours. In this respect a poem like the “The Colored Soldiers” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, for all that he was known as some fond-colloquial “black Robbie Burns”, delivers a truly forceful requiem. 12 The poem can be read in company with a novel like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy, which, despite its main theme of Free Negro life in Philadelphia, at the same time celebrates black Civil War military heroism.13 Did not, too, this returning black soldiery carry always the silhouette of possible further reprise, more race-driven combat, given the broken promises of Reconstruction? Harper also offers a reminder thatthe war and its abolitionist lead-up was never exclusively male-centred literary terrain. Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman vintage anti-slavers, call (again 11 LeRoi Jones/Imamu Amiri Baraka, Slaveship: A Historical Pageant, 1967, in Four Black Revolutionary Plays, Indianapolis. IN: Bobbs-Merill, 1969; William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, NY: Random House, 1967 – for the controversy the novel aroused, see William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, ed. John Henrik Clarke, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986; and Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave, originally published in March 1853 in Frederick Douglass’s Newspaper, and then as The Heroic Slave: A Thrilling Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington, in Pursuit of Liberty, np, 1863. The text is reprinted in Three Classic African-American Novels, ed. Andrews. 12 Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, NY:: Dodd, Mead, 1913. 13 Frances Ellen Watkins, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, Philadelphia, PA: Garrigues, 1892.


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apocalyptically?) for a double liberation: that of black women both as work and sexual property. Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, a deliberate riposte to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), tells one version of that story in the figure of Vyvry as black wife-mother survivor faced with both the racial and personal chaos of slavery.14 Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman offers another, a Louisiana plantation life and womanhood carried down through traumatic slave ownership, the Civil War, Reconstruction and segregation into the 1960s of Civil Rights.15 Alice Walker’s version of apocalypse ties in, inextricably, with her celebrated womanist credo and her affiliation with Zora Neale Hurston. It involves black sorority, a self-freeing from black as much as white patriarchy. In Meridian, told against the backdrop of Civil Rights with its Freedom Rides, Birmingham bombings in 1963, and marches like Selma in 1965, it involves Civil rights and community politics. In The Color Purple it looks to the rise from silence and the abuse of rape and incest of a black child-into-woman like Celie. The Temple of My Familiar frames a shamanistic vision of Africa both liberating, yet, in its passed down practices of female circumcision, also repressive. 16 Gayl Jones’ Corrigidora, also casts the story of black women as too often one of sexual oppression.The apocalyptic ravage of the female body begun under a patriarchal Brazilian slaver finds its eventual but painful redemption and voice in the blues of Ursa Corregidora as the novel’s singer heroine.17 The Great Migration, which between the 1890s and 1920s took an estimated million or more blacks north from rural Dixie into Harlem, Chicago and other cities, becomes for all the Jazz Age hoopla and flourish also a tableau of grim industrial divides by class and colour. Few more vivid depictions exist than William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge, a species of blues narrative of the passage (with due scenes of betrayal and riot) of three brothers as they leave sharecropper

14

Margaret Walker, Jubilee, Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1966. Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, NY: Dial Press, 1971. 16 Alice Walker, Meridian, NY and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1976; The Color Purple, New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1982; and The Temple of My Familiar, NY and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1989. 17 Gayl Jones, Corregidora, NY: Random House, 1975. 15

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Kentucky for the industrial-satanic steel mills of Monongahala Valley, Pennsylvania.18 All these eras carry markers of apocalypse as much personal as communal. From slavery times the recurrence is to chains, ship-holds, Jim Crow, “massa”, lynching, miscegenation, cotton, the quarters, patrollers, John Brown, the Mississippi of “sold down the river”, the Civil War as summarily “the war”, and always the dire language lexicons of “negro” into “nigrah” or “nigger”. Each has become sedimented within black idiom, a memorial language of control and accusation. “Middle Passage” (1966), Robert Hayden’s beautifully crafted poem-sequence, finds its own language to account for the “voyage through death/ to life upon these shores”. His three-part poem speaks of Christian America’s imprisonment of “black gold, black ivory, black seed”, the “charnel stench, effluvium of living death” and slavery’s en-shipments from Africa to America as “shuttles in the rocking doom of history”. 19 Alex Haley’s Roots, and its massively popular TV spin-offs (Roots, 1977, and Roots: The Next Generations, 1979), gave popular media expression to this enforced diaspora, the New World as the black genealogy descended from Kunta Kinte and put to survive within and beyond an America of slave bondage.20 *** The history involved has become as figural as literal, a kind of memorial, and often enough apocalyptic iconography of an AfroAmerica un-free in a land of freedom and caught within each overlapping turn of a politics given modern continuity in the term race. This, even so, is not to avoid recognition of the dangers in simply racializing oppression or powerlessness: the dangers of acceding to an ethos of victimry are well enough known. But from Jamestown in the 1600s through to the Civil War in the 1860s, and from the 1920s as in equal part New Negro renaissance and city or Klan violence through to the turbulent 1960s of Black Power in which Malcolm X would deliver his celebrated “ballot or bullet” speech and Eldridge Cleaver his “We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it”, the imagining of apocalypse as a 18

William Attaway, Blood on the Forge NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1941. Robert Hayden, Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher, NY: Liveright, 1985. 20 Alex Haley, Roots, NY: Doubleday, 1975. 19


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last resort, a pulling down of the American dream, is not tobe denied. It enters not only race politics but all of Afro-America’s historical culture, be it verse, drama or the dazzling compendium of oral folklore and signifying.21 In like measure it finds its expression in the continuity of antebellum and post-bellum African American novels. Martin R. Delany’s Blake, published in 1859, sets terms of reference when he has his Cuban-born hero, Henry Blake, gives notice to his fellow Mississippi slaves of his conspiracy to rid all the Americas of black bondage.22 “I now impart to you a great secret … I have laid a scheme, and matured a plan for a general insurrection of the slaves in every state, and successful overthrow of slavery!”

It strikes an insurrectionary, and indeed an apocalyptic, note, a whole hemisphere called to account and, as need arises, brought into a war of human redress. “I am for war – war upon the whites”, Blake subsequently announces to his Cuban followers of colour. 23 His mooted uprising signifies more than literal de-enslavement. It equally bespeaks the replacing of mere skin identification by an altogether more encompassing recognition of identity. Blake, undoubtedly, can be maze-like, episodic, with lacklustre dips in style. Blake himself can smack of over-heroicization. The story, moreover, remains unfinished, a kind of promissory note. Even so there can be no doubting the implication of black epic, a war-to-be uncompromisingly given to the overthrow of oppression. Further, it is conducted under wholly black auspices and without a white John Brown at Harpers Ferry to aid and abet. Delany creates a sense of gathering pace, history from below. Blake’s own immediate family is sold, arbitrarily, by the white plantation dynasty of Colonel Franks with a rescue narrative to follow. The creation of the secret network across slave territory, be it Mississippi and Texas, Charleston and New Orleans, all with their inlaid respective slavery-stories, ensures 21

Malcolm X, “The Ballot or Bullet”, transcribed and republished in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds Gates and McKay; Eldridge Cleaver, Soul of Ice, NY: McGraw Hill, 1968. 22 Martin R. Delaney, Blake or The Huts of America (1859), Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970, 39. 23 Ibid., 290.

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diversity as much as width of canvas. The conspiracy of Cuban mulattoes and blacks first against the Spanish, and then, with a highjacked slave-ship, to free slaves in the American south, gives off a sense of impending redemption at any or all cost. If a founding novel is to be invoked for black apocalypse, assuredly it lies in Blake. In Sutton Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio the drama lies in separatism, an envisioned black Masonic takeover of Texas as the model “to secure the freedom of the enslaved negroes the world over”.24 Under the dual leadership of the militant Bernard Belgrave, a mulatto, and Belton Piedmont, a full black, who from principle reneges in favour of a gradualism he pays for with his death (“I am not for internecine war”25), the Imperium’s founding is deliberately pitched to call into mind colonial America’s liberation from British rule. An address to the membership proclaims “If it calls for a Valley Forge, let us be free”.26 Like the novel out of which it arises, this serves as Griggs’ warning, his beacon: continue the denial of black rights and America will risk a quite new War of Independence, an apocalyptic war of race. Apocalypse may not quite befit two linking texts, Paul Dunbar’s The Fanatics and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. But both carry the silhouette if not the actuality of millennial conflict, a playing-out in small of race as division. With the Civil War as canvas Dunbar’s The Fanatics takes on America as several kinds of house divided, North and South, white and black, and within both yet further kinds of difference and allegiance. To this end the story centres on the contrasting plantation wealth and would-be chivalry of the three white dynasties of the Van Doren, Waters and Stewart families and the abasement of an attendant slave class. Negotiating both is the vernacular figure of Nigger Ed, the pariah as chorus (“He was a reproach to one and an insult to the other” 27 ). But as he moves increasingly from margin to centre it falls to him to express “anger and sorrow” at the hypocrisy of thinking the Civil War somehow simply attributable to his own “hapless race”. 28 This is history as classic blame-the-victimsyndrome. Dunbar’s own incisive note 24

Sutton Griggs, Imperium in Imperio (1899), NY: Arno/The New York Times, 1969, 191. 25 Ibid., 242. 26 Ibid., 221. 27 Paul Dunbar, The Fanatics, NY: Dodd, Mead, 1901, 181. 28 Ibid., 183-84.


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typically snaps through in the novel’s observation that “It became an act of patriotism to push a black woman from the sidewalks”. 29 Appomattox may have signalled one cessation of hostility, but another, still race-inflected, remains to fester across Dixie. Chesnutt, for his part, tells a later southern dynastic tale, a reworking of the Wilmington, North Carolina race riot of 1898. The divisions at issue, white ascendancy, black exploitation, find their focus also in the phobia of miscegenation, the white Carteret line with its racial honour code undercut by past cross-racial liaisons. That, and white mob passions against perceived black threat, leads Chesnutt to pitch the novel’s action in terms of “storm”, “threatened lynching”, “arms” and “shadow”. 30 One of the black players in the drama, Watson, summarizes Dixie race-politics as follows: “When the race cry is started in this neck of the woods, friendship, religion, humanity, reason, all shrivel up like dry leaves in a raging furnace.”31 It fell to Arna Bontemps, a “New Negro” literary stalwart and Fisk librarian of the 1920s, to write one of the most striking fictionalized accounts of black revolution. In Drums at Dusk he had chronicled Toussaint de l’Ouverture’s leadership of Haiti’s War of Independence in 1802 (to be given canny intertextual reprise in Ralph Ellison’s story “Mister Tousann” in 1941).32 But in Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia: 1800 he looks to a major uprising on American soil itself, that of Gabriel Prosser’s brave, would-be apocalyptic slave seizure of Richmond, Virginia in 1800. “Hell’s loose” observes a white Jacobin sympathizer of the gathering revolt.33 It throws a due light on the “win or lose all” rising hatched by Gabriel as much against his enslavement by word or image as by slaveholding itself – “I’m tired of being a devilish slave”.34 Doubly betrayed by a massive downpour of rain as by the retainer-slave, Old Ben, whose fear of God’s wrath at this uprising against slaveocracy causes him to reveal the plot and its leadership, Gabriel sees himself to the end as following in the steps of Toussaint. Bontemps depicts him as a man of “large design”, “dream”, 29

Ibid., 184-85. Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), ed. Robert M. Farnworth, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan, 1965, 274, 278, 281 and 293. 31 Ibid., 280. 32 Arna Bontemps, Drums at Dusk, NY: Macmillan, 1939. 33 Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia: 1800 (1936), Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968, 130. 34 Ibid., 69 and 103. 30

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with physique to match, the lover of Juba, but above all “the first for freedom of the blacks”. 35 Having failed to win slave freedom in Virginia, and in a striking echo of Babo in Melville’s “Benito Cereno”, Gabriel indicates the rope that eventually hangs him as his only bequeathed explanation or “talk”. 36 Thus silence becomes another style of apocalypse, the willed refusal to answer to a dispensation which itself has hitherto stolen from him and his fellow slaves the right as much to speak as act in their own name. *** It might have been only a matter of time before black apocalypse would take its comic-satiric turn. George Schuyler’s Black No More supplies the script, a fiercely absurd picaresque as a rogue geneticist develops a skin treatment that turns black into white. 37 The Menckenite flavour is unmistakable as the ways of American racial caste reduce to degree-zero absurdity. The world in which Mark Disher rises to control the colour altering “Black-no-more Incorporated” turns, in a boldly mischievous echo of freedom’s cry, on the phrase “White at Last!”, the supposed core longing of all or at least all middle-class Afro-America. The results, indeed, veer into zaniest apocalypse: a mock Klan and NAACP caught up in unholy alliance; “chromatic democracy” as the ruination of the black prosperity paradoxically won from segregated real estate or Afro hair-care as personified in Madame Sisseretta Blandish; W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Marcus Garvey and others of the New Negro elite all put to satiric account; mulatto children born to formerly black but now white women; ex-blacks several times whiter than authentic whites, who so reverse into a new underclass; black confidence-men whites lynched in an always lynch ready Mississippi; and stained skin as eventual chic modishness. If occasionally overwrought Black No More yields exquisite pillorying, the transformation of race from tragic into comic farce. *** 35

Ibid., 198, 213 and 222. Ibid., 223. 37 Black No More: being An account of the strange and wonderful workings of science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940, NY: Macauley, 1931. 36


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With urbanization, and allowing for the kind of lyric down-home black metropolis depicted in, say, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), the vocabulary changes once again. This time the register becomes one of ghetto, tenement, project, hustle, gang, shoot-out, penitentiary, not to mention openly spoken codes of verbal offence and defence for which a brute memory term like “motherfucker” acts as a kind of emissary shorthand. And if any one novel gives focus to the city, in this case Chicago, as a tenement hell of fear, flight and fate in its own three-section partition, it lies in Richard Wright’s landmark Native Son.38 Bigger Thomas’ violence, from the opening episode with the rat through to the murder and incineration of Mary, Wright tacks to a whole traumatic landscape deep within. The rat’s belly “pulsed with fear”, its “black beady eyes glittering”, 39 anticipate Bigger himself made rodent, and then murderous, by the urban maze which regulates and dehumanizes him. Each of Wright’s images for Bigger’s life suggests a tension of enclosure and revolt, the family tenement, the snarling furnace in which he burns Mary’s body, his hideouts from the police, and, finally, the prison cell from which he goes to his execution with “the faint, wry bitter smile” upon his face.40 Is this not a black apocalypse of ghettoed psyche as much as black city? The narrative vein that picks up on Wright’s vision (it has always been an inadequacy to think him merely a naturalist) includes, symptomatically, Ann Petry’s The Street with its story of Lutie Johnson driven to murder in tenement Harlem, Jones/Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell, a story-cycle novel of racist America as Inferno, and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place with its case portraits of brute violence against women and its counter-dream of black female bonding. There can, too, be no overlooking the city as a related apocalypse of drug culture or smack, cocaine to methamphetamine. Herbert A. Simmons’ Corner Boy early inscribes an unsparing ghetto and drugs life in St Louis, Missouri. George Cain’s Blueschild Baby makes the needle a virtual saviour-devil instrument, with the sway of horse or heroin as relief yet always a further dependency. Hal Bennett’s Lord of the Dark Places links drug habit 38

Richard Wright, Native Son, NY and Evanston, IL: Harper and Row, 1940. Ibid., 9. 40 Ibid., 392. 39

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into black existential pain, the will to catharsis drawn into the novel’s graphic, emeticizing prose. Robert Deane Pharr’s S.R.O. turns upon Single Room Occupancy, Harlem as the centre of a downward spiral of addiction presided over by the grim, deathly supplier Sinman. Latterly Ray Shell’s Iced, told in italicized line measures, unfolds a regime of crack cocaine virtually Dostoevskian in its willed, violent abandonment of everything but the dictates of drug habit.41 The city under riot becomes a literary continuity in its own right, from Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to Walter White’s Flight, which, although better known as a novel of passing, draws upon white Atlanta’s abuse of its black citizens in the 1920s, to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. 42 Ellison’s portrait derives from the Harlem riot of 1943, and from that of Detroit a few weeks earlier, but he couches it in terms of waking dream, a species of first-person surreal memory. If this is Afro-America’s house literally pitched both against white control, and against itself, it is also visionary fare, the near fantastical pitched battle in the wake of the shooting of youth leader Tod Clifton between The Brotherhood and the followers of the Garveyite Ras The Destroyer. As Caribbean nationalist “in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain”, mounted on a black horse and be-furred cap upon his head, Ras embodies both the reality and un-reality of the riot. Ellison’s description says all: “A figure more out of a dream than out of Harlem, than even out of this Harlem night, yet real, alive, alarming.”43 The always un-named narrator heads to Harlem in terms that teasingly echo Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave Is …?”: “When I reached Morningside the shooting sounded like a distant celebration of the Fourth of July.”44 Amid the flames and confusion the nick from a cop’s 45 has a voice saying “He’s got a hole in his head”. 45 Amid noise, flame, shadow and cries, the looter Dupre 41

Ann Petry, The Street, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1946; LeRoi Jones, The System of Dante’s Hell, NY: Grove Press, 1965; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, NY: Viking Press, 1982; Herbert Simmons, Corner Boy, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1957; George Cain, Blueschild Baby, NY: Doubleday, 1970; Hal Bennett, Lord of the Dark Places, NY: Bantam, 1971; Robert Deane Pharr, S.R.O., NY: Doubleday, 1971; and Ray Shell, Iced, NY and London: Harper Collins, Flamingo, 1993. 42 Walter White, Flight, NY: A.A. Knopf, 1926. 43 Ellison, Invisible Man, 544. 44 Ibid., 523. 45 Ibid., 524.


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rummages for shirts even as he drinks “Hundred proof bonded whiskey”. A woman is said to pass by the sight of “a dozen dressed chickens suspended by their necks from the handle of a new straw broom …”.46 Versions of the cause of the riot, the moment, as the figure Scofield says, “when hell broke loose”, proliferate and compete. An Irish policeman has slapped a black child for stealing a Babe Ruth and in turn slapped the child’s mother. A white woman has stolen “a black gal’s man”.47 A man with binoculars in a pawnshop window says it results from the actions of “that great leader, Ras the Destroyer”. 48 This is Harlem as both Inferno and Babel, a fierce, explosive competition of sights and tongues. “All the street’s signs were dead”, confirms the narrator, “all the day sounds had lost their stable meanings”.49 Each gathering detail of this real-unreal apocalypse adds confirming texture. As Dupre leads the invasion of a “colored store”, flashlights shine, the cash-register rings, and a milk wagon passes with aboard “a “huge woman in a gingham pinafore … drinking beer from a barrel”.50 The “exploding sounds of the night” echo and reverberate, bullets, injuries. 51 Kerosene mixes with milk and beer. Plans are hatched to torch the building. “White-helmeted” policemen arrive, and the narrator’s briefcase with his letters and identity-papers spills. Old women scurry towards him “with raised skirts loaded with canned goods”. Another store, under riot, sprays “a fusillade of…salami, liverwurst, hogsheads and chitterlings”.52 “I ran as in a dream”, says the narrator, only to see, apocalyptically indeed as it appears, seven hanging white bodies – but then to discover that “They were mannequins –‘Dummies!’… Hairless, bald and sterilely feminine”.53 Ras threatens the narrator himself with a hanging. “Give ’em hell and bananas” goes one shout, suitable off-the-wall speech for a scene the text at different points calls “hell”, “absurdity”, “ a red burst of fire”, “a shattered glass”. 54 Looking back from the border Harlem of his 46

Ibid., 526. Ibid., 528. 48 Ibid., 529. 49 Ibid., 525. 50 Ibid., 529 and 532. 51 Ibid., 536. 52 Ibid., 542. 53 Ibid., 543. 54 Ibid., 539-48. 47

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eventual manhole (“I felt myself plunge down, down”55), the narrator as Ellison’s own maker of Notes from Underground sees the riot as both myth and history (“The end was in the beginning”56), a glimpse of race-shadow as always the risk of becoming American apocalypse. Other fictions give their differing inflections to this threat of apocalypse. John O. Killens’ And Then We Heard the Thunder, neorealist, eventful, and spanning Fort Ord, California, Georgia boot camp, soldiering in the Philippines, and eventually a bitter race fight between black and white GIs in Bainbridge, Australia (“Bloody Yankees fighting Yankees” observes one townsperson), refracts the American military’s World War II racial double standard. 57 The American army, Atlantic and Pacific, and pledged to fight overseas fascist rule, turns right back on its own. Killens’ title, from a Harriet Tubman phrase, nicely catches an Afro-America at war on more than any one single front. In Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light: A Novel of Some Probability, for John A. Williams, New York becomes the scenario for a narrative of black-white armed confrontation, a latter-day Armageddon of the 1960s. Although a novel Williams himself has said was too much of the moment, the detail of its portrait of clenched fist black activism across Brooklyn, Manhattan and Harlem is not to be denied, a reaction to the temper of the time.58 More consequential is The Man Who Cried I Am, Williams’ adroit political thriller spanning America, Europe and Africa in which a Richard Wright exile is killed under the genocidal King Alfred Plan of a racist international cadre known as the Alliance Blanc.59 John Wideman’s The Lynchers, which opens with a catalogue of historic lynch activity, envisages an about-turn: four Philadelphia contemporary black men out to give public street lynching lynch to a white cop for the murder of his black mistress.60 Leon Forrest’s The Bloodworth Orphans, like the rest of the Nathaniel Witherspoon trilogy to which it belongs, imagines America as hemispheric racial orphanage, and in language to recall the narrative high baroque of 55

Ibid., 553. Ibid., 558. 57 John O. Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder, NY: Knopf, 1963. 58 John A. Williams, Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light: A Novel of Some Probability, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1969. 59 John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1967. 60 John E. Wideman, The Lynchers, NY: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovitch, 1973. 56


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Jean Toomer’s Cane, a world hexed into citied race war rather than healed by its multiple shared cross-ties of blood and dynasty.61 No account of urban apocalypse in the African-American novel would be complete, however, without invoking Chester Himes and, above all, his Harlem domestic tales, as he liked to call them. These romans policiers, set in black Manhattan, becomes the very metaphor of African American memory and place. As his case-hardened detective duo, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, take on each about-face and often quite unreal crime from For Love of Imabelle through to Blind Man With a Pistol and the posthumous Plan B, the edge of apocalypse grows close. How not to see the larger violence in each death caper, mugging, acid throwing, knifing and theft? Himes’ comedies, and the wickedly funny gallows humour in which they are pitched, suggest a maze at once implosive and explosive. For in Himes’ Harlem world of hustlers and con-men, chippies and religious freaks, race veers towards nightmare, citied life in which order has become un-order, daytime ever the threat of nightmare. 62 Among contemporaries, Ishmael Reed, ranking metafictionist, can be enlisted on the basis as he calls it of his “space satire” of Nixonian America and its racism in The Free-Lance Pallbearers, his narrative collage of race-war even as Jazz and black style dazzle the white 1920s in Mumbo Jumbo, and his postmodern slave narrative in Flight to Canada. Black-authored science fiction offers its own considerable legacy in issues of apocalypse. Not only George Schuyler’s Black No More but also his Black Empire, written under the name Samuel I. Brooks, points the way as a global revenge-fantasia with its smacks at both white oppression and Garveyism in the person of Henry Belsidus. The novel envisages a colonized Africa in preparation for battle with a still colonizing Europe.63 Subsequent SF speculative writing affords its own plenty. A sense of apocalypse in terms of gender as much as race comes into play, be it Samuel R. Delany’s four-volume saga of 61

Leon Forrest, The Bloodworth Orphans, NY: Random House, 1977, Jean Toomer, Cane, NY: Boni and Liveright, 1923. 62 Chester Himes, For Love of Imabelle, Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett, 1977; Blind Man With a Pistol, NY: William Morrow, 1969; and Plan B, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. 63 George S. Schuyler, as Samuel I. Brooks, Black Empire (1938), Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1991.

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master-slave sexuality and galactic power fetish begun in his Tales of Neveryone or Octavia E. Butler’s slave-plantation female survival parables in novels like the Patternmaster sequence and Mind of My Mind.64 *** Two further novels, each its own tour de force, offer a closing perspective. John A. Williams’ Captain Blackman works as though serial history in which Captain Abraham Blackman, under frontline fire in Vietnam, fantasizes black warriordom from the American Revolution through to the Nuclear Age. 65 From a figure like the black Crispus Attucks, the first soldier to be killed in the war against the British, Blackman passes on to a succession of black soldiering through the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Plains War, the Spanish American War, the two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam, with an Epilogue in which Blackman’s Aryan antagonist, General Ishmael Whittman, is out-finagled by a black takeover of America’s entire nuclear facility. History, finally, so falls under alternative racial auspices, the possibility of monumental endgame, and with all relevant inference left challengingly to the reader. Toni Morrison’s Beloved re-imagines the apocalypse of slavery as a haunting, Sethe Suggs’ killing of her own daughter to save her from a life of slave bondage in antebellum Kentucky.66 Beloved returns to take over Sethe and to possess the family’s Ohio home as retribution, a vision of death over life eased only by Sethe’s love for Paul B, another escaped slave. The novel bespeaks trauma and horror, but also love, the yet-one-more memorial apocalypse of a slave mother driven 64 Ishmael Reed, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967, Mumbo Jumbo, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972, and Flight to Canada, New York: Random House, 1976; Samuel R. Delany, Tales of Neveryone, NY: Bantam, 1979; Octavia E. Butler, Patternmaster, NY: Avon, 1976 and Mind of My Mind, NY: Avon, 1977. 65 John A. Williams, Captain Blackman, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. Other key novels in this tradition include William Gardner Smith, The Last of the Conquerors, NY: Farrar, Straus, 1948 and Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, NY: Bantam, 1969. A historical overview is to be found in Nat Brandt, Harlem at War: Black Experience in World War II, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. 66 Toni Morrison, Beloved, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.


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to destroy her own progeny (and so, in large measure, herself) in the face of slavery’s destructive writ. The novel’s spectacular virtuosity, “Ohio 1873” and the “124” of Bluestone Road as local signs and wonders for the title-page’s “Sixty Million and more”, serves to underscore the novel’s recurring allusions to the “haint” and “dirtying” of all slave seizure and rape. Just as “Beloved,” spirit-child, serves as “ghost company”, “red baby blood”, so Sethe herself lives out that haunting. Whip-scars in the shape of a chokeberry bush mark her back. Her breast milk is stolen by white boys. Her husband Halle becomes deranged. Her knowledge of Paul B’s debasement by prison guards adds to her own litany of accusation. In all her woman’s apocalypse points to both the silhouette and substance of the larger apocalypse. *** The term apocalypse, to be sure, requires its latitude. Even the most pertinent novels do more than offer all or nothing doomsday scripts, whether the subject be slavery or uprising, a 1960s Watts or the videoed all-white LAPD squad beating of Rodney King and its fiery aftermath in Los Angeles’ South Central in April 1992. Whether black apocalypse is best thought of as a genre of novel in its own right, or more a sub-genre, one underlying issue can be seen to persist. From Blake to Captain Blackman, Imperium in Imperio to Beloved, this has been fiction as taken up with Afro-America’s remembrance of its future as of its past or present, apocalypse then, or now, but only, and equally, as if always still to come.

10 WOMAN’S PLACE? THE LANDSCAPES OF JEWETT, CHOPIN, CATHER, HURSTON, WELTY, CHÁVEZ, YAMASHITA, SILKO When I behold the heavens as in their prime And then the earth (though old) still clad in green, The stones and trees, insensible of time, Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen; If winter come, and greenness then do fade, A Spring returns, and they more youthful made; But Man grows old, lies down, remains where once he’s laid. Ann Bradstreet, “Contemplations” 1 The history of life on earth has been the interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – man – acquired power to alter the nature of his world Rachel Carson, Silent Spring.2 We are of the animal world. We are parts of the cycles of growth and decay. Even having tried so hard to see ourselves apart, and so often without a love of our own biology, we are in relationship with the rest of the planet, and that connectedness tells us we must reconsider the way we see ourselves and the rest of nature. Linda Hogan, Dwellings 3 1 Ann Bradstreet, “Contemplations”, No II, (Several Poems, 1678) in The Complete Poems of Anne Bradstreet, eds Joseph R. McElrath and Allan P. Robbs, Boston, MA: Twayne, 1981, 167-74. 2 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962), with an Introduction by Al Gore, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992, 5.

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Mother Earth. Father Time. Gendering place, as gendering chronology, looks to a considerable ancestry, the bid, perhaps, for intimacy, the reduction of largeness of scale to the parental, the familial, even the simply manageable. United States fiction by women has long established a particular line in this respect, garden, farm, township, house, even the seasons as figurative biology to reflect girlhood, sexual awakening, love, friendship, marriage, motherhood or ageing. Other subjects, to be sure, have not gone missing, society or politics, adventure or war. Other kinds of writing by women equally come into the reckoning, whether of poet or plant scientist, explorer-cartographer or archaeologist. Yet without opting for some template or litmus test as to feminization of what Lawrence Buell calls literary ecodiscourse, are there not discernibly different gender stylings of voice, mind, eye or temperament to be met with where landscape – be it natural, domestic, regional sexual, social-cultural, even hemispheric – and in both local and wider compass, acts as a determinative focus in women’s writing?4 That, at least, acts as departure-point for the line of fiction to hand. Anne Bradstreet, Rachel Carson and Linda Hogan, moreover, suggest no more than a one American tradition, early New England seasonal round to the latter-day rise of eco-feminism. 5 A selective roster of male authors, text and politics, might look to William Byrd, Henry 3

Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, NY: W.W. Norton, 1995, 114-15. 4 Laurence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 5 Eco-feminist critique has established a considerable lineage. Scholarship especially relevant to this chapter includes: Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1980;; Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; Linda Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, Nature’s Mind: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, NY: Routledge, 1989; Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Re-invention of Nature, NY: Routledge, 1991; Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare: Women and The Environment, NY Routledge, 1995; Feminism and Ecology, ed. Mary Mellor, NY: New York University Press, 1997; Ecofeminism: Voice, Culture, and Nature, ed. Karen J. Warren, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997; Sandra G. Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialism, Feminism and Epistemologies, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988; Joni Adamson, American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place, Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2001; and Seeing Nature Through Gender, ed. Virginia J. Scharff, Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003.

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David Thoreau, John Wesley Powell, John Muir (and the Sierra Club), Edward Abbey, Scott Momaday, William Least Heat Moon, Simon Ortiz, Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry. Imagining landscape, thereby, not just ecological but in all its forms, clearly does not apportion into mutually exclusionary female and male zones, some absolute writ as to gendered literary canons. Even so, and given writing itself always highly various, what affinities – and indeed differences – of interacting consciousness of self and the landscape do in fact arise in women’s authorship? Is it enough to say that the name on the cover says sufficient about authorial gender or does it leave all still to be said? The sites under enquiry are several: Sarah Orne Jewett’s coastal Maine, Kate Chopin’s turn of the century Creole Louisiana, Willa Cather’s prairie, farm and township Nebraska, Zora Neale Hurston’s Afro-Florida and Georgia, Eudora Welty’s white Delta south, Denise Chávez’s Chicana working-class southwest of New Mexico, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Japanese American-written magic realist Brazilian rainforest, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s hemispheric Native America as centred in Tucson. Taken together these offer, as it were, a literary spectrograph, the one or another landscape of the Americas seen, and told, as shared women’s authorship even as each fiction invites being read for its own unique powers of viewpoint. *** Local colour regionalist, landmark ecological writer: the Sarah Orne Jewett of The Country of the Pointed Firs and her other Dunnet Landing and other eastern Maine story-portraiture, can be said to have met with something akin to a reborn life. Hers was routinely, and not a little condescendingly, designated some lesser order of women’s writing, merely New England-genteel or local-picturesque. In fact, and from the outset, her storytelling always represented more demanding fare – Maine as a winning force of both landscape and seascape yet also shrewdly perceived human theatre with its own darker shadings of set-back quite as much as well-being. For the world Jewett portrays offers no simple pastoral but intricately sited history in which grit, quirk, reserve, loss, and yet also serious kindness, together with a close, if often wary, heedfulness of Nature’s writ, all interweave. This is a Maine whose economy has

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long become depleted and which operates as a virtual gerontocracy. Dunnet, in other words, however fondly circumstantial or literal, offers itself as also a kind of alternative landscape of hidden seams, fate’s eccentrics and self-chosen isolates, even spirit visions. The upshot, underwritten by Jewett’s considerable virtuosity of style, deservingly has won her a better estimate in the American canon. These components all best come to focus in The Country of the Pointed Firs, an order of inward mind and heart as much as place told from genuine imaginative strength. “It is like becoming acquainted with a single person”, says the writer of her stay in Dunnet as the book opens, a “salt-aired, whiteclapboarded little town” of houses “wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the Landing, “sea-line”, and “the unchanged shores of the pointed firs”.6 So pictorial a vista almost immediately takes on vertical depth as detail accumulates. That, in turn, anticipates each Dunnet personality beginning with Mrs Almira (“Almiry”) Todd, then the township and its alleys and corners, the rocky shoreline and nearby island topographies, and always the stories within stories. In this respect Mrs Todd who serves as the writer’s landlady for the summer doubles as a species of New England curandera, an “ardent lover of herbs” with her garden’s “rustic pharmacopoeia”, a plant and leaf collector, and a benign white witch dispenser of nostrums and brews.7 Her first might-have-been husband lost to another woman, and then too early a subsequent seafarer’s widow, she incarnates the ancestral spirit of place. Always busily good-hearted she moves amid “strange and potent odors” as though always implicated in “sacred and mystic rites”.8 She it is who acts as sentinel for each of the landscapes within Dunnet, shore and sea, inland and island. The writer herself, having moved pen and paper into the local schoolroom, then opens her imagination to the well-named cranky exshipmaster and widower Captain Littlepage (“He looked like an aged grasshopper of some strange human variety”9). Jewett again builds a composite portrait out of what appears at first a mere vignette of 6

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) in Novels and Stories, Deephaven, A Country Doctor, The Country of the Pointed Firs, Dunnet Landing Stories, Selected Stories and Sketches, NY: The Library of America, 1994, 377. 7 Ibid., 278. 8 Ibid., 378. 9 Ibid., 385.

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eccentricity: the captain’s citation of Milton’s “A happy, rural seat of various views”, his eighty-year-old’s “spells”, 10 his “unexpected narrative” of the Minerva and its Newfoundland shipwreck, and above all the Greenland paranormal story long ago told to him by the Scotsman Gaffet of his North Pole journey to “a kind of wailing-place between this world an’ the next” and encounter with “the humanshaped creatures of fog and cobweb”.11 All of this she hears, and then relays, in its own odd balance of fact and fantasy. In the aftermath of a local funeral bees and song-swallows hover. The effect is one of a gallery, Dunnet as site gives a setting not only of locale but life-intodeath, at once sea-view, insect and bird sound, and always a theatre of memory. Each story increment adds to the ever deepening sense of overall landscape. The trip to Green Island and to Amiry’s mother, Mrs Blackett, and the fisherman brother William, gives off a further shared mix of the actual and the numinous. The sturdy good cheer of the mother (“a most flower-like face”), the shyness of the brother, their “kind of sainted home”, the “ballad music” they sing, and the pennyroyal gathered by Almiry gives one track.12 But the ledge they visit (“Like the great backbone of an enormous creature”13) suggests a species of other world, the rock formation as primordial glyph. Green Island itself might be Emersonian Nature writ small, his spiritual laws given topographical location. Mrs Fosdick, the visitor not always considerate but “full of a good traveler’s authority and enlightenment”, 14 and the only survivor of nine brothers and sisters, tells the Indian legend of Shell-heap Island. The portrait of Joanna Todd, the cousin of Almiry’s husband Nathan, suggests something akin to Melville’s Hunilla in “The Encantadas”, eccentric island self-punishment that provokes the comment, “In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a pace remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness …”. 15 Her funeral contrasts the all too unresponsive minister conducting the service with an emissary sparrow – by-rote funeral theology as it were set against 10

Ibid., 387 and 388. Ibid., 395 and 399. 12 Ibid., 415, 416 and 419. 13 Ibid., 413. 14 Ibid., 424. 15 Ibid., 444. 11

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Nature’s sympathy. The Bowden reunion and feast point to inland Dunnet, a processional, the gaiety of clan and lineage. Yet if full of life, festival, and warmth, it is also shadowed by the inventory of the Bowden graves, fathers and cousins lost at sea. Finally the novella offers Elijah Tilley, one more widower, stitching his socks, still mourning his wife Sarah, and in a house with a garden not of shrub but stones. To Mrs Todd he is to be thought “a plodding man” 16 whereas to the narrator he arouses speculation, a sense of life drawn into itself: “I often wondered a great deal about the inner life and thought of the self-contained old fishermen; their minds seemed to be fixed upon nature and the elements rather than upon any contrivances of men, like politics or theology.” 17 This human landscape, Dunnet as its own species of Vanity Fair, is done with evident affection but also keenest instinct for oddity, an environment thinned into drift or margin. In taking leave the narrator speaks of a good-by “to all my Dunnet Landing friends and “my homelike place”, but also to all the Maine coastal villages that look “as if they were crumbled on the furzy-green stoniness of the shore”.18 If the pointed firs serve as Nature’s spires, the town itself suggests mutability, not exactly fall but gentle decline. Jewett’s novel, story-round if that is more appropriate, has won increasing exegesis. Intertextual approaches look to each Emersonian trace, the bi-Atlantic impact of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cheshire village classic Cranford (1851, 1853) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Maine portrait in The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), and the endorsements of both Henry James and Willa Cather. Historians of style point to the command of discursive idiom, the layered prose and play of metaphor. But above all, and far from local-colour, there persists Jewett’s imaginative seizure of the peopling and environment of Dunnet’s Landing. In this the final Maine sea prospect as “full of life and spirit” and the receding “little town” play the one into the other,19 landscape both contemporaneous and memorial and told as though well beyond any one literary summer. *** 16

Ibid., 483. Ibid., 473-74. 18 Ibid., 484 and 487. 19 Ibid., 486 and 487. 17

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Kate Chopin’s The Awakening rightly has been recognized for more than mere Woman’s Era historical text. Is not the novella one of the defining portraits of “a solitary soul” (its original title), as Edna Pontellier is circled and finally self-drowned in the wake of divesting herself of each role of daughter, wife, mother and lover? Does not the Creole setting, Grand Isle to New Orleans, make for a keenly observed American cultural sub-set, French-European in etiquette, a portrait of mores as much as individual destiny with Flaubert and Daudet its literary touchstones along with the Emerson of Edna’s night reading? Is it, or is it not, feminist fare, Edna in pursuit of a path at once existentially sexual-artistic and pitched beyond the coercive realms of Leoncé Pontellier as her complacent businessman-husband, her Kentucky ex-colonel father, and “mother-women” like Adèle Ratignolle? These all count, undoubtedly. But so does one other. The Awakening, in a conjoined number of ways, invites being thought also as an environmental novel, one of society, gender and culture as much as, also and throughout, Nature. “Allez-vous en” caws the caged green and yellow parrot on the Lebrun summer-cottage porch at outset of the story.20 The bird also can mimic some Spanish and “a language which nobody understood”. Together with his companion mocking-bird (“whistling with maddening persistence”) this avian sight and sound might be said to carry a double augury, disruption to Mr. Pontellier and the even more disruptive eventual flight of his wife Edna Pontellier. She herself comes into view from the beach, a kind of flâneur in the company of her young admirer Robert Lebrun and silhouetted against the gulf “melting lazily into the blue of the horizon”. Chopin so frames her main figure as the returnee from a moment’s freedom of littoral to her husband’s marital surveillance, whether his gaze, (“looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property”), his solicitude about sunburn, or his re-installation as her owner-occupier in the handing-back of the wedding rings. 21 Edna is located in a perfect overlap of environments, marriage, sea-edge, sun, Robert’s lovefawning, Pontellier’s lazy husbandship, and Creole society. Edna’s “inward maze of contemplation” leads her into frequent needs for sleep, a realm of “indescribable oppression”, tears, and not 20

Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899), NY and London: W.W. Norton (Norton Critical Edition), 1976, 1. 21 Ibid., 3-4.

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least the bittersweet concession that Pontellier is by all local society standards a husband of which there are “none better”.22 But it also leads her into the process that will indeed be one of divestiture and whose operative metaphors lie in space, water, bird and other flight, and the nearby ocean. All the environments that enclose her she treats as realms of self not chosen, whether husband (“I tell you she is peculiar”, he tells the doctor 23 ), the children, housekeeping, the Ratignolles and Lebruns, the Grand Isle cottage, the New Orleans Esplanade Street house, the Tuesday at-homes that she abandons, Dr Mandelet’s offer of counsel, and even giving birth. Her clothes starch and contract her. Her wedding rings are to be thrown off. Emerson brings on sleep. Her lover Arobin’s scar reminds her of her own inner sense of incision. The atelier of Mlle Reisz supplies but temporary respite. Her move to a house of her own, and her would-be palatial supper, do little better. Escape for Edna presses and beckons, an unspecified call of self over circumstance and whether to spiritual or sexual purpose. At different times it can be her fantasy of love with Robert on his return from Mexico, or Mlle’s Reisz’s music, or the fugitive memories of Edwin Booth and the cavalry officer, or her own sketching, or the Gustav Klimt-like kiss with Arobin and its momentary erotic surrender, or the eventual last swim – the body undefined, amniotic, sexual, an extricating fusion of female Narcissus and Aphrodite. For a whole counter-environment of feeling and association has been gathering within her, whether the “girlhood home in the old Kentucky blue-grass country”, the sight of an owl in the water-oak, or pivotally, “the everlasting voice of the sea”.24 Hearing Mlle Reisz play a piano composition the musician entitles “Solitude”, Edna’s imagination throws up the image of a naked man at the seashore. His “hopeless resignation” is matched by the “distant bird winging its flight away from him”.25 These spatial-environmental metaphors cluster, whether “She wanted to swim out, where no woman had swum before” or her midnight to dawn reverie at the Grand Isle cottage in which she feels

22

Ibid., 5, 8 and 9. Ibid., 65. 24 Ibid., 6 and 8. 25 Ibid., 27. 23

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as if awakening from “a delicious, grotesque impossible dream”.26 She thrills to the bets and speed of the races and to Arobin’s driving of the carriage, the rush of stallion and mare in her own Kentucky blood. “Si tu savais” runs one of the songs throughout the story, nowhere better localized than in her invented romance story about the lovers lost in the Baratarian Islands. Edna’s rapt telling, the southern night heat and moonlight, the boat, the beating of bird’s wings, the reeds and saltpools indicate as much a dream as actual environment, wholly beyond any Pontellier or Louisiana in-house social order. That dream transfers exactly to the final passage-out into the sea. Adèle Ratignolle’s accouchement presages Edna’s own quest for a birth, a rebirth, of self. “I’m not going to be forced into doing things”, she tells Dr Mandelet.27 Her self-birth will be water borne, “absolutely alone”, as divested of pre-existent custom as she herself is of her bathing-suit. She feels “like some new-born creature”, her memories those of “blue-grass meadow”, “the barking of an old dog”, “the spur of the cavalry officer” – with its hint of steed and charge, and finally, “the hum of bees” and “the musky odor of pinks”.28 Chopin offers no programme, no explicit politics or ideology, simply Edna’s awakened beckoning to a state beyond children, marriage, society or any other role designated for her by history. The final and no doubt narcissistic ease into ocean life in death gives its own meaning to “a language which nobody understood”, the end to all hitherto pre-emptive codes of identity. She now enters, for the last and yet also the first time, the unspecified self-prospect. It makes for a perfect ending, the self still to be duly, and wholly, written, for Edna Pontellier at least, as the yet uncompleted landscape of her womanhood. *** Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, the Nebraska of the immigrant Shimerda family tracked by Jim Burden, speaks of immigrant and settler prairie existence as “a kind of freemasonry” (Introduction).29 Centred as it is for the most part in its Bohemian girl then woman 26

Ibid., 28 and 32. Ibid., 109. 28 Ibid., 113-14. 29 Willa Cather, My Ántonia, with Illustrations by W.T. Benda, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1918,. 27

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title-figure, the novel draws into itself always the sense of landscape as animate inventory, working Nature. Burden’s early observations set the note, whether “I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea” or “I felt motion in the landscape … the light air told me that the world ended here; only the ground and sun and sky were left”.30 Much as this is Burden’s boyhood arrival from Virginia into Nebraska, its footfalls run crowdedly through the novel, an unsentimental and seasonal agrarian order at first lived in and then returned to as a charge of memory. By story’s end the one landscape has come to inhabit the other. Ántonia’s pioneer farm girlhood, her move into the township as housekeeper, the marital first mishap with Larry Donovan, and her eventual life with Anton Cuzak as wife-mother (“a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races”31), find their frame in how the land transcends mere setting. From start to finish Cather keeps the terrain not merely in view but in motion, sky and wind, sun and snow, electric storms and “breathless, brilliant heat”. Jim early kills his “circus monstrosity” snake as if to clear this prairie Eden of blight (even so the Shimerda family will be obliged to survive a sod house, arduous farming and Mr Shimerda’s suicide from homesickness). Emmeline Burden, Jim’s grandmother, keeps guards over her adopted badger. Cows, geese, prairie dogs, coyotes, ducks, geese, hawks and other avian plenty, Jim’s pony and the Burden family farmhorses, and always the cornfields (“under the stars one caught a faint crackling in the dewy, heavy-odoured cornfields where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and green” 32 ), confirm Nature’s order of calendar and cultivation. The novel fully, observantly, accordingly annotates spring growth to sun-haze to blinding snowstorm (“It was as if we were being punished for the loveliness of summer”33). This mixed fare nicely subdues any tendency towards mere pastoral idealization. Krajiek cheats the Shimerdas in the original land agreement. Mr Shimerda’s gunshot death and different origins cause the Norwegian settlement to refuse him burial in their cemetery. Ambrosch’s surly resignation adds its human texture. The Russians Peter and Pavel pursue their own tough prairie existence, the one to 30

Ibid., 15 and 16. Ibid., 353. 32 Ibid., 137. 33 Ibid., 173. 31

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die too early and the other with his excessive taste for melons to move on account of more land finagling by Wick Cutter as moneylender – with the Cutter murder-suicide eventually to follow. Jake Marpole and Otto leave abruptly for the west when the Burdens move into town. The farm girls, not only Ántonia but Lena Legard, Tiny Soderball and others, also leave for Black Hawk as domestics, and if discovering their respective admirers at the Vanni dancing pavilion also face setbacks (Ántonia at the Harlings and then caught up in the Cutter hidden papers imbroglio). They also move on to other lives in Chicago and San Francisco. In all these respects Cather keeps the novel as a balance of landscapes: farm and township, autonomy and obligation. The abiding note is struck in the description of a country day out after Jim’s Commencement and as Ántonia, he, and the others discuss Coronado’s venture and his search for the Seven Golden Cities. The discussion take place against a backdrop of “curly grass”, “oaks turned red as copper”, “a shimmer of gold on the brown river”, trembling “light”, and “a limpid, gold-washed sky”. Cather fills out the landscape as though spectral memory, an almost oneiric canvas: Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun …. On some upland farm, a plough has been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking behind just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongues, the share – black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.34

As prairie iconography, plough against horizon, this remembered Nebraska day serves the novel’s purposes to perfection. Jim’s own career as lawyer-to-be, first at the University of Nebraska and then Harvard, has him reading at one point Vergil’s Georgics, ironic if erudite commentary on his own georgic America whose spirit lies in Ántonia. During his last memorial visit – “I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall”35 – he recognizes how Ántonia can no longer be thought 34 35

Ibid., 244-45. Ibid., 322.

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the handsome, once muscled ploughgirl daughter and Bohemian princess. She has become “a stalwart, brown woman, flat-chested, her curly brown hair a little grizzled”. Even so she continues for him to exude “the full vigour of her personality”, “the fire of life”.36 Above all she belongs for him to the working natural order, the settler and farm family paradigm of landscape: “Everything was as it should be: the strong smell of sunflowers and ironweed in the dew, the clear blue and gold of the sky, the evening star, the purr of the milk into the pails, the grunts and squeals of the pigs fighting over their supper.”37 He speaks of this, and the surrounding Nebraska prairie, with near lyricism as “the sense of coming home to myself”, “the incommunicable past”.38 In Cather’s assured idiom the figure of Jim Burden’s Ántonia, and her own Ántonia, in both triumph and wear, inhabits that coming home and past. For if the novel yields an American landscape of “the great midland plain”, 39 it also yields, indelibly and with greatest human particularity, Willa Cather’s own American landscape of womanhood. *** With Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God a necessary powerful African American dispensation enters the reckoning – oral narrative made over into script, a black folk idiom of Gullah and other Africanisms, a blues story, and a setting extending intimately, and dramatically, across the different Florida-Georgia landscapes. Few texts of early novels by black authors better anticipate, or confirm, Alice Walker’s womanist ethos, as much through its feats of voice as story. The text, as chronicle, meets precisely the life it tells. Few, equally, explore site, location, as so profoundly inward, the black south as a cultural dispensation held in the mind and senses. “Ah wants to utilize mahself all over”,40 so confides Janie Woods, born Janie Mae Crawford, whose history is in play, to Pheoby Watson, 36

Ibid., 331, 332 and 336. Ibid., 346-47. 38 Ibid., 371 and 372. 39 Ibid., 3. 40 Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), in Novels and Stories, NY: Library of America, 1995, 266. 37

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her friend in the all-black township Hurston created in the image of Eatonville, Florida. This taking of autonomy becomes a rich vernacular ply of self and saying, Janey as both her own story and storyteller. In the one circuit she becomes the seasoned veteran of her liaisons with, in turn, the dour, older sharecropper Logan Killicks, the patriarchal township Mayor Joe Starks, and the loving, liberative gambler-poet Vergible Woods or Tea Cake. In another she turns her tongue into vernacularity itself, a sustained flourish of phrase, image, wit or signifying. Little wonder that Phoeby responds to her words with “hungry listening”.41 This seam holds throughout. If her grandmother thinks “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world”, 42 Janie counters the limitation to perfection. Thinking her West Florida rural life “like a great tree in leaf …. Dawn and doom was in the branches”,43 she looks to “glossy leaves and bursting buds”, “singing bees”, the nearby “pear tree”,44 “pollen” and “seeds”45 and “the words of the trees and the wind”46 as a landscape of sympathetic poetry to counter the lovelessness with Killicks (“the vision of Logan Killicks was like desecrating the pear tree”47). In Eatonville, wife to Joe Starks as mayor, and having begun a new marriage with its own hopes she eventually finds it necessary to fight back “with her tongue” against Starks’s requirement of wifely submission (“You’re getting too moufy, Janie”48). For all their preeminence in the town, and the Starks store, she turns from him with the words “We ain’t natural wid one ’nother”49 and speaks of their marriage bed as “no longer a daisy-field … to play in”.50 Among the mule-story town group, and against Joe’s approval she is said to have “thought up good stories on the mule”. 51 In yet another metaphor drawn from Nature she is described as no longer “petal-open” to

41

Ibid., 182. Ibid., 186. 43 Ibid., 181. 44 Ibid., 183. 45 Ibid., 194. 46 Ibid., 184. 47 Ibid., 185. 48 Ibid., 232. 49 Ibid., 211. 50 Ibid., 232. 51 Ibid., 217. 42


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him.52 For Joe’s funeral she is said to have “starched and ironed her face”.53 Her own inner landscape remains at one with the natural order of her rural upbringing, full of savvy, the evidence, and above all the wording, of her own senses. With Tea Cake the balance is struck. “So you aims tuh partake wid everything, hunh?” he asks as their relationship gets underway.54 Their very first encounter is given its own environmental language – “So she sat on the porch and watched the moonrise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.”55 Their Sunday School picnic together leads to fishing, seeding the garden, journeys. Above all life with him means the Everglades and beanpicking by the shore of the Seminole named Lake Okechobee (“great, sprawling Okechobee”56). Theirs is the round of blues and dancing to the jukes, the companionship and josh of the worker community of Stew Beef, Sop-de-Bottom, Bootyny, Motor Boat and the others, and always the vodoun and folk reference (“Nature and salt. Dat’s whut makes up strong man like Big John de Conquer” 57 ). Her sheer togetherness with Tea Cake takes on lyric quality (“We ain’t got nothin’ tuh do but do our work and come home and love” he tells her58). Even her jealousy of the girl Nunkie highlights this uncoercive down-home love. Paradoxically, having been instrumental in causing Tea Cake’s rabies induced dementia from the dog bite and then by accident killing him in his frenzied misery, she will remember him as the very figure of ongoing life: Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.59 52

Ibid., 232. Ibid., 246. 54 Ibid., 276. 55 Ibid., 255. 56 Ibid., 281. 57 Ibid., 302. 58 Ibid., 283. 59 Ibid., 333. 53

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Nowhere in Their Eyes Were Watching God does landscape assume a greater force than in the Everglades hurricane the text summons as “old Okechobee” (“the monster began to roll in his bed”). The terms are folkish, anthropomorphic. The hurricane becomes “the monstropolous beast”, “Him-with-the-square toes”.60 A note of fetish enters – “the sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel” and “Havoc was there with her mouth wide open”. 61 This is Florida’s un-lyric landscape, the lake full of snakes, fleeing cattle, debris, and the more than twenty drowned workers. The gale brings its “lashing water”.62 Left, at Tea Cake’s death, to herself, and a house “full of thoughts”,63 Janie ponders her dark night of the soul. As she tells Pheoby she can be sad but also given to redemptive fond memory. Either way, and given all the turns and counter-turns of her rite of passage, it will be nothing if not as the custodian of her own life’s landscape. *** “Theirs was a house where, in some room at least, the human voice was never still”: the house is Shellmound in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, home to the crowded Fairchild clan in 1923 Mississippi.64 The wedding of Dabney Fairchild, second daughter, to Troy Flavin, overseer and twice her age, serves as the ostensible centre for the summer gathering of Battle and Ellen Fairchild and their eight offspring with assorted child cousins, siblings, family outriders and fussed great-aunts. It is the wedding to which Laura McRaven, nineyear old cousin, has travelled from Jackson in the aftermath of her mother’s death. The upshot is a novel as carousel, an intricate and indeed vocal round of dynasty, plantation home, and sumptuous Delta setting. If, initially, this first of Welty’s novels met with a mixed reception, too much the cacophony for doubters, a brilliant latest southern house of fiction to admirers, it has stayed the course, a deep South of family caught in all due inflection. As Laura travels aboard the Yazoo-Delta or Yellow Dog Express into the township of Fairchilds, Welty offers a highly exact sense of 60

Ibid., 303, 306 and 312. Ibid., 306 and 310. 62 Ibid., 309. 63 Ibid., 332. 64 Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1946, 194. 61


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region, the more affecting as it augments through the observing eye of the girl: Thoughts went out of [Laura’s] head and the landscape filled it. In the Delta, most of the world seemed sky …. The land was perfectly flat and level but shimmered like the wing of a lighted butterfly. It seemed strummed as though it were an instrument and something had touched it …. Sometimes like a fuzzy caterpillar looking in the cotton was a winding line of green willows and cypresses, and when the train crossed this green, running on a loud iron bridge, down its center like a golden mark on the caterpillar’s back would be a bayou …. When the day lengthened, a rosy light lay over the cotton …. In the Delta he sunsets were the reddest light. The sun went down lopsided and wide as a rose on stem in the west …. The sky, the field, the little track, the bayou, over and over – all that had been bright was now one color. From the warm window sill the endless fields glowed like a hearth in firelight, and Laura, looking out, leaning on her elbows with her head between her hands, felt what an arriver in land feels – that slow hard pounding in the breast.65

This power of place – the shimmer, graduations of light, the green, the red of the sun on the cotton, each willow, cypress, track and bayou – could not better fuse into the radius of family. For Dabney’s wedding or not, or Laura’s arrival and subsequent cousinly flower-girl role, or Ellen Fairchild as Virginia-born materfamilias with more than a hint of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway about her, the novel disallows any single centre to prevail. This is family as shared and often impromptu dynamic (“there was so much going on in real life”66), a mix of affection, escapade, small jealousies, memory. Shellmound, along with the other two residences, Marmion and The Grove, can suggest idyll (“It was eternally cool summer in this house” or “the whole Delta is in and out of this house”67). But it can also suggest in-bred fracture, whether the loved Uncle George’s move to work as a lawyer in Memphis, the eldest daughter Shelley’s disaffection, the class snobbery about Robbie Reid 65

Ibid., 4-5. Ibid., 54. 67 Ibid., 40 and 85. 66

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who has supposedly married above herself to George, and in her shadow the suspicion that Troy, from the hills, is about to do the same, the broken minds of Virgie Lee Fairfield and her daughter Maureen, the bullying of Battle’s sister Tempe Fairfield Summers, and the echoing, dead admonitions of Great-Aunt Shannon. Welty sustains this measure of family throughout, a regime of competing energies. The children flit and run. Mealtimes set the day’s clock. There are the river outings, wedding preparations and rehearsals. Dr Murdoch at the family cemetery gives his cryptic and unflattering verdict on Fairchild fertility (Ellen is pregnant with her ninth child). Black voices enter, briefly, like those of Parthenia with her lovepotion to heal the rift between Robbie and George and of Aunt Stutney (her catch-phrase “Ain’t studyin’ you”68). The novel, through each, discloses a family at once radiant in its sense of group but also exclusionary and self-regarding (and bitterly attacked as such by Robbie Reid Fairchild – “You’re just loving yourselves in each other – yourselves over and over again”69). A number of interstitial motifs underwrite the shifts of connection and fracture. The Yellow Dog whistles its journeying. Ellen loses her wedding pin that Laura finds and then loses. Other markers include George’s pipe, the railway trestle where Maureen got caught and was saved from the Yellow Dog by George, Ellen’s diary, and Dabney’s own pretty-girl’s pouts and dreams. At one point the novel observes that in the Delta “all the air is filled with things – it’s like shining dust that makes it looks so bright”.70 It might be said that Welty keeps her own authorial light on just that composite landscape, be it the Fairchilds (“to be a Fairchild was an inescapable thing” 71 ), Shellmound with its “undeterminate number of other rooms”,72 or the larger and enclosing Delta itself in all its Mississippi heat, time and colour. *** In “Willow Game”, the second of her seven-story cycle in The Last of the Menu Girls and with Rocío Esquibel as narrator, Denise Chávez 68

Ibid., 206. Ibid., 165. 70 Ibid., 137. 71 Ibid., 33. 72 Ibid., 8. 69

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gives a locating sense of Chicana girlhood as history and place. Hers is the southwest as township neighbourhood block, intersecting streets (“simply Up … Down”), votary flowers for “our Lady’s feet”, fences and alleys, the Greek “Old Man W”, the spy-like Strong brother and sister and the fractious Althertons “with their smiling young boys, senseless boys, demon boys”. 73 Above all are the three trees: the Apricot Tree, the Marking-Off Tree and the Willow Tree, an arboreal trinity which signal not just family (to include Rocío’s sister Mercy), school, or the neighbourhood cast with Regino Suárez and son as handyman pair, but childhood itself. None emblematizes this more than the Willow Tree, its leaves and branches cut or torn off by the disturbed Ricky Altherton (“now a rampaging, consumed adolescent”). The Apricot Tree dies. The Marking-Off Tree becomes fruitless. But is the Willow that most resists to the end. In the face of Regino’s efforts to fell and uproot it the tree is said to have “refused to come out of the earth”. The cavity left when the roots have been ripped out are “like a tooth gone”. The residual stump for Rocío comes to seem the very image of childhood as both pain (Ricky’s attack on her) and yet fondest loss (“shreds of magic living”). 74 Her mother’s planting of a new willow serves as reminder of the old, at once childhood’s end yet not quite the beginning of adulthood. Chávez writes a finely tuned parable, chicanismo made over into live memorial landscape. Something of this tough lyricism runs through all the other stories. “The Last of the Menu Girls” as title-piece offers a case in point, Rocío as work-study deliverer of menus at Altavista Memorial Hospital. The departure-point is the dying of her Great Aunt Eulilia (“[she] smelled like the mercilessly sick”75), her mother’s vein-scarred legs, and the cancered flesh and death of Doña Mercedes. In her own room she dances to secret pleasure in her own body. At the hospital under the benign but hunchback regime of the obsessively tea drinking Mr Marion Smith (“in my dreams, Mr. Smith was encased in green Jello” 76 ), and alongside the unfavoured ex-schoolmate Arlene Rutschman and the various nurses, she becomes both spectator and 73 Denise Chavez, The Last of the Menu Girls, Houston, TX: Arte Público, 1986, 41 and 45. 74 Ibid., 47-49. 75 Ibid., 14. 76 Ibid., 18.

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alimentary custodian of the patients – the bellowing Mr Samaniego, the jaundice-afflicted Mr Ellis, the snoring Mrs Daniels (“I’m a dying woman”), the “sad, wet-eyed” Mrs Gustafson, and the young Elizabeth Rainy in for a D and C (“it was this woman in her solitary anguish who touched the most deeply”).77 She ends her stint thinking of them all as a summer’s past only to find herself briefly returned to the hospital as a car accident patient. But the food-menu service she once provided is now gone, the daily roster of salisbury steak and macaroni, Jello and 7-Up. The story unfolds the landscape of young womanhood as one of “surgical” whole and part (“My heart reached out to every person”78), a visitation of youth into illness and death amid life. The collection’s other stories incrementally fill out this landscape. “Shooting Stars”, set as a cousinly visit to Texas (“Texas signified queer days, querulous wanderings, bloody fairy tales, hot, moon-filled nights, earthworms and unbought flowers”79), turns on the rise and fall of Rocío’s different idealizations of girl beauty. The local girl Eloisa turns out to reek in cigarette smoke; Diana ends up with her boyfriend Ruben running a Janitorial Service; Josie is no more than a party queen of pertness and high heels; and the gangly Barbara, against expectation, gets the “man of everyone’s dreams”. 80 She sees their several and competing images in the patterns of wall-plaster of her room, the model, or not, for her own as yet un-seized identity. “Evening in Paris” turns on Rocío’s one dollar Woolworth’s Christmas gift to her mother, teacher, of a “midnight blue” bottle of perfume. Her gift points both to the religious and other cluttering trinketry of the family home and yet to the actual Paris she will one day visit and make reality of the perfume’s “liquid manifestation of so much hope”.81 “The Closet” envisages family and girlhood as chambers of private life. In turn they include the closet of Rocío’s mother with its Shroud of Turin image of Christ’s eyes and the memory of her two husbands; the basement and half imaginary Grey Room to which Rocío retreats

77

Ibid., 24 and 27. Ibid., 35. 79 Ibid., 34. 80 Ibid., 62. 81 Ibid., 75. 78

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to encounter “presences” and “voices”; 82 the bathroom closet as medicine horde with its mementos of sickness, love and adolescent smoking; Rocío’s own closet where she has kept the sweatshirt of her early admirer Johnny; the TV closet of her step-sister Ronelia, married at sixteen, and whose wedding dress still hangs there; and the twicewidowed mother’s closet (“Nieves’s closet was her life, her artery of hope”83). Each represents the past as present, necessary storage, the story’s iconographic housings of identity. “Space Is a Solid” and “Compadre” set Rocío in contrasting contexts yet still within her township New Mexico family home with its intimacy of detail, its code switches into Spanish, and its power of domestic landscape. Related in five voices “Space Is a Solid” sees Rocío on a Drama Appreciation teaching assignment yet edging towards breakdown, adored by her student Kari Lee Wembey, harassed by Nita Wembley, the neurotic-religious mother who puts cash into the school and from whom she temporarily rents an apartment, and half loved, half not, by her Graduate Student boyfriend Loudon. Meantime she endures a demanding theatre internship during a production of The Crucible, bewitched by lack of cash, and the finding of her own true centre and ready with fantasy about different male actors and neighbours. Endlessly tired, unable to ride elevators, given to thinking her hands are turning blue, the story portrays a woman whose frayed or failing edges of her life are redeemed in Kari Lee’s class-exercise appreciation of her. “Compadre”, archetypal chicano usage, returns to Regino Suárez, “neighborhood handyman”, 84 whose defection from his marriage to Braulia and their many daughters (to include the fat, retarded Obelia) and son Eleiterio, Rocío witnesses through her mother’s sense of compadrazgo. That, in Nieves Esquivel’s self-pivoting definition, means “to be unrelated yet related, and yet willingly to allow the relationless relation absolute freedom within limits”.85 Rocío herself has surfaced to take possession of family and neighbourhood: she has become a writer. Her legacy is all about her, the sprawl of family, the rich inventory of passed-on clothes and broken TVs, Nieves’ dream of a garden fountain, her husband Salvador’s relationship with Regino 82

Ibid., 84. Ibid., 90. 84 Ibid., 143. 85 Ibid., 168. 83

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(she has given Salvador’s suit to him), and the families of the sister Mercy and half-sister Ronelia. Yet even as Rocío acts on her literary calling it is Nieves who speaks, Chicana, comadre, the embodied wife-mother spirit of home – “You don’t have to go anywhere. Not down the street. Not even out of this house. There’s stories, plenty of them all around.”86 Chávez engagingly acts on the cue, the landscape of Rocío’s storytelling in its turn nothing if not the shadow and substance of her own. *** Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest puts Latin American magic realism under Japanese American auspices, a ficción full of wit and cleverly conceived angles and hits. “It all seemed to be an incredible dream” observes its protagonist, Kazumasa Ishimaru, the Japanese migrant to Brazil about whose head hovers a golf-ball sized sphere or buoy which leads him into fabulous wealth and the role of national benefactor.87 His observation fits perfectly. For this is environmentalism – where more signally than the Amazon Rain Forest as the eventual point of arrival? – seen through a glass both darkly and surreal-comically. As the story turns and expands, a blend of comic-strip, manga, Swiftian or Borges-style pastiche (an Author’s Note speaks of it as “a kind of novela, a Brazilian soap opera, of the sort which occupies the imagination and national psyche of the Brazilian people on prime-time TV”), the central issue comes more and more into view: the folly, the sheer farcical likelihood, of a world reduced to environmental ground-zero. But Yamashita keeps her touch nicely distanced and without descending into homily. Each thread works for, and into, the unfolding canvas, not least Kazumasa as Innocent Abroad (“a sort of one man/one-ball institution”88), the one-time detector of track defects with the aid of his ball on Tokyo’s circular Yamanote Line who lands in São Paulo and almost unwittingly becomes the multi-millionaire. The dramatis personae who gather about him indeed could be Brazilian national theatre, or at least a shadow-cast. His cousin 86

Ibid., 190. Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Minneapolis and St Paul, MN: Coffee House Press, 1990, 58. 88 Ibid., 7. 87

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Hiroshi, shady entrepreneur, runs the Kazumasa corporation and eventual karaoke network. The city looks to Batista Djapan, his wife Tania Aparecida, and their pigeon empire. From up-country arises Mané Da Costa Pena and his feather cult. The coast’s Chico Paco becomes fisherman pilgrim saint. New York affords Jonathan B. Tweep, three-armed, clip-obsessed, and the GGG mega-corporation he rules together through the management strategy known as “Trialectics”89 with his three breasted lover Michelle Mabelle. As these various turnings intersect, along with Kazumasa’s love for Lourdes, his housekeeper, and her children, and Paco’s same-sex love for the disabled Gilberto (who becomes a Disneyland manchild in the amusement park built as Chicolandia), the novel takes a variety of shots. Boutique environmentalism comes under the gun. Yamashita guys the yuppiedom of the lambada and Ipanema beach fashion. Each grandiose leisure scheme is undercut, along with New Age faith cults and pilgrimages (a radio station among them called “Answered Prayers”), extreme animal rights, and Latin America’s “politics” of cartel, kidnap, and assassination. Not the least of these is transport obsolescence, a 1950s-60s “enormous parking lot” and “metal cemetery” in the jungle of “F-86 Sabres, F-4 Phantoms, Huey Cobras, Lear jets and Piper Cubs, Cadillacs, Volkswagens, Dodges and an assorted mixture of gaz-guzzlers …”. 90 All are “slowly crumbling” inside a soup of napalm, the very trace of Vietnam, which has led to a new strain of mice with lead and arsenic in their blood and suction pads for feet. Yamashita could well be credited with her own form of jungle gothic. The centre, however, most lies in the stretch of land known as the Matacão, a strange, shiny, plastic-like surface near the Rain Forest. It resembles nothing so much as a giant credit card (it becomes known as “miracle plastic”91), and indeed is subjected to capitalist investment, mining operations, religious devotion, all and every variety of fetish (“Everyone was after a piece of Matacão plastic”92). In fact it is the earth’s tumour or haemorrhoid, a species of malign cellular growth. Its Plastic Age surface promise flatters to deceive, a one locus of many

89


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where the world’s pollution has pressed upwards and taken on a virtual life of its own. For just as Manó’s “featherology” leads to “birdicide”, 93 the extermination of all avian life, so the Matacão becomes the centre for typhus, lice, “devouring bacteria”, “ominous holes”, 94 and the final corrosive ruin of culture, sky and earth population and the economy. Kazumasa retreats to finds solace with Lourdes in a farm, but most of the rest fall as graphically as they have risen, Mané of plague, Chico Paco of mistaken assassination and J.B. a suicide. Even the ball corrodes and dies yet in true magic-realist style manages to speak as posthumous narrator. This is landscape indeed through the arc, a vision of the rainbows of the great rain forest as magic curtaining, the actual world become irreal, ecology a counter-ecology. *** Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, her resolutely hemispheric text of the Americas, for its part envisages nothing less than the restoration of historic landscape – the return to indigenous custody through a risen people’s army and at once borderless, brown, respectful of Nature and the human order in despite of all European (and Euro-American) colonial intrusion. In this respect Tucson, the American Southwest, acts as the novel’s geo-historical centre, a placename originally meaning “plentiful fresh water … in Papago” yet where the city has “built its largest sewage treatment plant…next to the river”. 95 Sewage, corruption, people and territories despoiled, underwrite the novel at every turn. This is the Americas as broken history, dysfunctions of caste and family, modernity as glut. Tucson itself is designated a “city of thieves”.96 According to the passed-down Mayan Almanac of the Dead, however, actually a Book of Life, there is the prophecy of a reversal, a taking back of the land. This will take form in an eventual south-tonorth indigenous alliance (“The prophecies said gradually all traces of Europeans in America would disappear and, at last, the people would

93

Ibid., 199. Ibid., 206. 95 Ibid., 190 and 189. 96 Ibid., 610. 94

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retake the land”97). Even so, Silko offers no reductive white-brown cultural binary, a too ready blame narrative. Her vision remains one of the Americas historically forged of myriad nomenclatures and genealogies, be they tribal, Euro-white, north and south American, military or corporate. The novel, to this end, sets its narrative register as one of politics, crime and betrayal. Guns and cocaine rule. Oil, uranium mining and like excavation have left the land scarred. The CIA operates unchecked. Regimes run from Cuban revolutionary schools to police and army video torture pornography. Hollywood and TV Hotline Indians appear in the media. Selective imaging of Chiapas-like insurrection implies a controlled media. Real estate is endlessly finagled. The human organ trade lurks. Marxism and Capitalism vie, the one all plots and assassination, the other all consumer frenzy. Either way, tribal dispossession continues. Above all the writ is war large and small (“War had been declared the first day the Spaniards set foot on Native American soil, and the same war had been going on ever since: the war was for the continents called the Americas”98). The upshot, its more than seventy characters, ply of plot-lines, and compendium of indigenous sites – whether Arizona, New Mexico, Mexico, Central America, Alaska, New Orleans or Las Vegas, and desert, city or jungle, could not more aspire to be the eco-epic de nos jours. Silko unhesitatingly makes use of Yaqui, Navajo, Laguna, Hopi, Cherokee, Seminole, Mayan, and Inca tradition. She invokes the Aztecs as original blood sacrifice sorcerers who caused tribal peoples to flee north. The novel’s inventory reworks Native snake creatorgods and paired twin mythology (Lecha and Zeta as heiresses to the almanac, Tacho and El Feo as leaders of the coming insurrection guided by macaw spirits). Shamanism prevails, or as Comrade Angelita, tribal revolutionary, observes “The ancestors’s spirits speak in dreams. We wait. We simply wait for the earth’s natural forces already set loose, the exploding, fierce energy of all the dead slaves and dead ancestors haunting the Americas.” 99 Other gods enter the reckoning, not just Quetzacoatl, but the African and Haiti-to-New Orleans ancestor godheads of Damballah, Ogoun and Eursulie.

97

Ibid., 631-32. Ibid., 133. 99 Ibid., 518. 98

Woman’s Place?

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Opinion, predictably, has varied: Silko over-reaches, her novel is too crowded, or hectoring, or damagingly under-edited. Admirers speak of rare brilliance, the New World as indeed a very old world, replete in its own wisdom of populations and languages. The novel, even as it fills out its tapestry of fissure and self-loss, its show of multiple sexual desire or damage, so bears the promise of a redemptively better world of the Americas than that preyed on by the modern raptors of both capitalism and communism. Within the novel the almanac supplies the banner of resistance, complex prophecy, a codex. Born down across five hundred years and weathered by time and transport, and annotated by the grandmother Yoeme and others before her, its deciphering remains incomplete. Literally its “horse-gut parchment”100 has been part eaten by starving fugitives at one point. That it is given by the psychic Lecha to the coke addicted Seese, searching for her kidnapped infant son, to transfer to computer files, implies unfinished history, a text of life still to be fulfilled. To this end Silko can list past tribal and slave insurrections. Spanish encomienda and Dixie plantation labour give departure-points. The role of the Seminoles with Andrew Jackson in his victory at the Battle of New Orleans and the unedifying expulsion to the west-ofthe-Mississippi Indian Territory that becomes Oklahoma acts as symptomatic historic irony. Geronimo and Wovoka, Wounded Knee, the Navajo code-speakers in World War II, and the recent indigenous rebellions in Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru, all bespeak a Native trajectory. The novel’s proliferating strings of story and cause-andeffect builds into the one composite narrative. Each contributing folder of characters and action is so conceived to work as the narrative subsequent to the original Death Dog rule across the Americas. Lecha as psychic and Zeta as smuggler serve as inaugural voices. Seese becomes adoptee amanuensis for the almanac. The Tucson desert ranch with its family of Ferro, Jamey, Paulie and their dogs and companions might be time’s outpost, a remnant tribal colony. Seese’s connection through her stolen child Monte into the David-Eric-Beaufrey-Serlo gay circuit, the latter with his monied search for sangre pura eugenics with body parts supplied by Trigg, throws a morbid light on both death cult photography, the raising of children, and race and gender purity. In the Max, Leah and Sonny 100

Ibid., 570.

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Blue imbroglio, New York mafia crime is brought south to the country golf world of Arizona, another layer of corruption. The figure of Menardo, self-denying mestizo and global insurance entrepreneur, his affair with the greatly misnamed Alegria, his half-membership of Arizona’s power-elite El Grupo, his willing collusion in the CIA arms operation, and his farcical death on being shot through a supposed bullet-proof vest by his chauffeur-spy Tacho (a not so veiled allusion to the 1890s Ghost Dance and imagined immunity from bullets), supplies both truth to history and pastiche. The Angelita La EscapíaBartolemeo axis undermines Cuban-style Marxism as solution (“The Indians couldn’t care less about international Marxism; all they wanted was to retake their land from the white man”101). In Sterling, initially banned by the Laguna for breaking tribal community protocol and showing their sacred stone snake to a filmcrew, the novel has its conciliator and returnee. As he makes his way out of Tucson, the very vortex of historic ill, he encounters the pueblo’s new giant snake (“The snake was looking south, in the direction from which the twin brothers and the people would come” 102 ). On Silko’s part this is the novel as hemispheric vision, mythic while would-be actual, ecological while sedimented in the humanity of its indigenous peoples, the Americas in their entirety as first and last landscape. *** All of these landscapes, however wholly particular the fiction that delivers them, make for a continuity, women fabling women, environments of mind and consciousness as well as site. Yet as much as each participates in the shared creation of an American cultural as much as physical geography, a shared feminine voicing of the Americas, from New England to the Southwest, New Orleans to Brazil, Nebraska to New Mexico, black Florida to white Mississippi, there can be no mistaking the individuality of idiom. Each, no one would doubt, could be read under other schema. But under “woman’s place” they take on manifold implications, an interacting character at once wholly specific and yet always quite altogether more inclusive. 101 102

Ibid., 326. Ibid., 763.

11 ODD MAN OUT? HENRY JAMES, THE CANON AND THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA This, please, for the delightful young man from Texas, who shews such excellent dispositions …. I suggest to give him as alternatives these two slightly different lists: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Roderick Hudson. The Portrait of a Lady. The Princess Casamassima. The Wings of the Dove. The Golden Bowl. The American The Tragic Muse. The Wings of the Dove. The Ambassadors. The Golden Bowl.

The second list is, as it were, the more “advanced” … Henry James to Mrs Fanny Prothero1

On more than just one occasion James spoke with considerable appreciation, if not envy, of the use in France of Maître as a term of honour for its men of letters.2 It was far from vainglory on his part. 1

Henry James to Mrs Fanny Prothero, 14 September 1913, in Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984, IV, 683. 2 The one figure who did regularly address him as “Maître” was the French-speaking Joseph Conrad (see Frederick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives, NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979, 407). Nor does translation into “'Master” or “The Master” quite fit the bill, notwithstanding its use as a title for the fifth volume of the standard biography. It fails to convey the Gallic sense of intimacy and cultural pride of possession so subtly woven into the wish to pay respect. See Leon Edel, Henry James, the Master: 1901-1916, Philadelphia PA and NY: J.B. Lippincott, 1972.

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For a writer whose circle of literary friends had once included Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, and whose own mastery of the language might as readily have led him to Paris as to London, it could hardly have been thought inappropriate. Casting back, too, over a lifetime’s creative effort, not least as he saw it being embodied in the twenty-four volumes of Scribner’s New York Edition (1907-17), he had even more substantial grounds to think himself worthy of the French honorific. But would he have reacted with pleasure or suspicion to the idiom of a later age, which almost by reflex has taken to pronouncing him canonical? He may not literally have used the term himself, but on the evidence of his letter to Mrs Prothero few would accuse him of not having run well ahead of the game. There, in plainest fashion, he offered his own appointed canon, indeed not one but two, his own willingness to create representative and even alternative hierarchies for his fiction. Further, one can readily enough imagine him relishing the scriptural resonance of the term, his place at the head of a broad or perhaps more to the point in his case a high church of literature. Given how dismayingly unread he knew himself to be at his death in 1916, it would also represent a certain amends, a yet further, if posthumous, recognition of the unflagging expenditure of energy he had given to his chosen vocation. In addition, he might have appreciated stepping free from any mere coterie following of The Yellow Book variety, a writer at last to be savoured by an overdue more general readership. At the same time, who doubts that the critical intelligence capable of producing the Prefaces or essays like “The Art of Fiction” or “The Future of the Novel” would not immediately have detected the less favouring implications of canonical, its imputation of a top place in the hierarchy simply by privilege of caste or gender? Would he not also have found the term too chill or distant, the product of a time when the asseverations of academic theory have been alleged to threaten to inhibit any unmediated contact with the work at hand? But whatever his, or anyone else’s, caveats, canonical has become virtually required usage, attributed, furthermore, with barely a hint of reservation to the whole body of his fiction, be it early, middle or late. ***

Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

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What, then, happens when an agreed canonical writer like James produces a novel that, though occasionally it arouses even passionate shows of interest, nonetheless seems to go absent or missing? That is, a novel precisely like The Princess Casamassima (1886), the one novel in either list which has had to exist in a kind of suspended animation, there but somehow not there. For however often James’ story of London anarchism, with its cast of Hyacinth Robinson, the Princess, Millie Henning and the Muniments and their circle, has been given dutiful mention, acknowledged as an also-ran, far more often has it been discreetly stepped round or left to its own devices. In other words, should canonical apply simply across the board, even to novels like The Princess Casamassima which, whatever James’ overall ranking, tend to remain unread and to feature only infrequently in academic syllabuses? Nor can it be said to be a question simply of early or apprentice work. A thoroughly full-length effort, The Princess Casamassima after all appears well after James hit his stride, no less than five years on from The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and within little more than a decade and a half of the major phase of The Wings of The Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). Rather it might be said to share a fate with those novels which for one reason or another get stranded, or remain uninvited into the limelight, because they look on initial acquaintance to be out of kilter with the rest of the output, a kind of undeniable but wayward progeny. In this connection one thinks of, say, Henry Fielding’s Amelia, which abandons the expected comic-epic mould, or Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor, which inverts the Brussels love plot of the better-known Villette, or George Eliot’s Romola, which breaks ranks and attempts historical romance, or Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, which opts not for sea adventure but for a loweredeye and satiric Pilgrim’s Progress through the New World, or Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, which replaces Wessex with Cornwall, or Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, a novel by James’ great friend and countrywoman which moves out of her accustomed New York society and into a puritan and provincial New England. Taken along the canonical sightline, all these have been thought oddities, diversions from the main track. At different times they all have had to be refound, given new certificates of acceptability. More oddly still, in this

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light, almost every one of these texts represents a favourite offspring, a novel held in the most special affection by its author. As to The Princess Casamassima in its own right, how to account for its relative neglect given its inherent drama as a story of would-be political insurrection; or its portrait of Hyacinth first as child and then artist manqué and sacrificial assassin; or its memorable portrait gallery of types and characters, not least of which besides Hyacinth is the title figure of the Princess; or the peculiar weight and density of its evocation of London as “this huge, luxurious, wanton, wasteful city”?3 Given the routine charge that James sidestepped both politics and the sexual life, does it not, at however much a tangent, offer nothing if not political and sexual James? Why, in a further twist, does The Bostonians, which he also published in 1886 and which he thought a companion piece in terms of theme, tend to get invoked as being unarguably more alert to issues of social power struggle, or class, or gender, or even the relationship of art to politics? Why, and again oddly given its interest in London as underground site for conspiracy and protest, has The Princess Casamassima not very often been nominated for the great line of Condition of England novels with which it shows an obvious affinity and which typically includes the likes of Dickens’ Bleak House, Disraeli’s Coningsby, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, Gissing’s Demos and The Nether World, Conrad’s The Secret Agent or H.G. Wells’ Tongo Bungay? If not absolutely and unreservedly a missing James novel, The Princess Casamassima cannot be said to have had anything like the best or most assiduous of attention, and assuredly not so when put alongside the other novels from the same list chosen by his own hand to be representative of his different principal phases such as Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of The Dove and The Golden Bowl. In sum, what is it about The Princess Casamassima, whether as specimen canonical text or simply in and for itself, which goes on making it the uninvited member at the feast, the cuckoo in the nest? The author himself would have felt no small consternation at the question. For why include it in either list had he not held it in the most considerable personal esteem? We do not know how Stark Young, 3

This and all subsequent quotations are from the text Henry James published as The Princess Casamassima, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908, New York Edition, Vols I and II.


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“the delightful young man” on whose behalf Mrs Prothero had written and who would go on to become the distinguished drama critic of the New Republic (he came, incidentally, from Mississippi not Texas), reacted to James’ letter of reply. But his enquiry was not only timely in itself, it can be seen with perspective to have been made on far more than his own behalf alone. It also has the added bonus, be it by hindsight or not, of showing how uncannily James anticipated our latter-day interest in canonicity and, implicitly or otherwise, in the fate of novels which indeed become odd men out in the manner of The Princess Casamassima. *** Matters get no less odd when a round of still closer coordinates is brought to bear. First, we have James’ own Notebook entry for 10 August 1885, with its hint that there might in truth be something vexatious about the novel: It is absolutely necessary at this point I should make the future evolution of the Princess Casamassima more clear to myself. I have never yet become engaged in a novel in which, after I had begun to write and send off my MS., the details had remained so vague. This is partly – or indeed wholly – owing to the fact that I have been so terribly preoccupied – up to so lately – with the unhappy Bostonians, born under an evil star. The subject of the Princess is magnificent, and if I can only give up my mind to it properly – generously and trustfully – the form will shape itself as successfully as the idea deserves. I have plunged in rather blindly, and got a good many characters on my hands; but these will fall into their places if I kept cool and think it out. Oh art, art, what difficulties are thine? Without thee, for me, the world would be, indeed a howling desert. The Princess will give me hard, continuous work for many months to come; but she will give me joys too sacred to prate about …4

4

The Notebooks of Henry James, NY: Oxford University Press, 1947, 1961, eds F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock, 68; also The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, eds Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

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Whatever forward light these notes afford, it needs remembering that they emanate from an author still in the throes of composition. “Vague”, for instance, holds no necessary sway as a judgment on the eventual result, any more than James’ having “plunged in rather blindly”. His rhapsodic “Oh art, art, art …”can be matched up with any other number of self-encouraging memos and asides in the Notebooks. The key observation, however, for present purposes, has to be “The subject of the Princess is magnificent”, his conviction that he was about major fare and a novel to elicit nothing less for him than “joys too sacred to prate about”. But on both sides of the Atlantic, The Princess Casamassima was to enjoy no better fate than The Bostonians, much as the latter had gone on to win belated acclaim. In 1888 a mournful James would write of both to W.D. Howells: “I have entered upon evil days …. I am still staggering a good deal under the mysterious and (to me) inexplicable injury, wrought – apparently – upon my situation by my last two novels.” 5 This unflattering reception of novels matchingly given over to portraits of Boston and London – Tales of Two Cities so to speak – no doubt had something to do with his ill-fated venture into the theatre from 1890 onwards (he had adapted “Daisy Miller” for the stage as early as 1882). But his misgivings in the case of The Princess Casamassima would prove especially well taken. Truly a veil of silence, inattention at least, would descend, and to persist with only the most occasional demur for well over half a century. It took an Introduction written in 1948 by Lionel Trilling, and republished in 1951 in The Liberal Imagination, to get matters moving again. Trilling spoke up uncompromisingly for the novel as “an incomparable representation of the spiritual circumstances of our civilization”, by which he had in mind James’ observation to A.C. Benson in 1896: “But I have the imagination of disaster – and see life as ferocious and sinister.” He also argued that James had been “beautifully in control of his novel”, “warm” and “fluent”, and had created a “social texture” at once “grainy” and “knotted with practicality and detail”. 6 Even so, and however timely or invigorating the intervention, it created anything but a consensus. On the contrary:

5

Henry James to W.D. Howells, 2 January 1888, in Henry James Letters, III, 209. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, NY: Viking, 1951. 6


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in what debate there was to follow, the variance, indeed the outright disagreement, could not have been more marked. Only a part of Trilling’s admiration, symptomatically, would do for Irving Howe in his Politics and the Novel (1957). James’ “flight – or descent – to the world of anarchist London in the 1880s” amounted to “a bewildering mixture of excellence and badness”. Unlike Trilling, Howe could detect no “commanding vision of the political life”. 7 For all the virtuosity of individual portraits like Miss Pynsent or Millie or Paul Muniment or the Poupins, James had written too much from the outside. His anarchist scenes were too un-elaborate (and even unfactual, a Bloomsbury gathering place and pub like the Sun and Moon notwithstanding). The leader, Hoffendahl, comes over as too shadowy, mere silhouette and figure of mystery. As to the London poor and dispossessed, however keenly engaged his personal sympathies may have been, James had drawn them too much by implication, too abstractly. But Howe was the very spirit of restraint when put alongside Maxwell Geismar, whose Henry James and the Jacobites (1963) saw in The Princess Casamassima “James’s own most abiding prejudices, social ignorance and infantine obsessions”. The story, for Geismar, reveals James’ “baroque social conservativism”, a “dreamlike fantasy” which avoids all “the true conditions of British social misery” in favour of portraying a foundling prince, a moneyed and implausible Fairy Queen (reincarnated out of the former Christina Light of Roderick Hudson) and an aesthete’s retreat back to the life of art over political action – no half-measures, clearly, by this account, only Jacobite conspiracy. 8 Between views of The Princess Casamassima as worthy of “high estimation” (Gorley Putt) or a novel whose plot verges on “the inane” (Yvor Winters), it has also been notable for its absence in a number of the standard accounts. 9 Neither F.R. Leavis’ The Great Tradition 7

Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel, Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1957. Howe’s reading of the novel might be compared with John Lucas, Literature and Politics in the Nineeteenth Century, London: Methuen, 1971, 171-221. 8 Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites, Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1963, 70, 73, 75. 9 These judgments are taken from, respectively, Gorley Putt, Henry James: A Reader’s Guide, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966, 163, and Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason, Denver, CO: Alan Swallow, 1947, 333. The following can be added to the account: John Goode, “The Art of Fiction: Walter Besant and Henry

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(1948) nor Richard Chase’s The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), for instance, gives it space. Leavis, it is true, spoke of it elsewhere in passing, in an early comment praising its “sappy vitality” but later condemning it as “one of James’s most embarrassing failures” – two responses from a single source that point up the novel’s power to create contradiction.10 More lately still it has been made subject to gender and new historicist dispensations. interpretations which see James as respectively patriarchal (especially in the treatment of the Princess, Lady Aurora Langrish, and even Millie) and led by the inlaid biases of his class to his supposed horror at any upsetting of the established political order.11 To these dissonant responses should be added a solid round of influence hunting – which more than anywhere has pointed to Dickens (above all in the portrait of Mrs Bowerbank and Hyacinth’s childhood visit to his mother in the prison) and to the Turgenev of Virgin Soil (1876), to whose plot line The Princess Casamassima demonstrably bears a resemblance and whose French version James had once reviewed. 12 Who, moreover, could resist the comparison of James’ novel with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, two visions by fellow author-exiles of London as at-risk modern metropolis, and in danger of becoming a City of Dreadful Night? Little wonder, given these gyrations, that The Princess Casamassima goes on being called “a kind of freak among James’s other novels”,13 “the least representative”

James”, in Tradition, Tolerance in Nineteenth Century Fiction: Critical Essays on Some English and American Novels, eds David Howard, John Lucas and John Goode, London: Routledge, 1966; John L. Kimney, “The Princess Casamassima and The Quality of Bewilderment”, Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 22/1 (June 1967), 47-62; Sister Jane Marie Luecke, “The Princess Casamassima: Hyacinth’s Fallible Consciousness” Modern Philology, 60/4 (May 1963), 274-80; Taylor Stoehr, “Words and Deeds in The Princess Casamassima”, English Literary History, Vol. 37 (March 1970), 95-135; and Alwyn Berland, Culture and Conduct in The Novels of Henry James, Cambridge, NY and London: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 10 Cited by Putt, Henry James: A Reader’s Guide, 164. 11 Both points are joined in Marta Banta’s “Beyond Post-Modernism: The Sense of History in The Princess Casamassima”, Henry James Review, 3/2, (Fall 1982), 96107. 12 This resemblance has been helpfully explored in Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James, NY: Macmillan, 1961, 146-52. 13 Walter Dubler, “The Princess Casamassima: Its Place in the James Canon”, Modern Fiction Studies, XII/1 (Spring 1966), 44.


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of his works. 14 But has it, in truth, deserved to be James’ conspicuously un-canonical text, his odd man out? Without wishing to turn things utterly on their head and to claim The Princess Casamassima as some unqualified masterpiece, I suggest three kinds of reason why this assessment does James’ novel a genuine disservice and why in fact, for all its ostensible difference, it belongs utterly in line with the other landmarks of his oeuvre *** First, and to be blunt, what at heart is The Princess Casamassima most about? Debate has gone back and forth about whether James wanted simply to tell a Life (Hyancinth’s), or a Fate (the taking of the anarchist vow to assassinate a public figure like a Duke – with the Princess and Paul Muniment there to aid and abet), or even a would-be political thriller (irradiating out from Hoffendahl through Muniment, Poupin, Schinkel and the rest). None of these is out of place or unreasonable. But my own inclination would be far more to discern in The Princess Casamassima nothing less than James’ version of Culture and Anarchy, his deliberately pitched and selfappointed outsider contribution to the Condition of England issue. Here, after all, was his adopted and admired England, whose dense, stubborn particularity had drawn him from the start. But it was also an England, a civilization, in danger from within, its own inertia and seams of decadence. A hub of Empire it may have been, a repository of history and culture, a political order evolved out of pragmatics rather than any Grand Scheme, but it was also at risk of turning predator upon itself, the victim of its own perpetuated antagonisms of class, of wealth, and an unyielding and entrenched hierarchy. “Beneath the vast smug surface”, to cite James’ description in his New York Preface, its focal point, London, as a result has become a hive, a sinister, conspiratorial underworld likely by design or blunder to erupt at any time. 15 Much as James has been attacked for not knowing enough about anarchist politics, about Kropotkin, Bakunin, Blanqui, Nechaev, Tkachev, and the rest, does not his “little bookbinder”, Hyacinth Robinson, addled as he may be about his mix 14 Bruce R. McElderry Jr., Henry James, New Haven, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1965, 68. 15 The Princess Casamassima, Preface, xxii.

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of noble blood and his reduced conditions, speak directly to the issue in an outburst like the following: “It’s beyond anything I can say ... there’s an immense underworld peopled with a thousand forms of revolutionary passion and devotion. The manner in which it is organized is what astonished me …. And on top of it all society lives!” (II, 29). To this we might want to add James’ sharp political awareness of English political and cultural decline, as expressed in his letter to Grace Norton in January 1885: … the country is gloomy, anxious, and London reflects its gloom. Westminster Hall and the Tower were half blown up two days ago by Irish Dynamiters …. I find such a situation as this extremely interesting, and it makes me feel how much I am attached to this country and, on the whole, to its sometimes exasperating people. The possible malheurs – reverses, dangers, embarrassments, the “decline”, in a word, of old England, go to my heart …16

Having, to his own satisfaction at least, taken the measure in The Bostonians of what had become of America’s founding New Englandism (“I wished”, he writes in his Notebooks, “to write a very American tale, a tale very characteristic of our social conditions”), 17 so he undertakes a similar task for “Our Old Home”, as Hawthorne called it. It was, too, in his Hawthorne that he so lovingly enumerated the consoling textures of English as against American life, the “accumulation of history and custom”, “the complexity of manners and types”, in all, to his novelist’s eye, a necessary “fund of suggestion”.18 The Princess Casamassima, thereby, represents both an act of homage and a cautionary tale, James’ tribute yet also his critique and warning. The novel’s terms, however, have not been of a kind to satisfy those who look to James to have written his version of the English political or revolutionary novel. For better or worse, his were the deeply Arnoldian concerns of culture, high culture as may be, of that 16

Henry James to Grace Norton, 24 January 1885, in Henry James Letters, III, 66-67. The Notebooks of Henry James, 48. 18 Henry James, Hawthorne (1879), Ithaca NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997, 34. 17


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sweetness and light whereby society, and specifically English society, might avoid implosion and disaster. For James, any more than for Arnold, no one political programme or formal ideology holds -- rather, he seeks to indicate a way forward from the example of Hyacinth Robinson’s life and death. Deny imagination, the human will to self-expression, and you produce quite inevitably the ignorant armies of opposition, be it a meretricious aristocracy, a philistine middle class, a desperate anarchist underclass, or victims (and even the well intended, like Lady Langrish) caught – indeed stranded – in the ensuing clash and confusion. James’ vision throughout the novel assumes with Arnold that culture truly enlarges the whole view, thereby liberating us from all forms of the provincial. The politics of the provincial mar interests across the board: aristocracy, bourgeoisie, the working-class, the radicals and would-be insurrectionists. The incarnations in The Princess Casamassima are several, whether one-man sectarian leadership like that of Diedrich Hoffendahl (pointedly he has a mutilated hand), hard apparatchiks or commissars like Paul Muniment (whose face suggest to Hyacinth “the image of a look of bristling bayonets” [I, 119]), socialist and republican expatriates or excommunards like M. Poupin or Vetch, or the confused and jargon laden band of would-be terrorist plotters who gather at the Sun and Moon (the perfect deflationary name). A moneyed Princess Casamassima might well be in search of the real (“I want to know…real London, the people and all their sufferings and passions” [I, 222]), or read her borrowed volumes on Labour and Capital, or take up lower-class London residence, but she acts ultimately in bad faith, more out of her own personal disaffections than a political sense. As to Hyacinth he is both innocent and yet complicit, martyr and yet fellow traveller. If not quite of a kind with Conrad’s sacrificial Stevie in The Secret Agent he embodies a connecting vulnerability. James writes, ironically, affectionately and with all his resources of pace and interplay of viewpoint, to decry an England turning too narrow, and from the standpoint, implicitly, of an order whose touchstones he believed were also those bound up in art. This kind of high view ostensibly favours neither one nor another politics, but rather a view of society as an ambit, a process, which affords awareness, self-individuation, in the first instance, and implicitly a way forward from there to political and economic good management.

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That, however, is not to suggest that James excludes popular culture. How else to explain the vital presence of Millie and her world? James, in all these respects, will always fall short for those who want from him a manifesto, a programme, a call to arms even. But he saw himself, as ever, about a fiction that tells its story as authorially disinterested, for all his conservative turn ungoverned by intruding ideology. “Culture and Anarchy” as a phrase from his own time, “Culture and Society” as a phrase from a time closer to the present: James’ The Princess Casamassima at once lays claim to these frames but always, irreducibly, to his own measure. *** Second, The Princess Casamassima offers itself as supremely a novel of place, but of a kind far different from that to be found in Zola or even James’ admired George Eliot. As he recalls it in his Preface, the novel took form out of “the assault directly made by the great city upon an imagination quick to react”, a London at odds against itself and driven to insurrection from below. The city, whose streets and byways he had subjected to the inspection of his never-ending walks, loomed for him as “the great grey Babylon”, “a garden bristling with immense illustrative flora”. 19 Hyacinth Robinson, in turn, and no doubt Millie, Miss Pynsent, Mr Vetch and the rest, “sprang up for me out of the London pavement”.20 James, further, speaks of seeking to recreate “London mysteries”, of pursuing not only Hyacinth’s own ordeal of consciousness but that of the world in which it has arisen, a consciousness, a social texture, at work “irreconcilably, subversively”, beneath the city’s “vast smug surface”.21 If it gestures towards a London of the Thames, Millbank, Belgravia, Oxford Street, Camden Town, and pubs and meeting-places like the Sun and Moon, not to mention mood-setting weather from sunshine to damp and fog, The Princess Casamassima even more depicts a London refracted through the senses and impressions. These include, typically, Hyacinth’s own sense of crampedness, Miss Pynsent’s shabby gentility and compensating worship of the gentry, the vernacular exuberance and sexuality of Millie Henning (“to her blunt, 19

The Princess Casamassima, Preface, v. Ibid., vi. 21 Ibid., vii. 20


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expanded finger-tips, a daughter of London” [I, 61] “the muse of cockneyism” [I, 62]), Captain Sholto’s man about town knowingness, the Poupins’ exile republicanism, Lady Aurora’s aristocratic well meaning, and the avidity of the Muniment and Schinkel anarchist circle. For all this plenty, however, James self-acknowledgingly aspires to no more than a selective picture, a limited if vividly particularized cast, a city seen through a single lens and only in part. Better than anybody, he indeed knew himself to be writing as an outsider and actually seeks to turn it to his own advantage (which may be why, easy as it is to overlook, The Princess Casamassima uses a first-person narrator). Despite its length and meticulous unfolding, this by design would not be a novel of London set forth in all its Dickensian zest, nor a London open to the test of a historical or literal map. Rather, it would be a city imagined through feelings of individual engagement and response. Is there not, accordingly, a nice self-irony in the note he sent to his friend Thomas Perry in December 1884 as the novel was taking shape in his mind: “I have been all the morning at Millbank prison (horrible place) collecting notes for a fiction scene. You see I am quite the Naturalist. Look out for the same – a year hence – .”22 One has only to dwell for a moment upon how James conjures into being the novel’s different locales to discern not the city of the naturalist or historic realist but that of the literary impressionist. A Turner or Monet canvas, all controlled shade and indistinction, comes to mind. Lomax Place, where Hyacinth is raised by Pinnie, sets the note. It typifies hole-in-the-corner London, a step up from tenement poverty but disabling, limiting. More still to the novel’s deeper purposes, it serves as a place of Hyacinth’s first and shaping impressions. He recalls it on Pinnie’s death as a “cold, stale parlour”, for all her and Mr Vetch’s kindliness, a place of “impure air”, “mean window-panes” and a “chiaroscuro” he thinks of as having been “dismal” (II, 90). This is where he has been subjected to Pinnie’s “limited, stinted” outlook and to her unintended mocking glorification of his half-aristocratic parentage (II, 91); where Mrs Bowerbank (“a towering woman” [I, 7]) has made her entry as the emissary of Millbank Prison, within whose “dusky mass” and “brown, bare 22

Henry James to Thomas Perry, 12 December 1884, in Henry James Letters 18831895, III, 61.

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windowless walls” (I, 42) Hyacinth half-catatonically encounters his French mother, the murderess Florentine Vivier; where Hyacinth has come to know in the seamstress and the fiddler two surrogate parents and in Milly a warring but fond sister-companion; and where, amid the domestic round and eventual bookbinding at Crookenden’s, he has done his early reading and shown himself the artist in waiting. Lomax Place, thereby, becomes a place of the most intimate past as well as present, the London of his beginning self. Each subsequent staging-place works to like effect. Audley Court, where Paul and the crippled Rosa Muniment live, serves as a kind of testing-ground for Hyacinth’s anarchist credentials. In this locale he must negotiate Paul’s secretive hardness and Rosa’s tyrannical good cheer in the face of her physical disablement (she calls to mind Dickens’ Jenny Wren), a rite of passage into adult companionship – even though, like the Princess, Muniment will also eventually engage in bad faith towards Hyacinth. At Lisson Grove, the Poupin residence, he encounters a second home, a France abroad but also the place where Hoffendahl will send Schinkel to deliver his call to action. A once-safe haven has turned deadly, Hyacinth’s own last courtroom. The “Sun and Moon”, with its “hideously papered walls” (I, 296), its “meeting club” where raillery and bluster substitute for serious politics, conjures up “the shabby sinuous ways” of “Soho, Islington, and Pentonville” (I, 324). We see the Langrish home in Belgravia through Pinnie’s astonished, admiring eyes as “grand”, “noble”, a “higher” and “other” London. It belongs with the salon the Princess Casamassima establishes in South Street and with Medley Hall, the country estate where Hyacinth, reeling in its sumptuousness, sees a palace of art – books, heraldry, gardens, architecture and a deeply European Mme. Grandoni to explain and guide. James also includes a lower-middle-class London, that of Madeira Crescent, the “queer little cockneyfied retreat” (II, 179) rented by the Princess as part of her resolve to plunge into the arena of revolution. London, in James’ meticulous overall fashioning, thus declares itself as an urban canvas but always one of feeling, the shaping interaction of self and place. Its climate and streets become a part of Hyacinth, Millie, Muniment, Sholto and the others. The heaviness can be winter dampness and fog or the “thick” warmth of air of a London July. Hyacinth can be dazzled by London’s Belgravia and West End


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and by the world of the galleries and museums and opera beyond his bookbinding at Crookenden’s. He can also conjure up “the loud, contradictory, vain, unpractical babble” (I, 355) of the politicos at the Sun and Moon as though a counter-London, one of “the deep perpetual groan of London misery” (I, 343) and “the monstrosity of the great ulcers and sores” (I, 355-56). This London he imagines mocked by “granaries and treasure-houses and places of delight where shameless satiety kept guard” (I, 356). “Real” London, as sought by the Princess, will forever be denied her. It lies within, on the pulse and in the senses and beyond any mere willed acquisition. James, time and again adds to this felt London. As the novel pursues its plot line with an unhurried rhythm towards the fulfilment of Hyacinth’s vow, London increasingly exerts its own controlling presence. The novel summons a misted-over Thames, long, crepiscular streets (Hyacinth is said to engage in “interminable, restless, melancholy, moody, yet all-observant strolls through London” [I, 76]), obscure meeting-places (as when Muniment and Schinkel take Hyacinth to meet Hoffendahl), and the haze of West End lights and opera-house gaudiness (as on Hyacinth’s visit with Millie). In all the novel maps the city as one of shifting light and colour. James also, and as if to supply contextual touchstones, invokes first Paris (Hyacinth calls it “an enchanted city” [II 141]) in a letter to the Princess). The French capital becomes for the bookbinder one great “boulevard”, “brilliant with illuminations”, “tremendously artistic and decorative”, a place where Hyacinth “felt his pulse and took stock of his impressions” (II, 119-23). The phrasings could not be more to the point. Venice he likewise sees as though the impressionistic metropolis, the city of art. These European cities, like London, suggest the metropolis transposed into feeling, sensation, one of painterly impression. *** Third, and inextricable from the rest, The Princess Casamassima offers a Portrait of the Artist, or at least a portrait of the artist as would-be, the artist denied or in waiting. Hyacinth Robinson serves both as an instance in general of a Jamesian “consciousness” and as a consciousness that reacts with a special creativity, an intense openness

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to (though not command of) all sides of experience. This causes, as the novel at different times designates it, “his mixed, divided nature”, his “conflicting sympathies”, “his eternal swinging from one view to another”. The Princess herself calls Hyacinth “a strange mixture of contradictory impulses” (II, 244). In childhood he thinks of Mr Vetch as “a privileged, magical mortal” (I, 23) because he plays in the theatre orchestra. He is said to be a child given to long silences, a reader, a storer-up of experience, as we learn from his startling prison encounter with his blood mother. This childhood, this childishness, carries over, James makes clear, into Hyacinth’s adulthood, the suggestible and uncertain boy in the man. Millie, on her dramatic first visit as a grown woman to Miss Pynsent, instinctively recognizes the unrealized artist in him – his ability to have learned French so quickly, his stylish “blouse”, his “imaginative, ingenious” mind, and even his reticence or fright (and, let it be said, his very Jamesian reticence or fright) in the face of her willingness to make herself sexually available to him, not that it prevents his profound disappointment and shock at perceiving the signs of her liaison with Godfrey Sholto. Millie, importantly, observes from a self that has found it own centre, a “free temperament” in which “many disparities were reconciled” (II, 133). Despite his modest circumstances he becomes on his walks a kind of flâneur, the observer artist. At Crookenden’s a Ruskinesque fervour overtakes him as, under M. Poupin’s guidance, he acquires in his bookbinding the force of beauty over ugliness, both the power of appreciation of art and his own self-power as a craft artist. Accompanying Millie one time, he can offer as assured opinion the view that Buckingham Palace yields nothing “that a real artist would look at”. He frequently authors other identities for himself, as the artist révolté born through his mother’s French nationality of the Revolution itself (a revolution he imagines as “magnificent energy”), or, in English terms, as an enlisted artist-combatant against Victorian Gothic ugliness and slums. In all, if he has real politics, they lie in this resolve to make an artist of himself. The politics he finds himself obliged to take his part in, however, are those of infantilism, the deadly but story-book bravura of having to discharge his “tremendous solemn vow”(II, 45) by the assassination of the nominated aristocrat. As a consequence, there can be little surprise in Hyacinth’s eager capitulation to the Princess, his dazzling but ultimately spurious


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European muse and icon. James underlines the Princess’ whimsy in the embittered witness of her banal Italian princeling-husband, in Muniment’s brute admission that his group all along wanted not her but her money, and in her vaunted quest for “the real” (II, 222). Hyacinth, in his rapture, not inappropriately invents her as “in a statue, in a picture, in a museum” (I, 207). Likewise, he speaks true to form in pouring out to her his desperate resort to the pictures and exhibits at the British Museum and the National Gallery. In like vein he rebinds an edition of Tennyson for her and confides his wonder at “the glorious Louvre” (II, 123). The narrator, with no small irony, designates him a “genuine artist” not only in his bookbinding but in his professed desire to write – the very index of Hyacinth’s need to inscribe his own creative signature on history but which cannot be other than denied by his life’s circumstance. James shows a near perfect touch in so rendering the shortfall between Hyacinth’s aspiration to become an artist and its actual enactment. Politics as Hyacinth knows them, even those of Muniment whom he thinks the exemplary man of action, also grows increasingly impossible and remote. Anarchism, with its one note singleness of purpose, is transformed for him into “the beastly cause”. Vetch’s sceptical reference to “a general rectification” (II, 99) and Muniment’s serious belief in “the great grim restitution” (II, 157) become as otherworldly as the Princess’ turn to “foreign socialism”. But Hyacinth is left with his vow, the utter, reductive opposite of all he has it in him to become. His last act, suicide by the gun (and not, as some critics have thought it, his murder) is a would-be artist’s revenge, a final reclamation of his life by self-imposed extinction. It is literal death as the metaphor of the art, the creative existence, which has not taken form, be it Hyacinth as painter, writer, composer or representative author of his own terms of being. The writer especially, Hyacinth comes to think, has access to “wider fields of knowledge, still higher sensations”. But he himself becomes the figure of life denied, James’ own oblique but utterly striking way of expressing the consequence of a larger politics of division and repression. *** “Magnificent” as James himself may have thought his “subject”, his novel goes on being charged with a lack of true cultural or political

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vision, a lack of achieved place, a weakly turned artist-hero. By these criteria, The Princess Casamassima represents a falling-away, an error. To resolute anti-Jamesians, it proves what they had maintained all along, that James had neither the taste nor the stomach for anything but the delineation of the more rarified strata of society. To equally resolute Jamesians, it gives proof that he had moved too far outside his accustomed realms of psychology or manners and not done himself justice. Differing perspectives as they may appear, each contributes to the same result. Only a few hardy souls like Lionel Trilling have put up a case for admiring the novel. The rest, for the most part, have looked on in silence or with the wish to advance as quickly as possible to the safer shores of the agreed canonical fiction. These factors have worked to make The Princess Casamassima ever the odd man out, uncanonical, or perhaps more accurately acanonical, James. Yet if the argument to hand holds, the novel, whatever its reception, could not have been more Jamesian. In this one does not for a moment have to regard The Princess Casamassima as an unalloyed success. It can still be thought to come at its materials too obliquely, to depict anarchism as too much a world afar, and to lay itself open to the charge of a certain contrivance and over-delay in delivering Hyacinth into his fatal cul-de-sac. Nor does it mean failing to recognize why the Princess and Paul Muniment, as the two principal figures alongside Hyacinth, have not always satisfied, the former too operatic and the latter too unrealized. One can also like or dislike the values, cultural, political or otherwise, which may be assumed to he behind the critique of British society (Irving Howe speaks of James’ “comely conservativism”). But it serves nothing if we fail to see clearly the kind of novel James actually wrote or to attend scrupulously to the imaginative terms of reference in which it is cast. To do less is to assume a novel other than the one to hand, the one James set about to compose with all the resolve and exhilaration he registers in his Notebooks. That indeed means acknowledging his particular mode of portraying politics (with its emphasis more on feeling and personality), his impressionist’s sense of place and his notion of art as a radical and highest form of self-expression, with all that such implies for the life of Hyacinth Robinson. It also means acknowledging the reasons for James’ deliberateness of pace in the novel, its sometimes too deliberate rhythm of observation. Taking these considerations together,


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the odd thing about The Princess Casamassima becomes the fact that it ever became the odd man out in the first place.

12 WATCHING MANNERS: MARTIN SCORSESE’S THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, EDITH WHARTON’S THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Whatever other qualities the historical novelist has, the essential one is the visualizing power … Edith Wharton, Yale papers1 … my problem was how to make use of a subject – fashionable New York – which, of all others, seemed most completely to fall within the condemned category. There it was before me, in all its flatness and futility, asking to be dealt with as the theme most available to my hand, since I had been steeped in it from infancy, and should not have to get it up out of note-books and encyclopaedias – and yet! Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance 2 This was a love story requiring fineness and finesse, set among the first families and old order of New York. It was not something we were born to, but then, that might be an advantage. We could come to it without an agenda. The Shooting Script: The Age of Innocence3

Edith Wharton meets Martin Scorsese? A novel of Old New York and 1870s WASP high manners like The Age of Innocence made over for the screen by a director best known for Italian American film noir like Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1975) and Goodfellas (1990)? 1

From an untitled fragment in Edith Wharton’s Yale papers (quoted in Blake Nevius, Edith Wharton: A Study of Her Fiction, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1953, 43). 2 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance, NY: Appleton-Century, 1934, 206-207. 3 Introduction to The Shooting Script: The Age of Innocence, Screenplay and Notes by Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks, NY: Newmarket Press, 1993, vi.

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Barely had the word been mooted than chins wagged, warnings sounded. Here was filmmaking chutzpah to a fault, an oddity too far, a case of colliding or, at the very least, unlikely (and unlike) sensibilities brought together under the commercial aegis of Columbia Pictures. In the event Scorsese not only honoured the craft of Wharton’s novel but created a wonderfully exact and expressive film as, from the start, might always have been foreseen from one of America’s most accomplished contemporary directors. He had pictured the novel with style, measure, fidelity, yet also, and throughout, with a quite surest sense of how to make the camera yield its own distinctive film language – from the opera-house panorama as Gounod’s Faust is being performed to mark the beginning of the social season in haut bourgeois New York through to the sight of Newland Archer’s last, wistful decision (a lifetime later in the story’s terms) not to climb her apartment stairs and see again Countess Ellen Olenska in Paris. *** “With The Age of Innocence, I wanted to find a way of making something literary – and Americans are cowed by the tyranny of that word – and also filmic”:4 so Scorsese himself looks back on his own ambition in adapting the novel. In part, he goes on to explain, he had in mind the technical difficulty of making complex period film in America (“we no longer have the studios that have all the props and sets”). He also remarks about how much more of a tradition such filmmaking is in England, with an eye to adaptations like John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), and its grasp of the vernacular scenic idiom of Hardy’s Wessex, or Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), albeit largely shot in Ireland, whose use of Thackeray’s novel of epic impetuosity virtually makes landscape into time. To these Scorsese adds the record of the Merchant-Ivory films, adaptations from E.M. Forster to Kazuo Ishiguro, “where they make use of English settings”.5 Similarly he invokes European filmmaking of a related vein, whether the Visconti “Leopard” trilogy (1954, 1963, 1977), with its sweeping portraiture of Sicilian aristocratic wealth and 4 “The Age of Innocence – A Personal Journey”, in Scorsese on Scorsese, eds David Thompson and Ian Christie, London: Faber and Faber, 1989, 185. 5 Ibid., 187.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

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dissolution, or Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1961) as a modern period movie full of “elegiac eroticism” and which, reflexively to a degree, “reveled in cinema”.6 As Jay Cocks, his co-writer of the screenplay, bears out in their shared list of twenty or so cinema sources for The Age of Innocence, far from seeking to underplay his abiding admiration for American literary film, Scorsese positively revels in its appeal. Typically, and perhaps most relevant, Cocls and he invoke Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), taken from Booth Tarkington’s 1923 novel of social manners and snobbery (whatever the vexations of the studio’s change to a less sardonic ending), and William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) as a reworking of Henry James’ Washington Square (1881) with its oblique, powerful currents of eroticism and constraint in the figure of Catherine Sloper. 7 All of these, to which they themselves add cinema pieces like Vincente Minelli’s Madame Bovary (1948) – the note runs “Ellen Olenska must surely have read Flaubert” – and Roger Corman’s The Tomb of Liegeia (1965) glossed as a “canny adaptation … of Poe’s malarial imagination”, give working co-ordinates, a screen context.8 The Age of Innocence has the further advantages of being beautifully cast and acted, especially the principals of Daniel DayLewis as Newland Archer, Michelle Pfeiffer as Ellen Olenska and Winona Ryder as May Welland. Each stays meticulously in character while at the same time contributing to a genuine flourish of ensemble playing: Archer as indulged, moneyed, gently dissenting New York son and brother, Ellen as American become Old World European returnee and May as New World American ingénue. Décor, dress, etiquette, all given diligent research, add to the exactness as does the considerable use of paintings (barely a domestic interior is shown without its complement of portraits, landscapes and still lifes) with, to follow, London and Paris seen first as impressionist canvases and then in terms of the Louvre and Faubourg St Honoré. Scorsese also uses momentary whole screens of red or orange to reinforce this pictureliness, feeling as held within a field of colour and hue as in a Mark Rothko canvas. The largely British-Irish cast, one assumes, was chosen not only for actorly prowess but in part also to carry the 6

The Shooting Script: The Age of Innocence, 132. The Age of Innocence: Screenplay and Notes, 127-35. 8 The Shooting Script: The Age of Innocence, respectively 133 and 135. 7

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punctilious high New York accent.9 Joanne Woodward, in turn, as the voice-over, echoes not only the novel’s narrator but a kind of subtly fugitive, evidentiary Edith Wharton herself. Scorses’s especial care with his location shots equally pays clear dividends. The New York town of Troy supplies persuasive simulacra of the three-story brownstones of fashionable late nineteenth-century Manhattan. Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, aptly baroque in its vaulting and gilt embellishment, doubles for the Opera House. New York’s National Arts Club becomes the imposing, many-chambered Beaufort Mansion. Newport, Rhode Island, virtually plays itself in the summer scenes, a playground in pastel of lawns and coastline parties, sporting competitions, sailboats and the vacationing rich. The New York patroon cottage where Archer goes to see Ellen has about it the contrasting look of spare architectural simplicity to frame Archer’s excited dream of Ellen. A contrasting touch of exoticism, not a little ironically, runs through the Florida episode set against the cages of a parrot-filled white aviary where Archer seeks to persuade May into an early marriage. A literal enough Paris supplies the screen version for what Wharton’s novel calls “one of the avenues radiating from the Invalides”, and within it, the isolated “little square” under “a soft, sunshot haze” from where Archer will look up to Ellen’s “awninged balcony” and finally shuttered appartement (284-85).10 The film acts scrupulously on the novel’s suggestion of Ellen’s life and its passage as enclosed in another world, “this rich atmosphere”, but which, for Archer, finally remains best to be seen only in imagination. The novel describes him as having missed “the flower of life” as if to imply that, were he to meet Ellen again, it would re-emphasize and accuse all he has foregone as a life with her (275). The sets designed by Dante Ferretti, for their part, again insist not only on period authenticity but on a continuing play of inner signification as much as outward show. Of those especially built for the film, Archer’s study-library, his retreat, is made to flicker in part9

Besides Daniel Day-Lewis as Archer, the cast includes Richard E. Grant as Larry Lefferts, Alec McGowen as Sillerton Jackson, Geraldine Chaplin as Mrs Welland, Miriam Margolyes as Mrs Mingott, Sian Phillips as Mrs Archer, Michael Gough as Henry van Luyden and Joanathan Pryce as Rivière. 10 Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, NY: Signet Classics, 1952. All citations are from this version of the text.


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lights, shadows from the fire, curtained windows (in the interview with May he tries to open a window), and the patina of heavy furniture and leather bound books. Could he, against this weight of affiliation, ever have seized the chance offered in the person of Ellen to make good on his longing? The Beaufort Ballroom supplies a geometry clearly as social as physical, a painterly or embossed world caught in its own determining frame. The hall of the Metropolitan Museum, where Archer and Ellen meet, the screen version fills with appropriate Gothic resonance – the preserved bones, the darkness, as a context for transgression. Scorsese uses this chiaroscuro as a correlative of how the two see themselves and are seen by others. Likewise the film’s music enters and surrounds the action with a near perfect auditory feel, from the inaugural Gounod aria to the Strauss waltzes, from Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata to the Mendelssohn Quintet and “Marble Halls”. This insistence upon appropriate sight and sound, in fact, deserves recognition as a long-established Scorsese signature and as carrying over the precision of the Little Italy of Mean Streets, the night-time Manhattan of Taxi Driver and 1955 East Brooklyn in the early sequences of Goodfellas However, the final claim, as it always must be in film of quality, lies in Scorsese’s integration of each working source and part, the film as held within the one defining style. In this regard we also need to take especial note of his resolve to make The Age of Innocence go well beyond “the usual, theatre-bound film versions of novels”.11 In other words, the challenge lay in seeking to establish a visual or scenic match for Wharton’s dense, meticulous irony, her command of nuance. *** What kind of novel, then, had Scorsese taken upon himself to make over for the screen? The conventional response would be to say a work of manners borne of the history Wharton herself describes autobiographically in A Backward Glance: “Our society was, in short, a little “set” with its private catch-words, observances and amusements, and its indifference to anything outside of its own charmed circle; and no really entertaining social group has ever been

11

Scorsese on Scorsese, 179.

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anything else.” 12 Certainly the novel’s circumstantial show of “our society” is given with an insider’s touch – the contrast of long gentrified old as against financier new money (the patroon van der Luydens at one end and the banker parvenu Julius Beaufort at the other), with the Mingotts, Archers, Wellans, Chiverses, Leffertses et al. as branch players. Perhaps only Henry James or Marcel Proust ever made a fuller effort to capture the alliances and courtships, the rhythm of the social seasons, the circles of mutual observation, the talk, the requisite dress codes, and the dinners and soirées of so self-enclosed a circle of caste. For Wharton that also embraces the townhouse social élite for which the fleshly, appetitive Mrs Manson Minott (“Old Catherine” or “Catherine The Great”) provides a gossipy centre (the downstairs walls of her house festooned in dog portraits); the professions in which Archer plays lawyer at the genteel, Dickensian named “Letterblair, Lamson and Low” (“Old Mr Letterblair” has served as “the accredited legal adviser of three generations of New York gentility”); and the myriad servant underclass of maids, footmen and the drivers of each ever-waiting landau and brougham. Which novel, or film in its wake, better offers a social language of gentility’s foodways (or a male coterie world in the form of each loudly snipped, lit and deeply inhaled cigars which only the European Ellen dares challenge by lighting a cigarette for herself and Archer)? Sillerton Jackson struggles comically over his beef at the Archer dinner table, a marker for the provincialism of appetite represented by Mrs Archer and Janey. The lavish van der Luyden banquet becomes a culinary reprimand, a state of the art show of social power replete with illdressed English Duke, the best plate, and the Roman Punch, to those who have snubbed the Minott invitation to meet Ellen. Archer dines with his bachelor employer on fare as unappetizing as the message he finds himself called upon to deliver to Ellen about her need to abandon thoughts of divorce (and which, in another irony, will make her unavailable to him). On his honeymoon, at a Paris dinner, Archer meets in Rivière a man of interesting mind but not fortune: it will point up his growing sense of having settled for only half with May. The family council meal at Newport, in a yet further irony, leads to Archer’s encounter in Boston with Ellen (where, as the film nicely 12

Wharton, A Backward Glance, 79.


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underlines, he initially sees her as the subject of a painting). The “first dinner party” given by the Archers, actually a bitter last irony, will be to bid farewell to Ellen, which the film captures as an occasion of conspiracy, silence, more genteel code and which shows Archer, as for the first time, obliged to see himself in the true regard of his peers as philanderer, the strayed husband. Wharton’s The Age of Innocence possesses the two strands left out from the film, the bohemian artist coterie personified in the down-at-heel journalist Ned Winsett and, embodying just a right hint of social eccentricity, Medora Manson and her infatuation with the fake community apostle of love, Dr Algernon Carver. They both underline how full and circumstantial a story Wharton in fact wrote yet reasonably enough cut for Scorsese’s purposes. So far, so familiar. Wharton’s novel, however, at its centre turns on a human equation both older and richer: that of the heart’s affections, desire in all its contradictory pulls of dream and sublimation, resolve and evasion. What does Archer most seek in Ellen or she in him? What gain, what loss, slowly emerges for Archer in his betrothal to May? For all his own assumption of subject not object as he seeks to win over May’s parents for an accelerated engagement, or aids the Mingotts in their rehabilitation of Ellen, or contrives each feverish encounter with her in Boston and New York, does not Archer himself become increasingly un-centred? Has he not been caught out by his Bovaryish lack of self-understanding? In equal part, however, has he not been caught out by May herself in the calculated untruth she tells Ellen about her pregnancy and her subsequent dispensation as wife and mother? Will not, finally, his dream of Ellen always prove too rich as she in fact tells him, too extravagant, for “old fashioned” blood like his (in the in the resigned phrase he uses to his son Dallas as they approach Ellen’s Paris home)? These and associated questions Wharton builds one into the other, rooted in their own time and place and yet always indicative of greatly more perennial fare. She gives to each, too, not only the power of setting, of social ethos, but of a complex narrative vantage point. Archer’s every turn she has us see ironically from behind his own shoulder and so to be held up (anything but intrudingly) for judgement. At the same time, and a mark of her own modernist turn, she also leaves gaps, unwritten parts of the story left to the reader to fathom. Foremost among them are Ellen’s (and May’s) own interior thoughts,

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Ellen’s actual relationship with both the Count and then his secretary, the role of Beaufort in Ellen's life and, latterly, her times in Washington and then (and allowing for her mentioned help to Annie Beaufort), over three decades, in Paris. “Can’t you and I strike out for ourselves, May?” (74) Archer asks shortly after their engagement. In her own way the conventional May will do just that, but straight back into the world she has come from, whereas he and Ellen, who hover at the edge of un-convention, extrication, will not. Wharton’s achievement, in “a world balanced so precariously that its harmony could be shattered by a whisper” (the film’s voice-over), is to watch and have us watch, the flow and contraflow of the lives entailed in that paradox. *** As Jay Cocks recalls it, Scorsese had a working charter for the film, The Age of Innocence as period reprise but free of clutter, any “thick layer of dust”.13 “It’s a love story”, Cocks has him saying. “What’s important is the feeling, not the setting. Just nail the emotion and everything else will follow.”14 The challenge, accordingly, Scorsese took it upon himself to suggest, lay in giving due and full weight to the Archer-Ellen-May triangle as the essential drama being played out within this upper-echelon New York and all of its class ritual. The film, too, like Wharton’s novel, would show, or watch, feeling as an unfolding rhythm, each exterior locale correlated to a locale deep within. There is little to be said on its not having delivered on that promise. That is, from the start, Scorsese recognized Wharton for infinitely more than some mere custodian of an American Age gone by, a kind of from-the-source archivist – the onetime Edith Jones whose Knickerbocker mercantile-genteel family had given rise to the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses”. For all the “novelist of manners” tag, and Wharton’s command of a historic American era given over to sumptuously genteel or as she calls it “airless” claustrophobia, he rightly saw The Age of Innocence (to which could readily have been added The House of Mirth, Madame de Treymes and the quartet of 13 14

The Shooting Script: The Age of Innocence, vi-vii. Ibid., v.


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novellas she called Old New York as indeed endemically, and throughout, a novel of deepest, at times near ravening, desire.15 Wharton had written, and Scorsese would seek to recreate, nothing other than a species of passion-play, and that the more powerful for being situated inside Old New York as “slippery pyramid” (48), an enclosure. A world of strictest form, thereby, so much itself given to disguise, contextualizes Archer’s own disguised and divided love of Ellen over May. In this the film sets out its own stall of visuality, as it were, right from the outset, a screen narrative reflexively taken up with seeing and seen, watching and watched. As the titles come up, the screen moves from framed handwriting to a pink, indelibly sexual or vaginal rose opening and closing in the manner of a palimpsest, its pistil caught for a moment then surrounded in the swirl of petals with all their suggestion of fragility yielding to would-be ecstasy. This floral sequence (flowers rightly become a major stock of the film) in turn gives way to the more mundane yellow daisy plucked by Mme Nilsson, in clearly visible heavy make-up (“extravagantly painted” according to the shooting script), as she sings from Faust “M’ama … non m’ama” (“He loves me … he loves me not”). Hers, the focus insists, is indeed performance, opera as set-piece gesture, stylized set, with Mme Nilsson in brocaded white dress and her male co-singer/lover in maroon hose and doublet. Similarly the later leave-taking scene between the costumed lovers in The Shaughhram, which Archer reveals always draws him to the play, could not more silhouette the passion he denies to himself feeling for Ellen. Scorsese’s camera lifts and pans out to the whole opera house and we become aware of how the one stage implies the other, that of high society, too, as a choreography of footlights, boxes and house-seats, tuxedos and gowns, and with a fast, almost blurring serial shot of each dutiful cufflink, jewel, brooch and watch-chain. Crucially it settles on the opera glasses passed by Larry Lefferts whose word on form (“I didn’t think the Mingotts would have tried it on” [19] he pronounces on the appearance of Ellen) is as definitive as that of the Sillerton Jackson who performs a similar service on family. This, indelibly, as, alongside, we see through the opera glasses to Ellen and her Mingott15

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, NY: Scribner’s, 1905; Madame de Treymes, New York: Scribner’s, 1907; and Old New York: False Dawn; The Old Maid; New Year’s Day, NY: Appleton, 1924.

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Archer family, is a world of predatory gaze and watchfulness in which any deviation from the norm implies not only risk, gossip, but, at worst, removal from sight or, as in Ellen’s case, seemingly complete erasure. Archer, visually immaculate in tails and button flower, moves from the men’s box to that of Mrs Welland, in matronly dark green, May, in ingenue white, and Ellen, in exotic blue. His become the eyes which alight upon May’s lilies of the valley, upon the Countess’ hand that is offered in a European fashion but which, in an American style, he shakes rather than kisses. Later the film will invite us to watch him unglove, and kiss, that same hand as though in de-accelerated close-up, nowhere more intensely than in the carriage which takes him and Ellen from the Jersey City train terminus to Manhattan. His gaze at the opera, and ours with it, then moves outward to the seated assembly – faces, costume, couples, Old New York as tableau vivant. In this masterly opening vignette Scorsese effects a kind of double curtain-up, an invitation to see a start of the season and a start of the kind of story and the feelings it will pursue to follow. The sequence pauses, too, to settle upon Regina Beaufort as she leaves in the third Act for her ball and then moves to the waiting carriages outside. The Beaufort Ball we also so anticipate as continued over performance, high society as a kind of sanctioned dance within fixed rules of motion. We watch Regina as grandee matron (yet another guise which will be reversed when Beaufort’s bank fails and, in widow’s black, she appeals to Catherine for clan solidarity and causes her to suffer a stroke), then step towards her carriage, her arm held by liveried manservant. This is money cleansed into social style with Regina, as against Beaufort who will eventually take off with the actress Annie Ring, its loyal, spousal icon. The ball itself Scorsese shoots first as an unused ballroom caught under rays of sunlight. Its stillness (the dustcovers and like as props) then dissolves into animation, the initial fast-moving quadrilles, the talk of each social group, the salutations and drinks and the display of manners as tactics of offence and defence. Archer adds his own white gloves to those conformingly already upon the table before making his way through the various ante-rooms (the voice-over, citing Wharton, calls them “boldly planned”) before reaching the main floor. The camera could hardly better suggest a gallery of both custom and consciousness.


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Mrs Beaufort is seen placed like a live sentinel beneath her own youthful portrait, with to follow the sight of Beaufort’s “audaciously displayed” Buguereau nude (“Return of Spring”), the swirling waltz seen in vertical as well as horizontal shots, Julius Beaufort’s sauntering entrance, and May, still with her lilies of the valley (a sprig of which Scorsese has Archer break off suggestively when he has a moment alone with her in a bower to the side) and her news of Ellen’s last-minute withdrawal. The dance indeed can be said, and be seen, to have been launched. The camera tracks Archer’s movement from opera to ball, then through the different drawing rooms to the ballroom, as following a man wholly at one with the ritual. For all his professed ennui, he belongs utterly within this décor, servant as much as imagined master of convention. Whatever will be his eventual turbulent shift of feeling, from May to Ellen, from sanctioned marriage to illicit passion, the opening scenes have visually located him for all his longing as no serious nay-sayer to rules which, having made him, can as easily unmake him. May, in all her ingenuousness, is likewise caught amid her circle of young women companions as fully knowing of what is expected of her. The camera links her sprig of flowers to her very body, both innocent blooms, which Scorsese further emphasizes in her lowered glance and coquettish play with Archer. The later archery scenes will build on the camera’s dwelling upon her lithe huntress body, May as chastity yet with just the hint that she may not always prove the wholly ingenuous Diana. Film, like text, invites us to see her as the world most sees her, virginal daughter, genteel fiancée and soon to be dutiful wife. Ellen, by contrast, and although the opera scenes afford but a glimpse, we encounter as the dark woman of Polish title who has moved outside the circle and who Scorsese has turn to look upon Archer at the opera with a perfect movement of eyes. Her gaze, whatever the accommodating banter, the camera draws attention to as that of quite other experience, of a sexually knowing woman from beyond New York and deepened by a failed, true-aristocratic marriage and the knowledge of Europe’s greater social and artistic historicity. Archer, throughout, is shown to believe that he sees all, the man of his family (for whom mother and daughter deny themselves house space), the kindly courtier of May, the caring prospective kinsman of

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Ellen. In fact, and for as much as the film has him look, or ponder or scrutinize, he sees (in the sense of understand) too little too late, whether about himself, or the world his marriage to May will perpetuate and which will judge him Ellen’s lover, or, indeed, Ellen and all that she had seen. The visual cues and juxtapositions, faithfully seeking their own version of Wharton’s narrative, build into the one composite take. Little more might be asked in the way of exposition, the unfolding written word made over, en-figured, in its equivalent screen imagery. This lavish visual furnishing, Scorsese’s grammar of watching and seeing, runs right through his The Age of Innocence. If emphasis is given to key moments, that is not to underplay the whole but to confirm how each carries the implication of the whole. Nor is it to divert attention from how Scorsese keeps in view the co-ordinating lines of motif, from flowers (including the lilies of the valley sent daily to May as against the roses for Ellen) to domestic interiors (few more eccentric-comic than Catherine’s with her “French” downstairs bedroom). Each scene of explicit concealment and revelation adds to this co-ordination, whether Archer’s guilty, meticulous placing of a key in its envelope for his assignation with Ellen or the street exposure of Ellen and Archer to Larry Lefferts and to be with judged, or misjudged, accordingly. The film’s visualization of how Archer first recognizes his own feeling for Ellen the film locates within her Manhattan house. Archer enters before Ellen, his eyes drawn first to art’s avant-garde – an impressionist’s faceless woman with parasol upon a beach, a bold, linear, portrait of sea and littoral, and then to the mask upon her table. An Italian maid enters. He watches Ellen through the window say farewell to Beaufort. We witness not only incipient jealousy but his growing doubts as to his own custodial family stance in this overlapping of life and art from so far beyond, or outside, Old New York. On entrance Ellen, accordingly, speaks of her “odd little house” and the “little pieces of wreckage” she has brought from Europe. As their talk turns to the van der Luydens, with Ellen’s nice irreverence at the expense of the hypochondriacal Mrs van der Luyden – Cousin Louise, Archer revels in the display of cushions, rugs and artefacts all sumptuously blended into what he half-acknowledges is a small palace of art. As for the first time he begins to see in Ellen herself, as she pours tea, lights cigarettes for them, and as the fire


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blazes and ebbs, the living emissary of a world beyond the New York he has hitherto believed a labyrinth but she nominates “straight up and down”. The roles of adviser and advised reverse or, at the least, and as Scorsese acting meticulously on Wharton herself has them, look and estimate each other, come under interrogation. In their talk of fashion, right and wrong etiquette, the ways of family, Scorsese’s direction implies that everything they imagine themselves doing carries its exquisite counter-current. Ellen wonders where truth lies in a social order so abundantly given over to appearance or face. Tears come. And as Archer takes her hand film, like novel, has us see the contract between Archer and Ellen become all the more intense for what it holds back, feeling at the edge of becoming articulate and, thereby, dangerous. It is feeling, too, scrupulously seen, each gaze, glance, smile, gesture, built into an unravelling continuity. Their relationship, thereby, is at once explicit yet also figurative or subliminal, and to recur in exactly that form in nearly every subsequent encounter between them. This is sight and touch as the promise of passionate life, a necessary contrast with the sculpture of May’s kindly but un-passionate hands – those of the archer who, indeed, will eventually triumph as the kindly but inexorable guardian of decorum. The image of embracing hands continues when the film has Archer fantasize that Ellen has taken hold of him, at the patroon cottage (Scorsese’s own contribution); when, at Archer’s next visit to Ellen’s house, he kisses her literally hand and foot only to be confronted with May’s letter confirming an early marriage; when they meet in Boston and grasp hands across the table; and when, having met in Jersey City, they engage in their last claustrophobically intense ride in the carriage. This first Archer-Ellen encounter, however, lays down the pathway. Scorsese appears to have done it as a single take, the flow of feeling seen and watched as discrete in themselves and yet, typically, and by directorial design, folded into the film version’s ongoing larger narrative. A necessary contrast lies in how Scorsese renders the archery scene in which May plays a serene, ingenuous Diana. The scene opens with a panoply of linen-clad figures, blue and white awnings, the sight of arrows landing in targets, and May to be seen beatifically against the backdrop of a tree in full leaf. Only Beaufort hints of a flaw in the idyll with his observation that this is the only kind of target May will

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ever hit. May is then seen with her quiver of arrows, her winner’s smile, being photographed, and finally wearing the silver archery brooch (donated by Beaufort) as she sits in an athlete’s triumph with Archer and Catherine. The visual language again serves perfectly. This is May’s world, everything as it seems and in which light, and lightness of being, prevail. The summer pastels, whether of dress, picnic apparatus, bonnets, all bear an iconography of undeliberated ease and openness. Even Archer is seen to smile and bear May off in her winner’s pleasure. But the whole image of archery, arrows targeted and then aimed, makes for a residue that will be recalled when May wins her husband back from Ellen. The film acts perfectly on the text’s cues, May as transparent yet in her competitor’s recognition of Ellen, somehow, and at the same time, not. *** No more intensely visual a scene occurs in The Age of Innocence than that of Archer’s gaze upon Ellen at the water edge in Newport; it summons up Monet or Cézanne, a veritable call to contemplation. We are a year on from Archer’s marriage to May and the voice-over tells us of how he has heard of Ellen’s life but not seen her. Sent to find Ellen by Catherine, he strolls as indeed once again a figure in a picture urgently across manicured lawns, along a seaward path, through the leafy greens and browns of summer trees, and on to a bridge, unseen as he thinks (though in fact, as she later tells him, seen by Ellen), the watcher from afar. The sheer beauty of the scene is given conscious emphasis. The idiom is one of seascape, almost a live re-enactment of the painting he first saw in Ellen’s house. Each component scintillates, Scorsese’s filmic text of Wharton’s literary text. Life becomes for Archer art: a reddish and blurred sunlit sea, the slightest ripple of waves, and Ellen herself with her back to Archer at the end of the pier in stunning white dress and parasol (he will mistakenly think it the one at the Blenkers’ house), and the lighthouse and gently billowing sailboat. As he watches, and then gives himself the wager of whether or not she will turn to him before the boat passes the lighthouse, we see in him literally the will to an apotheosis always held in check by the life he


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has contracted with May (she will speak on his return to the house of a changed Ellen). Little wonder is it that to this beauteous, memorial scene of desire that Scorsese, if not Wharton, has the film version revert to in Paris, Ellen at the horizon not only of a blithe, warm, beckoning Atlantic ocean but of dream become memory. When Archer turns from going up to her apartment at the end, his words in the novel are “It’s more real to me here than if I went up” (286). Scorsese again acts on Wharton’s cue if not exactly her text -- Archer’s memory of Ellen at the water edge a kind of sublime haunting to accuse and pursue the companionable but quotidian family (and even political) round which has become his life. For the film it provides the perfect after-image, Archer’s own epitaph. Although less abundantly visual, Archer’s journey with Ellen from Jersey City to New York carries a shared configuration of meanings. “It happens to me all over again”, Archer tells Ellen. Scorsese’s camera picks up on that intensity. He films them pressed towards, almost into, each other in the carriage as if to make physical the lifetime represented by those two hours (a comparison with Archer and May in their Paris carriage is inevitable). Their hands, first gloved, and then lingeringly ungloved, join and yield to a larger embrace, the implication of an unrealized, unrealizable, consummation. He speaks of a realm in which words like “mistress” do not exist; she reproves him, and speaks of what life lived on the moral run, and so out of view, is really like (“It’s no place for us”). In anger, loss, he stops the carriage and leaves her with one last despairing gaze – “I should not have come today”. The power of the scene lies in the use of the carriage as exquisite prison. The trot and neigh of the horse, the rocking movement, the brief glimpse of the driver, all play against a will to step away from time (one key shot lingers over the turning wheel of the carriage). Even the rustle and thickness of Ellen’s coat, her furs and bonnet, and Archer’s topcoat, signal enclosure, restraint. The camera moves with utter exactitude from one body to the other, from Archer’s closed eyes to his embrace of her and to her ready response. When, as they talk, she reminds him of how he has always obeyed convention, and he abruptly exits from the carriage, the screen with reason might seem to imply sexual rise and fall, stolen bliss followed by post-coital sadness.

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Ellen moves off in the carriage with an almost frozen return of his gaze, his own lost secret-sharer headed for another order of time and place. At this point the camera pulls back only to pass on to a subsequent drawing-room scene of May doing embroidery and Archer poring over prints of Japan. Fantasy has indeed replaced fact, a compensatory would-be travel of mind over feeling. His life, now, will be May, decorum, order, his own first son and subsequent family, and, by dint of telephone (typified in his Chicago-New York conversation with Ted) and the like, a new New York which even so, and in essence, still carries his own old New York. As both novel and film imply, it might for Archer have been destined to be that all along, with desire, with Ellen, as always for him, and at whatever cost, his own grand illusion. The Age of Innocence will not likely be judged Scorsese’s best film. As a director of auteur status his achievement tends to be thought centred in the Taxi Driver and his more writer-director films – each with their shared Italian America, each with their discernible ethnic and cultural idiom. His version of Wharton’s novel, even so, remains a superb effort. In large part that has much to do with not trying to obliterate the literary original, both playing the narrator’s voice into the film and yet, at the same time, finding for the story told by that voice a right screen language. The upshot is that in watching Scorsese watch Wharton, as in any great adaptation, we experience doubly: a fiction relived in film, a film become its own fiction.

13 A QUALITY OF DISTORTION: IMAGINING THE GREAT GATSBY I can never remember the times when I wrote anything – This Side of Paradise time Or Beautiful and Damned and Gatsby time for instance. Lived in story. The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald 1

Hard though it may be to recall there was actually a time when Francis Scott Fitzgerald seemed at genuine risk not only of dropping out of style but out of sight. Where during the 1920s he had shone like the very laureate of Jazz Age America, its literary poster boy if ever there were, to those who lived on through the Depression and World War II he gave every appearance of having inhibited a time-when, some magic interlude or carnival which caused the age to resemble nothing so much as one unending Gatsby-like party. In a celebrated observation from his “Echoes of The Jazz Age” (1931), it was a time of “a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure”.2 If, at his too early death in 1940, the world had indeed moved on, from the Depression through to World War II, Fitzgerald could hardly avoid looking like the ghost of another age. To his fervent but loyal band of remaining admirers he may well have been the acknowledged author of The Great Gatsby (1925) or stories as fine as “Absolution” or “Babylon Revisited”. But he has also become the burnt-out case as it appeared, the left-over from a more facile era who willingly enough had been felled by a combination of profligacy, the publicity that had swirled about him, drink and the fatal blandishments of Hollywood. 1

The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, NY and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Broccoli Clark, 1978, 159. 2 “Echoes of The Jazz Age”, Scribner’s Magazine, XL (November 1931), 459-65. Republished in The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson, NY: J. Laughlin, 1945 and The Crack-Up, NY: New Directions, 1945.

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Almost everything, and everyone, associated with Fitzgerald, accordingly, then as now comes over half-steeped in legend, both the man and his age borrowed as much from the pages of his own fiction as history itself. In this, of course, Fitzgerald belongs in a long line of fellow America writers made over into, not to say celebrated, in the silhouette of publicity. Drugged Poe, Hawthorne shadowed in sexual guilt and given to covering his own traces, or Twain becalmed by Olivia’s New England gentility are instances. Closer to Fitzgerald’s own time there would be the supposed sexually closeted James, Wharton or Hemingway. Fitzgerald himself has not wanted for different and competing versions of who or what he was, although one version has tended to rise above the rest. Where once he dazzled by his ability to refract the social tapestry of the Jazz Age – the money and partying, the cocktails and flappers, the self-denying ordinance of Prohibition, the Teapot Dome and other boom-era scandals, the movies – he would also come to look like one of the age’s casualties, the perfect reflexive incarnation of fatigue and in his own celebrated formulation of crack-up. 3 Even though Fitzgerald quite recognized what had befallen him, he at the same time recognized his uncertainty as to the exact him in question. Had he not, he once asked, actually invented himself? *** Few accounts of American literature would be considered complete, or indeed wholly serious, that did not give Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby full acknowledgement, a triumph at once critical and popular and in both respects by the widest of margins. If it shines as a classic of period, the Jazz Age caught at full tilt in all its show of glamour or violence, it also invites an exploration of certain perennials within the human condition – the interplay in the novel’s terms between “dream” and “foul dust”, or to use a newer idiom, between

3

“The Crack-Up” originally appeared in Esquire, February 1936, 41-64; was then republished by Wilson in The Crack-Up (1945); and was subsequently issued in The Crack-Up and Other Pieces and Stories, Harmondsworth and NY: Penguin Books, 1965, 39-56

Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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the fierceness of desire and its consequences. 4 However otherwise read, a reworking and critique of the American Dream, a tale of doomed errantry, a discernibly American comedy of manners, a sexual pathology of sorts, even Fitzgerald’s tacit Marxian onslaught on capitalism and the fetish of commodity, by consensus The Great Gatsby stands out as a first among equals. That judgement has been altogether deserved. Furthermore, The Great Gatsby claims pride of place not simply by its evident fascinations of theme. Novella length to be sure, even so it offers a round of memorably sustained portraiture with a narrator in Nick Carraway as interestingly fugitive as the tale of Gatsby he tells, a framing image of Grail and Wasteland picked up by the narrative at every turn, and a concentration of effect Fitzgerald rarely elsewhere quite matched. It represents a wholly consequential feat, Fitzgerald’s storytelling rarely given to more lavish resources of image while maintaining narrative momentum overall. In virtually every aspect, and with due recognition of cavils like those to do with Fitzgerald’s authorial distance, The Great Gatsby overall reflects a flair as sure as rare. To speak of the imagination that went into the fashioning of The Great Gatsby, moreover, is to link together still other implications. It helps make emphatic Fitzgerald’s own sense of the specialness for him of this more than almost all his other fiction, an effort he would look back to both with pride and the bitterest regret that he had not held himself to the same undeviating resolve in the call of authorship. It directs us to the bravura with which he monitored his own progress, the novelist watching his art work through him. Coevally imagination, and imagining, function as a theme vitally important in its own right, not least in regard to Gatsby’s own astonishing self-invention and subsequent pursuit of Daisy Fay. One pointer to all these connecting implications lies in the observation made by Morley Callahan in That Summer in Paris (1983): As he sat there talking so sincerely I seemed to see him at night in his study. I looked at him in wonder, the author of The Great Gatsby pouring over some dumb unsympathetic review, hoping for one little flash of insight that might touch his imagination, 4

The Great Gatsby, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925, 2. These and all subsequent page references are to this edition.

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Gothic to Multicultural make him aware of some flaw in his work, make him a better artist. 5

Much of the discussion of The Great Gatsby justifiably has taken its point of departure from Fitzgerald’s letter of July 1922 to Max Perkins, his shrewd and long-serving editor at Scribner’s. There, with just a whiff of the rising star’s grandiloquence, Fitzgerald offered his memorable declaration of intent: “I want to write something new – something extraordinary and simple + intricately patterned.” 6 The upshot, at least as it came to him in a first draft two years later, Perkins immediately and intelligently recognized as indeed “extraordinary” – “an extraordinary book” is the literal echoing phrase in his own reply, and one also “to be proud of” and “suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and moods”.7 He saw it, in addition, as a quite major advance for all their immediate popularity on both This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned. Perkins may have expressed a worry about the “somewhat vague” contour of Gatsby himself and about the largely unspecified sources of his wealth. He may have felt that in having Gatsby speak with unusual volubility about his Army and Oxford past Fitzgerald seemingly had departed from “the method of the narrative”, namely Nick Carraway as the book’s voice of disclosure. But his essential, and prophetic, emphasis falls upon “the general brilliance of the book”, its “unequaled” characters and imparting of a sense of “eternity” to the main workings of the story. He speaks, too, of “the amount of meaning you get into a sentence”, a manuscript “full of phrases which make a scene blaze with life”.8 Perkins was not alone in foreshadowing the novel’s eventual impact. Fitzgerald’s virtuosity, his delivery of fable, elicited a who’s who of writerly approval. Gertrude Stein wrote grandly “You are 5

Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Some Others, NY: Coward-McCann, 1983, 206-207. 6 Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, July 1922. This letter is not included in The Letters of Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turbull, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962. See From Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, ed. John Hall Wheelcock, NY: Scribner;s Sonssa, 1950, and Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, eds John Kuehl and Jackson Bryer, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971. 7 Max Perkins to Fitzgerald, 20 November 1924, From Editor to Author, 38. 8 Ibid 40.


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creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did in Pendennis and Vanity Fair and this isn’t a bad compliment”. Edith Wharton gave it her blessing as “let me say at once how much I liked Gatsby, or rather His Book, & how great a leap I think you have taken this time – an advance upon your previous work”. The most celebrated nod came from T.S. Eliot – “it has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, English or American, for a number of years …. In fact it seems to me the first step American fiction has taken since Henry James.”9 Fitzgerald’s Princeton inner circle was not to be denied. Edmund Wilson responded with “Your book came yesterday and I read it last night. It is undoubtedly in some ways the best thing you have done – the best planned, the best sustained, the best written.” Baltimore spoke through H.L. Mencken (“‘The Great Gatsby’ fills me with pleasant sentiments. Evidences of careful workmanship are on every page. The thing is well managed, and has a fine surface”). Neither Wilson nor Mencken, however, disguised reservations. Wilson felt that the characters were “mostly so unpleasant in themselves” and Mencken that “the basic story is somewhat trivial”. But like Fitzgerald’s other respondents they spoke up unhesitatingly for the qualities Wilson, in a subsequent letter of May 1929 to Hamilton Basso, calls its “vividness and excitement”.10 Fitzgerald himself adds his own pointers, few more telling than his Introduction to the Modern Library edition of 1934. Often misunderstood as no more than a bad-tempered slap at reviewers, it brings into play his revealing and utter regard for Conrad. For in invoking the Preface to The Nigger of The Narcissus he clearly saw it as a credo, a set of necessary standards by which to measure his own performance in The Great Gatsby. With an implicit reference back to Conrad’s famous paragraphs on the need to achieve “the perfect blending of form and substance” and on the writer’s obligation “to make you see”, he moves on to the issue of fiction-writing (and writing in general) done in the imaginative all, or, as Conrad puts it,

9 These and all the following quotations are given in The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson, 1945. Gertrude Stein to Fitzgerald, 22 May 1925, 308; Edith Wharton to Fitzgerald, 8 June 1935, 309; and T.S. Eliot to Fitzgerald, 31 December, 310. 10 This letter is reprinted in Critical Essays on F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, ed. Scott Doanldson, NY: G.K. Hall & Co., 1984, 268.

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with a “clear” conscience. His predecessor’s words press tellingly from behind his own: Now that the book is being reissued, the author would like to say that never before did one try to keep his artistic conscience as pure as during the ten months put into doing it. Reading it over one can see how it could have been improved – yet without feeling guilty of any discrepancy from the truth, as far as I saw it; truth or rather the equivalent of truth, the attempt at honesty of imagination.11

However conscious of Conrad, Fitzgerald speaks finally only for himself or at least for the regimen he recalls having followed in the writing of The Great Gatsby. The “equivalent of truth” underscores how distinctive Fitzgerald himself thought the imagining of The Great Gatsby, its unusualness not only of vision but voice. As to “honesty of imagination” where in any of his longer fictions can he be said to have aspired more fiercely, or dedicatedly, to that end? In his own mind’s eye, as subsequently in the eye of many others, he had too readily gone on to squander his gifts. The Jazz Age legend, the partying and restlessness, the psychic wars of love and attrition with Zelda, the recurrent descents into booze and the Hollywood hack-work, and the eventual crack-up: all of these, as he rightly came to see, amounted to steerings off-course. In consequence, despite the continuing if intermittent stories, despite Tender Is the Night with its portrait of a world military conflict, an age, turned psychiatric, or The Last Tycoon with its trope of America as the movies, he finds himself looking back to The Great Gatsby as the vital turning-point, confirmation of imaginative duty done in honest and now accusatory good conscience. This he would affirm in a letter to his daughter, Scottie, written in June 1940, a scant six months before his fatal last heart attack. He speaks of his feeling that The Great Gatsby was where he had acted truest to his literary calling, as though to vindicate Conrad’s exacting desideratum that the true “worker in prose” pursue his course “undeterred by faltering, weariness, or reproach”:

11

The full reference to the 1934 reissue is The Great Gatsby, Modern Library Editions, NY: Random House, Inc., 1934.


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What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now that I’d never relaxed or looked back-but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: “I’ve found my line – and from now on this comes first. This is my duty – without this I am nothing.”12

The publication of The Crack-Up in 1945 did service on a number of fronts. It expressed Edmund Wilson’s personal homage to his lifelong Princeton friend (“that gleam of intellect/ That spilled into the spectrum of tune, taste,/ Scent, color, living speech, is gone, is lost…”) and it gave even greater impetus to the dizzying upward spiral of Fitzgerald’s posthumous recovery.13 The assembled essays, letters, notebook entries and jottings underscore serious Fitzgerald, a due antidote to the Fitzgerald all too easily fêted as the stylish high priest of 1920s society – which is not to say he lacked playfulness. Not only did Wilson call upon Stein, Wharton and T.S. Eliot, but upon an immediate circle of Thomas Wolfe, Glenway Wescott, John Dos Passos and John Peale Bishop. Each, assuredly, spoke from intimate friendship, but as much also from having been stirred, and often inspired, by the vibrancy, the enviable authority, of Fitzgerald’s story-telling imagination. For all of them The Great Gatsby recurs as the touchstone. Once launched this augmentation of Fitzgerald’s place in American literary ranks has known almost no check. Comparisons with stylists like Flaubert and Keats, Turgenev and James, have become almost commonplace, even allowing for expressions of dissent as in F.R. Leavis’ Scrutiny.14 The editions, the criticism, the biographies, and the different film and TV adaptations of his fiction have proliferated through to the Mia Farrow/Robert Redford 1974 version of The Great Gatsby. By comparison, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned come under fire for the beginner’s literariness. Tender Is the Night, however more compendious its span, is said to remain less than the sum of its parts. The Last Tycoon, the companion in spirit with

12

Fitzgerald to Frances Scott Fitzgerald, 12 June 1940. Letters, 79. Edmund Wilson, “Dedication”, The Crack-Up, 9. 14 See, as two opposing views, D.W. Harding, “Scott Fitzgerald’, Scrutiny 18 (Winter 1951-52) 166-74, and John Farelly, “Fitzgerald: Another View”, Scrutiny 19 (June 1952), 266-72. For still later dissent, see Ron Neuhaus, “Gatsby and the Failure of the Omniscient ‘I’”, Denver Quarterly, XII/1 (Spring 1977), 303-12. 13

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Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane as a fable of screen or press power mogulship, carries its irredeemable un-completedness. What holds throughout is precisely the focal place given The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s agreed peak. Which is not to avoid taking into account the fuss about Nick Carraway’s reliability as narrator (in a special sense Nick’s very unreliability needs to be seen as utterly intrinsic to Fitzgerald’s imagining of the story). In a notable recent essay, and from the vantage point of practising novelist as critic, George Garrett offers the due judgement when he calls The Great Gatsby unashamedly “marvellous”, a novel so strikingly well-imagined that it “shines with authentic inner light”.15 *** All of the foregoing speaks to the circumstances around the making of The Great Gatsby, its confirmation for Fitzgerald as much as for admirers of a creativity put under Conradian discipline. But what of the imagining within the text itself, the chronicling by which in the guise of Nick Carraway Fitzgerald weaves his fable of Gatsby’s Great Expectations? For from start to close one cannot but recognize that “Gatsby, His Book”, in Edith Wharton’s memorable formulation, depends upon a peculiarly magnified form of telling, as if only a mode daring enough to meet the story’s intrinsic extravagance yet itself kept just the right side of extravagance, would do. The Great Gatsby, that is, holds to a mode as colourful and even indeed lavish as need be, but never given over to mere luxuriance or too intruding a display. Involved here is something more than an attention to style in any narrow or workaday sense, much as Fitzgerald has justly had his acclaim for his different turns of phrase and aphorism. It means, too, doing more with Nick Carraway merely than as a point of view, dutifully as he has been pursued in this respect and tracked back to figures in stories like “Absolution” and “Winter Dreams” and to Conrad’s Marlow. It means attempting to elicit why, from Nick’s opening declaration of not wanting “more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart” (2) through to his final vision of a Lost America as the “fresh, green breast of the new world” 15 George Garrett, “Fire and Freshness: A Matter of Style in The Great Gatsby”, in New Essays on “The Great Gatsby”, ed. Matthew Bruccoli, Cambridge MA and London: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 101-16.


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(182) The Great Gatsby so especially seems marked out by its imagining, Fitzgerald’s almost page for page daring of invention. For as Nick affects at the story’s outset to draw breath, to position himself as observer where once he was participant, so we find ourselves, too, called upon to enter the spirit of his telling, to show a willingness to imagine the story in precisely the magnified terms that he does himself. Only that way, if Fitzgerald is to be understood aright, can Jay Gatsby, Jimmy Gatz as was, truly loom before us as “The Great Gatsby”. Any number of connecting clues as to the kind of imagining at work in Gatsby suggest themselves. Did Fitzgerald vacillate as much as he did about a right title because he was looking for one that would indicate to perfection his novel’s overall voice? Those he considered, Trimalchio, Trimalchio at West Egg, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, The High Bouncing Lover, On the Road to West Egg, and Under the Red, White, and Blue, the latter which he urged upon Max Perkins even after The Great Gatsby had been printed up on the title-page, invite being thought nothing if not pitched at one with the very soar of the text. In each, whether an allusion to Petronius’ infamous party giver in the Satyricon, or to some fantasy-style lover, or to the American flag as heady patriotic insignia, Fitzgerald clearly was seeking just the right touchstone. A shared note is struck in the quatrain he places under the eventual title (“Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; / If you can bounce high, bounce for her, too, / Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,/ I must have you!”). “Gold-hatted” and “high-bouncing” echo the discarded titles directly. The lines might also be ballad, even a nursery rhyme. They have the sprightliness, the winning exaggeration, of a refrain grown familiar by popular repetition. Likewise the invented author, THOMAS PARKE D’INVILLIERS, looks suitably Keatsian or Hardyesque, a balladeer of perhaps medieval provenance. The fact that a writer of the same name appears in This Side of Paradise, based upon John Peale Bishop, adds a further in-house touch. Then there is to hand Francis Cougat’s original dust-jacket for The Great Gatsby (donated by Charles Scribner, Jr., to the Princeton Club of New York and lately again pressed into service for Scribner’s paperbacks), originally done in gouache and which shows the fatal last car crash as a fireball within a wonderfully brooding and

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impressionistic play of colour. Overhead hovers the line-drawing of a flapper’s face, eyes bloodshot and lips puckered and rouged to required Clara Bow style. A speeding automobile, Daisy at the wheel if we have resort to the text, heads out of the conflagration, one final, murderous carelessness caught as though a rip in the picture’s impressionistic geometry. The dust-jacket, thereby, gives another confirming notice of the book’s spirit, Gatsby’s saga as plausibly actual or historic but always better comprehended as though magnified, fascinatingly distorted. *** As he tries to get the experiences of his Summer down East into some kind of imaginative order, Nick Carraway offers a backward glance as vivid as any in The Great Gatsby: Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old – even then it had for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house – the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares. (177-78; italics added)

Nick’s musings serve not only as his own call to memory but as a species of unreal checklist for all that has passed in the novel: “the East” as a locus for what in connection with his part of Long Island he calls “spectroscopic gayety” (45); Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy as for all its risk of excess and the ludicrous a truly magnificent obsession; and the drunken woman in her gown of white and jewels as figuration of Daisy Fay, besotted Fairy Queen, Spirit of the Age. The beguiling double standard of dress suit and evening gown formality with an anything-goes licence underlines the contraries in play. Carelessness


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will resonate throughout as one of the novel’s great mots clef, whether the “riotous” (4) partying at Gatsby’s World’s Fair of a mansion, the brute insouciance of Tom Buchanan, or Nick’s affair with Jordan as a form of bad driving with its coda in the literal bad driving whereby Daisy will run down Myrtle Wilson and Tom encourage her husband to think Gatsby the killer. In the voice of Nick’s remembering from “beyond the Ohio” (177) only an El Greco canvas or its like, will serve to explain this dazzle of wealth, extravagance, corruption and exhaustion. And how Nick remembers signifies equally with what he remembers. The Gatsby saga as indeed belonging to “my more fantastic dreams”, to “a night scene by El Greco” (178), directs us to the manner in which the novel at large is imagined. Most of all the phase “a quality of distortion” (177) comes into imaginative play, the story so the speak unravelled, even paradoxically re-enravelled, from within Nick’s reeling senses. Writing from a year or so on and from the safer ground of his heartlands Middle West, Nick finds he can best look back with any degree of equanimity only if he pictures Gatsby and the East as belonging to a dream, some baroque theatrical etched upon a Spanish canvas. Gatsby’s history is to be caught, and held, as though precisely a series of distortions, a brilliant feat of imagining on Fitzgerald’s part that has everything to do with the novel’s singularity. Fitzgerald understandably took pride in how he had surrogated out the telling of The Great Gatsby to Nick. If this Yale educated, gentrified son of small-town America can speak at the outset of the book as a giver or withholder of moral approval, he will also confess by the end to his “provincial squeamishness” (181) in the face of events which have entangled him for ever in the doings of Gatsby, Tom, Daisy and Jordan. Not unlike Hawthorne’s Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance or Emily Bronte’s Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, Nick frequently finds himself seeming always to be somehow catching up on the scenes that make up the very story he is telling and at pains to manage its extravagance and magic. Quite confessedly he will edit scenes, imagine conversations he could not have witnessed, fill in background and biography, and above all seek a best language to do justice to his own wonderments. A “night scene” (178) from El Greco offers but a single, yet utterly symptomatic, instance of all the distortion which must enter his own telling if he is truly to play chronicler, the custodian to the spirit and spectacle of the parade gone

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by. Rarely can anyone quite have sought out both the challenge and the consolations afforded by narrative, an assuaging idiom of order from out of the reeling disorder. This same use of distortion, Nick’s style of often fantastical and certainly self-amazed remembering, also links back to how Fitzgerald has him open his account. The ironic coolness with which he speaks of the “fundamental decencies” being “parceled out unequally at birth” (1) belongs less to the would-be moral soothsayer than to a man who has been violently knocked off his high moral perch. Is not the voice wry, that of his witness to things that have obliged him to flee in disarray back to his once condescended-to origins (a Middle West of the Carraway “wholesale hardware business” [3] itself mocked in the vaunted and not a little pretentious or even preposterous connection to the Dukes of Buccleuth)? Hardly now the student politician, the figure famed for his reserve and for being the beneficiary of unsought confidences and “the secret griefs of wild, unknown men” (1), he has come to require of the world only that it “be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention for ever” (2). “My Middle West” (177) may serve as a counter to “the East”, a refuge after so many “riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart” (2), but it does so at the price of compromise, Nick’s own failure of nerve. Little wonder, thinking back, he reaches hungrily for the imagery of distortion as though the survivor of an exorbitant, haunting night-time dream. Another major clue to Nick as story-teller lies in his opening observation on the novel’s title figure: “Only Gatsby, the man who gave his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction” (2). Would-be moral arbiter or not, in making this observation Nick also sets out his own stall as author, his literary self-in-waiting as it were. Having mocked his own one-time sureness of moral judgement (not out of keeping in someone who has failed to report a murder), he also mocks his own earlier attempts to play the author. “I was rather literary in college”, he confides self-deprecatingly, the begetter of “a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News”. This time, however, he takes up his pen as no brash neophyte editorialist, rather as a man compelled to utterance. He even throws in a bit of hard-earned wisdom which nicely again reflects upon authorship. “Life”, he avers, “is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all”, another recognition of his own organizing


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viewpoint in the novel and re-enforced through his acerbic aphorism about “that most limited of specialists, the ‘well-rounded man’ ” (4). The rest of The Great Gatsby’s opening pages act on these cues to perfection. Nick teasingly connects the West Egg/East Egg promontories that jut out into “the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound” (3) with the Columbus story, the most editorially knowing of inlaid historical references. He sets himself up, too, as a fauxLeatherstocking, bivouacked in his “weather-beaten cardboard bungalow” and the self-nominated “guide”, “pathfinder” and “original settler” on the strength of being able to direct a stranger to West Egg village. He dawdles over himself as neophyte money-maker drawn to “the shining secrets” of the dollar, a would-be cultist in the realms of “Midas and Morgan and Maecenas” (3-4). Who better to become a figure in his own story, “restless” after the Great War, anxious to find and tell his own story even as he is taken possession of by Gatsby’s story? As to the East little gives it more ironic fantasticalism than Gatsby’s house in all its gorgeous fake European authenticity, the “factual imitation of some hôtel de ville in Normandy” or as Nick describes it “spanking new under a thin beard of ivy” (5). More baronial confection looms in the Buchanan home, one of “the white palaces of fashionable East Egg”. Bought at unconscionable price from “Demaine, the oil man”, with its hint of Texas wildcatting and liquid gold, it gives itself forth as a “cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial Mansion” (7-8). If Gatsby signals new money, Tom is old money, the writ of parvenu wealth against socially laundered wealth. These two houses, each styled to be what it is not with Gatsby and Tom as their custodians and Daisy caught like spoilt jewellery inbetween, take us far beyond scene setting. The landscape of The Great Gatsby, not only West and East Egg but the Valley of Ashes, Wilson’s garage, Wall Street, the Manhattan of Myrtle’s apartment and the hotels, and even the roadway of the fatal accident – in all the East as Nick conjures it up from memory – amounts precisely to distortion, the geography of dream. Similarly the Buchanan ambit draws both on substance and, as it were, hologram, the actual and its after-image. Something almost Hogarthian, accordingly, infuses the portrait of Tom as “enormously wealthy”, arrogant of eye and gesture, the Yale athlete with a body of “enormous power” and a temperament at once “cruel” and “restless”,

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in all a man believably contemptible (7). His crypto-fascist yet comic riff on Nordics and “this man Godard’s The Rise of the Colored Empires” (13) endows him with his own larger-than-life status but in no sense one imaginatively out of control. Nick gets him just right, the “enormous leverage” of the body matched to “something pathetic in his concentration” (14). Nick’s authorial resources are insistently brought to bear, too, with Daisy and Jordan. He first conjures them into being like fantasy creatures, buoyed up on a balloon-like couch, clad in “rippling and fluttering white”, Daisy for her part oxymoronically “p-paralyzed with happiness” and Jordan “slender” and “erect” like some well-tempered figurine (8-9). Their “bantering inconsequence” (12) and Daisy’s “tense gayety” (16) serve as exquisite codings of the social register in which they move. Nick even invents himself for Daisy, the cousincourtier ironically reporting Chicago’s desolation at her absence and through the tribute of each car’s “left wheel painted black as a mourning wreath” (10). Past remembrance becomes fractured present: the room’s “groan of a picture” (8), Tom’s bluster and his bruising of Daisy’s finger, the midsummer-revel implication of the “longest night of the year” and Daisy’s query about candles (12), Myrtle’s phone call (16) and Nick’s own ambiguous disgust at the brittle ostentation. He alludes to the evening as “broken fragments”, “a trick of some sort” (18), as if to acknowledge that this is a scene recalled through the eventual larger sense of the whole, an account somehow itself as distorted as the scene it seeks to describe. *** The transition to Gatsby applies in kind. “The silhouette of a moving cat” presages his appearance, a figure who emerges from shadow and looks in isolation out and upward to “the silver pepper of the stars”. He appears distantly “content to be alone”, arms “stretched towards the dark water in a curious way” (21). Nick even speculates that Gatsby trembles as he gazes towards the “single green light” (22), which means Daisy. He then vanishes as promptly as he has appeared, self into shadow just as he has transformed shadow into self. Nick reimagines him to perfection, a Gatsby who has so elusively willed himself into being and who lives inside and shapes whatever Gatsby the world deceives itself it has so far known. It is in obligation to


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Gatsby as precisely his own distortion that Nick supplies the novel’s authorial distortions. This same distortion plays right across the novel, Nick’s telling itself a consummate parody of authoritative first-person narration. As the ensuing chapters fill out the drama they do so through an idiom which subtly shows itself to have absorbed Nick’s every past tilt and bias of memory (“Memory, of course, is never true” Hemingway would write in Death in the Afternoon). He tells his story only as he feels and remembers its unfolding, not to say recovers from its impact, a virtual courting of recognition for truth to fable if not fact. In this he especially acknowledges his own observer-participant role of modern Pandarus, lover and non-lover of Jordan for whom he vaunts his “tender curiosity” (58), and voice of requiem and retreat after the closing deaths. However paradoxically his so becomes the truer account. One needs, as another kind of underscoring, to pursue Nick’s pacing of his zig-zag but gathering perceptions. In his prism the Valley of Ashes, the novel’s ”fantastic farm” with its “ash-grey men” and their “obscure operations”, inverts the America of wheat field and prairie into the very ecology of hell (23). The “eternal blindness” of Eckleburg’s sightless eyes implies for him a universe of void, a wag of an oculist’s mocking godless billboard. Wilson’s garage, indeed Wilson himself (“a blond, spiritless man, anemic, and faintly handsome” [25]), he invokes as though out of Edward Hopper, a life caught in shadow and sepia. Myrtle, needful, fleshly, play-acting Tom’s wife within the “artificial laughter” (37) of her apartment party, becomes for him the very mongrel her lover so sullenly buys for her outside the station. Nick thinks back on a picture comically akin to “a hen sitting on a blurred rock” but which resolves itself into “the countenance of an old lady” (29); fitfully reads a chapter from a volume entitled Simon Called Peter; endures the shock of Tom’s breaking Myrtle’s nose and the sight of her blood; serves as the barely sober but captive audience for McKee’s photographic studies as the latter shows them clad only in his underwear and in bed; and moves on to a final memory of being “half-asleep in the cold lower level of Pennsylvania Station” waiting for the “four o’clock train” (38). These truly do contribute to pictures of a broken world, fragments, some perhaps unexplained sexual

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escapade, too much drink, in all linking distortions of time, place, mood, memory. In like manner Nick discloses his progressive entry into Gatsby’s story. The first of the great parties he invokes as a concourse of light and colour: the “blue gardens”; the “brisk yellow bug” of a welcoming station-wagon; the chauffeur in his “uniform of robin’s-egg blue” (41). The weave is one of more distortion, competing eddies of remembrance, variously the music, the banter, the proliferations of myth about Gatsby, the bar-flies and party-goers who “dissolve and form in the same breath” (42), the crashed cars and Nick’s celebrated conversation with Jordan about “bad driving” (59). Fitzgerald adds yet more self-reflexivity in the utter surprise of the owl-eyed man that Gatsby’s books are real, as if indeed reflexively The Great Gatsby were also offering its own kind of true lie. Gatsby himself, and the web he weaves, threatens always to outreach Nick’s chronicling. The listing of the guests who descend on the summer parties might be Wodehouse lampoon. Gatsby’s July morning appearance in his hydroplane, his Old Sport lingo, and the baroquely comic stagecoach car at once “monstrous in length” and loaded down with “triumphant hatboxes and supper boxes and toolboxes” and with its “labyrinth of windshields” (64), causes Nick to begin to assign Gatsby truly to some world elsewhere. How to gauge the talk of living “like a young rajah”, originating in San Francisco as “the Middle West”, and the “something sad that … happened to me long ago” (6365)? Are the war experiences, with their “enchanted life” and Montenegro medal, fiction or fact (66)? How to account for the “Oxford days” of the Trinity Quad and Gatsby of all things with “a cricket bat in his hand” (67) – fake CV, trick photography? Nick can hardly not sense more to come from the conjuror’s hat as Gatsby builds towards asking Nick’s help in bringing Daisy to within his reach (“I was sure the request would be something utterly fantastic” [68]). The meeting with Meyer Wolfsheim gives off the same ongoing shimmer of unreal reality. “Anything can happen” Nick surmises as they cross the Queensboro Bridge, “Even Gatsby could happen”. Their “roaring noon” (69) encounter with the legendary fixer of the World Series, relies in its every aspect upon ongoing distortion. They gather in a Wall Street cellar under a ceiling of “Presbyterian nymphs” close to The Old Metropole with its Capone-style criminal glamour in


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the death of Rosy Rosenthal. Wolfsheim’s offer of “a business gonnection”, his teeth cufflinks, assuredly his certification of Gatsby as “an Oggsford man”, all combine to suggest Dickensian command, the delineation of a modern American Fagin (72). *** Even the tracking-back to Gatsby’s Louisville courtship of Daisy and the account Jordan gives of her despairing resort to the bottle on her wedding-day mixes truth with embellishment, remembrance doubly editorialized first by Jordan and then by Nick. In Gatsby’s show of shirts to Daisy, the reunion for which all his parties and extravagance have been conceived, distortion becomes epiphanic, a kind of apotheosis. At a “pitch of intensity” he puts the shirts before her as in careless fetish. The scene is summoned by Nick as the dance of the heart, eroticism, and wonderfully underscored by Daisy’s descent into words short in every way on her beginning recognition of the enormity of the desire in play (“It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before” [94]). The “soft rich heap”, each different shade and style of monogram, bespeak gestural wealth, wealth almost mocked, as though for Gatsby on Nick’s construing “in [Daisy’s] actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real” (92). Which, in kind, is exactly how Nick seeks to recreate the scene and its place in the overall narrative. His recall of Gatsby’s allusion to Dan Cody, the Daniel BooneBuffalo Bill mentor preserved in a photograph and later to be described as the “pioneer debauchee” (101) adds its own fantastical archive. Cody, too, helps create the passage of Jimmy Gatz into Jay Gatsby, the farm boy from South Dakota who wills himself into the Playboy of the Western World. In Cody lies the elusive patriarch, flesh over spirit, and in whose take-all-before-him footfall Gatsby will amass the loot with which to ensnare Daisy. In turn Nick’s recall of the “The Love Nest” played by Ewing Klipspringer with its “In the morning,/In the evening,/Aint we got fun” gives a lyric, zany appropriateness to the love-story being acted out. In the subsequent scene, where Nick leaves Gatsby and Daisy dancing to their own reimagined stage-set, the effect is of a truth to fact and yet a ghost sonata. Nick has good grounds to describe them as looking at him

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“remotely” and as having “forgotten” him; they offer yet another distortion which in his telling elides unobtrusively into our ours. *** The move towards closure, Gatsby’s death and Nick’s retreat to “my Middle West”, acts on this lens of distortion with not the slightest dip in assurance. It can be Cody himself as embodying “the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon” (101), his yacht Tuolumee as dreamboat and “all the beauty of the world”, and above all Gatsby’s “Platonic conception” (99) of Gatz into Gatsby. Daisy can become Green Light, Grail, even jazz age geisha. The past can be repeated only as fantasy. Daisy can pretend to re-flower herself but her voice as Gatsby recognizes, is now “full of money”. Gatsby himself, once Tom has found out about the bootlegging, can possess the face of a man who might indeed have killed, a face that “could be described in just that fantastic way”. Mendelssohn’s wedding march can play elsewhere in the hotel as Gatsby seeks to replace Tom, one lost marriage for another. Events take over, a run of high-speed episodes, from Myrtle’s being run down (“her left breast … swinging loose like a flap” [138]) to Wilson’s gunning of both of Gatsby and himself. Distortion turns literally murderous. Gatsby’s world becomes for Nick a “twilight universe” marked out by “dark spots”, “dust” (151). By now it can no longer to be his own surprise that he feels himself losing the struggle to keep pace, the tale pitched to elude yet further the grasp of its teller. In rounding out his account Nick begins by contracting time, the past of Gatsby’s death as irresistibly still a time-present. “After two years”, he confesses, “I remember the rest of that day and that night and the next day …”. Meyer Wolfsheim’s letter seizes him as though from another world as, in turn, do the calls from Chicago about Young Parke and the under-the-counter bonds or from Klipspringer about his pair of shoes and inability to be present at the funeral. “Nightmare” (164) and “fantastic dreams” (178) Nick terms the circuit of events which have led to Gatsby’s death, his prior self-assurance under siege even if he takes pride in issuing a last approval of Gatsby and the removal of the dirty word from the wall. Yet more magnification for him lies in the threadbare pride in his son of Mr Gatz at the funeral, the ironically affecting comparison of


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Gatsby with another mid-west robber baron, a Minnesota railway tycoon (“If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill” [169]). The presentation to Nick of the “old copy” of Hopalong Cassidy and the Franklinesque notebook SCHEDULE give their indicators of where Gatsby’s self-invention began. But they also remind Nick of his unsought role as a Boswell. This “down East”, Gatsby’s but also that of the Buchanans, Jordan and the rest, and their “vast carelessness” on his own admission causes him to feel “haunted”. The retrospect, in a striking repetition of the expression he has used in likening West Egg to the El Greco painting, he thinks “distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction” (178). And it is with two different but connecting last distortions that the novel comes to rest. The first is personal, Nick’s sense of Gatsby’s parties and world as inward memory: I spent my Saturday nights in New York, because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over. (181)

This belongs very much on a par with the El Greco painting. A “material car” can perfectly well arrive, but it belongs with “the music and laughter” of parties now reshaped in memory. Nick’s other distortion carries more emblematic implications, and points less to the surreal or fantastical than to the sublime. It refers us to the larger myth in play, that of the American Dream as foundational legacy. With the dust of the obscene word erased from the white steps of the mansion, Nick allows, likely cannot prevent, his imagination once more to take flight. Long Island dissolves before him into the “fresh green breast of the new world”, the once promissory floweringto-be for “Dutch sailors’ eyes” (182) of an America still pristine and clear of carelessness. This last distortion, albeit lyric, restorative, the presiding myth of the New World, cannot be thought other than of a kind with the rest of The Great Gatsby.

14 EVERYTHING COMPLETELY KNIT UP: SEEING FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS WHOLE You see every damned word and action in this book depends upon every other word and action. You see he’s laying there in the pine needles at the start and that is where he is at the end. He has his problem and all his life before him at the start and he has all his life in those days and, at the end there is only death for him and he truly isn’t afraid of it at all because he has a chance to finish his mission. But would all that be clear? Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins (1940) 1 The most important thing in a work of art is that it should have a kind of focus – i.e. some place where all the rays meet or from which they issue. And this focus should not be capable of being completely explained in words. This, indeed, is the important thing about it good work of art, that its basic content can in its entirety be expressed only by itself. Tolstoy reported by A.B. Goldenwesier 2

In confiding to Maxwell Perkins the hope that For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) would exhibit a clear interdependence of all its essential detail – “everything completely knit up and stowed away shipshape” is an earlier phrase in his 1940 letter – Hemingway showed himself singularly acute about what, and what not, ought to count in his

1

Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, 26 August 1940, in Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-61, ed. Carlos Baker, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981, 514. 2 Tolstoy reported by A.B. Goldenweiser, quoted in R.F. Christian, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962, 104 and reprinted in War and Peace, Norton Critical; Edition, NY: Norton, 1966, ed. George Gibian, 1456. The original appeared in A.B. Goldenweiser, Vblizi Tolstogo, Moscow-Leningrad, 1959.

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novel. 3 The issue he calls attention to, whether Robert Jordan embodies a sufficiently credible and inclusive viewpoint through whom to refract the drama of the Civil War and the Spanish soil itself, offers a wholly reasonable point of departure. For does Jordan’s three-day partizan mission at the bridge begun and ended “on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest” (1) serve altogether convincingly as the book’s fulcrum, the means through which its widening circle of other concerns is brought to overall imaginative order? More precisely, can it not be said that Jordan’s consciousness and his undertaking behind enemy lines establish a sufficient centre for its portraits of Pablo, El Sordo, Maria and the others as expressions of the human spirit under press of war and beleaguered by Fascism? Hemingway’s long-standing preoccupation with Spain begun in The Sun Also Rises (1926) and the shorter stories and carried forward through Death in the Afternoon (1932), The Spanish Earth (1937), the political film documentary written with John Dos Passos, and The Fifth Column (1938), had always served him as an essential arena for the conflict of good and bad faith. But in the case of For Whom the Bell Tolls, his longest novel, had he made “every damned word and action” depend upon “every other word and action”? Opinion generally agrees that For Whom the Bell Tolls marks a more ambitious effort than The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, but that equally it falls down in several key aspects. Even among enthusiasts who greeted it on publication as a landmark achievement, the Spanish Civil War at last made over into epic and a work to be put alongside George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), the murmurs were frequent. Although Hemingway’s own comments on the novel do not provide the only measure for its success or failure, they do give a pointer to how he himself hoped For Whom the Bell Tolls would be best approached. Had he or not achieved Tolstoy’s “focus”, “a place where all the rays meet or from which they issue”?4

3

Quotations and page references throughout are to the first edition: Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls, NY: Charles Scribner, 1940. 4 For relevant discussions, see Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway, NY: Rinehart, 1952, 75-82, and Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 3rd edn, 1952, 242-59.

Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

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The false trails and sniping have taken a variety of directions. Hemingway’s assumed politics in the novel were early to arouse contention. The time’s Stalinists, in plain defiance of what Hemingway has Jordan say is his political outlook, pronounced the author too easy on fascism. Tacitly, if no more, he had undermined the anti-fascist cause by depicting loyalists as dishevelled and almost inevitably destined to fall before the smack of Franco’s military force. In Jordan, fellow-traveller or not, Hemingway is said to privilege the bourgeois-individual code hero at the expense of history, by which, usually, has been meant the Marxist class dialectic of ideological force and counter-force. Many of more liberal persuasion, including several later several ex-Party members, thought him simply duped by the apparent liberationist thrust, and efficiency, of the Communist Party machine in the Spain of the 1930s. He had been politically naïve, or at the very least too accommodating, as to long-term Soviet-Comintern intentions.5 Hemingway, further, is taken to task for lacking a sufficient grasp of the intricacies of Spanish history. More is needed to reflect the peninsula’s past-into-present, its ebbs of monarchy and republic, the shadow of empire, or the politics of religion from the reconquista to Franco as caudillo. A Pablo, or Sordo, or Anselmo may do selective peasant duty. The concentration on the personalities of the Republican command structure may well offer a number of key vignettes. But the wider perspective is missing of Spain’s Falangists and Republicans, its Catholic church hierarchy, the Catalans, Basques and Gallegos, and the Nationalist alliance with Germany and Italy. Despite the novel’s undoubted size, it is suggested, Hemingway somehow still does not do enough. It is in this connection that For Whom the Bell Tolls regularly attracts un-favourable comparison with War and Peace, a standard Hemingway himself several times observed could hardly not appear rigged to make him come off the loser.6 For his novel is not especially 5

Jordan’s own views are given as follows in one of his interior monologues: “You’re not a real Marxist and you know it. And you never could have. You believe in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. You believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Don’t ever kid yourself with too much dialectics. They are for some but not for you. You have to put many things in abeyance to win a war. If this war is lost all of those things are lost” (305). 6 For an indication of Hemingway’s regard for Tolstoy, see his letter to Charles Scribner, 6 and 7 September 1949, Selected Letters, 673.

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Tolstoyian. Hemingway’s version of the Spanish Civil War differs in almost every major aspect: the battles behind Fascist lines north of Madrid in hill and pine hardly resemble the great set-pieces of Tolstoy’s Austerlitz and his other principal scenes of action. Robert Jordan, unlike Tolstoy’s Pierre or Prince Andrei, is not there as philosopher of war and peace and the human condition. Which is far from to say that Tolstoy is not a relevant name to invoke. The observation to A.B. Goldenweiser about focus, and in Hemingway’s case about its applicability to Robert as narrative consciousness and the bridge as gathering-point, especially matters. In the case of Robert Jordan the misgivings tie into a wider view of the Hemingway hero, Nick Adams to Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry to Thomas Hudson. Is he simply one more in the litany of stoic losers? That would be unfair. He is far from the Nick of initiation in the early Indian and war stories. His life offers no equivalence to that of Jake as sexual casualty of war or Jazz Age expatriation unable to achieve love with his ruined and ruinous Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises. The relationship with Maria in no way reiterates Frederic Henry’s love of Catherine, the would-be healer cheated of lover and child in the wake of their flight from the Italian “joke front” of Caparetto in A Farewell to Arms (1929). Unlike all of them, moreover, he consciously experiences at close range the coming of his own actual death, a prospect the novel treats with scrupulous tact. This point gains further emphasis from Jordan’s personal history. He thinks of the American civil war in which his grandfather fought. It does not escape him that Lieutenant Berrendo, on whom he has his gun trained while covering the retreat of Pablo and the women, is as much as himself a committed believer in his cause. Berrendo, indeed, might even be his own symbolic alter ego. Jordan’s interior monologues, likewise, those that invoke midwest boyhood and those that call up Gaylords Hotel in Madrid and Republican notables like Karkov, Golz, Lister, Marty, Modesto and El Campesino, may or may not win over all readers. But there can be little question that they give dimensionality to Jordan’s role in the war, the further joining of America and Spain. Even the action around the bridge has been thought a weakness, too archly symbolic in its echoes of Leonidas and Horatio and use of a seventy-two hour time-span as the measure of a single life. Each different flashback, from Pablo’s taking of the Guardia Civil post and


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the flailing of the village’s fascists to the train blowing and Maria’s rape, is said to veer into a set piece, the detachable vignette. Pablo and El Sordo, further, have been considered too ready a symmetry, good and bad faith alternatives. Hemingway’s female portraiture has long been its own source of vexation. Pilar as the incarnation of the earth Madonna is routinely judged to lack all credibility, while Maria, adoring and healed of her rape by the fascists through her too instantaneous love of Jordan, amounts to no more than a cipher. Hemingway’s Spanglish has been yet another occasion of complaint.7 His transliteration of the Spanish tú into “thee” and “thou” gives the novel a look of unintended anachronism. But that again is unfair. Hemingway clearly wishes to signal something of campesino argot, residual habits of address passed down through generations. He also perfectly understands how tú can be curse and contempt as well as intimacy. This links into the larger issue of the novel’s general stylistic manner. Does it have about it too ritual a quality, whatever the given history, the specific lives, the novel edged by Hemingway towards formula and in which the sheer individual precariousness of war, of combat, risks getting underplayed? *** Most of these dissatisfactions, whatever their merits, have tended to divert attention from whether or not For Whom the Bell Tolls holds up as all imaginative whole, and if so, how that whole is achieved. Both in his letter to Perkins, and in the correspondence of 1939-40 with his publisher Charles Scribner, Hemingway went out of his way to insist on this as the essential test. Furthermore, his standard can hardly be thought other than perfectly exacting in its own right. He, as much as anyone, recognized the importance for For Whom the Bell Tolls to be knit up, and the integrated sum of its contributing parts. The point was not lost on Edmund Wilson. In one of the novel’s earliest reviews, Wilson set the critical pace in handsome, intelligent style, alighting on precisely the same issue that had exercised Hemingway. For him, also, Jordan as consciousness, and about his

7

Most notably by Arturo Barea, in “Not Spain but Hemingway”, Horizon, 3 (May 1941), 350-61.

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duties at the bridge, serves as the novel’s inescapable centre of gravity: [For Whom the Bell Tolls] is Hemingway’s first attempt to compose a full-length novel, with real characters, and a built-up story. On the eve of a Loyalist attack in the Spanish Civil War, a young American who has enlisted on the Loyalist side goes out into the country held by the Fascists, under orders to blow up a bridge. He directs with considerable difficulty a band of peasant guerillas, spends three nights in a cave in their company, blows up the bridge on schedule, and is finally shot by the Fascists. The method is the reverse of the ordinary method in novels of contemporary history. Franz Hoellering’s or André Malraux’s which undertake a general survey of a revolutionary crisis, shuttling back and forth among various groups of characters. There is little of this shuttling in “For Whom the Bell Tolls ”, but it is all directly related to the main action: the blowing-up of the bridge. Through this episode the writer has aimed to reflect the whole course of the Spanish War, to show the tangle of elements that were engaged in it, and to exhibit the events in a larger perspective than that of the emergency of the moment.

So much, for Wilson, was positive, but he also had his reservations: The novel has certain weaknesses. A master of the concentrated short story, Hemingway is less sure of his grasp of the form of the elaborated novel. The shape of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is sometimes slack and sometimes bulging. It is certainly quite a little too long. You need space to make an epic of three days; but the story seems to slow up towards the end where the reader feels it ought to move faster; and the author has not found out how to mold or to cut the interior soliloquies of his hero. Nor are the excursions, outside the consciousness of the hero, whose point of view comprehends most of the book, conducted with consistent attention to the symmetry and point of the whole. 8

8

Edmund Wilson, “Return of Ernest Hemingway”, New Republic, CIII/28 (October 1940), 591-92.


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Taken together both Hemingway and Wilson usefully suggest how For Whom the Bell Tolls might most appropriately best be understood and judged. Is the “larger perspective” achieved or not? What of the charge that it becomes slack, at time bulging, over-length? How true is it to say that the material that lies outside Robert Jordan’s consciousness is insufficiently tied in with the central drama of the bridge-blowing? Wilson raises what remains the pertinent issue, the novel’s “attention to the symmetry and point of the whole”, or as Hemingway himself colloquially expressed it, the desideratum that everything be “stowed away shipshape”. To that end working attention needs to be given, in turn, to the novel’s connecting dynamics of focus, flashback, inset and monologue. *** The focus of For Whom the Bell Tolls nowhere shows itself better than in the bridge. If analogies were sought in other classic American texts, then Hawthorne’s scaffolds or Twain’s raft would be among the most appropriate. For the bridge acts both as emphatically emblematic but also literal, not the deific Brooklyn Bridge of Hart Crane’s poem – it does not lend of its curveship a myth to God – but it radiates, as the novel says early on, a “solid flung metal grace” (35), an iconic power which grows in impact as Anselmo, Agustin, Pilar and Fernando (Pablo is the dissenter) come to see that it is here and finally that their stand must be made. They, in turn, speak of it in implicitly religious terms, the place of duty that if it is to cost them their lives must do so with all the dignity of an enterprise worthy of the sacrificial contract. In this the bridge appropriately keeps us mindful of other bridges, other antecedent occasions on the Tiber and at the Concord where earlier legendary hero-warriors have found the final turn of their destiny. Both Jordan and Pilar give full recognition to this. Jordan himself speaks explicitly: “my obligation is to the bridge, and to fulfill that, I must take no useless risk of myself until I complete my duty” (62-63). Pilar, slightly more euphorically, identifies the bridge with the Republic: “‘I am for the Republic,’ the woman of Pablo said happily. ‘And the Republic is the bridge. Afterwards we will have time for other projects’”(53). With a keen touch of irony, Hemingway equally shows that as the bridge grows in importance for the band, especially after Pablo’s

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return from what he terms the loneliness of his defection, so paradoxically at command headquarters it recedes in tactical importance, a symptom of the impending larger collapse of the loyalist forces. In this respect it becomes in its own right an omen of a kind with the triads of fascist bombers. The appropriate general note is struck by Golz to his French subordinate Duval: “Nous sommes foutus. Oui. Comme toujours” (428). Although obviously unheard by Jordan, or the band, Golz’s observation, by its admission of frailty, enhances, if anything, rather than diminishes, the human worth behind the action at the bridge. Nowhere does the bridge loom more importantly than in the novel’s closing sequence. To Jordan it becomes “a dream bridge. A bloody dream bridge” (437), not only his designated target, the object planned against, spied upon, easy to dynamite, but the place where finally boyhood and adulthood meet. In this sense a legitimate degree of ritual enters. For Jordan indeed sees in the work he has been assigned something of the larger paradigm, the shadow of other raids and counter-raids. Childhood picture-book heroism links to the real close-encounters of war. Jordan recalls his own younger imagination, nurtured both on the West and his grandfather’s Civil War stories, as the America of its own war-torn past to set against the Europe of wartorn present. In all these respects the bridge serves as the place where dream is brought up sharp against reality, life against death, bravery risks fear, and comradeship steers between intimacy and severance. If, however, the bridge functions as the novel’s centre of gravity, Hemingway builds around it a composite human world, at each turn linking the bridge to the tangle of energies and rivalries life in the camp among Pablo, Pilar, Anselmo, Maria, the gypsy Raphael, and the five others, the brothers Andrés and Eladio, and Agustin, Fernando and Primitivo. Hemingway’s detailed evocation of their life – the edgy group loyalty, the stock of curses, superstitions, stories told, retold, and frequently embellished, Jordan’s wary relationship with both Pablo and Pilar, the ritual of meals and guard duties, and the different spats – amounts to no small tour-de-force. This is the partizan round vividly excerpted and caught on the page. Jordan’s monitoring consciousness thereby does far more than only register time-present and time-preceding. It serves to afford a drama in its own right, a feature of the very action it is recording. The bridge, connectedly, acts as a kinetics, a focus in the larger Tolstoyian sense.


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Take, at the start, Jordan’s arrival at the camp with his dynamite under orders from Golz. In classic declarative style, Hemingway sets out the essential terrain within which the novel’s action will be enacted, “the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest” (1), the knotty, tree-lined mountainside, the painterly mill and stream which lead on to the bridge. In Anselmo, he establishes the first of the partizans, the tough, grainy, companion mentor who guides both Jordan and the reader into the hidden world of Pablo. Anselmo’s utterances confirm the simple good faith he has in the Republic’s cause, but also suggest a veteran who knows the terms on which he must live. “I am an old man who will live until I die” (16) is his affecting answer to Pablo’s taunts, for instance. He again conveys the human touch when he speaks to Jordan of God, “Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible for himself” (41). He also offers the perfect angle through which to encounter Pablo for the first time, a leader convincingly suspicious of Jordan’s arrival, a drinker, and at once shrewd yet beset with contradiction, with a peasant’s wary eye upon any disruption of what he knows as the best terms of safety. His general savvy in not being taken in by Jordan’s blandishments works especially well: “He is Pablo,” said the old man …. “Good. I have heard much good of you,” said Robert Jordan. “What have you heard of me?” asked Pablo. “I have heard that you are all excellent guerrilla leader, that you are loyal to the republic and prove your loyalty through your acts, and that you are a man both serious and valiant. I bring you greetings from the General Staff.” “Where did you hear all this?” asked Pablo. Robert Jordan registered that he was not taking any of the flattery…. “… What are you going to do with the dynamite?” “Blow up a bridge.” “What bridge?” “That is my business.” “If it is in this territory, it is my business. You cannot blow bridges close to where you live. You must live in one place and operate in another. I know my business. One who is alive now, after a year, knows his business.” (10-11)

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Hemingway appropriately locates Pablo within the imagery of hunter and hunted, the knowing fox but also the vulnerable hare. Pablo’s caution is as apt as his weariness of tone: “I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow up a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear? … What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do? …. To me, now, the most important is that we be not disturbed here …” (15)

The voice convinces because it has about it the ring of experience, and because Pablo’s scepticism counters the military planner’s abstractions, tactics made at the desk and set down bloodlessly upon army maps, even by so disciplined and well-meaning a general as Golz. The hideaway mountain way of life which Pablo and his band have made for themselves Hemingway makes into a wholly credible imagined frontline arena, the uncertainty of place the match of the uncertainty of men deeply at risk. That Jordan both sees this and tries to negotiate his way through to Pablo’s trust gives depth and yet more credibility to the novel’s creation of a working centre. The picture builds up as meticulously linking increments across the three days and nights Jordan spends in preparation for the attack on the bridge. The venial irresponsibility of Raphael, the gypsy, his mind always on the next meal or snaring a rabbit, is to have more serious consequences when he fails to guard the dynamite properly so allowing Pablo to attempt sabotage by destroying the plungers. The first glimpse of Maria, mute, temptingly pretty, suggests the girl, and even Spain, as vulnerable to the vengeful angers of fascism. The camp becomes its own round of event, each job, the talk, the rituals of food and drink, the bombast and cursing. The gathering human presence, and Hemingway’s scrupulous observation camp and guard duties and the workings of memory, each contribute to the substantive greater whole. Pablo embodies one pole. But Pilar equally holds mesmeric sway over daily life, a woman whose strength of will is expressed in her solid physical make-up:


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Robert Jordan saw a woman of about fifty almost as big as Pablo, almost as wide as she was tall, in black peasant skirt and waist, with heavy wool socks on heavy legs, black rope-soled shoes and a brown face like a model for a granite monument. She had big but nice looking hands and her thick curly black hair was twisted into a knot on her neck. (30)

She it is who in her embrace of Jordan, her nursing of Maria, and above all, her fraught, complex liaison with Pablo, expresses the standard for the human meaning of the loyalist cause. At the same time, she is not made by Hemingway into reductive matrilinear strength. She embodies mixed qualities, tenderness towards Maria, the passion of her affair with Finito, vixen energy in directing the camp’s daily rhythm, awareness of the Gypsy-Castilian tension in her relationship with Pablo, and her move into command in the final escape from Berrendo and his troops. As she ponders killing Pablo as a leader gone slack on his past skills and bravery she also recalls with mixed sentiments a man for whom she has shown love. She, appropriately, and as both participant and witness to the cruelties that any partisanship can inflict, is given the telling of the attack on the fascist village, delivered en route to the meeting with El Sordo. Her presence connects every aspect of the camp’s life to the bridge, home and away, base and operation, a portrait more complex than has sufficiently been allowed and that helps centre the human dimension of the story. The other connecting feature between camp and bridge has to be Maria. The criticism has been fierce. She ranks as cipher, the childlike submissive lover invented by a Hemingway incapable of imaging an adult woman. The instantaneousness of her passion for Robert is thought a mockery. But given the claustrophobia of the war, not to mention Jordan’s ascetic self-discipline, the notion of release through Maria or even hers through him, and however temporary an intimacy, might not entirely be without credibility. Hemingway, to be sure, errs badly in seeking to transform the relationship into some version of a lifetime’s love, but he suggests something plausible in how men at war, their nerves wound tight to the possibility of death or disabling injury, discover in themselves a more than customary drive towards sexual release. This does not deny that in For Whom the Bell Tolls the transaction goes all one way, towards fulfilling Jordan’s needs not the complexity of Maria’s. Maria cannot honestly be thought other than a

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mistake, a silhouette, but in context – the tight-wound mission – some small redemption is to be found. “Un callejón sin salida. A passageway with no exit” (305). So the predicament of El Sordo and his men trapped on the hilltop by the Nationalist troops and their supporting airpower is judged. As much, however, might be said of Pablo’s situation, and of Jordan’s and the partizans. In part, this has to do with the novel’s gathering omens, the raids of the Fascist bombers, Pablo’s well-taken misgivings about the blowing up of the bridge, Pilar’s reading of Jordan’s palm, and Golz’s initial forebodings about the counter-offensive. Andrés’s inability to get through the military bureaucracy with Jordan’s letter adds further credence to the operation’s likely failure. In part it has to do with how events finally unfold at the bridge. It is just so that For Whom the Bell Tolls reflects, and at best serves to enact, war as always No Exit, another Stephen Crane military box, the one three days to act as all days, the one killing-line as all killing-lines. The novel’s closing configuration, bridge, dynamite, flight, Jordan at his gun, war as wound, acts in concert, the novel’s focus sharp through to the end. *** The dozen or so flashbacks in For Whom the Bell Tolls give a kind of satellite circumstantiality, a circuit of detail and context. If bridge and camp serve as centre so the flashbacks fill out the enclosing larger world of Spanish politics within which Jordan’s action is to be situated. Several give Jordan’s own reminiscence, and perhaps are better thought interior soliloquies. But others give their specific measure the Civil War, the human scale of its historic clash of loyalties. The first, Jordan’s meeting with Golz, sets out the implications of his appointed mission: “To blow the bridge is nothing,” Golz had said, the lamplight on his scarred, shaved head, pointing with a pencil on the big map. “You understand?” “Yes, I understand.” “Absolutely nothing. Merely to blow the bridge is a failure.” “Yes, Comrade General.”


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“To blow the bridge at a stated hour based on the time set for the attack is how it should be done. You see that naturally. That is your right and how it should be done.” (4-5)

Hemingway shrewdly shows Golz as a man fully with his own identifying traits, whether the jokes about his and Jordan’s names and about their respective haircuts, or the drinks he offers, or the cryptic manner of speech. Yet at all times he remains, and precisely, the Genéral Sovietique taken up with larger planning against the Fascists. Where Golz, however, personifies high command, the depiction of Anselmo guiding Jordan to the camp translates the abstraction of his orders into local action. The implication is just right, Golz, Jordan, and then Anselmo as a descending military hierarchy with the mission at the bridge both destination and destiny. Major other flashbacks – Pablo’s village attack, Pilar’s relationship with Finito and Maria’s rape – similarly help establish the novel’s time-present. Not only are they developed with considerable authority in themselves but they contribute to the novel’s overall scheme as essential forms of the recent past through which to understand the larger impasse of Spanish civil war history. They also take their place alongside smaller points of recall, each located at appropriate intervals as reminders of past cause and present consequence. These include the memory of Kaskin, killed by Jordan to prevent capture yet his own secret sharer in doing the dynamite work. Joaquin’s remembrance of the killing of his parents in Valladolid for having voted Socialist acts as an event to set against Pablo’s flailing of the Fascists. The slightly sentimental memory of Karkov and Gaylords gives a reminder, among other things, of Jordan’s own aspirations to write. Jordan’s Spanish experiences, in fact, track back considerably into his American life. When he packs with meticulous care the dynamite it recalls for him the care he showed as a boy for his collection of bird eggs. His vivid memory of a black lynching in Ohio carries real implications for the barbarisms committed by both sides of the Spanish Civil War. Similarly, the invocation of Jordan’s journeys from Billings, Montana, to college, to France and Spain, ties in with the pasts given by the novel of Pilar, Pablo and Maria. Later the memory of the young Belgian soldier from the Eleventh Brigade whose emotional balance has been so disturbed that he cries all the time suggests an analogy with Pablo and his lachrymose, relentless

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drinking. The sum effect of these smaller flashbacks, as of the larger ones, is to thicken the novel’s texture, bridge and camp connected in time and place to encompassing other lines of reference. “I will tell it truly as it was” (99). In these terms Pilar begins the flashback to Pablo’s attack on the Guardia barracks and his brute, systematic execution of the village’s fascists. The story is told, one has to be mindful, as Pilar, Jordan and Maria are on their way to El Sordo’s camp, for whom history has reserved an equally sombre fate. Hemingway captures the account with flair, avenging humanity turned bestial. Pablo’s well-taken fears of what the event has made him, Pilar’s comforts, and the Lorca-esque final lament of a crying woman underline to a fine point the despoiling touch of civil war, whether loyalist or nationalist in allegiance. The episode amounts to drama in its own terms, but also once more as a way of pulling into the novel’s present the pressing reality of the Spanish past. Pablo, the others, as necessary veterans of this event double as hunters as well as hunted, killers yet themselves always vulnerable to being killed. Pilar’s recollection of Finito the novel tells in two sequences, a story to call up the Spain of the corrida, violence unlike war ritually controlled and defeated and which Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon takes impressive pains to document. Pilar’s initial reminiscence summons alimentary well-being, a Spain of pensinsular good food and wine, customs like the feria, festivity at large. Her account of Finito as the haunted, tubercular matador haemorrhaging deep within offers literal but also the implied metaphor of Spanish civil war history. The story possesses its own slightly surreal sadness, the corrida materials recalling, to good enough effect, the world of Romero in The Sun Also Rises. That Pablo, a handler of picador horses, should become his successor with Pilar suggests how the civil war has likewise transformed irregulars into regulars, handlers into warriors. Once more, and in particularity, the novel gives a past biographical wheel to the bridge and camp. The issue of Maria’s rape becomes necessary recollection as she and Jordan talk after their love-making, a past assuaged if not healed. The detail of the Falangist assault on her village, and the hair-cropping and rape itself, Hemingway relates with the same intensity and acceleration as in the accounts of Pablo’s actions at the train and in the Fascist village. But allowing that some readers do in fact see Spain’s self-inflicted trauma in Maria’s story, the love-making itself, the very


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speech between them, rarely has convinced. That said, her story undeniably does open into a more historical context, and of great importance, the Spanish past and present as both their own kinds of violation. Jordan’s arising reflections point in the appropriate mix of direction, people, life and death, belief or not in cause, the bridge: What a people they have been. What sons of bitches from Cortez, Pizarro, Menéndez de Avila all down through Enrique Lister to Pablo. And what wonderful people. There is no finer and no worse people in the world. No kinder and no crueler. And who understands them? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all… Well, it was something to think about. Something to keep your mind from worrying about your work. It was sounder than pretending. God, he had done a lot of pretending tonight. And Pilar has been pretending all day. Sure. What if they were killed tomorrow? What did it matter as long as they did the bridge properly? That was all they had to do tomorrow. (35455)

Past links to the present, Robert’s memory to that of Pablo, Pilar’s story to that of Maria, and Golz’s plan on paper to Robert’s action at the bridge. Hemingway’s way of keeping his novel knit up is again there to be seen. *** The two principal insets in For Whom the Bell Tolls – the death of El Sordo and his men and Andrés’ endeavour to get Jordan’s message through to Golz – work as parallel-time. They help establish the main convergence of action at the camp and bridge within lines of simultaneous action, the one vintage guerilla combat, the other the petty bureaucracies of war. The episode with El Sordo calls up quite the best of American war fiction, Crane to Mailer, and in a crazed figure like Marty or the absurdist dimension of the defeat, the domains of Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five. The action works in classic Hemingway manner, the drama of men cornered but turning to make their stand: El Sordo was making his fight on a hilltop. He did not like this hill and when he saw it he thought it had the shape of a chancre.

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Gothic to Multicultural But he had no choice except this hill and he had picked it as far away as he could see it and galloped for it, the automatic rifle heavy on his back, the horse laboring, barrel heaving between his thighs, the sack of grenades swinging against one side, the sack of automatic rifle pans banging against the other, and Joaquín and Ignacio halting and firing to give him time to get the gun in place. (307)

This carries something of the authority to be found in the description of soldiers on march through the dust at the opening of A Farewell to Arms. The group’s attempt to make their fortification against a superior force of Nationalist troops, the references to La Pasionaria, the oaths, and even the jokes, give reinforcing credibility to the action. The hill, however, despite El Sordo’s attempted ruse, indeed becomes a chancre, a diseased place under threat from a latest enemy planes in the line of the “the three monoplanes in V formation” (38), the Fiats and the other Heinkel aircraft, each threesome an omen. Hemingway catches perfectly in the physicality of his descriptions the sense of infection, body and body politics, impending death: Keeping a heavy fire on the hilltop, Lieutenant Berrendo pushed a patrol up to one of the bomb craters from where they could throw grenades onto the crest. He was taking no chances on any one being alive and waiting for them in the mess that was up there and he threw four grenades into the confusion of dead horses, broken and split rocks, and torn yellow-stained explosive-stinking earth before he climbed out of the bomb crater and walked over to have a look. (322)

The language works at one with the moral detritus of the bombing. The earth is “stinking”, the horses as dead and broken as the baroque beasts in Picasso’s Guernica. All of this is picked up at distant earshot, and guiltily, by Jordan and Anselmo and the others, evidence of their limited ability to act, and a reminder that their duty can be directed only at the bridge. The El Sordo episode give the one contextual bearing, Jordan’s own endeavour with Pablo against the fascist patrol another. Hemingway duly allows Berrendo, Carlist, blacksmith’s son, from Tafalla, Navarra, a Nationalist officer himself previously wounded, his own measure of dignity as he curses war after the decapitation of El Sordo and the others and says his Hail Marys for his dead officer comrade. Yet in turn he will be the figure in Jordan’s gun


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sights at the end, one more Civil War equation of hunter and hunted in the novel’s overall pattern. Andrés’ attempt to deliver Jordan’s letter turns on another tack, the sheer infuriating way bureaucracy works in a war, especially a war fought with volunteer forces in the face of a Fascist putsch. His initial guilt at having left his comrades, the repeated challenges to his identity, and his eventual ride on the motor-bike with ex-barber Captain Gomez to HQ and the crazed, un-tender mercies of Comrade Marty, might well suggest war as Kafka, a hallucinatory regime of orders, paper, unacknowledged safe-conducts and arbitrary acts of command. Even the release of Andrés and Gomez through Karkov’s intervention with Marty does no more than confirm that Golz’s notion of “Rien à faire” (429) is not far from the right gloss on events. The whole sequence works persuasively, bureaucracy as paper chase. But if it gives a reminder that the attack on the bridge, however carefully prepared for by Jordan, signifies circumference, it also emphasizes how for those involved the bridge is also centre, the very focus of life, risk, the cause, and planning and command. Jordan’s interior monologues both gloss the general pulse of the action in precisely the same way as the flashbacks and insets and give him in ever sharpening human detail as the novel’s central consciousness. One line of retrospective contemplation locates Pablo and Pilar and the camp, especially Jordan’s gathering wariness of where and where not to take command, when and when not best to speak. Another leads back into his Montana origins, the education that first brought him to Europe, and the course of his life’s necessary commitment to the Spanish Republic. The frequent musings over Spain point to how as a political history, a moral theatre, it has been the end to which everything else in his life would seem to have tended. At least that with justice can be said to be the import of his final soliloquy when, wounded, he attempts his compte rendu: I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it. And you had a lot of luck, he told himself to have had such a good life. You’ve had just as good a life as grandfather’s though not as long. You’ve had as good a life as any one because of these last days. You do not want to complain when you have been so lucky. I wish there was some way to pass on what I’ve learned,

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Gothic to Multicultural though. Christ, I was learning last there at the end. I’d like to talk to Karkov. That is in Madrid. Just over the hills there, and down across the plain…There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true. The way the planes are beautiful whether they are ours or theirs. The hell they are, he thought. (467)

The notion of a life contracted into the brief stay at the camp again operates persuasively because Jordan has demonstrably earned his rights of viewpoint. Whether the action in remaining behind is to be seen as his last chivalric hurrah, or as the appropriate act of a seasoned partizan, his thoughts bring back into focus the whole contour of the novel: the arrival with Anselmo, Pablo’s flight, the love of Maria, his warmth towards Pilar, the wider embrace of the war’s planning and command in Madrid, and as striking as any the motifs of earth and pine that begin the novel and to which Hemingway alludes in his letter to Maxwell Perkins. *** As the novel rounds to its last moments, Jordan and Berrendo, partizan and nationalist officer, each become the other’s nemesis, men whose shared destiny is to be, in the “No Man is an island” prefatory citation from John Donne, “diminished” by the other’s death. In this last of Jordan’s soliloquies For Whom the Bell Tolls closes on the allusion with which it began: He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest. (471)

Hemingway does well enough by his reader: armed men set one against the other, death-in-war as human inevitability. This vivid local confrontation could not better call up the larger generic dynamic of all war combat. It does not have to be argued again that For Whom the Bell Tolls gives hostage to fortune. Criticism has pursued the novel on by now familiar grounds, whether Hemingway’s supposed pathology of death, his women figures, or the ritualization of manner. But he also deserves due recognition of his novel’s working design. Parts do support the


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whole, and the whole, to a degree far greater than generally has been acknowledged, acts to carry and unify the energy of those parts. In the extent to which it is “knit up” For Whom the Bell Tolls has long deserved a better estimate than it has usually attracted.

15 MODERNIST FAULKNER: A YOKNAPATAWPHA TRILOGY

You write a story to tell about people, man in his constant struggle with his own heart, with the hearts of others, or with the environment. It’s man in the ageless, eternal struggles which we inherit and we go through as though they’d never happened before, shown for a moment in a dramatic instant of the furious moment of being alive, that’s all any story is. You catch the fluidity which is human life and you focus a light on it and you stop long enough for people to be able to see it … Faulkner in The University (1959) 1

When, in November 1950, news of his Nobel Prize was telephoned through to Oxford, Mississippi from Stockholm, Faulkner appears to have reacted with equanimity rare even by his own standards. The prospect of the cash pleased him well enough. He spoke of getting work done on the family home though in fact much of the payment eventually went into endowing black college scholarships. But whether well taken foreboding about the writer as public figure or just habitual reserve, he initially pleaded that his farming duties would prevent his going to Sweden, though in the event his family prevailed on him to attend the ceremony. The prize confirmed not only the plaudits Faulker was increasingly winning in America but those to be met with in Europe, notably from Sartre and Camus,. At one end, doubtless born out of familiarity with his will to privacy, there appeared the banner headline of the Eagle, his hometown newspaper, “BILL FAULKNER’S GOTTA LET OXFORD BE 1 Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 19571958, eds Frederick L. Gwyn and Joseph L. Blotner, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1959, 239.

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PROUD OF A NOBEL PRIZE WINNER”.

At the other there was the acclaim of him as the “unrivalled master of all living British and American novelists” offered by Gustaf Hellström, President of the Swedish Academy and himself a writer of distinction. Oxford or Stockholm, Faulkner had won an ascendancy beyond anything he, or his publishers and family, could previously have anticipated.2 Doubts, to be sure, persisted. Could this canonization erase the cavils tracking his career since Soldier’s Pay about a south edged in melodrama, the grotesque, not to mention Faulkner’s arcane plays of time-schema and his run-ons and italicizations? Was Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner of 1946 wholly persuasive in arguing for Yoknapatawpa as “the one connected story”, “living pattern”, a “permanent state of consciousness”? Whatever Faulkner’s wry, but not ungrateful, murmurings in a letter to Harold Ober about the “Spoonrivering my apocryphal county”, Cowley had helped stem the low ebb of the 1930s and early 1940s when not a single book was in print. No longer could there be condescending allusion to the Mississippi of Faulkner’s imagining as a repertoire, at least in spirit, derived from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” with its un-still ghosts, fissured mansions, black tarns and brother-sister guilt.3 If the Nobel Prize did not entirely remove these misgivings it did help affirm Yoknapatawpha as the counterpart, even equal, of Hawthorne’s New England, not to say Dickens’ London and Hardy’s Wessex. The prize gave added impetus to huge world sales, Faulkner as America’s premier living novelist. Easy shots about south of the Mason-Dixon line as fevered regionalism were not to be allowed rote muster. Faulkner’s Dixie was infinitely more than some mere backwater of violence, grudge, religio-sexual hang-up or even the colour-line as phobia or hex. Instead there was a due and better recognition of Faulkner’s scale of canvas, his plies of design, style, latticed use of memory, and increasingly the vernacular dark wit. That, 2

These and other biographical details are taken from Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols, NY: Random House, 1974, and Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner: American Writer, NY: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989. See also New York Times, 7 July 1962, 6. 3 The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley, NY: Viking Press, 1946. Reference, too, has to be made to The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962, ed. Malcolm Cowley, NY: Viking Press, 1966. A representative account of Faulkner’s supposed failings would be Norman Podhoretz, “William Faulkner and the Problem of War”, Commentary, XVIII (1954), 227-32.

Faulkner, A Yoknapatawpha Trilogy

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however, did not wholly settle the issue of how Faulkner’s fiction was to be billed. Was he Ancient Mariner or modernist? Was it to go futher than some prim worry about literary typology to think that he might be both? “Man in his constant struggle with his own heart”, “Man in the ageless, eternal struggles”: the phrases, inimitably, bear Faulkner’s insignia, the human condition as cycle and repetition. Faulkner, even so, would never step free of his own wholly specific sense of history. Mississippi becomes Yoknapatawpha, a population extending from Chickasaw Indians to black southerners to a white hierarchy of settler and military gentry, traders, townspeople, and always, the poor white clans of hill and smallholding. Sherman, Atlanta and the Civil War, and always the wilful domination of white over black from slavery to desegregation, give their haunting shadow to the region. The legacy of fundamentalist Bible Christianity stirs its contrary passions, white and black Christianities. The terrain looks to each determining turn of season, one of crop, heat, humidity, long southern nights. Yet however literal the Lafayette County behind Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner knew himself from the start always to have embarked upon a mythical kingdom utterly of his own figuration. To that end the storytelling comes over infused with yet other dispensations. Greek Tragedy bequeaths footfalls, as do the Old Testament and Shakespeare. The English Romantics, Keats and Shelley especially, give their mark. Tolstoy and other Russians are unmistakable. American forbears look especially to Hawthorne and Melville. As to writers from his own age Faulkner’s enthusiasm for Camus did not happen by chance. Both writers share a kind of stoic defiance, the will to believe in the face of a universe of absurdity or bad faith. By these and associated lights Faulkner truly appears the very custodian, in his own phrasing, of the “ageless”, “eternal” and “constant”.4 At the same time, and almost from the outset, Faulkner has been associated with a quite countervailing current. The early poetry of The Marble Faun and the first stories bear witness to his apprenticeship to Swinburne and the symboliste constellation of Verlaine, Baudelaire and Mallarmé. The hand of Beardsley and The Yellow Book are 4 William Faulkner, “Albert Camus”, Transatlantic Review (Spring 1961), reprinted in Essays, Speeches and Public Letters by William Faulkner, ed. James B. Meriwether, NY: Random House, 113-14.

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readily to be discerned in his youthful line drawings and design. Of yet more consequence has to be the incontrovertible impact of moderns like Joyce, Conrad and Eliot, not to mention Freud and his different findings and dicta. Even Sherwood Anderson enters as a key early mentor, a beacon of the new as Faulkner’s Time-Picayune pieces of 1925 (later to become his New Orleans Sketches) give generous if not always quite respectful witness. In truth Faulkner was laying claim to a modernist credential even as he affected the Mississippi horse trader driven, near accidentally, to set down old time yarns from the backcountry. A huge residuum of reading, and his own alertness to the seismic cultural dislocations of the age, feed into the Southern legacy he knew awaited the transformation of his storytelling. The refusal of linear chronology, and often enough syntax, or the disjunctive free-flow of consciousness and image, could not more have indicated Faulkner’s reflexive instinct, his modernist turn. The remarks in his University of Virginia interview of the writer’s being able to do no more than momentarily “focus a light” upon the “furious motion of being alive” can hardly be thought other than benignly disingenuous, further venturing into dissimulation. Given Faulkner’s shifting corridors of memory, his different mosaics and screens, “that’s all a story is” amounts to understatement with a purpose. For Faulkner in every way signals his own call to new orderings of narrative, the play of telling as always its own tale, the call of modernism as both vision and tactic. Nowhere more does that hold than in three of his best established novels, The Sound and The Fury, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!. 5 Each, as Faulkner many times insisted, palpably enacts plausible actual lives, dynasty, journey. Yet each, as he also equally insisted, invites attention to narrative as process – subject throughout to self-aware, not to say cannily self-circling, disclosure. Be it the Compson family, the Bundrens, or Sutpen’s Hundred, Faulkner invites, virtually mandates, the reader’s necessary co-authorship in the making, if not the literal inscribing, of each operative story. Yoknapatwapha undoubtedly embodies one of the best-known 5

All quotations from the novels are from the Modern Library/Random House editions as derived from the following first editions: The Sound and the Fury, NY: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929; Modern Library Edition, 1967; As I Lay Dying, NY: Cape and Smith, 1930; Modern Library Edition, 1946; and Absalom, Absalom!, NY: Random House, 1936.


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figurations of the south as topos even if the map Faulkner drew so sparely and by hand for Cowley obliquely mocks its complexity of human texture. For Yoknapatawpha gives his reminder of an old place and old stories while signalling the complex hieroglyphs of his own modes of narrative. This double weave, ancestral history or site within modernist writ, endow the Yoknapatawpha novels with quite their most distinctive colour. *** Faulkner’s own well-known account of The Sound and the Fury offers an especially pertinent point of departure: It began with the picture of the little girl’s muddy drawers, climbing that tree to look in the parlor window with her brothers that didn't have the courage to climb the tree waiting to see what she saw. And I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section One. I tried with another brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section Two. I tried the third brother, because Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through someone’s else’s eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself – the fourth section – to tell what happened, and I still failed.6

Four versions there may be, but the history which centres on, and about, Caddie Compson, and to which Benjy, Quentin, Jason and Dilsey offer their complementary testimony, in one sense could not offer a more dramatic core of happenings. From the regional origins begun in Quentin MacLachan’s flight from Culloden, through to the deal struck with Ikkemotubbe about the Chickasaw land which will eventually become the Compson property in the middle of Jefferson, and on into the events for which Caddie’s “muddy drawers” serve as the icon, the story unfolds as if inexorably the turn and heft of event. For does not The Sound and the Fury enact that most familiar Southern paradigm, the fall of a warring family or house at one with the Macbethian implications of the title? Across all four sections 6

Faulkner in The University, 15 February 1957, 1.

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Faulkner pursues dynasty, each different panel of generation, each enacted increment of innocence, initiation, marriage and death. Yet too ready an emphasis on the story as the dynamic of event would be akin to remembering Moby-Dick only for the whale hunt or Ulysses only for the outward show of a Dublin day. The necessary effect of The Sound and the Fury lies in subjecting the Compson collapse to precisely “trying to tell it” four times over, separate patterns, and in their mediating and emerging interplay. Dialogism, to invoke Bakhtin, might be thought a veritable plenty. Benjy’s imputed mnemonic phrasings offer one register, “Caddie smelled like rain” (44) or “Here, looney, Luster said” (53), along with Quentin’s wordintoxication, Jason’s laconic wit, the hypochondriac Bascomb whine of Mrs Compson, the ingratiation of Uncle Maury, and always Dilsey’s mothering assuagement and reprimand. Failure, as Faulkner’s professed estimate of the result, no doubt speaks out of an author’s familiar lament at the shortfall between aspiration and almost inevitably lesser execution. But the defiant virtuosity of his telling, the very nature of its challenge to bearings, is inextricably bound up in the modernist impulse both of novelist and novel. In this, too, not the least part of modernist Faulkner looks to the other player in the equation, the modernist reader, one at least willing to help co-ordinate his text’s every reflexive manoeuvre, Benjy’s section as opening sequence might offer the very instance of modernist fashioning, unapologetic in seeking to en-word the synaptic gaps of a retarded mind, wholly inviting of the abetting reader in management of the collagist back-and-forth sense data in play. 7 Benjy’s fifteen or so flashbacks can be said to make up a simultaneity of remembrance yet whose linear sequencing remains necessarily tacit. Allowing for the likes of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myskin in The Idiot or Conrad’s Stevie in The Secret Agent, Faulkner is not to denied his challenge, a different shy at human consciousness, a different shy at novelistic time. Calendar dates are not exactly denied us – the overall Easter Weekend frame of 6, 7 and 8 April 1928, the death of Damuddy in 1898, the change of Benjy’s name from its original Maury in 1900, the sale of Benjy’s pasture for a golf course to pay for Quentin to be sent to 7

For a first-class account of this aspect of Faulkner, see Stephen M. Ross, Fiction’s Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989.


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Harvard in 1909, Caddie’s seduction by Dalton Ames and then her marriage to Sydney Head in 1910, Quentin’s suicide and funeral also in 1910, the death of Mr. Compson in 1912, and Benjy’s castration in 1913. But so conventional a marking of dateline Faulkner carefully keeps subordinate. The more consequential register is one of pulse, memory or image (typically the concluding sentence about how “the dark” goes in “smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddie says that I have been asleep” [75]). Benjy’s section, it has not gone unnoted, actually manages quite the purest of records, his undeliberated immediacy the prompt to our own interpretative deliberation. Time-switches, accordingly, are to be indicated by italicization, or by the same Compson speaking variously as child and adult, or implicitly in the roster of Benjy’s black minders (in order Versh, T.P., Dilsey and her husband Roskus, and Frony and her son Luster), or by Benjy’s alternating associations of Caddie with flowers, water, jimson weed and fire. Each of these, like Faulkner’s use of the family mirror as a reflector of past and present, or the golfball-caddy-fence cluster yields a quite other, almost genetic chronology. Benjy’s wail lays down perhaps the strongest marker of change, be it at Caddie’s use of perfume in all its sexual rite-of-passage implication, or at the mention of her name long after she has fled, or at Luster’s wrong-way-around drive by the monument of the eyeless Confederate soldier in Jefferson. His wordless culminating wail acts not only upon those who have gone before but as though to foreclose the clock, the very idiom, on all other Compson dynasty. Quentin, by contrast, whether at-home Mississippi Compson son and brother or Harvard senior, whether colloquist with Shreve or selfcolloquist, is all interlocutor. He finds himself trapped to the point of collapse by rhetoric, words as penumbra. They impose upon him the impossible ideality of Caddie as southern flower and of himself as time’s honour-guard of her purity (to speak of incest is to lose the intricate nuance behind southern gender roles). Benjy wails, Quentin talks: Faulkner makes the seeming contrast in effect a linkage by aligning the time-present of Benjy’s birthday, 2 June 1910, with Quentin’s death day. Conventional past-ness and present-ness reduce at each fissure or jump. Quentin’s own inner time, rather, comes to prevail, his tick of memory the only sequence. Hence his Confederate grandfather’s watch, smeared in his own blood as he tries to destroy

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time and an implied, reference-back to Caddie’s loss of virginity, merges into the jeweller’s watches (none of which for Quentin tells the right time). These, in turn, link to his body as a sun-dial (“I stepped into sunlight, finding my shadow again” [82]), then into the factory whistles and the clock of the Unitarian steeple, and finally into the timelessness he craves by drowning. Just as for Benjy consciousness is innocent, the merest sensation, so, for Quentin it is the reverse, consciousness besieged by his own editorial crowding. The will to fix reality in the one timeless thesaurus shadows Quentin to the end. Faulkner has Dalton Ames collapse into Gerald Bland for him as anachronistically he fights for his sister’s long-ago honour. Deacon, the black dormitory porter, becomes one with black figures from Quentin’s Jefferson past. The little Italian girl, whom Quentin explicitly addresses as “sister” and is accused of kidnapping, metamorphoses into the young Caddie. His affair with Natalie segues into his brotherhood to Caddy and her pregnancy, a swirl of images calling up menstruation, mud, purification, and his earlier death-pact with his sister. Quentin’s clothes, which prompt Shreve, his Canadian room-mate, to ask whether he is dressed for a funeral or a marriage, he cleans as though through his death-by-water he will redeem Caddie’s “muddy drawers”. The worded flight into memory calls up telling his father he has committed incest with his sister, as if, impossibly, he can both un-sequence and re-sequence time. Quentin’s self-conceit of “i-temporary” (177) becomes intolerable to him, resolvable only by a last transition into permanent stillness below water and which he anticipates in his discussion with the boys who are fishing. “I began to feel the water before I came to the bridge” (115) gives the due import. All time will coexist for him equally, the point underscored in Faulkner’s use of one-off lines separated from larger sentences or paragraphs. The modernist design again works to filter and nerve Quentin’s story, the break-up of mind as much as body. Word-laden, ironically, he can find no word of escape, unless it be the cleansing wordlessness of death. Faulkner, once more, adjusts his telling to suit. From there, in Jason’s section, The Sound and the Fury tracks into more traditionally sequential narration, as if, among other things, to complete the possible ways by which we might grasp the Compson story. That, in itself, could well be thought a species of modernist joke, a parody of our wish for the straight story-line. Jason’s section, at any


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rate, that of the only sane Compson as his Bascomb mother insists, brings us back to earth with a jolt. His brute clichés, “Once a bitch always a bitch” (180) or “I have nothing against jews [sic] as an individual…It’s just the race (191), like his grimly comic mockery of Quentin’s southern honour code (“I haven’t got much pride, I can’t afford it with a kitchen full of niggers to feed and robbing the state asylum of its star freshman” [230]), offers realism with a vengeance. His own fate in becoming the false Jason, the adventurer cheated by Quentin, Caddie’s daughter, after having spent a lifetime cheating her, tells a bastard, wickedly parodic version of the myth of the Golden Fleece. His indeed signifies quotidian over southern-chivalric life (“Blood, I says, governors and generals. It’s a damn good thing we never had any kings and presidents; we’d all be down there at Jackson chasing butterflies” [230]) with Faulkner once again having adjusted storytelling to suit. No more than the sections given over to Benjy or Quentin does Jason’s section give the whole account, its mean, uncompromising factuality still the story only in part. Dilsey’s section Faulkner equally casts in more conventional narrative form, the section he acknowledges to have “tried myself … to tell what happened” and the only one told in the third-person. Thematically, Dilsey gives human embodiment to the sermon preached in her own black church, a personified signifier of life over death and the open as against closed Bible of Mrs Compson. “Hush. Dilsey’s got you” (316) she tells the wailing Benjy at the end. She it is, further, who carries the Easter message of family, not only in the care of her own kin but in the care of the most vulnerable Compsons, foremost Benjy, Caddie and Quentin as children, and in her turn, Caddie’s daughter Quentin. Hers, could it be doubted, is the rite of continuity (“They will prevail” and “I seed de first and de last”) as against the destructive wheel of Compson sound and fury. Read through a readership now heir to Civil Rights, however, controversy arises over Dilsey. Aunt Jemima? Mammy stereotype? Faulkner himself, it cannot be doubted, clearly conceived her as exemplary, the saving figure of compassion in the face of fatal human division. That debate lingers, seamed in issues of pc ideology even as there has been insistence on situating Dilsey in due historical context. Whichever view best applies, her account, its idiom black, oral, and shot through with echoes of churchgoing and spirituals, also only incompletely tells what happened. That holds, too, in the light of

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Christian parable and in her nursing care of Benjy as he carries his broken narcissus in hand and howls one last martyred time when Luster drives him the wrong way round the Jefferson town square. Her authority as moral lodestone may be absolute. But as narrative figure, and in kind with those who precede her, she richly complicates the history to hand by her actually incomplete authority. The Appendix, which in current editions appears at the beginning, can be said to yield another best clue. Its roll-call of all the players in the Compson drama, from Ikkemotubbe (“A dispossessed American king”) and Andrew Jackson (“A Great White Father with a sword”) through to the first and last of the Compsons and their black co-family, provides a species of historical bedrock, human data. But in having transposed the story four ways, and in the quite prodigious competition and overlap of each, The Sound and the Fury offers its acknowledgement of the impossibility of any one final, authorized version. That may amount to the truest measure of Faulkner’s own voicing in the novel, the modernist within the Yoknapatawpha story-teller of old and the story-teller of old within the Yoknapatwapha modernist, nothing if not the most singular coexistence. *** In the case of As I Lay Dying Faulkner as interviewee again yields an opening perspective. When asked about technique in the novel by Jean Stein for the Paris Review his reply, not a little disingenuously, ran as follows: “I simply imagined a group of people and subjected them to the simple universal natural catastrophes, which are flood and fire, with a simple natural motive to give direction to their progress.”8 A similar question at the University of Virginia elicited the following response: I took this family, and subjected them to the two greatest catastrophes which man can suffer – flood and fire, that’s all. That was simple tour de force. That was written in six weeks

8

Jean Stein, “William Faulkner: An Interview”, Paris Review (Spring 1956), reprinted in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, eds Frederick Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery, East Lancing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1960.


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without changing a word because I knew from the first where that was going.9

On both occasions, and whether he meant to cover his steps or not, he typically offered something less than the whole truth of the matter. The novel indeed can be said to rework a story old or ancestral in genre, with intertextual allusions back into the Books of Genesis and Isaiah and any number of classic journey epics. A Pilgrim’s Progress, a rite of burial, even a Voyage Thither in Melville’s phrase for Mardi, none is out of place. But as the story unfolds through its more than fifty monologues, mutually choric, a serial linkage of voice, “simply imagined” would be almost the last description to come to mind. For, once again, Faulkner’s art works to a wholly modernist script, “simple universal natural catastrophes” as may be, “flood and fire”, but held, told, in narrative as spoken motion. For good reason, much of the commentary on As I Lay Dying has begun with Addie, the expiring life force who controls the Bundren orbit of Anse, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell and Vardaman. Dying, and dead, perpetual bride, horizontal, she sponsors in each a wholly live, and conflicting, residue. Anse identifies her as the accuser of his own wheedling meanness of spirit (“I am a luckless man. I have ever been” [18], “Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit” [104], “We wouldn’t be beholden” [111]). Cash regards her as the mother to whom filial duty is ever to be paid, be it on life’s journey or death’s journey. For Darl she offers the one prop to his receding sanity, a last rescue-station. Jewel attracts her guilty preference, the illegitimate cuckoo son, the rogue horseman, Faulkner’s male version Hawthorne’s wayward Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. To Dewey Dell, her very name a marker of girl pliancy, she is the absent helpmate in unwanted pregnancy. In his child’s eye Vardaman sees Addie as undying life, breast and nurture. Ancillary voices add their weight and texture, be it Cora Tull’s neighbourly “There’s not a woman in this section could ever bake with Addie Bundren” (8), or Dr Peabody’s practised manner of “Well, Miss Addie … How are you sister?” (43) after Anse has called him in too late, or the bible-citing but hypocritical Rev. Whitfield with his “When they

9

Faulkner in The University, 15 April 1957, 87.

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told me she was dying, all that night I wrestled with Satan, and I emerged victorious” (169). None, however, gives more abiding voice to her than she does herself, comfortless, and riven by the gap between words and things (“I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth” [165]). To regard language as ungrounded, arbitrarily contingent on little or no more than itself, brings on in her a will to speech despite speech’s meaninglessness. This is not to deny the Addie time and place have made, the schoolteacher who fearing spinsterdom, married Anse Bundren, mothered four children by him, and one, Jewel, by the Rev. Whitfield, and who watches Cash build her own coffin in preparation for the black comic journey to the burying ground. But Addie’s essential being is to be found in this presiding soliloquy, reality the one order of things, words quite another. It is a condition the modernist in Faulkner could not have been better positioned to explore. The novel’s overall round of soliloquies, and the self-histories within them, all derive their essential meanings in relation to Addie, the irony that herself dying, or dead and en-coffined, she arouses energies of life. The ironic, however, hardly surprises in a context where a woman at once so married yet so exiled from love should go to her burial clad in wedding dress and a veil to cover the breathing holes driven by Vardaman through the coffin and into her face. Wife, mother, lover, each has exhausted and literally consumed her. It little surprises us that at the hands of her dutiful, but patently ramshackle and ill-sorted family, the supposed high ceremony of death should edge into winningly turned near-farce. Her corpse un-ceremonially can be ferried to Jefferson in a borrowed cart, get upturned in a flood, by accident almost undergo cremation, and draw waiting buzzards. The soliloquies which witness to her, furthermore, a syndrome of voices each only partly comprehending of the whole, are themselves given a parodic finale in the words “Meet Mrs. Bundren” (250) as Anse presents his new “duck-shaped” wife (249). They also remind us that story, in anything like completeness, for Faulkner always resides in the competition of the witnessing involved, that the full meaning of the journey from the Bundren homestead to Tull’s ford to Mottson to Gillespie’s barn to Jefferson will forever elude the single definition. History, what happened, in As I lay Dying as in most of Faulkner’s fiction, resides always to a degree unopened, a sealed contract of voice.


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Each Bundren soliloquy, nonetheless, does its part. Cash, who makes the coffin “on the bevel” (77) and who personifies the search for “balance” (90, 157) even though it literally costs him a leg, bespeaks a first-born’s will to right, to write, family un-balance. Darl, keenest in psychic register, typically knows who has fathered Jewel, spots his father’s inability to sweat and pathetic attempt to arrange the cover on Addie’s bed, recognizes Dewey Dell’s condition, and wrestles to make articulate the devastating inward cost of a mother’s death. Setting fire to her hearse in Gillespie’s barn takes on its own rationale in the face of reason’s loss, a breakage by which he is forced to see himself as a self outside himself (“Darl is our brother, our brother Darl …. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes” [244]). Jewel knows only the vocabulary of will, objectified in his loved and sublime horse traded by Anse for the new cart. Dewey Dell, slow with words herself (“I feel like a wet seed in the hot blind earth” [61]) becomes their repeated sexual object, whether spoken by Lafe at cotton-picking time or by the pharmacist MacGowan. For Vardaman words stand at one remove from experience, as in his “My mother is a fish” (79). He so identifies his mother’s need to breathe and swim and reacts to the buzzards more as playthings than emissaries of death. “They come from some place out in Yoknapatawpha county, trying to get to Jefferson with it …” (193) observes one of the bemused townsfolk as the caravan reaches journey’s end. He speaks nothing less than the truth, a summary of nothing less than the plot. But for everything else that remains to be said, we need the gallery of all the other speakers in As I Lay Dying, Bundren and non-Bundren alike. Theirs are voices in themselves old as “flood and fire”, and drawn from the terrain of the county’s hill and townships, yet made indelibly new in the measure of Faulkner’s modernist imagining. *** In turning to Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner’s University of Virginia class sessions again offer a well-known but irresistible starting-point: Q. Mr. Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom! does any one of the people who talk about Sutpen have the right view, or is it more or less a case of thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird with none of them right?

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Gothic to Multicultural A. That’s it exactly. I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact. So these are true as far as Miss Rosa and as Quentin saw it. Quentin’s father saw what he believed was truth, that was all he saw. But the old man was himself a little too big for people no greater in stature than Quentin and Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson to see all at once. It would perhaps have taken perhaps a wiser or more tolerant or more sensitive or more thoughtful person to see him as he was. It was, as you say, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. But the truth, I would like to think, comes out, that when the reader has read all these thirteen different ways of looking at the blackbird, the reader has his own fourteenth image of that blackbird which I would like to think is the truth.10

Faulkner must have thought himself unexpectedly blessed in so good a question, not to mention in Wallace Stevens’s blackbird. What better terms in which to explain his conception of Sutpen “as he was”, the upstart West Virginian possessed of his Grand Design? At the same time, too, if somewhat less expressly, it gave Faulkner the chance to indicate more of the modernist impulse behind his telling within Absalom, Absalom!, a tale at it seems literally old as, or at least out of, the hills, but given to its own rarest self-fashioning. Within the span from Sartoris, which first en-fables Yoknapatawpha, to The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion as Snopes mock-epic trilogy, and to include the circularly pitched Light in August and densely parabular Go Down Moses, no Faulkner novel in fact makes story-telling itself more so evident, or reflexive, a motif. For in its calculated delays, use of hearsay and gaps of understanding, and assuredly colloquist ending, the novel’s disclosure of Sutpen’s history takes on a determining energy in its own right. Rosa Coldfield, Mr Compson, Quentin Compson and the Canadian Shreve McCannon, each to their limits, serve as participant narrators yet also the very figures of our own impatience to have the story conclude or, at the very least, come to rest. The novel in one sense indeed does come to rest. Dead himself at the hands of Wash Jones, Sutpen’s dream of lineage, in like manner is 10

Faulkner in The University, 8 May 1958, 273-74.


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finally left dead, or a mockery, in the idiot figure of Jim Bond. But Absalom, Absalom! in reality denies conclusion. Sutpen’s life and meaning remain ever open to Faulkner’s thirteen or more ways of seeing as Quentin and Shreve summon up the story’s ghosts from inside their chill Harvard dormitory. The novel, in this respect, works a double-seam, in the one version, linear, an enactive forward drama, in the other, subversive of that linearity, speculative, circling, precisely resistant to any final geometry. This en-doubled overlap shows through at virtually every turn, narrative conceived to call attention to its own telling, the one almost consciously bound into and monitoring the other. Rosa, costumed in her “eternal black” (7) and “talking in that grim haggard amazed voice” (7) to Quentin in December 1909, opens the account by alluding to a past literally sealed inside the decaying Sutpen mansion. Faulkner casts her account in telegraphese, as if to imply how much will be required by way of gloss in the surrounding and subsequent text. “This demon” (9) she is imagined to call Sutpen. Quentin, compelled auditor, adds his own rush of re-constitutive imagery: “Out of quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard …” (8). This is Sutpen as malign Jehovah willing Sutpen’s Hundred into being to his own version of “the oldentime Be Light”, a plantation, a would-be dynasty, in Rosa’s imagining “torn” from the land. For her, only as some Dixie Satan can Sutpen and his consequence for her life be glossed. First there is his arrival “out of nowhere” (9) in Yoknapatawpha in 1833, the accompaniment of his French-speaking black slaves from Haiti and marriage to her sister Ellen in 1838. The the births of Henry in 1839 and Ellen in 1841 follow. She momentously calls back to mind the willed and boarded-up death of her father in his attic on account of the Civil War, and her own unassuageable sense of insult at being asked to first experiment in begetting a son. Faulkner immediately and in effect is telling two stories in the one, that to be elicited as fact in all its family history and sense of place, and that whose stored memory of outrage and mesmerized anger is to be heard in the idiom of a sixty-four-year-old Jefferson spinster talking half-crazily to the twenty-five-year-old Quentin at the turn of the twentieth century. The effect could not be more composite, perfect double narrative.

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As overlay to Rosa’s impressionistic fury we have Mr Compson’s account, variously relayed as reminiscence on the family porch, and as letters, and snippets recalled by Quentin in Harvard. Mr Compson helps establish the un-mythic Sutpen with a rationale to his actions, from the rejection at the Big House doorway to the certification of respectability by the marriage with Ellen (“[Sutpen] wanted … the two names, the stainless wife and the unimpeachable father-in-law, on the license, the patent” [51]), and from Confederate war service to his manoeuvres to resolve the fatal triangulation of Judith, Henry and Charles Bon. The ingredients for disaster are laid bare, whether Sutpen’s will to a male line or the veer towards incest and, given the epoch, miscegenation. Mr Compson supplies the details of the Haitian and New Orleans connection, the analogies between the Compson and Sutpen dynasties, and the role of Bon’s mother and her lawyer as again all the circuit of factuality. But, in a trope which calls up Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House”, Faulkner also has him develop a run of reflexive observation as to how words fictionalize even as they re-create truth. It might almost serve as modernist credo: We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Choctaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable – Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and


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serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs. (100-101)

In terms albeit high Southern and florid, Mr Compson rightly gives emphasis to the inescapability of “something missing” whenever human experience is pressed into word, narrative, story. Nonetheless, the story does get told, through to the shooting of Bon by Henry and Sutpen’s own decapitation with Wash Jones’ scythe (described with cryptic irony as the “symbolic laurel of a caesar’s triumph” [177]) on account of his seduction of Millie. We also experience it, precisely as Mr Compson indicates, in “the proportions called for”, as italicized snippets of interior monologue, letters, slivers of personal recall and the search for connections. Each acts in alliance with, and in modification of, the other, essential parts in the whole yet none of necessity revealing more than the truth in part. As the humidity and magnolia of Mississippi yields to the iron cold of New England so Sutpen-Compson history yields to further narrative pluralization through Quentin and Shreve. The sheer litany of event could not be in doubt: Sutpen’s violent innocence in seeking to father a last son on Wash’s granddaughter Milly; the discovery of the gravestones of Sutpen, Judith and Charles Etienne St Valéry Bon; the role of Clytie in the Sutpen lives; the burning down of Sutpen’s Mansion when, finally, Quentin does go “out there” (88, 172) with Rosa to glimpse as some left-over shadow from an earlier epoch the figure of Henry Sutpen; and the last, mocking bewailing of Jim Bond over the burnt embers of the house. But so ready an eventfulness finds its due and matching inscription in the modernist etiquette of Faulkner’s telling. Shreve’s urgent and fascinated concern to reconstitute the story and more generally to understand the South supplies one kind of energy. His “Tell me about the South. What’s it like there? What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all … (174) and “We don’t live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves (or have to got it backward …?” (361) is contrapuntally set against Quentin’s spiralling love-hatred of his heritage (“I don’t. I don’t! I dont hate it! I don’t hate it” [378]). As they each assume the roles of Henry and Bon, switch imagining of the story, or give a show of impatient exchange of question and answer, the one frame richly accelerates and overlaps into the other. This will to have the story

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move towards catharsis, some kind of completion of circle, Faulkner again underwrites in the ongoing exchange of enjoinders – Shreve’s “Will you wait?” (292) or “wait, now; wait!” (344), Quentin’s “Wait, I tell you!”(277). These, together with each play of interior voice and the purposive delays and gappings, yield a winning complication, story in common with history as ever contending and even unresolved narrative. “Maybe nothing ever happens one and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks …” (261) says Quentin. If so, Absalom, Absalom!, in common with most of the rest of the Yoknapatawpha fiction, supplies the reverberative style of telling to match – ripple-like indeed. The effect is antiphonal, full of recapitulation, pause, alternating narrators (Shreve at times not only interlocutor but actually taking on Quentin’s voice) and at once present-historic and memorial. Nothing in the Sutpen story is disclosed without awareness of narrative positioning, the teller inextricably and pre-emptively also the tale. But if Faulkner belongs in the modernist pantheon, that arises not without a necessary caveat. Behind the reflexivity, the density of self-reference, his fiction never loses touch with Yoknapatawpha as rooted in place, time and memory, a unique shock of the new for sure but always in the service of older and ancestral human turnings.

16 THE VIEW FROM THE REAR WINDOW: THE FICTION OF CORNELL WOOLRICH While from a proud tower in the town Death looks gigantically down 1 He was the Poe of the twentieth century and the poet of its shadows. 2

Horror movie fans counted 1960 as quite one of their best years. Norman Bates put in his appearance. Screens everywhere seemed full of Anthony Perkins’ performance, his every facial twitch and leer the promise of trouble to come. Repeated late-night TV showings may have taken down much of the initial shock of Hitchcock’s Psycho, but what film more stunned its audiences or more served as the by-word for cinematic menace? Contemporary full colour contenders like The Exorcist or The Shining or Alien look if not exactly mild then formulaic by comparison. Hitchcock himself spoke of his film as something of a dark comedy, a jokily done nightmare, which did little to assuage critics who discerned in Psycho a worrying inclination towards sexual nastiness and violence. But it hardly came across to aficionados that way. This was definitive horror, a perfect sum of its 1

Edgar Allan Poe, “The City in the Sea”, 1831, 1845. The poem first appeared as “The Doomed City” in 1831 and underwent various revisions before the eventual version as “The City in the Sea” published in American Review ( 1845). 2 Francis M. Nevins, Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die, NY: The Mysterious Press, 1988, 10. This work is of enormous significance as it offers a complete biography, an analysis of the fiction, and a bibliography and filmography. Other studies include Otto Penzler, Cornell Woolrich, NY: The Mysterious Bookshop. 1999, and, as an interesting addendum to the writing and screen versions, David Butler, Jazz Noir: Listening To The Music From “Phantom Lady” to “The Last Seduction”, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

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Gothic to Mulicultural

parts, in sequence the sinister Bates Motel, the peep hole voyeurism through a wall hung with stuffed birds, the great vertical stairway and hall shots, the off-camera double voices, Janet Leigh’s shower curtain knifing, Bernard Herrman’s shriek-like music, and the final glimpses first of the mummified Mrs Bates and then a regressed and wouldn’thurt-a-fly Norman. But why, in an account of the fiction of Cornell Woolrich (1903-68), begin here? Hitchcock, as the opening credits show, based Psycho on the novel by Robert Bloch, though the screenplay was done by Joseph Stefano. Bloch, for his part, had in fact developed the novel from two of his earlier short stories of menace, “Lucy Comes to Stay” and “The Real Bad Friend”. So far, as it seemed, all belonged to the realms of pure invention, the film, the novel and the stories. But Norman Bates, key aspects of him at any rate, would turn out to have had something of a real life counterpart: none other than Cornell Woolrich. Evidently Woolrich was no leering split personality motel-keeper, but his life might easily have been taken as a chapter out of one of his stories. In the first place he had lived out his own powerful mother-fixation, after a brief early spell in Hollywood sharing suites with her in a run of New York residential hotels until what for him was her crushing death in 1957. From then on Woolrich descended ever more into isolation, alcoholism and a deepening homosexual self-contempt. Towards the end of his life one of his legs became infected with gangrene and needed amputation. A scholarship he endowed at Columbia University, where he had been a student in the 1920s, bore not his own name but revealingly that of his mother. Were any or all of this not sufficiently gothic in itself, however, at his funeral only the merest handful of mourners attended, a leave taking as spare as that of Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby or Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore in 1849. But as compulsive, and indeed by all accounts as wretched, as he became in his private life, for Bloch, and one assumes for Hitchcock subsequently, Woolrich offered no more than a suggestive contour or outline in the making of Norman Bates. And in no greater respect was he not Bates than in his simply prodigious output of mysteries, suspense stories and romans noirs, a list which even at the time Psycho was being filmed (for Paramount but actually made at

The Fiction of Cornell Woolrich

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Universal) ran to well over one hundred back titles. 3 Not even Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler could challenge him on 3 The principal novels and story-collections are as follows: Cover Charge, NY: Boni and Liveright, 1926; Children of The Ritz, NY: Boni and Liveright, 1927; A Young Man’s Heart, NY: Mason Pub. Co., 1930; Time Square, NY: Horace Liveright, 1931; Time of Her Life, NY: Horace Liveright, 1931; Manhattan Love Song, NY: W. Godwin, Inc., 1932; The Bride Wore Black, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1940; The Black Curtain, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1941; as George Hopley, Black Alibi, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1942; Phantom Lady, Philadelphia and NY: J.B. Lippincott, Company, 1942; I Wouldn’t Be In Your Shoes, Philadelphia PA and NY: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1943; The Black Angel, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, for The Crime Club, 1943; as William Irish, After-dinner Story, NY and Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1944; as William Irish, The Black Path of Fear, Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, for The Crime Club, 1944; as William Irish, Deadline at Dawn, Philadelphia PA and NY: J.B. Lippincott, 1944; as George Hopley, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, NY: Farrar and Rinehart, 1945; as William Irish, If I Should Die Before I Wake, NY: Avon Book Company, 1945; as William Irish, The Dancing Detective, Philadelphia PA and NY: J.B. Lippincott, 1946; Borrowed Crime, and Other Stories, NY: Avon Book Company, 1946; Rendezvous in Black, NY: Walter J. Black, 1948; as William Irish, Dead Men Blues, Philadelphia PA: J.B. Lippincott, 1948; Waltz Into Darkness, Philadelphia PA: J.B. Lippincott, 1948; as William Irish, I Married a Dead Man, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1948; as William Irish, The Blue Ribbon, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1949; Savage Bride, NY: Fawcett Publications, 1950; as William Irish, Six Nights of Mystery, Tales of Suspense and Intrigue, NY: Popular Library, 1950; as George Hopley, Fright, NY: Rinehart, 1950; as William Irish, Strangler’s Serenade, NY: Rinehart, 1951; as William Irish, Eyes That Watch You, NY: Rinehart, 1952; as William Irish, Bluebeard’s Seventh Wife, NY: Popular Library, 1952; Nightmare, NY: Dodd, Mead, 1956; Violence, NY:: Dodd, Mead, 1958; Hotel Room, NY: Random House, 1958; Beyond the Night, NY: Avon, 1959; Death Is My Dancing Partner, NY: Pyramid Books, 1959; The Doom Stone, NY: Avon Books, 1960; The Dark Side of Love: Tales of Love and Death, NY: Walker, 1965; The 10 faces of Cornell Woolrich: An Inner Sanctum of Novelettes and Short Stories, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1965; Nightwebs: A Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich, ed. Francis M. Nevins, Jr., NY: Harper and Row, 1971; Angels of Darkness, Introduction Harlan Ellison, NY:The Mysterious Press, 1978; The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich, eds Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg. With an Introduction by Francis M. Nevins. Afterword by Barry N. Malzberg, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981; Rear Window: and Four Short Novels, NY: Ballantine Books, 1984; Darkness at Dawn: Early Suspense Classics, eds Francis M. Nevins and Martin H. Greenberg, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985; Into the Night, Completed by Lawrence Block, NY: Mysterious Press, 1987; Blues of a Lifetime: The Autobiography of a Lifetime, ed. Mark T. Bassett, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1991; The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus, NY: Penguin Books, 1998; Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories, ed. with an Introduction by Francis M. Nevins, NY: Carroll and Graf, 2004.

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these grounds, or in the sheer inventive energy and push of his plot-making, however much they were thought to outmatch him in other respects. It would not be hard to imagine a certain relish on Woolrich’s part for the unlooked-to contribution he made to Hitchcock’s film. After all, for so long having portrayed in his own fiction men and women caught out by chance he would have had little difficulty recognizing the irony of having inspired in whatever degree one of the screen’s best known oddities. Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, Double Detective, Black Mask, Detective Story, Dime Detective, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mystery Book Magazine, Shadow: these and other classic American suspense magazines of the 1930s and 1940s readily played host to Woolrich’s stories.4 Yet as quickly as the shorter mysteries poured out from him, so, in like measure, did their full-length counterparts, beginning with The Bride Wore Black (1940) and running through to the posthumous Into the Night (1987). All of these, furthermore, had been preceded by several early Jazz Age, Fitzgeraldian novels (Woolrich got to know Fitzgerald and regarded him as a mentor), the best among them Children of the Ritz (1927), Times Square (1929) and Manhattan Love Song (1932). Given these brimming energies, it is understandable that he felt obliged to resort to two other by-lines, William Irish and George Hopley. The Woolrich hallmarks were quick to make their impact. First there has to be the quality of noir in his fiction, the darkness and not a little the sourness of lives subject always to inward anxiety and fear, or panic, or every variety of threat. His people exist almost always on their nerves or close to the edge, caught up in mazes and puzzles that match perfectly their feelings within. Frustration, spite, madness, anger, the will to redress, thereby, stalk his story-telling, to the extent that emotional or psychological stability becomes something close to rarity, a near luxury. Characteristic scenarios include the frenzied race against the clock, robberies or murders which go quirkily wrong, would-be stranglers or knifers or poisoners one way or another hoisted with their own petard, and serial revenge killings. The Woolrich story 4

All references to Woolrich’s short stories are taken from Rear Window and Other Stories, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988, reprinted NY: Penguin Books, 1994, Darkness at Dawn: Early Suspense Classics by Cornell Woolrich, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, and Tonight, Somewhere in New York: The Last Stories and an Unfinished Novel, NY: Carroll and Graf, 2005.


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typically mixes speed with stasis, flights by train, airplane, boat or even by foot interposed with atmosphere-building bouts of delay and waiting. Each narrative also offers its own identifying roman noir backdrop, be it the Big City (usually Manhattan) recess or back street or single room occupancy hotel, the sultry South American port or the pseudo-European mansion. All of this was made Woolrich a virtual gift to makers of classic film noir. Of the more than twenty adaptations of his fiction three have become screen bywords, John Farrow’s Night Has a Thousand Eyes (Paramount, 1948), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (Paramount, 1954) and Francois Truffaut’s La Mariée etait en noir/The Bride Wore Black (Films du Carrosse, Artistes Associés, 1967). The directors of these, and others whom the genre has attracted, clearly have found Woolrich wholly congenial to their kind of cinema, a span to include Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) and, latterly, Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997). Who, after all, more plotted a world in which the human spirit appears narrowed down, haunted, driven against itself? In these and other respects, and by few more devotedly than his biographer and critic Francis M. Nevins, Woolrich understandably has been likened to Poe. Both make suspense their own unique province. Both contrive plotlines that catch the very fevers of claustrophobia, entrapment, lives run ragged by the single mistake or accident. Not that Woolrich actually borrowed from Poe – he had little need given his own fertility of invention. But the footfalls of Poe’s best-known stories nonetheless echo through his work. Behind Woolrich’s own darkened mansions, one glimpses if dimly “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Almost any of Woolrich’s trapped protagonists experience sensations akin to those brought on my impending execution in “The Pit and the Pendulum”, the meticulous underground revenge-murder in “The Cask of Amontillado” or the whirling downward entrapment in “A Descent into the Maelstrom”. Standard police detection proves about as effective as that shown up by C. Auguste Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the two other Dupin stories. These affinities, combined with his own visions of the role of chance or the turn of circumstance, long have helped situate Woolrich as to genre. Poe, at the same time, offers a marker for Woolrich’s limitations. Ingenious as he can be, does he not also give way to too monochrome

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an effect, too unelaborated a working-out of a given improbability or paradox? That is, for all that one senses Depression America, say, or the Second World War, or the workings of poverty and class somewhere in the background, are not his stories slightly airless, virtuoso in their sleight of hand or sting in the tail but lacking any notably larger resonance? No single personage stands out either, no Roderick Usher, no Fortunato, no Dupin, no Arthur Gordon Pym, or of his women, no Ligeia or Morella. Similarly one can turn to no equivalent of Poe’s “Eureka”, his cosmological prose poem as he designated it, to discover an ordering metaphysics. But however Woolrich may fall short, his strengths deserve their full acknowledgment, few more so than his virtuosities of plot. The plotting is rarely other than ingenious, shrewdly pitched to implicate the reader in its cat’s cradles and reverses. Woolrich knew to a fine point how to stage the unexpected, the will to revenge, the turns and false hopes of the cornered victim. At his very best, in addition, he offers a conundrum not merely for its own sake but as the implied local manifestation of a far greater and darker plot behind human affairs. His prose throughout remains of a kind, declarative, tight, the pared-down and urgent register of things happening. In these respects Poe indeed might have recognized an imaginative fellow-traveller and successor. *** How can Woolrich’s rear-window view, his determining vision of things, best be said to operate? As appropriate a starting place as any would be “Rear Window” itself, published first as “It had to be Murder” in 1942 in Dime Detective. A closely observed murder that turns nastily against the observer, it serves both as symptomatic Woolrich and as a pathway into a selective range of his other work. In the screen version, Hitchcock built up the central figures of Hal Jeffries, the murderer Thorwald and the precinct cop Lieutenant Boyne. He also adds, among others, a girlfriend (Grace Kelly) and a nurse. But he knew well enough to keep sharply to the fore the best Woolrich traits – the dark, night-time atmospherics, the hidden murder, the endangering lone act of witness, and the need to keep the suspense hermetically tight right through to the last moment.


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“They were the rear-window dwellers around me”: so Woolrich sets up a frame, a world.”5 A sleepless, immobilized narrator ponders each of these rear windows in turn, through which to spy upon one or another life and none more intriguingly than that of a man he comes to recognize as having committed murder. Jeffries’s voyeurism quickly, subtly, however, becomes ours, a mystery we, equally, must have unravelled and at whatever cost. “I knew he couldn’t see me within the darkness of my bay window”6 runs the text, the perfect way into the cat and mouse game whereby who is observer and who observed play one into the other. How could the reader become otherwise than co-conspirator, co-watcher, and, seemingly as it will turn out, covictim? Under shared cover of dark, as it were, the questions inevitably mount. Where is the absent wife? Has she been taken off in the trunk sent by Thorwald to the country? Why will the cop Boyne not believe Jeffries? Yet as each question poses itself, it does so within the assurance that we are at one with the narrator as camera eye, that we have become participating agents in the processes of observation. Woolrich, however, dramatically turns things around. Hitherto Jeffries and the reader had been enjoined to play Holmes or Poirot, working out each clue in turn, whether the silhouetted gestures of Thorwald in the window, the “freak synchronization” Jeffries comes to understand as having to do with the floor levels, the false trunk and letters, and the recognition of just how the wife has been done away with and then buried. But things then are made to impinge in quite another way, one which brings the story’s gathering threat ever closer, evr nearerthe reader’s sense of participation. The turning point lies in the exchange of telephone calls. With Jeffries we find ourselves obliged to anticipate Thorwald’s threatening entry into seemingly our apartment, our lives. The leg in plaster, the inability to do anything but wait, expresses perfectly not only the narrator’s dependence on events but our own. For Jeffries’s vulnerability, in a quite essential way, becomes also the image of the reader’s vulnerability. We, too, must sit mute before the killer’s footsteps arriving on the stairs, his stealthy entry into the room, the fatal and confusing exchange of gunfire, and even the final light of 5 6

Rear Window and Other Stories, Ibid., 5. Ibid., 9.

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explanation after the terrorizing dark. Woolrich so makes his suspense dual, that taking place upon the page and that in which we, ourselves, have become wholly implicated. The story’s timing, its alternating rhythms of stillness and action, not only assumes but virtually insists upon our continuing participation. If at one level “Rear Window” can be said to be all event, all text, it can equally be said to elicit and as it were implicate the reader’s own shifting circuit of sensation. Both, in truth, work to shared effect and enhancement. Both arise out of the still deeper plotting behind Woolrich’s rear-window world. The story offers a perfect point of entry into his huge canvas of shadow and fear, death as always life’s pursuer. *** A round dozen of Woolrich’s other stories, taken from across the span of his career, confirm this underlying darkness and something of its considerable number of permutations. In “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair”, for instance, Woolrich shows his talents for black humour. 7 The story is one of jealousy, the failed Dave Carter’s envy of the success of his one-time dental colleague Steve Standish. The latter gets arrested when a patient, an illiterate Italian, collapses in the course of receiving treatment. In fact, Carter has slipped cyanide crystals under the cap of a bad tooth, referred him on to Standish, and the man has died of poisoning. All of this is unravelled by the narrator, Standish’s friend and also his patient. As plot, it runs well enough, cleverly turned small-scale mystery. But the real sting lies in how the narrator, his own tooth diseased, allows his sleuthing to put him into Carter’s clutches. In order to catch Carter he allows cyanide to be placed under the cap of his bad tooth, risking death the moment he bites or swallows. Not only does he offer laconic commentary (“No man is a hero to his dentist”), he actually becomes the plot itself (“I was carrying Death around in my mouth”). Woolrich trades beautifully on a shared common fear of the dentist and his drill, the ominous medical figure of dream and his infernal apparatus. “Walls that Hear You” plays upon a related fear. It begins with the sadistic mutilation of Eddie Mason, a young hotel night porter who 7

Darkness at Dawn. 1-18.


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has been the accidental witness to an abortion. He is found with his tongue cut out and his fingers amputated. Told in the voice of Eddie’s brother, a master electrician who wires the doctor’s room for sound, it becomes a drama both of how and why and equally of the narrator’s own possible shared fate. As Eddie Mason confronts the dentist, Dr Avalon, he lets his guard down for a moment, is hit over the head, and is bound “helpless, like a spectator at the show”.8 Avalon suggests Sweeney Todd, a Crippen, scalpels at the ready and as willing to visit his malign surgery on this Mason brother as he has on the first. Who would not fear the un-chloroformed nightmare to hand, the pending threat of muteness and mutilation? To be sure, the cops arrive just in time, but not before Woolrich has exposed both his narrator, and through him the reader, to the prospect of the knife. “Murder in Wax” adds to the Woolrich world through the perspective of a woman narrator, Angel Face Reardon. Ostensibly she sets herself the task of tracking down the killer of Bernice Pascal, her unfaithful husband’s playgirl. Jackie Reardon, the husband, meantime has been sentenced to execution in Sing Sing. His wife alights on a local hoodlum, Tommy Vailant, as the likely murderer, planning her every move against him, winning his love even. All of this she dutifully reports back to her lawyer, Mr Westman. But the story then subtly turns in its own tracks as the finale points to Angel Face herself as the assassin. The paradoxes abound. Despite the good looks, the “honey” as admirers term it, Angel Face has managed to show a fund of intelligent cunning. But has she set up Vailant out of a real desire to free her husband or simply out of a bad conscience? Is there not rough justice in winning back the man who has betrayed her? The story’s deviousness, however, belongs not to her alone; it belongs also to Woorich in his devising of each contributing switchback. That again holds in “The Body Upstairs”, a detective piece in which the cop, Galbraith, narrates his solving of a murder in his own apartment block. Off-duty he may be, but he finds a corpse in the bath one floor up. The detection involves him in sorting out a confusion about wigs and hair dyes, tracing the killers to a literal other rear apartment, and establishing the true and switched identity of the body. Woolrich’s forte is his portrait of murder in the home, domestic or out-of-work-hours killing. 8

Ibid., 19-43.

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A switch of identity, again, serves as the heart of the matter in “The Death of Me”. Unable to pay his bills, Walter Lynch tries suicide, fails, comes upon a corpse on the railway track, and changes clothes with the dead man. He also finds a wad of $20 bills and a hotel address where yet more money lies to hand. There he becomes George Kelley, aka Hogan. But fellow gangsters close in on him. He escapes, hides out in a rooming house, meets by chance the insurance agent who has sold him the policy that he hopes will go to his wife at his death, and, despite being no longer Walter Lynch even signs an affidavit to that end. But the cops pursue him and he is arrested under the name that will doom him to the electric chair for murder. Entrapment inside an assumed identity has its precedents, such as Twain’s Chambers Driscoll in Pudd’nhead Wilson, but Woolrich’s handling gives it new form. A story like “Waltz”, told as brief monologue, similarly turns an old formula to fresh advantage. Waltzing with the heiress he has fooled into thinking of an elopement, a thief learns about the detective hired by the family to protect the valuables. He also learns of his resemblance to a wanted murderer. As the couple sway to “The Blue Danube” with the girl full of love-talk, each step brings sweat to his brow. Will he, won’t he be detected? But as he tries his robbery, he mistakes a gesture from the detective, exchanges gunfire and is killed. The same detective confessed himself baffled. The real murderer has already been apprehended: one plot has overlapped with another, cheating the robber of what easily could have been his. Death in Woolrich usually puts in its appearance as the upshot of arbitrary or wholly unforeseen causes. “The Corpse Next Door” represents a case in point. Ed Harlan, a man easily rattled as his long suffering wife knows, vows to trap a thief stealing milk from outside their apartment. He rigs up a wire, catches the man in the act, lashes out and kills him as he thinks, and then jams him into a put-you-up bed against the wall of the adjoining apartment. But the corpse haunts him, a “phantom X-ray” whose outline he thinks he sees pressing through the wall. A smell also hovers. When a new couple seek to take the apartment, Harlan kills the husband, fearing exposure of his murder. In fact, the milk thief is still alive, a derelict on whom the superintendent has taken pity and allowed to use the apartment. He has recently been released from hospital suffering only the aftermath of concussion. The smell has been caused by cooking below. Harlan


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has killed for nothing, ironically and needlessly contrived his own sentence of death. “The Dancing Detective”, originally published as “Dime a Dance”, likewise portrays death as a masked figure, an unexpected intruder. Told in an idiom that borders on Damon Runyon by its heroine-at-risk, a tough dance-hall hostess named Ginger, it plies its reader with false leads. Ginger’s room-mate is killed and a precinct cop, Nick Ballestier, is assigned to the case. But his watchful, personal interest in Ginger raises thoughts about whether he himself could be the murderer. In fact, as it emerges, a shell-shocked war veteran who knives his victims to the record of “Poor Butterfly” and thinks them incarnations of his lost wife Muriel, is the culprit. The Ripper syndrome could not have been far from Woolrich’s mind. Ginger just about escapes his clutches, the would-be killer’s blade scraping her ribs so close does she come to death. A trail of desperate messages to Nick and her fellow hostesses falls short, each a near miss. The killer himself, addled, lost, turns his gun on himself, the murderer become self-murderer. The signs have again pointed in the wrong direction and death has again made its entrance from a hitherto unsuspected place. Woolrich offers no better locus classicus as to his arts of suspense than “Three O’Clock”. Like Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”, it depicts a man doomed by time. Paul Stapp, who believes his wife to be an adulteress, brings all his watch repair skills to bear and primes a bomb to go off precisely at three o’clock. His grudge festers and rankles “in the darkness of his mind” (65), a man turned “dangerous” by his obsession. “Death was spinning its web” (66), the story declares, “death was on the wing” (72). But his own painstaking best-laid plans go awry when two burglars break in, tie and gag him, and leave him knowingly exposed to his own device. To his pleading eyes, the intruders respond with “Whadda you care what time is, you’re not going any place” (75). He hears his wife Fran enter and leave with, as he imagines, her lover. The phone rings that he is helpless to answer. A gas company man calls but to no avail. A child thinks he sees him through the basement window but his mother beckons him away. Stapp is left to hear the tick-tock of his own timer, the count-down to his own extinction. Yet at one minute past three, he is still alive even though he thinks himself “in a state of death already” (91). The causes are trivial yet for him everything. His wife has emptied the clock-bomb of its

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gunpowder thinking it dust. The lover turns out to be her own brother, an ex-convict she is meeting clandestinely. Stapp is left to ponder his own near eradication, a man brought back from the edge of life. Rarely does Woolrich manage suspense, or the world it underwrites, to stronger effect. “No clock had ever gone this fast” (77) reads the text, death this time literally as life’s pursuer pressed into an exact imagery, tense, controlled narrative. A playful touch of the reflexive enters “The Book that Squealed” whose central figure, Prudence Roberts, a Miss Marple-like librarian, deciphers a ransom note in the cut-out words from a cheap romance called Manuela Gets Her Man. Rebuffed by the police as an old biddie, except for one Officer Murphy, clue for clue she takes up the pursuit herself. The upshot is that she is seized by the kidnappers along with the young heiress, Virginia Rapf, and the original book-borrower, Florence Turner. Likely murder victims, and despite the police’s tardy acting on Prudence’s original, the three are rescued at the last moment with the related outcome that Florence gets her man in the person of Murphy. Woolrich again teases throughout. Life has imitated art. Formula thriller-dom has happened in fact as against fiction. Romance has actually produced the prospect of true love even as it is being enacted within an imagined story. “Death Escapes the Eye” does like duty. It actually involves a mystery editor, Lizzie Aintree, and a potential contributor, the Park Avenue socialite, Dwight Billings. They, and Billings’s gaudy ex-wife, Bernette, newly married, dance one around the other, a ritual of jealousy, taunt, missed chances and just possibly murder. Lizzie and Dwight fail to marry, and Bernette disappears, though whether or not by Billings’s own hand the story leaves open. The tale, one about mystery writers who themselves live out mysteries, pushes two ways at once. Woolrich again darkly, asks whether life or art, fact or fiction, involves the greater fantasy. In “For the Rest of Her Life”, a late story, Woolrich offers a credo of sorts, a working manifesto in small for his brand of mystery: Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is a mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered


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and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery. 9

It could not better apply to the story at hand. Linda Harris marries Mark Ramsey after a love affair in Rome, only to discover that her husband has a sadistic core to his personality. The evidence gathers. A waitress is burned by hot tea. A small boy’s dog is drowned. Linda herself is mocked and punished by Ramsey. She embarks on an affair with Garrett Hill, who flees by car with her from Pittsfield, Massachusetts back towards New York. But Ramsey pursues them in his Alfa Romeo, a chase to the death as it emerges. For Hill is killed and Linda is blinded and left crippled in a wheelchair – in due course to be handed back to the permanent, un-tender mercies of her husband. Entrapment comes full circle, the perfect prisoner with her perfect jailor. Right through to the end, Woolrich wrote as one of mystery-writing’s surest adepts in pursuer and victim, the destiny that in his own key metaphor threatens always from out of the rear window. *** These threats each play into the world of Woolrich’s full-length fiction, and nowhere more emphatically than in the six mysteries he wrote in the 1940s with the word “black” installed in their title. Roman noir could not have been more assiduously cultivated, a set of inspired urban folktales beset by shadow and fear. The best known, perhaps, is the first, The Bride Wore Black (1940), no doubt aided by having become one of Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague screen classics. Julie Killeen, her husband Nick killed the very day of her wedding, embarks upon a set of psychotic revenge murders against a group of drinking companions whom she believes responsible. Each she dispatches in suitable black manner: a push from the balcony, a poisoning, an ingenious asphyxiation, an arrow fired through the heart. The last victim escapes her, mainly through the intervention of the cop in the case, Moran. Beautiful, deadly, a Dietrich figure, she finally confronts the blackness in herself when she learns that her victims were not in stark truth responsible for Nick Killeen’s death. Her

9

Tonight, Somewhere in New York, 325.

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contract has been less to him than to revenge itself, a self reduced to its own blackest shadow. The Black Curtain (1941) reworks the Doppelgänger theme, the amnesia of Frank Townsend and his other existence as the hunted murderer Danny Nearing. Parallel lives are each set against the other, one which is all routine, job, a marriage to his wife Virginia, the other which is gangster-dom, a wrongful murder rap and a devoted girlfriend. Normalcy vies with its counter-image, Townsend/Nearing as the two sides to a riven self. “Put on the lights”, he demands at one point, “I’m frightened of the dark! Where was I? Who was I all that time?”10 He could be speaking as the trapped figure at the heart of all Woolrich’s suspense fiction. As indicative an emblem, however, of the overarching spirit of the series has to be the black jaguar that terrorizes the Latin American city of Ciudad Real in Black Alibi (1942). However much another murderer hides behind its feline menace, it embodies the very essence of the predatory, rearward shadow. Death has truly become the hunter, the creature of pursuit. To this Woolrich adds his insider’s knowledge of Latin American death and burial customs, not unworthy of comparison with that deployed in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. If, for its part, The Black Angel (1943) shares a serial form with The Bride Wore Black, it does less as a revenge drama than as Alberta Murray’s frantic endeavour to seek out the true murderer of Mia Mercer, for whose death her husband awaits execution. The plot has its customary sting, a “serial” that as she eliminates each likely suspect taunts both heroine and reader with its own defiance of formula. The Black Path of Fear (1944) also uses a Latin American setting, Havana as a haven of drug racketeering and vice. When Bill Scott’s lover, Eve, is mysteriously stabbed in a nightclub, it opens what the story calls a black path into his own unexpected new liaison with the Cuban woman named Media Noche, a Chinatown-Miami heroin scam, and detection that makes clever use of photography. It ends with Scott “standing there by myself at the bar”,11 one species of mystery solved but not that of the blackness of his own lonely isolation. 10 11

Woolrich, The Black Curtain, 11. Woolrich (as William Irish), The Black Path of Fear, 160.


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Rendezvous in Black (1948) yet further discerns only the shadow behind the self, the story of Johnny Marr’s revenge upon the weekend sportsmen who have run down and killed his girl, Dorothy, when their black sedan swerves from the road. Systematically he hunts them down, the lover turned into an implacable figure of hate, returning fixatedly to the place where he always waited for her, her “ghostly drugstore cowboy”. When finally the police close in, they find themselves facing a “saraband of death”,12 Marr a man as dead in life as in his actual eventual last shoot-out. Again Woolrich portrays defeat, dispossession, fear and pursuit as the shaping energies of life. As the novel says of Marr when he makes his vow of revenge: “on that note of dedication, the darkness came down over him.”13 It makes a right kind of signature, too, for the black series at large, more visions of darkness from Woolrich’s rear window. *** Woolrich’s other novels also pursue this special brand of blackness, the view from the rear window. In Phantom Lady (1942), for example, written as William Irish, he again deploys the race against the clock – the stockbroker Scott Henderson wrongly sentenced to death for the murder of his wife and his only alibi the dark-clad, anonymous woman of the title. Admirers have seen in it not only vintage suspense, the fevered retracing of clues as to Henderson’s innocence, but also vintage urban noir. Manhattan looms as indeed a city of dreadful night, shadowed, unyielding, a geometric city prison. In this respect one could also invoke Deadline at Dawn (1944), its donnée a city dance-hall and a young girl’s dream of romance in the face of threatening indigence. Bricky Coleman and Quinn Williams, respectively dancer and ex-convict, get caught up in a deadly game of theft and revenge. Woolrich’s plotting, as often, can veer towards too great a dependence upon surprise and sudden reversal. But his portrait of New York as void and loneliness stays solidly in the mind. He transforms the high-rises and subways and the lattice of avenues and streets into an authentic iconography of enclosure, the city as huis clos in its stone height, width and density. Bars, neon-lit hotel rooms, 12 13

Woolrich, Rendezvous in Black, 102. Ibid., 103.

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street-corners, benches, and the like, offer but the most temporary havens, mere transit points. New York in this becomes darkness, invasion, pestilence. Or so Becky is made to think: “When you breathe too much of it”, she says, “it gets under your skin, it gets into you – and you’re sunk. The city’s got you.”14 The view is hers, but in ever likelihood, also Woolrich’s. Waltz Into Darkness (1947) may seem to differ from much of his other fiction by using a nineteenth-century New Orleans setting. But Woolrich quickly turns to familiar terrain in his deployment of the woman from nowhere, the exterminating angel. Louis Durand finds that Jekyll has given way to Hyde in his passion for the replacement bride. Love, in this handling, turns upside down, rearward, dark where by rights it should be light. Woolrich edges towards a considerable grasp of forms of human doubling, the love object as a provocation to hate and destruction. To hand, in like manner, is I Married a Dead Man (1948), in form one more paradigm novel yet something far more in which a young, pregnant and abandoned Helen Georgesson unexpectedly finds herself able to exchange with another woman who is travelling with her husband to meet his family for the first time. A train crash kills both the husband and wife and Helen becomes the surrogate daughter-in-law, only in due course to lose out bitterly in the impersonation. Woolrich’s sense of noir, its power to reward and punish, was un-abating. If Woolrich’s vision or indeed reputation has been associated with any one single novel, it would have to be Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945). All the ingredients of a black Woolrich story lie to hand: the father-daughter love of Harlan and Jean Reid; nothing other than a prophet figure, Jerry Tomkins, who among other things foretells Harlan Reid’s death on a given date at midnight; a love affair between Jean and the young cop, Tom Shawn, who takes up the case; the countdown to the hour of the prophecy; and a run of night-time settings of which the last is the rich, secluded mansion of the Reid family. In no way could there have been surprise when film noir claimed it for one of its own in a 1948 Paramount production starring Edward G. Robinson and Gail Russell. Woolrich’s storyline just about holds, allowing for sustained flashbacks, digressions and a fair degree of gothic improbability. However, as always, he keeps his suspense 14

Woolrich (as William Irish), Deadline at Dawn, 110.


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tight, delaying explanation, playing mystery against solution. Above all in the figure of Jean Reid he offers a mouthpiece for his own encompassing view of things. And, inevitably, the terms of reference point to an extending vista of darkness and death: Darkness has begun….Darkness….Growing, steadily growing, by the days, by the weeks, by the months, until it had blotted out everything else. Until all is darkness. Until there is nothing but darkness. Darkness and fear and pain, doom and death.15

The view is indeed that from the rear window. Could Woolrich have formulated it more exactly?

15

Woolrich (as George Hopley), Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 21.

17 RICHARD WRIGHT’S INSIDE NARRATIVES

All my life had shaped me for realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, land I could not read enough of them. Richard Wright, Black Boy 1 I picked up a pencil and held it over a sheet of white paper, but my feelings stood in the way of my words. Well, I would wait, day and night, until I knew what I wanted to say. Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and the world outside, that world which was so distant and elusive that it seemed unreal. Richard Wright, American Hunger 2

Both of these observations, each without doubt something of a high flourish with which to round off his two volumes of autobiography, nonetheless serve their purpose well enough: they underscore how momentously Richard Wright regarded his call to a literary career. The first, easily misconstrued, points less to the kind of fiction he himself would eventually write than to the liberating shock of recognition he experienced on reading the likes of Dreiser, Crane, Howells and their inaugural current of American literary realism. For in their different anatomies of America he saw not exactly the mirror of his own life – how could any of them have written with authority of a black Southern boyhood lived hard against the colour-line and under permanent threat of white racist violence? – but human existence depicted as an oppressive power web likely to damage, if not actually consume, the individual. 1 2

Richard Wright, Black Boy, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1945, 274. Richard Wright, American Hunger, NY: Harper and Row, 1977, 135.

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The later observation arises out of Wright’s Depression and Chicago years, the era of his brief membership of and departure from the American Communist Party that together with his increasing disenchantment with America and subsequent FBI and State Department harassment led to his permanent European exile in 1947. His sense of elation on opting out of the Party’s dicta, for all that it had helped him towards what then seemed a credible ideology of racelessness and anti-capitalism, almost exactly parallels the sense of self-possibility he reports in Black Boy on leaving the Dixie South for his own migration northwards. To “build a bridge of words” between himself and America, and then worlds beyond, for a veteran of Mississippi-style racial custom and, if briefly, a former CP-USA sympathizer, if not exactly activist, must indeed in the light of that background have seemed an unreal notion. For in claiming the right to use words to his own design Wright not only gave notice of his chosen path as a writer, he also affirmed that he intended nothing less than to take on, and to beat at its own scriptural game, a white-run and proprietary world accustomed as if by right to doing most of the defining of reality. *** To emphasize Wright’s passage into authorship, his belief in writing as a crucial rite of liberation, is, moreover, to imply a great deal about his fiction itself. Although he had been held to be a committed writer, he never in fact wrote to any single protocol but adroitly kept his imaginative distance, however at different stages influenced by Marxism, Sartrean existentialism, or Freudianism. On publication of Native Son (1940), however much it helped establish his name, it must have been irritatingly inadequate to find himself habitually pronounced America’s pre-eminent “Negro protest writer”, its “black Dreiser”, the custodial voice of “black anger”.3 For however Wright of necessity found his departure point in deep abiding dissent, a personally endured bitter intimacy with the fissures and hypocrisies of race, this kind of phraseology, well intended or not, ultimately proves diversionary, even unhelpful. 3

The reviews from which these phrases are taken are reprinted in Richard Wright’s Native Son: A Critical Handbook, ed. Richard Abcarian, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1970. Richard Wright, Native Son, NY: Harper, 1940, 49.

Richard Wright’s Inside Narratives

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Among other deficits, it has locked his and a whole tradition of African American writing into too diagrammatic a series of oppositions: black protest against white oppression, a simplified dialectic in which black and white play out predictable racial roles. Wright quickly saw that protest in these terms obliquely gives validation, intended or not, to the very terms of the racial ascendancy and subordination it sought to challenge. As in the cases of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, he recognized from the start that binary versions of race in the face of every human contrariety would not take him or his reader very far. Some anger might indeed be ventilated. Black grievance might or might not win a sympathetic hearing, especially where white liberal guilt was involved. But the more elusive complexities, the sexual and psychological components, the built-in taboos, the nuance of offence and defence, the utter constructedness of race, and not least the whole dynamic of what Toni Morrison calls “racial language”, simply would be by-passed.4 Fiction, in consequence, risked being rendered down into sociology, documentary or treatise rather than imagined worlds taken from life and transformed by authorial fashioning voice, style, pattern. Yet Wright’s grasp of contrariety, his own as much as the world’s, still rarely wins sufficient notice. Throughout the Depression, and even into the 1940s, his writing was habitually taken to reflect the view that Marxism offered the right pathway beyond the colour-line and towards the holistic “vast unity” he says precisely was not his goal or expectation in taking up the pen. During the Eisenhower 1950s he found himself castigated an ungrateful black anti-American voice in league with an intellectual class still enamoured of Soviet Russia and unacceptably out of sorts with America’s predilection for a safe domestic and suburban consensus at home and the Cold War abroad. In the 1960s, even as he held sway as dean of the expatriate African American colony in Paris, an intimate of the Les Temps Modernes existential circuit, he was claimed by another image. The AfroAmerica raised on Civil Rights, Selma, Watts, or the rhetoric of Malcolm X, the Panthers and SNCC, seized on him as a standard bearer of either-or black militancy. In this he was to be set off against assumedly acquiescent native sons like a too conservative Ralph 4

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

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Ellison, or gay Baldwin, or non-violent Christian leadership in the mould of Martin Luther King. None of these versions, however vivid or summary, in fact gives anything like Wright’s overall measure. To one degree or another, however, these all have persisted. Wright’s “bridge of words”, for instance, despite massive debate about “realism” from Zola’s Le Roman Experimental (1880) to the theory generation of Barthes or Eco, still goes on being referred to some implied generic standard of realism-naturalism. Marxist interpretation, launched in New Masses and with Adorno and Gramsci later brought into the reckoning, continues to see Wright as a proponent of materialist history and, thereby, Afro-America’s equivalent of Mike Gold or John Reed. Freudianism, equally, has laid claim to Wright, not least under French auspices like that of his most assiduous biographer Michel Fabre, who considers Wright’s genius to have been created largely from a need to take command of split, sexual demons, regressive hates and compensations.5 The Black Aesthetic movement delivered yet another version, the author of Native Son and volumes like 12 Million Black Voices (1941) and The Color Curtain as the voice of a separatist black consciousness bent upon resistance to all appropriating white ascendancy.6 This was literary ideology as High Command whose leading proponents, Hoyt Fuller and Addison Gayle, insisted that Wright was their man, black authorship as black power, the clenched fist in word and deed. Wright, in fact, nowhere argues for so single-minded an aesthetic, his own terms of commitment always cannier, more eclectically angled. That, however, is not to deny that Black Aesthetic ideology played other 5 Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, NY: William Morrow and Company, 1973. 6 Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro United States, NY: Viking, 1941; The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference, Cleveland and NY: The World Publishing Company, 1956. For “The Black Aesthetic” movement, see Black Expression, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr., NY: Weybright and Talley, 1969; The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr., NY: Doubleday and Company, 1971; Addison Gayle, Jr., The Way of the World: The Black Novel in America, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday and Company, 1971; Mercer Cook and Stephen E. Henderson, The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969; George Kent, Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture, Chicago, IL: Third World Press, 1971; Stephen E. Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry, NY: William Morrow and Company, 1973; Hoyt Fuller’s editorial and contributions to Black World, formerly Negro Digest; and MidContinent American Studies Journal, XI/2 (Fall 1972).


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than a considerable part in repositioning him at the forefront of African American literary achievement. Certainly the Second Renaissance of the 1960s, as it has been called, and the recovery of a usable black cultural past from slave autobiography to Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925) to names like Imamu Jones/Baraka, owes unquestionable debts to the stir, the polemic, associated with the movement. Marxist, Freudian, existentialist, Black Nationalist, pan-Africanist – the categorization of Wright has been busy to a fault. Yet none wholly, or sufficiently, does full justice: the southern-born Black Boy to be sure but also the author who acknowledged other departure points. For there is also the Wright whose cultural legacy includes Heidegger, Dostoevski, Kafka, and from American literature, a line of writers to include Poe, Hawthorne and Melville, each as given over to alterity, and the exploration of displaced self. Wright’s ambivalences about Marxism, as about the Freudians and existentialists, or panAfrican and global notions of blackness, remain to be sifted, not to mention his estimate of his own partly welcome, partly unwelcome, position as a black exile in still colonialist France under the patronage of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. These versions, too, all cross and overlap, yet often the one has been advanced to do duty for the whole or to have eclipsed quite other and further Wrights. Oddly, the deceptive clarity of Wright’s work has equally played its part, its ease of access tempting the incautious into too ready a final version both of the man and his writing. For an author routinely taken to have lacked the stylistic finish of, say, Hemingway or Fitzgerald, or, among black authors, of Ellison, Herman Melville’s dryly sage observation in Moby-Dick offers just the right cautionary note: “I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all.”7 Loosening Wright and his fiction from these interconnecting biographical, ideological and literary-critical myths becomes even more difficult in the light of the role he was called upon to play for other African American writers. The relationship with his supposed two principal literary sons, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, offers the one kind of trajectory. The two Baldwin essays which most apply, “Many Thousands Gone” (1951) and “Alas, Poor Richard” (1961), 7 Herman Melville, “The Fountain” (Chapter 85), Moby-Dick (1851), NorthwesternNewberry Edition, Evanston and Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988, 373.

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actually amount to acts of disaffiliation, intimate, and greatly stylish expressions of a will-to-freedom as much from Wright’s strange hold on the white world’s version of American blackness as from Wright himself.8 Baldwin unquestionably admired much in Wright, the author as hero, not merely a combatant against racism’s arbitrary exclusions but a hugely savvy literary maker of the word. Nonetheless he wrote unsparingly of the limited dimensionality to Wright’s fiction, the too diagrammatic portraiture as he saw it of black life. The Harlem of his Baldwin family upbringing, the street, the storefront Pentecostalism, a stepfather’s rage, or the crowdedness of family may have afforded him a one richly historic dispensation of voice. But Baldwin left no doubt of his aspiration to use it alongside others, at once more metropolitan, be it Manhattan or Paris, and given to reaches which would extend, among others, to James, Proust or Faulkner. Ellison, for his part, gives equally complex witness. On the one hand, in “Richard Wright’s Blues” (1945) subsequently “The World and the Jug” (1963), he speaks of simply “stepping round” Wright, perhaps understandably given the fashioning of so cannily voiced a novel as Invisible Man (1952).9 Yet just as Invisible Man transforms for its own purposes the many backward glances to Dostoevski, Melville, Poe, Joyce, Malraux, H.G. Wells, and the other figures Ellison mentions as influences in Shadow and Act (1964) – along with jazz and African American spoken folklore – equally it can be said to call up Richard Wright. In this a subterranean narrative of identity and revelation like “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1945) especially looks to have been an influence. In “Remembering Richard Wright” (1971) he offers a still later bead. Wright, he argues, could be 8

“Many Thousands Gone” first appeared in Partisan Review, 18 (NovemberDecember 1951) and is reprinted in Notes of a Native Son, NY: Dial, 1955 and James Baldwin, Collected Essays, NY: Library of America, 19-34. “Alas, Poor Richard” was originally published as “The Survival of Richard Wright”, The Reporter (March 1961), and “The Exile”, Le Preuve (February 1961), is reprinted in James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, NY: Dial, 1961, 146-70. 9 “Richard Wright’s Blues” first appeared in Antioch Review, 55 (Summer 1945) and is reprinted in Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, NY: Random House, 1964, and The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, NY: Random House/Modern Library 1995, 12844. “The World and the Jug”, based on an exchange with Irving Howe, “The Writer and the Critic”, The New Leader (February 1964), and “A Rejoinder”, The New Leader (9 December 1963 and 3 February 1964), appears in Shadow and Act and The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, 155-88. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 30th Anniversary Edition, NY: Random House, 1952, 1982.


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“sometimes too passionate”, too message-laden at the expense of a more transcending art.10 But reservations or not he shows a genuine regard for Wright’s unyielding, indeed model, ambition. He so likens him to another kind of legendary black fighter and longtime breaker of barriers: “In him we had for the first time a Negro American writer as randy, as courageous, and as irrepressible as Jack Johnson.” *** Wright’s vaunted school raises connecting issues. How to designate as simply Wrightian a constellation of novels as various as Chester Himes’ If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), with its interactive dream and race-and-sex scenario set within the wartime ship industry of California, Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), with its Harlem club land rules of female sexual survival against odds, Alden Bland’s Behold a Cry (1947), which looks back to the World War I Chicago race riots, or Willard Motley’s Knock On Any Door (1947), the supposedly race-less because Chicago-Italian novel of citied vice, drugs, murder and execution? Other fiction usually assigned to the Wright column likewise lays claim to discrete terms, whether William Gardner Smith’s Last of the Conquerors (1948), the ironically titled story of black army experience in Occupied Germany, Lloyd L. Brown’s Iron City (1951), a consciously proletarian anti-prison drama, Julian Mayfield’s The Hit (1957), Harlem’s world of numbers told as the black community dream of a once-in-a-lifetime gambling success, or Herbert Simmons’ Corner Boy (1957), whose locale of St Louis, Missouri as ghetto and drugs nether-world traps its hero into a wrongful prison conviction, and Man Walking on Eggshells (1962), the vernacular, street-wise story of a jazzman turned political militant.11 10

Ralph Ellison, “Remembering Richard Wright”, Delta: Revue du Centre d’Etudes et de Recherche sur les Ecrivains du Sud aux Etats Unis, 18 (April 1984), 1-13. Initially Ellison delivered this as a lecture at the Library of Congress. 11 Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1945; Ann Petry, The Street, Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1946; Alden Bland, Behold a Cry, NY: Scribner, 1947; Willard Motley, Knock On Any Door, NY: Appleton-Century, 1947; William Gardner Smith, The Last of the Conquerors, NY: Farrar, Straus, 1948; Lloyd L. Brown, Iron City, NY: Masses and Mainstream, 1951; Julian Mayfield, The Hit, NY: Vanguard, 1957; and Herbert Simmons, Corner Boy, Boston, MA: Houghton, 1957, and Man Walking on Eggshells, Boston, MA: Houghton, 1962.

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In a slightly subsequent era the name of John A. Williams has entered the reckoning, above all early work like The Angry Ones (1960), based largely on Williams’ experience of the publishing world and its besetting codes of racism, Night Song (1961), loosely a version of the life and musical genius of Bird, Charlie Parker, and Sissie (1963), the story of two black siblings, the sister a singer based in Europe, the brother a playwright, and their sense of black family and kin. John O. Killens has been another frequently alleged Wrightian fellow spirit, whether Youngblood as (1954), a pre-Civil Rights story set in the Georgia of his origins, or And Then We Heard Thunder (1963), his 1940s story of a black Georgia regiment drawn into a vicious race fight with white GIs in allied Australia.12 However markedly different their interests or manner, all these writers have been gathered into the fold of Wright’s realism, the composite literary voice of (in a worn phrase) Negro protest. That Wright, from the Chicago and New Masses 1930s through to the late Paris years, exerted an extraordinary influence does not have to be doubted. But to credit him with some custodial or patriarchal influence over writers as conspicuously individual as Baldwin or Ellison, Chester Himes or Ann Petry, amounts to a serious skewering of the facts. Himes’ relationship with Wright, for example, especially as set out in his two-volume autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absurdity (1972), pays a far more complicated tribute to his fellow exile. For like Baldwin he both loved and found himself frequently warring against Wright, at once admiration of the apparent ease inside French intellectual life and yet the black spokesman status, the egotism, in all a clash of their two considerable yet markedly different kinds of creative temperament.13 The saga of Wright as assumed black literary touchstone continues most dramatically into the 1960s in Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice (1968). There, in “Notes of a Native Son”, he uses the begetter of Native Son, “the Richard Wright [who] reigns supreme for his profound political, economic, and social reference”, to berate James Baldwin as the incarnation not only of sexual but political 12

John A. Williams, The Angry Ones, NY: Ace Books, 1960, Night Song NY: Farrar, Straus, 1961, and Sissie, NY: Farrar, Straus, 1963; John O. Killens, Youngblood, NY: Dial, 1954, and And Then We Heard Thunder, NY: Knopf, 1963. 13 Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt, NY: Doubleday, 1972, and My Life of Absurdity, NY: Doubleday, 1976.


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effeminization ever willingly knee-bent to the white man. 14 But Cleaver’s admiration of Wright as tough hetero-black warrior, and condemnation of Baldwin as castratus and hater of his own blackness, however eye-catching, falls greatly short of the whole case. With understandable cause Cleaver might have been seeking a mythology suited to the polemical needs of the Black Panther challenge to America, the call to African Americans to cease being the compliant and all too literal prisoners of a history begun in slavery and continued in the nation’s ghettos and penitentiaries. But a mythology is what it was, and remains, unfair to the greater human texture (Baldwin’s bravery in issues of colour-line or sexuality not least) of both writers. From another angle there has been both the fictive and biographical Wright of John A. Williams. In his major racial-political thriller, The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), Wright exists clearly as the begetting presence behind the protagonist, Harry Ames, whose canny, born of experience (and sacrificial) black legacy is offered as one of necessary vigilance against destruction by white power interests. In The Most Native of Sons (1970), a biography for children, Wright becomes a figure of tenderness, the disciplined writer against the odds but, throughout, also the caring father and husband. Williams’ depiction of Ames as the victim of FBI and CIA machinations working in some kind of harness with various white supremacist groups in turn points forward to the Richard Wright revealed in Addison Gayle’s Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (1980), a piece of excavation however dully written to complement Michel Fabre’s standard biography, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973). By gaining access to most of Wright’s government files under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts of 1966 and 1974 Gayle shows how Wright suffered both McCarthyite red-baiting and, thereafter, continued government surveillance. The rumour still persists in some Paris and black circles that his death of a heart attack did not come about by natural causes. Gayle’s account, in line with his Black Aesthetic affiliations, assumes a stance that only a black biographer and critic with the right blackness of outlook could understand Wright’s place within an America white-racist to its historical core.15

14

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, NY: McGraw Hill, 1968. John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am, NY: Doubleday, 1967, and The Most Native of Sons: a Biography of Richard Wright, NY: Doubleday, 1970; Addison 15

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A late entry into Wright biography came with Margaret Walker’s Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988), She depicts Wright as very much the fellow novelist as much her fellow Southerner and Depression-era Chicagoan.16 From her early meeting with Wright at the South Side Writers Group in the mid-1930s, she both drew inspiration from him and helped in supplying material from the Robert Nixon case on which he based parts of Native Son. The Wright she portrays is one who carried at no small cost the psychic freight of Dixie into adulthood yet, at the same time, was able to use it as the wellspring for his best writing. If it is not dutifully insisted that Wright wrote only un-embellished naturalism then his shadow, quite against usual writ, can also be detected in Afro-America’s post-realist, even postmodern, litany. This notion of Wright as himself a species of postmodern has not anywhere near had its due. For as much as he writes into being black lives palpably located in historic time and place of the south or Chicago, he also is taken up with displacement, the inside psychic knots of black identity. Any amount of his fiction both portrays racism’s historic damage yet also its countering in the creativity of black selfhood, his own self-aware inscriptive power of the black on white of writing as the index of taking power of command in life. In this he can be seen alongside, say, Ellison’s Invisible Man, whose patterns of story, be it migration north or black inner city, also become a spin of seeing and un-seeing, harlequinry and doubling. Chester Himes, in each of the pyrotechnic Coffin Ed Johnson/Gravedigger Jones romans policers, likewise might be said to take up the Chicago ghetto legacy of Native Son and to havetransformed it into Harlem as both literal black world and magic shadow-territory shot through with violence and bizarrerie. This kind of legacy, in effect Wright’s as much as Ellison’s if not always recognized as such, has been considerable. Ishmael Reed’s pastiche fables, beginning from The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967) with its mock-Science Fiction space satire take on Nixonism, gives a one bearing. Others include William Demby’s The Catacombs (1965) as self-designated cubist fable of blackness within Marshall McLuhan’s global media order and using Rome and the film and theater worlds as frame, William Melvin Kelley’s dem (1967) as the Gayle, Jr., Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980. 16 Margaret Walker, Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, NY: Warner, 1988.


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play of mirrors between Harlem blackness and suburban whiteness, Robert Deane Pharr’s S.R.O (1971) with its city of supply and demand drug cauchemar, Hal Bennett’s Lord of the High Places (1971) whose violent, drug-centred realism in fact is made to border on irreality, Cyrus Colter’s The Hippodrome (1973) as a Kafkaesque modern city beheading and flight, or John Wideman’s The Lynchers (1973) as the story of a consciously anachronistic black-political gesture in the form of a would-be execution. In this legacy inside Wright weighs quite as much as the realist Wright, authorship whose working components point in their own variety of ways to the displaced self, black lives retold as though hyper-real, absurd, and with an often bitingly macabre blackness beyond black humour.17 Given the thickets that have enclosed Wright, and most likely kept much of his true creative self just out of view, inside narrative, Melville’s half-title for Billy Budd, supplies no inappropriate pathway into his imagination.18 That embraces the Richard he himself invents in Black Boy and American Hunger, and deftly perpetuates in reportage like Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956) and Pagan Spain (1957), or the veteran of that intimidatory Mississippi and Arkansas black upbringing, or on the evidence of his contribution to The God That Failed (1949) the half-in, half-out, Chicago Marxist, or the Greenwich Village and New York personality and shock author of Native Son or still later, the Paris expatriate and internationalist Third World observer and advocate.19 It may well be that Wright, man and oeuvre, have become irrecoverably fixed inside one or another of the usual versions. From the 1940s through to the Civil Rights era, Wright is taken to operate as the simply inveterate, and so heroic, realist. His writings bequeath black militant testament, naturalist or revolutionary fare untainted by 17

Ishmael Reed, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, NY: Doubleday, 1967; William Demby, The Catacombs, NY: Pantheon, 1965; William Melvin Kelley, dem, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967; Robert Deane Pharr, S.R.O., NY: Doubleday and Company, 1971; Hal Bennett, Lord of the High Places, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1971; Cyrus Colter, The Hippodrome, Chicago, IL: Swallow Press, 1973; and John Edgar Wideman, The Lynchers, NY: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1973. 18 Herman Melville, Billy Budd (An Inside Narrative), first published posthumously in 1924. The authoritative edition (and thereby the authoritative title of the work) is Herman Melville, Billy Budd Sailor (An Inside Narrative), eds Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Chicago IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962. 19 Richard Wright, Pagan Spain, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1957.

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the siren calls of modernism. In these respects Wright as mythic founder-figure has especially settled like a dense blanket over his own fiction. But however congenial the brevity or the politics of this view, it amounts to no more than the easy option, a reduction of the Wright endemically and from the outset altogether more elusive in racial and every other kind of complication. Fortunately, as a first counter-step one can again profitably turn to Wright’s account of things, his own sense of idiom and working terms of reference. *** The kind of writer Wright believed himself to be is nowhere better signalled than in his celebrated Preface to Native Son, “How Bigger Was Born”.20 There, as in essays like “The Literature of the Negro in the United States”, he insists on his inclination to see in black history not only a literal past scarred by oppression and survival, defeat and gain, but a matchingly inward and emblematic drama, one remembered within the collective African American psyche and in blues and black oral tradition.21 The last paragraph of “How Bigger Was Born” especially insists on this kind of inheritance: we have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy broodings of a Hawthorne. And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.22

In so claiming James, Hawthorne and Poe as semblables (again an essay like “The Literature of the Negro in the United States” which avers that “The Negro is America’s metaphor” shows how conscious he was of black literary tradition), he points precisely in the direction of his own species of inside narrative. Wright as realist may have

20

“How Bigger Was Born” first appeared in Saturday Review (1 June 1940), 3-4, 1720. It was then reprinted in Richard Wright, Native Son, NY and Evanston, IL: Harper and Row, 1940. 21 “The Literature of the Negro in the United States” became Chapter 3 of Richard Wright, White Man, Listen!, NY: Doubleday, 1957. 22 Wright, Native Son, xxxv.


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become standard writ, the received wisdom, but rarely has it said anything like enough. In this respect, the stories collected in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Eight Men (1961) offer especially useful points of illustration, each at once circumstantial, naturalist, yet at the same time subtly parabolic, a glimpse into the oblique workings of both white and black psyche. This dual note is struck as forcefully as anywhere at the outset of “Big Boy Leaves Home”, the title-story of Uncle Tom’s Children. Contemplating the events that have left his friends Lester, Buck and Bobo dead and himself a terrified northwards-bound fugitive from Dixie lynch law, Big Boy observes, “It all seemed unreal now”.23 On the surface the story appears to offer a straightforward episode of Southern racist violence, the account of four black boys whose swim at a summer water hole leads on to death and flight. But the story’s virtual every detail activates far more ancestral resonances from deep within Southern racial history, the rites whereby black manhood is killed or at least mutilated for its stereotypic desiring of white womanhood and in which the South, as often enough in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatwapha, becomes both bucolic domain of river and pinewood and brute inferno of lynch and castration. Told as a classical five-act sequence, the story opens with the boys’ banter, their snatches of black bawdy, the dozens, and general rough housing, all the marks of time as adolescence. The landscape of the woods, the “cleared pasture” and “the tangled vines” 24 serve as imaginable actual landscape and as nature’s seeming stamp of approval. But at the swimming hole, they encounter the first discord within this summer-time boyhood harmony, the sign put up by Ol’ Man Harvey, “NO TRESPASSIN”,25 its frank illiteracy at one with the intrusion of white property ownership into natural free space. With the arrival of the white woman and her soldier lover, the story calls into play the South’s even more familiar racial equation – Big Boy, “black and naked”, a screaming belle, and the avenging white manfolk with

23

Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas, NY and London: Harper and Brothers, 1938, 52. 24 Ibid., 17. 25 Ibid., 24.

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blood on his lips after the first tussle, gun in hand, and vowing death to “you black sonofabitch”.26 Paradise thereby turns to nightmare, fecklessness to a new burden of consciousness. As Big Boy flees after the death of Harvey’s soldier son back to family and community (to the bluesy chorus of his mother “This is mo trouble, mo trouble”27) and then away again into hiding at the kilns to await his escape in a truck owned by the emblematic Magnolia Express Company, so a latest black underground comes into play. “Six foot of snake”, racism given serpentine biological shape, greets his entry into the hell-like kiln. Big Boy can kill the snake with a stick but he still imagines “whole nests of them … waiting tensely in coil”.28 His underground hole, like Fred Daniels’s sewer in “The Man Who Lived Underground” or the manhole in Ellison’s Invisible Man, tacitly memorializes the still larger enclave – psychic, inward. This colour-line incarceration has pursued not only Big Boy and his three friends but a black communal ancestry down from the slaveholding South. Big Boy, even so, can think back to a more benign black order of home, school, train, songs and “long hot Summer days”,29 the shared memory of twelve-bar blues, guitar and briar-patch. At the same time, and against this comfort, he plays out in imagination his fantasy revenge on the white race, would-be heroism of the kind he thinks will make headlines like “NIGGER KILLS DOZENS OF MOB BEFO 30 LYNCHED”. But that also turns round on itself. The posse hunts down and captures Bobo to the refrain of “We'll hang ever nigger t’ a sour apple tree”. Bobo dies, to the chorus of “LES GET SOURVINEERS” and “HURRY UP N BURN THE NIGGER FO IT RAINS!”.31 The triviality of a concern for the weather subtly underscores the larger horror. As Bobo dies, another black boy martyred to white hate, Big Boy chokes the cerberean dog belonging to his white pursuers, displaced redress for the butchery of his friend and yet also the necessary killing of all residual innocence.

26

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 32. 28 Ibid., 41 and 42. 29 Ibid., 42. 30 Ibid., 44. 31 Ibid., 47 and 49. 27


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Wright’s language throughout carries its own iconic semantics. Big Boy’s insides are said to be drawn “into a tight knot”.32 He rightly senses that the home he is leaving is a South both his and not his, bucolic yet steeped in the shadow that will pursue his near namesake Bigger Thomas. A far older configuration is being played out. Black may be his own normative being but it also comes saturated in white projection as sexual phantom. Behind black and white as literal, visible pigmentation, lies a tension at once ancient, phobic, polarized. Wright’s story, accordingly, tells an updated slave escape or flight narrative to match with Big Boy the very embodiment of black American experience as fugitivism. This is the self as shadow, othered, the silhouette created and sustained in the eyes of the white South about him. Can it be doubted that he has been made fugitive to himself, a one identity accused and haunted and anything but of his own making? There is even a case for thinking an older destruction in play, that of Cain against Abel but replayed as white against black. Given the sum of these considerations to call a story like “Big Boy Leaves Home” simply naturalistic overlooks almost everything of Wright’s inside virtuosity, its pattern and echo, image and masquerade. Each of the other pieces in Uncle Tom’s Children, even if not equally successful, operates in kindred manner. In “Down by the Riverside”, true to the classic blues from which Wright borrows his title, the ostensible story of a black drowning and white ingratitude for help given during a Southern flood yields another inside parable. Its black main figure, perhaps too obviously called Brother Mann, as so often under Southern writ is in every sense sold down the river by unfair racial odds. As Mann drowns, the story describes his body as “encased in a tight vase in a narrow black coffin that moved with him”.33 This flood might be the flood of history itself, Southern-style, a murderous white stream of time in which black skin has been made into the garment of death. Similarly, in “Long Black Song”, we again enter mythy blues terrain, this time as languidly southern in atmosphere as the Georgia of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923). Tricked into giving her sexual favours to a white salesman, with a clock positioned as a strange object of desire, a black woman becomes the collusive but unwitting cause of 32 33

Ibid., 53. Ibid., 95.

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her husband’s death. As Silas finally chooses to burn rather than be hanged cravenly for the revenge he enacts against this white use of sexual privilege that has cheated him, he refuses both the time and the writ of white supremacism. He joins “that long river of blood”,34 but in a manner of his own choosing and not as victim-martyr of a system that literally, and figuratively, has denied him and his legitimate manhood. “Fire and Cloud”, also as steeped in myth as history, uses its story of the beating of the Reverend Taylor and his transformation from accommodationist Uncle Tom Christian to implacable community activist against white township authority, as a vision of new politics, race as arbitrary division to be not only challenged but erased from the agenda of Southern power. The beating itself Wright dramatizes as Klan-style crucifixion, brutality yet a rite of deepest inward liberation for Taylor and the past standard he represents. The story more than points to Wright’s growing conviction that only a more Marxist grasp of cross-racial class interests, as much as colour, promises salvation, change through historic consciousness and solidarity. In “Bright and Morning Star”, again given a Marxist and cross-racial element and appropriately published in New Masses in May 1938, he sets the warm maternal presence of Aunt Sue, the black mother of two activist sons, against Southern law-and-order thuggery. An’ Sue, to give her her black name, at first resembles Faulkner’s Dilsey. But she is here transformed from Christian mammy into a servant no longer available to the Compsons or their like. Rather, she incarnates the black woman as fierce protectress of her own, warrior and avenger. In shooting the stool pigeon who has brought on the torture and death of her son, Johnny Boy, she passes into the exemplary myth or as the story designates her “the dead that never dies”.35 Wright’s prose again edges towards a balance of history and parable, replete in Bible cadence, visionary: “But as she had grown older, a cold white mountain, the white folks and their laws, had swum into her vision and shattered her songs and their spells of peace.”36 The inside narrative of “Bright and Morning Star” resides exactly in these collocations of “cold white mountain”, “songs” and “spells of peace”. Aunt Sue dies but lives, her story en-seamed in 34

Ibid., 126. Ibid., 215. 36 Ibid., 184. 35


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black pictographic community speech, life out of death told as a visionary blues of the heart. *** In these respects, also, Wright wrote no better story than “The Man Who Lived Underground”, the centrepiece to Eight Men.37 Its journey form rightly attracts praise for how it calls up Dante’s Inferno and Dostoveski’s Notes from Underground and for how, cannily, it anticipates both Invisible Man and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. For in Fred Daniels’ underground odyssey, Wright develops both a literal drama of escape – a manhunt no less – and a parable of black manhood forced underground from its own self, hidden yet able to see all, invisible yet visible. In descending via the manhole cover into his underground existence, Daniels perceives the paradox of an America of both plenty and waste, withholding even as it offers bounty. Each glimpse of this America he experiences as one previously denied access, a kind of black underworld trespasser or scavenger forced to live at the margins of or underneath the presumed white mainstream of the nation’s history. Little wonder that his first sight is a glistening sewer rat, foreshadowing that which Bigger Thomas kills at the beginning of Native Son and the very figuration of his own rodent fate in the final police chase. Everything Daniels sees, and on occasion steals, Wright sets against the spirituals being sung by the black congregation, America’s black music as historic touchstone. As Daniels flees down into the sewer, he appears to step free of time itself and to become a traveller through all single versions of time. To good purpose the story asks: “How long had he been down here? He did not know.”38 He sees the dead abandoned baby “snagged by debris and half-submerged in water”, a Blakean innocent, eyes closed, fists clenched “as though in protest”, its mouth “gaped black in soundless cry”. Such mute human frailty links directly to Fred Daniels’ own fate, his self also essentially stillborn and an object of

37 “The Man Who Lived Underground” was first published in Cross-Section, 1945, and republished in Richard Wright, Eight Men, Cleveland, OH: World, 1961, and reprinted, with Introduction by David Bradley, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1987. Page references are to this later edition. 38 Wright, Eight Men, 33.

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repudiation. In “tramping on”, 39 the specific one black figure in history yet also the personification of others, so his sight of the embalmer at work becomes also emblematic. The embalmer’s “establishment” is ice-cold, white, diabolic, his “throaty chuckle” 40 (36) the very underlining of a white, a whited, world as hell. Each subsequent encounter confirms this coded landscape. The coal bin conjures up not only real fuel but the whole underground fire of black life itself. The movie house, and its flickering screen, offers visual movement of a kind with Daniels’ own miasmic perceptions of the world seen from his black underground. Life flickers like a moving image, a cinema reel. The fruit and vegetables he steals might be thought painterly, food transposed into surrealist nourishment as on a Dalí canvas. Similarly, the jewels he takes glisten hypnotically in the dark, real plunder yet also Gatsbyesque fantasy wealth. Even the newspaper heading, “HUNT NEGRO FOR MURDER”,41 assumes an air of disjunction, language as some foreign cryptogram that encodes reality within its own system. The same note applies to the Aladdin’s Cave Fred makes of the stolen banknotes, and his tentative first efforts to write out his name. In writing freddanniels and the other words he becomes like the first cave dwellers, a human presence, the newly literate slave, obliged by past history to begin again the finding and inscription of his own signature. Daniels himself resembles Melville’s Bartleby, another prisoner of walls: “What was the matter with him? .… Yes, he knew … it was these walls; these crazy walls were filling him with a wild urge to climb out into the dark sunshine aboveground.”42 He is finally shot because the story he resurfaces momentarily to tell cannot be credited by the police, any more than that of Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man or Jones/Baraka’s Clay in Dutchman. Wright’s naturalism once more secretes inside narrative, the visceral underground sediment of black American history. “The Man Who Lived Underground” undoubtedly offers the best of Eight Men’s stories, yet each of the others invites a similar decipherment. These, notably, include “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” as a gun-fable about black manhood in a supremacist white 39



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rural Dixie but not without a touch of farce, or “The Man Who Saw the Flood” as the parabular account as much of black oppression as river overflow, or “Man of All Work”, with its all-dialogue portrait of a husband obliged to play transvestite housemaid to earn for his own family, or “The Man Who Killed A Shadow” as Saul Saunders’ revenge on the “white shadow-world”43 in the person of a mean, racist National Cathedral librarian and a story full of sexual undertone about whiteness as power and gender. As so often in Wright’s storytelling, surfaces equivocate brilliantly, an outward show, another inside narrative. *** This double play of means and ends applies equally to the longer works. All five of Wright’s novels – Lawd Today (post.1963), Native Son (1940), The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954) and The Long Dream (1958) – yield their respective inlaid skeins, different in efficacy but clearly full of covert manoeuvre.44 Lawd Today, to take Wright’s first novel, probably written in the 1930s, and ironically not published at the time for want of a sufficient Marxist orientation, ostensibly tells a representative twenty-four hour day in the life of Jake Jackson, black Chicago postal worker. Its lively surface detail all has to do with the Lincoln Day Holiday, Wright’s informed sense of Chicago’s South Side street and bar life, community dreams of a magical Numbers fortune, meals of grits and sweet potato, and sexual opportunism. In other words, it seeks to map vernacular black style, work and play, joshing and rap, the energies of a city-within-a-city. At the same time Lawd Today moves into, and through, altogether more inward terrain, Jake Jackson as a man spiralling into selfcollapse. The increasing hatred he shows his wife, the valetudinarian Lil, and his inability to control his temper, mark his movement towards the edge, spooked by ill chance, a sense of odds. In fact Jake veers increasingly towards murderousness, the violence of the internal ghetto Chester Himes once strikingly termed “the prison of my mind”. One reality might apparently reside in a Chicago Lincoln Day Holiday with Roosevelt Firesides on the radio, or snatches of popular song, or 43

Ibid., 196. Richard Wright, Lawd Today, NY: Walker, 1963; The Outsider, NY: Harper 1953; Savage Holiday, NY: Avon, 1954; and The Long Dream, NY: Doubleday, 1958.

44

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the bustle of small commerce. But for Jake, inwardly, reality also resides in the realms of a beleaguered psyche likely to erupt into violence at the barest provocation. The documentary format of Lawd Today nothing if not flatters to deceive. Jake’s history situates normal event against abnormal consciousness, an inward war of two realities. *** Whatever its assumed status as naturalist classic the same holds even more for Native Son. For all its crime and punishment drama it carries precisely an “inside” story as “dense and heavy” and full of “shadow” as Wright himself hoped in might in “How Bigger Was Born”. In plot contour Native Son offers Bigger Thomas’ life as tenement upbringing, half-witting murder of his white patron’s daughter, subsequent disposal in the furnace of Mary Dalton’s body and, in turn, flight, murder of his girl Bessie, and trial and defence as developed through the dialectics of Mr Max, his Jewish and Marxist lawyer. But that much, together with Chicago as live urban backdrop, no more than half-locates Wright’s novel: it leaves the fuller achievement of Native Son seriously unmet. Ironically, Native Son has been criticized for not being naturalist enough. James Baldwin, to cite again his “Alas, Poor Richard”, speaks of the novel’s attenuation, Bigger and the others as figures more silhouette than three-dimensional. Even if this were true it suggests not so much a deficit as that Wright was attempting narrative far different in kind from that assumed to be naturalistic. For is not Native Son, against the usual assumption, more Dostoevski than Dreiser, indeed Notes from Underground rather than An American Tragedy? Chicago as city can be real enough, lake and south side, but also and in shared degree it bespeaks a city of mind and senses, the utter correlative of Bigger’s psyche. His violence, from the opening episode with the rat and his bullying of his pool hall friends through to the murder and incineration of Mary and his flight, mimetically follows the course of the cracks and splits deep within his own consciousness. Native Son virtually asks to be read as an exploration of Dostoevskian personality, not to mention Kafka or Céline. The true Chicago of the novel resides more in the splintered city or tenement pent up inside Bigger than in the Windy City of The Projects or Hyde Park. In arguing for this more symbolist reading of Native Son, a number of


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supporting kinds of allusion must do duty for the novel’s procedures as a whole. They have to do with sight, with the image of Bigger as rat, and with exactly the kind of city depicted in Native Son. Not only “The Man Who Lived Underground”, but Native Son looks onward to Invisible Man in its handling of sight as paradigm. The point is born home in a when Bigger considers the implication of having killed Mary: No, he did not have to hide behind a wall or a curtain now; he had a safer way of being safe, an easier way. What he had done last night had proved that. Jan was blind. Mary had been blind. Mr. Dalton was blind. And Mrs. Dalton was blind; yes, blind in more ways than one …. Bigger felt that a lot of people were like Mrs. Dalton, blind … (102).

Bigger’s black world can see him one way, merely wayward if his hard pressed mother is to be believed, a tough street companion according to his pool hall buddies, a lover in Bessie’s eyes. The white world, mirror fashion, equally can see him only in part, whether some preferred object of Mr Dalton’s self-serving largesse, or the proletarian black worker imagined by Mary and her lover Jan, or Mr Max’s example of how Marxism’s scientific history shapes individual consciousness. Even the final chase scenes, across a run-down wasteland Chicago and against which he is silhouetted by the police cross-lights, show him only in part, the formulaic rapist murderer. Bigger’s full human self, even at the end probably still un-recognized by himself, lies locked inside the “faint, wry bitter smile”45 he wears to his execution. Perhaps, too, it lies teasingly present in the white cat that watches him burn Mary’s body (an inversion of Poe’s “The Black Cat”?), the emissary of the Chicago white world that hitherto has so done its defining of Bigger but, just as plausibly, also the rarest selfglimpse of his own blanched identity. The rat killed by Bigger in the opening chapter also sets up a motif that resonates throughout the novel. Its belly “pulsed with fear”, its “black beady eyes glittering”, 46 at once a creature of offence and defence, it might be the very anima of Bigger himself. Will not he become a kind of Darwinian reverse? His own life, the strike or be 45 46

Ibid., 392. Ibid., 9.

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struck alternations, the would-be love yet eventual deadly impact on both Mary and Bessie, acts as the pendulum swings of hunter and prey. Within Chicago’s urban race maze Bigger doubles, or rather self-divides, his own familiar and yet his own stranger. He evolves, but backwards, into rodent predation and death. These inside meanings also lie behind Wright’s three-part partition of the novel into “Fear”, “Flight” and “Fate”, as much notations of Native Son’s parabolic meanings as the apparent drama at the surface. Bigger’s extended last colloquy with Mr Max implies that he has his glimmerings of the process that has made him into human rodent (Wright’s version of Kafka’s beetle?). This, again, is the predator himself trapped by predatory laws of survival. Wright to every purpose images Bigger’s life as not one but a series of enclosures – tenement, basement, hideout, prison cell, his own psyche, each, in the novel’s haunting last phrase, “steel against steel”.47 In “How Bigger Was Born”, Wright speaks of Chicago as “huge, roaring, dirty, noisy, raw, stark, brutal”, 48 that is as the city of the historic stockyards, oppressive summer humidity and the chill polar winds of a Lake Michigan winter. But he also speaks of Chicago as a city that has created “centuries-long chasm[s] of emptiness” 49 in figures like Bigger Thomas. Native Son internalizes this same black city, one of feelings half-understood, incarceration, revenge, the need to strike and maim. To discern in Native Son only an urban-realist drama again evades the dimensions of the novel Wright himself in “How Bigger Was Born” knowingly calls “the whole dark inner landscape of Bigger’s mind”.50 *** Though in no sense failures, both The Outsider and Savage Holiday go adrift and for connected reasons. In the former, Wright cannot resist loading his story of Cross Damon as the black twentieth-century man of alienation, with an accompanying (and intrusive) set of explanations about Angst and the eclectic tradition of outsider-ism. Not only does he repeatedly invoke Heidegger and 47

Ibid., 392. Ibid., xxvi. 49 Ibid., xxvii. 50 Ibid., xix. 48


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Kierkegaard, he glosses Damon’s different murders and assumptions of identity with allusions to Dread, Will, and the Absurd. To this end he imports into the novel another ranking, and suitably articulate, outsider, the hunch-backed District Attorney, Eli Houston. It falls to Houston, as it does to Mr Max in Native Son, to analyse the processes which have made Damon what he is – modernity’s amoral man of will, the dispenser and yet himself the victim of death-in-life. In Savage Holiday Wright’s touchstone becomes Freud, human personality in the form of Erskine Fowler, ex-insurance man eased out of his job to make way for the boss’ son and the object of an almost absurd round of events that results in the death of a neighbour’s young boy. His own glaring sexual repression eventuates in murder, the stabbing of the boy’s voluptuous mother whose easy sexual style causes him torment. As in The Outsider Wright manages a range of strong local effects, but more often he sounds tutorly, essayistic. The relative weakness of both books lies in the fact that he simply will not trust his own tale to do the work. Whether the keystone is existentialism or Freudianism, the inside narrative is made damagingly explicit. Wright’s philosophical interests tilt the novels too much towards idea or thesis over design, inside workings all too explicitly available. *** Fortunately, Wright’s last novel The Long Dream (a sequel Island of Hallucination remains unpublished) shows little blemish of this kind. In part this most likely has to do with Wright’s return to the materials he drew from so convincingly in Black Boy, the Deep South as memory, history, first origins. For Wright organizes the story of The Long Dream, that of Fishbelly Tucker’s childhood and passage into adult identity, without the over-intrusion that flaws The Outsider and Savage Holiday. A major part of the novel’s gain lies in Wright’s meticulous recreation of Fishbelly’s childhood, at once the wholly individual childhood of a black boy in the South whose undertaker father takes care to educate him as best he knows into the wiles needed to survive in the treacherous world of small town Dixie, and at the same time a version of black childhood itself, the dynastic re-enactment of what it means to be black, curious and permanently at risk from white

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authority. Fishbelly, from the first acquiring of his folk name through to his first sexual awakenings, does learn about the world from Tyree, his father. But, a nice touch of contrariety on Wright’s part, he also comes to know that his father’s business exists on deals struck with the Chief of Police, Cantley, and that the town’s tacit and demeaning lines of agreement have been arranged on the basis of white power and black deference. Further, Fishbelly perceives that his father, by running a Numbers racket and brothel, is also embalming his people in life just as he embalms them literally in death in his undertaking business. The chain of events that finally leads to Tyree’s death and Fishbelly’s jailing on a trumped-up sex charge involving a white woman again assumes its own doublings and interplays of colour politics. Fishbelly’s story, in all its twists and detail, offers the chronicle of one life. But it also takes on the more inclusive rituals of black coming of age, the day by day gathering perception of what it is to be man shadowed as “nigger”. Fishbelly’s story undoubtedly plays off Richard Wright’s own. For, like the portrait Wright creates in Black Boy and American Hunger, it refracts in the one life the more collective story of black community in the American South – the untiring spiral of Dixie racism, and yet also, always, black as the necessary counter-weight of intimacy, family, language. It is this impress, a varying geography of feeling as much as of literal place, that Fishbelly, reflexively following Wright’s own footsteps, carries with him to Europe. So working a plethora of memory, the storage of loss and gain, the novel as it closes locates in “the locked regions” of Fishbelly’s heart.51 The Long Dream returns to Wright’s best equipoise of outer and inner narration. Both operate as memorial interplay within Fishbelly, the literal South of black survival against white Dixie phobia, the inside South as a landscape of mind. Both co-exist for him, the contending mix of an America at once home and away. *** In his Introduction to George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953) Wright revealingly calls attention to the serried human layering of black experience in the white west. He implies how impossible it 51

Wright, The Long Dream, 384.


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would be to render that experience to any single measure, be it protest, a version of protest, or the one or another naturalism, or even of Marxism, Existentialism, or Freudianism. But one observation in particular throws light on the multiple reaches of his own best storytelling: The Negro of the Western world lives in one life, many lifetimes …. The Negro, though born in the Western world, is not quite of it; due to policies of racial exclusion his is the story of two cultures: the dying culture in which he happens to be born, and the culture into which he is trying to enter – a culture which has, for him, not quite yet come into being …. Such a story is, above all, a record of shifting, troubled feelings groping their way towards a future that frightens as much as it 52 beckons.

Such a story, one story but intricately drawn from many, points quite exactly to the nature of the inside narrative on offer in Richard Wright’s fiction.

52

George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1953, vi

18 VIOLENCE BECOME A FORM: THE NOVELS OF CHESTER HIMES There is no way that one can evaluate the American scene and avoid violence, because any country that was born in violence and has lived in violence always knows about violence. Anything can be initiated, enforced, contained or destroyed in the American scene through violence; it comes straight from the days of slavery, through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Indian wars, the gunslingers killing one another over fences and sheep and one goddamned thing after another; they grew up in violence …. The only people that the American community has tried to teach that it is Christian to turn the other check and live peacefully are the black people. Chester Himes, “My Man Himes”1

Despite his persisting and highly particular talents, Chester Himes has long continued to be footnoted as an exponent of protest and given to inherited, and considerably anger-fuelled, naturalism. 2 Until his revival in the 1960s this blunt evasion of his forty years of craft and resource speaks worlds of an American mainstream’s resistance to 1

“My Man Himes”, Interview with John A. Williams, in Amistad: Writings On Black History and Culture, eds John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris, NY: Vintage Books, 1970, 66-67. 2 This essay was written in 1972 and originally appeared in 1976 – nearly the firstever critical appraisal of Himes’ writing. Since it is now thought part of the receptionhistory of Himes I have left it largely unrevised except for small additions and revisions from the following: my review-essay, “Hurts, Absurdities and Violence: The Contrary Dimensions of Chester Himes”, Journal of American Studies, XII/1 (April 1978), 99-114; the British Association of American Studies pamphlet Black American Fiction Since Richard Wright, British Association of American Studies, 1983; and Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1998. The bibliographies and footnotes, however, are updated.

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black literary achievement. Canon, hierarchy, was nothing is not raceinflected, a colour-line. Although his imagination is hardly without flaw or unsteadiness, Himes always wrote fiction of considerable claim which explores a vital nerve in American life and which records with passion but also eloquence racism’s damage. If his fiction addresses the unflagging play of racial violence in America, its encasing pressures for those obliged to live out an aggregate identity determined by the crude basis of skin rather than by individual presence and need, it also gives that violence narrative style, its own power of idiom. The reaches of Himes’ abilities, diverse and capable of great wit and humour, from the start have deserved better than his small, if enthusiastic, readership. A veteran of two decades of expatriation, principally in France and Spain, Himes first came into print in the early 1930s with a burst of stories dealing with his prison and city experiences and the novels to follow. He was able to look back on a hugely crowded career that takes in his essays and film-scripts, over twenty pieces of short fiction, a sequence of prose poems for the Cleveland Daily News (1939) and his magazine correspondence and interviews as well as, to date, fifteen full-length novels. 3 His twovolume autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absurdity (1976), gives confirmation to his resolve as a writer, a lifecommitment in despite of family set-back, an early drift into crime, prison, injury, and turn-over in his different relationships.4 Two observations in The Quality of Hurt especially mark out his writer’s credo: No matter what I did, or how I lived, I had considered myself a writer since I’d published my first story in Esquire when I was still in prison in 1934. Foremost a writer. Above all a writer. It was my salvation and is. The world can deny me all other 3

Black on Black, NY: Doubleday, 1973, offers a selection of his stories, essays and the film scenario “Baby Sister”. The early non-detective novels are as follows: If He Hollers Let Him Go, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1945; Lonely Crusade, NY: Knopf, 1947; Cast the First Stone, NY: Loward-McCann,1952; The Third Generation, Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1954; The Primitive, NY: New American Library, 1955; and Pinktoes, Paris: Olympia Press, 1961. All page references, unless otherwise specified, are to the first US editions. 4 Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt, NY: Doubleday, 1972, and My Life of Absurdity, NY: Doubleday, 1976.

The Novels of Chester Himes

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employment, and stone me as an ex-convict, as a nigger, as a disagreeable and unpleasant person. But as long as I can write, whether it is published or not, I’m a writer, and no one can take that away. “A fighter fights, a writer writes”, so I must have done my writing.5

The other, a run of observations made while writing The Primitive (1955), gives something of his estimate of how history has shaped cultural blackness in America. The phrasing, by design or not, nicely echoes Crèvecoeur: The American black is a new race of man; the only new race of man to come into being in modern time. And for those hackneyed, diehard, outdated, slaverytime racists to keep thinking of him as a primitive is an insult to the intelligence. In fact, intelligence isn’t required to know the black is a new man, complex, intriguing, and not particularly likeable. I find it very difficult to like American blacks myself; but I know there’s nothing primitive about us, as there is about the most sophisticated African.6

Himes has never been one to appease, ever and uncompromisingly his own man – even, sometimes, to the point of offence. The title of Himes’s second volume implies a condition he sometimes calls that of the harlequin whose complexity, accordingly, requires an appropriate literary style: I had the creative urge, but the old, used forms of the black American writer did not fit my creations. I wanted to break through the barrier that labeled me as a “protest writer.”I knew the life of an American black needed another image than just the victim of racism. We were more than just victims. We did not suffer, we were extroverts. We were unique individuals, funny not clowns, solemn but not serious, hurt but not suffering, sexualists but not whores in the usual sense of the word; we had tremendous love of life, a love of sex, a love of ourselves. We were absurd.7

5

Himes, The Quality of Hurt, 117. Ibid., 285-86. 7 Himes, My Life of Absurdity, 36. 6

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So contrary a human condition has found in Himes, in his autobiography as elsewhere, one of its shrewder black visionaries. It did not take long for Himes to become something of an expatriate institution for younger black writers (he had an early following in Africa),8 enthusiasm of a kind more usually granted to Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin of the immediate post-war circuit, or to John A. Williams, Nikki Giovanni and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka of a succeeding literary tier. In some degree this belated recognition for a talent reputed to be of minor key derives from African American cultural recovery during the 1960s. More directly it has to do with Himes’ stupendously popular, almost cult, Coffin Ed Johnson/Grave Digger Jones novels, the Harlem detective saga initiated with For Love of Imabelle (1957), re-titled A Rage in Harlem (1965), and whose French re-issue as La Reine des Pommes (1969) in Gallimard’s Série Noire won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.9 8

See, for instance, Ambroise Kom, “Chester Himes et Sembène Ousman: Un Même Message aux Peuples Noirs”, L’Afrique Littéraire et Artistique, 42 /4(1976), 20-30. 9 The detective fiction, to include Run Man Run, has had a complicated publishing history. Titles and publishers have changed, and several appeared in French before American or British publication. In the listing that follows American editions are given first, then French and British. 1. For Love of Imabelle, Greenwich, NY: Fawcett, 1957. The title then changed to A Rage in Harlem, NY: Avon Books, 1965. La Reine des Pommes, Paris: Gallimard, Serie Noire, 1969. A Rage in Harlem, London: Panther Books, 1969. 2. The Real Cool Killers, NY: Avon Books, 1959. Il Pleut des coups durs, Paris: Gallimard, Série Noire, 1958. The Real Cool Killers, London: Panther Books, 1969. Himes’ original title was If Trouble Was Money. 3. The Crazy Kill, NY: Avon Books, 1959. Couché dans le pain, Paris: Gallimard, Série Noire, 1958. The Crazy Kill, London: Panther Books, 1959. Himes’ original title was A Jealous Man Can’t Win. 4. Run Man Run, NY: Putnam’s Sons, 1966. Dare-Dare, Paris: Gallimard, Série Noire, 1959. Run Man Run, London: Frederick Muller; London: Panther Books, 1969; 5. The Big Gold Dream, NY: Avon Books, 1960. Tout Pour Plaire, Paris: Gallimard, Série Noire, 1959. The Big Gold Dream, London: Panthers Books, 1969. 6. All Shot Up, NY: Avon Books, 1960. Imbroglio Negro, Paris: Gallimard, Serie Noire, 1960. All Shot Up, London: Panther Books, 1969. Himes’ original title was Don’t Play With Death. 7. The Heat’s On, NY: Putnam’s Sons, 1969. The title changed to Come Back Charleston Blue, NY: Berkeley Paperback, 1972) Ne nous enervons pas, Paris: Gallimard, Série Noire, 1961. The Heat’s On, London: Frederick Muller; London: Panther Books, 1968). 8.Cotton Comes to Harlem, NY: Putnam’s Sons, 1965. Retour en Afrique, Paris: Editions Plon, 1964. Cotton Comes to Harlem, London: Frederick Muller, 1966; London: Panther Books, 1969. 9. Blind Man with a Pistol, NY: William Morrow, 1969; NY: Dell, retitled Hot Day, Hot Night, 1970. L’Aveugle au pistolet, Paris: Gallimard, Série


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Although Himes always readily acknowledged the hand of Dashiell Hammett the detective writing marks an achievement quite triumphantly his own with vital links back into the five novels he published in America between 1945 and 1955.10 The Harlem Himes puts on the page in the Coffin Ed/Grave Digger fables goes well beyond mere city backdrop to a run of lively potboilers. It approaches inspired surrealism. Harlem is mapped as an urban hothouse mean with exotic hustle and violence and with its own presiding laws of motion and boundaries. At the same time Himes creates a mythical kingdom with properties of magic and violent farce. Though forever unlikely to earn comparison with, say Dickens’ London or Joyce’s Dublin (Chandler’s Los Angeles, Claude McKay’s Harlem, or Baraka’s Newark, offer more precise frames of comparison), Himes’ black Manhattan is charted with rich, and at times enticingly bizarre authenticity.11 With the exception of his jeu d’esprit, Pinktoes, published by Olympia Press in 1961, violence plays into all of Himes’ fiction, violence both quietly corrosive and loudly expansive. The nine Harlem domestic stories, as Himes terms them (only Run Man Run excludes Coffin Ed and Grave Digger), take up and magnify the violence of the earlier books. The Harlem they chart is one approaching implosion, an enclave of urban life constrained into exquisite heat and masquerade with the two detectives fighting a holding action against what, in the two most recent works, threatens as terminal violence. So daunting does he estimate this prospect that he says he has put aside a current novel (posthumously published as Plan B), in which Coffin Ed is killed by Grave Digger, a plot whose politics of graft and wheels-within-wheels, turns the one against the other.12 In later interviews, and with bitter amusement born of long observation, Himes was to warn that if America continues racist abuse at all levels, Noire, 1969. Blind Man with a Pistol, London: Hodder and Staunton, 1969; London: Panther Books, 1971. The detective sequence is admirably studied in Stephen Milliken, Chester Himes, A Critical Appraisal, Columbia, MS: Missouri University Press, 1976. 10 See n. 3. 11 LeRoi Jones writes as follows: “And one can find more moving writing in any of Chester Himes’s bizarre detective novels than in most serious efforts by Negroes, just because Himes’s main interest must be in saying the thing like it is” (Home: Social Essays, NY: Apollo, 1967, 123). 12 Chester Himes, Plan B, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

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the fictional prophecy of a second civil war with its black guerrilla underground could soon move into live reality. His prospectus on the historical magnetism of violence for white America he offers in clearest terms in “My Man Himes”, the 1970 interview with John A. Williams – long a strong admirer of his talent. It is a legacy that presses close, mainly ruinously, upon the black figures at the centre of the novels prior to Pinktoes and provides the assumptions behind the detective writing. Read sequentially, Himes’ first five novels, not always without dips, trace through an unfolding graph of injury, vital energies sapped and ever at risk of corrosion. In view, always, is the black psyche, controlling whiteness, the clash of pathologies. *** To these must be added Himes’ Une Affaire de Viol (A Case of Rape 1963), remaindered immediately after publication and not issued in English until 1980.13 Set in post-war Paris and told with something of the same caustic eye as his thrillers it operates as very much a roman à clef – Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Himes himself all make appearances. The narrative is organized as though in serial-form, almost as if Himes were imitating court documentary. Himes also was to indicate in a number of interviews that the text as it stands in French abbreviated a longer chronicle embracing a far wider circle of expatriate US black lives. The novel opens starkly with the apparent murder in Paris of Elizabeth Hancock, white American society belle, in the company of four expatriate back friends. These find themselves brought to trial and given life imprisonment: Cesar Gee, a twentynine-year-old painter edging into neurosis, Sheldon Russell, Harvard educated journalist and so-called professional Tom, who with others in black American Paris spends a great deal of his time in the Café Tournon, Theodore Elkins, of Creole stock and a politics student at the Sorbonne, and Scott Hamilton, a Himesian writer-exile figure. The hotel backdrop against which Himes sets the death involves all the ingredients of racial sensation. Black males consort with a lone white woman. Much allusion is made to Spanish fly. The drink is 13

Himes, Une affaire de viol, Paris: Editions Les Yeux Ouverts, 1963, English language version, A Case of Rape, NY: Targ Editions, 1980.


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plentiful. There can be no doubt of sexual activity. To the court, acting as if this all were stereotypic sexual appetite, the episode clearly amounts to a racial gang rape and killing. At this point Roger Garrison, dean of the Paris black literary colony, takes on his own investigation. It quickly becomes a rite de passage, obliging him to see his own complicity in the death of the woman (who has been one of his lovers), and to working out the meaning of his friends’ arrest and trial. That Elizabeth Hamilton was not in fact murdered but fell victim to an extraordinary piece of carelessness involving Spanish fly takes second place to the confrontation Garrison has to make with his own status as a famed black expatriate used by white political and cultural circles. Une Affaire de Viol anticipates various hallmarks of Himes’ thrillers – a crime wrongly construed, a syndrome of apparent black rape and arrest. The text speaks to the need to re-sift evidence, the different contours of racial viewpoint. These Himes works into a more seriously pitched theme than any of the Coffin Ed/Grave Digger volumes. The court transcript format subtly helps transform fiction into written evidence or historical witness. In developing this quasijudicial or indeed detective format Himes moves easily between the specific instance of racism now and the larger historical framework out of which it arises. The novel, at heart, concerns two kinds of disaffiliation, racial and literary-artistic. As a writer Garrison is shown to see differently, and of creative necessity, to seek a new language, a new form, for his distinctive vision. Elizabeth Hancock’s death underlines lines of racial separation and forces him to confront the double standards of western race, his own included. A sleuth of sorts, the writer as detective, Harrison’s detective work increasingly takes him into each larger contradictory sexual and power myth. Certainly Himes shows few illusions in the novel about French as much as American racial enlightenment. Among other things, Une Affaire de Viol registers the guilty truce which has allowed selected black Americans, mainly jazzmen and writers, to fraternize with French intellectuals while leaving unchecked French colonial racism and the exploitation of black and Arab workers. Even for American expatriates, as James Baldwin would also give witness, and as the arrest of Garrison’s friends takes place, once a certain line is crossed old racist formulae surface quite as predictably as they might in America. Yet Himes refrains from turning the four into simple models of virtue. He matches their frailties with those of their hosts. As much

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as it examines French racism the novel dares to tackle black racism. If guiltless of murder, Himes’ expatriates are not free of other taints. A number of factors conspired to lose Une Affaire de Viol any wide reception. It was published in French translation, by an obscure press, and went largely un-reviewed. Himes had apparently turned on Paris, especially Sartrean and intellectual Paris which, to its own satisfaction, prided itself on having extended its largesse to himself, to Wright, and other black expatriates.14 Himes, moreover, had treated the image of Richard Wright as less than sacrosanct (Wright himself believed Garrison was an unflattering attempt to portray him). The novel also appeared in the aftermath of Suez and at the height of the Algerian crisis, both events involving, especially for the French, the charged international politics of race as much as imperialism. The times, ironically, rather swamped Himes’ novel even though he was endeavouring to suggest, as in their turn, would both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, that a dangerous and conscious link existed between the domestic racism of most Western countries and their adventuring abroad. The rape in Himes’ title clearly was intended to convey violence well beyond the immediate events of Elizabeth Hancock’s sex-and-drugs death. *** Both men and women in Himes’ early books, nearly all of articulate middle-class stock, find their very sharpness of consciousness punitive. By counterpointing the inner and outer textures of the violence that Willie E. Abrahams aptly calls “the language of white manliness”, Himes avoids formulaic angry novels, though there is anger in all he writes.15 His detective novels are really logical points of arrival for an author to whom violence is both the essential condition, and the essential abuse, of the life before him. Himes should rank as a writer of serious, albeit uneven, accomplishment, a longstanding connoisseur of violence whose fiction was early to lay down its unique challenge. 14 A manifestation of the interest of the Sartre circle in Himes is to be found in René Micha, “Les Paroissiens de Chester Himes”, Les Temps Modernes, 20 (1965), 150723. 15 Willie E. Abrahams, Introduction to William Melvin Kelley, dem, NY: Collier, 1969, viii.


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If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) on first view might rank unambiguously as World War II race narrative, a brittle fable of persecution. But when Franz Fanon cited If He Hollers in Peau Noir, Masques Blancs (1952) as a pointer to how any black male, under racism, might indeed be driven to hit back at the icons of the white world, to violate sexually if need be, he did so in full recognition that this was a novel overwhelmingly careful in design.16 In the case of Bob Jones his life virtually personifies war and peace, conflict lived feverishly in the feelings, on the nerves. Richard Wright, in a review for PM in 1945, was shrewd enough to emphasize the pathologies being explored in the novel: “[Himes] sees too clearly to be fooled by the symbolic guises in which Negro behavior tries to hide, and he traces the transformations by which sex is expressed in equations of race pride, murder in the language of personal redemption and love in terms of hate.”17 The storyline supplies no more than a frame. Bob Jones, black shipyard leader-man, already frayed by wartime racist hostility and taunt, finds himself caught out, eventually, in the spurious rape charge of a peroxide blond migrant worker, Madge Perkins: “She was pure white Texas. And I was black.”18 Beaten to near coma by her white male co-workers, hauled off by the police, he accepts a judge’s summary and wholly cynical offer of the army rather than prison. But the novel’s true edge, its animation, derives from Himes’ portrait of a man forced to hold opposing views of himself. If possessed of a complex interior identity he is also perceived as mere black functionary. If the intimate lover he can readily be mythified as black rapist. In waking life “I had to get ready to die before I could leave the house”. 19 Nightly he finds himself driven to dream his own unmanning or some wildly violent compensation. “No wonder”, he muses, “I dreamed such crazy dreams and woke up full of philosophy”.20 16 Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1952; trans. Black Skin, White Masks, NY: Grove Press, 1970, London: Paladin Books, 1970. 17 Richard Wright, “Two Novels of the Crushing of Men, One White, The Other Black”, P.M. Magazine, Review (Spring 1945). 18 Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go, 124. 19 Ibid., 35. 20 Ibid., 154.

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These dream proliferate, jolting him from “absolute impotence” 21 to different states of euphoria. Three open the novel, those of a wiry but unloved black terrier, a police joke-cum-ruse to catch a black murder suspect thought to have killed a white man, and a black jobseeker jeered at mercilessly by two white workers for not having tools.22 In other dreams he is beaten by “the president of the shipyard corporation dressed in the uniform of an Army general”;23 imagines himself stampeded by swine and mistakenly shooting a .45 revolver at his girl Alice (whose light-skinned gentility, contrarily, lies behind her playing down race and urging him to college and the middle class) to the “sympathetic … smiles of millions of white women”;24 watches a white boy laughingly knife a black boy to death;25 and in the guise of a Western union employee guns down a white shipyard worker who has made him the object of racist abuse. 26 Each acts as the displacement of his conscious life, a warring racial sleep to complement racial wakefulness. In this respect the novel offers an overlap with experiences that might themselves be dream. At the Lincoln Theatre Jones watches “a black audience clapping its hands off for a blind white acrobat”.27 Mention is made to him of a liberal article on race-relations by Eleanor Roosevelt in Negro Digest even as his life implodes. 28 He finds himself caught in a sexual “death embrace” 29 with Madge as love-hate icon. Inner and outer man compete as he struggles from sleep to consciousness and to confront “all that tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes”. Under these conditions, for Bob, everyday life begins to turn surreal, alien, be it the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight, the music of Art Tatum or King Cole, LA’s Central Avenue, or the Zoot Suit riots. Pearl Harbor is said to have led into a racially underwritten “crazy, wild-eyed hatred”. The shipyard suggests to him “a littered madhouse”, its heavy-duty cranes “one-legged, one-armed spiders”. 21

Ibid., 101. Ibid., 1-2. 23 Ibid., 69. 24 Ibid., 101. 25 Ibid., 149. 26 Ibid., 197. 27 Ibid., 6. 28 Ibid., 52. 29 Ibid., 181. 22


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“Bile”, “electric shock”, “fever” and other motor responses well up in him, not least when, so unmanned, he is charged under the rape statutes with brute mannishness He even thinks himself a “sort of machine”, a racial cyborg as it were. 30 Despite his first-hand experience of race lived, as it were, always as inwardly as not, he hears Herbie Frieberger of the Union explain it as a merest footnote to Marxist laws of history and class. A restaurant “filled with solid white America” gives him a note that reads “We served you this time but we do not want your patronage in the future”.31 Conscription, “G.I. Blues” as Peaches, one of the shipyard’s black women workers, calls it, promises more of the same, a war in the name of freedoms denied at home. Another of Atlas’ black workers is made to observe “As long as the Army is Jim crowed a Negro who fights in it is fighting against himself”.32 Bob’s arbitrary, not to say abrupt, entry into the army at the behest of the judge in his rape trial, could not underline the point more. This war of the psyche, and of America’s inlaid codes of black and white, is to be carried into the wars of Europe and the Pacific. For a first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go offers a formidable portrait of race as multiple violence, a war of nerves on competing fronts yet told in a single concentrated story. *** Lonely Crusade (1947), longer, fuller, pursues a more evidently political canvas, but not without Lee Gordon as a man also pushed to the edge. “Fear was the price for living” the novel observes of him at the outset. When, after a run of unemployment, he becomes a union organizer, his elation gives way to apprehension and that, in its turn, to fear that feeds on itself: … when he boarded the streetcar with white Southern warworkers that war spring of 1943, being a Negro imposed a sense of handicap that Lee Gordon could not overcome. He lost his brief happiness in the seas of white faces … he had once again crossed into the competitive white world where he would be subjected to every abuse concocted in the minds of white 30

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 60. 32 Ibid., 120-21. 31

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Gothic to Multicultural people to harass and intimidate Negroes …. And to be afraid, and hate his fear himself for fearing it, and hate himself for feeling it. The fear in him was something a dog could smell … he could see the hostile faces of the white workers, their hot, hating stares; he could feel their antagonisms hard as a physical blow; hear their vile asides and abusive epithets with a reality that cut like a knife.33

The turning wheel of “handicap”, “fear” and “hate” he allows to become sexual aggression towards his wife Ruth, her better salary a humiliation, her body more a source of pain than love. The violation he feels is comprehensive, as psychological as physical. At Comstock he is put to decipher the true face from the false, variously Louis Foster as white capitalist boss, Luther McGregor as black communist stooge and psychopath, Jackie as alluring white decoy, and Joe Ptak, Marvin Todd and Smitty as stalwarts of the Union. At each Hollywood venue he struggles to separate substance from shadow, especially when Rosie, a Jewish-Marxist theoretician in the vein of Wright’s Mr Max, argues for a materialist and class-based view of race. He meets, contrastingly, both a black party functionary as con man like Bart and a black would-be revenge killer like Lester McKinley who plots Foster’s murder. Each cross-racial marriage beguiles yet confuses him. Which is show, fashion, which not? Then there is Los Angeles itself, at once an everyday network of freeways and neighbourhoods with Central Avenue as main artery, yet also, near-phantasmagorically, a “ bloated, hysterical, frantic, rushing city in the spring of 1943”.34 Caught out one way, then another, Lee opts, finally, for the flag of Unionism. Yet the novel leaves little doubt of ongoing violent contraries. White Southern workers resent a Union urging them to transfer their hate from blacks to the white rich. Black workers find themselves sold out by a supposedly race-less Community Party leadership and by black as much as white apparatchiks. Comstock’s management unhesitatingly plays each against the other, corporate divide-and-rule against an already racially divided workforce. In a

33 34

Himes, Lonely Crusade, 4-5. Ibid., 131.


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review of the novel’s political conspectus Ishmael Reed shrewdly observed that, in Lonely Crusade, “Himes is on no one’s team”.35 The novel, for sure, can become sententious, not least Himes’ pronouncements on Communism and Capitalism or the Party and the Union. But Himes’ take on alliances between Jews and blacks, and on black anti-semitism and Jewish racism, have a discomforting acuity. This, however, is not to overlook how Lee’s parlous interior conflicts track those of the larger World War II conflict, not least when he takes up the union banner in the face of a white cop’s pointed gun after Joe Ptak has been felled by the guards. From a literary perspective it also does less than justice to Himes’ turns of speed with voice, wit, dialogue, and the ability to take more than one shot across the bow at any one time. *** Himes never explicitly acknowledges Jim Monroe, the protagonist of Cast the First Stone (1952), to be reconstituted after his death as Yesterday Will Make You Die, as black.36 It has long been thought, however, that he changed Jim’s colour identity at the request of the publisher. At this same time his portrait of the claustrophobia in a federal prison takes on any number of analogies with the ghetto-asincarceration, blackness as white penitentiary sentence. The novel’s outset has Jim deprived of name and history – “After ten days all information relative to my past and future, my body and soul, had been carefully recorded and filed. It had been done grimly and without sympathy.”37 A beginner, Jim gradually learns the ecology of prison routine, the high-temperature emotions of men placed under monitored physical constraint. Even so he gains a position of sufficiency, in some respect triumph, from labourer in the prison’s power-house to favoured cellmate – the latter by a series of sexual and hustling moves. His looks and ease give him presence, a cachet. Even 35

Ishmael Reed, “Chester Himes: Writer”, Black World (March 1972); republished in Shrovetide in New Orleans, NY: Doubleday, 1978, 77-99. 36 Cast the First Stone was re-issued in a reconstructed and unexpurgated edition as Yesterday Will Make You Cry, NY and London: Norton Books/Old School Books, 1998. In his Introduction Melvin Van Peebles writes “Chester saw America unflinchingly too as hilarious, violent, absurd, and unequal – especially unequal” (17). 37 Himes, Cast the First Stone/Yesterday Will Make you Cry, 3. References are to the eralier version.

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so, and whatever advantages he manages, a syllabus of total control guides his sense of time: “Almost all the days belonged to the prison. They were steel-laced and unvarying, shaped and molded for eternity. Another day. And then another.” The fixed limits of Jimmy’s universe Himes terms “stone and steel and concrete”.38 This universe as Himes depicts it, much drawn from his own seven-year detention, smacks at time of Genet’s Notre Dame des Fleurs, one of prison queens, lifers, trusties and guards, men bound into need, touch, or dominance. Only the solace of Jimmy’s lovers keeps the wellsprings of emotion real – Mal Steater especially, who becomes his prison-named cousin, and Duke Dido, the artistic queen who finally hangs himself. Trying to write, wrestling down sexual self-contempt, and playing the card school boss, Jimmy staggers through his sentence as a man without privacy or the fostered confidence of identity. Like the Biblical injunction from which the book takes its title, the prison envisions life as closed circuit, a storehouse of cellular separation. The massive fire that kills a large number of prisoners acts as a powerful emetic to the congested cycle of abusive power in the prison, a further violent image of how repressive systems turn in on themselves and implode. The analogies with racial repression, though implicit, are clear. The outside world Himes keeps only marginally in view. Jimmy gets letters from his mother. Clothes, cigarettes and food are smuggled in on the prison underground. In the main, however, the prison is its own violently inverted world. The reality of cell and yard for Jimmy becomes unreal. Religious liberty is practised in a guarded church. The prison hospital becomes a haven of sexual activity. Human contact turns always parasitic. In Jimmy’s wait for outside life “thoughts of death touched me constantly”.39 When Dido, the prison’s most ravaged queen, writes a story, it depicts suicidal self-affright – “Shadows they are all about me. In the stench-laden corners of my dungeon they are black sentinels at the black gates of death, forbidding me sanctuary.”40 This dialectic of self-enclosure and escape Himes keep sharp, formidable, throughout. Survival in Cast the First Stone is elemental and deeply existential, in kind with a first-person male litany that runs 38

Ibid., 122. Ibid., 298. 40 Ibid., 275. 39


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from Nat Turner to Frederick Douglass and embraces a modern circuit of George Jackson, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver. In treading the paths of prison violence, Jimmy Monroe belongs patently enough with Bob Jones and Lee Gordon in Himes’ gathering of men at once violated and in their turn made violent. *** The Third Generation (1954) acts as the diary record of a family’s decline that works over a number of close autobiographical sources available in The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity. As a novel it lies closer to Truman Capote’s category of the non-fictional novel, personal history only lightly fictionalized. Crowded, at several points slack in laying out its texture – Himes was likely too close to parts of the story – it maps out the decline and fall of the Taylor family, Professor Willie, his wife, and three sons. The Taylors experience a psychologically downward journey yet upwards from South to North. That involves, equally, the mother’s blighting pride in the lightness of her skin (she can pass) and the conviction that it elevates her infinitely above her darker-skinned husband. Her frequent outbursts affect not only her husband, a personable teacher of iron-craft, but also Charles, the youngest son, on whom the novel comes to focus (he is eighteen in the late 1920s). It makes him bitter, resentful. The family’s picaresque, each stoppingoff place through the small-town South, the different vignettes of a childhood at once fraught yet fond, and the eventual migration into urban Cleveland, give spatial definition to Charles’ private awakenings and the parents’ domestic storms. In the distant hinterland, touching the Taylor family only at margins, stands the other face of the Twenties, the wealthier exuberance of flapper and jazz baby whose literary custodian was Scott Fitzgerald. Violence pursues the family. The father, deprived of his professor’s status on the black campuses of the south, dies in a knifing. Tom, the eldest boy, drifts into obscurity. Charles, self-accusing, lonely, an artist in the making, drops out from college into the petty crime that puts him in prison and into the charge of the courts. The mother, for whom the legacies of colour have reserved their most ingenious devising, slows down finally, to end up alone in the city, brooding over her lost dynasty, and fading into senescence. Only

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William Lee, Jr., the son blinded in a gunpowder accident, finds an accommodation with his life. Like Himes’ own blind brother, Joseph Himes, he moves into academia. The cruel freak of blindness removes from his sight, at least, the literal spectacles of segregation and the inwardly turned and contradictory psychological violence of Lilian Taylor as she seeks to make her black family white. The Third Generation, in fact, amounts to an anthology of such fissures, though the book has sweeter rural moments like the slow drive into Delta Mississippi, for instance, or the hallelujah sermon (“Dry Bones in the Valley”). The mother’s wedding night (“She was never able to separate the blackness of his skin from the brutality of his act”41) and the unrelieved fury she feels at the black part of her racial heritage (“she wasn’t white like other white people, because she lived with Negroes” 42 ) lies at the ironic core. But Himes adds supporting irony in the husband and wife mutual slangings (he “a shanty nigger”, she “white men’s leavings” 43 ), from William’s question to his mother, “Are we bad because we’re colored?” and her answer to her sons, “You both have white blood – fine white blood – in your veins”,44 and from the array of incidents which educate the children into the different grammars of racism. Mrs Taylor’s angry impotence, typically at the white dentist’s where she tries to pass or on a train journey in which she refuses apartheid seating, and her swelling skirmishes with the system which places so ambiguous a gloss on her identity (her portrait is done with sympathy) serve as a chorus on the family’s coming rupture and ultimate decay. Mrs Taylor’s need to reverence the imagined aristocracy of her planter forbears causes her to repress the historical rape which blended her colour and brings down an inevitable curtain of violence on her family. The “old bitterness of color” in the book’s repeated phrase, asserts itself in the contending future the Taylors anticipate for their children: “She wanted to rear them in the belief that they were, in large part, white; that their best traits were from this white inheritance. He wanted to prepare them for being black ….”45

41

Himes, The Third Generation, 103-104. Ibid., 95. 43 Ibid., 40. 44 Ibid., 99. 45 Ibid., 170. 42


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Preparing for being black for Charles, amounts largely to an unsuccessful course in survival. Like accusing shadows around him stand his father’s capitulation, the draining anger of his mother, Tom’s disappearance, and William’s sightlessness. Himes gives especial attention to Charles’ adolescence, a portrait of the artist as family disaffiliate. Jim Crow sharpens his awakening consciousness. The sight in childhood of a cart puncturing the body of a woman haunts him like a spectre. Within him lurks a feeling for art and possible imagined worlds. The frustration of these creative drives blisters out into petty crime and his ventures on Cedar Avenue, the city’s numbers-gaming and red light district. The despair brought on first by the divorce, then by the death of his parents, and his resort to the bright-eyed rapacity of the block, a recess of hustlers, pimps and whores, brings on an odd, and contradictory, final enervation. His obvious energies and creativity lie in abeyance, tired and unrealized. In the event Charles/Himes loosened the blockage with a cascade of short stories in the 1930s. But the novel, appropriately, ends on a temporary and foreboding note of quietness. *** The Primitive (1955), originally issued as The End of the Primitive, invites being thought one of Himes’ best accomplishments, its insight into race as psychology in many ways stronger than anything in his previous work.46 The circuits of failure and exhaustion that connect Jesse Robinson and Kriss Cummings revolve through highly controlled shifts of viewpoint and interior flashback. Robinson, who might well be a grown-up Charles Taylor, and his equally ravaged, self-avenging white woman, fight literally to the death a sexual battle whose weaponry is racial taunt and the broken relationships which scar them and their inter-racial circle. The lost weekend they spend together at Kriss’ New York apartment, intensified by visits from other friends and lovers and by fresh deliveries of drink, Himes works as a memory theatre for their two lives. The net of mutual revelation spreads painfully wide, into a hate which was once love and into an accusing past of bad marriages, Kriss’ conquests at parties and in bed, 46

The Primitive has now been restored to its original version as The End of the Primitive, NY: W.W. Norton, 1997. Page references are to this edition.

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and Jesse’s struggles to get published. The whole is pulled together with evident pace and astringency. From the parallel first two chapters that diagnose the linked insecurities of Kriss and Jesse, Himes matches the line of their sexual and racial experience to an interior psychology of ravage. Their weekend’s descent into hell is measured through window and mirror gazing, nightmares, subliminal television newscasts that garble snatches of contemporary history. The fare includes an interview with a chimpanzee as though life has changed into some Darwinian reversal. Consciousness, for both, lies in an ever narrowing circle of gaze, alcoholic dream, and slicks of memory. Jesse especially suffers from his dream-life. The book first mentions him in his dream of drowning in icy water. Kriss depends upon pills, drink, and a compensating run of squires to bolster a psyche that, left to itself, might collapse into chaos. Himes keeps their self-wars, in kind with the sexually loaded love-hate wars between them, as an unfinished drama, with intervals of respite but not resolution the only apparent option. Jesse’s imagination constantly dreams up possible books, a literary steadying to a life marked by split and loss. He casts about for shape to his broken marriage with Becky, the rejections of white publishers, and his false arrest in a car accident. The homosexuals he boards with in a run-down Harlem tenant house, sympathetic as they are, reminds him of the challenges to his own manhood. Kriss, however outwardly more assured in her role of executive in a Madison Avenue foundation bringing already rich students to America from India, looks back in her early morning reveries to a private trail of pain. These include a girlhood abortion, her lost homosexual Mississippian husband, and her demeaning availability to his successors. The circle of relationship increasingly veers into a descending sexual dance. Drink blurs reality. Love reverses into hate. When Jesse stabs Kriss in a miasmic trance it points to Himes’ most nuanced instance of risen violence, identity seized confusedly at an almost inevitable price of murder. The novel shows great assurance in delineating the thrusts of Jesse’s dream life, their incipient violence and absurdist turn. Poe or De Quincey might be heard in one of the more powerful of them: He dreamed he was in a house with a thousand rooms of different sizes made entirely of distorted mirrors. There were


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others besides himself but he could not tell how many because their reflections went on into an infinity in the distorted mirrors. Nor could he see their true shape because in one mirror they all appeared to be obese dwarfs and in another tall, thin, cadaverous skeletons. He ran panic-stricken from room to room trying to find a familiar human shape, but he saw only the grotesque reflections, the brutal faces that leered from some distortions, the sweet smiles from others, the sad eyes, the gentle mouths, the sinister stares, the treacherous grins, the threatening scowls, hating and bestial, suffering and saintly, gracious and kind, and he knew that none of them was the true face and he continued to run in frantic terror until he found a door and escaped.47

Norms for Jesse have become hallucinatory, an American house of oscillating mirrors and contortions. The inflections of whiteness as power, personified in Kriss and her taunts and vampings, draw down into a single locus of pain. Killing her, he finds himself obliged to believe, certifies both efficacy and his membership in an American norm. Only in the act of murder, one life for another, is there afforded comprehension, a coming-to-terms with the bitter paradox of his life: You finally did it …. End product of Americanism on one Jesse Robinson – black man. Your answer, son. You’ve been searching for it. BLACK MAN KILLS WHITE WOMAN …. Human beings only species of animal life where males are known to kill their females. Proof beyond all doubt. Jesse Robinson joins the human race.48

A considerable distance on from Bob Jones’ dream of impotence, Himes completes the graph of violence in his first novels with an appropriate diagram of what has brought murder into Jesse’s soul. Himes’ skills with prose that traps the sting of sensation gives just the right engraving to The Primitive. When Jesse phones the local police precinct with news of what he has done, the cryptic idiom he drops into could well come from a voice out of Grave Digger’s Harlem:

47 48

Himes, The End of the Primitive, 132. Ibid., 205-207.


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“I’m a nigger and I’ve just killed a white woman,” Jesse said, giving the address on 21st Street and hung up. “That’ll get the lead out of his ass,” he thought half-amused.49

The detective work lies close ahead. *** Yet more of the groundwork for the Coffin Ed/Grave Digger fiction was prepared in Pinktoes, Harlem as Himes’ light-hearted mix of tittle-tattle and erotica. An odyssey of sexual puns and scandal, it makes of inter-racial liberalism, the parties and bed-hopping, a comedy to be ranked, perhaps, with Terry Southern’s Candy or with the lighter sexual badinage of Henry Miller or William Melvin Kelley. Mamie Mason, “the hostess with the mostess”, the presiding, and not a little overweight, genius of “la Societé des Mondaines du Monde de Harlem”, gathers about her a motley of publishers, artists, college, and foundation presidents, actors and clerics in hues from the pinkest of pinks to the jettest of blacks. Together with their various paramours and wives she conducts, with appropriate bravura, a sexual barn dance whose antics beautifully undercut the usual solemn masquerades of concern with “the problem”. Pinktoes offers a bawdy tilt at middle-class American urban liberalism. It romps through the sexual and emotional manners of racial good-feeling, an extravaganza with the usually hushed premise that sexual fascination serves as the prime mover for most bourgeois racial contact. *** Read in sequence, Himes’ detective novels unveil a meaner, but still dark-comedy Harlem. Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, his two rough-hewn law marshals with their own approximate standards of justice, patrol an overcrowded kingdom of black life, a gallery of the living violent and bizarre. With the Harlem he took to calling the Mecca of the black, Himes displays a geographer’s scruple for accuracy and detail even to the point of having made regular trips from Europe to New York in a bid to keep his knowledge of the changes in Harlem’s landscape up to date. Ever the laconic archivist 49

Ibid., 207.


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he successfully puts on view the feeling of Harlem’s pulse and argot, its music, dishes and flavours, the sweltering summer landscapes of brownstone and tenement, the motley of bars, whorehouses, churches and pawnshops. No one could doubt an insider’s knowledge of jazz and blues, soul food and pig knuckles. Book after book offers a milling population of preachers and politicians, sober matriarchs and mock-religious prophets, pimps and their chippies, drug pushers and wheel thieves, transvestites and con men, shysters of every kind and sex. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are adepts in reading the deceits and false fronts of Harlem as netherworld, a territory prone to the wildest species of violence. Knifings, acid-throwing, torture to the point of overspill, street-shootings, and throat-cuttings figure most prominently. Careful observation underwrites the complexspirals of crime, violence included, unravelled by his two black guardian cops. Each of Himes’ eight Grave Digger Jones/Coffin Ed Johnson novels, he rightly insists, for all their seeming extravagance, rings true to the spirit of Harlem. Himes’ styling is witty, complicated, and often anarchically funny. These are sagas whose detection goes beyond immediate mayhem, predatory hustle, or even murder. A convoluted but rigorous logic always applies. The two Harlem Sheriffs, as he calls the detectives in The Crazy Kill, have the unenviable task of bringing to some level of tolerable order the eruptive undergrowth of crime and communal self-violence that results from straight-jacketing half a million people into a suffocating urban enclave. Of his novels and their violence Himes himself remarked in a 1972 PBS TV interview “They’re based on one thing; black people want money through crime. They don’t have any choice.” All of the Coffin Ed/Grave Digger novels, and Run Man Run though it does not use the two detectives is no different in this respect, develop ingenious map readings both of Harlem and wider colour-line violence. 50 Whatever the convolution of the given crime, or heist, Himes keeps his stories keyed to a Harlem whose presiding terms of reference he sets out in The Crazy Kill:

50

Run Man Run is perhaps the nearest of Himes’ later work to the straight detective story. At its centre is the story of an undercover white cop, a psychopath, who kills two blacks in a restaurant and then relentlessly pursues a black witness. His violence is linked to the city’s own violence, its own racist creature.

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Gothic to Multicultural Unwed young mothers, suckling their infants, living on a prayer; fat black racketeers coasting past in big bright-colored convertibles with their solid gold babes, carrying huge sums of money on their person; hardworking men, holding up buildings with their shoulders, talking in loud voices up there in Harlem where the white bosses couldn’t hear them; teen-age gangsters grouping for a gang-fight, smoking marijuana weed to get up their courage; everybody escaping the hot-box rooms they lived in, seeking respite in a street made hotter by the automobile exhaust and the heat released by the concrete walls and walks.51

Almost invariably he makes the foreground of the novels an act of macabre violence, an event outrageous to at least one of the five senses. Philip Oakes, in a profile of Himes, after observing that in the novels, “Death is not only seen as grotesque, but grotesquely funny”, offers this sample list of their violent wares: A hit-and-run victim, jammed against a wall, and frozen stiff on a sub-zero night, is stripped of her finery and revealed as a transvestite. Dr. Nubutu, inventor of an elixir distilled from the mating organs of baboons, rabbits, eagles and shellfish, is butchered while arguing the true cost of rejuvenation. A white homosexual, whose jugular has been severed, expires on the sidewalk, remarkable only because he’s not wearing trousers.52

To these choice items, which describe in turn All Shot Up and Blind Man with a Pistol, can be added a transvestite nun with throat cut open in a chase after fool’s gold (A Rage in Harlem); a white King Cola salesman, the flagellant of teenage black girls, shot by the marijuana-high leader of a teenage gang of Moslems (The Real Cool Killers); the death by religious ecstasy of Alberta Wright, a follower of one Sweet Prophet Brown, which puts in train the murderous search for a Numbers Fortune hidden in an armchair (The Big Gold Dream); and the corpse of a headless tyre thief riding the Harlem streets on a motorcycle and crashing into a store with the shop-front motto “We Will Give Credit to the Dead” (All Shot Up). This cryptic

51 52

Himes, the Crazy Kill, 73. The Observer, 29 June 1969.


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resourcefulness of imagination comes over time and again in like situations. Unlikeliest starting points abound, and unravel, for the two detectives whose own arrival at the scene of any crime is itself a mixture of comic high kitsch and genuine threat as in The Crazy Kill: An inconspicuous black sedan pulled out from the kerb and parked at the end of the block unnoticed, and the two tall, lanky colored men dressed in black mohair suits that looked as though they’d been slept in got out and walked towards the scene. Their wrinkled coals bulged beneath their left shoulders. The shiny straps of shoulder holsters showed across the fronts of their blue cotton shirts. The one with the burnt face went to the far side of the crowd; the other remained on the near side. Suddenly a loud voice shouted, “Straighten up!” An equally loud voice echoes, “Count off!”53

“The one with the burnt face” is Coffin Ed, victim of an acid throwing attack that has left him twitchy and psychopathic and whose subsequent skin-grafts make fearsome basilisks to wrongdoers. A Rage in Harlem gives the details. Between them Grave Digger and Coffin Ed preside over a citied black kingdom, its rules and expectations always counter to appearance. They themselves live outside Harlem but have it cross-webbed with stoolpigeons and informants. Their inwardness with Harlem represents an endless bafflement for their white precinct officer, Lieutenant Anderson, who suffers the kind of inadequate optics put to great imaginative effect in the Harlem of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and made over into surreal comic nightmare in William Melvin Kelley’s dem (1967). They observe guidelines of their own making, laying off brothels, numbers, houses and bars intrinsic to Harlem life, but pistol-whipping their way over anybody bringing violence upon an already violated community. Their code Himes sets out in A Rage in Harlem: Grave Digger and Coffin Ed weren’t crooked detectives, but they were tough. They had to be tough to work in Harlem. Colored folks didn’t respect colored cops. But they respected big shiny pistols and sudden death. It was said in Harlem that Coffin Ed’s pistol would kill a rock and that Gravedigger’s 53

Himes, The Crazy Kill, 28.

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Gothic to Multicultural would bury it. They took their tribute, like all real cops, from the established underworld catering for the essential needs of the people – gamekeepers, madams, streetwalkers, numbers writers, numbers bankers. But they were rough on purse snatchers, muggers, burglars, con men, and all strangers working any racket. And they didn’t like rough stuff from anybody but themselves. “Keep it cool,” they warned, “Don’t make graves.”54

The two novels published before Himes’ death, Cotton Comes To Harlem (1963) and Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), noticeably extend the brief of the thriller-detective format of the run from A Rage in Harlem (1957) to The Heat’s On (1961) and with it violence as a presiding theme. Cotton Comes to Harlem, the first also in the film series directed by Ossie Davis with Raymond St Jacques and Godfrey Cambridge in the detective roles, spans out from a death-strewn Back to Africa caper into more inclusive considerations of race-war in Harlem and America at large. Underpinning Himes’ customary recipes of death and violent mayhem lies a pressing regard in this novel for AfroAmerica as history which he brings to focus by making his central and reverberating point of reference a bale of white Alabama cotton. Himes frames his gun battles and violent inflections of the comic-grotesque within a subtle historical parallel. The former is to be met with in the Holy Dream pitch when a thief cuts the skirt from a church-sister’s backside in a bid to get her hidden purse while his accomplice enthrals the good woman with details of a conversation he has held with Jesus in a dream. The latter takes one of several forms in the competition of Garveyism versus the Back to the Happy Southlands scheme run by a crooked neo-Confederate colonel. Himes thus dovetails the cult of Mother Africa into the communal memory of cotton slavery and subsequent black fortunes in America. Harlem is made a point of intersection, deeply explosive, between a chattel slave past, a future bound up with the politics of black nationalism, and a highly dangerous urban present. The task of Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, apart from sorting out the gory complexities of the Reverend Deke O’Malley and Colonel Robert L. Calhoun and their respective gangs, is to keep a harder then usual rein on a situation 54

Himes, A Rage in Harlem, 49-50.


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which brings into visible clash white retrenchment and the political arms of Black Power (the Black Muslims, significantly, appear for the first time in his work). In other words, Cotton Comes to Harlem takes the subject of violence beyond the immediate demands of the detective yarns into the wider reach of the political, or perhaps racial-political, parable. This widening of theme and narrative kind applies even more to Blind Man with a Pistol, the title Himes deliberately chose to emblematize the un-seeing thrust of “all unorganized violence”. 55 Retitled Hot Day Hot Night in the American re-issue, this probably richest in imagination of the detective series, binds together a number of seemingly disparate themes: an inter-racial sex scandal which brings into play Himes’ unflagging genius for the grotesque and comic; a rejuvenation caper with a black Mormon and his wives with leads into syndicate crime; and a spate of protest marches, political and religious, which put Harlem on a nervous, insurrectionary edge. For the first time in the series, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are barely able to contain the flare-ups. Their ambiguous status as black cops is challenged by new wave militants. Tired, obviously aging, the pair learn more clearly than ever that black ghetto crime derives, in large part, from the wider national equations of racism and power. The Afro explosion, the sixties moves to revolutionize black consciousness, lie pressingly to hand. Blind Man with a Pistol makes copious reference to Black Power, to the legacy of Malcolm X, and to city colour-line confrontation and shoot-outs. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed also inject a more explicit political character to their musing in their talk of Malcolm: “You know one thing, Digger. He was safe as long as he kept hating the white folks – they wouldn't have hurt him, probably made him rich; it wasn’t until he began including

55

Himes offers the full origin of the title in a preface to the novel: “A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on a subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today’s news, riots in ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doing in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.”

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Gothic to Multicultural them in the human race they killed him. That ought to tell you something.” “It does. It tells me that white people don’t want to be included in a human race with black people.”56

The violent train of events Himes weaves and counterpoints throughout the novel comes to a turbulent close with a berserk pistol-firing of a blind man. As he flails about at the end of a bizarre chain of events, his contortions articulate the chiliastic threat Himes reads in his times. His gun blasts off indiscriminately, and “everyone thought the world was coming to an end; others that the Venusians were coming. A number of white passengers thought the niggers were taking over; the majority of the soul people thought their time was up.” 57 The blind man suggests confusion and sightless riot. Himes uses him as live figuration of what ensues from white supremacist distortion, a kind of mad, out-of-control revenge anarchy. The detective novels almost cede their place to a prophecy of racial apocalypse in which not even Grave Digger and Coffin Ed can exert a restraining hand. *** Two further observations by Himes himself offer useful angles on his writing. On the origins of violence as root and branch theme in his books he comments: If I had wanted to express my revulsion for violence then I would have made the violence even more repellent, really repellent. I am simply creating stories that have a setting I know very well.58 56

Himes, Blind Man with a Pistol, 142-43. Ibid., 233-34. 58 Nova (January 1971), 52. In this same article Himes is quoted as holding the following political views on violence: “All of the so-called leaders of the Black people in the United States are effectively neutralized by publicity. I have never fully endorsed the black movements although I have supported both the Black Muslims – I was a friend of Malcolm X and the Panthers. I don’t think they will succeed because they are too used to publicity, and a successful revolution must be planned with secrecy, security. Yet there is no reason why 100,000 Blacks armed with automatic rifles couldn’t literally go underground, into the subways and basements of Manhattan – and take over. The basements of those skyscrapers are the strongest part of the 57


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In drawing from “a setting I know very well”, evidently enough, Himes looks to violence personally witnessed and which he takes to characterize the pervasive racist grain of black American experience. The life which gives shape to his writing undoubtedly is violent enough – at the inner level in terms of racist damage to personality and at the outer level in the matching landscapes of ghetto, colour-line, and sheer human blight. We might be grateful for being spared “really repellent” violence. Among, other things, Himes undoubtedly has in mind, as always, the terminal violence of unconstrained racial warfare. Himes’ other comment links violence to the narrative disposition of his detective works: My French editor says, the Americans have a style of writing detective stories that no one has been able to imitate …. There’s no reason why the black American, like all other Americans, and brought up in this sphere of violence which is the main sphere of American detective stories, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t write them. It’s just plain and simple violence in narrative form …. American violence is public life, it’s a public way of life; it became a form, a detective story form.59

“Violence in narrative form” might stand more widely for nearly all of Himes’ novels. In opening up his vistas on violence with so careful a controlling lens, Himes has mounted a record, both in terms of a major theme and in the resources of his narrative form, not to be put aside with complacency. His novels, canny, long seasoned, offer inventive story lexicons, a unique map of racist cost and violence. Early to late they give continuing grounds for attention.

building…This was the novel I was writing, and I don’t know if I have the energy or determination to finish it …. The whites are going to have to back down, and I don’t know if they can bear to do that. I believe in organized revolution with violence as the only way for the Blacks to instill enough fear into the whites to make them back down.” 59 Amistad, Interview with John A. Williams, 48-49.

19 FLUNKING EVERYTHING ELSE EXCEPT ENGLISH ANYWAY: HOLDEN CAULFIELD, AUTHOR The imagination also has a history … the imagination is also part of autobiography. Leonard Cohen, Interview (2006) 1

Few self-accounts, whether autobiography or novel, display quite so ostensibly disaffecting a take-it-or-leave-it bravura as The Catcher in the Rye. From Holden’s opening disparagement of his early childhood as “all that kind David Caulfield kind of crap” through to his last, peremptory “that’s all I’m going to tell about”,2 J.D. Salinger has his narrator sound the very model of scepticism about whether indeed we do “really want to hear about it” (3). Yet given the book’s spectacular popularity since its publication in 1951, clearly only the most obdurate of readers have proved resistant to wanting to hear about it and to Holden’s different virtuoso flights of scorn or dismay or selective approval. Yet however Holden has most come to be regarded – one of the classic isolates of modern times, the savvy but endlessly vulnerable witness to crassness and bad faith, post-war American adolescence itself – he also engages to become the catcher of his own broken self. That is, he invites a conscious, at times near conspiratorial, tryst with his reader, a reciprocal, and so redeeming, companion awareness. In giving notice, at virtually every turn, of the need to establish a usable signature in life, so he shows himself, knowingly or not, as nothing other that the author-in-waiting of The Catcher in the Rye. To that end, and in kind, he consciously and recurrently reaches out to the reader 1

Interview with Leonard Cohen, PBS News Hour Poetry Series, 29 June 2006. J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1951, 3 and 276. All other references will be in the text. 2

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for a mutuality of spirit, the collaborative saving effort of coimagination.3 In part the appeal of the novel accrues to Salinger’s originality in conceiving as his narrator the seventeen-year-old who hovers dauntingly at “six foot two and a half” (3), whose hair has turned its celebrated and premature grey on the right side of his head, and who writes of Pencey Prep and his all but Lost Weekend in New York from his West Coast psychiatric ward in the wake of his nervous breakdown. But, to use a key term from the novel, the “composition” (37) Holden offers is far from some merely offbeat recollections of an endlessly put-upon and precocious teenager. His final composition can be seen as the latest in a trajectory that time upon time has seen Holden composing with quite extraordinary fertility other themes, other selves, other identities. Each, however, has hitherto been of the moment, a spontaneous if never other than highly particular creation conjured into being to meet a required part, or to win or deflect attention, or to fill up the spaces of his loneliness, or, often enough, simply to make good on his sheer creative overdrive. Whatever the occasion, this serial of made-up identities could not be more inviting or more often hugely funny, a kind of inspired, even euphoric, ventriloquy on Holden’s part, and at the same time a set of rehearsals, a repertoire, to be called back into play in the role of catcher as eventual author-autobiographer. In this connection, too, it cannot surprise us that nearly all the qualities and people Holden reveals himself to prize possess a humanity marked out by style, and an authenticity not only of heart or the senses, but also of art. Indeed, these are people like Holden himself – the Holden who can be wilful, contrary, often impossible, yet in a manner insistently of his own making and at odds with whatever is to be deemed dull, conformist, mere formula. Each 3

Oddly, this aspect of Holden has not been much covered in the criticism. But I do want to acknowledge the following: Eugene McNamara, “Holden as Novelist”, English Journal, 54 (March 1965), 166-70, and Warren French, “The Artist as a Very Nervous Young Man”, Chapter 8, in J.D. Salinger, NY: Twayne, 1963, 102-29. Other criticism with a bearing includes Maxwell Geismar, “The Wise Child and the New Yorker School of Fiction”, in American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity, NY: Hill and Wang, 1958, 195-205; Donald P. Costello, “The Language of The Catcher in the Rye”, American Speech, 34 (October 1959); and Carl F. Strauch, “Kings in the Back Row: Meaning Through Structure – A Reading of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye”, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 2 (Winter 1961), 5-30.

Holden Caulfield, Author, The Catcher in the Rye

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“phony”, “an all”, and “crumby” is reiterated as the need to install his own signature as writer or monologist, a signature that would be impossible to think anyone’s but his alone. The Catcher in the Rye, as often enough noted, does indeed thereby yield a portrait of the artist, but one that, more than virtually any comparative narrative, operates to its own performative rules. For a start it makes Holden’s every authorial tic or habit as much an equal part of the narration as almost all the supposedly actual events being unravelled. His inveterate use of “phony” gives one signature as do the mock or otherwise confessional-boastful gibes at his own expense – “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful” (22). Automatically, intimately as it were, he assumes that he has the reader’s ear. Of Phoebe, notably, he can say “You should see her .... You’d like her” (88) or “Old Phoebe. I swear to God you’d like her” (89), phrasing similar to that he uses for his revered lost brother Allie. The animus can work in the other direction, his run of mean, welltargeted judgements. But the same bravura intimacy operates – “Pencey was full of crooks” (7) or “That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat” (72). Holden apparently tells the one story, from Pencey to Manhattan to “this madman stuff” (3), only to reveal himself, fugitively, in the margins, telling another, that in which as if in negotiation he inveigles the reader-listener into sharing the imaginative writing of himself into being. Both stories are told by the ultimately larger self of Holden as author, the Holden who can editorialize gloriously, fire off opinions, imitate screen celebrities or his fellow preppies, or even, as it appears, brazenly flaunt his resentment at all the unlooked-to burdens of writing autobiography. But if any one overwhelming clue can be said to indicate his essential vocation, it has to do with his strongest and most radical symptomatic fear, that of disappearing, be it crossing Route 209 to see “old Spencer” (8) or Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue as he talks to the dead Allie (257). In the very compositional process of making that fear articulate, transposing it from life to narrative, it is being dissolved and conquered, Holden as self-catcher.4 4

See, notably, Charles Kaplan, “Holden and Huck: the Odysseys of Youth”, College Literature, 18 (November 1956), 76-80; Edgar Branch, “Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger”, English Journal, 44 (September 1957), 313-19; If You Really Want to Know: A “Catcher” Casebook, ed. Malcolm M. Marsden, Chicago, IL: ScottForesman, 1963; and Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, ed. Joel

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Analogies have been much proposed for The Catcher in the Rye, few more so than Dickens’ David Copperfield, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Each as a rite of passage, the journey of a life, clearly share similarities, whether in respect to the ingenuous narrator or the encounter with experience as reversal or transformation. But Salinger’s novel perhaps belongs more precisely with those fictional autobiographies that show their protagonists discovering their truest being in the call to authorship and in the self they consciously fashion as the words precariously, yet inevitably, take sequence upon the page. Memorable as each is, Copperfield, Huck, and Dedalus tell their stories from positions of retrospect (even Copperfield with his opening query of “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life … these pages must show”). Holden comes over as altogether more extemporaneous, his account more volatile and rapid. Or so Salinger persuades us to feel. Holden’s essential styling of things – his every transition, dissolve, off-the-cuff commentary and wisecrack – could hardly fail to implicate his reader from first to last in the heady business whereby, and as for the first time and in the mirror of his own composition, he

Salzberg, Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1990). Other relevant criticism includes The Fiction of J.D. Salinger, eds Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958, 1979; J.D. Salinger and The Critics, eds William F. Belcher and James W. Lee, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1962; Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, ed. Henry Anatole Grunwald, NY: Harper, 1962; Studies in J. D. Salinger, Reviews, Essays and Critiques of “The Catcher in the Rye” and Other Fiction, eds Martin Laser and Norman Fruman, NY: Odyssey Press, 1963; Warren French, J.D. Salinger Revisited, Boston, MA: Twayne, 1988; James E. Miller, J.D. Salinger, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1965; Juan José Coy, J.D. Salinger, Barcelona: Editorial Fontanella, 1968; J.D. Salinger, ed. Harold Bloom, NY: Chelsea House Books, 1983; Ian Hamilton, In Search of J.D. Salinger, NY: Random House, 1988; Elizabeth Kurian, Religious Response to The Existential Dilemma in the Fiction of J.D. Salinger, New Delhi: Intellectual Publishing House, 1992; Paul Alexander, Salinger: A Biography, Los Angeles, CA: Renaissance Books, 1999; Margaret Ann Salinger, Dream Catcher: A Memoir, NY: Washington Square Press, 2000; Stuart A. Kallen, Understanding The Catcher in the Rye, San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 2001; With Love and Squalor: Writers Respond to The Work of J.D. Salinger, eds Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller, NY: Broadway Books, 2001; Letters To J.D. Salinger, eds Chris Kubica and Will Hochman, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002; Alsen Eberhard, A Reader’s Guide to J.D. Salinger, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002; and Michael A. Sommers, J.D. Salinger, NY: Rosen Publishing Group, 2006.


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sees himself whole and clear. In no way can he ever disappear again, even if he does “sort of miss everybody I told about” (277). To some extent an experiment like Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein’s invention of herself through the persona of her Paris lover-companion, bears a resemblance to The Catcher in the Rye.5 Stein’s modus operandi, however, the one self refracted in the gaze of a co-self, goes only so far. Two other American first-person classics, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, however unlikely as they might at first perhaps be thought, come closer. Both, in an overall sense, obviously tell a larger historic story, that of black American odyssey, whereas Holden’s is one story taken from a life of Pennsylvania white privateschool and a background of the affluent Manhattan of both his parents and of clublands and cocktail bars. But they do so in a manner, and with an improvisational daring, of a kind. Both black texts depict a self, in the face of historic denial, discovering – making – itself as it goes along, a self that, as it moves from identity at the margins to selfpossession, becomes increasingly aware of its own figuration in writing. No one would suggest Holden to be the exact fellow traveller of Ellison’s black underground spook or the oratorical whirlwind who becomes Malcolm X. But the story Salinger offers in The Catcher in the Rye delineates a figure who equally, and equally powerfully, draws the energies of self-discovery into his own narrative. This drama of self-inscription in and of itself thereby becomes the parallel of all Holden’s other doings at Pencey and in Manhattan. Not the least part of it, furthermore, is that whatever Holden’s protestations to the contrary, his is a finished autobiography, a story posing as a fragment but wholly complete in its beginning, middle and end. It would do less that justice to who he is, or at least to who and what he has become, and to Salinger behind him, to think otherwise.

5

Fiction that poses as autobiography, to be sure, has a long ancestry. Other American examples would include James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an ExColored Man (1912), John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) and Ernest Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). Given the analogies I suggest between African American fiction and The Catcher in the Rye, it cannot come as a surprise that all these texts were written by black authors. One might also invoke Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre.

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Holden, then, takes to the writer’s life out of several kinds of necessity. Despite the contrariness of his signing off – “I am sorry I told so many people about it” (277) – his composition inscribes nothing less than a path from fissure to psychological health. Literally and figurally, he re-writes himself. The self-enacting privileges of authorship, moreover, give him his occasion as for the first time to elicit pattern, order, from what throughout his troubled young life has overwhelmingly been isolation. Writing counters this isolation by giving him access to a community that, in the act of reading him, equally and of necessity affirms him. It serves as apotheosis, the artist writing from the fullest wellsprings of his being and so un-prostituted (4) – the jokily risqué term he uses about his Hollywood screenwriter brother, D.B. He has made one world into another, one prior self or circle of selves into another. Acknowledging the author in Holden thus becomes a critical necessity in seizing the full measure both of the tale he tells and of himself as teller. From start to finish Holden qualifies as the performing self, in Richard Poirier’s phrase, “authorly” to a degree in how he sets up terms and conditions for his story. 6 Nowhere does he do so more cagily than in the opening of The Catcher in the Rye, where his mock brusqueness in saying what he won’t do – “I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything” – and the equally mock doubts about any readerly good faith we might be assumed to possess – “If you really want to hear about it” – combine not so much to put us off as positively to commandeer our attention. “Where I was born”, “my lousy childhood”, and “anything pretty personal” about his absentee parents are to be withheld, though not, apparently, the happenings behind this “madman stuff” and his being “pretty run down” (3). How better to stir curiosity or put before the reader guidelines as to what is to follow? His every denial and insistence betrays the authorly Holden, a narrator about his duties with all the scriptural energy of one who can do nothing to stop the storytelling impulses with him. D.B., the brother who “used to be just a regular writer” but who on Holden’s estimate is “being a prostitute” (4) in Hollywood, similarly helps to position Holden as author. D.B. has forfeited this regularity 6

Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life, NY: Oxford University Press, 1971.


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for the movies, for the Jaguar, and we learn at the end, for “this English babe” (276) who comes with him to visit Holden. But he once wrote “this terrific book of short stories” whose title piece “The Secret Goldfish”, Holden has taken to because it delineates a body of private feeling strongly held, that of “his little kid that wouldn’t let anybody look at his goldfish because he’d bought it with his own money” (4). As narcissistic as the kid may be, he has made of the goldfish a thing of his own, an icon or even artwork. D.B. also points ahead to remind us that Holden comes from a family of writers, not only himself as the Hollywood prostitute but Allie who wrote poems on his baseball mitt and Phoebe who composes her Old Hazle Weatherfield detective stories. All the Caulfield siblings, in fact, are compulsive fabulists, imaginers, self-inscribers. *** That pattern recurs, from the Pencey to the New York scenes, a live tableau of impersonation. The interview with Old Spencer has rightly been admired as a comic tour de force, from the “ratty old bathrobe” (11) worn by Spencer and the unwanted “terrific lecture” about “Life is a game” (12) through to the Vicks Nose Drops and the dazzlingly awful nose-picking (13). As a parody of dead rhetoric and set-piece counselling, the episode works to perfection. But in addition to the comedy, it also serves to open up another round of perspectives on Holden as author. Whatever else Holden has failed, he has “passed English”, or, as he says in his note added to the exam answer written for Spencer on the Egyptians, “It is all right if you flunk me though as I am flunking everything else except English anyway” (17). A boy who can wonder where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter or see through received cliché – “Game, my ass. Some game” (12) – might well pass English. In the first instance he is about the search for some kind of benign spiritual principle and in the second about the quest for a language untrammelled by inertness or mere hand-medown phrasing. He seeks an English that expresses him, his situation, not that of phony institutionalism. Little wonder, then, that Holden also shows himself as a virtually insatiable reader. If he can act out his contribution for Spencer, assuage the history teacher’s need to play the stentorian, he has books in plenty to draw upon. Not only has he been exposed to “Beowulf,

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and old Grendel, and Lord Randal My Son, and all those things” (144), but to a literary syllabus as extensive as it is various. David Copperfield he brings into play in his first sentence. Clad in his red hunting hat while rooming with Stradlater he reads Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa – “I wouldn’t mind calling this Isak Dinesen up” (25). Within a trice he adds to the roster Ring Lardner, Somerset Maugham, and Thomas Hardy – “I like that Eustacia Vye” (25). On the train to New York he delivers himself of his thoughts on “those dumb stories in a magazine” (70), obviously no fan of tabloid popular culture. The sex book he has read at Whooton, “lousy” as he thinks it with its view “that a woman’s body is like a violin and all” (121), comes pressingly to mind as he waits for his prostitute at the Edmont Hotel. He delivers himself about his views of the Bible – “I like Jesus and all” but the Disciples “were about as much use to Him as a hole in the head” (130). With the nuns Thomas Hardy again comes into his mind: “you can’t help wondering what a nun maybe thinks about when she reads about old Eustacia” (144), and Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar. He remembers a discussion of Oliver Twist in a film seen with Alice, a novel obviously familiar to him. His meeting with Carl Luce has him invoking Rupert Brooke and Emily Dickinson as, incongruously, a pair of “war poets”, and in turn Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (“a phony book” [182]) and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (“Old Gatsby, Old sport. That killed me” [183] as his eye for style causes him to remark). With the nuns in New York he gets into a discussion about Romeo and Juliet (144). For good measure, given the novel’s title, he throws in Robert Burns, the writer from whose ditty he has conjured up his fantasy of himself being “a catcher in the rye”. All those allusions he contrives to wear lightly, passing stopovers as might be in the passage of his own gathering imagination. In fact, they speak to him from within the community he will shortly join, that of authors and artists who also, and at every daring, have made over the world on their own creative terms. A key moment in the process manifests itself in “the big favor” solicited of him by Stradlater, namely a “composition” that can be about anything “just as long as it’s descriptive as hell”. More than a little revealingly, Stradlater instructs him not “to stick all the commas and stuff in the right place”. In part, this advice is to cover up Holden’s authorship, but as Holden himself realizes only too well, it typifies how neither Stradlater nor much of the rest of Pencey has the


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faintest appreciation of what “English” (36-37) means. The date with Jane Gallagher, who for Holden is the girl individualized by keeping her kings at the back at checkers but for Stradlater is no more than another sexual scalp, stirs in him the memory of Allie, live or dead his one dependable imaginative ally alongside Phoebe. Unsurprisingly he chooses to write about the mitt, the poems in green ink “written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere”. Holden, moreover, writes in his “pajamas and bathrobe and my old hunting hat” (49), as if costumed for the job like some suitably updated Victorian or Sherlock Holmes man of letters. Everything he pours into his description, predictably, is wasted on Stradlater, flush as the athlete is with recent sexual conquest and with concerns a universe away from whatever Holden may so delicately seek to encode about Allie’s death – his traumatized night in the garage and the near selfmutilation of putting his writing hand through “all the goddam windows” (50). “I sort of liked writing about it” (51) he confides, almost shyly, and as though dimly and understatedly aware that he has been caught about his most intimate and essential business. Authorship, whether he likes it or not, pursues him. Literal authorship, however, is one thing. Holden also revels in authoring himself in other ways. He plays the student penitent for Spencer, the scholar-prince and then canasta player for an uncomprehending Ackley, the imagined “goddam Governor’s son” (38) who prefers tapdancing to government, and then the no-holds-barred pugilist for Stradlater. On meeting Mrs Morrow, he becomes Rudolf Schmidt, the name borrowed from the dorm janitor as he discusses Ernest Morrow with Mrs Morrow when they share a compartment on the train journey between Trenton and Newark (71). This latter impersonation once again underscores Holden’s drive to invention, the relentless transition into charade and hyperactive fabulation. His version of Morrow as “adaptable”, “one of the most popular boys at Pencey”, “original”, and “shy and modest” (73), not only plays to a fond mother’s heart, but also shows Holden on a great improvisational jag, one invention barely put forward before another follows suit. His lie, too, about leaving Pencey early on account of needing an operation for a “tumor on the brain” smacks of a matching versatility of invention, alibi-ing as an art, as in turn does his excuse for not visiting the Morrows in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on account of a promise to see his grandmother in South America (75). He even

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starts reading the timetable to stop inventing or lying – “once I get started, I can go on for hours if I feel like it. No kidding. Hours” (76). He cannot resist, too, trying on the role of club car roué, a man who knows his cocktails and has the chutzpah to ask Mrs Morrow to join him. This is wit, style, all to symptomatic good purpose. More authoring, literary and otherwise, however, lies directly ahead as Holden alights at Penn Station and embarks upon his weekend picaresque in New York. *** “I’m traveling incognito” Holden tells the cab driver who takes him to the Edmont Hotel and who is the first of the two drivers who have to field the questions about where the ducks go when the Central Lagoon freezes over in the winter.7 Much as Holden gamely affects to apologize for the B-movie implications of the “incognito” of the opening phrase – “When I’m with somebody that’s corny, I always act corny too” (79) – it again emphasizes his uninhibited and everburgeoning passion for invention. Doubtless the loneliness that tears at him always, together with his fear of disappearance and sheer nervous fidget, propel him ever more into impersonation, a masquerade of identities. Yet whatever the source, they mark him out as a peerless and habitual fantasist. Are they not, also, instance for instance, the contrivances of a self that as yet is truly incognito, that of Holden as yet again author in waiting? Each con-man routine and verbal sleight-of-hand bespeaks authoriality, the inventing self alongside the invented selves. Is there not, even, a hint of the embryonic author in Holden’s query to the cabbie about which band is playing at the Taft or New Yorker and about joining him for a cocktail – “On me. I’m loaded” (79)? For this is Holden as returnee Manhattanite, lounge-lizard, the glad-hander fully, and again precociously, knowing in the city’s ways and willing to say the hell with expense. That he is under age to be drinking

7 The comparison with Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man again is greatly suggestive: “I’m shaking off the old skin and I’ll leave it here in the hole. I’m coming out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless ….” Invisible Man, New York: Random House, 1952, 503. Both the Prologue and Epilogue in Ellison’s novel likewise underscore the narrator’s play of incognito and counter-incognito status.


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merely points up the affectation. But who Holden truly is, in this vignette as elsewhere, indeed does lie incognito. Yet even his role-playing risks eclipse when he witness the routines being acted out at the Edmont. One window reveals the transvestite recomposing himself as a woman and then “looking at himself in the mirror”. Holden does not fail to note that he is “all alone too” (80). A second window exposes him to the “hysterics” of the couple squirting water in each other’s mouth, with a possible third party just out of view. “Lousy with perverts” is Holden’s reaction, much as he concedes that this “kind of junk is sort of fascinating to watch” (81). But mere voyeur Holden is not. He wants, indeed needs, to be in the action, the absolute participant observer. To watch this urban cabaret relegates him to consumer not maker. Within a trice he is back to his own efforts, the would-be suitor to Faith Cavendish, burlesque stripper and Eddie Birdsell’s one-time date. Much as he fails to talk her round – “I should’ve at least made it for cocktails or something” (86) – it leads him on to the person he knows to have a truly creative centre, none other than his fellow writer and infant sister, Phoebe. “Old Phoebe”, Holden muses, “You never saw a little kid so pretty and smart in your whole life” (87). But no sooner has he made an inventory of all that makes Phoebe an object of passionate fondness for him – the straight A’s, the short red hair stuck behind her ears, her “roller-skate skinny” body, her ability to speak Robert Donat’s lines in The 39 Steps and stick up a finger with part of the middle joint missing – than he also adds a detail as close as could be to his own impulses. Alongside D.B. and Allie, “a wizard” (88), Phoebe is a writer. Holden gives the information as follows: Something else she does, she writes books all the time. Only, she doesn’t finish them. They’re all about this kid named Hazel Weatherfield – only old Phoebe spells it “Hazle.” Old Hazle Weatherfield is a girl detective. She’s supposed to be an orphan, but her old man keeps showing up. Her old man’s always a “tallattractive gentleman about 20 years of age.” That kills me, Old Phoebe, I swear to God you’d like her …. She’s ten now, and not such a tiny kid any more, but she still kills everybody – everybody with any sense, anyway. (89-90)

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Holden recognizes in Phoebe not just a sister but a figure whose creative quirks amount to perfection. She cannot finish her stories. She gets her proportion all out of joint (the twenty-year-old father). The name Hazle is either an inspired abbreviation or a misspelling, not to say an ironic echo of Faith Cavendish’s Cawffle for Caulfield. And she makes her detective an orphan with a parent. The logic here, for sure, is that of a child’s imagination, the logic of spiralling fantasy more than hard fact or chronology. Holden recognizes in it the same authenticity as in D.B.’s “The Secret Goldfish” or Allie’s poems in green ink, a Caulfield energy of imagination by which he, too, is wholly possessed. Nonetheless, his own compositions have still supposedly to take written shape, even though they are in fact being realized even as he describes Phoebe and every body else. His other authoring goes on, however, as unstoppable and fertile as ever. He tells “the three witches” (91), Laverne, Old Marty, and Bernice, with whom he drinks and dances in the Lavender Rooms, that his name is Jim Steele, that if not Peter Lorre, then he has seen Gary Cooper “on the other side of the floor” (96), and that “sometime” he will look them up in Seattle (98). But when, once more rebuffed, he again calls to mind Jane Gallagher, it is as another literary ally, another fellow traveller in the ways of the imagination. She may well lose eight golf balls, be “muckle-mouthed” (100), keep her kings at the back, be “terrific to hold hands with” (103), and get hold of his neck at the movies, but she also has a redeeming affinity with composition and the written word. Once again Holden alights on aspects of someone else that mirror his own writerly alter ego: She was always reading and she read very good books. She read a lot of poetry and all. She was the only one, outside my family, that I ever showed Allie’s baseball mitt to, with all the poems written on it. She’d never met Allie or anything, because that was her first summer in Maine – before that she went to Cape Cod – but I told her quite a lot about him. She was interested in that kind of stuff. (100-101)

Jane belongs in a companionship of style, and Holden responds accordingly. Like D.B. before the prostitution, Allie, and Phoebe, she recognizes and opens to the things of the imagination. Others, too, will embody this for Holden: the piano player Ernie (“He is so good he’s almost corny” [104]) even though he later becomes critical of the


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piano-playing; the two nuns (one of whom teaches English); “this colored girl singer”, Estelle Fletcher, whose record of “Little Shirley Beans” he buys for Phoebe (149); Miss Aigletinger who took them to the Museum of Natural History (155); “Old James Castle”, who was bold enough to tell Phil Stabile he was conceited, would not take it back, and was driven to jumping to his death at Elkton Hills school (a boy, significantly, with “wrists about as big as pencils” [221]); and Richard Kinsella, who during “Oral Comp” always gets derided for his digressions (of which Holden observes, “I mean it’s dirty to keep yelling “Digression!” at him when he’s all nice and excited” [238]). Like all of these, Jane appeals to his need for alliances against the dead hand of uncreativity and phoniness. His trip to Ernie’s, and the Catch-22 conversation en route in which the cab driver, “old Horwitz”, tries to find the logic of his question about the Central Park ducks, again calls into play Holden’s skills as literary impresario. Unwittingly Horwitz comes close with “If you was a fish, Mother Nature’d take care of you, wouldn’t she?” (109). “Old Ernie” he quickly marks down as a phony, a mere exhibitionist rather than legitimate piano-player who is given to “putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass”. He hates the clapping, the instant “mad” applause. He even, teasingly, thinks of himself as “a piano player or actor or something” to the effect that “I wouldn’t want them to clap for me….I’d play in the goddam closet” (110). From instinct, Holden knows that good music, good writing or good art in general, needs a right, intimate, true response and not mere noise. But such surrounds him, especially when he runs into Lillian Simmons who asks him about D.B. who “used to go around with” (112) her for a while (“In Hollywood”, she gushes, “How marvelous! What’s he doing?”). Lillian he can just about tolerate, but not the “Navy guy” with her. In a last wonderfully black stab of invention he reduces Lillian’s date to some comic book one-syllable name – “Commander Blop or something” (113). His experiences with “the elevator guy” (119) Maurice, and the hooker Sunny, might be thought a case of art outrunning life. Holden’s virginity, his sex-book good manners as he thinks them when the girl gets to the room – “‘How do you do’, I said. Suave as hell, boy” (122) – his parlour game attempt at conversation in the guise once again of “Jim Steele”, and his excuse of having had an

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operation on his “clavichord” (126) hovers between pathos and French farce. When Maurice returns for the rest of the money, he knows just whom he is dealing with, however (“Want your parents to know you spent the night with a whore?”[134]). “A dirty moron” Holden can call him, but he cannot act his way out of getting slugged (135). What, typically, he can, and does, do, is re-invent himself as a movie hero, a bleeding, tough guy private eye. He acts out in life what he will go on to act out in his writing: About half way to the bathroom, I sort of started pretending I had a bullet in my guts. Old Maurice had plugged me. Now I was on the way to the bathroom to get a good shot of bourbon or something to steady my nerves and help me really get into action. I pictured myself coming out of the goddam bathroom dressed and all, with my automatic in my pocket, and staggering around a little bit. Then I’d walk downstairs, instead of using the elevator. I’d hold on to the banister and all, with this blood trickling out at the side of my mouth a little at a time. What I’d do, I walk down a few floors – holding on to my guts, blood leaking out all over the place – and then I’d ring the elevator bell. As soon as old Maurice opened the doors, he’d see me with the automatic in my hand and he’s start screaming at me, in this very high-pitched, yellow-belly voice, to leave him alone. But I’d plug him anyway. Six shots right through his fat hairy belly. Then I’d throw my automatic down the elevator shaft – after I’d wiped off all the finger prints and all. Then I’d crawl back to my room and call up Jane and have her come over and bandage up my guts. I pictured her holding a cigarette for me to smoke while I was bleeding and all. The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding. (135-36)

As pastiche Chandler or Hammett or Erle Stanley Gardner this would take more than a little beating, film noir from an expert. But Holden is also scripting his own part, the author (and here the film-director) insinuated into his own text. The pathway towards the writership ahead once more has been carefully indicated. It is so again, in Holden’s meeting with the two nuns as he awaits his link-up with “old Sally Hayes” (137). His mind drifts effortlessly across his life present and past, Sally with her flurry of words like “grand” and “swell” (138) and the recollection of Dick Slagle who


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pretended Holden’s suitcases were his own at Elkton Hills (despite Holden’s gesture of putting them out of sight under his bed). Slagle has taken refuge in the word “bourgeois” (141), an intended put-down of Holden, but as tired a form of language as Sally’s schoolgirlisms. In encountering the nuns, however, Holden again finds himself recharged by their evident genuineness, the one next to him especially with her “pretty nice smile” (143), her warm thank you for his contribution, her being an English teacher, and perhaps most of all her enthusiasm on hearing “English was my best subject”. As much as he cannot resist two digressions of his own – on what a nun thinks about the “sexy stuff” in The Return of the Native or Romeo and Juliet and on his father’s one-time Catholicism – he recognizes in his listeners a decency that all but humbles him (144). He also upbraids himself for having even to think of money in connection with them and for blowing smoke in their faces. “They were very polite and nice about it” (147), each nun as unfeignedly charitable about his rudeness as about not bringing Catholicism into the conversation. Holden writes of them as of Jane, or Phoebe, or the hat-check girl, two authentic religious women for whom one of his wilder performances would be wholly wrong. Holden’s next foray into a literary arena, or at least something close, arises out of his date with Sally Hayes (“the queen of the phonies” [152]) to see Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the Broadway benefit show I Know My Love. No sooner does he buy the tickets than his mind takes off on acting, the whole nature of performance itself. He thinks as a veteran of bad or unauthentic performances – those of Spencer, Stradlater, Ackley, Buddy Singer from the Lavender Room, Old Ernie, and white girl singers of “Little Shirley Beans”, among others. The latter, who lack Estelle Fletcher’s “very Dixieland and whorehouse” feel (149), can also be compared with the “terrific whistler” Harris Macklin (167) and the “swell” kid he hears “singing and humming” Burns’s lines “If a body catch a body coming through the rye”. The child’s obvious un-phoniness “made me feel better” (150). Such are the touchstones for his dislike of “acting” (“I hate actors”) and his irreverent slaps at Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (“too much like a goddam general, instead of a sad, screwed-up type guy” [152]). Holden’s own touch of Hamlet also, no doubt, plays into these judgements, his own need to find out how exactly to act for himself.

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The other touchstone he turns to lies in the exhibits in the museum, un-actorly “glass case” art that does not “move”, is “warm”, and is free of all the “dog crap and globs of pot and cigar butts from old men” (153) that deface Central Park. Performance as seen in the museum, whether the Indians rubbing sticks or the squaw with the bosom weaving a blanket or the Eskimo fishing or the deer and birds, all strike Holden as things that “should stay the way they are”, natural and “forever” as indeed exhibits in a natural history museum might be expected to be (158). His verdict on the Lunts has exactly to do with unnaturalness. They overact, or rather “didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors”. Theirs are performances whose off-centredness he rightly thinks “hard to explain” (152). Matchingly hard for him to explain to Sally is his own performance: his hatred of the “dopey movie actor” type he sees at the intermission and of Sally’s Ivy League “buddyroo”, even of Sally herself (164). On he persists, however, through the rising and frenetic inventory of New York, taxicabs, Madison Avenue buses, “phony guys that call the Lunts angels” (166), and his own experience of boys’ prep schools. But when he tries to author an alternative, Sally and himself as pastoral homesteaders in Massachusetts and Vermont (171), he finds himself speaking, writing, in the air, cut down by the unimaginativeness of Sally’s response. Their exchange ends in disaster (“I swear to God I’m a madman”), but as he takes stock he also thinks that at the time of “writing” his script for Sally and himself “I meant it” (174). Holden, once again, has become most alive, and most himself, in creating yet another imagined world. Nor does Holden find his direction from the two would-be mentors he seeks out, Carl Luce and Mr Antolini. Both betray him, or at least fail to grasp the essential human and creative purposes behind Holden’s turning to them. Luce he has been drawn to because he knows, or pretends to know, the mysteries of sexual life. He also possessed “intelligence” and “the largest vocabulary of any boy at Whooton” (193). But Holden suspects him from the outset of being a “flit” himself, a mere “hot shot” parader of his own ego and vanity (186). As to Antolini, his betrayal cuts even deeper. Yet another English teacher, he has won Holden’s admiration for trying to talk D.B. out of going to Hollywood and for being his best teacher. But he also has his not-so-hidden purposes in calling Holden “you little ace


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composition writer” (237), in welcoming him to the Antolini apartment for the night, and for playing the sage with his citations from William Stekel on “brilliant and creative men” (244). The game is revealed in his homosexual pass, that “something perverty” (249) which for Holden is not only sexual but also a sell-out of all the seeming literary advice he has had served up to him by Antolini. Only in Holden’s own will to make good on the artist in himself, Salinger invites recognition, lies redemption. The pointers in this direction are given in abundance. Holden tellingly casts his mind back to D.B.’s conversation with Allie about war writing and about Rupert Brooke, Emily Dickinson, Ring Lardner, and The Great Gatsby. Out in the park again looking for ducks he starts “picturing millions of jerks coming to my funeral and all” (200). At his parents’ apartment he goes into his “bad leg” routine for the new elevator boy (205). In Phoebe’s room he experiences a near shock of recognition on reading the entries in her notebooks, one stylist’s salute to another. She, in her turn, understands the broken record pieces he is carrying for her; the significance of his “I passed English” (217); the parable of James Castle and Holden’s related catcher fantasy; and what they are about in dancing the “four numbers” to her radio (228). The “something very spooky” (256), his fear of disappearing on Fifth Avenue, serves to indicate the ebb before the storm, his lowest point. Not only must he erase all the “fuck you’s” from the walls in order to make a world worthy of health to the other side of the “dizziness” and “crazy stuff” that threatens his very existence (262). “Mad”, euphoric, certainly, though he appears in company with Phoebe on the carrousel (that modern incarnation of a medieval art pageant) as it plays “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (273) in the rain, Holden can in fact combat his fear of disappearance only through art, authorship. What better apprenticeship, after all, could anyone have served? *** “That’s all I’m going to tell you about” (276) may be his parting shot, but it is an all of whose variety, drama, or fascination, there can be little doubt. Only an author of his vintage, too, could offer the advice “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” (277). In making text of life, “goddam autobiography” (3)

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of experience, he has taken charge of himself as both observer and participant. Willingly or not, he has become the person he has most sought out from the beginning, and who in return has most sought him out, none other than Holden Caulfield, author.

20 THE PLACE WE HAVE COME TO: THE LATE FICTION OF ROBERT PENN WARREN Since my idiot childhood the world has been trying to tell me something; there is something hidden in the dark. Robert Penn Warren, “Three Darknesses” 1

Reading Penn Warren through Meet Me in the Green Glen and A Place to Come to, his two final novels, is to be reminded not only how durable has been the career that announced itself so early and strikingly in John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929), Thirty-Six Poems (1935), Night Rider (1939) and the co-founding in 1935 with Cleanth Brooks and others of the influential Southern Review but how much of a piece most of his work has been philosophically. 2 Both these last novels, the one a species of latter-day Hawthorneian romance, the other the fictionalized autobiography of a displaced Southern intellectual, take up themes that have long been the hallmarks of all Warren’s writing. These look to the self born unbidden into its time and place and obliged to confront its destined identity. They deal in the stubborn intractability of the world’s facts in the face of the levelling great design or narrow idealism (John Brown, for Warren, clearly personifies the idealist turned fanatic). And, inevitably, they summon the South – most evidently that of Kentucky, Tennessee and the old Confederacy of his origins – as an especially irresistible complex American fate, a deeply inward, echoing history and sense of place. 1

“Three Darknesses, ”The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, ed. John Burt, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988, 529. The poem originally Appeared in The New Yorker, Feb. 5, 1983, 40. 2 Meet Me in the Green Glen, NY: Random House, 1971; A Place to Come to, NY: Random House, 1977.

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Other interests, to be sure, have captured Warren’s imagination, nor formulated abstractly, do these convey the local detail or distinctive, muscular idiom through which Warren has given them voice. But one way or another, they recur throughout his books, whether Warren the fiction-writer, or the prolific lyric and narrative poet, or the critic and public essayist. They were there as interests discernibly enough during the early Fugitive years with Tate, Ransom, Davidson and the Vanderbilt circle, as Warren has made clear in several of his interviews, and throughout the Agrarian period which produced his notorious, and for many indefensibly cautious and reactionary, contribution to I’ll Take My Stand (1930).3 Notions of the loss of identity in a dislocating modern industrial order and a countervailing belief in an historic Southern community run through all his work. Fact as against idea, an opposition notably explored in All the King’s Men, equally operates. A basically tragic theory of history shapes his racial and historical writing, especially Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956), its sequel, Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), and The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (1961). Warren’s literary tastes, not only for Shakespeare and the Elizabethans who have held his attention from the outset, but for philosophical writers like Coleridge and Conrad and of his American forebears for Hawthorne, Melville, Dreiser and Faulkner, play their part, his inclinations towards stoicism, the pre-ordained sway of time and history. If, however, there has been agreement on what interests have drawn Warren, there has been far less agreement on how good a writer and thinker he has been overall.4 One constituency took to regarding 3

Robert Penn Warren, Interviews 1950-1978, NY: Random House, 1978. Relevant criticism includes Leonard Casper, The Dark and Bloody Ground, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1960; Charles H. Bohner, Robert Penn Warren, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1964; Paul West, Robert Penn Warren, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1964, Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers; Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. John L. Longley, Jr., NY: New York University Press, 1965; Barnett Guttenberg, Web of Being: The Novels of Robert Penn Warren, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971; Richard Gray, The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977, Marshall Walker, Robert Penn Warren, NY: Harper And Row, 1979, Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Richard Gray, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980, especially Tjebbe Westendorp, “A Place to Come to”; and James Justus, The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1981, 125-31. 4

The Late Fiction of Robert Penn Warren

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him as one of America’s leading literary all-rounders, a figure of startling versatility. Another thinks the poetry, notably Brother to Dragons (1953) and Promises, Poems 1954-1956 (1957), eclipses everything else. Yet another holds that Warren as fiction-writer, especially on the basis of All the King’s Men (1946), marks his strongest dimension, a born storyteller whose fluency exactly serves his tough, existential philosophy. Whichever is right, Warren certainly attracted honours – the Pulitzers given unprecedentedly for both his fiction and poetry, an enviable harvest of other prizes, and the distinguished academic career that from 1950 installed him at Yale. Through to his death in 1989 there seemed few signs of flagging. Poetry, fiction, lectures, if not more criticism, continued to flow. The last novels, for admirers, cap a wholly distinguished career, begun in the 1920s a step behind the great American Modernist generation of Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and confirm him as a major presence for whom fiction reflects but one aspect of his manifold talent. There has, however, been the altogether less hospitable view of Warren. This sees him as essentially a second-rater, a mind trying too hard on limited resources. He is to be granted his great energy, a way with anecdote and the local effect, but does he in fact offer anything profound? If in his fiction he can do a story, or people his narratives in lively manner, is he not finally too diagrammatic, the literary Southerner as would-be historian dressing out his tales in philosophical high seriousness and bent at all costs on driving home this or that point about illusion, or determinism, or human folly? All ten of his novels, together with his uncollected stories and those published as The Circus in the Attic (1948), met with mixed critical returns.5 Even All the King’s Men, and its fellow bestseller, World Enough and Time (1950), despite their stupendous popular success and the acclaim granted from within academic high quarters, failed to appease the doubters. A novel like Band of Angels (1955), however, was sure and certain proof. Here was pure magnolia, gilded 5

In sequence the novels are Night Rider, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1939; At Heaven’s Gate, NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1943; All the King’s Men, NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1946; World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel, NY: Random House, 1950; Band of Angels, NY: Random House, 1955); Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War, NY: Random House, 1961; Flood, NY: Random House, 1964; Meet Me in the Green Glen, NY: Random House, 1971, and A Place to Come to, NY: Random House, 1977.

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Southern melodrama born of the same stock as Gone with the Wind. Similarly Warren was held to have fallen flat in The Cave (1959), laboured Platonic allegory which altogether overloaded its occasion, the Floyd Collins cave tragedy of 1925 in Kentucky. In Wilderness (1961), Warren also gave hostage to fortune. His story of a Bavarian-Jewish innocent brought to recognition of his and Civil War America’s fallen estate simply failed to convince; again one of Warren’s allegories too obvious in its designs upon the reader. Warren, in fact, has long been subject to rebuke. One typical unflattering phrase applied to his fiction was “drug-store Gothic”, by which was meant that all too easily he gave himself to writing shot through with sub-Faulkner cadence and to emotions awkwardly in excess of the facts.6 Thus Warren’s regional world of memory, his dark and bloody ground of stored-up passions, the Civil War, the south of both mansion and backcountry, was never the match of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, or Flannery O’Connor’s bible-driven Georgia, or Eudora Welty’s family-dynastic Delta. Earlier in his career his politics as a southerner earned him no small obloquy, especially in I’ll Take My Stand, but they were also subsequently seen to have shaped the holy writ of New Criticism, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943). In playing down the historicity of literature in favour of a formalist aesthetic, Warren – and Brooks – were held to have extended their narrow conservativism into a view of literature that rendered it vapid, a preference for pattern at the expense of life. Nor were matters helped by Warren’s popular reputation. Paradoxically, the work that reached his widest readership, All The King’s Men, became the victim of its own myth. As each succeeding version made its mark, the film, the play, and the widely-viewed TV opera, so the original novel tends to recede with the effect that Louisiana’s historical Huey Long has somehow blended into Warren’s Willie Stark. An odd hybrid of life and art as a result has fixed itself somewhat hazily in the public mind as all Warren’s own creation. The very fact of popular success, furthermore, still gets taken as evidence of an art lost to any real seriousness. Warren can hardly escape the force of these misgivings, though some are patently unfair and others 6

Wallace W. Douglas, “Drug Store Gothic: The Style of Robert Penn Warren”, College English, XV/5 (February 1954), 265-72.


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risk being over-stated. No doubt it can be said that any writer willing to take as many chances as he has, and in so great a variety of forms, inevitably courts unevenness, even outright failure. Meet Me in the Green Glen and A Place to Come to, as late fiction and given how they represent Warren’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses, especially serve in seeking to arrive at the balance of his achievement. If the former attempts a modern romance of sorts, in effect an anti-romance set in a Southern valley, do not the Italian opera motifs, the doomed liaison, cause it to veer toward melodrama, even bathos? Does not A Place to Come to, with Jed Tewksbury as professorial narrator, and its weave of introspection and low comedy of manners, score or lose for Warren? Tewksbury, whatever else, belongs with Warren figures whose quest for moral identity comprises little short of a gallery. They begin with Percy Munn in Night Rider (1939), include Jack Burden in All the King’s Men, and follow in figures like Beaumont in World Enough and Time, Sumpter in The Cave, and Rosenzweig in Wilderness. Where Warren has always been impressive – his strong sense of story-line and creation of worlds grounded in precise, physical observation, his different uses of memory and great splashes of vernacular – is also to be found in these two novels. But he is also prone to his typical defects, the tendency to over-schematize his materials or to press his own interests at the expense of the story. In Meet Me in the Green Glen, he sets a classic hollow man, Murray Guilfort, in opposition to his two lovers, a lost soul who risks becoming an over-easy target despite all the variety of traits Warren attributes to him. In A Place to Come to the laconic voice of Jed’s mother in Dugdon, Alabama, and the dips into bawdy, both of which play against the narrator’s intellectuality, can read as if contrived, too ready an ironic opposition. Neither novel is uninteresting nor fails to display genuine occasional sureness. But in the event that might not be quite enough, especially if Warren is to be measured against his own professed masters, Conrad to Faulkner. *** The kind of circumstantial yet mythic world of Meet Me in the Green Glen is indicated early, as Angelo Passetto, the Sicilian born parolee who has violated the code of paesano by naming and thus

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dooming his countryman, Guido Altrocci, after a fatal gas-station robbery, walks into Spottwood Valley. His may have been the betrayal of innocence rather than bad faith, but Guido’s accusing cry of traditore and Angelo’s subsequent jail sentence, haunt him into a wish only for stillness, “the privacy of a dream” (46). Warren depicts Spottwood Valley as at once recognizably actual, a sizeable family land-holding in Tennessee with creeks, woods, game and seasonal change, but also as Hawthorne’s neutral territory of romance. Even as Angelo enters, Warren invokes “spotchy, slidingdown grayness”, as if the “mist and drizzle”(3) were a curtain temporarily pulled aside to admit both one of the novel’s main players and the reader. The description of Angelo also introduces the valley’s other casualty of history, Cassie Killigrew Spottwood, obliged to nurse in silent ritual the once robust body of a husband who married her lovelessly in girlhood only for brute sexual convenience and who lies inert and in decay, felled by a stroke. His only remaining gesture is “that sound” (47), a low, throaty animal groan as grim residue of the feckless, healthy animal who has once been Sunderland Spottwood. Amid the “hollow shadows” of the Spottwood house, a mansion with more than slight recall of the Pyncheon home in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Angelo and Cassie against apparent odds of background, language and age (he is twenty-three, she is over forty) find a love which for a moment bids to hold time in abeyance. It gives meaning to the Green Glen of John Clare’s poem, the lyric, fabled place of the full heart. It is a love at first far more Cassie’s than Angelo’s, and also shot through with disjuncture, silences, nervous moments of sexual fantasy and apprenticeship and, Warren obliges us to see, betrayal. All of these elements, more or less, are contained in the following with its hint of mystery and the story’s implicit violent resolution: For how could they, who belonged to the real world, ever enter the privacy of a dream? For this was a dream: Angelo Passetto had walked up the road, in the mist and gray rain, and suddenly he was here where nothing resembled the real world he had known. Here were the hollow shadows of the house, with the scurry of rats in the room overhead. Here the always shut door to the room where he had ever been and from which he could hear, sometimes, that sound. Here that woman with the shape you could tell nothing about…and with all the hair piled up,


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dark hair that, in a crazy way, you wished were gray, and with that white face that turned those black eyes on you like you had done something and they saw right into you. (46-47)

As elsewhere in the novel, and consciously or otherwise, Warren takes his chances. How close is he to writing Dixie gothic formula, the decayed mansion haunted by living ghosts? Or does the description persuade, a congruence of the intense surge of love about to be narrated with setting, especially when added to with the shifting atmospheric colours of the enclosing valley? For in Angelo and Cassie he unquestionably intends romance, a love to recall the mythic dimensions of, say, Heathcliffe’s love for Cathy in Wuthering Heights. As the plot gets under way with the sexual encounters in the house, and the strange, contrapuntal pattern of events that puts Angelo in court accused of murdering Sunder with a knife, Warren moves inexorably closer to the novel’s climactic high moment. That lies in the striking cries both Angelo and Cassie utter at the trial, transcending their mutual betrayals, the avenging, wrongful indictment of Angelo, and Parkerton’s fascinated small town witness to a love beyond its own known standards. Cassie’s confession of guilt, in blatant contradiction of the court’s judgement, her own guilt, lies less in having herself murdered Sunder than in having betrayed the spirit of the Green Glen, her rapturous love for Angelo. Angelo turns to her, before all in the court, and, using the endearment he has reluctantly come to use in their wayward passage through and beyond the enclosing shadow of the Sunderland home, for a last time calls her “piccola mia”. The expression is pitched as though the epiphanic equivalent of Cathy’s “I am Heathcliff” or Billy Budd’s “God Bless You Captain Vere!”. Like dream itself, each cry penetrates the elaborate web which has wrapped itself around the pair, and which the novel refracts through the prying witness of Parkerton and through each of the other principal characters. This mutual, transfiguring courtroom shock of recognition, and the dream it bears witness to in Spottwood Valley, is, of course, in itself melodrama, tragic melodrama since Angelo will die in the electric chair and Cassie sink into dementia. Warren just about brings it off, though not without a price, especially the references-back into the sexual scenes in the house and the clipped, B-movie language of the pair’s awakening to each other and to themselves. This is the lyric

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poem at the heart of a fragment of Tennessee history. It calls for a fine act of narrative balance, partly but not wholly accomplished by Warren, an essentially nineteenth-century romance over into modern psychological narrative. The love affair has won its fair degree of attention. Warren suggests the novel’s chronology to be that of no-time into time. Cassie’s love aids the recovery of her beauty as she calls it. The betrayals (Sunder’s with the mulatta Arlita, Angelo’s with their daughter Charlene) give the story a line of counterpoint. But for all Warren’s patterning and the imagery of locked and unlocked selves, the lyricism puts the balance of the novel at risk. Cassie and Angelo may meet, love, even learn the histories encoded in their respective names. But they also are given to act out second rate Carmenism. She wears the red dress, black underwear, beads and rouge bought in Parkerton by Angelo, he acts out the role of Latin suitor with sleekeddown black hair and manicured shoes. Sexual opera truly threatens. Each midnight encounter and the Freudian shots about corridors and the incarceration of self weaken the narrative. “It wasn’t till I knew how I had always been locked up that I knew how you had felt” (148) Cassie tells Angelo. Cassie’s inside and outside voices, as she calls them, and all the shadowy deliquescence of the outside night scenes Warren alludes to in relation to the psychology of his lovers, once more smacks of over-insistence. When, for instance, Cassie awakes from her living sleep to find herself re-born into history, Warren cannot resist a springtime scene in which chicks hatch in an old incubator, as artificial a note as the newly fertile hens in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Angelo’s adolescent mooning over Charlene similarly rings false. He re-invents her as virgin madonna to be protected by his courtly manhood. In turn, Cassie watches all, and is watched herself by the wraithlike Arlita, learning of Sunder’s sexual betrayal just as she is learning of Angelo’s. She then forgives both Angelo and Charlene, only to pull back at the last minute and accuse the Sicilian of killing Sunder. Her further court-room reversal just about comes off, but the risk is that of histrionic licence. Some of these deficiencies are mitigated by the way Warren roots the action both in the house and the valley. Warren’s ability to render landscape has always been one of his powers, in his poetry probably even more so than in his prose. He locates the valley both as a place


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visible to the outward perceiving eye, but also as inward terrain and nowhere better than, again, in Angelo’s arrival: Long ago a great stream had cut through the heaved-up limestone to make this valley. The valley had been made, and now the great stream was shrunk to a creek that rose in the hills to the southwest, then swung northerly. The creek was nothing to what the great stream had been, but in flood, even now it would come roaring down the boulder-strewn bed. On the left bank of the stream, to the west, reared the bluffs, sometimes showing the gray of limestone, streaked black with lichen, and sometimes covered with woods…opposite the house there were woods from the creekbank willows to the skyline, where now the grayness of sky tangled in the bare, black boughs of oaks. On the right bank, around the house, the land spread out level, then sloped up in the distance. Fields had once been on the slope, but now were gone to weeds and brush, with faraway woods scarcely visible in the slow-coiling mist and deliquescent torpor of the land. A road lay between the creek and the old fields. A man was coming along the road, moving southward against the direction of the creek’s flow. (5-6)

This is not exactly Egdon Heath nor Faulkner’s mythical kingdom. But it does make for credible imaginative geography, especially when Warren explores links between human feeling and their reflection in the domain of Nature. The intimation of time’s natural order as against Angelo’s broken life makes a persuasive contrast, “the creek’s flow” to be set against his citied alienation. The point is emphasized when Angelo goes out at night and takes a stalk of cress that has been crushed underfoot and frozen. In his thawing of its “icy shape” lies the clue to his own thaw back into humanness. The scene works because it can draw on Warren’s larger allusions to the natural order, the particularity of the Valley: With one finger, he touched the free curve of the stalk that arched from ice back to its root. Carefully, he pinched off the stalk at the root and began to lift it. The foot track of bright ice came with it, keeping its shape. He held it high, letting the moonlight shine on it, even through it. He lowered the ice into the flattened palm of his left hand…Then, all at once, with a fierce exhalation, he thrust his now parted lips against the icy

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Gothic to Multicultural shape. It shattered soundlessly beneath that kiss. He shut his eyes and held his face pressed against the fragile coldness. He held it there until the ice had completely melted and his face was wet. (187-88)

Where, in depicting the house, Warren too often gives way to laboured metaphors of imprisonment, corridors, hidden crevices and pipes, his nature passages let the writing stand on its own terms. The novel’s surface of wrongly accused lover, Cassie’s flight through the night to beg for Angelo’s release, needs to draw upon and contrast with precisely this kind of quietness. Angelo is set within nature in a way Cy Grinder, Cassie’s hill-boy first love, is not. When, as the novel opens, Cy is seen to have shot a great deer (dubbed Sandy Claws by Angelo), the killing signifies bad faith, an animal shot only for the trophy. By the end of the novel, largely from the example of Cassie’s shining love for Angelo, he has become the Valley’s game warden, possessed of a commitment to change and the future personified in the sleeping form of his daughter. Angelo’s scene is the more successful because it avoids this too ready contrast. As always, Warren supplies a full supporting cast for his novel, each of whom sees mirrored in Cassie’s lyric, violent passion for Angelo, an image of their own desire. The achievement again is mixed. Cy Grinder generally works as a portrait, from redneck Gatsby (“an un-tarnished Adam walking the new earth with the breath of the Worldwide Correspondence School blown into him” [77]), to the awakening given him by Mrs Killigrew in the aftermath of a car accident which has put her daughter Cassie in hospital (“the words that fell from that bony apocalyptic face were the blaze of truth”[79]), to his flight out of the valley into eight years of the west and revenging contempt for the life he once thought definitive by marrying Gladys Peegrum, a woman as ungainly in form and personality as her unfortunate name suggests. The subsequent trajectory works equally well. Cassie’s call upon him to help her escape the nursing home and its sedation arranged by Murray Guilfort through the shabby-genteel Miss Edwina Parker persuasively enough brings into focus their past relationship. She reminds him of how he acted falsely to her, abandoned her in another hospital after the accident, and how they might now be a long married couple. His abiding sense of life’s opportunity missed comes over at strength:


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“If you hadn’t walked out that door,” she said, “and never even turned your head. We might be sitting here just the same, like now. Maybe we live in Parkerton, and you an engineer working for the power company. Maybe we’re driving back from Nashville, been to see our boy in college over there. Maybe we just got hungry on the road coming home…” In the men’s room, he stood in front of the mirror and saw the heavy, roundish, weathered face there above the thick neck and the popped button of the shirt collar, and stared into the pale, flat eyes that regarded him with outrage… Gy Ginder stood and thought how his whole damned life had been working to bring him here to stand shivering, locked in a can like he was afraid, saying, now, now, for if you could just live now, no backward and no forwards, you could live through anything. (324)

Cy’s angry stasis links back to Angelo’s wish to not “think of anything” (6) and Cassie’s “always being locked up” (148). Yet more it locates Cy as a man who has earned his right to self-knowledge. In Leroi Lancaster Warren does less well. Parkerton’s liberal man of conscience, he personifies the well-meaning seeker after justice who, despite himself, cannot help not seeing in the union of Cassie and Angelo the sexual apotheosis he had once hoped for with his fullbosomed, calm Episcopalian wife Corinne. Lancaster’s displacement of sexual drive into good works, his furious defence of Angelo, the letter written to the ACLU in hopes of calling attention to the wrongful conviction, and his magazine article bent upon exposing Dixie justice, just about pass. But when he experiences psychosomatic chest pains on seeing “the full shining” (275) of Cassie’s face in her love for Angelo the text gives way to yet another interfering extra touch. Warren depicts him as “the new Leroi” (342), in part by his blunt refusal of a job in Murray’s law firm and in part by becoming an unexpected father, as if the reader were in need of a live symbol of regeneration. Murray Guilfort, Sunder’s attorney and ostensible first and best college friend in whose devious largesse lies Cassie’s fate, is a further instance of where Warren can write to impressive good effect yet with annoying over-insistence. As given in the novel he is quite Warren’s most interesting, or potentially interesting, figure, the man who seeks refuge from his own inadequate self in a lie and then orders his life, acquiring great power and advantage en route, to that lie. In Murray’s

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abiding envy of Sunder’s “flushed face” and “ruthless self-fulness” (133) lies the clue to his life. Sunder is the strong will and body he lacks, the brute alter ego who has seized Cassie as he takes seizure of the life about him, He is the figure who has early seen Murray wholly for what he is, craven, a hanger-back and tepid personality. Murray’s revenge, his saving myth of self, is to cast himself as Cassie’s protector and Sunder’s loyal bondsman. Married to the wholesome Bessie (who sweats inside her clothes and grows fat), a backroom arranger of things who purchases the illusion of sexual grandeur from a succession of Chicago whores, Murray will willingly pay out of his own pocket for the maintenance of the Sunderland estate, self-created evidence of his efficacy. On is own appointed reckoning it situates him to advantage in a world that has cast him as a man without qualities. The novel first reveals him “in a gray suit well buttoned up” (20), appropriate clothing for a figure of hidden self. Each manoeuvre, whether seeking to deprive Cassie of Angelo, or the ritual witness over Sunder’s body, or defence of Cassie and placing her in the ambiguous care of the sanatorium, or even his rise to Attorney General in the State after his spirited public defence of his own actions towards Sunder at the trial, brings on quite literal heartburn, destruction from within. His evasions and side-steps, however, cannot deflect what he sees in Cassie’s face in the aftermath of her midnight flight to save Angelo: “In the world there was no place to flee, from the joy on the face of Cassie Killigrew Spottwood. The world was full of people” (363). Left only to take care of Arlita and ponder the burnt-out rags of Cassie’s red dress and Angelo’s last prison letter to Cassie, he becomes death-in-life, the very creature of the schemes of which in public he is so apparently the master. Warren invests him with a vernacular specificity, but, as often in the novel, in the closing scenes that send Murray to his suicide, overdoes the portrait. The final twist is to have the news of Murray’s death seen on television by Cy Grinder. Meet Me in the Green Glen cannot be thought other than a novel where Warren’s best resources consort uneasily with his typical penchant for disallowing the narrative its space. Each strength thereby becomes bound up with, virtually a condition of, an accompanying defect. Where he is strong, the variety of contributing detail and the


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pace, there is also the intruding hand, the upshot at once a beckoning and yet an inadequacy. *** “We are all stuck with trying to find the meaning of our lives, and the only thing we have to work on, or with, is our past” (15). So Jed Tewksbury, the unremitting voice of A Place to Come to, blends his professional interest in the past as a medieval historian with his need to discover a designing purpose to his life in the present. Warren spoke of the novel as a strong personal favourite, no doubt in part because the narrator’s career so closely resembles his own. For like Warren, Tewksbury is a writer and scholar-professor who has left his native South, the fictional Dugdon, Alabama, is also twice married, and is the like of his creator both physically and in his early precocity and keen intellectual appetite. Through him, Warren addresses nearly all his better known concerns, especially the necessity for self-knowledge and the ways in which history shapes and is shaped by the individual life. He also attributes to Jed a fund of down-home folk savvy, making him the aphorist of sorts with an occasional keen edge to his tongue. Jed’s historical interests allow Warren to use the medieval world order, and Dante as its pre-eminent custodian in The Divine Comedy, as the backcloth against which to depict not only the cupidities of Jed’s own life but his perceptions of larger twentieth-century malaise. In the novel’s moral scheme, as in T.S. Eliot’s before, Dante thus stands for a supposed medieval organic world order that throws into sharp relief modern fragmentation. No centrifying body of belief or agreed cultural standard holds. As Jed’s eventual friend, Stephan Mostoski, physicist and Polish-Jewish survivor of the holocaust whose survival has depended utterly on his changes of identity, bears witness: “We are merely feeling the first pangs of modernity…the death of the self which has become placeless” (296). In seeking a place to come to, Jed joins earlier Warren journeyers, the self in search of its own centre yet also communion beyond itself. But if Jed is Warren’s latest everyman, he is an everyman of marked intellectuality. That in itself is no necessary drawback, but Warren again insufficiently keeps his own editorial distance. Jed’s autobiographical life he discloses as too relentlessly discursive and

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self-aware. The result is that as much as A Place to Come to is concerned to take measure of modernity, it suffers Warren’s, and through him Jed’s, encroaching hand at every turn, an almost preemptive strike against the reader’s critical distance. In this Jed is never the fictional equal of his fellow professor, Bellow’s Moses Herzog, say, or to put the novel yet further among its literary betters, the colloquists in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. However insistently Jed, or his mentor Stahlman, or Mostoski, speak of alienation, the loss of self, or the shadow cast by recent history, the note more smacks of seminar than discussion credibly grounded in the dynamics of the text. As always in a Warren novel A Place to Come to manages a density of local world, including a story-within-a-story not unlike the Cass Mastern episode in All the King’s Men. It would also be remiss not to note the story’s momentum or how adept are the uses of flash-back and different organizing motifs. Yet it remains, almost stubbornly it might be said, a novel that leaves one unsure whether Jed has also come to more than a fairly unexceptional, sentimental accommodation with his life. When Moses Herzog ends up temporarily in abeyance at his Ludeyville retreat, it cannot be doubted that his manic engagement with things will resume in no short time. With Jed, the reader has only the final arch and indulgent letter written to his former wife, not in itself an unlikely gesture, but inadequate as an ending to the expectations raised by the novel’s drive towards an understanding of the self caught up in the contraflows of history. Jed, however, does go home again to his southern origins, partly to face his dead, the mother he has not seen in a quarter-century and the father who died his legendary, drunken death. In so returning to “the matter of Dugden”, as the novel calls it, he does so as Warren’s man of sorrows who declares his reconciliation with his past. Chicago professorial savant, failed husband and “racketeer” as he terms himself, he sees in his son Ephraim the means to a separate peace, sufficient to forgive Old Buck, his sexual-vagabond father, and the wheel of personal and historic circumstance that has brought outward academic honour but inner remorse. The story of his life between his departure from and return to Dugden carries its full play of episode and counterpoint. That embraces the academic migration north and scholarly tutelage under the expatriate German classicist Dr Stahlman with his dream of a


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timeless imperium intellectus. It embraces Jed’s marriage to Agnes Andresen and into her Nordic South Dakota family, Agnes’s death of cancer, and the flight to Nashville and his passionate adultery with Rozelle Hardcastle as the one-time belle of Dugden high school days. It calls up the memory of his war with the Italian partisans and his return to Rome to seek out old comrades, his second marriage, divorce and attempted reconciliation with Dauphine, and his rise to academic eminence. But at each of these turns Warren tends to merge his own voice into that of Jed, a life ostensibly told in the one register but which also carries its author’s gloss on that life. A Place to Come to overtly offers itself as a novel of South and North. First there is the south of Dugden in Claxton County, Alabama, small-town, mean, and ready to turn Old Buck Tewksbury into a folk hero as if he were the spirit of Civil War derring-do. This natal South, at least its narrower, pinched spirit, is conveyed in the letters written to Jed by his mother with her advice is “For you, it’s got to be, git wha’s to git, then git. Git on” (40). So extravagant but shrewd an illiteracy can be engaging with an occasional Ambrose Bierce-like humour. But it can also wear, even if the letters do the job of referring us back to the world of Mr Tutwayler who buried Jed’s father and to the shotgun bungalow domain of Jonquil Street. They are also a means of keeping up Dugden’s focus on Rozelle, and on Perk Simms, Jed’s eventual stepfather and self-appointed kin, the guardian of a more honest Southern community life and a man unembarrassed in his love of Jed’s mother. Simms’ simplicity, even if it veers close to maudlin, is the moral standard Jed seeks in his return and a contrast with the Dugden of Buck’s war whoops and the grand myth of Confederacy as heroic Lost Cause. Warren is good at establishing the town, especially in the opening funeral scenes. But as the final “place to come to” for Jed, his mother’s house and his own one-time bed, it also takes on a roseate hue, an out-of-keeping sentimentality. Dugden also provides the contrast with Nashville as new monied south where Jed accepts his university post in the aftermath of Agnes’s death. There, despite contact with Bill and Sally Cudworth, the husband and wife who, as their name implies, have found their own pasture, with Mrs Dee-Dee Jones-Talbott, the fond grande dame still mourning her lost Italian love Sergio, and with Maria McInnes, the heiress who fears her mental un-hinging as her mother before her and who is appointed by the others as a likely wife, Jed comes to a

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revulsion as sharp as that which first drove him out of Alabama. In Rozelle Carrington and her husband Lawford, Jed a world of monied leisure, a spurious show of society and the arts. Lawford’s sculptures turn out tawdry, wholly amateur. Rozelle gives in to a web of assignations with Jed, Warren attempting a version of Couples southern-style but without Updike’s baroque sexual flair. Their affair, however, does give Warren the chance to tell the story of Rozelle’s first husband, a Florida detective story bright with energetic intrigue. The Nashville scenes are colourful, but again too often reflect Warren’s unwillingness to let well enough alone. On Bill and Sally as domestic paragons Jed supplies an inevitable over-explanation: The joy sprang from their willed and full embracement of their life in time, and I, God help me, was in flight from Time. I could not stand the reproach of the sight they provided. (216)

Mrs Jones-Talbott, with her first marriage to an English aristocrat, boutique Marxism, and need to honour Sergio’s memory in the Dante classes she takes with Jed, is awkwardly made the subject of an episode in which, after watching a stallion mate, she makes love with Jed. Maria McInnes, in turn, becomes the occasion of Jed’s omniscient observation: “she had, in her non-expectation, a sort of selflessness which was manifested in a sympathetic concern for the ups and downs of the lives around her” (122). Lawford Carrington is the straw man, handsome fake artist embroiled in a fake marriage and art world who dies, too suitably, of a drugs overdose. Rozelle is better conceived, part Southern siren, but also given to contradictions and turns of vernacular she herself sometimes fails to understand. Her eventual nemesis, as the wife of a black con-man who poses as an Indian guru and deals in drugs, works better than the rest of the novel – Warren allowing a major character free and half-comic rein. Jed himself moves through this world full of confidential asides to the reader. “Hell … I’m not a thinker, I’m a college professor” (148) he observes at one point. At another he edges into sententiousness – “I knew, in other words, what hero, saint, Marxist, criminal and madman must know: identity with fate” (163). Of his affair with Rozelle he sounds as if he were again in seminar mode


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“Now I was free to be only what I was in the moment in which I was” (177). This kind of knowingness mars. Jed’s university and Chicago life contrast with the South of his upbringing, well enough anticipated in his early Latin lessons with the inventively-named Miss McClatty and even his time at a backwater southern college. In Dr Stahlman, however, civilized professorial flower of Teutonic scholarship, Jed has his passport into the larger world of mind. But Stahlman, too, is not left to be himself. If meant to embody German scholarship at its humane ideal best, he must also have a Jewish wife martyred to Nazism. If the sentinel of high culture he must make emphatic and explicit his guilt at not having returned to Germany and certain death by standing against “the beer swill of München” (59). He offers Jed no less than a grand galvanic theory of history, and on taking out American citizenship gives as his opinion that he would have preferred to be born black, “the perfect existential man” (64). His notion of the “timeless and placeless, sunlit lawn” (58) of the imperium intellectus suggests a Yeatsian Byzantium of mind, Dante’s eternity of grace. But it cannot help seeming too easy a trope, especially when the listener is Jed Tewksbury, lately of Dugden. The Stahlman episode makes suspiciously ready allusion to America’s “murderous innocence” (66) and when predictably he takes to suicide, his quest for perfection of spirit passes to Jed, himself on first arrival in Chicago obliged to say “I stood still, I had no place to go. Not in the world” (45). His “place to go”, with the advent of war, takes him to Italy and there, witness to SS atrocities, he kills a German officer who is also a classical scholar, proof were it needed that humane study and the Geneva Convention still do not guarantee humanity. Jed’s relationship with Agnes Andresen gives its own rise for demur. The world of graduate library study and young coupledom is set out convincingly, but with Agnes’ cancer the novel turns indulgent once more. Jed writes a thesis on nothing other than “Dante and The Metaphysics of Death” as she weakens towards her end. The accompanying comment offers guidance: “In my studies in theory I undertook to analyze the idea that for Dante death defines the meaning of life, the core drama of the Divina Commedia depends upon this idea” (89). Warren can situate Agnes in a background of the protestant mid-west with considerable aplomb (Jed’s first journey to South Dakota with Agnes is touching). But he renders Agnes’ death,

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witnessed also by the unnecessary first fiancé, in terms that turn Jed into less spouse than chorus. Stephan Mostoski begins as a strong conception but become flawed by the insistence on making him the representative Jewish survivor, ready always with his insights into his own and the post-holocaust condition. He is at once the novel’s witness to Hitler as a symptomatic barbarism, and the sounding-board for Jed’s own lonely displacement: “I told him, how, hating the South, I had fled it, and ever afterwards blamed my solitude on that fact” (295). Jew and Southerner are offered as spiritual bondsmen, fugitive selves in unhealing time: More than once Stephan told me that I was the only person he had met in America who could really understand him. And he, I felt, understood my story – which I did not pretend to understand. (296)

But Stephan has been witness to far more than Jed could ever know, and to collapse one form of momentous historic disaffiliation into Jed’s simply is lax, just as is his “my story – which I did not pretend to understand” (296). The last stage in Jed’s journey back to a sense of place is his response to a street attack on an old Italian woman. Injured himself, he makes sure she gets to hospital and eventually pays for her funeral. She refers to him as mio figlio, the surrogate mother with whom he has made peace and come to nurture. The symbolism of the act, which prepares the way for Jed’s final return to Dugden, is overt in a disfiguring way. For the novel as fictional autobiography always opens itself to the risk whereby the narrator loses his own voice in that of the author’s. It is a flaw too abundant in A Place to Come to. Jed can barely escape his creator’s reach. The upshot is that Warren loses the efficacy of what should be, and hints of being, the drama of a life engagingly pitched between mind and body, In the Nashville episode, for instance, Jed sets out his leave-taking as follows: “I don’t know how much longer I could have lived the life I had been living in Nashville, all the intensities, lies, self-divisions, dubieties, duplicities, and blind and variously devised plummetings into timeless sexuality” (269).


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The listing and account-book explanation spoils Jed’s chance of allowing his actions to show these implications. Of his trysts with Rozelle we are given the following: I now stood numb, absolutely catatonic, in this doomful tangle of time. I was waiting for something to happen. Something did happen, and the last thing I could have possibly predicted. She let the suppliant hand- sink, and all at once, as she dropped to her knees on the floor, she reached out to seize my hand -- my left one – to press it against her face, kissing it in a soft, shy way, saying between kisses that she knew she could not live without me. (252)

Both passages, to be sure, need their contexts, but both disclose Warren at weakness. To consider Jed bound up in “this doomful tangle of time” and Rozelle with her “suppliant hand” is to become aware of a rhetoric which does Warren few favours. If I have seemed severe on Warren in these two novels, it is because he is, as he always has been, a novelist who promises so much. His confident creation of place, the American valley South of Meet Me in the Green Glen or Italian citied north of A Place to Come to, yield their triumphs. Warren also knows how to give pace, dynamic, to his story. But Warren as philosophic novelist, and he himself always invites that consideration, does not work to right advantage in either novel. Both give their evidence of a literary career to be measured with seriousness and yet amount to late achievements in which his characteristic strengths too often fail to wholly outweigh his characteristic defects.

21 HARLEM ON MY MIND: FICTIONS OF A BLACK METROPOLIS Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. Each group has come with its own separate motives and for its own special ends, but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another. Proscription and prejudice have thrown these dissimilar elements into a common area of contact and interaction. Within this area, race sympathy and unity have determined a further fusing of sentiment and experience …. In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self determination. It is – or promises to be – a race capital. Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro1 There are, I suppose, contained within the central mythology of Harlem, as many versions of its glamour, and its despair, as there are places with people to make them up. (In one meaning of the name, Harlem is simply a place white cab drivers will not go.) And Harlem means not only Negroes, but, of course, whatever other associations one might connect with them. So in one breath Harlem will be the pleasure-happy center of the universe, full of large, hippy mamas in electric colors and their fast, slick-head papas, all of them twisting and grinning in the streets in a kind of existential joyousness that never permits of 1

Alain Locke, Introduction to The New Negro: An Interpretation, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925, 6-7.

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Gothic to Multicultural sadness or responsibility. But in another breath this same place will be the gathering place for every crippling human vice, and the black men there simply victims of their own peculiar kind of sloth and childishness. But perhaps these are not such different versions after all; chances are both these stereotypes come from the same kinds of minds. But Harlem, as it is, as it exists for its people, as an actual place where actual humans live – that is a very different thing. Though, to be sure, Harlem is a place – a city really – where almost anything any person could think of to say goes on, probably does go on, or has gone on, but like any other city, it must escape any blank generalization simply because it is alive, and changing each second with each breath any of its citizens take. LeRoi Jones, “City of Harlem”2

Historically, Harlem begins with the very settlement of America itself, the village enclave founded just north of New Amsterdam in 1658 by the tough-willed, often maverick, Dutch ex-Governor of Curaçao, Peter Stuyvesant, and given the name of Nieuw Haarlem. But, overwhelmingly, black Harlem has been a child of the present century, the indisputable First City of Afro-America whose six or so crowded square miles lie between the East and Harlem Rivers to the one side and Morningside and St Nicholas Avenues to the other with 125th Street as the great arterial thoroughfare. It is this Harlem, iconic yet always sharply local in its human nuance, which has so installed itself in the world’s imagination, its very mention a prompt to interest if not fascination. In the immediate, visual sense, Harlem from the 1920s onward has never been less than tangibly there, an internationally acknowledged city of black life and memory. It supplies a mirror, too, for American racial and urban politics at large, whether viewed through its vintage, Jazz Age years, or through the wrack of the Depression, or through the swirling race-riot era of the 1940s (Harlem, like Detroit, blew up in 1943), or through the 1960s dramas of Black Power and the calls to militancy by leadership like that of Malcolm X, or, for all the individual human resilience and style, its subsequent ghettoization and poverty.

2

LeRoi Jones, “City of Harlem” (1962), in Home: Social Essays, NY: William Morrow, 1968, 88.

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But simple chronology, narrative history, could not possibly give the whole account. For more than Chicago’s South Side, or Los Angeles’ Watts and South Central, or black Atlanta, Harlem has carried the banner of black urban America, the American race capital as Locke called it. In this respect, it has eluded definition, as unique yet at the same time as utterly symptomatic as any city in America; commentary from Alain Locke to LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka reaffirms both. Harlem rightly has been judged hardworking, respectable, indubitably religious, a community keen to state and maintain its own respectability. It has also been a Harlem edged with crime and violence, whether from racketeering, narcotics, gangs and hustle in general, or the everyday abrasion of a people often made to feel pressured and boxed in to the point of implosion. Nor would it ever be denied that Harlem has been a world of show-time, whether the supposed doorstep bohemia of visiting white night clubbers in the 1920s, or the music, entertainment and fashion capital both created and then sought out by generations of black Americans. A further paradox for a Northern city within a city lies in how Harlem has always been a Southern place in its talk, churches and music. So, at least, would be the testimony of any black elder with roots in delta Mississippi, sharecropper Georgia, cotton Alabama or the tobacco Carolinas, and with memories variously of intimate family kin and yet also of the insults and ravages of Jim Crow. The process extends to an eclectically Caribbean Harlem, one of Jamaicans/Rastafarians, Trinidadians, Barbadians (Bajans), St Lucians and Guyanese. Africa, equally, has contributed to the cultural mix – Yoruba and from Nigeria, Kenyans, Ghanaians, Liberians, or a line of pre-Independence South Africans with its African National Congress (ANC) affiliations and usually in flight from Johannesburg’s apartheid, and speaking languages from Xhosa to Zulu. There has even been Black Jewish Harlem in the form of its several Ethiopian Hebrew Congregations. No one signature prevails. The multifaceted fact of Harlem lies in its immense cultural widths and depths, the undiminishing play of its different peoples and histories. So insistent a mix shaped and energized historic Harlem. Its beginnings lie in the initial move up-town from the West Side of black families in the years immediately prior to World War I and into homes once owned by Irish, Italian and Jewish residents. Another

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announcement of Harlem’s coming of age takes place with the sight of the heroic, all-black Fifteenth Regiment back from Europe and marching in deserved triumph up Fifth Avenue in February 1919. Who could doubt Harlem’s astonishing gallery of personalities? Politics spans the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey in the 1920s, and his heady, if financially disastrous, Back to Africa movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) with its Black Star Line ships destined for Liberia, to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in the post-war years as Harlem’s own flamboyant Congressman, to Malcolm X. Music celebrities look to Josephine Baker, whose vaudeville genius for song and dance in Jazz Age shows like Shuffle Along, and onstage sexual daring, she transferred from Renaissance Harlem to Paris in 1925, where she continued to hold sway at the Folies Bergères and other boîtes de nuit and to work in anti-racist causes and UNICEF. A minstrel actor like Bojangles Robinson became one of the great song-and-dance early stage presences. Paul Robeson gave the spirituals new concert voice but his roles as O’Neill’s Emperor Jones and Shakespeare’s Othello launched him into serious mainstream theatre even if his lifetime’s radicalism brought down on him ongoing FBI and other government persecution. A jazzman and race man like Miles Davis long has taken on luminous reputation. Other kinds of presence include A’Leila Walker, the 1920s hair-care heiress and salon queen, and Katherine Dunham, whose School of Dance (founded in 1944 in New York) made her a decisive force in the modern American arts. To all of these might be added each athlete celebrity from Joe Louis to Willie Mays, Muhammad Ali to Carl Lewis who, even if they did not originate in Harlem, gave its citizenry meaning and pride. Harlem’s physical ecology, likewise, has become a necessary source of identification, whether the characteristic brownstones, the tenements, the storefront and African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches, or the few affluent neighbourhoods like Sugar Hill and the Stanford White-designed Striver’s Row, early on used as a Harlem place reference in Plum Bun, Jessie Fauset’s 1929 novel of passing.3 To these have to be added the subsequent barrios of Spanish or Puerto Rican (and now other Latino) Harlem dwellers, each with their own 3

Jessie Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral, NY: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929.

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differences of language, religion, family, dress and foodways. The shared conviction continues among nearly all Harlemites that against the odds, whether poverty, racism or the recent calamity of drugs, America’s first and self-availing black city can still survive and thrive.4 *** All of this dense human current of change has inevitably bred, and then become entwined in, its own spiral of mythologies, a Harlem prodigiously to be imagined and re-imagined.5 This also holds true, never more so than in the 1920s, for inter-racial Harlem, a frequent meeting and gathering point despite any number of built-in constraints across the colour-line. Whether in high or popular culture, mainstream allusion or rap, Harlem has come to signify a kind of figurative or emblematic community replete in specific, yet at the same time legendary, names, associations and rites.6 Harlem has also long established its identity in every kind of music, from the choirs and gospellers to the jazz and blues played in a myriad of clubs, bars, cellars or lofts. Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” or “Drop Me Off in Harlem” typically serve as musical signings-in and as much to be heard in some round midnight watering hole as concert hall. Harlem musicianship yields a simply dazzling roster of names, besides a vintage Harlemite like Ellington who made Sugar Hill his home, that have included whatever their origins Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Ethel Mills, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, James Brown and Aretha Franklin. Harlem may not have been the only stopover in their lives, but it ranks among

4 For historical reference, see John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (1947), 3rd edn, NY: Knopf, 1967; James Egert Allan, The Negro in New York, NY: Exposition Press, 1964; and Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York 1890-1930, NY: Harper, 1966; also the pictorial compilation, Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America (1968), ed. Allan Shoener, NY: Dell Publishing, 1979. 5 See, for instance, George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 6 An early anthology of Harlem writing and photography would be Harlem U.S.A., ed. John Henrik Clarke, Berlin: Seven Seas Books, 1964.

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the most important, especially in venues like the Cotton Club, the Lafayette Theater, and the Apollo Theater. In the visual arts a similar virtuosity holds. One early instance would be the woodcuts, prints and graphics of Aaron Douglas, some of which Alain Locke included in The New Negro. Harlem also becomes the organizing reference in James Van Der Zee’s Talented Tenth family and social photographic portraiture, the shrewd, versatile, Bootsie cartoons of Ollie Harrington, and the latterday portfolios of camera-work by John Taylor and Gordon Parks. The achievement equally extends into the allied arts of painting, notably Romare Bearden whose canvases frequently serve as book covers for black-authored texts, or Beauford Delaney,7 in whom James Baldwin found an early Village mentor, friend and sexual ally; of ballet, now virtually synonymous with the Dance Theater of Harlem; and not least of sport, the swerve and slam dunk of entertainment basketball as performed by the Harlem Globetrotters, however much they, as other black players and teams, began in an era when the National Basketball Association (NBA) operated a white-only regime. In each of these manifestations Harlem has been the locus of a historic and ever continuing body of black creative self-expression.8 In popular terms, particularly, it is virtually written into America’s music and dance, whether 1920s cabaret (with Ellington, Basie and Calloway in the line of succession), a post-war Harlem tuned in to Lena Horne, Ray Charles or The Platters, or, through the 1960s and after, the CD and video worlds of Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Whitney Houston or Ice Cube and a current generation of rappers. Then there has been film: early Works Progress Administration (WPA) 7

This important artist has long been due a full biography. Fortunately one has been written by a friend and biographer of Baldwin: see David Leeming, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997. 8 Two excellent cultural histories of Harlem are David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, NY: Knopf, 1981, and Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900-1950, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982. See also Amritjit Singh, The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976; Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, eds. Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990; George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995; and Cary D. Wirtz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance, College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1996.

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shorts with PBS and other network documentaries to follow; screen adaptations of Chester Himes’ Coffin Ed/Grave Digger Jones detective stories like Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Come Back Charleston Blue (1972) filmed on location; black action movies like the immensely popular Richard Roundtree John Shaft series – Shaft (1971), Shaft’s Big Score (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973); and, latterly, a full length bio-pic like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) with Denzel Washington in the title role. Harlem, in consequence, has properly come to be seen as a kind of live theatre in its own right, a working arena of street culture, churches, eateries, dress, shoeshine stands, barbershops and clubs, even of graffiti and turf markings and, as always, the vital seams of talk from preaching to rap, kitchen-talk to youth slang. Much of the latter has been added to the store of Harlem community and other related African American material held in archives like those of the Schomburg Library, an increasingly appreciated black popular culture. For some, in fact, this populist Harlem should be even more emphasized. Not only is Harlem held to have been the occasion of an extraordinary mix and range of art, its dynamic amounts to a kind of social or urban art form, a black, citied tableau vivant. By the 1990s Harlem would even feature in advertisements for tourist bus and walking tours. *** Nor, from its beginnings to the present, has Harlem been anything other than a written city, a city made over into a plurality of literary forms. Its poets run from Countee Cullen and Claude McKay in the Harlem Renaissance, through Melvin Tolson whose consciously modernist Harlem Gallery, published in 1965, offers a landmark, to the voices found in black nationalist collections like the LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal anthology Black Fire.9 Its drama has been both early vaudeville and modern Harlem-centred pieces like the musical gospel 9 Countee Cullen, Color, NY: Harper, 1925; Copper Sun, NY: Harper, 1927; The Ballad of the Brown Girl: An Old Ballad Retold, NY: Harper, 1927, and The Back Christ and Other Poems, NY: Harper, 1929; Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1922; Melvin B. Tolson, Harlem Gallery, Book 1, NY: Twayne, 1965; and Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, eds LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, NY: William Morrow, 1968.

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satire adapted from his own novel of Langston Hughes’ Tambourines to Glory and the later church fable of word and flesh of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner.10 Harlem journalism and essay work equally enter the reckoning, especially that of key black newspapers like the Amsterdam News and of which LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s “City of Harlem” marks one symptomatic instance. James Baldwin plays his part in the company, as vividly as anywhere in his early, compelling, “The Harlem Ghetto” (1948), Harlem as “congestion”, an “insistent, claustrophobic pounding in the skull”.11 Then there has been the Harlem imagined and carried in fiction, and nowhere more so than in the novel. For though Harlem has had its remarkable short-story tellers, among them Langston Hughes in any of his Simple pieces, or James Baldwin in his lyric, jazz-like “Sonny’s Blues”, along with John A. Williams, Alice Childress, Toni Cade Bambara or Rosa Guy, it has been the novel which by scale if nothing else has sought out Harlem’s completeness and plurality as a city. That is also not to say that Harlem been the preserve only of black writers. A white, along with a nuyorriqueño line of authorship, from Carl Van Vechten in the 1920s to Warren Miller, Shane Stevens, Edward Lewis Wallant and Piri Thomas in the 1950s and after, invites its own recognition. If the focus here falls mainly upon the novel, that, in part, is because its elasticity and length have been especially hospitable to the telling of Harlem’s complex singularity. At the same time, it is a novel to be seen in the context of the associated range of other expressive and cultural forms, for it shares with them the sense of challenge to the narrative imagination, a Harlem on the Mind metamorphosed and transferred to the written page. Alain Locke’s insistence upon Harlem as “the largest Negro community in the world”, a coming “race capital”, gives a reminder that despite poverty and the colour-line the 1920s were indeed among its best, or at least its best celebrated, years. It was then, probably 10

Langston Hughes, Tambourines to Glory, NY: John Day, 1958. This was the novel from which Hughes made his adaptation. The play was published as Langston Hughes, Tambourines to Glory, NY: Hill and Wang, 1958, 1963; James Baldwin, The Amen Corner, NY: Dial, 1968. 11 “The Harlem Ghetto”, first published in Commentary, February 1948, and subsequently in Notes of a Native Son, NY: Dial, 1955, 51-64.

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more than at any time since, that Harlem was in vogue. The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), born of Survey Graphic’s special Harlem number in 1924, helped to underline how Harlem had come to express much of Afro-America itself – an international black city of art, spirit, memory, music and word. So, at least, was the literary witness of its ministry of all, or nearly all, the talents.12 And so, from a later age, would be the witness of Ishmael Reed in his Mumbo Jumbo with its mock-history of Jazz age America, using Dyonesian and Pharaonic myth and as caught up in the liberative fever called Jes Grew – dance, food, talk, honky-tonk, show-time, sex, the whole free play of the senses as against the puritanism which led to Prohibition, Hooverism, and the nation as white Main Street.13 Harlem would also have its own full-length, and greatly contrasting, chroniclers. James Weldon Johnson writes in Black Manhattan of “the recognized Negro capital”, “the Negro metropolis”. 14 But his emphasis, as maybe befitted a lifelong Republican, falls less upon black migration and the struggles and costs than the high-cultural story – Harlem as a literary and theatre tradition recorded as through a personal diary, a memoir. For Claude McKay, in his Harlem: Negro Metropolis, albeit by then an ex-Marxist and Catholic convert with old scores to settle, even the retrospect of the Depression does nothing to dim Harlem’s importance.15 He insists upon its role as magnet, a black urban self-mirror, the first, true gathering place of the varieties of black modernity. If the 1920s offer a place to begin, they do so precisely because they indicate a Harlem from the outset resistant to the kind of blank generalization excoriated by Jones/Baraka. Of all the Jazz Age fiction that takes on Harlem, no two novels more contend for its perceived style than Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger

12

Scholarship on the Harlem Renaissance had been increasingly prolific. See, especially, Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, NY: Oxford University Press, 1971 and Voices From the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins, NY: Oxford University Press, 1976; The Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays Edited with a Memoir, ed. Arna Bontemps, NY: Dodd Mead, 1972; and The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary, ed. Bruce Kelner, NY: Methuen and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. 13 Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, NY: Doubleday, 1972. 14 James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan, NY: Knopf, 1930. 15 Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, NY: E.P. Dutton, 1940.

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Heaven and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem.16 The former, written by Harlem’s probably best known white patron of the arts who would also bequeath an important photographic archive of its writers and people, by title and subject matter became a source of considerable controversy. Who was best qualified to write Harlem? The latter, ironically, was also an outsider’s Harlem, written by a Jamaican, however engaging the lyric and pulse of his down-home salute. Earlier novels had pointed the way, whether Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, with its portrait of black life and rooming on West 27th Street and a drinks gathering-place like The Banner Club, or James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man whose drama of passing also takes in Sixth Avenue from Twenty-third to Thirty-third streets as a black enclave with its own ragtime “Negro Bohemia”.17 Even if it does not deal exclusively with Harlem, there needs to be invoked Nella Larsen’s Quicksand which explores black Manhattan through the eyes of its almost white Danish-American and deeply self-divided heroine. On her arrival from the South, and then Chicago, Helga Crane finds herself seized by “the continually gorgeous panorama of Harlem”. In Rudolph Fisher’s two novels, The Walls of Jericho and The Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, the note turns more laconic, the one a witty, cryptic satire of Harlem society manners, the other a city conjure story replete with wondrous African con-man and a detective pair to anticipate Chester Himes’ Grave Digger and Coffin Ed.18 Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry offers the Harlem portrait of Emma Lou Morgan, a black woman in revolt against her own colour and whose life borders on a pathology of black self-hate. George Schuyler’s Black No More takes an attractively scabrous tilt at the workings of colour hierarchy and the urge to whiteness not only in Harlem but in Afro-America at large. Countee Cullen’s only novel, One Way to Heaven, the doomed love 16

Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, NY: Knopf, 1926; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem, NY: Harper, 1928. 17 Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods, NY: Dodd, Mead, 1902; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Boston, MA: Sherman French, 1912; NY: Knopf, 1927. 18 Nella Larsen, Quicksand, NY and London: Knopf, 1928, reprinted as Quicksand, NY: Macmillan/Collier Books, 1971. References are to this latter edition. Rudolph Fisher, The Walls of Jericho, NY and London: Knopf, 1928 and The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, NY: Corvici, Friede, 1932.

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story of Sam Lucas and Mattie Johnson and at the same time a panorama of Harlem religiosity, shows a flair for painterly image wholly befitting Harlem’s then best-known poet.19 It was, however, the novels of Van Vechten and McKay that set the standard, relative bestsellers and required reading for anyone with an eye to matters uptown. It may seem odd that Harlem’s first chronicler in fiction should have been white, but Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven can be located within a context in which other white writings had turned to black America with a quite new kind of relish, whether in O’Neill plays like The Emperor Jones (1920), a Sherwood Anderson novel of race like Dark Laughter (1925), or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha cycle of mixed southern dynasty begun with Sartoris (1929). 20 In 1934 so grand a patron as Nancy Cunard made a considerable splash with Negro: Anthology, her wide-ranging compendium of black writing, art and photography.21 Van Vechten, thereby, in a sense was doing no more than extending this general upsurge of white literary interest in both black America generally and Harlem in particular. But what writer, especially a white one, could use “nigger” in his title without arousing profoundest offence? No matter that “Nigger Heaven”, a phrase which refers to the topmost gallery of mixed theatres, where blacks were assigned seats, and often to be heard as shorthand for Harlem itself or at least for its clubs, was fairly common parlance. No matter that the novel would be endorsed by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and, most importantly, Claude McKay, who thought it the work of an author “not a bit patronising” and indeed would himself use the phrase in Home to Harlem. W.E.B. DuBois spoke for the majority when he gave it a drubbing as “an affront to the hospitality of black folk”, a caricature.22 19

Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, NY: Macauley, 1929; George Schuyler, Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940, NY: Macauley, 1931; and Countee Cullen, One Way to Heaven, NY and London: Harper, 1932. 20 For a full listing of Van Vechten’s writing and photography, see A Bibliography of the Works of Carl Van Vechten, ed. Bruce Kellner, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. 21 Negro: Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard, London: Wishart, 1934; reissued, NY: Frederick Ungar, 1970. 22 See, respectively, James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way, NY: Viking, 1933; Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, NY: Knopf, 1940; Claude McKay, A Long Way from

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The truth is that, well meant or otherwise, Nigger Heaven offers too slight an achievement to have other than representative significance. Its plot borders on the mawkish, a formula love story and murder with touches of yet other melodrama as embellishment. It renders Harlem itself as a kind of unexplored social territory, not quite exotica but something near. Van Vechten does better, however, in situating some of the action in the Black Venus, a typical nightclub catering to white patrons and an instance of cabaret Harlem. He is also highly germane in the depiction of the workings of racism both at street level and in publishing. He tries, not without success, to emulate something of Harlem speech, its vernacular ease and invention. This he takes to the length of actually including a glossary of then everyday terms like “ofay”, “daddy”, and “snow”. It is also perhaps to his credit that he recognized his own ambiguous position in writing black Harlem fiction. He has one of his characters, a white magazine editor, say: I have visited Harlem in two capacities, as a customer in the cabarets and as a guest in my friends’ homes. The whole place, contrary to the general impression, is overrun with fresh, unused material. Nobody has yet written a good gambling story; nobody has touched the outskirts of cabaret life; nobody has yet gone into the diverse tribes of the region …. Well, if you young Negro intellectuals don’t get busy, a new crop of Nordics is going to spring up who will take the trouble to become better informed and will exploit this material before the Negro gets round to it.23

Locke himself could not have put things better, a call to arms from a perhaps unexpected quarter. Although Nigger Heaven belongs in the most minor league as fiction, it does have importance as a clue to the Harlem in the minds of outsiders, an image of Harlem that undoubtedly played to, and re-enforced what white America wanted (or even needed) to believe about its emerging premier black city. Far closer to Harlem’s feel, its heat and energy, though with its own form of exoticizing, is Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem published two years later. Jamaican by birth and upbringing McKay Home, NY: Lee Fruman, 1937; and W.E.B. DuBois, “Review of Nigger Heaven” Crisis, December 1926, 81-2. 23 Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, 222-23.

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may have been, but as his poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, and his history, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, confirmed, he could call upon a long intimacy with Harlem as black community life. Home to Harlem seemed instantly a taking-up of Van Vechten’s and Locke’s shared call, an insider witness to the sight and sound, the ease and jazz, of Harlem. At last, said admirers, Harlem had found its laureate, even if certain self-appointed black guardians of respectability deplored the scenes of sex and drink. This admiration, however, trod lightly round the issue of whether the ostensible protagonist, Jake, gets eclipsed by his Haitian friend Ray, or whether the plot reads too segmentally, or whether McKay had allowed his lyricism to risk turning lush or indulgent. The Harlem that most caught the attention is established early in the novel as Jake, a longshoreman, deserts his regiment in Europe and works his passage back to Harlem via Marseilles. He ponders, blueslike, “Jest take me ’long to Harlem is all I pray”.24 The note is taken up in self-musings like the following, a vision of Harlem as a world warmed by affection and memory: Oh, to be in Harlem again after two years away. The deep-dyed colour, the thickness, the closeness of it. The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and “blues” playing somewhere…singing somewhere, dancing somewhere! Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem. Burning everywhere in dark-eyed Harlem …. Burning 25 now in Jake’s sweet blood.

Within this “familiar Harlem” McKay acknowledges that the city can also be violent, abrasive, even murderous. Jake moves through Harlem’s “thickness” and “honey” as to the manner born, relishing its licence and especially its women. But during stopovers from working on a Pullman with Ray he also gets embroiled in its dangers, eventually after a fight leaving for Chicago with his new found “brown sugar”, the appropriately named Felice. Who would deny that this is a male Harlem, the women either endlessly compliant and decorative or hard-edged madams? Even so, it is Jake himself as one of Harlem’s own who embodies the novel’s true spirit. A passage like 24 25

McKay, Home to Harlem, 3. Ibid., 15.

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the following unfolds a near impressionistic Harlem, an irresistible black city of appetite and the senses: Dusk gathered in blue patches over the Black Belt. Lenox Avenue was vivid. The saloons were bright, crowded with drinking men jammed right around the bars, treating one another and telling the incidents of the day. Longshoremen in overalls with hooks, Pullman porters holding their bags, waiters, elevator boys. Liquor-rich porters, banana-ripe laughter …. The pavement was a dim warm bustle. Women hurrying home from day’s work to get dinner ready for husbands who worked at night. On their arms brown bags and black containing a bit of meat, a head of lettuce, butter. Young men who were staggering through life, passing along with brown-paper packages, containing a small steak, a pork chop, to do their own frying. From out of saloons came the savory smell of corned beef and cabbage, spare-ribs, hamburger steaks. Out of little cook-joints wedged in side streets, tripe, pigs’ feet, hogs’s ears and snouts. Out of apartments, steak smothered with onions, liver and bacon, fried chicken.26

If this, however, is blue collar and after-work Harlem, warmheartedly given to the evening meal, so a more genteel New Negro version can be found in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun. Its middle-class race story of the Philadelphia-born Angela Murray that ends in her move from New York to Paris delivers the more standard 1920s version, Harlem as almost anthropological surprise: On an exquisite afternoon she went to Harlem … she was amazed and impressed at this bustling, frolicking, busy, laughing great city within a greater one. She had never seen coloured life so thick, so varied, so complete …. Unquestionably there was something very fascinating, even 27 terrible, about this stream of life …. Harlem was a great city.

*** 26

Ibid., 204-5. Jessie Redmond Fauset, Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral, NY: Frederick A. Stokes, 1929, 96-98. 27

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1929 and its economic aftermath burst the bubble. Just as the Depression gripped America at large, so in Harlem and other black communities the poverty that had always threatened grew especially brutal. Harlem, in particular, edged increasingly towards slum, a ghetto. As quickly as it had come into vogue so Harlem went out of vogue. The image became one of citied un-affluence, a black urban people under duress and a far cry from the trumpeted gaiety of the preceding decade. And fiction, like all the arts, reflected the process. Social realism became the rallying cry, usually associated with Richard Wright in the guise of Negro Protest. Yet Wright’s black city world was to be not Harlem but South Side Chicago, at least as depicted in his landmark novel Native Son and in the driven, divided figure of Bigger Thomas. Much as Wright has been accorded realist status, he rarely wrote without more emblematic purpose. Of the literary school attributed to Wright, principally Chester Himes. Willard Motley and Ann Petry, it would, too, be the last who bequeaths a Depression and Harlem period novel of great importance. Published in 1946, and set against a World War II background, Petry’s The Street carries the mark of the Depression at every turn, a tough, deterministic story as far away as imaginable from the brave optimism of Alain Locke and his contemporaries of a generation earlier. It also depicts Harlem through the viewpoint of a woman, Lutie Johnson, forced to shift for herself and her son Bub within a web of circumstance that leads her to an almost inevitable and fatal act of violence. Harlem, as it were, narrows down precisely to a street, and within it the commodifying reduction of its people and their lives. This threat laden Harlem gains especial edge in Petry’s focusing of things through Lutie. Caught out by a bad marriage, struggling to stay respectable given her looks and relative youth, surrounded by offers to hustle, she finds herself at first drawn to a small-time musician, Boots Smith, who promises to help her into a singing career. But he, in turn, reveals himself as yet another sexual threat, a would-be rapist. In him, and in all the pressure of the street, Harlem closes in on her, incarcerating, dangerous, anything but communal. One hears just the right echo of urban blues in this sample of how she is made to react: She glanced up at the gloomy flats where the heads had been. There were row after row of narrow windows – floor after floor packed tight with people. She looked at the street itself. It was bordered by dustbins. Half-starved cats prowled through the

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Gothic to Multicultural bins – rustling paper, gnawing on bones. Again she thought that it wasn’t just this one block, this particular street. It was 28 like this all over Harlem wherever the rents were low.

Although the novel uses precisely “this particular street” to locate all the “rustle” and “gnaw” of an impoverished Harlem, Petry offers more than mere diagram. She develops a full, various fictional cast: Mrs Hedges, the tough, fire scarred madam, who operates to her own wellintended standard of morality; the furtive and near pathological tenement supervisor Jones of whom Mrs Hedges remarks, “You done lived in basements so long, you ain’t hardly human no more”;29 Jones’ intimidated mistress Min who resorts to a Harlem roots doctor in the hope of making Jones desire her; Bub’s white teacher, Miss Rinner, always frightened by Harlem and to whom teaching there amounts to a stigma; Boots Smith, scarred with a knife wound from one of his past women, dangled by the club owner Mr Junto (a name which obliquely refers back to the white slavocracy elites), made to serve as his general runner and pimp, and never able to rise above low-grade musical jobs; and, outside Harlem, the affluent white Connecticut family who first employ Lutie as a maid and are so embroiled in their own money and domestic violence that they fail to see in her anything but another unremarkable black serving woman. Around this street Petry implies a further lattice of other similar streets and tenements each with its boxed-in humanity to match. She also successfully evokes the ambiguous glitter of Harlem club life, especially the Casino where Lutie works and the Junto Bar and Grill where she hopes to establish a singing career. But it is, inexorably, to the street, 116th Street, that Lutie returns, Harlem as determining ghetto and menace. Within its world Bub eventually is sent to Reform School for theft, and Lutie, like Claude McKay’s Jake before her, heads out to Chicago after the killing of Boots. Harlem’s implacable urban geometry and the behaviour and state of mind it engenders is captured graphically in Lutie’s reaction to a young girl she sees in hospital:

28 29

Ann Petry, The Street, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1946, 229-30. Ibid., 237.

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She felt she knew the steps by which that girl landed on the stretcher in the hospital. She could trace them easily. It could be that Bub might follow the same path. The girl probably went to high school for a few months and then got tired to it. She had no place to study at night because the house was full of lodgers and she had not incentive anyway, because she didn’t have a real home. She found out that boys liked her and she started bringing them to the apartment. The mother wasn’t there to know what was going on. They didn’t have real homes, no base, no family life. So at sixteen or seventeen the girl was fooling around with two or three different boys. One of them found out about the others. Like all the rest of them, he had only a curious supersensitive kind of pride that kept him going, so he had to have revenge and knives are cheap. It happened again and again all through Harlem …30

Petry’s vision of Harlem here as throughout in The Street reads clear-eyed and unsentimentally, a community both injured and self-injuring. 1930s Harlem under economic siege also lies behind the vision of Louise Meriwether’s retrospective juvenile novel Daddy Was a Number Runner.31 Written as the first person story of twelve-year-old Frances Coffin, it tells a Harlem coming of age, a self-awakening forced ahead of its time on a burgeoning black adolescent girl. Replete with period Depression references to Father Divine, Dutch Schultz, Roosevelt and the Fireside broadcasts, it locates in Francie a Harlem that finds itself obliged to sell itself short on its own evident best promise. Francie bears witness to her father’s hustle as a numbers man, to her peers who have taken to prostitution and pimping, to a catalogue of petty crime, welfare and street culture, and yet, throughout, also to the warmth and extraordinary texture of her family and neighbourhood. Meriwether’s achievement rests upon her ability to take up this Harlem paradox. In the very ingenuousness of Francie’s vernacular she measures the contradiction of Harlem’s vital human richness forced to exist – in the Depression as rarely at any other time in American history – within a devitalizing poverty. 30

Ibid., 204. Louise Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner, Englewood-Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970. 31

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The Harlem fiction by which Langston Hughes has come to be best known cannot in any strict sense be thought a body of novel writing. Yet the Jesse B. Semple or Simple stories begun in 1943 in the Chicago Defender give precisely that impression. Eventually to run to five collections, in turn Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Takes a Wife, Simple Stakes a Claim, The Best of Simple and Simple’s Uncle Sam, these immensely subtle, ingenuous seeming pieces of black folk narrative turn upon the figure of Simple as the voice of street corner and domestic Harlem, its own immediate post-war griot.32 Spoken as if to an often incredulous Hughes himself, they touch on American race issues read in the paper, heard on the radio, carried by word of mouth, and mulled over in the work place and bar. A man of many apparent foibles, Simple especially features as the put-upon Harlem family man, by his ex-wife Isabel, his current glamour girl Zarita, his country cousin Minnie, and his kinsman F.D. (for Franklin Delano). A one-time Virginian who in time honoured fashion has stepped North to Harlem, his puzzlement and general sense of being always caught on the wrong foot act as Hughes’ wry, ingenious mode of taking bearings on an America shot through with racial double standards. Not that he ever allows Simple to become too preacher-like, rather the genial, often self-contradicting man of the Harlem average. Harlem itself features characteristically for Simple in outbursts like the following from “A Toast to Harlem” from Simple Speaks His Mind: No, I would not go back down South, not even to Baltimore. I am in Harlem to stay! You say the houses ain’t mine. Well, the sidewalk is – and don’t nobody push me off. The cops don't even say, “Move on”, hardly no more …. Here I ain’t scared to 32

Langston Hughes, Simple Speaks His Mind, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1950; Simple Takes a Wife, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1953; Simple Stakes a Claim, NY: Rinehart, 1957; The Best of Simple, NY: Hill and Wang, 1961; Simple’s Uncle Sam, NY: Hill and Wang, 1965. For discussions of Hughes’ Simple stories, see James A. Emanuel, Langston Hughes, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1967,and Therman O’ Daniel, Langston Hughes, Black Genius: A Critical Evaluation, NY: Morrow, 1971. An overview of Hughes studies through to the 1990s is offered in A. Robert Lee, “‘Ask Your Mama’: Langston Hughes, the Blues and Recent Afro-American Literary Studies”, Journal of American Studies, XXIV/2 (1990), 199-209.

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vote – that’s another thing I like about Harlem. I also like it because we’ve got subways and it does not take all day to get downtown, neither are you Jim Crowed on the way. Why, Negroes is running some of these subway trains. This morning I rode the A Train down to 34th Street. There were a Negro driving it, making ninety miles a hour. The cat were really driving that train! Every time he flew by one of them local stations looks like he was saying, “Look at me! This train is mine!” That cat were gone, ole man. Which is another reason I like Harlem! Sometimes I run into Duke Ellington on 125th Street and I say, “What you know there, Duke?” Duke says, “Solid, ole man. “ He does not know me from Adam, but he speaks. One day I saw Lena Horne coming out of the Hotel Theresa and I said, “Hubba! Hubba!” Lena smiled. Folks is friendly in Harlem. I feel like I got the world in a jug and the stopper in my hand! So drink a toast to Harlem!33

Simple’s mix of standard American and down-home black idiom, his assumed community oneness with Duke Ellington and Lena Horne, his relish at the thought of a black brother flying home at the controls of the A train, and his folk reference to the world in a jug add up to a community voice, a voice at once itself and yet that of a larger Harlem. Hughes, however, always knew better than to make Simple some uncritical laureate of Harlem. Simple speaks as perfectly familiar with its poverty and dangerous crowdedness (“A Million – and One”), its sheer daily threat (“Enter Cousin Minnie”), its ambiguous religiosity (“Simple Prays a Prayer”), its case-hardened experience of white America (“There Ought to be a Law”), its own recent riots, violence and police harassment (“Name in Print”), and even its extremes of weather (“Letting Off Steam”). But throughout he comes over as yet another type of Harlem insider, un-Jim Crowed as he says, and at ease with the customs and talk of his people. Hughes’ own posture of the liberal fall guy, seemingly taken unawares by Simple’s prejudices and values, makes for a perfect counter and point of access. He can be amused, put out, frequently astounded by his Harlem crony, but he also finds himself, as indeed do we, obliged to learn from Simple. Their colloquies, thereby, become a kind of Harlem speaking, a community in dialogue with itself, yet never too inward or hermetic.

33

Hughes, Simple Speaks His Mind, 32.

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Harlem, immediate post-war Harlem at least, can rarely have been more congenially voiced or overheard. *** “How do you get to Harlem?” “That’s easy”, he said, “You just keep heading north”.34 That, precisely, is what the un-named narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man does, a journey that takes him from Dixie to Manhattan’s black Promised Land, from darkness to light, and from unseeing to vision.35 Two of Ellison’s essays give bearings on the point. In “Harlem Is Nowhere” (1948) he writes: … the most surreal fantasies are acted out upon the streets of Harlem; a man ducks in and out of traffic shouting and throwing imaginary grenades that actually exploded during World War I; a boy participates in the rape-robbery of his mother; a man beating his wife in a park observes Marquess of Queensberry rules …. Life becomes a masquerade, exotic costumes are worn every day …. For this is a world in which the major energy of the imagination goes not into creating works of art, but to overcome the frustrations of social discrimination.36

In “Harlem’s America” (1966) he indicates how these Harlem rites of surrealism and transformation at the same time point to, and complement, the writer’s art: Harlem is a place where our folklore is preserved and transformed. It is the place where the body of our Negro myth and legend thrives. It is a place where our styles, musical styles, 34

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, NY: Random House, 1952, 155. Reprinted as Invisible Man, 30th Anniversary Edition, New York: Random House, 1982. 35 A necessary retrospect is to be found in the 30th Anniversary Edition: speaking of a novel largely written in, as well as about, Harlem, Ellison observes “this has always been a most willful, most self-generating novel, and the proof of that statement is witnessed by the fact that here, thirty astounding years later, it has me writing about it again.” 36 Ralph Ellison. “Harlem Is Nowhere”, written originally for (but unpublished by) Magazine of the Year 1948. The piece is included in Shadow and Act, NY: Random House, 1964, 297.

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the many styles of Negro life, find continuity and metamorphosis.37

As he speaks out of a “basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century” in “border area” Harlem, 38 illegally irradiated by light siphoned from the Monopolated Light & Power Company, the narrator of Invisible Man calls up not only his own journey but that of nearly all Afro-America. The escape from Dixie slavery to northern city freedom, and from the erasure into the finding of his name, lie encoded in the journey from his college and Battle Royal south to the New York first of the Paint Factory (“KEEP AMERICA WHITE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS”) and then of Harlem. Ellison’s inspired use of optics as governing metaphor runs throughout, a narrative play light and darkness, seen and mis-seen. As his narrator very quickly recognizes: This really was Harlem, and now all the stories which I had heard of the city-within-a-city leaped alive in my mind…For me this was not a city of realities, but of dreams; perhaps because I had always thought of my life as being confined to the South. And now as I struggled through the lines of people a new world of possibility suggested itself to me faintly, like a small voice that was barely audible in the roar of city sounds. I moved wide-eyed trying to take the bombardment of impressions.39

Harlem as dream, a black American dream vacillating between euphoria and nightmare, touches base with history clearly enough. References abound not only to Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington but in the figure of Ras to Marcus Garvey as 1920s black nationalist. The 1943 and other Harlem riots supply their marker. The contribution of the American Communist Party is re-written as The Brotherhood with its Marxist-scientific laws and heresies and the leader Jack whose half-cocked glass eye pops out before the astonished narrator. Tod Clifton embodies the youth street activist, Mary a mothering Harlem and Bliss Proteus Rinehart the Harlem hustler from Zoot Suiter to numbers man. But the Harlem Ellison most 37

Ralph Ellison, “Harlem’s America”, New Leader, 48 (26 September 1966), 22-35. Ellison, Invisible Man, 5. 39 Ibid., 157. 38

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insists upon is that built up in the mind of the narrator, one simultaneously on the defensive and the attack, full of tricks, pitfalls and double-takes. As he says, this makes for a Heart of Darkness Harlem in which strange, hallucinatory identities like those of Ras, Tod Clifton, Brother Jack, the looter Dupre and, above all, those visited on or adopted by the narrator himself, exist as if by some strangely ordained transhistorical writ. For like Harlem itself, the narrator exists in and yet across time, a voice of now yet which comprises all the increments of black time to have gone into that now. Whether as the bearer of false promissory notes (his college scroll, the letters from Bledsoe), or as an apparatchik in the Brotherhood, or as the confidence man Rinehart, or indeed the eventual voice of Jack The Bear hibernation in the Prologue and Epilogue, the narrator speaks at once to, of, and from behind a Harlem bound up in all the prodigal contradictions of American history. For him Harlem exists as located in actual time and place, bar and stoop but also riot, a human order pressing in its very actuality yet at the same time lodged as a veritable fantasy lodged deep and challengingly within the American racial psyche. So multifarious a Harlem could hardly have found a more attuned chronicler than Ellison, or at least than his narrator persona. The latter, meeting up with the Boston philanthropist Mr Norton to whom, as a student in his Tuskegee-like college, he has shown the Trueblood family and taken to the Golden Day, tells him he has “made” him.40 That is, by becoming a writer, a mythologer of underground creativity, he has come to serve as the surrogate of all any African American who in effect dreams American reality with Harlem as one of its essential loadstones. Whether history or myth, a heaven or hell, war or peace, Harlem in Ellison’s assured fashioning of Invisible Man signifies archive of local culture yet the very writ of an Afro-America at the edges of fantasy. A companion Harlem is to be found in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, a Harlem of pentecostal rites, coming of age, and the ever immediate past of black Southern dynasty.41 John Grimes, still young during the Depression, provides the human link to three black generations, a Harlem remembrance of things past. In part, this frame 40 41

Ibid., 565. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, NY: Knopf, 1953.

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calls up the Great Migration, the Northward shift of black families out of Klan-fed hate and Dixie injustice. More emblematically, it calls up the Old Testament: John’s preacher-stepfather, Gabriel, as a flawed Abraham, with Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael re-enacted in the lives of the unloved first wife Deborah, the alluring homegirl Esther, and the wayward prodigal son Roy. The Harlem interwar years with Gabriel’s second wife Elizabeth, and John as her own illegitimate son by the murdered Richard, then take up and echo this earlier tier, the Northern story as the implied retelling of the Southern. Rarely thereafter, whether in his too amorphous Another Country, or his Harlem-Puerto Rico novella If Beale Street Could Talk, or his broad ranging Just above My Head, which contains a number of key Harlem scenes, has Baldwin’s fiction – again “Sonny’s Blues” offers the exception – quite caught the fervour and cadence of embattled ghetto life.42 In part, this is due to the tightness of design in Go Tell It on the Mountain, its counterpoint of 1930s time-present and memory of time-past. It is also due to Baldwin’s sureness about the particular Harlem he is dramatizing, the Harlem of his best essay work marked by the authority of personal experience. This is a Harlem that, for John, has itself become his stepfather’s Temple of the Fire Baptized, apocalyptic, ablaze in visions of the Fall and the Redemption, and which leaves his own already uncertain sexuality caught midways. The Grimes family, and the Temple’s church people, like Praying Mother Washington and the lithesome, androgynous Elisha, personify Harlem as of this world yet with the promise of the next, and amid whose competing human frailties John must negotiate flesh and spirit. Baldwin, even so, keeps his novel firmly tied into history. The Prayers of the Saints, the three memory pieces of Gabriel as flawed patriarch, of Florence, his embittered, literally cancerous sister, and of Elizabeth as guardian mother, are eventful in their own right. But they also play off Depression-era Harlem against an earlier Dixie while showing the threads of hope and despair bound into the same story. The Harlem of the novel, thereby, takes on a personal yet historic signification, as John’s own immediate place of becoming and at the

42

James Baldwin, Another Country, NY: Dial Press, 1962; If Beale Street Could Talk, NY: Dial Press, 1974; and Just above My Head, NY: Dial Press, 1979.

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same time that of the larger community whose journeys across time and family have been the making of him. *** To move from Ellison and Baldwin to Chester Himes, one-time jewel thief, Ohio State student, California war-worker, jailbird, European literary exile, autobiographer and novelist, is to engage in another post-war register of Harlem, one quite sumptuously audacious in its bizarrerie. The Grave Digger/Coffin Ed novels, For Love of Imabelle/A Rage in Harlem (1957) to Cotton Comes to Harlem (1966) and Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), along with Pinktoes (1961) as sexual-comic Harlem spoof, and Run Man Run (1966) with its portrait of a white psychotic cop loose in Manhattan, offer a Harlem hitherto un-written, surreal and violent urban box, a counter-order of drugs and crime, a black city of the absurd.43 It was in this regard that, in My Life of Absurdity Himes offered the following observation of the Série Noire thrillers: “The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I never called it real; I just wanted t take it away from the white man if only in my books” (Himes’ italics).44 To these can be added Himes’ still unused screenplay Baby Sister (1961), a Brechtian cartoon-strip that shares a style, a vision, with the thrillers. The iconography again calls up poverty, dilapidated houses, numbers, black matrons, street brothers, Jesse Simple bars, the Apollo Theater, switchblades, shiny big cars; in all, Harlem as cannibal territory wired with hustle. Himes builds this mix of vulnerability and glitter into the piece’s very idiom: This is Harlem, U.S.A., a city of contradictions. A city of Negroes isolated in the center of New York City. A city of incredible poverty and huge sums of cash. A city of the meek and the violent. A city of brothels, bars and churches. Here is the part called Sugar Hill, where the prosperous live – the leaders, the professionals, the numbers barons. Here is the part they call the Valley, where the hungry eke out an existence and prey upon one another. The Valley is like a sea filled with

43 For a full account of the detective thrillers, see Chapter 18, “Violence Become a Form: The Novels of Chester Himes”. 44 Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity, NY: Doubleday, 1976, 126.

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cannibal fish. Put in your hand, and pull out a stub. This is the story of a good-looking, healthy, voluptuous, seventeen-year old black girl, called BABY SISTER LOUIS, who lives in the Valley. She lives with her family; her mother MAMA LOUIS, and her three brothers: SUSIE, twenty-two years old, BUDDY, twenty years old, and PIGMEAT, fourteen years old. Her elder sister, LIL, a blues singer, lives with her man on Sugar Hill. BABY SISTER is a juicy, tasty lamb in a jungle of hungry wolves. And in the Valley there is no good shepherd. Only the will of the inhabitants of this community, restricted, violated and violent, timid and vicious, living in their rat-ridden, hotbox, stinking flats, are either the hungry wolves themselves, or are struggling desperately to save themselves from the hungry wolves. And it is perfectly reasonable and natural that these people should be hungry, the wolves and the sheep alike. If your own food – food for the soul and food for the spirit as well as food for the stomach - has been held just out of your reach for three hundred years, or longer, you would be hungry too. And one way to keep from starving in this land of plenty when you have 45 no food is to eat your baby sister.

Not for Himes any dewy eyed or nostalgic picture; rather, as though in the style of an adult nursery story, this is Harlem as war-ground, preyed upon and yet always self-preying. Himes supplies a key to quite other fiction that has given its attention to post-war Harlem, not least four intersecting narratives, three white written and the other a Latino-written autobiographical fiction of fact. Warren Miller’s The Cool World, told in the first person voice of Richard “Duke” Custis, gang leader adult before his time, dramatizes a Harlem of territorial divides and inevitable group violence. It compares illuminatingly with Shane Stevens’ Go Down Dead, also centred in gang and black adolescent Harlem, a 1960s revolt novel told as a week-long episode in the life of Adam Clayton “King” Henry. More consequentially, Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker envisages in the image of Sol Nazerman’s pawnshop a Harlem itself the repository of sold-out lives and property. Sol survives, reluctantly, as the witness both to his own Jewish and European catastrophe and to that unfolding in the Harlem about him. 45

Baby Sister was published for the first time in Chester Himes, Black on Black: Baby Sister and Selected Writings, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973, 11-12.

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For him, whether the past of Belsen or the present of the ghetto, both make for hell. Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets renders Harlem as Puerto Rican barrio, a cycle of gang violence, prison, drugs and the struggle for manhood pressured against a white colour-line of power and language.46 In all of these Harlem offers the contradiction of stasis and vitality, at once urban enclosure yet at the same time a site of immense wellsprings of life. Nor has recent black-written Harlem fiction itself been any less aware of the paradox. For it lies deep within the continuing variety of design, genre, styles, novels as markedly distinct from each other as they were throughout the New Negro years of McKay and Toomer, Fisher and Thurman, Larsen and Fauset. *** Charles Wright’s The Messenger, the chronicle of its writer-protagonist within a Manhattan of midnight cowboy hustle and drugs, might be a diary novel as episodic, and given to cuts and fades, as the city in which it is set. The confessional style provides just the right thread to its world of queens and johns, street bars, a remembered black boyhood in Missouri, and Charlie’s life as a message deliverer across the five boroughs. Above all it tells a writer’s life, the will to subdue the city to the word. Within all of this Wright manages a perfect cameo of Harlem as at once many cities in one: Tonight I caught the A train, went up to Harlem. Kenya, the Iron Curtain …. As I walk down 125th Street, I see young men, sharp as diamonds in suits they can’t afford, leaning against flashy cars that don’t belong to them, or stepping smartly as if on their way to a very high class hell. 125th Street is Forty-Second Street, Broadway, Times Square, Fifth Avenue all combined into a jungle of buildings. It is a prayer meeting with a hand-clapping, tambourine “Yes Lawd.” It’s Blumstein’s Department store, the Harlemite’s Macey’s. It’s the Apollo, with the only live stage show in Manhattan. It’s the 46

Warren Miller, The Cool World, NY: Little, Brown, 1959; Shane Stevens, Go Down Dead, NY: William Morrow, 1967; Edward Lewis Wallant, The Pawnbroker, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961; and Piri Thomas, Down These Mean Streets, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.

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smart bars catering to Big Time wheeling and dealing Negroes 47 and downtown whites, who want a swinging Harlem night.

William Melvin Kelley’s dem – them or white folks, takes on Harlem through a complex mesh of dark, inventive satire. Kelley sets up white suburbia and black Harlem as two zany, opposite worlds, each run to its own confounding play of rituals and language. 48 Mitchell Pierce, a white advertising executive fixated by TV soap-opera and fast losing the ability to differentiate between media and reality, finds himself faced with his wife’s having given birth to twins, one black, one white. Setting out to discover his black co-father, an Ellisonian trickster named Cooley, he finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into a Harlem wholly beyond his imagining. Kelley, in other words, offers yet another species of Harlem as still terra incognita to most of white America, a great enclave of un-encounterd life. Robert Deane Pharr’s S.R.O. drives realism to yet another kind of furthest reach. Harlem becomes a ghetto vortex, a self-circling tenancy of drugs, need, relief.49 Presided over by the supplier Sinman, it is a Harlem that fixes itself at every turn, its ravages held only momentarily in abeyance by the needle. Claude Brown’s The Children of Ham, a follow-up to Manchild in the Promised Land, his bestselling autobiography, depicts Harlem through the den life of a group of young black drop-outs, a story of literal survival under the rules of Harlem ghetto culture. 50 Whether Harlem comes over violentabsurdist as in Himes, terra incognita as in Kelley, predatory in body and spirit as in Pharr, or sociological as in Brown, there can be no doubting the continuing variety of its novels. This continues in Toni Morrison’s adroitly memorial Jazz, set in 1926, and told against a backdrop of the Great Migration.51 The lyric, doomed love of middle-aged Joe Trace, salesman of Cleopatra Beauty products, for eighteen-year-old Dorcas who refuses to name him even 47

Charles Wright, The Messenger, NY: Farrar, Straus, 1963, 176-77. William Melvin Kelley, dem, NY: Doubleday, 1967. 49 Robert Deane Pharr, S.R.O., NY: Doubleday, 1971. The title refers to a single room occupancy hotel in Harlem. 50 Claude Brown, The Children of Ham, NY: Stein and Day, 1976; Manchild in the Promised Land, NY: Macmillan, 1965. 51 Toni Morrison, Jazz, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. 48

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as she lies dying when he shoots her after discovering her affair with a younger man, and his wife Violet’s violent reaction and eventual calm, makes their Harlem world into a ballad, the stuff of black urban legend. Morrison’s feats of circling, querulous narration, the remembrances of coming North, setting up home, becoming Harlemites, gives a wonderful, bracing resonance to the novel. A conspectus of these different, if frequently overlapping, fictions of place is also engagingly developed in Rosa Guy’s A Measure of Time, the life and times of sassy Dorine Davis, who comes up from the Jim Crow South of her youth in the 1920s to be a survivor in the Harlem of the 1960s.52 At successive phases in the novel she is one of the jazz age’s black glitterati, a booster pulling off spectacular store heists, a Depression era hustler, and a prison inmate who emerges to a world where Malcolm X and Martin Luther King offer the touchstones, and throughout she serves as a carrier of Harlem at its ambiguous best and worst. Certainly Harlem’s ambiguities are not lost on Darryl Pinckney in High Cotton. His narrator, the wry, un-pious Columbia University student and witness from a black middle-class he calls the Also Chosen, allows himself to ponder: The Negro Capital of the World, the old-timers’s Seventh Avenue, which boasted “fifty-two Easters a year”, I knew had moved, long before, to the rare-books desk of the Schomburg library. The Hotel Theresa was dead, the Apollo was in a coma, and the lush exchanges between neighbors in the pretty town houses of Stanford White had to wait in a nourishing obscurity, like a piece of music whose neglect makes its revival all the more rapturous. The voyeuristic possibilities of the remains, the bad corners, were more animating to me than the 53 dissertation-giving ardor for the ruins of melanophilia.

For Rosa Guy, as for Darryl Pinckney, and all the succession of Harlem novelists, the rich, human rumor of Harlem, as Garcia Lorca names it in his Poeta en Nueva York (1940), continues to press for

52

Rosa Guy, A Measure of Time, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. Darryl Pinckney, High Cotton, NY and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992, 133-34. 53

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literary expression.54 The only fact about Harlem in this respect may indeed be its dense, necessary irreducibility, the resistance to the single account. This, one supposes, helps to identify why there have been so many varieties of Harlem on my Mind – be they expressed in the novel or in any of the abundant literary, visual, popular culture and all other forms inspired by the enduring black First City of America.

54 I take the term “rumor” from Lorca’s poem “El Rey de Harlem”. The full line reads “Harlem … Me llega tu rumor”. Most translations read something like “Harlem … your murmur comes to me”. But “rumor” in this context conveys a great deal more. It incorporates the notion of energy, vitality, the sweep of human feeling and activity. In this sense it denotes perfectly why Harlem has so appealed to the creative imagination. Darryl Pinckney also makes use of this allusion in High Cotton, 132.

22 DOWN HOME: MAPPING THE SOUTH IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION “You’re black and living in the South – did you forget how to lie?” Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man1 John had read about the things white people did to colored people; how, in the South, where his parents came from, white people cheated them of their wages, and burned them, and shot them – and did worse things, said his father, which the tongue could not endure to utter. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain 2

Neither of them a Southerner by birth, both Ellison and Baldwin, even so, issue reminders of the accusing memory, the bitter sting, that the South can hold for Afro-America. This is not to overlook in their two landmark novels, as in other black written fiction, a more fondly remembered Dixie of black family and kin and, in the storytelling by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and their fellow women authors, of longtime black Southern styles of mothering and sisterhood. Nor does it suggest that these do not link into, or find story form from, the yet wider, and more inclusive, intimacies of the South’s black rural communities and townships and each different workplace and church congregation. But the South in view, and albeit written by the Oklahoma-raised Ellison and by Baldwin as vintage Harlem expatriate, bespeaks a familiar enough equation: the memory of black endurance in the face of the long winding course of white hostility. For have not black 1

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, NY: Random House, 1952; reissued as Invisible Man, 30th Anniversary Edition, NY: Random House, 1982, 136. 2 James Baldwin, Go tell It on the Mountain, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963, 39.

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Southerners, however profoundly implicated in their sense of region, been obliged to face a radical ambiguity? Suborned under slavery as working labour, whether cotton or tobacco, field or house, it has taken the arduous haul since Abolition to win recognition as necessary cocitizenry. Yet however often denied they have been inextricable from the making of the South as ongoing history, as a massive human presence, as a homeland and body of custom and myth, and not the least of things, as a style of culture and word. The timeline runs from the early slaveholding plantations of Virginia, Georgia or Louisiana to the Ku Klux Klan begun in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865, and from disfranchisement in the wake of Reconstruction to the largely Southern mandated segregation of the US army during World War II. If the 1960s ushered in key contemporary change in the form of civil rights, voter registration drives, and Black Power, white racist intransigence also continued. The church bombing at Sixteenth Baptist Church Street in Birmingham, Alabama in September 1963, or the killing of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, can be thought symptomatic. A celebrated rally like that of Selma, Mississippi, in 1965, however, did double duty as a reminder not only of the South’s “Colored Only” regimes but of the counter-politics of coming desegregation. Jim Crow, moreover, in all its myriad bullying and at its worst in each lynching, fire attack and rape, can be seen to have led to anything but a culture of victimry. Latterday setbacks, often graphic, continue, among the more recent the white-supremacist decapitation of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas in 1998. But the strength of body as of spirit, the sheer stamina, which has underwritten black survival in the South, and given rise to each affirming code of language and belief and humour, equally holds. Literary fiction, almost of birthright, was bound to draw from an archive at once so rich, if often ambiguous, in its human drama. The music of the black South supplies one immediate seam, whether the virtuosity of Mississippi blues and New Orleans jazz or legendary names from Louis Armstrong to Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters to B.B. King. Black Christianity, Bible-protestant and often millennial in its allusions to the promised land, and full of a dazzling sermonry of call and response and spirituals like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, supplies another. Everyday foodways, to include black-eyed peas, corn pone, collard greens, pig feet or chitterlings, give their own

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idiom of black Dixie. Humour is remembered, and restyled, from mockery of The Big House and in performances of the cakewalk during slavery, to Hoodoo, also known as Voodoo or Vodoun, a black and slave belief-system of sympathetic but often capricious African deities and of which Ishmael Reed wittily avails himself in his pastiche slave-narrative Flight to Canada, to the wordplay of competitive insult like the dozens.3 The fund of vernacular folklore, Brer Rabbit or Jack the Bear, Stackolee or High John the Conqueror, necessarily weighs. It won early explicit recognition in collections like Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men and Tell My Horse.4 This transposing of the South’s black oral tradition into a quite indispensable body of written story continues in the contemporary authorship of, among others, Raymond Andrews in his Muskhogean County novels like Appalachee Red, with its ribald, vernacular portraits of black and country Georgia, or A.R. Flowers, raised in Memphis, Tennessee, in De Mojo Blues and Another Good Loving Blues, both of which draw with a surest touch from black Delta idiom and blues along with Hoodoo.5 The lineage, in fact, is of longstanding, whether Charles Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius McAdoo folk pieces like “The Goophered Grapevine” (1897) and his The House Behind the Cedars as a classic novel of passing set in North Carolina; or Jean Toomer’s Cane, with its mosaics of Georgia heat and race fever; or Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” and “Long Black Song”, eventually to be included in Uncle Tom’s Children, the one a Southern mythic story of black flight and the other of black resistance, and to be followed by The Long Dream as a parable of black manhood in a white controlled Dixie township. In Hurston’s case she famously drew from her own all black Eatonville, Florida upbringing as well as from the Caribbean and the Carolinas and South’s other sections.6

3

Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada, NY: Random House, 1976. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, Philadelphia PA: Lippincott, 1935, and Tell My Horse, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938. 5 Raymond Andrews, Appalachee Red, NY: Dial Press, 1978; A.R Flowers, De Mojo Blues:De Quest of Highjohn the Conqueror, NY: E.P. Dutton, 1985, and Another Good Loving Blues, NY: Viking, 1993. 6 Charles Chesnutt, “The Goophered Grapevine”, in The Conjure Woman and Other Stories, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1899, and The House Behind the Cedars, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1899; Jean Toomer, Cane, NY: Boni and Liveright, 4

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The extracts from Baldwin and Ellison, also need their due sense of context. In Invisible Man the voice belongs to Dr Bledsoe, a kind of grotesque Booker T. Washington and Principal of the Tuskegee-like Deep South College, as he upbraids the eponymous narrator. The slave tactic of putt’n on ol’ massa, with its calculated mock-servility, he is shown to have adapted, however, to his own cynical political interests. The other speaks to the ordeal of consciousness of fourteenyear old John Grimes in Go Tell It on the Mountain as he wrestles with his preacher-father’s hatred of white people, and his own Pentecostal call of spirit over flesh, in the Harlem of the Depression. The effect is to bring the South to the North, Dixie’s white violence and fervent backcountry black Christianity carried echoingly into Manhattan’s premier black city. Significant as they are in their own right, both novels, at the same time, offer bearings, a pathway, into how the fiction of contemporary Afro-America more generally has taken to writing the South. For his part, Ralph Ellison, in the two full-length works of fiction to have appeared under his name, and by coincidence as may be, bequeaths a marker for the half century in play. After much celebrated delay, including the loss of an earlier draft in a fire at Ellison’s summer home in Plainfield, Massachusetts in 1967, Invisible Man now has its posthumous successor in the novel Juneteenth. 7 If Invisible Man deservedly won classic status one factor lies in how its first part depicts Dixie. The Battle Royal scene carries an emblematic reference-back into slave ownership and pugilism. Any supposed magnolia version of the South is undercut by the township’s brutal racial politics and practices. The Trueblood and Golden Day episodes turn, at times with near surreal dark comedy, upon race-andsex as the haunting cultural phobia of history south of the MasonDixon line. In Juneteenth, although the South again constitutes but one point of reference, the view of America’s racial plenty, not to say ethnic-racial overlap, and as a resource for strength as against division, again finds expression. Ellison’s soaring ventriloquy, together with his use of trickster myth, adaptations of jazz and blues riff, and 1923; Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children, NY: Harper, 1938, 1947, and The Long Dream, NY: Doubleday, 1958. 7 Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth, NY: Random House, 1990.


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deployment of the black sermon, adds confirming density, a would-be epic of the national drama of black and white. Under a title that calls to mind the celebration of 19 June 1865 when Union troops entered Texas to free it of the baleful reach of Southern slavery, the notoriously long in the making Juneteenth could not be more ambitious. In its story of Bliss, the seeming white-born Southern child raised as a black preacher by his mentor, the former jazz virtuoso Reverend A.Z. Hickman, it seeks both to give witness to America’s history as one hexed, near broken, by its race phobias and fissures, and yet challenged to make good on its shared human occupancy. Bliss as harlequin, in Hickman’s plan, is to carry the inner meanings of blackness into the very citadel of America’s whiteness. Ellison, thereby, seeks to open black and white as constructs to every kind of interrogation – hue, visage, language, politics, history, an America of the South, the Southwest, and across the regions. The span of the story runs in time from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to Bliss’ incarnation as the latterday racist Senator Adam Sunraider of Vermont, and in geography from Oklahoma to New England to Washington, DC. But for all the scenes in one time Indian Country, and elsewhere, it is inevitably the South which supplies a kind of bedrock of reference, whether the episodes of good ol’ boy viciousness or Hickman’s black Camp revivals and conversions. Bliss’ life, from childhood adoption through to his assassination in the Senate chamber, could not be more specific, even singular, and yet, and at the same time, more call upon the always larger iconography of memory. For to apply a line from the opening chapter of Juneteenth this is the Afro-America, the America, and indeed the South, of a people “embarked upon a difficult journey who were already far beyond the point of no return”. 8 The South invoked by Ellison and Baldwin, slavery and after, acts as generic terrain, mythical kingdom. In the black literary fiction between Invisible Man and Juneteenth there has been no shortage of other contributions, each substantively particular as to cast, locale and story while remaining linked into this shared general vision. The further names to invoke, not a few in number, still do only selective justice to a genuinely compendious record. It could even be 8

Ellison, Juneteenth, 5.

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asked whether or not virtually any African American text, however obliquely, does not bear the footfalls of black memory of the South. But novel, novella, stories single or collected, and by writers both from the South or North, each puts Dixie under its own style of black fashioning. To be sure there are overlaps of a general temper with the South written into being by Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey or Bobbie Ann Mason. But there can be no overlooking a narrative imagination also different in its grounding, that of an AfroSouth as it were, and which gives its own discrete narrative to the overwhelmingly white-told versions of the events, and eventfulness, of the South as an historic American theatre of region. *** In all these respects Toni Morrison, born in Ohio and long resident as Random House editor and professor in New York, serves as a key voice, her South summoned in different vignettes, wonderfully vivid panels of story. These find place within the unfolding overall panorama of African American history she began with The Bluest Eye and its story of Pecola Breedlove’s descent into racial and sexual selfhate. Whether, subsequently, given as the flying African fantasy and Virginia treasure-hunt, and through the person of the Michigan-raised Milkman Macon Dead III, in Song of Solomon, or as the text designates it the “haint” of slavery and the desperate, if loving, hacksaw killing by Sethe Suggs of her own daughter to escape continuing enslavement in ante-bellum Kentucky in Beloved, she has sought always to render the South as perfectly literal yet, and at the same time, a dispensation which reverberates in the inner mind and senses.9 The same holds for the less acclaimed Jazz, told as though a 1920s blues ballad, the love triangle of Violet Trace, her husband Joe, and his passion for the eighteen-year-old Dorcas who refuses to name him as her killer as she lies dying after he has shot her from jealousy. Harlem may be the setting but it calls up the South of the turn of the century Great Migration, a South if for Violet and Joe the site of their courtship as “a young country couple” from Vesper County, Virginia, 9

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970; Song of Solomon, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977; and Beloved, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.


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with the move to Baltimore, Maryland to follow, then also the cause of “a wave of black people running from want and violence”.10 The novel’s two parallel flashbacks, Joe’s abandonment as a child, his onetime tree-top sleeping, and Violet’s family history through her Baltimore grandmother, True Belle, with its story of the mulatto Golden Gray and Joe’s likely wild-woman mother, might be Dixie genealogy in microcosm. They both give witness to survival out of the distortion of slavery, each historic Southern code of whiteness and blackness and the race power-politics to which they have given rise. Morrison’s landscape in Jazz, overwhelmingly, is the Harlem of Lenox Avenue and 140th Street, its round-midnight clubs, eateries and storefront churches. In one way it could not be more urbanized. But with each arriving northbound train, literally segregated into “Colored Coaches” yet full of mythic resonance, it is also a Harlem which, once again, she shows to have drawn black-Southern country remembrance into its very way of being. A similar process of adaptation holds for Albert Murray, the Alabama raised novelist of Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree and The Seven League Boots, his blues inspired Scooter trilogy which, without downplaying the colour line, respectively, and always affectionately, calls up a South of black boyhood, Tuskegee education, and life as a Swing-era bassist in an Ellington-style orchestra.11 In his South to a Very Old Place, a memoir and half fictive travelogue, he puts matters with succinct flourish: You can take the “A” train uptown from Forty-second Street in midtown Manhattan and be there in less than ten minutes. There is a stop at Fifty-ninth Street beneath the traffic circle which commemorates Christopher Columbus who once set out for destinations east on compass bearing west. But after that as often as not there are only six more express minutes to go. Then you are pulling into the IND station at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, and you are that many more miles north of Mobile, Alabama, but you are also, for better or worse, back

10

Toni Morrison, Jazz, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, 30 and 33. Albert Murray, South to a Very Old Place, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1971; Train Whistle Guitar, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1974; The Spyglass Tree, NY: Pantheon Books, 1991; and The Seven League Boots, NY: Pantheon Books, 1996. 11

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Gothic to Multicultural among homefolks no matter what part of the old country you come from.12

Alice Walker’s career as fiction-writer might almost be a paradigm in its use of the South as literary context and motif. Its silhouette is everywhere in her language and imagery, whether her Georgia family sharecropper and African-Cherokee origins, cross-marriage to the Jewish civil rights lawyer Melvyn Leventhal, activist years in Jackson, Mississippi, or the evolving black feminist ideology of womanism and which she would gather into a volume like In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Both of her first novels, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, with its unsparing, and at the time greatly controversial, threegenerational portrait of black family fissure, and Meridian, with its protagonist Meridian Hill as early womanist figuration in an era of 1960s civil rights, draw upon a Deep South, Georgia specifically, whose race etiquettes and vexations she grew up with firsthand.13 No novel of hers, however, more deservedly came to the fore than The Color Purple, its epistolatory story of Celie, her sister Nettie, and the flamboyant, red-dressed Queen Honeybee, Shug Avery, as the crafted expression of different styles of womanhood won against a backcountry South of brutalizing black maleness.14 Controversy again was immediate. Had Walker perpetuated a stereotype of blackSouthern men as rapists and tyrants? Are the Africa scenes too sentimental a foil to the regime which first separates Celie from her sister, makes her the sex commodity respectively of her stepfather Alphonso, an unloving second spouse, and her eventual husband Albert who withholds Nettie’s letters from her, and in the course of which she is arbitrarily separated from her own children? The novel, in fact, was at once always fuller, and more nuanced, than these reactions suggested. Walker handles the complex sexuality that, under Shrug’s healing love and guidance, gives self-esteem to Celie with genuine subtlety. Albert and Celie, despite his past ravage, in turn find a new equilibrium as Celie begins her clothes design business in 12

Murray, South to a Very Old Place, 3. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1970; In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1973; Meridian, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1976; In Search of Our Mothers’s Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1983. 14 Alice Walker, The Color Purple, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1982. 13


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Memphis, a reborn but forgiving weaver-woman or Penelope as it were. Their relationship, finally, assumes its place within the unsilenced womanism that brings together Celie, Shrug, Nettie, the children Adam and Olivia, and the rest of their circle. It represents Southern black womanhood, if not Southern black family at large, imagined under new auspices. This rite of passage, as Stephen Spielbeg was to recognize in his 1985 film with Whoopi Goldberg in the title role, also takes its course against, and within, a finely etched Georgia. Black-centred in family and relationship it gives only passing references to a white ambient population. Speech is vernacular, Hurston-esque. The story gains from a close sense of mule-worked land, climate, household, birthing, dress, food, and the music and dance of blues and the country jukes. The Color Purple tells a cautionary, and evidently enduring, tale of gender and dynasty. But no small part of its success lies in the degree to which Walker furnishes Georgia as a South in just the right attentive working detail. *** A necessary line of recent African American fiction of the South is to be met with in the varying styles of historical novel. As notably as anywhere it came to be a phenomenon most associated with Alex Haley’s Roots: A Family Saga whose TV spin-offs (Roots, 1977, Roots, the Next Generations) won an American viewership of well over a hundred million.15 Gambia to Maryland and Virginia, Kunta Kinte to Chicken George in North Carolina, George’s daughter Cynthia (Haley’s grandmother) to his own birth and family upbringing in Henning, Tennessee: Roots was deemed a unique American genealogy, at once diaspora and homecoming, and with the South as its inevitable turning-point. Haley’s canvas embraces Juffure in West Africa as idyll, the trauma of the middle passage, slave auction, Dixie servitude, the freedom trail, the black 1920s and Depression, and a South, an America, eventually obliged to face the shadows of its history. Beginning from the capture, and then transportation, of Kunte Kinte to Virginia in 1767, the story evolves through a vivid gallery of African 15

Alex Haley, Roots: A Family Saga, NY: Doubleday, 1976.

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into African American clan and no less than seven generations of historical change. Haley’s own search for ancestry plays into the momentum, whether the Atlantic journey-back through slave ports both in America and Africa or the final encounter with the griot able to rekindle the story from passed down oral memory. Whatever the cavils about inertness of style, or plagiarism, or about the Hollywood studio huts-and-jungle Africa of the TV series, this was widely taken for a fiction of fact whose sweep, for good or ill, invited comparison with Gone with the Wind, one kind of pageant of the South for another. Margaret Mitchell’s bestseller of 1936, to a considerable extent, was also in the mind of Margaret Walker when she composed her neoslave novel, Jubilee.16 Based upon the life of her great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, her figure of Vivry, offspring of a white slaveholder and bonded slave, serves as a would-be rebuke to the stereotype of the mammy. Reactions, even so, have varied as to the efficacy of Jubilee. In telling the story of the white Dutton plantation, replete in ageing belles like Big Missie and Miss Lillian and the Legree-like poor white overseer Grimes, not to say the replay of Sherman’s March on Atlanta, how far does it escape its own kind of formula narrative as magnolia romance or gothic? Is Vivry herself sufficiently invested with imaginative life? There can be little doubt of a South, a canvas, of high incident. Vivry’s girlhood, always open to sexual risk, takes place under the guardian care of older black women. Her life in the quarters is told with circumstantial flair. The unwitting double-marriage, first to Randall Ware, her Free Negro blacksmith husband, and then to Innis Brown, her loyal homesteader, and her mothering of Jim, Minna and Harry, underline slavery’s often dire implication for black family life in the South. Few scenes in Jubilee carry the frisson of Vivry’s witness to the hanging of two black women as alleged murderers. If her rise to elder, and old-time Bible Christian, can look routine that does not by any means eclipse the former Georgia slavewoman, Margaret Walker’s Vivry as lived figuration of a past black South. In Ernest Gaines, raised on a plantation in Oscar, Louisiana, the South looks to a storyteller of rare triumph. His creation has been St Raphael Parish, a world of Black, Cajun, Creole and other mixed-race 16

Margaret Walker, Jubilee, Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1966, and How I Wrote Jubilee, Chicago, IL: Third World Press, 1972.


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communities and lives with near to hand New Orleans and the bayou country. Catherine Carmier delineates the crossed racial love of Jackson Bradley and the novel’s Catherine, a chronicle of the loss, the masquerades and silences, brought on by the Southern hex of race. Of Love and Dust turns on murder, plantation heritage, and relationships once again pursued in defiance of prescribed race lines with their accusations and taboo. Bloodline, five first-person narratives told in voices freighted in vernacular, carries the imprint of yet other kinds of fought-for black selfhood. Given acknowledgement of In My Father’s House as a portrait of intergenerational black politics in the South, together with A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson before Dying both with their own workings of Southern remembrance, no novel, however, has more won Gaines his reputation than The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.17 Told as though in the tape-recorded voice of the centenarian Jane Pittman in the early 1960s, that of a one-time slave still living on a Louisiana plantation and who marches for Civil Rights at the novel’s conclusion, it un-spools a history, a South, from cotton slavery and the War of Secession to the era of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King with greatest sureness. Not surprisingly it led to an acclaimed TV version of 1974 starring Cicely Tyson. Gaines himself, in a 1978 interview with Callaloo, speaks with just the right inside appeal, and affection, when he says of the fictional Jane Pittman: You have seen Miss Jane, too. She is that lady who lives up the block, who comes out every Sunday to go to church when the rheumatism does not keep her in …. She sits on a screened-in porch fanning herself in the summer, and in the winter she sits by the heater or the stove and thinks about the dead…She knows much – she has lived long. Sometimes she’s impatient, but most times she is just the opposite. Truth is what she remembers.18

17

Ernest Gaines, Catherine Carmier, NY: Atheneum, 1964; Of Love and Dust, NY: Dial Press, 1967; Bloodline, NY: Dial Press, 1968; The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, NY: Dial Press. 1971; In My Father’s House, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978; A Gathering of Old Men, NY: Knopf, 1983; and A Lesson before Dying, NY: Knopf, 1993. 18 Ernest Gaines, “Miss Jane and I”, Callaloo, III/1 (May 1978), 23-28.

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To Jane’s friend, Mary Hedges, the book’s self purporting editor explains in the Preface: “I teach history …. I’m sure [Jane’s] life story can help explain things to my students.” Mary’s response is to ask “What’s wrong with them books you already got?” to which the answer is “Miss Jane is not in them” (x). As she calls up the crosshatch of people who have entered her life, black, white, creole, cajun or mulatto, and all the Louisiana history they bear, Jane, in fact, assumes her own kind of griot voice. The one-time slavegirl, escapee, wife and mother, and eventual community historian, however, remains a black Southerner, a witness to the region as both time and place. “Miss Jane’s story is all of their stories, and their stories are Miss Jane’s” (x) confirms Gaines’ fictional editor-listener. She can be as spontaneous, and at times as discontinuous, as each volte-face in her history, and aging memory, all require. These nicely intersect in the editor’s further, and not a little Faulknerian, observation that “This is what Mary and Miss Jane meant when they said you could not tie all the ends together in one direction”.19 Built as a quartet, “The War Years”, “Reconstruction”, “The Plantation” and “The Quarters”, and pitched to be read as the spoken as much as the written word, the novel becomes a tale of the South wholly, and often sumptuously, inextricable from the rhythms and language of its own telling. “I’m headed for Ohio” Jane says in childhood in the aftermath of the South’s defeat.20 But as her companions are killed by renegades from the Secesh forces, as they are known, she walks not out of the South but right back into it, a voice of accusation and yet celebration. Each section bears witness. In “The War Years”, as Jane and Ned, the son of Big Laura who has been killed in the escape from the plantation, seek to escape northward from the patrollers, they also find their route into literacy and discarding their slave names. Jane abandons Ticey, her slave name. For his part Ned calls himself after Frederick Douglass: We must have been two dozens of us there, and now everybody started changing names like you change hats. Nobody was keeping the name Old Master had given them. This one would say, “My new name Cam Lincoln”. That one would say: “My

19 20

Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, x. Ibid., 14.


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new name Ace Freeman”…. Another one standing by a tree would say, “My new name Bill Moses. No more Rufus.”21

Gaines leaves little doubt for the black South of the connection between freedom and name, the twin liberation of escape and word. “And that was the deal: the Secesh got their land, but the Yankees lend the money.”22 So, in “Reconstruction” Jane cites a contemporary, the era in which she has married the warm, devoted horse-breaker, Joe Pittman (even though, in slave fashion, they have jumped the broom) and the return of Ned. In this surrogate son Gaines offers a local version of Douglass, also a teacher-orator but whose challenge to postbellum white ascendancy leads to his murder by the cajun Albert Cluveau. Ned has died for refusing the South’s terms (“America is for red, white and black men”23). He dies, however, facing his killer, his blood, like that of black generations before him, sedimented into the Southern soil: “For years and years, even after they had graveled the road, you could see little black spots where the blood had dripped.”24 In “The Plantation”, actually the Samson plantation where Jane spends the early part of the twentieth century, she witnesses a latest twist in the drama of mulatto-dom. In the love of white Tee Bob Samson for Mary Agnes Lefabre, a creole woman tainted by the merest increment of black ancestry, the most ancient of Southern race taboo is broached. The affair, beautifully told as a courtship, a lost hope, ends in disaster but not melodrama. Jane’s is the monitoring voice, against a backdrop of the klan and the rise of Governor Huey Long. She remembers the sympathetic cajun, Jules Raynard, first with respect to Tee Bob (“he thought love was stronger than one drop of African blood”), and then on the challenge to transform an old South, and its taboos, into a new South: “The past and the present got all mixed up.”25 As to “The Quarters” the section centres on Jimmy Washington, the only son of Jane’s friend Lena Washington, an early Civil Rights activist who challenges the pre-ordained racial order by using a whites-only water faucet. He meets his death at the hands of a white 21

Ibid., 17-18. Ibid., 69. 23 Ibid., 109. 24 Ibid., 116. 25 Ibid., 192. 22

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Dixie posse. Jane transforms the account of the event she acquires from Robert Samson, the latest scion of the plantation dynasty, into a kind of talking blues, ancestral and balladic – “They shot him at eight o’clock this morning”.26 She it is, nonetheless, a survivor of a past as cruel as any in American history, who best understands Jimmy’s sacrifice as she puts her own body, and authority, into the march for civil rights. She takes this action as much from within the march of history as from within any one Southern protest or place. “Me and Robert looked at each other there for a long time”, she says, “then I went by him”. 27 On this measure The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has its title figure go by not simply one more white Southerner but the white South at large. Gaines offers Jane as legacy, an embodied pulse and archive, to the future. A shared ambition of scale holds for the novels of Leon Forrest, Chicagoan, from 1969-72 editor of Muhammad Speaks though never himself a convert to Islam, and whose ancestry looks both to Creole Louisiana and its Catholicism and the Mississippi of his father’s family with its inheritances of backcountry and Bible Protestantism. Each of his novels, from There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, with its vision-haunted passage of Nathaniel Witherspoon as he attends his mother’s Chicago south side funeral, through to Divine Days, quite the longest novel in African American tradition and given over to the life and death of the writer Joubert Antoine Jones, once more implies the South within the North.28 This is a Chicago born of black migration, blues, religion, and always remembrance of the dislocations, or in Forrest’s abiding metaphor, the orphanings of slavery. Two novels, especially, give focus to these Southern histories, at once Modernist in their narrative working (Joyce and Faulkner are strong influences), and yet, unmistakably, indebted to a black cultural repertoire of jazz, the warm improvisational talk of black barbershop, kitchen and street, and always of equal importance, the sermon as its own art of performative rhetoric. In The Bloodworth Orphans Forrest envisages a Book of Genesis, the huge dynastic chaos begotten of the slave-owning white patriarch Arlington Bloodworth Sr. (1817-1917), and reaching from antebellum 26

Ibid., 243. Ibid., 244. 28 Leon Forrest, There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, NY: Random House, 1973, and Divine Days, Oak Park, IL: Another Chicago Press, 1992. 27


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Mississippi to modern New Orleans, from Chicago to Africa.29 Told as a colloquy between Nathaniel (or Spoons as he has become) and Noah Ridgerook Cranberry, last of the Bloodworths, Forrest unravels a saga of miscegenation, religious prophets – notably W.W.W. Ford, his conflated trickster version of Elijah Muhammad as founder of the Black Muslims, and a history from its very beginnings in the slave South as near-fantastical as not. The intertextual echoes are many, notably of Faulkner’s Quentin and Shreve in Absalom, Absalom! or of Ellison’s Rinehart in Invisible Man. But as a dense, contrapuntal world, southern and northern, high-rhetorical and colloquial, the novel achieves unique status. With Two Wings to Veil My Face Forrest creates another vast genealogical web in which Nathaniel becomes scribe, amanuensis, to Great-Momma Sweetie Reed.30 Her story becomes his, that of another black elder whose origins are to be found on the Rollins plantation in antebellum Mississippi and which approaches its close in an imagined Chicago of 1958. Voices, memories, ledgers, a cycle of pasts, all become the very ply of Great-Momma’s passage. They include the South of her mother’s rape and murder in 1874; her marriage at fifteen to the former escaped slave (and Nathaniel’s grandfather), the fiftyfive-year old Jericho Witherspoon, in 1882; and her half-delirious attendance at the memorial service for the 115-year-old in the Memphis-Raven-Snow Funeral Home in 1944. No feature of the story more stands out than the branded letters JW on the patriarch’s back, each “vivid as a visitation”, and in whose de-encrypting Forrest gives his measure of America’s slave South, together with its northbound aftermath, as in equal parts literal and ghost history. Other history-focused fictions in which the South acts if not always as fulcrum then as an indispensable touchstone might almost be thought to add up to a litany; four do duty. In John A. Williams’ Captain Blackman, told as though in hallucination by the injured Abraham Blackman in the Vietnam War, the novel develops a serial portrait of black warriordom from pre-Independence to the Civil War, World Wars I and II to Indo-China and the nuclear age.31 The South, within this, is caught, vividly, dramatically, in Williams’ scenes of slave insurrection and Civil War black regiments fighting in the Union 29

The Bloodworth Orphans, NY: Random House, 1977. Two Wings to Veil My Face, NY: Random House, 1984. 31 John A. Williams, Captain Blackman, NY: Doubleday, 1967. 30

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cause. For Toni Cade Bambara in The Salt Eaters, situated in the invented town of Claybourne, Georgia, her story of Velma Henry’s attempted suicide and eventual recovery through a politics of black sisterhood and community against a nearby polluting chemical corporation, tells the one Southern story inside another.32 Layered in different time-shifts, multi-focal as to character and not least in Minnie Ranson as faith healer, and brimming in allusion to the folkways of the black South, it gives witness to past strategies in which black Americans have tricked, duped, and outwitted the white power structure. Velma’s own healing, thereby, becomes the expression of a political well-being of gender and Southern black community at large. David Bradley’s The Chaneyville Incident, a decade in the making, makes historical excavation itself the centre of his novel. 33 In the research of John Washington, a Philadelphia history professor, and through a close-worked narrative display of black-oral, manuscript and libraried sources, Bradley tells a story of Southern slave forbears. The figure of C.K Washington acts as a key presence, an insurrectionist leader in the continuum of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey or Nat Turner. The role of Underground Railroad stations is remembered, not least Chaneyville, as the site of a Maseda-like group suicide of slave escapees to avoid recapture. The black-white love relationship of Washington as black historian and his Virginia slaveholder-descended psychologist girlfriend, Judy, further refracts, and gives a possible healing to, this South-North history. A frequent observation about Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose is that it acts as a riposte to William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. 34 However pertinent this may be, it is not to underplay its own unique conception of the neo-slave novel, Dessa as author of her own history both in deed as female slave insurrectionist, and in word, despite the would-be possession of her story by the white plantation owner, Miss Rufel, and the white male amanuensis, Nemi. Its scenes of Southern enslavement, escape, revolt, and itinerary sweep as Dessa and other ex-slaves travel the region in a fake minstrel show, work to a double end. At an immediate level Williams offers well-turned exemplary fare, a slave woman’s vindication of efficacy and inward identity. But, 32

Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters, NY: Random House, 1980. David Bradley, The Chaneyville Incident, NY: Harper and Row, 1981. 34 Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose, NY: Berkely Books, 1986. 33


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quite equally, Dessa Rose seeks to un-slave the South’s very language of ownership and dispossession. Williams’ achievement, not unlike Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) over a century earlier, cannot be thought less than considerable, the slave South told as at once high narrative drama in its own right, and yet, throughout, as also canny, liberationist counter-text. *** In their peopling, and sense of the South as locale and time, the novels of Morrison, Walker, Gaines, and their contemporaries, have had plentiful company. William Demby’s Beetlecreek offers a symptomatic early marker.35 Its portrait of Johnny Johnson, adolescent son of a dying, consumptive mother in Pittsburgh, and sent to his aunt and uncle, David and Mary Biggs, in their West Virginia township, suggests race division as always endgame. Demby, furthermore, does an audacious reversal of the Huckleberry Finn-Jim equation. He pairs Johnny with a kindly older white man, Bill Trapp, a one-time carnival performer and a magus of sorts. For all that the story ends on a fatal note of destruction, this is the South as might-have-been, a benign racial garden as against its binary stasis of white and black. Trapp’s approach to David Biggs in the name of a proposed picnic leads to the latter’s sense of racial odds, his particular South a closed circle made such by the town’s circles of hostility and taboo: “There was no way to explain to the old man how complicated this story was, how Negro life was a fishnet, a mosquito net, lace, wrapped round and round, each little thread a pain … too complicated.”36 For Johnny this could not more hold. He sees his life in West Virginia as a dream episode, one of entrapment, betrayal. His mother’s haemorrhaging becomes prophetic of death-in-life, whether the stillborn child born to the Biggses, or David Biggs’ failing marriage and doomed hope of a renewal with the ex-street girl Edith Johnson, or the local gang leader’s killing of a baby pigeon as the denial of beginning life. It is, however, the false rumour of child molestation against Bill Trapp, and the town’s temporizing agreement to let things stand, which further perpetuates the deathly status quo. The final burning of 35 William Demby, Beetlecreek, NY: Rinehart, 1950, and The Catacombs, NY: Pantheon, 1965. 36 Demby, Beetlecreek, 104.

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Trapp’s house, the outcome of Johnny’s gang initiation, inverts this South into a wasteland, the ashes of hope for a better Southern order. The novel has sometimes been thought too unrelenting (little wonder that after its publication Demby moved to Italy where The Catacombs, his early-postmodern, or as he calls it “cubist”, novel, would be published in 1965). But Beetlecreek affords its own kind of achievement, a South modern without having ceased to be accusingly ancient, and whose shadow of racial enmity Demby is able to invest with its own kind of life. Gayl Jones’ Corregidora derives its setting from her native Kentucky, an imagined 1960s-told, and bittersweet, blues story of the South.37 In Ursa Corregidora, club-singer, of Bracktown, Kentucky, there is carried the memory of the original Corregidora as the Brazilian mestizo slaver whose monstrous, bewitching sexual rule has bequeathed blight on her and the history to which she belongs. Her own sexual damage – she has had her womb removed after a fall at the hand of her estranged husband Mutt Johnson – gives a grim irony to the Southern slavery’s self-preserving injunction to make generations. Ursa’s brief affair with Tadpole, owner of Happy’s, the cafe-club where she sings, leads to betrayal with a younger woman. That she finally learns how Great Gram acted in revenge for all four generations of women (Great Gram herself, then Grandmother and Mama – each prostituted by, and the latter two fathered by, Corregidora) by orally dismembering Corregidora, serves, even as she returns to Mutt, to underline her own full awakening to slavery’s cost for black womanhood. Jones’ South in the novel is one of deepest inherited wound, enslavement in the form of sexual property. Yet, in the blues Ursa sings, and embodies, and in however relative a degree, it is a South reflexively also made subject to rejoinder, a repossession. For Gloria Naylor, New York raised of Mississippi parents, her Mama Day can be thought a virtuoso tale of two worlds, New York and Willow Springs, the latter a black Southern coastal island between South Carolina and Georgia. 38 The inspired reworking of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is unignorable – the storm, the island, the title figure Mama, or Miranda, Day as black female Prospero – yet filtered through the African-Americanism of conjure, roots, the 37 38

Gayl Jones, Corregidora, NY: Random House, 1975. Gloria Naylor, Mama Day, NY: Vintage, 1988.


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communing with spirits. The novel looks both back to a first slave woman, Sapphira Wade, who took the island by force from its white first proprietor, and forward to the wholly contemporary failed marriage of Mama Day’s great-niece, Cocoa (full name Ophelia), and her now deceased husband George Andrews, with whom, through Mama, she now speaks across the barrier of life and death. The world in view derives from black animist belief and practice, one of intervening spirits, the supernatural. These spirits act as the guardian signatures of a culture that fuses Africa into Dixie, a source for its people of nurture, meaning, strength, continuity in the face of severance. Willow Springs, and Mama Day as its inspirational avatar, literally embodies that order, a passed-down black sisterhood, a magical black South. *** In Randall Kenan and Melvin Dixon the South encounters quite another kind of genuinely enterprising imagination, one not only black but gay. In A Visitation of the Spirits Kenan makes over his own background of Chingquapin, North Carolina, into Tims Creek, home of the Cross family, and in which Horace Creek, sixteen-year-old cousin of the Reverend Jimmy Greene, descends into breakdown, and eventual suicide, as he fails to come to find a modus vivendi for his sexual orientation. 39 The novel has been thought unsparing, oversuffused in nightmare and self-accusation. But Kenan writes with a sure touch, whether Horace’s dream of becoming a hawk, a soaring bird, as his bulwark against pathology, or the portrait of a black religious South whose Calvinist-Lutheran prescription leaves little room for sexual plurality. In Melvin Dixon’s Trouble the Water the homocentrism is altogether more muted.40 Its story of Jordan Henry, and the call made upon him by his grandmother for the not so obscure oedipal revenge against his father in allowing the death of Jordan’s mother, with a setting also in backcountry North Carolina, reviewers were quick to term “Southern Gothic”. The author’s command of black folk magic – conjure or hoodoo – as of the ways of a complicated sexuality, deserved better. 39

Randall Kenan, A Visitation of the Spirits, NY: Grove Press, 1989. Melvin Dixon, Trouble the Water, Boulder, CO: The University of Colorado and Fiction Collective 2, 1989. 40

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A.J. Verdelle’s The Good Negress, a meticulously paced first novel of the coming of age of Denise Palms (Neesey), takes place as an interaction of two black family regimes, the one that of her watchful, savvy grandmother in down-home rural Virginia, and the other that of her well-meaning but flighty mother in inner-city and street Detroit.41 Neesey’s rise to consciousness in The Good Negress Verdelle locates within a close worked context of black family, at once grand-daughter, daughter, sister to David and Luke Edward, and above all, a girl moving into possession of her own language of experience. The emphasis falls upon Neesey as homemaker, cook and cleaner, but also the beginning taker of her own life decisions whether as High School writer-student or sexual initiate. She both embodies black womanhood as lineage and, in her literal yet always emblematic journeys from Virginia to Detroit, a yet latest South-into-North. Were another first novel to be offered in comparison it might be Ntozake Shange’s Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, a stylish collage of story, poem and diary given over to three sisters, along with their mother, who carry their exuberant creative sass out of black Charleston into the bohemianism of California.42 *** The South in the African American short story has shown a vibrancy quite of a kind with longer fiction. The title story of John Edgar Wideman’s collection, Damballah, gives every confirmation, a near exquisite vignette of the early South told as though in several voices, in which the slave, Orion, named Ryan by his owner, refuses any word of English, is beaten and then decapitated for attacking the overseer. 43 His head is then returned to the waters of the Southern river by the slave-boy who earlier has seen him standing, immobile, amid its current. It is water which calls up Orion’s memory of a sacral realm, healing, the medium of his ancestral deities. Of these Damballah, to whom he prays, acts as Vodoun father god, the spirit of his own Africa to offset the South’s slave America. Short stories centred on the South by women carry equal weight. Arthenia Bates’ Seeds Beneath the Snow offers gentle fare, story 41

A.J. Verdelle, The Good Negress, Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1995. Ntozake Shange, Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, NY: St Martin’s Press, 1982. 43 John Wideman, Damballah, NY: Avon Books, 1981. 42


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vignettes of a middle-class black Southern community. 44 Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love (1972) depicts the black rural South and citied North as bound into an ongoing continuum and through the focus of sorority, women’s relationship with each other. 45 Alice Walker’s In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women pursues lives, Southern for the most part, told in black-womanist voice. 46 Gayl Jones’ White Rat (1977), stories edged in violence and set within, or against the South, explores cross-sexuality.47 Opal Moore’s “Freeing Ourselves of History: The Slave Closet” (1988), a piece which looks back to Southern slave legacy, looks to the costs as against the gains to Afro-America entailed in assimilation.48 A name that has deservedly come to preside is that of James Alan MacPherson, born and raised in Savannah, Georgia, and the justly feted author of Hue and Cry and Elbow Room. 49 In the former collection assured stories like “On Trains” and “A Solo Song: For Doc” call up legendary old-time Pullman porters and waiters, elders usually of Southern origins from the classic American railway era and to whom MacPherson gives honouring memorial. In the latter collection a piece like “Why I Love Country Music” depicts the fond, echoing recall of a black New Yorker for his long-ago Southern boyhood and the girl he once partnered at a country dance. “The Story of A Dead Man” turns on black-Southern folklore, the feisty, mythic story of Billy Renfro. MacPherson, to be sure, has frequently written of worlds far beyond the South, be it Manhattan or London. But those generated from Georgia, as from other Dixie, carry an especial force of remembrance. In one sense it cannot surprise that black fiction has put the South, for all the gravity of its history, under fantastical, and even comicirreverent, rules. How else to account for worlds, lives, so arbitrarily turned upside down? George Schuyler’s Black No More was early into the fray, with its zany, take-no-prisoners story of a rogue geneticist’s invention of a treatment to change skin colour and its race purity hex 44

Arthenia Bates, Seeds Beneath the Snow, NY: Greenwich, 1968. Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love, NY: Vintage, 1972. 46 Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1973. 47 Gayl Jones, White Rat, NY: Random House, 1977. 48 “Freeing Ourselves of History: The Slave Closet”, Obsidian, 11 (1988), 27. 49 James Alan McPherson, Hue and Cry, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1969, and Elbow Room, Boston, MA: Atlantic-Little, 1977. 45

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and phobia, especially for the Deep South. 50 In Cotton Comes To Harlem, perhaps the best known of his Grave Digger Jones/Coffin Ed Johnson Harlem detective series, Chester Himes memorializes the South as cotton-patch in a violent, but always fiercely comic and spiralling urban parable.51 William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer, in which the entire black population of a Southern state leaves in a reprise of slave escape, lowers its own boom on supremacist whiteness. 52 John Killens, no doubt mindful of his Macon, Georgia upbringing, in The Cotillion, or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd equally cuts a satiric swathe through Dixie, along with the cities, for all manner of race and class practices.53 In Charles Johnson’s The Oxherding Tale the South is explored as though under baroque phenomenological auspices, appropriately enough in fiction written by a professional philosopher and the author of Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 .54 In the story of the black Andrew Hawkins, of Cripplegate Plantation, who becomes the white William Harris, a birthing the result of a drunken wife-swap, Johnson takes aim at all imprisoning identity-by-category and nowhere more ruinously than in America’s ever colour-obsessive South. Is there not, too, a fugitive remembrance of the American South as race theatre in the Science Fiction, the speculative gender and ethnicity galactic writing, of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler?55 *** Rarely, however, has black authorship exhibited quite the brio, the flourish, of Ishmael Reed, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, raised in Buffalo, New York, and a doyen of the postmodern turn. Whether an early fantasia novel like The Free-lance Pallbearers, with its tilts at 50 George Schuyler, Black No More: being an account of the strange and wonderful workings of science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940, NY: Macauley, 1931. 51 Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem, NY: Putnam’s, 1965. 52 William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962. 53 John Killens, The Cotillion, or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd, NY: Trident, 1971. 54 Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982, and Being and Race: Black Writing since 1970, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987. 55 Samuel R. Delany, Neveryone series, NY: Bantam; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1979-87; Octavia Butler, Patternmaster, NY: Warner Books, 1976.


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Nixonian America, or Mumbo Jumbo, with its Dixie-generated vision of a Neo-Hoodoo outbreak of jazz and cultural vitality in the 1920s, the South has throughout supplied a touchstone.56 But with Flight To Canada it becomes a yet more complete site for Reed’s comedy of errors, the South and its mythologies made subject to dark laughter. Reed tells his story as mock-epic, a slave-escape decked out in rap, music, jive-talk, even a verse Prologue which explains that this is as it were secret narrative, an alternative telling of the South. For all its reference to Jeff Davis and Lee, mint-julips Dixie, belles and mammies, and the spirit of Sir Walter Scott, the novel’s time jumps and zones can, and do, intersect. Helicopters fly anachronistically over the quarters. The Underground Railroad, antebellum icon, shades into modern form as a jumbo jet no less, seats duly reserved, flies the escapees into Canada. Given the entourage of Raven Quickskill, slave, pen-man, trickster and reverse Uncle Tom, together with Master Swille, plantation owner, and his TV-obsessed wife Ms. Quille, and their slave servants Robin and Judy, not to mention Princess Quaw Quaw Tralararara and the slaves 40s and Stray, this is syncretism writ large. The South onc more becomes black black-comedy. Abraham Lincoln visits the slavequarters with “Hello Dolly” playing in the background. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Byron-haunted New Englander, makes her entrance in the same sweep as John A. Williams, celebrated African American author of The Man Who Cried I Am. John Wilkes Booth, actor, assassin, is to be heard alongside Harry Reasoner, Texas’ gravelvoiced journalist and anchorman. A Native American avian lore of ravens and other spirit-birds is shown to overlap with African American tradition. One key lies in Reed’s use of Edgar Allan Poe as the South’s custodial presence, the gothic-symboliste behind “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Poe, or Eddie Poe as he becomes in the novel, Reed implies could not more serve as the voice of the South’s white psyche, a South outlandish in slaveholding, codes of pseudo-gentry and, always, its self-haunting as to “the war”: Why isn’t Edgar Allan Poe recognized as the principal biographer of that strange war? Fiction, you say? Where does 56

Ishmael Reed, The Free-lance Pallbearers, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967, and Mumbo Jumbo, Garden City, NY: Random House, 1972.


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fact begin and fiction leave off? Why does the perfectly rational, in its own time, often sound like mumbo-jumbo? Where did it leave off for Poe, prophet of a civilization buried alive, where, according to witnesses, people were often whipped for no reason? No reason? We will never know, since there are so few traces of the civilization the planters called “the fairest civilization the sun ever shone upon,” and the slaves called “Satan’s Kingdom.” Poe got it all down. Poe says more in a few stories than all of the volumes by historians. Volumes about that war. The Civil War. The Spirit War. Douglass, Tubman and Bibb all believing in omens, consulting conjure and carrying unseen amulets on their persons. Lincoln, the American Christ, who died on Good Friday. Harriet saying 57 that God wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. Which God? (Reed’s

italics) Poe, the South’s whitest historic author, as forerunner to Ishmael Reed, black contemporary whose life has been lived mostly in New York and California, affords a perfect irony. For in the literary fiction of both writers the American South finds its most fantastical repertoire, a history, a region, nothing if not abidingly familiar, yet, and at the same time, abidingly other.

57

Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada, NY: Random House, 1976, 18-19 (italics in the original).

23 I AM YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE: I AM AN INDIAN WITH A PEN – FICTIONS OF THE INDIAN, NATIVE FICTIONS … to be an Indian in modern society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical. Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins 1 [Aunt Susie] must have realized that the atmosphere and conditions which had maintained this oral tradition in Lagunaculture had been irrevocably altered by the European intrusion – principally by the practice of taking the children away from Laguna to Indian schools, taking the children away from the tellers who had in all past generations told the children an entire culture, an entire identity of a people. Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller 2 The Indian was an occidental invention that became a bankable simulation; the word has no referent in tribal languages or cultures…Native American Indians have endured the envies of missionaries of manifest manners for five centuries. The Boy Scouts of America, the wild simulations of tribal misnomers used for football teams, automobiles and other products, Western movies, and the heroic adventures in novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Manfred, Karl May, and others are but a few examples of the manifold envies that have become manifest manners in the literatures of dominance. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners3 1

Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, NY: Avon, 1969, 10 (rpt. Custer Died for Your Sins, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968). 2 Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller, NY: Arcade Publishing, 1968, 6. 3 Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1981, 11, 31.

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Unreal and ahistorical”; “Irrevocably altered”; “A simulation”: each phrase speaks to, not to say against, one of America’s, one of the world’s, most enduring fictions. Their shared animus, looking back to a timeline of well before Columbus’ landing, is to disrupt, not to say face down, the best known figurations of America’s Native peoples. Indigenes as otherness may well date from antiquity or cross every border. But few have attracted fantasy quite so insistent, or lavishly popular and beguiling, as that of “The Indian”. Fictions seize the popular imagination even as they contest one with another. Noble Savage vies with Devil’s Child. Adamic innocent alternates with emblazened terror. Images of wilderness, the tomahawk, scalping, lie deeply embedded with the American, and indeed the larger Western, historic psyche. Shorthand takes over, familiarly, and endlessly, to repeat itself. Cowboys and Indians. Gun versus arrow. Captivity and escape. The Only Good Indian is a Dead Indian. War Parties. Noble Chiefs. Squaws. Pocahontas. Hiawatha and Minnehaha. Sitting Bull. Custer’s Last Stand. Geronimo. Vanishing Americans. From their shoreline, or forest, first encounters with Euro-America in the seventeenth century, to the cavalry and homesteader battles of the Plains and beyond in the nineteenth, to life on the reservations and in the cities, tribal peoples are so to be denied time, access to change, and, for sure, modernity. Theirs belongs to a past folder of American history, or at best, its downward slope. The massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 becomes endgame with an epilogue of drift and poverty. No one could overlook the reduction of numbers, or contemporary joblessness, welfare poverty, drink, and violence. Yet how to account for the ongoing Native presence of more than three-hundred Federally recognized tribes, a population estimate of between one and four millions on an off reservation, and, however sparingly, important pockets of economic upturn, along with an ongoing, and to be sure sometimes re-found, sense of cultural vitality? Native politics from the 1960s on finds reanimation through Tribal Councils, community groups, the American Indian Movement (AIM) and Native American Rights Fund (NARF) and, against stereotype, city activism. Sovereignty and land claims have been busy, along with legal action over mineral holdings, family and adoption rights, and issues of schooling and language. From Connecticut to Minnesota to Nevada there has been the spectacular rise of Native casino economies.

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The assumption that Native America, Indians, somehow bowed out after Wounded Knee, to be kept alive only in the simulacra of daguerreotype, canvas, photograph, screen or comic strip, has always been illusion. In every tribal and mixed-blood variety, they remain not only un-erased, but as much among the living as other Americans. Native authorship cannot be said to have anything but kept pace.4 Vine Deloria, veteran Sioux lawyer, has made a name inveighing against this out-of-time, harlequin imaging of Indians in US history. Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo author, in Storyteller as beyond, has long given herself to the politics of indigeneity, the embrace of a sacral earth and coming redress. Gerald Vizenor, long Berkeley based and presently teaching in New Mexico, and with origins in both Chippewa-Ojibway (or Anishinaabe) White Earth Reservation and inner-city Minneapolis, adds Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence and Postindian Conversations to his previous ironic undermining of essentialist fictions of “The Indian”.5 The Native written novel, with Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn a spur and landmark, gives companion reckoning. Two intergenerational tiers count especially. The one, selectively, calls up novels by James Welch (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre), Lesley Marmon Silko (Laguna), Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) and Gerald Vizenor. The other can be located in five first novels by, respectively, Thomas King (Cherokee), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee), Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d’Alene), and Betty Louise Bell (Cherokee). In them, as in a spectrum that extends from Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux) to 4

Key historical accounts include Alvin M. Josephy, The Indian Heritage of America, NY: Knopf, 1968; Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970; Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970; Handbook of North American Indians, ed. William Sturtevant, Washington DC: Smithsonian, 1970; Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890, Albuquerque, NM: The University of New Mexico Press, 1984; Ward Churchill, Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America, ME: Common Courage, 1994; Alvin M. Josephy, 500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North American Indians, NY: Knopf, 1994; and Roger L. Nichols, Indians in the United States and Canada: A Comparative History, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, Second Edition, 1994. 5 Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, NY: Viking Press, 1977; Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

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Michael Dorris (Modoc), Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna-Sioux) to Martin Cruz Smith (Senecu del Sur-Yaqui), Native fiction finds its own yet further continuity of invention.6 *** A sense of contextual lineage, and of the best known contributions to the “Indian” fictions of Native America, amounts to a working prerequisite. Has not a truly tribal mix of cultures and languages, histories and beliefs, stretching across all the Americas from the Bering Strait to Tierra del Fuego and from the Caribbean to the South Seas, been rendered down into the single trope or glyph? Actual geography, Pequot Massachusetts, or the New Mexico pueblos, or the Sioux Great Plains, Black Hills and North and South Dakota, largely transposes into tourist itinerary, out of time backdrop or romance. Little short of a diorama of cliché has come into being, ahistoric when not actually anti-historic.7

6

Gerald Vizenor, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, Saint Paul, MN: Truck Press, 1978 (rev. and rpt. as Bearheart: the Heirship Chronicles, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Griever: An American Monkey King in China, Normal, IL: Illinois State University and Fiction Collective, 1987; and Chancers, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Among the liveliest, and sometimes contentious, literary accounts of Native fiction are Charles R. Larson, American Indian Fiction, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1978; Alan Velie, Four American Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welsh, Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982; Arnold Krupat, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989; Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, ed. Gerald Vizenor, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico, 1989; Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992; and James Ruppert, Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Few better accounts of pan-American Native culture exist than Gordon Brotherston, Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through their Literature, NY and London: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 7 Quite one of the fullest analyses is to be found in Robert F. Berkhover Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian From Columbus to the Present, NY: Knopf, 1978. This, subsequently, has been supplemented by Fergus M. Bordewich, Killing The White Man’s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1996.

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Placenames, from Chicago to Manitoba, Connecticut to Seattle, the latter named for the Duwamish Salish leader Sealth, serve as merest word shadows of the intricate tribal life histories behind them. Dime novels like Stella Delorme, or the Comanche’s Dream (1860) by Ned Buntline, the pen name of E.Z.C Judson, through to latterday bestsellers like Guns of the Timberland (1955) by Louis L’Amour, author of more than a hundred Westerns, serve up white triumph and Indian killing and vanishment according to requirement. It is in this connection that Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, longtime editor of Wicazo sa review and the novelist of From the River’s Edge with its busy portrait of Sioux community, took aim at so admired a doyen of Western fiction as Wallace Stegner. In Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice she berates him for his talk of the tribes’ “glorious demise,” his fantasy Indians, and his allegation that the Native West somehow ended with Wounded Knee (“I argue with Stegner’s reality. The culture I have known …exists in cummunities all over the region, in language and myth, and in the memories of people who know who they are and where they come from”)8. Buffalo Bill Cody, a name contrived by Buntline, and whose Wild West circuses begin in 1883, requires his own special mention. It falls to him to have re-invented the West as entertainment, a white cavalry and Indian warrior spectacle. His genius lay in concocting a quite dazzling commercial simulation, US troopers and scout heroes set against warpainted cohorts, together with charging battle formations, whoops and bugles, and Sitting Bull, Gall, Yellow Hand and Black Elk actually employed to enter the ring playing themselves. The process does not abate, whether Red Man chewing tobacco, the Indian Head nickel, barber shop manikins, paratroopers with their Geronimo shouts, or Boy Scout troop names. Pontiac (1720-69), one time leader of the Ottawa people and Algonquin federalist, becomes the appropriated name for a bestselling car, with Jeep Cherokees and Winnebego motor homes also in the line-up (Winnebagos are variously eastern Sioux and Chippewa bad spirits). Mutual of Omaha, one of America’s largest insurance companies, vaunts a celebrated war-bonnet logo by which Omaha’s Dakota Sioux become reduced to an advertising token. Sports teams unashamedly assume names like 8

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, From the River’s Edge, NY: Arcade, and Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, NY: Arcade, 1991, 30.

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the Atlanta Braves, with an echo of savagism in the Tomahawk Chop of their fans, or the Cleveland Indians, the Kansas City Chiefs or, as egregiously as any, the Washington Redskins. Television long has conjured into being its own Indian Country, for recent times a series like Cheyenne (1955-63), with its frontier scout Bodie, or Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993- ), with its buckskin Florence Nightingale heroine among picture-book Cheyenne, or Northern Exposure (1990- ), with its New York Jewish hero and Cicely and its seeming Alaska Athabascan Indians like Marilyn Whirlwind and Ed Chiglia. Latterly counter-culture Hippy Indians, punk Mohawks and New Age religionists and self-appointed TV hotline healers with their supposed Indian crystals and feathers, add nothing if not a touch of carnival. Not a few Native authors have been moved to ask whose Indians, whose Indian fictions, these are to be thought. As to the view of the tribes as a parade gone by it can look to the very founding of the American Republic. The Boston Tea Party of 1773, with New Englanders in assumed Mohawk garb and headgear, acts out its faux-Indian masquerade as though from an already previous era. In the 1920s one of the best-known images of Calvin Coolidge, Vermonter, US President, has him seated in a three-piece business suit and wearing a full Sioux chieftain bonnet. Together they bridge the ongoing fiction: stereotypical paleface elided into stereotypical Indian.9 The case of Ishi, last of the California Yahi (a division of the Yana people), who was supposedly discovered in turn of the century California and, at the behest of the Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, lived out his days in San Francisco assiduously making artefacts for display, gives another turn to events. For some Ishi embodied the romance of a last stone-age man untrammelled by civilization. For others he served as the very instance of the Vanishing American bequeathing burial trophies, as it were, to a culture he himself once had lived. In fact, in his things unsaid, his art, and even his role in a range of Native literary treatment, he has proved elusive 9

For a wide-ranging analysis of these simulations see Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture, ed. S. Elizabeth Bird, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996. An earlier study to cover the ground is Raymond William Stedman, Shadows of the Indian: Stereotypes in the Twentieth Century, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982.

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of both. Wrangles about the return to tribal custody of bones, tools, and every manner of artefact, have been increasingly frequent, not to say heated.10 An oblique commentary is to be found in a well-loved text like J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1952). At Manhattan’s “Museum of Natural History” Holden Caulfield gazes admiringly at “the Indian stuff” with its ever-fixed manikin fire makers and “squaws” displayed under a “big glass case”.11 From early canvas and image though to Hollywood and TV a like visual fictionalization operates. George Catlin’s sketches, notably “Comanche Feats of Horsemanship” in his Manners of the North American Indians (1841), gives expression to the heroic mould. Charles Bird King’s mid-century “Pawnee Warriors”, for all their feathers and tattoo, look not only deliberately grouped, and courtly, but suspiciously Caucasian in looks. Thomas Moran’s “The Spirit of the Indian” (1869), also stately to a fault, suggests, however, the tribute of farewell. Frederic Remington’s Frontier Sketches (1898), or his oil painting “The Last of His Race” (1908) with its warrior gazing from his bluff as much into past time as place, or any of rearing horse sculptures, supplies a West of Native romance for an Eastern audience. 10

See Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961, and Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University/University Press of New England, 1994. Vizenor has also written a whole play, Ishi and the Wood Ducks, full text to be found in Native American Literature: A Brief Anthology, ed. Gerald Vizenor, NY: HarperCollins, 1995. For a consideration of both, see Louis Owens, “The Last Man of the Stone Age: Gerald Vizenor’s Ishi and the Wood Ducks”, 33-45, in Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor, ed. A. Robert Lee, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State Popular Press, 2000. 11 J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1951, 155-56. As to the museum controversies none has been greater than that involving the Smithsonian. At least two-hundred tribal museums have now come into being, not least the National Museum of the Indian in Washington DC. Typical would be the Makah Cultural Center and Museum in Neah Bay, Washington, the Iroquois Indian Museum in Upper New York, the Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Sioux Indian Museum, the Navajo Tribal Museum in Window Rock, Arizona, and the Wampanoag National Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts. For a highly relevant account, see Karen Coody Cooper, “Museums and American Indians: Ambivalent Partners”, in American Indian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Contemporary Issues, ed. Dane Morrison, NY: Peter Lang, 1977, 403-12. The issue is also helpfully explored in Curtis M. Hinsley, The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making Moral Anthropology in Victorian America, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981.

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Edward S. Curtis’ twenty volumes of sepia photographic stills, done between 1907 and 1930, might be almost remnant pageantry, Native icons of inertia. Recent Native art has both sought to be independent of, yet obliged to negotiate, this imagery. The Santa Fe based artist, David Bradley, for instance, in canvases like “Sleeping Indian” (1994) depicts a mythic Indian Country in terms of a dormant bow and arrows warrior and tourist trading post, a mountain lion and mechanical earth-digger. The ironies of each contrast could not be better taken.12 D.W. Griffith comes into the frame, literally, with two-reelers like The Redman and Child (1908), The Squaw’s Love Story (1911) and Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1914), the latter a rabid, savage portrayal of make-believe Indians as dog eaters and gratuitous killers and which, in redface as against blackface, did for Natives what The Birth of a Nation (1915) did for African Americans. These were creatures of forest and night, dark, skulking conspiracy. Griffith, that is, Southern raised film pioneer, invents his own ethnic fictions, the more compelling on account of his overall visual genius. 12 George Catlin. North American Indians, Being Letters and Notes on Their Manners, Customs, Written During Eight Years Travel Among the Wildest Tribes of Indians in America, NY: Wiley and Putnam, 1841. Recent collections include George Catlin, North American Indians, edited with an Introduction by Peter Matthiessen, NY: Vintage Books, 1989, and George Catlin, Drawings of the North American Indians, with an Introduction by Peter H. Hassrick, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1994. A well-taken analysis is to be found in Mary Sayre Haverstock, Indian Gallery: The Story of George Catlin, NY: Four Winds Press, 1973. Charles King’s Native portraiture is studied in Viola Herma, The Indian Legacy of Charles Bird King, NY: Doubleday, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976, and Andrew Consentino, The Paintings of Charles Bird King, Washington DC: National College of Fine Arts, 1977. Moran receives due evaluation in Thurman Wilkins, with Caroline L. Hinkley, Thomas Moran: Artist of The Mountains, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2nd edn, 1998. For Frederic Remington, see Frederic Remington: the Masterworks, eds Michael Edward Shapiro, Peter H. Hassnick et al, NY: Harry N. Abrams for the Saint Louis Art Museum and Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1998. The work is helpfully annotated in James K. Ballinger, Frederic Remington, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. The standard Curtis portfolio is Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian, ed. Frederick W. Hodge, 20 Vols, and Supplement 4 Vols, 1907-1930. Best commentary includes Christopher M. Lyman, Vanishing Race and other Illusions: Photography of Indians by Edward Curtis, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982, and Mick Gidley, Edward Curtis and the North American Indian, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998. The tradition overall receives intelligent scrutiny in Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and US Indian Policy, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982.

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The radio series of The Lone Ranger, first broadcast in 1933 on the Mutual Radio Network, then screened as ABC’s 1949-58 TV series with a run of cinema versions to follow, perhaps offers the most hugely successful fiction. In these Jay Silverheels played one of the most controversial of all Indian roles, that of Tonto as alter ego to Clayton Moore’s white lawman replete with in mask and identifying cry of “Hi-ho Silver!”. Was not this Man Friday, loyal, unswerving, duly buckskinned and all monosyllabic Indian-talk, not least “You Kemo Sabe” meaning “You Trust Scout”? Which is not to overlook the precedent, however ambiguous, of Silverheels as Native screen actor, early in a line to include Chief Dan George in Little Big Man (1970) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Larry Littlebird as Abel in the film of House Made of Dawn (1972), Will Sampson as Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Gary Farmer in Powwow Highway (1992).13 In movie terms purported Indian legacy, the fiction made more glamorous by the screen’s transition from black and white into colour, also takes on well-known figurations. Jeff Chandler as Cochise in the Apache-settler conflict of Broken Arrow (1950) or Richard Harris as the British aristocrat Lord Morgan, transformed, through the Sun Dance ritual, into adoptee Dakota Sioux in A Man Called Horse (1970), supply Noble Indian fare, warrior aristocracy. A movie like Robert Mulligan’s The Stalking Moon (1968) suggests in its Apache stalker an update of the indigene as always the unseen threat. John Ford, best-known cinematographer of the West, equally embodies the ambiguity inherent in these Indian representations. If a cavalry trilogy like Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), with John Wayne at the helm, and backdrops of Monument Valley, Arizona – actually Navajo heartland, is to be thought a tour de force, how much is the price the stylization of Native peoples as bonneted chiefs, daemon kidnappers, healer elders and doe-eyed tribal woman? Perhaps The Searchers (1956), with its re-working of Indian captivity and the Western’s codings of white-red genetics and blood, signalled Ford’s recognition of his own complicity. Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), taken from Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel, also can be thought rare in offering a degree of 13 A greatly pertinent account is to be found in Chadwick Allen, “Hero With Two Faces: The Lone Ranger as Treaty Discourse”, American Literature, LXVIII/3, (September 1996), 609-38.

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Native viewpoint of the West. Behind the comedy entertainment of 111-year old Jack Crabb as one-time white into Cheyenne foundling, and each absurdist zigzag from sole survivor of Custer’s last stand to adopted son of a preacher, is there not also unease, a sense of one American history having too often been told at the expense of another?14 Yet more recent Hollywood, whether Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), with its Sioux actors and sub-titles, or Michael Apted’s Thunderheart (1992), with its Oglala Sioux setting and based on the Pine Ridge shoot-out of the 1970s, may well suggest a changing dispensation. But whatever Costner’s liberal good-intentions, or attempts at Native landscape, Dances with Wolves cannot resist a white frontier adventure, captivity romance, laid-on Sioux wolf symbolism, and a regulation Vanishing American ending. Apted’s Thunderheart, within its murder investigation format, shows an evident sympathy for the abuse of Native land and mineral rights. But its backdrop of the Ghost Dance, whose revivalist implications in the 1890s under the Paiute medicine man, Wovoka, known as Jack Wilson, and after the death of Sitting Bull, simply blur into a background silhouette of dancing and chanting Indians.15 A Disney

14

A considerable body of scholarship attaches to Natives and cinema. Among the most illuminating are: Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness, NY:: Knopf, 1979; The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies, eds Gretchen M. Bataille and Charles L.P. Silet, Ames. IA: Iowa State University Press, 1980; Images of American Indians on Film: An Annotated Bibliography, eds Gretchen M.Bataille and Charles L.M. Silet, NY: Garland, 1985; Ellen L. Arnold, “Reframing the Hollywood Indian: A Feminist Re-reading of Powwow Highway and Thunderheart”, 347-62, and Mary Alice Money, “Broken Arrows: Images of Native Americans in the Popular Western”, in American Indian Studies, ed. Dane Morrison, NY: Peter Lang, 1977, 363-88; and Jacqueline Fitzpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Early film is analysed in “Science and Spectacle: Native American Representation in Early Cinema”, in Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture, ed. S. Elizabeth Bird, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1986, 79-85. 15 For a relevant study of the Ghost Dance, and its relationship to Wounded Knee and the revivalist movement, see David Humphreys Miller, Ghost Dance, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1959; Paul Bailey, Ghost Dance Messiah, NY: Tower Publications, 1970; Marion F. Briggs and Sarah D. McAnulty, The Ghost Dance Tragedy at Wounded Knee, Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1977; Russell Thornton We Shall Live Again: The 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance Movement as Demographic Revitalization, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1986; and Jack Utter,

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cartoon like Pocahontas (1995), replete in pastoral and love song, and however winning the animation, says little of Virginia’s Powhatan Confederacy, the Tidewater battles (1622-44), John Smith, or the appropriation in a term like princess of her actual status and tribal beliefs before Christian conversion and life and death in England.16 Native cinema faces the same challenge as Native fiction. How to un-film inherited fictions? Irony, a species of trickster screening, would seem to have been one way, as in the Hopi film-maker Victor Masayesva’s Imagining Indians (1992), with its fantasy of a Native visit to the dentist as an imagined extraction of Indians as stereotypes of sweatlodge and dream-catcher chic. Powow Highway offers a witty reverse captivity story that begins from Northern Cheyenne’s Dull Knife Reservation, itself named for a leader who once sought to lead the Cheyenne back to their homelands. In Smoke Signals (1997) the Cheyenne-Arapaho director, Chris Eyre, transfers the bittersweet stories of Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), involving Spokane tribal figures like Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-The-Fire, from page to screen with a right measure of wit. To both can be added Gerald Vizenor’s Harold of Orange (1983), a trickster short feature in which he has Indians not so much play Indians, as play at playing Indians. He draws on a phenomenon of longstanding. Geronimo’s appearances, at small town parades and rodeo, in the role of captured Indian almost perfectly anticipates Iron Eyes Cody, tear in eye, paddling a canoe, against a polluted industrial backdrop, as part of the Keep American Beautiful Campaign first aired on TV in 1971. Is the latter fair use or more Indian fiction, one not only steeped in eco-sentimentality but hypocrisy given past historic seizure of Native lands? Television itself can even be said to supply its own revisionist version of Indians. Commentary has not been far off the mark in suggesting that an unprecedentedly successful series like Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek (1966-69), or the sequels The Next Generation, Wounded Knee and the Ghost Dance Tragedy, memorial Edition, Lake Ann, MI: National Woodlands Publishing Company, 1991. 16 Pocahontas, directed by Micahel Giaimo, Disney Studio 1995. A Canadian version, the mythology recognized in its very title, offers a comparison – Pocahontas: The Legend, directed by Danièle J. Suissa, Protocol Productions, Ontario, 1995. Pocahontas as myth is also studied in Jennifer Gray Reddish, “Pocahontas”, Tribal College, VI/4 (Spring 1995), 22-23.

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Deep Space Nine and Voyager, offer in figures like the Vulcan Mr Spock, the android Data or the black commander Tuvok (as against the supposed actual Native-born Chakotay) a re-working of the American indigene. Each, at least, is suitably other, impassive, spiritual, arcane, marked by colour or visage, and, true to James Fennimore Cooper’s formula of Chinachgook and Natty Bumpo, mainstays to James Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard or Kathryn Janeway as white leader-captain. The potency of western culture’s co-option of Native America equally makes its way into language. For just as the Columbian conquest began a seizure of land and body, so the principal colonizing idioms of English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch seized, and in an always vexing term, translated, “The Indian” each into its own preemptive writ. Indian/savage, indio/piel roja, peau-rouge/sauvage: these, and their like, became the lexical pair bondings of Eurocolonialism, an othering, a binary, by linguistic fiat. As freighted as any has been the “squaw”, initially an Algonquin word for a married woman, but long tied into primitvist nomenclature. A place-name like California’s Squaw Valley continues to be a source of provocation. As to tribal languages themselves, they at first could indeed be construed by New England’s Puritans as the Devil’s Tongue, or, just as exotically, and a frequent assumption, some diasporic Lost Tribe’s Hebrew. Translation led into every kind of impasse, literal misunderstandings, but also, as in the case of many missionary syllabaries and lexicons, vernacular and especially sexual usages either changed or, frequently, were censored. As the first Indian texts began to appear in print, themselves often twice or even three-times made over from oral sources or adapted from pictomyth, histories that once had been delivered in performance, full of live improvisation, became scriptural and linear, a fixity all too reassuringly westernized.17 The story of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), set on the shores of Gitchee-Gummee, anglicized Anishinaabe phrasing for Lake 17 For overall guides, see Franz Boas, Race, Language and Culture, NY: Macmillan, 1940; The Languages of Native America: Historical and Comparative Assessment, eds Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979; William Bright, American Indian Linguistics and Literature, Berlin: Mouton, 1994; and Ives Goddard, Native Languages and Language Families of North America, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

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Superior but usually taken for child-talk, could not be more to the point. Initially it came to attention as an Anishinaabe/Chippewa/Ojibway oral myth centred on the trickster deity Manabozho or, among other spellings, Nanabozo or Nanapush, and collected by the one-time New York entrepreneur and eventual Indian Agent, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, in Algic Researches: Comprising Inquiries Respecting The Mental Characteristics of the North American Indian: First Series: Indian Tales and Legends (2 Volumes, 1839). In Longfellow’s fashioning, conflated with the sixteenth-century Mohawk-Iroquois leader Hiawatha, it emerges as classic American Indian romance. No poem of “The Indian” has taken greater hold. Cast, ponderously, in a trochee-form derived from the Finnish folk epic, The Kalevala (Longfellow, after all, was holder of the Smith Chair of Languages at Harvard), it has been translated into over eighty languages and quite innumerable plays, operas, pageants and children’s and other editions. One of them, in a perfect ironic turn of the wheel, has been Anishinaabe-Chippewa. This not only re-enforces the view that little or no Native literature precedes the 1960s but that other tribal arts, because a-scriptural, do not harbour their own literary significance. Spoken creation-stories, tribal chants, or the dance narratives of the powwow win less attention. A whole dimension of narrative is overlooked within Anasazi clay and wall design, Ojibway bark pictographs, Osage and Tlinglit blankets, Pueblo pottery, Hopi basketwork, Zuni or Hopi katchina carvings, or Navajo sand paintings, silverwork, and turquoise and coral jewellery. All of these imply Native worlds, a cosmos, being told, created, memorialized. What recognition is to be accorded the Cherokee savant Sequoyah (1770-1843), known as George Guest, who created the first written form of Cherokee (“I thought that would be like catching a wild animal and taming it”)? Nor should the literary inclusions of Native journalism be by-passed, from a founding journal like the Cherokee Phoenix (1828-34) through to contemporary publications like Lakota Indian Country Today, New Mexico’s Gallup Independent, Minnesota’s Native American Press/Ojibwe News or Washington’s Yakima Nation Review. Native word has not been in short supply. For many in Euro-America the supposed want of scriptural word and text was to be situated within social-Darwinian destiny, the inability of the tribes to evolve and adapt. It is a formula long

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complicit in the stupendous, white contrived loss of Native landholdings, the impact of the gun and the Bible, the importation of disease, and the view of indigenous peoples as both wayward and infantile. It is also a view that, notoriously, underwrites the issue of drink. The assumption has become widespread that alcoholism, from illicit whisky as firewater through to the recent controversies about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) for which Michael Dorris’ The Broken Cord became a controversial marker, somehow afflicts tribal America in a degree uniquely greater than any other population in America.18 Similarly, the issues of removal always require consideration, whether the sending of young tribes people to the Indian Boarding Schools of Pennsylvania like that at Carlisle, the unremitting use of Oklahoma as arbitrarily assigned homeland or, to give a notorious instance, the dispatch of a chained, prisoner-of-war Geronimo and his Chiricahua (and other) Apaches to a distant Fort Pickens, Pensacola, Florida, in 1886, even after their voluntary surrender. It takes no undue ironist to note that in proportion to evisceration, the Indian became in yet another paradox an ever greater candidate for EuroAmerican myth and fantasy. What education as to American history could best have applied? What version of Indians would a Native authorship be disposed to create? Recognizing the fuller human idiom of civilizations like those of the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs, or, in more subsequent western experience, of the Algonquins, Navajo, Chippewa-Ojibway, Laguna and Acoma Pueblo, Sioux, Cherokee, Comanches, Arapaho, Hopi, Apache (whether Mescalero, White Mountain, Jicarilla or San Carlos), Chickasaw, Osage, Zuni, Blackfeet, Salish, Nez Percé, Seminoles, and each myriad other clan and grouping, makes for a necessary point of departure. One can begin, for instance, with tribal self-naming, often enough meaning simply “the people” as against extraneous, and often wildly prejudicial, nomenclature. That embraces the Diné, the Navajo word for themselves, Numa for the Paiutes, Apsaloka for the Crow, Tsis-tas for the Cheyenne, and Oceti Sakowin (or Seven Fireplaces) as the different branches of the Sioux know themselves. Each tradition invites a due sense of lived time-space and calendar, creation and vision myth, art, dance, wordplay and humour, cedar burning,

18

Michael Dorris, The Broken Cord, NY: Harper and Row, 1989.

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childrearing, and ways of preparing food, whether wild rice, cornmeal, maize, game or fish cooked over mesquite.19 But how, accordingly, to read shamanism, or the animism of bear, crow, raven, turtle and otter, or each legend bearing Tlingit totem pole, or the powwow and wealth redistributing potlatch, or the spirituality of the sweatlodge, kiva, katsina or Ghost, Sun and Peyote cosmology? Along with each has to be the utterly compendious trickster lore, the Coyote of the Navajo, Spiderwoman for the Pueblos, Weesageechak for the Cree. Do all Native philosophies, moreover, settle into shared wheel, circle or hoop, with the earth, for all its centrality, as gynocentric mother? Above all, how to come even close to the translation, let alone the scripturalization, of the sumptuous, and simply inescapable, oral legacy of Native America, each ceremony and story? A further selective tendency has been that of victimry, Indians as one-time slain warrior-hunter or tragic squaw, or, of late, drinker or foodstamp mother. This denies the survival wisdom, and irony, brought on by having had to negotiate Euro-America’s will to dominance, not to mention the complex dimensionality of place and time in all Native tradition. Assigning to others only the one-note role of victim has never been helpful, as survivors of the Nazi and Armenian holocausts have been at pains to attest. But the Indian, however much a fiction from the start, actually enters a double curve as both victimizer and victim. Nor can the issue be said to have been reliably advanced by expertise begun with missionaries and explorers, added to by photographers and folklorists, and, from the late nineteenth-century onwards, given the stamp of science by anthropology. How far can the arising accounts reliably be thought to have articulated Native reality? Why, as a first consideration, should tribal informants ever have revealed all or anything like all to outsiders, especially in matters sacred? Do not the taxonomies of missionary religion, or of different explorer accounts, or of anthropological social science, rather reflect the categorizer rather than the categorized? Anthropology in particular has come in for satiric treatment, fact parodied not only as, but in, fiction, typically Gerald Vizenor’s The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal 19 A greatly helpful essay-collection dealing with oral naming and tradition is Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations, ed. Karl Kroeber, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

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Heirs to a Wild Baronage with its Berkeley-style campus, purloined Indian relics and shy at academism as against trickster lives, and Michael Dorris’ story “Shining Agate”, in his collection Working Men, as the retelling of an Athabascan ice-fishing prank at the expense of its social science investigators.20 How, in other words, to meet in its historicity, and in every variety, a Native America enrolled and un-enrolled, full-blood and mixedblood, and not the least of it, contemporary? In the latter respect America one also looks to the vast concourse of mestizos (NativeSpanish), métis (French-Canadian-Native) and, at just the slightest remove, America’s Chicano and other Latino populations as born of Aztec-Castillian and related crossovers. In this respect too Black-Native, Asian-Native, or even Jewish-Native mixed-bloods cannot be overlooked, each a continuing part of the New World’s pervasive mestizaje across Canada, the United States and Latin America. As the Mexican-Chicano performance artist, Guillermo Gómez-Peña observes with considerable pertinence: “How can the five hundred million mestizos who inhabit the Americas go on being called a ‘minority’?”21 Pope Julius II could decree in 1512 that Indians were to be thought descendants of Adam and Eve – thereby conferring upon them a Christian soul. But it did little to inhibit the Euro-American need to figure Native peoples as the other of threat, rape, phantom death and, always, the obstacle to America’s winning of the West. The latter phrase, in common with Manifest Destiny, could not smack more of civilization over savagery. Such, for long, conveniently kept out of sight the actual historic ravage and injustice, whether New England’s treatment of the Pequots, or the forced removals of the Cherokee from Georgia to Oklahoma in 1835 after the discovery of gold on their land and now known as “The Trail of Tears”, or the killing of five-hundred or so Shoshone by Federal troops in 1863 at Bear River, Idaho, or the murder of the Cheyenne in the Battle of Wazita at Sand Creek, Colorado in 1864, or the unprovoked army attack on the Blackfeet at 20 Gerald Vizenor, The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage at Petronia, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988; Michael Dorris, Working Men, NY: H. Holt, 1993. 21 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, ‘Documented/Undocumented’, L.A Weekley, 1990 (rpt. In The Graywolf Annual Five: Multi-Cultural Literacy, eds Rick Simonson and Scott Walker, Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1992, 127-34.

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Marias River in 1870, or the culminatingly memorial massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890 which Gerald Vizenor has not been alone in calling the Mai Lai of American history. In this respect the ignominious role of Oklahoma as forcing-ground, both the Territory and the State as it became in 1907, again requires emphasis, Indian Country for some thirty-plus removed tribal groupings – Apache to Kiowa to Medoc. Nor, in matters of Native history, can the Bureau of Indian Affairs go unmentioned. Until 1849 under, revealingly, the War Department, and thereafter the Department of the Interior, the BIA has played nothing if not a quite decisive hand, whether through each appointed Indian Agent, through relocation, or through policy decisions to do with education, land rights, welfare and legal services. Be the starting-point Columbus’ first enslavement of his “gentle” Arowaks in the 1490s, or Cortés’ defeat of the Aztecs in 1521 with its subsequent encomienda slaveholding by the Spanish, or Anglo-Puritan settlement and warfare in Algonquin-named Massachusetts from the 1630s onwards, the westernizing impulse has found not only a language but a bureaucracy to sanction, and to perpetuate, colonization. Notwithstanding an exception like Roger Williams, Rhode Island’s founder, the characteristic inflection is to be heard in Mary Rowlandson celebrated Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) where she speaks of the Wampanaoags (the son of whose King Phillip would be sold into Caribbean slavery) as “murderous wretches [by whom] I should choose rather to be killed … than taken alive”. Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) saw appropriation of tribal land, again mainly Algonquin, as nothing if not mandated by Christian providence. “The New Englanders”, he writes with all the assurance of Calvinist mission, “are a people of God settled in those which were once the devil’s territories”. Selective weigh-stations serialize the process, but what remains constant is precisely this insistent othering, the one collectivized fiction despite the evident variety of tribal culture. The line can be seen to have run from England’s establishment of a Board of Commissioners in 1675 in Albany to handle Indian Affairs to the Indian Removal Act in 1803, from Wounded Knee in 1890 to the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1906, and from the Citizenship Act of 1924 to the Wheeler-Howard/Indian Reorganization Act of 1934

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and, of recent legislation, the Indian Freedom of Religion Act in 1978. Interpretation of the politics, the imaging, within this history remains anything but settled. Something of this is to be seen in Korzack Ziolkowski’s still unfinished Black Hills rock sculpture of the Lakota-Sioux holy man, Crazy Horse (his actual Sioux name Tashunca-uitco). It may well have been an intended counter to Mount Rushmore’s Founding Fathers statuary. Yet to any number of Sioux it signals a double desecration, of the Black Hills or Paha Sapa meaning Sacred Land, and of the un-Sioux singling out of self over community. That, too, it is situated near Custer, South Dakota, as named for the US Cavalry’s long supposed martyr Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeated at Little Big Horn in 1876, merely compounds the irony. Latterday land-claims, from Maine to Alcatraz, Massachusetts to Taos, again bring into play as much fiction as fact. Is this fair due or greed, a latest Indian generation calling time on history or simply an eye to the main chance? In one view Native America, conspicuously, is owed restitution for land and resources seized, treaties broken. In another it is a case of Indians as yet again troublesome, unaccommodating to Federal or State statutes. Liberal conscience especially turns several ways at once. Reclamation may be right but are the tribal councils of the Chippewa-Ojibway, Mohawk and Paiutes, with their formidable casino and gambling empires, displaying selfreliance, latest American enterprise, or sell-out, a parody of American consumerism? Equally a challenge to stereotype has been the Native response to environment. The pro-environment voice has been one thing, as with the Prairie Island Sioux’s campaign against Minnesota’s Northern State Power nuclear facility near the Upper Mississippi or the Laguna Pueblo’s attempts at redress against the health effects of the local uranium mine. But another, again especially upsetting to liberal wellwishers, has been the negotiation by a number of tribes, or more specifically their tribal councils, to accept nuclear waste on reservation land, the siting of MRS or Monitored Retrieval Storage facilities (a number of tribespeople have asked – who better?). These latter include the Paiutes of Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and the Mescalero Apache in southern New Mexico, the latter un-consulted witnesses to an earlier era’s Los Alamos and Manhattan Project atomic-bomb history. Similarly there has been controversy about the Tuscarora of

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New York and the Suquanish of Washington State who have created cigarette factories: yet more enterprise, or a betrayal of eco-health, not to say of the once ceremonial-only uses of tobacco? Views, fictions, once more run in cross-currents. Is this, whatever the economic advantages, a betrayal of ecological good practice or supposed “Indian” earth values even if tribal people themselves have been known to cause pollution? On the other hand, does not the objection represent a latest form of liberal patronage, the tribes as incapable of making their own political decisions? Whichever holds, tribal no less than the rest of America, has at no time been either unconflicted or free of contradiction, and not least in the rise and increasing quantity of urban Native Americans. 22 Any one version, or some all-purpose pan-Indian, again fails to do even minimal service as Gerald Vizenor’s use of the Warhol version of Russell Means perfectly illustrates. *** Mainstream American literature, along with its Canadian counterpart, has equally played a part as ambiguous as any in the making of Indian fictions. If Puritan New England and Virginia can be said to have begun the story, the mythopoeia grew and thickened over time. For the New Republic era Philip Freneau’s reference to “the ancients of the lands” in “The Indian Burial Ground” (1786) adds more early nostalgia. Charles Brockden Brown’s “brawny and terrific” Indians in Edgar Huntly (1799) reworks gothic caricature. Washington Irving’s portraits in A Tour of the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1835) and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837) turns to the alternative typology of the tribes as heroic, figurings of Adamic renewal and health. Incontestably, however, it is James Fenimore Cooper’s five-part Leatherstocking cycle that supplies the best-known mythus. From The Last of the Mohicans (1826) onwards Chingachgook enters EuroAmerican consciousness as the beau idéal of tribal typology, Good Indian to Magua as Bad Indian, or on D.H. Lawrence’s reckoning wife to Natty Bumppo. Michael Mann’s 1993 movie of the novel, with 22 Off-reservation and citied Native America is surveyed in Donald L. Fixico, The Urban Indian Experience in America, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2000.

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Daniel Day-Lewis and Russell Means in the key roles, may well try for politically correct update. But, no less than the original, and allowing for the novel’s claims as early American parable of frontier and rights of ownership, it also perpetuates quite one of the best known, and enduring, of all fictions of Indians. The makers of the American Renaissance work most of the variations. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) Edgar Allan Poe contributes Dirk Peters, the mixed-blood, and distortedly muscled son of a fur-trader and “an Indian woman of the tribe of Upsarokas”. In Nature (1836), Emerson’s Transcendentalist manifesto envisages Columbus, and the Europe that bred him, nearing “the shore of America; – before it, the beach lined with savages”. For Thoreau, in Walden (1852), tribal America embodies Nature’s atavistic lodestones (“I have seen Penobscot Indians”, he writes evidentially). Hawthorne, in line with his best-known genre, speaks in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832) of Indian warfare as “naturally susceptible of the moonlight of romance”. Whitman, in “Song of Myself” (1855), includes in his vistas the Indian as trader in memorabilia, trinketry, the “squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemmed cloth ... offering moccasins and beadbags for sale”. It falls, perversely, to another Easterner, the New York-born Herman Melville, sea-goer, whalerman, perhaps best to discern the dazzling elusiveness, the trompe l’oeil, in American perceptions of “The Indian”. Who better personifies the very fiction of “The Indian” than the harpooner Queequeg in Moby-Dick (1851), if a South Seas Islander (from “Kokovoko ... a place not down on any map”) then also the tattooed bearer of a tomahawk pipe of peace? Were further confirmation needed Melville rarely bettered a chapter like “The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating” in The Confidence-Man (1857), as canny a deflation of savagism as any he wrote. Two subsequent writers can be said to anticipate the present century. For all his otherwise enlightened racial views, Mark Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) contributes Injun Joe, a stereotype as dire as quite any, and who dies as much encaved in the fearing white psyche as in any specific riverside Missouri. On another tack, one can turn to Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor ... A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (1881), an angry, well-taken indictment of the duplicity of Government, Land Speculator and Indian Agent alike.

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Modern versions of Indian story look to Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925), with its contrast of attenuated modern America as against fictional Blue Mesa tribal America; William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha cycle in its vast genealogical white, black and Chickasaw peopling; and Ernest Hemingway’s Michigan Indian sequence featuring Nick Adams in which Natives become the very sentinels for his code of grace under pressure. In their wake, notably, have come Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), his cautionary tale of America as mental institution and with Chief Bromden as Native schizo-narrator; Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964) as frontier dark comedy of Native and homesteader lives caught up in the history of Custer, the Sioux, Little Big Horn in 1876; Arthur Kopit’s send-up play of the Buffalo Bill legend in Indians (1968); and Tony Hillerman’s ongoing Navajo-Pueblo police mystery series, few more striking than his Anasazi story A Thief of Time (1968) with Sergeant Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. Memorable as each is their very attractiveness lies in the quality of fiction over fact. White-written discursive efforts at understanding Indian-Native disjuncture have by no means gone missing. Edmund Wilson was early into the fray with Apologies to the Iroquois. Leslie Fiedler, in a typical show of flamboyance, turned to the Indians of mainstream page and screen in The Return of the Vanishing American. Dee Brown did seminal groundwork in seeking a Native perspective to American history, and especially the frontier, in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Each manages a degree of rejoinder to the mask, and the proliferation of counter-masks, in which Native America has been attired by non-Native America.23 *** Given these often competing cross-lights, how best for the Native author indeed to write Native fiction, to un-author, as need be, each Indian fiction. The arising ambiguities have been equally many and pose their own challenges. The Life and Adventures of Joaquin 23

Edmund Wilson, Apologies to the Iroquois, NY: Farrar Straus, 1960; Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American, NY: Stein and Day, 1968; and Dee Brown, Buried My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of The West, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.

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Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), by the Cherokeedescended John Rollin Ridge, as the first known Native novel actually offers a Mexican thief adventure. It may well, however, imply a Native story inside its tale of Spanish dispossession and seizure. Firstever novels by Native women are to be found in Wynema (1891) by the Creek-Mukogee S. Alice Callahan, with its portrait of cross-racial women’s friendship, and Cogewea, the Half-Blood (1927) by the Okanogan-born Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket), a stirring romance of mixed-blood life yet in terms of western ranch property. Sundown (1934), by John Joseph Mathews (Osage), turns to Oklahoma oil politics, on the one hand wild-scatting white bravura and on the other white-Osage interface and tribal disinheritance as centred in the mixed-blood figure of Chal (for Challenge) Windzer. The Surrounded (1936), by D’Arcy McNickle (Cree-Metis, enrolled Salish), turns upon Archilde Leon, mixedblood son of a Flathead mother and Spanish father as heir to the spacious western Montana of the Salish, yet, finally, entrapped within the white-Native encounter acted out upon its terrain. Momaday’s House Made of Dawn ushered in talk of a Native American Renaissance, in many ways a well-meant hurrah. But even that would bring into play more paradox, not to say vexation. For allowing that less than a dozen Native-authored novels had hitherto been published, or that Momaday acknowledges knowing little at the time of Native writing, was this, again, to confirm some prior literary void? At the same time if there has been a renaissance, and literary scholarship to match, has that not led to ever greater excavation, a circling back into hitherto under-recognized ancestries of Native word and story? In fact, and no less than Momaday himself, Welch, Silko and Erdrich, not to mention Vizenor, are to be recognized as having emerged from anything but a Native literary vacuum.24 24

A timely study in this respect is to be found in Colin Calloway, The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America, NY: St Martin’s Press, Bedford Books, 1994. I have invoked only selected fiction in this sense of prior Native lineage. Autobiography extends from William Apess (Pequot) and Samson Occom (Mohegan) to George Copway’s Chippewa self-portrait, The Life, History, and Travels of Kahge-ga-gah-bowh [George Copway] (1847) and from as-told-to writing like The Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk, or the life of the Sioux medicine man recorded by John G. Neihardt, as Black Elk Speaks (1932), to the classic of NevadaPaiute upbringing, Sarah Winnemucca, Life among the Piutes [sic]: Their Wrongs and

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*** Mid-way into James Welch’s Winter in the Blood his bemused, and un-named, Montana Blackfeet narrator makes a near classic observation: “Again I felt that helplessness of being in a world of stalking white men.”25 It carries all the novel’s darkly laconic tone, the historic role reversal of the hunter hunted. The single contemporary Native life, as maybe, the effect is of still larger serial dislocation, a near comedy of errors. For all the self-drift, drinking, absurd chance encounters, and each accusing shaft of memory, Welch’s story is far from one of sentimentality. It points, toughly, and with acknowledgment of what has been lost, to access back into the sustenance of tribal legacy. To this end Welch develops a first-person voice full of quizzicality in which worlds clash yet, often enough, overlap and even collude. From his return home past the borrow-pit, with its implication of earth lost or evacuated, to his mother, Teresa First Raise, and her new husband Lame Bull, through to the life-changing recognition of the blind Yellow Calf as his true Blackfeet grandfather as against “the half-breed Doagie” and the funny-serious burial of his grandmother, the narrator might almost be snared in two landscapes. The one evokes literal Dodson, Montana, its township bars and commerce, along with his mother’s Reservation valley holding of hay, alfalfa and fishing country. The other bears “the presence of ghosts”, 26 the line of family which includes the snowdrift drunken death of First Raise, his father, and of Mose, the fourteen-year old brother mangled and then killed in a cattle round-up whom the narrator might once have saved. Between the two disjuncture indeed holds sway: “I was as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.”27 These different terrains throw up confusions, charades, which only slowly begin to clear. His Cree woman, who he thinks to marry, unmans him further by stealing his gun and razor, then haunts him Claims (1883). Verse looks to the Creek-raised Alexander Posey’s dialect Poems (1910) – Posey also wrote the newspaper satires known as the Fus Fixico letters. Native drama has a notable early practitioner in the Cherokee-born Lynn Riggs whose Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), became the basis of Rodger and Hammerstein’s folk musical Oklahoma! (1943). 25 James Welch, Winter in the Blood, NY: Harper and Row, 1974, 120. 26 Ibid., 159. 27 Ibid., 2.

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through the memory of her teeth made green by drinking crème de menthe. Nature itself can seem out of joint, cockeyed as Yellow Calf calls it, in which meadowlarks sing in mock chorus, pheasants gabble, magpies as tricksters argue, a hawk shot by the narrator in childhood is remembered only for its unmoving tongue, his longtime horse Bird dies pulled down by mud, and the fish have disappeared from the river. The story of Amos, the pet duck who survives as its siblings drown, bespeaks another family given over to dysfunction, their own selfdrowning. The episode shadows forward to the early tribal widowhood and abandonment of his grandmother; his mother’s marriage to First Raise as drinker and who could make white men laugh, yet also a handyman, and who was found frozen dead in the borrow-pit with his arm pointing homeward; and the narrator’s always accusing culpability in the accident and death of Mose. Throughout an Eliotic note sounds, Montana, if once a Native ecology, then also now dry season, rainlessness, a place for grail and fisher king. Each encounter for the narrator adds to the displacement. Who, exactly, is the aeroplane man from Malta, clad in white hunter garb, carrying a teddy bear and five boxes of chocolate covered cherries, and who hires him to get to Canada before his arrest by “the two suits” as a possible FBI fugitive? His own mother’s letter to the Harlem priest, with whom she drinks but who refuses Native parishioners burial in tribal ground, he finds himself moved to destroy. His overnight encounter with the barfly Malvina, one in a line of several women, edges into fantasy, rough yet maudlin and even comic sex, with its bedroom gallery of the woman’s photographs. All of these conflate in his hungover reverie, dream picaresque. The hitchhike back home, in which he gets a lift with a family of Hutterites, exposes him both to a father who asks if Indians eat river turtles, having his picture taken like some curio, and a daughter the very personification of anaemia, a sickly whiteness. Only in his understanding of the example of Yellow Calf, and the love and succour he once gave to the grandmother and to Teresa as the child he fathers with her, does the narrator begin to glimpse a way to confront the unbalance of his life. His bad leg, dating back to Mose’s death, has localized the larger malaise, life lived at a limp. But Yellow Calf’s revelation, and the linkage it supplies into a better order of Native being, together with the grandmother’s burial, becomes processes of birth. For even as he wears his father’s patched-up suit,

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Teresa dons red lipstick, coat, high heels and a black cupcake hat, Lame Bull makes a preposterous funeral speech, and the coffin fails to wedge evenly in the ground, rain has at last fallen again. The old lady’s pouch, and with it her arrowhead, he himself returns to the earth. Absurdity, comic-absurdly as befits, has begun to dissolve. As for the first time, and true to his age of thirty-two against the endless taunts of being called a boy, the narrator finds adulthood in a historic Blackfeet and Gros Ventre continuity of name, family, tribe, land, and call to health. He makes a self-promise to have his leg fixed and, a vintage touch of Welch irony, even marriage to his Cree. The signs of disjuncture remain, nowhere more so than in the inspired motley and rhetoric at the grandmother’s funeral. But they do so also in relation to the signs of juncture, life over death. Winter in the Blood so fuses a sense of carnival into seriousness, the narrator’s life as Native comédie humaine, a jugglery, yet also the promise of order to be won from that same discordance. *** “Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought Woman ... is sitting in her room thinking of a story now/I’m telling you the story/she is thinking.” 28 Leslie Marmon Silko’s opening verse in Ceremony beckoningly, and quite exactly, gives the rationale of her novel. The account of Tayo as someone returned damaged from World War II, as mixed-blood, and as linked into the Laguna reservation drought and the nearby Los Alamos atomic tests, could not imply a more evident contemporaneity. At every turn, however, and within the sunrise to sunrise frame, Silko grounds her novel in, and make its a parallel with, Laguna-Keres and allied story: creation myth, witchery, sickness, vision quest, healing. This sustained interaction, a double fiction doubly told, deservedly has won the novel a centre-place within Native American fiction. The intertextual link to House Made of Dawn has been much noted. But Silko’s novel is, and remains, emphatically her own, a narrative about ceremony yet, reflexively, itself that self-same ceremony. At the opening Tayo’s “humid dreams of black night”, his “fever voices”, and specifically the Pacific jungle killing of his uncle, Josiah, and cousin Rocky, along with Japanese soldiery, are said to be tangled up 28

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, NY: Viking Press, 1977, 1.

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“like colored threads from old Grandma’s wicker sewing basket”.29 At the close, and after the war-veteran deaths of Harley and Pinkie, and the banishment of Emo, together with Tayo’s restoration from the “battle fatigue”30 that has caused him repeatedly to drink and vomit, Old Grandma observes: “‘It seems like I already heard these stories before ... only thing is, the names sound different’.”31 This reiteration Silko tells in terms of Tayo’s literal return to Laguna, yet also of his return to a sustaining myth-world, a cosmos which coheres. Here his passage takes him through encounters with key healing medicine figures. Ku‘oosh starts the process with his herbs, bundles and old dialect. Josiah’s paramour, Night Swan, part-Mexican dancer of flamenco, prophetess, and herself an incarnation of Thought Woman, gives him love and a vision of the pathway to recovery. The Navajo healer Betonie, who updates the ceremonies with his telephone books and the like, recentres him through sandpainting, prayer-stick, ritual cut, and the five hoops, and sends him on to find the missing spotted cattle. The healer-lover Ts‘eh Montaño, an incarnation of Yellow Woman and companion to the Mountain Lion Man, gives him power to resist further witchery, whether his own (he refusal to kill Emo) or that visited on, and perpetuated by, the white world. He regains, however slowly or at cost, tongue (early described as “the carcass of a tiny rodent”32), body, and indeed, finally, enters the kiva as himself a newborn medicine man, for the moment at least, both the healed and healer. In situating Tayo’s story within each legend of Corn and Reed Woman, Ck‘o‘yo and other tricksters, Hummingbird, Pollen Boy, and their spirit company, Silko unravels a story both actual and ethnomythic. Her protagonist’s war-zones, abroad, at home, or in figures of drift like Emo or the Apache-Ute woman Helen Jean from Towac reservation, she tells as wholly specific in time and place. Yet it is a place synchronous with, and to be understood through, a tribal vision of the world. Illness and cure, whether of Tayo, or of post-war Laguna itself, is told throughout Ceremony as literal, yet also as the shadow-act of the “fifth world”.33 29

Ibid., 5-6. Ibid., 31. 31 Ibid., 260. 32 Ibid., 15. 33 Ibid., 68. 30

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In the one, the terms are those of Philippines killing, post-traumatic disorder – with would-be white hospital treatment, bars, the barbed wire fencing of their land (Tayo’s quest for the lost cattle is set against such fencing), the drought, and ultimately the bomb. In the other, they are those of Pa’caya’nyi’s bad magic34 or the mythical witch gathering (“It was Indian witchery that made white people in the first place”35), against which the deities of sun, cloud, corn, and water provide good stories and tribal ceremonies of health. In depicting Tayo’s course, from death-in-life (“He was tired of fighting off the dreams and the voices” 36 ) to his own sunrise, Silko writes a single, yet multiple, fiction and, at every turn, and near faultlessly, with a command of style to match. *** As typical a moment as any in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen occurs when Russell Kashpaw, Chippewa from North Dakota and a Korean war veteran, is honoured by his state as its “most decorated hero”. Russell, however, has been shot to pieces, become an alcoholic, and needs a wheelchair after suffering a stroke. As the celebrants mill about he sees himself as if in a Chippewa death vision: … this was the road that old-time Chippewas talked about, the four-day road, the road of death. He’d just started out. I’m dead now, he thought with calm wonder. At first he was sorry that it had happened in public, instead of some private place. Then he was glad, and he was also glad to see that he hadn’t lost his sense of humor even now. It struck him as so funny that the town he’d lived in and the members of the American Legion were solemnly saluting a dead Indian, that he started to shake with laughter.37

A number of Erdrich hallmarks come into play: tribal history as a mix of defeat and victory, the “four-day road” to indicate Chippewa cosmology, the smack at stereotype as, once again, in “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”, and the irony which can envisage the 34

Ibid., 46-49. Ibid., 132. 36 Ibid., 26. 37 Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1986, 300. 35

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transformation of Russell as maimed dead Indian into all-American live patriot. Russell’s musings, moreover, give off just the right laconicism, tough, rueful, yet free of self-pity. In building this, and the rest of her Chippewa world at the US-Canada border, Erdrich barely misses a step, lives, families and histories webbed, or inter-circled, one into the other, and yet, at the same time, full of missed connection like the history behind their making. Indian, for Erdrich, has never meant cheerfully harmonious tribal community. If, figuratively, there is indeed an Indian pattern to her fiction, one of revolving wheel, then it is a wheel broken as often as not, full of odds spokes, shards, lives caught out by circumstance. Her story logic so foregoes all easeful circularity in favour of doublingsback, switches, events subject to their own paradoxical rounds of fracture. Characters, mainly from Chippewa dynasties like the Kashpaws, Lamartines and Morrisseys, touch, move on, intermarry and feud, always persuasively human, yet as if the inhabitants of an only dimly perceived circle within America’s upper Midwest. Taken in sequence both The Beet Queen, and story-cycles like Love Medicine (both the original and expanded version) and Tracks, would seem to move back and forth through both space and time, in one perspective three decades of Argus, North Dakota, and its surrounding reservations and burial grounds, and in another Chippewa history from the turn of the century down into the 1980s.38 Yet novel or cycle each functions as complete in itself. Erdrich genuinely startles and compels, her early work, The Beet Queen, quick to win a bookcover accolade from Philip Roth in the blurb as “the most interesting new novelist to have appeared in years”. At first sight The Beet Queen indeed suggests something less than Native-centred narrative, which is to say the Kashpaws and their kin do not make frequent appearances. But the novel’s Indianness lies as much in its oblique style of narrative as any given explicit Indian theme. If wheel or hoop are to be thought Indian, then the story, as it doubles back and forth on itself, almost turns inside out that sense of circle. Told across a thirty-year span and again through linking firstperson voices, The Beet Queen opens with Mary and Karl Adare, eleven and fourteen respectively in 1932, who arrive illicitly by 38

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1984 (rev. edn 1993); and Tracks, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1988.

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boxcar in Argus, North Dakota, to claim kin with Fritzie and Pete, their aunt and uncle and the owners of Kozka’s Meats. Their mother, Adelaide, recently widowed and nothing if not crazy for romance, has dumped not only them but a new-born baby brother to fly south from Minnesota to Florida with “The Great Omar”, a none too successful aviator stuntman. It is the first of many separations, lives whose connection is their apparent disconnection. At Argus, the two Adare children themselves part company. Karl, alarmed by a fierce dog, jumps back on the train only to find himself in the amorous clinch of a hobo who rejoices in the name of Giles Saint Ambrose. Despite believing he has found love, Karl plunges out of the train, only to break both his legs and be nursed back to health by the journeying Fleur Pillager, Chippewa medicine woman. Subsequently raised in a Catholic orphanage, he then takes to the road as a salesman of farm and household gadgetry, still to find connection, love, nexus. Mary, meantime, goes about the wheel of her life in shared disjunctive manner. Her girlhood she spends in fierce tension with her disturbed, glamour struck cousin Sita, in childhood the human centre of what Argus dubs a religious miracle yet also a spinsterish Old Maid and purveyor of beef and pork who takes over the meat business. Hers, too, has become oddity, a life at the circle’s rim. The lives of the two Adares, however, are but two spokes in the wheel. Clementine James, part-Indian and Mary’s lifelong friend, allows Karl to father a child on her, whom Mary virtually adopts and promptly names Dot. But Dot’s actual given name is Wallacene Darlene. This links us to Wallace Keff, also Dot’s self-appointed guardian and the bachelor President of the Argus Chamber of Commerce. Wallace is the man responsible for introducing sugar beet into the region as a sure-fire cash crop. His life, in turn, circles into that of Karl Adare – for he lives with a lonely secret. The only experience that in any way transforms an otherwise stale round of Babbittry is his darkly comic sexual encounter with Mary’s driven but seductive brother. Clementine, too, contributes her brother, Russell Kashpaw, the Korean veteran more dead than alive to the ongoing circle. He, if no one else, can see his own breakage inside the Chippewa wheel. It is to Dot Adair Nanapush, however, that the novel finally reverts, with further linking turns into the lives of Adelaide, Sita, the lost

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Adare who surfaces as Father Miller, a Catholic priest, and others in the Kashpaw and related dynasties. As Wallace Keff intends it Dot will be the Queen in Argus’ Sugar Beet Festival. But, again, the wheel turns unexpectedly. She sees that things have been rigged in her favour, gives way to a fury of her own, and like her grandmother Adelaide before her, takes to the skies. That is, she soars off with the local sky-writing pilot to seed the clouds for needed rain only to wheel back to earth when the main events of the festival are over: a last ironic Indian circling indeed. One vital clue to the links which bring together all these lives resides in an observation made by Celestine James as she watches with her new born baby by Karl a small white spider busy about its labours: “A web was forming, a complicated house, that Celestine could not bring herself to destroy.”39 Louise Erdrich could not have spoken better to her novel in its deftly managed apparent illogic. This is a tale bordering on magic, magic history, perhaps, as much as magic realism. For The Beet Queen manages to captures the oddity of lives connected in discontinuity, against appearances their own kind of Indian circle. *** Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart, at first view, might readily call up Chaucer, Dante or Cervantes in its use of the peregrinus motif. But the travels in play, from the start, clearly belong to quite another order of irreality. They involve entering, and traversing, an America as much bereft of spiritual balance as of oil and petroleum energy, at once toxic, cannibal, and literally unlit. Yet for all the dystopian impulse, and not only as in Swift but also in the art of Hieronymus Bosch or George Grosz, Vizenor’s own Book of the Grotesque at the same time offers therapy towards better historical grace. If “war words and terminal creeds”,40 serve as his codings for Native life conventionally told as though in savagist monochrome, or having been put under malign siege from sources that in collaboration can be Native along with nonNative, then the novel acts as trickster countermand.

39

Ibid., 176. Vizenor, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart / Bearheart: the Heirship Chronicles, 1987, 11. 40

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The manuscript given by Saint Louis Bearheart to Songidee migwam, AIM radical whose sacred Anishinaabe name she too readily discloses on breaking into the BIA offices, might indeed be a story brought out of hiding. The life-passage it tells of Proude Cedarfair, fourth of his name, and of his wife, Rosina Parent, from the “sovereign circle” of sacred cedar trees at “migis sandridge”41 in the Upper Mississippi (or as cited from Anishinaabe the misibi) to Chaco Canyon as “vision window” 42 and into the Fourth World, Vizenor pitches as a kind of puppet drama. His “circus pilgrims”, 43 each a fantastical mixed-blood whose number includes the seven clown crows and the mongrels Pure Gumption and Private Jones, travel the abandoned interstate highways of America as though across a wasteland of darkest dream. The frequency of violence and death, the extravagant sexuality, have sometimes aroused shock-horror complaints. Yet, at the very outset, Vizenor would seem to have issued a kind of Native cum postmodern authorial health-warning (“The bear is me now” reads the opening line44). The names of the pilgrims, and their tics or manners, do reflexive service, starting with Bearheart as woodland tribester yet also ursine spirit-healer, and whose repeated ha ha ha haah gives its own ironic acoustic to the novel. Of Rosina, Native woman, the text observes “She did not see herself in the abstract as a series of changing ideologies”.45 Others, usually mixed-blood, assume a shared magical or mongrel physiology, whether Benito Saint Plumero, lover of a green woman statue, and in an old Native piece of bawdy possessed of the endlessly in-service giant penis known as President Jackson, or Pio Wissakodewinni, “parawoman mixedblood mammoth clown” – an alleged male rapist given female hormone and caught sexually midway, or Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher, born at Wounded Knee of Lakota father and white mother, and who will die of a poisoned cookie for her narcissistic blather about Mother Earth and related outof-time feathers and warpaint tribal clichés. The company extends to Bishop Omax Parasimo, wearer of three metamasks in aiding tribal people to shelter, and who will die of 41

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 238. 43 Ibid., 96. 44 Ibid., vii. 45 Ibid., 35. 42

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lightning strike; Dr Wilde Coxwain, dispenser of fake tribal history, and his male lover, Justice Pardone Cozener, lawyer illiterate; Sir Cecil Staples, “monarch of unleaded gasoline”, bald, toothless, skinpoisoned custodian of What Cheer Trailer Ruins, the Evil Gambler of Anishinaabe and other tribal myth (a life for five gallons of petrol), and the gargoyle mixed-blood who will die by one of his own killingdevices only when defeated in the game of chance by Proude; Lilith Mae Farrier, abused daughter and mocked one-time teacher, yet loving sexual partner to her twin boxer dogs, who destroys herself by fire having lost to Sir Cecil; and Inawa Biwide, orphan, victim of torture at New Mexico’s Palace of Governors, pure spirit in a world of excremental history who will step into the Fourth World with Bearheart. In their Brobdignagian encounters Vizenor seeks to skewer the legacy of America as Manifest Destiny, Native mantrap, and gasoline and foodway culture. Interstate perfectly applies, asphalt routeway yet also the index of a half-human condition. Bearheart appropriately, works as a narrative theatre of episode and mask, one violent metamorphosis set against another. Often Vizenor accoutres them in a rhetoric long identified as his own but which, as ever, works to unfix fixity, the sediments of co-optive past usage: survivance, transmotion, paramask, terminal creed, vision bear, shaman crow or panic hole. The opening collusion with the Federals of Jordan Coward, gin soaked and blustering Chairman of the nearby Reservation, to have the Bearheart cedars felled by Federal agents serves as perfect image of sell-out, tree killing petty power as anti-life. It provides a curtain-raiser to the darker, at times near hallucinatory, sequences to follow. Any number stand out. At the Scapehouse on Callus Road the novel envisages a thirteen-woman poet commune of Wierds and Sensitives, literally poisoned womanhood given to animal eating, cancer, and group orgy with Bigfoot. At Big Walker the pilgrims barely avoid death as oil scavenging whites try to seize the silver cabriolet they have been given only to burn to death in the flames. What Cheer yields Sir Cecil, parody aristocrat and bad spirit, to be followed by the novel’s most graphic horror, that of the Hlastic Haces, the Dunfries colony of cripples whose body parts, and faces especially, have been so eaten by cancers as to leave them unable to pronounce Plastic Faces. When Little Big Mouse, white woman companion to the giant pilgrim, Sun Bear Sun, seeks to console them with a striptease,

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these ruined and parasite ghouls lust and masturbate and eventually cause her death by dismemberment. At the Bioavaricious Regional Word Hospital language itself comes under imagining as equally cancered, more terminal creed in the form of government or canonical history and never less so than in regard to Native America. At the Witch Hunt Restaurant the target is what Vizenor terms Fast Food Fascism, hanging witch women served as edible take-outs. At the city of Orion, by contrast, hospitality is to be exchanged for live spoken story, a suspicion of how, yet again, the fixed written word exerts its own imprisoning. Sun Bear Sun, for example, captured along with the other pilgrims by white authority at the Palace of Governors, is left “answering unanswerable questions”.46 These different close-encounters, and as one after another pilgrims dies or abandons the journey, will lead into Bearheart’s own final and transcending bear-entry into the Fourth World. Postmodern likely only begins to cover the turnings of Bearheart, its satirical reversals and uses of the grotesque. Native fiction is often construed as different orders of emergence, vision or homing story.47 Each indeed plays its part in Vizenor’s novel. It is the trickster ethos, however, Native-oral and at the same time postmodern-reflexive, if not an interplay of both, which above all gives it narrative energy. Complaint, distractingly, may on occasion have surfaced about maverick violence or offending sex. But the wholly more consequential challenge should not be doubted, tribal history imagined as tribal meta-history, Native America imagined as an awakening from nightmare. *** Fictions of Indians. Native fictions. The dialectic is far from lost on Thomas King, of mixed Cherokee and Greek stock, raised in California’s Central Valley, and long resident in Canada. Looking back to nineteenth-century portraiture of Native life in All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction he 46

Ibid., 230. A greatly influential essay in this regard is William Bevis, “Native American Novels: A Homing In”, in Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, eds Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1987, 580-620.

47

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recognizes the romance, the beckoning power, of mythic Indian-ness, and at the same time calls for its end: The literary stereotypes and clichés for which the period is famous have been, I think, a deterrent to many of us. Feathered warriors on Pinto ponies, laconic chiefs in full regalia, dusky, raven-haired maidens, demonic shamans with eagle-claw rattles and scalping knives are all picturesque and exciting images, but they are, more properly, servants of a non-Native imagination. Rather than try to unravel the complex relationship between the nineteenth-century Indian and the white mind, or to craft a new set of images that still reflects the time but avoids the flat, static depiction of the Native and the two-dimensional quality of the culture, most of us have consciously set our literature in the present, a period that is reasonably free of literary monoliths and which allows for greater latitude in the creation of characters and situations, and, more important, allows us the opportunity to create for ourselves and our respective cultures both a present and a future.48

The observation throws a necessary light upon his Medicine River, King’s portrait of contemporary tribal life, likely Blackfeet, both on “The Reserve” as the Canadianism has it, and on the nearby township. For all that the novel turns beautifully on trickster humour, a revolving circuit of tease and understatement, there can be little doubt as to its astute seriousness of aim. “I was used to conversations with Harlen that didn’t make much sense and didn’t seem to go anywhere”. 49 The speaker is Will Sampson, son of Rose Horse Captive and an absentee, long dead white father who worked in rodeo, describing his friend and alter ego Harlen Bigbear in Medicine River. For Harlen it is, community fixer, benign trickster, tribal good spirit, who has brought Will back from Toronto to the Medicine River of Canadian prairie and the Rockies. There he has shrewdly finagled him into setting up his photography business (wonderfully against stereotype given the view of Indians as 48 Thomas King, All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Native Canadian Fiction, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990, ix, (rpt. as All My Relations, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). 49 Thomas King, Medicine River (1990), Markham, Ontario and NY: Viking, 1997, 169.

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spooked at their thought of their spirit being stolen by the camera), made him play basketball for the Medicine River Friendship Center team, and sought to get him married to Louise Heavyman, single mother of South Wing, teasingly named not after some Indian Princess but for the hospital ward where she was born. Harlen, in fact, serves as an apt figuration of modern Native life, a fixer and mender of lives (some of them in his basketball team like Floyd and Elwood). Yet King makes him no cartoon Noble Indian, all spirituality and oneness with Nature. Harlen Bigbear falls ill with flu, loves tattle and gossip, and typically misreads maps, even getting lost, of all places, at Little Big Horn. Unlike some latter-day Chingachgook or Hiawatha, and having had Will buy, and help repair, an old canoe in a yard sale, he manages to crash it in the whitewater of the upper Medicine River. He is said, contemporarily, to like “basketball … cars … golf”.50 For all his savvy, he can also find himself treading lightly round Bertha Morley’s scheme, as he mistakenly believes it, to marry him after she has advertised herself in “The Calgary Centre for the Development of Human Potential” as “a Blood Indian woman in good health .... I like to go fishing and hunting, and I play bingo every Thursday.”51 Will Sampson becomes the recorder, and quite literal image-maker, of Harlen’s Medicine River, a kind of Winesburg, Ohio George Willard figure, who also frequently brings into play the memory of his own boyhood as non-status Indian with his brother James and hardpressed mother. The family thus has both tribe and city in their make-up, an Indianness of the Rockies and Calgary, the Reserve and tough, economically stringent urban life. Each photographic image Will processes in his studio, and its writing-up as story, so helps fill out his own circle as much as the reader’s. This holds for his close encounters with not only Harlen and Louise, but the bingo antagonists Big John Yellow Rabbit and Eddie Weaselhead, the marriage doctor Martha Oldcrow, January Pretty Weasel as abused tribal wife, Harlen’s storyteller brother, Joe Bigbear, the tribal elder Lionel James, and the self-divided AIM aficionado David Plume. Each builds into a live and overall Medicine River, “Indians now” as it were. Even Will’s sense of place changes and 50 51

Ibid., 201. Ibid., 178.


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grows, Medicine River if a modern Canada, and within it a modern Alberta, of TV, fast food, pick-up trucks, Federal and Provincial government and the RCMP (or Mounties), then also, an older tribal world of Chief Mountain and Ninastiko with its ceremonies, trickster myths and play. King’s achievement is to write neither nostalgia nor case-study. Medicine River, rather, carries its stories as performative, the oral lightly assumed in the written. Motifs olds and new blend. The “leather rattle made of willow and deer hide”, which Will receives from Martha Oldcrow, serves as a Native form of the “musical top” he buys for South Wing and which, in parallel, makes “a sweet, humming sound, the pitch changing as it [spins] in its perfect circle”.52 As Will’s insights deepen into Harlen’s obliquities, not to say into Medicine River itself, and his own rite-of-passage, so the novel overall shows a tribal past making its own kind of way into the present. Even so, at one point Joe Bigbear looks back on his world-trips pondering how the world prefers its “Indian stories” to be rooted in the “olden days” versions: But those people in Germany and Japan and France and Ottawa want to hear about how Indians used to be. I got some real good stories, funny ones, about how things are now, but those people say, no, tell us about the olden days. So I do.53

The point perfectly reflects on Medicine River’s own workings, a world of present over past, live substance over long ago shadow. For his part Will thinks of the air flights in which he has fantasized for fellow passengers the father who indeed was the itinerant, drinkaddled rodeo cowboy, and whose letters he once read to his mother’s anger and upset. He makes him into a “senior engineer with Petro-Canada”,54 a pilot, a career diplomat, and perhaps most to the point given his own vocation, a photographer.55 It throws a fittingly reflexive cast on the novel at large: Medicine River’s imaging of Native legacy as always dynamic, as capable as any other of its own inventions or, if need be, its own counter-inventions. 52

Ibid., 260-61. Ibid., 173. 54 Ibid., 78. 55 Ibid., 80. 53

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*** In her poem “Neighbors” Linda Hogan has a run of lines that might do good service as a prologue to her novel Mean Spirit: In this country, men have weapons they use against themselves and others. It is the dying watching death. Light a candle.56

The story on offer is one of a turn-of-the-century Osage dynasty caught out, murderously, by Oklahoma oil politics – oil, in one of the novel’s recurrent images, as the earth’s seeping blood. Densely and adroitly webbed throughout, told at gathering pace, and given a large cast of players from oil-scatters to Hill Indians, and from the sinister fixer John Hale to the legendary coyote ghost John Stink, it secures its own “Indian mystery” story out of a true American conspiracy still fully to be given light or, indeed, resolution. Beginning with the unsolved murder in 1922 of beautiful, oil rich Grace Blanket, Osage full blood, then the adoption of her daughter Nola by Belle and Moses Greycloud and their extended family, and moving from the invented Oklahoma town of Watona to Washington DC from where the Lakota born agent, Stacey Red Hawk, takes up the detection, Hogan recreates a tale whose own turns, corners and entanglements she transposes into a genuinely encompassing narrative. At one level this is Warren Harding’s America as land grab, a predatory, anything goes white frontierism with the Osage, like other tribal people pre-1924, in law non-citizenry whose lands become fenced in, and out, as much by statute and picket as by each instalment in the “ring of murders”.57 Not that Mean Spirit gives ways to victim history; quite the contrary. For another level operates, primarily that of Grace’s Osage legacy, as carried forward by the Greyclouds and Nola. It is first to be met with in the surreal, near oneiric, “silent bedchamber” opening scene, indoor beds placed outdoors to deal with the nights of an Oklahoma summer. The linkage to the novel’s other Native lore are many: the sacred fire maintained by the water-diviner 56

Linda Hogan, Savings, lines 19-22, Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1988, 65. 57 Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit, NY: Athenaeum, 1990, 242.

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Michael Horse, and whose almanac, The Book of Horse, he shows only to Stacey; Sorrow Cave, the many chambered sacred Osage refuge with its bats and memorial pictographic wall drawings; the Hill Indian watcher-runners who keep guard over Nola; the stallion, Red Shirt, sought and respected by Horse; and Belle’s bees which attack and kill Sheriff Gold (“Bees were like Indians, Belle thought to herself, with a circular dance, working together for the survival of the next generations”58). None of these, for sure, stops the murders of Grace, or a community which includes Benoit, John Thomas, Walker, the Indian deputy Willis, and others. Nor does it wholly explain the role of Hale, or the lawyer Forrest whose son, Will, marries Nola, or the photographer John Tate who finally kills his own wife Ruth, twin-sister of Moses Greycloud, or even the deathly black Buick which delivers the killers. For the conspiracy, from the fictional Watona to Osage murders elsewhere in actual America, and even as far away as England, Hogan tells as an always elusive thread, and whose origins lie as much in the Federal Government as in local Oklahoma white greed and connivance. Hogan is equally careful not to make all whites into villainy, as Hale’s one-time mistress, China, and the departing physician, Dr Black, give witness. Native life equally has its push and pull divides, as in the case of the grandson, Ben Greystone, or Belle’s daughter, or the fate of the mixed-blood preacher Joe Billy and his wife as they work their way out of Baptist Christianity back toward Native belief. Stacey, a modern law agent, increasingly remembers his own meaning as a Sioux. But it is the immersion of the Osage themselves, most of all the Hill Osage, in their own sense of time and place, threatened as may be, that offers a counter-resource to the dire workings of the oil conspiracy at hand. Like King, Hogan in no way veers towards sentimentality. The novel ends, toughly, with the land indeed lost and scarred by rigs and boreholes and the Greyclouds themselves in flight. Hogan’s novel can in this respect be thought a species of palimpsest, a Native version of history written over, or at the interstices of, Oklahoma as Indian Country. Mean Spirit gives notice of a mystery whose true meaning, its feints and shadows, even for Hogan still await their solution. 58

Ibid., 312.

Native Fictions

519

*** Louis Owens’ Wolfsong makes its Indian Country the Pacific Northwest, specifically the wooded, part glacier, North Cascades of Washington State, ancestral home of the Salish people, whether Stehemish, Stillaguamish or Skagit. In Tom Joseph’s return from college in California, his taking-up of his uncle’s wolf mantle, the different visions which take him back into a recovery of his own Native identity, and his eventual retributive dynamiting of a huge water tank linked to the Honeycutt Copper local mining operation, he becomes a figure both of tribal return and escape, at once self-found and yet fugitive. In this Owens’ own Forest Service background evidently helps. The landscape and animal scenes are written not only from an experienced observer’s eye but from a sense of their past place in the Salish cosmos. The allusions to old-growth cedar, raven, bear, deer, coyote, sweat-lodge, and Dakobed as “the great mother mountain”,59 known in English as Glacier Peak, underlie, and serve as ironic comment on, the copper mining, logging, and J.D. Hill’s road building operations. A keen by-play, too, is kept up not only in Tom’s loss of his onetime girl, Karen, to Buddy, JD’s son, but in the running taunts and cynicism of his beer swilling brother, Jimmy. A whole community play of opposite forces, in fact, comes into play: Martin Grider, the Forest Ranger, as against Dan Keller, mouthpiece for the mining interests; the well meaning white logger, Vern Reece, as against Buddy and white bullyboy accomplices like Jake Tobin; Jim Joseph’s sympathetic white friend, Sam Gravey, as against Mad John, a kind of Holy Fool preacher; and Tom’s mixed-blood Flathead college friend, McBride, alongside Karen, herself part-one Cherokee. The essential equation, however, resides in Tom Joseph with his uncle, Jim Joseph, for whose funeral he has returned in the first place. As the “crazy Indian” who shoots at the road-maker’s machines, Jim Joseph speaks of having seen the ghosts of ancestors, heard chants, and talked to birds and animals. Finally he bequeaths his own 59

Louis Owens, Wolfsong, Albuquerque, NM: West End Press, 1991 (rpt. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). Wolfsong, 1996, 88.

520


wolfsong, and with it each inlaid tribal value, to the returnee. It becomes Tom’s own inner voice. Wolfsong, thereby, takes up Salish lineage as rite-of-memory and yet, and at the same time, its necessary furthering into the future. In finding himself called to assume his uncle’s mantle, one generation for another, Tom takes on Honeycutt Copper and its corporate ethos of cash return and land abuse. But he equally smacks out at hobbyist Sierra Clubbers. His eventual flight, having countermined the company’s holdings, and with perhaps an echo of the flight of Chief Joseph and his Nez Percé people to the Canadian border in 1873, gives its own gloss to history as repetition. Owens’ debut novel offers its own Cautionary Tale, Salish-Cascades and Northwest in its setting as may be, yet a fiction which shrewdly, and throughout, also implies the quite wholly larger time and landscape of Native America. *** “Thomas Builds-The-Fire’s stories climbed into your clothes like sand, and gave you itches that could not be scratched”; “I’m a recovering Catholic”; “Nobody ever notices the sober Indians”: few novels, Native-written or otherwise, can quite have made their bow with a wit as punchily comic, and yet serious, as Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues.60 The touch is playful, full of well-targeted satiric tease, yet perfectly alive to defeat, even pathos. The novel’s Spokane reservation world has its share of HUD sub-standard housing, basketball, alcohol babies, competing churches, and tribal infighting. But it can also be one of myth, dream memories, jumps in time, benign fakers like “the end of the world...crazy old Indian man” known as “the-man-who-wasprobably-Lakota”61 and an overseeing musical shaman like Big Mom of nearby Wellpinit Mountain. As in his subsequent full-length fiction, short stories and poetry, Alexie shows himself always the storyteller marvellously quick on his feet, a master of the revels. From the magical arrival at the reservation crossroads of Robert Johnson, legendary bluesman with his guitar-music born of his compact the devil – white and known as “The Gentleman”, through to 60 Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995, 15, 146, and 151 respectively. 61 Ibid., 11.

Native Fictions

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the rise of Coyote Springs as “warrior band”62 – this albeit a Rock Band, the novel pursues an odyssey across an America of Indians real and imagined. Thomas, “the misfit storyteller of the Spokane tribe”,63 serves throughout as part goodfellow, part savant and visionary. With Victor Joseph, drinker and bully yet who inherits the guitar and indeed plays like the devil, Junior Polatkin, his binge partner and uncertain drummer, and the two Flatfoot Tribe sisters, Chess and Checkers Warm Water, who sing back-up, together at first with the blonde New Age princesses in turquoise sings and beads, Betty and Veronica, he seeks to make music, reservation blues, as a stay against confusion, his own story of understanding. The results lead into cavalcade, picaresque, from Spokane Indian Reservation to Arlee, Montana as the first of a slew of tavern and other gigs, and from a disastrous visit to a New York recording studio to an eventual journey in Thomas’ iconic blue van to Seattle. Each episode en route does bittersweet, and often bitingly funny, service. Johnson’s guitar early speaks in its own voice (“The blues always makes us remember” 64 ). CIA and FBI agents dress as Indians “but didn’t fool anybody because they danced like shit”.65 Father Arnold hovers deliciously between spirit and flesh, mission to the Spokane and passion for Checkers. Thomas’ journal lists entries for Coyote. Envious reviews of the group appear in the tribal press,66 not least at the behest of the Tribal Chairman, David WalksAlong, whose muscled convict-nephew, Michael White Hawk, exudes threat. A remembered half-fantasy basketball game between Samuel, Thomas’ drunkard father, and the cops, becomes a replay of past “Indian wars”. Each transformation happens at high pace, a fiction of fast moving fictions. Alexie especially shows his paces when Cavalry Records, under the commercial management of latter-day intertextual generalship like that of Phil Sheridan and George Wright, and they, in turn, under a boss named Mr Armstrong, offers the group a studio tryout (“Indians are big these days”67). A kind of history replays itself. The group, Victor Joseph at least, becomes violent and trashes the 62

Ibid., 77. Ibid., 5. 64 Ibid., 22. 65 Ibid., 34. 66 Ibid., 83. 67 Ibid., 224. 63


522

studio. Betty and Veronica, stage Indians to a fault, become the acceptable purveyors of tribal music. In turn Big Mom comes to think “Indian men have started to believe their own publicity and run around acting like the Indians in the movies”.68 Victor trades in Junior to the Devil even as Robert Johnson receives a cedar flute from her, a life for a death. As he drives out of the reservation, with Chess and Checkers, Thomas finds songs for all the warrior horse spirits of Indians dead and alive. The note is fond, restorative, the perfect visionary follow-on to all the mediating comedy of Reservation Blues. *** In Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon, her narrator Lucy Evers, college teacher in California, a recent divorcee from a Jewish husband, and like Bell herself a Cherokee mixed-blood daughter, returns to Oklahoma to witness the dying of her long put-upon yet wayward mother. Lucy summons the Evers lineage as through “women’s voices” and from across a “kitchen table”,69 a family she has grown up as passed-around Indian child and as the grown woman who “every year [becomes] more Indian”. Her homecoming stirs “thick memory”,70 a litany of anti-romance: Dust, outlaws, pretty black-eyed women raising children alone, chopping their way through cotton, good ol’ boys and no-good men. Full-blooded grandmothers, mixedblood renegades and lost generations, whirling across the red earth in forty-nine Chevys, drunk on homemade beer, and aged by years of craving under the hot Oklahoma sun.71

The voices that speak to this memory play one into the other, witness and accusation, comfort and recrimination. They each, in turn, however particular, even idiosyncratic, have their origins in the spiral begun from Cherokee displacement and dispossession. Gracie Evers, never much above poverty, defiantly yet pathetically goes on repeating her credo as one of “‘Don’t mess with Indian 68 69

Ibid., 208. Betty Bell, Faces in the Moon, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994,

4. 70 71

Ibid., 33. Ibid., 5.

Native Fictions

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women’”, to be emulated, always, by her sister’s answering: “‘Naw, I sure wouldn’t wanna do that.’” In her drift from man to man, drinking, newspaper cuttings and second-hand clothing, Gracie becomes the perfect gatherer-up of white America's trifles. From the Depression onwards, and in an Oklahoma whose shacks lie in the shadow of historic Fort Sill, hers has been a world of margins, loss more than gain. Her sister Rozella, known as Auney, plays Gracie’s companion colloquist, another lost generation daughter of Hellen Evers, the grandmother who at her death “told my mother, then nine years old, would always be watching her from the moon”. 72 Auney, equally, lives a life of make-do, aping white fashion to the point where she peroxides her hair to calamitous effect, a woman always voluble yet as un-centred as her sibling. From a generation before them stands the redoubtable Great Aunt Lizzie Sixkiller Evers, full-blood keeper of Cherokee wisdom, austere Christian, TB sufferer, and a farmwoman and purveyor of family chronicle who, for a while, raises Lucy. In her Lucy finds a more complete voice of the history that has made her the child dreamer who once shouted “‘I am Quanah Parker!’” 73 in identification with the great Kwahadi Comanche leader of the South Plains, eventual cattle rancher, and mover in the use of peyote out of which would arise the Native American Church. Lizzie acts as a means for Lucy to go back in memory to the 1835 Trail of Tears, to imagine the first Dawes Act tribal enrolment interview of the Georgia-born Robert H. Evers, to call up the Dust Bowl’s impact on tribal life, and to situate the Evers line in the larger history of Cherokee names and places. Accordingly Lucie writes not the romance of her own child-notebooks and which she finds among her mother’s belongings, but the ply of hope and poverty in her long, winding family-tribal ancestry. Asked “What’s it like being an Indian?”, her reply carries a perfect impatience with fictions and stereotype: I wish I had Indian stories, crazy and romantic vignettes …. Anything to make myself equal to their romance. Instead I can offer only a picture of Momma’s rented house, a tiny flat twobedroom shack in a run-down part of town.

72 73

Ibid., 56. Ibid., 70.

524


Years later, too, when seeking out the Dawes Commission’s Cherokee Rolls, an encounter with a supercilious white male librarian at the Oklahoma Historical Society brings on her memorialist’s latest answering act of voice, nothing other than “I am your worst nightmare: I am an Indian with a pen”. 74 The riposte does related kinds of duty. For sure, it summarizes the edge, the well-placed remembrance, of Bell’s own Faces in the Moon. Equally it carries forward, with an abruptness surely justified, the resolve of Native America’s writers as to their own terms of literary imagining for Native identity. The kinds of new fiction in evidence, typically, can look to several tiers. One includes novels like The Jailing of Cecilia Capture by Janet Campbell Hale (Coeur d’Alene), an unsparing Californian portrait of city mixed-blood womanhood; Firesticks by Diane Glancy (Cherokee), imagist story threads of mixed-blood heritage, marriage and travel; The Light People by Gordon Henry (Anishinaabe), story-soliloquies linking the Ojibway-Chippewa past to present; and Eye Killers by A.A. Carr (Navajo-Laguna Pueblo), an updated vampire fable as a way into delineating white-Native culture encounter in New Mexico.75 Another tier, yet more recent, invokes Hiawatha by David Treuer (Anishinaabe), a three-generational family saga from Ojibway reservation to Minnesota’s Twin Cities in which human fracture and displacement are just about held back from defeat; Field of Honor by D.L. Birchfield (Choctaw), the satiric idyll of an underground tribal Oklahoma intruded upon by a Marine deserter suffering Stockholm Cowardice Syndrome Dysfunction; and Bleed into Me (2005) by Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet), sixteen stories of modern Native lives caught at odd moments, amid stereotype, and often enough offcentre. 76 These, in shared spirit with Bell’s novel, give every continuity to the legacy of Indians with a pen, of Native over Indian fictions, and the promise of a future literary order of American territories ahead. 74

Ibid., 59. Janet Campbell Hale, The Jailing of Cecilia Capture, NY: Random House, 1985; Diane Glancy, Firesticks, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993; Gordon Henry, The Light People, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994; and A.A. Carr, Eye Killers, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. 76 David Treuer, Hiawatha, NY: Picador, 1999; D. L. Birchfield, Field of Honor, Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2004; Stephen Graham Jones, Bleed into Me: A Book of Stories, Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 2005. 75

INDEX

Abrahams, Willie E., 368 Abbey, Edward, 199 Adorno, Theodore, 338 Aeneid, 134, 161 Alcott, Bronson, 95 Alexis, Sherman, 22, 484, 52022; The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 491; Reservation Blues, 491 Armstrong. Louis, 431, 458 Arnold, Matthew, 231, 233; Culture and Anarchy, 231 Baker, Josephine, 430 Baldwin, James, 337, 342, 364, 366, 432, 448-50, 457; Essays: “Alas, Poor Richard”, 339; “The Harlem Ghetto”, 434; “Many Thousands Gone”, 339-40; Novels: The Amen Corner, 434; Another Country, 449; If Beale Street Could Talk, 449; Go Tell It on the Mountain, 448-50, 460; Just Above My Head, 449; Story: “Sonny’s Blues”, 434 Balzac, Honoré de, 115 Bambara, Toni Cade, 434, 472, 477; Gorilla, My Love, 477; The Salt Eaters, 472

Barth, John, 64 Barthes, Roland, 338 Basie, Count, 431, 432 Basso, Hamilton, 263 Bates, Arthenia, 476-77; Seeds Beneath the Snow, 476-77 Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 163 Baudelaire, Charles, 61, 301; Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym, 61 Beardsley, Aubrey, 301 Beauvoir, Simone de, 339 Beckett, Samuel, 149 Bellow, Saul, 420; Herzog, 420 Bennett, Hal, 190, 345; Lord of the Dark Places, 190, 345 Berger, Thomas, 162, 501; Little Big Man, 501 Berry, Wendell, 198 Bierce, Ambrose, 161; Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 161 Birchfield, D.C., 524; Field of Honor, 524 Bishop, John Peale, 265 Black Elk, 485 Black Fire, 433 Black Mask, 320 Black South, 457-80 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 29

526


Bland, Alden, 341; Behold a Cry, 341 Blatty, William, 32; The Exorcist, 32 Bloch, Robert, 32, 318; “Lucy Comes to Stay”, 32, 318; “The Real Bad Friend”, 32, 318 Bontemps, Arna, 187-8; Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia: 1800, 187-88; Drums at Dusk, 187 Borges, Jorge Luis, 63, 149 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 48; Modern Chivalry, 48 Bradley, David, 472, 488; The Chaneyville Incident, 472 Bradstreet, Ann, 197, 198 Brady, Mathew B., 163 Brant, Sebastian, 129; Das Narrenschift/Ship of Fools, 129 Broken Arrow (film), 489 Brontë, Charlotte, 225; The Professor, 225; Villette, 225 Brontë, Emily, 29, 413; Wuthering Heights, 269, 413 Brooks, Cleanth, and Warren, Robert Penn Warren, 410; Understanding Fiction, 410; Understanding Poetry, 410 Brooke, Rupert, 396, 405 Brown, Charles Brocken, 12, 14, 23-43, 85, 499; Alcuin: A Dialogue, 26; Arthur Mervyn, 23, 24, 39-41;

Clara Howard; or The Enthusiasm of a Lover, 26; Edgar Huntly, 24, 25, 30, 31, 41-43, 48, 499; Jane Talbot, 26; Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, 36; Stephen Calvert, 26; Wieland, 24, 26, 28, 32-37 Brown, Claude, 453; Manchild in the Promised Land, 453; The Children of Ham, 453 Brown, Dee, 501; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 501 Brown, Elizabeth, 28 Brown, James, 431 Brown, Lloyd L., 341; Iron City, 341 Brown, Williams Wells, 180; Clotel, 180 Buntline, Ned, 485; Stella Delorme, or the Comanche’s Dream, 485 Burke, Edmund, 109 Burns, Robert, 95, 396, 403 Burroughs, William, 149 Burton, Robert, 129; The Anatomy of Melancholy, 129 Butler, Octavia, 194, 478; Mind of My Mind, 194; Patternmaster, 194 Byrd, William, 198 Callahan, S. Alice, 502; Wynema, 502 Callahan, Morley, 261; That Summer in Paris, 261 Calloway, Cab, 431

Index Camões, Luis Vaz de, 129; Os Lusíadas (The Luciads), 129 Camus, Albert, 39, 301; La Peste, 39 Capote, Truman, 31 Carlyle, Thomas, 128 Carr, A.A., 524; Eye Killers, 524 Carroll, Lewis, 128 Carson, Rachel, 97, 198 Cather, Willa, 205-208, 501; My Ántonia, 205-208; The Professor’s House, 501 Catlin, George, 487; Manners of the North American Indians, 487 Céline, Jean-Louis, 354 Cézanne, Paul, 163 Champollion, Jean François, 132 Chandler, Raymond, 19, 319, 402 Channing, William Ellery, 94 Charles, Ray, 432 Chase, Richard, 13, 230; The American Novel and Its Tradition, 230 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 95 Chavez, Denise, 213-17; The Last of the Menu Girls, 213-17 Cherokee Phoenix, 493 Chesnutt, Charles, 186-87; 459; House Behind the Cedars, The, 459; The Marrow of Tradition, 18687, 190 Cheyenne (TV series), 486

527 Childress, Alice S., 434 Chopin, Kate, 203-205; The Awakening, 203-205 Christian, Barbara, 14 Clare, John, 412; “Meet Me in the Green Glen”, 412 Cleaver, Eldridge, 184, 342; Soul on Ice, 342 Cobden, Richard, 109 Cocks, Jay, 245, 250 Cody, William/Buffalo Bill, 485 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 408 Collins, Wilkie, 38 Colter, Cyrus, 345; The Hippodrome, 345 Coltrane, John, 431 Conrad, Joseph, 17, 90, 160, 61, 64, 74, 226, 263-64, 302, 304, 408; The Nigger on the Narcissus, 263; The Secret Agent, 17, 226, 230, 233, 304 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 14, 484, 485; From the River’s Edge, 485; Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, 485; ed. Wicazo sa review, 485 Cooper, James Fenimore, 12, 14, 29, 45-59, 499; Novels: The Chainbearer, 47; The Crater, 47; The Last of the Mohicans, 49, 499; Leatherstocking Cycle, 30; The Oak Openings, 47; The Pilot, 47; The Pioneers, 49; The Prairie, 49;

528


Precaution, 45, 46; The Redskins, 47; Satanstoe, 47; The Sea Lions, 47; The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, 5, 45-59; The Ways of the Hour, 47; Prose: The American Democrat, 47; History of the Navy of the United States, 47; Home as Found, 47, 48; A Letter to His Countrymen, 47; Notions of the Americans, 47 Cooper, Judge William, 49; A Guide in the Wilderness; or the History of the First Settlement in the Western Countries of New York, with useful Instructions to Future Settlements, 49 Cooper, Susan Delancey, 49 Corman, Roger, 32; Dir. The Tomb of Ligeia, 245 Cougat, Francis, 266 Cowley, Malcolm, 300 Crane, Hart, 285; “The Bridge”, 285 Crane, Stephen, 12, 17, 59-75, 293, 499; The Black Riders and Other Lines, 160; “Maggie, A Girl of the Streets”, 60; The Open Boat and Other Stories, 160; The Red Badge of Courage, 17, 159-75; War Is Kind, 160; Whilomville Stories, 160 Crazy Horse, 498

Cullen, Countee, 433, 236; One Way to Heaven, 43637 cummings, e.e., 162; The Enormous Room, 162 Cunard, Nancy, 437; ed. Negro: The Anthology, 434 Curtis, Edward S., 488 Dana Sr., R.H., 29 Dante, 24, 351, 419, 422, 423; La Divina Commedia, 23; Inferno, 351, Davis, Miles, 430, 431 Defoe, Daniel, 39; A Journal of the Plague Year, 39 Degas, Edgar, 163 Delaney, Beauford, 432 Delaney, Samuel R., 194, 478; Tales of Neveryone, 194 Delany, Martin, 17, 179, 18586; Blake; or the Huts of America, 179, 185-86, 195 Deloria, Vine, 483 Demby, William, 344, 473-74; Beetlecreek, 473-74, The Catacombs, 344, 474 Detective Fiction Weekly, 320 Detective Story, 320 Dickens, Charles, 38, 226, 300, 365, 392, 396; Bleak House, 226; David Copperfield, 392, 396; Oliver Twist, 396 Dickey, James, 462 Dickinson, Emily, 116, 396, 403 Dime Magazine, 320

Index Dinesen, Isak, 396; Out of Africa, 396 Disraeli, Benjamin, 226; Coningsby, 226 Dorris, Michael, 484, 494; “Shining Agate”, 496; The Broken Cord, 494; Working Men, 496 Dos Passos, John, 18, 162, 265, 280; Three Soldiers, 162 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 304, 339, 340, 351, 354; The Idiot, 304; Notes from Underground, 361, 354, Double Detective, 320 Douglas, Aaron, 432 Douglass, Frederick, 177, 8, 447; Narrative, 181 Dove, Rita, 78-79; “David Walker”, 178 Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman (TV series), 486 Dreiser, Theodore, 162, 235, 354, 408; An American Tragedy, 354 DuBois, W.E.B., 437 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 182, 186-87, 436; “The Colored Soldiers”, 182; The Fanatics, 186 Dunlop, William, 28; The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: Together with Selections from the Rarest of Original Letters, and from His Manuscripts before Unpublished, 28, 36 Duyckinck, Evert, 84, 120

529 Duyckinck, George, 120 Eakins, Thomas, 63; Whitman, 63; The Watering Hole, 63 Eco, Umberto, 338 Edgeworth, Maria, 48 The Edinburgh Review, 27, Eel, Roberta, 156 Eliot, George, 11, 225; Romola, 225 Eliot, T.S., 72, 265, 302 Ellery Queen’s Magazine, 320 Ellington, Duke, 431, 432, 445 Ellis, William, 142; Polynesian Researches, 142 Ellison, Ralph, 21, 175, 179, 190-92, 337, 344, 352, 383, 293, 446-48, 460-2, 471; Essays: “Harlem is Nowhere”, 446; “Harlem’s America”, 446; “Richard Wright’s Blues”, 340, “The World and the Jug”, 340; Novels: Invisible Man, 179, 190-92, 340, 342, 344, 352, 364, 383, 446-48, 457, 460, 461, 471; Juneteenth, 460-61 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 46, 63, 84, 85, 26, 54, 155, 500; “The American Scholar”, 46; Nature, 500 Equiano, Olaudah, 8 Erdrich, Louise, 22, 483, 502, 507-10; The Beet Queen, 507-10; Love Medicine, 508; Tracks, 508 The Exorcist (film), 32

530


Fabre, Michel, 338 Fanon, Franz, 369; Peau Noir, Masques Blancs, 369 Far From the Madding Crowd (film), Dir. John Schlesinger, 244 Faulkner, William, 12, 18, 31, 299-316, 408, 410, 415, 437, 470, 471; Novels: Absalom, Absalom!, 19, 302, 307-12; 471; As I Lay Dying, 19, 302, 308-11; The Hamlet, 312; The Mansion, 312; Sartoris, 312, 437; Soldier’s Pay, 300; The Sound and the Fury, 19, 302, 303-308; The Town, 32; Prose and poetry: The Marble Faun, 301; New Orleans Sketches, 302; The Portable Faulkner, 300; Interview, Paris Review, 304 Fauset, Jessie, 430, 440; Plum Bun, 430, 440 Fiedler, Leslie, 13, 501; The Return of the Vanishing American, 501 Fielding, Henry, 24, 225; Amelia, 225 Film Noir, 320, 332 Fisher, Rudolph, 436; The Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, 436; The Walls of Jericho, 436 Fitzgerald, Ella, 431 Fitzgerald, Scott F., 12, 18, 259-77, 318, 320, 339,

396,405; Novels: The Beautiful and the Damned, 262, 265; The Great Gatsby, 12, 18, 259-77, 396, 405; The Last Tycoon, 364; This Side of Paradise, 262, 265; Stories and prose: “Absolution”, 259, 266; “Babylon Revisited”, 259; “Echoes of the Jazz Age”, 259; “Winter Dreams” 266; The CrackUp, 264, 265 Fitzgerald, Zelda, 264 Flaubert, Gustave, 115, 265 Flowers, A.R., 459; Another Good Loving Blues, 459; De Mojo Blues, 459 Ford, John, 489 Forrest, Leon, 92-93, 470-72; The Bloodworth Orphans, 192-93, 470-71; There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, 470; Two Wings to Veil My Face, 471 Fort Apache (film), 489 Forster, E.M., 244 Foster, Elizabeth S., 145 Franklin, Aretha, 431 Freud, Sigmund, 302, 336, 357, 414 Frye, Northrop, 28; The Anatomy of Criticism, 128 Fuller, Hoyt, 338 Fuller, Margaret, 30 Gaines, Ernest, 21, 183, 46670; The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 83, 467-70; Bloodline, 467;

Index Catherine Carmier, 467; Of Love and Dust, 467 Gall, 485 Gallup Independent, 493 Gardner, Erle Stanley, 402 Garrett, George, 266 Garvey, Marcus, 430 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 108, 202, 226; Life of Charlotte Brontë, 108 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 4 Gayle Jr., Addison, 338, 343; The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 343 Geismar, Maxwell, 229; Henry James and the Jacobites, 229 Genet, Jean, 374; Notre Dame des Fleurs, 374 Gillespie, Dizzy, 431 Giovanni, Nikki, 364 Gissing, George, 108, 229; Novels: Demos, 226; The Nether World, 226; Prose: Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, 108 Gladstone, William, 109 Glancy, Diane, 524; Firesticks, 524 Godwin, William, 26; Mandeville, 26 Gone With the Wind (film), 161 Gordon, Dexter, 431 Gold, Mike, 338 Gramsci, Antonio, 338 Grant, Ulysses S., 161 Greco, El, 277

531 Gray, Henry, 129; Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical/Gray’s Anatomy, 129 Griffith, D.W., 488; Dir. Battle of Elderbush Gulch, 488; The Birth of a Nation, 488; The Redman and His Child, 488; The Squaw’s Love Story, 488 Griggs, Sutton, 17, 186; Imperium in Imperio, 186, 195 Guy, Rosa, 434; A Measure of Time, 454 Hackluyt, Richard, 130 Hale, Janet Campbell, 524; The Jailing of Cecelia Capture, 524 Hammett, Dashiell, 19, 319, 365, 402 Hardy, Thomas, 54, 225, 300, 396, 403; A Pair of Blue Eyes, 225; The Return of the Native, 54, 403 Harlem, 427-55 Harold of Orange (film), 491 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 182 Harrington, Ollie, 432 Hawthorne, Julian, 88 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 3, 12, 15, 36, 62, 83-102, 260, 279-97, 300, 301, 339, 346, 408, 412; Novels: The Ancestral Footstep, 15; The Blithedale Romance,

532


100, 113, 209; The Dolliver Romance, 114; Dr Grimshaw’s Secret, 115; Fanshawe, 84; The House of the Seven Gables, 100, 113, 412, 414; The Marble Faun, 100, 114; The Scarlet Letter, 15, 62, 83-102, 104, 106, 107, 117, 137, 314; Septimius Felton, 114; Prose: American Notebooks, 103, 104, 109, 110; Story-collections: Mosses From an Old Manse, 29, 84, 88, 94, 105, 106, 112, 126; Our Old Home, 14; The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales, 112; Twice-Told Tales, 62, 84, 105; Stories: “The Birthmark”, 31, 110; “The Bosom Serpent”, 110; “The Celestial Railroad”, 150; “The Custom-House”, 15, 83-102, 104, 106, 107, 117, 137, 314; “Ethan Brand”; 31, 36; “Grey Champion, The”, 112; “The Hall of Fantasy”, 23; “The Maypole of Merry Mount”, 112; “Legends of the Province House”, 112; “P’s Correspondence”, 29; “Rappaccini’s Daughter”, 84, 112; “Roger Malvin’s Burial”, 112; “Young Goodman Brown”, 112 Hawthorne, Sophia, 88, 104, 120, 138

Hazlitt, William, 27 Hawkes, John, 162 Hayden, Robert, 84; “Middle Passage”, 184 Heat Moon, William, 199 Heidegger, Martin, 143, 339, 356 Heller, Joseph, 162, 293 Hellström, Gustaf, 300 Hemingway, Ernest, 12, 18, 160, 161, 162, 164, 273, 279-97, 266, 339, 396, 501; Novels: A Farewell to Arms, 162, 280, 282, 294, 396; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 19, 279-97; The Fifth Column, 280; The Sun Also Rises, 280, 282; Prose: Death in the Afternoon, 273, 280; (with John Dos Passos), The Spanish Earth, 280 Henry, Gordon, 524; The Light People, 524 Hillerman, Tony, 501; A Thief of Time, 501 Hilliard, John Northern, 162 Himes, Chester, 12, 20, 193, 341, 342, 361-87, 436, 441; Autobiography: My Life of Absurdity, 20, 342, 362-63, 375; The Quality of Hurt, 20, 342, 362-63, 375; The Real Cool Killers, 382; The Third Generation, 373-77; Novels: All Shot Up, 382; The Big Gold Dream, 382; Blind Man with a Pistol, 20, 193, 382, 384, 385-86,

Index 450; Cast the First Stone, 373-75; Cotton Comes to Harlem, 384-85, 433, 450, 478; The Crazy Kill, 381, 383; For Love of Imabelle/A Rage in Harlem, 20, 193, 364, 450; If He Hollers Let Him Go, 20, 341, 369-71; Lonely Crusade, 371-73; Pinktoes, 20, 365, 366, 380, 450; Plan B, 365; A Rage in Harlem, 382, 383; Run Man Run, 381-82, 450; The Primitive, 362, 377; Une Affaire de Viol/A Case of Rape, 20, 366-68; Storycollections: Black on Black, 20 Hitchcock, Alfred, 19, 32, 317; Dir. Psycho, 317; Rear Window, 321 Hogan, Linda, 22, 197, 198, 483, 57-58; Mean Spirit, 517-18; “Neighbors”, 57 Homer, 24 Horne, Lena, 432, 445 House Made of Dawn (film), 489 Houston, Whitney, 432 Howe, Irving, 229; Politics and the Novel, 229 Howells, William Dean, 117, 162, 228, 335 Hughes, Langston, 434, 44446; Stories: “A Million – and One”, 445; “A Toast to Harlem”, 444-45; “Enter

533 Cousin Minnie”, 445, “Letting Off Steam”, 445; “Name in Print”, 445; “Simple Prays a Prayer”, 445; Story-collections: The Best of Simple, 444; Simple Speaks His Mind, 444; Simple Stakes a Claim, 444; Simple Takes a Wife, 444, Simple’s Uncle Sam, 444; Tambourines to Glory, 434 Hurston, Zora Neale, 183, 20811, 459; Novel: Their Eyes Were Watching God, 208-11; Stories: Mules and Men, 459; Tell My Horse, 459 Ice Cube, 432 Iliad, 161 I’ll Take My Stand, 408, 410 Imagining Indians (film), 491 Ishi, 466-67 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 244 Irving, Washington, 30, 47, 85, 499; Novels: Astoria, 499; The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, 499; A Tour of the Prairies, 499; Stories: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, 30-31; “Rip Van Winkle”, 30-31 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 500; A Century of Dishonor …. A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian

534


Tribes, 500 Jackson, Holbrook, 129; An Anatomy of Bibliomania, 129 Jackson, Michael, 432 Jackson, Shelley, 129; The Melancholy of Anatomy, 129 Jackson, Shirley, 31; The Haunting of Hill House, 31; We Have Always Lived in the Castle, 31 James, Henry, 12, 16, 31, 85, 103-17, 223-41, 260, 265, 346; Novels: The Ambassadors, 112, 114, 225; The American, 106; The Golden Bowl, 112, 225, 226; The Portrait of a Lady, 31, 114, 225, 226; The Princess Casamassima, 17, 14, 22341; Roderick Hudson, 108, 226, 229; The Tragic Muse, 108; The Wings of the Dove, 31, 112, 225, 226; What Maisie Knew, 106, 112; Prose: “The Art of Fiction”, 108; 224; “The Figure in the Carpet”, 108; “The Future of the Novel”, 108, 224; French Poets and Novelists, 108, 115; Hawthorne, 16, 85, 103-17, 105, 232; Letter to Grace Norton, 232; Notes on Novelists, 108; Partial Portraits, 108; William Wetmore and His Friends,

108; Stories: “The Author of Beltraffio”, 108; “The Jolly Corner”, 31; “The Lesson of the Master”, 108”; “The Madonna of the Future”, 108; “The Real Thing”, 107, 108; “The Turn of the Screw”, 31; Jewett, Sarah Orne, 7, 199202; The Country of the Pointed Firs, 199-202 Johnson, Charles, 478; Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, 478; The Oxherding Tale, 478 Johnson, James Weldon, 21, 435; Black Manhattan, 435; The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 436 Jones, LeRoi/Imamu Amiri Baraka, 178, 161, 189, 364, 365; Novels: The System of Dante’s Hell, 189; Plays: Dutchman, 351, 352; Slaveship: A Historical Pageant, 181; Prose: “City of Harlem”, 434; “Statemeant”, 178 Jones, Stephen Graham, 524; Bleed Into Me, 524 Jones, Sir William, 132 Joyce, James, 63, 302, 340, 392, 470; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 392 Jules et Jim, Dir. François Truffaut, 245 Kafka, Franz, 295, 339, 354, 356

Index Kanellos, Nicolás, 141 Kantor, MacKinlay, 161; Andersonville, 161 Kazin, Alfred, 14 Keats, John, 27, 265, 301 Kelley, William Melvin, 344, 380, 383, 453; A Different Drummer, 478; dem, 344, 383, 453 Kenan, Randall, 475; A Visitation of the Spirits, 475 Kesey, Ken, 501; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 501 Killens, John. A., 92; And Then We Heard the Thunder, 92, 342; The Cotillion, or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd, 478; Youngblood, 342 Kim, Elaine, 14 King, B.B., 458 King, Charles Bird, 487 King, Martin Luther, 458 King, Thomas, 22, 483, 51316; ed. All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction, 514-16; Medicine River, 514-16 King, Stephen, 32; The Shining, 32 Kierkegaard, Søren, 357 Kubrick, Stanley, Dir. Barry Lyndon, 244 L’Amour, Louis, 485; Guns of

535 Timberland, 485 L.A. Confidential, Dir. Curtis Hanson, 321 Lakota Indian Country Today, 493 La Mariée en noir/The Bride Wore Black, Dir. François Truffaut, 321 Lardner, Ring, 396, 405 Larsen, Nella, 436; Quicksand, 436 Lathrop, George Parsons, 1067, 109, 111; A Study of Hawthorne, 106 Lawrence, D.H., 85, 108, 499; “A Study of Hardy”, 108 Leavis, F.R., 229, 265; The Great Tradition, 229 Lee, Spike, 433; Dir. Malcolm X, 433 Lewis, Carl, 430 Lewis, Monk, 25 Lincoln, Abraham, 161 Lippard, George, 30; “The Heart-Broken”, 30; Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, 30 Literary World, 84, 90, 20, 126 Little Big Man (film), 489-90 Locke, Alain, 339, 434; ed. The New Negro, 339 The Lone Ranger (Radio and TV series), 489 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 84, 86, 94, 492; The Song of Hiawatha, 492 Lorca, Federico García, 454;

536


Poeta en Nueva York, 454 Louis, Joe, 430 L’Ouverture, Toussaint de, 71, 187, 188 Lovecraft, H.P., 31; Supernatural Horror in Literature, 31 Lowry, Malcolm, 330; Under the Volcano, 330 Lyly, John, 129; An Anatomy of Wit, 129 Mailer, Norman, 162, 293; The Naked and the Dead, 162 Malcolm X, 393; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 393 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 301 Malle, Louis, 19 A Man Called Horse, (film), 489 Mann, Thomas, 420; The Magic Mountain, 420 Marx, Leo, 13 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 162, 462 Mather, Cotton, 497; The Wonders of the Invisible World, 497 Mathews, John Joseph, 502; Sundown, 502 Matthiessen, F.O., 13 Maugham, Somerset, 396 Mayfield, Julian, 241; The Hit, 341 Mays, Willie, 430 McCullers, Carson, 31 McKay, Claude, 189, 365, 433, 435, 437, 438, 438-40;

Harlem: Negro Metropolis, 435, 439; Home to Harlem, 189, 436, 437, 438-40 McLuhan, Marshall, 344 McNickle, D’Arcy, 502; The Surrounded, 502 McPherson, James Alan, 477; Stories: “A Solo Song: For Doc”, 477; ¨On Trains”, 477; “The Story of a Dead Man”, 471; “Why I Like Country Music”, 471; Story-collections: Elbow Room, 477; Hue and Cry, 477 Melville, Herman, 11, 12, 16, 31, 47, 53, 62, 84, 85, 95, 96, 104, 117, 119-40, 4147, 301, 339, 340, 408, 500; Novels: Billy Budd, 20, 125, 128, 147, 169, 345; The Confidence-Man, 16, 53, 125, 141-57, 225, 500; Mardi, 124, 142, 309; Moby-Dick, 11, 16, 62, 84, 86, 107, 116, 119-40, 359, 500; Omoo, 124; Pierre, 31; Redburn, 24; Typee, 16, 120, 128, 142; WhiteJacket, 24; Poetry: Battle Pieces, 161; Prose: “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, 46, 84, 90, 105, 107, 126, 128; Stories: “Bartleby”, 31, 107, 142; “Benito Cereno”, 31, 142, 151; “The Encantadas”, 142, 201; “I and My

Index Chimney”, 47; Storycollection: The Piazza Tales, 31, 142 Mencken, H.L., 263 Meriwether, Louise, 443; Daddy Was a Number Runner, 443 Miller, Henry, 380 Miller, Perry, 12 Mills, Ethel, 431 Minelli, Vincente, Dir. Madame Bovary, 245 Mitchell, Margaret, 161, 183, 410, 466; Gone With the Wind (novel), 161, 183, 410, 466, (film), 161 Momaday, M. Scott, 21, 199, 483, 502, 505; House Made of Dawn, 22, 483, 502, 565 Monet, Charles, 163 Monk, Thelonius, 431 Moore, Opal, 477; “Freeing Ourselves of History”, 477; “The Slave Closet”, 477 Moran, Thomas, 487 Morehead, Sarah, 120 Morley, John, 109, 117 Morrison, Toni, 17, 21, 179, 337, 533-34, 457, 462-63; Beloved, 179, 194-95, 462; Jazz, 453-54, 462-63 Motley, Willard, 34, 441; Knock on Any Door, 341 Muir, John, 199 Murray, Albert, 21, 463-64; South to a Very Old Place, 463; Seven League Boots, The, 463; The Spyglass

537 Tree, 463; Train Whistle Guitar, 463 Murray, John, 142 Mystery Book Magazine, 320 Nabokov, Vladimir, 63 Native American Press/Ojibwe News, 493 Naylor, Gloria, 189, 474; Mama Day, 474-75; The Women of Brewster Place, 189 Neale, John, 29-30; Logan, A Family History, 29-30 New Masses, 338, 342 The New Negro, 432, 339, 342 Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Dir. John Farrow, 321 Nineteenth-Century: A Quarterly Miscellany, 30 Norris, Frank, 162 Northern Exposure (TV series), 486 Nuku Hiva, 120 O’Connor, Flannery, 31, 410, 462 Odyssey, 161 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (film), 489 O’Neill, Eugene, 430, 437; The Emperor Jones, 437 Opie, Amelia, 48 Ortiz, Simon, 199 Orwell, George, 280; Homage to Catalonia, 280 Otter, Samuel, 29; Melville’s Anatomies, 129

538


The Outlaw Josie Wales (film), 489 Owen, Wilfred, 162 Owens, Louis, 14, 22, 484, 519-20; Wolfsong, 519-20 Palumbo-Liu, David, 14 Parker, Charlie, 431 Parks, Gordon, 432 Peacock, Thomas Love, 27; Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 27-28 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 13 Perkins, Max, 262, 279, 283, 296 Petry, Ann, 21, 189, 342, 44143; The Street, 189, 441-43 Pharr, Robert Deane, 90, 345, 453; S.R.O., 190, 453, 345 Picasso, Pablo, 294; Guernica, 294 Pinckney, Darryl, 454; High Cotton, 454 Pisarro, Camille, 163 The Platters, 432 Pocahontas (film), 489, 491 Poe, Edgar Allan, 12, 14, 24, 28, 61-81, 115, 260, 318, 321, 339, 346, 355, 479-80, 500; Novels: Journal of Julius Rodman, 62; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 15, 30, 53, 61-81, 500; Prose: “Eureka”, 322; Marginalia, 29 Stories: “The Black Cat”, 355; “The Cask of Amontillado”, 321; “A Descent into the Maelstrom”, 321; “The Fall of

the House of Usher”, 30; “King Pest”, 39, 300, 321, 479; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, 321; “The Pit and the Pendulum”, 30; Polanski, Roman, 19 Pontiac, 485 Powell, Adam Clayton Jr., 430 Powell, John Wesley, 199 Powwow Highway (film), 489, 491 Psycho (film), 32 Putt, S. Gorley, 229 Pynchon, Thomas, 104 Radcliffe, Ann, 25, 98; The Mysteries of Udolpho, 98 Rear Window, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 321 Reed, Ishmael, 11, 21, 193, 344, 488-9; Flight to Canada, 21, 93, 459, 479; The Free-Lance Pallbearers, 193, 344, 478-79; Mumbo-Jumbo, 193, 435, Remington, Frederic, 487; Frontier Sketches, 467; “The Last of His Race”, 487 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 163 Richardson, Samuel, 30 Richie, Lionel, 432 Ridge, John Rollin, 502; The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, 502 Rio Grande (film), 489 Robinson, Bojangles, 430 Rosenberg, Isaac, 162

Index Roth, Philip, 129; The Anatomy Lesson, 129 Rowlandson, Mary, 497; Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson, 497 Rowson, Susanna Haswell, 48; Charlotte Temple, 48 Saldívar, José David, 14 Salinger, J.D., 12, 20, 104, 389-406, 487; The Catcher in the Rye, 20, 389-406, 487 San Juan, Epifanio, 14 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 339 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 493 Schuyler, George, 188-89, 193-4, 436, 477-78; Black Empire, 193; Black No More, 188-89, 193-4, 436, 477-78 Scorsese, Martin, 243-58; Dir. The Age of Innocence, 24358; Goodfellas, 243, 247; Mean Streets, 243, 247; Taxi Driver, 243, 247 Scott, Sir Walter, 24, 48 Scribner, Jr., Charles, 267, 283 Sequoyah, 493 Shaft (film series), 438 Shakespeare, William, 24, 147, 301, 430; As You Like It, 147; Hamlet, 403; Julius Caesar, 396; Romeo and Juliet, 396, 403; The Tempest, 474

539 Shange, Ntozake, 476; Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo, 476 Shell, Ray, 190; Iced, 190 Shelley, Mary (Godwin), 26, 28; Frankenstein, 28 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 301 Sherman, William T., 61, 301 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (film), 489 The Shining (film), 32, 317 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 17, 22, 219-22, 483, 502, 505-507; Almanac of the Dead, 21922; Ceremony, 505-507 Simmons, Herbert A., 187, 341; Corner Boy, 189, 341; Man Walking on Eggshells, 341 Sitting Bull, 485, 498 Smith, Bessie, 458 Smith, Henry Nash, 13 Smith, Martin Cruz, 484 Smith, William Gardner, 341; Last of the Conquerors, 341 Smoke Signals (film), 491 Snyder, Gary, 199 Southern Literary Messenger, 64 Southern Review, 407 Southern, Terry, 380; Candy, 380 Spark, Jared, 28, American Biography, 28 Sollors, Werner, 14 The Stalking Moon (film), 489

540


Star Trek (TV series, film), 491-2 Stein, Gertrude, 18, 262, 265, 393; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 393 Stendhal, 18 Sterling, Rod, 31, Dir. The Twilight Zone (TV series), 31 Stephens, Sir Leslie, 117 Stevens, Alexander H., 161 Stevens, Shane, 434, 451; Go Down Dead, 451 Stone, Robert, 162 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 202; The Pearl of Orr’s Island, 202 Stranger on the Third Floor, Dir. Boris Ingster, 321 Styron, William, 472; The Confessions of Nat Turner, 472 Swift, Jonathan, 128

Toomer, Jean, 18, 349, 459; Cane, 349, 459 Traven, B.F., 10 Treuer, David, 524; The Hiawatha, 524 Tribes, Native, 494 Trilling, Lionel, 228; The Liberal Imagination, 228 Trollope, Anthony, 85 Truth, Sojourner, 183 Tubman, Harriet, 183 Turgenev, Ivan, 111, 230, 265 Turner, Nat, 77, 82 Twain, Mark, 96, 161, 260, 392, 500; Novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 500; Huckleberry Finn, 392; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 326; Story: “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”, 161 The Twilight Zone (TV series), 32

Taylor, John, 432 Les Temps Modernes, 337 The 39 Steps (film), 399 Thomas, Piri, 434, 452; Down These Mean Streets, 452 Thoreau, Henry David, 77, 86, 94, 150, 54, 182, 199, 500; Walden, 116, 500; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 150 Thurman, Wallace, 436; The Blacker the Berry, 436 Tolson, Melvin, 443 Tolstoy, Leo, 18, 163, 281; War and Peace, 281

Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 78 Updike, John, 422; Couples, 422 Van Der Zee, James, 432 Van Doren, Mark, 119, 35 Van Vechten, Carl, 434, 4356, 437-38; Nigger Heaven, 436, 437-38 Verdelle, A.J., 476; The Good Negress, 476 Verne, Jules, 80; Le Sphinx des Glaces, 80 Vesey, Denmark, 77, 181

Index Visconti, Luchino, Dir. Leopard trilogy, 244 Vizenor, Gerald, 22, 482, 483, 495-6, 497, 510-13; Bearheart, 510-3; Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, 483; The Trickster of Liberty, 495-96 Vizenor Gerald and Lee, A. Robert, Postindian Conversations, 483 Voltaire, 109 Vonnegut, Kurt, 64, 162, 293 Walker A’Leila, 430 Walker, Alice, 21, 83, 457, 464-65, 471; Novels: The Color Purple, 83, 464-65; Meridian, 183, 464; The Third Life of Grange Copeland, 464; Prose: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 464; The Temple of My Familiar, 183; Stories: In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, 477 Walker, Margaret, 183, 344, 466; Jubilee, 183, 466; Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, 344 Wallant, Edward Lewis, 434, 451; The Pawnbroker, 451 Walpole, Horace, 25, 98; The Castle of Otranto, 98 Warren, Robert Penn, 12, 20, 21, 407-25; Novels: All the

541 King’s Men, 408, 409, 410; 420, Band of Angels, 409; The Cave, 410; Meet Me in the Green Glen, 21; Night Rider, 407; A Place to Come to, 21; Wilderness, 410; World Enough and Time, 409; Poetry: Brother to Dragons, 409; Promises, Poems 19541956, 409; Thirty-Six Poems, 407; “Three Darknesses”; 407; Prose: John Brown: The Making of a Martyr, 407; The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial, 408; Segregation: The Inner Conflict of the South, 408; Who Speaks for the Negro?, 408; Stories: The Circus in the Attic, 409 Washington, Booker T., 181, 447; Up from Slavery, 181 Washington, Denzel, 433 Waters, Muddy, 458 Welch, James, 22, 483, 502, 503-505; Winter in the Blood, 503-505 Welles, Orson, 19, Dir. Citizen Kane, 266; The Magnificent Ambersons,245; Touch of Evil, 321 Wells, H.G., 226, 340; Tono Bungay, 226 Welty, Eudora, 211-13, 410; Delta Wedding, 211-13

542


Wescott, Glenway, 265 Wharton, Edith, 11, 12, 18, 47, 225, 243-58, 260, 263, 265; Autobiography: A Backward Glance, 11, 247; Novels: The Age of Innocence, 18, 243-58; Ethan Frome, 225; The House of Mirth; 250; Madame de Treymes, 250; Old New York, 250 Wheatley, Phillis, 180; “Goliath of Gath”, 180 White, Stanford, 430 White, Walter, 190; Flight, 190 Whitman, Walt, 63, 61, 500; Drum Taps, 161; Leaves of Grass, 63, 116; “Song of Myself”, 500 Whittier, James Greenleaf, 29, Wideman, John, 179, 192, 345, 476; Damballah, 476; The Lynchers, 179, 192, 345 Williams, John A., 17, 192, 194, 304, 434, 479; Novels: The Angry One, 342; Captain Blackman, 94, 195, 71-72; The Man Who Cried I Am, 192, 343, 479; Night Song, 342; Sissie, 342; Sons of Dark, Sons of Light: A Novel of Some Probability, 92; Prose: “My Man Himes”, 366; The Most Native of Sons, 343 Williams, Sherley Anne, 47273; Dessa Rose, 472-73

Wilson, Edmund, 61, 265, 283, 501; Apologies to the Iroquois, 501; Patriotic Gore, 161 Winters, Yvor, 229 Wodehouse, P.G., 274 Wolfe, Thomas, 265 Woodhouse, Richard, 27 Woolrich, Cornell (aka William Irish, George Hopley, 320), 12, 19, 31733; Novels: Black Alibi, 330; The Black Angel, 330; The Black Curtain, 330; The Black Path of Fear, 330; The Bride Wore Black, 320, 329-30; Children of the Ritz, 320; Deadline at Dawn, 331; I Married a Dead Man, 332; Into the Night, 320; Manhattan Love Song, 320; Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 332; Phantom Lady, 331; Rendezvous in Black, 331; Times Square, 320; Waltz into Darkness, 332; Stories: “Body Upstairs”, 325; “The Book That Squealed”, 328; “The Corpse Next Door”, 326; “The Dancing Detective”, 326; “The Death of the Waltz”, 326; “Death Escapes the Eye”, 328; “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair”, 324; “For The Rest of Her life”, 328-29;

Index “Murder in Wax”, 325; “Rear Window”, 322-24; “Three O’Clock”, 327-28; “Walls That Hear You”, 324-25 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 14 Wovoka, 490 Wright, Charles, 452-53; The Messenger, 452-53 Wright, Richard, 12, 19, 20, 189, 335-59, 364, 366, 368, 441; Autobiography: American Hunger, 345, 358; Black Boy, 336, 345, 358; Novels: Lawd Today, 353-54; The Long Dream, 353, 357-58, 459; Native Son, 20, 189, 336, 342, 345, 346, 351, 353, 354-56, 357, 441; The Outsider, 353, 356-7; Savage Holiday, 353, 356, 357; Prose: Black Power, 345; The Color Curtain, 338, 345; “How Bigger Was Born”, 346, 356; “The Literature of the Negro in the United States”, 346; Pagan Spain, 345; 12 Million Black Voices, 338; Stories: “Big Boy Leaves

543 Home”, 347-49, 459; “Bright and Morning Star”, 350-51; “Down by the Riverside”, 49; “Fire and Cloud”, 350; “Long Black Song”, 459; “Man of All Work”, 353; “The Man Who Killed a Shadow”, 353; “The Man Who Lived Underground”, 340, 35153, 355; “The Man Who Saw the Flood”, 352; “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”, 352-53; Storycollections: Eight Men, 20, 347; Uncle Tom’s Children, 20, 347, 349, 459 Wyler, William, Dir. The Heiress, 245 Yakima Nation Review, 493 Yamashita, Karen Tei, 217-19; Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, 217-19 The Yellow Book, 224, 301 Yellow Hand, 485 Ziolokowski, Korzack, 498 Zola, Émile, 115, 163, 338; Le Roman Experimentale, 338

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