White Contriving, Black Jiving

...Writers &Writing WHITE CONTRIVING BLACK JIVING BY K1NGSLEY SHORTER F f man is a prisoner of circumstances, one might think that surely none is more arbitrarily confining than the color of one's skin But in his new novel, Westward to Laughter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 238 pp , $5 95), Colin Maclnnes conceives a world where servitude of race is merely one wall ot the prison in which all men are immured At first sight this book seems like a good old-fashioned adventure yarn An unsuspecting Scottish lad ships out to the West Indies to seek his fortune There, on the fictitious island ol Laughter, he finds himself immediately inducted into a world of unmitigated villainy, peopled exclusively by corrupt planters, bestial slaves (both black and white), cruel soldiers, and ruthless pirates He struggles mightily to escape, but Calvmist predestination is against him, and before long he too is reduced to slavery on a sugar plantation The rest of his adventures—escape, capture by pirates, involvement with an abortive slave rebellion, and eventual recapture and hanging—provide Maclnnes with ample opportunity to put his characters through then- deterministic paces, with massive infusions of local color and some not uninteresting historical digressions Contrary to appearances, however, Westward to Laughter is not really an adventure story Neither is it, in any more than the most superficial documentary sense, an attempt to explore some of the background to the race situation m our own tune It is, rather, a skillful exercise in camp, a self-mocking comic-stnp account of some purportedly serious matters Maclnnes' deliberately crude portraits of the Wealthy Planter, the Treacherous Slave and the Wicked Pirate are akin to the Pop artists' blow-ups of Superman or Marilyn Monroe metastatements several wry removes from reality, the ironic iconography of myth The caricature effect is heightened by liberal use of capitals, a pseudoarchaic touch ("Some of them, in the hold, made Attempts upon me that I would not have conceived possible in other than Beasts"), by thunderous cormness ("He quaffed a larger grog He gulped a stalwart dram"), and by comically abrupt departures trom the would-be 18th-century style of the narrative into reported speech pungent with obscenity and dialect The atmosphere generated by these distancing devices is one of ghoulish comedy—sort of Boys' Life Gothic—since Maclnnes' subject concerns the extremes of suffering and oppression In a sense, of course, all Maclnnes' novels have been "historical The black and teenage subcultures he put on display m "The London Novels" are just as inaccessible to his predominantly white, over-30 readership as the picaresque carryings-on of the 18th century, and every bit as romantic It is not, I think, unfair to suggest that in his guided tour ot the London underworld, Maclnnes was in fact pandering to our bourgeois romanticism, to wistful yearnings for a more colorful existence City of Spades, for example, was less a contribution to mterracial entente than an invitation to ethnic slumming—a painless round trip across the tracks to see how the other half lives Painless, because while you could identify with Johnny Fortune m his triumphs, you could as easily withdraw from him in his defeats, round, for at the end you could say "Fascinating1" and pick up the Times where you left off Maclnnes is a fluent writer with a sharp and humorous ear for ethnic argot He knocks plots together quite well, and knows how to hold your interest But Westward to Laughter strengthens my long-standing suspicion that he is essentially a highly skdled purveyor of escape literature with Redeeming Social Significance Like the more ambitious kinds of science fiction, Maclnnes' excursions into alien territory tickle the anthropological fancy without speaking to the anguished consciousness of race and sex and mortality that we must all live with And we need more than a Baedeker of the exotic for the Other Half that lives across the tracks is the other half of ourselves c ecil Brown, the hugely talented young author of The Life and Loves of Mr Jiveass Nigger (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 213 pp, $5 50), tears up the tracks and wraps them round the Statue of Liberty No de-termimst, Brown is not a man to take the accident ot color—or any other aspect of human contingency?lying down His is the most exciting black voice I've heard since James Baldwin I say voice, because this man talks to you right off the page, with a volatile immediacy not ordinarily achieved in print And what he talks about—by turns exuberant, hypnotic, bullying, sardonic, furious, elegiac—is the adventures of George Washington, an enterprising young black American digging the fleshpots of Copenhagen George will be a writer, naturally, but just now he is playing the stud, hustling white chicks for bed and board and hanging out with fellow exiles at home-from-home night spots There is a lot of sex, recounted with immense gusto and infectious good humor, a great deal of beer drinking and rapping with the brothers about blackness and whiteness, and some hilarious anecdotes—all intercut with flashbacks of George's childhood down South The central issue of Brown's novel is black sexuality in a white world And in the safe neutrality of Denmark, George and his friends act out the fantasy that haunts race relations in America black men balling white women This they do with vengeful zest, spurred by the corroding awareness that in the dialectics of exploitation, it is often impossible to say who is using whom, the tables can be turned by white collusion, so that the stud becomes a gigolo George, who "came to Scandinavia to get the White Bitch out of his system by wallowing in Whiteness untd he could live without it," attempts to preserve his identity from this collusive taint by going under false names Like the waiter pretending to be a waiter m Sartre's classic illustration of mauvaise foi, Jiveass George plays at being a hustler, inwardly dissociating himself not only from his girl friends but from his black brothers as well Thus, to the American lady consul who is keepmg him at the Hilton in exchange for sex, he tries to be "Paul Wmthrop," Princeton graduate When this backfires and she reveals that she knows his real name, he panics "What it others knew his real name too and were just putting him on by pretending otherwise Jive him, ]ivmg Jneass himself" But there is a whole lot more to the racial psycho-drama than sex-as-revenge, and young George knows it He brings a well-stocked literary imagination to bear on the interlocking fantasies of black and white "But this shit just didn't start yesterday, the nigger existed a helluva long time in the psyche, the literature of the Western head, long before they got to Africa " Milton's Comus, for instance, he maintains is "really about the nigger marrying Miss Ann all over again, the thing is very contemporary," Miss Ann being the archetypical white planter's daughter This is blackness seen as id to white ego, functioning as Freud's "slow return of the repressed " George's humanity—and racial pride—is offended by the notion of black rape, nevertheless, he is deeply implicated in the corollary vision ot blackness as God's gift to frustrated white womanhood, the black man as knight-errant of sex whose ministrations can give Miss Ann "a glimpse into the immortal soul of the umveise," whose kiss can awaken her "from a thousand years' sleep " The trouble, ot course, is that whiteness and blackness are complementary constructs If all the world were black, would black still be beautiful7 It there were no whites, to whom would blacks preach the gospel of the id7 And if there were no whiteness, how should blackness know itself7 Cecil Brown's book trembles on the edge of this awareness, but never quite comes to grips with its implications For George Washington "The God of the strong was the Lover, the Seducer The only way to keep your strength is to give, never accept anything from anybody " He is only intermittently aware that this is an obstacle to reciprocity, to true human relationship, and does not seem to see that these attitudes are inseparable from the self-glorifying myth of black sexuality As his loneliness deepens, George's world begins to go to pieces He is outhustled and out-black-rhetoricked by his tougher-mmded drinking companions Other people's lives break open to reveal hollowness and despair The lady consul kills herself, his white American girl friend is seduced by her own father, and George fights to defend the only man he respects against charges of homosexuality, only to find out afterwards that they are justified Utterly demoralized, he decides to go home, back to "Charlie country," and write "a novel about the race problem with a dynamite stick concealed mside it" The Life and Loves of Mi Jiveass Nigger, presumably, is that book, and if author Brown does not emerge altogether intact from the labyrinth of racial mystification, it is still an explosive achievement...