BOOKS
Druska, John & Scott, Nathan A. Jr.
"ambiguous" and thus made no inescapable demand on our consciences; and not in the sense that the race issue was so "complex" that we needed years of patient talk rather than a...
...In "Pavement," for example, official demands that a Jamaican constable (McKay was one) "make a case," instead of letting minor offenders slide, lead to his inadvertently wrecking the career of a promising native...
...Tallahassee...
...Cooper describes how McKay's poetry (especially Harlem Shadows) was both precursor to and part of the "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920s, and he traces McKay's subsequent growth as journalist, novelist and story-writer...
...RICHARD JOHN NEUHAU$ Woodbury, Conn...
...It showed what a tyro, a journalist could do with opinions made available to the public by scholars like Denis de Rougement who seemed to expect their reputations to compensate for the sloppy logic of their presentation...
...They recreate McKay's vision of his actual life in Harlem and Jamaica with, as McKay says in his preface to Harlem Shadows, "truthfulness and naturalness of expression instead of an enameled originality...
...20525...
...5-10-74 derful, the strange great moments whose magic may be caught by any clairvoyant mind and turned into magical form for the joy of man...
...A "must" for students of American religion, history, politics, and journalism...
...Neither these books, nor the later Jamaica-set Banana Bottom (1933) are exceptional formal achievements...
...and he evaluates the quarrel between NYR and Commentary in the light of their stands on the war, as well as on whether Norman Podhoretz set up Dennis Wrong to slay NYR in Commentary because NYR invited Edgar Z. Friedenberg to murder Podhoretz' autobiography, Making It, in NYR...
...The Passion of Claude Me]gay: Selected Poetry and Prose, 1912-1948 WAYNE COOPER, Ed...
...The Novel as Faith: The Gospel According to James, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence and Virginia Wooif JOHN PATERSON Gambit, $10 NATllAN A. SCOTT, JR...
...In his early work, the poetry of Songs o[ Jamaica, Constab Ballads and Harlem Shadows, and some of the articles he contributed to revolutionary journals like Max Eastman's The Liberator, McKay instinctively began prophesying what we know today as the Black Power Movement...
...His novels lack dramatic shape because life is really the only plot he accepted...
...Although white America generally came to regard the Harlem flourish as a vogue and Richard Wright's success in the 1940s erased for many the memory of any black artists before him, McKay retained always a sense of his artistic vocation and his role in relationship to his race...
...Paper - $4.50 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19129 Purposeful Books of Contemporary Christian Thought Commonweal: 243 his chosen limit, however--of simply rehearsing the idea of the novel advanced by his subject-figuresmhe has produced a competent book that will no doubt have a certain usefulness for students of modern literature...
...If so, the deficiency need not be located in just Barker or Chesterton...
...It occurs to me that he might have applied this same label to the man who faulted a writer without having read him...
...Information: Bruce Mazzie, ACTION, OCP Box P-w Washington, D.C...
...Letters o] not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance o[ being published...
...One may jib a little at Mr...
...John J. Carey, Chairman, Department of Rellqion, Florida State University...
...To the Editors: Regarding Dennis O'Brien's review of G. K. Chesterton [Mar...
...Cooper's poetry selections are comprehensive enough and they give us a good short view of McKay's concerns and development as a poet...
...Woolf, and he seeks to define as systematically as possible the fundamental aesthetic of the novel by which its principal practitioners were guided...
...rather he has patched it together, jumping back and forth with a chronicle, a narrative history, and a round of interviews in which the author plays Lincoln Steffens visiting Intelligentia, describing their living quarters, and hoping they will spill some gossip-the Truth why __'s review was turned down or how it happened that __ fell from favor after __'s famous piece implying that __ was It is very difficult to write a critical history of an institution--particularly a journal which, if it succeeds, ultimately transcends and outlasts the personalities and minor jealousies of the fallible people who put the package together each week...
...After the success of Banjo, he published his collection of short stories, largely because he did not want to become solely known as an author of picaresque tales but wished to establish himself as a writer 'of many moods.' Late in life, he remarked that 'some of my best material is in the book of short stories, Gingertown.' I think telling tales of local urgency, like a tribal medium, suited McKay best, perhaps because a pastoral ideal had informed his work from the beginning, making him hope for a wholeness in things, at one point making him love "to think of communism liberating millions of city folk .to go back to the land...
...If Cooper's book lacks anything it might be a fuller treatment of the critical work, however sparse, others have done on MeKay...
...By personalizing their endeavor Nobile has unintentionally trivialized what, to them, is sacred and above personality...
...For, as he clearly demonstrates through his analysis of their prefaces and essays and notebooks and letters, the tradition of James and Hardy, of Conrad and Joyce, of Lawrence and Mrs...
...It's The New York Review o! Books...
...Paterson's argument...
...Wayne Cooper's The Passion of Claude McKay is particularly helpful in revealing the racial and artistic beliefs that McKay maintained with integrity through early travail like his railroad diner's job, temporary literary success, economic failure, and his Roman Catholic conversion and lengthy illness in the 1940s...
...He has not organized his story from a unified point of view...
...InI0 May 1974:242 evitably, as he faces such figures as James and Conrad, as Joyce and Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, what he has first of all to remark is the absoluteness of their conviction that the novel, more so than any of the other great literary forms, is the medium capable of doing the fullest justice to the modern reality...
...Its response was not one of mere pragmatism but documented moral outrage...
...Along with his clear critical introduction to McKay~s career, Cooper includes in the bulk of his volume carefully selected and arranged samplings of McKay's writing...
...Which brings us to the things Nobile has not done well...
...But his ideal transmuted itself through many forms and he continued to sense it as a force of the earth alive in black folk everywhere, a power through which the artist may seize moments of life and make them art...
...10 May 1974:244 As he makes evident in Banjo, MeKay saw the authentic tribal passion of blacks as a hope and a challenge against mechanized Western civilization, "the serried crush of trampling white feet," "the grand mechanical march of civilization...
...Paterson does not seek to answer the question that arises most immediately, as to why this faith at this time took so firm a hold on the literary imagination...
...To the Editors: It surprises me that you would publish a review of Barker's G.K...
...William Cole, Saturday Review~World "On a first reading what impresses are the delicate textures and atmospheres 9 . . On a second, it's the complexity of tone and the subtlety...
...In this book--whose task, strangely, has not been previously undertaken-Mr...
...Paterson in effect suggests) but as one that extends even unto our own present which is everywhere filled with programs calling for a "realism" that, in forswearing all the machinery (of plot and character and verisimilitude) belonging to traditional realist fiction, will uphold the possibilities of vision and structure...
...Name Address City, State, Zip [] I prefer a full year, and the Anniversary Year issue, for $14...
...Within UUIIIlUUIIIllUUI and Americon Catholicism The Magazine, The Movement, The Meaning by Rodger Van Allen Printed as a weekly journal of religion, politics, literature, and the arts, independent of church subsidy or control, Commonweal has briskly responded to the issues of our century which have impinged most upon both religious and national life...
...His reading in Jamaica had shackled him with a "conservative poetic style" that, Cooper claims, caused him to cling "devotedly to those conventional forms most revered by the educational elite of nineteenth-century Jamaica...
...In all of MeKay's novels a precision in creating incident seems his real strength...
...It is just possible Chesterton realized that the force of the triple reduction to absurdity that constituted the backbone of his book was a personal gift to him that could not be expected to impress anybody who didn't share the gift, and who had read more widely than the rules of the Index of Forbidden Books prescribed...
...No luck...
...He foresaw the importance of such issues as black reluctance to desegregate at the cost of losing racial solidarity...
...So, in the case of the novel, one wonders if the moment of literary history that began about 1870 may not require to be thought of not as one having ended about 1940 (as Mr...
...Gay Talese's story of the New York Times, The Kingdom and the Power, was at least a popular success because he constructed his narrative around those key moments in the struggles of colorful and ambitious newspapermen when -- because of shrewd judgment, a warm word or a foolish prank--they either seized glory or saw their careers crumble to dust...
...Interested persons should submit a curriculum vitae and three names of persons to be contacted for recommendations...
...And thus a tradition that had originally constituted itself as a mode of empirical science was, by the time of Virginia Woolf, veering towards "a new abstractionism" whose claim (which Mr...
...Florida 3230b...
...A number of reasons, including poverty, swayed McKay in the early 1920s from poetry to fiction...
...Contact: Dr...
...And in the period extending, roughly, from 1870 to 1940, it was with a similar peremptoriness that most of the great artists using the form were prepared to lay down their claims...
...Woolf, was a tradition that intended, initially, to "represent life," to render the concrete actualities of experience with the least Possible distortion and reductivism...
...He finds the "criminal" in bed with a black servant, after he has been prodded to enforce the white law by the servant's white master, who in turn has his own reasons for seeing the native's career ruined...
...Maybe O'Brien is only saying that Barker's biography of GKC didn't move him to a course of action (i.e., reading Chesterton) which his poor opinion of ghetto-mentality Catholics who admired Chesterton when O'Brien was young precluded him from taking...
...He has cluttered his text with over 20 expressions left over from his theology courses at Louvain-like "hyperduliac"--that will make sense only to fellow ex-seminarians...
...Illll Bonus Offer A free copy of Commonweal's historic 50th Anniversary Year issue, just cited by the Catholic Press Association as the best special issue of 1973, with the next-. . . . . . 17 Issues for $;3 . . . . . . For New Subscribers Only COMMONWEAL 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...and he realizes this talent to its fullest in his short stories...
...Perhaps under the influence of Talese, on whose sex life he has written for Esquire, Nobile has taken the wrong approach to his subject: trying to probe the heart of America's most influential intellectual journal by poking around the personalities of the editors and contributors...
...Can one attach any greater importance to such a review than to a put-down of Shakespeare some years ago by a critic who found the plays to be mostly a stringing together of quotes anyone could find in a thesaurus...
...and Nobile has entertained us a bit by stirring up those feuds again...
...Many of his poems fail to survive their outdated sounds of Victorian rhetoric...
...10016 Please send a copy of the 50th Anniversary Year issue and the next 17 issues...
...Paterson'~ including "the good little Thomas Hardy" (as Henry James called him) in this company, for, though he commanded the natural fabulism of the born storyteller, he, as we feel, only just stumbled into the art of fiction and never gave himself either to any large theoretical commitments or to the kind of insistent hauteur expressed by Lawrence's remark...
...And McKay insisted on discussing such topics, even as he refused to whitewash depictions of the creative passion he felt in his Harlem experience (the novel Home to Harlem), despite objection from the black intelligentsia of his day, including on occasion W. E. B. DuBois, to McKay's so-called contentiousness, racial heresies and obscenities...
...Philip Nobile has done a number of good things in his book...
...Unfolding like a novel, this account sketches in broad outline the history of the American Catholic liberal intellectual community played against the rapidly changing background of our times...
...Or, as Cooper sums up, "In his prose fiction, he attempted to move beyond rebellion to a positive affirmation of black life at its simplest, most basic folk level...
...finity for the short story in his headnote to the fiction section: (McKay) was naturally drawn to the form in his earliest attempts at fiction and . . . Home to Harlem was originally a short story...
...But in their episodes, as in his stories, he realizes complete dramas of celebration...
...But in James, in Conrad, in Joyce, in Lawrence, and in Virginia Woolf--in the central avatars of traditionalist modernism in English fiction --there is, indeed, a great new dogmatic kind of faith in the novel as "the one bright book of life" which declares itself again and again in the most imperious tones...
...22]: just nitpicking or is there really something extraordinary about a reviewer confidently dismissing Chesterton as irrelevant while happily admitting he has never read any Chesterton...
...If only we could seize the personality of Robert Silvers, he pants, as on the last page he scours the editor's office for some tell-tale photograph or toy that will betray his host the way the "Rosebud" sled broke the mystery of Charles Foster Kane...
...This, again, is a large question not addressed here but the tackling of which in some way, one feels, would have enlivened and enriched Mr...
...Paterson's focus is, there is one large irony that emerges from his chronicle and that gives to his book a very considerable interest...
...McKay wrote Home to Harlem and Banjo (set in Marseilles) in the late 1920s, and both feature only nominal plots that hinge almost entirely on coincidence or accident, picaresque heroes, and a real feeling, vivified in scene after scene, of black passion in its best sense, visualized in a b 1 a c k-brown-yellow spectrumw"Ancient black life rooted upon its base with all its fascinating new layers of brown, low-brown, high-brown, nutbrown, lemon, maroon, olive, mauve, gold"--and embodied in figures like Harlem's Jake, buoyant amid sweetmen, grass-widows and buffet flats, or a piano player who's driven to the ancestral sources of his music, "like a primitive dance of war or of love 9 . . the marshaling of spears or the sacred frenzy of a phallic celebration...
...Heterodoxy was a surfeit of brilliance...
...I suppose that it is reassuring that Dean O'Brien indicates that he did read the book he reviewed...
...JOHN DRUSKA is a writer who currently teaches high school in Indianapolis...
...Articles and letters comprise a good part of the collection, and these appear as a helpful adjunct to any more inclusive reading of McKay's poetry and prose fiction...
...The Everlasting Man was better suited to my pedestrian talent...
...The novel is the one bright book of life...
...Cooper's book has the effect of drawing for us a true portrait of McKay as a black man and as an artist...
...NATHAN A. SCOTT, JR., is Shailer Mathews Professor of Theology and Literature at the University of Chicago...
...22] by a man (Dennis O'Brien) who makes a great point of never having read Chesterton except in the form of some "great lines" reproduced by this biographer...
...Freed from conventional poetic forms, McKay was able to express in a more natural voice his care for local detail and the resonance of human lives sharing a locale...
...It seems to me I read one or another of the Father Brown mysteries but found them too clever to my taste...
...They see their institution as having a life of its own--it exists as a body of thought independent of the lives of the writers, in which we are not supposed to be "interested...
...It is somewhat surprising that Mr...
...Reading Kingdom inspired one of my students towrite a fantasy about Clifton Daniel running amok in Times Square because he had been demoted to driving a delivery truck...
...McKay's themes don't always come to life in his poetry...
...McKay deserves recognition as an artist especially for such stories as the three Jamaican tales in Gingertown (1932), "Crazy Mary," "When I Pounded the Pavement," and "The Strange Burial of Sue," all of which read as episodes in men's lives that naturally assume the shape of stories because of their under-stated emotional climaxes...
...and finally he attempts to review the Review, rating it intellectually "tops," but "not even trying" on literature, etc., concluding--in a meteaphor that he should regret as long as a certain priest-sociologist should regret comparing Yahweh's love to a halfnaked wife with a martini pitcher-that the NYR is like "sex" in that when it's bad it's "still pretty good...
...and not in the sense that the race issue was so "complex" that we needed years of patient talk rather than a radical confrontation with the exploitation of American blacks...
...A Jamaican who gravitated to Harlem by way of Tuskegee and Kansas State, and later became by his admission a "troubadour wanderer" through Russia, Europe and Africa, McKay has, in Cooper's words, "received little critical attention or public recognition...
...One or two years9 Expenses paid-medical, travel, vacation, living...
...Once McKay had discovered his racial and artistic themes in his early work they became of a piece with the point-ofview in all his writing...
...James Dickey "Josephine Jacobsen is particularly good on poets and the writing of poetry...
...Near the end of Banana Bottom, McKay's last published novel, the narrator implies his author's attitude toward Squire Gensir, a white character in the book who is one of the first educated men to take Jamaica folk art seriously and who resembles one of McKay's early mentors...
...Intellectual feuds are interesting stories, especially when they are focused on issues of real value: the political polarization of our campuses, the assassination of John Kennedy, or even the relative literary worth of Norman Mailer...
...He was not above substituting ridicule for logic, as when he noted that belief in Providence allowed of no exceptions, even in the presence of its apparently most meaningless manifestation, meaning de Rougement...
...I imagine that Chesterton would have had some comment with at least Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...The irony would have amused GKC, but it depresses me...
...McKay handles this by means of a simple, emotionally-muted narrative that reflects the frustration of the black constable's self-discovery: he's become the inhuman tool of the white power...
...Yet, narrow as Mr...
...The shift in concentration seems to have allowed him to capitalize on that sense of locale I mention above...
...GERARD HINRICHS Brooklyn, N.Y...
...Once you read Talese the New York Times is no longer a gray mass of print but evangelical McCandlish Phillips hounding the Ku Klux Klan Nazi Jew to suicide and Father Reston coming through in the crunch for "his boys...
...It allowed him to replenish himself through his words even as he was losing his publishers and his public9 McKay's passionate self-awareness manifests itself in two major concerns throughout his work: that the black race fulfill its tribal identity within American society but without acquiescing to it...
...You get the "Et Tu, Brute" Award for 1974...
...He too is the journalist as moralist...
...While he acknowledged Joyce as a modern and formal master, he admired most and emulated D. H. Lawrence, not, McKay insisted, because of Lawrence's social rebellion, but because he found Lawrence's English "the ripest and most voluptuous since Shakespeare...
...While its romantic rhetoric verges at times on the banal, its language is endemic to McKay's passion and its basic truth is, The Shade-Seller: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Josephine Jacobsen "Miss Jacobsen's work will make its way with readers who have calm, deep minds, and will deepen those who aspire to a quiet and gentle depth of language...
...Yet, more than most journals, NYR correctly perceived what the Vietnam war was doing both to the Vietnamese and to America...
...The "Experiments in Fiction" chapter provides just a few extracts from McKay's fictional canon, the area of his work that I find the most interesting and most accomplished...
...Being a novelist," said Lawrence, "I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet...
...After two or three pieces of that rich cake, I put it away...
...Neither communism nor any dogma closed to self-criticism satisfied McKay long...
...Cooper, though, does full justice to his subject without pitying or edifying him...
...10 May 1974:246...
...But the ones that do, whether polemical or not, do so, it seems to me, by virtue of their perceptive local detail ("Flame-Heart," for example...
...But then, from the turn of the century on, the reality to which the novelist was to be true was increasingly conceived not in terms of the thrusting materialities of the social world but in terms of the systoles and diastoles of the internal world of sensibility-which meant that the novelist began to sacrifice world to self and object to subject, that the burdens of representation began to seem less important than the burdens of analysis, that plots and heroes began tO seem less crucial than metaphors and symbols...
...Paterson tends to take at face value) was that of holding integrally together both "world and vision, fact and structure," but, as it would seem, the dimensions of world and fact having in truth been very considerably superseded by the dimensions of vision and structure...
...To the Editors: With regard to the review of Barker's Chesterton in your March 22 issue, it was startling to learn that reviewer Dean O'Brien isn't sure that he ever read anything of G.K.C.'s nor intends to start doing so at this late date...
...q'ruth alone," said the tradition (by way of Conrad), "is the justification of any fiction which makes the least claim to the quality of art...
...and seldom before---even among good men mhad the temptation toward violence as a response to social ills been so strong...
...But ambiguous in that seldom before had the oppressive nature of some of our institutions-from universities to prisons--been so laid bare--as it was in Watts, Newark, Chicago 1968 and Kent State...
...Passion reinforces my feeling that, with minor alteration, McKay's praise of the Squire might serve us as a valid eulogy of McKay as well...
...whereas his sole concern is with the formal aesthetic of fiction that this classic modern generation evolved...
...and that he fulfill his power to make of his black experience an art that all men can share...
...In the novel form McKay's voice overflows with detailed episode...
...Perhaps too this is why the editors of NYR have become antagonistic to a book which, on the surface, certainly means to treat them very favorably: because, on an emotional level, the editors and Nobile have a very different conception of what NYR is doing...
...He also offers his own guidelines on how books should be assigned to reviewers...
...and, by publishing Bernard Fall, Hans Morgenthan, I. F. Stone, Noam Chomsky, Henry Steele Commager and Mary McCarthy on Vietnam it both forced the intellectual community to get its conscience into gear and furnished thousands of professors and other journalists with documentation and hard questions of their own...
...Join the universal struEEie for human dignity--through education, skilled trades, agriculture, engineering, business, urban planning, medicine & other fields of community development...
...Volunteer your skills g experience in developing nations overseas and U.S...
...JAMES W. AgNOLD DeBary, Fla...
...After all, NYR isn't like sex because it isn't like anything...
...Chesterton [Mar...
...Commonweal: 245 I believe, energized by the best stories McKay has written, which also prove that art makes the most forceful polemic: Before him it had been generally said the Negroes were inartistic: But he had found artistry where others saw nothing, because he believed that wherever the imprints of nature and humanity were found, there also were the seeds of creative life, and that above the dreary levels of existence everywhere there were always the radiant, the mysterious, the wonThe Florida State UniveHi~ Department of Religion announces an opening in New Testament Studies to be filled at the advanced assistant or associate Professor level--available September 1974...
...At the same time, it ought to direct anyone who hasn't read McKay's novels and stories to an appreciation of them...
...In both Harlem and Banjo the Haitian Ray appears as a kind of type of the black artist who derives his power from his association with the black common man in America and France...
...but here, as elsewhere Cooper's headnote furnishes us with an apt framework for fitting his choices in with the historical and literary impression he tries to create through Passion, and for seeing his choices in the context of McKay's career...
...In illustrating Tom Hayden's article on the Newark riots with a page-one diagram of a Molotov Cocktail and in lending its pages to Andrew Kopkind's put-down of Martin Luther King the editors may have momentarily slipped into the irrationality that characterized so much of the late 1960s debate...
...Virginia Kirkus $5.95, Paperback $2.95 DOUBLEDAY 17-Issue Trial, $3 9 Return coupon from next page PEACE CORPS & VISTA NEED YOU...
...Cooper remarks upon McKay's af0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 REVIEWERS FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., is book editor of Commonweal...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 000 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued ]rom page 229) Commonwears reputation would do this to any literary figure, much less to the gallant and currently beleaguered Chesterton, at whose chubby knees many of your readers first learned that the English language could be applied to contemporary issues with charm and wit...
...Paterson looks back at the classic line of modern fiction in the English language running from James to Mrs...
...But, of course, any attempt at such an exploration, though it would have made for a richer and more interesting book would have taken him into complex issues of social and cultural history...
...Schocken, $10.95 J O H N D R U S K A Wayne Cooper has edited a valuable sourcebook to the life of Claude McKay (1889-1948...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 10
