LeRoi Jones and the Tradition OF the Fake
Kauffmann, Stanley
LeRoi Jones has already had more attention, more production of plays, more publication, more criticism and news comment than—at any less opportune moment—he could conceivably merit. But one...
...Now we have the unfortunately important example of LeRoi Jones, the luckiest man of our times, a writer who—unlike James Baldwin— would be less than lightly held if he did not happen to be a Negro at this moment in American history...
...He teaches at the New School and at Columbia...
...Come up, black dada nihilismus...
...The remarks above are a milder version of what the Negro protagonist says in Jones's prize-winning play Dutchman...
...The tradition has certainly flourished since the Thirties...
...Apropos of these lines, here is a passage from a poem in Jones's recent collection The Dead Lecturer: A cult of death, need of the simple striking arm under the streetlamp...
...One can reasonably assume, I think, that, besides anticipating arguments against his polemical position, the author has in fantasy projected a betrayal (in a moment of stress the wife calls her ex-husband "nigger...
...The Negro war leader visits the home of his ex-wife (white) who is re-married to a white man and who has taken the two small daughters of her first marriage to live with her...
...When he is given his pistol and his signal, will he do his self-declared duty and begin the slaughter with his wife and children...
...When D-Day comes and the knife-thrusts happily make poems unnecessary, can we count on Jones to slit these ladies' throats...
...The dialogue of the play rehearses in synoptic form some of the arguments against Jones himself, but, here as elsewhere, knowledge of objections is not necessarily an answer to objections...
...a culture whose time has come and which is rotting at the roots...
...and I mean successful writers—the pull on lesser-known writers to remain home was not as strong...
...New York Herald Tribune, Dec...
...That's right...
...He says to his ex-wife: "The point is that you [whites] had your chance, darling, now these other folks [Negroes] have theirs...
...Muste's belief in Jones's pronouncements rests on the United States commitment to containment of Communism in Asia, the disparity of living standards between whites and non-whites around the globe, and a view of Mississippi as microcosm of the long world history of colonialism and the exploitation of colored peoples...
...17, 1964): "My ideas revolve around the rotting and destruction of America...
...With great good humor he assured the audience that "our enemies" included "most of you who are listening...
...What are the facts of this fire-eater's life...
...In the last thirty years or so, a new tradition has grown, particularly but not exclusively in this country...
...Herzen took his exile...
...In the Depression years a group of novelists and playwrights arose, proletarian in tone and careerist in intent, who preached strike, solidarity, and quasi or non quasi Communism...
...In Liberation (February 1965) he refers to Jones's Voice interview and says: There are forms of expression used by Jones which seem to me open to question, but his basic view about America's role in the world today should be seriously considered, and comes nearer, in my opinion, to the realities of the present world situation than the point of view which prevails among Americans, including probably most Negro Americans...
...But many writer-revolutionaries have been prepared to substantiate their beliefs with all or part of their lives, and have done so...
...the professor of English who outSpenglers Spengler in books and articles and who fulfills his job at the university, preparing students for the future while he is waiting for the end...
...His New School course is called American Poetry Since 1945...
...Obviously every social critic who has ever written has had to exist on this planet, without benefit of the Archimedean dream...
...13, 1964: "You better learn now, not when someone's got his knife against your throat...
...of course they argued that their books/ plays had to be read/seen in order for their message to be effective...
...The exchange finally comes down to what the protagonist calls the point...
...Perhaps, if his play about mass-murdering whites is doing well enough, he takes a taxi...
...Rape their fathers...
...made the evening as searing as one of his plays...
...Cut the mothers' throats...
...Meanwhile, the Kings, Farmers, Rustins, Randolphs labor on, trying to get Negroes registered, educated, suitably employed and paid...
...However, in Jones's writings and pronouncements, he has so insisted on violence—at a time when such advice could easily affect others' lives—that a comparison between his modus scribendi and modus vivendi is not only illuminating but imperative...
...The Negro survives...
...and while Rustin plans, Jones is providing pseudo-orgasmic thrills as distractions for energy that might otherwise be usefully employed...
...It is a grievous error, I believe—and a further proof of the danger of Jones's propagandism—for an A. J. Muste to supply a missing foundation of purported reason under these loose demagogic utterances...
...Later:] Jones has stumbled over that ironic obstacle which lies in the path of any who would fashion a theory of American Negro culture while ignoring the intricate network of connections which binds Negroes to the larger society...
...This seems to me utterly foolish, and the folly is heightened, rather than modified, by Muste's later statement that "the advocacy of violence in the United States, at least at this juncture, is adventurist rather than revolutionary...
...In the New York Post, Jan...
...The catalogue continues: "The work of Robert Lowell, Robert Duncan, W. D. Snodgrass, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and many other important younger American poets is considered [in the course...
...Of course they made contributions to strike funds according to their means...
...That will be too late to say Yes...
...To do so is to attempt a delicate brain surgery with a switch-blade...
...Not a note...
...And I'm the great would-be poet...
...It would also have small extra-literary relevance...
...For progress, Jones substitutes revenge...
...He has a white wife and two daughters by her...
...since some critics...
...There are even some white "artifacts" and "paintings on the wall" helping them...
...all it needs is a simple knife thrust...
...This tradition, to me, is one in which a writer preaches violence, revolution, anarchism—total action—against his society, while he lives and works cozily within that society and profits by the continuance of the status quo...
...Meanwhile Jones continues his irresponsible and increasingly successful career as a professional firebrand, disconnected from the facts of his life...
...Italics added...
...Or will he fink out...
...From a report of a panel meeting in a Village night club (New York Times, Feb...
...Some kind of bastard literature...
...For possible fellowship, he substitutes black chauvinism...
...Rustin is carefully planning strategy, having perceived that the Negroes' opportunity, now that the first social improvements have been achieved, is in organized political power...
...He has edited an anthology called Four Young Lady Poets...
...Their color apparently made their deaths less real than that of their Negro companion, James E. Chaney...
...and there is good reason to believe that, in some places in the South, these whites run greater physical risks than Negroes...
...Rape the white girls...
...one gets the impression that while Jones wants to perform a crucial task which he feels someone should take on—as indeed someone should —he is frustrated by the restraint demanded of the critical pen and would like to pick up a club...
...Even a stalwart like A. J. Muste has been to some degree hoodwinked by Jones...
...Compare his statement in the Village Voice: "America is the source of Western culture...
...One can argue only with the phrase "needless to say...
...The cutters from under their rented earth...
...Bayard Rustin wrote (Commentary, February 1965): "Needless to say, I am assuming that the forms of political democracy exist in America, however imperfectly, that they are valued, and that elitist or putsch...
...Here are some recent Jones pronouncements (Village Voice, Dec...
...The author's response to this fantasy betrayal is not only the death of the betrayers and the children but the virtual end of the world...
...The bearded Mr...
...Luther took his excommunication...
...But their view of Jones as social analyst emphasizes that my view is not necesarily a white one...
...The practitioners are easy to recognize today: the playwright who sees drugs as the only solace and inevitability in our society's mess at the same time that he marries, begets a family, lives happily without apparently raising his family on pot, let alone heroin...
...Let a bullying white man kick, curse, browbeat and shoot a nice liberal black professor and his wife in their suburban living room...
...Guerrilla warfare by blacks is inevitable in the North and South...
...But one aspect of his work and persona seems worth further analysis, hopefully as counteraction...
...a bomb kills the wife...
...The arguments Jones anticipates and tries to answer are all crushed by his summum bonum: "Right is in the act...
...But even Jones makes no such grand claims or promises...
...Ralph Ellison, in his review of Jones's book Blues People reprinted in Shadow and Act, not only exposes the flaws of Jones's understanding of blues and jazz but comments on the author's tone...
...The words fascist and fascism, he declared, had been made obsolete by the words America and Americanism and he raised the vision of "20 million 'spooks' storming America...
...In the Times report quoted earlier, he referred to Michael H. Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, the white civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi, as "artifacts" and "paintings on the wall...
...In one sense it can be conjectured that he has already murdered his family...
...This is his place in the Tradition of the Fake...
...He began with a description of "the revolutionary theater" which he said "hates whites" and was "a theater of victims...
...ist conceptions of exercising power are beyond the pale of discussion for the civil rights movement...
...So far as I know, these ladies are white...
...Poet...
...The play's rhetoric and dialectic, neither of which is worth much criticism as such, explode finally in blood vengeance...
...But, to my knowledge, there were few such writers who—like the figures named above—put their money where their mouths were (as gamblers say...
...The catalogue, presumably with his approval if not in his words, describes it thus: "American poetry since World War II has been the most influential and vital of world poetries...
...Some random examples: Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Ernst Toiler, none of whom insured that revolutionary principle did not disturb his personal life...
...Just let me bleed you, you loud whore, and one poem vanished...
...Jones, after writing his verses and making his speeches about rotting America, takes the bus: to the New School, where he explicates the virtues of contemporary American poetry...
...All he promises is vengeance—specified as such and as bloody as necessary or possible...
...With most poets and playwrights it would be heavily literal and ludicrous to apply tests of pragmatism to their metaphors...
...who put their whole lives on the line...
...God help us all...
...They appeared at protest meetings, sometimes visited Gastonia or Cuba, signed manifestoes, but were all busily bucking for the book club, Broadway, or Hollywood...
...10, 1965): The audience, liberals all and most of them white, sat in a daze while LeRoi Jones, playwright, and Archie Shepp, jazz musician, both Negroes, pronounced them guity of racial injustice...
...Many of these people later suffered painfully in the McCarthy era, but they suffered precisely because they were struggling to remain within the plump precincts of Madison Avenue or Hollywood...
...The leftist writers who went to Spain in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were not many...
...The masochism of white audiences vis-a-vis Jones is yet another subject, well explored by George Dennison in Commentary, February 1965...
...The only way one can rationally accept Muste's support of Jones on these grounds is to believe that a racially equal United States—with, let us say, a Negro President and Secretary of State—would immediately change our Vietnam policy, would wipe out domestic corruption, would embrace and be embraced by Africa...
...15, 1965, Langston Hughes suggested that performances of The Slave be alternated racially: Every other night let all the present Negro characters be played by white actors, and vice versa...
...Here is Clay addressing the white girl who has teased him: Bird [Parker] would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw...
...I shall not offend Hughes and Ellison by comparing them as authors with Jones or by underscoring that their interest in Negro freedom is at least as deep as his...
...claim that LeRoi Jones may not really be writing about color at all, but instead is concerned with no group "smaller than mankind...
...The Negro has in fact killed the two daughters before the play opens and subsequently shoots the second husband...
...American Negroes have already found in Africa—as whites have long known—that the same color of skin does not automatically eliminate prejudice...
...For those of us who see the civil rights movement as the struggle in which our whole national social and spiritual aspiration is involved, by which this country must grow or strangle, Jones is a dangerous nuisance...
...So far as I know, every one of the poets named is white...
...His play The Slave deals with a cataclysmic race war in the future...
Vol. 12 • April 1965 • No. 2
