Remember Joe Wood
Shatz, Adam
JOE WOOD had a voice as deep as a doublebass, and he spoke as he wrote: low, slowly, softly. He forced you to listen attentively to each of his words, pausing gravely as if to prepare you for...
...They suspect that he fell from a snowbridge...
...Our lives are about naming ourselves —we are electricians, poor people, Ellingtonians, entymologists, spelunkers, candy-store owners, Woods...
...His body is believed to be buried in the snow or hidden in some ravine...
...Joe found more to admire in the tormented, intractable Delmore Schwartz, with his "lonesome inability to cut himself from the web of anti-Semitism," his "wrestling with the contradictions of modern Jewishness...
...Joe was intellectually curious in an oldfashioned way...
...The big, bookish glasses...
...Joe wasn't grateful to be in that room, either...
...Joe led his life with exemplary purpose and an uncommon generosity of spirit...
...During an exhaustive search that eerily coincided with the latest Kennedy family tragedy, forest rangers failed to come up with any physical evidence of Joe's whereabouts...
...Our lives—they are about choosing our communities, and making new ones...
...Which does not make me a "multiculturalist" or a "cultural mulatto"—it makes me a human being in the world...
...Before long, however, I realized it was a style, the outward mark of a sensibility, artful but true...
...92 DISSENT / Fall 1999...
...Growth...
...Joe shared Schwartz's "lonesome inability" to forget the working-class people he grew up with, and something of his feverish lyricism...
...He never forgot the old neighborhood, and he was tough on those who did, particularly when they were writers he otherwise admired, notably Alfred Kazin...
...But mostly we just talked about our interests: Fassbinder and Tarkovsky, Delmore Schwartz and Alfred Kazin, Prince Paul and Miles Davis...
...The last time I saw Joe, a week before he disappeared, we ate sushi outdoors on Ninth Street...
...And in his quiet but forceful way, he reminded them that his presence alone did not fulfill the promise of integration...
...A belly dancer roped Joe into dancing with her, and he held his own, laughing all the way...
...In his essay "Malcolm X and the New Blackness," he asked, "Do Black and White adequately describe my life...
...In Joe's estimation, Kazin, for all of his graceful sentences, never weighed the costs of making it...
...On July 8, Joe, a thirty-four-year-old writer and editor, visited Mount Rainier in Seattle to go bird-watching for the day...
...I realize this sounds like a sentimental portrait of intellectual camraderie...
...Joe also had a mystical streak that was reinforced by a passionate affinity with Japanese culture...
...The only consolation here is that he died in a place he loved...
...I remember vividly a phone conversation we had shortly after we started hanging out...
...and he replied in the negative...
...His ambitions were lofty, to be sure, but unlike most writers in New York he was not governed by them...
...Nor was he quite at home writDISSENT /Fall 1999 91 ing for magazines...
...And, from time to time, we did, of course, discuss the biz...
...I was stunned by the question, and also slightly shamed by it...
...He never came back...
...For he had once been, as he put it, "downright romantic" about "my blackness, our Black culture: yams, Zora Neale, Al Green...
...He forced you to listen attentively to each of his words, pausing gravely as if to prepare you for the next one...
...Joe asked me how I was and I proceeded to tell him of all the projects I was taking on...
...And with this style, Joe had a look, one that gave him away instantly...
...The next time we met, Joe was reading William Caddis's dense philosophical novel The Recognitions, and he was puzzling over its treatment of divine illumination —it was "dope," he said, his highest compliment...
...As a writer for the Voice and an editor at the New Press, he moved easily through a predominantly white publishing world, but he never ceased to point out inequities his white peers preferred not to notice, beginning with the fact that he was often the only black man in the room...
...seemed to be spending much time thinking about America or Blackness...
...After several long phone conversations over the course of several months, we had coffee in Brooklyn, near both of our homes, and we talked about James Baldwin's essays, which we both loved, and about The Education of Henry Adams, which Joe had just completed...
...Joe's essays—and virtually everything Joe wrote was an essay in the classic sense of an effort, where the writer makes mistakes as well as discoveries on the hard road to insight—were unpredictable, and I think Joe was sometimes nearly as surprised by them as we, his readers, were...
...Joe and I struck up a friendship just over a year ago, but I felt I already knew him from his sharp, probing work in the Village Voice, and from the fine anthology of essays on Malcolm X that he edited...
...Denying this is a tyranny—"race" is not my only state...
...Joe was a native New Yorker, born and raised in the Bronx, but he seemed happiest, freest, in the woods with his binoculars, peering at birds...
...I am trying to remember these details because we are not likely to see them—himagain...
...Still, he leaves behind some remarkable, sensitively drawn essays on the vicissitudes of identity in post–civil rights America...
...he knew he deserved to be there...
...He told me he was looking forward to wrapping up his long-awaited book on Mississippi at a writer's colony during the fall...
...Where Joe might have gone with his writing, we'll never know...
...We went to films at MoMA, heard jazz at the Vanguard and ate Japanese food (which Joe ordered with exquisite taste...
...When I first met Joe, I thought this was an affectation...
...Joe was at heart a man of letters, and his journalism sometimes has a gnomic, lyrical quality that tests—or rather protests against—the boundaries of the form...
...Later that evening, we had drinks at a Moroccan bar on the Lower East Side...
...He wrote slowly, and he did not produce a large body of work...
...I am a multitude of names, masks, community memberships...
...The Malcolm X cap, worn with urbane nonchalance...
...And so his solution was not to abandon the notion of black identity but to reconceive it—to make it bend to the complex shapes of black America, rather than the reverse...
...Reviewing Kazin's memoirs in these pages, he argued that Kazin never found his true subject: "the Jewish stranger's road to whiteness and the middle class...
...Our new Blackness," he wrote, evoking Walt Whitman as much as Malcolm X, acknowledges the way each of us lives beyond the Black community...
...A long pause followed...
...But I think Joe considered friendship a sanctuary from all that...
...But how are you, besides the professional...
...The knapsack filled to capacity with literature...
...HIS ANSWER gained in authority from the fact that he understood the yearnings for easy, instinctive solidarity that lie at the heart of nationalist politics, recognized those yearnings in himself...
...He did not care to live by the informal but still bitter logic of Social Darwinism that leaves otherwise "progressive" writers comparing column inches...
...Before long, Joe and I were seeing a lot of each other...
...The immigrant's son had instead become reconciled to affluence and assimilation, and the price of the ticket was a certain superficiality...
...The bemused, vaguely world-weary expression that sometimes broke into a wide, astonished smile...
...Joe grew up in the Bronx, where, he wrote, "no one...
...His loss deprives us of a brilliant, heterodox young writer, and a cherished friend...
...ADAM SHATZ is a New York writer...
...He knew that thousands of Japanese go to the mountains each year to die, and though he had no intention of joining them, I'd like to think that he would draw some comfort from this...
...I am a Black and I can be a member of a circle made up of Mississippi Whitefolk: I make new communities all the time...
...what kind of writers would we have been had we not...
...Which is to say, he went his own way, paying little attention to trends...
...In his casual, unassuming way, Joe embodied this ethos...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
