Remember Joe Wood

...This, it should be clear, was mostly Joe's doing...

...Joe smiled and said, "I'm not sure I could either...

...But does my blackness ruin my reading...

...BRIAN MORTON is executive editor of Dissent and author of Starting Out in the Evening...

...One of the beautiful things about Joe's essays was that they were simultaneously arguments with others and arguments with himself...

...I wasn't sure that our friendship, which was not so very strong in the first place,had survived the exchange...

...Why didn't Dissent run a series in which people like Richard Rorty explored what race has meant to them...

...This guy, I thought, with his black leather jacket and his satchel full of books—this is one of the people who keep civilization alive...

...I for one promise not to suggest slyly that you don't deal well with writers of color if you promise never again to pull a comment such as 'anti-Semitism is such a boring substitute...

...When it finally came in, I didn't like it...

...When should I get this piece in...

...A hard and patient worker, Joe wrote two or three more drafts...

...The next time we talked, I expected him to be curt with me...

...As it is, I'm pretty sure I'm as capable as you of discerning the differences between the use of irony, understatement, and other literary tricks—and the fact of racism . "I'm not one to give up," he continued...

...He almost always had some theme, some question he was working out in his mind—the many meanings of the idea of family...

...Joe wrote back a few weeks later...

...The review he finally produced was a long, thoughtful, dazzlingly intricate meditation on Kazin, modernism, Jewishness, blackness, whiteness, ethnic success in America, literary tradition, and the art of the memoir...

...he was more comfortable with serious disagreements than I was...

...Ten years younger than I, Joe had read more than I had, but, as I was grateful to discover, he wasn't the kind of person who bludgeons you with his learning...

...He was generous with what he knew...

...After we said good-bye I watched him for a second as he headed for the subway...

...He wasn't...

...you could count on him to put the ball in play, conversationally...

...Joe became more interested in writing for Dissent...

...There are some people who, even in their uniqueness, seem to represent something beyond themselves...

...At one point Joe told me that he'd met Alfred Kazin, and he spoke appreciatively about a lecture he'd heard Kazin give...

...It struck me as a generous remark...

...The review was a long time coming—he read a great deal of Kazin's work to prepare for it...

...I wrote Joe a long letter, telling him what I thought was wrong with the review...

...I hope not—if I pulled out my black eyes I'd be blind...

...In the Voice article, of course, Joe had made clear his disdain for Farrakhan and his worldview...

...I was eager to keep working with him...

...the many ways in which the idea of race can give us a distorted picture of ourselves...

...Kazin's work meant a lot to me, and I wasn't happy about the prospect of publishing an attack on him...

...Obviously my interpretation is shaped by my experience in the world...

...When he wrote back to me, he didn't exactly seem flattered by my ability to quote from his work...

...But I didn't...

...A few months later, when I heard that Kazin was publishing a book culled from his diaries, I asked Joe to review it for Dissent...

...Once, thinking about a piece of fiction I was working on, I told Joe that I thought the gulf of ethnicity might be harder for a fiction writer to cross than the gulf of gender...

...I said I thought I could create a convincing white woman character, but I wasn't so sure I could create a convincing black male character...

...I was trying to make the point that anyone's words could be damagingly ripped from their context...

...Black writers, he once said, were always exploring their personal experience of race...

...At one point in his review, Joe had criticized Kazin for not expressing outrage after telling a story about racist violence in the South...

...We got into the habit of having dinner two or three times a year...

...Yeats says somewhere that out of our arguments with others, we make rhetoric, out of our arguments with ourselves, we make poetry...

...I wanted to see what the lyrical young memoirist would have to say about the lyrical old memoirist...

...He liked to challenge you...

...Please keep your mind open...

...Instead of destroying our friendship, the argument made it stronger...

...It was always fun to talk with him...

...In this version, the admiration Joe felt for much of Kazin's writing was more explicit—this version even conveyed a certain feeling of kinship...

...It wasn't a mannerly disagreement, particularly on my DISSENT / Fall 1999 93 end...

...The letter was harsh—without quite admitting it to myself, I made it as harsh as I could, because I wouldn't have minded if he'd decided to take the review and publish it somewhere else...

...You had the impression that if you called him at any hour of the day, you would find him thinking about some subtle theoretical problem...

...But I'm not going to drop the basic thesis...

...We had dinner last spring— a typical dinner, in which he displayed such a wide range of interests, such sheer pure love of learning, that as I listened to him I found myself smiling with admiration for the way his mind worked...

...I think identity was Joe's main theme: the complexity of personal and cultural identity, the slipperiness of it, and the damage that comes when groups and individuals define themselves too crudely...

...why weren't white writers doing the same...

...when you left him at the end of the evening you wanted to go home and read the writers he'd been telling you about...

...he planned to write reconsiderations of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for us...

...from one of my pieces and leave it hanging naked in the air, twisting with possible meaning...

...Your own work is filled with irony, ambiguity, understatement—it's filled with a battery of rhetorical devices sophisticated enough to warm the heart of Lionel Trilling himself—but you don't seem to grant Kazin the use of the same resources...

...He argued that "the principal narrative" running through Kazin's autobiographical work (not only his published diaries, but his memoirs as well, from A Walker in the City to New York Jew) was Kazin's unhappiness over "the loss of his America to black 'foreigners.' " This wasn't a picture of Kazin that I could recognize...

...It seems to me that you're holding part of your own literary intelligence at bay...

...He was an interesting mix: he was blunt, almost fierce, in his opinions, yet in his manner he struck me as one of the gentlest people I'd ever met...

...He would have made a good teacher...

...One of the things I liked about talking with him was that I could never anticipate his reactions...

...As I was getting to know him through our conversations, I was also getting to know him through his work: his introduction to the collection of essays on Malcolm X that he edited, his ambivalent profile of Albert Murray in the Village Voice, his long essay in Paul Berman's collection Blacks and Jews...

...In my letter, I wrote, "Isn't it possible that a writer who has recorded the sight of a white man throwing a lit cigarette at a black soldier and another man playfully tossing around the finger of a black man whom he's just lynched— isn't it possible that a writer who's recorded these things might feel that an expression of authorial outrage was superfluous...

...In a piece in the Village Voice a few years ago, as I recall, you dismissed Farrakhan's anti-Semitism as 'boring.' Someone reading your work in the spirit in which you read Kazin's would conclude— what...

...I think we both felt easier with each other now...

...The next time we talked on the phone, I thought of telling him this...

...His work was marked by strong political passion, but also, and always, by an open-hearted exploration of his own contradictions...

...I enjoyed the argument," he said...

...In his letter, Joe said he thought my intelligence had been "clouded a bit by your distaste for my argument . . . I am reworking the piece to answer your more technical complaints . . . Also, I will improve the beginning of the piece by letting readers know that I think Kazin is worth reading...

...His "basic thesis," however, was unchanged—we'd kept arguing, and he hadn't retreated an inch, I'm glad to say...

...94 DISSENT / Fall 1999...

...Why was Norman Podhoretz's "My Negro Problem—and Ours," published in 1963, the last serious personal essay about race by a white writer...

...I'm eager to have a fight in public...

...If I had, I'm sure he would have laughed...