White Man's Harlem
MURRAY, ALBERT
THE NOVELS OF WARREN MILLER White Man's Harlem By Albert Murray Warren Miller is much too slick and much too superficial for his work to be mistaken as serious fiction. But you never know for...
...Nevertheless, Negroes would do well to keep an eye cocked on Warren Miller, slapdash, slapstick and all...
...This is all very well, but as a writer he seems unable to imagine himself living in Harlem as a Negro for five minutes...
...What useful purpose is really served by confusing segregated housing in the U.S...
...is also slapdash, and this time the slapstick is all too intentional...
...But certainly not if he is really ambivalent about it...
...Stuff and nonsense," as the native sons used to say about nuclear fallout...
...They will find themselves in the prefabricated world of the up-to-date social worker, a newspaper stage-set with crudely carved ebony and mahogany puppets moving their lips in a snazzy jazzy tempo while an inept ventriloquist mouths overworked Marxist and psychiatric clichés disguised as the untutored wisdom of the curbstones: "Hurst live in a cellar an dont know whut the world all about...
...Miller does not seem able to resist the temptation to put Negroes in their place by reducing them to stereotypes...
...Miller's very slapdash slickness may actually enable him to slide into an important position as a very special expert on Negro Matters...
...Incidentally, Harlem contains a vast network of slum areas which are an ambitious social worker's absolute delight, yet Harlem is not really a ghetto in spite of all the slapdash nonsense being popularized to that effect by the world's greatest political song and dance men, who pretend to be making a great moral outcry against oppression, but are really performing mostly for headlines and handouts...
...But coming back to white writers, some of William Faulkner's finest characters are Negroes...
...Can a white man really play Negro music...
...No need to catalogue the cornballisms...
...Thus Baldwin's endorsement of The Cool World would seem exaggerated to say the least...
...But Lu Ann, the gang's teenage prostitute, takes the cake...
...Joel Chandler Harris was certainly no great shakes as a writer, but doggone my cats if his talking animals aren't infinitely more human than any character in either The Cool World or The Siege of Harlem...
...Albert Murray, a resident of Harlem, is co-editor of a new monthly magazine...
...166 pp., $3.95...
...The truth is, Warren Miller simply cannot imagine himself as Duke Custis...
...If the sequel to The Siege of Harlem is another mirthful matinee piece called Porgy and Bess Stomping at the Savoy and the Walls Come Tumbling Down, and then this very same Warren Miller grows a beard or something, goes serious and slaps together still another one about how once upon a time a boy in Boston heard a record nightmare by Artie Shaw and became an expert on jazz and the jazz life and had a cotton field romance with a Negro girl and became an expert on Negro sex life as it really is, and was befriended one night by a Negro hipster and became an expert on the narcotics life as it really is, and went on to spout a steady stream of magazine articles explaining the civil rights movement as it really is, this very same Warren Miller could be easily mistaken as a genuine friend of Negroes...
...And of course white writers are just as free to have as much fun with Negro characters as with any others...
...The Siege of Harlem (McGraw-Hill...
...The Cool World, has already been made into a deadly serious avant garde propaganda film, which has been generally dismissed as Art but praised as realistic documentation...
...He ain't...
...This kind of language is supposed to project the sensibility of 14-year old Duke Custis, the first person narrator-protagonist, whose great ambition is to buy a pistol and become the absolute ruler of his gang...
...It is no more realistic than the book itself, which was more concerned about being cute about everything than about being accurate about anything...
...If Ernest Hemingway could write good stories about Italy, France, Spain and Cuba, and if numerous other writers can produce outstanding books about people who lived not only in distant lands but in distant times, why shouldn't a white writer be able to do an excellent book about contemporary Harlem...
...All too often it happens...
...Many white Americans have always gone for this kind of old razzmatazz and they still pay well for it...
...For the Harlem described by James Baldwin himself could not possibly produce a James Baldwin either, certainly not that fayboy prose style which bears so little resemblance to the store front rhetoric of his childhood...
...Most people would agree that the best treatment of Harlem in a novel so far is to be found in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which contains prophetic political insights, dramatic intensity and some of the wildest comedy in American literature...
...The Cool World is not only not fine, it is hardly a novel at all...
...Certainly he cannot condescend to his own characters and at the same time expect his readers to believe in them...
...Is it any wonder then that some of us act like animals an some of us become animals...
...The Cool World was a slapdash job...
...White Negro...
...Neither is he any Roark Bradford, however fondly he may yearn for them good old Green (fried chicken) Pastures...
...His concept of space travel is that of an idiot...
...The same question comes up when you complain about the unauthenticity of most white jazz musicians...
...Yet it must be taken seriously because Baldwin certainly is...
...Although the question almost always has racist implications, the factors are not racial but cultural...
...In fact one of his books...
...Nor does his sensibility reflect any meaningful contact with radio programs, movies...
...Equitone tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days...
...With your white Negro anything is possible...
...And, of course, there are also those ever-so-smooth Negro con artists who operate in the sad, fuzzy world of the white liberal, and who will allow themselves to be sprayed with this kind of you-know-what just to prove how tolerant Negroes arc, or how superior they are to it...
...Why shouldn't it be possible...
...He dont know the world run by crooks pushers and hood from top to bottom...
...Free and Equal, whose first issue will appear next month...
...Much has been made of the fact that he is a white man who lived in Harlem for live years...
...In fact, it is precisely in such typical Ellingtonia as Echoes of Harlem, The Mooche, Harlem Speaks, Slapping Seventh Avenue, Uptown Downbeat, Harlem Airshaft and so on to Tone Parallel that you find so many of those downright Elizabethan qualities of Negro life that have been conspicuously and consistently missing from Negro writing...
...Routine Negro stage comics do a better job of spoofing the civil rights movement every night...
...Its no world to be nice in . . ." "Harrison slam his book shut...
...Of course he can...
...He white folks Number One Negro (mispronounced as Baldwin does it when referring to himself on TV...
...It was also slapstick, but one is not certain how much of the clowning was really intentional...
...The Harlem described by Warren Miller could never produce a James Baldwin...
...Harlem has become a Nation within New York City, has nationalized the numbers racket, and there are such hilarious vaudeville landmarks as Station WEB DuBois...
...Not even the great Pigmeat Markham can make this stuff stack...
...They will find a series of patently contrived situations hastily derived from the currently fashionable generalizations of the socalled social sciences...
...It happens...
...He say to the window...
...A former English instructor at Tuskegee Institute and an ex-Air Force major, he has written essays for Life and New World Writing...
...He something else...
...Book promotion being what it is these days, and his subject matter being life in Harlem...
...with the way Jewish life was separated from the Gentile world in the days of the old ghettoes...
...Whenever you complain about how some white writer misrepresents Negro life, somebody always wants to know if you think it is possible for any white person to write accurately about Negroes...
...Not even the best comedians at the Apollo Theater can bring stuff this thin to life...
...Whatever his literary potential may be otherwise, when Warren Miller writes about Negroes and Harlem he immediately becomes a second-rate blackface comedian, an opportunistic clown cutting topical capers for the entertainment of the "white world," as they say in Amagansett...
...Of course it is possible...
...Shitman get hot man stay cool man shitman soul man shitman...
...Not if he hangs around with it for a while and then withdraws and allows himself to become a "white hope" even as he returns to his old accents...
...Checkpoint Frederick Douglas, the Black House, and so on...
...The degree of fundamental cultural separation implied by the term ghetto would not be applicable to the actual life of Negroes in the U.S...
...And so on...
...and humility before it as the good Negro musician does...
...Indeed James Baldwin, who knows more about the goings on in Greenwich Village and Saint Germain des Prés than he is ever likely to know about Harlem, who surely knows more about the guerrilla warfare of New York intellectuals than he has ever known about uptown street gangs, and whose scintillating prose style is much closer to Oscar Wilde than to the vernacular of Harlem, has called The Cool World "One of the finest novels about Harlem that has ever come my way...
...and he ain't no Octavus Roy Cohen either...
...No matter how rotten with racial bigotry the New York housing situation is, it is grossly misleading to imply in any way that the daily involvements, interests and aspirations of Negroes are thereby restricted to the "Negro community...
...But then there is always that handy Theory of the Unique One, which so many Negro refugees have been using on their white well-wishers and the philanthropic foundations for so many years: "I got out because I was somebody special, but them poor bastards back in there need all the help you can spare them, and I'm willing to be the spokesman or administrator for any program you may initiate for the bloody beggars...
...And it is a pity and a shame that he doesn't handle his role of Head Negro in Charge of Spokesmanship with a greater sense of responsibility...
...This boy's existence is represented as so circumscribed that he has no significant awareness of the rich diversity of life about him in Harlem, to say nothing of life in New York at large...
...But there is a curious consistency operating here...
...even in the days of slavery...
...Stuff...
...Otherwise, only in Negro music, and above all the music of Duke Ellington, do you find the fantastic richness of the actual life of the people of Harlem rendered in truly artistic form...
...He stand up and go to the window an look out...
...And look what happened to the Indians...
...In the white houses an in the vegtable stores on the corners all of them got big hands in the pie...
...If he develops the same familiarity with its idiomatic nuances, the same love of it...
...But Warren Miller's feeble attempts at ridicule only expose his own provincialism, which he sadly mistakes for a superior sophistication...
...As Jelly Roll Morton or somebody said: If you see dear Mrs...
...It go Thuck...
...But so it goes, and it should surprise no one in Harlem if mass media elects Warren Miller Number One U.S...
...It is a minstrel show in which the writer comes pumping on stage doing a saggy-bottomed, tangle-footed buck and wing in the guise of Joel Chandler Harris, which he ain't...
...The trouble is that the Indians used to have friends like that...
...Why not...
...The fantastic thing is how few of us succum to their idea of us.' An he went on like that standing there at the window not looking at us lookin out at Harlem...
...Jomo, N'Krumah, Ahmad, Shabad and such like...
...Most of Faulkner's Negroes in The Reivers, for instance, are very funny indeed...
...Miller's latest book...
...If he is a good enough musician and respects the medium as he would any other art form...
...They make us live like animals...
...Here you find Uncle Remus uptown telling bedtime Amos and Andy war stories to a group of children who have such side-splitting musical comedy names as M'boya...
...TV, magazines or even comic books...
...Those who insist on working their way through the everlasting coyness of the language screening The Cool World will not find themselves in a landscape created by an imaginative novelist at all...
...But you never know for sure...
...Now if a writer cannot, will not or at any rate does not identify with his people he is not likely to write truly about life...
...One well known NAACP bigwig, for instance, used to have one of those Aunt Jemima memo boards hanging in his kitchen just to prove how sophisticated he was...
...She doesn't even know about the subways...
...Not if he allows his publicity to convince him that he is superior to the masters he knows damn well he is still plagiarizing...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 25
