Wren Houses for the Birds

HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR

WRITERS & WRITING Wren Houses for the Birds By Stanley Edgar Hyman If the tape machine has released all sorts of terrible djinn. into our polluted air, it has also brought us many invaluable...

...With characteristic insight...
...Williamson is fiercely competitive, and the principal outlet for competitiveness in his subculture seems to be getting the best of one's associates...
...His father, who favored and indulged him, died when the boy was nine...
...He employed two men to collect stickers, had his two sisters and his common law wife wrapping them in cellophane, and even hired a girl to cut the cellophane...
...He began in a street gang at 13, stealing bedspreads off clotheslines and robbing the boys who collected for newspaper routes...
...Williamson explains: "Now I hate to ask a woman can I have intercourse with her...
...He does not go into much detail about these techniques, but Hustler...
...Williamson himself made deliveries and collected the money...
...above the level of the documentary is Williamson's art...
...There are indications that Williamson exaggerates his success at crime: he boasts of four or five robberies a day, but seems never to have a dollar in his pocket...
...I was always doin' wrong...
...Bohannan's commentary says: "Read perceptively, the wit has become gall...
...and his story is edited by R. Lincoln Keiser with a commentary by the anthropologist Paul Bohannan...
...The third trade at which Williamson showed special skills is narcotics pushing...
...Of a hectic period in his sex life: "I had four girl friends at this time...
...What, indeed, would the Heavenly Kingdom do...
...Of a girl who gave him a dollar to' get her some heroin: "She was a very small dope fiend...
...He found school frustrating, quit at 13, and has lived mainly by "hustling" from that time on...
...He was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1930, one of seven children...
...He varies his routine with burglary, purse-snatching, and mugging...
...I think that this is an overstatement with a core of truth...
...Williamson calls his criminal activities "doin' wrong," and boasts of himself in contrast to other criminals: "Maybe they did wrong once a week, once every two weeks, but I did wrong once a day, every day, or four or five times a day...
...Williamson remarks: "I always came back to the poolroom, 'cause that was something I really loved...
...That's something I hate to do...
...he says at one point...
...If he has little feeling of racial hostility, he displays a considerable social hostility...
...Williamson takes no unnecessary chances: in his apprenticeship, whenever he could, he rolled drunks' as an armed robber, he specializes in robbing "dope dealers," since they are in no position to call the police...
...Williamson is quite aware of the effects of his acts on his victims, and appears to enjoy it...
...Tried to make a date with her...
...Soon afterwards, a friend introduced him to the excitement of armed robbery, which has been his trade since...
...Apart from pool and clothes, carrying a gun is the only other form of self-expression available in Chicago of which Williamson will admit: "That's something' I loved...
...He tells a horrible story of lying in the hospital after bullet wounds in his stomach and intestines had been sewn up, ignoring the doctor's orders not to drink water, as a consequence vomiting and ripping open his stitches...
...Williamson is a man of intelligence, industry, organizational ability, eloquence, and sensitivity...
...He assured me that he was not ashamed of anything in his life," Keiser says in his introduction...
...Williamson has the typical arrogance and impatience of the Faustian personality: if listening to a lecture from his common-law wife on the topic of his failings is the price of getting some money from her, it is "not really worth it," and he walks out...
...He observes: "I'd say that's my most greatest love in the world, nice clothes that is...
...The final effect of Hustler...
...The family moved to Chicago when Henry was six...
...Every time I made a piece of money," he explains, "I always bought me some clothes...
...Williamson attributes this addiction to his attachment to his father...
...makes it clear that in an industry where so many distributors are themselves irresponsible addicts, Williamson is a cautious and reliable businessman...
...is full of them...
...Of his education in prison: "Now what school consisted of out there was makin' wren houses for birds.' Of his failure to keep a promise to send heroin back to a cellmate after Williamson was released: "I did one thing for him...
...Like many other small-time criminals, Williamson stole inspection stickers off the windshields of parked cars and trucks, and sold them...
...into our polluted air, it has also brought us many invaluable things that we would not have had otherwise...
...Keiser edited the transcription, with a liberal insertion of exclamation points...
...I dread that...
...he says of one period in his life: "At night I would go out and make peoples miserable...
...Williamson seems to have little or no superego, and we are led to project ourselves into his apparent freedom from fear and guilt...
...After two years, Williamson got homesick and returned to Chicago...
...Williamson's personality is a complex one...
...Henry Williamson has had what we must recognize as a representative American life, if one a little livelier than most...
...Of waking up after a drunk: "There's vomit all over the bed, all in my hat, and that's sitting ace-deuce on my head...
...He is a gifted pool player, and has been hustling suckers since he was 13...
...The obvious appeal of Hustler...
...He is somewhat ambivalent about women: he enjoys female company, and has (or had) an ambitious sex life, but there are odd hostilities and tensions...
...Doubleday, 222 pp., $4.50...
...I called up a girl friend for him...
...What will the Great Society do with types like Henry Williamson...
...This raises the question of ethics...
...He says of his career as a hoodlum before he quit school: "I had become kind of a little rough then...
...Aspects of Negro life have always had this pastoral appeal for white America...
...by that exercise of guile backed up by superior force that the Melanesians call "wabuwabu" Thus, whenever he can, Williamson cheats his partners in crime out of most of the profits, and he does his best to see that they do not cheat him similarly...
...He is a comic monologuist in Mark Twain's tradition: explaining why hogs and chickens are stolen in Alabama, but rarely cows ("Everybody know his own cow...
...where he has remained since...
...He started selling stickers to used car dealers, in wholesale lots of 100 or more, and soon had an industry going...
...Beyond that, he revealed a talent for business organization...
...he admits: "I think I like to rob women...
...as a pusher, he feels safe from being robbed himself, because other stick-up men know "I wouldn't stand for it noway...
...I think he wrecked me on that, 'cause I still like good clothes...
...One of Williamson's most engaging locutions is his odd use of "semi": he "semi-worshipped" his father, he robbed a "semi-drugstore," and so forth...
...He has had no outlet for these traits other than varieties of criminal hustling...
...As a corollary, Williamson enjoys pulling a gun on women...
...Williamson's principal passion seems to be for expensive clothes...
...He says that he is fearless ("I'm not afraid of the devil if he's got some money...
...I was always mad at the world...
...Some of this is the natural eloquence of Negro folk speech, but Williamson is far from artless in his use of it...
...telling the story of a prison riot with masterly understatement and economy ("At this time when I was out there I had a little disturbance, and I got locked up...
...Williamson was deft at getting stickers off intact in a few seconds...
...is what William Empson calls "pastoral," the appeal of what appears to be a simpler and more carefree life...
...His language is at once understated and vividly metaphoric, like the blues...
...They became friends, and Keiser persuaded Williamson, who was unlikely to write an autobiography in the normal course of events, to tape record the story of his life...
...His vocabulary demonstrates his awareness of the wickedness of his acts, and his Byronic pleasure in that wickedness...
...Williamson will, however, accept self-constraints...
...Williamson seems to be the sort of Faustian personality who cannot accept any externally-imposed constraint or limit...
...I was doin' the usual thing that young guys do with 'em...
...the autobiography of a small-time Chicago Negro criminal...
...These illicit activities depend mainly on muscle, but Williamson has three lines of work that make more use of his skills...
...Their eyes get so big...
...and his experiences in the book tend to bear him out...
...Williamson loves to tell comic self-deprecatory anecdotes about himself, and Hustler...
...One sign that these are edited disclosures is their absolute avoidance of the argot of narcotics: "dope dealers" sell "heroin" to "dope fiends...
...is nevertheless disquieting...
...he is thus defiantly immoral...
...He is called "Henry Williamson...
...A year or two later Williamson got in a fight at school which resulted in his opponent's loss of an eye...
...But just beneath the surface Williamson is neither so happy nor so free as he says, and he knows it...
...To avoid further trouble, the family sent Henry back to Alabama, to live on an uncle's farm...
...I'm not braggin'," he says, "but I was an expert...
...His style runs to irony and wry humor...
...There wasn't no honor among us," Williamson explains simply...
...Williamson was not being entirely honest with Keiser (why should he be...
...Keiser is a Chicago caseworker who interviewed Williamson when he applied for welfare payments after he had been shot and crippled in a robbery...
...A case in point is Hustler...
...I think he spoiled me a little bit too 'cause he bought me all kinds of clothes," Williamson says...
...He is extremely gregarious, and prefers to rob with a partner when he can...
...creating verisimilitude with precise numbers ("The man'll lose twenty-six or twenty-seven dollars a day...
...Here too he proved to be unusually gifted...
...By acts of his unaided Will, he gave up drinking and cured himself of heroin addiction...
...This may be so, but one must not conclude from it that Williamson is amoral...
...Although Williamson is primarily a stick-up man, our age of specialization never succeeded in holding him within narrow craft limits...
...Williamson's life and personality arc of considerable interest, but what raises Hustler...

Vol. 48 • February 1965 • No. 4


 
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