NEGRO WRITERS AND WHITE CRITICS

...Just as the "mili­tants" on the civil rights front have served notice on the nation that they have no ambitions to share in "the American dream" as that dream is pres­ently interpreted, so the writers of the mood of James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones have no desire to direct their work toward "the American literary mainstream" so long as that main­stream follows its present course...

...One of Ciardi's colleagues, poet Lou­is Simpson, put the whole thing into simpler language when, in a notice of Gwendolyn Brooks' Selected Poems in the New York Herald Tribune's Book Week, he wrote the following: "I am not sure it is possible for a Negro to write well without making us aware he is a Negro...

...But to leave nothing out is to go against the grain...

...Shapiro says of Tolson that the six­ty-five-year-old Negro poet wrote in "Negro," a defiant and richly indige­nous language which, it appears, more Negro writers are using without apol­ogy...

...It gives a certain comfort...

...The only class in the English Depart­ment of Wayne State University that I ever came close to failing was a creative writing seminar presided over by a pencil-slim, steel-willed little wom­an who rejected every suggestion that Detroit Negroes lived in a discrimina­tory society...

...he must in that context be captured and returned to colonization, to that Tradition which had enslaved his ancestors, and would continue to do so if it could manage it...

...Our modern literature is a literature of dissent, mo­notonous and endless dissidence...

...For the Negro writer can only fur­ther demean himself and reinforce the arrogance and presumption of the critics by seeking to bend his vision and his art to the shape the critics hold up as example...

...In the realm of civil rights, the government has at last recognized this and is now indicating some interest in making it possible for the two coun­tries, ultimately, to blend into one...

...Write about people the readers can identify with," is one of the more innocuous of the familiar strictures...

...Has nothing changed in the quarter century sep­arating Wright and Baldwin...

...Most of the Negro writers now receiving some at­tention from the reading public have a catalogue of tales of teachers, edi­tors, agents, and publishers who have advised them against writing about Ne­groes...

...It is a commonplace but cu­rious law of the Outsider that the more he strives to fashion himself emotion­ally after the Insider, the more he proves himself Outside—and without benefiting his real condition," she wrote...

...Doesn't 'the American dream' now include some Negroes...

...The Negro's answer is no more wel­come than his question, and the Negro writer's work is rejected because it per­sists in asking questions and in ad­vancing answers...

...In that famous essay he wrote: "It is because I am con­vinced that we white Americans are— for whatever reasons, it no longer mat­ters:—so sick and twisted in our feel­ ings about Negroes that I despair of the present push toward integration . . ." The wound of history is deep, and only the strongest of medication can heal it...

...American critics, no less than the American public in general, have am­bivalent feelings about Negroes, and these feelings are bound to affect their reaction to Negro writing...

...What is so insidious here is not that Ciardi rejects the legitimacy of Baldwin's "protest"—he professes full sympathy—but, more subtly, that he wishes to disavow the necessity that there be "Negro writers" at all, with­out first assuring the demolition of the barriers which make certain that Negro experience is radically different from that of "other men...

...Says Shapiro of this device: ". . . this powerful critic [Tate] does not consider the theme of Negro suf­fering good enough for the art of po­etry, just as though the theme of Amer­ica was not good enough theme for the poet Hart Crane...

...The critics do not openly admit that they resent the questions asked by Ne­gro writers...

...it means to dissent...

...He has known it so well and he has been forced to live in such constant tense awareness of it that his reaction to the knowledge has often skirted the psychotic...

...The adoption of the language can result only in a deepening estrange­ment between Negro writers and the critics, but the relationship between these two is—like a miserable marriage —destructive of all positive ends any­way, and an early divorce can only settle the air and make way for fresh and more constructive alliances...

...The fantasy construct, 'perpe­trated as an historical fiction,' as Alain Locke pointed out forty years ago, was the image of the Negro that none but the Negro himself wanted to reject...

...on the other hand, the work of Evgeny Evtushenko, the highly ac­claimed young Russian poet, is combed and filtered for evidence of disaffec­tion with life in Russia...

...American publishers and editors and, especially, critics can be expected, quite understandably, to reject the al­legation, but the plain fact is that few members of the literary establishment are qualified, by reason of perception and detachment, to judge the work of Negro writers if that work is intended as a genuine reflection of the quality of Negro life and experience...

...And the only conceivable explanation has to be that, at some point, the mass of critics cease visualizing black men and black writers as people and begin to see them as problems and as threats...

...The best of the Negro writers know this...

...It is Gilman's notions about Negro being which confound him, not any objective facts about that being, and yet, as a critic, Gilman has locked Ne­groes in his own very damaging fan­tasy construct...

...Writing in Harper's in June, 1965, poet Kenneth Rexroth did his bit to shore up the "protest" myth by dismiss­ing most Negro poetry...

...Attacking Baldwin along with Wright, Shay declared, "The American Negro has had an ex­traordinary run of bad luck in his lit­erary spokesmen," oblivious of the fact that he is in no position whatever to make such a judgment for Negroes...

...The Negro novelist-essayist, Hansen opined in a letter, is "doing the Negro writers some harm," and thus Hansen demonstrated his sudden and quite out-of-character concern for the welfare of Negro writers...

...This generation's electee seems to be Ralph Ellison...

...But generosity is neither what is wanted nor what is needed to set on keel the relationship between white critic and Negro writer...

...Gilman sees Negroes as becoming, not being— but becoming what...

...But in trying to assert that Tolson has been assimilated by the Anglo-Saxon tradition, he puts Tolson in quarantine and destroys the value of the poem—possibly this crit­ic's conscious intention...

...However, such critics are in the minority, despite the canard in currency among the critics them­selves...

...Even Jewish, New York-born, "liberal" Norman Podhoretz admitted in his ex­traordinary Commentary essay of 1963 that he experienced considerable dis­comfort at the idea of a black male bedding a white female...

...Harry Han­sen, that long-time editor of the World Almanac, temporarily abandoned his nostalgic musings about old and mostly forgotten writers in his Chicago Trib­une column to get in his licks against Baldwin...

...In his Wilson Library Bulletin arti­cle, "Decolonization of American Lit­erature," Shapiro throws light on the establishment's method of dealing with the Negro poet and his themes...

...It is a shocking state of affairs, but it doesn't make for art...

...And the single presumption which is basic to the myriad others flowing out from it is simply this: that Negro life has sub­stance and value only to the extent to which it meets what is considered the white norm...

...You must adjust and make the best of things, or people will call you neu­rotic...

...But, obviously, the achievement is not easy...

...And so, unable to write for her class, I withdrew from it, taking the only "incomplete" of my college career...

...But the dissidence of Negro writers grates especially hard against the grain, for it not only is endless but it also continually reminds the critics of the failure of the culture and of the crit­ics' failure in the culture's behalf...

...The doctrine oper­ates to deny the validity of Negro an­guish and bitterness, which are merely normal and "human" responses to the conditions under which Negroes are forced to exist...

...It would have been far more logical of Ciardi to "insist" that the shackles be lifted from the lives of Ne­groes so that Negroes can live "as other men...

...Critics, it would seem, are no more "generous" than other individuals...

...Quite the contrary, he has tried to lose it...

...Thus it took a Southern intellectual and poet, an anti-Negro poet, to introduce Tolson's Li­bretto...

...Karl Shapiro wrote in the June, 1965, Wilson Library Bulletin: "A lit­erature is the expression of a nation's soul, and a great literature leaves noth­ing out—that is its greatness...

...The relation­ship between the races in America is in fact a tragedy or a mortal sin, but artistically it is a bore," wrote Mr...

...Self-sufficient and self­respecting Negroes are unlikely to ac­cept as their models the people and the culture whose standards or moral­ity and civility permitted the degrada­tion of Negroes in the first place...

...And while, in recent years, a growing number of Americans have been pressured into some admis­sion of the doctrine's perniciousness in the area of civil rights, little attention has been paid to its no less evil influ­ence in the world of letters...

...It is understandable, then, that not many critics are likely to agree with Shapiro that "The importance of the Negro writer in the world today is far out of proportion to the number of books we have to go by," and that ". . . the significance of Negro writing today is paramount because everywhere, not simply in America, the Negro is in the position to ask the questions...

...Podhoretz has no delusions about the objectivity of white people in general toward Negroes...

...What is want­ed and needed is the recognition that, for all practical purposes, the critic and the Negro writer dwell in two dif­ferent—and essentially hostile—coun­tries...

...Rex­roth, a gentleman who likes to prove his lack of prejudice by boasting that he lives in a Negro area of San Fran­cisco...

...To which Hicks quite appropriately answers, "Ridicu­lous!," adding: "Baldwin or any other Negro has a right to ask the largest possible questions about the civiliza­tion of which he is a second-class citizen...

...Until recently, he has glossed it, and he has sometimes ignored it...

...Shay de­manded in exasperation at all the Ne­gro complaints...

...You must stop writing about these things," she told me...

...Certainly he has not had to seek it...

...In the first place, the country occupied by Amer­ican Negroes is a deeply "depressed" one, and its full development will re­quire massive injections of the kind of economic and psychological aid which the white-occupied country always has considered dangerous to its own self­interest...

...Negroes are unlikely to consider any­thing that affects their lives so wholly as a "bore," and they are not con­vinced that there exists an automatic conflict between what is called "pro­test" and what is called "art...

...Arthur Shay, whose qualifications as a "liberal" rest primarily on his re­ported efforts in behalf of decency in Deerfield, Illinois, when the citizens of that Chicago suburb joined forces and turned back the planned invasion of an integrated housing development, became hysterical in print in what pur­ported to be a review of the late Richard Wright's posthumously pub­lished novel, Lawd Today, in the Chi­cago Daily News...

...That was the only possible lit­erary context for a great Negro poet ten or fifteen years ago...

...it is true because they bring to their evaluation of Negro writing a set of ingrained presumptions which render.it impossible to arrive at an essential clarity of vision...

...The critic's coun­try is not the Negro writer's country, and the goals of the two separate and essentially antagonistic territories are far from identical...

...For many years readers have been told, in one way or another, that Ne­gro writing lacks merit because it is "protest" literature, and these readers have been led to understand that Ne­gro writing will reach the level of lit­erature only when it is able to meld with "the mainstream of American lit­erature," which is another way of say­ing that this writing will be acceptable when it ceases to offend white sensibil­ities...

...Negro Writers and White Critics by HOYT W. FULLER ONE OF THE OLDEST and most viru­ lent of all the doctrines which have been used to hobble and degrade Negroes over the ages is the notion that the members of this dark-skinned "race" are to be judged in their hu­manity by the degree to which they approach whites in appearance and be­havior...

...The Negro, and especially, later, the Negro writer, has always known who he is," Redding wrote...

...Until he is, his good man­ners will be bad manners, his decency will be an indecency, and his sense of the proprieties will be the most shock­ing impropriety it is possible for him to commit against himself and against the idea of a human being...

...Occasionally, a Negro writer is sin­gled out for praise, but only when he seems to be disdaining "protest" and "moving toward the American literary mainstream...

...This blending will by no means be easy—and not because of the usual reasons advanced, such as, "You can't change people overnight"—even if the government is persuaded that its sur­vival in a predominantly non-white world depends upon it...

...In a recent, somewhat belated attack on James Baldwin's Another Country, which he clearly misunderstood, poet John Ciardi showed how richly he de­serves status among the philistines by writing that, "in the long run, I must insist, there must be no Negro writers, but only men as other men and com­mitted to all man...

...These writers manage to be pertinent by the simple expedient of, first, accepting the hu­manity of all men and, then, by travel­ing up and out from there, empathiz­ing with other men in the circum­stances which affect their lives...

...Unhappily, only a handful of critics show any significant awareness of their own responsibility in placing in ap­propriate perspective the literature of the two American countries...

...Yet drama, as an art, cannot be concerned with an in­sistence on the right to be, but on the nature of being . . ." Incredible, but there it was...

...Second, the consequences of this de­velopment may be to a considerable degree the opposite of what is intended and expected...

...What is de­cried in the first instance is eagerly sought in the second...

...These reviews re­flect, in general, the prevailing atti­tude of the American public toward Negroes, and this attitude is basically unfriendly...

...Gilman simply follows in an old and honored tradition...

...This is true not so much because these critics bring the element of racialism into their judgment...

...In waging his battle, Shapiro also is illuminating the workings of the machinery which excludes Negroes from anthologies of poetry or else seeks to provide them with honorary citizenship in the white country to pay them homage...

...Poet Allen Tate wrote approvingly some years ago of Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, but Tate did so by shoving Tolson toward the "main­stream...

...they are more subtle than that...

...Now, that is at least a matter of opinion...

...While generations of readers have been influenced by critical attitudes little different from Ciardi's and Simp­son's, generations of Negro would-be writers have foundered in frustration in the futile effort to become what they could not possibly be—writers who shielded their race, and all its implica­tions, from their work...

...Then Redding adds what could be a direct explanation of Oilman's con­fusion about the Negro's being: "The Negro's identity was locked into the white man's fantasy construct of the slave, and Emancipation did not free him...

...There is no "universality" in the Negro predica­ment...

...It is in the stage of being an arm of Negro awakening, of Negro political action, of Negro insistence, not on rights, but on being...

...The Negro is not yet inside America—which is what the shouting is all about...

...The point is made again by Gran­ville Hicks in his Saturday Review discussion of F. W. Dupee's narrow at­tack on James Baldwin in The King of the Cats...

...Writing of the anthology, Soon One Morning, in the September, 1963, Midstream, Cynthia Ozick stated the proposition with elo­quence...

...Some critics, presumably afflicted by guilt and seek­ing to compensate for it, apply less stringent standards in their evaluation of Negro writing...

...In an article on "The Problems of the Negro Writer," published in the Autumn-Winter 1965 issue of the Mas­sachusetts Review, Saunders Redding, a Negro writer no critic today will ac­cuse of being "militant," had some­thing to say about the Negro's being which, coincidentally, answers Gilman...

...It could hardly be otherwise...

...But then, it always has been the Amer­ican white's prerogative to decide what is best for Negroes...

...In the office where I have worked for seven of the past ten years, hundreds of newspapers and magazines are received and read week­ly, and reviews of Negro books, plays, and performances are among the items routinely collected...

...On the other hand, if being a Negro is the only subject, the writing is not important...

...It is, on the sur­face, an eminently sensible statement, but it is insisting that men with chains on their arms and legs run the mile with seasoned and unfettered ath­letes without calling attention to their bonds...

...Ciardi, for example, believes that critics "have always tended to be especially generous to Negro writers and for understandable reasons," but Ciardi would find himself embarrassed if called upon to produce evidence to support his claim...

...The ardently unconventional female poet Gertrude Stein wrote back in the Twenties that the Negro "suffers from Nothingness," and an army of greater and lesser lights have been repeating the libel ever since...

...Negro play­writing is in a preliminary stage," he said...

...It is the crudest and most crippling of devices, for it first dic­tates that Negroes be isolated, de­meaned, and controlled, and then de­mands that they organize their emo­tions, aspirations, and activities on the model of those who isolate, demean, and control them...

...But it obviously is not the Negro's answer that Shay wants...

...During a panel dis­cussion of "What Negro Playwrights Are Saying," at the New School for So­cial Research in April, 1965, Newsweek drama critic Richard Gilman said, in effect, that Negro playwrights are in­capable of saying anything of aesthetic and artistic importance...

...And does not The Toilet, for example, concern itself with "the nature of being" as LeRoi Jones sees it...

...It is time the critics also under­ stood it...

...Prospects for peaceful coexistence be­tween the two American countries might be slim indeed unless habitua­tion in the one is matched by conver­sion in the other...

...This dissidence gives modern literature its authenticity...

...However, Mr...

...Notable among these few are Granville Hicks, Cynthia Ozick, Robert Sayre, and, espe­cially, Karl Shapiro...

...To Baldwin's statement in The Fire Next Time that "A vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man's profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white," Dupee replies: "You exaggerate the white man's conscious­ness of the Negro...

...However, Karl Shapiro is wag­ing a valiant one-man campaign against the "closed corporation" of the poetic establishment and for elevating the late Melvin B. Tolson to his right­ful place in the American pantheon of poets...

...It is the way that the questions are asked which irritate...

...Or, is it that Gilman simply has restated the dictum advanced more directly by Louis Simpson: "If being a Negro is the only subject, then the writing is not important...

...He is then regarded as a near-evolue, an almost-man, ready to be accepted because his technique and themes are all but indistinguishable from those of his white peers...

...Baldwin is dis­missed as "one of literature's most fas­cinating Oedipal wrecks" when he stands up to speak...

...for what he was made to suffer in America led, ironically enough by a kind of moral necessity, to a distortion of his iden­tity into something not only base, but evil, and he has had to live with this distortion while trying not to live it...