Masks in Fiction

...Or Jean Toomer...

...His central action is viewed as an instrument of, or for, salvation, a dangerous rebellion, miscegenation, or the suffering of a Christ-figure...

...This is apparent on the first page, where we are told that "American literature renounced European models in the Nineteenth Century...

...Having touched, fortunately lightly, on the topic of what is American about American literature, Miss Rose goes on to argue that "the first American artists to aim programmatically at founding a native style consonant with the American experience called themselves The Eight," in the first decade of this century...

...There is scarcely an American artist worth remembering who is not given a compliment or two...

...Henry James and Edith Wharton are no longer on hand to defend themselves, but it does seem safe to say that James never regretted reading Balzac from beginning to end...

...Leslie Fiedler can condemn Edgar Allen Poe for using blackness as a sign of evil, and Sidney Kaplan can condemn Melville for inconsistency in his portrayal of Negroes...

...Miss Rose is nothing if not comprehensive...

...Yet, with few exceptions, our literature has been as uniformly white —^if not always Anglo-Saxon—as were our television commercials of a few years ago...

...Why not Joel Chandler Harris...

...The images of the Negro in American writing are images that suffer from the tendency to present abstractions rather than individuals...

...They are followed by essays on individual writers—Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin...

...The first block of six essays deals with historical movements and genres— colonial literature, the ante-bellum Southern novel, Reconstruction novels, the American Gothic, the "Harlem novel," and the contemporary "search for identity...

...She has seen success close at hand, but fails to understand that the enduring triumphs are usually the possession of those who have been schooled by failure...

...Such a list raises questions: Why only one poet...

...Nor is she always arresting when dealing with the individual artists...

...The outstandingly good novelist does not, however, see him or anyone else in such simplistic terms...

...He sees not a Negro but a human being whose skin is black, and as a result he is condemned for the complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty of his portrait...

...It is the mediocre novelist— however angelic his cause—who writes the most satisfactory propaganda...

...Kind as she is to almost everyone, Miss Rose seems to be searching for artists so American as to be uncon-taminated by the Old World...

...This is a curious statement...

...She does quote Malcolm Cowley on the decade, but it is doubtful whether his summons for "a more passionate apprehension of life" will make any particular impression even on the now middleaged men and women who once followed his book reviews in The New Republic...

...Every essay in it is enriched by the others, and the whole is much greater than any of its parts...

...This is a debatable point...

...And, not surprisingly, Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most consistent and consistently acceptable fictional portait of the Negro in our fiction, with the possible exception of the works of William Faulkner...

...But for white America the Negro has always been a social and moral testing, a cause, a subject for debate, something demanding either action or apologia...

...This fine book emphasizes the extent to which American novelists and critics have failed to do this kind of basic justice to one of the most challenging and indigenous subjects...

...Because of his erudition," we are told, Robert Motherwell "was able to take a large view...

...What is perhaps more important, they are charming the connoisseurs in 1968...

...For Thomas Cole and his friends who haunted the Hudson River Valley nearly 150 years ago could also be congratulated, in Miss Rose's words, for having evolved "a native style consonant with the American experience...

...No one could guess from reading her account of the 1920s that John Marin and Georgia O'Keeffe lived like hermits—at least when compared with our own Andy Warhol...

...The critic, as this collection shows, also brings an abstract standard to bear upon the novelist who writes of the Negro and thus asks that the fictional black man correspond to the critic's ideal...

...In this book James Baldwin is brilliantly unjust to a better novelist, Richard Wright...

...This should be an exciting moment...

...Even Ralph Ellison, in a graceful but early essay whose conclusion he now disavows, tends to convert the people of his race into the "Black Mask of Humanity...

...That comment makes this abstract expressionist sound like a banker who has been happily obliged to retire from a board of directors he has graced for too many years...

...That happens in the essays on Herman Melville, Mark Twain (whose Pudd'nhead Wilson is seen as more important than his Huckleberry Finn), Ralph Ellison, and Faulkner...

...While it is true that John Sloan and Robert Henri earned a well-deserved reputation for recording the everyday aspect of Theodore Roosevelt's America, Arthur B. Davies, who was just as much a member of The Eight as they were, preferred the dream-world of his nymphs to laundry on the line...

...Images of the Negro in American Literature comes closer to supplying the raw materials for the construction of an answer to why this state of affairs is true than any other book that I have seen...

...Why no drama...

...And when not lost in that dreamworld, he liked nothing better than to dynamite the complacency of his generation by showing the best modern work from Europe...

...Here is a book almost without bias...

...As for Edith Wharton, she was guilty of reading not only French literature in the original, but even German and Italian...

...The Negro has been—and still is—portrayed as a primitive savage, as a happy laborer, as a miserable slave, as an awesome Gothic figure, as a repository of the agrarian virtues, as an inhabitant of a meaningless urban world, and as an "archetype" of man's search for himself...

...So The Eight were not the first to qualify under Miss Rose's nationalistic classification, and you might even ask whether they could qualify at all...

...Such questions are more than quibbles, and yet they do not touch the unique quality and value of this book...

...Marcus Klein is unwilling to take Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man on Ellison's own terms...

...But the Negro has had another fate and today plays a major role in our moral, social, and political history...

...He was, after all, the arch-instigator of the 1913 Armory Show which displayed Europe's avant garde to America...

...It consists of a perceptive, historical introduction by Seymour Gross, in which he sketches the shift from "stereotype to archetype" of the Negro in American writing, followed by fifteen essays by other writers, all but one of which have been previously published...

...Or Howard Odum...

...Similarly, when she comes to the Great Depression, the best she can do to make the New Deal come to life is to cite Lewis Mumford, who called out at the Artists' Congress that "the time has come for people who love life and culture to form a united front...

...It is a function of art to keep the individual alive, visible, and capable of love and hatred...

...Miss Rose is obviously an admirer of all of The Eight...

...This book shows that there have been many images of the Negro in American writing and that, although they developed in historical order, they continue to exist and co-exist...

...It isn't, possibly because the author is so much of her own time that she cannot imagine an age when American art prices were not fluctuating with the brilliant uncertainty of Xerox...

...Ellison has more recently asserted that one of the dangers for the Negro is the tendency to see himself as an abstraction hopelessly pitted against abstractions...

...Miss Rose is not at her best when sketching the background of American history...

...But perhaps the saddest moment in American Art Since 1900 is the one in which Miss Rose describes the international recognition accorded the abstract expressionists in the late 1940s...

...Or George W. Cable...

...Almost...

...Or Charles W. Chesnutt...

...And there are times when Miss Rose is the victim of a passion for compiling categories...

...That quality lies in the fact that how the different critics look at the problem is as important as what they say about it, and the critics here play against each other in such a way that this is not a collection of essays but truly a book—and one that deserves to be read through, not merely in...

...Whether she succeeds in giving us an idea of the world The Eight and other artists lived in is another matter...

...given way before the forces of history until his current role in our national lives is small...

...Reviewed by Wayne Andrews If you happen to believe that American artists are meant to be Americans first and artists afterward, this generously illustrated book by Barbara Rose, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and is a contributing editor to Art in America, may satisfy your every need...