Writing & Other Bloodsports, page 26
There is only one major female character in The Day of the Locust, Faye Greener, a “platinum” blonde extra, with “swordlike” legs. She is the American sex-symbol, a flesh-and-blood version of the screen sex-goddess invented by Hollywood movie producers. What little plot there is in the novel revolves around Faye Greener. Tod, Homer Simpson, a dwarf bookie, an unemployed cowboy actor, and a Mexican cockfighter all eye Faye avidly as she artlessly licks her lips and teases them with the seductive movements of her body, using tricks she has learned from watching the movies. Except for Homer Simpson, who is unaware of his passion, they all desire her physically. Tod and Homer are the only two characters treated sympathetically by the author, but Homer is an immobilized man at the lowest level of awareness short of being an automaton. He has fled to Hollywood after ten years as a night clerk at a midwestern hotel. The minor characters congregate at his rented home, as does Tod, and take advantage of his hospitality. During the long hot days, Homer, completely immobilized, sits in a broken deck chair in his backyard.
There was a much better view to be had in any direction other than the one he faced. By moving his chair in a quarter circle he could have seen a large part of the canyon twisting down to the city below. He never thought of making this shift. From where he sat he saw the closed door of the garage and a patch of its shabby, tarpaper roof. In the foreground was a sooty, brick incinerator and a pile of rusty cans. A little to the right of them were the remains of a cactus garden in which a few ragged, tortured plants still survived, (p. 40.)
Android-like, Homer sits there all day long, scarcely moving, watching a hard-working lizard hunt flies in the cactus.
Homer was on the side of the flies. Whenever one of them, swinging too widely, would pass the cactus, he prayed silently for it to keep on going or turn back. If it lighted, he watched the lizard begin its stalk and held his breath until it had killed, hoping all the while that something would warn the fly. But no matter how much he wanted the fly to escape, he never thought of interfering and was careful not to budge or make the slightest noise. Occasionally the lizard would miscalculate. When that happened Homer would laugh happily.
Between the sun, the lizard and the house, he was fairly well occupied. But whether he was happy or not is hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither. He had memories to disturb him and a plant hasn’t, but after the first bad night his memories were quiet, (pp. 40-41.)
After a drunken party at Homer’s house, Homer hears a groaning sound; he opens the bedroom door and catches the professional cockfighter having sex with Faye Greener. She leaves the house, and Homer becomes slightly mad. He runs wildly along the streets; in his confusion he unthinkingly attacks a small child who nags him into the act. A crowd of the cheated ones, waiting outside in the streets for a world premiere of a new movie, delighted to have something destructive to do while they await the arrival of the stars, trample Homer to death, under the impression that he is a sexual pervert. Tod, who is coincidentally present in the crowd, has a leg broken during the mob-surge, and is thereby provided with another scene to add to his projected masterpiece, “The Burning of Los Angeles.”
The novel’s title is a reference to the locusts in the Book of Revelation. These locusts make their appearance when the fifth angel blows his trumpet, and they have orders to inflict pain on all human beings who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. None of the characters have the seal of God on their foreheads in The Day of the Locust. In West’s Hollywood the locusts swarm daily over the hopeless, immobilized men and women who have been cheated by the false promise of the American Dream.
For the most part (an exception is James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain) the black novelist in America has had his greatest success with the so-called protest novel. Publishers assume, and not without reason, that the American reading public will only be interested in a black writer’s novel if it is a protest novel. The black artist, who prefers to think of himself as a man first and a black second, often resents this attitude on the part of publishers. James Baldwin tried to break through the stereotype with Giovanni’s Room, but he wrote self-consciously about white characters in Europe, not about blacks in America. In a more ambitious novel, Another Country, Baldwin returned to the protest theme, concentrating on a series of sordid interrelationships (a round-robin of sexual partner exchanges) between low whites and low blacks in New York. None of the characters in Another Country have a sense of values about anything except perhaps when and where they will obtain their next orgasm. The implied, or understated protest in Another Country is that society will not condone or approve of unlimited promiscuity, homosexuality, and sexual love between blacks and whites. Another theme in the novel is that only homosexuals are adjusted and able to cope with modem life. Baldwin’s characters are as weak and voiceless as the shades Ulysses encountered in the underworld. Not until these shades drank blood from Ulysses’ sacrifices did they become strong enough to speak. And the black novelist in our society, unfortunately, must be willing to spill a little blood on his work to drive home his points and position. The late Chester Himes, in his earlier novels, was willing to make blood sacrifices, and, despite the commercialism of his later fiction, he remains one of our best American novelists, black or white.
Himes’ best-known work of social protest is undoubtedly If He Hollers Let Him Go, which received a good deal of critical acclaim. This bestseller was complemented by Lonely Crusade, a novel about a black union organizer in Los Angeles, and Cast the First Stone, a prison novel. All three are protest books. The latter is a day-by-day account of the brutalizing effects of prison life; and Lonely Crusade, which may be the major work upon which Himes’ reputation will eventually rest, is a dialectic concerning the hopelessness of a black union organizer in the getting of concrete results among apathetic members of his own race.
Lee Gordon, the “lonely crusader” of the title, is a graduate of U.C.L.A. (a Sociology major); and he becomes immobilized, unable to function, because the white union staff personnel do not trust him: he is too well-educated for a black man, a fact of life which does not fit into their preconceptions of the black intelligence. His own people do not trust him because he is obviously—to them—a tool of both the union and the Communists who have infiltrated the union. The black workers do not trust the union either, because it is under the control of white organizers. Because of the all-around distrust and frustration, Gordon cannot function. The novel ends when Lee Gordon, in desperation, marches into what will probably be his death (at the hands of the police) as a strike leader of a strike in which there are no interested worker participants, white or black. His death will be meaningless, of course, because the black workers will not understand the sense of “honor” in the face of impossible odds that Gordon has learned by reading books they have never heard of or read themselves. But the novel is by no means romantic; Gordon is simply finding a way to kill himself. In Lonely Crusade, Himes proves that not only is there no place in American society for the black intellectual, there never will be a place for him on a fully functional level. This is a bitter, pessimistic novel, but it at least allows the hero the meager comfort of dying in a hopeless cause. Lee Gordon knows what he is dying for whether anyone else knows or cares or not. The white intellectual often has a difficult time in finding a place for himself in America, but the black intellectual will always be a lost rubber ball in high weeds.
In The Primitive Himes has two intellectuals as his leading characters. Kriss is a white, middle-aged woman without moral scruples or prejudices. A plain, unattractive woman in many respects, she has a “white goddess” complex, and minimizes her inadequacies by being of service to black men and by being serviced by them in turn. She has a well-paid executive position with a philanthropic foundation in New York. This type of work, throughout the years, has enabled her to meet a great many young, intelligent blacks seeking foundation grants. She likes blacks, and feels secure in the knowledge that she “understands” them. Kriss is highly intelligent, good at her job, and casually, almost indifferently, promiscuous. Himes, whose attention to detail in his fiction often borders on the microscopic, credits or debits Kriss with having had affairs with eighty-seven different men. After working hours Kriss usually stays at home in her expensive and somewhat bizarrely decorated apartment. She is “at home” to black and white men alike; since her divorce from a wealthy white homosexual she cannot abide the thought of waking up alone in the mornings. Although she can function efficiently enough at work, she is immobilized at night and on weekends because of her inability to generate genuine feelings.
Jesse Robinson, the joint-protagonist, is a black novelist who has had a critical but non-commercial success with two protest novels. However, Jesse does not want to write any more protest novels; he wants to publish his new novel, which he considers to be a significant contribution to the understanding of the culture of blacks in America (From the sketchy comments made about this novel, it bears a close resemblance to Himes’ The Third Generation, a novel that did contribute significantly to the understanding of black culture in America). The novel is on the sordid side, but it has been written out of his experience and Jesse knows that it is valid. While he awaits final acceptance—or rejection—of the novel, Jesse lives on a publisher’s option of $500.00, a sum that is almost exhausted when The Primitive opens. The book is turned down by the editor; commercially, it is too autobiographical for a novel and too embittered to be published as an autobiography. The editor also feels that it is much too sordid to be published as fiction, anyway. The implication is clear, and throws much light on the plight of the creative black man in America. The black novelist who writes truly of his experience in America cuts himself off from the white, book-buying public. White Americans, publishers feel, do not want to know how Afro-Americans truly live, work, play, and die. To accept such truths, the white reader must also accept a portion of the responsibility for tolerating the conditions of the black experience in America. Jesse is enough of a professional writer to know that it is futile to argue against a publisher’s rejection. Talking to himself in his misery, he leaves the publishing firm with his manuscript under his arm.
Jesse starts drinking in a serious way, and soon becomes so drunk he wanders about New York in an alcoholic blackout. He has spells of lucidity, and during one of them remembers Kriss. He met Kriss several years before when he had applied for a writer’s grant at a foundation Kriss had been employed by in Chicago. He calls on her, bringing several bottles of liquor, and she welcomes him as an old friend and ex-lover. The remainder of the novel, written in a racy, surrealistic style, is concerned with a drunken weekend in Kriss’s apartment. Kriss and Jesse are two misfits, escaping reality in drunkenness. Other characters, white and black, come and go during the weekend. There are arguments that trail off incoherently; food is cooked and forgotten, burning down into charred remains on the kitchen stove. When the weekend is over Jesse wakes on the living room couch with a colossal hangover. He enters the bedroom and finds a nude Kriss with a knife in her heart. Jesse has killed her, but he does not remember doing so, nor does he know why he killed her. He telephones police headquarters: “‘I’m a nigger and I’ve just killed a white woman,’ Jesse said, giving the address and hung up. ‘That’ll get the lead out of his seat,’ he thought half-amused.” (p. 152)
Jesse has finally lost the ability to feel; his emotions have been deadened because he has never been able to get anyone to accept the idea that he was capable of emotion. Benumbed in mind, he is indifferent to the death of Kriss and to his impending fate as her murderer. He will no longer have to struggle impossibly to prove that he is both a man and a writer. Jesse could have killed Kriss for several reasons. She was unattractive, fat, and there were red pimples scattered over her slack white skin. But the black men who slept with her, including Jesse, slept with her because she was a white woman. She knew the real reason, and she was not above rubbing it into them sarcastically after she had downed a few drinks. But Jesse also killed her as a final protest to his frustration and enforced immobility as a black artist who was unrecognized by a white world.
Although blacks make up slightly more than ten percent of the population, they do not buy ten percent of the published books in America; if they did, a black writer like Jesse Robinson would not have any major problems. Jesse murdered the available symbol that represented the white society and the white publishing world that would not allow him to be the artist he knew that he could be. The indirect method of suicide, as illustrated by Lee Gordon and Jesse Robinson, is a common resolution to immobilized hero novels when the hero is a supersensitive intellectual.
Chester Himes was a highly skilled craftsman; his narrative was swiftly paced, and he had a superb ear for dialogue. In recent years, however, Himes quit writing serious novels. He lived in France, and was engaged in writing a series of comic mystery novels featuring two Harlem detectives, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. The first novel in this series, For the Love of Imabelle, won the Grand Prix de Literrature Policere in its French translation. These mysteries, as good as they are, and they are very good, were an unhappy compromise for one of our most talented American novelists.
Questions concerning the remobilization of the immobilized black hero in American fiction are, under current social conditions, either rhetorical or academic. As R. E. Bratset sees the problem, it is one of communication between two different races who do not and cannot speak a common language.
If white Americans cannot know what it is to be black, logic dictates that black Americans cannot know what it is to be white. One of the tenets of good communication— that the speakers concerned share a system of beliefs, values, and referents—is, therefore, forever violated. The black man and the white man are destined to mutual isolation, and there is no hope of the two groups effecting significant responses in their intercourse with each other. (ETC, 20:31, Sept. 1963.)
Although I do not share Bratset’s viewpoint that there is “no hope” for communication between the two races (any intelligent reader can understand Chester Himes), novels by black writers invariably distort the characterizations of the white characters in one way or another. This distortion makes the white reader suspect, in turn, that the black characters are also distorted; and that the problems presented in the novel are out of proportion to reality—or at least exaggerated to drive home an obvious point, e.g., Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The same comment holds true for black characters in novels written by white novelists, e.g., Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven. Nevertheless, if the black novel has not closed the communication gap between black and white Americans, the gap has been narrowed significantly. When readers, both white and black, accept the “distortions” as the way blacks and whites appear to white and black novelists, the gap will be narrowed even further. As the matter now stands, all black novels are merely studies in the immobilized man.
The immobilized man is either insensitive or supersensitive; as a consequence of these two extremes he acts as a catalyst upon the other characters with whom he comes into contact. As a supersensitive man in an insensitive world his values are not shared by the other people he meets. When other people attempt to challenge his values by argument, they are soon forced to reexamine their own. When the supersensitive hero finds that the world is too much for him, which he usually does, he often kills himself. Suicide is always disturbing to other characters; by killing himself, the supersensitive hero has given them a final convincing argument that life is worthless.
The insensitive or unfeeling immobilized hero also reveals by his actions and activity that life is worthless. Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty and John Barth’s Jacob Horner, who are both incapable of emotion, arouse the emotions of practically everyone they encounter, disturbing the status quo, and thereby forcing a revaluation of values by the fictional characters, and, in some instances, in readers.
J. D. Salinger’s supersensitive heroes, Dr. Seymour Glass in particular, have upset the other characters in his stories, his readers, and even literary critics. The body of criticism on Salinger far exceeds his collected works, and this is unusual for a living writer who has only written one novel and a handful of short stories.
Dr. Seymour Glass’s suicide is a remarkable example of the supersensitive immobilized hero in American fiction. When Seymour shoots himself through the head, his family is never the same again—and his is an above-average family.
Seymour was the oldest son in an Irish Jewish New York family, and he was the most intelligent of the Glass children. As the oldest brother he acted as confessor, mentor, and “saint” for his younger brothers and sisters. All of the Glass children, Zooey, Boo Boo, Buddy, Waker and Walker, and Franny, were bright. During their childhood each child served a stint on a children’s radio quiz program, “It’s a Wise Child.” In this manner, as paid members of a panel, the children earned enough money to pay their own way through college when the time came.
Seymour, the brightest of the lot, who held a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University, shot himself at the age of thirty-one. This suicide—but not the reason why—is described in a short story, “A Perfect Day for Banana-fish,” published in 1949 in The New Yorker.1 No valid reason for the suicide is provided; in the story the reader learns from a long distance telephone conversation between Seymour’s wife and his mother-in-law that he was released from an Army hospital, and that he had recently rammed his car into a tree in an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself. But no motivation for the attempt is given. Seymour’s wife is rather self-centered, but this is not unusual in an American wife if she is also young and pretty. She is also on the insensitive side, but she cannot be blamed for Seymour’s death. In the French Foreign Legion, squad leaders are reduced in rank if a member of their squad kills himself; as a consequence, they look for telltale signs of depression in their men. But American wives do not have this kind of training; they are invariably astonished when their husbands kill themselves—and no penalty is attached for the failure of wives to observe their mates intelligently.
