Tributes Read online

  Big job jigs, with their jobs unstable,

  Sweated and fumed and trembled ’round the table

  Trembled ’round the table

  Sat around as gloomy as the watchers of a tomb

  Tapped upon the table

  Boom, Boom, Boom.

  With their soft pigs’ knuckles and their fingers and their thumbs

  In a holy sweat that their time had come

  Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom.

  How can I go back to being a bum.

  Then I had religion, then I had a vision

  I could not turn from their anguish in derision.

  Then I saw the Uncle Tom, creeping through the black

  Cutting through the bigwoods with his trousers slack

  With hinges on his knees, and with putty up his back.

  Then along the line from the big wig jigs Then I heard the plaint of the money-lust song.

  And the cry for status yodeled loud and long

  And a line of argument loud and wrong

  And “Bucks” screamed the trombones and the flutes of the spokesmen

  “Bucks” screamed the newly made Ph.D. Doctors

  Utilize the sure-fire goofie dust powder

  Garner the shekels

  Encompass mazuma

  Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, booma.

  Bing.

  Tremolo, mendicant implorations

  From the mouths of Uncle Toms

  To the great foundations.

  “Jack is a good thing

  A goddamn good thing

  The only bad thing

  Is there ain’t enough.

  Boom, fool the whitefolks

  Boom, gyp the jigaboos

  Boom, get the prestige

  Strut your stuff.”

  Listen to the cry of the Negro mass

  Down to its uppers, down on its ass.

  Hear how the big jigs fool ’em still

  With their services paid from the white man’s till.

  Listen to the cunning exhortations

  Wafted to the ears of the big foundations

  Blown to the big white boss paymasters

  Faint hints of far-reaching grim disasters.

  “Be careful what you do

  Or your Mumbo-jumbo stuff for Sambo

  And all of the other

  Bilge for Sambo

  Your Mumbo-Jumbo will get away from you.

  Your Bimbo-Sambo will revolt from you.

  Better let Uncle Tombo see it through,

  A little long green at this time will do. … ”

  Not unlike Guillén Leon, and Aimé Césaire, even Luis Palos Matos and Julia de Bargus, Brown was committed to humanity in spite of its denigration of such as evidenced in “Side by Side”:

  VII. MOB

  A nigger killed a white man in the neighborhood

  The nigger was shot up and then hung out

  For the blood to dry, a black sponge dripping red.

  John, you were in the mob, and what did it get you?

  The killed man is just as dead as the lynched,

  And both busted hell wide, wide open,

  And side by side, Lord, side by side.

  So Brown recognized the Africanization of our hemisphere long before we as a people, or a nation recognized him. Brown paid homage to the heroes Nat Turner, Crispus Attucks McKoy, in the same breath as Garvey & Du Bois.

  I sing of a hero,

  Unsung, unrecorded,

  Known by the name

  Of Crispus Attucks McKoy.

  Born, bred in Boston,

  Cousin of Trotter,

  Godson of Du Bois.

  No monastic hairshirt

  Stung flesh more bitterly

  Than the white coat

  In which he was arrayed;

  But what was his agony

  On entering the drawing-room

  To hear a white woman

  Say slowly, “One spade.”

  —from “Crispus Attucks McKoy”

  This lack of self-consciousness, this visceral and aesthetic commitment to the lilt of our tongues, the swing of our hips and the brilliance of our minds and improvisational acuity is particular to Sterling Brown for his generation. He was bothered not so much by who he was, or who we were, but that we could not see him, we could not hear: I offer a quote from Sterling Brown’s own “Honey Mah Love”:

  We who have fretted our tired brains with fears

  That time shall frustrate all our chosen dreams

  We are rebuked by Banjo Sam’s gay strains,

  Oh Time may be less vicious than he seems;

  And Troubles may grow weaker through the years—

  Nearly as weak as those Sam told us of,—

  Sam, strumming melodies to his honey love;

  Sam, flouting Trouble in his inky lane.

  Oh, I doan mess wid’ trouble. …

  As noted in Neruda’s memoirs, the coal miners reciting his poems to him would also have made Sterling Brown’s heart sing.

  Nelson Algren. Chicago, 1973. Photograph by Nancy Crampton.

  Chicago Guy:

  Nelson Algren

  John Sayles

  I READ A LOT as a kid, indiscriminately. In the fifth grade I might be reading Treasure Island, The Black Stallion, The Caine Mutiny, White Fang, Fail Safe and whatever World War II combat memoirs and Readers’ Digest condensed novels my parents had kicking around the house, often simultaneously. I wrote stories as well, mostly intentional or unintentional parodies of books I’d read or movies and TV shows I’d seen. But the idea that a writer was something you could be, that I might write something that could get out in the world and be read by other people, was fairly late in coming.

  I think I was in junior high school, twelve or thirteen years old, when I came across Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots. Typical of my scattered approach to reading, I picked it up because I saw on the jacket that he had written A Walk on the Wild Side and I really liked Brook Benton’s title song from the movie (I hadn’t yet seen the movie, which falls apart after the opening titles by Saul Bass). I had read Grapes of Wrath at this point, and my parents had told me stories about the Depression era, but Algren’s book brought it alive to me in a more visceral way—it is an epic of powerlessness. The protagonist—poor, ignorant, small—has some humane impulses, but it is clear they will only be a liability in the mean world he lives in. There are brief glimpses of hope, moments of peace, but then somebody in boots stomps in and the fun is over.

  I don’t think I set foot in a bookstore or knew such a thing existed (my parents were teachers and brought stuff home from school but I can’t remember them buying a book) until I was in college. So I began to dig into the card catalogues of the local libraries looking for more things by Algren. I read his short stories, a few of his essays and reportage. I’d never been to Chicago, never played poker or bet on the horses, but somehow his world was very familiar to me. The books were funny, not because Algren made fun of the characters, but because the characters understood the humor of desperation. A story like “A Bottle of Milk for Mother,” in which world-weary cops banter with the night’s haul of murderers, drunks and thieves as one by one they face the hard glare of a police line-up, has a bizarre, stand-up comedy feeling, where all the participants, cops and criminals, understand that the joke is on them. Algren was a devotee of Hemingway, but his characters barely kept up the facade of living according to a code. They tried to survive day by day and the best and most compelling of them knew their own weaknesses. There is no second chance in Hemingway, whereas Algren’s characters often hit bottom halfway through the book, then have to take a good look at each other and push on.

  Reading Algren was not unlike reading Faulkner in that I came to have a geographical impression of the world he created, meeting characters central to one story on the periphery of another, finding themes repeated and expanded upon. But Algren’s world, mostly city-dwelling immigrants and small-time operators, was more familiar to
me than Faulkner’s guilt-ridden Mississippi. The cruelty Algren’s characters showed to each other was more venal and immediate, not based on some deep historical sin but on everyday human frailty, deceit, selfishness and longing. He is wise to his characters but not dismissive, his sentiment tempered with irony. When the rough edges he worked so well began to gentrify he moved from Chicago but never really found another home. He is one of those writers, like Faulkner or Cheever or Raymond Chandler or Zane Grey, who owns a piece of turf in the American imagination. You think “Nelson Algren’s Chicago” and it’s sure, I know exactly—there.

  Beside entering his world, I got something else from reading Algren. It was the realization that, hey, they let this guy get away with this stuff, recognizable human behavior, people with warts and humor and appetites, and somebody typed it up in a book and got it out in the world. Maybe I could do something like that. I remember reading a book with the dedication “For Nelson Algren—who does not know me from Adam and should not be held responsible.” The people who influence you to write aren’t necessarily who you’re going to write like, but the fact of their existence, of the existence of their characters, the spirit in them, opens up a possibility in your mind. There have been a lot of writers whose work I got into later that really knocked me out, writers who brought me into worlds unknown and opened up areas of style and technique that helped me get my own act together. But the one who jump-started me from reader to writer was Nelson Algren, who I never met and should not be held responsible.

  My Willa

  Maureen Howard

  I HAVE BEEN TRACKING HER for well over fifty years, since the good sisters instructed me that there lived somewhere—in Maine or was it New Mexico?—a wonderful lady who wrote stories for Catholics. In their zeal to lure us away from comics, movies and our favorite radio shows, they elevated Willa Cather to the state of blessed, never suspecting that in Death Comes to the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock, it was the culture of Catholicism in America that interested her, the organizing drama of its rituals, the missionary’s overlay of European morals and manners on native life. And—shocking to say—Cather, with renewed desire (the secular desire of most writers), was, in these late works, finding her way into new forms:

  In the Golden Legend the martyrdoms of the saints are no more dwelt upon than are the trivial incidents of their lives, it is as though all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance. The essence of such writing is not to hold the note, not to use an incident for all there is in it—but to touch and pass on. I felt that such writing would be a kind of discipline in these days when the “situation” is made to count for so much in writing, when the general tendency is to force things up.

  —Letter to Commonweal, November 23, 1927

  I see now that Cather was finding her way further into legend, for her novel she would claim as her first real work, My Ántonia, is partitioned into tales that have become legendary to the narrator, but I hadn’t a clue when I borrowed that novel from the public library and never thought why my Ántonia? Because she is the girl, the woman that Jim Burden makes into legend. Because the teller of the tale lays claim, possesses his material—or hers—and this burden may, or may not, be unburdened by the telling. Fitzgerald, who admired Cather, was drawn to this narrative frame when giving Nick Carraway the first and last say in his Gatsby. Nick’s performance in these passages is grandiloquent. He speaks a rhetoric at once beautiful and defensive. Jim Burden, Cather’s early narrator of what is actually a disturbing American pastoral, cannot import his romantic view into the present.

  But already I’m writing of rereadings, reevaluations of Cather’s sturdy, or was it inspired, career. When I was a kid I would have called her Miss Cather if granted an audience, but in truth she would not have welcomed me in her parlor. Privacy was sacred to her in her later years. No longer William, the flamboyant cross-dresser at Lincoln University, nor Willa of the girlish middy-blouse, nor the celebrated Willa Cather of the velvet opera cape, she wanted no intrusions into her life and very little into the life of her art. In her will she forbade the use of her work in movies or television, so there is no point in discerning the dandy script in Lucy Gayheart or the possible docudrama of My Ántonia. Cather closed down: nothing mean spirited, just a reaffirmation that good work must be valued for its own sake, honored in its original form like a fine Mimbres pot or the Dutch landscapes she so admired, or like magnificent landscape itself, not sold to the highest bidder.

  From her earliest novel, Alexander’s Bridge, she wrote about the dream of artistic accomplishment, the talent which elevated the artist yet often diminished the human response. The trade-off was real to her. She made it so pressing to the men and women of her invention that the Yeatsian dilemma—“perfection of the life, or of the work”—seems removed by the eloquence of its beat from the compromised lives of her characters. There is no wonder that Cather was rediscovered in our time by feminist critics, or, let’s say less academically, by women readers made newly aware of the counterdemands of family and work, of the liberation of self and the loss that it might exact. Who better than Cather to turn to—a woman writer, reputation in decline, misread as schoolroom genteel? Yes, Miss Cather, the poet of passion and accommodation, endurance and loss, yet she has been scolded for her male narrators, for not outing, for a conservative bent that blossomed as the American audience grew, to her mind, vulgar in its tastes.

  Does anyone pretend that if the Woolworth store windows were piled high with Tanagra figurines at ten cents, they could for a moment compete with Kewpie brides in the popular esteem? How old-fashioned her complaints in “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), perhaps even a dated view in that year, the year in which she won the Pulitzer for her war novel, One of Ours, a lesser work, a willed work. A bumper crop that year: Ulysses, The Wasteland, Women in Love. D. H. Lawrence arrived in Santa Fe, Cather territory, in September of 1922, quite unaware that in April she had gone after him in this essay on the impoverishment of “realism” for depicting the behavior of “bodily organs under sensory stimuli.” Can anyone imagine anything more terrible than the story of Romeo and Juliet rewritten in prose by D. H. Lawrence! Yes, that can be imagined, as well as the fact that she quite liked Lawrence when they met and that they both were moved by the grandeur of the Southwest to write powerful romantic tales of retreat from the Woolworthian goods of society.

  Willa Cather. The Granger Collection, New York.

  To be fair, though Cather’s famous essay is more writer’s jotting than theory of the novel, it can be read as a modernist proclamation, a call to move away from verisimilitude and clutter to suggestion. She puts forth the example of modern painting, abstraction, understatement—a more telling simplicity. Art must unfurnish, discover “the emotional aura of the fact or the thing.” All of her work has a surface simplicity—she was, we must recall, a popular novelist—all, that is, except her masterpiece, The Professor’s House, which is intricate, bold in its construction and furnished. In the novel, Professor St. Peter refuses to write in his new house, though his writing of history has paid for all its splendid conveniences. A trophy house, we might call it in current lingo: it is literally and newly furnished. Published in 1925, the novel can be read as working through the prescriptions of “The Novel Démeublé.” The furnished fiction, that is, the recognizable bourgeois novel of the opening section, “The Family,” with its intricacies of plot and politics of family, class and money, is rendered in detail, adorned with many things— bathtubs, lamps, jewelry, clothes—which tell of a worthy past and a fashionable present. “The Family” is not so much concluded as abandoned, just as the Professor has departed emotionally from wife, children, affairs of the university—and Cather turns to a simple tale—“Tom Outland’s Story.”

  Or not so simple, for the idyll lived by Tom Outland on the Blue Mesa of Old Mexico is a boy’s adventure that is ruined by money and politics, the very stuff of novels, not heroic tal
es. Tom Outland had appeared at Godfrey St. Peter’s house, the old house, the shabby house, to propose himself as a student. One of the notes touched on is the irony that the Professor, who has earned his laurels by writing about the Spanish adventurers in America, has never been to the land they explored, has never gone beyond the European story, his material researched in European libraries. In “The Family,” the appearance of Tom Outland is magical, the gifts which he brings princely—turquoise stones, ancient pots with the black fire marks still on them. Cather is setting the reader up to witness a rotten deal: Tom’s things with their pure aura traded off for the family’s things weighted with envy and a smug, even hilarious display of upward mobility.

  Troubled by the present, the Professor is drawn to recollection, not only to discover the lost record of Tom Outland’s story, but the lost boy and the ambitious young man in himself. All of Cather’s novels are narratives of recollection. The Professor’s House is her one indulgence in, or confrontation with, the present; perhaps even in part Cather’s novel is an admission of her disappointment in Isabelle McClung, the great love of her life, who married a middling musician, Jan Hambourg.

  The Professor believes:

  Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. He has been able to measure it, roughly, just once, in his student Tom Outland—and he had foretold.

  It is reductive to read the displacement of sexual desire for artistic achievement, to take God-free Saint Peter, a man of diminished ardor whose best work lies behind him, for a wounded Cather. The biographical note is a footnote, as it is so often to great fiction. What’s more, the Professor, in voluntary exile from his family, sees that “the design of his life had been the work of this secondary social man, the lover.” Second billing was not a role Cather would easily take on. In writing her most complex, to my mind, her great novel, she recollected herself camping in the Southwest with her brother where she was as overwhelmed as Tom Outland by the landscape and exulted in the discovery of the layered history that was still its secret. Look up, look out, increase the field of play. Turn to another less familiar, less familial story. Tom Outland’s story (oh, the Bunyanesque names, Cather’s draw to tale, to parable) is that of the adventurous orphan, who, to remain our hero, is killed off in the First World War. Though he is engaged to the Professor’s most worldly daughter, the design of his life is neatly cut off before marriage.