The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings Page 32

  (1949)

  The Cool World by Warren Miller

  I CONSIDER IT A TRIBUTE to Warren Miller, whose name was unfamiliar to me, that I could not be certain, when I had read his book, whether he was white or black.* I was certain, however, that I had just read one of the finest novels about Harlem that had ever come my way. The author had obviously looked at something very hard. He had felt it very deeply and was trying to tell the truth about it.

  The people in his book are Negroes, but they are handled with no condescension and with no self-pity. Because they are seen so clearly and made so real, the drama they act out contains implications which go far beyond the confines of the squalid, claustrophobic world which they inhabit.

  This world is a world we have created, we, the American Republic; and its existence gives the lie to every one of the principles in which we say we believe. In fact, the most remarkable and valuable thing about this study of Negro children in Harlem is that it does not leave one thinking about race at all. It leaves one thinking about the moral state of this country.

  I think that there is something suspicious about the way we cling to the concept of race, on both sides of the obsolescent racial fence. White men, when they have not entirely succumbed to their panic, wallow in their guilt, and call themselves, usually “liberals.” Black men, when they have not drowned in their bitterness, wallow in their rage, and call themselves, usually “militant.” Both camps have managed to evade the really hideous complexity of our situation on the social and personal level.

  The Cool World is the story of Richard “Duke” Custis, who lives in a Harlem apartment with his mother and grandmother, and his mother’s procession of “husbands.” The “husbands,” of whom we glimpse, in passing, only one, are a sorry, irresponsible, embittered lot; the mother is not so much indifferent as defeated; and the grandmother has retired into the depths of the Old Testament.

  Mr. Miller manages to convey, with a masterful economy, the atmosphere of this dreadful apartment, and the peculiarly desperate apathy which has overtaken this family—if, indeed, it can any longer be called a family. The grandmother can no longer reach her daughter, and neither of them can reach the boy. He has struck out to find his own identity according to the only standards he has ever seen honored: he is the War Lord of the Royal Crocadiles (his spelling), a street gang in mortal competition with the Wolves.

  The Wolves have knifed Duke—who has been knifed seven times at the age of fourteen and is proud of it—and killed another member of the Crocadiles, and the Crocadiles are planning a vengeful “rumble.” In this “rumble,” one Wolf, Angel, and one Crocadile, Cowboy, are killed. Duke is sent away to a Youth Center, from which he tells us his story.

  I confess that I do not really believe in his “rehabilitation,” there being nothing in the book and very little in my own experience to lead me to believe in it. But this somewhat perfunctory ending cannot really detract from the book’s great power.

  Mr. Miller tells his story in the argot of the Harlem streets. He appears to be one of the very few people who have ever really listened to it and tried to understand what was being said. In his handling, it is not strange because it is exotic; it is strange, and it is frightening, because it conveys the children’s state of mind with such force.

  And this state of mind is the American state of mind, seen from a peculiar angle, and in some relief: “Blood got one sister a nurse an a brother at Fisk University learnin to be a doctor or somethin. Man I dont see it * * *. No point workin like that when they can take it all away from you when ever they feel like it you know.”

  This frightened and distrustful child has long since ceased believing a word we say—about honor, ideals, equality, hope. He watches what we do. He thinks of the world as a loveless place, of infinite evil, run by thieves and murderers.

  Well, we are quick to insist, the world is not like that. We will have to prove this to him, though, for he lives in Harlem, that world we have created but do not have the honesty to visit nor the courage to change. Until we do this, he has no reason to believe us, nor have we the right to expect to be believed.

  The “cool” world is a world in which children watch their contemporaries and their elders dying by the hour. And we ignore this world at our own very great peril, for as long as they are dying, we are dying, too.

  (1959)

  *Mr. Miller (who is white) is a versatile writer. He has published children’s books under his own name as well as an adult novel, The Way We Live Now. As “Amanda Vail” he is responsible for two spoofs of female boarding-school and college life, Love Me Little and The Bright Young Things. [This footnote was published with the essay.—Ed.]

  Essays by Seymour Krim

  SEYMOUR KRIM says at one point in this extraordinary volume: “I was as wrong as you can be, and still live to tell about it.” He was, indeed, and so were all of us; not many of us lived; and most of those who lived and tried to tell the tale soon found themselves choked in attitudes, mystiques, and dictions which were not theirs. There is observable, I think, in the work of most of this generation a desire to tell what actually happened—or what it actually feels like to be an American, now; but this desire is perpetually defeated by the spiritual obligation of being an American, which obligation is, simply, never to accept that evil is in the world. I am struck by the variety of ways in which the actual spiritual state of Americans is denied by people who have every reason to know what that state is: our educators, artists, and politicians. It is hard for me to believe, for example, that educators do not know the sorry truth behind the lack of real education here. It seems very clear to me that until the educators themselves believe in what they teach, there is no hope for their students. But the educators cannot accept this, because in order to do so they would have to overhaul every aspect of their private lives, which effort would hurl them forever beyond the bounds of the academic life. It would hurl them, in fact, into that search and that danger which Krim has endured and to which he bears witness. I myself believe that it has never been more difficult to become an individual than it is now, in the middle of the twentieth century, in the richest and most bewildered country in the Western world, the country which has inherited all the follies and crimes and contradictions of the West at the very moment that the moral assumptions of the Western world are proving themselves bankrupt. What is demanded, if we are to redeem our history, is an unprecedented and violent assault on reality, an overhauling and overturning and undermining of all the standards by which we imagine ourselves to live. The reason that this is necessary is that we really do not live by these standards; we cling to them because we are shipwrecked, and have no other spare, but the awful gap between our public expectations and our private settlements has precipitated spiritual disaster. To save ourselves, we must re-examine ourselves; and it is probable that never before has so heavy a burden fallen on so many or been shouldered by so few.

  Among these few, alas, most of our elders cannot be included, and Krim makes this stonily clear in his report on the literary avant-garde life of the forties (“What’s This Cat’s Story?”). It is the most candid and truthful record of that time that I have ever read, and I suppose part of its dry effectiveness to come from its total lack of malice. It took perhaps one or two cocktail parties—those cocktail parties which, since one was present, signaled one’s entry into this fabled world—to recognize that one had been “had.” The people with whom one was dealing, so far from being giants, appeared to be in the literary professions principally because they hated literature. I concluded this from the fact that they placed no more trust in life than the weariest button merchant, and their timidity, respectability, and ignorance were made all the more obvious and appalling by the formulas they adopted to hide these. Their prejudices were precisely those of the class to which they aspired, or from which they sprang: the property-owning class (in fact or desire); and I, of course, since I had forced myself to expect so much more, found it very difficult to forgive t
hem for the nightmares of tolerance I endured at their hands. But the thing for which I most scorned them may have been, after all, the most important: they did not know how to raise their children. They did not trust their own instincts, or authority, or love, and raised them, as it were, by the book. And the ill-mannered, tyrannical, anchorless children proved, even more authoritatively than did the aridity of so much of their elders’ work, or lack of conviction when the chips were down, the elders’ real vacuity.

  Krim is the first person, as far as I know, to bring up, in any responsible fashion, the prevalence of the Jewish intellectual in what we like to call the literary life. I have never really written about Jews, because both culturally and socially, and for better and for worse, I have been too close to them. It is possible that I am afraid of examining whatever tension exists in my mind between the Jewish pawnbrokers and landlords of my childhood, and my friends; though, to tell the truth, in the beginning, for me, all Jews were in the Bible, and all I knew or cared about landlords was that they were white. In short, I think that my hatred of all white people was too incandescent to allow me to see their features. In any case, since the Bible had always been so crucial to me, I concluded that the reason for the prevalence of the Jew in intellectual activity simply resulted from the fact that he was the only American who had behind him anything that could be called an intellectual tradition—by which I mean, simply, the knowledge that thought and the interior, private life are real. But I did not consider the price that was paid for this—for reasons which are, I suppose, all too obvious; nor did I consider the implications of the fact that the Jewish tradition retained such force because the world did not allow the Jew to escape it. Krim opens up in this book a momentous speculation on how the dreadful Jewish past is yoked to the dreadful American dream, and the dues paid in the Jewish personality. It illuminates for me many of the disasters endured by friends of mine—and also illuminates some of the darker corners in the minds of my present-day friends—and I can only hope that Krim will dig deeper into this question one of these days.

  He is also, God bless him, almost the only writer of my generation who has managed to release himself from the necessity of being either romantic or defensive about Negroes. His “Anti-Jazz” essay ought to be required reading by every hipster who can read (on the evidence, there are not many), and its last sentence ought to be engraved on the walls of every jazz point in this country: “It comes from something further down and wayer out than I think you dream of… man.” Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, King Oliver, and my mother and my father thank you, baby. Not one of us ever sat in an orgone box, and we’ve yet to hear any singing coming out of that cage.

  “Ask for a White Cadillac” is more painful and goes much further: but the only hope for the reestablishment of human relations in this country, let alone race relations, is for the truth to come out. It can only come out if those who have been there will dare to tell the truth about where they’ve been—and why.

  I have reservations about this book, of course, but I don’t know how important they are. Krim’s supercharged, locomotive style sometimes drives me mad—I hope he will soon retire from active duty all those monotonous variations on the verb “to swing.” I disagree with his estimate of the “Beats,” from which so many of his stylistic affections come. On the other hand, since, as Krim says, they “opened me up,” I feel that my ground there is rather shot from under me. He has gone far beyond them just the same, in passion and clarity and responsibility, just as he has gone far beyond most of us into that chaos out of which we shall have to rebuild our homes.

  (1961)

  The Arrangement by Elia Kazan

  Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:

  Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

  —W. H. AUDEN

  MEMORY, ESPECIALLY AS ONE grows older, can do strange and disquieting things. Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal. When more time stretches behind than stretches before one, some assessments, however reluctantly and incompletely, begin to be made. Between what one wished to become and what one has become there is a momentous gap, which will now never be closed. And this gap seems to operate as one’s final margin, one’s last opportunity, for creation. And between the self as it is and the self as one sees it, there is also a distance, even harder to gauge. Some of us are compelled, around the middle of our lives, to make a study of this baffling geography, less in the hope of conquering these distances than in the determination that the distances shall not become any greater. Chasms are necessary, but they can also, notoriously, be fatal. At this point, one is attempting nothing less than the re-creation of oneself out of the rubble which has become one’s life: and this is the situation with which Elia Kazan presents us in his first novel, The Arrangement.

  I am far from certain that anyone can deal with so bleak a situation either to his own or anybody else’s satisfaction; and any such attempt is certain to leave one open to the charge of awkwardness. Kazan’s book has a certain raw gracelessness which I have not often encountered, and which I find difficult to describe. It is a terribly naked book—not blatantly so, but uncomfortably direct. He does not seem to have invented anything, though obviously he must have, and he seems not so much to have drawn his characters as to have yanked them, bleeding, dismembered, and still in a state of shock, from the scene of their hideous accident. No more than Job’s messengers give the impression that they were hoping to become radio announcers does Kazan give the impression that he was trying to write a novel. He is talking. He is trying to tell us something, and not only for his sake—for then The Arrangement would be nothing more than an unexpected and arresting tour de force from an eminent man of the theater—but also for ours. The tone of the book is extremely striking, for it really does not seem to depend on anything that we think of as a literary tradition, but on something older than that: the tale being told by a member of the tribe to the tribe. It has the urgency of a confession and the stammering authority of a plea. “I still haven’t figured out my accident,” the narrator begins; and, in fact, he never does explain it. He doesn’t need to. Some accidents can only happen here.

  Eddie, Evans, Evangelos—“whatever your name is”—is a big wheel at the advertising firm of Williams and McElroy, where he is known as Indispensable Eddie. He is, he tells us, “solvent, set for life,” with a beautiful Beverly Hills house, a swimming pool, “the goddamnedest lawn in that whole area,” three cars, a hi-fi, two original Picasso drawings, and a “deep freeze that held thirty-six cubic feet of food.” He has been married for twenty-one years to a remarkable woman, named Florence, and they have a daughter, Ellen, of college age. He is indispensable to Williams and McElroy because he is an expert at persuading people to buy trash they don’t need and can’t use and can’t live with. The rewards for this specialty are high indeed in this society—this consumer economy, in which the consumer is both the menace and the prey—and Eddie is very proud of his eminence, his affluence, his skills; which also operate, of course, to get him any girl he wants. His arrangement is all but perfect. But all arrangements depend on the harmony of the elements which make up the arrangement. If any element ceases to function, or begins to function differently, the arrangement is finished. In Eddie’s case, the arrangement is menaced and finally destroyed by two elements, one overt and one dormant. The overt element is his relationship to a girl named Gwen, a girl who is a challenge to him, and whom he has really grown to care about. The symptom of his love for her is his need for her respect. But she does not consider him to be better than any of the other whores, in spite of the devastating think pieces he does from time to time for respected intellectual magazines. This, too, is an arrangement: the honesty, or at least the ferocity, of his think pieces is intended to nullify his advertising copy. But Gwen sees this arrangement for exactly what it is, and refuses to be impressed by it, a
nd this brings Eddie’s long-buried uneasiness concerning his life, and the manner of his life, to the surface of his troubled mind.

  But it is another element altogether which is really responsible for the ruin of all of Eddie’s arrangements, an element so long dormant that it would not seem to be part of any arrangement at all. Yet, as Eddie’s situation becomes more painful and more grotesque, and as his blind, outrageous, and dangerous decisions multiply, it begins to be clear, both to him and to us, that this element has always contained the germ of the disaster which has so nearly destroyed him. This element is his relationship to his father, his relationship to his past. Seraphaim, his father, is dying. He is dying very loudly, gracelessly, and horribly, disputing death with every stratagem, no matter how base, which cunning and despair can devise.

  Seraphaim is a Greek who left Turkey at the end of the century, and somehow managed to bring his entire family to America—where, for a while, they prospered. Eddie—“Evangeleh” to his father—made his father bitter by refusing to go into the family rug business: and it has not helped their relationship that the business subsequently failed, and the family lost all its money in the crash of 1929. Now black sheep Eddie-Evangeleh, once mockingly called “Shakespeare,” is the only big shot in the family, and Seraphaim’s only hope. For Seraphaim’s brothers simply failed to survive the 1929 cataclysm; they literally do not know what hit them, and exist in a carefully cultivated state of semi-idiocy; while all the other members of the family are aggressively respectable and respectably eviscerated. Whatever Eddie is, he is not like these people, who simply wish, at bottom, for Seraphaim to die as quietly and comfortably as possible. But he will not be quiet, and their ideas concerning his comfort strike him—quite rightly, though the poor people have scarcely any other choice—as galling, even dishonest, condescension. On the other hand, there is no possibility whatever that Seraphaim can do what he feverishly demands that Evangeleh help him do: he wants Evangeleh to take him out of the hospital and set him up in business again.