'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  And in this hour of strained relations between black and white Americans, in particular between black students and white intellectuals like writers of Mailer’s stature, the relationship was strained tight as a bow about to be snapped. The black students came from many of the colleges to hear Mailer, who was one of the biggest draws in this field of civil rights and freedom and protest against the war in Vietnam. His book on the subject, The Armies of the Night, had created a great positive literary stir; and had placed him in the forefront of American intellectuals who were against the war. He was numbered amongst luminaries like Dr. Benjamin Spock; Yale Chaplain William Coffin; and the Nobel Laureate, Dr. Gerry Wall of Harvard. But the black students in the Calhoun master’s lounge that night were a rebellious lot, intent upon taking Mailer to task for his “appropriation” of a black voice that they thought ought to have laid down this Law of Black. John Henrik Clarke, the editor of Freedomways magazine that came out of Harlem; Harold Cruse, the author of the controversial book of “black ideas”; and even James Baldwin: this triumvirate they thought ought to have been lecturing them on this evening of sociable entertainment, but of most unsociable discussion.

  The evening for me, was one of curiosity: observing the successful American writer in an academic atmosphere, surrounded by Americans, some of whom were black, in this time of racial stress and torment, and comparing the man now known as Aquarius, christening himself thus, as a brush of objectivity, as a means of controlling his material and escaping the criticism that his views were too personal, this new Aquarius was appealing to me, in the comparison with Canadian and West Indian writers, who did not, and possibly could not, command this “rock star” attention.

  I had not met Aquarius before this. My interest in him was caused at the time by his reputation that centred on the incident of stabbing his wife, and being arrested. I thought this was the stuff that made a man a writer, this brushing, this facing, this tempting the prison bars, fate, destiny, daring — or madness. And I had hoped to find the wife-stabber in his personality. When I met him, all that gossip and history became myth, a picture now faded out of all relevance, rendered now in the heat of debate, as a misrepresentation of a past that bore no relation to civil rights and Vietnam and Richard Nixon and the burning of draft cards. We were all legionnaires in the armies of the night. And the night was black. I observed Aquarius in the same way as I had observed George Lamming the Barbadian, who wrote In the Castle of my Skin: watching him like a hawk, not to see anything about his character and personality, but how he held his cigarette, how he exhaled the smoke, how he held the glass with the whiskey and soda, how he used the English accent in his poet’s voice, something like Dylan Thomas, these things of great value to me, a writer who had not yet written a short story, furthermore, a novel. But what was I observing Aquarius to find? Was I searching his body, his hands, his fingers, looking to see if the machismo in his words in fiction was reflected in his personality, in the way he looked, in the way he positioned his body on the receptive couch? Was I trying to imagine how his body would have lurched to deliver the stab that was dramatic and life-threatening?

  At a dinner party given in Aquarius’s honour, in the master’s dining room, my wife was seated beside him. She had read Armies of the Night, and the things written about his past with knives and wives.

  “He’s not like that, at all!” she said. And she related the stories he told, and was impressed by his sense of humour. “Those things are all lies!” she added, contradicting the popular gossip about his temperament.

  Let me not continue as diarist, pretending to be Samuel Pepys or James Boswell, and let Aquarius use his own voice to describe that night at Calhoun College. He gives his own narrative in Of a Fire on the Moon, published in 1970. He is describing two things: a dinner party in the Houston home of a mutual friend, a millionaire who dealt in oil and oils and sculptures from Africa, and his meeting the students at Calhoun College.

  There was also a Negro in his [Aquarius’s] host’s living room, a man perhaps thirty-five, a big and handsome Black man with an Afro haircut of short length, the moderation of the cut there to hint that he still lived in a White man’s clearing, even if it was on the very edge of the clearing. He was not undistinguished, this Negro, he was a professor at an Ivy League college; Aquarius had met him one night the previous year after visiting the campus. The Negro had been much admired in the college. He had an impressive voice and the deliberate manner of a leader. How could the admiration of faculty wives be restrained? But this Black professor was also a focus of definition for Black students in the college — they took some of the measure of their militancy from his advice. It was a responsible position. The students were in the college on one of those specific programs which had begun in many a university that year — students from slum backgrounds, students without full qualification were being accepted on the reasonable if much embattled assumption that boys from slum were easily bright enough to be salvaged for academic life if special pains were taken. Aquarius had met enough of such students to think the program was modest. The education of the streets gave substantial polish in Black ghettos — some of the boys had knowledge at seventeen that Aquarius would not be certain of acquiring by seventy. They had the toughness of fibre of the twenty-times tested. This night on the campus, having a simple discussion back and forth, needling back and forth, even to even — so Aquarius thought — a Black student suddenly said to him, “You’re an old man. Your hair is gray. An old man like you wants to keep talking like that, you may have to go outside with me.” The student gave an evil smile. “You’re too old to keep up with me. I’ll whomp your ass.”

  “It had been a glum moment for Aquarius. It was late at night, he was tired, he had been drinking with students for hours. As usual he was overweight. The boy was smaller than him, but not at all overweight, fast. Over the years Aquarius had lost more standards than he cared to remember. But he still held on to the medieval stricture that one should never back out of a direct invitation to fight. So he said with no happiness, “Well, there are so many waiting in line, it might as well be you,” and he stood up.

  The Black boy had been playing with him. The Black boy grinned. He assured Aquarius there was no need to go outside. They could talk now. And did. But what actors were the Blacks! What a sense of honor! What a sense of the gulch! Seeing the Black professor in this living room in Houston brought back the memory of the student who had decided to run a simulation through the character of Aquarius’ nerve. It was in the handshake of both men as they looked at each other now, Aquarius still feeling the rash of the encounter, the other still amused at the memory. God knows how the student had imitated his voice from the chair. There had been a sly curl on the Black man’s voice whenever they came across each other at a New York party.

  It was in this New York townhouse, at a party where I first met Norman Mailer. My agent, a tall, handsome Princeton-educated black American, Ronald Hobbs, had, through a friend of his who was private secretary to the owner of the townhouse, and the owner of the Magritte in the Houston mansion, had introduced me to the millionaire, Jean de Menil, and his wife. Mrs. de Menil is an art historian. She was the artistic force responsible for the production and publication of The Image of the Black in Western Art, by Harvard University Press. At this time, Ronald Hobbs was the agent of Larry Neal, Leroi Jones, H. Rap Brown, and other rising black talent.

  I would spend weekends in the New York townhouse, even when Mr. and Mrs. de Menil were away, either at the Houston mansion, or in Paris. Jean would call me at Yale and arrange for me to be looked after by the staff. “Are you coming alone? How many staff do you want?” It was exposure to a style of life unimaginable. But I learned to spend comfortable weekends, alone in the three- or four-storey townhouse, filled with more priceless things than the mansion in Houston.

  The first night I was introduced by Ronald Hobbs was at the birthday party for Mr. de Menil’s private secretary. Mailer was there. We ate lobster and
drank champagne; and danced to music played by a small orchestra. I observed that Mailer, whether through the amount he had drunk, or through lack of balance, did not handle the slow pieces with much confidence. Lots of New York and international celebrities were at that birthday party. I remember each guest had two bottles of wine, one white, placed at his table, just before the butlers served the lobster. At the end of the party, I stood at the door, thanking my host, and chatting with Ronald Hobbs about the time the last train from Grand Central left for New Haven. Mr. de Menil heard our concern, for it was very late; and he instructed a driver to take me. Believing that I was to be dropped off at Grand Central, I repeated my thanks, said good night, and got into the limousine that was called. It might have been lurking round the corner. A liveried chauffeur opened the door. And when I thought I had recognized the avenue leading to the train station, I told the driver, “Turn here.”

  “No, sir,” he said. Through my mind flashed the encounter with the taxi driver refusing to drive me from Rockefeller Centre to Harlem, some years before. I did not know what to do, or think. And then the chauffeur explained.

  “Mr. de Menil said I am to drive you to Yale.”

  One weekend, alone in the townhouse, I called a cousin through marriage, George Carter, a schoolteacher and a painter, who lived in Harlem.

  “Come and visit me, cuz.” It was a Friday night, about six o’clock, still in time for dinner.

  “Where’re you?” he wanted to know. “When did you get into the city?”

  “I am on Park Avenue, in a townhouse …”

  He did not let me finish.

  “Get-outta town, nigger! Shee-it! This nigger ain’t coming downtown, brother. Park Avenue did you say? This nigger’s safer in Harlem, cuz.”

  “There are some things I want to show you. As an artist, you’ll appreciate them. This place has four stories, and each floor is decorated in different period, furniture, and paintings in such good taste, and …”

  George would come, for a minute, since we were cousins, to take a peep at the paintings. I told the cook, the only member of the staff I thought I needed for the weekend, to prepare dinner for two. “Would you like appetizer, soup and main course, sir? What should I serve?”

  Medium-rare lamb chops, asparagus, spinach, spring tomatoes, split-pea soup, Boston lettuce, small tomatoes, garlic, olive oil. “And would you mind choosing the wines for us?”

  The doorbell went. George. I opened the door, and before he took the next step inside the darkened front hall, he said, “Shee-it! Did you break in here, brother?”

  We went up and down in the lift, one of those with the concertina door, that you close behind you, and then press a soft bell, and try to hear the noise of the pulleys, but cannot, because everything in this townhouse is soft and civilized and noiseless. On each floor, George showed his amazement and joy at the treasures in this magnificent house.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  We were on the second floor, going up. The furniture and the sculptures and the paintings he recognized.

  “Originals! Masterpieces, brother!”

  On the third floor, we entered a small sitting room, and sat round a table of polished mahogany with inlaid pearls, on which were two antique ashtrays, for people smoked in houses in those days. George took a cigarette. It was French. Gauloises Filters. His eyes took in the room.

  “God-damn!”

  He was holding an art book in his hand, turning the leaves in an almost absent-minded way, nodding as he recognized the pieces of ancient sculptures. And then he was pointing to an object. He touched the object, all the while pointing at the illustration of a piece of sculpture in the glossy-paged book.

  “Ain’t this a mother …?”

  The piece he was touching was the illustration he had been looking at in the art book.

  I could not believe my eyes. He could not believe his eyes.

  “This thing was made, or discovered in something-B.C.!”

  And we went down in the voiceless lift to the dining room, on the first floor, with a view of the sculpture garden, blessed in the soft shower of electric lights, bringing out breasts and limbs and torso, and the green leaves of plants surrounding them.

  I had indulged in a taste of Victorian manners and mannerism, and had asked the maid to place George at one end of the oblong mahogany dining table, and I at the other. I wanted him, as much as myself, to experience the distance in dining that men of wealth, or of cold demeanour, lived with at breakfast, luncheon, and dinner. George would know this. George would have experienced this: he came from good West Indian stock.

  We carried on the kind of conversation that Victorian gentlemen, and ladies, at dinner would engage in; and when it was over, when we had our salad and a glass of champagne “to cleanse the palate.” The maid asked, “Where would you like coffee to be served, sir?”

  “The library, please.”

  When I said, “please” I was unsure about the protocol to be used to household servants. Should I have said, “The library?” Or, “The library, thank you?”

  George knew as well as I did, that in this kind of refined atmosphere and environment, one takes one’s coffee in the library.

  I had never seen the library. I did not mind George knowing this. But I could not afford to have the maid know that I had never entered the library; did not know if there was a library; but was sure that in a house of this kind, with these art treasures, there was bound to be a library. The lift was still silent. There was some anxiety. I wanted to find the library and sit in the proper state of expectancy, before the maid entered it. The lift was made to stop at the floor above the dining room. I made a quick inspection of the room, and there was no library. On the next floor, in the murmurless lift, my spirits fell: I had one more floor left to investigate, and find a library. It was not on the second floor. Nor on the third. And the lift did not go higher. We were approaching the private apartments of the de Menils.

  We went back down to the second floor. And there it was. We had hardly sat in reading chairs and lifted a book, any book, to give the impression that we were cool, when the maid as silent as the lift, entered the library. On her tray were espresso coffee in demi-tasse cups, and two large crystal snifters. I could smell the rich, seductive strength of the Armagnac Monluc, VSOP…

  I was teaching in the summer of 1969, at the School of Letters, Indiana University, when the call came from Jean de Menil, in Paris, inviting me to Houston, Texas, because “Norman’s going to be there, writing a piece on the launching on the moon, for Life magazine, and it would be good to see the launching ourselves …”

  I was working on a short story in the Wilmington humidity, restless because of it, worried to be told by one of my black students doing graduate work in black aesthetics, that “the motherfucking Klan was born in Bloomington-Indiana, Jack, this ain’t no shit, Brother!” Wondering if they would take it upon themselves to march from the “nine miles from here” and occupy the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. Or if the Indiana State Police and National Guard would do it for them. On the campus this summer, there were six blacks: two women, and four men, and me, and we formed a little society to protect ourselves from the humid Bloomington humidity and from boredom. The short story was not going well, and it was in the midst of this torment of trying to make sense of the words that the telephone call came from Paris, from Jean, to visit him in Houston. I tried to shuffle out of the obligation by informing him that travel by plane from Bloomington to Chicago, then to Atlanta, then to Houston was not only precarious because of the small planes necessary to hook up to the larger planes, planes that “rattle and shake” like flimsy kites in the Barbados wind, but that I was busy with my work and with my graduate seminars. He would not have no for an answer, and with Parisian skill and diplomacy, he sent a special delivery note to my uncomfortable apartment on the brink of the campus, a section that seemed to be in the middle of a forest. And as I got to know my surroundings and environment, it turned o
ut that I was indeed living in the middle of a forest. The Klan, nine miles away, had the necessary camouflage to attack me any moment of the deepened black nights so peculiar to the South. I thought of Macbeth and Duncan and the three weird sisters, and the prediction of invincibility and duplicity in language.

  “Be bloody, bold, and resolute,” the Second Apparition assures Macbeth, “laugh to scorn/The power of man, for none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth.” Macbeth ignored the caution and wisdom of believing an “apparition” who went on to give stronger, more curried assurances: “Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until/Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill/Shall come against him.”

  Who, murderous king, struggling writer, superstitious leader of men going into battle would worry his head over the possibility that the “Apparition’s” reassurance, that his safety and invincibility lay in the unnaturalness of walking forests? Still, with the Klan just nine miles down the street, I could not be certain that they would not turn themselves into trees and tree trunks with the green camouflage, and come after me …

  But these were unreasonable thoughts. I really did not want to take the long flight from Bloomington-Indiana to Houston-Texas, Texas being the most reprehensible state I had heard about, from the point of view and the mouths of runaway slaves, and those who did not have to run away but had lived through that plantation horror.

  Jean’s letter said, “Don’t worry about the complicated flights, my jet shall come to get you at Bloomington, like a breeze!” The exclamation mark was most functional. And conspicuous. I fell for that punctuation mark. I told my students, who spread the news throughout the summer school classes, that “their professor” was going to Texas on a private jet.