They entered the hall. A bevy of faces rushed up to meet them, all of Cosima’s and Mary Ann’s friends, in long pale organdies and taffetas and crepes, smiling, sparkling, with exclamations of congratulations and dramatic undertones of surprise, while he stood amid them covered with confusion subsumed by a feeling of blasphemy, of sacrilege, that such merriment should take place in the presence of the martyred dead. He looked stealthily around to see if she were there, but before he could complete his survey, he felt himself being swept away and flung into the midst of another group. Mary Ann showed her corsage to all her friends and flaunted her triumph he thought suddenly. He felt sick in the stomach. He felt dizzy. He made an attempt to escape.
“Come on, Mary Ann,” he said, “let’s dan —” but before he could utter the words, she let out a delighted squeal and ran toward the corner where she stood, alone: in a wine-colored organdy dress with a hooped skirt and a long stole of the same color draped over her shoulders. She looked as though she might have stepped out of another century, a lovely century peopled with beautiful, sad ladies who had suffered with dignity in the hands of misfortune, some queen whose king had abandoned her through some unavoidable importunity of fate, one to whom “something had happened.” Moved by the impact of his thought, a sense of fatality stole upon him and forced him to try to measure up to the tragic import of the moment.
“Oh, Cosima! I’m so happy!” Mary Ann was saying, throwing her arms around her. “Look!” thrusting forward the austere corsage on her shoulder. The gardenias looked so white, as though they had been compressed of the purest snow, the flesh of snow, at the feet of the ice-laden trees. Cosima kissed Mary Ann on the cheek without smiling, at which instant her gaze met his. It was as cold as death!
He and Mary Ann were moving away. While they were dancing he noticed that Cosima’s father had reappeared. No one asked her to dance. She danced with her father, a tall, lean, thin-boned man with sensuous pink lips, who looked at the world through the slits of spectacled eyes, as they turned about, she like a moth imprisoned by the flame, the bright globes burning in the ceiling reflecting in the polished rims of his glasses.
They went home early. He caught a glimpse of her — behind Mary Ann’s ear — just as her stole whisked through the door.
After that Mary Ann’s ebullience became oppressive, the dance grew tiresome, the gardenias on her shoulder began to wither in the heat, to be crushed in the jostle of the dance. Finally the last piece had been played and the senior class had filed out of the hall in pairs. The “hip cats” were going to a nightclub and have a “ball,” and the “squares” were going home. Mary Ann leaned heavily on his shoulder, smiling a dreamy smile. As he slipped her wrap over her shoulders, she fell back into his arms and turned her face to his — under the staircase near the main entrance, they were alone.
Now? her eyes seemed to whisper.
He beheld her with an expression of hatred that he struggled to disguise by planting a feeble kiss upon her lips. Then he grabbed her by the arm and fled to the safety of the waiting limousine, she laughing all the while as though she were drunk, or a little mad.
He often saw them together during the few remaining days of the semester, but now they both avoided him. Something had happened, he knew, but why isn’t she mad at Mary Ann, too! And then: Boom! COSIMA KNEW IT ALL THE TIME!
In his despair he tried to console himself with the thought that actually she did love him, but had sacrificed him to the will of her father, the will of the white niggers! he added bitterly. Gradually a subtle hope fired his imagination and shone like a little sun upon the horizon of his consciousness in the form of the thought: This can’t be the end!… Somewhere … somehow.
Next Year! thundered a voice.
BOOM! retorted the shattering explosion from over the sea and over the sea and over the …
AFTERWORD
It’s a small miracle Such Sweet Thunder wasn’t lost to oblivion. Vincent Carter was living in Bern, Switzerland, when he completed the manuscript in 1963. He found a top-flight agent in New York who believed in the book and worked energetically to find a publisher. She sent many encouraging letters back to Vincent about this or that editor who loved the book but still needed to convince his or her colleagues to agree to take it on. No offer ever came. The book was too long, they said. It needed editing, which would require time and money. And even with further development and revision the chances for a commercial payoff would be too uncertain. By 1970 Vincent had given up on getting the manuscript published, and on the writer’s life, and he turned his attention to other passions. Long before this decision to set aside his typewriter, he had written to a friend in Paris, Herb Lottman, “I write in order to empty my form of its content so that I can stop dying and live once and for all.” Published or unpublished, the manuscript that would become Such Sweet Thunder had already achieved this purpose for him.
Though I think it’s fair to say that Vincent was Amerigo, Such Sweet Thunder is not memoir. It’s high art. Two of Vincent’s heroes were Shakespeare and Duke Ellington. He dedicated his book to Ellington because the Duke’s example was a major inspiration and influence. He wanted to achieve in literature what Ellington had been doing in music for decades, celebrating and embracing a mix of styles that he loved and admired, from classical to African American traditions and innovations to European modernism. But Vincent’s approach did not fit well with what New York publishing houses were looking for from black writers during the angry ’60s. In fact some of the best and widely read black American fiction writers of the day, such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, were producing stinging works of nonfiction on the topic of race. Vincent’s work mounted no protest, though the content of his fiction makes clear that he was a “race man” to his core.
The only book Vincent Carter managed to publish during his lifetime was The Bern Book: A Record of a Voyage of the Mind, a memoir of being the only black man in Bern during the 1950s. It’s a daybook of digressions, filled with observations, insights, and personal biases. The Bern Book makes clear Vincent’s devotion to art to the exclusion of social commentary. A recurring theme is his inability, even in the relative isolation of his self-imposed Bernese exile, to escape the human insistence to freight so many considerations with race-based judgments. Goaded by his Swiss friends’ idealization of work songs and spirituals as “pure” expressions of the “true” nature of the Negro, Vincent writes: “The art of Marian Anderson represents the acme of what the Negro’s expression can reach. But what I have just said is ridiculous, for if this great lady can elevate Negro music to the level of ‘fine’ art, how then can I confine her excellence to her race? Is it not the main attribute of a work of art that it transcends itself through the very medium which it employs to express itself?”
Though completed in 1957, The Bern Book would not be published until 1973, and even then without much notice or circulation. It found its publisher by virtue of an essay written by the aforementioned Herb Lottman, who had become a biographer and culture critic, and published in 1970 in the journal Cultural Affairs. The essay was all about Vincent and called “The Invisible Writer.” If The Bern Book hadn’t been published, I’d never have heard of Vincent, and you wouldn’t be holding Such Sweet Thunder in your hands now. An author friend of mine came upon a copy of The Bern Book in a secondhand bookstore and alerted me to it, because I, like Vincent, am from Kansas City, and in it Vincent makes mention of his boyhood.
Lottman’s 1970 essay served as the foreword to The Bern Book. In it he described the novel Vincent had completed in 1963 but had never gotten published, despite its having been passed around in typescript and greatly admired by a number of expatriate American writers and artists living in Europe. He wrote that when he had shown it to Richard Wright’s widow, she could hardly find words for her enthusiasm. “She finally said that such a tableau of childhood by a black man had never been done before.” Herb extolled the work’s musical prose, its Faulknerian humor. But it was a big bo
ok, he reported, and he feared for it because of its length. What happened to that manuscript? I wondered. Did it still exist? I had to try to find it, and the hunt was on.
I located Herb in Paris in the summer of 2001. He informed me that Vincent had died in 1983, and that he had dumped his Vincent Carter file years before when moving between apartments. Vincent had never married or had children and was an only child. So if the manuscript survived the best bet for finding it might be to try to track down any members of Vincent’s extended family in K.C. Herb said that meanwhile he’d write to others who had known Vincent in Europe, and for whom he still had contact information. During the ensuing three months my efforts to locate Vincent’s family through the Kansas City Star archives and Kansas City Public Library were fruitless. Just about when I was ready to give up, a fax came whirring in from Herb in Paris. A Swiss friend had contacted a friend in Pennsylvania who contacted a friend in Greece who remembered the name of Vincent’s girlfriend in Bern, Liselotte Haas, and of the yoga studio she had run. The phone number for the yoga studio was still in the Bern telephone directory. One of my co-workers who is from Germany dialed the number, and Liselotte answered. A few days later, via FedEx, I held in my hands an 805-page yellowed manuscript. It had been in a box under a bed, unread, for more than thirty years.
I read Such Sweet Thunder with the most exhilarating sense of discovery I have ever experienced from a manuscript. I found Vincent’s rendition of the way in which Amerigo views the world at each stage of his development, how he yearns for understanding and acceptance, and above all how he experiences the love and discipline of his parents, Viola and Rutherford, all to be pitch-perfect. Amerigo immediately became real to me, as desirous and deserving of tenderness and opportunity as any child. And Vincent’s depiction of the vibrant, jostling, mysterious, fascinating surroundings rich with warmth and fun, danger and uncertainty in which Amerigo must find his way amounted to a fictional world apart as enveloping, compelling, and unforgettable as any I knew in literature. In its most accomplished moments the manuscript achieved the transcendent quality Vincent had so admired in the efforts of others and described in The Bern Book, that “perfect balance of form and content.”
True to the personal aesthetic he articulated in his memoir, Carter had produced a novel that was not overtly preoccupied with questions of race. As a very young boy, Amerigo is just discovering, and not really understanding, racial prejudice. At the same time he is also learning about sexuality, love, art, literature, and life itself — the standard themes of the European bildungsroman. Amerigo is a dreamer, and yet it is clear that many of his dreams will go unfulfilled, not because of who he is but because of the color of his skin. This reality is abundantly clear to the reader, and to the adults who love, protect, and guide Amerigo. In time, Amerigo starts to grapple this weighty fact of life too. As for Carter’s own dreams, around the time he decided to set aside Such Sweet Thunder he wrote to Herb Lottman, “One day we’ll find a publisher who is right for us. But if we don’t nothing will have been lost, for the thoughts will have been thought just the same.”
When Steerforth Press published the first hardcover edition of Such Sweet Thunder in 2003, we copyedited the manuscript with the lightest possible hand and published it in its entirety, even though we knew that if Vincent were still alive we would have insisted on cuts and revisions. Vincent had been so precise in his selection of every word that we didn’t want to fiddle with his creation before presenting it to the world complete. Besides, the novel contained numerous scenes of such perfection and literary moments so sublime that we considered the work to be a truly great book, even with its flaws.
Then the reviews came, and as the cover and inside front pages of this volume reveal, they teemed with high praise. But they also almost universally expressed the opinion that the book’s opening, which introduced Amerigo as a soldier in an encampment in France in World War II, was inferior to the rest of the book and didn’t “work.” And that the pages that followed, in which the reader experiences the sights and sounds of Amerigo’s life from the viewpoint of a newborn, infant, and toddler were disorienting. “Reading these pages,” one reviewer said in Newsday, “is like trying to make one’s way through a multi-vehicle accident on a single lane highway. It’s possible that many of those long-ago editors and publishers gave up on the book before they started.
“But then, somewhere past 40, maybe 45 pages, something magical happens,” the reviewer continued. “The book takes us into its arms and transports us back in time.” This paperback version begins precisely on what had been page 45 of the hardcover edition, so that the reader immediately enters the Jones’s apartment, Amerigo’s world. Other scenes that caused the story to sag in places have been cut, along with subsequent references back to the excised passages. But the words that remain and the euphony of the prose are all Vincent’s.
The one substantive change we made before publishing the hardcover edition, with the support of Liselotte Haas, who is in fact Vincent’s literary executor, and others who knew Vincent, was to impose a title on the book that was not of Vincent’s choosing. He had intended to call it “The Primary Colors.” Hints to why he had chosen this title can be found throughout the text: There’s the treasured glass star that Old Jake gives to Amerigo near the beginning and that he carries in his pocket through the years. “He took the star and held it up in the air as the old man had done so that the sunlight shone through it, reflecting brilliant points of red, green, yellow, and blue light from its beveled edges, just like the rainbow!” And there is Amerigo’s first visit with his school class to the art gallery, where he learns to observe the color of things, and is inspired to return again and again on his own. And then of course there’s the obvious overarching connection: the book’s entire focus is on a boy’s primary years in an era when one’s color, or race, was distressingly determinative. But we chose instead to publish Vincent’s work under the title “Such Sweet Thunder,” and we hope, but will never know, that he would have approved. We think it fits the work in many ways, and it connects Vincent to two of his heroes. Duke Ellington, with Billy Strayhorn, used “Such Sweet Thunder” for the title of their 1957 tribute suite to Shakespeare. It’s a phrase taken from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hippolyta says, “The skies, the fountains, every region near / Seem’d all one mutual cry. I never heard / So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”
Chip Fleischer
Publisher
Hanover, New Hampshire
Such Sweet Thunder Page 55