And then there is Henry, who at all times in the book is presented as a sensible foil to West’s more alluring matters of pure sentiment. An illustrative episode occurs when at one point West and her husband get into a discussion of literature with a Croatian poet, who tried to insist that Joseph Conrad and Jack London were writers superior to the more traditional “literary” types like Shaw, Wells, Péguy, and Gide:
They wrote down what one talks in cafés, which is quite a good thing to do if the talk is good enough, but is not serious, because it deals with something as common and renewable as sweat. But pure narration was a form of great importance [the Croatian poet felt], because it gathered together experiences that could be assimilated by others of poetic talent and transmuted into higher forms.
Henry offers a wan rejection of this (“Conrad has no sense of tragedy at all”), but it is the poet’s continuing opinions that West goes on to quote at length and, one might even suspect, adopt.
The reviews of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, were to say the very least quite flattering. In the New York Times, it was praised somewhat curiously as “a most brilliantly objective travel book,” even as the reviewer credited its genius specifically to the fact that it was written by “one of the most gifted and searching of the modern English novelists and critics.” In the New York Herald Tribune, the reviewer wrote, “This is the only book I have read since the war began which is life size, which has a stature of its own comparable to the crisis through which the world is moving.”
That last remark was important. When Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was published, Pearl Harbor was still a couple of months off; America was still feeling quite safe from the tumult of Europe. For most Europeans, the war was not something to be compared to a thrilling book. By the time Black Lamb appeared, it was the all-consuming fact of daily life.
West and her husband spent the war quietly in England. Henry had been working for the Ministry of Economic Warfare since the beginning of the war in Europe in the fall of 1939. The couple had bought a manor in the country to live at, partially because they thought that if the worst came they could possibly “live to some extent on what we can grow.” From England she sent two dispatches to Harold Ross’s New Yorker. In them she referred to herself repeatedly as a housewife. Her travails during the war were not the stuff of Gibbon, she admitted, but she would never have wallpapered the new house if the price of wartime paint were not so high. Her lampshades were unsuitable only because they “send out rays that might cost us our lives, for my house stands on the top of a hill and might easily catch the eye of a cruising Dornier.” She was particularly attuned to the effect of the war on cats, beginning one piece with some remarks about her ginger tabby:
This crisis has revealed cats as the pitiful things they are—intellectuals who cannot understand the written or the spoken word. They suffer in air raids and the consequent migrations exactly as clever and sensitive people would suffer if they knew no history, had no previous warning of the nature of warfare, and could not be sure that those in whose houses they lived, on whose generosity they were dependent, were not responsible for their miseries. Had Pounce found himself alone in the house and free, he would probably have run out into the woods and not returned to the dangerous company of humans.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon had established West as a reporter of the first rank. She could not really put her journalistic tools to use until after V-day in Europe, but she then became the New Yorker’s chief correspondent on war trials. Trials were a good subject for West, since they consider both the case in front of them and the general principles of law, a move from specific to general not unlike the way West generally reasoned in her essays.
The first she covered was that of William Joyce, a man who had become known in England as Lord Haw-Haw. Joyce’s backstory was somewhat involved. He was born in America but spent his life in Ireland and later England as a die-hard Anglo-Irish nationalist. He joined Sir Oswald Mosley’s Fascist movement in the 1930s, then found himself in Germany in the fall of 1939. He became a propaganda broadcaster for the Nazis, whose broadcasts were played on English airwaves to hurt morale in England. His nickname came from the British papers; he was a reviled figure. Captured after the war, Joyce was put on trial for treason in England. West was among those who believed firmly that he deserved the death sentence he would eventually receive. She was eager to connect what she considered Joyce’s moral smallness with his physical stature: “He was a tiny little creature and, though not very ugly, was exhaustively so.” By the time she witnessed his hanging she was interested no longer in Joyce, but in what she thought were his victims: “An old man told me that he was there because he had turned on the wireless when he came back from seeing his grandchildren’s bodies in the mortuary after a V-1 explosion and had heard Haw Haw’s voice.”
The trials at Nuremberg, which West also covered for the New Yorker, presented somewhat more difficult questions for her. It was not that she liked the Nazis any better, but she used her pen to sketch them as ultimately not very menacing. On seeing Rudolf Hess, the deputy führer, she observed that he was “so plainly mad that it seemed shameful that he should be tried.” She wrote that Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor, was “very soft.” She was not quite making the argument, later made famous by Hannah Arendt, that certain of these officials were not evil in the traditional sense of the word. West was certain they were guilty of the crimes committed, she was not persuaded by the argument that these officials had only followed orders, and she said so quite directly:
It is obvious that if an admiral were ordered by a demented First Sea Lord to serve broiled babies in the officers’ mess he ought to disobey; and it was shown that these generals and admirals had exhibited very little reluctance to carry out orders of Hitler which tended towards baby-broiling.
The question of collective German guilt for the atrocities of the Nazis, which was to become one of the great moral and political questions of the second half of the twentieth century, was not of great interest to West in these early postwar writings. She had little to say about the Holocaust beyond the fact that it deserved punishment. Even then, she believed the Nazis deserved punishment for their conduct of war in general, and lumped “what they did to the Jews” under the general category of Nazi criminality.
This was a serious moral oversight. In part, it happened because as the trials dragged on, West’s attentions were turning away to Soviet Russia. She identified certain similar strains of thought in Nazism and Communism, and as early as the Joyce article she was sounding alarms:
There is a similarity between the claims of the Nazi-Fascists and the Communist-Fascists, and no less similarity between the methods of putting them forward. The claims depend on an unsound assumption that the man who possesses a special gift will possess also a universal wisdom which will enable him to impose an order on the state superior to that contrived by the consultative system known as democracy: which will enable him, in fact, to know other people’s business better than they do themselves.
Her preoccupation with Communism would take up much of the next forty years of her life and writing, although she did not keep to a single subject. She was sent to write about the king’s funeral, Democratic conventions, the trial, Whittaker Chambers, South Africa. She was called upon to remember the dead, as in a 1975 reminiscence of the suffragettes, whom she remembered as “extremely good-looking.” But the attention she could command had leveled out, stalled. Her alienation from leftist causes and her flighty style alienated her from the young up-and-coming writers of the 1940s and 1950s. She was a kind of crank to them, a relic from an earlier era.
Late in her life, West sensed this diminution of interest and felt it keenly. To a friend, she wrote, “If one is a woman writer there are certain things one must do—first, not be too good; second, die young, what an edge Katherine Mansfield has on all of us; third, commit suicide like Virginia Woolf. To go on writing and writin
g well just can’t be forgiven.’” She would write in that same painterly, chatty way of hers until the day she died. Her books would still receive acclaim, and in her later years she became a regular guest on intellectual talk shows. She was one of the only women who were considered experts on grave matters of state. But she made mistakes. Her obsession with anti-Communism was just one of them.
3
West & Hurston
In 1947, the New Yorker sent West to cover a lynching trial in Greenville, South Carolina. The assignment was her idea. On the night of February 16, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle had been abducted from the Pickens County jail, where he was being held on murder charges in the stabbing death of a white taxi driver. Circumstantial evidence had connected him to the killing. The taxi driver’s coworkers formed a mob and took Earle from the jail. They beat, stabbed, and shot him to death.
While lynchings in the United States had never truly ended, by the 1940s they were relatively rare. Earle’s case made headlines all over the Northeast. Newspapers eagerly reported gory claims about the condition of Earle’s body to shock their readers. One said his head had been “blasted to bits.” Another claimed the mob had ripped his heart from his body. There was perhaps something comforting to Northerners about reading these brutal details. Because they lived far away, they could use their shock as a form of self-congratulation. The savagery, they told themselves, was confined to the backward South.
Except as it turned out, the South was also conflicted about the death of Willie Earle. South Carolina then had a relatively new governor, Strom Thurmond, in office only a month. The Greenville lynching provoked a crisis for him. President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights was said to be watching the trial closely, though the FBI ultimately declined to investigate. In the end, thirty-one men were put on trial.
West, like most of the white intellectuals of her era, was appalled by the lynching. She saw it as the product of deeply entrenched racism. “It would, of course, be sheer nonsense to pretend that the men, whoever they were, were not affected in their actions by the color of Willie Earle’s skin,” she wrote. But West was at pains to convey what she evidently felt were the nuances of the situation. She wrote that she didn’t see a culture of white impunity in the face of black suffering. The defendants, by West’s measure, were seriously afraid they would be convicted. She diagnosed Earle as having “developed a great hostility to white men.” She wrote that the white men who had performed the lynching did not, evidently, enjoy it. She said they were moved by outraged friendship with the dead taxi driver rather than bloodlust. She quoted only one black person at length, and this black person made “a plea for the extension for the Jim Crow system.”
“There is nothing I wish for more,” he said, “than a law that would prohibit Negroes from riding in taxicabs driven by white men. They love to do it. We all love to do it. Can’t you guess why? Because it is the only time we can pay a white man to act as a servant to us.”
Where she saw racism, it was mostly impersonal, institutional. The court seats were segregated. The black journalists who had come to cover the trial were criticized for sitting among whites in the press area, so much so that they ultimately moved to the black seating area. She speculated that the lynch mob must have been less afraid of being prosecuted for the death of a black man than for a white one.
Her outrage had more direct targets. When a defense attorney said he wished more men like Willie Earle were dead, then added, “There’s a law against shooting a dog, but if a mad dog were loose in my community, I would shoot the dog and let them prosecute me,” West could not help herself. “A more disgusting incident cannot have happened in any court of law in any time.” Her offense at the proceedings, though, was an offense taken on the part of humanity. The words “racism” and “prejudice” do not appear in the piece.
West did recognize that the eventual acquittal of the defendants was unjust, that the celebrations of the defendants on hearing the verdicts were mere “rejoicing at a salvation that was actually a deliverance to danger.” She worried that the verdict would bring lawlessness, though it was mostly the conduct of blacks she seemed nervous about. She thought they did not “know what they were doing.” She also thought the trial in Greenville augured the end of lynching in the South, a prediction we now know to be wildly incorrect.
Perhaps the problem was West’s inexperience with the subject. In Greenville, West had waded into waters that were already better covered and understood by others, mainly black writers. The writings of Ida B. Wells, the black journalist who spent her life advocating against lynching, may have been half a century old, but her name was still widely known. And there were other black writers of the time, black writers who frequently appeared even in white newspapers, who better understood the circumstances of the South. Among them was Zora Neale Hurston.
Hurston had grown up in Eatonville, Florida, a black enclave in a racist state. A rebellious tomboy, she had left school early and spent eighteen months of her twenties acting as a maid to a performer in a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe. She would only receive her high school diploma at twenty-six, after which she attended Howard University. By 1925 she ended up, as many aspiring young black intellectuals did, in Harlem, where she quickly became a regular writer at black magazines like Opportunity and the Messenger.
Her breakthrough piece, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” was published in 1928. Hurston had not realized she was “colored,” she wrote, until she left Eatonville as a child. And she did not believe it tragic that she was. She could not join in the sorrow other black people felt on account of their race either, she said, for “I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” But twenty years into living in the white world, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” The intellectual situation in the America of her time, and for many years after, was a very white background. Newspapers and magazines were effectively segregated, even in the liberated North. Hurston’s work was covered by the major white newspapers—her books were all reviewed by the New York Times—but she was clearly considered first and foremost a black writer. And black writers were not invited to contribute to the New Republic, or the New Yorker. Making a living solely as a literary journalist would have been impossible for her.
So Hurston studied to be an anthropologist, eventually getting her PhD from Barnard College at Columbia. There she became a protégé of the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas, who had her measure skulls for him. Her work could then be called ethnography and supported by foundations. She would publish several folklore studies in her lifetime, most of them efforts to preserve black vernacular spoken in enclaves like Eatonville. Those voices would also surface in her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. She also explored the voodoo traditions of Jamaica and Haiti and recorded her findings in Tell My Horse.
This burgeoning career, however, came to a screeching halt in 1948 when her landlady’s son accused her of molesting him. After several months of proceedings, the boy recanted his accusation, but it hit the press, and the stress of it all made it difficult for Hurston to write. It didn’t help that her interest in the lives of black people did not align with the priorities of editors of magazines and publishing houses. “The fact that there is no demand for incisive and full-dress stories around Negroes above the servant class is indicative of something of vast importance to this nation,” she wrote in the 1950 essay “What White Publishers Won’t Print” for the Negro Digest.
Before she fell into obscurity completely, though, there was one story she had left to write. In 1953, Hurston was sent by the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper, to cover the trial of Ruby McCollum in Live Oak, Florida. She agreed, her biographer says, primarily because she needed the money. But evidently the facts of the crime drew her in too.
McCollum, who was black, was standing trial for the murder of a white man, Dr. C. Leroy Adams. There was absolutely no question that she had killed him. McCollum shot Adams in
his offices in front of several of his patients. Then she turned around, went home, and waited to be arrested. The question at the trial was not whether she had committed the crime, but why. It turned out there was some connection between the doctor’s services and McCollum’s husband’s bolita empire. (Bolita is a Spanish lottery game.)
It also turned out that one of McCollum’s four children was fathered by Adams. At the trial, she claimed he had repeatedly raped her, but she was not allowed by the judge to elaborate on the circumstances. After McCollum’s first trial, she was convicted of murder; at the second, she was permitted to enter a plea of insanity and spent several years of her life in a mental institution.
Hurston was able to attend only the first trial. Her editors at the Courier pumped up the drama of her pieces with sensational headlines, but she covered it with nuance and respect. She reported on the visions of the spectators, who told Hurston they saw McCollum’s spirit wandering around town with the head of an eagle and “a flaming sword in her hand.” When it came to McCollum’s story, she reproduced the court transcript, sometimes with her own annotations. When the prosecutor claimed that McCollum’s real reason for killing Adams was an unwillingness to pay her medical bills, Hurston repeated it.
The simple reprinting of the transcript does not make for inspiring reading. But Hurston seemed to be biding her time. After the trial was over, she produced a kind of short story about McCollum’s interior life. Printed by the Courier in ten installments, the series undoubtedly took liberties with the facts. Hurston wove a story of a brave, rebellious McCollum, who had ultimately “ruled the lives and fate of two strong men, one white, the other colored.” In her telling, McCollum was a woman not unlike herself: tomboyish, eager to be loved, lonely in a bad marriage to a man who cheated on her. Something about the case seemed to meld fact and fiction for Hurston; scholars have pointed out that Hurston even used lines she previously used in Their Eyes Were Watching God in the pieces.
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