The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones

by Amiri Baraka

  At the same time I had begun a long prose work. It was as if I wanted to shake off the stylistic shackles of the gang I’d hung with and styled myself after. I consciously wrote as deeply into my psyche as I could go. I didn’t even want the words to “make sense.” I had the theme in my mind. My early life, in Newark, at Howard, in the air force, but the theme was just something against which I wanted to play endless variations. Each section had its own dynamic and pain. Going so deep into myself was like descending into hell. I called it The System of Dante’s Hell.

  I would focus on my theme and then write whatever came into my mind as a result of that focus. I called them (later) “association complexes.” I was tearing away from the “ready-mades” that imitating Creeley or Olson provided. I’d found that when you imitate people’s form you take on their content as well. So I scrambled and roamed, sometimes blindly in my consciousness, to come up with something more essential, more rooted in my deepest experience. I thought of music, I thought of myself as an improvising soloist. I would go into almost a trancelike state, hacking deeper and deeper, my interior rhythms dancing me on. Only in the last section is there what I called “fast narrative,” something approaching a conventional narrative. It was almost like what Césaire had said about how he wrote Return to My Native Land. That he was trying to break away from the heavy influence that French Symbolist poetry had on him. So he decided to write prose to stop writing poetry. And what he came up with was a really profound new poetry, showing how even the French language could be transformed by the Afro-Caribbean rhythms and perception. (Though I did not find this out about Césaire until almost twenty years later!)

  I wrote in jagged staccato fragments until at the end of the piece I had come to, found, my own voice, or something beginning to approximate it. We were also going through the process of moving. Another little girl child had been born, Lisa, so we had two little girl babies. We were moving to East 14th Street, between First and Second Avenues, into a terrible though huge barnlike apartment over a Gypsy storefront. It was not the sleek, quiet West Side apartment in Chelsea. We moved into the grimy East Side just before the still vague East Village changed abruptly into Chelsea East. Our lease had run out on West 20th Street. The rent had been high for us in the first place, but now I had also gotten fired from my job for having gone off to Cuba. I had to get back on unemployment, so there was no way we could support West 20th Street.

  It was a weird time for me altogether, what with the political impulses the Cuba trip had set in motion. There was an unused metal sign over the Gypsies’ place on which in some critical moment in U.S.-Cuban relations I’d painted “Cuba Si-Yanqui No!”

  When I finished Dante’s Hell, it was Lucia to whom I thought I should show it, and she thought it should be published immediately. I also showed it to a friend, John Fles, who was publishing a one-shot anthology of new work, along with Artaud, whom Fles dug. It was called The Trembling Lamb. I felt, then, that I was in motion, that my writing, which I’d been deadly serious about, was now not just a set of “licks” already laid down by Creeley, Olson, etc., but was moving to become genuinely mine. I felt that I could begin to stretch out, to innovate in ways I hadn’t thought of before. And in all my poetry which comes out of this period there is the ongoing and underlying contention and struggle between myself and “them” that poetry and politics, art and politics, were not mutually exclusive.

  Lana wanted to be a “mistress.” She took that as a real identity, Brook Farm, I’d thought before, when I discovered the Nellie-Luke Sashimi hookup.

  When I discovered that Luke and Nellie were still seeing each other, I just left, moved out, and Lana, a young dancer I’d met, wanted me to move in with her. Lucia didn’t know what the hell I was doing, but she was half hip to the Lana scam, so we were not as close as before. I’d picked up the phone one day and it was Luke, maybe drunk, trying to disguise his Asian accent, like an alligator “disguised” in a tuxedo.

  Nellie had started work again at the Sectarian Review and we’d hired a West Indian woman to watch the kids all day, while Nellie worked and I wrote. But now I just split. I said a few words to Nellie, gathered my shit, and was gone. Luckily I had found a place to sublet that was just three blocks up the street on East 17th Street, in an elevator building, one of the old luxury-type apartments. A young white piano player who was working with Jackie McLean was splitting and he wanted to get rid of the place, so I leaped on it. It was a nice little three-room spot, between Second and Third Avenues, the only run-down-looking building in a block of extremely high-priced luxury apartments.

  Lana started coming around to that apartment, spending the night (when she wasn’t hooked up to Butler). She was hinting that she wanted to move in with me, but I wasn’t hearing those hints. The solitude, being a young man with some knowledge of the town now, not thrown back and forth at the whim of whoever as guides, was sweet.

  During this period, I’d tried to start a group known as the Organization of Young Men (OYM). It was one fledgling effort at building some political consciousness downtown. And not so strangely, it was all black. Not that I’d planned it that way, but that is who was in it. And not so strangely, almost all of those in it had white wives or lovers. Archie Shepp, Steve Cannon, Leroy McLucas, Walter Bowe, Harold Cruse, Calvin Hicks, A. B. Spellman, Bobb Hamilton, and a few other folks. We weren’t certain just what we wanted to do. It was more like a confirmation of rising consciousness. We issued at least one statement, but the sense of it was that we knew it was time to go on the offensive in the civil rights movement. We did not feel part of that movement. Most of us were isolated now from the mainstream of the black community and we did not reflect, in an undistorted

  way, that consciousness. Our consciousness, in the main, was that of young black intellectuals “integrated” to within a hair’s breadth of our life.

  We talked vaguely about going “uptown” to work. But what work we did not really understand. We had a few meetings, but then Calvin Hicks had already organized a stronger, somewhat more experienced group, the name of which came to be On Guard. It was the same kind of group, mainly black intellectuals living downtown, many of whom were married to or “going with” white women. And in that organization, it was an unwritten rule that our wives, lovers, etc., weren’t to go uptown with us. The exception to this was Hicks’ wife, who was explained as “an Egyptian,” though to the untrained or spontaneous eye, she looked extremely white.

  Finally, after a few clandestine visits back to East 14th Street, I abruptly decided to go back. Why? I can’t really say. Perhaps a sense of family, a feeling of being somehow insecure living “by myself,” or whatever. But I came back, to much hand wringing and moaning from Lana and the old goodbye to some others.

  The West Indian woman was still “minding” the children while I tried to write. One time she took them to the park that is part of the Stuyvesant Town apartments, and while sitting on a bench next to many black “governesses” with their lily-white charges, she was asked did those children live in the complex. These security guards knew they didn’t, because at the time Stuyvesant Town was lily white. So they asked Miss Brown to leave!

  I had also become a part of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee under Richard Gibson’s urging. And this brought me further into the world of political commitment. It was as if I had two distinct lives, one a politically oriented life, with a distinct set of people I knew and talked to, the other the artsy bohemian life of the Village.

  Zazen had come, finally, to an end. So Lucia and I began to put out a small newsletter, which would come out monthly or thereabouts, called The Fleeting Bear. It published poetry, reviews, snippets of essays, fiction, and was distributed to whoever wanted it for a contribution of one kind or another.

  Working with the On Guard people, I would go uptown. We had opened a small office on 125th Street and got involved in a few struggles. The most important battle we took up was when the government tried to frame Rob Williams. We set up
a committee, the Monroe Defense Committee, to raise money and put out propaganda about the case. We ran into trouble with the Socialist Workers Party, which wanted to have some grip on the group. I was very naive about sectarian left politics and didn’t really understand what was going on. All I knew is that the SWP wanted to put a woman named Berta Greene on the MDC and Richard Gibson was always complaining about the SWP and, particularly, Berta Greene as interfering obstructionists to the work he was trying to do with Fair Play. We met one day at my house on 14th Street. Calvin, Virginia Hamilton, Archie, and some others and SWP people gave us a check for a couple hundred dollars and wanted to talk about Berta’s being an officer on the committee. We went into secret caucus and subsequently told them we didn’t want Berta on the committee. So SWP took their check back. What was so wild was that some of us were talking about how we didn’t want white people on the committee but we were all hooked up to white women and the downtown Village society. Such were the contradictions of that period of political organization.

  But Rob’s frame-up brought us into that struggle in a big way. We put out a little publication called In/Formation, which talked about the case and which we began to distribute mostly downtown. We had the uptown office, but most of us (all of us) still lived downtown.

  The SWP started a rival defense committee, as they usually do when they cannot steer things their way. So the two defense committees struggled with each other and at the same time we were trying to get out information about Rob’s case. I became a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and eventually chairman of the New York chapter. I started also to speak at different places around the city about Cuba and also the Williams case. Both these issues had caught the imagination of a certain sector of young people of my generation — harbingers of things to come. I began meeting a lot of different kinds of people than the sequestered artistic types I’d been running with, but I was still very much a part of a downtown art scene, though the positions and opinions I was beginning to take were always opposed by most of my artsy world. “Cuba Libre” was reprinted by the Fair Play Committee right after it appeared in Evergreen Review late in 1960.

  In some ways the East 14th Street apartment was the scene of even larger bashes than those on West 20th Street. The West 20th Street sets were, in the main, in-house kinds of things — close cutthroat friends. On East 14th Street we had one New Year’s Eve party that looked like it had half the Village there. And there was not only anything people wanted to drink or smoke (and whatever they wanted to snort somewhere in one of the rooms) but we had taken to buying these amyl nitrate capsules, which were normally used to revive heart attack victims. Cracking the glass tube inside a bright yellow net and whiffing that boy gave one of the oddest kinds of instant high. It made things hilarious (do people with heart attacks feel instantly sad?), but its effects were very short lived — perhaps a minute. For this reason people were always whipping out the yellow-clothed capsule, popping it, and falling all over cracking up. People who didn’t know what was happening thought we were nuts.

  The Fleeting Bear was coming out regularly and became the talk of our various interconnected literary circles. It was meant to be “quick, fast, and in a hurry.” Something that could carry the zigs and zags of the literary scene as well as some word of the general New York creative ambience. Lucia and I were very serious about it, sending it to anyone who wanted it or who we thought should get it and asking for any contribution they wanted to give. Usually that meant people might drop a dollar on you when you couldn’t possibly have “charged” a dollar for that skimpy little thing. But the publication had real impact and influence and was greatly talked about. And though it had a regular circulation of about 300, those 300 were sufficiently wired for sound to project the Bear’s presence and “message” (of a new literature and a new criticism) in all directions.

  Fleeting Bear 9, however, got another response. We were sending it to a couple of people in the slam and the authorities intercepted that issue, which contained Burroughs’ take-off on Roosevelt, called “Routine: Roosevelt after the Inauguration” (an excerpt from Naked Lunch), plus a dramatic section of my own Dante called “The Eighth Ditch,” about a homosexual rape in the army. In the middle of the night (about 3 A.M.) treasury agents, FBI, and police showed at East 14th Street. I was awakened with these nabs standing over my head. Nellie told them not to wake the children and they threatened to arrest her. One of them asked me, “Is that your wife?” Just to show that they did not like the interracial business.

  I was being charged with sending obscene materials through the mail. So you can see that certainly was another day, just a little over thirty years ago. The words used in those two pieces can probably be found in most films released now. I was locked up but got a lawyer, and when Lucia turned herself in later, we were both released on our own recognizance.

  I defended myself before the grand jury, however. I read all the good parts of Joyce’s Ulysses and Catullus aloud to the jury and then read Judge Woolsey’s decision on Ulysses, which described obscene literature as being arousing “to the normal person.” I went on, saying, “But I know none of you [grand jury] were aroused by any of these things.” They dismissed the case.

  During those East 14th Street days, Timothy Leary showed up. He was teaching up at Harvard and doing research on hallucinogens; he and another guy (Alpert) who became a guru and changed his name to Baba Ram Dass. Leary was floating around the downtown artistic community handing out the drug psilocybin, also called “the magic mushroom,” to get the reaction of writers and painters and dancers and musicians to hallucinogenic drugs. LSD was a later development of this same stuff.

  I had my reservations about taking that bullshit. My rationale was that while traditional drugs (bush, scag, cocaine) were OK with me, I didn’t know anything about this kind of shit Leary was pushing. But I went for it anyway and took some of it. I was high about eight hours! And then when I thought I was down I had a relapse. The shit made stuff seem like it was jumping around on my desk and in the house. Papers, pictures, furniture all would suddenly leap to another spot or jump up and down. After a while I began begging to come down (in my head). And then aloud: “I wish this shit would go away!” Finally, it was late at night and I thought I had shook the shit off. So I went for a walk up First Avenue, which was just a block away. When I got up in the 20s, suddenly I started hearing these wild screams and moans. “Goddammit, that shit is back again. Goddammit!” I was whining out loud, but then I looked up and I was walking right near Bellevue and it was the noise the nuts were making. I never used it again, Leary or not!

  I had gotten together enough poems for a first book and was thinking of publishing it through Totem. But I hit on an idea of getting Ted Wilentz and his brother, Eli, who ran the Eighth Street Bookstore, to co-publish with us. They had started a publishing company, Corinth Books, to publish a book that Eli had done on New York City history. Ted was a good friend of Allen Ginsberg and generally a warm and fairly knowledgeable person about the new literary scene, since people were always coming into his place mashing new stuff on him to sell out of his store. We’d always got a good response with Zazen and the Totem books and he carried much of the new literature from all over the country. So in 1961 my first book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, was published.

  The Totem-Corinth collaboration published a number of significant books. Empty Mirror, early poems by A.G.; Myths and Texts, Gary Snyder; Like I Say, Philip Whalen; Second Ave., Frank O’Hara; Hands Up, Ed Dorn; Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Kerouac; Gilbert Sorrentino’s Black and White. Plus Totem, by itself, published Max Finstein’s Savonarola’s Tune and Charles Olson’s seminal work, Projective Verse, which was for many of us the manifesto of a new poetry.

  But soon we had to move again. This time the landlords wanted to tear down the old building to make way for a new apartment complex. So the apartment-hunting routine had to begin again. I was still not doing anything but writing. Nel
lie still worked for the Sectarian Review, so that was the steady money; other than that, there was, for a time, my unemployment check. Then only some other very little bits and pieces. I was doing articles on music for Metronome in its new reemergence and that provided a few pennies here and there. I had even had a cover article, “Blues, Black and White America,” which tried to look at the music from a historical perspective. The editors wanted to come on more radical than the dreary Downbeat. One of the editors was a friend of Lenny Bruce’s. The cover of the issue in which I had the big article showed a white referee on a football field kicking a black baby over the goalposts!

  But I was writing reviews consistently for Metronome, and another publication was initiated, first by Marc Schleifer and later by Lita Hornick, called Kulchur. The title was taken from Pound’s title A Guide to Kulchur. Schleifer was a young Jew who had come out of the University of Pennsylvania as an arch-conservative, then was transformed by the various Village forces and became more radical than most of my other colleagues. He was later to interview Rob Williams in Monroe and publish the introduction to the first edition of Rob’s important work Negroes with Guns, which was one of the first contemporary statements in support of black self-defense. Schleifer also went to Cuba later and, finally, during the intense period of estrangement between certain blacks who had been living downtown and their erstwhile white friends, Schleifer went to Algeria, then Egypt, changed his name to Abdullah, and became a Muslim!

  Lita Hornick was the wife of Morton (“Mortie”) Hornick, who was, when I met him, the president of the Young Presidents Club, whose members had to be presidents of large corporations before they got to be thirty. He died a few years ago. They lived up on Park Avenue, but Lita had a literary interest (which she still maintains), and becoming familiar with the Beat scene and with people like Frank O’Hara and myself, she decided she wanted to buy Marc’s magazine. For a time, Schleifer continued as editor, then Mrs. Hornick took over. Sorrentino was poetry editor; O’Hara was arts editor; I was music editor. The magazine was more focused on commentary than poetry or fiction, though it did have a drama issue, which I edited. And while there was no money being made, it offered still another vehicle for expression of our broad common aesthetic. It allowed us to resume our attack on the academy, for instance, at an even higher level than Zazen provided. Plus, our editorial meetings at the Hornicks’ were always a treat for us downtown frayed-at-the-edges semi-bohemians passing into the Park Avenue pad to view some sho nuff wealth. Mortie Hornick and I always had a running banter going, he needling me because he knew I always talked against the rich, and me accepting the needling good-naturedly, but still adding a little doo doo in the contest.