by Jeff Sharlet
But most of all we’ve been talking about the light and the darkness that drive his work like pistons, the “love ethic”—“the most absurd and alluring mode of being in the world”—and the “death shudder.” Both have been with him almost as long as he can remember.
“Just all my life I’ve had death shudders. The sense of, of sheer feebleness and—and relative helplessness we human organisms experience in the face of the cosmos and the face of death and the face of despair.” His voice drops to a cool murmur. “All those things that rattle you, make you shudder and shiver and quiver.”
Death shudders and the famous black suit: a man in mourning. For what? One of West’s protégés, a professor of religious studies at Oberlin College named A. G. Miller, sees West’s suit as a tribute to W. E. B. DuBois, author of The Souls of Black Folk. West, like DuBois, is an investigator of what DuBois called “double-consciousness,” the black experience of being aware of both yourself and of who you seem to be through white eyes, the gaze defined as normal in America from Dubois’s days in the early twentieth century to ours in the early twenty-first. But West is fascinated by another, far-less-certain DuBois: Blanche, the protagonist of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, “the American Hamlet,” in West’s words. Blanche is a white Southern belle fallen on hard times and forced to move in with her sister and brutish brother-in-law, Stanley. She finds solace for a while in the arms of a workingman named Mitch, but she poisons the relationship with lies—she calls them “magic”—of a mythical past at odds with the truths of her morbid mind and her years of suffering. Tipped off by Stanley, Mitch confronts her, ripping a shade off a lamp to see her in the light of the bare bulb. “That wonderful moment,” West says, widening his eyes and rearing back in horror to play the part of an outraged Mitch: “Let me see who you really are!”
The suit, he says, is who he really is. But even that answer has layers of meaning. “It’s in emulation of Masha,” he continues, a protagonist of another favorite play, Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a drama of provincial manners set amid the Russian gentry. West identifies with the lonely woman at the heart of the story. “She’s wearing black, says she’s in mourning.” Her father has just died, she’s trapped in a pointless marriage with an uninteresting man. “But it’s even deeper than that. How do you make deep disappointment a constant companion and still persevere? There is this sense with Masha, when you see her in that black dress, of having a sad soul with a sweet disposition.” That, he believes, is the best balance we can achieve: sweetness within sorrow, a style he sees as the only honest foundation for hope. “That’s what I’m aiming for, brother.”
West was born on June 2, 1953, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa was the self-declared “Oil Capital of the World.” It had also been the site of America’s worst race riot, when tens or maybe hundreds of black citizens were murdered one night in May 1921, killings anticipated by a headline in a local paper that read, “To Lynch Negro Tonight.” When West was two, his father—“a PK,” says West, “a preacher’s kid”—moved the family to Topeka, Kansas, so he could study biology at Washburn College in the hope of becoming a dentist. Cornel’s older brother, Clifton, was one of two African Americans in the first kindergarten class after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka desegregation decision, which began in his school.
In 1958 the family moved to Sacramento, a civil service town of sleepy jobs and no great riches, where West’s father had been hired as a civilian administrator in the air force. There they lived in a new house in the black suburb of Glen Elder. It was a slice of small-town America: Friday nights were for all-ages dance parties—“Corn has the gift of gyrating hips,” says his brother, “a funkified kind of cat”—and Sunday mornings were for church. The Saturdays in between were for baseball. His mother, Irene, read him poetry and played him records, Nat King Cole, crooners. “White” was the color of Donald Duck’s feathers, the cowboys on Bonanza. “I don’t want it to sound idyllic, but it was.”
Then Cornel went to school. Glen Elder was one of three black neighborhoods in Sacramento, each cut off from the rest of the city. To get to school the Glen Elder kids had to cross a creek. There were two options: They could walk over a rickety wooden footbridge or they could wait for a lull in the traffic and dash across the main bridge, which had no sidewalks or guard rails and was high enough over the water to make a fall life-threatening. “If a truck came the same time you were on the bridge,” says West, “you’d go under.” His neighborhood had no streetlights, no public transportation. But it was the bridge that educated him. “You could just see the racial politics. You could see Jim Crow.”
“There’s a signature moment we all go through in life when we have to step out of this box of fear where we’re at,” Cliff West says. “That bridge was Corn’s moment. He was five years old and alone, and he had to go across the bridge. And he did it. Lot of us older kids didn’t want to do it, but he did it. That was his moment of stepping out into nothing, and landing on something.”
Cornel remembers it differently. “That was the first death shudder,” he says, fifty-one years removed from that day and still shaken by it, rocking in his chair, his voice a whisper. He’s felt them ever since. “After that it’s just a matter of imagining what nonexistence is like, what life is like after bodily extinction.”
West kept those ideas to himself. “It was a strange sensibility for a kid. I just think that most people had other things on their mind. You didn’t want to distract them or irritate them by sharing these kinds of thoughts that I was having.”
The following year the city built a new school—on the black side, for black children. West understood what was happening. Summer trips to see his grandparents in Texas and Oklahoma made it plainer. “We sat on the back of the bus,” remembers Cliff. “Couldn’t look people in the eye.”
“I had a rage, man,” says Cornel. He began fighting almost every day. He’d line kids up and go down the row, relieving them of their milk money. “Everyone in the neighborhood knew I’d be going to jail.” When he was eight, he beat another boy so badly he nearly killed him. “I was a gangster.” The first time he clashed with a teacher was in second grade, for no good reason. A year later he did it again. This time it changed his life. “That one”—West’s second rebellion—“was morally inclined,” says Cliff.
The family had just returned from Texas. While they’d been riding in the back of the bus, the Freedom Riders were being beaten and firebombed for riding in the front. In West’s family, old stories were surfacing: West had learned about a great uncle who’d been lynched years before, his broken body wrapped by his killers in an American flag. One day, when his teacher told the class to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, West refused. “Why we saluting this thing that don’t love us? I’m not gonna do it.” The teacher stared. “Cornel West! You stand up right now!” She waited. The other kids got nervous. One by one several more sat down. The teacher, late in a pregnancy, waddled over to West.
“She hit me first,” West says.
The principal didn’t care. “She hit a little black kid,” West remembers. “She got a prize, man. Gotta keep us in order.” West was expelled.
At first no school would take him. Then his mother arranged for an IQ test. He scored 168. That won him a seat at Earl Warren Elementary, an “enrichment” school on the far side of town. He was one of two black children in his class, but there the students were all geniuses, none so bright as West. He loved it. “Sheer act of grace,” he says of the twist by which expulsion led him to the school. He read a biography of Einstein and decided he wanted to be like him. (He took up the violin in emulation of “Albert.”) He read a biography of Theodore Roosevelt and decided he’d go to Harvard because T.R. had. (“I loved his strenuous mood.”) He worked his way through every volume in the bookmobile that was the black side of town’s only library.
When he was fourteen, he picked up the
book that would make him a philosopher. It was a collection of Søren Kierkegaard. West went straight to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, a meditation on Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. It’s a fantastically difficult work for a reader of any age, but for West the book was a revelation: Nothing, not even the love between a parent and a child—or God and humanity—is as it seems. Kierkegaard contrasted a “knight of infinite resignation,” who sacrifices all with no hope of reward, with the even more puzzling figure he dubbed the “knight of faith,” who makes the same total sacrifice and yet, through his embrace of the absurd—the defiance, transcendence, even, of reason—expects that he will somehow meet his reward. The second knight is Kierkegaard’s model for a Christian, but many Christians find him deeply unsettling, since Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the absurd as a crucial element of faith brings with it the necessity of doubt; one would be a fool to accept the absurd as reasonable. The “leap of faith,” a phrase derived from Fear and Trembling, requires stepping into nothingness.
“In the end,” West says now, “we’re beings headed toward death. I was convinced for the most part that we don’t have any control. So you really have to make a leap, you have to acknowledge the magnitude of the mystery.” Not so much the mystery of life as the mystery of death. “It is a kind of vertigo,” he told the philosopher George Yancey, “a dizziness, a sense of being staggered by the darkness that one sees in the human condition, the human predicament.”
By then West had become a model teenager, a track star who rose before dawn every day to train, a straight-A student at the head of his class and its elected president. He was spoken of as a possible successor to the pastor of his church, Shiloh Baptist. One life, a good life, was laid out before him. But he began to have doubts. To West the average Christian now seemed like a well-behaved child. Be a good boy or girl, and you’ll get your dessert in heaven. But the “leap of faith,” as Kierkegaard conceived it, was absurdly dangerous, like attempting to jump across an abyss with no chance of success. Why try? Because once West had felt the death shudder, once he’d become aware in his bones of the reality of death, ordinary life—waiting to die, living as if you never will—seemed even more awful. There was no choice but to step out into nothing, hoping he’d land on something.
TODAY KIERKEGAARD’S IS just one face in a crowd lining the walls of West’s office in Stanhope Hall, a simple but handsome three-story sandstone building at the heart of the Princeton campus, a beret of ivy perched above its door. Nearly every inch of his bookshelves features not the spines of his library but its covers, and every cover has been chosen for its portrait of one of West’s heroes. It’s his own private matrix, a chamber full of deep quotation and resurrection, dedicated to keeping the dead alive. “Brother Fyodor might disagree with that,” he’ll say gesturing toward glowering Dostoyevsky, or, speaking of how he learned to love movies, “It was this sister right here,” nodding toward an arch-eyed vamp. “Bette Davis. Good God!” Bessie Smith smiles between Herman Melville and Flannery O’Connor. The radical black crime novelist Chester Himes looms beneath a tiny portrait of Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French pioneer of modern architecture. A bare-chested Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat revolutionary, dances around the corner from the Greek opera star Maria Callas. A couple of “bad men”—William Faulkner and Robert Johnson—are bookended by a couple of witty ones, Oscar Wilde and Billy Wilder. Tupac Shakur offers his baleful gaze next to that of another murdered poet, Federico García Lorca. “My dear brother Erasmus,” West says, staring at a picture of the sixteenth-century Dutch satirist. “I look at him every day. How do we human beings learn to laugh at ourselves and then love others? That’s the great juxtaposition. Brother Whitehead”—as in Alfred North Whitehead, the British philosopher-mathematician whose classic Adventures in Ideas, a model for the presentation of complex ideas to a broad community, West rereads every year. “I was here until one o’clock last night, and I looked at Brother Whitehead. These are soulmates, man,” he says. “You carry them around with you, they inhabit your heart and mind and soul.”
West understands himself first and foremost as a reader. “I read as easily as I breathe.” He reads a minimum of three hours every day regardless of his schedule, and rarely sleeps more than three hours a night. “I’ve been blessed with a powerful metabolism,” he says. Eddie Glaude Jr., a West protégé whose office is across the hall from his mentor’s, recalls traveling with West and talk-show host Tavis Smiley. Smiley had just gotten advance proofs of a memoir he was about to publish, and he gave Glaude and West copies at the end of a long night, around two in the morning. At seven they were on the road to their next event. West was bright eyed. He’d read the book cover to cover and wanted to discuss it right away. “The only other reader in my intellectual inventory who’s comparable to Cornel is Ralph Waldo Emerson,” says Glaude. “And Emerson loses his sight! The library of the cosmos belongs to Cornel. Everything and anything can come before him, because he’s a pious reader.” Glaude means pious in the Westian sense, not prudish but in love with the voices that precede and accompany ours, fellow travelers past and present.
West has a reputation as a ladies’ man—“a swordsman,” cackles one less-than-enlightened admirer—but it’s hard to believe, given West’s first love, reading. How romantic can it be to crawl into bed with your lover and a copy of, say, Georg Lukács’s 1923 History and Class Consciousness, one of the many texts West rereads every year? His list of lovers is long, but nearly every story since West left Sacramento for Harvard—“The cats would say ‘You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Corn grind on a bow-legged honey,’ ” his brother Cliff recalled for West’s 2009 memoir, Brother West—has ended with West’s own blues. His first marriage, to a philosophy graduate student named Hilda Holloman, broke up not because West was running around with other women but because he was staying up too late talking philosophy and “the funk” with his best friend, James Melvin Washington, junior faculty with West at Union Theological Seminary in New York. West pledged most of his salary to Holloman and their son and moved, for a few nights, under a blanket in Central Park. His second marriage, to Ramona Santiago, an administrator at Union fourteen years his senior—“on the dance floor, she floated like a dream”—dissolved somewhere over the Atlantic, during a semester West spent commuting between Monday classes at Yale and Thursday classes at the University of Paris.
He met his third wife at a Holiday Inn in New Haven, where he’d taken to eating his meals as marriage number two died. “I was sitting in the restaurant reading Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit, and I looked up and saw the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life.” The waitress, he thought, seemed like someone out of a fairy tale. And so she was—Elleni Gebre Amlak was Ethiopian royalty after a fashion, a descendant of Haile Selassie, the modern nation’s founder, in exile from her mother country’s dictatorial regime. When it collapsed, she returned, and she took West with her, to wed in Ethiopia’s grandest Coptic cathedral in a five-hour ceremony followed by a party for two thousand, from which West emerged with a new name: Fikre Selassie. And when the marriage ended several years later—Elleni had no use for the celebrity that engulfed West following the 1994 publication of Race Matters—that was all he managed to keep. The court awarded Elleni nearly everything but West’s 1988 black Cadillac, the car he still drives. After Elleni, he fell for Aytul Gurtas, a Kurdish journalist who came to Harvard as a Neiman Fellow. They’re separated now, but West still sees her every six weeks—that’s when he flies to Bonn, Germany, where she lives, to visit their ten-year-old daughter. “My beloved Zeytun,” he says, the fruit of what he calls “my broken life.”
West is cagey about his current romantic condition. “I’m not a ladies’ man,” he insists. “I’ve just been fortunate enough to fall in love with select ladies in the past.” “Past,” perhaps, being the operative word. “I’m just dangling and adrift, in a certain sense. I’m hoping somebody’s
praying for me.” In his voiceover commentary for the DVD box set of The Matrix trilogy—a brilliantly free-form conversation with metaphysical writer Ken Wilber about the movies’ philosophical roots, from Plato to Schopenhauer to William James to West’s own writing—West strikes an oddly mournful note when Neo and the romantic lead, Trinity, make love. “Love itself is a certain kind of death,” he muses. “That deep sense of lack and loss are part of the structure of desire.”
“There’s a way in which you could think about Cornel as a kind of sick soul,” says Glaude. “In the sense that he begins with the dead, with darkness. He begins with suffering. The blue note. All too often people want to move too quickly beyond that.”
“That’s the American way,” says West when I raise the question of the blue note and its dismissal. “ ‘No problem we cannot solve.’ Well, that’s a lie. I don’t know why Americans tell that lie all the time.” He laughs, shaking in his chair, mimicking a voice that sounds like a suburban golfer in pants a size too small. “‘No problem we can’t get beyond.’ That’s a lie! But—it generates a strenuous mood.”
This, to West, is a good thing, the naïveté that makes ambition possible. “Engagement! I like that. Now, Brother Leopardi on the other hand”—Giacomo Leopardi, a nineteenth-century Italian poet-philosopher—“he starts with what he calls, ‘The mind’s sweet shipwreck.’ Ain’t that a beautiful phrase?”
West believes Leopardi should be the poet of our times—late empire, midrecession. “You hear about people rereading Steinbeck now,” he says, referring to a recent surge in sales of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s Great Depression chronicle. “They got to go deeper than that.” Steinbeck lets us off too easy. West prescribes Leopardi for “deep-sea diving of the soul,” a process that’s not just personal but essential to understanding “the paradox of human freedom”: that we must summon the strength to resist and endure even as we acknowledge that we are ultimately weak in the face of death and despair. “We are organisms of desire,” West defines the human condition, “whose first day of birth makes us old enough to die.”