The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader

by Henry Louis Jr. Gates

  “No culture without norms, Mr. Slade. It’s an elementary principle. History gives us no reason for optimism about the triumph of civilization over barbarity. Where we do not move forward, we regress. To be sure, it begins with slight lapses. Errors of usage—confusing ‘disinterest’ with ‘uninterest,’ using ‘hopefully’ for ‘it is to be hoped.’ And then, with astonishing swiftness, the rot sets in. With our sense of language dulled, who can appreciate the exquisite verbal precision of the very finest literature? We cease to judge, we join the relativist’s party of mindless tolerance, we descend into the torpor of cultural egalitarianism.” “Sounds ugly,” I said. “It is.” “Even so,” I said levelly, “you wouldn’t shoot me.” “Wouldn’t I?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “You don’t have a silencer,” I pointed out, “and the sign says to be quiet in the library.” I knew I had him there. There was one more lead I had to check out. Word on the street had it that a certain Harold Bloom was deeply involved in the whole business. He was a critic who taught at Yale and moonlighted at City College. I figured the time might be right to pay him a visit. I didn’t talk conspiracy with him. Just said people around town thought he knew a lot about canon formation. Maybe even had something to do with it himself.

  Bloom folded his hands together under his chin. “My dear, the strong poet will abide. The weak will not. All else is commentary. Politics has nothing to do with it.” Something else was bothering me, and I decided to be up-front. “I noticed the cops paid you a visit before I came by. What’d they want?”

  “I’m a suspect, if you can believe it.” He looked at me wide-eyed. “Somebody killed off Thomas Stearns Eliot, and they think I had something to do with it. Imagine that. Little old me.” Then he grinned, and I saw he could be a very dangerous man.

  So Tommy was dead. That should have cheered me up, but it didn’t. From a pay phone on the corner, I made a quick call to an old friend in the N.Y.P.D. Turned out Bloom had a rap sheet longer than a three-part New Yorker profile. They were after him for a whole series of murders, from Matthew Arnold to Robert Lowell. All of them savaged with bloody dispatch, often in a paragraph or less. So far, they couldn’t pin anything on him.

  The police were biding their time. Seems they had a decoy all set up. A young policewoman who wrote poetry in the style of Sylvia Plath, working undercover at The New York Review of Books. But that wasn’t going to do me any good. Bloom was a small fish. I was angling for the biggest one of all.

  Problem was, I was banging my head against a brick wall and it wasn’t for sure which was going to give first. I didn’t like to call in debts, but I couldn’t put it off any longer. It was time to look up my old friend Jason Epstein. These days he was a big cheese at Random House, but I knew him back when he was a gumshoe at Pinkerton’s.

  When he showed up at the Royalton on West 44th Street, I could tell something was wrong. They had gotten to him. “You too, Jason?” It hurt; I couldn’t hide that. “Just tell me why. What’s in it for you?”

  In reply, he dropped a book on my lap that made the Manhattan phone directory look like a pocket diary. “It’s called ‘The Reader’s Catalog,’” he said, “and it’s my baby. It lists every book worth reading.” I was beginning to understand. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Look, Slade, I can’t afford to make up the ‘Catalog’ from scratch every week. We’re talking stability. Critics talk about the literary canon, publishers talk about the importance of a strong backlist, but it comes to the same.”

  With the help of two waiters, I lifted “The Reader’s Catalog” back onto the table. I thought about all the lives that had been ruined to make it possible. I thought about the most respected writers of our time acting like citizens of the Town That Dreaded Sundown. “You’ve got to give me a name, Jason,” I said. There was anger in my voice; fear, too. I didn’t care what they’d done to him, didn’t care about the things he’d done. I just had to reach him somehow.

  Jason didn’t say anything for a long while, just watched the ice cubes dissolve in his Aqua Libra.

  “I’m taking a big risk just being seen with you,” he said, massaging his temples. But in the end, he came through. So that’s what I was doing at 10 o’clock in the morning, my trench coat hunched over my head, tailing Susan Sontag down the rainy streets. Epstein told me she was scheduled to make a pickup that morning. If so, she’d lead me where I wanted to go.

  My confidence was growing, and I didn’t think twice when she strode under the 38th Street overpass on the East Side. Vandals had knocked out most of the lights. The darkness protected me, but I had a hard time making her out in the gloom.

  Then somebody laid a blackjack to the back of my head and the lights went out completely.

  When I came to, my head was throbbing and my eyes didn’t want to focus. I made them.

  Something told me I’d arrived at my destination. I was seated before an enormous desk, ornately carved with claw-and-ball feet. And an enormous tufted leather chair with its back to me. Slowly, it swiveled around. The old man was small, and the huge chair made him seem tiny. He winked at me. “Who are you?” I said. It came out like a croak. “It’s not important,” he said blandly. “The organization is what’s important.”

  “Organization?” I was dimly aware of the floor vibrating beneath my feet. Meant we were probably in a factory of some sort.

  “The literary canon—now that ain’t chopped liver. Could be you don’t understand how big this thing is. We’ve got people all over, wouldn’t work otherwise. We’ve got the daily reviewers, we’ve got the head of the teachers’ union. . . .” “Al Shanker? He’s with you?” He seemed amused by my naivete. “We’ve got people in the teachers’ training colleges. We got the literature profs at your colleges, they’re all in on it. The guys who edit the anthologies—Norton, Oxford, you name it—they all work for us. Ever hear about the Trilateral Commission?” “Something to do with international trade?” His cheeks dimpled when he smiled. “That’s the front. It’s really about the literary canon. The usual hustle: we’ll read Lady Murasaki if they let in James and Emerson. It’s a tricky business, though, when you get into fair-trade issues. We got reports that the English are dumping. Some of our guys wanted to use the farm parity system for Anthony Burgess—you know, pay him not to write novels.” He rolled his eyes. “Never works. They tried it over here with Joyce Carol Oates. She just sold the overage under a bunch of pseudonyms.” I tried to cluck sympathetically, but it caught in my throat. “Sooner or later they’ll come to me,” he said. “And I’ll take care of it, like I always do.” “Sounds like a lot of responsibility.” “You see why my boys didn’t appreciate your sniffing around. There’s too much at stake. You gotta play by the rules.” He spread his brown-spotted hands on the desk. “Our rules.”

  “Who would’ve thought it? Literary immortality a protection racket.”

  He mouthed his cigar obscenely. “Come off it, kid. There’s no immortality in this business. You want 20 years, even 40, we can arrange it. Beyond that, we’ll have to renegotiate terms at the end of the period. Sooner or later there’s going to be a, whaddaya call it, a reassessment. We send a guy down, he does an appraisal, figures the reputation’s not really earned, and bingo, you’re out. Maybe you’ll get a call back in 50 years or so. Maybe not.”

  I shook my head. “You guys play hardball.” I laughed, but I was scared. “You see what we did with James Gould Cozzens?” “Who?”

  “Exactly. And 30 years ago, he was the hottest thing around. Then somebody got a little greedy, figured they could cut their own deal. . . .” The old man laughed, showed teeth like little yellow nubbins. “Something I want you to see.”

  He led me out of his office and onto an inside balcony overlooking a vast industrial atrium. I heard the din of machinery, felt the blast of hot factory air. And I saw the automatic conveyor belt below. At first I thought it was a moving slag heap, but it wasn’t. All at once I felt sick and dizzy.

  Heaped high on the conveyor belt
, thousands and thousands of books were being fed into a belching, grinding mechanical maw. Turned into pulp. I could only make out some of the titles. There were fat novels by James Jones and Erskine Caldwell and Thomas Wolfe and James T. Farrell and Pearl Buck. Thin novels by Nelson Algren and William Saroyan. The old Brooks and Warren “Understanding Poetry” nestled beside the collected plays of Clifford Odets. I tried to look away, but my eyes were held by a sick fascination. “Butterfield 8” and “The Big Sky,” “Young Lonigan” and “Manhattan Transfer,” “Darkness at Noon” and “On the Road”—the literary has-beens of our age, together at last, blended into a high-fiber gruel. The old man led me back into his office and closed the door. “Beginning to get the picture? You want to take care you don’t end up on that pile, Mr. Slade.” He squeezed my shoulder and said, “Of course there might be another way.” I shook my head. “You’re going to have to kill me,” I said. He opened the left-hand drawer of his desk, removed a dogeared copy of a journal. “My boys came up with something interesting. It was in The Dalhousie Review, Spring 1947.” He looked triumphant. “A sestina called ‘Cadences of Flight.’ Makes you a published poet yourself, doesn’t it?”

  “Jeepers,” I said. My face was hot with embarrassment. “I was in high school.”

  That’s when he made his proposal. I know, Dwight Macdonald said that people who sell out never really had anything to sell, but what did I care? Turned out Dwight was on their payroll from the beginning. Listening to the sound of untold literary tonnage being pulped, I had to admit there were worse things than being co-opted.

  When I got to my apartment, I dialed Estelle’s number and told her she might as well come over. She was at my door in a quarter of an hour, wearing a long gray trench coat with a belt, as heavily made-up as ever.

  “Estelle,” I said, “I’m off the case.” I peeled $25 off my billfold. “You can have your money back.”

  “They turned you, didn’t they?” she said, scarlet suffusing her beige pancake foundation.

  I looked at her wistfully. The gal had spunk, and I admired that. I felt a sudden rush of warmth toward her. All these years of kicking around the city alone—maybe it was time to settle down with somebody. Sure, her cockamamie assignment had turned my life upside down, but right then her body looked inviting to my tired eyes. Maybe it was fate that brought us together, I was thinking. Maybe. I said, “Lookit, everyone’s got a price.” “Yeah? What was yours?”

  “I’m in, sugar,” I blurted. “You understand what I’m saying? They’re going to put ‘Cadences of Flight’ in ‘The Norton Anthology of Poetry,’ fourth edition. It’s gonna be deconstructed, reconstructed and historicized in PMLA. And there’s going to be a couple of questions about it on the New York State Regents exam in English. It was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, baby. How could I say no?” “You were going to blow the whistle on the whole outfit.” “And they were going to feed me into a paper mill. Sometimes you don’t know what’s in your best interest till someone points it out to you.” The look she gave me was smoldering, and not with passion. “But Estelle”—and I gazed into her eyes soulfully—“I been thinking maybe we have the rest of our lives together for explanations.”

  Estelle stared at me for what seemed like a long time. Then she worked her fingers into her hair and started working it free. It was a wig. The eyelashes went next, then she ran a towel under the tap and scrubbed off her makeup. She fished out the stuffed brassiere last of all.

  The transformation was astonishing. Before me stood a perfectly ordinary-looking man in his early 50’s, his dark hair beginning to gray. I began to shake. “You’re—you’re. . . .” “Thomas Pynchon,” he said in a baritone. Pulled off the white gloves and extended a meaty paw.

  Thomas Pynchon. Now there was someone you never saw on “Oprah Winfrey.”

  My mind wanted to reel, but I pulled it in sharp. “So that’s why you sent me on this mission impossible.” “I knew you’d never take the case if you knew who I was.” Mists were clearing. “Damn right I wouldn’t. Being a famous recluse wasn’t good enough for you. It was anonymity you were after. You didn’t care if you had to bring down the whole system of dispensation to get it.” I paused for breath. “I’ve got it right, haven’t I? That’s why you set me up, with this despicable Estelle act.” Pynchon only shrugged. “So,” I said, “you wanted out.” The words came out through gritted teeth: “Out of the canon.”

  “Can you blame a guy for trying?” he asked, and walked out of my life.

  Alone in my apartment, I poured myself a couple of fingers of Jack Daniel’s and tried to make room on my shelves for the critical essays and Ph.D. dissertations about me they said would come flooding in. I was going to be explicated, which was good. I was going to be deconstructed, which wasn’t so good. It was a tough job, being a canonical author.

  But somebody had to do it.

  SOURCE: The New York Times Book Review, March 25, 1990.

  PART IV

  “RACE,” WRITING, AND READING

  THE LAST SELECTION in this section, on the great Harlem Renaissance writer and innovator, Jean Toomer, was co-authored by Rudolph Byrd, a prominent scholar of African American literature and Gates’s classmate at Yale, who died while we were putting this reader together. Much of what Gates and Byrd, along with other bright lights like Kimberly Benston and Barbara Johnson, learned in Yale’s Deconstructionist heyday wasn’t remote from what they would teach their undergraduate and graduate students (including me) a decade later: that race could be—and should be—unmoored from the fixed meanings attributed to it by our culture’s binary thinking, that constructed significance trumped innate meaning, and that “scare quotes” around “race” could suggest the term’s contingency and also the critic’s own distance from a notion that was, in fact, a very real and inescapable fact of daily life. Hence, this section begins with Soyinka, whose masterwork dramatizes the very real difference race makes in the practice of power, and concludes with Toomer, whose own passing sheds light both on how race lives in literature and how we live with race.

  One selection here deserves a special note. We have included the introduction to The Image of the Black in Western Art, the ten-book series based on the archive of nearly 30,000 images of black people in Western art, from classical Greece and Rome to the twenty-first century, of which Gates is a co-editor. The chief reason for its inclusion here—aside from its philosophical connection to the other pieces—is its debt to Dominique de Menil, who with her husband established this archive as a liberal humanist means to beat back racism in their adopted South. The seminal Critical Inquiry volume, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, also excerpted in this section, is dedicated to de Menil. By placing the two pieces next to each other, we see that the spirit of the type of critical reading that dominated the academy in the 1980s is very much alive and in practice today, even if the writing has changed.

  Abby Wolf

  BEING, THE WILL, AND THE SEMANTICS OF DEATH

  Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman

  Who would fardels bear,

  To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

  But that the dread of something after death,

  The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn

  No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

  And makes us rather bear those ills we have,

  Than fly to others we know not of?

  Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

  And thus the native hue of resolution

  Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

  And enterprises of great pitch and moment

  With this regard their currents turn awry,

  And lose the name of action.

  —HAMLET, ACT III, SCENE I

  NOT SINCE THE civil war in the Congo has a black African nation been so much in the consciousness of the United States as Nigeria is today. Perhaps it is not accidental that Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman enjoyed its Am
erican premiere in October 1979, at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, in the same week in which Nigeria transformed itself to a representative republic, becoming overnight, after thirteen years of military dictatorship, Africa’s largest and most prosperous democracy.

  Soyinka’s public career as a writer dovetails somewhat ironically with modern Africa’s anguished struggle for independence from colonial rule and for a democratically elected government. Indeed, his fourth and most elaborate play, A Dance of the Forests, performed nineteen years ago at Nigeria’s Independence Day festivities, announced his presence as a major creative writer. Yet, even then, the discordant relationship of Soyinka’s art to his nation’s image of itself was distinctly evident: the production was staged despite its rejection by the Independence Day committee, rejected no doubt because of its implicit refutation of a linear, naive, romantic idea of time and human progress. Ironically, the play subsequently won the Encounter Drama Competition sponsored by London’s Observer.

  It is difficult to find exact analogues in the West for Soyinka’s public role in Nigeria and throughout Africa. Author of over a dozen plays, two novels, and three books of poetry, he is perhaps the most widely read African writer, both within and outside of Africa. In addition to this respect from African and European audiences alike, Soyinka is also perceived as a force in the political arena, embodying in a discreet way the moral authority of a disinterested philosopher with the political authority of the Times of London’s editorial page. As an author he draws upon this public definition of his role—most recently as Secretary-General of the Union of African writers—both to protest censorship and imprisonment of writers, especially by African and Latin American governments, and to keep alive the dream of a unified Pan-African continent governed by the democratic socialism he holds most dear. He has no counterpart here: he is neither poet-turned-politician like Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, or the late Augustino Neto; nor is he the artist-in-exile, demanding the mythical return to a federal never-never land, like Pound and Solzhenitsyn; nor, finally is he, like the mutable Amiri Baraka, artist-become-ideologue, determined to diminish that precious distance which irrevocably separates art and shadow from act. On the contrary, Soyinka’s stature as an artist depends in part on his remarkable ability to avoid confusing art and politics; never is he reductive, nor does he attempt to mirror reality in a simple one-to-one relationship. He is a profoundly political writer in that most subtle sense, in which Euripides was, or Lorca. Perhaps it is fair to say that his most admirable characteristic as a writer and activist is the compelling manner in which his art and his political acts have always assumed their unique form—separate somehow, but equal.