Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  Nevertheless there remains a thin strand of connection between Malamud’s visionary “Angel Levine” and a commonplace of Jewish temperament, between the messianic insistence on the anguish of the other and the common sense of ordinary, “bad,” Jews. The sociological—the “real”—counterpart of Malamud’s holy fables is almost always taken for granted by Jews: it is, simply put, that Jews have always known hard times, and are therefore naturally sympathetic to others who are having, or once had, hard times. The “naturally” is what is important. It is a feeling so normal as to be unrelated to spiritual striving, self-purification, moral accountability, prophecy, anything at all theoretical or lofty. This plain observation about particularized suffering requires no special sensitiveness; naturally there are Jews everywhere, and some of them are black.

  But what has surprised some Jews, perhaps many, is that this Jewish assumption—this quiet tenet, to use a firmer word, that wounds recognize wounds—is not only not taken for granted by everyone else, especially by blacks, but is given no credibility whatever. Worse, to articulate the assumption is to earn the accusation of impudence. Nowadays the accusers would include numbers of Jews who point out how thoroughly racism has infiltrated the life of Jewish neighborhoods and institutions; Jews, they say, are as racist as anyone—maybe more so, in view of (the litany begins) those Jewish shopkeepers who have traditionally been the face-to-face exploiters of the black ghetto. For all these accusers, “Angel Levine” must seem not just dated, obsolete, a sentimental excrescence of that remote era when Jews were as concerned with CORE as they were with UJA—but wrong. And many young blacks writing today would regard its premise not only as not a moral hope, but as a hurtful lie. Or else would see Manischevitz’s salvation as simply another instance of Jewish exploitation, this time of black benevolence.

  Black distrust of this heritage of Jewish sympathy is obviously a social predicament, but it is, curiously, a literary one as well. If the distrust has caused a blight on the sympathy, it turns out also that the distrust antedates the withering of that sympathy. The historical weight of “Angel Levine” was this: Negroes are not goyim, not in the full oppressive meaning of that word. How could they be? Anti-Semitism is not properly a Negro appurtenance—it is not historically black, any more than plantation-slave guilt is properly a Jewish burden. Thirteen years later The Tenants appears to reply: but no, the black man is a goy after all; and perhaps always was. Between these contradictory and irreducible formulations, Jewish astonishment came to fruition. It was as improbable for the Jew to imagine himself in the role of persecutor—or even indifferent bystander—as it was for him to imagine the black man in that same role. Yet by the late sixties Jews and blacks were recognizable, for and by one another, in no other guise. In a 1966 symposium in Midstream on the relations between blacks and Jews, the sociologist C. Eric Lincoln wrote: “One could argue the expectation that if the Jews are not especially moved by faith, then they ought to be moved by experience. Perhaps so. But the best way to forget an unpleasant experience is not by becoming implicated in someone else’s troubles.” If this sounded like a sensible generality, it was nevertheless shocking to Jews because it was so thoroughly contrary to the way Jews had been experiencing their own reality, their own normality.

  But 1966 counts as almost recent; it is, anyway, midway in time between the redemptiveness of “Angel Levine” and the murderous conclusion of The Tenants—the corrosion of relations had already begun. It began perhaps not so much because of the emergence of black political violence and Jewish fear of that violence, and not even because anti-Semitism had again become the socialism of the militant masses, but more fundamentally out of the responsiveness of America itself: the Jews have been lucky in America, the blacks not. Manischevitz’s daughter—we can imagine it—moves out of the foul old neighborhood to Long Island; the black Levine, according to Malamud, has no place green to go but heaven.

  Jews are nowadays reminded that this difference—America felt simultaneously as Jewish Eden and black inferno—has always been exactly the thing that called into question the authenticity of Jewish sympathy; that this disparity from the beginning made the Jews suspect to resentful blacks, that Jewish commitment to black advancement, much less black assertion, had to be undermined by the Jews’ pleasure in an America open and sweet to them. The statement “The blacks have not been lucky in America” is used now as a reproof to these luckier Jews for the impudence of their empathy, and to show it up as a lie—an ineluctable time-bomb sort of lie: if Jewish identification with black causes was after all not intended to be traitorous, then it was destined by Jewish success to become so. That most American Jews are themselves less than eighty years distant from their own miseries in the Russian Pale is said to be wiped out by their American good luck, and all at once; Jews who lay claim to historical memory are ridiculed as pretentious or bullying—present security is taken for a mandatory form of amnesia.

  But this very formulation—the hell of being black in America—that is today raised against Jews to chide them for the vanity and presumptuousness of assuming historical parallels, is nevertheless not tolerated when Jews themselves proffer it. Either it is taken as still another meaningless white mea culpa, or else as a sign of greenhorn uppityness: the Jew putting on airs in the pretense of a mea culpa he hasn’t been around long enough to earn. Lack of sympathy is an obvious offense; sympathy turns out to be more offensive yet. The point is surprising but unsubtle. If the current wound-licking withdrawal of Jews is now seen as an outrage or an expected betrayal, what of that earlier, poignantly spontaneous Jewish concern? In the very hour of its freest, most impassioned expression, it was judged as a means to take the Negro’s humanity away from him—even then. To illustrate this astounding statement one must turn from the social side to the literary.

  Sociologists—I hope I am permitted this fractionally unfair jibe—arrive at their preconceptions cautiously and soberly, but it is the smoothness of their preconceptions they are all the while aiming for. Literary minds work rawly and unashamedly through their beliefs, and have the skeptical grace to arrive at no man’s land. Both Jew and black in The Tenants are literary men. Their war is a war of manhood and of art. The book has no conclusion and stops in the middle of an incoherency. Eight years before the publication of The Tenants, five years after the appearance of “Angel Levine,” at the absolute height of “Jewish concern” for the condition of being black in America, a Jew and a black, both literary men, acted out an adumbration of the tragic discord (this phrase is not too grandiose) of The Tenants. Their war was a war of manhood (what does it mean to be human) and of art (what are a writer’s most urgent sources). Their clash led to no tangible conclusion and stopped in the middle of a double questioning: “how it seems to Ellison I cannot really say,” Irving Howe wrote at the last, “though I should like very much to know.” “You should not feel unhappy about this or think that I regard you either as dishonorable or an enemy. I hope,” Ralph Ellison had already written, “you will come to view this exchange as an act of, shall we say, ‘antagonistic cooperation’?”

  (“Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other.”)

  The exchange is seminal and ought to be republished all in one place for its superb documentary value—a collision rich in felt honesty and therefore somehow strange, hurtful and agonizing, eluding decent summarization. Ellison’s side in particular is a remarkably useful notation in the history not so much of black as of Jewish self-understanding. That there is space here only to give the argument with the sort of crude speed one would ordinarily eschew is probably, for purposes of illuminating a single point, all to the good—that single point being the response of one profoundly gifted black writer to “Jewish concern.”

  It ought to be made instantly clear that nothing in Howe’s “Black Boys and Native Sons”—the essay that triggered the debate with Ellison, first published in Dissent (Autumn 1963)—was overtly written from the viewpoint of a Jew. The essay was, fir
st of all, a consideration of Baldwin and Wright, and finally of Ellison himself. Baldwin, Howe observed, had at the start of his career backed off from Wright’s “nightmare of remembrance,” hoping to “ ‘prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or even, merely a Negro writer.’ ” And Ellison, Howe noted, was the “Negro writer who has come closest to satisfying Baldwin’s program.” Appraising Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, Howe marveled at “the apparent freedom it displays from the ideological and emotional penalties suffered by Negroes in this country,” but at the same time admitted he was troubled by “the sudden, unprepared, and implausible assertion of unconditioned freedom with which the novel ends.” “To write simply about ‘Negro experience’ with the esthetic distance urged by the critics of the fifties, is a moral and psychological impossibility,” Howe charged, “for plight and protest are inseparable from that experience.” And while acknowledging that “the posture of militancy, no matter how great the need for it, exacts a heavy price from the writer,” Howe set his final sympathies down on the side of Wright’s “clenched militancy” and Baldwin’s ultimately developed “rage.”

  As against Ellison’s affirmation of America as a place of “rich diversity and . . . almost magical fluidity and freedom,” Howe wrote:

  What, then, was the experience of a man with a black skin, what could it be in this country? How could a Negro put pen to paper, how could he so much as think or breathe, without some impulsion to protest, be it harsh or mild, political or private, released or buried? The “sociology” of his existence formed a constant pressure on his literary work, and not merely in the way this might be true for any writer, but with a pain and a ferocity that nothing could remove.

  Afterward Ellison was to characterize these phrases as “Howe, appearing suddenly in blackface.” The reply to Howe, an essay of great flexibility and authority, came in the pages of The New Leader the following winter, and what Ellison made plain was that he was first of all a writer and a man, and took his emotional priorities from that: “Evidently Howe feels that unrelieved suffering is the only ‘real’ Negro experience, and that the true Negro writer must be ferocious. . . . One unfamiliar with what Howe stands for would get the impression that when he looks at a Negro he sees not a human being but an abstract embodiment of living hell.”

  In coming out for the autonomy of art, Ellison seemed to leave Howe stuck with all the disabilities, crudenesses, and ingenuousness of the militant Protest Novel. Yet in almost the next breath here is Ellison defending his own militancy as unassailable: “I assure you that no Negroes are beating down my door, putting pressure on me to join the Negro Freedom Movement, for the simple reason that they realize that I am enlisted for the duration. . . . Their demands, like that of many whites, are that I publish more novels. . . . But then, Irving, they recognize what you have not allowed yourself to see: namely that my reply to your essay is itself a small though necessary action in the Negro struggle for freedom.” Here Ellison suddenly seems to be giving Howe a victory. Even in not writing the Protest Novel he is protesting; by virtue of being black his heart is instantly recognizable—by fellow blacks—as being in the right place, “enlisted.”—And had not Howe argued, “But even Ellison cannot help being caught up with the idea of the Negro”?

  This part of the argument—complex and blazing, essentially the classic quarrel between critic and imaginative artist, and between the artist’s own two selves, the “esthetic” and the “engaged”—is also an uncanny fore-echo of one of Malamud’s preoccupations in The Tenants. There, however, it is the Jew who assumes Ellison’s overall position of the free artist committed first of all to the clean fall of his language, and the black man who expresses Howe’s implacability. What this reversal portends we shall see in a moment, but first it is necessary to look at Ellison’s consideration of Howe as Jew. It comes very suddenly—and I think justly—in his reply, and points to the absence anywhere in Howe’s remarks of the admission that he is a Jew. Whether or not Howe himself thought this relevant is not the issue; what is important is that Ellison thought it relevant, and scornfully rounded on Howe for having called himself a “white intellectual.”

  . . . in situations such as this [Ellison wrote] many Negroes, like myself, make a positive distinction between “whites” and “Jews.” Not to do so could be either offensive, embarrassing, unjust or even dangerous. If I would know who I am and preserve who I am, then I must see others distinctly whether they see me so or no. Thus I feel uncomfortable whenever I discover Jewish intellectuals writing as though they were guilty of enslaving my grandparents, or as though the Jews were responsible for the system of segregation. Not only do they have enough troubles of their own, as the saying goes, but Negroes know this only too well.

  The real guilt of such Jewish intellectuals lies in their facile, perhaps unconscious, but certainly unrealistic, identification with what is called the “power structure.” Negroes call that “passing for white.” . . . I consider the United States freer politically and richer culturally because there are Jewish Americans to bring it the benefit of their special forms of dissent, their humor and their gift for ideas which are based upon the uniqueness of their experience.

  The statement reads admirably. But if Ellison wants to “see others distinctly,” including Howe’s distinctiveness as a Jewish rather than a “white” intellectual, he must not object to Howe’s seeing him distinctly, as a man participating in a certain social predicament—i.e., getting born black in America. Defining an individual’s social predicament does not automatically lead to stripping him of his personal tastes and talents, as Ellison assumes earlier in his essay, when he speaks of “prefabricated Negroes . . . sketched on sheets of paper and superimposed upon the Negro community.” Jews also have their predicament, or call it their destiny, as Jews; but destiny is something profoundly different from a stereotype.

  The second part of Ellison’s remarks, ringing though they are, is where the real difficulty lies. If Ellison thought Howe obtuse because he visualized the black as a man in perpetual pain, if Ellison thought Howe was distorting his own more open perception of the effect on blacks of their civil inequities (“matters,” Ellison wrote, “about which I could do nothing except walk, read, hunt, dance, sculpt, cultivate ideas”)—what could a Jew think of Ellison’s Jewish projections? What could be “special” about forms of Jewish dissent that do not include dissent on behalf of others?2 What else, in the eye of history, could “special forms of dissent” mean if not the propensity to be enlisted in social causes not intimately one’s own? What could be the purpose of ideas based upon the uniqueness of Jewish experience if that uniqueness did not signify at least in part a perennial victimization, and if that experience did not expend itself beyond compassion into identification? How then does it happen that Ellison, in attributing so many useful and distinctive things to Jews, has it all add up to nothing less ugly than “passing for white”?

  The trouble, I think, is a simple one. At bottom it is Ellison, not Howe, who fails to nail down the drift of distinctive experience, who imagines the Jew as naturally identifying with the white “power structure.” Ellison has some of the psychology right, to be sure—it was a case of “perhaps unconscious” identification, but in a way Ellison was curiously unable to conceive of, except for the instant it took for him to ridicule the idea: “Howe, appearing suddenly in blackface.” But Howe’s call for the “impulsion to protest” was not a matter of burnt cork—he was not coming on as a make-believe Negro (and certainly not as a make-believe member of the “power structure”), but rather as a Jew responding implicitly and naturally—i.e., vicariously—to an urgent moment in history, applying to that moment the “benefit of [his] special form of dissent.” That the “identification” was authentic, the vicariousness pragmatic, the dissent genuinely felt, untouched by manipulativeness or cynicism, the next several years in America rapidly made clear, the proof being the rise of black programs of “ferocity,” both political and literary—which,
interestingly enough, a Jewish critic was able to foretell through the exercise of his own familial sensibility.

  In this interpretive retelling, I have perhaps made Howe out to be too much the prototypical Jew. This may be unfair to him. I do not know his personal views or whether he would welcome this characterization. But the exchange with Ellison, at this distance and after so many reversals in the putative black-Jewish alliance (how long ago that now seems, how unreal the very phrase), has taken on the power, and some of the dread, of a tragic parable. Ellison’s inability to credit the Jew with a plausible commitment was, as it turned out, representative not only of what was to come, but of what had long been. From the Ellisonian point of view, “Angel Levine” never was true: impossible for black man and Jew to share the same skin and the same pair of eyes out of which to assess reality. Ellison’s side of the argument, it seems to me, utterly undermines the “sociological” premises of “Angel Levine”—black and Jew are not, will never be seen to be, mutually salvational. But it is not only the nonfictive referents of the tale that are undermined. Little by little even the moral truthfulness begins to seep out of the vision itself—what was radiant, if illusioned, hope at the time “Angel Levine” was conceived has disintegrated into a kind of surrealism, an arbitrary act of art, set apart from any sources of life. Literature (even in the form of fantasy) cannot survive on illusion.