Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  This is perhaps why Malamud went forward from the failed dream of “Angel Levine” to the warlike actualities of The Tenants. Ellison, meanwhile, is revealed by the passage of time to be not simply representative but prophetic. Society becomes for the black, if not yet magically fluid, then not nearly so much of a shut box as it is for Malamud’s Jew in the claustrophobic world of The Tenants, or for the Jew in an America now seen to be inhabited by black as well as white goyim, with few temperamental allies. Black political fluidity has increased immeasurably since Ellison wrote, expressing itself in a kind of overall ascendancy of purpose, while Jewish political self-consciousness is static, confined to a handful of Congressional constituencies. But even then, while acknowledging the chasm between himself and the power structure, Ellison made it plain that he was at home in America in the most comfortable sense of country-culture. In the very same essay addressed to Howe there is an account of quail hunting in snowy Ohio fields, and a note of gratitude to Hemingway for having written so well on wing shooting “that I could keep myself and my brother alive during the 1937 Recession by following his descriptions.” Few Jews, even of the third or fourth generation, will recognize in themselves this sort of at-homeness with the land, whereas even urban Poles and Italians have land-memory to draw upon. What emerges from the encounter with Howe is that Ellison has a Gentile ease in America—an easier scorn, even, for its blemishes—that Howe and Malamud, with their bookish moral passion, have not. “I could do nothing except walk, read, hunt, dance, sculpt, cultivate ideas.” It is almost as if the Jew can do nothing but cultivate ideas.

  What happened between Ellison and Howe (behind the back, as it were, of literature) was bound to be seized on by the larger metaphor of the novel. In my own case I have not found it possible to think about The Tenants without first turning Howe-Ellison round and round; together they make a bemusing artifact in a reverse archaeology. Dig them up and discover, in genteel form, the savage future.

  I came to rehearse their exchange because, in my first reading of The Tenants, I was, like many readers, rabidly discontent with Malamud’s conception of his black character, Willie Spearmint, later called Spear. Willie Spear is a black writer who has the flavor of an Eldridge Cleaver rather than an Ellison; and this seemed to matter. Malamud, it appeared, had deliberately chosen—for novelistic bite and drama—an unruly spear-carrier, when he might have chosen a poised aristocrat of prose. And up against Spear he set the Jewish writer Harry Lesser, a man almost too fastidious in his craft. The balance was unequal, the antagonists unfairly matched, the Jew too hesitant and disciplined, the black too spontaneous and unschooled.

  That the antagonists have to be a match for each other at first strikes one as important, because The Tenants is partly, despite its directness of language and gesture, a theater piece designed as stately discourse. Though I admit the comparison is inflated, nevertheless one is put in mind of the eye-to-eye feud of Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots, in Schiller’s Maria Stuart; or of Shaw’s Joan at her trial, another example of an elevated contest of societal interpretation. The Tenants is obviously barer and coarser than these—airless and arid, a flat plain pitting philosopher-king against philosopher-king. Except for these two figures—the Jew and the black—the book is, by and large, unpeopled. The two writers meet in an almost empty tenement about to be torn down. Lesser still lives in his old apartment, refusing to move out until his novel is finished. Already ten years of his life have gone into trying to finish it. Willie is a squatter—hauls in a typewriter, rustles up an old table and chair, and begins.

  The friendship that springs up between them is not really a writers’ friendship. In a literary sense it is the relation of higher and lower. Lesser is always the pro, the polisher, authority, patron of opinion; he has published before, one book is moderately famous. Willie, out of the ghetto, is the rough-hewn disciple. Lesser is the cultivated representative of Society-at-Large, and when he speaks as writer he speaks not as a Jew but as a clear-cut descendant of the American literary tradition from Hawthorne to James—that very James, in fact, who, visiting the Lower East Side in 1904, worried about the effect of Yiddish-influenced impurities on his clean ancestral English. Lesser too feels himself superior: a natural inheritor, like James, of the language, while Willie is only a crude aspirant, likely to damage his material by clumsiness. Lesser observes:

  He has not yet mastered his craft. . . . What can I say to a man who’s suffered so much personal pain, so much injustice, who clearly finds in his writing his hope and salvation, who defines himself through it? He comes in the end, as in the old slave narratives, to freedom, through his sense of writing as power—it flies up and carries him with it—but mainly in his belief that he can, in writing, help his people overthrow racism and economic inequality. That his freedom will help earn theirs. The Life he writes, whatever he calls it, moves, pains, inspires, even though it’s been written before, and better, by Richard Wright, Claude Brown, Malcolm X, and in his way, Eldridge Cleaver. Their self discoveries have helped Willie’s. Many black men live the same appalling American adventure, but it takes a unique writer to tell it uniquely, as literature. To make black more than color or culture, and outrage larger than protest or ideology. . . . Lesser sees irrelevancy, repetition, underdeveloped material; there are mistakes of arrangement and proportion, ultimately of focus.

  Reading this, it is easy to think: Ah, but this is unjustly conceived. Willie is a straw man. Why not a black writer who is not only fully literate, but accomplished? Suppose Malamud had given us Ellison instead of Willie—then what? Lesser, like Ellison, believes first of all in the primacy, the loveliness, of the sentence; for him literature is the personal courage by which the language is seized. Beyond that lies propaganda. Granted that two-literary-intellectuals-talking-to-each-other does not make a novel (Mann and the Russians excepted), or, at least, would not make this novel, Malamud seems to be asking for the sort of resentment that would soon come to surround his formulation: Jewish Intellectual versus Tough Black Militant. Unequal warfare in the Republic of Letters. Could it not—for fairness—somehow have been contrived as Jewish Intellectual versus Black Intellectual?

  There were, of course, good novelistic reasons why it could not. For instance, the conflict that eventually interposes itself between Lesser and Willie is not intellectual but rawly sexual. Willie has a Jewish girl friend, Irene, whom Lesser covets and ultimately wins. Irene is unfortunately a fiction-device and lives only intermittently. Her narrative task is to convert the two writers into enemies through sexual jealousy. Lesser’s importuning landlord, Levenspiel, is also a fiction-device—he is there to give us the novel’s pivotal “problem,” to put time pressure on a stubborn Lesser—but Levenspiel, by contrast, manages to live vividly: “Have a little mercy, Lesser, move out so I can break up this rotten house that weighs like a hunch on my back. . . . Hab rachmones, Lesser, I have my own ambition to realize.” All this is beside the point. Levenspiel and Irene and Willie’s black friends who slide in and out from the wings are all interruptions in the dialogue between Lesser and Willie; they are pretexts for necessary “action,” for novelistic progress. They are not what the book fundamentally intends.

  If The Tenants progresses, it is not through plot but through revelation. The revelation is one-sided: it happens inside Lesser. We do not really know what happens inside Willie. And what happens inside Lesser is this: the clear realization that the black writer who shares his quarters and also his literary hopes is, more than he is writer, more than he is lover, more even than he is fleshly human being, a ferocious, a mythic, anti-Semite.

  It is a revelation to Lesser because, at the start of their closeness, it did not “show.” When Willie is angry at Lesser he says “white,” he says “ofay,” he does not yet see distinctly into his rage at the Jew. Lesser, himself a failing writer, views Willie as a possibly ascending one. All that is in Willie’s way is technique. He tells Willie, “Not that you don’t work hard but there has to
be more emphasis on technique, form. . . .” They discuss form:

  Lesser asks Willie to grant him good will. “I know how you feel, I put myself in your place.”

  In cold and haughty anger the black replies. “No ofay motherfucker can put himself in my place. This is a black book we talkin about that you don’t understand at all. White fiction ain’t the same as black. It can’t be.”

  “You can’t turn black experience into literature just by writing it down.”

  “Black ain’t white and never can be. It is once and for only black. It ain’t universal if that’s what you are hintin up to. What I feel you feel different. You can’t write about black because you don’t have the least idea what we are or how we feel. Our feelin chemistry is different than yours. Dig that? It has to be so. I’m writin the soul writin of black people cryin out we are still slaves in this fuckn country and we ain’t gonna stay slaves any longer. How can you understand it, Lesser, if your brain is white?”

  “So is your brain white. But if the experience is about being human and moves me then you’ve made it my experience. You created it for me. You can deny universality, Willie, but you can’t abolish it.”

  “Bein human is shit. It don’t give you any privileges, it never gave us any.”

  “If we’re talking about art, form demands its rights, or there’s no order and maybe no meaning. What else there isn’t I think you know.”

  “Art can kiss my juicy ass. You want to know what’s really art? I am art. Willie Spearmint, black man. My form is myself.”

  Up to the moment of Willie’s conclusion—“I am art”—this exchange is only another chapter of Howe-Ellison, with Willie as Howe, speaking in behalf of “being caught up with the idea of the Negro,” and Lesser as Ellison, speaking in behalf of the universal values of art and humanity. But the two positions, Ellison’s and Willie’s, intermingle somewhat. Willie, like Ellison, does not trust his antagonist to “know how you feel, . . . [to] put myself in your place.” Addressing Howe, Ellison simultaneously denies and affirms universality: as a black man he considers himself first of all a man, one who despite external disabilities is pleased to walk, read, hunt, etc., like all men; but again as a black he denies that anyone not black can creditably take into himself the day-to-dayness of the black predicament. Willie accepts only the denial: only a black can know what it is to be black, no one else. As for “being human,” not only does Willie reject the term “universal,” but he sees himself as almost physiologically different (“Our feelin chemistry is different than yours”), and he goes further yet—he freezes himself into the image of a totem, a “black man.” The statement “My form is myself” is beyond humanity, beyond even art. It stands for something more abstract than either: a political position taken at its most absolute. For a totem is an absolute politics: an object, an artifact, a form representing an entire people, together with its interests, its cult, its power, its history and fate. The totem has no fluidity, its being is its meaning. Willie has turned the politics of a group into an object—himself, black man. In Willie Art is Politics, Politics is Art.

  This is why it would not have served Malamud’s deepest intention if he had chosen not Willie, but a more “realistic,” pragmatic, literate, humane, relatively apolitical, less symbolic black for the novel. In not choosing an Ellison, of course, Malamud took on himself both a risk and a certainty. The certainty was the charge of “stereotype” and “black-lash,” to which The Tenants has already been preëminently subject. The risk—a “stereotype” having indeed been chosen—was the failure of the novel as art. To a degree this has happened—to the very degree that Willie’s stereotyped expectations lead to banalities masking as passions. Something was necessary to stimulate Willie’s active vengeance, so we are given a plot-fulcrum, Willie’s girl Irene. In return for Lesser’s stealing his girl, Willie destroys Lesser’s work of ten years; the war is on. Irene exists to accommodate neither Willie nor Lesser, but the exigencies of a made fiction. All this is too obviously and distractingly schematic—even the lineaments of “parable” cannot contain it—and if I seem to be bringing it up again now, it is only to contrast it with the novel’s authentic passions. These are in the mimicry of Willie’s writing. I will come to them in a moment.

  Suppose, though, Malamud had chosen an Ellisonlike character to confront his Lesser. The first advantage would have been safety in the world external to the novel: with equal contenders, fewer readers might have cried bigot. And internally, also, there would have been an advantage: the contenders might have met and if necessary separated on the cultural issues, as Howe and Ellison did, not on the extraneous ones of purloined women and violated manuscripts. (“But,” Malamud might counter, “purloined women and violated literature are the stuff of Willie’s culture.”) It might even be argued that, if novelistic conflict was what was wanted, if dramatic misunderstanding and distrust were what was wanted, a fictionalized Howe-Ellison clash could have provided them as surely as Lesser-Willie, and with the black man’s “humanity” intact, all stereotypes avoided and averted. Inside the air of Malamud’s novel, Ellison—or, rather, “Ellison”—would still have found Jewish literary empathy suspect, as the actual Ellison did in the more open world of nonfictional debate; and there would not have occurred, between two civilized beings, the perilous contrast between the “civilized” Jew Lesser and the “savage” Willie. (As the book now stands, though, there is nothing to choose at the end between Willie’s and Lesser’s savagery.) And not only this: with “Ellison” instead of Willie to do battle with Lesser, the novel would have been intellectually richer, thicker, clearer, the parable more perfect, the fright more frightening because in seemingly safer hands.

  With so much to lose from Willie, with so much to gain from “Ellison,” why did Malamud opt for what is so plainly a grossness, a caricature, above all a stereotype?

  Here is Willie at his grossest:

  “. . . You tryin to kill off my natural writin by pretendin you are interested in the fuckn form of it though the truth of it is you afraid of what I am goin to write in my book, which is that the blacks have to murder you white MF’s for cripplin our lives.” He then cried out, “Oh, what a hypocrite shitass I am to ask a Jew ofay for advice how to express my soul work. Just in readin it you spoil what it says. I ought to be hung on a hook till some kind brother cuts off my white balls.”

  Ellison had complained to Howe (implying Howe was guilty of it too) that nonblack writers tend to create “prefabricated Negroes . . . sketched on sheets of paper and superimposed upon the Negro community.” Surely this quotation from Willie fits Ellison’s imputations; Willie is unabashedly “prefabricated.”

  But the real question is: who cast this die, who prefabricated Willie? Not Malamud. The source of a stereotype is everything. When, in the late 1890s, William Dean Howells praised the black poet Paul Dunbar’s dialect verse for having “the charming accents of the Negro’s own version of our [sic] English,” chiefly because it exploited “the limited range of the race,” which was “the range between appetite and emotion,” the stereotype imposed on Dunbar by a white critic killed the poet and the man; he died in bitterness at thirty-four, wretched over the neglect of what he regarded as his real work—“But ah, the world, it turned to praise / A jingle in a broken tongue.” In the sixty or so years since Dunbar’s death, the “jingle in a broken tongue” has entered the precincts of “soul,” and the notion of “our English,” when espoused by blacks, receives serious pedagogical and linguistic consideration as a legitimate alternative, a separate language with a distinctive grammar. The stereotype, emerging from Howells, was an insult and a misappropriation; emerging from black pride, it begins to gather the honors of honest coinage.

  Malamud did not make Willie. He borrowed him—he mimicked him—from the literature and the politics of the black movement. Willie is the black dream that is current in our world. Blacks made him. Few blacks disavow him. The black middle class, which is ambivalent about Willie, ne
vertheless does not disavow him—not simply out of loyalty to the underclass (the loyalty is what is in doubt), but out of covert gratitude.3 Almost no black writer has disavowed Willie. Ellison is the exception: “. . . what an easy congame for ambitious, publicity-hungry Negroes this stance of ‘militancy’ has become!” he exclaimed to Howe, but that was eight years ago, and since then, though Willie has grown louder and published amply (he is famous as LeRoi Jones, for instance), Ellison has had nothing to say about him. Surely Baldwin does not disavow Willie; he has become him.

  In short, Willie is what he intends himself to be (which is also what he is intended to be by those blacks who do not deny him): a totem, emblem of a community unified in and through Willie’s spirit, what he calls his “form”—not man, as Ellison would have it, but black man.

  What is the meaning of Willie in his self-declared “form”? Willie’s form takes up not freedom and fluidity, but unmovable hatred and slavish vengeance. His vengeance is “literary” in two ways: the burning of Lesser’s book, and the creation of his own—but “his own” ends as a travesty and spoliation of all humane literary values. Only through the destruction of Jewish culture, says Willie’s form, can black culture arise. Lesser finds Willie’s notes: “I have got to write better. Better and better. Black but better. Nothing but black. Now or never.” And whereas earlier—before the pivotal jealousy episode—writing “black” for Willie had for the most part meant telling the poignant and honest story of his ruined, scarred, and panicked childhood in the ghetto,4 now, writing black for vengeance, Willie dreams pogroms. For him literature serves politics—not as propaganda consciously does, as an “arm” or partner or extension or tool of politics—but intrinsically, below the level of rational motivation. Willie’s only politics is coextensive with nearly the whole of his literary imagination; it is the politics and the imagination of anti-Semitism.