by Ann Petry
As George Jackson walks slowly to and from his church, he tries to arrive at an honest conclusion about Harlem. He knows there is too much fear around—fear of the police, and an equally great fear of one’s neighbors, as evidenced by special locks on the doors of the apartments and iron bars at the windows that open on fire escapes. He admits, uneasily, that there are too many children playing in the streets, night and day—his own and other people’s children. His final conclusion might be contained in one short sentence: “Hawkins is here.”
You can hear these same words all over Harlem when a bone-chilling wind sweeps across the town, hiking down from the North, intensifying the damp cold of the Island. On all sides people say, “Hawkins is here,” or “Old Man Hawk is out there.”
Whether George Jackson lives in the clutter of the Hollow or the comparative luxury of the Hill, he shivers as he looks around him; even on a hot day in August when the heat waves are rising from the sidewalk and the roads go soft and gummy underfoot, he shivers and says, “Hawk is here.”
I do not know who Hawkins is or how he became a symbol for cold weather. But he could represent the chilling statistics on Harlem: the high death rate, the incredible population rate per city block. In that sense Old Man Hawkins stays in Harlem, huddled in the doorways, perched on the rooftops.
Can he be run out of this end of town? I think so. One of my favorite stories about the Rev. John Johnson suggests how the job might be done. Reverend Johnson was a police chaplain, the minister of Harlem’s St. Martin’s Protestant Episcopal Church, and a special advisor to the late Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia on the doings, the troubles, the needs and the demands of the people of Harlem.
The Little Flower, so the story goes, used to send for John Johnson about twice a week; and, leaning back in his chair, fiddling with his black-rimmed spectacles, the mayor would say, “Well, Johnnie, what do they want now?”
Johnnie Johnson always gave the same answer. “More houses, Mr. Mayor. More houses.”
They still want more houses, need more houses.
And there is something else involved. Harlem has been studied and analyzed by sociologists, anthropologists, politicians. It has been turned and twisted, to the right and to the left; prettied up and called colorful and exotic; defamed and labeled criminal.
Sometimes its past has been glorified; more often it has been censured. But looked at head on, its thousand faces finally merge into one—the face of a ghetto. In point of time it belongs back in the Middle Ages. Harlem is an anachronism—shameful and unjustifiable, set down in the heart of the biggest, richest city in the world.
Holiday, April 1949
The Novel as Social Criticism
* * *
AFTER I had written a novel of social criticism (it was my first book, written for the most part without realizing that it belonged in a special category) I slowly became aware that such novels were regarded as a special and quite deplorable creation of American writers of the twentieth century. It took me quite awhile to realize that there were fashions in literary criticism and that they shifted and changed much like the fashions in women’s hats.
Right now the latest style, in literary circles, is to say that the sociological novel reached its peak and its greatest glory in The Grapes of Wrath, and having served its purpose it now lies stone-cold dead in the market place. Perhaps it does. But the corpse is quick with life. Week after week it sits up and moves close to the top of the best-seller list.
It is my personal opinion that novels of this type will continue to be written until such time as man loses his ability to read and returns to the cave. Once there he will tell stories to his mate and to his children; and the stories will contain a message, make a comment on cave society; and he will, finally, work out a method of recording the stories, and having come full circle the novel of social criticism will be reborn.
Its rebirth in a cave or an underground mine seems inevitable because it is not easy to destroy an old art form. The idea that a story should point a moral, convey a message, did not originate in the twentieth century; it goes far back in the history of man. Modern novels with their “messages” are cut from the same bolt of cloth as the world’s folk tales and fairy stories, the parables of the Bible, the old morality plays, the Greek tragedies, the Shakespearean tragedies. Even the basic theme of these novels is very old. It is derived from the best known murder story in literature. The cast and the setting vary, of course, but the message in Knock on Any Door, Gentleman’s Agreement, Kingsblood Royal, Native Son, The Naked and the Dead, Strange Fruit, A Passage to India, is essentially the same: And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother: And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
In one way or another, the novelist who criticizes some undesirable phase of the status quo is saying that man is his brother’s keeper and that unless a social evil (war or racial prejudice or anti-Semitism or political corruption) is destroyed man cannot survive but will become what Cain feared he would become—a wanderer and a vagabond on the face of the earth.
The critical disapproval that I mentioned just above is largely based on an idea that had its origin in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the idea that art should exist for art’s sake—l’art pour l’art, Poe’s poem for the poem’s sake. The argument runs something like this: the novel is an art form; art (any and all art) is prostituted, bastardized, when it is used to serve some moral or political end for it then becomes propaganda. This eighteenth century attitude is now as fashionable as Dior dresses. Hence, many a critic who keeps up with the literary Joneses reserves his most powerful ammunition for what he calls problem novels, thesis novels, propaganda novels.
Being a product of the twentieth century (Hitler, atomic energy, Hiroshima, Buchenwald, Mussolini, USSR) I find it difficult to subscribe to the idea that art exists for art’s sake. It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda, whether it be the Sistine Chapel, or La Gioconda, Madame Bovary, or War and Peace. The novel, like all other forms of art, will always reflect the political, economic, and social structure of the period in which it was created. I think I could make out a fairly good case for the idea that the finest novels are basically novels of social criticism, some obviously and intentionally, others less obviously, unintentionally, from Crime and Punishment to Ulysses, to Remembrance of Things Past, to USA. The moment the novelist begins to show how society affected the lives of his characters, how they were formed and shaped by the sprawling inchoate world in which they lived, he is writing a novel of social criticism whether he calls it that or not. The greatest novelists have been so sharply aware of the political and social aspects of their time that this awareness inevitably showed up in their major works. I think that this is as true of Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevski as it is of Balzac, Hemingway, Dreiser, Faulkner.
A professional patter has been developed to describe the awareness of social problems which has crept into creative writing. It is a confused patter. Naturalism and realism are terms that are used almost interchangeably. Studs Lonigan and USA are called naturalist novels; but The Grapes of Wrath is cited as an example of realism. So is Tom Jones. Time, that enemy of labels, makes this ridiculous. Dickens, George Sand, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote books in which they advocated the rights of labor, condemned slums, slavery and anti-Semitism, roughly a hundred years ago. They are known as “the humanitarian novelists of the nineteenth century.” Yet the novels produced in the thirties which made a similar comment on society are lumped together as proletarian literature and their origin attributed to the perfidious influence of Karl Marx. This particular label has been used so extensively in recent years that the ghost of Marx seems even livelier than that of Hamlet’s father’s ghost—or at least he, Marx, appears to have done his haunting over more of the world’s surface.
I think it would make more sense if some of the fictional emphasis on social problems were attributed
to the influence of the Old Testament idea that man is his brother’s keeper. True it is an idea that has been corrupted in a thousand ways—sometimes it has been offered to the world as socialism, and then again as communism. It was used to justify the Inquisition of the Roman Church in Spain, the burning of witches in New England, the institution of slavery in the South.
It seems plausible that so potent an idea should keep cropping up in fiction for it is a part of the cultural heritage of the West. If it is not recognized as such it is almost impossible to arrive at a satisfactory explanation for, let alone classify, some of the novels that are derived from it. How should Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Germinal, and Mary Barton be classified? As proletarian literature? If Gentleman’s Agreement is a problem novel what is Daniel Deronda? Jack London may be a proletarian writer but his most famous book The Call of the Wild is an adventure story. George Sand has been called one of the founders of the “problem” novel but the bulk of her output dealt with those bourgeois emotions: love and passion.
I think one of the difficulties here is the refusal to recognize and admit the fact that not all of the concern about the shortcomings of society originated with Marx. Many a socially conscious novelist is merely a man or a woman with a conscience. Though part of the cultural heritage of all of us derives from Marx, whether we subscribe to the Marxist theory or not, a larger portion of it stems from the Bible. If novelists were asked for an explanation of their criticism of society they might well quote Richard Rumbold, who knew nothing about realism or naturalism and who had never heard of Karl Marx. When Rumbold mounted the scaffold in 1685 he said, according to Macaulay’s History of England: “I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.”
Similar beliefs have been stated in every century. Novelists would be strangely impervious to ideas if a variant of this particular belief did not find expression in some of their works.
No matter what these novels are called, the average reader seems to like them. Possibly the reading public, and here I include myself, is like the man who kept butting his head against a stone wall and when asked for an explanation said that he went in for this strange practice because it felt so good when he stopped. Perhaps there is a streak of masochism in all of us; or perhaps we all feel guilty because of the shortcomings of society and our sense of guilt is partially assuaged when we are accused, in the printed pages of a novel, of having done those things that we ought not to have done—and of having left undone those things we ought to have done.
The craftsmanship that goes into these novels is of a high order. It has to be. They differ from other novels only in the emphasis on the theme—but it is the theme which causes the most difficulty. All novelists attempt to record the slow struggle of man toward his long home, sometimes depicting only the beginning or the middle or the end of the journey, emphasizing the great emotional peaks of birth and marriage and death which occur along the route. If it is a good job, the reader nods and says, Yes, that is how it must have been. Because the characters are as real as one’s next-door-neighbor, predictable and yet unpredictable, lingering in the memory.
The sociological novelist sets out to do the same thing. But he is apt to become so obsessed by his theme, so entangled in it and fascinated by it, that his heroes resemble the early Christian martyrs; and his villains are showboat villains, first-class scoundrels with no redeeming features or virtues. If he is more pamphleteer than novelist, and something of a romanticist in the bargain, he will offer a solution to the social problem he has posed. He may be in love with a new world order, and try to sell it to his readers; or, and this happens more frequently, he has a trade union, usually the CIO, come to the rescue in the final scene, horse-opera fashion, and the curtain rings down on a happy ending as rosy as that of a western movie done in technicolor.
Characterization can be the greatest glory of the sociological novel. I offer as examples: Oliver Twist, child of the London slums, asking for more; Ma Joad, holding the fam’ly together in that long westward journey, somehow in her person epitomizing an earlier generation of women who traveled westward in search of a promised land; Bigger Thomas, who was both criminal and victim, fleeing for his life over the rooftops of Chicago; Jeeter Lester clinging to his worn-out land in futile defiance of a mechanized world. They have an amazing vitality, much of which springs from the theme. People still discuss them, argue about them, as though they had had an actual existence.
Though characterization is the great strength of these novels, as it is of all novels, it can also be the great weakness. When society is given the role of fate, made the evil in the age-old battle between good and evil, the burden of responsibility for their actions is shifted away from the characters. This negates the Old Testament idea of evil as a thing of the spirit, with each individual carrying on his own personal battle against the evil within himself. In a book which is more political pamphlet or sermon than novel the characters do not battle with themselves to save their souls, so to speak. Their defeat or their victory is not their own—they are pawns in the hands of a deaf, blind, stupid, social system. Once the novelist begins to manipulate his characters to serve the interests of his theme they lose whatever vitality they had when their creator first thought about them.
And so the novelist who takes an evil in society for his theme is rather like an aerial trapeze artist desperately trying to maintain his balance in mid-air. He works without a net and he may be sent tumbling by the dialogue, the plot, the theme itself. Dialogue presents a terrible temptation. It offers the writer a convenient platform from which to set forth his pet theories and ideas. This is especially true of the books that deal with some phase of the relationship between whites and Negroes in the United States. Most of the talk in these books comes straight out of a never-never land existing in the author’s mind. Anyone planning to write a book on this theme should reread Native Son and compare the small talk which touches on race relations with that found in almost any novel on the subject published since then. Or reread Act I Scene 1 of Othello, and note how the dialogue advances the action, characterizes the speaker and yet at no point smacks of the pulpit or of the soapbox. When Iago and Rodrigo inform Brabantio that Desdemona has eloped with Othello, the Moor, they speak the language of the prejudiced; but it is introduced with a smoothness that hasn’t been duplicated elsewhere.
One of the most successful recent performances is that of Alan Paton in Cry the Beloved Country. The hero, the old Zulu minister, wrestles with the recognized evil within himself, and emerges victorious. Yet the miserable existence of the exploited native in Johannesburg, the city of evil, has been revealed and the terror and glory of Africa become as real as though one had lived there. It is written in a prose style so musical and so rhythmic that much of it is pure poetry. Cry the Beloved Country is proof, if such proof is necessary, that the novel of social criticism will have a life as long and as honorable as that of the novel itself as an art form. For this book is art of the highest order, but it could not possibly be called an example of art for art’s sake. It tells the reader in no uncertain terms that society is responsible for the tragedy of the native African.
In recent years, many novels of social criticism have dealt with race relations in this country. It is a theme which offers the novelist a wide and fertile field; it is the very stuff of fiction, sometimes comic, more often tragic, always ironic, endlessly dramatic. The setting and the characters vary in these books but the basic story line is derived from Uncle Tom’s Cabin; discrimination and/or segregation (substitute slavery for the one or the other) are evils which lead to death—actual death or potential death. The characters either conform to the local taboos and mores and live, miserably; or refuse to conform and die.
This pattern of violence is characteristic of the type for a very good reason. The arguments used to justify slavery still influence American attitudes
toward the Negro. If I use the words intermarriage, mixed marriage, miscegenation, there are few Americans who would not react to those words emotionally. Part of that emotion can be traced directly to the days of slavery. And if emotion is aroused merely by the use of certain words, and the emotion is violent, apoplectic, then it seems fairly logical that novels which deal with race relations should reflect some of this violence.
As I said, my first novel was a novel of social criticism. Having written it, I discovered that I was supposed to know the answer to many of the questions that are asked about such novels. What good do they do is a favorite. I think they do a lot of good. Social reforms have often received their original impetus from novels which aroused the emotions of a large number of readers. Earth and High Heaven, Focus, and Gentleman’s Agreement undoubtedly made many a person examine the logic of his own special brand of anti-Semitism. The novels that deal with race relations have influenced the passage of the civil rights bills which have become law in many states.
I was often asked another question: Why do people write these novels? Sometimes I have been tempted to paraphrase the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland by way of answer (I never did): “‘Please would you tell me,’ said Alice a little timidly . . . ‘Why your cat grins like that?’ ‘It’s a Cheshire cat,’ said the Duchess, ‘and that’s why.’”
Behind this question there is the implication that a writer who finds fault with society must be a little wrong in the head. Or that he is moved by the missionary spirit or a holier-than-thou attitude and therefore is in need of psychiatric treatment. I think the best answer to that question, on record, is to be found in Robert Van Gelder’s Writers and Writing. He quotes Erich Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front, Three Comrades, Arch of Triumph) as saying that people cannot count with their imaginations, that if five million die in a concentration camp it really does not equal one death in emotional impact and meaning—the death of someone you have known and loved: “If I say one died—a man I have made you know and understand—he lived so, this is what he thought, this is what he hoped, this was his faith, these were his difficulties, these his triumphs and then he—in this manner, on this day, at an hour when it rained and the room was stuffy—was killed, after torture, then perhaps I have told you something that you should know about the Nazis. . . . Some people who did not understand before may be made to understand what the Nazis were like and what they did and what their kind will try to do again.”