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Reviews New
York Times Book Review, September 24, 1967 By
Robert Bone Devotees
of the short fiction of Nathanael West will be captivated by the recent manner
of William Melvin Kelley. They have waited 30 years for a bitter fabulist entirely
worthy of the West tradition. Now, in Kelley’s latest novel, they may savor something
of the gift for satire, the corrosive style and the surreal grotesqueries that
we associate with the author of "Miss Lonelyhearts." These
resemblances are hardly accidental; they flow from the common vantage point of
Ivy marginality. West, the New York Jew who went to Brown, and Kelley, the New
York Negro who attended Harvard, were thoroughly exposed to Ivy culture, but in
the end remained outsiders. Victims of polite, prejudice and delicate rebuff,
they have sought equally sophisticated measures of retaliation. The result, in
literary term, is an imagery of revulsion and an abrasive irony. Born
in New York City in 1937, William Melvin Kelley was educated at the Fiedlston
School and Harvard, where he served an apprenticeship in creative writing under
the tutelage of John Hawkes and Archibald MacLeish. He is the author of two novels,
A Different Drummer and A Drop of Patience, and a collection of short stories,
Dancers and the Dance. As
a writer, Kelley is a long-distance runner. He intends to earn a living from his
books, and at 30 has already published four. Moreover, the books are unified in
over-all design. Each volume is part of a larger saga, so that what lies in store
for his readers is a sort of Yoknapatawpha legend in reverse: an epic treatment
of American history from a Negro point of view. Kelley’s
novels are marked by a progressive mood of disaffiliation from the dominant values
of his culture. The hero of A Different Drummer, for example, represents the earlier,
nonviolent phase of the Negro revolution. Under the astonished gaze of his white
neighbors he sows his fields with salt, slaughters his livestock and burns his
home, thereby inspiring a vast migration from the rural South. The
hero of A Drop of Patience is a blind jazz musician. His blindness is an emblem
of the Negro’s vulnerability, so long as he accepts the values of the white middle
class. Abandoned by his white mistress, in and out of mental institutions. Gradually
he recovers, finding a sustaining vision in the folk values implicit in his craft. Now,
in dem ("lemme tellya how dem folks live"), Kelley turns to an overt
satire of the ways of white people. His present mood is bitter, disillusioned,
alienated to the point of secession from American society. The expatriate impulse,
however, has found in satire a controlling form. Kelley’s images are able to encompass
his negative emotions. The result is a sharp increase in perception for the victims
of his satire. Kelley’s
fable turns on the scientific concept of superfecundation: "the fertilization
of two ova within a short period of time by spermatozoa from separate copulations.
It is only distinguishable from two egg twinning if the female has coitus with
two males of diverse physical characters, each passing his respective traits to
the particular twin he has fathered" (Guttmacher, "Pregnancy and Birth"). Hence
the long section called "Twins," which comprises the bulk of the novel.
Mitchell Pierce and his wife Tam are having, for New Yorkers of their social station,
the usual marital difficulties. Mitchell has been philandering, and in retaliation
Tam takes a Negro lover. To the consternation of everyone, she brings forth a
set of twinsÑone white and the other colored. The
injured husband undertakes a search for what might be called his co-genitor, with
the object of unloading all responsibility for the darker child. His quest leads
him, after a tour of Harlem, to a man named Calvin Coolidge Johnson. Cooley, however,
refuses to accept the child. He is "a long grudge-holding black man,"
and he reminds Mitchell of those countless white slaveowners who, having sired
mulatto children, denied their fatherhood and forced a black man into the paternal
role. Now, Cooley insists, Mitchell’s turn has come. When Mitchell asks, "But
why me?" Cooley replies with unassailable logic, "Why my great-granddaddy?" There
is, in this astringent fable, a good deal more than mere poetic justice. With
his central image of the twins, Kelley reminds us that white and black Americans
are virtually brother, that denial of fraternity is our historic crime. By his
ironic reference to Calvin Coolidge, he calls up an archetype of bourgeois philistinism
and political irresponsibility, still prevalent in our suburban middle class.
Finally he warns us, through Cooley’s uncooperative stance, that the white problem
must be solved by whites alone. The delusion of white supremacy is ours; it is
our manhood that is challenged to admit our self-deception and to rectify the
past. That we
have been diverted from this moral revolution by a false concept of manhood is
the burden of Kelley’s opening pages. In a section called "When Johnny .
. . ," he portrays a veteran of the Korean War who becomes a psychopathic
killer. Trained by the Marine Corps in seventy different ways to kill with his
bare hands, John Godwin murders wife and children in the course of a domestic
quarrel. Then, after raping his dead wife, he proceeds calmly to cut his lawn
with a power mower. In
this grim tableau of thwarter power and pathological response, Kelley seeks a
symbolic equivalent for America’s current posture in world affairs. Unable to
resolve our racial crisis, unable to complete the unfinished business of American
democracy, we have embarked on overseas adventures of a falsely virile kind. A
bullying arrogance, Marine Corps style, has characterized our recent foreign policy.
And in Vietnam we kill with a technical efficiency and a chilling moral detachment
which approaches schizophrenia. The
point of articulation of Kelley’s novel, where the stories of Mitchell Pierce
and John Godwin are joined, is currently a focal point of national debate. I have
in mind the question of priorities, placed definitively on the national agenda
by this summer’s riots. To what shall we commit our wealth, our best energies,
our sense of national honor: to the jungles of Vietnam or the jungles of Detroit?
Novels
available in the Coffee House Press Black Arts Movement
Series:
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