Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 58 of 253 · 20 per page

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “There, there,” I said, sucking down the coffee. I was intensely bored of Reva already. This would be the end of our friendship, I felt. Sometime soon, my cruelty would go too far, and now that her mother was dead, Reva’s head would start to clear of its superficial nonsense. She’d probably go back into therapy. She’d realize that we had no good reason to be friends, and that she would never get what she needed from me. She’d send me a long letter explaining her resentments, her mistakes, explaining how she had to let me go in order to move on with her life. I could already imagine her phrasing. “I’ve come to realize that our friendship is no longer serving me”—that was language her therapist would have taught her —“which is not a criticism of you.” But of course it was about me: I was the friend in the friendship she was describing. As we drove through Farmingdale, I wrote my reply to her would-be “Dear John” letter in my head. “I got your note,” I would begin. “You have confirmed what I’ve known about you since college.” I tried to think of the worst thing I could say about a person. What was the cruelest, most cutting, truest thing? Was it worth saying? Reva was harmless. She wasn’t a bad person. She’d done nothing to hurt me. I was the one sitting there full of disgust, wearing her dead mother’s shoes. “Good-bye.” • • • FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, through the proceedings at Solomon Schultz Funeral Home, I stayed by Reva’s side but watched her as though from a distance. I started to feel strange—not guilty per se, but somehow responsible for her suffering. I felt as though she were a stranger I had hit with my car, and I was waiting for her to die so she wouldn’t be able to identify me. When she talked, it was like I was watching a movie. “That’s Ken, over there. See his wife?” The camera panned over the rows, narrowed in on a pretty half-Asian woman with freckles, wearing a black beret. “I don’t want him to see me like this. Why did I invite him? I don’t know what I was thinking.” “Don’t worry,” is all I could think to say. “He’s not going to fire you for being sad at a funeral.” Reva sniffed and nodded, dabbed at her eyes with her tissue. “That’s my mom’s friend from Cleveland,” she said as an obese woman in a black muumuu hoisted herself onto the stage. She sang “On My Own” from Les Misérables, a cappella. It was painful to watch. Reva cried and cried. Tissues stained with mascara like crushed inkblot tests piled up on her lap.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It was miserable seeing her now. She was in a simple shift dress of very thin cotton. Her tiny yogic body came up against it and then retreated once more – it depended on how she stood. You would have no idea, looking at her like this – make-up free, so simply dressed – no idea at all of the strange, minute cosmetic  kipps and belsey attentions she gave to other, more private parts of her body. Howard himself had been amazed to discover them. In what position had they been lying when she had offered the peculiar explanation of her mother being Parisian? ‘For Godssake, why would you want to meet him ?’ ‘Warren’s interested in him. And actually so am I. I think public intellectuals are incredibly weird and interesting . . . It’s got to be a kind of pathological tension, and then he has the race thing to contend with . . . But I just adore his dapperness . He’s terribly dapper .’ ‘Terribly dapper fascist.’ Claire frowned. ‘He’s so compelling , though. Like what they say about Clinton – charisma overdose. It’s probably entirely phero-monal, you know, like nasal , in some way Warren could explain – ’ ‘Nasal, anal – it’s definitely coming out one orifice or another.’ Howard now brought his glass to his mouth so that the next thing he said might be slightly muffled. ‘Congratulations, by the way. I hear they’re in order.’ ‘We’re very happy,’ she said placidly. ‘God, I am so fascinated by him – ’ Howard thought for a moment that she meant Warren. ‘See how he works the room? He’s everywhere, somehow.’ ‘Yeah, like the plague.’ Claire turned to Howard with an impish face. He saw that she had thought it would be all right now to look at him, now the ironic pace of their conversation had been set. The affair, after all, was so long in the past, had remained undiscovered for so long. In the interim Claire had got married! And that imaginary night at a Michigan conference was now the accepted reality; the three-week affair between Howard and Claire Malcolm in Wellington had never happened. Why shouldn’t they talk to each other again, look at each other? But in fact to look was lethal, and the moment she turned they both knew it.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  33Ramsdale revisited. I approached it from the side of the lake. The sunny noon was all eyes. As I rode by in my mud-flecked car, I could distinguish scintillas of diamond water between the far pines. I turned into the cemetery and walked among the long and short stone monuments. Bonzhur, Charlotte. On some of the graves there were pale, transparent little national flags slumped in the windless air under the evergreens. Gee, Ed, that was bad luck—referring to G. Edward Grammar, a thirty-five-year-old New York office manager who had just been arrayed on a charge of murdering his thirty-three-year-old wife, Dorothy. Bidding for the perfect crime, Ed had bludgeoned his wife and put her into a car. The case came to light when two county policemen on patrol saw Mrs. Grammar’s new big blue Chrysler, an anniversary present from her husband, speeding crazily down a hill, just inside their jurisdiction (God bless our good cops!). The car sideswiped a pole, ran up an embankment covered with beard grass, wild strawberry and cinquefoil, and overturned. The wheels were still gently spinning in the mellow sunlight when the officers removed Mrs. G’s body. It appeared to be a routine highway accident at first. Alas, the woman’s battered body did not match up with only minor damage suffered by the car. I did better. I rolled on. It was funny to see again the slender white church and the enormous elms. Forgetting that in an American suburban street a lone pedestrian is more conspicuous than a lone motorist, I left the car in the avenue to walk unobtrusively past 342 Lawn Street. Before the great bloodshed, I was entitled to a little relief, to a cathartic spasm of mental regurgitation. Closed were the white shutters of the Junk mansion, and somebody had attached a found black velvet hair ribbon to the white FOR SALE sign which was leaning toward the sidewalk. No dog barked. No gardener telephoned. No Miss Opposite sat on the vined porch—where to the lone pedestrian’s annoyance two pony-tailed young women in identical polka-dotted pinafores stopped doing whatever they were doing to stare at him: she was long dead, no doubt, these might be her twin nieces from Philadelphia.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  What other women do without half thinking was for me a great and momentous act. It was a denial of my name, my destiny, my mother. My sisters were different. Gundra Miranda called herself “Randy” and married at eighteen. She married a Lebanese physicist at Berkeley, had four sons in California, and then moved her family to Beirut where she proceeded to have five daughters. Despite the seeming rebelliousness of a nice Jewish girl from Central Park West marrying an A-Rab, she led the most ordinary family life imaginable in Beirut. She was almost religiously in favor of Kinder, Küche, and Kirche—especially the Catholic Church, which she attended in order to impress the Arabs with her non-Jewishness. Not, of course, that they liked Catholicism that much, but it was better than the other alternative. Both she and Pierre, my brother-in-law, believed in Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, and Lionel Tiger as if they were Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed. “Instinct!” they snorted. “Pure animal instinct!” They came to hate the Berkeley beatniks of their college days and to preach territoriality, the immorality of contraception and abortion, and the universality of war. At times they honestly seemed to believe in the Great Chain of Being and the Divine Right of Kings. And meanwhile, they just kept on breeding. (“Why should people with superior genes use contraception when all the undesirables are breeding the world into extinction?"—the old refrain whenever Randy was announcing a new pregnancy.) Lalah (the other middle daughter after me) was four years younger and had married a Negro. But as in Randy’s case, the unconventionality of the choice was misleading. Lalah went to Oberlin where she met Robert Goddard, easily the whitest white Negro in the history of the phrase. My brother-in- law Bob is actually cocoa brown, but his mind is white as a Klan member’s member. I don’t know about his member. How he got to a school like Oberlin rather perplexes me, as it perhaps perplexed him. After college, he went to medical school at Harvard and quickly decided to head where the bread was: orthopedic surgery. He now spends four days a week setting legs and pinning hips (and collecting huge fees from insurance companies).

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Clotilde will make you some tea and . . . yes, just make yourself comfortable here,’ he said, as they stepped on to the cowhide rug of the library. ‘ Clotilde! ’ Kiki sat down on the piano stool as she had before and, with a sad smile to herself, checked the shelf nearest to her. All the N’s were in perfect order. ‘I’ll be back in one minute,’ murmured Monty, turning to go, but just then there was a loud noise in the house and the sound of someone charging up the hallway. The someone stopped at the library’s open door. A young black girl. She had been crying. Her face was full of rage, but now, with a start, she spotted Kiki. Surprise supplanted anger on her features. ‘Chantelle, this is – ’ said Monty. ‘Can I get out? I’m leaving,’ she said and walked on. ‘If you wish to do that,’ said Monty calmly, and followed her a few steps. ‘We’ll continue our discussion at lunchtime. One o’clock in my office.’ Kiki heard the front door slam. Monty stayed where he was for a moment and then turned back to his guest. ‘I’m sorry about that.’  on beauty and being wrong ‘ I’m sorry,’ said Kiki, looking at the rug beneath her feet. ‘I didn’t realize you had company.’ ‘A student . . . well, actually that is the question,’ said Monty, walking across the room and taking the white armchair by the window. Kiki realized she had never really seen him like this, sitting down, in a normal, domestic setting. ‘Yes, I think I met her before – she knows my daughter.’ Monty sighed. ‘Unreal expectations,’ he said, looking at the ceiling and then at Kiki. ‘ Why do we give these young people unreal expectations? What good can come from it?’ ‘Sorry, I don’t . . . ?’ said Kiki. ‘Here is a young African-American lady,’ explained Monty, bringing his signet-ringed right hand down solidly on the arm of the Victorian chair, ‘who has no college education and no college experience, who did not graduate from her high school , who yet believes that somehow the academic world of Wellington owes her a place within its hallowed walls – and why? As restitution for her own – or her family’s – misfortunes. Actually, the problem is larger than that. These children are being encouraged to claim reparation for history itself . They are being used as political pawns – they are being fed lies. It depresses me terribly.’ It was strange being spoken to like this, as if in an audience of one.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Reading something – every now and then.’ ‘No doubt, no doubt . . . that was always more your mum, though, weren’t it? Always had a book in her hand. Walked into a lamp-post once reading a book in the street,’ said Harold, a story Howard had heard and heard and heard, as he had heard the bit that came next and came now. ‘Spose that’s where you got it from . . . Oh, blimey, look at this big tart. Look at him! I mean, purple and pink? He’s not serious, though, is he?’ ‘Who?’ ‘ Him – whatsisname . . . he’s a bloody fool. Wouldn’t know an antique if it was being shoved up his arse . . . But it was funny yesterday ’cause he was doing the bit where you guess the price the thing’ll go for before it goes – I mean, it’s mostly tat, I wouldn’t give you ten bob for most of it, if I’m honest, and we had better stuff than that just knocking around me mum’s house . . . never gave it a first thought never mind a second, but there you are . . . I’ve forgotten what I was on about now . . . oh, yeah, so it’s usually couples or mother and daughter that he gets on, but yesterday he’s got these two women – like bloody buses, both of ’em huge, hair very short, dressed like blokes of course, like they do, ugly as  on beauty and being wrong sin and looking to buy some military stuff, medals and that, ’cos they were in the bloody army, weren’t they, and they’re holding hands, oh dear . . . I was laughing , oh, dear . . .’ And here Harold chuckled mirthfully. ‘And you could tell he didn’t know what to say . . . I mean, he’s not exactly kosher himself, now is he?’ Harold laughed some more, and then grew serious, noting, possibly, the lack of laughter elsewhere in the room. ‘But then there’s always been that aspect in the army, hasn’t there? I mean, that’s the main place you find them, the women . . . I spose it must suit them more, mentally . . . as it were,’ said Harold, this last being his only verbal pretension. Now, Howard, as it were . . . He’d started using it when Howard came home for the summer after his first year in Oxford. ‘Them?’ asked Howard, putting his HobNob down. ‘You what, son? Look, you’ve broken your biscuit. Should have brought a saucer for crumbs.’ ‘Them.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  But he that laughed before at his fellow, said againe, Verily this tale is as true, as if a man would say that by sorcery and inchantment the floods might be inforced to run against their course, the seas to be immovable, the aire to lacke the blowing of windes, the Sunne to be restrained from his naturall race, the Moone to purge his skimme upon herbes and trees to serve for sorceries: the starres to be pulled from heaven, the day to be darkened and the dark night to continue still. Then I being more desirous to heare his talke than his companions, sayd, I pray you, that began to tell your tale even now, leave not off so, but tell the residue. And turning to the other I sayd, You perhappes that are of an obstinate minde and grosse eares, mocke and contemme those things which are reported for truth, know you not that it is accounted untrue by the depraved opinion of men, which either is rarely seene, seldome heard, or passeth the capacitie of mans reason, which if it be more narrowly scanned, you shall not onely finde it evident and plaine, but also very easy to be brought to passe. THE SECOND CHAPTER How Apuleius told to the strangers, what he saw a jugler do in Athens.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  (There are no traffic regulations in Beirut but lots of cursing.) Besides, Pierre usually thinks it’s very cute when the kids curse in Arabic. Naturally the afternoon wound up with everyone yelling or crying and water all over the floor, and once again we did not go sightseeing or even to the beach. The incident, however, provided us with a mission. We had to take Louise back to her village in the mountains (Pierre’s “ancestral village,” as he called it) and find a still more naive mountain girl to replace her. The next morning, we put in the obligatory few hours of yelling and then piled into the car and headed along the Mediterranean for the hills. We stopped at Byblos to admire the Crusader castle, reflected torpidly on the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks, ate at a nearby seafood restaurant, and then proceeded into the sun-baked mountains along a road which looked and felt like another archaeological find. Karkabi, Pierre’s much-vaunted “ancestral village,” is a town so small you could easily pass it without noticing. The town only got electricity in ‘63 and the electricity tower, in fact, dominates the village. (It is also the point of interest which the villagers are most avid to show you.) When we arrived in the main square (where a skinny donkey was pulling a stone around in a circle to grind wheat), everyone practically fell over themselves touching the car, breaking their necks for a look at us, and being generally depressingly obsequious. You could tell Pierre loved this. It was his car, and he probably also wanted everyone to think we were his four wives (though, of course, they knew we weren’t). All this seemed even more depressing when you considered that nearly everyone in town was Pierre’s cousin at least and that they all were illiterate and went barefoot—and what the hell was so difficult about impressing them? Pierre slowed the ridiculous tank of a car to a crawl as we drove past (to let all the rubberneckers get a good look). Then he pulled up in front of the “ancestral home"—a small, whitewashed adobe house with grapes growing on the roof and no windowpanes or screens but only small square windows with wrought-iron grilles over them (and flies zooming freely in and out—but inevitably more in than out). Our arrival sent everyone into a frenzy of activity. Pierre’s mother and aunts began preparing tabuli and humus with a vengeance and Pierre’s father— who is about eighty and drinks Arak all day—went out to shoot birds for supper and nearly shot himself.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Even if you slam the door and walk out, even if you fuck everyone in sight, you don’t necessarily get closer to freedom.” Wasn’t I sounding like Bennett? The irony of it! “I wish you’d tell Judy that,” Marty said. “Nobody can tell anyone anything,” I said. — Later, when Adrian and I were in the tent together, I asked him about Judy. “Boring cunt,” he said. “It just lies there and doesn’t even acknowledge your existence.” “How’d she like you?” “How do I know?” “Don’t you care?” “Look—I fucked Judy as one might have coffee after dinner. And not very good coffee at that.” “Then why bother?” “Why not?” “Because if you reduce everything to that level of indifference, everything becomes meaningless. It’s not existentialism, it’s numbness. It just ends by making everything meaningless.” “So?” “So you wind up with the opposite of what you wanted. You wanted intensity, but you get numbness. It’s self-defeating.” “You’re lecturing me,” Adrian said. “You’re right,” I said without apology. — The next morning Judy and Marty were gone. They had packed up and fled in the night like gypsies. “I lied to you last night,” Adrian said. “About what?” “I actually didn’t fuck Judy at all.” “How come?” “Because I didn’t feel like it.” I laughed nastily. “You mean you couldn’t.” “No. That’s not what I mean. I mean I didn’t want to.” “It doesn’t matter at all to me,” I said, “whether you did or didn’t.” “That’s shit.” “That’s what you think.” “You’re just furious because I’m the first man you’ve met that you can’t control, and you can’t put up for long without anyone or anything you can’t control.” “Crap. I just happen to have somewhat higher standards of what I want than you do. I see through your game. I agree with you about spontaneity and existentialism—but this isn’t spontaneity at all—it’s desperation. You said it about me the first day we screwed and now I’ll say it back to you. It’s all desperation and depression masquerading as freedom. It isn’t even pleasurable. It’s pathetic. Even this trip is pathetic.” “You never give anything a chance,” Adrian said. — Later we swam in the pond and dried ourselves in the sun. Adrian stretched out on the grass and squinted up into the sunlight. I lay with my head on his chest smelling the warm odor of his skin. Suddenly a cloud passed in front of the sun and rain began to fall lightly. We didn’t move. The rain cloud passed, leaving us sprinkled with large drops. I could feel them evaporating when the sun came out and shone on our skin again. A daddy longlegs walked over Adrian’s shoulder and through his hair. I sat bolt upright. “What’s wrong?” “Disgusting bug.” “Where?” “Your shoulder.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  “elevate” their portfolios and inspire jealousy and, delusional as they all were, respect. I was perfectly happy to wipe out all that garbage from my mind. I’d never been to the kind of party in the Polaroid photos, but I’d seen it from afar: young and beautiful and fascinating people hailing cabs and flicking cigarettes, cocaine, mascara, the diamond grit of a night out on the town, random sex a simple gesture in a bathroom stall, wading once onto the dance floor then back out again, screaming drink orders at the bar, everyone pushing toward the ecstasy of the dream of tomorrow, where they’d have more fun, feel more beautiful, be surrounded by more interesting people. I’d always preferred a septic hotel bar, maybe because that’s where Trevor liked to take me. He and I agreed that people looked stupid when they were “having a good time.” The interns at the gallery had told me about their weekends out at Tunnel and Life and Sound Factory and Spa and Lotus and Centro-Fly and Luke + Leroy. So I had some sense of what went on in the city at night. And as Natasha’s assistant, I’d been responsible for keeping a list of some of the most socially valuable people at an art party—specifically the young impresarios and their attendants. She invited them to openings and told me to study their bios. Maggie Kahpour’s father had owned the largest private collection of Picasso doodles in the world, and when he died, she donated them to an abbey in the south of France. The monks named a cheese after her. Gwen Elbaz-Burke was the grandniece of Ken Burke, the performance artist who was eaten by the shark he kept in his swimming pool, and the daughter of Zara Ali Elbaz, a Syrian princess who was exiled for making a pornographic art film with her German boyfriend, a descendant of Heinrich Himmler. Stacey Bloom had started a magazine called Kun(s)t about

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I didn’t want her to leave. The white glare off the overhead light gleamed across her collarbones. She was beautiful, with all her nerves and all her complicated, circuitous feelings and contradictions and fears. This would be the last time I’d see her in person. “I love you,” I said. “I love you, too.” • • • PING XI’S VIDEOS and paintings went up at Ducat in late August. The show was called “Large-Headed Pictures of a Beautiful Woman.” He or Natasha FedExed me tear-outs of the reviews. No note. The images from the show were not what I’d remembered imagining from my days with Ping Xi in my bedroom. I had expected a series of all sloppily painted nudes. Instead, Ping Xi had painted me in the style of Utamaro woodblock prints, wearing neon kimonos printed with tropical flowers and lipstick kisses and Coca-Cola and Pennzoil and Chanel and Absolut Vodka logos. In each piece, my head was huge. In a few portraits, Ping Xi had collaged my actual hair. In Artforum, Ronald Jones called me a “bloated nymph with dead man eyes.” Phyllis Braff condemned the show as “a product of Oedipal lust” in the New York Times. ArtReview called the work “predictably disappointing.” Otherwise, the reviews were positive. The videos described were of me talking into the camera, seeming to narrate some personal stories—I cry in one—but Ping Xi had dubbed everything over. Instead of my voice, you heard long, angry voice mails Ping Xi’s mother had left him in Cantonese. No subtitles. • • • I FOUND MY WAY into the Met one afternoon in early September. I guess I wanted to see what other people had done with their lives, people who had made art alone, who had stared long and hard at bowls of fruit. I wondered if they’d watched the grapes wither and shrivel up, if they’d had to go to the market to replace them, and if, before they threw the shriveled strand of grapes away, they’d eaten a few. I hoped that they’d had some respect for the stuff they were immortalizing. Maybe, I thought, once the light had faded for the day, they dropped the rotted fruit out an open window, hoping it would save the life of a starving beggar passing below on the street. Then I imagined the beggar, a monster with worms crawling through his matted hair, the tattered rags on his body fluttering like the wings of a bird, his eyes ablaze with desperation, his heart a caged animal begging for slaughter, hands cupped in perpetual prayer as the townspeople milled around the city square. Picasso was right to start painting the dreary and dejected. The blues. He looked out the window at his own misery. I could respect that.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  16. Denique die quadam madidae! illius aniculae sermo talis meas affertur aures: * De isto quidem, mi herilis, tecum ipsa videris, quem sine meo consilio pigrum et formidulosum familiarem istum sortita es, qui insuavis et odiosi mariti tui caperratum super- cilium ignaviter perhorrescit ac per hoc amoris languidi desidia tuos volentes amplexus discruciat. Quanto melior Philesitherus adulescens et formosus et liberalis et strenuus et contra maritorum inefficaces diligentias constantissimus, dignus Hercule solus omnium matronarum deliciis perfrui, dignus solus coronam auream capite gestare, vel ob unicum istud, quod nunc nuper in quendam zelotypum maritum ex- imio studio commentus est. Audi denique et amato- rum diversum ingenium compara. l7 «Nosti quendam Barbarum nostrae civitatis de- curionem, quem Scorpionem prae morum acritudine vulgus appellat? Hic uxorem generosam et eximia 1 Heinsius emendation for the MSS’ timidae. Helm’ intimidae may well be right, mess 424 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK IX to see, but I could not, by reason mine eyes were covered every day: and verily, if I had been free and at liberty, I would have discovered all her abomination. She had an old woman, a bawd, a messenger of mischief, that daily haunted to her house, and made good cheer with her at breakfast, and then they would drink wine unmixed, and after this first skirmish they would contrive and plot to the utter undoing and impoverishment of her husband: but I, that was greatly offended with the negligence of Fotis, who made me an ass instead of a bird, did yet comfort myself for the miserable deformity of my shape by this only mean, in that I had long ears, whereby I might hear all things that were done even afar off. On a day I heard the shameless old bawd say to the baker’s wife: “ Dame, you have chosen (notwith- standing my counsel) a young man to your lover, who as meseemeth is dull, fearful, without any grace, and dastardly coucheth at the frowning looks of your odious husband, whereby you have no delight nor pleasure with him. How far better is the young man Philesitherus, who is comely, beautiful, in the flower of his youth, liberal, courteous, valiant, and stout against the diligent pryings and watches of husbands, alone worthy to embrace the worthiest dames of this country, and alone worthy to wear a crown of gold, be it for one part alone that he played with clever wit to one that was jealous over his wife. Hearken how it was, and then judge the diversity of these two lovers. * Know you one Barbarus, a senator of our town, whom the vulgar people call likewise Scorpion for his peevish manners? This Barbarus had a gentle- woman to his wife, of exceeding beauty, whom he : 425 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Here the Jew is caught in the American cross fire. The Negro, facing a Jew, hates, at bottom, not his Jew ishness but the color of his skin. It is not the Jewish tradition by whi ch he has been betrayed but the tradition of his nati,·e land. But just as a society must ha,·e a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol. Georgia has the Negro and Harlem has the Jew. Journey to Atlanta T HE PROGRESSIVE PARTY has not, so far as I can gather, made any very great impression in Harlem, and this is not so much despite as because of its campaign promises, promises rather too extravagant to be believed. It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what etfect this mutual contempt has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very little to do with one an other.) Of all Americans, Negroes distrust politicians most, or, more accurately, they have been best trained to expect noth ing from them; more than other Americans, they are always aware of the enormous gap between election promises and their daily lives. It is true that the promises excite them, but this is not because they are taken as proof of good intentions. They arc the proof of something more concrete than inten tions: that the Negro situation is not static, that changes have occurred, and are occurring and will occur-this, in spite of the daily, dead-end monotony. It is this daily, dead-end mo notony, though, as well as the wise desire not to be betrayed by too much hoping, which causes them to look on politicians with such an extraordinarily disenchanted eye. This fatalistic indifference is something that drives the op timistic American li beral quite mad; he is prone, in his more exasperated moments, to refer to Negroes as political children, an appellation not entirely just. Negro liberals, being con sulted, assure us that this is something that will disappear with "education," a vast, all - purpose term, conjuring up visions of sunlit housing projects, stacks of copybooks and a race of well soaped, dark-skinned people who never slur their R's. Actu ally, this is not so much political irresponsibility as the product of experience, experience which no amount of education can quite efface. It is, as much as anything else, the reason the Negro vote is so easily bought and sold, the reason for that exclamation heard so frequently on Sugar Hill: "Our people never get anywhere." "Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a 54- JOURNEY TO ATLANTA 55 century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat levelled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  One is that Negroes love money quite as much as whites do, and rather more than they love one another. The other is that the people in America least attracted to the idea of a 6o6 THE CRUS ADE OF INDIGN ATION 607 worker's state are the workers. They are not interested in themsel ves as \\·orkers----e xcept in their clashes "ith manage ment, in which they are represented by those other managers, the union leaders. They are interested in achieving what, in fact, can still be achie,·ed at this period in American lif e: a measure of economic peace. Unle ss forced by outside pres sure, they are not terribly concerned with what may be hap pening next door- among ::\egroes, for example. In the �egro world, as in the white world, �egroes who ha,·e money band together and try to ignore the existence of their unluckier brothers. That is the way the lm·e of money works. But neither money, nor the love of it, is the root of all e\·il. The importance of money is simply that power in the "·orld does not exist without it and power in the world is what almost e,·en·one would like to have. The love of monev thesis is the thesis of Daniel Guerin's Negroes on T7Je March, and, since I find it impossible to take the thesis seriously, I find it rather difficult to discuss the book- which is, anyway, less a discussion of the American �e gro's situation than a rather shrill diatribe against the capitalist system. :So one "ith any pretension to intellectual honesty claims that the capitalist system is perfect, or is likely to be made so. It may indeed be doomed, and we may all be the slothful and pussy-f ooting creatures Mr. Guerin says we are. But his own tone is so extremely ungenerous that I cannot a\'Oid a certain chill when I think of the probable fate of dis senters in his ,·ari-colored brave new "·o rld. Here he is on Gunnar .\lyrdal, the Swedish social scientist whose An Amer ican Dilemma Mr. Guerin finds "f eeble in interpretation". (All italics are J\lr. Guerin's.) " ... it does not explain how, by whom, and JVh)' mce p1·ejudice was brought into being." (It certainly does not; I, too, should like to read the book which does. ) But Mydral's feebleness, it turns out, is blacker than mere incompetence: "Without cal ling into question Myrdal's good faith, we must ne,·ertheless make the obsen·ation that his method is quite in harmony with the concerns of those who subsidized his work and sen·es their interests quite well. For what did the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation actually want? " \Vhat they didn't want was a "cause -and-eff ect rela tionship. . . . established between capitalist oppression and 6o8 OTH ER ESS AYS race prejudice."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There are, no doubt, as many ways of coping with the resulting complex of tensions as there are black men in the world, but no black man can hope ever to be entirely lib erated from this internal warfare-ra ge, dissembling, and contempt having inevitably accompanied his first realization of the power of white men. What is crucial here is that, since white men represent in the black man's world so heavy a weight, white men have for black men a reality which is far from being reciprocal; and hence all black men have toward all white men an attitude which is designed, really, either to rob the white man of the jewel of his na"ivete, or else to make it cost him dear. The black man insists, by whatever means he finds at his disposal, mactlie white man cease to regard -him-as - ane xotic rarity and recognize him as a human being. This -is a- very charged - al"1<rdifli.ciilemoment, for there is-a great deal of will power involved in the white man's nai"vete. Most people are not naturally reflective any more than they are naturally ma licious, and the white man prefers to keep the black man at a certain human remove because it is easier for him thus to pre serve his stmpltctt y and avmd-bemg ca UeO-tO acco unrfof crimes �olllmit l: eoovfilsTorefathers;- orhis-n - eiglibors.- -m is inescapably aware, nevertheless, that fie - Is-in a. - beftef- position in the world than black men are, nor can he quite put to death the suspicion that he is hated by black men therefore. He does not wish to be hated, neither docs he wish to change places, and at this point in his uneasiness he can scarcely avoid having recourse to those legends which white men have created about black men, the most usual effect of which is that the white man finds himself enmeshed, so to speak, in his own language which describes hell, as well as the attributes which lead one to hell, as being as black as night. Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. It is of quite considerable significance that black men remain, in the imagination, and in ovctwhelming num bers in fact, beyond the disciplines of salvati on; and this de spite the f..

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The exception is Q;tality, whose heroine f(>rsakes her white would-be lover and is last seen making plans for a Negro hos pital with a quite satistyingly dark young doctor. In Kingsblood Royal the sting of transgression is removed by the complete innocence of the transgressor and the impossibility of taking his one-thirty-second Negro-ness seriously. God Is For White Folks ends in quite an impressive display of abrupt insanity, murders, and sudden deaths in which all of the elderly trans gressors arc destroyed and the lover and his lass, produced, incontrovertibly, by sin, are redeemed through blood and al lowed to enter the manse. In The Path of Thunder, Lanny, despite his father's blood, is dark, and Sarie is fair, and they arc shot to death in an old cabin; it is Lanny's father, inci dentally, who shoots them. But the quarrel here is not with the violent incident; or the THE IMAGE OF THE NEGR O violent death; or the difficulty of union between black and white. The reports of violence may not come in the nature of a revelation, but it is a real and valid aspect of the lives that Negroes lead. One suspects, however, that the very frequency and sameness of the reports operate on the public mind as a bludgeon, numbing the hypothetical response; it may, indeed, be insisted that unle ss the report has the urgency of a reve lation, the report is worthless. Out of whatever motives, we have here, in eff ect, merely the exploitation of an ugly reality. Finally, we are shown noth ing, we feel nothing, nothing is illumin ated. The worthless ness of these novels consists precisely in that they supposedly expose a reality that in actuality they conspire to mask. For this is not the reality: the reality is more sinister, more treach erous, and more profound than this; and it is, above all, more personal. In none of the foregoing has it been my purpose to resurrect or exploit the ancient bogeyman of sex between the races, but only to inquire how and why in the first place it became a bogeyman at all, and why, if it has been exorcised, it exerts yet, as the sole breath oflif e in these ambitious novels, so ferocious and unmistakable a force.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Miss Horne's column made her sound like an embittered Eleanor Roosevelt, and the only column of Robeson's I have read was concerned with the current witch-h unt in Holly wood, discussing the kind of movies under attack and Hol lywood's traditional treatment of Negroes. It is personally painful to me to realize that so gifted and forceful a man as Robeson should have been tricked by his own bitterness and by a total inability to understand the nature of political power in general, or Communist aims in particular, into missing the point of his own critique, which is worth a great deal of thought: that there are a great many ways of being un-Amer ican, some of them nearly as old as the country itself , and that the House On-American Activities Committee might find concepts and attitudes even more damaging to American lif e in a picture like Gone With the Wind than in the possibly equally romantic but far less successful Watch on the Rhine. The only other newspapers in the field with any significant sale in Harlem are the Pittsburgh Courier, which has the rep utation of being the best of the lot, and the Afro-American, which resembles the New York Jo urnal-Am erican in layout and type and seems to make a consistent if unsuccessful effort to be at once readable, intelligent, and fiery. The Courier is a high-class paper, reaching its peak in the handling of its society news and in the columns of GeorgeS. Sch uyler, whose Olym pian serenity infuriates me, but who, as a matter of fact, re flects with great accuracy the state of mind and the ambitions of the professional, well-to-do Negro who has managed to find a place to stand. Mr. Schuyler, who is remembered still for a satirical novel I have not read, called Black No More, is aided enormously in this position by a genteel white wife and a child-pr odigy daughter-who is seriously regarded in some circles as proof of the incomprehensible contention that the NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON mating of white and black is more likely to produce genius than any other combination. (The Afro-American recently ran a series of articles on this subject, "The Education of a Genius," by Mrs.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I began to see that Elijah's power came from his single-mindedness. There is nothing calculated about him; he means every word he says. The real re ason, according to Elijah, that I f.1iled to realize that the white man was a devil was that I had been too long exposed to white teaching and had never received true in stru ction. "The so-called American Negro" is the only reason Allah has permitted the Unit ed States to endure so long; the white man's time was up in 1913 , but it is the will of Allah that this lost black nation, the black men of this countr y, be re deemed from their white masters and returned to the true f.1ith, which is Islam. Until this is done-and it will be accom plished very soon-the total destruction of the white man is being delayed. Elijah's mission is to return "the so-called DO WN AT THE CROSS 325 Negro" to Islam, to separate the chosen of Allah from this doomed nation. Furthermore, the white man knows his his tory, knows himself to be a devil, and knows that his time is running out, and all his technolo gy, psychol ogy, science, and "tricknology" are being expended in the effort to prevent black men from heari ng the truth. This truth is that at the very beginning of time there was not one white face to be found in all the universe. Black men ruled the earth and the black man was perfect. This is the truth concerning the era that white. men now refer to as prehistoric. They want black men to believe that they, like white men, once lived in caves and swung from trees and ate their meat raw and did not have the power of speech. But this is not true. Black men were never in such a condition. Allah allowed the Devil, through his scientists, to carry on infernal experiments, which resulted, finally, in the creation of the devil known as the white man, and later, even more disastrou sly, in the creation of the white woman. And it was decreed that these monstrous creatures should rule the earth for a certain number of year s-I forget how many thousand, but, in any case, their rule now is end ing, and Allah, who had never approved of the creation of the white man in the first place (who knows him, in fact, to be not a man at all but a devil), is anxious to restore the rule of peace that the rise of the white man totally destroy ed. There is thus, by definition, no virtue in white people, and since they are another creation entirely and can no more, by breeding, become black than a cat, by breeding, can become a horse, there is no hope for th em.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  An understanding is expected of the Jew such as none but the most naiVe and visionary Negro has ever expected of the American Gentile. The Jew, by the nature of his own precarious position, has failed to vindicate this faith. Jews, like Negroes, must use every possible weapon in order to be accepted, and must try to cover their vulnerability by a frenzied adoption of the customs of the country; and the nation's treatment of Negroes is un questionably a custom. The Jew has been taught- and, too often, accepts-the legend of Negro inferiority; and the Ne gro, on the other hand, has found nothing in his experience with Jews to counteract the legend of Semitic greed. Here the American white Gentile has two legends serving him at once: he has divided these minorities and he rules. It seems unl ikely that within this complicated structure any real and systematic cooperation can be achieved between Ne groes and Jews. (This is in terms of the over-all social problem and is not meant to imply that individual friendships are im possible or that they are valueless when they occur.) The structure of the American commonwealth has trapped both these minorities into attitudes of perpetual hostility. They do not dare trust each other-the Jew because he feels he must climb higher on the American social ladder and has, so far as he is concerned, nothing to gain from identification with any minority even more unl oved than he; while the Negro is in the even less tenable position of not really daring to trust any one. This applies, with qualifications and yet with almost no ex ceptions, even to those Negroes called progressive and "un usual ." Negroes of the professional class (as distinct from professional Negroes) compete actively with the Jew in daily contact; and they wear anti-Semitism as a defiant proof of their citizenship; their positions are too sha ky to allow them any real ease or any faith in anyone. They do not trust whites or 52 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON each other or themselves; and, particularly and vocally, they do not trust Jews. During my brief days as a Socialist I spent more than one meeting arguing against anti-Semitism with a �egro college student, who was trying to get into civil service and was supporting herself meanwhile as a domestic.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels arc preached, the un t(>rtunatc tendency to make one belligerent. Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted. This is the prime concern, the frame of reference; it is not to be confused with a devotion to Humanity which is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause; and Causes, as we know, arc notoriously bloodthirsty. We have, as it seems to me, in this most mechanical and interlocking of civilizations, at tempted to lop this creature down to the status of a time sa\"ing invention. He is not, after all, merely a member of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be ex- EVE RYBODY ' S PR OTEST NO VEL 13 plained by Science. He is-and how old-f ashioned the words sound!- something more than that, something resolutely in definable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity- which is nothing more than the disquieting com plexity of ou rselves-we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over all other claims. What is today parroted as his Responsibility-wh ich seems to mean that he must make formal declaration that he is involved in, and affected by, the lives of other people and to say something improving about this somewhat self -evident fact-is, when he believes it, his corruption and our loss; moreover, it is rooted in, interlocked with and intensifies this same mechanization. Both Gentleman' s Agreement and The Postman AlJVays Rings TJVice exemplifY this terror of the human being, the deter mination to cut him down to size. And in Uncle Tom's Cabin we may find foreshadowing of bo th: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more palatable than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power. It is interesting to consider one more aspect of Mrs.