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.

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• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Consider, in those ext ravagant denouncements which characterize those novels -to be more and more re marked on the bookshe lves-wh ich are concerned with ho mosexuality, how high a value we place on this dangerous attribute. In The City and the Pillar the aYowed homosexual who is the protagonist murders his first and only perfect love when at length they meet again for he cannot bear to kill instead that desolate and impossible dream of love which he has carried in his heart so long. In The Folded Leaf the frail , introverted Lymie attempts suicide in an effort to escape the danger implicit in his love for Spud; a bloody act which, we are told, has purchased his maturity. In The Fall of Valo1' the g,od-like Marine defends his masculinity with a poker, leaYing for dead the frightened professor who wanted him. These Yi olent resolutions, all of them unlik ely in the extreme, are com pelled by a panic which is close to madness. These novels are not concerned with homosexuality but with the eYer-present danger of sexual activity between men. 600 OTH ER ES SAYS It is this unadmitted tension, longing and terror and wrath which creates their curiously mindless and pallid, yet smoul dering atmosphere. It is a mistake, I think, that this subject matter sets them apart in any fruitful or significant way from anything written by James M. Cain or Laura Z. Hobson or Mary Jane Ward. They are alike in that they are wholly unable to recreate or interpret any of the reality or complexity of human experience; and that area which it is their self -avowed purpose to illumi nate is precisely the area on which is thrown the most distorting light. As one may close Gentleman's Agreement, which is about Gentiles and Jews, having gained no insight into the mind of either; as The Snake Pit reveals nothing of madness and James M. Cain tells us nothing of men and women, so one may read any current novel con cerned with homosexual love and encounter merely a proces sion of platitudes the ancestry of which again may be traced to The Rover Boys and their golden ideal of chastity. It is quite impossible to write a worthwhile novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unha ppily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion. If the nov elist considers that they are no more complex than their labels he must, of necessity, produce a catalogue, in which we will find, neatly listed, all those attributes with which the label is associated; and this can only operate to reinforce the brutal and dangerous anonymity of our culture. A novel insistently demands the presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labeled.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  These novels have in common a subterranean assumption, unspoken by the emancipated, but living in our culture and apparently shared by the novelists themselves: the assumption that whiteness is a kind of salvation and that blackness is a kind of death. Beneath this assumption, like the dark, fantastic sub-plots on which these books rely, are the centuries of fear and desire and hatred and shame that are peculiarly the prov ince of the Puritan Anglo-Saxon and which have made the oppression of black by white a more complicated reality than these novels indicate. The exploration of this reality may yet produce a very powerful literature; we are, in the meantime, confronted with a phenomenon not even remotely literary, which is only one more aspect of an enduring inability to face the truth. Commmtary, April 19+8 Lockridge: (The American My th) I. THE BOOK AS SYMPTOM I N his lifetime Ross Lockridge, Jr., came across a great many words and in Raintree County he has set down every one of them. It fi>llows fr om this that his reading was prodigious: apparently almost every volume of American history ever pub lished and most of the best (and much of the mediocre) writing of past epochs and our own: Shakespeare, Donne, Wolfe, Whitman, Joyce, Dos Passos. He heard-and remem bered-almost every folk song, ballad and doggerel verse which can be called American; he accepted, with a really re markable zest, all of the best American sentiments and prac tically listed all of the old, familiar aims and concepts. His book is as American, as banal and brave and cheerful as The Battle Hymn of the Republic, which, in fact, it resembles to an appalling degree; and, since Raintree County is not nearly so concise it is a good deal more difficult to get through without gagging. Mr. Lockridge, then, is concerned with America. The jacket states reverently that he has attempted no less than a complete embodiment of the American Myth: an heroic undertaking indeed! His people are as invincibly American as the Fourth of July and it takes them 1066 pages to celebrate; everything that happens to them takes place in a fr agrant, booming be nevolent confusion called the Republic. The Hero is John WycklitT Shawnessy, who is something of a cross between Lin coln, Mickey Rooney, Van Johnson and Shakespeare, with much in his makeup of the Sht'opshire Lad; though he does not, of course, ever allow himself such suicidal excesses of gloom. He and the book have moments that are genuine enough; perhaps the book's best moments are those con cerned with Johnny's childhood. In spite of the fact that Mr. Lockridge writes fur too much, there are times when he does not write badly.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The movie's lif eless unreality is only occasionally threatened by 35 NOTES OF A NA TIVE SON Pearl Bailey, who has, however, been forestalled by Mr. Prcminger's direction and is reduced-in a series of awful cos tumes, designed, it would appear, to camouflage her person alit y-to doing what is certainly the best that can be done with an abomination called Beat Out That Rhythm on a Drum and delivering her lines tor the rest of the picture with such a murderously amused disdain that one cannot quite avoid the suspicion that she is commenting on the fil m. For a second or so at a time she escapes the film's deadly inertia and in Miss Bailey one catches glimpses of the imagination which might have exploded this movie into something worth seeing. But this movie, more than any movie I can remember having seen, cannot afford, dare not risk, imagination. The "sexiness," tor example, of Dorothy Dandridge, who plays Carmen, becomes quite dearly manufactured and even rather silly the moment Pearl Bailey stands anywhere ncar her.* And the moment one wishes that Pearl Bailey were playing Carmen one understands that Carmen Jones is controlled by another movie which Ho lly wood was studiously not making. For, while it is amusing to parallel Bizet's amoral Gypsy with a present-day, lower-class Negro woman, it is a good deal less amusing to parallel the Bizet violence with the violence of the Negro ghetto. To avoid this-to exploit, that is, Carmen as a brown skinned baggage but to avoid even suggesting any of the mo tivations such a present-day Carmen might have-it was helpf ul, first of all, that the script tailed to require the services of any white people. This seals the action otl� as it were, in a vacuum in which the spectacle of color is divested of its dan ger. The color itself then becomes a kind of vacuum which each spectator will fill with his own f.. 1ntasies. But Carmen Jones docs not inhabit the never-never land of such bogus but *I have singled out Miss Bailey because the qualit y of her personality, forth right and wry, and with the autho ritative ring of authent icit y, highlights for me the lack of any of these qualities, or any positive qualities at all, in the movie itself. She is also the only pertimner with whose work I am more or less t:unil iar.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They know the black cop's mother and his father, they may have met the sister, and thcy know the younger, or the older brother, who may be a bondsman, or a junkie, or a student, in limbo, at Yale. They know how much the black cop has to prove, and how limited THE DE VIL FIND S WORK arc his means of proving it: where I grew up, black cops were yet more terril)·ing than white ones. I think that it was T. S. Eliot who observed that the people cannot bear very much reality. This may be true enough, as far as it goes, so much depending on what the word "people" brings to mind: I think that we bear a little more reality than we might wish. In any case, in order for a person to bear his lite, he needs a valid re-creation of that lif e, which is why, as Ray Charles might put it, blacks chose to sing the blues. This is why Raisin in the Sun meant so much to black people-on the stage: the film is another matter. In the theater, a current flowed back and forth between the audience and the actors: flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood-as we say, tes tifYing. The filmed play, which is all, alas, that Raisin is on film, simply stayed up there, on that screen. The unimagina tive rigidity of the film locked the audience out of it. Fur thermore, the people in Raisin arc not the people one goes to the movies to sec. The root argument of the play is really tar more subtle than either its detractors or the bulk of its admirers were able to sec. The Defiant 011 cs, on the other hand, is a film, with people we arc accustomed to seeing in the movies. Wel l: all except one. The irreducible difficulty of this genuinely well-meaning film is that no one, clearly, was able to foresee what Poi tier would do with his role-nor was anyone, thereafter, able to undo it-and his performance, which lends the film its only real distinction, also, paradoxically, smashes it to pieces. There is no way to believe both Noah Cullen and the story. With the best will in the world, it is virtually impossible to watch Tony Curtis while Sidney is on the screen, or, with the pos sible exception of Lon Chaney, Jr., anyone else. It is impos sible to accept the premise of the story, a premise based on the profound American misunderstanding of the nature of the hatred between black and white. There is a hatred-cert ainly: though I am now using this word with great caution, and only in the light of the effects, or the results, of hatred.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  No, white people had a much better time in the house of bondage than we did, and God bless their souls, they're going to miss it-all that adulation, adoration, ease, with nothing to do but fornicate, kill Indians, breed slaves and make money. Oh, there were rough times, too, as Shane, True Grit and Rocky inf(>rm us, but the rules of the game were clear, and the re wards demanded nothing more complex than stamina. God THE HOUSE OF BOND AGE 8os was a businessman, like all "real" Americans, and understood that "busi ness was business." The American innocence was unassailable, fixed forever, for it was not a crime to kill a black or a red or a yellow man. On the contrary, it might be, and was most often so considered, a duty. It was not a crime to rape a black or red or yellow woman-it was sport; besides, ni.!rgers ought to be glad we pump some white blood into their kids every once in a while. The lowest white man was more exalted than the most articulate or eminent black: an exceed ingly useful article of faith both for the owners of the South ern fields and the bosses in the Northern sweatshops, who worked this exalted creature past senility to death. Thus, what the house of bondage accomplished for what we \viii call the classic white American was the destruction of his moral sense, except in relation to whites. But it also de stroyed his sense of reality and, therefore, his sense of white people had to be as compulsively one-dimensional as his vision of blacks. The result is that white Americans have been one another's jailers for generations, and the attempt at individual maturity is the loneliest and rarest of the American endeavors. (This may also be why a "boyish" look is a very decided ad vantage in the American political and social arena. ) Well, the planet is destroying the American fantasies; which does not give the Americans the right to destroy the planet. I don't know if it is possible to speak coherently concerning what my disturbed countrymen want, but I hazard that, al though the Americans are certainly capable of precipitating Armageddon, their most desperate desire is to make time stand still. If time stands still, it can neither judge nor accuse nor exact payment; and, indeed, this is precisely the bargain the black presence was expected to strike in the white Repub lic. It is why the black face had always to be a happy face. Recently, the only two black shows on Broadway were min strel shows. There was a marvelous current between the blacks on the stage and the blacks in the audience.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  381 develop his own philosophies, notably in two texts, Rameau’ s Nephew and D’Alembert’ s Dream. Like other philosophes, Diderot was constantly threatened with imprisonment or exile for his subversive writings. His fi rst three publications earned him three months’ confi nement at Vincennes. Further, although there were more than 200 collaborators working on the Encyclopedia, Diderot was the chief writer and, therefore, bore the brunt of the Church and throne’s contempt. He was greatly respected by his intellectual peers for a “sparkling” mind, but Diderot was plagued with doubt for most of his life about his talents, fearing he lacked the innovation and craft of a creative genius. In his own lifetime, he was never held in so high a public esteem as Rousseau and V oltaire, but the 20 th century rediscovered him and has resituated him as one of the greatest thinkers of the 18 th century and an important contributor to 19th- and 20th-century thought. Let us now look at the Encyclopedia, its chronology, and its collaborators. Diderot was fi rst commissioned as the chief translator of the English Cyclopedia (1746). The original director abandoned his function as leader of the project in 1747, and Diderot and d’Alembert (who were originally responsible only for the arts and scienti fi c articles, respectively) were promoted to co-editors. The project expanded in scope over the years. First, it was conceived as a translation of Chambers’s two volumes, then as a translation with original additions, presented in four volumes of text and one volume of fi gures. Then, Diderot’s Prospectus announced that the project would be mostly original work, complete with ten volumes of text and two of fi gures (1750). V olumes were published one at a time, nearly annually, and additional volumes were conceived along the way. More than 200 collaborators contributed to the Encyclopedia, including V oltaire and Rousseau. Many of them were “polygraphs,” like Diderot, who wrote on a range of topics, but a new practice of commissioning “specialists” The Encyclopedia was commercially successful, despite the many attempts by reactionaries to thwart its publication.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Whatever unity they possessed early in their marriage began to evaporate after their daughter Lori—whom I call Aunt Wee—was born in 1962. By the mid–1960s, Papaw’s drinking had become habitual; Mamaw began to shut herself off from the outside world. Neighborhood kids warned the mailman to avoid the “evil witch” of McKinley Street. When the mailman ignored their advice, he met a large woman with an extra-long menthol cigarette hanging out of her mouth who told him to stay the fuck off of her property. “Hoarder” hadn’t entered everyday parlance, but Mamaw fit the bill, and her tendencies only worsened as she withdrew from the world. Garbage piled up in the house, with an entire bedroom devoted to trinkets and debris that had no earthly value.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In The City and the Pillar the aYowed homosexual who is the protagonist murders his first and only perfect love when at length they meet again for he cannot bear to kill instead that desolate and impossible dream of love which he has carried in his heart so long. In The Folded Leafthe frail, introverted Lymie attempts suicide in an effort to escape the danger implicit in his love for Spud; a bloody act which, we are told, has purchased his maturity. In The Fall of Valo1' the g,od-like Marine defends his masculinity with a poker, leaYing for dead the frightened professor who wanted him. These Yi olent resolutions, all of them unlikely in the extreme, are com pelled by a panic which is close to madness. These novels are not concerned with homosexuality but with the eYer-present danger of sexual activity between men. 600 OTHER ESSAYS It is this unadmitted tension, longing and terror and wrath which creates their curiously mindless and pallid, yet smoul dering atmosphere. It is a mistake, I think, that this subject matter sets them apart in any fruitful or significant way from anything written by James M. Cain or Laura Z. Hobson or Mary Jane Ward. They are alike in that they are wholly unable to recreate or interpret any of the reality or complexity of human experience; and that area which it is their self-avowed purpose to illuminate is precisely the area on which is thrown the most distorting light. As one may close Gentleman's Agreement, which is about Gentiles and Jews, having gained no insight into the mind of either; as The Snake Pit reveals nothing of madness and James M. Cain tells us nothing of men and women, so one may read any current novel con cerned with homosexual love and encounter merely a proces sion of platitudes the ancestry of which again may be traced to The Rover Boys and their golden ideal of chastity. It is quite impossible to write a worthwhile novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion. If the nov elist considers that they are no more complex than their labels he must, of necessity, produce a catalogue, in which we will find, neatly listed, all those attributes with which the label is associated; and this can only operate to reinforce the brutal and dangerous anonymity of our culture. A novel insistently demands the presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labeled. Once the novelist has created a human being he has shattered the label and, in transce nding the subject matter, is able, for the first time, to tell us something about it and to reveal how profoundly all things involving human beings interlock.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Really? I don’t think …’ Then I saw that it was one of his conversational hairpins. I followed his glance across the room to where a dapper man, with crisp gold hair going grey, was sitting at the central table. Nantwich made a kind of diving or salaaming motion with his hands, and the man nodded and smiled. ‘Ronald Staines, you must know his stuff, of course.’ ‘I’m not sure that I do.’ I was sure he must be a dreadful photographer. ‘What sort of thing does he specialise in?’ ‘Oh, very special. You must meet, you’d love him,’ said Nantwich recklessly. I suffered a twinge of the mildly oppressive sensation one gets when one realises that the person one is talking to has plans. ‘Actually, there are lots of people, not yet dead, that I’d like you to meet. All my society is pretty bloody interesting. Falling to bits, of course, ga-ga as often as not, and a coachload of absolute Mary-Anns, I won’t deny it. But you young people know less and less of the old, they of you too, of course. I like young people around: you’re a bonny lot, you’re so heartless but you do me good.’ After this bizarre outburst he sat back and lapsed into one of his vacant spells, occasionally emitting an ‘Eh?’ or giving a shrug. I wondered what his complaint was: not just senility, clearly, as he could be sharp and to the point; was it hardening of the arteries, some slowly spreading constriction that brought on his spasmodic torpor? I knew that I must judge it by medical criteria, although I reckoned that he took advantage of his condition to further the egocentric discontinuities of his talk. Looking around the room I saw clear cases of other such afflictions, and thought how people of a certain kind gather together as if to authenticate a caricature of themselves—their freaks and foibles, unremarkable in the individual, being comically evident in the mass. As spoonfuls of soup were raised tremblingly to whiskery lips and hands cupped huge deaf ears to catch murmured and clipped remarks, the lunchers, all in some way distinguished or titled, retired generals, directors of banks, even authors, lost their distinction to me. They were anonymous, a type—and it was impossible to see how they could cope outside in the noise and race of the streets. How much did they know of the derisive life of the city which they ruled and from which they preserved themselves so immaculately and Edwardianly intact? As my eyes roamed across the room they came to rest on Abdul, who stood abstractedly sharpening his knife on the steel and gazing at me as if I were a meal.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  By the time I left, three guys worked in the warehouse; at twenty-six, I was by far the oldest. One guy, I’ll call him Bob, joined the tile warehouse just a few months before I did. Bob was nineteen with a pregnant girlfriend. The manager kindly offered the girlfriend a clerical position answering phones. Both of them were terrible workers. The girlfriend missed about every third day of work and never gave advance notice. … Bob missed work about once a week, and he was chronically late. On top of that, he often took three or four daily bathroom breaks, each over half an hour. It became so bad that, by the end of my tenure, another employee and I made a game of it: We’d set a timer when he went to the bathroom and shout the major milestones through the warehouse—“Thirty-five minutes!” “Forty-five minutes!” “One hour!” Eventually, Bob, too, was fired. When it happened, he lashed out at his manager: “How could you do this to me? Don’t you know I’ve got a pregnant girlfriend?”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Lady Sings the Blues is related to the black American expe rience in about the same way, and to the same extent that Princess Grace Kelly is related to the Irish potato famine: by courtesy. The film pretends to be based on Billie Holiday's autobiography, and, indeed, Billie's book may make a very fine film one day: a day, however, which I no longer expect to live long enough to see. The film that has been made is 554 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK impeccably put together, with an irreproachable professional polish, and has one or two nice moments. It has absolutely nothing to do with Billie, or with jazz, or any other kind of music, or the risks of an artist, or American life, or black life, or narcotics, or the narcotics laws, or clubs, or managers, or policemen, or despair, or love. The script is as empty as a banana peel, and as treacherous. It is scarcely possible to think of a black American actor who has not been misused: not one has ever been seriously challenged to deliver the best that is in him. The most pow erful examples of this cowardice and waste arc the careers of Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters. If they had ever been allowed really to hit their stride, they might immeasurably have raised the lc\·el of cinema and theater in this country. Their effect would have been, at least, to challenge the stultifyingly pre dictable tics of such overrated figures as Miss Helen Hayes, for example, and life, as one performer can sometimes elicit it fr om another, might more fr equently have illuminated our stage and screen. It is pointless, however, to pursue this, and personally painful: Mr. Robeson is declining, in obscurity, and Miss Waters is singing in Billy Graham's choir. They might have been treated with more respect by the country to which they gave so much. But, then, we had to send telegrams to the Mayor of New York City, asking him to call off the cops who surrounded Billie's bedside-looking for heroin in her icc cream-and let the Lady die in peace. What the black actor has managed to give arc moments indelible moments, created, miraculously, beyond the confines of the script: hints of reality, smuggled like contraband into a maudlin tale, and with enough force, if unleashed, to shatter the talc to fr agments. The f.1cc of Ginger Rogers, for example, in Tales of Manhattan, is something to be placed in a dish, and eaten with a spoon-possibly a long one. If the face of Ethel Waters were placed in the same fr ame, the face of Little Eva would simply melt: to prevent this, the black performer has been scaled otT into a vacuum.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Mr. Cain, indeed, has achieved an enormous public and, I should hope, a not inconsiderable fi>rtunc on the basis of his remarkable preoccupation with the virile male. One may sug gest that it was the dynamism of his material which trapped him into introducing, briefly, and with the air of a man wear ing antiseptic gloves, an unattractive invert in an early novel, Serenade, who was promptly stabbed to death by the hero's mistress, a lusty and unlikely senorita. This novel contains a curious admission on the part of the hero to the eftect that there is always somewhere a homosexual who can wear down PRESERVATION OF INNOCENCE 5 99 the resistance of the normal man by knowing which buttons to press. This is presented as a serious and melancholy warning and it is when the invert of Serenade begins pressing too many buttons at once that he arrives at his sordid and bloody end. Thus is that immaculate manliness within us protected; thus summarily do we deal with any obstacle to the union of the Boy and the Girl. Can we doubt the wisdom of drawing the curtains when ' they finally come together? For the instant that the Boy and Girl become the Bride and Groom we are forced to leave them; not really supposing that the drama is over or that we have witnessed the fulfillment of two human beings, though we would like to believe this, but constrained by the knowledge that it is not for our eyes to witness the pain and the tempest that will follow. (For we know what follows; we know that life is not really like this at all.) What are we to say, who have already been betrayed, when this boy, this girl, dis covers that the knife which preserved them for each other has unfitted them for experience? For the boy cannot know a woman since he has never become a man. Hence, violence: that brutality which rages unchecked in our literature is part of the harYest of this unfulfillment, stri dent and dreadful testimony to our renowned and cherished innocence. Consider, in those extravagant denouncements which characterize those novels-to be more and more re marked on the bookshelves-which are concerned with ho mosexuality, how high a value we place on this dangerous attribute.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  regulars hung out, and the conversation was moving right along. Just the right mix of edgy critical people like Jennifer Chase and Seth Jabovic to stir the pot, and type-B conciliators like me and Doris and Amira to calm things down and smooth over ruffled feathers when the pot started to boil over. You can just about set your watch by the topics. From nine to ten it’s all gossipy chitchat: “Did you ever meet . . . ?” and “Did you hear what so-and-so did last week?”—that sort of thing. When that gets old we move on to politics and issues of the day. Imagine a younger McLaughlin Group sitting around in beanbag chairs with drinks in their hands, smoking up a storm. Once the budget is balanced, the trickier foreign policy is sues have been settled, and pot is legal and available in every supermarket, the boy-girl thing finally bubbles to the surface. Call it midnight. And once you get on the topic of sex and re lationships you never get off it, because nothing ever gets set tled in that area. We had more gals than guys in the circle that night—Jimmy and Big Herman were at a Blackhawks game, I think. The pre vious night there had been a strange incident at one of the fra ternities on the local campus, and the rumors were flying. “It’s called a train,” said Seth. He waved a thin white hand dismissively, sending a trail of smoke floating upward. “Dis gusting, really, but certainly not a crime.” “Sounds like the police think it was a crime,” said Jennifer. “I heard they dragged a bunch of hungover frat guys in for questioning.” Seth shrugged. “Of course, if the woman files a complaint afterward, they have to investigate.” “Investigate what?” asked Amy. “Can someone tell me what the hell a ‘train’ is?”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I think Ronald and I will have things to talk about, darling,’ I said. ‘But do sit in on it if you want.’ I felt a shiver of possessiveness and cruelty, as if I were some vile businessman addressing his wife. We all went to the windows and stepped out. To the side there was a gathering of expensive garden furniture, chairs with curved wicker arms and flowered cushions, a long, unfolding sun-bed, and a glass-topped table with a jug of Pimm’s and a matching set of Deco beakers: there was something ideal about it, as if it were in a catalogue. Beyond, at the edge of the terrace, stood tubs of alpine plants—dwarf conifers, lichen-yellow, and wiry tufts of heather leading their perfectly senseless existence. ‘We can all have a drink,’ said Staines. Then round the corner from the garden Bobby appeared. Bobby was—what?—thirty-five? He had been deeply indulged, had eaten too much, drunk too much, and his face and body were the record of it. I could see at once what sort of a child he had been: the loose mouth, the cheap, unblinking, china-blue eyes, the lock of glossy blond hair that he pushed back as he ambled towards us—all were features of a school tart, as it might be Mountjoy, aged by a decade and a half (and where was Mountjoy now?). His clothes made the idea inevitable: a crumpled white shirt, plimsolls, and baggy white flannels held up round the waist with what I recognised (from James having one the same) as an Old Gregorians tie. When we were introduced he said ‘Hullo’ in a plummy, straight manner and extended a hot damp hand with plump, double-jointed fingers and long chalky nails. I thought confusedly of theories of the humours, and could not imagine intimacy with a man with such hands. ‘So you’re going to do old Charles,’ he said, and chuckled as though Charles were a delinquent like himself. ‘Well, good luck is all I can say.’ He had pitched into the subject with charmless suddenness, but I was obliged to ask him more. ‘The old boy’s not all there, you know. I shouldn’t wonder if there was some mental thing. The mother was quite barmy, of course. Whole lot of them were pretty odd.’ ‘The previous Lord Nantwich, Charles’s father, was a gifted poet,’ Staines reassured me formally, dispensing the Pimm’s in little dribbles and sploshes as the fruity garnish fell in. ‘He wrote plays in verse for his servants to perform. My grandmother used to know him—which is how I came to meet Charles, you see. He dandled me I think would be the word—longer ago than even I can remember.’ ‘Where did the family come from?’

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  When Americans look out on the world, they see nothing but dark and menacing strangers who appear to have no sense of rhythm at all, nor any respect or affec tion for white people; and white Americans really do not know what to make of all this, except to increase the defense budget. This panic-stricken saber rattling is also for the benefit of the domestic darker brother. The real impulse of the bulk of the American people toward their former slave is lethal: if he cannot be used, he should be made to disappear. When the American people, Nixon's no-longer-silent majority, revile the Haitian, Cuban, Turk, Palestinian, Iranian, they are really cursing the nigger, and the nigger had better know it. The vote does not work for a black American the way it works for a white one, for the despairingly obvious reason that whites, in general, are welcomed to America, and blacks, in general, are not. Yet, risking a seeming contradiction, one may go further and point out that America's egalitarian image is 802 OTHER ESSAYS very important to American self-esteem. Therefore, blacks fr om the West Indies, say, or Africa, who arrive with no social or political quarrels with the United States, who have already been formed by the island, or village community, and who bring their mercantile skills with them, are likely to fare much better here than Sambo does-for a brief and melancholy sea son. Since the entire country is bizarre beyond belief, the black immigrant does not quarrel with its customs, consider ing that these customs have nothing to do with him. He sticks to his kith and kin, and saves his pennies, and is the apple of the white American eye, for he proves that the Yankee-Puritan virtues are all that one needs to prosper in this brave new world. This euphoria lasts, at most, a generation. In my youth, the West Indians, who assured American blacks that they, the West Indians, had never been slaves, ran their stores, saved their pennies, went bankrupt and, as a community, disappeared or, rather, became a part of the larger black community. Later on, the Puerto Ricans were hurled into this fire and, after the brief, melancholy and somewhat violent season, we began to compare notes, and share languages, and now here come, among others, the Haitians, and the beginning of the end of the doctrine of divide-and-rule, at least as concerns the dark people of the West. The white person of the West is quite another matter. His presence in America, in spite of vile attacks on "the foreign born," poses no real problem. Within a generation, at most two, he is at home in his new country and climbing that lad der. If there is trouble in the Irish, Italian or Polish ward, say, the trouble can be contained and eliminated because the de mands of these white people do not threaten the fabric of American society.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But at the end of the book they arc still there; their neighbors are no better t(:>r the experience but, having tried and failed, they are resigned and have ceased to hurl brickbats; instead they are looking about for other places to live.) With Ki11gsblood Royal we descend abruptly into a kind of lugubrious, sentimental nightmare. This is an ill-tempered, tasteless, condescending novel, which, despite the great fame of its author, might be dismissed as utterly without signifi cance if it were not for the tact that three other novels, written by people closer to the scene-two Negroes and a Southern white woman-diHer from it only in that they are not quite so bald. These novels-The Path of Thunder, God Is For White Folks, and QualitJhavc a great deal in common. They are not, in the first place, so much concerned with Negroes as they arc with sex between the races and the doomed offspring thereof (Negroes arc, as a matter of tact, considered with a somewhat uneasy and disapproving affection.) The protago nists arc manitestly superior, and arc monotonously hounded because of their dark blood, which in these novels has much the same relevance as some mysterious, rather nasty, and im- THE IMAGE OF THE NEGRO placable disease. In all except one of these novels, the protag onists are as fair as daylight: Neil Kingsblood "discovers" that he has Negro blood and must learn to face it; in Q]tality, the heroine, who has been "passing" in the North, comes home to the South and her illiterate granny to live among and learn to love her people; in The Path of Thunder, the locale of which is South Mrica, Lanny, the hero, is quite dark, but turns out, after all, to be the son of the town's ruling white man; and in God Is For White Folks, Beau, the illegitimate son of a South ern plantation owner, eventually comes home to his dying father's bosom, bringing a Negro bride as irreproachably fair as himself to reign in the ancestral halls. This approaches pure fantasy, an element familiar in fiction but never allied formally with sociology. Here we can make two charitable assumptions: one, that, after all, these things do happen; two, that the tasteless prose and the antique plots will present no obstacles to the public mind and are, perhaps, the safest vehicles for a humane and honest rage. But, probing more deeply, one finds that these novels are not essentially any more "advanced" than The Birth of a Nation; even the humane rage comes closer to approximating a kind of uncon trollable hysteria.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I like young people around: you’re a bonny lot, you’re so heartless but you do me good.’ After this bizarre outburst he sat back and lapsed into one of his vacant spells, occasionally emitting an ‘Eh?’ or giving a shrug. I wondered what his complaint was: not just senility, clearly, as he could be sharp and to the point; was it hardening of the arteries, some slowly spreading constriction that brought on his spasmodic torpor? I knew that I must judge it by medical criteria, although I reckoned that he took advantage of his condition to further the egocentric discontinuities of his talk. Looking around the room I saw clear cases of other such afflictions, and thought how people of a certain kind gather together as if to authenticate a caricature of themselves—their freaks and foibles, unremarkable in the individual, being comically evident in the mass. As spoonfuls of soup were raised tremblingly to whiskery lips and hands cupped huge deaf ears to catch murmured and clipped remarks, the lunchers, all in some way distinguished or titled, retired generals, directors of banks, even authors, lost their distinction to me. They were anonymous, a type—and it was impossible to see how they could cope outside in the noise and race of the streets. How much did they know of the derisive life of the city which they ruled and from which they preserved themselves so immaculately and Edwardianly intact? As my eyes roamed across the room they came to rest on Abdul, who stood abstractedly sharpening his knife on the steel and gazing at me as if I were a meal. After doing more than justice to bowls of family-hotel trifle we made our slow progress back to the smoking-room. As Percy poured coffee we were joined by Ronald Staines. He was dressed entirely properly, but there was something about the way he inhabited his clothes that was subversive. He seemed to slither around within the beautiful green tweed, the elderly herringbone shirt and chaste silk tie which plumped forward slightly between collar and waistcoat. His wrists were very thin and I saw that he was smaller than his authoritative suiting. He was a man in disguise, but a disguise which his gestures, his over-preserved profile and a Sitwellian taste in rings drew immediate attention to. It was a strikingly two-minded performance, and, though I found him unattractive, just what I was looking for in the present surroundings. ‘Charles, you must introduce me to your guest.’ ‘He’s called William.’

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The father knows perfectly well that America is not the world: indeed, it would have to be a part of his pride that his effort has helped to release his son from the obscenely crippling pressures of his homeland. It can make absolutely no difference to him who his son marries: if the son is free and happy, the father is, too. And it is worth noting, perhaps, that the film appears completely to forget the wonder doctor's eminence, and the effect that this would have on his parents. As the parents of a world-famous man, they, indis putably, outrank their hosts, and might very well feel that the far from galvanizing fiancee is not worthy of their son: it is not the black parents who would be ill at ease. But the American self-evasion, which is all that this country has as history, has created the myth on which this film is based, and this myth cannot endure so treacherous a perception; treacherous to the American self-image, and to what passes, in America, for self-esteem. Only yesterday, if, indeed, it was yesterday, the hotly contested white fiancee cried death before dishonor! (or you yellow dogs!) and ran out of this life, into the arms of Jesus, in order not to be defiled by the nigger's touch. Today-if it is today-she tells her mother, in a scene manip ulated with such cool efficiency that it almost seems to be true, that, although she certainly wanted to sleep with her black fiance, he was too honorable to touch her: in this day of so many liberations, make of this collision of inadmissible fantasies whatever you will. In any case, it is out of all this that the black son must say, finally, to his black father, and ignobly enough, "You're a colored man. I just want to be a THE DEVIL FINDS WORK man." Which means that a man exists only in the brutally limited lexicon of those who think of themselves as white, and imagine, therefore, that they control reality and rule the world. And the black son says this to his black father in spite of the fact that he, the wonder doctor, has had to become a living freak, a walking encyclopedia of rare medical knowl edge, in order to have the question of his marriage to a white girl discussed.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Well, please, make yourself absolutely at home. I’m afraid there isn’t a pool—but you may like to sunbathe outside with Bobby’—he gestured tritely towards the garden—‘or whatever!’ ‘I think Ronald and I will have things to talk about, darling,’ I said. ‘But do sit in on it if you want.’ I felt a shiver of possessiveness and cruelty, as if I were some vile businessman addressing his wife. We all went to the windows and stepped out. To the side there was a gathering of expensive garden furniture, chairs with curved wicker arms and flowered cushions, a long, unfolding sun-bed, and a glass-topped table with a jug of Pimm’s and a matching set of Deco beakers: there was something ideal about it, as if it were in a catalogue. Beyond, at the edge of the terrace, stood tubs of alpine plants—dwarf conifers, lichen-yellow, and wiry tufts of heather leading their perfectly senseless existence. ‘We can all have a drink,’ said Staines. Then round the corner from the garden Bobby appeared. Bobby was—what?—thirty-five? He had been deeply indulged, had eaten too much, drunk too much, and his face and body were the record of it. I could see at once what sort of a child he had been: the loose mouth, the cheap, unblinking, china-blue eyes, the lock of glossy blond hair that he pushed back as he ambled towards us—all were features of a school tart, as it might be Mountjoy, aged by a decade and a half (and where was Mountjoy now?). His clothes made the idea inevitable: a crumpled white shirt, plimsolls, and baggy white flannels held up round the waist with what I recognised (from James having one the same) as an Old Gregorians tie. When we were introduced he said ‘Hullo’ in a plummy, straight manner and extended a hot damp hand with plump, double-jointed fingers and long chalky nails. I thought confusedly of theories of the humours, and could not imagine intimacy with a man with such hands. ‘So you’re going to do old Charles,’ he said, and chuckled as though Charles were a delinquent like himself. ‘Well, good luck is all I can say.’ He had pitched into the subject with charmless suddenness, but I was obliged to ask him more. ‘The old boy’s not all there, you know. I shouldn’t wonder if there was some mental thing. The mother was quite barmy, of course. Whole lot of them were pretty odd. ’ ‘The previous Lord Nantwich, Charles’s father, was a gifted poet,’ Staines reassured me formally, dispensing the Pimm’s in little dribbles and sploshes as the fruity garnish fell in. ‘He wrote plays in verse for his servants to perform. My grandmother used to know him—which is how I came to meet Charles, you see. He dandled me I think would be the word—longer ago than even I can remember.’ ‘Where did the family come from?’ ‘Oh, they still lived in Shropshire. They had a house in town, but they never came down.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The woman is presented as a kind of pathetic, unthinking racist. But she cannot be so unthinking (no woman is) as to take for granted that the man she met last night will approve of being made, in fact, her accomplice in murder. After all, she knows only 528 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK that the man she met last night ordered her to feed the black boy: and the white boy who orders you to feed his black boy may not be willing to authorize you to kill him. This is not only what every woman knows, it is, more crucially, what every white Southern woman knows. It would appear, however, that this revelation on the part of the woman has the etTect of opening our white hero's eyes to the bottomless evil of racial hatred, and, after a stormy scene-a scene quite remarkably unconvincing-and, after the little boy has shot him in the shoulder, our hero lights out for the swamps, and Noah. He finds Noah, and they head for the train-Lord, that Hollywood train, forever coming round the bend!-but the gunshot wound slows the white boy up. Noah refuses to leave him-you're dragging on the chain! he cries, stretching out his arm. They get to the train, the black man jumps on, but the white boy can't make it, and the black man jumps off the train, it is hard, indeed, to say why. Well. He jumps off the train in order to reassure white peo ple, to make them know that they are not hated; that, though they have made human errors, they have done nothing for which to be hated. Well, blacks may or may not hate whites, and when they do, as I have tried to indicate, it's in their fashion. Whites may or may not deserve to be hated, depend ing on how one manipulates one's reserves of energy, and what one makes of history: in any case, the reassurance is false, the need ignoble, and the question, in this context, absolutely irrelevant. The question operates to hide the question: for what has actually happened, at the end of The Defiant Ones, is that a white male and a white female have come together, but arc menaced by the presence of the black man. The white woman, therefore, eliminates the black man, so that she and the white man can be alone together. But the white man can not endure this rupture-from what one must, here, perhaps, call his other, better, worse, or deeper self-and so rejects the white woman, crashing through the swamps, and braving death, in order to regain his black buddy. And his black buddy is waiting for him, and, eventually, takes him in his arms.