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 Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  384 Lecture 58: Denis Diderot believed that knowledge and its acquisition were in a constant process of evolution and could not be con fi ned to a closed system. The process of writing the Encyclopedia was itself an experiment in testing this philosophy of knowledge. Diderot was the chief architect, writer, and often scapegoat of the Encyclopedia, but it is dif fi cult to distinguish his individual creativity within such a collaborative work. We must look to his individual works to discover his identity and personal preoccupations, speci fi cally Rameau’ s Nephew. Ironically, those individual works, the ones for which he is known today, were unpublished during his lifetime. These include The Nun , an erotic, fi rst-person narrative; a long series of critical essays on the Paris art salons that mark the birth of the speci fi cally French genre of art criticism; dramatic criticism and a discussion of the art of acting; and a text that cannot be classi fi ed according to any recognizable genre, Rameau’ s Nephew. In this dramatic dialogue, two characters, Him (Rameau’s nephew) and Me (Diderot?), wander conversationally through various social, musical, literary, moral apolitical, and philosophical subjects. It is possible to identify two distinct strains of argument that run through this dialogue: ● The debate over the moral purpose of art ● The debate over two fundamentally 18 th-century beliefs: on the one hand, the emotional belief in perfectibility, moral progress, and the essential goodness of man and, on the other, the position of the absolute materialist, which eventually results in an amoral determinism and utter cynicism. The debate opens with a solitary walker in the center of Paris. His intellectual life seems as cynical as that of Rameau’s nephew. What does separate the two exactly? How would one judge their relative value to society? The conversation of the two characters is a kind of chess game, and this reminds us that their relative moral values are necessary to enable them both to be “players.” The ample evidence that Rameau’s nephew provides of his complete lack of moral or ethical standards is matched by the fact that his interlocutor, Me ( Moi), fi nds him amusing at least as much as he fi nds him repulsive. The con fl ict generated by Moi’s recognition that even

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

  386 Lecture 59: William Blake William Blake Lecture 59 Poet, engraver, visionary, William Blake called the God of institutionalized Christianity “Nobodaddy” and asserted that Newton’s scientifi c insights, unleavened by poetic inspiration, had produced a world of darkness. F or Blake, the scientifi c rationalism of the Enlightenment and its belief in the idea of progress did not herald, as it did for Neoclassical writers, the dawn of a new age but the gradual dimming of the emotional and spiritual light (the “imagination”) that infused the material world with meaning. Newton’s “single vision,” argued Blake, was limited by logic and empiricism; Blake’s vision found its expression in both verbal and visual forms that pierced the mundane. In this lecture, we will study Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), deceptively simple and deeply ironic poems and their accompanying plates, that represent, on the one hand, a world that appears to know nothing of the oppressive weight of social laws or the restrictions of the rational and, on the other, the world that has been exposed to the corrupting infl uences of industry and an excessive reliance on reason. We will fi rst explore Blake and the Enlightenment. The difference between the Neoclassical view of scientifi c thought and reason and Blake’s view may be neatly summed up in the difference between Pope’s account of Newton and Blake’s. For Pope, Newton shined the light of science on the world of nature, whereas Blake condemned Newton’s “single vision” as like a sleep. The limitations and constraints of an over-reliance on mathematical and empirical reason are represented in Blake’s 1795 illustration of Newton, curled in on himself, backed against a rock, measuring reality. Newton’s science, like Locke’s and Bacon’s, threatened to deprive the world of mystery (God) and, thus, was Satanic. In his rejection of the precepts of order and rationality that typifi ed Neoclassicism, Blake was the fi rst major fi gure in the movement that would be retroactively designated as Romanticism, with its emphasis on the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the visionary, and the transcendent.

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

  508 Lecture 74: Joseph Conrad promptly cared for by his uncle. In spite of all his faults, his uncle believed that he might become “a real man.” In the summer of 1878, he went to work on an English schooner and started learning English. By 1895, he had become a master mariner, quit the life of the sea, and established himself as a British writer. At age 29, he quali fi ed as a master mariner, became a British subject, and started writing fi ction. Three years later, he started work on his fi rst novel. In 1895, two years after he quit the sea, Almayer’ s Folly appeared under his new pen name, Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s experience in the Congo in 1890 laid the groundwork for Heart of Darkness. Like his character Marlow, Conrad as a boy hoped that he could explore the unknown territory of Africa when he grew up. As a young man in 1890, Conrad voyaged by steamboat to Stanley Falls, the highest navigable point on the Congo River, where the Belgian company that employed him ran a trading center for allegedly noble purposes. Supposedly, King Leopold II of Belgium aimed to liberate the Congo natives from enslavement by Arabs and to civilize them. The Belgians actually sought to colonize the Congo, monopolize its trade, and exploit its resources. But in Conrad’s story, Kurtz fascinates Marlow because—by reputation at least—he promises to “redeem” the sordid enterprise of conquest by acting on his “moral ideas.” During his own time in the Congo, Conrad quickly discovered that there was nothing noble about the Belgians’ work there. He was ravaged by sickness for much of his time there. Even when healthy, he loathed most of the people he met for their greed, stupidity, and duplicity. He bitterly regretted going to the Congo He deplored the clumsiness of the natives. Though Conrad’s ignorant contempt for native rituals has provoked the charge that he is racist, his story chie fl y aims to expose the hypocrisy of European colonizers. Although Marlow—like Conrad himself—af fi rms Though Conrad’s ignorant contempt for native rituals has provoked the charge that he is racist, his story chiefl y aims to expose the hypocrisy of European colonizers.

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

  541 Young Bayard Sartoris inherits a family tradition made up of violence, aristocratic grandeur, and reckless heroism. He indulges in daredevil driving and riding, injuring himself and causing at one point the death of his grandfather. His wild driving becomes a kind of heroism in the eyes of Narcissa Benbow, who marries him. Even though his death in a plane crash seems to end the Sartoris line, she keeps his name alive by producing a child at just about the time he dies. In late October 1929, four months after marrying Estella Franklin and just after publication of his fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury , Faulkner started writing As I Lay Dying. At the time, he was working a 12-hour night shift at the University of Mississippi power station. He learned that he had nothing to do between midnight and 4:00 A.M. He decided to write during those hours. By this means, he wrote As I Lay Dying in just six weeks. He knew beforehand just where he was going. He resolved to write a book that would make his reputation if he never again touched pen and ink. As I Lay Dying is a novel with a bizarre format: The central fi gure is a corpse traveling to a burial ground on a journey menaced by fi re and fl ood and narrated from 15 different points of view, including that of the corpse itself. Like Joyce in Ulysses, which he very much admired, Faulkner creates distinctive narrators with severely limited points of view. He sometimes enters a character’s head to give the reader all that passes through it in a stream of consciousness . This technique exempli fi es Modernism, which spotlights the radical subjectivity of the isolated self. But rather than using distinctive narrators for just some of the chapters, Faulkner makes his characters do all of the storytelling from their mutually exclusive points of view. Paradoxically, the family is mostly composed of tight-knit loners who don’t understand each other. The only one who understands the others is Darl, who is fi nally sent to a lunatic asylum. Though its title recalls the word of a betrayed husband in Homer’s Odyssey, the counterpart of that husband in Faulkner’s novel is an adulterous wife. In Book 11 of The Odyssey, when Odysseus visits the realm of the dead, the shade of Agamemnon says that his murderous, adulterous wife would not even close his eyes “as I lay dying.” Addie’s life with her husband, Anse,

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

  509 the humanity of African natives, he believes they display a primitive state of humanity. The “prehistoric” men he saw on a riverbank struck him as “not being inhuman.” Embodying “truth stripped of its cloak of time,” they manifest the primitive condition from which—according to Darwin— civilized humans evolved. Conrad’s treatment of the natives in his story has provoked the charge that he is racist. The natives never speak a language that is said to be comprehensible. Marlow makes no effort to understand tribal culture and at one point calls native rituals fi endish. But Conrad chie fl y aims to expose the savagery latent in “civilized” men. In the natives, primitivism can take the form of an exhilarating vitality. But the underside of this wild vitality is the uninhibited savagery of murderous aggression. Marlow discovers this kind of savagery in Kurtz. By exposing the savagery of Kurtz, his story implicitly attacks the whole imperial project and the globalizing assumption that “developed” nations are uniquely equipped to civilize the world. Taking a steamer up the Congo to the Inner Station (the fi ctional counterpart of Stanley Falls), Marlow learns that Kurtz’s grand design of civilizing the natives has somehow led him to barbarous acts. While the natives are pitiable and at times touching, Kurtz is powerful. For the most part, Marlow treats the natives not as brutes but as victims of white colonizers and even, at one point, partners in Marlow’s own work. But in the eyes of Marlow, Kurtz combines the greatest hope of achieving good with the greatest capacity for doing evil. Before meeting Kurtz, Marlow comes to think of him as remarkable. He sends in as much ivory as all the other agents put together. He supposedly combines the sensitivity of an artist with the learning of a scholar and the eloquence of an orator. In spite of another agent’s contempt for Kurtz’s idealistic aims, Marlow wants to see what will become of them in the jungle. Though Kurtz controls others chie fl y by his “civilized” eloquence, which is underscored by the voice of the narrator in this story, Kurtz reveals the savagery beneath his eloquence. While Dickens’s Pip writes the story of

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

  544 Lecture 81: Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht Lecture 81 Born in the Bavarian city of Augsburg in 1898, he was the eldest son of a paper factory clerk who worked his way up to sales director by the time Bertolt was 14 and who thus exempli fi ed the bourgeois respectability that his son would come to loathe. B ut his mother touched his heart and took charge of his early education. Though his father was a Catholic working in a predominantly Catholic city, Bertolt and his younger brother were raised as Protestants by their Protestant mother, who steeped them both in the Lutheran Bible and sent them to a Protestant elementary school. All of this may help to explain Brecht’s fascination with Scripture and wars of religion. His fi rst play, which he wrote at the age of 16, was called simply The Bible. He scarcely stopped writing thereafter. His best known works include The Threepenny Opera, which he wrote in the late 1920s with the composer Kurt Weill, and Mother Courage, which he wrote just after the Second World War broke out in the fall of 1939. In 12 scenes, this play stages a dozen years sliced from the middle of the Thirty Years’ War in the early 17 th century, when the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire fought the Protestant nations of the north. The title fi gure is a canteen woman named Mother Courage who profi ts from the war by selling goods from a covered wagon that she hauls around behind the troops. But as one after another of her three grown children are drawn into the war and killed, we see how futile are her hopes of gaining anything but misery from the war. As a confi rmed Marxist, Brecht sought to show not just the folly of trying to profi t from small trading during the war but also the dehumanizing effect of a preoccupation with business. In this play about the Thirty Years’ War, Brecht focuses on the characters that history typically overlooks. In the early 17 th century, the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire fought the Protestant nations of the north for 30 years. The title character in Brecht’s play is a canteen woman who follows

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  No promise was kept with th em, no promise was kept with me, nor can I counsel those coming after me, nor my global kinsmen, to believe a word uttered by my mor ally bankrupt and desperately dishonest countrymen. aAnd, '' says Doris Lessing, in her preface to African Stories, awhile the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are among the heaviest count s in the indictment against human ity, colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the at rophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing our selves in every creature that breathes under the sun. " Amen. En avant . I8 April 1984 Amherst, Massachuse tts Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood T o BE ANDR OGYNOUS, Webster's informs us, is to have both male and female characteristics. This means that there is a man in eve!)' woman and a woman in eve!)' man. Sometimes this is recognized only when the chips are, bru tally, down-when there is no longer any way to avoid this recognition. But love between a man and a woman, or love benveen any t\Vo human beings, would not be possible did we not have available to us the spiritual resources of both sexes. To be androgynous does not imply both male and female sexual equipment, which is the state, uncommon, of the her maphrodite. However, the existence of the hermaphrodite re veals, in intimidating exa ggeration, the truth concerning eve!)' human being- which is why the hermaphrodite is called a freak. The human being does not, in general, enjoy being intimidated by what he/she finds in the mirror. The hermaphrodite, therefore, may make his/her living in side shows or brothels, whereas the merely androgynous are running banks or filling stations or maternity wards, churches, armies or countries. The last time you had a drink, whether you were alone or with another, you were having a drink with an androgynous human being; and this is true for the last time you broke bread or, as I have tried to suggest, the last time you made love. There seems to be a vast amount of confusion in the West ern world concerning these matters, but love and sexual ac tivity arc not synonymous: Only by becoming inhuman can the human being pretend that they are. The mare is not obliged to love the stall ion, nor is the bull required to love the cow. They are doing what comes naturally. But this by no means sums up the state or the possibilities of the human being in whom the awakening of desire fuels imagination and in whom imagination fuels desire.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Without attempting to track my way through any more 512 THE DEVIL FIND S WO RK of what we will call the pre-plot: the War comes. The South is shamefully defeated-or, not so much defeated, it would appear, as betrayed: by the influe nce of the mulattoes. For the previously noted eminent and now renegade Southern poli tician has also, as it turns out, a mulatto protege (we do not know how this happened, but we are allowed to suspect the worst) and this mulatto protege is maneuvered into the pre viously all-white Congress of the United States. At which point the Carpetbaggers arrive, and the movie begins. For the film is concerned with the Reconstmction, and how the birth of the Ku Klux Klan overcame that dismal and mistaken chap ter in our- American-history. The first image of the film is of the Mrican slave's arrival. The image and the title both convey the European terror be fore the idea of the black and white, red and white, saved and pagan, confrontation. I think that it was Freud who suggested that the presence of the black man in America foreshadowed America's doom-wh ich America, if it could not civilize these savages, would deserve: it is certainly the testimony of such disparate witnesses as William Faulkner and Isadora Duncan. For Marx and Engels, the presence of the black man in Amer ica was simply a usefi.il crowbar for the lib eration of whites: an idea which has had its issue in the history of American labor unions. The Founding Fathers shared this view, eminently, Thomas Jef ferson, and The Great Emancipator freed those slaves he could not reach, in order to create, hopefully, a fifth column behind the Conf ederate lin es. This ambivalence con tains the key to American literature-in a way, it can be said to be American literature-all the way from The Scarlet Letter to The Big Sleep. In any case, what Europe really felt about the black presence in America is revealed by the stratagems the European-Americans have used, and use, to avoid it: that is, by American history, or the actual, present condition of any American city. The first image, then, of The Birth of a Nation is immensely and unconsciously revealing. Were it not for their swarthy color-or not even that, so many immigrants having been transformed into white men only upon arrival, and, as it were, by decree-were it not for the title preceding the image: they CHAPTER TWO 51 3 would look exactly like European passengers, huddled, silent, patient, and hopeful, in the sha dow of the Statue of Liberty. (G ive us your poor! Many of the poor, not only in America, but all over the world, are beginning to find that these tamous lines have a somewhat sinister ring.) These slaves look as though they want to enter the Promised Land, and are re garding their imminent masters in the hope of being bought.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Secondly, by taking with violence, and this is an even greater injury: “They have violently robbed the fatherless” [Job 24:9]. Among such that do such things are wicked kings and rulers: “Her princes are in the midst of her as roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves, they left nothing for the morning” [Zeph 3:3]. They act contrary to God’s will who wishes a rule according to justice: “By Me kings reign and lawgivers decree just things” [Prov 8:15]. Sometimes they do such things stealthily and sometimes with violence: “Your princes are faithless companions of thieves, they all love bribes, they run after rewards” [Is 1:23]. At times they steal by enacting laws and enforcing them for profit only: “Woe to those who make wicked laws” [Is 10:1]. And St. Augustine says that every wrongful usurpation is theft when he asks: “What are thrones but forms of thievery?”[City of God IV, 4]. Thirdly, theft is committed by not paying wages that are due: “The wages of him whom you have hired shall not abide by you until the morning” [Lev 19:13]. This means that a man must pay every one his due, whether he be prince, prelate, or cleric, etc.: “Render therefore to all men their dues. Tribute, to whom tribute is due, custom, to whom custom” [Rm 13:7]. Hence, we are bound to give a return to rulers who guard our safety. The fourth kind of theft is fraud in buying and selling: “You shall not have divers weights in your bag, a greater and a less” [Deut 25:13]. And again: “Do no unjust thing in judgment, in rule, in weight, or in measure” [Lev 19:35-36]. All this is directed against the keepers of wine-shops who mix water with the wine. Usury is also forbidden: “Who shall dwell in your tabernacle, or who shall rest in your holy hill?... He who has not put his money out to usury” [Ps 14:1,5]. This is also against money-changers who commit many frauds, and against the sellers of cloth and other goods. Fifthly, theft is committed by those who buy promotions to positions of temporal or spiritual honor. “The riches which he swallowed, he shall vomit up, and God shall draw them out of his belly” [Job 20:15], has reference to temporal position. Thus, all tyrants who hold a kingdom or province or land by force are thieves, and are held to restitution. Concerning spiritual dignities: “Amen, amen, I say to you, he who does not enter by the door into the sheepfold but climbs up another way is a thief and a robber” [Jn 10:1]. Therefore, they who commit simony are thieves.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  What has always been missing from George Gershwin's ON CATFISH ROW 619 opera is what the situation of Porgy and Bess says about the white world. It is because of this omission that Americans are so proud of the opera. It assuages their guilt about Negroes and it attacks none of their fantasies. Since Catfish Row is clearly such a charming place to live, there is no need for them to trouble their consciences about the fact that the people who live there are still not allo wed to move anywhere else . Neither need they probe within their own lives to discover what the Negroes of Catfish Row really mean to them. But I am certainly not the first person to suggest that these Negroes seem to speak to them of a better lif e-better in the sense of being more honest, more open, and more free: in a word, more sexual. This is the cruelest fantasy of all , hard to forgive. It means that Negroes arc penalized, and hideously, for what the general guilty imagination makes of them. This fantasy is at the bottom of almost all violence against Negroes; it is the reason they arc not to be mixed in buses, houses, schools, jobs; they arc to remain instead in Catfish Row, to have fish fries and make love. It is a fantasy which is tearing the nation to pieces and it is surely time we snapped out of it. For no body in Catfish Row is having fish fries these days, and love is as rare and as difficult there as it has always been everywhere else. They struggle to pay the rent, the lif e insurance, the note due on the bedroom suite, the TV set, the refrigerator, the car. They worry about their children. They begin to hate each other, they turn to mysticism or to dope, they die there. Obviously, neither Samuel Goldwyn nor Otto Preminger nor most of the audience for Pot;gy and Bess knows this, or wants to know it; and they would defend their production, I suppose, in the words of Mr. Preminger, as taking place in "a world which does not really exist." This is an entirely illegit imate defense, and, in any case, the people in front of the camera keep reminding one, most forcefully, of a real Catfish Row, real agony, real despair, and real love. Many of them have been there, after all, and they know. Out of one Catfish Row or another came the murdered Bessie Smith and the dead Billie Holiday and virtually every Negro performer this country has produced. Until today, no one wants to hear the story, and the Negro performer is still in battle with the white man's image of the Negro-which the white man clings to in 620 OTH ER ESS AYS order not to be forced to revise his image of himself.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  “You weren’t a piece of shit,” mumbled Susan. “And anyway, I feel like you’re doing the same thing to me now.” “What?” “All we ever talk about is you. You don’t seem interested in my relationship with Jonathan or my wedding or my therapy. Those are the things I’m doing in my life. I’m trying very hard to get well and to have a good relationship and get married.” Her voice became a tremulous squeak, tears appeared, her face crumpled delicately and she pecked at it with her napkin. Susan scowled at her cold cup of chamomile tea. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she despised Jonathan, that she thought their relationship was a farce, that she hated traditional weddings and that she thought Leisha used therapy the same way she had used Eddie—to distract herself from her own life. A wave of classical music surged through the room, loudly enough to knock over a table, aggressively soothing the eaters of cannoli and cute cakes. “And the way you talk about Stef all the time—” Stef was the man Susan had met in a public rest room. “I don’t talk about Stef all the time.” “It seems like you do. And what you say is so horrible, even if you talk about him a little it’s a lot.” How could we have pretended to be friends for so long, Susan thought. “Especially when you talk about him and that Italian girl, it’s so awful it makes me hurt inside. Don’t you see how they’re using you?” “They’re not using me,” Susan said stiffly. “Oh no, what about the time they tried to shoot you up in the bathroom at Area, or wherever the fuck you were?” “They didn’t shoot me up.” “They tried.” “Not very hard, obviously. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if they’re using me, I don’t care. I’m doing this thing with them because I want to. I can take care of myself, and I’m not trying to make you a part of it.” “But when you tell me stories like that nipple-piercing thing, you are making me part of it. Why do you put yourself in positions where you have to take care of yourself?” They stared at each other with what seemed painfully close to hate. A raw feeling traveled up Susan’s throat. She was sweating. Leisha spoke slowly and deliberately. “I think you’re involved with them because you don’t have anything else to do. I think you think it’s interesting.” This last word was sarcastic enough for two or three words. “And it’s not interesting at all. It is sordid and disgusting.” Her nostrils dilated. “How dare you?” said Susan. “How dare you judge me?” —

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The social and moral bankruptcy suggested by this fact is of the bitterest, most terrifying kind. The people, however, who believe that this democratic an guish has some consoling value are always pointing out that So-and-So, white, and So-and-So, black, rose from the slums into the big time. The existence-the public existence--of, say, Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr., proves to them that America is still the land of opportunity and that inequalities vanish before the determined will. It proves nothing of the sort. The determined will is rare-at the moment, in this country, it is unspeakably rare-and the inequalities suffered by the many are in no way justified by the rise of a few. A few have always risen-in every country, every era, and in the teeth of regimes which can by no stretch of the imagination be thought of as free. Not all of these people, it is worth remem bering, left the world better than they found it. The deter mined will is rare, but it is not invariably benevolent. Furthermore, the American equation of success with the big times reveals an awful disrespect for human lif e and human achievement. This equation has placed our cities among the most dangerous in the world and has placed our youth among the most empty and most bewildered. The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at list ening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models. That is exactly what our children are doing. They are imitating our immo rality, our disrespect for the pain of others. All other slum dwellers, when the bank account permits it, can move out of the slum and vanish altogether from the eye of persecution. No Negro in this country has ever made that much money and it will be a long time before any Negro does. The Negroes in Harlem, who have no money, spend what they have on such gimcracks as they are sold. These include "wider" TV screens, more "f aithful" hi-f i sets, more "pow erful" cars, all of which, of course, are obsolete long before they are paid for. Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expens ive it is to be poor; and if one is NOBODY KNOW S MY NAME a member of a captive population, economically speaking, one's feet have simply been placed on the treadmill forever.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I tried one of the jackets on but it made me feel like Jimmy Edwards. A third assistant, who was very nervous but had learnt the basic cant of salesmanship and stuck to it through thick and thin, kept telling me it really suited me. I put it back on the rail and in the mirror beside me was my rival. I looked down quickly and then slyly peeped and saw that his smile extended beyond his own admiration of the black denim jacket he was trying and called ironically for my opinion of it too. "Hello there," he said. "We keep on meeting." I turned and gave him a black stare that I couldn't keep from weakening into residual good manners. "Yes, don't we just." "You remember I ran into you twice. You're English, aren't you? you're usually with that tall, fair Belgian boy. Amazing-looking kid." I felt sick of being complimented on the beauty of my companions. "I can't remember what his name is." He turned sideways to check the cut of the jacket and show me his compact backside—perfectly acceptable in itself but irrevocably horrible by dint of being his. "Hans," I said. He raised his chin and frowned in the mirror as if to say he didn't for a moment believe me. "We really ought to have a drink some time," he said, with the same menacing naturalness. "You know, two Brits abroad, mutual interests . . ." "I'm afraid I don't drink," I said, probably with a trace of beer on my breath. Probably he'd seen me in the bar when I was far gone. "Amazing shop this, isn't it? It's like a fairy grotto." He looked at me archly. "What do you do, actually?" "I'm a writer." I turned to see how my friends were getting on. "I don't do much at the moment," he said. "Well, I work out." He smiled and peeled off the jacket. I thought for a disgusting moment he was going to start working out right there. He pulled a bill-fold from his shirt-pocket and handed me a card. "If you change your mind," he explained confidently. I shook my head but he held it out till I took it, with invisible fumigation tongs, and walked off down the shop with it. To my confusion it didn't say "I am a noxious berk" but "Rodney young—Researcher". Cherif had picked a rather New Look full-skirted brown coat with wide shoulders and a tie-belt. It was going to cost me a lot but I was determined to go through with it, without quite understanding why.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is the question of Bigger's hu manity which is at stake, the relationship in which he stands to all other Americans-and, by implication, to all people and it is precisely this question which it cannot clarify, with which it cannot, in fact, come to any coherent terms. He is the monster created by the American republic, the present awful sum of generations of oppression; but to say that he is a monster is to fall into the trap of making him subhuman and he must, therefore, be made representative of a way of lif e which is real and human in precise ratio to the degree to which it seems to us monstrous and strange. It seems to me that this idea carries, implicitly, a most remarkable conf ession: that is, that Negro lif e is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims; and, further, that the use to which Wright puts this idea can only proceed from the assumption not entirely unsound-that Americans, who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experience, have therefore no way of NOTES OF A NA TIVE SON assessing the experience of others and no way of establish ing thcmsch·cs in relation to any way of lif e which is not their own. The privacy or obscurity of Negro lif e makes that lif e capable, in our imaginations, of producing anything at all; and thus the idea of Bigger's monstrosity can be presented without fear of contradiction, since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and no Negro has the voice. It is an idea, which, in the framework of the novel , is dignified by the possibility it promptly affords of presenting Bigger as the herald of disaster, the danger signal of a more bitter time to come when not Bigger alone but all his kindred will rise, in the name of the many thousands who ha ve perished in fire and flood and by rope and torture, to demand their rightful vengeance. But it is not quite fair, it seems to me, to exploit the na tional innocence in this way. The idea of Bigger as a warning boomerangs not only because it is quite beyond the limit of probability that Negroes in America will ever achieve the means of wreaking vengeance upon the state but also because it cannot be said that they have any desire to do so. Native Son docs not convey the altogether savage paradox of the American Negro's situation, of which the social reality which we prefer with such hopeful superficiality to study is but, as it were, the shadow.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This remote, public, and, as it were, principled, bondage is the indispen sable justification of their own: when the prisoner is free, the jailer faces the mid of himself. If Lady Sings the Bhtes pretended to be concerned with the trials of a white girl, and starred, say, the late Susan Ha yward (I 'll Cry Tomo1·ro1v) or Bette Da,·is (A Stolen Life) or Olh·ia de Ha\'illand (T o Each His Own) or the late Ju dy Garland (A Star Is Born) or any of the current chicks, Billie's lm·e for her father and for the husband who so fatally turned her on would be the film's entire moth·ation: the guy that 1von you/ has nm off mzd undone you/t hat great begimzing/has seen its ji1zal in ning/: as desperately falsified, but in quite another way. The situations of Lana Turner (in The Postman Al ways Rings Twice) or Barbara Stanwyck (in Double Indemnity) or Joan Crawford (in almost anything, but, especially, Mildred Pie1·ce) THE DEVIL FINDS WORK are dictated, at bottom, by the brutally crass and commercial terms on which the heroine is to survive-are dictated, that is, by society. But, at the same time, the white chick is always, somehow, saved or strengthened or destroyed by love-s oci ety is out of it, beneath her: it matters not at all that the man she marries, or deserts, or murders, happens to own Rhodesia, or that she does: love is all . But the private lif e of a black woman, to say nothing of the private lif e of a black man, cannot really be considered at al l. To consider this forbidden privacy is to violate white pri vacy-by destroying the white dream of the blacks; to make black privacy a black and private matter makes white privacy real, for the first time: which is, indeed, and with a vengeance, to endanger the stewardship of Rhodesia. The situation of the white heroine must never violate the white self -image. Her situation must always transcend the inexorability of the social setting, so that her innocence may be preserved: Grace Kelly, when she shoots to kill, at the end of High Noon, for example, does not become a murderess. But the situation of the black heroine, to say nothing of that of the black hero, must always be left at society's mercy: in order to justify white history and in order to indicate the essential validity of the black condition. Billie's account of her meeting with Louis McKay is very simple, even childlike, and very moving. Louis is asleep on a bench, a whore is lif ting his wallet, and Billie prevents this, pretending that Louis, whom she has never seen in her lif e before, is her old man. And she gives Louis his wallet.

• 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.