Disappointment

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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  Adrian idealized madness in typical Laingian fashion. Schizophrenics were the true poets. Every raving lunatic was Rilke. He wanted me to write books with him. About schizophrenics. “I knew you wanted something from me,” I said. “Right. It’s your index finger I want to use and your ever so opposable thumb.” “Up yours.” We cursed at each other constantly like ten year olds. Our only way of expressing affection. Adrian’s past history of women practically qualified him for membership in my family. Never fuck a kinswoman seemed to be his motto. His present girlfriend (now watching his kids, I learned) was the closest thing to a native bird he’d had: a Jewish girl from Dublin. “Molly Bloom?” I asked. “Who?” “You don’t know who Molly Bloom is???” I was incredulous. All those educated English syllables and he hasn’t even read Joyce. (I’ve skipped long sections of Ulysses too, but I go around telling people it’s my favorite book. Likewise Tristram Shandy.) “I’m illit-trate,” he said, pronouncing the last two syllables as if they rhymed. He was very pleased with himself. Another dumb doctor, I thought. Like most Americans, I naively assumed that an English accent meant education. Oh well, literary men often do turn out to be such bastards. Or else creeps. But I was disappointed. Like when my analyst had never heard of Sylvia Plath. There I was talking for days about her suicide and how I wanted to write great poetry and put my head in the oven. All the while he was probably thinking of frozen coffee cake. Believe it or not, Adrian’s girlfriend was Esther Bloom—not Molly Bloom. She was dark and buxom, and suffered, he said, “from all the Jewish worries. Very sensual and neurotic.” A sort of Jewish princess from Dublin. “And your wife—what was she like?” (We were so hopelessly lost by now that we pulled over and stopped the car.) “Catholic,” he said, “a Papist from Liverpool.” “What did she do?” “Midwife.” This was a strange bit of information. I didn’t know quite how to react to it. “He’d been married to a Catholic midwife from Liverpool,” I imagined myself writing. (In the novel, I’d change Adrian’s name to something more exotic and make him much taller.) “Why did you marry her?” “Because she made me feel guilty.” “Great reason.” “Well it is. I was a guilty son of a bitch in medical school. A real sucker for the Protestant ethic. I mean, I remember there were certain girls who made me feel good—but feeling good scared me. There was one girl—she used to hire this huge barn and invite everyone to come fuck everyone. She made me feel good—so, of course, I mistrusted her. And my wife made me feel guilty—so, of course, I married her. I was like you. I didn’t trust pleasure or my own impulses. It frightened the hell out of me to be happy. And when I got scared—I got married. Just like you, love.”

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I was caught up short by his candor. “OK,” I confessed glumly, “you haven’t fucked me properly. I admit it.” “That’s better. Why are you always trying to be such a goddamned social worker? To salve my ego?” He pronounced it “egg-oh.” I thought for a while. What was I doing? I just assumed that you had to act that way with men. If you didn’t they’d fall apart, or go crazy. I didn’t want to drive another man crazy. “I guess I always just assumed that the male ego was so fragile you had to coddle it—” “Well mine isn’t so fragile. I can take being told I haven’t fucked you properly—especially when it’s bloody true.” “I guess I’ve just never met anyone like you.” He smiled delightedly. “No, you haven’t, ducks, and I daresay you never will again. I told you I’m an antihero. I’m not here to rescue you—and carry you away on a white horse.” What was he here for then, I wondered? It certainly wasn’t fucking. We went swimming at a huge public Schwimmbad on the outskirts of Vienna. I had never in my life seen so much sunburned fat. In Heidelberg, I had deliberately avoided the public swimming pools and saunas; and when we traveled we had always avoided the beach resorts frequented by Germans. We made a point of bypassing Ravenna and the other Teutonic encampments. Instead, I used to gaze enviously at the beautiful concave navels of the French Riviera, the moneyed, exercised midriffs of Capri. But here we were surrounded by mountains of Schlag and Sacher Torte metamorphosed into fat. “It’s like The Last Judgment by Michelangelo,” I told Adrian. “The one at the end of the Sistine Chapel.” He stuck his tongue out at me and made a face. “Here are all these people just enjoying themselves and having a good swim, and you’re turning your satirical gaze upon them, seeing depravity and corruption all around you. Madam Savonarola, I ought to call you.” “You’re right,” I said meekly. Couldn’t I ever stop looking and dissecting and tearing everything down? I couldn’t. “But they do look like The Last Judgment,” I said. “God’s revenge on the Germans for being such pigs is making them look like pigs.” And, by God, they did: not just fat, not just rolling bellies, and flabby arms, and double chins, and shimmering thighs—but all of it bright pink. Crackling. Burnt. Redder than Chinese pork. They looked like suckling pigs. Or like the fetal pig I had to dissect in Zoology II—nearly the Waterloo of my college career.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I’m nineteen and it feels like it’s too late for me or something. Right? Doesn’t it feel like that? We were just saying about how awe-inspiring Claire is and what it must have been like for her to be so successful so young and stuff,’ said Daisy, for the sake of Lena, who now knelt awkwardly by the low table, having made a weak pretence of coming over to pick up the condiment tray. Daisy looked over at Claire, waiting for her to continue the thread. They all looked at her. ‘You’re asking me what it was like when I started.’ ‘Yeah – was it amazing ?’ Claire sighed. She could tell these stories all night long – she often did when people asked. But they had nothing to do with her any more.  On Beauty ‘God . . . it was ’, and it was a very strange time to be a woman poet . . . I was meeting all these amazing people – Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti, and then finding myself in these insane situations . . . meeting, I don’t know, Mick Jagger or whoever, and I felt just very examined , very picked over, not just mentally but also personally and physically . . . and I suppose I felt somewhat . . . disembodied from myself. You could put it that way. But the next summer I was already gone, I went up to Montana for three years, so . . . things normalize quicker than you’d think. And I was in this beautiful country, in this exceptional landscape , and the truth is land like that is what fills you up, it’s what nourishes you as an artist . . . I’d get involved with a cornflower, for days . . . I mean with its actual, essential blueness . . .’ Claire talked on in her loopy way about the earth and its poetry, and her students nodded thoughtfully, but an unmistakable torpor had descended. They would have preferred to hear more about Mick Jagger, or Sam Shepard, the man she’d gone to Montana for, as they already knew from their Googling. Land did not interest them too much. Theirs was the poetry of character, of romantic personalities, of broken hearts and emotional warfare. Claire, who had experienced more than enough of this in her life, populated her poems these days with New England foliage, wildlife, creeks, valleys and mountain ranges. These poems had proved less popular than the sexualized verse of her youth. The food arrived. Claire was still speaking about the land. Zora, who had been clearly brooding on something, now spoke up. ‘But how do you avoid falling into pastoral fallacy – I mean, isn’t it a depoliticized reification, all this beauty stuff about landscape?

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  They are real because people agree that they’re real. But they, and emotions, exist only in the presence of human perceivers. ... Imagine the feeling of reaching into a bag of potato chips and discovering that the previous chip you ate was the last one. You feel disappointed that the bag is empty, relieved that you won’t be ingesting any more calories, slightly guilty that you ate the entire bag, and yet hungry for another chip. I have just invented an emotion concept, and there is surely no word for it in the English language. And yet, as you read my prolonged description of this complex feeling, you most likely simulated the whole thing, right down to the crinkle of the bag and the cheerless little crumbs at the bottom. You experienced this emotion without a word for it. Your brain accomplished this feat by combining instances of concepts you already know, such as “Bag,” “Chips,” “Disappointment,” “Relief,” “Guilt,” and “Hunger.” This powerful ability of your brain’s conceptual system, which we called conceptual combination in chapter 5, creates your very first instance of this new chip-related category of emotion, ready for simulation. Now if I name my new creation “Chiplessness” and teach it to our fellow citizens, it becomes every bit as real an emotion concept as “Happiness” and “Sadness.” People can predict with it, categorize with it, regulate their body budgets with it, and construct diverse instances of “Chiplessness” in different situations. This brings us to one of the most challenging ideas in this book: you need an emotion concept in order to experience or perceive the associated emotion. It’s a requirement. Without a concept for “Fear,” you cannot experience fear. Without a concept for “Sadness,” you cannot perceive sadness in another person. You could learn the necessary concept, or you could construct it in the moment through conceptual combination, but your brain must be able to make that concept and predict with it. Otherwise, you will be experientially blind to that emotion. I realize this idea might sound counterintuitive, so let’s start with a few examples. You are probably unfamiliar with an emotion called liget. It’s a feeling of exuberant aggression experienced by a headhunting tribe from the Philippines, the Ilongot. Liget involves intense focus, passion, and energy while pursuing a hazardous challenge with a group of people who are competing against another group. The danger and energy instill a sense of togetherness and belonging. Liget is not just a mental state but a complex situation with social rules about which activities bring it on, when it is appropriate to feel, and how other people should treat you during an episode. To a member of the Ilongot tribe, liget is every bit as real an emotion as happiness and sadness are to you.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  but continually be fed and fatted with fine and chosen barley and beans and vetch; howbeit another prevailed, who wished my liberty, for me to run lasciviously in the fields amongst the horses, whereby I might engender upon the mares some stout mules for my mistress. Therefore the groom that kept the horses was called for, and I was delivered unto him with great care, in so much that I rar before him right pleasant and joyous, because ] hoped that I should carry no more fardels o: burdens: moreover I thought that when I should thus be at liberty, in the springtime of the year, when the meadows and fields were green, I should find some roses in some place; after which it came into my mind that if my master and mistress did render to me so many thanks and honours being an ass, they would much more reward me being turned into a man. But when he (to whom the charge of me was so straitly committed) had brought me a good way distant from the city I perceived no delicate meats nor any liberty which I should have, but by and by his covetous wife and most cursed quean made me a mill ass, and (beating me with a cudgel with many twigs) would wring bread for herself and her household out of my skin. Yet was she not contented to weary me and make me a drudge with carriage and grinding of her own corn, but she made me to grind for her neighbours and so earned more gain by my toil: nor would she give me such meat as it was ordained that I should have, for all my miserable labours, for my. own barley which I ground in that same mill by my own goings about she would sell to the inhabi- tants by, and after that I had laboured all day upon this engine of toil, she would set before me at night 323 LUCIUS APULEIUS vespera furfures apponebat incretos ac sordidos, mul- toque lapide salebrosos.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Kiki kissed Warren and was hugged too tightly by Claire; she waved and called goodbye and did all the necessaries on behalf of Jerome, who stood oblivious next to her on the blue doorstep of a Moroccan restaurant. To stave off the inevitable discussion, Kiki watched the couple walk away for as long as she could. ‘ Fuck ,’ said Jerome once again, loudly. He sat down where he was. The sky had misted over slightly, allowing the sun to cast itself in a misleading godly role. It shone beneficence in thin rods of Renaissance light, thrusting through a landscaped cloud that seemed designed for this purpose. Kiki tried to figure the blessing in it all, a way to spin bad news as good. Sighing, she removed her headwrap. Her heavy plait collapsed down her back, but it was good to have the sweat ooze from the scalp down her face. She sat down next to her son. She said his name, but he stood up and began to walk away. A family searching each other’s backpacks for some lost item blocked his progress; Kiki caught up. ‘Don’t do that, don’t make me run after you.’ ‘Er . . . free citizen, moving through the world?’ said Jerome, pointing to himself. ‘You know, I was just about to sympathize, but actually I think I want to tell you to grow the hell up .’ ‘Fine.’ ‘No, it is not fine. Baby, I know you were hurt badly – ’ ‘I’m not hurt. I’m embarrassed. Let’s skip it.’ He pinched his brow with his fingers, a gesture so like one of his father’s that it was ridiculous. ‘I forgot your burrito, sorry.’ ‘Forget the burrito – can we talk?’ Jerome nodded, but they walked the left side of Wellington Square in silence. Kiki paused, and made Jerome pause, by a stall selling pin-cushions. These were shaped like fat Oriental gentlemen, complete with two diagonal dashes for their eyes and tiny yellow coolie hats with black fringes. Their pulvinate bellies were red satin,  kipps and belsey and it was here that the needles pierced. Kiki picked one up, rolling it in her hand. ‘These are cute aren’t they?

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  So we walked through the Freud house in search of revelation. I think we half expected to see Montgomery Clift dressed and bearded like Freud and exploring the eaves of his own dank unconscious. What we saw, in fact, was disappointing. Most of the furniture had gone to Hampstead with Freud and now belonged to his daughter. The Vienna Freud Museum had to make do with photographs and largely empty rooms. Freud had lived here for nearly half a century, but there was no scent of him left—just photographs and a waiting room reconstituted with overstuffed furniture of the period. There was a photograph of the famous consulting room with its Oriental carpet-covered analytic couch, its Egyptian and Chinese figurines, and its fragments of ancient sculpture, but the consulting room itself had vanished, along with a whole era, in 1938. How strange, somehow, to pretend that Freud had never been driven out, or that with the help of a few yellowing photos, a world could be recreated. It reminded me of my trip to Dachau: the crematoria torn down and tow-headed German children running and laughing and picnicking on the newly seeded grass. “You can’t judge a country by just twelve years,” they used to tell me in Heidelberg. So we peered at the curiously sterile rooms, the left-over paraphernalia of Freud’s life: his medical diploma, his military record, his application for assistant professorship, a contract with one of his publishers, his list of publications attached to an application for promotion. And then we inspected the photographs: Freud, cigar in hand, with the first psychoanalytic circle, Freud with a grandson, Freud with Anna Freud, Freud before death leaning on his wife’s arm in London, young Ernest Jones striking a glamour-boy profile, Sandor Ferenczi peering imperiously at the world, circa 1913, mild-mannered Karl Abraham looking mild-mannered, Hanns Sachs looking like Robert Morley, und so weiter. The artifacts were present, but the spirit of the enterprise was lacking. We trooped obediently from one display to the next wondering about our own sticky history, still in the writing. We had a quiet lunch together and again tried to repair the damages of the previous evening. I vowed to myself I would never see Adrian again. Bennett and I treated each other with utmost consideration. We were careful not to discuss anything of consequence. Instead we spoke anecdotally of Freud. According to Ernest Jones, he was a poor judge of character, a poor Menschenkenner. Often this trait—a certain naiveté about people—went with genius. Freud could penetrate the secrets of dreams, but he could also fall dupe to an ordinary con man. He could invent psychoanalysis, but he would inevitably put his faith in people who betrayed him. Also he was very indiscreet. He often gave away confidences which had been entrusted to him on the sole condition that he keep quiet about them.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  She was hysterical, placing her hands all over his face, apparently trying to stop him speaking. Zora frowned at her, not understanding. ‘Why the hell not?’ Carl asked, peeling a hand from his mouth and holding Victoria at the shoulders as she continued to weep loudly. ‘She’s so damn superior all the time, she should have a little home truth told to her – she thinks her daddy’s such a – ’ ‘NO!’ screamed Victoria. Zora put her hands on her hips, utterly bemused, almost entertained, by this new scene passing in front of her. Someone was making a fool of herself, and, for the first time tonight, it  on beauty and being wrong wasn’t Zora. A window someplace down the street was thrown up. ‘ Keep the goddamn noise down! It’s the middle of the goddamn night! ’ The clapboard houses, prim and shuttered, silently seemed to support the departure of the street’s noisy visitors. ‘Vee, baby, go back in the house. I’ll be in in a minute,’ said Carl and tenderly wiped some tears from Victoria’s face with his hand. Zora abandoned her curiosity. She felt the fury double inside her. She didn’t stop to consider the meaning of what had just passed, and so did not follow Jerome as his mind wandered down a formerly concealed path to a dark destination: the truth. Jerome put his hand against the soggy trunk of a tree, and this alone kept him upright. Victoria rang the bell to get back in the house. For a moment Jerome met her eye with all that he felt: disappointment because he had loved her; grief because she had betrayed him. ‘Can you keep it down out here?’ requested a kid at the door and let a distraught, broken Victoria back into the house. ‘I think that’s enough now,’ said Jerome firmly to Carl. ‘I’m going to take Zoor home. You’ve upset her enough as it is.’ Of all the things he had been accused of so far, this reasonably voiced charge struck Carl as the most unfair. ‘This was not me, man,’ said Carl adamantly, shaking his head. ‘I did not do this. Damn!’ He kicked a step hard. ‘You people don’t behave like human beings, man – I ain’t never seen people behave like you people. You don’t tell the truth , you deceive people. You all act so superior, but you’re not telling the truth! You don’t even know a thing about your own father, man. My daddy’s a worthless piece of shit too, but at least I know he’s a worthless piece of shit. I feel sorry for you – you know that? I really do.’

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Is that in the City, or – ?’ ‘In the City, yeah. Round St Paul’s way.’ ‘But you’re still living at home.’ ‘Just come back weekends. Go to church, Sunday lunch. Family stuff.’ ‘Live near by or – ?’ ‘Camden – just by the – ’ ‘Oh, I know Camden – once upon a century I used to knock about there a bit – well, do you know where the – ’ ‘Your photos are finished, I think,’ said Michael, picking them out of their cubbyhole. He shook them and blew on them. ‘You couldn’t use the first three; they’re not square on your face,’ said Michael brusquely. ‘They’re strict about that now. Use the last one, maybe.’ He handed them to Howard, who pushed them into his pocket without looking. So he hates the idea of this marriage even more than I do, thought Howard. He can barely even be polite to me. Together they walked down the street from which Michael had just come. There was something fatally humourless even in the way the young man walked, a status-preserving precision to each step, as if proving to a policeman that he could walk along a straight white line. A minute and then two passed without either man speaking. They walked by houses and more houses, uninterrupted by any conveniences, neither shop nor cinema nor launderette. Everywhere cramped rows of Victorian terraces, the maiden aunts of English architecture, the culture museums of bourgeois Vic-toriana . . . This was an old rant of Howard’s. He grew up in one of these houses. Once free of his own family he had experimented with radical living spaces – communes and squats. And then the children came, the second family, and all of those spaces became impossible. He did not like to remember now exactly how much and for long he had coveted his mother-in-law’s house – we forget what we choose to forget. He saw himself instead as a man hustled by circumstance into spaces that he rejected politically, personally, aesthetically, as a concession to his family. One among many concessions.  kipps and belsey They turned into a new street, clearly bombed in the last war. Here were mid-century monstrosities with mock-Tudor fronts and crazy-paved driveways. Pampas grass, like the tails of huge suburban cats, drooped over the front walls. ‘It’s nice round here,’ said Howard, and wondered about this instinct of his to offer unsolicited exactly the opposite opinion to the one he held. ‘Yeah. You live in Boston.’ ‘Just outside of Boston.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  At a double remove from the usual review media, Lolita went generally unnoticed during its first six months. But in the winter of 1956 Graham Greene in England recommended Lolita as one of the best books of 1955, incurring the immediate wrath of a columnist in the Sunday Express, which moved Greene to respond in The Spectator. Under the heading of “Albion” (suggesting a quaint tempest in an old teapot), The New York Times Book Review of February 26, 1956, alluded briefly to this exchange, calling Lolita “a long French novel” and not mentioning Nabokov by name. Two weeks later, noting “that our mention of it created a flurry of mail,” The Times devoted two-thirds of a column to the subject, quoting Greene at some length. Thus began the underground existence of Lolita, which became public in the summer of 1957 when the Anchor Review in New York devoted 112 of its pages to Nabokov. Included were an excellent introduction by F. W. Dupee, a long excerpt from the novel, and Nabokov’s Afterword, “On a Book Entitled Lolita.” When Putnam’s brought out the American edition in 1958 they were able to dignify their full-page advertisements with an array of statements by respectable and even distinguished literary names, though Lolita’s fast climb to the top of the best-seller list was not exclusively the result of their endorsements or the novel’s artistry. “Hurricane / Lolita swept from Florida to Maine” (to quote John Shade in Pale Fire [1. 680]), also creating storms in England and Italy, and in France, where it was banned on three separate occasions. Although it never ran afoul of the law in this country, there were predictably some outraged protests, including an editorial in The New Republic; but, since these at best belong to social rather than literary history, they need not be detailed here, with one exception. Orville Prescott’s review in the daily New York Times of August 18, 1958, has a charm that should be preserved: “ ‘Lolita,’ then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.”11 Prescott’s remarks complement those of an anonymous reviewer in The Southern Quarterly Review (January 1852), who found an earlier, somewhat different treatment of the quest theme no less intolerable: “The book is sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous. Mr. Melville’s Quakers are the wretchedest dolts and drivellers, and his Mad Captain, who pursues his personal revenges against the fish who has taken off his leg, at the expense of ship, crew and owners, is a monstrous bore.…”

• From On Beauty (2005)

  He’d been laying this look on her since they were children, and now Zora defended herself as she always did, by attacking. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t like her. I can’t pretend I like her when I don’t. I do not like her. She’s just a typical pretty-girl, power-game playing, deeply shallow human being. She tries to hide it by reading one book by Barthes or whatever – all she does is quote Barthes; it’s so tedious – but then the bottom line is, whenever things get sticky for her she just works her charms to her advantage. It’s disgusting. Oh, my God, and she has this coterie of boys just following her everywhere, which is fine – obviously it’s pathetic, but whatever you need to make it through the day . . . but don’t fuck up the dynamic of the class with stupid questions that go nowhere. You know? And she’s vain. Wow, is she vain. You’re lucky to be out of that situation.’ Jerome looked pained. He hated hearing anybody bad-mouthed; anyone except Howard, maybe, and even then he preferred to do his own dirty work. Now he folded his muffin wrapper in half and passed it idly between his fingers like a playing card.  the anatomy lesson ‘You don’t know her at all. She’s not really that vain. She just hasn’t settled into her looks. She’s still young. She hasn’t decided what to do with it yet. It’s a powerful thing, you know, to look like that.’ Zora guffawed. ‘Oh, she’s decided. She’s using it as a force of evil.’ Jerome threw his eyes back in his head but laughed along. ‘You think I’m joking. She’s poisonous. She needs to be stopped. Before she destroys somebody else. I’m serious.’ This went too far. Zora sank into her stool a little, realizing. ‘You don’t have to say any of that – not for me, anyway,’ said Jerome crossly, confusing Zora, who had been expressing nothing but her own feelings. ‘Because . . . I don’t . . . I don’t love her any more.’ With this simplest of sentences all the air seemed to rush from him. ‘That’s what I found out this semester. It was hard – I willed myself. I actually thought I’d never get her face out of my system.’ Jerome looked down at the table top and then up and directly into his sister’s eyes. ‘But I did. I don’t love her any more.’ This was said with such solemnity and earnestness that Zora wanted to laugh, as they had always laughed in the past at moments like these.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is at this pomt, precisely, that many and many a student packs his bags for home. The transformation which can be effected, in less than a year, in the attitude and aspirations of the youth who has divorced himself from the crudities of main street in order to be married with European finesse is, to say the very least, astounding. His brief period of enchantment �ng ended, he cannot walt, It seems, tO look agam on his native land the \'lrtues of which, If not less crude, have also become, abruptly, stmple, and vztal. With the air of a man who has but barely escaped tumbling headlong into the bottomless pit, he tells you that he can scarcely wait to leave this city, which has been revealed to the eye of his maturity as old, dirty, crumbling, and dead. The people who were, when he arrived at Le Havre, the heirs of the world's richest culture, the pos sessors of the world's largest esp1'it, are really decadent, pe nurious, self-seeking, and false, with no trace of American spontaneity, and lacking in the least gratitude for American favors. Only America is alive, only Americans are doing any thing worth mcmiuning in the arts, or 111 any other field of NOTES OF A NATIVE SON human activity: to America, only, the future belongs. Whereas, but only yesterday, to confess a fondness for anything Amer ican was to be suspected of the most indefensible jingoism, to suggest today that Europe is not all black is to place oneself under the suspicion of harboring treasonable longings. The violence of his embrace of things American is embarrassing, not only because one is not quite prepared to follow his ad mirable example, but also because it is impossible not to sus pect that his present acceptance of his country is no less romantic, and unreal, than his earlier rejection. It is as easy, after all, and as meaningless, to embrace uncritically the cul tural sterility of main street as it is to decry it. Both extremes avoid the question of whether or not main street is really ster ile, avoid, in fact-which is the principal convenience of ex tremes-any questions about main street at al l. What one vainly listens for in this cacophony of affirmation is any echo, however faint, of individual maturity. It is really quite impos sible to be affirmative about anything which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made one's own.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Their entire purpose (apart from mak ing money; and this money is not for blacks; in spite of the fact that some of these films appear to have been, at least in pan, financed by blacks) is to stifle forever any possibility of such moments-or, in other words, to make black experience irrelevant and obsolete . And I may point out that this vogue, had it been remotely serious, had a considerable body of work on which to draw-f rom Up From Slavery to Let Me Live, from The Au to-Biography of an Ex-Colored Man, and Cane, to Black Boy to Invisible Man to Blues Child Baby to 11J e Bluest Eye to Soledad Brother. An incomplete list, and difficult: but the difficulty is not in the casting. 556 THE DE VIL FINDS WO RK My buddy, Ava Gardner, once asked me if I thought she could play Billie Holiday. I had to tell her that, though she was certainly "down" enough for it-courageous and honest and beautiful enough for it-she would almost certainly not be allo wed to get away with it, since Billie Holiday had been widely rumored to be black, and she, Ava Gardner, was widely rumored to be white. I was not really making a joke, or, if I was, the joke was bitter: for I certainly know some black girls who are much, much whiter than Ava. Nor do I blame the black girls for this, for this utterly inevitable species of schiz ophrenia is but one of the many manifestations of the spiritual and historical trap, called racial, in which all Americans find themselves and against which some of us, some of the time, manage to arrive at a viable and honorable identity. I was really thinking of black actors and actresses, who would have been much embittered if the role of Billie Holiday had been played by a white girl: but, then, I had occasion to think of them later, too, when the tidal wave of "black" films arrived, using such a staggering preponderance of football players and models. I had never been a Diana Ross fan, and received the ne ws that she was to play Billie with a weary shrug of the shoulders. I could not possibly have been more wrong, and I pray the lady to accept from me my humble apologies-f or my swift, and, alas, understandably cynical reaction. For, indeed, the most exasperating aspect of Lady Sings the Blues, for me, is that the three principals-Miss Ross, Billy Dee Williams, and Richard Pryor-are, clearly, ready, willing, and able to stretch out and go a distance not permitted by the film. And, even within this straitjacket, they manage marvelous moments, and a truth which is not in the script is sometimes glimpsed through them.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Knopf. $s. E VERY TIME I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts-and depressed that he has done so little with them. A real discussion of his work de mands more space than I have here, but this book contains a great deal which a more disciplined poet would have thrown into the waste- basket (almost all of the last section, for example ). There arc the poems which almost succeed but which do not succeed, poems which take refuge, finally, in a fake sim plicity in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity of the experience! And one sometimes has the impression, as in a poem like "Third Dcgrcc"-which is about the beating up of a ::\lcgro boy in a police station-that Hughes has had to hold the experience outside him in order to be able to write at all. And certainly this is understandable. Nevertheless, the poetic trick, so to speak, is to be within the experience and outside it at the same time-and the poem tails. Mr. Hughes is at his best in brict� sardonic asides, or in lyrics like "Mother to Son," and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Or "Dr eam Variations": To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me That is my dream! To fling my arms wide In the face of the sttn. Dance! Whirl! Whirl! 614 SER MONS AND BL UES Till the quick day is done. Rest at pale evening . . A tall, slim tree . . . Night coming tenderly Black like me. 615 I do not like all of "The Weary Bl ues," which copies, rather than exploits, the cadence of the blues, but it comes to a remarkable end. And I am also very fond of "Island," which begins "Wave of sorrow /Do not drown me now." Hu ghes, in his sermons, blues and prayers, has working for him the power and the beat of Negro speech and Negro mu sic. Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand-or sleight-of-hand- by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary-wi thout the faintest notion of what it really means-the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience. Hughes knows the bitter truth behind these hieroglyphics: what they are designed to protect, what they are designed to convey. But he has not forced them into the realm of art where their meaning would become clear and overwhelming.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I don't wish, here, to belabor a point to which we shall, presently, and somewhat ela borately, be com pelled to return: but, no one, I read somewhere, a long time ago, makes his escape personality black. That the movie star is an "escape" personality indicates one of the irreducible dan gers to which the moviegoer is exposed: the danger of sur rendering to the corroboration of one's fantasies as they are thrown back from the screen. The danger is as great for the performer: Bette Davis may have longed, all these years, to play Mrs. Alvi ng, in Ghosts, and Spencer Tracy may have car ried with him to the grave an unfulfilled King Lear - nobody was about to let them try it, for tear that their public would feel themselves betrayed. This is one of the reasons that Joan Crawford, for example, doesn't like the film Rain, in which she starred. God knows that it's not a very good picture, but Crawfi.>rd didn't write the abysmal script. She made the mis take, and very honorably, after all, of trying to be Miss Sadie Thompson instead of Miss Joan Crawfi>rd, and the kids didn't like that at all . CHAPTER ONE 501 For the tension in the theater is a very different, and very particular tension: this tension between the real and the imag ined is the theater, and this is why the theater will always remain a necessity. One is not in the presence of shadows, but responding to one's flesh and blood: in the theater, we are re creating each other. Clearly, now, when speaking of the the ater, I am not referring to those desperate and debilitating commercial ventures on which Broadway embarks each season, or those grim "revivals" of stillborn plays of which London is so fond, or those "adaptations" of American monstrosities which have been the rage of Paris for so long. Nor, in the present instance, is the term, "one's flesh and blood" meant to ref er, merely, to the spectacle of a black boy seeing, for the first time in his lif e, living black actors on a living stage: we are all each other's flesh and blood. This is a truth which it is very difficult for the theater to deny, and when it attempts to do so the same thing happens to the theater as happens to the church: it becomes sterile and irrelevant, a blasphemy, and the true believer goes elsewhere carrying, as it happens, the church and the theater with him, and leaving the form behind.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is only when time has begun spilling through his fingers like water or sand-carrying away with it, forever, dreams, possibilities, challenges, and hopes-that the young man realizes that he will not be young forever. If he wishes to paint a picture, raise a family, write a book, design a building, start a war- well, he does not have forever in which to do it. He has only a certain amount of time, and half of that time is probably gone already. As long as his aspirations are in the realm of the dream, he is safe; when he must bring them back into the world, he is in danger. Precisely for this reason, Paris was a devastating shock. It was easily recognizable as Paris from across the ocean: that was what the letters on the map spelled out. This was not the same thing as finding oneself in a large, inconvenient, indif ferent city. Paris, from across the ocean, looked like a refuge from the American madness; now it was a city four thousand miles from home. It contained-in those days-no dough nuts, no milk shakes, no Coca-Cola, no dry Martinis; nothing resembling, for people on our economic level, an American toilet; as for toilet paper, it was yesterday's newspaper. The concierge of the hotel did not appear to find your presence in France a reason fi:>r rejoicing; rather, she found your pres ence, and in particular your ability to pay the rent, a matter for the profoundest suspicion. The policemen, with their re volvers, clubs, and (as it turned out) weighted capes, appeared to be convinced of your legality only after the most vindictive scrutiny of your passport; and it became clear very soon that they were not kidding about the three-month period during THE NE W LOST GENER ATION 66 5 which every foreigner had to buy a new visa or leave the coun try. Not a few astounded Americans, unable to call their em bassy, spent the night in jail, and steady offenders were escorted to the border.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The children probably suffered, though they have since been kind enough to deny it, and in this way I read Uncle TomJs Cabin and A Tale of Two Cities over and over and over again; in this way, in fact, I read just about everything I could get my hands on- except the Bible, prob ably because it was the only book I was encouraged to read. I must also confess that I wrote-a great deal-and my first professional triumph, in any case, the first effort of mine to be seen in print, occurred at the age of twelve or thereabouts, when a short story I had written about the Spanish revolution won some sort of prize in an extremely short-lived church newspaper. I remember the story was censored by the lady editor, though I don't remember why, and I was outraged. Also wrote plays, and songs, for one of which I received a letter of congratulations from Mayor La Guardia, and poetry, about which the less said, the better. My mother was de lighted by all these goings-on, but my father wasn't; he wanted me to be a preacher. When I was fourteen I became a preacher, and when I was seventeen I stopped. Very shortly thereafter I left home. For God knows how long I struggled with the world of commerce and industry- I guess they would say they struggled with me-a nd when I was about twenty one I had enough done of a novel to get a Saxton Fellowship. When I was twenty-two the fellowship was over, the novel turned out to be unsalable, and I started waiting on tables in a Village restaurant and writing book reviews-mostly, as it turned out, about the Negro problem, concerning which the color of my skin made me automatically an expert. Did another book, in company with photographer Theodore 5 6 NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON Pelat owski, about the store-front churches in Harlem. This book met exactly the same fate as my first-f ellowship, but no sale. (It was a Rosenwald Fellowsh ip.) By the time I was twenty-f our I had decided to stop reviewing books about the �egro problem- which, by this time, was only slightly less horrible in print than it was in lif e-a nd I packed my bags and went to France, where I finished, God knows how, Go Tell It on the Mount ain.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  "W ell," I began, "even if you don't like it ... " "Oh," he said quickly, raising his head and looking at me sideways, "I never said I didn't like it." And then he explained to me, with difficulty, that it was simply contrary to everything he'd ever seen or believed. He'd never dreamed of a mingling of the races; had never lived that way himself and didn't suppose that he ever would; in the same way, he added, perhaps a trifle defensively, that he only associated with a certain stratum of white people. But, "I' ve never seen a colored person toward whom I had any hatred or ill- will." His eyes searched mine as he said this and I knew that he was wondering if I believed him. I certainly did believe him; he impressed me as being a very gentle and honorable man. But I could not avoid wondering if he had ever really looked at a Negro and wondered about the lif e, the aspirations, the universal humanity hidden behind the dark skin. As I wondered, when he told me that race re lations in his city were "excellent" and had not been strained by recent developments, how on earth he managed to hold on to this delusion. I later got back to my interrupted question, which I phrased more tactfully. "E ven though it's very difficult for all concerned-this sit- A FLY IN BUTTERM IL K I95 uation---doesn 't it occur to you that the reason colored chil dren wish to come to white schools isn't because they want to be with white people but simply because they want a better education?" "Oh, I don't know," he replied, "it seems to me that col ored schools are just as good as white schools." I wanted to ask him on what evidence he had arrived at this conclusion and also how they could possibly be "as good" in view of the kind of lif e they came out of, and perpetuated, and the dim prospects faced by all but the most exceptional or ruthless Negro students. But I only suggested that G. and his family, who certainly should have known, so thoroughly disagreed with him that they had been willing to risk G.' s present well being and his future psychological and mental health in order to bring about a change in his environment. Nor did I men tion the lack of enth usiasm envinced by G.' s mother when musing on the prospect of a fair grandchild. There seemed no point in making this man any more a victim of his heritage than he so gallantly was already.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The graciousness of her reception was only slightly marred by the fact that she was not expecting singers and thought they were a new group of can vassers. She arranged for them to take rooms on Butler Street at the YMCA. Here the first gap between promise and per formance was made manifest, a gap, they felt, which was per haps too trifling to make a fuss about. In New York they had been promised comparative privacy, two to a room; but now, it developed, they were to sleep in a dormitory. This gap, in fact, it was the province of Mr. Warde to close, but whether he was simply weary from the trip or overwhelmed by the aristocratic Mrs. Price, he kept his mouth shut and, indeed, did not open it again for quite some time. When they returned to headquarters, somewhat irritated at having had to wait three hours for the arrival of Louis Burner, who had the money tor their rooms, Mrs. Price suggested that they go out canvassing. This was wholly unexpected, since no one had mentioned canvassing in New York and, since, more over, canvassers arc voluntary workers who are not paid. Fur ther, the oldest of them was twenty, which was not voting age, and none of them knew anything about the Progressive Party, nor did they care much. On the other hand, it is some what ditncult to refuse a grey-haired, aristocratic lady who is toiling day and night f(>r the benefit of your people; and Mr. Warde, who should have been their spokesman, had not yet recovered his voice; so they took the petitions, which were meant to put the Wallace party on the ballot, and began knocking on doors in the Negro section of Atlanta. They were sent out in pairs, white and black, a political device which JOURNEY TO ATLA NTA 59 operates not only as the living proof of brotherhood, but which has the additional virtue of intimidating into passive silence the more susceptible beholder, who cannot, after al l, unleash the impatient scorn he may feel with a strange, be ne,·olent white man sitting in his parlor. They cam·assed for three days, during which time their ex penses-$ 2.2 5 per man per day-were paid, but during which time they were doing no singing and making no money. On the third day they pointed out that this was not quite what they had been promised in New York, to be met with another suggestion from the i1wincible Mrs.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  "I' ve got to make some kind of decision soon," he says. I tell him that I am coming to the campus the next day, OTH ER ES SAYS and this elic its from him the names of students he wants me to meet, and also the names of Reverend Steele, Reverend Speed and Mr. Haley. I think it is safe to say that these three, along with one other person whom I cannot, for the person's sake, name-and it strikes me as horrendous that such a con sideration should be necessary in this country- were the four Negro adults most respected by the students. This fact alone, since they are four utterly dedicated and intransigent people, ought to cause the municipality to reflect. The next day I meet and briefly talk to A., lean, light-col ored, taciturn, nineteen, from Ohio, a sociology major, who has been arrested for his part in the sit-ins and is on a year's probation. He is very matter-of- fact and quiet, very pleasant and respectful, and absolutely tense with the effort this costs him. Or perhaps I exaggerate, but I am always terribly struck by the abnormal self -containment of such young people. A. speaks about the possibility of transferring to another college. Somehow I do not get the impression that this possibility is very real to him, and then I realize that part of his tension is due to worry about his exams. I also talk to V., eighteen, from Georgia, the skinniest child I have ever seen, who is also on a year's probation. He is rather bitter about the failure of the Negro community to respond as he had expected it to. "/ haven't got to live with it," he tells me-so mewhat unrealistically since, as it later turns out, his relatives are determined to keep him in Tallahassee and he will certainly be living with the problem for the next couple of years. "I did it fix them. Looks like they don't appreciate it." He was appalled that the Negroes of Frenchtown-the section of town in which I am staying-sh ould have vanished on the evening of March J2.