Charles H. Nilon lecture in contemporary black fiction at the University of Iowa, May 13, 1970

Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of the University of Iowa, in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the University, presents a series of lectures by Black specialists as material for the University's course Afro-American Literature. The lecture for this week is Charles H. Nilon, Professor of English at the University of Colorado, speaking on Contemporary Black Fiction. Charles H. Nilo...: Good afternoon. I have called my talk this afternoon Telling It As It Is. I'm not sure that this title is conducive to literary description or evaluation, but I think that it represents something of the stance that the contemporary Black writer takes, taught himself, and taught his material. It has to do with the kind of content he's concerned to present, and it has to do with the forthrightness with which he presents that particular content. Charles H. Nilo...: I think to that the Black writer, traditionally, has wanted to, tried to, tell it as it is. And that, in the last decade, he has found it possible to come nearer doing that than he has at earlier times. From about 1880 down to the 1920s, the period of the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance, Black writers wrote in response to the white concept of the Black world; in protest, attempting to prove themselves capable and human in the way that white people were, and therefore deserving of freedom and permission to enter the mainstream of American life. Charles H. Nilo...: The image of the Black man, and the work of the novelist who wrote before the Harlem Renaissance, was characterized by race pride, uplift, and hope. But often it did not convey the reality of Black life: the folklore, the folk art, the actual Black experience. Because these were not prized by the white world, the Black novelist engaged in the process that Countee Cullen called, "Quenching pride and cooling blood." Characters created by William Wells Brown in My Southern Home, by Frances Harper in Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted, and by many other, better Black novelists, were exaggeratedly model persons. They were too good. Charles H. Nilo...: Many Black writers of fiction found themselves defensively answering white critics. White creators of Black images, such as Thomas Dixon and Thomas Nelson Page, who in works such as The Leopard's Spots, The Clansman, and Red Rocks, proclaim the Black man inferior, brutal, incapable of human self control and decency. Charles Waddell Chesnutt in his novels designedly tried to answer the charges of these post reconstruction novelists. He tried to present the truth about the behavior of the Black man during reconstruction and to show the variety in his person and in his behavior. He wanted to tell it as it was. Charles H. Nilo...: Since the period of the Harlem Renaissance, Black novelists have been trying to tell it as it is, although this has been their stated intention only in the last decade. In spite of the forces that control their efforts, Paul Laurence Dunbar [inaudible] tried to do this. Several men who were perhaps not genuinely novelists, social activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson and Walter White, wrote novels because this seemed a way to say things that needed to be said to an audience that might respond to knowing them. Charles H. Nilo...: Telling it as it is means, as a kind of creed, that the writers sent to write, Ellison and Baldwin, have lost their illusions, know themselves and their differences, and that their shame has been replaced with pride. Telling it as it is involves avoiding sentimentality. Richard Wright said after Uncle Tom's Children had been published that he would never write another novel that women could cry and feel good about when they had finished reading it. Charles H. Nilo...: Telling it as it is is getting the facts straight; not oversimplifying, sensing the complexity of human experience, facing the ugly without repulsion. It is clinical. It is also an impossible task, because the writer who strives to do it is limited by his humanity, by his ability to see, to know, and to interpret. Charles H. Nilo...: It is also a functional creed however, because it provides perspective, a rhetoric, and a stance. This perspective rhetoric and stance is not exclusively a literary characteristic. It is a convention of the mass of Black people, a strategy for survival that has replaced the accommodation that characterized Ellison's narrator's grandfather in Invisible Man. Charles H. Nilo...: The Black writer who tells it as it is does not avoid the taboos. He does not avoid the ugly and the repulsive. He does not hesitate what he believes because it may offend or shock. He tells the bad and the good about himself. He investigates the problem areas. He does not try to make his characters noble. He strives to show the particular quality of their humanity. Charles H. Nilo...: In a practical sense, this means that he looks carefully at the Black person in the Black community and tries to present him as he is. He is concerned to show cause and effect and to develop and reveal character so that it can be known both sensuously and intellectually. Charles H. Nilo...: Telling it as it is means in part dealing boldly and intimately with the monsters, the Bigger Thomas', the Rufus Scotts, and the Boatwrights. This is literature of extreme situations. A literature whose possibilities are experienced in the works of Alexander Trocchi, of [Genet], and of William Burroughs. The writing has something of the function of confession and serves the writer and the reader in somewhat the same way that blues serve the singer and the listener. Many of the writers make use of blues lyrics to establish tone and pace, as well as to provide a logic for their character's actions. Charles H. Nilo...: Clarence L. Cooper Jr., Nathan C. Heard, and Cecil Brown are three young novelists whose work provides some understanding of what it means to tell it as it is. Cooper and Heard are products of the urban ghetto and they have spent time in jail. Cooper was at one time a drug addict and knows the world of the addict. His novels, The Scene and The Farm, a story set in a treatment center in Kentucky, present this world in precise, frank detail. Charles H. Nilo...: For Cooper and Heard, prison experiences functioned somewhat as it functioned for Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver. Through it, and in spite of it, they have discovered meaning and purpose. Brown, who has come to write novels more conventionally, left dirt farming in North Carolina and went north to school at Columbian, Chicago, when he was 18. The three young men are products of our time and they're shaped by the forces that shape Black life now in America. Their work is a presentation of the life that they know and feel. It is a response to their individual pasts and to their knowledge of themselves as members of a particular race. Charles H. Nilo...: Clarence Cooper's The Scene is a story of the cycle of dope addiction. In a way it's a demographic study of a fixed number of blocks within a city and of the people who have come into that area. It is a presentation of a sub culture and its socio-economic controls. The businessmen of the dope world, their strategies and rationalizations are shown. The law as it functions in this world is represented both in its corruptness and in its effort to provide order and protection. There is a language here, a vocabulary, a set of meaningful gestures, a code of behavior, a mystique. The Scene defines a value system, a way of life and death. The people who live in this world, pushers, users, pimps, prostitutes, tricks, cops, fences, form a community which exists and has a means by which men seek to provide themselves the things that human beings require: escapes from pain, comfort, challenge, love, and an opportunity to exercise power and intelligence. Charles H. Nilo...: The people who live in this world are outsiders, the alienated, the beaten who are still trying and who still have the animal capacities. They are described in this novel a formidable, extralegal, perverse pattern of life; a power structure that is motivated by cruel intelligence and fear. Charles H. Nilo...: Individual progress to destruction in The Scene is revealed in the portrayal of the life and death of a young man who is the typical if not the central character. He's an outsider who's lived with an aged aunt who is loving, frightened, poor, religious, and ineffectual. He is attracted to the world of dope because of the glamor, because he must try to be a man, and because of the appeal of things. He sees the men who wear expensive clothes, who drive expensive cars, and who enjoy starkly beautiful, expensive women. The world is one in which there is challenge and strength and power. It is a world to which he has access. He does not realize that once he has entered it he will not be able to leave it. Charles H. Nilo...: This young man begins as a pusher. He yearns for respect and admiration. He becomes a pimp and a user of drugs. Those employ him deliberately trap him. When life becomes difficult he murders to feed his habit and his pride. He abuses his whore but his pride forces him to believe that she loves him and will come to his rescue. He dies in jail tormented selfishly and pridefully believing the woman he has degraded will come to his rescue. Charles H. Nilo...: The Farm shows how difficult it is to treat the addict; how difficult it is to make him human again. The daily routine of the institution is presented in detail. The addict is confronted with all of the problems inside the hospital that he meets outside and struggles to protect his privacy and his sanity. Charles H. Nilo...: Cooper's work is carefully done. Through a careful choice of words and images he tries to make language work for him. Although nothing is hidden in the telling, no modesty is preserved, his style is marked by control, rhythm, and pattern. The style contains and orders the incidents almost too self consciously. But perhaps necessarily, because it provides an aesthetic distance that permits the reader to accept the content without revulsion. Charles H. Nilo...: Nathan Heard's Howard Street, like Cooper's The Scene and The Farm, is a contained world. A presentation of life as it is lived in several blocks. The details are not given but there is a sense of community that is developed over a period of years. There's an evocation of power and desperation. There are intangibles. Charles H. Nilo...: The two brothers, Franchot and Hip, who are the principle characters, have developed in different ways. Franchot is a brick mason who is competent and who lives totally in control of himself in the ghetto world. His brother is an addict and a pimp who lives off the earnings of the girl that he keeps on the streets. After their parents' deaths, Franchot works, supporting himself and his brother, and tries, but fails, to keep his brother off the street. Charles H. Nilo...: The novel is the story of the two brothers, the bars, the houses of prostitution, [inaudible] institutions, the dope trade, the street gangs, the police, and of the street. The author does not complain or accuse, he tells. His manner is somewhat similar to that of the French author, Robbe-Grillet, who says that contemporary writers of fiction must make the reader acquainted with the world of things as they are before value can be assigned to them. Charles H. Nilo...: There is a way of life described in this novel that is defined in the blues phrase that is printed at the beginning of book two, "Baby, if you live your time will come." The phrase suggests a way of life, a sense of equality, a let and let live life of tolerance, an austere fateful, almost stoic attitude. The characters know their world and accept it. The young man who had been to Rutgers for a year and who now drinks cheap wine and does odd jobs, exemplifies his attitude in his self acceptance. He has no illusions. He knows where he has been and he knows where he is. He listens, he serves in his capacity, passively. He's like many other characters who fill the pages of this particular novel. They live in a world that they accept. They're not necessarily happy, they're not necessarily content. They think, as the blues phrase suggests, that if they live long enough their time will come. Charles H. Nilo...: Cecil Brown's The Life And Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, a novel published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1969, is perhaps one of the most challenging novels, in my judgment, to be written during the '60s. I would say one of the best novels, but I'm not certain that I know how properly to judge in a literary way the work of the novelist that I'm discussing. Charles H. Nilo...: In tone the book is what, to borrow a word from the jazz idiom, may be called funky. In its candor it is for some people shocking. It is comic, it's dynamic. The satire burns. In many ways it's a traditional Black novel. George Washington, a jiveass nigger who sometimes calls himself Paul Winthrop Jr., a Princeton graduate, and sometimes Julius Makewell, and at other times, when it's to his advantage, Efan, is concerned about identity and self determination. He's concerned to escape the dualism in which he lives that results from being Black and being an American. He wants to know who he is and to find something within himself that he can live by. Charles H. Nilo...: The story is presented in three sections. The first section is a prologue that is titled A Prismatic Account of Some Important Matters. The body of the story is called The Tale and takes place in Copenhagen. The story concludes with an epilogue that is added that is called An Epiphanic Conclusion of Some Important Matters. Charles H. Nilo...: In the prologue the author provides a view of George Washington's sources. I might read a part of the very first section of that, a section that's called The Spirit of the Father, a section which is written in a sense to give a sense of the character's past, a sense of where he comes from, a sense of what kind of experiences the people who have made him have had. Charles H. Nilo...: This section that's called The Spirit of the Father begins, "I swear 'fo God this is the cussinges' man ever born. He must've been cussing when he came into this world. When his mother, Miss Lillybelle Washington, gave birth to this heathen the first thing he said must've been a cuss word. He probably cussed out the midwife and his mother and anybody else who happened to be in sight, cussed them out for bringing him into the world. He's that kind of man, you know. There ain't a soul in this community he ain't cussed out, hardly a dog or a cat either. But the Lord is gonna visit this nigger, you watch and see, he's gonna visit this nigger." Charles H. Nilo...: "When I met him, when I first laid eyes on this nigger, he was cussing out in the street, cussing with my brothers. And I said to myself, 'Why is that nigger always using cuss words?' So I thought it was just youth, just being young, and I was foolish enough to up and marry that fool. He tole me after we got married he was gonna stop cussing, and you know the stranges' thing is that he did. And three months later, he cuss old man Lennon into a blue streak. Old man Lennon ain't never done nothing to nobody. That old man been walking around this town for 40 years, picking up junk in his wheelbarrow and taking it home to see what use he could find out of it. And he happened to come by the house and this nigger of mine claimed the man picked up his hammer. Lord God Almighty, did he cuss that poor man out. I can't stand no cussing man, I don't like no cussing man. Lord, gib me any kind of man, a short, square-headed man, a ugly man, any kind of man, but don't give me no cussing man." Charles H. Nilo...: "I got experiences to prove this: there ain't but one thing a cussing man is good for, and that's cussing. There is one thing about a cussing man that you can bet your bottom dollar on, and that's he'll cuss. And if he don't cuss, grits ain't grocery, eggs ain't poultry, and Mona Lisa was a man. But the Lord gonna visit that nigger. The Lord or somebody gonna visit him. Because you can't go through life cussing out everybody, everything you see, you just can't do that and get away with it. Or am I a fool?" Charles H. Nilo...: The passage is written by the wife of the father of the cussing man. The cussing man has provided himself with a technique for survival. He lives on a dirt farm in North Carolina. He knows the etiquette of life there. He can't do much to change conditions, but he can cuss about it. The cussing is an evidence of his humanity, of his sensitivity, of his struggle. The son, who is named, ironically, George Washington, follows in the tradition that the father has lived in. Now, he doesn't cuss but he's a jiving person. Jiving here is another technique. In a way I suppose a superior technique to that of the father, because the father is limited to verbal expression. The person who jives can preserve his psyche, as the father does, but he can also provide for some of his bodily needs through jiving, through a particular deceptive pattern. Charles H. Nilo...: The cussing man provides a technique which makes us aware that traditionally Black people have had to find techniques of survival. Ellison reminds us of this in the death scene of his narrator's grandfather. The old man had always been polite, he had always smiled. He had never offended any white person, he'd worked hard. And when he died without the smile, without the politeness, he said, "Keep fooling them. Keep smiling them to death." The old man had discovered a technique of survival. Charles H. Nilo...: George Washington comes out of a tradition of people who've had to find a way to survive, a way to protect the psyche, a way to provide the material wants. These techniques of survival, however, have not been adequate to make the people who use them fully human. There have been consequences of their use. Charles H. Nilo...: As I said earlier, George Washington's technique is superior to his father's because it allows him to make it and to keep soul and body together. His mother comments at one point about the cussing of the father. She said, "I guess a nigger man cuss because he's so poor and ain't nothing but a nigger. I guess cussing is his way of testifying. I can understand that. I just hope God understands it." Charles H. Nilo...: At another point fairly early in the novel, after George has become a jiving man, he says he knew he'd have to think up some lie to tell them; knew he had to play some phony role which finally would not be phony at all since it would get him what he wanted. He was Mr. Jiveass Nigger himself and knew that nothing under the sun was really thorny if it was functional. Charles H. Nilo...: George Washington is intelligent. He reads. He could've gone to Princeton on a scholarship but he refused to go. He goes to Harlem for a time and makes it there with his brain and his body. During this period he is like Rinehart in Ellison's Invisible Man. He has no self. He plays whatever role people want him to play. If you remember Rinehart, he changed his identity almost from day to day. Sometimes he's a numbers man, sometimes he's the preacher in the fundamentalist church. Sometimes he's thought to be the Black nationalist, Ras the Exhorter. He plays whatever role is necessary to get what he wants. Charles H. Nilo...: The character George Washington is like the young man in Albee's American Dream who says that he will do anything for money and who says he cannot love what he can relate. George Washington cheats, flimflams, a Black woman preacher of $900. He steals from a young white woman, who has given him a lift and taken him home to her bed, while she sleeps. After he has done this he thinks about it. And he thinks. "And you don't go to sleep afterwards and you think about the TV, the radio, the ring, the watch, and the $32.89 in her handbag. But what can she really complain about? 'Cause I ain't got nothing in this world. Your daddy's got it all, baby." Charles H. Nilo...: In the body of the story, the section called The Tale, George Washington has come to Copenhagen. Here he feels free of some of the pressure of race. Nobody stares at him when he walks on the street with a white girl. He can rent a room. The police do not bother him. There are other Black men who are making it there. He becomes one of a group. People seem to respect him. When he has used up the $900 that he took from the Black woman preacher, he finds it necessary to try to make it in that world. He's not inhibited. Most people who are down and out in a foreign country go to the American embassy, and so he goes to the American embassy and he speaks to the consul there. The consul happens to be a woman, a woman from Oklahoma; and older woman but a very vital person. They play a game that he's accustomed to. She has to make him know that he's a nigger and he has to maker he know that he's a man. And they come to a kind of agreement, which results in her taking him to dinner and providing him a room at a Hilton hotel and results in what one might've expected from the beginning. Charles H. Nilo...: He discovers this is not entirely satisfactory. Something about it irks him. He doesn't like getting along by being a stud. He had thought at one time that he could prove his humanity with his body. But he realizes the longer he lives in Copenhagen that a body is just a body, and that when bodies are in contact that the magic is not unusual if one is Black and one is white, that the unusual is in the mind and it's the unusual in the mind that disturbs him. Charles H. Nilo...: George Washington lives in various ways with several white women. He admires particularly a Black man from the states who seems really to have made it. He's married a wealthy Swedish girl. Her family has provided money for them. He seems to be totally in command of the girl; the girl seems to worship him. He's blatantly unfaithful to her. He moves about the town, about the country, outside the country, with a great deal of freedom. And George Washington looks at him and thinks that he's happy and thinks that he's made it. And yet he doesn't find in his own awareness the possibility of that same happiness. Charles H. Nilo...: He has a variety of experiences while he's in Copenhagen, but he's never at ease with himself. It's true that he's left America and in leaving America he has left certain overt distinctions that were uncomfortable. It's true that in many ways people treat him as if he's a man. He looks very carefully at a friend of his, a Black friend who is a medical school graduate from Harvard who had left America and who's come to Copenhagen and who works in a hospital there, who seems to have a good life. And he wonders if this friend has found something that he hasn't found. He's not sure about this. But he does have a sense of his own insecurity. He realizes that he can get money. He realizes that he can get a freedom from the overt patterns of prejudice. And yet there is something which is not at ease, something that still qualifies as humanity. Charles H. Nilo...: Gradually he begins to realize that since coming to Copenhagen that really nothing has changed. He talks about this with the friend who is the physician, and in that conversation we recognize that he chooses to make crucial his experience in Copenhagen in terms of early experiences that he has had in America. He was terribly frightened in America, he said. He was frightened to be a man there. He was frightened of his own sexuality. He, on one occasion, had been walking in a town in North Carolina, unconsciously, unaware of anybody, and he began to be afraid quite suddenly. Charles H. Nilo...: He remembered the Emmett Till case and he says in talking to his friend about that, "'I know what it's like to be afraid of a woman, man.' George said. 'I mean, a white woman. You remember Emmett Till, the Black boy hanged to kill for whistling at a white woman? When I was around 15 down south, I was walking the street whistling. But anyway, this white woman jumped up and walked across the street right in front of me. And this was a white town, man. Let me hurry up and tell you. It was called Whiteville, no lie. If you don't believe it, look on the map. Whiteville. So it looked like I was whistling at the white woman. I mean, it could look that way if you wanted it to. I knew how them crackers' minds worked, see? So I got very scared in a short period of time. I mean, suddenly. I was scared stiff I mean. I was kind of neurotic anyway. I didn't know what to do. I started to run but then I caught myself and started whistling God Bless America as loud as I could. Boy, I was a scared mother.'" Charles H. Nilo...: The memory of this fear, in a way, is a kind of indication of the fear that George Washington has lived with. The need to escape possible danger, even when no danger is present, has been a kind of need that he's always had and he's always known. But ironically he's begun to realize that by coming to Copenhagen and by associating with the white woman who frightened him in America, that he hasn't got rid of that fear.He makes a decision. He decides that he's going to go back to America. He decides that that's where he came from, that's where he belongs, and that somehow he has to make it there. Charles H. Nilo...: He gets in a fight and he has to go to the hospital. And while he's there he has a conversation with his friend, the Black doctor, and in that conversation he says, "No, it is a tragedy if a Black man lets himself love something in white women just as if a man lets himself be used by another man. And it's not beautiful, because it's based on a weak will. Somebody must have a strong enough will to set standards, to set up a guideline, or we won't be able to tell who's white or who's man and who's woman. I'm Black and a man and that's my identity." Charles H. Nilo...: Now, in this novel you move actually from the period when George Washington, alias Paul Wenthrop Jr., alias anything else he wants to be, grows up in the south, assimilates almost unknowingly all of the fears, all of the tensions, that a Black person may grow up with and assimilate there. And having assimilated these, he still makes the effort to be a man, to discover who he is and what he is. Now there are times when it seems to him that the way to be a man is to get as far away from being Black as one can. And symbolically I suppose one gets as far away from being Black as he can when he moves to another country and takes a white woman there. But this symbolic escape does not work for him, and so he has to find something else. And I think the important thing is that he finds the something else in himself while he's in another country. Charles H. Nilo...: George Washington has, I suppose, towards the end of the novel, what we might call an epiphany as a result of his experience and he is able to decide to be Black, to be himself. In a way, I suppose, the resolution of George Washington's problem might remind you of the resolution that James Joyce makes in The Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist. I've mucked the title. In that particular novel you have the young man who is making the choice, the choice of going into the church or the choice of living his life as he feels he must live it, and that means in a sense living it as an artist. And there is the tension provided between what he has been, what his parents are, what the church is to his family, and the sense of what he is himself and what he feels he must do in order to be himself. And at the end of the novel, in the form of an epiphany, we discover Joyce's young man choosing what he must choose. And at the end of this novel we have George Washington choosing to go back to America and to live there, because that's home for him. Home is where he comes from, home is what has shaped him, home is where his culture is. It's where his pain and suffering is, but there is a possibility for him to be a man, he thinks, there. Charles H. Nilo...: He says that he has found a myth to live by. The writers who, as I say, tell it as it is are generally concerned about the finding of myths by which Black people can live. Their task is not a new one. Du Bois, in 1903 in The Souls of Black Folks, has an essay in which he talks about the dilemma of being Black in America. He talks about it as a dualism. He says in that passage, it's a much quoted passage, that the Black person has a dual realization. He realizes very soon that he's Black and that being Black has a certain connotation and a certain denotation in America. Charles H. Nilo...: He also realizes that he is an American and that he has certain loyalties to America. And he realizes that these two things that he is do not allow him to be a unified person; that there are pressures both within and outside that make the dualism incompatible. Du Bois explores the consequences of this. Du Bois tried in various ways to provide a means of resolving this dualism. His Pan-Africanism was one of these efforts to find a means to deal with it. His concern about cooperatives or about socialized means of providing for the masses was a way of trying to deal with it. His efforts through the Negro Academy to educate people was an effort to deal with this particular kind of problem. Charles H. Nilo...: So the problem that George Washington has is a crucial problem. It's a problem that has been the Black man's problem since his status was defined in America. The defining of that status is something that Winthrop Jordan deals with in his work White Over Black. Jordan seems to suggest that from about 1815, America defined the status of Black persons and that roughly since that time that's what it's been in a way in the thinking and in the acting of America. Charles H. Nilo...: George Washington attempts to deal with this problem as many Black persons in our world today attempt to deal with it. His action is, I suppose, related to what we call Black Power. It's related to what we call Civil Rights, it's related to what we call the Black Revolution. It is the core at the center of the particular crisis that we have now. He says that he is concerned to find a myth to live by. And he's using myth in the rather generally accepted sense of myth. He recognizes, I suppose as Thomas Mann's Joseph did when he went down into Egypt, that there were a number of ways, a number of centers. One had to choose, though, what was to be his center, what was to be his way. That finding a myth was in one sense deliberately choosing a myth and then making that myth, if I can use an overworked word, viable. Making that myth something that he could live by. Charles H. Nilo...: George Washington says in effect, "It is possible that I could've made other choices. It is possible that I could have made better choices. But I choose to live by what I am. I choose to live as a Black man and to live out of the resources that are in myself; to accept whatever my past has been and to utilize that past. To utilize its art, its folklore, to utilize its pain. And as a result of that use of what I find in myself, to be a man." Charles H. Nilo...: Now, in the novels by Cooper and Heard, the characters that we observe do not go so far, are not so mature in their discerning, as George Washington is. But the essential process that the authors engage in, Cooper and Heard, is a process which contains, I think, ultimately the same kind of effort or the same kind of gesture. These authors are authors who look at the world around them very carefully. Not in the sense of trying to escape it. The junky in Howard Street says to the white, liberal, civil rights worker, "What do you come down here for? Why don't you go, perhaps, to your own people over there where some of those educated Black people are? They may have some use for you. We know what the score is here. We know what our lives are. We know how they're made. We don't like them, but you can't change them for us." Charles H. Nilo...: He doesn't say that we have to change them ourselves, but he implies in a sense that if our lives are changed, we have to make the changes. And so, Heard provides, in a sense, a description of a world and he shows a way of life. It's as though he wants to say to the people who read his book, "We are becoming accustomed to ourselves. We are accepting ourselves. We aren't saying that what we are is good or bad, we're simply saying, 'This is what it is.'" I mentioned the French critic and novelist, Robbe-Grillet, who says that one of the needs in our time for the writer of fiction is to have him make us aware again of what things are; of tables and chairs, of surfaces, of quality which is available to the touch. To make us aware of our sense, and that we can begin to place value upon things when we know what those things are. Charles H. Nilo...: So these writers who try to tell it as it is are writers who are becoming familiar with their world, are writers who are in the process of trying to make the world available to other Black people, to other people. And when they know the world in detail, when they have recreated the past, when they have recreated the present, then perhaps they can assess a kind of value to what they are doing. Charles H. Nilo...: And so, Cooper and Heard do not go so far as Brown does. But insofar as they go they are doing the same kind of thing. You might say that the process engaged in by the three novelists is a process of bringing things out in the open and of trying them all on for size. It's a process by which men test both their knowledge and their strength. Charles H. Nilo...: The Life And Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger is a novel which in some ways is typical of the activity of the contemporary Black writer. The authors who write in this period write not only as an act of expression, but to discover who they are and to understand the choices that they must make in a time or crisis. They are within the tradition that Black writers have made of what is necessary for them in America. Charles H. Nilo...: I don't know whether there's some questions you'd like to ask or not. As I've said before, I can talk about their questions here or I can talk about them outside. Yes, sir? Speaker 3: In that section in Brown's book about the cussing man, somehow in the rhythms there I find a bit of Dunbar. Do you think [inaudible] or- Charles H. Nilo...: Well, I don't know whether I'd be as specific as you are or not in saying that. You might very well find that. I want to talk tomorrow about the form a bit and when I do that I want to say something about how the contemporary Black writer tries to use rhythms that are essentially Black rhythms. And in Dunbar's verse, in his dialect verse, I think he captures many of these rhythms very nicely. The pacing in the line which is a good deal, I suppose, like the pacing that one finds sometimes in the blues lyrics. It's a good deal like the rhythms that one finds in the sermons of the old time preachers. The sort of thing that James Weldon Johnson captures, I think, a bit of in God's Trombones. Charles H. Nilo...: So a part of the conscious artistry, a part of the effort on the part of these writers to be artists in a conscious sense, is the effort which they make to utilize the resources of Black culture: the rhythms, the folktales, the myths, the attitudes. They try to make something of the experience which is in the past, and they try to find in that experience something which can be lived by, something which one can take a certain type of pride in. Charles H. Nilo...: Actually I suppose they try to do something which Du Bois says in this essay that I referred to that Black people might do. That out of whatever was different by them or in them, they might find something to contribute to America which would enrich America's total cultural pattern. And I think this is the kind of effort that's made. Charles H. Nilo...: Brown and Cooper have tried to do a lot with language. Cooper's language is considerably stylized. I don't know whether you've read any of his fiction or not, but I think that he stylizes it in order to make the rather horrible, ugly tale that he has to tell not necessary acceptable but to keep it from revolting us. He doesn't spare any of the ugliness. All of the physiological symptoms that the dope addict experiences when he has an overdose, or when he attempts to have sex, or the brutality of the police, or the ugliness of dying from bad drugs, the drugs that are contaminated. All of these ugly things are put into the story, but somehow, through the use of language, through the distance that is kept between the reader and what he reads about by language, Cooper makes what he has to say in a way acceptable. Charles H. Nilo...: Heard tells a rather straightforward story. In both Brown and Cooper there is a marvelous sense of the comic. Cooper has something of this ability to laugh even though the situation is as ugly as it is. Brown has this ability to laugh. The laughter does not mean in any sense that the person who laughs is not aware. The laughter is in one sense a defense, in another sense it shows, I suppose, a kind of strength. The ability to step away from oneself and to look at it. We mentioned Dunbar and Dunbar has a novel that I mentioned the first day, a novel called The Sport of the Gods. And in that novel, that's called The Sport of the Gods, you find Dunbar, in the title in a sense, engaging in a certain kind of laughter. Charles H. Nilo...: I suppose one of the concepts of comedy is that there is a certain kind of comedy in man's relationship to the gods. Man is totally powerless before the gods and yet he behaves as though he controls his own life. I don't know whether you know the Mark Twain story The Mysterious Stranger or not, but in that story two little boys in a German town go out one day to play. One of these little boys is a perfect stranger to the little boy who's visiting there. And they began to play and the boy who seems native says, "Well, these games are sort of boring. Let's have some fun." He sort of snaps his fingers and then there appear a group of little people, little Lilliputians like those in Gulliver's Travels. They move about. They seem to have flesh and blood. They talk to each other, they do things. Charles H. Nilo...: And the little stranger is just delighted by this. It's very marvelous. But the boys grow tired of games. And although these little people seem to have their own will, when this person gets tired of the game he just takes his hand and comes down on them. And the little boy who's visiting says, "Well, that's so cruel. You ought not to do that." And he says, "So what? I can make some more when I want to." Charles H. Nilo...: So you almost feel, in the Dunbar title, that Dunbar is saying that, well, Black people are really for the sport of the gods. They don't really have to be concerned about them. They let them go on for a time, pretending they control their lives. When they get ready they slap them down. Doesn't matter. They can make some more if they want to. Charles H. Nilo...: This sense of being at the mercy of a fate that one can't control becomes in a way a rather comic thing, certainly the way that the writers use it. It's an irony. It is, I suppose, in a sense ironic that man, no matter whether he's Black or white, behaves as though he can control his destiny. It's ironic but it's necessary. We understand that. So these writers make us aware of that particular kind of comedy. Charles H. Nilo...: Heard doesn't utilize, I suppose, a direct comic device, and yet that is a sort of almost tragic comic situation. You've got two brothers who have had, in a sense, equal care by their parents. As much as they could give them. They were decent Black people, they worked hard. They provided a house and food. They die. The older brother takes care of the younger brother. The neighbors are very fond of the younger brother. He's handsome, he seems to be talented, they think he's going to go a long way. But somehow he winds up a dope addict and the other brother winds up steady, still taking care of him. It's ironic that, coming out of the same situation in a sense, they develop so differently. Charles H. Nilo...: There are a number of ironies here. One of them is that in a gang. This is a group of boys who bring themselves together because there's nothing else to do in one sense. But by being in a gang they have a way to provide some status. They have a way to provide a certain kind of humanity for themselves, to know who they are in terms of exhibiting courage and strength. Now the exhibition of courage and strength is made contrary to desirable sorts of behavior, but for them the result is that they become, in a way, people. Charles H. Nilo...: One night these boys go out and they rob a store and they're pleased with themselves. And for boys like this the question, I suppose, of masculinity is a very important thing. And so, somebody says, "Let's get a girl." Well, by getting a girl they don't mean they're going to go to one of the houses, because the people won't let them come there. But they stand in a dark place and they wait until a woman passes. They can't see her very well, but they attack her, they pin her down, and they use her one after another. And the party's broken up by the police. Charles H. Nilo...: And one of the boys in the gang discovers just before he's finished, by the feel of the clothes and by the shape of her face, that the lady they have got is his mother. Now this is a kind of comedy in a way. It's a tremendously interesting kind of comedy. But here he is and here he's involved in it. And there's nothing he can do to undo it somehow. Charles H. Nilo...: So it becomes, I think a rather fascinating experience to go through and to notice the ironies, to notice the satire. And I think that the purpose of it all, and probably a part of the explanation to the more activist writers who claim that they're writing for Black people and they're not concerned about white people, is found in the fact that the Black writer realizes that Black people need to know certain things about themselves, that they need to understand these things. Not in the sense of there being good things or bad things, but simply in the sense of there being what's there, knowing the facts. Because I think they realize that you can't act to change things until you know what you've got to change. Or you can't act to keep things until you know what you want to keep. Charles H. Nilo...: And so, there is in a sense, in the thing that's called the Black aesthetic, I think a certain kind of reality, a certain kind of concern which Black writers have towards themselves and a concern for other Black people. They may not have, I think, the aggressive anger or the aggressive unconcern for white persons which these things imply, but they do have, I think, a concern to show and tell as much as they can to the Black community in its process of knowing itself. Charles H. Nilo...: Is there some other questions you'd like to bring up? Yes? Speaker 3: [inaudible] I was concerned about John A. Williams' The Man Who Cried I Am. Charles H. Nilo...: Yeah. Speaker 3: [inaudible] Charles H. Nilo...: Well, I think you can say that it's a part of the same thing. I talked about it yesterday in a different way. Actually, what I tried to do in these last two days, today and yesterday, is talk about something of the stance, I suppose, that the Black writer takes. And in that discussion yesterday I was saying that the Black writer, John A. Williams, one of those that I talked about, is utilizing some of the same devices that were utilized in the period of the abolitions. He is in a sense using biography and history and he's saying in a way that these are our lives. Charles H. Nilo...: And to make his interpretation of these lives valid, he follows in a sense a fairly extreme pattern, because he takes particular individuals, he takes people in his own profession. He's a writer so he uses Richard Wright, he uses James Baldwin, he uses Martin Luther King, he uses Malcolm X, he uses John Kennedy. He doesn't identify the white Jewish publishing world that he has worked through, but he makes those persons present. He looks at the leadership in Africa. He looks at the intellectual in France, and he sees all of these things in terms of the present crisis in the Black world and he says in a sense, "Well now, what's happening?" Charles H. Nilo...: I think you could say he's telling it as it is as much as you could say that he's making a particular use of history, and that he uses the history as a means of telling it as it is. I think that it may be difficult right now to say how good some of these books are as literature. I think it's difficult to say that about most of the writers we have in America now. We can't say that very well about Roth or about Bellow or about a good number of other people, because we live in a period when literary forms and art forms are changing. And I think it's Susan Sontag who says that maybe the best we can do now is to say what we like and not to try to say why it's good. We can describe it, but we have to take a certain hesitant attitude, a certain tentative attitude towards it, because the period and the forms are too close to us. We will get, as societies have done in the past with some distance from it, a better sense of what these writers have done and we'll be much better able to say, "That's a good novel," or, "That's structurally a bad novel," than we're able to say now. Speaker 1: That was Charles H. Nilon, professor of English at the University of Colorado, with today's lecture. This series of programs is presented by the broadcasting service of the University if Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies program at the university. As material for the course, Afro-American Literature. Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast at 1:30 PM, May 13th, 1970, from Shambaugh Auditorium, and was recorded for future broadcasts. This is the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa.