AMIRI BARAKA, THE former LeRoi Jones, was born Everett LeRoy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. The son of Coyette (“Coyt”) LeRoy Jones, a postal supervisor, and Anna Lois Russ Jones, a social worker, LeRoy was raised in a stable lower-middle-class, upper-working-class black family.1 Even though his family aspired to the bourgeoisie, Jones was fundamentally shaped throughout his early years by a rather typical American lower-middle-class socialization, with one qualification: He was born and raised black in a significantly racist society. In describing his religious upbringing, Jones provided a glimpse of the black, lower-middle-class world of his youth:
My own church in Newark, New Jersey, a Baptist church, has almost no resemblance to the older more traditional Negro Christian churches. The music, for instance, is usually limited to the less emotional white church music, and the choir usually sings Bach or Handel during Christmas and Easter. In response to some of its older “country” members, the church, which was headed by a minister who is the most respected Negro in Newark, has to import gospel groups or singers having a more traditional “Negro” church sound.2
Despite the limited musical offerings of his status-conscious church, Jones was undoubtedly exposed to robust, “traditional Negro” secular music. The Newark of Jones’s early years was a hub of black night life. In Swing City, author Barbara Kukla claims that between 1925 and 1950, Newark was a “thriving mecca of entertainment.”3 A center for jazz, musicians going into and out of New York City performed regularly in Newark. One testimony to this vibrant black musical culture was a black girl born in Newark in 1924 who performed in local night clubs before professionally emerging on the national scene as “the Divine One,” Sarah Vaughan. Certainly, the young Jones must have been exposed to some aspects of this rich musical tradition. Perhaps his love of black music dated from these earliest encounters.
For much, if not most, of LeRoy’s youth, the Jones family resided either in black neighborhoods located on the fringe of Italian American neighborhoods or in black enclaves in Italian American neighborhoods. Jones attended predominantly white public schools. When recalling his days at the McKinley and Barringer Schools, Baraka mentions that he was not prepared for the racism there, and he responded to being called nigger by learning curse words in Italian. His outsider status led to the development of a split life between the black playground worlds of his buddies and the hostile white surroundings of these schools. Concerning this dual existence, Baraka surmised, “It must be true, maybe obvious, that the schizophrenic tenor of some of my life gets fielded from these initial sources.”4
After graduating from high school, Jones enrolled in the Newark branch of Rutgers University. He once again found himself in a predominantly white environment. In explaining his year-long stay at Rutgers, one biographer wrote, “The effort to prove himself in an ‘essentially mediocre situation’ and the experience of always being an outsider in any school social activities made him transfer to Howard University.”5
Howard University proved critical to the development of Baraka’s ethnically marginal identity, for at Howard he was exposed to the world of the Negro elite, the authentic “black bourgeoisie.” Long considered the “capstone” of Negro education, Howard University was the national centerpiece for the education of the black bourgeoisie. Founded in 1866 by General Oliver Howard (head of the Freedman’s Bureau) to educate the former slaves, Howard University was, and continues to be, the best-funded, predominantly black center of higher education because of its direct subsidies from the federal government. By the early twentieth century, Howard had become specifically endowed with the mission of educating the black professional class.6 Through this university came a disproportionate share of the country’s black lawyers, doctors, dentists, ministers, teachers, social workers, and scholars.
Except for the sporadic intellectual exchanges in classes taught by Sterling Brown, Nathan Scott, and E. Franklin Frazier, Jones strongly disliked Howard. He considered it anti-intellectual.7 Howard students appeared to be more interested in acquiring the “proper” black bourgeois weltanschauung than in obtaining a serious education. Jones was disgusted by what he thought to be Howard’s educational philosophy. “The Howard thing let me understand the Negro sickness. They teach you to pretend to be white.”8 Theodore Hudson, author of From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka, mentions Jones’s involvement in a “watermelon episode” that has almost become a legend. Though somewhat imaginary, the episode captured Jones’s disenchantment with Howard and, more precisely, his disillusionment with the black middle class. As the story goes, Jones and a buddy bought a watermelon and sat down to eat it on a bench in front of one of the college halls. Shortly thereafter, his buddy left to attend a class. Now sitting alone, Jones was approached by a university administrator, the dean of men, who asked Jones just what he thought he was doing sitting outside a campus building eating watermelon. Jones claims to have nonchalantly answered that he was simply eating the melon, whereupon the insulted dean ordered Jones to discard it. Rather mischievously, Jones replied that he could chuck only his half of the melon for the other half belonged to his friend. According to Jones, the agitated dean’s response was shocking: “Do you realize that you’re sitting right in front of the highway where white people can see you? Do you realize that this school is the capstone of Negro higher education? Do you realize that you are compromising the Negro?”9
Jones’s story may have been apocryphal, for as Hudson discovered, several key details were incorrect.10 In any case, the story’s facts are less important than its unstated premise. The story portrays Howard University as situated in a victim-status ideology. Because the dean wanted black students to convey to whites an image of themselves that was deserving of white acceptance, black students were not taught to innately value themselves. Instead, the properly socialized bourgeois Howard student should internalize this “white gaze” in his or her psyche. White persons did not have to be physically present. Jones realized that Howard’s inability to redefine itself in a non–victim-status manner led to and reinforced a disrespect for the artistic expressions and cultural artifacts of black folk culture, particularly those art forms that had yet to acquire an acceptable status in white artistic and intellectual circles. More important, though, such attitudes embodied and/or reinforced a disrespect for black people.
Jones recalled several other incidents at Howard that manifested the victim-status syndrome. After a Howard student production of James Baldwin’s play The Amen Corner, a professor of English stated that the production of this play about the lives of poor blacks in a storefront church had “set the speech department back ten years.”11 On another occasion, upon being informed that Sterling Brown and others wanted to sponsor a jazz concert, the dean of the music school told them that jazz would never be performed in the Music and Art Building.12 Humorously, Baraka later noted, “When they finally did let jazz in, it was Stan Kenton.”13
Concerning the victim status and Howard University, Jones wrote:
Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness. . . . These are all examples of how American society convinces the Negro that he is inferior, and then he starts conducting his life that way.14
Jones flunked out of Howard in 1954. This was no surprise, insofar as Jones was never able to discipline himself academically. Not quite willing to embrace bourgeois black achievement norms yet sufficiently “Americanized” to value a college degree, Jones felt ambivalent during his Howard years. This sense of personal anomie was compounded once outside the imposed constraints of college life. Describing his lack of direction upon flunking out of college, Jones observed:
I was completely unslung. Disconnected . . . Like how could I flunk out of school, who had never had any problems in school? I was supposed to be some kind of prodigy. . . . I came back home but didn’t go out. I had to do something. I didn’t think I could be walking Newark’s streets when I was supposed to be in school and I couldn’t even explain it.15
Baraka enlisted in the U.S. Air Force as a way of reimposing order in his life. The military, with its strong tradition of discipline, would provide Jones with the externally imposed volition that he could not generate on his own. Military service has historically functioned as an agent of discipline for many young men and women and, as such, has often been seen as a socializing mechanism for upward mobility. But Jones was not seeking upward mobility; he had entered the military after having failed at upward mobility. Evidently he perceived the disciplined life of the military as a negation of the undisciplined life of the black bourgeoisie. It was no accident that in later life when Jones attempted to fashion a revolutionary posture, he did so by adapting a highly ordered, paramilitary lifestyle.16
Jones claimed that he left Howard because he was repulsed by the anti-intellectual ethos of the black bourgeoisie. He referred to Howard as an “employment agency,” implying that it was in the business of training people for the workforce, as opposed to educating them.17 But Jones did not leave Howard radicalized. To what extent was he authentically alienated from bourgeois black life when he left Howard? It is hard to imagine a self-proclaimed radical student or an estranged college dropout seeking haven in the U.S. Air Force, unless the alienation stemmed less from opposition to the broader American social order than from not succeeding in it. Jones was obviously at odds with his bourgeois aspirations, but this rejection of bourgeois black society did not necessarily extend to bourgeois white America. Several years later, when he became disaffected from white “middle America” (as embodied in the military), it was not surprising that this alienation lacked an explicit political content. He emerged then as a Beat poet. However, when Jones entered military service after having flunked out of college, he was a young man experiencing the pangs of status dislocation.
Baraka has interpreted his days in the air force as his introduction to the sickness of white America.18 Howard University, he claims, had exposed him only to the sickness of black America.
When I went into the Army it shocked me into realizing the hysterical sickness of the oppressors and the suffering of my own people. When I went into the Army I saw how the oppressors suffered by virtue of their oppressions—by having to oppress, by having to make believe that the weird, hopeless fantasy that they had about the world was actually true. They actually do believe that. And this weight is something that deforms them and finally, makes them even more hopeless than lost black men.19
While in the air force, or “error farce” as he called it, Jones began to consider seriously the realm of ideas. No longer subjected to lists of disaffiliated required readings as he had been in the university, Jones for the first time in his adult life let his inquisitiveness dictate his reading matter. Although this inevitably made for eclectic reading, the variety of texts nourished his curiosity.
In his autobiography, Baraka describes a trip to Chicago while on weekend leave from the air force. While walking near the University of Chicago, he went into a bookstore and saw books there that grabbed his attention, including some that he had read before. He recognized Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but was fascinated by the eccentric opening lines of Joyce’s Ulysses, “Stately plump Buck Mulligan.” Unsure at that moment just what was happening to him, he was aware, however, that he was in the midst of a cataclysmic occasion.
I suddenly understood that I didn’t know a hell of a lot about anything. What it was that seemed to me then was that learning was important. I’d never thought that before. The employment agency I’d last gone to college at, the employment agency approach of most schools I guess, does not emphasize the beauties, the absolute joy of learning. . . . I vowed, right then, to learn something new everyday. . . . That’s what I would do. Not just as a pastime, something to do in the service, but as a life commitment. . . . I needed to learn. I wanted to study. But I wanted to learn and study stuff I wanted to learn and study. Serious, uncommon, weird stuff! At that moment my life was changed.20
Once shielded from the “education-as-a-means-of-upward mobility” ethos and its powerful reinforcements in the broader social order and black subculture (i.e., careerism, economic self-sufficiency, church, family), Jones became freer to engage in “impractical” tasks such as reading poetry and writing essays. But Jones was not completely free to become an intellectual, for he still held to some of those social beliefs defining a successful life as the acquisition of economic and social status.
The influence of the military on Baraka’s intellectual development cannot be overstated. Insofar as his military service seemingly placed him in a bounded social strata, suspended in time and divorced from the mores and mobility norms of mainstream society, it provided Jones with a necessary social space in which he could pursue intellectual interests without concern for their utility. That is, the military functioned as a social marginality facilitator for the young Baraka. Not seeking to make a career in the military, Baraka’s enlistment in the air force as a lowly private after three years of college must be considered, according to middle-class norms, as a deliberate effort at downward mobility.21 Jones’s enlistment was the second indication that he was guided by norms different from those expected of him. His rejection of the bourgeois achievement norms that ultimately resulted in his forced departure from Howard was followed by a social marginality facilitator, military life, that shielded him from the logic of black bourgeois, social-status acquisition.
Like most black intellectuals, Jones could not write about an early childhood spent in intense study, as described in Sartre’s The Words or as chronicled in Flaubert’s letters. Most blacks have entered the intellectual life through emotionally uprooting acts of commitment undertaken at a mature age rather than through the seemingly natural progression of individuals nurtured from the crib on poetry, classical music, and belles lettres. This manifestation of personal dislocation as a result of the decision to become an artist/intellectual is not limited to blacks, for many working-class white intellectuals have also experienced similar degrees of dislocation/alienation on their journey to bourgeois intellectualism.22
Jones’s decision to enter the world of ideas seems not to have been definitive, although we can now see that the young LeRoi constantly risked adversity to begin his intellectual journey. Not only did he have doubts about the utility and validity of the intellectual and artistic life, but he also could not necessarily rely on encouragement and understanding from those closest to him. For Jones and numerous other blacks, the decision to become an intellectual was a very lonely one. Like many black intellectuals, Jones began his intellectual journey burdened with guilt for betraying the crude economic mobility expectations of those who supported him and for “selfishly” participating in a bourgeois pursuit that seemed unrelated to improving the lives of those to whom he felt an attachment.
Baraka is acutely aware of those factors that led to his initial immersion in the life of the mind.
Coming out of Howard and getting trapped in the Air Force had pulled me away from the “good job” path.”23 . . . the service was my graduate school or maybe it was undergraduate school . . . it was the pain and frustration of this enforced isolation that began to make me scrawl my suffering to seek some audience for my elusive self-pity. . . . Because now, so completely cut off, I read constantly, almost every waking hour. . . . The best-seller list became a kind of bible for me. I tried to read everything on it. . . . I wanted to become an intellectual.24
During this period, the moment of his intellectual birth, Jones often reflected on how he had misused his time at Howard. Whatever anxieties he experienced concerning his wasted Howard years was overshadowed by his relief at having avoided the crude “upward-mobility” trajectory. This realization was brought home to him on those occasions when he encountered graduates of Howard who were pursuing careers in the air force. Their careerism, which masked a weltanschauung hostile to a creative engagement with ideas, reinforced in Jones’s mind the belief that he was, after all, on the right path.25 Although military life provided him with relief from the resilient pressures of “being a credit to his race,” the military could not sustain his desire to be a credit to himself intellectually. For that, Jones would have to look elsewhere.
In 1957 Jones left the military after being given an “undesirable discharge” on the erroneous grounds that he had been a communist. He was accused of having belonged to a communist front organization during his days at Howard and later hiding this information from the military when he enlisted.26 A latter-day victim of the residual phobias of the McCarthy period, Jones was thrilled to leave the “error farce.”27 Paradoxically, his escape from the military coincided with an event that foreshadowed an intensifying dependence of blacks on the federal government for protection of their citizenship status. During the same year as his discharge, President Dwight Eisenhower reluctantly ordered federal troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to guarantee the safety of nine black children who were integrating the formerly all-white Central High School. Eisenhower had decided in this instance to place the federal government behind the implementation of the Brown decision because a state official, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, openly challenged the authority of the federal government to issue and implement the ruling. Under the national spotlight, Central High School was integrated with the help of a federalized Arkansas National Guard and the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army.
One can only wonder how the Little Rock crisis affected Jones’s spirit.28 Although all black Americans lived daily with the hypocrisy of America’s contradictory commitments to democracy and white supremacy, the impact of this incongruity on a black person’s psyche varied with the individual. What did it mean for Jones to be part of the Strategic Air Command, an organization whose mission was to protect a country (and to destroy the world, if need be), even though that country did not protect and value his existence? Did Eisenhower’s actions give him a ray of hope, or did the necessity for the federal troops’ intervention appear to doom the long-run prospects of a multiracial nation?
Upon his discharge from the air force, Jones moved to Greenwich Village. Just a short distance from his home town of Newark, the Village was nonetheless an abrupt departure from his past and expected future. Jones’s parents helped him move into his first New York City apartment. In his autobiography, he recalls the dissonance and disappointment in his mother’s face when she first saw his dark, empty, cold-water flat. This was not what she had envisioned for her son, the “child prodigy.”29
Jones had visited the Village several times before moving there. A childhood friend who considered himself a writer was already living there. Jones had been fascinated by both his friend’s intellectual self-definition as a writer and his circle of bohemian friends. The deviance of the bohemian scene with its romantic intellectual intensity was tempting, particularly to an aspiring writer escaping the regimentation of military life.30 Jones’s foray into the bohemian world of the Beat generation became crucial to his emergence as a significant American writer.
In his excellent study Amiri Baraka / LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism,” Werner Sollors explains much of the significance of bohemia to Jones’s artistic development. Bohemia, Sollors remarked, is a response to bourgeois society. Borrowing from the writings of Helmut Kreuzer, Sollors argues that at the very center of the choice to become a bohemian is an emotional identification with the socially downtrodden, economically exploited, racially stigmatized, and persecuted. Bohemians typically extend their definition of the “oppressed” to anyone in conflict with the middle class.31 The bohemian emphasis on aesthetic protest, however, is much more similar to bourgeois politics than most bohemians would like to admit.
In their desire to be as anti-middle class as possible, Bohemians present no political alternatives to bourgeois rule, but merely invert images of bourgeois values. In their alternative aristocratic and plebeian masquerades, they reject the bourgeois obsession with money by acting as wasteful dandies or as penniless oppressed artists, by withdrawing to the ivory towers of the arts or by agitating for spontaneous violence in the streets.32
Sollors maintains that owing to bohemia’s belief in the virtue of negation, bohemianism can easily appear more politically radical than any sustained project of political engagement. This bohemian fixation on being different can also just as easily lead to an identification with the extreme right or the extreme left. “Disgust for the political center makes the bohemian discard the conservative and the liberal and embrace the fascist and the communist.”33
Jones considered his emergence in the bohemian subculture of the Beat community as a negation of the lifestyle of the black bourgeoisie to which he had been exposed at Howard and had always been expected to join. He followed a well-used path. Greenwich Village had long been a haven for blacks, particularly black artists seeking a less racially confining life. James Baldwin had lived off and on in the Village during the 1940s. His mentor, Buford Delaney, had been there since the early 1930s. By the mid-1950s, the Village had become a contact zone of cultural intermingling. According to Mary Pratt, contact zones are “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.”34 The interracial exchanges and cross-fertilization between white and black artists that took place then have become part of Village lore. Perhaps the most explicit nexus for the cross-cultural fertilization was jazz, particularly bebop. By the early 1950s, Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie had achieved heroic status in bohemia. Later they were joined by John Coltrane, Horace Silver, Miles Davis, and Sonny Rollins, among others. Jazz clubs proliferated in the Village. In addition, there was a vibrant jazz subculture attached to Village lofts and coffee shops.
In the eyes of many of the disaffiliated whites drawn to the Village bohemian scene, jazz musicians were the quintessential alienated artists. Charlie Parker was a revered figure not only because he was an outstanding musician but also because his drug habit signaled his alienation from the mundanities of bourgeois life in 1950s America. This infusion of Afro-American culture via jazz into the very core of bohemian Village life must have attracted the young LeRoi. When this respect, if not reverence, for jazz was situated in a subculture that apparently accepted interracial relationships, Jones could easily have viewed the Village as a haven of racial tolerance and equality.35
In choosing to flee the lifestyle of the black bourgeoisie, Jones did not retreat to a Harlem or Roxbury. Instead he chose as his new home an environment populated by the outcast sons and daughters of bourgeois white America. But then, he regarded himself as an outcast “native son” of bourgeois black America! College had given Jones a glimpse of bourgeois black life, and he had realized that he did not really belong to the Negro bourgeoisie. His parents were neither high-status professionals nor high-income earners. It is probably more accurate to consider Jones a product of the stable upper-working class, a black socioeconomic sector that often deferred to middle-class socializations (i.e., children should attend college). In black America, the Jones family would undoubtedly have been viewed as middle class.36 This categorization speaks to the racially circumscribed socioeconomic world of black Americans, a world in which few black families were able to attain economic or status equality with their supposed peers in the white middle class. Even the so-called black upper class, small numbers of which could be found in any large urban area, was at best on a par economically with the lower rungs of the white upper middle class.37
By moving to the Village, Jones was not actually trying to escape a bourgeois world. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that Jones wanted to give up the bourgeois life as an ideal worthy of pursuit. He was renouncing a possibility, not an existing empirical actuality. Rejecting bourgeois aspirations was crucial to Jones precisely because when funneled through the status insecurities of the black upper working class, such ambitions often led to an obsessive attachment to middle-class styles and mores. As a black person in pre–civil rights era America, Jones’s occupational possibilities were far different from those of his white bohemian peers. He could not defect from a society that had never included him. The affected and thus tenuous nature of Jones’s “rejection” of bourgeois black life may help explain why he would spend so much energy throughout his career demeaning the black middle class. By rhetorically assaulting the black middle class via retelling personal narratives (e.g., his stories about Howard University), Jones could solidify his vicarious entrance into its ranks, all the while intending to renounce it.38 In so doing he would be perceived as a class renegade (i.e., a bohemian). To the extent that his simultaneous claim to black middle-class status and his rejection of a middle-class identity were partly figments of his psyche, Jones could never quite put them to rest. Bourgeois Negroes haunted him throughout his life. Ironically, once Jones attained a degree of prominence, he used his celebrated artistic status to sustain a peculiar noblesse oblige disdain for bourgeois blacks.
From the vantage point of the parent society, Jones’s racial identity continually tested the boundaries of his bohemian identity. In the eyes of nonbourgeois blacks and whites, Jones’s immersion in a predominantly white world could be interpreted as an example of successful racial integration. Because of the prevailing status and class encodings that many blacks projected onto whites, whiteness, and integration, Jones’s journey to an impoverished life in the Village was tantamount to “moving on up.” When attached to Jones’s life in the predominantly white Village, the rhetorically hegemonic ideal of a racially integrated America may have suffocated his bohemian identity in the eyes of non-bohemian blacks (and even some whites). Bearded “white boys” in need of a shower could never become “niggers,” even if they loved Charlie Parker! White women dressed in black skirts, black stockings, and sandals were still white and generated fears of miscegenation when seen in the company of black men.
In an article published in 1958, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, denounced the Beats as “Know-nothing bohemians.”39 Religiously possessed by the idea of “making it,” Podhoretz surprised few in attacking a movement of writers and artists who were gaining prominence without having bowed to establishmentarian intellectual certification.40 Podhoretz felt threatened by writers who thumbed their noses at what meant everything to him. Even though his critique of the Beats contained significant insights, the status-grasping editor may have written the article intending to appease more established but similarly unsympathetic critics of the Beats like Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Diana Trilling, and Irving Howe. The denial of intellectual validity to the Beats by the New York intellectual establishment only reinforced their raison d’être. Podhoretz had inadvertently legitimated the Beats by defining them as worthy of establishmentarian attack. Reflecting on Podhoretz’s self-anointed role as the protector of cultural hierarchies, sociologist Daniel Bell, his friend and ideological confrere, wrote:
Norman had always been told that he was going to be the spokesman for his generation. In the late fifties, he turned around and found a whole phenomenon called the Beats, who were far out, doing things that Norman never dreamed of—being on the road, taking hashish, screwing madly. Norman’s reaction was to write “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.”41
Despite disparaging the apolitical character of the Beats, Podhoretz found them lacking when compared with the Village bohemians of the 1920s and 1930s. According to Podhoretz, the bohemianism of the 1920s “represented a repudiation of the provinciality, philistinism, and moral hypocrisy of American life—a life, incidentally, which was still essentially small-town and rural in tone.” He concluded that the bohemia of the 1920s was “created in the name of civilization,”42 arguing that the idealized midwestern life captured in a Sinclair Lewis novel was a less civilized and less enlightened form of existence than life in New York City. He substantiated this claim by invoking Lewis, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Eliot as midwesterners who sought a more cosmopolitan existence in the bohemia of the 1920s. In making such claims, Podhoretz revealed an East Coast urban bias, which ill concealed the parochialness of his “universal” criteria for assessing degrees of civilization. As for the politically radical bohemia of the 1930s, Podhoretz noted that despite its political engagement, it was marked by “deep intellectual seriousness.”43 Not so for the Beat bohemia of the 1950s. Not seriously committed to cosmopolitanism, politics, or intellectualism, the Beats were “Know-nothings.” According to Podhoretz, Beat bohemia was
hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, energy, “blood.” To the extent that it has intellectual interests at all, they run to mystical doctrines, irrationalist philosophies, and left-wing Reichianism. The only art the new Bohemians have any use for is jazz, mainly of the cool variety. Their predilection for bop language is a way of demonstrating solidarity with the primitive vitality and spontaneity they find in jazz and of expressing contempt for coherent, rational discourse which, being a product of the mind, is in their view a form of death. To be articulate is to admit that you have no feelings.44
In these astonishing statements, Podhoretz reveals his racist criteria for calibrating degrees of civilization. Apparently, the most injurious accusation that he could hurl at Beat bohemia was linking the Beats to the primitivism of jazz, a primitivism that was supposedly contemptuous of reason.
Had Podhoretz been better versed in American intellectual history, he would have known that the emergence of a politicized American bohemia could have been dated at least from the founding of The Masses in 1910.45 Many early American bohemian intellectuals were de-politicized, including Jean Toomer’s Gurdjieff circles.46 Yet Podhoretz accurately captured the ethos of political disengagement among the Beat bohemians of the 1950s, in contrast to the religiously politicized bohemian circles of John Reed, Randolph Bourne, Floyd Dell, and Max Eastman.
Because of Beat bohemia’s cultural ramifications, a broader conceptualization of “the political” might consider the Beats’ retreat from middle-class society as significantly political and politically significant. Insofar as they developed a community and/or subculture with distinct norms and boundaries, the Beats provided a glimpse of an alternative America. Unfortunately, this glimpse did not escape the lure of an entrenched American sexism. Beat bohemia was conspicuously male centered, although it did contain qualities of enduring political significance in the Beats’ tolerance of homosexuality and interracial relationships, less repressive sexual mores, and respect for black artistic expression, particularly jazz.47 But such cultural possibilities may have been exaggerated, given the enfeebled cultural conformity of the Eisenhower years. The Beats did not, however, create a critical cultural alternative to mass society, for their social vision was not necessarily emancipatory. Given their attachment to anarchism, the Beats equivocated in their commitment to changing the parent society, particularly since the alternatives (e.g., socialism and communism) seemed equally committed to the oppressive concentration of state power. As often as not, the Beats propagated an ad hoc negation of bourgeois society, which led Hazel Barnes to refer to them as “negative rebels.”48 The radical stature of the Beats depended on the continued existence and viability of bourgeois America. Beat bohemia neither projected an indigenous utopian vision nor sustained hope for mass social change.
The Beats’ dialectical dependency on the parent society was typical of most American oppositional movements. The Civil Rights movement and the ideals it projected existed in what Albert Murray called a state of “antagonistic cooperation” with the parent racist order.49 The more pertinent issue, however, is the degree to which the Beats or any oppositional formation becomes trapped in a rejection of what they oppose. The Beats were sometimes but not universally knee-jerk, although factions in the Beats developed different orientations. The knee-jerk tendencies in Beat bohemia were clearly present wherever the beatnik style was adopted. As inventions of a consumer culture, the beatniks were commodified versions of the Beats, devoid of oppositional intent or character. In The End of the American Avant Garde, Stuart Hobbs commented on the attempt of American consumerism to co-opt the Beats:
The absorption of the Beat “lifestyle” into postwar society was fraught with additional ironies. The writers for Time, Life, and other media presented the Beat vanguardists as silly and deplored their lack of moral values. At the same time, however, they popularized the superficial aspects of the vanguard rebellion among young people who felt alienated from the bourgeois conformity of the decade. In this way, the media controlled the rebellion. By discrediting the substance of the vanguard critique of America, the mass-media popularizers enabled a “safe” rebellion that did not undermine the consumer culture, but rather created a new consumption community.50
This mass-marketed image affected the actual lives of various Beats, leading some of them to act like reified embodiments of “themselves.” Others rebelled against these consumerist images. During the late 1950s, Allen Ginsberg spent a lot of time trying to inform the public of the differences between Beats and beatniks. Ginsberg’s biographer wrote,
He took pains to show the difference between the Beat Generation with its philosophy of love and tenderness, and the beatniks, who were mostly weekend bohemians out for a good time, but the press generally blurred the distinction, and the public perception was that Allen was the progenitor of all the bearded young men who wandered around Greenwich Village in handmade leather sandals, carrying bongos and a bottle of Chianti.51
Jones’s first published essay was a letter to the editor responding to Podhoretz’s attack on the Beats.52 Jones directed his response to Podhoretz’s commentary about the romanticization of blacks in Beat life and literature. In arguing simultaneously that blacks en masse occupied the status of primitive in Beat circles and black bohemians were too “whitenized” to fill this niche in bohemia, Podhoretz had touched an exposed nerve in Jones. To support his argument, Podhoretz offered extensive quotations from an essay written by Jack Kerouac, a Beat mainstay. Kerouac described how when walking through the “colored” section of Denver, he had wished that he was a Negro, “feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” In true romantic imagery, Kerouac further stated: “I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensuous gal; and dark faces of the men behind the rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs.”53 Such ludicrous claims evoked a trenchant reaction from Podhoretz: “It will be news to the Negroes to learn that they are so happy and ecstatic; I doubt if an idyllic picture of Negro life has been painted since certain Southern ideologies tried to convince the world that things were just as fine as fine could be for the slaves on the old plantation.”54
Podhoretz astutely perceived that Kerouac’s supposed “love” for Negroes did not include a commitment to their social advancement. In Beat circles, Kerouac was well known as a zealous antiblack racist.55 His celebration of “Negro ecstasy” was little more than a crude romanticization of the Afro-American as the embodiment of primitivism. But Podhoretz was not finished. He then claimed that the white bohemians’ celebration of Negro rawness and primitive simplicity could not have been premised on knowledge of their Negro associates in the Beat scene. “The last place you would expect to find evidence of this is among bohemian Negroes. Bohemianism, after all, is for the Negro a means of entry into the world of the whites, and no Negro bohemian is going to cooperate in the attempt to identify him with Harlem or Dixieland.”56
Jones’s response to Podhoretz’s comments reveals more by what he did not say. Taking issue with Podhoretz’s implicit claim that Dixieland was a black art form as well as his contention that the black bohemian was using bohemia to assimilate into the white world, Jones observed,
No Negro Bohemian is going to cooperate in an attempt to identify him with Harlem or Dixieland: Harlem is today the veritable capital city of the Black Bourgeoisie. The Negro Bohemian’s flight from Harlem is not a flight from the world of color but the flight of any would-be Bohemian from what Mr. Podhoretz himself calls “the provinciality, philistinism and moral hypocrisy of American life.” . . . Dixieland . . . is to traditional jazz what Rock and Roll is to Blues, or Rhythm and Blues—a cheap commercial imitation. The Negro intellectual certainly has no responsibility either for it or to it.57
Podhoretz had thrown down the gauntlet. First, he accused Jones and his kind of attempting to racially assimilate, an accusation young LeRoi found quite disturbing. Second, in pointing out Kerouac’s racially parochial comments, Podhoretz cleverly raised implicit questions about the willingness of Jones and other black Beats to tolerate bohemian racism in order to find a home among whites.58 Finally, and perhaps most threatening, were Podhoretz’s comments that focused suspicion on the relevance of the black bohemian to the political, social, and economic plight of broader black America. To a young black intellectual, these were devastating insinuations. At the time of his exchange with Podhoretz, Jones had not yet developed an intellectual self-definition that could ethnically legitimate his life as a black bohemian intellectual without organic connections to a black community. He never did.
Jones’s response to Podhoretz was contrived. He conspicuously chose not to comment on Podhoretz’s characterization of Kerouac’s writings (or if he did, it was not published). Nonetheless, we must consider whether Podhoretz caught Jones in a racially obsequious and/or uncritical posture vis-à-vis white bohemians.59 Harlem in 1958 was not, as Jones claimed, the capital of the black bourgeoisie, and Podhoretz knew it. There is reason to doubt that Jones would have known this or much of anything substantive about Harlem, had it in fact been a bourgeois haven. He admitted as much in his autobiography, written more than twenty years after the exchange with Podhoretz. Reminiscing about his coterie of black Villagers who eventually left bohemia for Harlem, Jones noted that “most of us were from downtown and knew next to nothing about Harlem.”60 This point about Harlem need not be academic. Had Harlem been the capital of the black bourgeoisie, as Jones asserted, the sting of Podhoretz’s insinuations would have remained, for the issue was not Harlem per se but Harlem as representative of black America in general. If Harlem remained in the grasp of the black bourgeoisie, why, then, didn’t Jones move to Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Roxbury, or any other nonbourgeois black community in America? Or was all of black America bourgeois?
What Jones evidently could not admit was that he had come to Greenwich Village to gain access to a community that could and would help him master his craft as a writer. Instead of defending his intellectual and personal freedom, he hid his artistic motivations behind the deceptive claim that his flight to the Village was an escape from the black bourgeoisie. If Jones had revealed his reasons for moving to the Village, Podhoretz and others might have regarded them as a confession of estrangement from the black community. And such an interpretation would not have been completely wrong. Living in Greenwich Village was Jones’s way of distancing himself from a life governed by bourgeois mores. An aspiring writer, he could not have found respite in black, nonbourgeois communities, for they could neither materially nor culturally sustain his intellectual quest. Poor black communities were not necessarily the bearers of values different from those of the black bourgeoisie. Jones sought haven amid those who had rejected the bourgeois life, not amid those who desired it but had failed to achieve it.
Insofar as the bohemian Beat subculture may have been the only accessible intellectual community in which an unsponsored, novice black writer like Jones could have obtained an artistic apprenticeship, his move to Greenwich Village of the 1950s was fortuitous. Where else could Jones have gained access to a circle of peers and literary advisers as talented as Allen Ginsberg, Joel Oppenheimer, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Gilbert Sorrentino, A. B. Spellman, Diane Di Prima, Gregory Corso, and even Jack Kerouac?61 Podhoretz and the “New York intellectuals” had not been and never would be overly receptive to emerging black literary talents, particularly those who entertained avant-garde ambitions. Had Jones not entered bohemia, it cannot be assumed that he would have artistically surfaced elsewhere. Bohemia, in sum, was a social marginality facilitator for Jones.
In his exchange with Podhoretz, Jones was unable to admit that he had interests as a black intellectual that were not necessarily synonymous with the immediate interests of the broader black community. Jones was in Greenwich Village in order to write, a fact that he was simply unable to acknowledge. Insofar as Podhoretz arrogantly defined black inauthenticity for black bohemians, Jones timidly accepted Podhoretz’s terms of debate. By Podhoretz’s reasoning, the only way that a black bohemian or any black could be authentically “black” was by linking himself or herself to a Harlem. What this specifically demanded of the black bohemian is unclear. The generic claim is that the black bohemian wasn’t “black” unless he was ethnic. Being ethnic meant being in Harlem, which meant not being bohemian. According to Podhoretz, a black bohemian’s authentic identity was defined by his material relationship to his ethnic group, leading to an inescapable conclusion that the black bohemian was ethnically inauthentic.
Jones’s reply indicated that he believed that he should have been in Harlem and implied that he would have been there if Harlem had been authentically “black.” According to Jones, the black community—that is, the black community under the direction of the black bourgeoisie—wasn’t “black,” but he, bohemian LeRoi, was. Podhoretz deemed Harlem to be black and Jones to be an impostor.
Podhoretz realized that the black bohemian had not only distanced himself from the black community but had probably done so intentionally. But he erred in claiming that this was necessarily a bid for assimilation. Podhoretz failed to grasp that the black bohemian was in bohemia precisely because he viewed it as something other than the typical “white community.” As a bohemian, Jones viewed himself as a member of a deviant subculture outside the tolerated boundaries of the dominant white society. For Jones, “white America” was an ethos, not simply a place where whites were found in large numbers. The Village scene, though primarily white, was far less culturally parochial than midtown Manhattan or the Upper East Side.62
Had Podhoretz recognized the possibility of a black ethnically marginal existence, he probably would have been more careful in characterizing black bohemians. In his eyes, blacks were authentic only when they were “black” and left being “white” to whites. “Black” blacks lived in Harlem, or at least wanted to. “White” blacks lived everywhere else. “White” whites, including Jews, could live anywhere, including, unfortunately, Beat bohemia. Herein lies a “catch-22” in Podhoretz’s reasoning. Why would black bohemians who were supposedly interested in being white-like join a subculture in which the whites were supposedly interested in being black-like? Had Jones really wanted to be white-like, he would have tried literally and metaphorically to move next door to the Podhoretzs of the world, but then he would have discovered that authentic whites did not want to live near either authentic or in-authentic blacks. Podhoretz could not admit that even in his liberal vision, assimilated blacks were only figments of the printed page.
Nevertheless, if Jones did not want to publicly confess his racial inauthenticity, Podhoretz would acknowledge it for him. The irony is that the degree of cultural assimilation and artistic conformity demanded of Jones in bohemia was significantly less than what would have been demanded of him had he attempted to serve out his literary apprenticeship at the Partisan Review or any of the other major journals of the “New York intellectuals,” including Podhoretz’s Commentary. Podhoretz, ironically, became the prime reminder of the intellectual and moral costs of pursuing establishmentarian recognition.63
Jones was not the first black intellectual to use bohemia as a social marginality facilitator. Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and Claude McKay, among others, spent a great deal of their intellectual youth in bohemian circles.64 In fact, Jones was not the only black bohemian in the Village and/or Beat scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s to gain notoriety. According to Harold Cruse, who also was living in the Village when Jones arrived, “he [Jones] was just another addition to the black intellectual scene of Greenwich Village—and rather late at that.”65
Ted Joans, a black painter and poet, candidly admitted how the Beat scene facilitated his emergence as a commercially viable artist.
Well, I’m not really a poet except for Allen Ginsberg who grabbed me one November day in nineteen fifty eight and said he was bored with reading in the coffee shop and why didn’t I do it because I was great. He insisted I go with him and try. I tell you I was scared silly at first but it all worked out and now I’m making more money than I ever made from my painting . . . as for all the showoff stunts well hell that’s just part of the job and making a living.66
If true, Joans’s naked admission provides a glimpse of the material benefits available to the black bohemian who chose to live under the veil of a distinctly bohemian, racially motivated, reverse patronization often referred to as “Crow-Jimism.”“Crow-Jimism,” a term attributed to Kenneth Rexroth, was defined by Sollors as an “inversion of white segregationist society in the bohemian sub-culture.”67 Blacks were considered by the Beats as heroic precisely because they were seen as the true antithesis to decadent bourgeois society. This romanticization of the black lumpen ignored the possibility that their tenuous socioeconomic situation might not have been a conscious rejection of bourgeois society but vice versa.68
“Crow-Jimism” surfaced particularly around the issue of sexual norms. As a reversal of or a contrast to the Jim Crow taboo on interracial relationships between black men and white women, Crow-Jimism valorized such relationships.69 “Crow-Jimism” (sometimes called “Crow-Janeism”) constructed the white woman as the dominant player in interracial relationships. Sollors describes “Crow-Jane” as a white bohemian woman who rejects bourgeois civilities,70 often by having affairs with black lumpenproletarians, young men that Baraka poetically referred to as “Young gigolos of the 3rd estate. / Young ruffians / without homes.”71
Because of “Crow-Jimism” (or “Crow-Janeism”), black bohemians were sometimes viewed by white bohemians as intellectually or artistically unambitious. In negating the intellectual establishment’s overly critical appraisals of black intellectuals (most often to the point of ignoring them entirely), bohemia often uncritically celebrated black artists. Black bohemians who came to the Village in search of artistic development were often accepted by white bohemians who were not committed to supporting their artistic growth critically and honestly. This may explain why Jones and other previously unknown and unpublished black writers were easily accepted into the Village’s intellectual/artistic circles.
After having gained admission to bohemian circles, even if by means of “Crow-Jimism,” black artists soon realized that they had to step outside “Crow-Jane” protocol if they were to expand artistically. Less serious and perhaps less talented black artists like Ted Joans opted for the upwardly mobile benefits they acquired a result of remaining behind the “Crow-Jimism” veil.72 Jones, however, a black bohemian with significant artistic ambitions, remained constantly on the alert to “Crow-Jimism.”
The presence of “Crow-Jimism” among the Beats was only one moment in a long tradition of “philo-Negroism” in American bohemia. In her fine study of an earlier generation of Greenwich Village bohemians, Leslie Fishbein described the racially parochial ideas of the editors of The Masses, a radical bohemian journal published between 1911 and 1917.
If the Socialist party viewed blacks as workers to be organized and the NAACP viewed them as victims of American racism, the new radicals in Greenwich Village found in blacks a new cultural symbol. Villagers envied the paganism of blacks, and believed them to be free of the puritanical repression that plagued whites.73
According to Fishbein, Carl Van Vechten was the pivotal link between black Harlem and these white bohemians. While Van Vechten may have been a crucial white patron of the Harlem Renaissance artists, his motives in valorizing blacks appear to have been explicitly racist and divorced from any real engagement with the dominant issues of black life.
Reveling in the sex and spontaneity of blacks, denied to whites by their puritanism, Van Vechten failed to question whether freedom and escapism should be equated, whether drunken revels could compensate for the deprivation and discrimination that blacks faced in their daily lives.74
Bohemia’s embrace of the Negro as a “noble savage” and exotic primitive reasserted itself forty years later in Norman Mailer’s abrasive but celebrated essay “The White Negro”:
Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm.75
Written shortly before Jones’s emergence in the Village, Mailer’s 1957 essay conveyed the depth of the “Crow-Jim” racist romanticism present in Beat bohemian and progressive intellectual circles. After reading this essay, James Baldwin rhetorically asked its author, “Why malign the sorely menaced sexuality of Negroes in order to justify the white man’s own sexual panic?”76
We should not conclude that the avant-garde art world was free of the “normal” contours of white American, antiblack racism. Mimicking the parent society, white avant-garde artists devalued the works of black artists when their work was deemed to be too obsessed with “black concerns.” In a study of the avant-garde New York school of the early 1960s, Rosenberg and Fliegel interviewed prominent white painters who asserted that there were no important black American painters. Summarizing these interviews, Rosenberg and Fliegel wrote:
Artists are convinced that an important part of the Negro’s predicament lies in his inescapable preoccupation with himself as a Negro. They see that he is unable to separate his existence as a member of an oppressed group from his art. He is unable to transcend his immediate life and enter competently into artistic developments of broader, let alone universal, significance. . . . Surrounded by a brutal reality, it is virtually impossible for him to forget that he is a Negro. This reality is too much with him. . . . As long as the Negro is caught up in this vicious circle his art will suffer. As long as the Negro paints as a Negro he is doomed to disappointment. This is not a dilemma of the Negro’s choosing, it is the consequence of his extreme social subordination.77
Similar “friendly” arguments have historically been used to devalue black writing. Indeed, when writing about black American life, black novelists and poets have often been accused of sacrificing “universal” concerns.
Even in white liberal circles during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the prevailing attitude toward black Beats and black cultural artifacts remained mired in images of the “uncultured others.” The white writer Seymour Krim chose the racially parochial pages of the white liberal/left newspaper The Village Voice to issue an astounding racist commentary on black Beats and the valorization of blackness by white Beats. Krim argued that jazz was the music of black squalor and ignorance. Even though the music was breathtaking, its socioeconomic origins in black blight should have prevented white jazz lovers from identifying too strongly with it.
What would you white jazz lovers say if you saw your own people, thousands of them, enslaved in the hocus pocus of various Father Divines—still operating by the carload in Harlem and Philadelphia—buying furniture and especially the needed music boxes, phonograph or radio on time, time, time, the girls buying earrings and the men booze or sharp ties when the kids need medical help or the ex wife is forced to “go into the life” become a prostitute, “because my old man don’t give a——what happens to me” . . . every true, religious jazz-lover I have ever met who is white has degraded a part of himself to be something he can never be, nor would ever want (nor would his colored friends want him) to be if he looked at it calmly. Most ordinary Negroes, whose emotions are naturally put into jazz . . . would gladly have sacrificed the music to a white skin and a less brutal standard of living.78
The black bohemians’ attempt to sidestep mass culture and crass, philistine elements in American society as well as forthright American racism led them into a community that valorized their social marginality. Once in Beat bohemia, these blacks were often celebrated for being precisely what mainstream society had made them, outcasts. Nonetheless, mainstream society had a difficult time viewing their entrance into bohemia as a deliberate rejection of the parent society, for the parent society had already stigmatized them as outcasts. By birthright, blacks were the quintessential American deviants, a fact that lay at the root of their valorization by white Beats. When black bohemians attempted to reject not only American cultural tastes but also Western artistic norms, they were accused of nothing less than a rejection of civilization itself (and blacks were most in need of Western acculturation).
Locked in racial parochialism, Podhoretz could view Jones’s bohemian proclivities only as a pretense. “Who do these parvenu Negroes think they are fooling?” The absurdity of a Negro rejecting white America was too much for him to bear. As the quintessential parvenu Jew, Podhoretz was intent on proclaiming any cultural authority that he could muster, which wasn’t much in the realm of the cultured highbrow. But when commenting on a black, he could embrace his whiteness. In so doing, Podhoretz, the parvenu Jew, could refuse to grant Jones, the parvenu black, the right to refuse—the very right that had been denied to Podhoretz by his status superiors.79 Regardless of what Jones said or wrote, Podhoretz knew that he had gone to the Village in order to gain access to “white culture.” The circle was not only complete but inescapable. In or out of bohemia, a black was always and only a black. Krim was more forthright. Blacks, including black bohemians, would cease being black if they could. Honest blacks would admit this but they, evidently, weren’t talking.
Like Krim and Mailer, Podhoretz assumed the authority to explain black life to blacks and whites. Whether or not blacks agreed with his description and diagnosis was irrelevant. The white authoritative father had spoken and other white readers could testify to the validity and acuteness of his observations. Once again, black artists and intellectuals witnessed a discussion about themselves that they were barred from joining. They could, like Jones, enter the discussion uninvited, but they would still be viewed as interlopers. Into such a world, a self-conscious aspiring writer named LeRoi Jones emerged.