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“…A THING NEVER MEANT a thing until it moved.” Melvin Ellington, the protagonist of Wesley Brown’s 1978 novel Tragic Magic arrives at this realization, ironically, during one of the few moments in the novel when he’s at rest, finally lying at his belle Alice’s side. It’s a posture we aren’t used to seeing him in. Magic covers a single day in Melvin’s life as he makes his way to New York City from Pennsylvania, where he served time for refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War. Thrown off his path as a college student and finding himself marooned in a kind of emotional dead zone—the result of steeling his heart against the depravities of prison life—he walks his old neighborhood haunts like a latter-day Leopold Bloom, if Bloom’s step and thought were infused with the spirit of jazz.
When the novel opens, Melvin’s in transit. Riding a New York City subway with a past date named Tonya, he sees a man come onto her. The moment makes him insecure; should he have stood up to the man on Tonya’s behalf? Fought him? “I guess I should have done something,” he wonders aloud, like he’s playing for forgiveness. It’s not forthcoming, because Tonya isn’t offended by his inaction in the least. “What could you have done?” she retorts. She rejects the notion that Melvin’s gender makes it his duty to defend her honor—she’s perfectly well off defending it herself, as she reminds him. “You know, I almost kicked that dude in his family jewels. I caught myself just in time. I guess that wouldn’t have made you look too good if I had.” Melvin finds himself anxious over Tonya’s implication: that she doesn’t need him around at all. At least, not in the tired, predictable ways he wants her to need him.
Tragic Magic is about tragedy, alright—the kinds of tragedies men bring upon themselves by allowing their inner lives to be ensnared in the trap we’ve come to call toxic masculinity; and the death of mind, spirit, and body that ensues when men willingly lower themselves into the coffin of gender expectations, how that death pervades everything from friendships to political activism. The scene is the first of many haunted by the specter of this death. When Melvin finds himself in a Pennsylvania prison preparing to serve a three-year bid for dodging the Vietnam War draft, he meets Chilly, an old hand of incarcerated life who warns him that not appearing like a certain kind of man can mean death. Or, worse, the ultimate violation of normative masculinity—sex between men. To that end, Chilly gives Melvin a set of directives: “Watch yourself when you take a shower. Don’t walk around half nude. And for your own protection, make sure you stay on a top bunk. The main thing is to be a man.”
But, as Brown suggests, being a man is dangerous business. When Melvin finds himself staring at another man’s body in the prison shower, he indulges in gorgeous description, some of the novel’s most beautiful writing. “The slouch in his shoulders is an indication that very little has impressed him enough to make him straighten up. His face interests me most of all,” he rhapsodizes. “His hair, sideburns, and mustache have been trimmed as evenly as a well-kept lawn. And he is the color of a skillet broken in by cooking.” He catches himself, though, remembering where he is. “I’ve got to be more careful… At any moment someone may decide you will make a good piece of merchandise.”
Wesley Brown’s genius in this novel is to set us down in the midst of men whose interior lives, whose senses of what it is possible for them to be in this world, have been so constrained by masculinity that they cannot even begin to think of other possibilities. He holds us so close to this world that it can seem as if there is no escaping it. Melvin, whose peers nickname him Mouth because of his overenthusiastic method of smooching women, is in many ways the perfect vehicle for this portrayal: his voice brings us into a too-intimate, almost claustrophobic relationship with the anxious world of masculinity, a community of men who feel a constant need to prove their male bona fides. It is a world of rampant homophobia, misogyny, body shaming, and generalized fear of what it would mean to let one’s guard down and participate in an actually intimate relationship—not just with women, but with anybody at all. Melvin, who seems most motivated by an adolescent lust, is not exempt from this fraternity. As a result, neither is the reader. We must be careful to read this novel not as an endorsement of heteronormativity, but an attempt to honestly reckon with the toll it takes on the novel’s male characters, the way it leaves them emotionally deformed.
Among these men, Melvin’s childhood friend Otis is perhaps the most deformed. A veteran of the Vietnam War who, unlike Melvin, was driven to fight by his obsession with that paragon of American machismo, John Wayne, Otis is a young buck whose chief concerns are bedding women and demonstrating his physical prowess against other men. Quick to anger and possessed of a pride that goes only about half an inch deep, he is the Kurtz to Melvin’s Marlow. Racked by loneliness and more than a little guilt, Melvin seeks his friend out upon hearing that he’s lost a hand as a result of the war. What he finds is less a person than an open wound, a man whose notion of his identity has been fundamentally challenged by his participation in a failed war, and a more personal failure to live up to an impossible standard. Once certain that fighting would make him every bit as heroic as Wayne, Otis—now a radio engineer rather than a warrior—is straining at society’s leash, leaping at every chance he gets to prove his belonging to the lethal fraternity of American cowboys.
If Melvin is different from men like Otis, it is by virtue of his fundamentally curious nature. A skeptic whose posture towards life is characterized by a fundamental uncertainty, and an outsider who cannot quite fit himself into the cohort of horny alpha males who dominate his world, Melvin is attuned to a certain dissonance in the given world, the possibility that the world can be otherwise than it is. He is not a critic of this world but a questioner, a rebel without commitment to anything in particular, save what seems to be a pathological inability to accept things as they’ve been given to him—or to tell a story that doesn’t zig and zag in an ecstatic directionless-ness. Listening to Melvin think is like listening to Charlie Parker improvise a solo by following an idea or concept wherever it will take him, without any concern for whether or not it lines up with what came before, or what people will think of it.
And, just like “Bird’s playing started everyone in the joint to jumping giddy and yapping in a strange tongue that emphasized the buzzing sound of the letter Z,” Melvin’s improvisatory, itinerant thought process is an intimation of a new and different language of gender and masculinity. He sees and hears what his brethren cannot—or are unwilling to—see and hear. Back in the prison shower, for example, he perceives that the prison doesn’t really mandate one strict definition of masculinity. Far from it: it’s a space where men routinely break their own rules about what it means to “be a man.” Melvin realizes that even as his fellow prisoners enforce certain gender norms, they themselves are “indulging in a favorite shower-room pastime: comparing the size of each other’s Swanson Johnson.” There’s some kind of improvisation happening here, a possible riff on staid, boring heteronormativity, maybe a new language. The inmates engage in a comparison of virility, a test of manhood that will be “determined by the one who can get his rizz-od as hizz-ard as a rizz-ock at a mizz-oments nizz-otice.”
The spirit of Bird lingers over the proceedings, shepherding us towards something other than a dangerous and tragic notion of the masculine. This is the gift that Wesley Brown has given us: a new way to speak, a language that we have to excavate and rescue from the murky depths of gender expectation. This novel is an unruly and difficult story of how gender works in the world, and how we might find our ways to new modes of being. This is a novel that denounces reification and casts off stasis in favor of itinerant movement, in the hopes that we might come to find the meaning of our lives by playing our own solos, by riffing on the given world in search of other possibilities.
—ISMAIL MUHAMMAD