The Stone Face

by William Gardner Smith

  WILLIAM GARDNER SMITH (1927–1974) was born and raised in a black working-class neighborhood of South Philadelphia, where his youth was punctuated by brutal episodes of racist violence: at fourteen, he was stripped and beaten by the police, and at nineteen was assaulted by a group of white sailors. A star student and passionate reader, Smith began reporting for the black-owned Pittsburgh Courier as a high-school senior and took a job at the paper after graduating at the age of sixteen. In 1946, he was drafted into the army and stationed in Germany; there he completed his first novel, describing a romance between a German woman and a black American soldier, which would be published two years later as Last of the Conquerors. Returning to the States, Smith continued to contribute to the Courier, studied at Temple University, led demonstrations against police brutality, and pursued an interest in Marxism that soon attracted the attention of the FBI. In 1949 he married Mary Sewell, and in 1950 he published his second novel, Anger at Innocence. Feeling stifled by racism and McCarthyism, Smith left for Paris, where he worked for Agence France Presse and became acquainted with Richard Wright and Chester Himes. His third novel, South Street, about a black radical who returns from exile in Africa to his hometown of Philadelphia, was met with little fanfare when it was published in 1954. In 1956, the US government declined to renew Smith’s passport. Now divorced, he continued to live and work in France, where he met his second wife, Solange Royez, a teacher whose mother had escaped Nazi Germany, and in 1963 The Stone Face came out. Invited to help launch the first television station in Ghana, Smith moved in 1964, with his wife and infant daughter, Michèle, to Accra. His son, Claude, was born there, but after a military coup brought down the government of Kwame Nkrumah, the family returned to Paris. In France, Smith met and married his third wife, Ira Reuben, and another child, Rachel, was born. In 1967, he revisited the United States to write his final book, Return to Black America, published in 1970. He died of cancer in 1974 in a suburb of Paris.

  ADAM SHATZ is the US Editor of the London Review of Books and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker, among other publications.

  THE STONE FACE

  WILLIAM GARDNER SMITH

  Introduction by

  ADAM SHATZ

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1963 by William Gardner Smith

  Introduction copyright © 2021 by Adam Shatz

  All rights reserved.

  First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2021.

  Cover image: Norman Lewis, American Totem, 1960; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Estate of Norman Lewis; courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smith, William Gardner, 1927–1974, author. | Shatz, Adam, writer of introduction.

  Title: The stone face / William Gardner Smith ; introduction by Adam Shatz.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2021] | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020043522 (print) | LCCN 2020043523 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681375168 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681375175 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3537.M8685 S76 2021 (print) | LCC PS3537.M8685 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043522

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043523

  ISBN 978-1-68137-517-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  THE STONE FACE

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  INTRODUCTION

  A Stranger in Paris

  In 1951, in an essay entitled “I Choose Exile,” the novelist Richard Wright explained his decision to resettle in Paris after the war. “It is because I love freedom,” he declared, “and I tell you frankly that there is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America!” Few of the black Americans who made Paris their home from the 1920s to the civil rights era would have quarreled with Wright’s claim. For novelists such as Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin, for artists and musicians such as Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, and Beauford Delaney, Paris offered a sanctuary from segregation and discrimination, as well as an escape from American puritanism—an experience as far as possible from the “damaged life” that Theodor Adorno considered to be characteristic of exile. You could stroll down the street with a white lover or spouse without being jeered at, much less physically assaulted; you could check into a hotel or rent an apartment wherever you wished so long as you could pay for it; you could enjoy, in short, something like normalcy, arguably the most seductive of Paris’s gifts to black American exiles.

  Baldwin, who moved to Paris in 1948, two years after Wright, embraced the gift at first but came to distrust it, suspecting that it was an illusion, and a costly one at that. While blacks “armed with American passports” were rarely the target of racism, Africans and Algerians from France’s overseas colonies, he realized, were not so lucky. In his 1960 essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” published just after Wright’s death, he accused his mentor of celebrating Paris as a “city of refuge” while remaining silent about France’s oppressive treatment of its colonial subjects: “It did not seem worthwhile to me to have fled the native fantasy only to embrace a foreign one.”* Baldwin recalled that when an African joked to him that Wright mistook himself for a white man, he had risen to Wright’s defense. But the remark led him to “wonder about the uses and hazards of expatriation”:

  I did not think I was white, either, or I did not think I thought so. But the Africans might think I did, and who could blame them? . . . When the African said to me, I believe he thinks he’s white, he meant that Richard cared more about his safety and comfort than he cared about the black condition. . . . Richard was able, at last, to live in Paris exactly as he would have lived, had he been a white man, here, in America. This may seem desirable, but I wonder if it is. Richard paid the price such an illusion of safety demands. The price is a turning away from, ignorance of, all of the powers of darkness.

  “Alas, Poor Richard,” like Baldwin’s famous critique of Wright’s Native Son, was an exercise in self-portraiture, if not self-congratulation. By then Baldwin had come home to America and joined the civil rights struggle that Wright, nursing his wounds in his exile, preferred to observe from afar. But in his autobiographical story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” also published in 1960, Baldwin implied that he too might have ended up the butt of an African’s joke if he had stayed. The narrator, a black expatriate reflecting upon his estrangement from the Algerian “boys I used to know during my first years in Paris,” remarks that “I once thought of the North Africans as my brothers and that is why I went to their cafés.” But while he “could not fail to recognize” their “rage” at the French, which reminds him of his own rage at white Americans, “I could not hate the French, because they left me alone. And I love Paris, I will always love it.”

  Perhaps because he was grateful to the city that had “saved my life by allowing me to find out who I am,” Baldwin never gave us a novel about the “uses and hazards of expatriation.” This achievement belongs, instead, t
o a long-forgotten writer three years his junior, William Gardner Smith, a Philadelphian who moved to Paris in 1951 and died there in 1974, at the age of forty-seven, of leukemia. A journalist by trade, Smith published four novels and one work of nonfiction. The most striking of his books—and his deepest inquiry into the ambiguities of exile—is The Stone Face, a novel set in Paris against the backdrop of the Algerian War. Long out of print—the hardcover edition goes for $629.99 on Amazon, roughly $3.00 a page—it was published in 1963, the same year as The Fire Next Time. If it lacks Baldwin’s prophetic eloquence, it radiates a similar sense of moral urgency. But where The Fire Next Time reflects Baldwin’s return to his native land, his reckoning with its defining injustice, The Stone Face explores a black exile’s discovery of the suffering of others: an injustice perpetrated by his host country, a place he initially mistakes for paradise.

  Simeon Brown, the protagonist, is a young black American journalist and painter who begins to question France’s self-image as a color-blind society as he witnesses the racism experienced by Algerians in Paris and becomes aware of their struggle for independence back home. At once a bildungsroman and a novel of commitment, The Stone Face resonates with contemporary concerns about privilege and identity, but its treatment of these questions is defiantly heterodox. Among the beneficiaries of privilege in the novel are Simeon’s black expatriate peers, who refuse to support the Algerian struggle, partly because they’re afraid of being expelled from France but also because they’d rather not be associated with a despised minority. They are not perpetrators of anti-Algerian racism, but they are passive bystanders, clinging to the inclusion they’ve been denied at home. The Stone Face is an anti-racist novel about identity, but also a subtle and humane critique of a politics that is based narrowly on identity.

  The Martinican poet Aimé Césaire famously imagined a gathering of the oppressed at the “rendezvous of victory,” but in The Stone Face the West’s victims—black, Arab, and Jew—are often bitterly at odds in their struggle for a place at the table. One of the Algerian characters explodes into an anti-Semitic tirade, accusing Algeria’s Jews of being traitors to the national cause, worse than the colonialists themselves. Stung by this outburst, Simeon’s Polish Jewish girlfriend, Maria, a concentration camp survivor, begs him to forget about race and the Algerian question and live a “normal” life, but unlike her, Simeon does not have the option (nor the desire) to fully disappear into whiteness. No one in The Stone Face is impervious to intolerance or moral blindness. (In a somewhat clumsy metaphor, both Simeon and Maria are visually impaired: one of his eyes was gouged out in a racist attack; she is undergoing surgery to avoid going blind.) The title alludes to the hateful face of racism, and Smith suggests it lies within all of us.

  Fighting the stone face, Simeon learns, is not simply a matter of defending one’s own people, and sometimes requires actively breaking with them. By the end of the novel, he has repudiated “racial” loyalty to his black American brethren in favor of a more dangerous solidarity with Algerian rebels. In its embrace of internationalism, the novel argues powerfully that exile needn’t be a delusional fantasy or a solipsistic flight from one’s ethical obligations. What matters, what is ultimately “black,” for Smith, is not a question of one’s identity or location but of conscience, and the action it inspires.

  Born in 1927, Smith grew up in South Philadelphia, in a black working-class neighborhood of one of the North’s most racist cities. By the time he was fourteen he had already been stripped naked and beaten with a rubber hose by police officers who felt that “I lacked proper respect.” At nineteen he was assaulted at a nightclub by a mob of white sailors who thought that his light-skinned date was a white woman.

  A precocious student of literature, Smith read the same novelists as most aspiring writers in midcentury America: Hemingway and Faulkner, Proust and Dostoyevsky. Keen to begin publishing, he turned down scholarships at Lincoln and Howard to take a job at a black-owned newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. But what really set him on his course as a novelist was being drafted into the army. In the summer of 1946 Smith went to occupied Berlin as a clerk-typist with the 661st TC Truck Company. He spent eight months in Germany, and by August 1947 he had completed a draft of a novel, Dark Tide over Deutschland. Farrar, Straus & Company paid him five hundred dollars for the manuscript and published it in 1948 under the title Last of the Conquerors. A reviewer in The New York Times described the novel—the story of a love affair between a black soldier in Berlin and a German woman, with strong echoes of A Farewell to Arms—as “a revealing example of the tendency of minority groups . . . to project themselves into a fantasy world in which they enjoy rights that are inherently, if not actually, theirs.”

  Yet the love between Hayes Dawkins and Ilse Mueller is no fantasy, even if it is endangered by the racism of the American army, which polices “fraternizing” between black soldiers and German women. To read Last of the Conquerors today is to grasp that it is out of such “fantasy worlds” that freedom is ultimately born. “I had lain on the beach many times,” Hayes muses, “but never before with a white girl. A white girl. Here, away from the thought of differences for a while, it was odd how quickly I forgot it. . . . Odd, it seemed to me, that here, in the land of hate, I should find this one all-important phase of democracy. And suddenly I felt bitter.”

  More than any novel of its time, Last of the Conquerors captured the paradoxes of the black American soldier’s experience in Europe. Hayes has come to the Old World as a “liberator,” but he serves in a segregated army that, for all its talk of spreading democracy, has imported the racist practices of Jim Crow.† And like many of his fellow black soldiers, he has his first taste of freedom in the arms of a white German woman—and in a country that has slaughtered millions of people on racial grounds.

  Hayes is keenly aware of his good fortune in Germany—and also of how strange and precarious it is: “Wonder how many Negroes were lynched in the South this year. . . . Wonder how many Congressmen are shouting white supremacy. . . . Nice being here in Berlin. Nice being here in Germany where the Nazis were once rulers. Nice being so far away that I can wonder—but not be affected.” Once his affair with Ilse is discovered, however, his superiors in the army do everything they can to keep the lovers apart, working closely with former Nazis in the local polizei no less eager to separate “the races.” Nor is this the only prejudice they share. “Men, I forgot,” Hayes’s white captain says one evening, during an after-hours drinking session, “there was one good feature about Hitler and the Nazis”:

  We waited for the one feature. “They got rid of the Jews.” A bolt of tenseness landed in the room. You could not see or hear it, but you could feel it land. The German girls were especially struck. . . . “Only thing. Only good thing they did. . . . We ought to do that in the States. . . . Jews take all the money. . . . Take all the stores and banks. Greedy. Want everything. Don’t leave anything for the people. Did it in Germany and Hitler was smart. Got rid of them. Doin’ it now in the States. Take the country over and Americans ain’t got nothing to say about it.”

  After returning to Philadelphia, Smith attended Temple University on the GI Bill, helped organize demonstrations against police brutality, and studied Marx. (His ties to Communists and Trotskyists raised the suspicion of the FBI, which would keep a file on him for the next two decades.) He married a local woman, Mary Sewell; received a fellowship from Yaddo; and published a novel, Anger at Innocence (1950), a story about a love affair between a middle-aged white man and a white female pickpocket half his age. But for all his success, Smith felt suffocated by racism and McCarthyism, and feared, as he later told an interviewer on French television, that if he stayed in America he would end up killing someone. The Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James suggested that he try living in France and gave him Wright’s address on the rue Monsieur le Prince in the Latin Quarter.

  In 1951, the Smiths sailed to France. They moved into a tiny hotel
room for $1.60 a night, until they could find an apartment. He found a job at Agence France Presse (AFP), profiled Wright for Ebony, and became a drinking companion of Chester Himes and the great cartoonist Ollie Harrington at the Café de Tournon, a haunt of black writers and artists near the Luxembourg Gardens. He published a new novel, South Street (1954), about a black American radical who has returned from exile in Africa. But the reviews were lukewarm, and he felt that he’d “come to a dead end” and no longer wanted to follow “the road of protest.” He took a long hiatus from fiction, divorced, and met the woman who became his second wife, Solange Royez, a schoolteacher from the French Alps whose mother had fled Nazi Germany as a child. Marrying a Frenchwoman reinforced his self-perception as an exile. So did the scrutiny of the American government, which declined to renew his passport in 1956, shortly after a visit he had made to East Berlin. For the next few years he lived in Paris as a “stateless” person.

  “Youth was the most outstanding characteristic of William Gardner Smith—youth and naïveté,” Himes wrote. But courage was another. Most of the black American exiles in Paris adhered to the unspoken agreement with the French government that, in return for sanctuary, they would not intervene in “internal” affairs, above all the sensitive question of French rule in Algeria, which was officially considered a part of France and divided into three departments. As Richard Gibson, a member of the Tournon circle, recalled, “There was a lot of sympathy for the Algerian national struggle among the American writers, but the problem was, how could you speak out and still stay in France?”

  Even before the war of independence broke out in November 1954, Smith wrote about the oppression of Algerians in France. In an article for the Pittsburgh Courier, he described sitting on the terrace of the Café de Flore and overhearing racist chatter about an Algerian rug-seller who’d passed by: “A bell rings somewhere in your head. Echo from another land. You finish your beer and go home, tired, to bed.” As Edward Said has written, “Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation. . . . From that juxtaposition one gets a better, perhaps even more universal idea of how to think, say, about a human rights issue.”