'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  And then, during those seven months, the notices were more frightening, more dangerous to the health, more deadly, and they drove a stake through my guts, labelling me as an indigent man incapable of providing the basic requirements of a household: heat in winter. Winters in the fifties were longer and more depressing than they are today. They were colder and more snow fell, and it was always dark, certainly after four o’clock. And this continued for seven months. It took two months, May and June, to recover from the chill that seeped into the bones. I do not know whether the prevalence of tuberculosis, or TB, for short, or consumption as we more graphically called it in Barbados, was caused by the unrelenting seeping into the bones of the chill of Toronto winters; but I do remember that between 1955 and 1960, people talked more frequently, and openly, of other persons whose lungs were being eaten out by consumption. When you passed in front of the doors of the TB Laboratory on College Street, west of St. George, you did not cough. Or if you had a tickle in your throat, you made sure to pass the TB Lab, walking west to reach Spadina Avenue, when you could cough to your heart’s and lungs’ delight. Or you made a little ugh-ugh, looked round to see if anybody heard, covered your face with a handkerchief, or a Kleenex, and pretended there was no disturbance in your chest. I always thought of consumption when the cheque to Roma Fuels bounced, or when they grew angry at my late payments, and put just enough oil in the tank to start the motor. And of course, when they did not come at all.

  There is no greater joy, when your furnace is not working, when you dress yourself in all your sweaters and your winter coat, with two pairs of thick socks, and a hat on your head; and you walk up and down the hallways on the second floor, from the kitchen to the bathroom, shuttling electric kettles of hot water, saucepans and pots, to put life and warmth into the bath tub, in which you shall have to put your five-year-old daughter, beside your three-year-old daughter, and your wife, helping you in this demonstration of personal failure, and you cannot even run, just run out of the house, as you could do, would do, were able to do, had you remained back in Barbados, where there is no winter. But there is no escape here.

  When I made the decision to be a writer, and gave myself one year to see if I could be a writer, and when I decided to remain home and look after Janice and Loretta, aged three and one, I did not know what I had decided to do. There was logic in my decision. But I realize now that I was brave, and reckless, self-centred, and perhaps a little irresponsible to have thought of this “temporary abandonment” of wife and girl children, at a time when to be black in Toronto was, as my mother said, “a horse of a different colour.” And I think that my mother understood the pun intended; and that was intended.

  To whom could I go to tell me what a writer was … or is? To whom could I go to “discuss writing?” Where could a young black man, wanting to be a writer in Canada in 1962, go to hear other writers, and talk with them about plot, theme, hours sitting in a chair, pounding a Remington Rand Noiseless? And when and if he managed to write something, a story, a poem, where could he go to get it read, and edited, then published?

  It startled me that no one, critic, reviewer, professor, has seen the real point, the explanation, in this solitary journey embarked upon in a state of mind, on a landscape that was like a badly drawn map, which showed just the dot of destination with no route to that destination. They do not know. For many reasons. They do not know because they have never had a serious interest, and did not promote in the fifties and the sixties, a developmental interest in the writing of a black man from the West Indies. Not that I felt that this was part of their literary obligation. It must have been strange for them, and for Canada, to have been faced with a novel written by a black man amongst them. It was, after all, only 1964; and in 1964 racism was widespread, was publicly stated, was engaged in without apology. They had no black men born amongst them who were writing — even if they were not writers. I think the distinction is important. For even if there had been blacks writing, the so-called literary establishment did not automatically and necessarily regard them as writers, even a “Negro-Canadian writer.” This establishment is more stupid than it is racist. So I absolve it of its manifold iniquities. I have always been granted absolutism to this so-called establishment, mainly by ignoring it, and refusing to admit to its influence. It is a shifting disposition, with no guidance to the writer, certainly the beginning writer, in his own literary uncertainty. I have always felt that the recognition or the status conferred upon a writer by the establishment was based upon matters other than literary. It gave me the impression from as early as 1964 when my first novel, The Survivors of the Crossing, was published, that the establishment had been like a small room made of thick cement, with no ventilation of windows and no jalousies, and no means of entrance. It is a cell, a cellar, from which beginning writers, especially “visible minorities,” are excluded. What is inside this unventilated structure no one knows. For when the contents or the inhabitants are disclosed, we are left in awe of the establishment’s method of selection.

  I understood how difficult it would be for a beginning writer, a writer who is black. And knowing this, I decided from the beginning not to tie my person, my hope, my disposition, and my character to the uncertainty of acceptance, of appreciation, and of being a favourite. And this separation of the actual writing from the person doing the writing, saved me from the anxiety of neglect and the disappointment of my writing being misunderstood by editor and by reviewer and by critic. It was too new to them. Unexpected. Unappreciated. Too foreign. Problems with the usage of dialect; problems with the themes dealt with in the fiction, problems with the interest asked of the Canadian reader to be taken in by this new literature. The establishment was unprepared to deal with this “new voice.” And the establishment did what establishments faced with a new virus of writing does best: it pretended that the new writing was irrelevant and did not exist. There were a few reviewers and critics who, in their broad-mindedness, gave this new literature a chance: Kildare Dobbs; William French; William New; and one lone intellectual, a professor of English at York University, Stan Fefferman, writing in the Telegram about my third novel, on May 27, 1967, who, even if he did not understand the portrayal and the “function” of the main character, Bernice, wrote that “the first twenty-five pages of Austin Clarke’s novel, The Meeting Point, convey the familiar morally superior attitudes of the Negro observer of white society. The Negro observer in this case is Bernice Leach, a West Indian woman who works as a domestic for a Jewish family in Forest Hill. Bernice’s view of the Burrmanns’ household is a stereotyped Negro parody of a white family.”

  My question to Professor Fefferman, not really to him personally, but to the attitude he represents is this: How would he know what the Negro thinks? It is an old presumption that “others” know what the Negro thinks. Many white intellectuals have presumed to be able to “think” for the Negro. It is a bulwark of the psychology of racism, and a characteristic of colonialism.

  Two of my friends joined Professor Fefferman in this attitude of presumptuousness: Norman Mailer, who wrote a piece for Look magazine in which he confessed he was thinking for the American Negro, if I understand the article correctly. But Mailer had the fortune or the misfortune of presenting this thesis to an audience of students and faculty at Calhoun College at Yale University one night in 1969; and he earned the wrath of the few young black students, recently admitted to Yale in the university’s program of recruitment of black students. The other friend, Robert Penn Warren, novelist, poet, and professor of creative writing at Yale, asked the question, “Who Speaks for the Negro?” in the title of his book, and left us with the impression that he was not asking a deliberative question, but was, by innuendo, stating that he knew who spoke for the Negro, and by extension, offered himself as candidate for that authorship, or authority.

  But Professor Fefferman does not deserve complete chastisement. He acknowledged what I consider to be the first steps in literary reasonableness, that the novel he
was asked to review for the Telegram in 1967, The Meeting Point, “has more in common with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel than it does with James Baldwin’s Another Country. Which is to say, it is an original book.”

  Those five last words are the point. The writing which the establishment faced in 1964, 1965, and 1967, with The Meeting Point, and continuing with two more novels, Storm of Fortune and The Bigger Light, in 1973 and 1975, respectively, resulted in misunderstanding of the point. Before I leave this point of the presumption that white critics and intellectuals “speak for the Negro,” and to give it an international context, I must add the names of William Styron, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Irving Howe, the critic who presumed to educate Ralph Ellison that he had the wrong image constructed in his novel, Invisible Man, by comparing the main character in The Invisible Man, with Bigger Thomas, the main character in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Ellison wanted the comparison to be made with other writers. I shall let Ellison make the point himself in his essay “The World and the Jug”:

  Let me end with a personal note: Dear Irving, I have no objections to being placed beside Richard Wright in any estimation which is based not upon the irremediable ground of our common racial identity, but upon the quality of our achievements as writers. I respected Wright’s work and I knew him, but this is not to say that he “influenced” me as significantly as you assume. Consult the text! I sought out Wright because I had read Eliot, Pound, Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, and as early as 1940 Wright viewed me as a potential rival — partially, it is true, because he feared I would allow myself to be used against him by political manipulators who were not Negro and who envied and hated him. But perhaps you will understand when I say he did not influence me if I point out that while one can do nothing about one’s relatives, one can, as an artist choose one’s “ancestors.” Wright was, in this sense, a “relative,” Hemingway an “ancestor.” Langston Hughes whose work I knew in grade school and whom I knew before I knew Wright, was a “relative”; Eliot, whom I was to meet only many years later, and Malraux and Dostoevsky and Faulkner, were “ancestors” — if you please or don’t please!

  I have never presumed to give reviewers, critics and professors of English advice. I have never, before this, discussed what professors of English, critics, and reviewers have written about my work. Not that I have not noticed and read their views. But my view is an echo of Ellison’s evocative advice to Irving Howe: “Consult the text!”

  Ellison, as was to be expected, by his claimed “ancestral” connection to Eliot, Pound, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Malraux, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner, was branded an Uncle Tom, a traitor to the Negro literary establishment, fawning over white writers, like Saul Bellow, his friend. It was, after all, at a time when the civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., black cultural nationalism advocated by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and SNCC demonstrations against segregation scratched the character of American society, and this I feel caused Ellison to explain this “ancestral” literary connection to, and praise of, the “ancestors” he enumerated.

  Do you still ask why Hemingway was more important to me than Wright? Not because he was white, or more “accepted.” But because he appreciated the things of this earth which I love and which Wright was too driven or deprived or inexperienced to know: weather, guns, dogs, horses, love and hate and impossible circumstances which to the courageous and dedicated could be turned into benefits and victories. Because he wrote with such precision about the processes and techniques of daily living that I could keep myself and my brother alive during the 1937 Recession by following his descriptions of wing-shooting; because he knew the differences between politics and art and something of their true relationship for the writer. Because all that he wrote — and this is very important — was imbued with the spirit beyond the tragic with which I could feel at home, for it was very close to the feeling of the blues, which are, perhaps, as close as Americans can come to expressing the spirit of tragedy. (And if you think Wright knew anything about the blues, listen to a “blues” he composed with Paul Robeson singing, a most unfortunate collaboration!; and read his introduction to Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning.) But most impor-tant, because Hemingway was a greater artist than Wright, who although a Negro like myself, and perhaps a great man, understood little if anything of these (at least to me) important things. Because Hemingway loved the American language and the joy of writing, making the flight of birds, the loping of lions across an African plain, the mysteries of drink and moonlight, the unique styles of diverse peoples and individuals come alive on the page. Because he was in many ways the true father-as-artist of so many of us who came to writing during the late thirties.

  But what has this to do with Professor Fefferman? Absolutely nothing. Except as a caution to the reviewer, the critic and the professor of English, not to minimize the importance of “consulting the text!”

  But I was talking about Fridays. If you had lived through the four preceding days, and Fridays came and you did not receive a notice that your last cheque was NSF, if there was no letter delivered by the postman saying that you had five days from the date of the letter now in your hand, in which you did not pay all the arrears of the bill, Hydro, Bell Telephone, mortgage, Roma Fuel, your subscription to Maclean’s and the Atlantic Monthly, then you could breathe more easily on Friday night, and invite friends to dinner — white rice and oxtail stew, with West Indian potatoes, avocado pear, and canned peaches cut into halves, and filled with sour cream — and play calypso music (as I played many times for my former editor and publisher, Patrick Crean, when he lived down the street from me, on Brunswick, beside the French high school, Loretto College), and talk into the night, until the blob of blackness in the black night changed into the grey outline of a man, Sibelius, in Jean Sibelius Square, where a girl was raped and stuffed into a refrigerator on the second floor of a flat, and the man who did that has not been found and caught yet. Patrick responded to my dinners with dinners of his own, “silvers and crystals licking-down the place, and antique furnitures” in greater profusion than the window of Britnell’s Antiques, up the street from Britnell’s bookshop (somebody told me he was his brother), near the corner of Yonge and Dupont, across from the Masonic Temple lodge, where rowdy dances and speeches by visiting West Indian politicians were held, religiously. So, if the clarion call, and being reminded of bounced cheques — I have always hated this term, it is so crude and so accusatory! — could be left until Monday to face the music, not lessened by the intervening weekend, then we could have a discreet, modified, Friday-night party. Six bottles of beer, Labatts; one bottle of rum, bottled by the LCBO; a bottle of white wine, Graves; peanuts in the shell from down in Kensington Market; cashews, and roasted walnuts from an Italian man with a cart who sold the best walnuts in the whole of Ontario. When we — my wife and I — changed the menu. It was beef stew. I had convinced the butcher I went to, most often, that I had a large dog who liked beef bones; and the butcher would give me a large parcel wrapped in brown paper, filled with parts of the cow that had as much meat as bones, and I carefully cut the meat to the bone, and had not only enough for a stew, but sufficient for the yellow split-pea soup, with dumplings and pig tails, fit for a king. In these early days of Kensington, which was called the Jewish Market, the butchers gave away beef bones, pig tail, the worst part of salted cod from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, because the population of Toronto in the 1950s was of a culture and ethnicity that did not stomach what we in Barbados, called “the leavings” from the best cuts of the meats, pork, beef, lamb, veal, and saltfish, served at the tables of the wealthy and the white, which at some period in Barbados, was the same thing.

  So, Fridays had their hours of relief: going to the Kensington Market and leaving with bones and beef on the bones; peanuts in the shell; vegetables and fruits at prices more suitable to the budget of a writer who had no budget, and all this made possible by the absence of l
etters and telephone calls and threatening form letters promising doom. But there was never, upon my soul and spirit, a feather of despair, for I always felt that this was a period of testing my longevity: my longevity in the sustaining of hardship.

  I used to feel, in those days, that I did not have any right to expect Canada to be more hospitable to me, in life, in employment, in civil rights, in public decency, and that I did not have the moral or the political right to attempt to inflict my Barbadian culture and morality upon the Canadian character, no matter how oppressive and racialistic it became with significant frequency. I felt then, that I was the one to adjust to Canada, not having Canada moderate or modify its “way of life” to accommodate me. And I felt this was the case because I showed no allegiance to Canada. I did not want to be known as a Canadian. I did not desire Canadian citizenship. If Barbados had the nationalistic presumptuousness to declare war on Canada, I would, naturally, fight for Barbados. But this might very well mean deportation or departure back to Barbados. I did not even want a Canadian passport. And the reason for this is that Barbados was still the natural and cultural navel string of my spiritual and artistic ancestry. Canada, and Toronto, were unable, at that time, to infiltrate and diminish the strong links that birth in Barbados created to define me, in character, as a Barbadian.