Swords & Roses

Now and then while reading about American literature of the 1920s, I’ve run across references to Joseph Hergesheimer, often mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And in used bookstores I’ve sometimes seen old copies of his novel Java Head.

My curiosity finally overcame my inertia enough to look into who this man was. According to Wikipedia, “Hergesheimer’s reputation fluctuated wildly in his own lifetime, from a peak of acclaim and popularity in the 1920s to almost total obscurity by the time of his death.... Tastes changed decisively in the 1930s ... with both critics and writers favoring a more terse, tough-guy style.”

But remarkably, “When asked in 1962 what was his favourite American novel, Samuel Beckett replied ‘one of the best I ever read was Hergesheimer’s Java Head‘.” (For a thoughtful piece on Hergesheimer and the difference between flowery writing and writing that is simply bad, see The Simpleton.)

The New York and Brooklyn libraries don’t have any copies of Java Head that can be checked out, but Brooklyn was able to find me a copy of Swords & Roses, published by Knopf in 1929. I had thought this was a collection of short stories about the Civil War, but instead it’s a work of nonfiction: a kind of love letter to the Confederacy, featuring mini-biographies of figures like Generals Johnston, Beauregard, and Jeb Stuart, as well as Confederate naval hero John Newland Maffitt.

The first essay, “The Deep South,” gives a hint of why Hergesheimer was admired for his descriptive writing, and why Clifton Fadiman said he was “deficient in mere brain-power.” Hergesheimer is describing the great plantation houses of the antebellum South.

There were excessively fine houses, houses with the woodwork, the stair rails, of rosewood; with marble columns and classic ballrooms, elaborate marble mantels and Florentine mosaics; with all the door knobs and window catches and light brackets run from pure silver.... The wells were so deep that the water, drawn in a cedar bucket, was cold as ice water. Perishable food was lowered into them. The wells were haunted, they were the subject of negro legend; but the legends were all beneficent; when the slaves slowly drew up the water they commonly sang. Their songs and the sound of the winding chains were a part of the early spring morning. There were dippers at the wells—gourds for the negroes, beautifully wrought silver for white people. The negroes, it is conceivable, were not more unhappy than the whites; they were negroes, remember, on plantations, in the country; in a country that was seldom cold. They worked in the fields, or in the house, and slept in small cabins. They were, within the rigid fact of their slavery, free—they had no responsibility, they had no debts, and when they were old they were safe: they cleaned the ornamental brasses, they tended the making of tallow candles, polished and filled the lamps, and with soft cloths rubbed brilliant the cut prisms, the teardrop prisms and the pendentive prisms of the girandoles and crystal chandeliers.

Not bad, right? Who wouldn’t want to be a slave when you could drink ice-cold well water from a gourd, and polish the pendentive prisms of the girandoles with a soft cloth?

North Country Institute for Writers of Color

Writers of color: You have until May 31 to apply for the Center for Black Literature‘s North Country Institute for Writers of Color retreat.

The retreat takes place from July 6 to 10 at the Valcour Educational Conference Center in Plattsburgh, New York, on the shores of Lake Champlain. This year’s workshop leaders are Ernesto Quiñonez (fiction) and Marita Golden (memoir).

National Black Writers’ Conference

On Saturday I walked to Medgar Evers College by way of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and sat in on two panels at this year’s National Black Writers’ Conference.

This was the tenth anniversary for the conference, and it seems to have gotten more press than usual this year: an article in the New York Times (though Tayari Jones, one of the participants, noted that several comments on the article were “disturbing’—not to say racist) and a mention on NPR.

I picked two panels to attend because they included writers I already knew and liked: Meena Alexander and M.G. Vassanji speaking on “Literary Encounters: East Meets West” and Chris Abani and Maaza Mengiste on “The Impact of War and Natural Disasters in Literature by Black Writers.” I got to meet each of them afterwards, and came away with signed copies of Quickly Changing River, The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, Hands Washing Water, and Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.

(Meena Alexander had disappeared in the time it took me to buy her book, so I had to be satisfied with exchanging it for a presigned copy. I was pleased, though, to find that it included two poems she read during the panel: “Four Friends” and “Nomadic Tutelage,” an homage to Audre Lorde.)

James McBride was also on the war panel. I hadn’t seen him before, or read his work, and was fascinated to hear his description of how the movie of his novel Miracle at St. Anna got filmed. Spike Lee called him up one day to propose the idea, they made a handshake agreement—two black men from Brooklyn, of about the same age—and for the next year McBride wrote the script and discussed it with Spike Lee in various restaurants. No money changed hands. As usual, Spike Lee had great difficulty raising money for the movie, and in the end it came mostly from Italy. (McBride was scathing on the subject of how pathology is the only kind of black story that sells—using Push and the movie Precious as his main examples.)

Chris Abani made more startling statements than anyone else I heard. Every time he publishes a book, he says, someone tells him it will end his career. When he told his publisher the idea for his next book, he said, the man visibly flinched. “My career is entirely about rewriting James Baldwin,” he said at one point, and a little later, “For Baldwin, all love is light. The only aberration is the absence of love.”

Abani once spoke to a Hutu man involved in the massacres in Rwanda. What was the hardest thing about killing your Tutsi victims? he asked him.

“After a while the machete gets dull and you start to get blisters,” the man said, and laughed.

Was it the literal truth? Was it a joke meant to shock? Or was there was an element of both? Abani didn’t try to explain.

One mango at a time

In 1996, a relatively peaceful time in Haiti, I traveled there with Global Exchange and was struck—despite the deforestation, despite the outbreaks of violence—by what a vibrant, welcoming, and even beautiful country it was. I wrote an article about the trip called Haiti as a Tourist Destination.

About a year later, I came upon a book of photos from Haiti that made me wonder—beginning with the seeming village idiot pictured on the cover—whether the photographer had been to the same place. “Steeped in Voodoo and brutalised by its rulers,” the book’s description read, “it is a country where human life is cheap and animals hardly worth life.”

Along with a surprising amount of help and compassion after the earthquake in Haiti, there has been a strong undercurrent of contempt and condescension. Once the compassion has faded, I’m afraid the contempt will continue. Long-term assistance and development requires a recognition that Haiti is worth developing.

For that reason I was pleased to see an op-ed in the New York Times called Building Haiti’s Economy, One Mango at a Time. Here’s an excerpt:

Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and yet it need not be so, because unexploited economic opportunities abound there. Some of the best mangoes in the world grow in Haiti — though too many of them rot, offshore from the world’s largest market, for want of adequate roads and well-governed ports. Excellent coffee is grown in the Haitian mountains, but much of it is sold informally across the border to coffee producers in the Dominican Republic, who reap most of the profits.

Haiti also has many qualities attractive to tourists: a warm climate; magnificent white-sand beaches and turquoise water; Tortuga, the famous pirate island off the northern coast; and the Citadel, a mountain fortress erected after Haiti’s independence in the early 19th century to fend off colonial powers, now a World Heritage site. Still, it is one of the least visited places in the Caribbean.

Richard Wright stamp

While I was on the USPS website, I discovered to my surprise that a stamp honoring Richard Wright came out last year.

It looks nice, but it’s a 61-cent stamp. Who uses 61-cent stamps? If you really want to honor a major American writer, wouldn’t you put him (or her) on a first-class stamp? Instead we have Bob Hope, Gary Cooper, and the Simpsons.