568
MAUREEN HOWARD
of good pornography. Undiluted male fantasy,
Going Down
has Steve
Chance (really) as its hero, a surly reluctant lover. The characters in
Markson's book do talk like faded Shakespearean actors playing Bouci-
cault. Steve Chance cries out unbelievably to a hostile dog in the street,
t
"Well, the devil. ... Be cursed instead, then, mendicant fool. ..."
Their muddled but high-toned thoughts constantly invoke Renoir,
Vivaldi, Corelli, Judas, Christ, Oedipus, Melville, Sisyphus and Mr.
Kurtz, to name but a few. The offense is that this novel is written out
of some nether landscape in the writer's world that reveals itself to be
empty, like Steve Chance who finds himself to be empty of all but the
basest desires. It is a world that should not be tolerated outside of the
confines of some passe artists colony.
The Life
&
Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger
is an amazing first novel
of serious intent about an expatriate Black. Cecil Brown is a sophisticat-
ed man who knows he is writing in a literary tradition. Using the
cliches of Wright and Baldwin, he arrives at a point of real honesty:
Europe is not a place for the Black man to be free, but just another
setup in which Mr. Jiveass Nigger himself can play out his stereotyped
role. Balling chicks in Copenhagen is not where the action is after all.
At the end of the novel George Washington (Mr. Jiveass), a fine crea–
tion, decides to come back to America in the squarest possible fashion:
George went and made a telephone call to the embassy and told
the receptionist that he had no money and wanted to get home
and the receptionist said that the embassy could only assist in hav–
ing him shipped back to America, the fare for which he'd have
to pay back later. That's cool, George said, that's very, very cool.
This from one of the most successful con men of all time.
The Life and
Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger,
as the title implies, is the history of a career,
a career that must come to an end. It would please Cecil Brown to
know that, like the "frail lady" he envisions in the epilogue to his story
turning his "dead cock over with the tip of her Scripto looking for
'meaning,''' I cannot quite say what jive is to save my liberal white
ass. It's the put on, the run around or
to
use a phrase more natural to
me - blarney. Indeed, the fibbing, free-wheeling George Washington is
very like the Playboy of the Western World. His stories range from a
short background of his childhood in the South told with wit and per–
fection of detail to a wildly funny interpretation of
Comus
("the whole
thing is really about the nigger marrying Miss Ann all over again"), to
the line he hands the ladies who are only too happy to believe in
him
as a Princeton graduate, soulful poet, ungrateful cocksman.
The sex in
Mr. Jiveass
is blown up, part of the fabulous in a world
scaled up
to
the highs of Coltrane and James Brown:
