390
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Power, a missile in the hand of the Revolution, "a concrete function,
an action." Jones himself sums
it
up best
in
lines Neal explicates ap–
provingly:
We .want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger-poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews .
..
(Bad poems might even be better than good ones, for such delicate
uses: "Another bad poem cracking / steel knuckles in a jewlady's
mouth.") Since such anti-Semitic ranting makes it impossible to
think about the poems as literature they need not concern us here,
any more than the action-poems they describe, except as a point on
the compass. The novelist Cecil Brown does belong to literature, but
since, like others of his generation, he is attracted to that point, his
work brings into focus the crucial conflict between art and com–
mitment.
The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger,
published in 1969,
is
not a very good novel by conventional standards. The plot is loose
and perfunctory; no character
is
quite as real as the hero, who seems
to be a somewhat fantasized version of the author; the occasional
leaps into big thinking fall flat. By the . same standards Ishmael
Reed's two books,
The Free-Lance Pallbearers
(1967) and
Yellow
Back Radio Broke-Down
(1969), which are far freer
in
form, don't
. qualify as anything at all conventionally; they are really antinovels,
and probably wouldn't have gotten published ten years earlier. In the
interim the sixties did much to undermine traditional standards,
and fostered some wild and inventive alternatives to the well-made
art novel, some merely self-indulgent, others genuinely rich in new
modes of perception and behavior. In that sense both Brown and
Reed owe more to the sixties than they do to other black writers,
just as Baldwin belonged intrinsically to the postwar period and
Wright to the thirties. Whatever they share of Wright'S aggressive
militance has little to do with his politics or his defining sensibility.
In a reminiscence, Saunders Redding describes how Wright always
burned with "zeal for a cause. ·... He never seemed to believe that
an attitude toward life that was lighted by the faintest ray of hedon–
ism could
be
quite real and legitimate.... He could only just tol–
erate ... the people to whom life is a joke, and not an ironic joke."
