Old Racist Books
I know black people who read only books by other blacks. In part they want to support the work of black writers — a laudable goal. Partly they enjoy seeing themselves, their experiences and concerns, reflected in what they read. (Who doesn’t?) And the choice is also partly about self-protection. There are enough casual displays of white racism, privilege, and entitlement in the real world, the thinking goes, so why risk encountering them while relaxing with a novel? These readers cast a wary eye on works by contemporary nonblack writers. Books by dead white authors? Forget it.
As a black reader, I understand that attitude. I just don’t share it. This statement will make me sound like — perhaps reveal me to be — the world’s original sap, but I look on books as representatives of the best that the world of human thought has to offer. Greedy fellow that I am, I want unfettered access to that thought. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where I couldn’t read Virginia Woolf or John Cheever, just as I wouldn’t want to live in one that was missing Zora Neale Hurston or Ishmael Reed.
Over the years my openness has been richly rewarded. From time to time, of course, my reward is to read a sentence like this one, from Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh: “With or without her nigger, Mrs Beste-Chewynde was a woman of vital importance.”
What am I supposed to do when I come across a passage like that? Do I rip the book in half at the spine and throw the pieces across the room, feeling that to continue reading would be an act of self-hatred? Do I sigh heavily and plod on, seeing the need to accept the book for what it is — a product of a different time? Do I recognize the separation between author and narrator and give the author the benefit of the (wafer-thin) doubt? Or do I remember my rule about separating any work of art from the artist? I love, for example, the music of Miles Davis, a man not exactly on the cutting edge of feminism. (Of course, his misogyny didn’t come through in his records.)
I’m interested in people’s thoughts on this. Not that I’m likely to change the way I read. I guess I look on the world of books as an adventure; adventure suggests unpredictability – and a certain amount of risk.
You always come up with the most thought-provoking posts…
Wafer-thin, ha. Your rule is fantastic, applicable even to politicians and garbage-collectors.
I’m much more of a wuss, a female white wuss. I’d have thrown it across the room, then picked it up and read it but with little in the way of enjoyment. Catch-22 was a real misogynistic trial to read in that way. I hardly appreciated it as a result. Kudos to you for finding things to enjoy in such trials.
I remember reading the first book of Asimov’s Foundation series and being absolutely baffled and incensed when I realized that the only mention of a woman in the ENTIRE 400+ pages was “and his wife.” The boyfriend who had called it a must-read laughed at how silly I was to hold that against what he thought was the greatest book ever written. Oh, but I do. Because clearly Asimov did not think that women mattered.
P.S. “Men of a Certain Age” just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?
“The best that the world of human thought has to offer”? How would I know what that was with my flaws and all? I fall in love with books because of the elegance of their sentences/stanzas and the manner in which they go about presenting what they are presenting. (I have been mistaken–flaws, I guess, run deep–having found books I thought worthy to be reread a waste of time upon a second reading and books that I didn’t initially like extraordinary later on.) Sometimes old thinking–racist, misogynistic, or whatever–can be grating. Pound’s “there is a rabble/ Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” simultaneously offends and impresses. I’m not going to allow the potential offence–I’m the child of such an early twentieth-century infant–force me to put aside Pound, who could write better than a good portion of his contemporaries. (Pound, by the way, never let his thinking get in the way of his admiring a talented writer.) I’d hate to live in a world in which say Faulkner was banished to libraries’ basements, while lesser stylists with more acceptable ideologies were presented as better reads. The difference between writing that one finds admirable for the acceptability of its thinking and great writing is that one has to accept the thought of the former kind to admire it while great writing remains admirable despite its ideological flaws or elements of thought that its readers may believe wrong. Do I have to be a right-wing Republican, or further to the right, to enjoy Palin’s memoir. Yes. Do I have to be a Puritan to love Milton, a Catholic to love Dante or Geoffrey Hill. No. Those books I didn’t finish a second time were usually books I admired at first because they validated something in my way of thinking at the time.
It is discouraging to find sexist, racist, antisemitic passages in books, especially if the author otherwise has been communicating wisdom, insight, compassion, etc., and especially if the reference, like the E. Waugh sentence Cliff mentions, is so unthinkingly dismissive it would seem, in this case, to banish the black reader from the book he or she is reading. It must be akin to the decades of classic movies in which the black actor appears only as the porter or maid. (Or, in present-day Hollywood, the roommate or best buddy of the white lead.) And I suppose the sort of masculine movies or books in which the sole female character is a wife or maybe a stripper providing a background thrill as the male actors huddle over their drinks. I think you can read books by blinkered genuises of the past (& present) while both appreciating the art and educating yourself as to the pernicious capacity of bigotry to make brilliant people somewhat stupid. I am interested in novelists who write in interesting ways about the stressful and magnetic interactions between different sorts of people in our multiracial world — like Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Richard Price — who else?
Thanks to all of you. Albert, you make an excellent, nay illuminating, point. I should have made clearer that by “thought” I don’t mean ideology, but merely ideas, and the mental capability — or quality of thinking — that allows one to express them beautifully. Eileen — I would add Baldwin to your list, just off the top of my head . . .