阿诺德•兰帕瑟德 | 史蒂文 • 特雷西的美国非裔文学研究评论（英文）
阿诺德•兰帕瑟德（Arnold Rampersad），美国斯坦福大学人文学科荣休教授、美国艺术与科学院院士， 曾任教于罗格斯大学、哥伦比亚大学、普林斯顿大学等，其研究领域为美国非裔文学及人 物传记，著有两卷本《兰斯顿 • 休斯生平》《拉尔夫 • 埃里森传记》《W•E•B• 杜波依斯的艺术与想象》等，曾入围或获得国家图书评论家奖、非小说类国家图书奖、普利策传记文 学奖、国家人文奖等。
内容摘要：本文考察了史蒂文 • 特雷西有关美国非裔文学研究论著，特别关注美国黑人音乐、美国文学、美国非裔文学和民间文学方面的具体主题。本文认为，特雷西在诸多问题上进 行了颇有价值的探索，涉及：布鲁斯音乐的非洲源头和美国非裔源头，民间歌曲和民间故 事及其文学功用，布鲁斯音乐的形式与结构要素及其在美国非裔文学中的运用，布鲁斯特 征的应用、修辞技巧和节奏、区域性或历时性变化等，以及在音乐和文学中发挥重要作用 的关键人物。本文还对特雷西关于兰斯顿 • 休斯、拉尔夫 • 埃里森、詹姆斯 • 鲍德温等非裔作家及 T•S• 艾略特、威廉 • 卡洛斯 • 威廉斯等重要白人作家的评论进行了审视。
关键词：民间文学；布鲁斯；爵士；学术；民族文化
A Review of Steven C. Tracy’s Scholarship on African American Literature
I believe that I first read Steven Tracy’s scholarly work in any significant way some decades ago when I was asked by a committee to evaluate his fine book (written well before we met one another) called Langston Hughes and the Blues. From the start, I was tremendously impressed by this study. As someone who had spent the better part of a decade researching the life of Langston Hughes, and then had written a two-volume biography of Hughes, I was extremely impressed by Tracy’s amazing attention to and command of facts and details concerning Hughes, as well as the intellectual and scholarly poise that he brought to researching and writing this book. Most important, perhaps, for me was the fact that although I had tried to address the crucial question of the role of the blues in Hughes’ large body of work, I found myself learning an immense amount from a book by a younger scholar extraordinarily equipped to deal with the matter of the full impact of the blues on Langston Hughes.
Other fine work followed from Steven Tracy. In 1993, he produced Going to Cincinnati: A History of the Blues in the Queen City. In part a tribute to a city that has meant so much to him at a personal level, this book also captures with remarkable specificity many of the dynamics at work, on a grander scale, in the set of scholarly investigations of the blues and certain important factors related to the blues tradition that became central to Tracy’s academic career. Even in writing about a single if celebrated city, Cincinnati, Tracy’s scholarly and critical probes have a larger, national, breadth and depth. Then, in 2015, after almost two decades of constant work, ever expanding in scope, Tracy published the magisterial volume Hot Music, Ragmentation and the Bluing of American Literature (University of Alabama Press). This remains an amazing achievement, the kind that surely establishes and defines excellence in a scholar-critic. As aware as I had been of Tracy’s remarkable powers in this respect, I must admit that I had awaited the volume with some trepidation. The scope of the challenge Tracy faced in writing it was truly considerable, the scholarly risks he faced great, the demands on his abilities so acute, that I had begun to wonder naturally if he could rise effectively to these stern challenges. It’s one thing to want to write a definitive book on the blues and American literature; it’s another thing altogether to succeed in doing do. Suffice it to say that Tracy met those challenges with splendid success. In the process, he demonstrated again and again that he possesses rare personal resources, including the highest levels of intellectual energy, expertise, and argumentative skill. He also showed how remarkable is his command not only of the blues but of the entire debate about the multiple ways in which this form, once ignored and even scorned, profoundly changed our understanding of what it means to be American, or to be modern, or to be quite simply a human being in the world.
We are also indebted to Professor Tracy for important edited volumes such as Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader (1999). Given how little so many of us know or understand about the historical culture of the blues, and our collective need to remedy this deficiency, this collection is invaluable. Also worthy of note and praise are Tracy’s contributions as an editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes (2001); his Historical Guide to Langston Hughes (2003); his Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison (2004); and his invaluable Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance (2011), on an important but neglected subject.
Thanks to this vital body of work (in conjunction with the efforts of other scholars drawn to the topic), the study of the role of the blues in the development of American literature and culture, once seen as a marginal if not specious preoccupation, is now understood to be of primary importance to our understanding of the national culture. Although others have contributed to our understanding of the subject, our debt as students of American literature and culture to Steven Tracy is truly significant. In fact, it is hard to think of any other literary academic who has developed a more astute and comprehensive knowledge of the blues—its personalities, its historical issues and events, its specific artefacts. Even harder is the task of finding another scholar of comparable achievement who has been more intimately immersed in blues culture not simply in a bookish sense but as a performer—a musical virtuoso possessing astonishing skill on the harmonica. Gracefully combining this wide range of abilities, Tracy has taught us better than almost anyone I can think of the lesson that traditional approaches to the study of American literature and culture are almost woefully insufficient in doing justice to the field. We miss much that is vital about America if we insist on exploring its nature without constant reference to the blues. We must begin by conceding the extent to which we have ignored, forgotten, suppressed, or rejected, at our peril, crucial elements of our past and our true nature. This new volume, in conjunction with his other books, shows clearly that Tracy is that rare American academic and intellectual who is capable of leading us—and is evidently doing so—to a fresh understanding of our literary tradition and national culture.
It seems fair to say that the notion of the blues as a major influence on American literature, and thus of considerable influence on all literature in English, and ultimately on modern world literature, has not been widely accepted. At its most benign level as a cultural and political problem, our unwillingness to accept the importance of the blues may be tied to our general resistance to the idea that any music has been truly influential in the production of literature. Yes, we accept the notion of music as a gentle, perhaps sultry influence here and there; no, not as a deeply rooted, determinative influence. The resistance hardens in America when the music is the blues, with its roots in Southern black communities and, ultimately, Africa. We see things somewhat differently when we look at music by itself. We can now admit the marked extent to which the blues, along with related forms, has influenced modern music. The existence of a binding link between black American music and what has emerged as quintessential American and even Western popular music is hardly contested. We can now grasp fairly easily the idea of the origins of such music in Africa. We see fairly readily the effects of slavery and racial segregation, with its accumulated nexus of geographical, economic, and cultural displacements, in blues-derived music. Why then have we resisted the idea that the same tradition of African-based music, crucially reshaped by more purely American circumstances, including the legacy of slavery, has left and continues to leave an indelible mark on our writers as well?
Tracy does not try to prove that the blues possesses the energy to make the world slow- dance to its rhythms. Instead, he makes the case for a bonded connection, concretized over the decades and generations, between the blues and a larger American culture that ostensibly rejected it in the deep past except on certain limited terms. To all intents and purposes, the dominant culture once seemed determined to repudiate Africa even as that culture surrendered to Africa in other ways in the slow but steady drift of history from one dominant form of reality to another. In making what we might call “progress” in understanding ourselves, the blues became more and more understood and valued. This is an American story even as it also applies to all of humanity. To learn or appreciate this story is to move beyond particularity toward the general, to move from the incidental to the generic, from the individual to the human condition as a whole. As Tracy himself puts it brilliantly, what we are considering “begins not in a static place, but in a nexus, a locus of energy, a place of violence, and turmoil, and confrontation, and sacrifice, and restlessness, and frustration, and accommodation, and perseverance, and creativity, and enrichment, and transcendence” (Write Me 1). This was a place where humanity was compromised by a base commerce in (black) human flesh, “a place where the highest ideals of this democracy—personal freedom; exaltation of the masses; the embracing of the spirit of the revolutionary moment and improvisatory celebration … are most sweetly and rhythmically exemplified.” We must go back to Africa to understand the force, “to examine who and what it was that existed there that was brought here to create that which was greater than the sum of its mechanical parts” (Write Me 1).
It is a central strength of Tracy’s overall argument—although it would be inaccurate to suggest that this fertile mind possesses only one argument—that Africa is never alien, and is always essential, to the genesis and impact of the blues. Even when he moves forward in time past the 1880s, when by general accounting we find evidence of the first signs of what we would recognize and perhaps even canonize as authentic blues, he is always determined to have us look back to Africa for our best understanding of the blues phenomenon. Eloquently Tracy writes of the “long musical passage from the first arrival of the slaves in this country [the country that became the United States] and the emergence of the blues, probably sometime in the last two decades of the nineteenth century” (Write Me 2). He reminds us of what emerged then in music that we can plausibly call “the Blues,” as in the work of singers such as Texas Alexander, Bessie Tucker, and Son House. He is scrupulous in identifying and praising the precursors of “modern” blues (what we might regard as “authentic” blues), and also in naming and praising the early students of a form barely recognized at the time, to be found in the work of collectors such as Gates Thomas and Howard Odum, and collector-musicians such as W.C. Handy, the self-styled “Father of the Blues.” In compressed but always clear—and thrilling— writing, Tracy alerts us to the development of the movement that would bear everlasting fruit, so to speak, starting with Mamie Smith’s historic recordings in 1920 of “Crazy Blues” and “It’s Right Here for You.”
Tracy makes a crucial distinction between “vaudeville” blues and the “folk blues” of preceding generations. The latter was largely untouched by those commercial forces that must be seen as an essential element in the story of the blues and its evolutions. Certainly these commercial forces would affect the form of the blues in the generations to come; indeed, their power would be inseparable from the development and impact of the form. He tips us off to the essential gender inflection of the story, with men such as Reece Du Pree, Papa Charlie Jackson, Ed Andrews, and the groundbreaking success in 1926 of Blind Lemon Jefferson leading the way. He reminds us at the same time about the extent to which the story of the blues is also richly inflected by feminine history, as seen in the parallel success of not only the aforementioned Mamie Smith but also other performers such as Victoria Spivey and Clara Smith, as well as the queenly Bessie Smith and the almost legendary—but very real—Ma Rainey. These competitively gendered and yet complementary and ultimately harmonizing traditions, as well as other factors such as regionalism and its fertilizing vitality, would only strengthen the evolving blues tradition. Ultimately these factors made it almost invulnerable to the dangers it encountered, from the predatory practices endemic to the entertainment industry, especially when complicated by racism, to the Puritanism that applied brakes to the authentic expression of a people forced to live, in general, outside of propriety. Religious fervor itself encouraged Puritanism, both as an aspect of spiritual life and as a necessary relief from the constrictions of middle-class values; but still the blues survived and flourished.
Tracy is excellent in emphasizing the existence of variety and complication where many, perhaps most, listeners might see mainly a rough harmony that overrides variety and complication, apart from the variety that comes naturally with individual, competing performers. In sum, he invites us to see a dynamic complexity that emerged from the simple if awful and awesome truth of enslavement, dispossession, legal injustice, the predatory application of the law, and the other elements that reflected the raw social forces that dominated the world in which “the people of the blues” lived. Properly cautious and judicious, and always a scholar and an intellectual, despite his legitimate and even wonderful credentials as a performer, Tracy coolly tells the story of this enchanted subversion of colonial and imperial power until the truth and beauty of the blues form could no longer be denied as a key shaper of the modern world in which we live. Again to quote him: “Blues performers can be seen as purveyors of both personal and communal, contemporary and historical, realities and visions. First person singular on the surface, first person plural down deep, multi-tensed in their echoes of the past, soundings of the present, and reverberations in the future. Unifiers” (Write Me 7).
Of black American writers, perhaps it is correct to say that three from what we might loosely call the “old school” stand out in their ongoing, ingrained homage to the Blues; they almost precociously if not indeed prophetically saw the Blues as crucial to a true understanding of the nature of reality as well as a genuine engagement, by way of their racial heritage, with the artistic process. These three were Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison. Of course other writers, such as Sterling Brown, tried to sound the depths of blues wisdom and blues creativity; and certain other writers, generally younger, such as James Baldwin, took a somewhat more oblique approach to essentially the same course of central creative action as African American writers. Of the three writers first mentioned, Hughes and Ellison command special attention, more so than Hurston in this particular context, in that the men wrote explicitly and at length about what the blues had meant to them. Ellison, even before Invisible Man appeared, was almost compulsively intellectual;understanding the blues was a cerebral challenge to which he rose as if on winged feet (of course, his greatest statement about the blues is to be found, in oblique form, in his Invisible Man.) Langston Hughes never presented himself as an intellectual, and often presented himself as the opposite; but the blues were so important to him that he was hardly ever more serious than when he talked about it as an instructive, directing power in his life. The blues provided him with a manifesto as well as a living. Hurston was different from Ellison and Hughes in this regard for reasons that I believe have little or nothing to do with gender. Almost theatrically proud to be a Southerner, and often theatrical in her self-presentation in general, she seems to have so thoroughly absorbed the expressive style of the blues that she appeared to be both beneath and beyond displays of intellectualism concerning the form. However, her masterpiece of a novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, absolutely reflects the most intimate truths of the blues.
In this book Tracy explores at length in various essays the work of all of these writers, and always in connection with their vested interest in the blues. Each presents to him an individual and distinct voice or pen invoking the myriad subtleties of the form, with Tracy moving from author to author with compelling authority. There is to be explored, too, the matter of the nature of fiction versus that of poetry. One important matter setting Ellison and Baldwin apart from writers such as Hughes and Sterling Brown is the fact that the former wrote fiction primarily, while Hughes and Brown, among others in a select circle, saw themselves as poets centrally. (Of course, both men also distinguished themselves in other forms—Hughes in fiction and drama, Brown in a remarkable set of critical essays.) The poets therefore engaged the blues largely on terms close to those terms that inspired the blues singers and song writers themselves. Hughes is crucial to Tracy’s pedagogy of the blues, his ability to teach us about the form in all its historical and stylistic valences. In the case of Hughes, he undertakes to provide “a survey of his experiences with blues and blues performers” that should make it “easier to establish” the poet’s “primary interests and concerns, giving us insight into the ideas he expressed about blues in his prose and the effects of his understanding of the blues tradition on his poetry” (Langston Hughes and the Blues 104). At one level, this seems to be an isolated, solitary, Hughes-centered, intellectual operation. However, in Tracy’s skilled hands what Hughes experienced and how its mediation by the blues affected his writing stand as a template for broader concerns. They involve especially the modes in which many writers engage the blues dynamic that suffuses their understanding of modernity and its often unfathomable complications. This observation applies equally to writers who are, or seem, largely unconscious of their almost inevitable connection to the blues dynamic.
In Hughes’ case, Tracy takes us back to the beginnings of the poet’s personal experience of the blues, especially as related in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea. There Hughes writes about growing up in small-town Lawrence, Kansas, but learning much about the blues when he venture across the state line, in fabled Kansas City, where he had family. “There were blind guitar players,” he wrote, “who would sing the blues on street corners. There were people plunking the blues on beat up old pianos.” In those days before radios and the juke box, Hughes observed, “I was very much attracted to the blues. I remember even now some of the blues verses that I used to hear … And so I, in my early beginnings at poetry writing, tried to weave the blues into my poetry” (Langston Hughes and the Blues 105). Hughes then mentions lyrics that Tracy, with his deep well of knowledge of the subject, is able to place for us in their specific historical contexts. Tracy then goes from there to give us a persuasive, invaluable lesson about the blues past. He tells us about the Kansas City blues, about what set it apart from other regional expressions of the blues, about who its major stars were and the major events that took place to inspire certain songs. In other words, Tracy anchors his discussion in specificity. Using Hughes’s own words he also manages to illuminate the connection between blues and jazz.
This connection was vital to Hughes but also to the genuine history of black American music. From the same vantage point Tracy also explores Hughes’s spare but vivid memory of Chicago in 1918 to again cast a bright light on the black musical scene there involving blues and jazz. And, of course, Tracy continues here to mine Hughes’s observations about the 1920s, highlighted by his books of poems The Weary Blues (1926) and, even more radically in its homage to the blues, Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). Tracy is also persuasive in exploring the general subject when Hughes spends crucial months in Paris working close to black American jazz musicians in a nightclub, Le Grand Duc; and also later, when Hughes accompanies Zora Neale Hurston for a ramble in the South. Tracy brings us up short when he emphasizes that it’s not enough to say that the blues influenced Hughes; we “must take into account the various types of blues he encountered” (Langston Hughes and the Blues 104). Always we have this emphasis on the concrete, the specific, the historical, the nuanced. This encompassing emphasis makes Tracy’s investigation of Hughes and the blues virtually definitive, despite the attention that others have paid to the subject.
Hardly anywhere, perhaps, is Tracy’s intellectual command more provocative and rewarding than in his probing of a subtle interior subject: the relationship in the blues between pain and laughter. He cites a letter from Hughes to Carl Van Vechten, when Van Vechten’s understanding of the blues was still embryonic, if not shallow. Hughes wrote: “The Blues always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the Spirituals, because their sadness is not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter, the absurd, incongruous laughter of sadness without even a god to appeal to” (Langston Hughes and the Blues 115). If this is not a superb statement about the bleakness of the modern condition, and the possibilities and impossibilities of relief from it, then it means nothing. Suffice it to say that, in the hands or minds of black Americans, the blues arrived at a vision of the world almost identical to the vision ascribed solemnly to white visionaries often hailed as prophets of the modern condition, as in the case of Eliot, Beckett, and Joyce. I feel moved here to quote—as Tracy himself does—the words in tribute to black music, notably the blues, that I think of as possibly the most powerful in all of Hughes’s prose writing: “Like the waves of the sea coming one after another, always one after another, like the earth moving around the sun, night, day, day-night, day-night, day-forever, so is the undertow of black music with its rhythm that never betrays you, its strength like the beat of the human heart, its humor, and its rooted power” (Langston Hughes and the Blues 116).
One of the more provocative aspects of Tracy’s writing is his learned asides, as when he lists blues performers singled out for praise by Hughes and then comments on each of them— and others who might have made the list—in ways that Hughes himself almost certainly could not have matched. Not only was Hughes’s knowledge of the music he loved neither systematic nor comprehensive; the poet of the blues had virtually no technical knowledge of music, could play no instrument, could not read music, or—apparently—carry a tune. These negatives make even more invaluable the sympathetic scrutinizing of Hughes’s “world of music” carried out here by Tracy, who realizes that the service Hughes performed for the blues allowed him some exemption from a colorless scrutiny of his competence in this or that aspect of the topic of his “scholarly” or “technical” grasp of music. Hughes not only loved the Blues and jazz but allowed it to settle so deeply into his consciousness and his writing that his lack of “technical” knowledge became a kind of liberation. Tracy could have snobbishly worked to “expose” Hughes; instead, he enlightens us and illuminates Hughes as Hughes richly deserved to be illuminated—with Tracy’s readers becoming the main beneficiary of his magnanimity as well as his scholarly integrity, knowledge, and sophistication.
One other area in which Tracy’s range of knowledge and feeling comes through is in his exploration of the difference between jazz and blues as shaping forces in the world of literature. His command of jazz is akin to his command of the blues in its thoroughness (or so it seems to me) and its appreciation of differences and complexities. He hears the differences between the “Chicago styles” of Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, and Bix Beiderbecke; the swinging of Ellington, Basie, Holiday, and Fitzgerald; the “big-band” developments of Gerald Wilson and the combination or collaborations of Miles Davis and Gil Evans; the bop of Parker, Gillespie, and Bud Powell; the “hard-bop” of Wes Montgomery, Clifford Brown, and Art Blakey; West-Coast” cool jazz of Davis, Chet Baker, and Lennie Tristano; and the subtle but crucial factors that separate soul jazz, free jazz, fusion, chamber jazz, and Third Stream, as well as avant-garde jazz, smooth jazz, and the non-traditional jazz associated with large, recent figures such as Wynton Marsalis and Marcus Roberts.
“These various styles,” Tracy tells us helpfully, were “developed and practiced in various locations in sometimes overlapping time periods” linked to factors such as “modernization, migratory patterns” and other factors (Langston Hughes and the Blues 89). These factors involved, for example, the changing habits and practices of the recording industry, “include some of the most important and influential music made in the twentieth [and, I might add, the twenty-first] century.” (“Jazz Literature” 850). The struggle is constant to retain the integrity of a commitment to factors such as “improvisation and individual expression in jazz, emphasizing the primacy of finding one’s own voice in a world that seeks to suppress it or deny it, or insist on uniform and undifferentiated expression” (“Jazz Literature” 850).
Skilled, as I have written, both in music and literary knowledge, Tracy shows an especially (to a fellow literary scholar) fine command when he seeks to identity the tradition, often overlooked, of African American writers who owe a special debt to jazz. Some of the writers spring easily to mind, while others spring less easily while being indebted all the same. They range from Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Claude McKay starting in the 1920s to more recent writers. However, Tracy is also interested, as well he should be, in white writers for whom jazz has been, in varying degrees, important to their literary creativity. To me, this is crucially important ground. The list includes Sandburg, Williams Carlos Williams, Fitzgerald, Van Vechten, Robert Lowell, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Welty, Creeley, and Rukeyser, to list some of Tracy’s more prominent names. (Additional names come readily to mind.) But Tracy poses questions of pressing importance. Perhaps the most important, with the answer being often the most elusive, is: “How does the reader tell when the jazz influence is present in a work of literature?” Sometimes the answer is obvious, as when the title of a piece, or prominent references within it, acknowledges its stylistic and thematic connections to jazz. Just as often the trail is more cleverly camouflaged. The reader then feels the need for a deeper knowledge of the music in order to feel the full impact of the piece of writing.
Then there is, famously so in the case of Ralph Ellison, for example, the “problem”— or the opportunity—presented by noting the structures of fresh or relatively fresh work that blends “the influence of jazz with other literary elements as well” (“Jazz Literature” 852). A writer such as Ellison reveled in such blending, but it probably exists widely, almost willy- nilly, as well-read writers compose their poems or stories or even their dramas while creating impulsively out of the heterodox world they have cultivated (some would say colonized— but who cares?) as their own forty acres of fertile ground. Tracy wisely warns us about how “difficult” it can be “to pin down in concrete terms the variety of subtle ways that material from the oral tradition influences the written tradition, especially if the material is not verbal.” It is one thing to search for or to recognize correspondences between songs and literature; it is another, more difficult thing, to establish relationships when the music is purely instrumental. That’s when, one might say, it is crucial to have someone like Tracy, whose feet are firmly planted in both camps, to guide us as we try to understand better the elements that move us to a finer understanding of the complex world we live in.
We have seen already how important Langston Hughes is to the literary and cultural challenges illuminated here by Tracy; but what has been explored to this point really doesn’t do full justice to the attention Tracy pays to this crucially important writer who lived and practiced so consistently in the world of black music, whether that music was the blues, gospel, or jazz. In one of his essays here, Tracy begins with an apparently casual observation that is anything but casual in its implications: “In all areas of life it can sometimes be difficult to react appropriately to something we don’t understand, academic not excepted.” He might have written “academic in particular,” because the mixture of tradition, snobbery, and a just regard for authority and the past often leads us into the slowly but surely concretizing muck that often passes for our guiding standards and values. Tracy goes on, wisely: “The productions of minority cultures have often been looked at as aberrations, lacking the intelligence, power, and validity necessary to render them worthy of comparison to the productions of ‘cultured’ Americans.” In some respects, his entire volume is dedicated to exploring the implications of these observations and warnings.
He is particular astute, I believe, in looking at the example of white American writers who experienced something like the trauma of minority or black writers as they sought to bring forward their evolving—sometimes near-revolutionary—ideas about where they felt compelled to go as writers because of their individual response to American reality. From the earlier, foundational period of our national writing, Tracy lists among the notable white American writers attracted to the figure of the black American, and thus what we would call the question of race, individuals such as Cotton Mather, Samuel Sewell, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Royall Tyler, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. To this list one must add the figure of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel that many people (including, apparently, Abraham Lincoln) believed to started (or at least helped to start) the Civil War. It did so by galvanizing the abolitionist cause and anchoring a deep revulsion against slavery in the American liberal consciousness. Among their black counterparts he mentions Phillis Wheatley, the former slave who became the second American woman to publish a volume of verse; the autobiographer Olaudah Equiano; the poet (and slave) George Moses Horton; the revolutionary David Walker; the intellectual Martin Delany; and another important poet, James Monroe Whitfield. Of course, Frederick Douglass belongs here. These were, in a literary sense, all precursors of Mark Twain, whose Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, despite its controversial standing in the eyes of many modern readers, was a watershed event not only in the emergence of the black American subject but in the empowering of dialect as the premier American literary medium.
Tracy situates himself carefully in two important ways. The first is his recognition that in much of the earlier writing about “the Negro,” the slave was “an object, a problem, and the discussion was in the language of the educated European, not the language of the field hand” (“Hughes in Our Time” 8-9). Secondly, he wisely defends white authors such as Whitman, Stowe, and Mark Twain against unjust and reductive criticism of their approach to the black subject in their creative writings. “Whatever shortcomings we see in Stowe’s work … from the perspective of the present day” (“Hughes in Our Time” 8-9), he argues persuasively (bracketing Whitman and Mark Twain with Stowe in this regard), we need to see that she was “a progressive social activist who used the contemporary conventions of the sentimental and gothic novels to fashion a sociopolitical affront to the slavery status quo.” Crucially, “we can see in this an early clarion call that Hughes was to continue to follow in his work in the Jim Crow and civil rights eras” (“Hughes in Our Time” 8-9).
More important in some respects than the ideological connections between Hughes and sympathetic earlier writers are the ways in which these connections and these artists, in the course of their sociopolitical enthusiasms, directed Hughes and later writers in their creative careers. One line was in his and their deep respect for folklore. Quite properly and usefully, at this point Tracy links Hurston with Hughes in their shared reverence for the key lessons taught by black mass culture, especially in the South. Hughes “drew from its wisdom, passion, directness, energy, and creativity a profoundly rooted art of consummate artistic and sociopolitical importance.” (“Hughes in Our Time” 10-11). Tracy speaks of Hurston’s folktales in her Mules and Men (1935), where “one encounters tales that accomplish a variety of valuable functions in terms of ordering, disordering, and reordering the community and the world” (“Hughes in Our Time” 10-11). One crucial task for the slave or the former slave pinned down by post-slavery racism in its various forms was “to learn the master’s language but not become enslaved by it.” (“Hughes in Our Time” 10-11). Hughes, like Hurston and, in a sense after them, Ellison, recognized how much depended on this distinction.
Tracy is also incisive in pointing out some of the costs, in terms of acceptance and prestige, of these and kindred artists’ commitment to making their work speak to and for “a humanity and a sense of freedom and justice” (“Hughes in Our Time” 13) that Hughes, for one, sought to make an integral part of his vision of himself as an artist in the twentieth century. Tracy smartly points out certain almost startling similarities in the sets of travails these writers endured. He points to the bitterness and hostility that both Whitman and Hughes faced early in their publishing careers, when they willfully shocked many people. Like Stowe, Hughes was roundly castigated and even crudely insulted for identifying his art with the will of the masses of black people. Acceptance and praise came only eventually, after innovative art based paradoxically on ancestral foundations had worn down its bourgeois enemies. In appropriately colorful terms, Tracy links Hughes to Whitman in their common, soaring faith in the “common people”: “Hughes made himself part of the American stew and began swapping juices brought to a boil by the African American folk, sociopolitical, and literary traditions with the other variegated elements of the American [literary] tradition” (“Hughes in Our Time” 13).
One of the most eloquent and yet incisive places in this invaluable volume come when Tracy moves from his discussion of Hughes and the “common people” to Hughes and the charge of “excessive simplicity” that dogged—and continues to dog—Hughes’s reputation as a writer. Astutely Tracy looks at the similarity between Hughes’s experience and that of certain notable, groundbreaking American writers—the famously laconic Hemingway, for example (who suggested, as is well known, that “all of American literature” flows from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn); and William Carlos Williams, who dared to challenge what Tracy calls “the ascendant [T.S.] Eliotic poetic style” (“Hughes in Our Time” 13), with its reverence for impacted, learned, literary allusions, often confoundingly cloaked. Because of his challenge Williams “paid the outsider price for years” until time revealed his “simple” excellence. Tracy also highlights here the infamous clash between James Baldwin and Hughes that was scandalously staged by Baldwin in his scathing review of Hughes’s Selected Poems in 1959. This review opens with Baldwin’s apparently panegyric acknowledgement of Hughes’s great talent as a poet, but with the praise snuffed before the sentence ends by Baldwin’s expression of abiding regret at how little Hughes had done with this talent.
Invoking at some length Hughes’s comic but also deadly serious Jesse B. Semple, or “Simple” (the hero of the newspaper column he published for some twenty years), when Simple celebrates Ma Rainey’s blues singing in the course of a Simple story named “Shadow of the Blues,” Tracy links Simple, who stands for the honestly acculturated “common” black man, to the incomparable Rainey. “She is in the air Simple breathes,” Tracy writes brilliantly, “in the universe of sounds Simple habitually hears. Simple’s formula for solving race relations—jazz, the medium; jive, the language; and jam, the collective action—is a marvelous social and cultural affirmation, beautiful in its naturalness and directness.” (“Simple’s Great African American Joke” 17).
Also excellent, and exploring territory not often traveled, is Tracy’s essay “Langston Hughes: Poetry, Blues, and Gospel—Somewhere to Stand.” Tracy takes its title from an exhilarating if enigmatic statement by the famed Greek mathematician Archimedes: “Give me somewhere to stand and I will move the earth” (The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence 51). Tracy sees Hughes as a man who “sought to change the way we looked not only at art and African Americans, but also at the world” (“Langston Hughes: Poetry, Blues, and Gospel” 51). His aim was the promotion of “emotional and intellectual freedom, and, above all, life- and love-affirming—self-affirming” (“Langston Hughes: Poetry, Blues, and Gospel” 51). Hughes mounted this quiet campaign on a proper appreciation of blues, gospel, and jazz, which might stand in, as a trio, for sensuality, religion, and art (not to exhaust the possibilities of this trio in the black American and African world). Tracy dares to speak the truth. Hughes was not necessarily the finest historian or the most subtle interpreter of the blues, gospel, jazz, or black religion. What Hughes did instead was to bring together the essential element of these sectors, separate and yet unified, through the alchemy of literary art. The result was a body of work that speaks volumes about and to the world—a body that Tracy abundantly and finely examines in essay after essay here.
See, for example, the essay called simply “The blues novel.” This is, I would suggest, almost as subtle a reading of this elusive topic as one could hope for. It should be seen in this way not least of all because, as Tracy himself points out, the phrase “blues novel” is incongruous—“so incongruous,” he writes, “as to approach the level of oxymoron.” He also explores the challenging subsidiary question as to “whether there is a differentiation between a blues novel and a jazz novel.” (He quickly reminds us, however, that “there can be an overlap between the two.”) (Tracy, “The Blues Novel” 127). Here, seeking illuminating texts, he chooses to look at Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930), and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), as well as other texts, including one each by Richard Wright and William Attaway. Naturally he makes reference to Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and Alice Walker, notably in The Color Purple, as well as to less familiar texts that do not escape the eyes of someone as invested in the blues as Tracy is. I can think of few short essays that treat this fascinating topic with such sweep (“The Blues Novel” 127-138).
This volume is nothing if not expansive. It includes an invaluable look—or some invaluable looks—at Sterling Brown, the poet and influential, charismatic Howard University professor of English who truly valued the blues although it was emphatically not the normal music played in the ivied tower Brown inhabited at Howard University. Starting virtually in the Harlem Renaissance, Brown wrote powerfully under its influence until he died after a long life. Probing the matter of Brown’s limited readership among blacks as well as whites, Tracy makes important points about the relationship between literary creativity in the African American world and matters such as the difficulties of publication, literary professionalism, and the roles of academic learning and the public intellectual. Other essays here on Brown also yield wisdom. I was thrilled to find here and read Tracy’s “W.B. Yeats and Sterling Brown, the Irish and New Negro Renaissances, and the Vernacular Performer.” (Tracy, The Yeats Journal of Korea). This relatively small essay is a gem that Illuminates a subject mentioned fairly often but only in swift passing—the elements shared by the Irish Renaissance, in which the renowned Yeats figured prominently, on the one hand, and the “New Negro” or Harlem Renaissance, which brought forth such a wealth of African American talent, on the other.
Even more invaluable, perhaps, in the rarity of its focus is Tracy’s “William Carlos Williams and Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms.” Central here is the manifesto, written in 1929, that Williams wrote to encourage and help guide and define Charles Henri Ford’s magazine Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms. The links between the acclaimed Williams and major elements of African American cultural values have been noted in passing; but Tracy, with his typical diligence and yearning for specificity, is able to raise the general level of discussion and understanding to embrace not only poetry and the blues but the characteristics of American and even European modernism as seen in the work of artists, musicians, and others interpreters of the historic movement. Tracy’s expertise in a variety of cultural areas allows him to track not only Williams in his tangled involvement with African American art and culture but figures such as George Antheil and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other important figures who also helped to redefine American “high” culture starting in the 1920s in particular.
For students, scholars, and other readers eager to be invited to a deeper historical understanding of how the blues functioned in that transitional, revelatory period in our history, when it was first identified and analyzed by skilled collectors, it is a special treat to read Tracy’s essay on the pioneering folklorist and sociologist Howard W. Odum. Experts have hailed Odum as probably the leading force among such collectors and commentators early in the 20th century. He survived an early misstep in his career, when he employed racist language typical of the age, but he redeemed himself sufficiently to be hailed by no less a critic than Sterling Brown as “a poetic craftsman as well as a social observer” (Rainbow Round My Shoulder xiv). Central to the essay is an extended analysis and evaluation of Odum’s trilogy of novels, often called the “Black Ulysses” trilogy, starting with Rainbow Round My Shoulder: The Blue Trail of Black Ulysses. Tracy’s essay here served as a formal introduction to an edition of Rainbow Round My Shoulder. This edition was designed in part to try to rescue Odum from the published disdain of Robert Hemenway, the leading biographer of Zora Neale Hurston. However, it set the stage for one of Tracy’s most astute essays, a piece that is something of an education in American and African American folklore, the blues, the landmark resistant writings of the 1920s and earlier penned by black observers such as Du Bois, Garvey, and Ida B. Wells, the modernism of artists such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Hughes, and the rich, complex texture of blues cultures over which Tracy stands as authoritative. The essay is superb, I believe, in every way. The discography presented in three scholarly notes that conclude the essay demonstrates once again the sterling qualities that Tracy has brought to his approach to American and African American literature, culture, and music.
This high, invaluable quality, unsurpassed in my opinion by any other primarily literary scholar working in the linked American and African American world of creative writing, continues in Tracy’s essay “A Wright to Sing the Blues: King Joe’s Punch,” which is primarily about Richard Wright, the blues, and literature. Also superb is the essay “Beauty is in the Ear of the Beholder: Eliot, Armstrong, and Ellison. Beginning with an emphasis on the composer Antonin Dvorak in his memorable and fruitful American sojourn, Tracy assesses the composer’s example and his proposed solutions to the central issue of American musical creativity and inventiveness. Tracy probes Dvorak’s attempt to reorganize the American understanding of “tradition and the individual talent,” a dilemma perhaps most famously explored in Western intellectual history by T.S. Eliot. Tracy then shifts to the relationship between Eliot and Ralph Ellison, and especially that between The Waste Land of 1922 and Invisible Man in 1952. He offers a bright, sustained analysis of Louis Armstrong and his own exposure to, and explorations of, the world of classical music, albeit “classical” music of the frothy kind. Light or heavy, this music was absorbed by Armstrong (influenced by his musician wife Lil Hardin) into his evolving but revolutionary musical career. Ellison took enormous comfort in Armstrong’s borrowings and legitimate thefts—in the widely acknowledged sense that all artists, great or not, both borrow and steal. This opened the way for his own employment of culturally “forbidden” elements, allusions, and themes, when he composed Invisible Man. Again, Tracy’s fusions of seemingly disparate cultural material attest to his almost unique command of an angle of vision on African American and American literature and culture.
In some respects, Ellison and Armstrong, in addition to other figures such as Langston Hughes, bring out the very best in Tracy as an intellectual, scholar, and visionary. (A visionary he surely is.) His essay “A Delicate Ear, a Retentive Memory, and the Power to Weld the Fragments” (which is primarily about Ellison) is, quite frankly, almost certainly beyond the ability of virtually all other scholar-critics in the field. Linking Antonin Dvorak (again) to Ellison, whose complex success is anchored forever in the annals of American and African American literature and culture by his novel Invisible Man and his essay collection Shadow and Act, Tracy brilliant expands our understanding of the national culture itself.
This collection of his “fugitive” essays demonstrates the acute sharpness of his intelligence, his almost incomparable (certainly among scholars of American and African American culture) store of hard knowledge of music and musical productions, his fine training in American literature, and our great good fortune in having him as a resource as we move forward with the long, difficult, and often dangerous business of trying to understand ourselves, what we stand for, and the increasingly enigmatic world in which we move.
END
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