Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  From this arrangement, the African learns parody, first in earnest, for self-preservation, then in loathing.

  From this arrangement, the white man learns parody, first in loathing, then in earnest.

  From this point in American history, the African takes over the narrative; the Indian remains the odd man out, sticks to his reserve, embitters himself, while the white man makes him up. The Indian, as much a puritan as any Puritan, as regards identity, never gets a handle on parody or, indeed, on self-parody.

  After the Civil War, white Southerners felt themselves bereft. Their way of life was judged by their victors to have been an abomination. After black emancipation, whites, in their loneliness, invented happy Negroes, a happy Babylon of singing and dancing. They invented the American musical. These were the minstrel shows.

  It is conventional in America now to view the minstrel shows as only mockery—blackened faces and transvestism (white men also played black women in minstrel shows). The greater mockery was in daring to attribute nostalgia for captivity to black folk. The nostalgia was entirely a white invention, all that mammy stuff, uncle stuff; familial parody. The most famous purveyor of white “ethiopian airs,” as minstrel songs were called, was Stephen Foster. Most of his songs were written in Pennsylvania; Foster hadn’t much knowledge of the South and was forever consulting gazetteers for the names of rivers. Foster’s songs masqueraded as songs overheard on an old plantation. But they were pathetic love songs sung by white people to black people in the guise of mockery.

  Black people, of course, have steadfastly refused all pathetic suits. I never loved you. You are deluded.

  By the 1920s, Al Jolson broke the immigrant son’s silence—and he did so in blackface. Here again we gather the puritan theme of America to the parodist’s theme: Jolson’s father was a cantor in a synagogue who disapproved of theater-singing as inappropriate to a Jew. The only way for a young Jewish man to sing from his heart on a stage, to be authentic to his private yearning, was to do so in blackface—a protective masquerade, also an emulation of the supposed freedom of black people.

  Shortly after Al Jolson broke the sound barrier, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s creation of Tarzan—in print, comics, and later on the screen—moved many American boys toward the game of naked Africans or “natives.” Tarzan is not an African, but a peer of the realm, an accidental Indian, an inauthentic savage, an innate gentleman, a natural puritan, an ecologist. (It is a very confusing parable.) But the main point taken by American boys is that, while Tarzan is white, he finds his meaning in darkest Africa.

  Only decades after Jolson and Tarzan, Norman Mailer wrote an intriguing essay, “The White Negro,” which comes very close to telling the truth about greasepaint and footlights and finding the company of one’s desire. The white hipster went uptown, as to wilderness, to listen to jazz in the forbidden playhouse. A generation later, if white Americans were still not willing to admit to an envy of blacks, they were at least willing to applaud Elvis Presley for daring to play B. B. King. Whites were putting on black culture and calling it their own.

  Soon, an unrepentant charmer named Cassius Clay introduced a new game to the American playground: black brag gadocio. I’m the greatest! Clay spoke in jingle rhymes and he was all that he said he was, an authentic American hero. Even after Cassius Clay renamed himself Muhammad Ali, his es pousal of Islam—the puritan impulse—did not seem at odds with the playfulness of his self-promotion or his occupation, which was of the playhouse.

  In Ali, did America finally have an integrated, playful puritan? Perhaps. But puritanism not only weathered the dawning era of blackface (everyone in the sixties wanted to claim the black analogy), puritanism defined the era: wire-rimmed glasses, unshaved legs, bra burnings, campus witch trials, the rejection of “role-playing” and the rejection of authority, tradition—the university president as British sovereign. And don’t forget the smugness and sourness; the humorlessness, literalness, that characterized the Native American at a school like Stanford, for example, or the Chicano or the black—the insistence on delineating what was offensive, or, better, oppressive or, better, inauthentic.

  At a time when the Stanford Dollies were beginning to be instructed in sexual victimization, at a time when white football players were slapping hands in the end zone in imitation of Cab Calloway, a Yurok Indian named Timm Williams would be banned from playing the role of Indian at Stanford. That’s the puritan truth. And reasons for the ban were the purest puritan: Native American students on the Stanford campus, and Native Americans who were not of the campus, objected to the heroic portrayal of the Indian as demeaning to them. A rejection of pageantry as inauthentic. I quote from a Stanford University News Service release (10-11-79):The term Indians was first used by sportswriters, then adopted by students before [the] Big Game in 1930. It was officially dropped following quiet discussions with Native American students in 1972, when the student senate also voted against its continued use.

  In 1972 [Stanford President] Lyman told alumni his talks with American Indian students at Stanford had indicated that “if there is any effect whatever from [use of] the heroic Indian symbol, it is to romanticize and perpetuate an illusion about the American Indian.

  “The American Indian students don’t want today’s problems to be concealed in what they regard as always a somewhat commercialized and always somewhat fake representation even of the Indian tradition,” Lyman continued.

  “They talk about religious dances [at sports events] being profane, they talk about the impact it has upon them to see pseudo-Indian motifs worked into pompon girls’ costumes, and so on.”

  (Nor would Timm Williams lend his headdress—as if that were some profanation of the role.)

  In 1971, my sister returned from Paris. She had found that her look—la mexicaine—played very well in Paris and she played Paris very well. She returned with long Audrey Hepburn coats and short, very short, skirts. And her hair, always plentiful and lustrous, was wildly teased and tossed. She went to Harvard Business School, where she evolved a playful theory of haute couture as theatrical parody of the mundane. She filled my head with big ideas. She established in my mind that the only point to becoming an intellectual was to become a public intellectual. She established in my mind that a public intellectual should be glamorous: Stop dressing like a graduate student. Then she married a judge and gave birth to theatrical children.

  In 1972, I went to London to study. I did become, for a time, Rodriguez of the Reading Room. I balanced many a teacup on my knee. I met people. I knew people. Not well. Not well at all. I went to plays, that was my lonely passion and my parish. On a rainy night in March, a Thursday night, I would take up my umbrella and walk out to watch Gielgud illuminate a half-empty theater. I saw everything and everyone. I sat in the cheap seats, young enough to hear every word of the tenuous conversation of the time—they were broken conversations. Blocked. If Gielgud dried up, it didn’t matter, for the conversation was characterized by stammer. The china was chipped, the carpet frayed, and the stage lighting pale—“an afternoon in early spring.” A generation was flickering, dying. I was growing younger, heedless.

  In October 1979, at fifty-six years of age, Prince Lightfoot attempted a Stanford comeback, in gangster fashion, “accompanied by several men wearing T-shirts,” and of a “threatening demeanor” (Stanford Daily, 10-8-79, and ff.):Timm Williams returned to the Farm Saturday, receiving a mixed response of cheers and boos from the seventy thousand fans. . . . Williams was appearing as . . . Chief Lightfoot for the first time in seven years. There are conflicting reports on how Williams, who had no pass, was allowed on the field. . . . He waved to the crowd and then slowly circled the track, accompanied by men who acted as cheerleaders by waving their arms to solicit applause.

  As he paraded in front of the student section . . . Williams received both boos and cheers.

  Although band members said they had been told to “just ignore” Williams, they included a native American fanfare in their post
-game show. Williams began dancing, but stopped when persons in the stand began throwing ice and trash.

  The final theatrical question in America concerns old age (beginning with middle age): how to behave “appropriately,” dress appropriately, assume a role that feels inauthentic and for which one is never emotionally prepared (one has seen others take the role so admirably). Remember, the mermaid no longer sings for you, old sport, nor does the wolf whistle. Oh, what the hell. That will have to do. Nobody’s going to be looking at me anyway.

  Two years ago, I am late for a dinner in London. Ten-thirty and the after-theater crowd is barking happily, yelping yuppily throughout this bright, meaty restaurant. Ooops. My party has arrived and is already seated. Yes, I see them. Pardon me. Yes, yes, wavey, wavey. I’m coming.

  Suddenly over a shoulder, I catch a glimpse of him. A voice and a glow from his table announce his presence, as do busers who hover. His arm is draped around the back of a woman in gray. He turns, a three-quarter profile, and as he turns, his eyes catch mine. They are still madly blue.

  On June 15, 1816, William Hazlitt addressed readers of the London Examiner concerning the rumored return to the stage of the famous Mrs. Siddons:Players should be immortal, if their own wishes or ours should make them so; but they are not. They not only die like other people, but like other people, they cease to be young and are no longer themselves, even while living. Their health, strength, beauty, voice, fail them; nor can they, without these advantages, perform the same feats, or command the same applause that they did when possessed of them. It is a common lot: Players are only not exempt from it.

  T. E. Lawrence portrayed himself heedlessly—went native—betrayed his tribe, pursued a private sense of authenticity. The English could never see it. What did he think he was doing, traipsing around dressed like that, so chummy with the Toffees? The bugger.

  But the Arabs saw. If an Arabian could be thus portrayed, then there must be, then there would be an Arabia.

  Before he took the role of Lawrence, Peter O’Toole consented to a producer’s suggestion he change his nose. Whatever his Irish nose had been was replaced by an English nose, which, of course, he kept; which is how we recognize him—for Lawrence portrayed him authentically.

  When Prince Lightfoot stepped upon the field of Stanford Stadium to thunderous applause he was the distillation of an Indian, the Mohawk gas, the nickel sort, the Edward Curtis, the Burt Lancaster. His face painted, his arms fringed, his breast-plate rattling, he drew majesty; tom-toms intoned the mystery of his glance. But the puritan Indians of Stanford would not approve, in their Monday hearts, a musical-comedy Indian. Puritans distrust the efficacy of art.

  Harry Demar “Timm” Williams, [who] personified Stanford’s Indian mascot from 1951 until it was abolished in 1972, died Sunday, March 6th, when his compact car was hit broadside at an intersection in Crescent City, Calif. He was 64.

  . . . His last official appearance as the Indian was at the 1972 Rose Bowl, where he was carried off the field triumphantly . . . [Stanford University News Service 3-7-88].

  Do not for a moment, darling, imagine I propose Timm Williams’s story as a sad story. His is a triumphant story. And if I seem to have fashioned from its shadow, from the privacy he wore, from all I cannot know, a parable for my own life, do not, for a moment, think you know what an Indian is. You are idle, shallow creatures. And we are not of your element.

  Someone once described to me seeing a matinee of The King and I in New York. At the intermission, outside the theater, as my informant was pacing around with his Playbill scrolled in his hand, he heard a sound like sweeping, like pavement being swept. He glanced down into the dark stairwell at the side of the theater and there he saw the star of the play, Gertrude Lawrence, in her second-act ball gown (dragging upon the pavement)—the most famous ball gown in theatrical history; the ball gown that will shortly be whipped through the real air of the stage during the “Shall We Dance?” polka, a moment of theater so purely accidental, so rehearsed, so wonderful that an encore is now standard in any production.

  Gertrude Lawrence is wearing her Titian-colored wig. A diamond bracelet glitters upon her wrist. She is smoking as she paces back and forth. Within three months she will be dead. She will be buried in this ball gown. From which we can take it—if we take nothing else—that roles are to be taken seriously, not only by those of us who listen in the dark, but also by those transfigured personalities who move, for a time, in the light.

  Chapter Four

  POOR RICHARD

  THERE WAS NOTHING HEROIC ABOUT THE FIGURE OF BENJAMIN Franklin, bespectacled, portly, subtle, radical, dangerous.

  In grammar school—and as new to American history as to the American tongue—I nevertheless puzzled through several junior biographies of Franklin because young Ben’s ambition magnified my own. I kept lists in those years of the books I read. I recognized the yearning to escape the limits of family—“a strong inclination for the sea”—as well as some more vertical yearning: a boy becomes a man by gaining wisdom; each book a rung therefore; each rung a classical tag. I weighed the shame of the sordid candle shop where Franklin was forced to work for his father against the optimism of old New England. Ben greeted each new-minted morning with the self-improving question: What good shall I do this day?

  The only other federal figure who interested me as much as Benjamin Franklin was Richard Milhous Nixon. I did not admire Nixon, his name a negation. I recognized him. The part of my formation that was not tutored by Franklin—Franklin recommending the society of right-minded men—was fascinated by Nixon, his knock-kneed stealth.

  Because of Franklin, I went in my black suit to improving lectures where I took notes. One night an address by Eleanor Roosevelt. Another week a diplomat in sunglasses from New Delhi. I purchased tickets to touring Broadway plays—they used to call them “bus and truck companies,” the kind that came to Sacramento—ennobling plays like A Man for All Seasons and Sunrise at Campobello. I loved them because they were improving. My black suit was the uniform of self-improvement, of the seminarian, the apprentice, the Machiavel. I wore mine from eighth grade to college—taken in, let down. My black suit made me invisible and that was its point. Respectably shabby, and that was its point. I could go to the opera. I could go to New York.

  But I would never wear the black suit as patrician George Washington wore a black suit, or John Kennedy for that matter. I wore a black suit as Nixon wore a black suit. As Malcolm X wore his. It was the putting on of sweat rings and dried lips and bright eyes, the black suit. Unease, yes, but also optimism. Nothing so dries out a young man’s skin as the black suit. It never fits. Mine didn’t. It wasn’t supposed to fit, the kind of suit I had, the acolyte’s suit. It was appropriate. There is nothing so attractive to the world as an ardent young man in an ill-fitting suit. Whereas a young man in a well-fitting suit has joined . . . something.

  Because of Nixon, on Monday nights I’d tell my parents I was going to Boy Scout meetings, and I went instead, alone and in my Boy Scout uniform, to the smoke-filled, cigar-scented pro wrestling matches at the Memorial Auditorium. There I joined Okie women in flannel shirts and teenaged Mexican farmworkers, and several hundred other spectators who knew the game in America was rigged against them.

  In the light of day, at my Catholic high school, it was Kennedy versus Nixon. It was Kennedy, of course. Just so, to earn extra credit (a kind of Nixonian stealth), and to attract the notice of my English teacher (another), I wrote a book report on Profiles in Courage, which must be a very good book because it won a Pulitzer Prize. The book did not interest me.

  I admired a darker grain. Reading Nixon was a private pleasure whereby I sought another league. I was first at my public library to check out Six Crises. I read with shrill pleasure Nixon’s recollection of the call to boyish ambition: “Only one train a day went through the town of Yorba Linda (population then of less than 300) and hearing its whistle as it slowed down at the crossing never failed to start me to daydre
aming about the places I would visit when I grew up.”

  In those years, I hadn’t learned to cover my ambition by feigning detachment. At an all-boys’ high school, naked ambition was certainly acceptable on the playing field, where players could dote with unironic concentration on “Coach”—Coach’s Adam’s apple, Coach’s gold fillings, Coach’s wedding ring, the tassel of corn silk at Coach’s throat; all the mysteries. Fawning ambition so plainly expressed in the classroom was quite another matter. It wasn’t that I got A’s; other boys got A’s. It was that I wanted my A’s so badly and sought them so blatantly—that’s what everyone saw.

  Nixon: “I won my share of scholarships, and of speaking and debating prizes in school, not because I was smarter but because I worked longer and harder than some of my more gifted colleagues.”

  Courtiers of the Italian Renaissance extolled a locution of insouciance they named sprezzatura, which translates to nonchalance. The young Florentine was schooled to study the art of the courtier so well, so habitually, as to transform his own demeanor to an artless grace. There was to be no seam to seeming; no nurture to naturalness. Such an idea should repel Americans. American myth celebrates becoming—the awkward journey of effort and pluck. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence, the coal miner’s son, mocks Benjamin Franklin. Though Lawrence came from the working class, he remained an Englishman and it was necessary for him to forget the reason why Americans rebelled against the fatherland. Lawrence mocks Franklin’s notion of a self-invented man—“ The ideal man! And which is he, if you please?”—because Lawrence cannot enlarge upon the daunting, often comic task of self-invention. Free of the father, what is the American to do but imagine himself in the future tense? What could Ben grow up to become except an inventor? What figure could convey him but an aphorism?