Fugitive Fictions
Journal article by Aldon Nielsen; African American Review, Vol. 37, 2003
Journal Article Excerpt
Fugitive fictions. by Aldon Nielsen "You're too erudite." ... What that mean? (Amiri Baraka, Fiction 287) Ask Baraka. (Bob Perelman, Marginalization 150) There is no reason any intelligent man should have it easy in America--especially not any intelligent black man. (Amiri Baraka, Home 165) In the aftermath of the artistic and popular success of his play Dutchman, Amiri Baraka felt the full force of white America's still regnant "one-at-a-time" reputation-manufacturing apparatus trained upon him. The "Great White Way," as he puts it, began to flow, albeit briefly, in his direction; some other black artists resented his new opportunity to play the part of "that noble savage in the buttermilk"; and, as he was to recall decades later in his Autobiography, "it was as if the door to the American dream had just swung open, and despite accounts that I was wild and crazy, I could look directly inside and--there--money bags stacked up high as the eye could fly!" (Autobiography 276). While most readers are aware today of the fact that Baraka's response had been to close that door tightly, not entirely politely, few are fully aware of the particular inducements that Baraka refused in the wake of all that buttermilk and whiteness. The gathering of metaphors in Baraka's reminiscences of those days is an indication of just how far the American language has had to reach for adequate representations of a racialized predicament that no white writer has ever really felt, but Baraka's unpublished papers indicate just how much he denied himself materially as a result of his decision to guard the integrity of his artistic explorations. What was at stake was no less than Baraka's commitment to an aesthetics of innovation. Writing in Cricket in 1969, Baraka argued that "what is necessary is constant effort at achieving a total. At achieving something new" ("Notes" 46). What he was offered by America's commercial publishing establishment following the success of Dutchman (a work in which he had indeed achieved something new), and his subsequent media notoriety, was an opportunity to abandon that achievement, to achieve something not so new, in return for more money than he had ever before seen. Just how much it was worth to corporate publishing to divert Baraka into their stable is apparent from correspondence with his agent. It was worth $75,000 to at least one editor, a significant sum even in seventies-era currency. Among Baraka's unpublished papers that he has deposited at Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn collection are letters from William Targ, then Editor-in-Chief at Putnam's, to Ronald Hobbs, Baraka's literary agent at the time. The subject of the correspondence is a fiction manuscript in progress that Targ hoped to publish. At one point Targ suggests a possible advance against royalties in the area of $75,000, a clear indication that Targ expected to sell a substantial number of copies of a second novel by Baraka. On April 9, 1974, Targ wrote to Hobbs to ask how Baraka's work on the book was progressing. By September of that year the staff at Putnam's had read a draft of the novel; they did not like what they read. After reviewing Targ's earlier description of what he expected from this second novel, one has to wonder seriously if anyone at Putnam's had read The System of Dante's Hell, Baraka's first novel, published by Grove Press. What Putnam's hoped to get from the author of Dutchman, Black Magic, and Raise Race Rays Raze was a sort of black version of The Godfather, a book that Targ had a hand in publishing. Mario Puzo's wildly successful commercial novel comes up more than once in Targ's letters to Baraka's agent; perhaps visions of movie tie-ins danced in Targ's head in those post-Shaft years. Targ reminds Hobbs in one letter of a manuscript conference that must have been a study in mutual misapprehension. On April 3 he writes to Hobbs: |
You'll recall that I referred to The
Godfather in our talks, and that we all
agreed that the assigned novel should
try for the same kind of strong plotting,
and that we were in fact, striving
for a popular novel that would be a
successor to The Godfather. Such a book
must be structured in the traditional or
classic form, and written in what is
currently referred to as romantic realism,
although social realism might be a
more appropriate characterization....
At all costs scenario-notebook, surreal
and symbolic techniques should be
avoided. (Howard Papers, Box 3)
| It is difficult to imagine what sort ... |
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