The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (36 page)

Steve worked in a bookstore, Orientalia, along with Cunningham and Cage's and the Living Theater's lighting designer, Nicky Czernovitch, whom I had now got to know going in and out of Orientalia, staring in awe at the thousands of titles relating to Eastern thought. Zen had come in even then with some groups of Village intellectuals. It was the so-called Beat Generation people who later popularized this attention to Eastern philosophy, especially Zen. But Korret, Czernovitch, Cage, Cunningham, Renny Charlip, and their circles were intimately involved with the philosophy even then. And because of Steve Korret, so was I.

The most obvious facet of the Zen trend in the Village in those days was the Zen “jokes.” People in that circle would make ironic statements, funny
or with pretensions of being funny, that were supposed to reveal some basic Zen truth or insight. I guess this came because in the various books about Zen, especially Blythe and Alan Watt and Suzuki, humor was supposed to be an intrinsic part of the doctrine. And many times individuals were supposed to have gained “enlightenment” through laughter. In fact, the Zen masters and monks and other initiates were always supposed to be “roaring with laughter” in revelation of one Zen truth or another.

One of Korret's friends was a painter named Norman, a Jewish dude who had strange, almost slanted eyes. I was sure this was because he was deep off into Zen. And Norman played the part. When I first met him, he gave me one of his strange-ass paintings. It was a seated woman, painted very flat against a very flat background, with no eyes. I sat and looked at that painting for a long time trying to figure it out. I never did.

Norman, in his sandals and long reddish-brown beard, was for me, in those days, the prototype of the Village intellectual. A painter, involved with Zen and its high antic truths, who walked around in sandals (though with socks) even in the winter and a big turtleneck sweater, cracking ironic anomalies about a world I was still trying to understand.

Because of William White and his paintings and my own attempt at doing some painting under his influence while I was in the service, it crossed my mind a couple of times that maybe I wanted to be a painter. I remember standing in the cold-water flat on East 3rd Street batting painter or writer back and forth in my head for a minute. But then I settled quickly on being a writer since as broke as I was I could not buy the materials to paint with. Hence my decision.

Still, I was fascinated with painting. And Korret's circle contained, I found out after a while, quite a few painters. The black painters, Harvey Cropper, Arthur Hardie, Walter Williams, Sam Middleton, Virginia Cox, and the great Vincent Smith, were all part of Korret's circle, inner or outer. Later, many of these people went to Europe, convinced, probably, that the U.S. is really home only for barbarians.

Certainly, Europe was the intellectual center for many in Korret's circle. I guess for one part of a whole generation, they were more connected to the vision the emigré Richard Wright or the 20s “modernists” had about America, with Europe as some sort of haven. There was a whole section of that generation that came just after Wright, Jimmy Baldwin's generation, perhaps, who took up residence in Europe, or who came back and forth. Some finally deciding it was better to be formally foreign in a foreign land. There was still the mythology of black people being able to make it better
in Europe, especially Paris, away from the diabolic torture of American racism. There was no doubt that for many black intellectuals, like their white counterparts, white intellectual Europe was the source and site of the really serious intellectual pursuits. But for black people this assumption has very serious implications. (It has, finally, for all Americans.) The intellectual worship of Europe is in one sense only the remnants of colonialism, still pushed by the rulers through their “English Departments” and concert halls!

It was Harvey and Arthur I had seen in a photo Korret sent me in Puerto Rico. Bird had some indirect hookup with this circle, I'd heard. Harvey Cropper had tried to teach Bird to paint in exchange for Bird teaching Harvey to play the saxophone. But Bird was dead by the time I got to the Village (contrary to what Ted Joans wrote in 1981 in
Coda
magazine saying that when I was around in the early days of beatnikdom I didn't “consistently fly on bird wings”). Bird died when I was in the error farce. I remember Yodo and I talking about it. I didn't reach the Village (except on leave from HU or the error farce) until March 1957!

There were writers too in that circle. One I remember, Clyde Hamlet, who imitated Dylan Thomas. But many people did then. Korret's work at this time was connected very consistently with Thomas, who was roaring around the Village, especially the White Horse Tavern. Hamlet was a very short, very dark brother with owlish eyes who ran with jazz musicians as well. He was reputed to have lived with Buhaina, Art Blakey, up in a loft on 29th Street. Hamlet was suave and sophisticated, I thought, he was hip to me. That's why I couldn't understand his poetry sounding so exactly like Dylan Thomas's (nor Steve's) when it seemed to me, once I'd read Thomas, that anyone reading him would realize immediately that their poems (especially Clyde's) were simply Thomas imitations and little else.

What I'd said before about how my reading was taking me into something and away from something at the same time is relevant here. Because this circle of Korret's and indeed his influence, to a certain extent, was merely a continuation of the other “whitening” influences I had been submitting to enthusiastically under the guise of information, education. That was true. But, again, there was something else being taken in. I guess not for the first time, but adding weight to whatever other similar tendencies come with anything you take in in this white supremacy society.

So that Europe as intellectual center was yet another stone to the weight of “alienation” from black (if that is not too strong a word) that was building up in me. Exiting from one world and entering another. That's the way
this learning I'd committed myself to had taken shape. As fragmented and personal as that learning was, the sources I went to most consistently had more the weight of the white than the brown or black (though the yellow trailed its source, as it does, like a shadow).

And I learned quickly that the Cages and Cunninghams were very highly esteemed in that circle. Almost mythological beings, and ditto “Dylan,” as Korret called him, like they were cutbuddies. So I was heavy into Dylan and Yeats too because Steve Korret quoted Yeats so often. He'd even quoted “Lapis Lazuli” in a letter to me in Puerto Rico, and I treasured those few lines and eagerly sought to know their source. “Gaiety transfiguring all that dread./All men have aimed at, found and lost;/Black out; Heaven blazing into the head.”

There were deep assumptions these people lived by and I did too, but who knew what they were? I didn't, and I am clear that unconsciousness is a ubiquitous condition. The rule of confusion is terrifying. But I followed now, eagerly, happily, assured in myself that this, finally, was what I had been looking for. Not only as the place where my intellectual pursuit would take place, but the life there, as I knew it, as it seemed to me then — this was the life I wanted.

When Charlene, Steve's wife, served cheese omelet and black bread along with ale, for me it was the sheerest revelation. Korret's white apartment to me was the essence of hip bohemianism. I knew nothing (consciously) about omelets (nor black bread, nor ale). It was “Village food” and I adored it. I had known nothing about white apartments. Even the word “bohemian” I thought of as intriguing, positive, something to be found out about and emulated. The conversations, both their form and content, heard around Steve or in those coffeehouses, or around Washington Square and MacDougal or Bleecker. The long-haired mysterious women with their eyes painted, “free-looking” in sandals. Dudes with berets or bookish pipe-smoking people. I was drawn to all of them and all of it. Who knew that all of this sat in a particular way in the world of meaning? Who knew the significance of all of it measured against a real world? The world Norman called (since he worked at not having to work) “The World of Effort.” Echoing the superhip metaphyiscs of Bodhidharma or the second Patriarch.

But it is significant that most of those blacks I met through Steve Korret, who were artists, left this country, finally, never to return. Virginia Cox lived for years on Bedford Street, very near where Steve Korret lived before he went to Scandinavia in 1960. Vincent Smith, who was perhaps the
most legitimately bohemian (in the sense that he had no money and was not just some middle-class juvenile having his way paid through bohemia, as I later was to find out some of the white folks I met were, but coming out of a Brooklyn ghetto had to struggle against society and even against what it tried to make him into, in order to paint). And then finally, when he began to paint consistently, Vincent developed a style that was thoroughly black; completely connected to the history and tradition of Afro-American painting, but at the same time, original and fresh. Vincent still lives in the U.S., and though he still, even at his high level of artistic accomplishment, has difficulty getting major shows, this is also part of the black tradition in this country, and will be until we get our own cultural institutions. But his work is still strong and still triumphantly beautifully black, and all those streets and voices and music course through his images with a daring and sense of color that is his alone yet collective as the African American experience itself.

At the time Vince was joked about, not harshly but lovingly, in Korret's circle, because he was such a hard liver. (Though, thank goodness, this changed many years ago.) He was a wine bandit, for a minute, the talk had it. And he lived in a loft that had neither heat nor light. It was the bohemianism of necessity, in one sense, rather than the fake poverty of the well-to-do little boys and girls. But Vincent's vision was black, and the soul that pulsed through his work was dark as our history and he has survived!

This was 1957. Eisenhower was president and jokes were made about his backwardness, much like the gibes that were tossed at genius Gerry Ford. The Montgomery bus boycott had just scored a success, desegregating Montgomery's buses. Martin Luther King, the leader of this black victory, was just coming into the public's eye when he had cooled out large numbers of armed black people who were spoiling for a fight as a reaction to racists' bombing of King's home. This had taken place on national television. A few months later SCLC — the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — was born. This was the year that Jimmy Brown, the great fullback, also shot into national prominence. Later that year, Orval Faubus and Little Rock would also come to widespread public notice.

So this was a time of transition. From the cooled-out reactionary '50s, the '50s of the cold war and McCarthyism and HUAC, to the late '50s of the surging civil rights movement. And I myself was a transitional figure, coming out of the brown world and its black sources but already yellowed out a bit by the Capstone employment agency on The Hill. And then to add insult to injury, or maybe attempted homicide to assault, I had offered
myself to the totalitarian “whiteness” of the military. Running away from it, I dived into the books, only to get involved in a deeper, more “profound,” more rational version of the same thing. And then suddenly the unaware chump, seeking escape, runs into, strangely, a slender white woman with painted eyes, ponytail, and sandals with a copy of Strindberg under one arm.

The Village, of course, is where I first met with white in any social situation portending equality (though that is a story still to be told). The underlying tone of that social circle was that black men and white women could make it, if they wanted to. Steve was not hooked up with a white woman nor had he been that I know of. In fact, later, when I began to go out with one white woman I met (whom I later married), Steve spoke somewhat disapprovingly of this, in his way. And I believed, for some reason at that time, that he did not even like white people, though I had never thought of it before. But when he said what he said to me about the white woman I was seeing he tried to embarrass both of us saying that she had caught me “with coon fruit” (watermelon). And seeking to legitimatize his seeming objection to this woman or at least understand it, I said Steve hated white people. Though it never occurred to me that he did, or for that matter that
anybody
did or would bother.

Strange then, that after Korret left for Scandinavia he would marry a white woman and be content to live over there with her and the family they created. Though I guess it is not strange, since if you are going to stay in a place where there are mostly white people, there is certainly a greater chance of becoming hooked up with one. And then, like we used to say, So what?

That circle, however, did seem to have the white woman/black man connection as one of its underlying themes. Certainly, Clyde Hamlet was always hooked up with one white lady or another. And so were many of the now emigré painters of that group. But I thought nothing of it except that it was hip. The idea that you could go with a white woman seemed like one of the “down” aspects of the whole bohemian scene. Before coming to the Village I had never really thought about white women. In Barringer High, I certainly looked at the various sweaters and skirts and insinuating walks and lyrical smiles of the mostly Italian female student body. But that was nothing and barely registered. (At least I didn't think it did at the time.)

I think that was the tone of perhaps a whole generation or two of black intellectuals, who, seeing segregation and discrimination as the worst enemy, sought a more open contact with the world. And certainly, those who
were taught that Europe (the Holy Grail of “whiteness”) was the source of intellectual life and measure could have that understanding shaped in some specific social context into a liaison or affair or long-term relationship with whites, a romantic connection. This was one of the advertised characteristics of the bohemia I came into. Though a black and white couple could still cause a few heads to turn, even in the Village. But by the late '50s such connections and relationships were on the obvious increase.