An American Poet

The business of reviving writers from the past reflects the fashions of the present — which means that a neglected author who doesn’t fit our current fashions is probably going to stay neglected, no matter how good he happens to have been.

A case in point is James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938). In the midst of our massive, ongoing revival of African-American literature, the recognition of Johnson has been tardy and insufficient. Few figures in the history of American arts did so much memorable work in so many areas. As a social historian, he wrote the impressionistic history Black Manhattan (1930). As an anthologist, he edited and extensively introduced selections of African-American spirituals and poetry. As a lyricist, he collaborated with his brother Rosamond around the turn of the last century, writing, most famously, “under the bamboo tree,” which T. S. Eliot memorably appropriated.

Johnson also wrote an ingeniously subtle novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), creating a persuasive narrator quite different from himself. Initially published anonymously, this short novel has been reprinted several times (most recently by Penguin as a “Twentieth-Century Classic”). At other times, Johnson was an elementary school teacher, a high-school principal, a lawyer, a diplomat in Latin America, an officer of the NAACP, the founder of a weekly newspaper, a co-founder of ASCAP, an effective lobbyist for anti-lynching laws, and a college professor. At New York University in 1934, he taught the first course in “Negro literature” at a white school. The closest parallel to him in American literature as a poet-bureaucrat has been Archibald MacLeish.

Less visibly, Johnson wrote poetry that has recently been collected for the first time, finally. Complete Poems includes Johnson’s exhortatory classic “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a poem widely known as the Negro National Anthem. This poem is also the subject of a new coffee table book in which various celebrities spout familiar homilies (some of which, like Al Gore’s, incidentally reveal that their authors may not have read the poem). Complete Poems also includes “God’s Trombones,” which attempts to reproduce in standard English the genius of African-American sacred oratory. The poem is perhaps best remembered for the line: Your arm’s too short to box with God.

Scarcely familiar with all of Johnson’s poetry before, I was surprised to discover “My City,” a sonnet that concludes with classic lines that should go onto the poetry placards currently displayed in New York’s subway cars:
But, ah! Manhattan’s sighs and sounds, her smells,
Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes
From being of her a part, her subtle spells,
Her shining towers, her avenues, her slums —
O God! The stark, unutterable pity,
To be dead, and never again behold my city.
 
Another strong sonnet, “Blessed Sleep,” opens:
Blessed sleep, kindest minister to man,
Sure and silent distiller of the balm of rest,
Having alone the power, when naught else can,
To soothe the torn and sorrow-ridden breast.
 
A third, “Beauty Never Old,” closes:
The world, for me,
And all the world can hold
Is circled by your arms;
For me there lies
Within the lighted shadows of your eyes
The only beauty that is never old.

Influenced by poetry fashionable during his college years, Johnson did much of his best work in its traditions, remembering poetic models that, unfashionable for a while, some find increasingly viable today. Notwithstanding his other activities, he was always a serious poet. (It was probably for poetic advantage that, after the publication of his first book of poems, he changed his middle name from William to Weldon.)

Complete Poems includes, by contrast, two poems with long, unrhymed lines: “Vashti” and “The Rivals,” the latter a longish narrative poem in African-American dialect, reflecting the influence (and perhaps the temporary literary success) of Johnson’s near contemporary, Paul Laurence Dunbar. “Vashti” is, to my senses, a failure, while “The Rivals,” eccentric even by today’s standards, is either a masterpiece or a mistake. (Incidentally, one deficiency of this Complete Poems, probably to be rectified in a later edition, is the absence of the dates for individual works that would help to interpret these works.)

Johnson’s most familiar literary masterpiece remains The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a successful early example of an ironic narrator whose first-person story is so rich it seems more true than fictional. The model was not Johnson himself, whose skin was dark, but a close friend and sometime law partner who married a white woman and, fair-skinned, did indeed pass over into the white world. Letting his wife know his racial heritage, he keeps it a secret from his children. Though the narrator is socially successful, he concludes, “I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.” The recent posthumous revelations about the prominent New York literary figure Anatole Broyard, who grew up black in Brooklyn, show that “passing for white” is not a dead topic. But it is with his literary model of a persuasive yet ironic first-person narrator that Johnson’s real success lies. A similar autobiographical narrator, likewise nameless, appears in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), by common consent the greatest of African-American novels.

Because Johnson achieved a level of professional freedom rare for anyone black or white, he didn’t fit the categories into which African-American writers have been put, and alas still are. He wasn’t particularly angry, he was never poor, and he wasn’t orphaned or female. Usually employed as a bureaucrat, he wrote in his spare time. Worse, he was well-educated and excelled at more than one genre. His authentic autobiography, Along This Way (1933), is an American success story. Lamentably, the sole biography, Eugene Levy’s James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (1973), concentrates on his administrative activities, to the neglect of intelligence about his literary work. The fact that no biography of Johnson has appeared since is another index of unfortunate neglect.

James Weldon Johnson stands in starkest contrast to W. E. B. Du Bois, much as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison were antipodes in a later generation. Where Du Bois and Wright, in their novels, were susceptible to blinding fantasies and ideologies, Johnson and Ellison closely observed realities. Du Bois and Wright were isolated from African-American communities (Du Bois indicatively dying in Ghana, Wright in Paris), while Johnson and Ellison lived among their people. Du Bois and Wright were immature, flat-footed artists, each depending upon a kind of internal determination to overcome limitations, while the work of Johnson and Ellison reflects artistic mastery of various arts. (Interestingly, Fanny McConnell, who married Ralph Ellison in 1946, had a decade before typed Along This Way for Johnson.)

Indeed, the differences between Johnson and Du Bois are so profound and so important that every time I read about something African-American named after Du Bois — an academic institute, or a university chair — I wince and lament that it wasn’t named after Johnson instead. It may be necessary to change all our current intellectual fashions in America before we can accurately winnow the superior from the inferior among the neglected writers of the past. But at least we can be certain any fashion that neglects James Weldon Johnson deserves to be rejected.

The author of Politics in the African-American Novel, Richard Kostelanetz has recently collected his literary essays, Person of Letters in the Contemporary World.