Love for Sale: And Other Essays

By Clifford Thompson

In his first nonfiction collection, Thompson muses on different art forms and their relation to his own experiences as an African-American in the post-Civil Rights era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Autumn House Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781932870879

Clifford Thompson

Clifford Thompson’s work has appeared in publications including The Best American Essays 2018, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Threepenny Review, and Village Voice. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award for nonfiction and teaches at New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in Brooklyn, New York

Book preview

LOVE FOR SALE

– Preface –

A COLLECTION OF essays is an odd thing. Generally speaking, there is no sense of movement toward an illuminating conclusion, as there is or should be in a novel; usually there isn’t even a single subject followed all the way through, as in a biography, say, or the history of a war. Even the best essay collections, from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son to Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist, can seem to have a hodgepodge quality. What, for example, does Baldwin’s tale of being arrested on charges of stealing a hotel sheet (Equal in Paris) have to do with his take on the film Carmen Jones (The Dark Is Light Enough)? The answer lies in that innocuous possessive pronoun, his. The essays in a collection, whatever they concern, represent his (or her) views. Taken together, and given a broad enough array of topics—suddenly, variety becomes an advantage—they demonstrate a sensibility; they are like a porcupine’s quills, extending in different directions but, collectively, revealing a shape, helping define their source.

What, or who, is the source of the essays you’re about to read? I am a middle-aged black American; I’m a husband and father; for close to two decades I’ve made my living as an editor; but in my heart, I’m a writer—the author of several dozen published essays, some of which are now in your hands. I love several forms of art—literature, film, painting, jazz—and these are the subjects I often write about, sometimes separately, sometimes together.

I’m not sure that jazz is the most important of these for me, but it’s the one that offered a way of thinking and writing about the others; it is jazz that helped me make sense of my cultural identity and served as one safe place in the world from which to contemplate the rest. As a younger man I struggled to figure out who and what I was. I was black, and I had grown up in America, but I didn’t know how to reconcile those two things. Individual instances of black achievement aside, the history of blacks in America seemed to me one long tale of woe, not one that could sustain me emotionally and intellectually in the largely white circles where I’ve often found myself since my college days. How could I make sense of my life and presence in this country without renouncing blackness, which I was unwilling (not to mention unable) to do? And yet how could I embrace America, the source of so much misery for people who looked like me? The answer I found was that jazz—which I had already begun listening to—not only represented a major, positive black contribution to American culture; it embodied an element central to Americanness: improvisation, or making a new way to achieve an end. The Founding Fathers did it with the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution; black American slaves did it with the Underground Railroad; jazz musicians do it every time they solo.

Secure in my cultural identity, and my love of jazz, I began to explore the connections between that art form and others: the novels I’ve long read, starting with my random discovery of The Sun Also Rises in a bookstore the summer I was seventeen; films, which I’ve watched devotedly since boyhood and began to study seriously as a freelancer for Cineaste and other movie publications; and visual art, for which I have a late-blooming affection and which, in my spare time, I try to create myself.

The essays that follow are divided into five sections; except for the first and last sections, the pieces are grouped according to the art forms they cover, but often a piece about one form will discuss another. Those connections among the arts, and the connections between art and life (the latter explored particularly in the first section), are what truly excite me. It is with great enthusiasm that I discover, say, how Zadie Smith is like Clint Eastwood; what the sax great Coleman Hawkins has in common with Thomas Hardy; how the bassist/composer Charles Mingus is like the Roman statesman/philosopher Marcus Aurelius. It is that enthusiasm I wish to share.

PART ONE

ON MY MIND

THREE FUNERALS AND A WEDDING

The Threepenny Review, 2012

THE WORST FUNERAL I ever attended, by far, was my friend Gerald’s. Half a generation older than me, Gerald took me under his wing when I arrived, at twenty-three, as an editorial assistant at Doubleday in 1986; he was one of few blacks there and tended to gravitate toward the others. A married father of two, Gerald was also on what is known as the Down-Low—that is, he secretly slept with men. He certainly kept that a secret from me, until one day in the spring of 1994, when he called from his hospital bed to tell me in a trembling voice that he had AIDS. I went to visit him soon afterward. Before I could make a second visit, he died.

The funeral was held at a Seventh Day Adventist church in Harlem, a couple of blocks from the apartment where I had once lived. Conducting the service was a sort of tag team of two ministers—maybe there were three—who seemed to know very little about Gerald and who soon proved to be poor choices for other reasons as well. After congratulating each other for having shown up, they made remarks hinting that they had done so reluctantly (because, one assumes, of the cause of death); they added that they had agreed to perform the funeral after talking with Gerald’s widow, whom they kept calling the wife. Later in the service one of them made a homophobic joke. At another point several people, including me, rose one by one to give spontaneous testimonies about what Gerald had meant to them, or how much he had helped them in their writing or publishing careers; after the last of us had sat down, one of the minister-clowns returned to the podium to inform those gathered that Gerald was clearly one of the most important people in literature in the history of this nation.

Gerald was many things. He was a great supporter of black endeavor, especially in literature and music. He was easy to make laugh, and he did so from his rather ample belly. He was quiet-spoken, a quality that, like his laugh, seemed at odds with the anger that ran not far below his surface—anger at racism and at white people, anger that made him, to speak the unvarnished truth, a bit of a racist himself. There are, it seems to me, two logical ends of the spectrum of black people’s attitudes toward whites. At one end is the belief that every person of every color should be evaluated individually, that the failure to observe this rule is the very cause of black people’s miserable history in America; at the other end is the belief that since so many white people have treated so many black people so abominably, it makes good old-fashioned sense not to trust them. Gerald and I were friends despite my being at one end of the spectrum and his being pretty near the other. Our debates on the subject were usually friendly and usually won by him; it didn’t help my arguments that while I rejected the opposing point of view on moral grounds, I felt the pull of its logic. (I’ve wondered more than once if I would be a match for him now.) What I admired about Gerald was that, unlike so many who defend their own kind, he stood up for others, too. One day, after a couple of years of hearing him support blacks and disparage whites, I was floored when he said something to the effect of, Lately I’ve been more into feminist issues than black issues. Gerald, I say again, was many things. He cannot be called—and I write this as someone who had a lot of respect for him—one of the most important people in literature in the history of this nation, and to say that he was is to admit to a profound ignorance. For that reason I’m glad, in retrospect, that the minister said so: it means that the farce that constituted the world’s goodbye to my friend was not a triumph of prejudice and meanness but a result of something a little easier to forgive.

LIKE MANY work environments, Doubleday seemed a good place to be if you knew why you were there and what you were doing. I barely had a handle on either. I wanted to be a writer and so had sought a job that had to do with books—an idea that made sense in a vague sort of way but had very limited application to my day-to-day work. I wrote great reports on manuscript submissions (at least my boss said so), but most of my time was spent fielding phone calls from impatient authors, typing copy from my boss’s nearly illegible handwritten notes, or filling out forms whose connection to the literature of the age I failed to grasp. What might’ve helped me was a sense of where I wanted to go in the company and what I needed to do to get there, but I was ambivalent about the obvious goal—becoming an editor—because it wasn’t clear to me what the editors at Doubleday did that amounted to anything. From what I could tell, they talked on the phone; they went to lunch; they had what were called focus meetings and pre-focus meetings; they yelled at their assistants. What did any of it have to do with the shaping of great writing? When did these editors edit? And if they edited at home after leaving the office, instead of spending time with their loved ones—instead of writing—what kind of life would that be?

The one bright spot for me in all this was Gerald. He knew that what I really wanted was to be a writer, so one day he arranged a lunch for the two of us and a female literary agent he knew well. I tried, earnestly, to convey to the agent what I wanted to accomplish, tried to find out from her how I could do so. At one point Gerald laughed and said in his usual cut-through-the-bullshit fashion, and speaking the absolute truth, My boy’s so nervous. Nervous or not, with Gerald’s help I got the agent sufficiently interested in me to place a short story of mine in an anthology edited by Terry McMillan. It was my first published piece. To Gerald’s horror, it was about a young black man who dates a white woman.

IRONICALLY, BECAUSE so much of Gerald’s funeral was so appalling, I remember it more clearly than I do some others. There was, for example, James Baldwin’s funeral. When Baldwin died, in December 1987, I was working at Doubleday for Marshall De Bruhl, the editor who headed the imprint Anchor Press. Marshall was very friendly with Doubleday’s consultant Gloria Jones, the widow of the novelist James Jones, one of Baldwin’s confreres during his fabled years in Paris. So it was that one morning, as I was sitting at my desk, Marshall walked in and announced that Baldwin’s funeral was to be held at Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine and added, You and I are going. And we did, getting picked up by limousine on that gray day at Doubleday’s Midtown Manhattan offices, riding in the back next to Mrs. Jones, sitting in that enormous cathedral surrounded by the literati. I am sorry to say that that event, for all its grandeur, solemnity, and sadness, was largely wasted on me—partly because, for all my supposed devotion to the world of books, the Baldwin I’d read amounted to one short story (Sonny’s Blues) whose details I barely remembered. Just as scandalously, the funeral failed to inspire me, bone-headed twenty-four-year-old that I was, to go on a Baldwin-reading tear.

No, it was Gerald who did that. By then Doubleday had become part of Bantam Doubleday Dell, whose imprint Laurel came out with paperback editions of Baldwin’s books. One day, months after Baldwin’s funeral, Gerald stopped by my desk with an armful of them. It’s not going too far to say that his gift changed my life. That summer, 1988, after leaving Doubleday, taking a part-time job, and starting work on an ill-fated novel in my mouse-ridden Brooklyn apartment, I consumed those books. I felt as if the voice in them, in all its wisdom, intimacy, humility, pain, rage, exasperation, wistfulness, and affection—in short, its humanity—was speaking directly to me, and the fact that Baldwin was black was the icing on the cake. (He was also, of course, gay; I have to think that meant something to Gerald.) I fell in love with Baldwin’s work and with Baldwin himself, who seemed to me to have set the high-water mark for American letters.

In 2005, forty-two years old and less wide-eyed, I read quite a few of Baldwin’s books again. As an insightful woman once wrote, nothing remains the same, and Baldwin’s writing did not strike me this time around as being unquestionably the work of the greatest, most capable writer America had ever produced. There was too much to get past, structurally and stylistically—from the near-plotlessness of some of the novels to what amounted to tics: the frequency of the adverb set off by commas, for example, or of certain words, with terrifying high on the list. To be fair, that word must have accurately summed up the way the world often appeared to him. Baldwin was born in 1924 and grew up poor, one of many children, in Harlem—at a time when being black was an unarguable hindrance, when being gay was unspeakable (to use another favorite Baldwin word) and made him a minority within a minority, when being as intelligent as he was must have felt like a curse, one that let him see exactly the predicament he was in. And what came through more powerfully than before in the re-reading of even the most loosely structured of his novels (Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, say) were the lessons about humanity learned through the sheer terror of having been James Baldwin, terror that even at its worst was laced with guilt, for being better off than others he knew, for refusing to partake in the depths of their suffering. A onetime boy preacher, Baldwin had left the Christian church but did not seem to have left behind its belief in sin—one’s own or one’s country’s—or its belief in there being a reckoning. (Hence the title and message of The Fire Next Time.) The burden of those beliefs and of his fear, guilt, and hard-won wisdom come through in every sentence he wrote, as does his humanity.

And to give Baldwin his due, it is necessary to recognize the beauty of many of his essays. Every so often I re-read the long title piece of his 1955 collection Notes of a Native Son, and surely it is a measure of the depths of that work that it seems to be about something different each time. It is mainly about Baldwin’s going on his nineteenth birthday to his father’s funeral, where the eulogy presented to us . . . a man whom none of us had ever seen—a man thoughtful, patient, and forbearing, a Christian inspiration to all who knew him, and a model for his children; then again, the essay chiefly concerns Baldwin’s discovery, in the segregated New Jersey town where he’d found work in defense plants, of what his father had long warned him about—the weight of white people in the world; or is its real focus the way to conduct oneself in the world responsibly? Notes of a Native Son is, of course, about all of those things, and