William Melvin Kelley, Dunfords Travels Everywheres, Doubleday, 1970.
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An African-American reads James Joyce might be an easy way to describe this novel, as Kelley takes us on a strange trip, playing Joycean linguistic games along the way. The first part takes place in an unnamed European country, which smells a bit like France and where the natives speak a variation of Esperanto. The country has apartheid but based not on skin colour but on the colour of the clothes you happen to have chosen to wear that morning (and you can’t change till the next day). In other words, apartheid is arbitrary. Chig Dunford is an African-American in the middle of this. The second part of the book abruptly switches tone, with the story of Chig’s return to the US by ocean liner (where he finds chained African slaves being transported) intermingled with a story of a dentist persuading Carlyle Bedlow to seduce his (the dentist’s) wife so that he (the dentist) can dump his wife, pay her less alimony and run off with his assistant, Maria. Not only do the stories change so does the language, varying from conventional English to African-American dialect to Joycean language. An interesting way to point out how racism is taken for granted and ignored. - The Modern Novel
Readers of Mr. Kelley's earlier novels will recognize his concern with black experience--the quality of estrangement and the substance of that unique legacy--and they will remember, too, the Dunfords and the Bedlows, a relatively well-to-do family and a poor one, who figured so prominently in Dancers on the Shore (1964). This time the exploration turns inward, into the minds of Chig Dunford and Carlyle Bedlow. Chig has become a successful academic, funded to study 19th century literature in Europe, Carlyle a Harlem hustler; but though they seem to have little common ground, their deepening fantasies converge in the richly snarled dream narratives that bridge their separate stories. The stuff of these dreams is their shared subconscious heritage; the medium, however, is an invented idiom of Joycean near-homonyms whose black accent and oral tone are unmistakable, but which is exhaustingly difficult to read--despite the Fact that it holds the key to the rest of the work. This apparent stubbornness arises from the author's realization that the English language has itself been a factor in black disinheritance, to which an epigraph from Joyce applies: "". . . His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. . . . My soul frets in the shadow of his language."" Patient readers will find this inventive, sophisticated, and serious; others will not read enough to form an impression. - Kirkus Reviews
Well this is embarrassing. Here's a novel I paid serious BURIED money on behalf of, a novel straight out of The Wake, whose introduction to me lay direct=next to Barthelme, Federman, Burroughs ; some tough company ;; in a chapter titled "Everybody's Joyce". And I'm looking here at SIX (.6.) ratings and ZERO (.0.) R/reviews and but one Listopia listing (just saw that one and voted this one up). And but I just can't get excited about it. Like one gets clobbered when digging into There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden which is just huge. I can't quite rave about it like one raves about Federman. I'll adVOCate for it, but not like for Miss MacIntosh. What I mean -- it's a fairly straightforward novel with two threads ;; I think of those threads maybe more as tableaux than as plots only because maybe ploddy=people would complain if we allowed consideration in that direction. But what really calls attention to this nugget and the reason it's disappeared from the literary landscape are the several dream sequences which are written in a very well=wrought Wakese. And really aren't to be missed. And are to be studied. And annotated upon. But clearly, if the dreaming of X and the fiction=experience of X are related, that relation will only be revealed in a second and third readings which I had intended to do, but, well, see above lack of excitement. But please what this book does need is at least an eighth and ninth and tenth gr=reader. Do have your annotating pen at ready when you pick this up. [I understand there's an e-edition available from one of those internet=libraries]
Kelley's got a few other novels which will deserve our collective attention.
Sample ::
[Just prior to the outbreak of the first Wakese ::] Where on earth had those words come from? He tried always to choose his words with care, to hold back even anger until he found the correct words. Luckily, he had never suffered a pronunciation problem. His family lived in Harlem; he had grown up there, but had no trouble saying that, they, these, those or them.Then :: "Witches oneWay tspike Mr. Chigyle's Languish, n curryng him back tRealty, recoremince wi hUnmisereaducation. Maya we now go on wi yReconstruction, Mr. Chuggle? Awick now? Goodd, a'god Moanng agen everybubbahs n babys among you, d'yonLadys in front who always come vear too, days ago, dhisMorning we wddeal, in dhis Sagmint of Lecturian Angleash 161, w'all the daisiastrous effects, the foxnoxious bland of stimili, the infortunelessnesses of circusdances which weak to worsen the phistorystematical intrafricanical firmly structure of our distinct coresins: The Blafringro-Arumericans." [not proofread in my transcription. sorries.]
Which, well, is just one more piece of evidence that Wakese is the language of the post-colonial world. The Irish Finnegans Wake. The Yoruba Tutuola. Desani's All About H. Hatterr. Kelley's Dunfords Travels Everywheres. Most of Our South Of The Border. Which reminds me, the three epigraphs to our novel ::
Melvin B. Tolson --:
The Futurafrique, flight-furbished ebony astride
velvet-paved miles, vies with the
sunflower magnificence of the Oriens, challenges the snow-lily
diadem of the Europa.....
James Joyce --
The language in which we are speaking
is his before it is mine...
I cannot speak or write these words
without unrest of spirit.
His language, so familiar and so foreign,
will always be for me an acquired speech...
My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
Amos Tutuola --
We slept in that a bush, but when it was about two o'clock in the night, there we saw a creature, either he was a spirit or other harmful creature, we could not say, he was coming toward us, he was white as if painted with white paint, he was white from foot to the topmost of his body, but he had no head or feet and hands like human-beings and he got one large eye on his topmost. He was long about 1/4 of a mile and his diameter was about six feet, he resembled a white pillar. At the same time that I saw him coming toward us, I thought what I could do to stop him, then remembered a charm which was given me by my father before he died. - Nathan "N.R." Gaddis @ goodreads
A strange amalgam of ideas, scenes suggestive of potential for fuller development, ambiguous events, and suggestions that many or all events are either dreams or some kind of research project/experiment, all interspersed with odd language-play that includes puns; phonetic substitutions; alt-grammar; spelling, punctuation, and spacing trickery; and cryptically mangled dialect. It had enough ideas to intrigue me and hold my interest so I would come back to it after a long hiatus. Its appeal is in its mystery and its suggestions for further narrative development. But I can't say that it fulfills its promises, and some ideas seem like throwaways. One could make quite a project of studying it, though. I'm not sure I'm up for a reread yet. Just writing a translation of some of the more cryptic passages and then rereading one's own translation might help work some things out. I admire the author's chutzpah in not giving any flying doughnuts about making sense or being reader-accessible. So let's say I had a lukewarm reaction overall, and I still have one arched eyebrow. - Zadignose @ goodreads
The experimental novelist William Melvin Kelley has confounded critical efforts to situate his work within the aesthetic and political parameters of Black Arts. Though Kelley was a contemporary of the movement, he wrote fiction that undermined its belief that literature ought to serve as a mouthpiece for “the people.” Yet Kelley’s two late novels, dεm (1967) and Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970), evinced the same qualities of performative textuality that Black Arts practitioners had advanced for their cause. By directing his publisher to follow his typescripts as closely as possible, Kelley created typographic experiments that made blackness a feature of readers’ engagement with the printed details of certain pages. Despite this convergence with Black Arts literary strategies, Kelley remained a maverick in the uses he identified for such experiments. Like other postmodern satirists of the era, he was a critic as much of racial indivisibility among blacks as he was of race’s invisibility to whites. In his late fiction, then, Kelley used typographic play to subvert not only racial but class assumptions about what a “black” voice ought to sound like. - Kinohi Nishikawa
https://academic.oup.com/alh/article-abstract/30/4/730/5145362?redirectedFrom=fulltext
read it at Google Books
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Set in a mythical backwater Southern town, A Different Drummer is the extraordinary story of Tucker Caliban, a quiet, determined descendant of an African chief who for no apparent reason destroys his farm and heads for parts unknown--setting off a mass exodus of the state's entire Black population.
Nearly three decades offer its first publication, A Different Drummer remains one of the most trenchant, imaginative, and hard-hitting works of fiction to come out of the bitter struggle for African-American civil rights.
June, 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets off an exodus of the state’s entire black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of view of the white residents who remained, A Different Drummer stands, decades after its first publication in 1962, as an extraordinary and prescient triumph of satire and spirit.
In 1962, aged just 24, William Melvin Kelley's debut novel A Different Drummer earned him critical comparisons to James Baldwin and William Faulkner. Fifty-five years later, author and journalist Kathryn Schulz happened upon the novel serendipitously and was inspired to write the New Yorker article 'The Lost Giant of American Literature', included as a foreword to this edition.
June, 1957. One afternoon, in the backwater town of Sutton, a young black farmer by the name of Tucker Caliban matter-of-factly throws salt on his field, shoots his horse and livestock, sets fire to his house and departs the southern state. And thereafter, the entire African-American population leave with him.
The reaction that follows is told across a dozen chapters, each from the perspective of a different white townsperson. These are boys, girls, men and women; either liberal or conservative, bigoted or sympathetic - yet all of whom are grappling with this spontaneous, collective rejection of subordination.
A lost masterpiece republished for 2018, A Different Drummer is for readers who have been waiting for the next rediscovered classic.
Kelley could have made this a straightforward satire but then the book would not have had the impact it does. It is not the first or, indeed, the best book to look at the condition of African-Americans in the United States but it is certainly one of the most interesting and, undeservedly, has not received the recognition it deserves.
It is set in a fictional and unnamed state which clearly approximates to Mississippi. At the beginning an old white man tells the story of how all the African-Americans left the state, leaving it now the only state without any Negroes. Most of the rest of the novel is in the form of flashback, with different players (white and black) giving their account of what happened. It starts with the arrival in the state of a slave ship, with a huge, powerful African. No-one can control him and he escapes but Dewey Willson, the patriarch has already bought him and forbids anyone from shooting him and sets out to find him. He cannot. The African then appears at Willson’s house and frees his slaves. Eventually, after many slaves have been freed, the African is tricked by a former slave and is killed, leaving his son as Dewey Willson’s slave. It is the great-grandson of the son who will lead the exodus. - The Modewrn Novel read more here
The first officially recorded use of “woke” as a political term was in 1962, in an article by young African-American writer and teacher William Melvin Kelley. In the same year, he published his debut, A Different Drummer. It won him comparisons with Faulkner, then slipped into obscurity until this year, when a New Yorker article brought it back into the public eye, and sparked a bidding war.
It begins with Tucker Caliban, who shoots his livestock, sets fire to his house and leaves the fictional deep south state he calls home without a backward glance. Soon every other black man and woman in the state has gone, filing on to buses and into cars with carefully blank faces.
Kelley boldly tells his story from the perspective of the white residents, who spin stories of Confederate generals and formidable slaves, speak of their dreams and their youth and try to rationalise this modern exodus. This fierce and brilliant novel is written with sympathy as well as sorrow. It’s a myth packed with real-world resonance, as hope and decency wither in a community that’s as woke as a corpse. - James Smart
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/27/different-drummer-william-melvin-kelley-review
Mr. Kelley's timely allegory is climaxed by the ""strategic withdrawal"", first of Tucker Callban, then of Tucker's fellow Negroes, from an unnamed, typical cotton-belt state. The concern here is with the events which precipitated that exodus. ""Tucker was feeling his African blood"", surmise some town racists. And that would indicate that there's a little bit of Serendip even in the heart of Dixie. The first of the re-rooted Cailieus had possessed such monumental strength, was of such epic proportion, that it had taken a whole slaver's crew to control him. He was called ""The African"". Fresh off the ship, he gathered up his chains ""like a woman grabs up her skirts"", fled from captivity, and led an band of escaped slaves who sought to free all of their race. The African was finally shot and his baby boy taken from him to beget a progeny of progressively smaller men. Ironically, many generations later, the tiny, bespeckled Tucker Callban is his only true heir. Tired of his second-class citizenship in the South of today, he decides to recover what it is that the Negro has lost. In a superbly written scene of destructive nobility, Tucker salts his land, kills his livestock, and burns his house. He must begin anew away from a legacy of sacrifice and ""good-niggerism"". Not a flawless novel, this is nevertheless a stunning work and one which explores all kinds of Negroes, from Oxford derived to Uncle Tom survived. It is an Odyssey of the Negro gone full circle, back again to the stature of the African. - Kirkus Reviews
Every so often, a “forgotten classic” is rediscovered around which the literary world rallies with praise and predictions of a “Stoner effect” – a reference to the reissue of John Willams’s 1965 novel, which went on to become an international bestseller. Early this year, it happened to the 1962 debut novel by William Melvin Kelley, an African American and member of the Black Arts Movement, who died last year.
A Different Drummer more than lives up to the hype, both in terms of its literary accomplishment and in the power of its political vision.
Kelley’s story is set in the deep south, in 1957, amid the racial hostility and resistance of the early civil rights era; but he also draws our eye to the complicated nexus of oppression, bigotry, reparation and guilt inherited by white Americans after the abolition of slavery.
The story revolves around the Willsons, a former slave-owning family whose latest scion, David Willson, has sold a piece of their former plantation to his servant, Tucker Caliban, the descendant of a rebel slave. The sale sets off a chain reaction and leads to a mass exodus of the town’s black population.
Significantly Kelley’s black characters, including Tucker, are seen only through the eyes of the white majority, their motives never explicitly revealed. So when Tucker salts the fields he has bought (ie land on which his forefathers were oppressed), burns down the house and kills his livestock before leaving town, the reason for his actions have “yet to be determined”.
Kelley instead delves into the minds of the Willson clan past and present, including David, now head of the family business but who once wrote against segregation for a radical newspaper, his wife, Camille, and two children – tracing their psychological trajectory from slave owners to benevolent masters, and then campaigners, of sorts, for racial equality.
Some chapters reach beyond the Willsons to the wider townsfolk, and here we see an America that holds fast to its moral superiority over black people. There is as much outrage as confusion over the departure of black locals, even if the governor’s statement claims: “We never needed them, never wanted them, and we’ll get along fine without them.”
The Willsons, for all their past violence and residual prejudices, are drawn with sensitivity. Their daughter Dymphna feels sisterly towards Tucker’s wife, Bethrah, who is all the more trusted because “she hardly looked like she was coloured, except maybe her nose”.
Published two years after Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, A Different Drummer also depicts the racial complexities of pre-civil rights southern life through children’s eyes. Kelley’s youngsters observe adult violence and bigotry without understanding it fully; we see their incomprehension of a changing America in which a man like Tucker must now be referred to as a “negro”, not a “nigger”.
Yet for all of Kelley’s sympathetic characterisation, his ending returns us to the horrors of race hate. A new introduction to the novel ascribes Kelley’s literary decline to the fact that “many white readers didn’t want a black writer telling them what they thought, especially when so much of it was withering”.
Today the book offers us an unflinching study of the southern white American psyche at the cusp of the civil rights movement: its belligerence against change, the incomprehension and anger. It is woeful to think that almost 60 years later, Kelley’s story seems just as timely and as urgent, but what a gift to literature that we have rediscovered it. - Arifa Akbar
www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/26/different-drummer-by-william-melvin-kelley-review-powerful-timely
“[A] lost giant of American literature. . . . Brilliant.” —The New Yorker
“Radical and important.” —Financial Times
“Kelley blended fantasy and fact to construct an alternative world whose sweep and complexity drew comparisons to James Joyce and William Faulkner.” —The New York Times
“A rare first novel; dynamic, imaginative, and accomplished.” —Chicago Sunday Tribune
“Powerful. . . . Unflinching. . . . A gift to literature.” —The Observer
“So brilliant is this initial novel that one must consider Mr. Kelley for tentative future placement among the paragons of American letters.” —Boston Sunday Herald“Beautifully written and thought-provoking.” —Baltimore Evening Sun“This first novel just perhaps could play a part in changing our history.” —Kansas City Star“An astounding achievement . . . Timeless, mythic. . . . Still relevant and powerful today.” —The Sunday Times (London)
“Breathtakingly good. . . . Must be one of the most assured debuts of all time.” —Sjón, author of CoDex 1962
“An imaginative, brilliantly observed world of the 20th-century Deep South in turmoil. . . . Kelley delivers his observations with caustic humour and surprising compassion. The comparisons of his debut to the books of James Baldwin and Faulkner are justified.” —The Irish Times “A rediscovered classic of African American literature. . . . A powerful novel that weaves intricate themes like racism, systemized oppression and identity together.” —Bookriot
I didn’t know who William Kelley was when I found that book but, like millions of Americans, I knew a term he is credited with first committing to print. “If You’re Woke, You Dig It” read the headline of a 1962 Op-Ed that Kelley published in the New York Times, in which he pointed out that much of what passed for “beatnik” slang (“dig,” “chick,” “cool”) originated with African-Americans.
A fiction writer and occasional essayist, Kelley was, himself, notably woke. A half century before the poet Claudia Rankine used her MacArthur “genius” grant to establish an institute partly dedicated to the study of whiteness, Kelley turned his considerable intellect and imagination to the question of what it is like to be white in this country, and what it is like, for all Americans, to live under the conditions of white supremacy—not just the dramatic cross-burning, neo-Nazi manifestations of it common to his time and our own but also the everyday forms endemic to our national culture.
Kelley first addressed these issues at length in his début novel, “A Different Drummer.” Published three weeks after that Times Op-Ed, when he was twenty-four, it promptly earned him comparisons to an impressive range of literary greats, from William Faulkner to Isaac Bashevis Singer to James Baldwin. It also got him talked about, together with the likes of Alvin Ailey and James Earl Jones, as among the most talented African-American artists of his generation.
When I read “A Different Drummer,” I understood why. Geographically, the novel is set in a small town called Sutton, outside the city of New Marsails, in an imaginary Southern state wedged between Mississippi and Alabama. Temporally, it is set in June, 1957, when a young African-American farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, slaughters his horse and cow, burns down his house, and departs the state—whereupon its entire African-American population follows.
It’s a brilliant setup. Our culture has produced countless fantasies about what would have happened if the Civil War had ended differently—chiefly, if the Confederacy had won and slavery had endured. (See, e.g., “The Guns of the South,” “If the South Had Won the Civil War,” and “Underground Airlines.”) But we have a paucity of art that chooses to imagine a different outcome for the civil-rights movement, or alternate universes where African-Americans, from any era, wield not less power but more.
Appropriately, that seizure of power—the sudden refusal of African-Americans to continue living under conditions of subordination—flummoxes the white citizens of Sutton. When “A Different Drummer” opens, one of them, seeking to make sense of the recent events, recounts a harrowing story. Half slave narrative, half tall tale, it concerns a behemoth of a man, known simply as the African, who arrives one day on a slave ship, cradling a baby boy in the crook of his arm. Bound by chains held by at least twenty men, the African is led into town and sold—whereupon he whips around and, with the chains, knocks over his captors and decapitates the auctioneer: “Some folks swear . . . that the head sailed like a cannon ball through the air a quarter mile, bounced another quarter mile, and still had enough steam to cripple a horse some fellow was riding into New Marsails.” Gathering up his chains “like a woman grabs up her skirts,” the African then flees to a nearby swamp and starts conducting raids to free other slaves. Eventually, his nominal owner, led to the hideout by a traitor, kills the African and claims as his own the baby boy: Tucker Caliban’s great-grandfather.
The man who tells this tale maintains that Caliban acted as he did because “the African’s blood” resurged within him. Not all his listeners agree, but they’re hard pressed to offer a better explanation for the recent exodus, or imagine its likely consequences. Some wonder whether wages will be better or worse with a third of the population gone. Others, professing not to care about Caliban and his followers, echo the governor’s statement: “We never needed them, never wanted them, and we’ll get along fine without them.” Still others feel betrayed, in ways they can’t articulate, by the violation of a social compact whose terms they’d never previously bothered to study too closely.
Although the plot of “A Different Drummer” depends on the autonomous actions of African-Americans, the story is told exclusively through the eyes of these white townspeople. This, too, is a smart idea—a kind of fictional affirmation of the historian Lerone Bennett, Jr.,’s claim that “there is no Negro problem in America. The problem of race in America . . . is a white problem.” Moreover, it is wonderfully executed. At twenty-four, Kelley was already a strikingly confident writer, with a sense of humor reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor in stories like “Revelation”: caustic, original, efficacious. He was also a keen observer, and although his story has the emotional proportions of a myth, his sentences reliably feel like real life. Tucker Caliban’s doomed cow is “the color of freshly cut lumber”; to the men watching from outside, the fire he set first appeared climbing a pair of curtains in the center of his home, then “moved on slowly to the other windows like someone inspecting the house to buy it.”
“A Different Drummer” ends in pessimism, less about the fate of black Americans than about the moral potential of white ones. Yet, thanks to it, Kelley’s career began in tremendous optimism. His was the rare first novel that makes future ones seem both inevitable and exciting—and, indeed, he went on to publish four more books in under a decade. But I wasn’t alone in being unfamiliar with them. After his early and fiery start, Kelley largely faded into obscurity—not just before our era but in his own prime. Obscurity, of course, is a common enough fate for authors. But what’s curious about Kelley is that he is seldom read today not just because of the weaknesses in his books but also because of their peculiar, discomfitting strengths. - Kathryn Schulz
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William Melvin Kelley, Dem, Doubleday, 1967., / Coffee House Press, 2001.
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Originally published in 1967, dem is a classic of the Black Arts Movement. This surrealistic satire lays bare the convoluted and symbiotic relationship between whites and blacks. Coffee House Press is pleased to bring back into print this widely unavailable work.
Upper-middle-class Manhattanite Mitchell Pierce and his wife Tamara enact the twists and turns of human relationships in this startling fable about the intersections of race, class, sex, love, and marriage. Kelley questions the nature and validity of subjective realities as he examines the constraints and consequences of prejudice.
Mitchell is convinced he has it made. With advancement at work, an attractive wife, and a comfortable apartment, he has achieved the 1960s version of the white man’s American dream. Then, slowly but surely, that dream becomes a nightmare, and Mitchell can’t seem to wake up. Did he really find his boss’s wife and children dead in an upstairs bedroom of their suburban home? Did his wife really become pregnant after a brief fling with their black maid’s boyfriend?
Notable as a satiric portrayal of white characters from an African American perspective, this milestone achievement tugs at our ability to suspend disbelief and forces us to reexamine stereotypes from the past and current images in America’s racial divide.
Kelley's 1967 novel is here reprinted as part of the press's Black Arts Movement Series: books from the resurgence of African-American literature during the ’60s and early ’70s. For this edition, John Wright provides a long scholarly introduction placing the novel in its historical context. On dem's first appearance, Kirkus (July 15, 1967, p. 828) noted its episodic form, and its racial schematics, especially in the fourth section, in which a woman gives birth to twins, one black and one white. Overall, though, "some very good writing carries along the excess of symbolism." Finding it more contrived than Kelley's other work, we found it also "more angry," as well as a "powerful and delicate handling of a heavy theme and an unwieldy plot." - Kirkus Reviews
William Melvin Kelley, A Drop of Patience, Doubleday, 1965.
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In A Drop of Patience, William Melvin Kelley tells the searing story of Ludlow Washington, a black jazz musician, with the emotional intensity of the blues. Blind since childhood and put into a state home, Ludlow first learns the piano and later takes up the horn. When at fifteen he is released to the custody of a bandleader, his unmistakable talent takes him on an odyssey from Boone's Cafe, a small dive in New Marsails, to New York where he becomes a leading, visionary jazz musician. This is the coming of age story of a man set apart - by blindness, by race, by artistry - who must learn through adversity not only who he is and whom to trust, but also from where he derives his self worth. The Dark Tower Series brings this neglected classic back into print after an absence of many years. Considered by Stanley Crouch to be one of the finest novels ever written about jazz - an exploration of the African-American experience that evokes comparisons to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - A Drop of Patience is an exquisite and forceful parable of moral and spiritual blindness and a staggering work of art.
borrow it here
This writer (whose A Different Drummer will be remembered) has a unique insight into a segment of American society that is seldom reported without distortion. He is an American Negro and, as he makes clear in his brief preface, he uses his elected role of storyteller to ""ask questions...(to) depict people, not symbols or ideas disguised as people"". In the sixteen pieces collected here, the author tells meaningful stories of people first and only secondarily examines Negro society-- separated by color and self-stratified by skin shade, money and education. Their problems sound suspiciously common to all except that color-consciousness intensifies them. There are the Dunfords, a middle class family suffering typical status tensions who are given more than one story here (and a novel would be an excellent place for them). There are the much poorer Bedlows, who also turn up in more than one story, and who struggle to a survival they accept without always understanding rewarding. - Kirkus Reviews
William Melvin Kelley, Dis/Integration
Dunford also is the focus of Dis/Integration, a novel Kelley recently completed. He’s still seeking a publisher. In that novel, Dunford lives almost entirely among Euros (Kelley’s preferred term for Caucasians or whites) and only occasionally sees his family. Kelley likens Dunford’s situation to Leopold Bloom’s in Joyce’s Ulysses.
“He’s in society, but he’s not really a part of that society,” Kelley said. “I see African-American kids now who have grown up in the suburbs with Euros, and they’re not African-American any more — culturally, anyway. They don’t know any more about the ghetto than anybody else.”
Kelley doesn’t know when or if Dis/Integration will be published. He can’t pinpoint exactly why he hasn’t been able to get a book published in the past 42 years. “My wife thinks I was blacklisted because I was an early opponent of the Vietnam War,” he said. “I’m not sure about that.” He believes he might have earned a reputation in the publishing world of being hard to work with because he staunchly resisted changes his publisher, Doubleday, wanted to make in Dunfords Travels Everywheres. His absence from the United States for nine years and the emergence of other talented African-American writers in the 1970s such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker may have worked against him, he said.
But it’s all speculation. No one knows for certain why a writer of his talent and stature hasn’t been able get a book published in 42 years. So the mystery lives on. And so, happily, do William Melvin Kelley and his literary legacy. - Steve Kemme
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William Melvin Kelley: Interview
William Melvin Kelley's novels to date have dealt with inter-racial conflict, but the emphasis has been on the examination of characters, black and white, and the myths with which they delude themselves. His novels pose no "solutions" to the conflict but the solution of self-understanding, and his depiction of the relationships—loving and competitive—between men and women and blacks and whites combines compassion, objectivity, and humor.
His first novel, A Different Drummer, set realistically rendered characters in a fantasy plot. From multiple points of view he displayed the reactions of the whites of a fictional Southern state to the spontaneous grass-roots emigration of the state's blacks. A minor incident in A Different Drummer concerns Wallace Bedlow, who is waiting for a bus to take him to New York City, where he plans to live with his brother, Carlyle. Bedlow appears only that one time, but he surfaces again in "Cry for Me," probably the best short story in Dancers on the Shore, in which he becomes a famous folk singer. In that story the themes of one's public image versus the true self and commercialism versus art are explored.
These themes are developed further in Kelley's second novel, A Drop of Patience. The protagonist is a blind, black jazz musician, whose intuitive experimentation is contrasted to the intellectualization of critics, and whose love of music comes into conflict with the commercialization of music. More important than these themes, however, is the development of the character himself, who passes through various rites of passage as he learns to deal with sex, love, racism, and fame.
Carlyle Bedlow, who appeared in several of the stories in Dancers on the Shore, reappears in Dem, Kelley's third novel. "Lemme tellya how dem folks live," the novel begins. It goes on to show dem white folks living out their myths of white superiority, masculine prerogative, and soap-opera escapism. They are such victims of the pernicious myths of their culture that they are no longer even a threat to black people.
Racial conflict nearly disappears amidst the experimentation and fantasy of Dunfords Travels Everywheres, Kelley's own clever and original permutation of Finnegans Wake. A triptych in plot, style, and character, Dunfords Travels Everywheres is an ambitious short novel; it succeeds in being clever, but as an exploration into character it's less satisfying than his earlier novels.
Kelley has shown himself a skillful craftsman in a variety of styles and approaches. In his stories and in his first three novels his exploration of character develops as the character seeks—or refuses to seek—a unity between the person he feels he is and the personality he or society thinks he should be. This is true also in one of the three interwoven stories of Dunfords Travels Everywheres. In the other two stories a playful fantasy dominates. If Kelley's fiction has a direction, it's one that moves from seriousness and psychological probing to fantasy, playfulness, and comedy. —William Borden
https://biography.jrank.org/pages/4494/Kelley-William-Melvin.html
William Melvin Kelley, the experimental novelist and filmmaker—who mastered and reinvented a kind of midcentury literary style crafted from a colorful array of language and perspectives—died in Manhattan on February 1, 2017, at the age of 79. For the past three decades, Kelley taught fiction at Sarah Lawrence College, where I enrolled in his seminar. We struck up a long dialogue about Jewish and African American literature and culture.
From his teaching and the dialogues that followed off and on for years afterwards, Willy inspired in me a self-reliance and will to originality, which seems to always pull me back to his surreal and carnivalesque view of American culture. Never predictable, Willy, when I asked him which novel might give my work a sharper, more distinct view of Jewish American culture, responded: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That novel—in its Yiddish translation—became my doctoral dissertation’s keystone. Kelley’s work was always spiritual: he studied the Jewish tradition—as closely as he could without the benefit of an official conversion—calling himself a Child of Israel and a believer in the “True God.” He often said that as a poor reader, there were only two books in his life that he had read end-to-end: James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the Hebrew Bible.
Willy, or “Duke” as he was known in his Harlem neighborhood, was born in Staten Island on November 1, 1937. His father, William Melvin Kelley Sr., was an editor at the African American newspaper the Amsterdam News, who tried unsuccessfully to start his own newspaper and ultimately became a civil servant. His mother, the former Narcissa Agatha Garcia, was a homemaker and devout Catholic.
Kelley was intimately involved in discovering a new African American aesthetic, one catalyzed by the history-shifting politics of the Civil Rights and Black Power era. In 1962, he published his first novel, the masterpiece A Different Drummer. The novel takes place in a mythical southern state that mysteriously loses its large black population in 48 hours. The literary critic Trudier Harris called the novel “a battleground of sorts,” which rebelled against expectations by depicting African American characters with no narrative voice of their own. Instead, the narrators are taken from among numerous white characters, who each describe and analyze the actions of black characters for the reading audience.
Kelley was a late subject of the Harlem Renaissance photographer Carl Van Vechten and a young protégé of Langston Hughes, who in 1965 invited him to tour Europe under the auspices of the State Department. Kelley’s imagination honored the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance by depicting the absurd inequalities that followed in its wake. He published prolifically throughout the 1960s, including a collection of short stories, Dancers on the Shore (1964), and the novels A Drop of Patience (1965), dem (1967), and Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970). In that final novel, Kelley devised a Joycean creole: “Dust, we may away ouSelfs from the langleash language for a Perusol o’ so some Source matourial gleanered from dPages o’ Dialy Citysun”
“I would say there were two languages that were created by African Americans,” he explained in one of his seminars. “One that is being created so that African people could communicate with European people and another language for African people to communicate with other African people. I imagine that at that point, English was the common language that we were using. So, OK, we would use English words, but we use them in an African way. That process takes a long time,” he thought, “Yiddish is a language that can be considered a Creole language. It was a combination of Hebrew and German, and it was spoken by Jews in Europe. It’s a question that African Americans will have to answer. Do we let it die out and learn standard English, or do we keep them both and develop a language and literature in both?”
Willy’s assignments at once confounded and invigorated the Sarah Lawrence campus’s avant-garde sensibilities. One recurring exercise, for example, was for seminar participants to write a romance novel collectively. Each of the 15 students would be responsible for writing one chapter. At the culmination of the semester, the students came together for a charged reading that voiced a cohesive work with divergent points of view, styles, and levels of diction. Another involved writing five pages without the verb “to be”—a technique that Willy culled from the biblical narrators.
In 2014, the Oxford English Dictionary credited Kelley with coining the political term “woke,” in a 1962 New York Times article titled “If You’re Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist. If You’re Woke You Dig It.” The hashtag #staywoke later became a catchphrase of the new Black Lives Matter movement, after first passing serendipitously through Erykah Badu.
Kelley wrote intricate novels that identified with the rejection of dominant social orders, while also penning incisive essays drawn sharply from his experience in the centers of power. In “The Ivy League Negro,” which appeared in Esquire Magazine in 1963, he remarked on African American men like himself enrolled at elite universities:
In my class at Harvard, out of a thousand boys, there were ten Negroes. By the end of the first three weeks of the term, I had met them all. A Negro in a new situation will look, either consciously or unconsciously, for other Negroes. He will not feel really at home until he knows how many there are, their names, and where they came from. I always compare it to two spies in enemy territory dropping notes scribbled on matchbook covers as they pass one another on the street.In his novel dem, an absurdist parable, a white woman gives birth to twins—one of whom, mysteriously, is mixed-race—only to discover that the mysterious baby is the result of super fecundation: the “fertilization of two ova by two separate sperm during two separate copulations.” After the death of the white baby, her grieving husband Mitchell searches for the father of the brown baby and finds Calvin Coolidge Johnson in Harlem, who denies any responsibility for the child. A man who long held a “grudge” against whites, Coolidge reminds Mitchell of the countless slave owners who fathered children and denied their paternity, forcing black men into a false paternal role. Instead, Coolidge insists that Mitchell’s time had come. When Mitchell asks, “Why me?” Coolidge replies, “Why [my] great-granddaddy?”
Kelley was an expert in the arts and theories of mixed metaphor. Of his childhood he wrote:
I was not raised in a ghetto, but in the North Bronx, the only Negro boy on a predominantly Italian-American block. Knowing this you must not immediately assume that I was unhappy, you must not assume I was always fighting on my way to school; this was not at all the case. On the contrary, being the only Negro gave me a wonderful advantage; I was always a very important part of the games my white friends and I played. When we played the Lone Ranger, I was always Tonto; when we fought the Japs, I was always the Friendly Native. This is because I was not so much “colored” as brown, and too good a friend to be one of the outlaws or the Japanese.Kelley attended the Fieldston School and in 1957 entered Harvard College planning to be a civil rights lawyer. Instead, he was drawn to the seminars of John Hawkes and Archibald Macleish, and won the Dana Read Prize in 1960 for the best piece of writing in any Harvard undergraduate publication. Shortly thereafter he took a leave of absence to focus on his writing and left campus six months short of earning a degree. In 1965, in the moments after hearing of Malcolm X’s murder, he detailed his decision to go into exile: “I wouldn’t assign myself the task of announcing that our little rebellion had failed, that racism had won again for a while. Not with a young wife and a toddler depending on me and all this killing going on. By the time I reached the Bronx, I had decided to depart the Plantation, perhaps permanently.” Kelly’s time abroad brought him and his family to Rome, Ibiza, Paris, and Jamaica, where he taught at the University of the West Indies. In Europe, he joined other African American artists, writers and intellectuals in self-imposed exile.
Besides his uncollected short stories, which have appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, the New Yorker, the Negro Digest, Quilt, and many anthologies, Kelley has a 1964 short story collection, Dancers on the Shore, which won the Transatlantic Review award. In 1988, he wrote, produced, and starred in the rare experimental film “Excavating Harlem.” From 1989 until 1992, he kept a video diary, as a way to capture the beauty of his family and neighborhood that he felt could not be described in words. The resulting video, some of it damaged by years of storage, was collected and edited over the course of two years into another short called The Beauty That I Saw. The film debuted in the 2015 Harlem International Film Festival, where it won a Harlem Spotlight Award. In 2008, he was awarded Anisfield Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Willy Kelley was known for his enduring devotion to his family and his beloved Harlem. His acerbic and artful allegiance to the masses came through in a 1977 New York Times dispatch from Kingston, Jamaica, where he wrote of the political similarities between the island and his native land:
The poor and the righteous can do anything they will, as they periodically and devastatingly show. But oftentimes (weary after years on a low-protein diet), they surrender the Authority to Do to some fatty ego with a megaphone and one ancient laugh in his script. Country people will stand quietly for hours listening to a fool. They grow the food the fool gets fat on, but after all the fool comes from the city. -http://www.publicbooks.org/if-youre-woke-you-dig-it-william-melvin-kelley/
No doubt the most pressing questions concerning the fiction of William Melvin Kelley are not about its merits, which are considerable and readily enough apparent, but have to be those related to the circumstances of its “rediscovery”: Why did Kelley publish nothing after 1970? (His first novel appeared in 1962, and Kelley died in 2017.) What accounts for the long period of neglect his work endured until recently, when all of his books were brought back into print?
For thirty years, only Kelley’s first novel, A Different Drummer, remained in print, but in 2020 the other books, the story collection Dancers on the Shore (1964) and the subsequent three novels, A Drop of Patience (1965), dem (1967), and Dunfords Travels Everywheres, again became available (all published by Anchor Books). The two most recently published (September) perhaps fortuitously give us salient clues in solving the mystery of Kelley’s disappearance from the literary scene. The stories in Dancers on the Shore are realistic and conventional, and while most of them could stand alone as short stories, they really work together in a dual-stranded portrayal of mid-century African-American experience, one strand focusing on the middle class Dunfords and the other on the working class Bedlows (particularly the brothers Carlyle and Mance). “Chig” Dunford and Carlyle Bedlow reappear in Kelley’s subsequent novels (and one story in the book, “The Servant Problem,” along with its white protagonist, reappears as the core focus of dem, which also features Carlyle), although they play much different roles, less clearly acting as illustrative types.
Indeed, although Chig and Carlyle are also the twinned protagonists of Dunfords Travels Everywheres (also published in September), they have largely been in this book separated from the context in which they are introduced in Dancers on the Shore and employed as the performers in a drama of narrative mutation and linguistic experiment. Chig is presented as a student traveling with others in an unnamed European country, notable for practicing a kind of voluntary apartheid whereby citizens divide themselves according to the color of their clothing (and thus it is possible to switch sides). We also become familiar with the other members of Chig’s group, including a white woman named Wendy, with whom Chig is in love. A second part of Chig’s story depicts his return to the United States on board a ship, one of whose other passengers turns out to be Wendy. Carlyle is a streetwise resident of Harlem who is enlisted in a scheme concocted by his dentist to trap the dentist’s wife in the appearance of adultery, so that the dentist might marry his mistress. Carlyle also helps a friend escape the clutches of a figure the friend claims is the devil (but who turns out to be a conman).
As unrelated as these narratives might seem to be, Kelley brings them together through the novel’s most conspicuous feature, a dream language reminiscent of that employed in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, into which both Chig and Carlyle fall, as if they have merged into a collective unconscious evoked by an amalgam of distorted discourse and vernacular African-American speech:
The questjung reminds still. Why, when those off us that gowhine that way, run up Hattanhand, waving aisde Malma-Mae to buy boy bye the bearettes—why do skiers flie and fists flight? How do the tampors at Camp Tiwayo get out the shatgrins and flupipointed hats? When do the balls gangle over the palmbreaker’s bedpost? Why such constarenation?
The novel alternates between the two characters, with intermediate episodes related in this dream language, which ultimately invokes a hallucinatory vision of “New Afriquerque” that seems finally to unite Chig and Carlyle in a transformed racial (un)consciousness.
Readers expecting this novel to further develop the story of the Dunford family as initiated in Dancers on the Shore, or even to similarly expand Carlyle Bedlow’s character as introduced in Kelley’s immediately preceding novel, dem, surely found it puzzling at the least, perhaps literally incomprehensible. Although dem had shown Kelley departing from the conventional realism characterizing his first three books, few were likely prepared for the Joycean extravagance of Dunfords Travels Everywheres (the parallels with and allusions to Finnegans Wake are numerous and explicit). For some critics, while this novel engages with the realities of black life in America just as profoundly as Kelley’s previous work, it evokes its themes with such modernist “difficulty” that the themes threaten to be lost. In these ways Dunfords Travels Everywheres seems to abandon the kind of social analysis to which Dancers on the Shore might be reduced and that arguably represents the approach readers and critics assign by default to the African-American writer. That Kelley spurns this approach could certainly help explain the neglect into which his work fell after the publication of what turned out to be his final novel, as no follow-up book ever appeared.
Yet Kelley’s fiction was never, in fact, either straightforwardly realistic or obviously rhetorical. Not even A Distant Drummer, no doubt his best-known book, could really be described as social realism, despite the fact it is the most direct treatment of racial conflict. The conflict is, at least at first, expressed in the absence of confrontation between blacks and white, in a situation that could be considered fanciful: One of the novel’s main characters, Tucker Caliban, suddenly leaves town (located in an imaginary Southern state squeezed between Mississippi and Alabama) after burning down his farm, prompting most of the rest of black population in the area to exit as well, although their motives remain obscure—at least to the white population—and their destination equally uncertain. Thus the novel’s white characters are left to ponder the ramifications of their own future existence without black people, a prospect that throws them into a kind of confusion that ultimately does prove deadly (in the most provocative twist Kelley performs on the “race novel” as many readers would have known it), but the exodus of the novel’s black characters necessarily makes it a story about the behavior of whites, to whom the behavior of Tucker Caliban, the narrative’s ostensible protagonist, looms mysterious, his “protest” undeclared.
If Kelley’s emphasis on the race consciousness of white people was a daring enough move in the midst of the civil rights era, his second novel, A Drop of Patience, seems to deliberately reject the temptation to follow up A Different Drummer with a more unqualified protest novel. It could be described as a character-driven novel largely restricted to the consciousness of its protagonist, a blind jazz musician named Ludlow Washington. Indeed, so confined is it to Ludlow’s circumscribed verbal awareness that although Ludlow becomes an acclaimed practitioner of the “new music” (presumably bebop), we get very little sense of the actual music he plays—no extended descriptions of its sound and texture, little effort made by Ludlow himself to explicate his own music. Much of the novel, rather, is taken up by accounts of Ludlow’s failures with women—several women enter with him into long-term relationships that all go wrong. Ludlow is essentially portrayed as a radical innocent whose affliction is in some sense a source of his talent but also, given his earliest experiences as a child abandoned to the custody of a group home, has made him ill-equipped to negotiate the expectations of a world where the motives of those he encounters are just as veiled to him as their physical visages.
Ludlow is far from a saint in his own behavior toward the women with whom he becomes involved, but the cumulative distress he suffers when every one of his romantic relationships falls apart is real enough (at one point a breakup actually drives him insane), and the prevailing atmosphere of A Drop of Patience could be called melancholic. In this it differs from A Different Drummer, which, if anything, at times verges on the comic in its tone—it would not be altogether a mischaracterization to say that this novel has a satirical edge to it, except that both the characters (the white characters) and the situation project a kind of absurdism more than they suggest the corrective impulse of satire. Certainly Tucker Caliban seems to have abandoned any expectation that the white people among whom he finds himself are likely to alter their attitudes or behavior in any meaningful way, such that simply leaving his life there behind him is the most sensible action. Aside from Tucker, the black character who has the most substantive role in the novel, Reverend Bradshaw, a civil rights leader from the North who picks exactly the wrong time to arrive in town in an effort to better understand his black compatriots in the South, is also portrayed somewhat satirically, although arguably this only underscores the unequivocal horror of his lynching at the novel’s conclusion.
If all of Kelley’s fiction provides a palpably off-kilter perspective on the narratives they present, dem is the work that could most accurately be called absurdist comedy, although the absurdism is tinged as well with something closer to surrealism, and at times the effect is less comical that just strange. That the wife of the protagonist, a white man named Mitchell Pierce, would give birth to twins, one black and one white, purportedly from different fathers, is certainly sufficiently bizarre, but that Mitchell’s response is to try and track down the father of the black child and persuade him to adopt it only compounds an initially preposterous situation. (Few other people seem to regard Mitchell’s plight as incredible, nor does Mitchell seem to consider his wife’s apparent infidelity with alarm or anger, while the wife believes Mitchell’s indifference toward her only encouraged her to be unfaithful in the first place.) The complications Mitchell encounters when on his quest hardly bring him serenity: at one point Mitchell injures himself and must spend several weeks in bed, during which time he becomes addicted to a daytime soap; later he sees a woman in an Automat (she turns out to be a prostitute) whom he insists is actually a character from the show, and he proceeds to follow her around the city.
This episode, like a previous one in which a man from Mitchell’s office turns out to be a killer, is related and then dropped, with no subsequent references to the events and no indication they have affected the characters in any fundamental way, as if these are lives of disconnected moments, the characters unprepared to think about the consequences of their behavior since their experience consists of random and impulsive acts without continuity or purpose beyond their immediate occurrence. Mitchell Pierce makes strenuous efforts to locate Cooley, the supposed father of the mismatched son, but there is little sense that he understands his own motivations (his marriage is surely over, anyway), nor that he even believes that success in his efforts will solve his problem—he doesn’t really have a coherent conception of what his problem might be. In his portrayal of Mitchell Pierce, Kelley shows white racism to be less the expression of considered beliefs and more the product of disordered impulses, along with a need to dwell in a fantasy version of reality.
We could regard dem as Kelley’s attempt to align his fiction more closely with the increasingly adventurous practices introduced by American writers in the 1970s—from “black humor” to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme to the metafiction of John Barth—practices that would later be loosely affiliated as “postmodern,” although both dem and Dunfords Travels Eveywheres might be more precisely described as “neo-modernist” than postmodern. Indeed, even if a reader might consider dem to be primarily satirical , its satirical message is not so easy to pinpoint, and what lingers most from reading both this novel and Dunfords Travels Everywheres are the unconventional formal and verbal devices Kelley employs, not really any specifiable themes. This is especially true of Dunfords Travels Everywheres, which is clearly an experimental work, albeit the experiment—the novel’s linguistic transformations—is recognizable as variations on the similar dream language of Finnegans Wake. If the expectation of an African-American writer in 1970 was that his work would inevitably foreground “content” (implicitly becoming some variety of protest novel), then certainly it would have been difficult to maintain that dem and Dunfords Travels Everywheres clearly meets such an expectation.
Writers such as Ishmael Reed, of course, also during this time wrote formally and stylistically unconventional novels, but Reed’s books as well exhibited a kind of thematic militancy that few readers could miss, and thus he was able to maintain a published presence in contemporary American fiction, although even Reed has suffered a relative lack of attention, given the level of his achievement. The same could be said now of Percival Everett, whose audacious and outrageously satirical novels do receive their share of critical praise but lamentably remain undiscovered by most readers. Kelley’s final two published books (he did not stop writing, but no further fiction has been posthumously published) show a writer moving increasingly toward artifice and experimentation, and we can only conclude that publishers’ reluctance to accept any subsequent work indicates he was continuing in that direction. Until and unless Kelley’s unpublished work is made available, of course, we can’t be sure, but the impatience with the difficulty of Dunfords Travels Everywheres expressed by reviewers at the time seems a telling sign of the response he would likely have continued to receive.
Fiction that is considered difficult or dissonant is generally deplored (when not simply ignored) by the preponderance of American readers, but it would seem that such fiction is regarded as especially problematic when indulged by an African-American writer. Perhaps this is merely the corollary of the notion that experimental fiction itself is a derogation of the writer’s duty to directly engage with social realities and to be “accessible” in doing so, and thus any writer is subject to this judgment. But surely not all readers and critics who might have found Dunfords Travels Everywheres puzzling or frustrating harbored this sort of intolerance of all norm-defying literary works. It’s just that in Kelley’s case the norm defied goes beyond the craft-based norms associated with the conventional novel. Instead, Kelley violated the cultural norm—held mostly by white readers—attached to African-American writers, the requirement that they be, if not strictly social realists, then writers of aesthetically transparent fiction, the value of which is above all sociological and political. Kelley’s work has such value, to be sure, but none of his fiction, going back to A Different Drummer, has as its purpose to reinforce this requirement: these are novels and stories whose achievement rises first of all from aesthetic invention and surprise, and have a thematic complexity to match their narrative dexterity.
At the moment, literary culture is permeated with calls for the inclusion of multifarious “voices,” voices that have previously not been heard (or not heard enough). If in referring to these voices we mean that more writers who are not white males should be published, these calls are certainly appropriate. By this measure William Melvin Kelley is a “voice” from the recent past to which more readers should attend. But the most common use of the term literally evokes voice as the opportunity to “say something,” often implying that the saying itself is even more important than the “something,” the declaration made or message delivered. Kelley is not a writer inclined either to “speak” in this immediately expressive way or to “make a statement” through the more indirect agency of fiction. He is more interested in the surprising things fiction might be made to do than the platitudinous things it is usually made to say. In addition to a voice, we should grant an African-American writer like Kelley his preoccupation with the medium in which he works, even when this makes some readers and publishers uncomfortable. - Daniel Green
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