LETTERS: 1987:45 - 49

LETTERS: 1987: 45 – 49

45.

                                                                                                   August  22,  1987

Dear friend R.K. Singh,

I am glad to have your letter with the news that you got my novel SUMMER FOR JOEY and that word has come of a review copy of GREAT DAY COMING having been sent you.

My publisher made the mistake, against my instructions, to send your copy of the novel by slow mail when  I had specified airmail.  I’m sorry it was delayed.

About GREAT DAY COMING, I cannot say much about the book until I have a copy in hand.  There have been so many delays.  Please send my thanks to your friend and publisher for his care in speeding the process by his frequent phone calls.

I cannot at this time mail you an article. I would like, if you think it appropriate, in due time, to write a short essay on GREAT DAY COMING as historical criticism, written at the height of our civil rights militancy and reflecting optimism that at that time there was a chance that we would have a true revolution  for Blacks and that such a turnabout might be an influence on the entire social/economic structure of the US, promoting sympathy for underprivileged minorities. But the aftermath of the rebellion has led, if anything, to backlash and digging in to entrench reactionary pogroms.  This is shown by both Nixon and Reagan administrations, both moving toward dictatorship by the corporate/Military bodies that use government for beachheads.

My book, if it has merit, gets its force from being something reflecting the hopefulness of a ferment for change that led to even greater repression, not  only against Blacks but against minorities in general and against the whole laboring force,  including the lower middle class Whites  who have lost their status and, with their children, are being pushed down and exploited for greater profits  for corporations and politicians and leisure-class investors in stocks and bonds.  I see little hope for improvement  and could not today muster the hope-for-the-future  that sparked that  book. What I am saying you will not hear from the American diplomatic family in India, which has always used its power to persuade foreign governments and citizens that the US is much more democratic than it is.  My lectures in India during my US tour  in summer 1971 were  against the falsehoods being promoted by the USIS that paid for my tour, expecting me  to say what they wanted me to say, as so many US lecturers abroad are glad to do  in order to enjoy the money and  power that comes from their toeing the US party line.

I look forward to reading anything you write on either book.

                                                                                                              Yrs.

                                                                                                              Lyle G

46.

                         

                                                                                                September  15,  1987

Dear friend Singh,

I have in succession your two letters of August 18 and September 2.  No copy of the book has yet reached me. I can’t tell whether my whole text was printed and whether the original preface and the 1981 Foreword are both there. 

I am glad you approve of my thesis. I trust it is clear that it is not simply my idea but an idea drawn from the documents I have reviewed, and legitimately so.  The date of writing (1968-9) was during the Civil Rights rebellion for Blacks. I had just returned to Buffalo from teaching during the summer at Miles College, a Black college on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama. The program was established by John Monro, former dean of students at Harvard, who left the University and moved to Miles College, to set up a course of studies that could help Black students overcome the handicap caused by their having attended inferior “separate but equal” elementary schools established by White folks for Blacks.

As I read and studied with those students, there was no doubt of their intelligence and sensitivity and initiative.  They were students of promise who had suffered from schools that denied fulfillment of their potential. Monro’s aim was to help overcome this handicap.

Back in Buffalo for the school year 1967-8, I started reading the books mentioned in GREAT DAY COMING with a class of high school teachers in downtown Buffalo, where a majority of students were Black.  My class was made up of both White teachers and Blacks. At first the Whites dominated class discussion, as they always had, but at a certain point the Blacks woke up to the fact that the material in this course was themselves and their history, and they began to speak out.  I learned from them, and so did their colleagues, the  White teachers.  I had intended a one-semester class, but at the end of the semester they asked  to go on with more readings.  Their ideas, more than mine, dictated what  I put into my book.

I can’t write an article on Black literature since 1968. I visited Turkey and India in 1968 through 1971, first as Fulbright professor at Hacettepe University (1968-9), then as visiting professor there in spring terms 1970 and 1971, at which time I spent the month of May each year teaching American literature to teachers from different campuses of the University of Madras. During the fall terms, I returned to Buffalo and taught Black Literature at SUNY-Buffalo, from where I retired in June 1972, at which time my wife and I moved to Bennington, Vermont, my wife’s birthplace.  Since then I’ve  not kept up with Black Literature but have devoted myself to writing fiction and poetry and local politics.

You notice that in this letter I use the descriptive word “Black” and not “Negro,” whereas in my book the word is more often “Negro.”  I wrote my book just at the watershed when “Negro” became offensive to Black Americans because  it conveyed to them all the demeaning connotations of White supremacy concentrated in the epithet White people had coined.  To the extent that I have used “Negro” in my book, the language is obsolete, and is bound to offend US Black readers.  I am sorry for this  but when I learned of the possibility that the book would be published in India, I did not wish at such a distance to undertake revising the vocabulary. 

My dear friend, if you believe that any of the above paragraphs shed light on my book, you have my permission to print them in any article, or as another foreword to your review.

I welcome the thought of your reviewing my novel SUMMER FOR JOEY, which continues to sell well.  I have given many readings and continue.

I believe I sent you a copy of my book of poems RECALLS (Winter, 1986, Bob and Susan Arnold, Green River, Vermont). 

This is a limited edition for poets and libraries, and if you wish you have my permission to reprint, mentioning indebtedness to the Arnolds. The lyrics in this book are a preface for my narrative poem AZUBAH NYE (on my grandfather’s great grandmother and on family history). “Azubah Nye” was featured in Cid Corman’s ORIGIN magazine, Fifth Series #4, Fall 1984.  Both the narrative poem and the lyrics will be printed together for the first time by White Pine Press, Dennis Maloney, Editor, Fredonia, New York, scheduled for Fall 1988.  

I enclose an editorial from the BANNER, summarizing the editor’s thought on the present condition of American Blacks.

Also an announcement of my appointment to a Selectmen’s commission, my first official recognition by the Bennington political establishment.  This will keep me busy for the next 15 months, till December 1988.

                                                                                                              Yours,

                                                                                                              Lyle Glazier

47.

                                                                                                    October  10, 1987   

Dear friend Singh,

It is impossible for me to write for you an essay on recent Black literature, for since 1968-9 when I wrote GREAT DAY COMING, I have gone on to different work.  It will be up to young Black authors to write the sort of essay you have in mind.  My student Dr. Jerome E. Thornton of Afro-American  Institute at State University of New York at Albany is now engaged in that sort of writing, and inside the Black experience, as I could not be, he will achieve immensely more valuable results than my novice book of nearly two decades ago.

In 1985, I did rewrite some fragments of GREAT DAY COMING, bringing them more up to date, and under second cover I am mailing you a piece on Zora Neale Hurston revising that essay in the book.  You are welcome to use it.

I enclose also the poems called RECALLS. If you use them, I hope you will acknowledge indebtedness to prior publication by LONGHOUSE (Bob Arnold, Editor, Green River, Vermont) in a limited edition for poets and libraries. These prefatory lyrics to my three-part narrative AZUBAH NYE are scheduled for publication along with the narrative:  Dennis Maloney, White Pine Press, Fredonia, New York, September 1988.

If anything, I am flattered that my New Delhi publisher thinks I am Black, for my interpretation coincides with the new evaluations now being made by Jerome Thornton, and by the recent best-selling novel BELOVED by Toni Morrison, who is vividly recapturing the spirit of books by Jean Tommer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka that proclaimed that Black writers should not be persuaded to meld into White society as tokens but should continue the struggle of Black folk to remain true to their heritage, and in so doing (incidentally) they might perhaps  redeem US materialistic society and contribute to our achieving true Democracy.

As you asked, I am sending Teresinka Pereira $15 in your name for your entry in her Directory.

Your many activities reflect a  mind and spirit intensely alive.  Congratulations on your ability to flourish creatively even in the sterile atmosphere where you dwell.

                                                                                                  Yours,

                                                                                                  Lyle G

48.

                                                                                                  October 19,  1987

Dear friend Singh,

I have your remarkable review. Only two suggestions for you to consider. (1) I meant not to be quite so hard on Dr. King, whose “nonviolent direct action” was meant to bring out the covert violence in White society, so in his way he was strong against the White supremacists, who hated him and made him pay. In a sense he used the Christian  middle class ethic to attack the materialistic emphasis of White Christians who wanted both money and the name of piety. (2) Your interpretation of my last chapter misses the irony.  The only ones who “love a ghetto” are money changers who profit from it.  Those who live there do not love it no matter how hard they struggle to make a haven of love inside a nest of exploitation by moneychangers.  The seeds that are sucked up into the network of  skyscrapers are the lifeblood of the ghetto inhabitants who are being made to expend heart and soul (and the blood of their children) for profit of landlords.

Otherwise your  article is superb. I like very much, too, the way you put your finger on the pulsebeat where my novel and Black literature book cross fibers.  I’ve had seven or eight published review of SUMMER FOR JOEY, all of them flattering, but nobody but you has pointed out the irony of the incident where the boy watches in horrified glee as the darkie’s teeth are crammed down his throat.  That is good reading and good reporting on your part, and I thank you.

Unfortunately, I sent the letter to the DIRECTORY CHECK ENCLOSED as soon as I got your earlier letter. I hope they go through on granting you the recognition they promised you.

I learn so late, also, that the price of GREAT DAY COMING probably exceeds the amount in my check.  Can you possibly get your Delhi friend to ask the publisher if he can have a copy to mail me airmail if you will pay the postage out of that fifteen dollars. I know nothing about the marketing arrangements made for the book.  Does somebody get paid for writing it or delivering it to the publisher? I get nothing. Arrangements were made and then I was informed.  So it does seem that at least I should get a copy. 

Hope my article on Zora Neale Hurston is worth something for you as worth considering for your magazine. It shows how without changing major promises, I would, if I were writing the book today, change details of my criticism.

                                                                                                  Yours,

                                                                                                  Lyle G

49.

                                                                                                  November 21, 1987

Dear friend Singh,

I have your letter of Nov 9.

I did not submit my manuscript to RAAJ PRAKASHAN. It was submitted with my permission by Dr. K S Misra, but I did not know where until I was informed.  I am happy to see the book in print.

The enclosed article from BENNINGTON BANNER will tell you a bit more about my part in the publication.

I am glad to know that you intend to publish the article on Zora Neale Hurston which will show one example of how the book might be revised today, if I were to take on the task of revision as I do not intend to do.  Since I wrote the book in 1968-9, a wealth of books by Black authors have flooded the US market. After retirement from Buffalo in 1972, I have been chiefly engaged in writing fiction and poetry or engaging in politics in Bennington.  At my age, I have no reason to go back and catch up with what has happened in a cultural phenomenon that was for a short time my concern.  This does not mean that I am no longer interested in the failure of US society to accept Blacks into full partnership. As a writer, whether of poetry, fiction, literary criticism, or Black experience, I have been most concerned with looking at US society, its people and politics, to determine and record scholarly or lyrical impressions of our failures and successes in realizing the ideals announced in the “Declaration of Independence” and the Bill of Rights, and repeated in such documents as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address—for all the people and from all the people, a government guaranteeing “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

How far we fall short! How, in spite of discouragements, we should continue the struggle!

                                                                                                  Yours,

                                                                                                  Lyle Glazier