HARLEM SHUFFLE: A Book Review

I guess I’m just about as white as you can get. I still recall the trepidation I felt in anticipation of my first visit to Harlem, back in the late 1970s, on an art research project. It’s a good thing I had not read Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem Shuffle” before going there; if I had, I might never have dared set foot in that fabled quarter of New York City… Joking? Not entirely. (I was actually warmly welcomed; never felt a moment of anxiety. My fear was the product of pure prejudice). Whitehead’s, though, is the street Harlem of the late 50s, early 60s, a sprawling, teeming urban underworld of petty criminals, hookers, druggies, con men, stone cold killers—people, in other words, who are all struggling to survive in an urban jungle. They are human beings, all; and remarkably this writer (whose “Underground Railroad” was made into the popular television series of the same title) manages to allow every one them a kind of nobility in their humanity.

Ray Carney, Whitehead’s protagonist, is the nearest thing to a law-abiding citizen. He runs a regular furniture store, but needs to supplement his income with a little fencing of goods of doubtful origin here and there. He has a wife and family to support and like everyone else in the story is constantly on the hustle. It’s what everyone must do to simply get by. This is the social norm of a community sidelined by the dominant white culture to the south; everyone gets creative in their need to escape abject poverty, neglect, injustice, squalor, even hunger. Whitehead introduces us to a cast of criminals great and petty, vicious and simple-minded, cruel and compassionate, powerful and weak. The cops are venal, on the take like everyone else. Their killing of an innocent, unarmed boy sets off a riot. Sound familiar? Even Harlem’s wealthy Negros (the then-current term) have a mutual back-scratching Society that supports them in their effort to maximize their profits. 

It's a social structure based on contingency in which everyone has learned to play their part. Favors given require favors in return, and if not honored require payback or revenge. Carney’s conscience is malleable—but he has one. His great desire is to find a place for his family to live on respectable Riverside Drive, and he’s stubborn, patient, willing to do what it takes to fulfill his dream. Unhappily, this leads him ever deeper into the morass of crime, dragged to ever lower depths by his peripatetic, drug-addled cousin, Freddie, who whines constantly, after each worse disaster, “I didn’t mean to get you into this”; and by his resource of last resort, Pepper, a steely old criminal associate of Carney’s father’s and a man who does not hesitate to kill if he sees the need. 

What keeps the reader’s head above this exceedingly polluted water is the sympathy the author shares with us for all his characters. A handful of them, to be truthful, are just plain evil—and for the most part these are not Black. The white power structure of mid- and lower Manhattan real estate moguls, financiers and lawyers are the inevitable winners in this Gotham City; they are no less venal than their less privileged fellow-citizens to the north, and with less reason to be so. But they thrive with impunity. They don’t get nabbed by the cops and packed off to jail. 

If all this sounds familiar, I’m sure that it’s no accident. Whitehead is as powerful a creator of fiction as he is a social observer, historian and critic. His observation and evocation of detail, not only that of human behavior but of the seething reality of New York City’s streets is acute, spot-on, compelling. One of the deep pleasures of fiction is to be transported into an unfamiliar world and live there for a spell, entranced. Here we are, in Harlem, at a period in history not long after the great Negro cultural resurgence of the Harlem Renaissance, not the only moment in history when riots seem the last, inevitably futile recourse of the socially repressed in their struggle for equality and justice, and Whitehead has us live the experience in all its anguishing realism. His book is a great read. His prose is tough, complex, colorful, enlivened by wry humor at life’s vicissitudes. Reading, I found the realization of the Harlem that my white timidity so fearfully projected, all those years ago—not only its lawlessness and squalor, its inexorable Blackness, but more importantly the innate courage and dignity of human beings struggling to survive, and their memorable, deeply flawed, profoundly moving humanity.

A SOFT SPOT: Two sort-of film reviews

But first, can I share a secret? It’s relevant. This is something I have never told anyone in my life before, not even Ellie, who knows everything about me, because I always found it acutely embarrassing. And here I am, about to say it out loud, in public. It’s a pleasure to be too old for shame, too old for embarrassment.

The back story is from my last days at boarding school when I made friends with a school mate about my own age. I admired him immensely, perhaps because he was everything I felt I was not, but aspired to be: a rule breaker, an intellectual who played Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie loudly in the school corridor for everyone to hear; who drank his coffee black; who boldly smoked cigarettes, and even boasted he smoked reefers; who was cynical and smart and dismissive of everyone else in the school. I did everything I could to be just like him, but always fell short. I had the gray trousers of my school uniform daringly tapered—but they were corduroys, and looked slightly ridiculous. Wanting even to emulate his ultra cool short haircut, I went to the barber and told him what I wanted; he gave me… a “Perry Como”! Totally un-cool!

So here’s the secret. My “friend,” my hero, my nemesis gave me a nickname. In his contempt for my friendship, he dubbed me the Village Idiot. 

So much shame! Such a secret, for so long! And now of course I realize that it only hurt as much as it did because… my friend was right! He was smart enough to recognize that the piece of me I so badly wished to hide was some part of my essence as a person. I know enough now, after more than sixty years, to treasure it instead. That soft spot. The innocence. I was brought up in a country village. The Village Idiot is the embodiment of the innocence, the guilelessness, the sense of wonder at the strangeness of the sophisticated grownup world that remains buried somewhere deep in my heart to this day. In all the clever scheming and hostility and squabbling that surrounds us in the world we have foolishly built for ourselves, I am happy to occasionally be able to find refuge in that familiar, comfortable, innocent place in my soul (okay, you soul-less scoffers, my psychological makeup). 

These thoughts were occasioned by two British movies we watched on two consecutive evenings. That would-be lofty intellectual part of me felt almost guilty enjoying them as much as I did. They were charming—and what’s wrong with charming? Both were set the rural environment in which I grew up, both touched on that simplicity, that innocence I’m trying to describe. The first was “Summerland.” In its opening scene, a crotchety old author is disturbed at her work by a posse of unruly children. She shoos them away, yelling after them to “bugger off.” Next scene, she’s young again. It’s World War II. She is working at the same typewriter and jumping up, irate, to chase off another bunch of mocking kids. She’s a holy terror, an outsider, a thorn in the village flesh; along with the whole rest of this tiny population, these kids are sure she’s a witch.

Then an officious lady from the government shows up at her door, bringing with her a scruffy boy, an evacuee from London’s Blitz, who is assigned to be billeted at her house.

She’s outraged, of course. Hates the idea. Despises children. Behaves horribly to the boy. But then of course slowly comes to love him, and he her. He worms his way into her hidden tenderness, her humanity. And through him rediscovers the wound that has made her so bitter… I’ll not say more. I won’t act the spoiler. Enough to say that the film is totally charming.

And then there was “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.” You may have seen this. It’s an old one. We stumbled across it on Netflix and were happy we did. In this one, the peaceful rustic innocence of one of the Channel Islands that lie between England and France is shattered by the arrival of the Germans at the start of World War II. Their hated, brutal presence lifts the veil of innocence and reveals many dark secrets that lurk beneath the surface of village life. The protagonist of the story, a young woman, a promising writer from London, intrigued by the “society”, arrives on the island to research the book club that proved a refuge from the Nazi storm for a motley group of villagers—and ends up entranced…and of course—this is a movie—enamored.

So yes, there’s an English country bumpkin somewhere deep in my heart. And these days I find myself longing to be back where I grew up. Los Angeles feels noisy, with its constant roar of press and police helicopters above and the unceasing wail of sirens on the streets. Its endless traffic jams. It feels tense, as though always awaiting some imminent disaster. Try watching those movies. You’ll see what I mean. You may even find that you too, like myself, are a bit of an idiot. Which is a good place to be.

SHADOW

    I spent a while the other morning sitting with my shadow.

    It’s a familiar concept. We all have our light side and our dark, our yin and yang, our animus and anima. Our masculine and feminine. Our polar opposites. We like to hide the shadow. It’s not something we’re proud of or want to share with other people. For myself, the part I like to show is the light side, the one who cares deeply about every other human being. The shadow is his opposite, the one who doesn’t give a toss about anyone but himself. The one who’s angry, hostile, selfish, inconsiderate, mean… The un-gentle Englishman.

    As I say, we mostly keep our shadow hidden from view, even—no especially—our own. But he or she does tend to pop out at inconvenient moments, most frequently when need arises to deflect the shadow that some other person is throwing at us, provoking our own to come out to play. Projection is one convenient word for it, a simple mechanism by which we react as though our shadow is not ours, but theirs. I point my finger: see what a nasty guy he is. It’s a neat trick of the mind. 

    I find it salutary to sit and watch the shadow from time to time. No use trying to expunge or exorcise it. Try losing your actual shadow when you’re standing out in the sun. In the human psyche, it’s embedded. Psychotherapy is one way to try to get rid of it, but no matter how well you can “understand” it or trace its origin—in childhood, say—sorry, you’re stuck with it. The best way to live with it, I have to remind myself again and again, is simply to be vigilant, to watch for the shadow when it resurfaces, when I find myself pointing the finger, likely getting angry or defensive, above all making judgments about other people: he’s so petty-minded, she’s so selfish, they’re so greedy. Which is exactly the time, I have to remind myself, to trot out the old mirror one more time and take a good look at what I see there.

    The other strategy is to make friends with that shadow side. You, “hypocrite lecteur,” as the French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in one of my favorite lines of all time, “mon semblable, mon frère.” You, reader, hypocrite, my mirror image and my brother. (Hideous translation, as are all translations of poetry. Better a live sparrow, though, than a stuffed eagle, as Edward FitzGerald wrote about his translation of Omar Khayyam…) I try to recognize that my “brother” is only trying to help by inserting himself in the situation and, instead of resisting, thank him and tell him: I don’t need your help right now.

    My shadow came out to play last week. It was an uncomfortable reunion, but good to see him again, shake his hand, and have some fun.

 

 

 

TO MY CRITIC

I am always grateful for those kind enough to take the time to follow my meanderings online, whether here, on Facebook, or elsewhere. I ‘m especially fond of those who enjoy what they read—I am as susceptible to praise as any other human being and certainly it pleases me to know that I have written something that resonates with other people. It’s why I write, to communicate with my fellows.

I also have my critics, and I’d be a fool not to welcome them as much as those who praise me. They teach me to pay more careful attention to my words, and often to have second—or third!—thoughts. I am grateful to them, too, for their response. Among them is one who happens to have been born across the Channel from my own native land, and who appears to share his countrymen’s traditional intellectual disdain for their delusional cousins across the sea. If I don’t misrepresent him, he takes the view that the sciences, particularly the biological and evolutionary sciences, are sufficient explanation for all human behavior and scoffs at me when I see it otherwise.

Most recently—other readers may have notice—he takes me to task for writing so much about myself. He even attributes that to an inability to leave my childhood behind and instructs me to “leave myself at the door.”

Well, I guess I must plead guilty. I do write a lot about myself. What may have escaped my friend’s attention, though, is that I not only have a reason for it, I have distinguished precedents among his own compatriots. I will not presume to compare myself to literary giants like Montaigne and Rousseau (say what you like about the latter, and I admit my preferred hero is Montaigne), but both of these were insistent that they were writing about… themselves!

Precedents aside there is, as I say, a reason for what my friend identifies as a grievous fault. I look in the mirror not, I hope, out of pure narcissism or because I have failed to grow up, but our of curiosity. I have always wanted to know more about what it means to be a human being, and how to be a better one, and the one closest to me, the one that I know best, the one most available tor study is… myself! I believe that the closer I can get to the truth about myself, my own heart and mind, the more I will know about the humanity I share with every other human being on this planet.

Thus my latest book, the one that is not in production—I will soon, I hope be trying shamelessly to persuade you to buy a copy!—is called “Dear Harry: Letters to My Father.” It is—with apologies to my French friend—of course about myself. But mention the title to anyone—well, anyone who is not actually French—and their eyes light up in recognition. Yes, those eyes tell me, I too wish I had known my father better. I too wish to have felt his love in a way I never did. Yes, there are many things I’d wish to tell him if he were still alive…

See what I mean? Come right down to it, it’s not really about “myself” at all. I holding the mirror up I’m looking at the reflection of a man like other men—and not too different from other women. That’s the point.

PRAYER: SOME THOUGHTS

            It’s Sunday today, the day when every week as a child I would go to church. I would sit on one side of my mother in the Rector’s pew, my sister Flora on the other, with all around us my father’s congregation; and my father himself up by the altar, leading the service, or standing at the lectern to read from the Bible, or in the pulpit to deliver his weekly sermon.

            This memory goes back eighty years.

            I do not go to church these days. Unless as a tourist, I have not set foot inside a church in all these many years.

I don’t pray. When we were little, my sister and I would get down on our knees every night at bedtime, bring our hands together as we had been taught, and say our prayers. I don’t know what we prayed for. For Mummy and Daddy, surely. And, since this was during the war, for the men and women—it was mostly men, in those days, doing the fighting and dying—whose lives were at risk on the battlefield or in the air. Or on the ocean.

I have the vague memory of praying especially for the sailors; we were an island nation, after all, and our navy had for centuries been our bulwark against the French and the Spaniards who kept trying to invade us. Also, remember, this was the time when the Battle of the Atlantic was raging and the German “Wolf Pack” of U-boats still had free range of the ocean between us and America, our mainstay of supplies of food was well as weaponry. Millions of tons of vital freight were being sent to the bottom—and many thousands of lives lost to these elusive menaces, until their codes were broken by our geniuses at Bletchley Park, and the danger was reduced. So I think to remember praying for the merchantmen and the brave navy sailors sent out to protect them. There was a particularly moving hymn we used to sing, my mother’s favorite, “Eternal Father, strong to save…” whose last lines, memorably, were “Oh hear us when we cry to Thee/For those in peril on the sea.” My heart constricts a bit, even today, when I play that melody back in memory…

Then at my first boarding school we were required to pray, two dozen boys to a dormitory, all kneeling down beside their beds in striped pajamas. At both my boarding schools, too, attendance at chapel services was obligatory. But I suspect that by the time I was a teenager I was already no longer actually praying when I was on my knees. My mind was mostly on more important things in such private times—most notably the thing between my legs, a subject of vastly greater interest, I confess, than Jesus. But at least, for all those years at school, I went through the formal motions we associate with prayer.

I stopped even the pretense of praying, when I left school. I have not prayed since. And for most of my adult life I gave it little thought. Indeed, I gave little thought to the spiritual dimension of my life, except to scoff at it; I don’t suppose I even thought I had one. (I was also unaware that I had a heart, except for the mundane and necessary business of pumping blood; but that’s another story). But those early years must have in some way left their impression on me, because there came a time, in my later middle years, when it dawned on me that there was a gap in my life where it once had been. Long lost to Christianity and the belief in miracles, salvation, heaven and hell, God, and so on, I found a home for my “spiritual” yearnings (I put that word in quotation marks because I don’t like it; it has largely lost its meaning through the obfuscation of sentimental overuse) in the Buddhist dharma—the handiest and most practical guide to leading a decent, responsible life that I know of—and the daily practice of meditation.

Which brings me around, finally, by an admittedly circuitous route, to the question I was wanting to address: is meditation just another form of prayer? 

I have often pondered the distinction. Both require the same private, quiet, dedicated time. Both require me to focus my mind and determine what might need change or improvement in my life, or in any particular situation in which I might find myself. Or the world at large. I can pray for others. Mummy and Daddy. Sailors in peril on the sea. World peace. But prayer, it seems to me—at the risk of oversimplifying—presupposes a belief in Someone (or Something?) to pray to, as well as the expectation of efficacy—an answer to my prayers. And I don’t subscribe to that belief. I don’t believe that anyone is out there, ready to take a personal, or any other kind of interest in my affairs, still less to intervene. No Eternal Father, strong to save. No one to “hear us, when we cry to Thee..” I see no evidence for anyone out there “watching over us” and generally supervising the affairs of us foolish human beings. With respect for those who do, I see no “Higher Power”, no “Supreme Being”, whatever you choose to call it. 

So, with no One to pray to, I see no reason to pray. But I do meditate. In meditation, I have nothing to ask for and no one to ask it of. When I start out every morning as I do, with the recitation of the lines I have learned as metta—May I be happy, may I be free from stress and pain, and so on—I don’t think of this as a prayer for help. The work is mine. I need to find those things within myself. The Buddha is not a god, but rather a human being who found a way to achieve those things and is happy to show the way to anyone who cares to take heed and do the work. When I wish happiness for others, it is not in the expectation that someone will reach out and solve their problems for them; it is rather that they find their way to the path that can make this happen. If there is something that I want or need—even if it’s something as big and unattainable as world peace—I can work to set that intention in my mind. It then becomes my own responsibility to bring the intention to fulfillment in the best way I can, even if only in the small ways that are within my reach. I can, for instance, work to create the peace I’m looking for in my own heart and mind, and be ready to share with my fellow human beings. 

So meditation, as I see and practice it, is not just quiet time devoted to the search of salvation, forgiveness, wisdom, serenity or whatever. It’s work. Inner work, but still work. And I don’t expect or want anyone to do it for me. Perhaps a Christian, perhaps even my own father (I suspect he might) would argue that prayer is not that much different. That we are each responsible for our own lives, our own happiness, our own salvation. 

But then, see, there’s still God. Who is The Problem.

 

MORE THOUGHTS ABOUT GRIEF... AND MORE

           When I posted my thoughts about grief (see previous entry) on Facebook, I little imagined how deeply and movingly people would respond. It had me thinking that we often fail to give social media its due. It is not always about immediacy, about surface… So I had to write more:

            In response to my post about grief yesterday, a couple of good people suggested that grief was “a waste of time”. I disagree. I think I see what they mean, though. Grief is a healthy and necessary process, as I see it, a natural response to one—or many!—of the blows with which life constantly bombards us. The point I wanted to make is that, as with any other emotion, it's important to avoid clinging to grief, as though it were the only reality. We live in a condition of impermanence, and need to understand that even a powerful, often overwhelming emotion like grief is no less subject to impermanence than fear, or anger—even joy. Which doesn't mean that we should brush it off. It's important, as I see to, to experience it, and experience it in full consciousness. If we don't, that's when it sticks.

            There were also responses to some thoughts I expressed about death and dying:

            Another thing I wanted to clarify: the fear of dying. (Oh, this is getting serious...) 

            I'm told that the dread of incontinence, incapacity, dependence is "fear of dying lite." Okay. But I do think thee's a difference between the fear of dying and the fear of death. Someone else refined my perhaps overly casual remark with the thought that what is to be feared is a dying process that is painful and interminably prolonged. I agree. 

            If given a choice--I won't be!--I would like to die like that monk I once read about: sitting quietly, without resistance but also without urgency, in full consciousness of the process, able to watch it every step of the way. And, if there is a "passage" to some further state of existence (I remain skeptical) I’d very much like to be aware of where it is I'm going! That would be the first step in what my sister, before her own too-early death, insisted cheerfully was "the next great adventure." I'd like to think, seven years later now, that she is still embarked on that adventure!

            And lastly…

            In all this about grief, and death and dying, I completely forgot to mark D-Day, the beginning of the end of at least one manifestation of fascism in Europe. We Europeans (I still count myself one, at heart) need to remember our debt of gratitude to our primary allies in this endeavor: Americans. The thousands of young men at the start of their adult life, whose lives were snatched from them in the brutal ugliness of war. If not for them, their incredible courage and their sacrifice, the history of Europe would look very different today. I can't claim to know how, but different, for sure.

            This day should bring our attention to the resurgence of fascism, in our own country as well as in Europe, and the urgent need to repel it. Too, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a stark and unmistakable echo of the facts and the consequences Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939. Will Putin content himself with one little bite of the European apple? Not if history tells us anything about men of his kind.

            The least we can do in America today, to honor those thousands of brave souls who died on those beaches, and thousands more who were wounded, is to commit ourselves to the continuing struggle against men such as Hitler, Stalin and Putin, and the totalitarianism for which they stand.

GRIEF

            I realize I have been living in a state of grief. Grief for the loss of the lad that I once was, and for the green countryside of rural England where I grew up; grief for the insults to the body proffered by old age; grief for opportunities squandered along the way; grief for the America that embraced me sixty years ago and is suffering so grievously today; grief for the loss of civility and mutual concern between fallible human beings; grief for the young lives lost at the Texas school last week and for the families bereaved; grief for another needless war in Europe, for the lives lost, for the threat of renewed global conflict; grief for the very planet that we so mistreat… 

            The grief is endless. Used to searching in meditation for that place where I hold such feelings in my body, I found it everywhere this morning. Used to being able to witness the impermanence of such feelings and using the breath to let them slip away, as feelings do, I found this particular feeling to be stubborn, stubborn and pervasive. It has been with me for much longer than I have been aware of it.

I found solace this morning in the exercise of an old strategy: substitution. In substituting gratitude for grief, I was finally able to escape it. I have much to be grateful for. For family first, and friends, for the material comfort of my life, for my own personal freedom from the sources of suffering that beset so many others. Grateful above all to have found the refuge of the meditation practice, where I can clear my mind and find solace in my heart. 

            The grief will return, as feelings do. I know this. Even the feeling of gratitude has its own impermanence. But it will do for now.