[This new publication brings the work of this astonishing
novelist, a satirist and humorist of biting insight, to new
audiences.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE MARGINS WILL NOT HOLD  
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Gene Seymour
September 30, 2020
Bookforum
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_ This new publication brings the work of this astonishing novelist,
a satirist and humorist of biting insight, to new audiences. _

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_The Collected Novels of Charles Wright
The Messenger, The Wig, and Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About_
Charles Wright
Introduction by Ishmael Reed
Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780062839602

The decades of near-silence that came in the wake of Charles
Wright’s trilogy of short novels seem almost as aberrant and
disquieting as the novels themselves. Wright died of heart failure at
age seventy-six in October 2008, one month before Barack Obama’s
election and thirty-five years after the publication of _Absolutely
Nothing to Get Alarmed About_, the last of Wright’s novels, whose
1973 appearance came a decade after his debut, _The Messenger_. Wright
clawed and strained from the margins of American existence for
widespread acknowledgment, if not the fame his talent deserved.
Cult-hood was the best he got, but it’s been enough. Through the
dedication and (even) fervor of his steadfast readers, Wright’s
sardonic, lyrical depictions of a young black intellectual’s odyssey
through the lower depths of mid-twentieth-century New York City have
somehow materialized in another century, much as Wright once imagined
himself to move through time and space: “like an uncertain ghost
through the white world.”

It’s tempting to think of Wright’s unnamed alter ego in these
mostly autobiographical novels as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,
emerging tentatively from the city’s underbelly at the dawn of the
1960s, just as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum, but
still condemned to occupy the “lower frequencies” of a forbidding
metropolis, in a state of what the biracial Beat poet Bob Kaufman
characterized as “solitudes crowded with loneliness.” As with
Ellison’s hero, Wright’s protagonists are often mistaken in these
novels by people on varied social levels for being anything other than
their true selves.

The point is marked harshly, if almost haphazardly, as far back as
_The Messenger_. One of the protagonist’s delivery assignments takes
him beyond Manhattan to the “serene, green world of Manhasset, Long
Island,” where a small boy with a space helmet and Davy Crockett
T-shirt aims a water pistol at him and shouts, “Hey you! Chinese
Boy!” This disagreeable interlude prompts a comparably unpleasant
reverie of a Missouri childhood during which the narrator was both
affronted and cold-shouldered by whites for being black while
withstanding insults from black friends for being “yellow” or
“shit-colored.” In sustaining the bruises from these bigotries
(“They called me dago as a child, before my curls turned to
kinks”), Wright’s narrator also recognizes that they forged the
foundation of his lifelong status as an outsider, someone who carries
his understanding of who he is through mood-swinging tumult and the
hand-to-mouth uncertainties of his life among the prostitutes, drug
addicts, and dealers. These were his neighbors and, at times, friends
in the city’s grubbier precincts and side streets during the Kennedy
New Frontier years.

Wright’s hard-boiled protagonist is also a street hustler,
augmenting his scant income as a messenger with whatever he picks up
from being picked up for sex by women and men. Not all the trysts are
consummated. One Saturday morning finds him reading Hemingway short
stories on a park bench in the East Fifties when a “middle-aged
man” with a “whiskey-ad face” asks him to survey the first
editions in his apartment. The narrator gets off on the books, but
declines his host’s advances.

There are other such encounters in _The Messenger_: sadder, funnier,
and darker. But one mentions this occurrence—and Wright’s plots
are mosaics of occurrence—to bring up the author’s affinity for
Hemingway, whose stories also buck Wright up in _Absolutely Nothing to
Get Alarmed About_. Other influences come up in these books—F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nathanael West, and Langston Hughes—and
they all contribute to the bone-dry fatalism and bruised romanticism
that Wright’s protagonist carries around like weapons. Such
attributes don’t always protect him from pain, embarrassment, or the
loneliness of walking barren streets “saddled with a numb,
self-centered despair.” But they do afford the narrator enough cool
composure to tell an overbearing police sergeant to stop intruding on
his personal space.

When the reader gets to the second of these novels, 1966’s _The
Wig_, it feels as though the flamboyant astral boogie of George
Clinton’s Funkadelic stormed into the middle of a bop quartet’s
lovesick ballad. The mean-streets milieu is roughly the same, this
time centered mostly in Harlem, where we meet Lester Jefferson, a
rambunctiously outgoing and terminally callow variation on Wright’s
urban-loner persona. Lester is determined to capitalize on the
transformative potential of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society with some
bold transformations of his own. These begin with the vigorous
application of something called Silky Smooth Hair Relaxer (“with the
Built-in Sweat-proof Base”), thus bringing to life the eponymous
“wig”: a lustrously silken hairdo that so boosts his self-esteem
(“I hadn’t felt so good since discovering last year that I
actually disliked watermelon”) that he believes nothing less than
the American Dream is within reach. Helping him along is one Little
Jimmie Wishbone, a shady personage who once was so celebrated a movie
star that he was serenaded in the White House Blue Room by a
congressional chorus singing “He’s a Jolly Good Nigger.”

The imagery and the circumstances swing hard and wild in this surreal
vision of a 1960s New York populated with such exotic characters as
Sunflower Ashley-Smithe, a “thoroughbred American Negro” record
producer; Sandra Hanover, née Alvin Brown, “a male-femme in sundown
antelope costume and matching boots” along with a five-o’clock
shadow; and the mysterious Mr. Fishback, a necrophiliac funeral
director. Despite his attention-getting locks, Lester has trouble
finding work until he scores a gig requiring him to dress up in a
chicken suit to promote a fast-food franchise (“$90 for five and a
half days, plus all the chicken you could eat on your day off”).

In drastic contrast to its more ruminative predecessor, _The Wig_
reads as though it could have been airlifted from the present day.
Back when Jim Crow was still reeling from the blows it took from civil
rights legislation, Wright’s heedless, insolent appropriation of
degrading stereotypes to challenge status-quo racial presumptions was
tonic for young black writers seeking escape from the naturalism white
critics like Irving Howe generally expected from them. _The Wig_
anticipates the work of Fran Ross, Paul Beatty, Darius James, and
Ishmael Reed, who in his introduction to this collection regards the
novel as a landmark in African American fiction and elsewhere calls it
“Richard Pryor on paper.” _The Wig_ feels as though it was talked
up in torrential bursts rather than written down, balancing its honest
rage with narrative vigor.

If _The Wig_’s rococo audacity evokes the dizzying convergence of
upheaval and possibility marking the go-go ’60s, then _Absolutely
Nothing to Get Alarmed About_ comes across like the bleak
morning-after of the Nixon era. Assembled largely from columns Wright
wrote for the _Village Voice_, his final novel represents a drastic
shift back to the blue-tinged melancholy of _The Messenger_ and to
that book’s protagonist, who, despite having gained some renown as a
writer, is still struggling to find steady work and hold on to a place
to live. _Absolutely Nothing_’s beginning finds him in the Salvation
Army Bowery Memorial Hotel, fighting off insomnia and “arrogant
cockroaches” as he drinks his way to something resembling
consciousness. Even through an alcoholic haze, his boldness,
resilience, and facility with language remain intact as he reminds the
reader who he is and what he’s there for:

Solitary watchman. Lantern held high. Peering out at friends,
strangers. Desperately trying to get a reassuring bird’s-eye view of
America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sunny philosophy had always appealed
to me. I believed in the future of the country. At fourteen, I had
written: “I am the future.” Twenty-six years later—all I want to
do is excrete the past and share with you a few Black Studies.

And so he does, conducting a tour of a New York City enervated by a
free-falling economy and imploding desires. As with the most
interesting American writing of its era, _Absolutely Nothing to Get
Alarmed About_ wanders comfortably between journalism and fiction,
blending the narrator’s deepening spiral into alcoholism and
depression with compassionate and persuasively rendered set pieces
about others in his social circle who experience similar travails
along the precipice of urban squalor: cat lovers and dognappers, drug
addicts and winos, lovers and haters. “Like an addicted
entomologist, I am drawn to people. Let them flutter, bask, rest, feed
on my tree. Then fly, fly. Fly away. Goddammit.” His sense of humor
remains intact, but just barely, and at times you want to avert your
eyes from the scenes he depicts, e.g., a “fat, laughing Chinese girl
about three years old” falling to the ground on a pile of dog
excrement.

And still Wright manages to inspire, even when he’s staring at you
from the bottom of an empty bottle. When I first read _Absolutely
Nothing to Get Alarmed About_, in my relatively secure twenties, I
imagined how living along the sawtooth edges of New York City in those
economically stressed mid-1970s would, for any young black writer, be
enthralling and disheartening all at once. Even at his most
marginalized, Wright wrote with a sense of style and intensity of
vision that allowed me to believe I could live, grow, and strain for
enlightenment within the isolation the book evokes. That’s why, I
suppose, Wright’s meager literary output won’t go away: As much as
his Fitzgeraldian dreams were atomized by life, he never stopped
taking it all down, turning it into art, and being true to his
calling.

Maybe one should look not to Fitzgerald but to Pryor for the most apt
comparison. In a routine about a trip to Africa, Pryor describes a
wildlife tour where he caught several animals in the act of being
their predatory or preyed-upon selves. Among the latter was a giraffe
that had extracted itself from pursuing lions. “Half his ass,”
Pryor recalled, “was eaten off. Just hangin’ there like that. But
the mothafucka had an attitude like, _Fuck it! I’m alive!”_

_Gene Seymour is a writer living in Brooklyn._

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