Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“PORGY” by DuBose Heyward (first published
in 1925)
There are very
different reasons for reading old books – catching up with the classics; being
a “complete-ist” and so reading the more obscure works of well-known authors;
finding out what other people have been praising; or seeing, out of simple
historical interest, what a past age once admired, even if you know that the
book in question hasn’t lasted the distance as a classic. (This last is the
main reason I sometimes read yesterday’s bestsellers).
But my reason
for reading DuBose Heyward’s Porgy was
sheer curiosity. I wanted to know what the source-novel of the Gershwins’
“folk-opera” Porgy and Bess was like.
Besides, I’d bought a handsome little hardback “Travellers’ Library” edition of
Porgy (printed in 1930, I see) at a
second-hand bookshop some years back, and I was sick of seeing it on my shelf,
taunting me for not having read it. So recently I sat down and read it. It
didn’t take long. Porgy is a very
short novel and easily read in a couple of sittings.
But it does have
a major difficulty for modern readers.
This is a book
about black characters written by a white author, and reading it now, we can’t
help being aware of the elements of condescension there are in it, even if on
first publication it gained praise from some black intellectuals like Langston
Hughes. Edwin DuBose Heyward (1885-1940) was a white Southerner, born and
raised in Charleston, South Carolina, where Porgy
is set. (The setting is a seaport, with steamers that run to and from New York,
but I do not think the novel specifically names the city.)
If you know the
Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, you will
find the general outline of the story familiar.
Porgy is an ageing
and crippled beggar “black with the
almost purple blackness of unadulterated Congo blood.” (Part One) Porgy,
who often travels around on a little cart drawn by a smelly goat, lives on
Catfish Row with other poor black folks. Most of the men are stevedores or
fishermen. Most of the women are servants or cooks for white folks. In the
novel’s opening section, the burly stevedore Crown murders Robbins in a brawl
over a gambling game. Crown flees (and hides out on a well-wooded island).
Much later
Crown’s woman Bess turns up – raddled, disreputable and with a history of drug
abuse, “happy dust” (presumably cocaine) being supplied to her by the
light-skinning “octoroon” Sportin’ Life. Possibly she’s lived as a prostitute,
though the novel never exactly says this. “She
was extremely drunk and unpleasant to look upon”, says the author when she
first appears. The tough and matriarchal women who dominate Catfish Row (Maria
and Robbins’ widow Serena) don’t think much of Bess, but she begins to cohabit
with Porgy. They seem to find happiness together, but their happiness is
interrupted when the people of Catfish Row go on a picnic to the island where
Crown is still living wildly. Crown manages to grab Bess when she is separated
from the crowd and apparently forces himself on her sexually (not depicted
explicitly in either novel or “folk-opera”, but the implication is clear).
At heart, Bess
is still Crown’s woman. Later, and after a terrific hurricane rocks the city,
Crown returns at night to claim Bess. Porgy kills him and (it is implied) the
tough women of Catfish Row drag the corpse to another spot. Porgy is now
apparently secure in his possession of Bess. The murder of Crown is unsolved by
the police. Porgy is not a suspect because the police never consider that an
ageing cripple would have been capable of killing the formidable Crown. Porgy
goes to jail briefly for a minor misdemeanour (failing to help the coroner
identify the corpse). But when he returns to his tenement, he finds that Bess
had fled and gone off to live the good life somewhere else. The child they were
going to raise together (a baby orphaned when her mother was killed by the
hurricane) has been given to Serena. Porgy feels suddenly old.
Nearly all of
this you recognise from Porgy and Bess,
which is hardly surprising as DuBose Heyward collaborated with the Gershwins
when they were putting their musical together in 1935, and Porgy and Bess also drew heavily on Porgy, a stage-play adaptation of the novel which Heywood and his
wife Dorothy had written in 1927. In fact, though the words of songs were Ira
Gershwin’s work, most of the recitative of Porgy
and Bess can be credited to Heyward.
Every so often
in reading the novel, I found myself stumbling over passages that clearly
inspired the folk-opera’s songs. “Libbin’
will be easy” says Crown to Bess (Part Four) and my head immediately starts
playing “Summertime”, though there is nothing else like that song in the novel.
Having encountered Crown again, Bess pleads in the novel:
“Oh fuh Gawd sake, Porgy, don’t let dat man
come and handle me! Ef yuh is willin’ tuh keep me den let me stay. Ef he jus’
don’t’ put dem hot han’ on me, I kin be good, I kin ‘member, I kin be happy.”(Part
Six)
This is quite
clearly the origin of the folk-opera’s “I Loves You Porgy”. (And if you are too
dull-witted to understand how great a song that is, especially when sung by
Nina Simone or Billie Holiday, then that is your loss.)
Yet such moments
of recognition are rarer than I expected. The fact is, the novel’s emphases are
different from the musicalized version. There is less suggestion that Bess
feels any real love for Porgy – we have to take their happiness on trust in the
novel, as it is described briefly from the outside only and never really
dramatised. Sportin’ Life appears only very briefly in the novel (before being
vigorously kicked out by the protective Maria) and he is certainly not the
star-part fellow who gets to sing “It Ain’t Necessarily So”. And there is no
uplift at the end, such as provides Porgy
and Bess with a rousing (if delusional) final curtain when Porgy sings “Lawd,
I’m on My Way,” and sets off to find Bess. The novel simply tells us that Porgy
suddenly feels old at the loss of Bess and it implies he accepts defeat.
More than
anything, this brief novel is weighted with descriptive “local colour” of the
sort that can’t figure in any stage version. There are long descriptions, like
the one of a black fraternity’s colourful parade that opens Part Four.
Heywood’s style often teeters near to purple prose.
Take this account
of what Porgy sees on his rounds through the parts of town where white folks
live:
“Before the houses and the rose-tellises stretched a
broad drive, and beyond its dazzling belt of crushed shell the harbour lay
between its tawny islands, like a sapphire upon a sailor’s weathered hand.
Sometimes Porgy would steal an hour from the daily rounds, pause there, and
watch a great, blunt-nosed steamer heave slowly out of the unknown, to come to
rest with a sight of spent team, and a dusty thundering of released anchor
chains.” (Part Two)
Or take this
description of a fishing fleet:
“Warm sunlight flooded out of the west,
touched the old city with transient glory, then cascaded over the tossing
surface of the bay to paint the taut, cupped sails salmon pink, as the fleet
drove forward directly into the eyes of the sun.” (Part Five)
But the
hurricane is an artful piece of descriptive writing, a huge, frightening event
over which Heyward takes many pages in Part Five as he notes the different
phases of the great storm.
DuBose Heyward,
native of Charleston, presumably observed at first hand some of the life he
depicted. As is well attested, the character of Porgy is based on a real
crippled beggar who did his rounds in the city - Samuel Smalls, nicknamed “Goat Cart Sam”. It is possible too that the
“Gullah” dialect Heyward gives his black characters is at least in part
authentic, although this is one of the elements of the novel that
African-Americans now find most reprehensible. To them, the novel’s characters
speak in a white man’s caricature of black dialects. It is well-known that at
first sophisticated black actors in New York baulked at performing Porgy and Bess or the play Porgy as written, because the dialogue
was not black speech as they knew it. (I remember some years ago going to a
production of Porgy and Bess with a
black American cast – the programme notes were careful to point out that it was
written in “the authentic Gullah dialect”, lest anyone think this was the way
the actors and singers habitually talked.)
Even if we
accept Heyward’s rendition of black speech as authentic, there are those
unnerving moments where his language turns patronising. Women are referred to
as “negresses”, Crown is a “buck nigger”, and blacks grow “wool” on their
heads. Porgy would in the afternoons “experience
a pleasant atavistic calm, and would doze lightly under the terrific heat, as
only a full-blooded Negro can.” (Part One) This sounds like the white
Southerner’s stereotype of the cheerful, lazy black man, just a mite away from
Stepin Fetchit.
And of course
the novel’s blacks are credulous and superstitious. After burying the murdered
Robbins in the graveyard, the superstitious mourners (including the presiding
clergyman) have a race to get out of the graveyard, as they believe the last to
leave will be the next to die. Porgy gets a “conjer’ woman” to cast a spell to
make Bess well. When a buzzard lands on the roof after Crown is killed, Porgy
thinks it’s the soul of Crown coming back to haunt him.
Which brings me
to what I think is the most unpalatable aspect of the novel for modern readers.
It is clear that DuBose Heyward sees black life in Charleston as quaint and
colourful partly because blacks are unsophisticated and “uncorrupted” by
education or the influence of Northerners. There is the clear implication that
it is better for blacks to live their “simple” lives rather than become part of
a complex modern city or civilisation. In short, Heyward really thinks that
they should “know their place”. The novel caricatures the one black who has
some advanced formal education - the “lawyer” Frasier, who offers cheap (and
non-legal) divorces.
Most tellingly
there is an exchange between the corrupting Sportin’ Life and the matriarchal
Maria in Part Two.
“Yuh sho got good-lookin’ white gals in dis
town” says the Sportin’ Life (Part Two) to the scandalisation of Maria, who
at once rebukes him and tells him he’s got no business to say that. This plays
very much to the white Southerner’s fear (in history the cause of many
lynchings) that “uppity” blacks spend their time lustfully eyeing up white
women.
“Come now, old lady”, says Sportin’ Life
“don’t talk like dese old-fashioned
lamp-oil niggers what have had no adwantage. Why, up in New York, where I been
waitin’ in a hotel…”
Clearly Sportin’
Life is about to tell of hedonistic New Yorkers being racially mixed. But Maria
bursts out:
“Noo
Yo’k…. Don’t yuh try any Noo Yo’k aroun’ dis town. Ef I had my way, I’d go down
tuh dat Noo Yo’k boat, an’ take ebbery Gawd’s nigger what come up de gang plank
wid er Joseph coat in he back an’ a glass headlight on he buzzom and drap un
tuh de catfish befo’ he foot hit decent groun’! Yas; my belly fair ache wid dis
Noo Yo’k talk. De fus t’ing dat dem nigger fuhgit is dat dem is nigger. Den dem
comes tuh dese decent country mens, and fills un full ob talk wut put money in
de funeral ondehtakuh pocket.”
“Niggers forget
they are niggers” when they should remain “decent country men”. That is the
novel’s view of blacks who go to the big modern city and who therefore (like
Sportin’ Life) end up as criminals and corrupters. They should really remain
simple, picturesque people in settings of intense local colour. And not get
“uppity”, even if their passions and losses make for interesting drama.
With regret, then,
we can’t read this novel now in anything like the spirit the author intended.
Footnote: I am not an
expert in that strange era of the 1920s when white American authors, most of
whom regarded themselves as liberals or radicals, were writing about black
people, usually with the intention of praising their “natural, carefree,
primitive” lives in contrast with stifling white middle-class morality. Apart
from DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, the
best-known (or, if you prefer, most notorious) examples of this phenomenon were
Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven and
Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter,
both of which were, like Porgy, big
bestsellers and won literary prizes. As interpreted nowadays by black (and
other) readers and critics, they are seen as dated, patronising examples of
“cultural appropriation”, perpetuating white stereotypes of black people
regardless of their author’s conscious intentions. The best analysis of Porgy which I have read (much better
than my own paltry review here) is Kendra Hamilton’s “Goat Cart Sam a.k.a.
Porgy”. It places the novel in the context of such 1920s literary endeavours.
You can find it at this link:
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