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    New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"
    New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"
    New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"
    Ebook436 pages12 hours

    New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"

    By Noelle Morrissette, Bruce Barnhart, Lori Brooks and

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    James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole.

    Johnson’s novel provocatively engages with political and cultural strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains in print over a century after its initial publication. New Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book’s reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its author, and its continuing influence on American literature and global culture.

    Contributors: Bruce Barnhart, Lori Brooks, Ben Glaser, Jeff Karem, Daphne Lamothe, Noelle Morrissette, Michael Nowlin, Lawrence J. Oliver, Diana Paulin, Amritjit Singh, Robert B. Stepto

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Georgia Press
    Release dateJul 15, 2017
    ISBN9780820350967
    New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"

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      New Perspectives on James Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man" - Noelle Morrissette

      PART ONE

      Cultures of Reading, Cultures of Writing

      Canons and Authenticity

      Stepping across the Confines of Language and Race

      Brander Matthews, James Weldon Johnson, and Racial Cosmopolitanism

      LAWRENCE J. OLIVER

      It would not have taken a psychologist to understand that I was born to be a New Yorker. . . . But being born a New Yorker means being born, no matter where, with a love for cosmopolitanism; and one either is or isn’t.

      —James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way

      We New Yorkers have to make traditions for ourselves, as best we may, in the welter and vortex of conflicting influences. We come of stocks so varied, and yet so ill fused, that although the new American begins to emerge, he is surrounded and encompassed about by men of every heredity; and he is receptive perforce; and he is not hostile to the foreigner; and he cannot but be cosmopolitan.

      —Brander Matthews, More American Stories

      In his autobiography, Along This Way, James Weldon Johnson relates that after he moved from Jacksonville to New York City in 1902, intent on making his career as a songwriter with his brother, Rosamond, and Bob Cole, he began taking literature classes at Columbia University (then Columbia College) from Brander Matthews (1852–1929), whose writing he had read. Johnson’s description of his first meeting with Matthews leaves no doubt that it was a critical event in his literary career. Matthews received him cordially, and Johnson was flattered to discover that the professor was familiar with his work in musical comedy. The visit, Johnson states,

      was the beginning of a warm and lasting friendship between Brander Matthews and me. He talked a great deal about the musical comedy stage and the important people connected with it. In his lectures he frequently set me in an enviable light before the class. . . . I was fascinated with my work under him. I was especially impressed with his catholicity, his freedom from pedantry, and his common sense in talking about the theater. I believe that he shocked most of us in the class when he declared that the best plays of Weber and Fields were the same sort of thing as the theater of Aristophanes.¹

      These comments, made after Matthews’s death, indicate how deeply Johnson admired the professor, whose classes he attended for three years (1902–5) during a formative period in his literary career. In 1905, before leaving for a European musical tour with Rosamond and Cole, Johnson met with Matthews to discuss his more serious work and showed him the first two chapters of his novel. Matthews liked the chapters and the title, and he told Johnson that he was wise to write about what he knew best.² Though some attention has been paid to the Johnson-Matthews relationship, there is still a great deal to be learned about how Johnson’s years of study under the Columbia professor shaped his literary views and influenced the development of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and later works. Johnson does not specify which of Matthews’s numerous texts he read, and we do not know exactly what he heard in Matthews’s classes or discussed in private conversations. However, by examining Matthews’s major work on the writing and criticism of fiction and drama, we can infer what he taught Johnson about literary theory and the craft of fiction writing during and after his studies at Columbia.

      Johnson was an accomplished musician, composer, and journalist before moving to New York City. But fiction writing was new to him. In this genre he was a novice. Matthews’s lectures and critical writings provided him with knowledge, guidance, and advice about the craft of fiction that he needed in order to produce an international literary classic that, as Michael Nowlin argues elsewhere in this volume, would defy the white supremacist notion of African American literary destitution. In The Historical Novel and Other Essays (1901), Aspects of Fiction (1896), and Inquiries and Opinions (published in 1907 but composed of essays and addresses dated 1903–5), Matthews explores a wide range of topics of interest to literary critics and fiction writers.³ I believe that Matthews’s writings and lectures, especially those that explore the problematic interconnections of race, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, were as important to Johnson’s conception and composition of The Autobiography as were works by Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who provided Johnson with models and tropes relating to African American experiences. What Matthews contributed to Johnson’s development as a fiction writer (and poet) was equally important: he presented Johnson with a series of theoretical and technical questions to think through and solve as he planned and drafted his novel.

      Matthews was a political and social progressive, and like most white progressives, he believed that while African Americans were entitled to the benefits and protections of U.S. citizenship, they were essentially different; they were thus a part of yet separated from the dominant, white American culture. Matthews’s racial ideology is clearly revealed in his introduction (which Johnson solicited) to Johnson’s Fifty Years and Other Poems. Matthews praises the poetry and asserts that African Americans must be welcomed into the body politic as American citizens, with the rights and the duties of other American citizens,⁴ a statement that Johnson would have appreciated. Yet Matthews also makes the confounding assertion that even if they are not as we are, African Americans know no language, no literature and no law other than those of their fellow citizens of Anglo-Saxon ancestry.⁵ Johnson was an integrationist in his politics and aesthetics, but he certainly did not consider himself to be of Anglo-Saxon lineage, and he was fluent in Spanish as well as English. Thus Matthews’s conflicted racial ideology, which permeates his critical writings, presented Johnson with a paradox as he was drafting The Autobiography.

      Matthews’s friendship and teaching, I believe, helped create in Johnson a productive tension that plays out in The Autobiography as well as in the theory of a modernist black poetics that he develops in his later works.⁶ Though the book in many respects fulfills Matthews’s criteria for the modern American novel, it also implicitly resists and subverts Matthews’s theory of a cultural cosmopolitanism rooted in Anglo-Saxon ideals.⁷ If Matthews’s theory of cosmopolitanism encouraged the cross-fertilization of art forms, it ignored the American reality—which Johnson knew all too well from his experience of nearly being lynched in Jacksonville in 1901—that any attempt or even suspicion of cross-fertilization of black and white bodies could mean brutal death. As Jeff Karem argues in his essay in this volume, white elites like Matthews might have had economic and class privilege, but they lacked privileged knowledge of their own culture because they [did] not possess the [disturbing] truth about their nation in the way the narrator does.⁸ One of Johnson’s aims was to educate them about their own cultural blindness.

      Brander Matthews and Columbia University

      It is not difficult to understand why Johnson sought out Matthews when he moved to New York to pursue dual careers as a musical composer and literary artist. Matthews was one of the most prominent and influential scholars and critics of the Progressive Era on both sides of the Atlantic.⁹ Though his scholarly interests were broad, drama was his major area of specialty. His numerous books include French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century (1881) and The Development of the Drama (1903). Matthews was a regular contributor to the major literary magazines, and his textbook An Introduction to American Literature (1896) went through several editions and helped shape the American literary canon of the early twentieth century. Unlike most scholars at elite institutions during the period, Matthews had eclectic tastes and little patience with academics and critics who were literary mandarins, dwellers in ivory towers, secure in their possession of the only key to all the arts.¹⁰ He was as interested in popular culture as in elite culture, and in all the literary genres. Thus the Columbia professor appreciated and advocated for the western humor of Twain, the free verse of Whitman, the puppet shows performed in New York’s Little Italy, the dramatic techniques of Molière and Shakespeare, and the black minstrels and vaudeville that Johnson was writing for and producing in New York City. Whereas the literary mandarins denigrated vaudeville and black minstrels, Matthews asserted in The Importance of the Folk-Theatre that these humble forms of drama, which he compared to the French opéra comique and comédie-française that he enjoyed, were as essential to an understanding of the evolution of the drama as embryology is to a student of zoology.¹¹ Though that statement is well intentioned and supportive of the kind of work James and Rosamond Johnson were doing, it assigns black cultural production to a lower stage of development, which corresponds to the view that even the most progressive-minded whites had of black people at the time. Johnson would challenge that perspective implicitly in his novel and explicitly in his prefaces to his later anthologies.

      Like Johnson, Matthews was a cultural diplomat and mediator who was respected by individuals representing diverse literary and political views, including anti-imperialists like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Richard Watson Gilder, and imperialists such as Rudyard Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt. He was a founder or member of literary clubs in New York, London, and Paris; France awarded him the Legion of Honor in 1907 for his contributions to French literature. Matthews helped organize the American Academy of Arts and Letters, serving as its president during 1912–14, and he was elected as the president of the Modern Language Association in 1910. His personal friendship with Roosevelt, the embodiment of Progressive Era manly Americanism, was especially close; the two corresponded for decades, often discussing literary and political matters, even while Roosevelt was in the White House.¹²

      Literary Technic

      When Johnson brought to Matthews the first two chapters of The Autobiography in 1905, he had already decided on the basic themes and form of his novel of racial passing, including W. E. B. Du Bois’s tropes of the color line, double-consciousness, and the veil. However, although Du Bois’s masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk (1903) inspired Johnson and helped clarify his views on race and black culture, it had little to offer in terms of crafting a modern novel—making decisions about plot, character, narrative technique (spelled technic by Matthews), and so on. Even if it had been possible for Johnson to read Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), before writing his own, he would have found it formally conventional, its style and narrative technique looking back to the realist and romantic traditions of the previous century. Du Bois had a poetic imagination, and his strength as a creative writer was the lyrical essay, which allowed him to express his own as well as black culture’s soul. As he famously stated, the style of his hybrid work was "tropical—African. This needs no apology. The blood of my fathers spoke through me and cast off the English restraint of my training and

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