Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #6 " 'Mr. Hunter's Grave' - Fact, Fiction, or Faction?"

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

This is the fifth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “ ‘Mr. Hunter’s Grave’: Fact, Fiction, or Faction?” (August 6, 2015):

It’s interesting to compare seven reviews of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (2015) and see the various ways they respond to Kunkel’s revelation that Mitchell fabricated certain aspects of his great “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956). The seven reviews are:

1. Thomas Berenato’s "Progress of Stories" (Los Angeles Book Review, April 21, 2015)

2. Janet Malcolm’s "The Master Writer of the City" (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015)

3. Charles McGrath’s "The People You Meet" (The New Yorker, April 27, 2015)

4. Blake Bailey’s " 'Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,' by Thomas Kunkel" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, May 19, 2015)

5. Thomas Powers’ "All I Can Stand" (London Review of Books, June 18, 2015)

6. John Williams’ "Review: 'Man in Profile" Studies Joseph Mitchell of 'The New Yorker' " (The New York Times, June 24, 2015)

7. Thomas Beller’s “Nowhere Man” (Bookforum, Summer 2015)

Before looking at these pieces, I want to set out the fabrications reported by Kunkel. There are six:

1. The single Saturday visit with Hunter, as described in the story, is actually a conflation of at least seven different interviews that Mitchell conducted with Hunter over a number of months.

2. The three long Hunter monologues in the story were constructed by splicing (and “embroidering”) quotations from related segments of multiple Mitchell-Hunter conversations. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell stayed faithful to the spirit and tang of Hunter’s observations, it seems clear that much of the old man’s language was Mitchell’s own.”

3. In the story, Mitchell’s first meeting with Hunter occurs in Hunter’s house; in actual fact, it took place at Sandy Ground’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

4. In the story, it’s Rev. Raymond Brock who steers Mitchell to Hunter; in actual fact, it was a man named James McCoy, sitting on the porch of a house in Sandy Ground, when Mitchell passed by, who first mentioned Hunter to Mitchell.

5. In the story, Mitchell first encounters Brock in St. Luke’s Cemetery; in actual fact, he didn’t meet him there. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell was preparing his story, he asked if could set their meeting in St. Luke’s Cemetery, which is one of the graveyards Mitchell knew from his early visits. Brock agreed that would make for a better read and gave his permission….”

6. In the story, Hunter takes the “BELOVED SON” wreath ribbon out of his wallet at the cemetery entrance. In actual fact, according to Kunkel, “Mitchell first came across the BELOVED SON ribbon while in Hunter’s house on his second visit there; it was spread atop a bureau in his bedroom. On a table beside Hunter’s bed lay his late son’s wallet. While it’s possible that Hunter had for a time carried the ribbon in his own wallet, it doesn’t appear he pulled it out for Mitchell in the poignant manner the writer described.”

In Man in Profile, Kunkel asks, “Should the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” suffer for the license Mitchell employed in telling it?” He answers, “As with any aspect of art, that is up to the appraiser.”

Well, let’s see what the seven appraisers listed above have to say. Thomas Berenato, in his “Progress of Stories,” writes,

What the “character” Mr. Hunter says in the story “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is not verbatim what George H. Hunter told Mitchell in propria persona, but it is revelatory of his character, or at least of “character” period. Sometimes Mitchell sought, and received, permission from his subjects to rearrange or even reassign the dialogue that took place. Sometimes not. In any case, monologues unspool for pages at a time. Soliloquies as charming and harrowing as these are few to find outside the works of Joyce, Beckett, or Bernhard. They are all as unmistakably Mitchellian as Sebald’s are Sebaldian. Mitchell, Kunkel writes, “was in fact a first-rate writer of literature whose chosen medium happened to be nonfiction.”

Implicit in this is that fact pieces that are considered “literature” are somehow exempt from the requirement that they be accurate.

Janet Malcolm, in her “The Master Writer of the City,” expresses a similar view. She refers to Mitchell’s “radical departures from factuality.” Regarding “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” she says,

What Kunkel found in Mitchell’s reporting notes for his famous piece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” made him even more nervous. It now appears that that great work of nonfiction is also in some part a work of fiction. The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.

Malcolm mocks the puritanical response to the liberties Mitchell takes with the facts. She says,

He [Mitchell] has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he is reading is what actually happened. He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.

Her view is that “Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat.” She says,

His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

Malcolm suggests, “Mitchell’s genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named.”

Charles McGrath, in his “The People You Meet,” takes a different view. He says, “More than we knew, or wanted to know, he [Mitchell] made things up.” Of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” McGrath says,

Mitchell’s best work is lovely and stirring in a way that a documentary or a recorded interview could never be. George Hunter, an elderly black man and Staten Island resident, and the subject of a story that is probably Mitchell’s masterpiece, would be less interesting if we had to read what he actually said. And yet the piece gains immeasurably from being presented as factual, an account of scenes and conversations that really took place. If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.

McGrath’s view differs from Malcolm’s. She sees Mitchell’s fabrications as a function of his creative imagination. She holds that most journalists lack such an imagination (“There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads”). Whereas McGrath says, “As inglorious examples like Jayson Blair demonstrate, invention is often easier than reporting—you can do it without even leaving home—and requires no special talent other than nerve.”

McGrath doesn’t use creative license to excuse Mitchell the way Berenato and Malcolm do. But he does defend him. He says, “Mitchell’s best defense is that he wrote what he did out of affection and empathy for his subjects, not a wish to deceive.”

Blake Bailey, in his “Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, by Thomas Kunkel,” calls Mitchell’s writing “a kind of hybrid nonfiction that encompassed (with the blessing of his editors) long embellished monologues delivered by old Mr. Flood and Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the Gypsy king, who were actually composites of various New York characters with a piquant admixture of Mitchell himself.” Other than the “long embellished monologues,” Bailey makes no mention of any of the other fabrications reported by Kunkel. He calls Mitchell “arguably, our greatest literary journalist — a man who wrote about freaks, barkeeps, street preachers, grandiose hobos and other singular specimens of humanity with compassion and deep, hard-earned understanding, and above all with a novelist’s eyes and ears.”

Thomas Powers’ “All I Can Stand,” is a favorable assessment of Kunkel’s book and a wonderful review of several of Mitchell’s best stories, including “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (“To disappear is the common fate and it would have been Mr Hunter’s, too, were it not for one thing – Joe Mitchell’s refusal to let him go. In the way of writers, Mitchell has listened to Mr Hunter, told his story, and stayed the clock”). Interestingly, throughout his piece, Powers refers to Mitchell’s stories as “fact pieces” without qualification or acknowledgment of the “license” (Kunkel’s word) that Mitchell employed in writing them. Is Powers in denial of Mitchell’s fabrications? Or does he view them as irrelevant? His failure to comment on Kunkel’s revelations is a weakness in a piece that is otherwise an excellent appreciation of Mitchell’s writing.  

John Williams, in his “Review: Man in Profile Studies Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,” calls Mitchell “a writer who observed and imagined his way to a brilliant, heightened version of reality.” He says, “It’s clear Mitchell did make things up.” He approvingly quotes Janet Malcolm’s Kunkel review (“But few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to”). It appears that Williams, like Berenato and Malcolm, sees Mitchell as a literary artist, exempt from journalism’s basic “don’t mess with the facts.”

Thomas Beller, in his “Nowhere Man,” observes that Mitchell’s pieces convey an “immersive sense of interest in their subjects, within which there is affection, even love.” He says Mitchell’s prose is “burnished with the warmth of empathy.” He doesn’t mention Mitchell’s fabrications other than to say that Mitchell wrestled with “guilt over liberties he took with facts,” and to point out that Mr. Flood was not Mitchell’s only composite character.

Until I read these reviews, I didn’t think of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as a “heightened version of reality” (Williams) or a “kind of hybrid nonfiction” (Bailey) or “some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named” (Malcolm). I thought of it the way Powers apparently still thinks of it – as a “fact piece.” I agree with McGrath when he says, “If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.”

I resist reading “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as fiction. Mitchell didn’t intend it as such. In the Author’s Note of his great Up in the Old Hotel (1992), he classified it as “factual.” In my opinion, everything in it is factual, except the six fabrications listed above. They are sufficient to compromise the story’s status as a fact piece, but insufficient to justify reclassifying it as fiction. Malcolm’s phrase – “some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named” – will have to do for now. 

"Mr. Hunter's Grave" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction?

Joseph Mitchell (Photo by Therese Mitchell)

It’s interesting to compare seven reviews of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (2015) and see the various ways they respond to Kunkel’s revelation that Mitchell fabricated certain aspects of his great “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (The New Yorker, September 22, 1956). The seven reviews are:

1. Thomas Berenato’s "Progress of Stories" (Los Angeles Book Review, April 21, 2015)

2. Janet Malcolm’s "The Master Writer of the City" (The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2015)

3. Charles McGrath’s "The People You Meet" (The New Yorker, April 27, 2015)

4. Blake Bailey’s " 'Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,' by Thomas Kunkel" (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, May 19, 2015)

5. Thomas Powers’ "All I Can Stand" (London Review of Books, June 18, 2015)

6. John Williams’ "Review: 'Man in Profile" Studies Joseph Mitchell of 'The New Yorker' " (The New York Times, June 24, 2015)

7. Thomas Beller’s “Nowhere Man” (Bookforum, Summer 2015)

Before looking at these pieces, I want to set out the fabrications reported by Kunkel. There are six:

1. The single Saturday visit with Hunter, as described in the story, is actually a conflation of at least seven different interviews that Mitchell conducted with Hunter over a number of months.

2. The three long Hunter monologues in the story were constructed by splicing (and “embroidering”) quotations from related segments of multiple Mitchell-Hunter conversations. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell stayed faithful to the spirit and tang of Hunter’s observations, it seems clear that much of the old man’s language was Mitchell’s own.”

3. In the story, Mitchell’s first meeting with Hunter occurs in Hunter’s house; in actual fact, it took place at Sandy Ground’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

4. In the story, it’s Rev. Raymond Brock who steers Mitchell to Hunter; in actual fact, it was a man named James McCoy, sitting on the porch of a house in Sandy Ground, when Mitchell passed by, who first mentioned Hunter to Mitchell.

5. In the story, Mitchell first encounters Brock in St. Luke’s Cemetery; in actual fact, he didn’t meet him there. Kunkel says, “While Mitchell was preparing his story, he asked if could set their meeting in St. Luke’s Cemetery, which is one of the graveyards Mitchell knew from his early visits. Brock agreed that would make for a better read and gave his permission….”

6. In the story, Hunter takes the “BELOVED SON” wreath ribbon out of his wallet at the cemetery entrance. In actual fact, according to Kunkel, “Mitchell first came across the BELOVED SON ribbon while in Hunter’s house on his second visit there; it was spread atop a bureau in his bedroom. On a table beside Hunter’s bed lay his late son’s wallet. While it’s possible that Hunter had for a time carried the ribbon in his own wallet, it doesn’t appear he pulled it out for Mitchell in the poignant manner the writer described.”

In Man in Profile, Kunkel asks, “Should the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” suffer for the license Mitchell employed in telling it?” He answers, “As with any aspect of art, that is up to the appraiser.”

Well, let’s see what the seven appraisers listed above have to say. Thomas Berenato, in his “Progress of Stories,” writes,

What the “character” Mr. Hunter says in the story “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” is not verbatim what George H. Hunter told Mitchell in propria persona, but it is revelatory of his character, or at least of “character” period. Sometimes Mitchell sought, and received, permission from his subjects to rearrange or even reassign the dialogue that took place. Sometimes not. In any case, monologues unspool for pages at a time. Soliloquies as charming and harrowing as these are few to find outside the works of Joyce, Beckett, or Bernhard. They are all as unmistakably Mitchellian as Sebald’s are Sebaldian. Mitchell, Kunkel writes, “was in fact a first-rate writer of literature whose chosen medium happened to be nonfiction.”

Implicit in this is that fact pieces that are considered “literature” are somehow exempt from the requirement that they be accurate.

Janet Malcolm, in her “The Master Writer of the City,” expresses a similar view. She refers to Mitchell’s “radical departures from factuality.” Regarding “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” she says,

What Kunkel found in Mitchell’s reporting notes for his famous piece “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” made him even more nervous. It now appears that that great work of nonfiction is also in some part a work of fiction. The piece opens with an encounter in the St. Luke’s cemetery on Staten Island between Mitchell and a minister named Raymond E. Brock, who tells him about a remarkable black man named Mr. Hunter, and sets in motion the events that bring Mitchell to Hunter’s house a week later. But the notes show that the encounter in the cemetery never took place. In actuality, it was a man sitting on his front porch named James McCoy (who never appears in the piece) who told Mitchell about Mr. Hunter years before Mitchell met him; and when Mitchell did meet Hunter it was in a church and not at his house.

Malcolm mocks the puritanical response to the liberties Mitchell takes with the facts. She says,

He [Mitchell] has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he is reading is what actually happened. He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.

Her view is that “Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat.” She says,

His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

Malcolm suggests, “Mitchell’s genre is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named.”

Charles McGrath, in his “The People You Meet,” takes a different view. He says, “More than we knew, or wanted to know, he [Mitchell] made things up.” Of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” McGrath says,

Mitchell’s best work is lovely and stirring in a way that a documentary or a recorded interview could never be. George Hunter, an elderly black man and Staten Island resident, and the subject of a story that is probably Mitchell’s masterpiece, would be less interesting if we had to read what he actually said. And yet the piece gains immeasurably from being presented as factual, an account of scenes and conversations that really took place. If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.

McGrath’s view differs from Malcolm’s. She sees Mitchell’s fabrications as a function of his creative imagination. She holds that most journalists lack such an imagination (“There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations. They couldn’t create a character like Mr. Flood or Cockeye Johnny if you held a gun to their heads”). Whereas McGrath says, “As inglorious examples like Jayson Blair demonstrate, invention is often easier than reporting—you can do it without even leaving home—and requires no special talent other than nerve.”

McGrath doesn’t use literary values to excuse Mitchell the way Berenato and Malcolm do. But he does defend him. He says, “Mitchell’s best defense is that he wrote what he did out of affection and empathy for his subjects, not a wish to deceive.”

Blake Bailey, in his “Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, by Thomas Kunkel,” calls Mitchell’s writing “a kind of hybrid nonfiction that encompassed (with the blessing of his editors) long embellished monologues delivered by old Mr. Flood and Cockeye Johnny Nikanov, the Gypsy king, who were actually composites of various New York characters with a piquant admixture of Mitchell himself.” Other than the “long embellished monologues,” Bailey makes no mention of any of the other fabrications reported by Kunkel. He calls Mitchell “arguably, our greatest literary journalist — a man who wrote about freaks, barkeeps, street preachers, grandiose hobos and other singular specimens of humanity with compassion and deep, hard-earned understanding, and above all with a novelist’s eyes and ears.”

Thomas Powers’ “All I Can Stand,” is a favorable assessment of Kunkel’s book and a wonderful review of several of Mitchell’s best stories, including “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” (“To disappear is the common fate and it would have been Mr Hunter’s, too, were it not for one thing – Joe Mitchell’s refusal to let him go. In the way of writers, Mitchell has listened to Mr Hunter, told his story, and stayed the clock”). Interestingly, throughout his piece, Powers refers to Mitchell’s stories as “fact pieces” without qualification or acknowledgment of the “license” (Kunkel’s word) that Mitchell employed in writing them. Is Powers in denial of Mitchell’s fabrications? Or does he view them as irrelevant? His failure to comment on Kunkel’s revelations is a weakness in a piece that is otherwise an excellent appreciation of Mitchell’s writing.  

John Williams, in his “Review: Man in Profile Studies Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker,” calls Mitchell “a writer who observed and imagined his way to a brilliant, heightened version of reality.” He says, “It’s clear Mitchell did make things up.” He approvingly quotes Janet Malcolm’s Kunkel review (“But few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted than Mitchell. The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to”). It appears that Williams, like Berenato and Malcolm, sees Mitchell as a literary artist, exempt from journalism’s basic “don’t mess with the facts.”

Thomas Beller, in his “Nowhere Man,” observes that Mitchell’s pieces convey an “immersive sense of interest in their subjects, within which there is affection, even love.” He says Mitchell’s prose is “burnished with the warmth of empathy.” He doesn’t mention Mitchell’s fabrications other than to say that Mitchell wrestled with “guilt over liberties he took with facts,” and to point out that Mr. Flood was not Mitchell’s only composite character.

       

Until I read these reviews, I didn’t think of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as a “heightened version of reality” (Williams) or a “kind of hybrid nonfiction” (Bailey) or “some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named” (Malcolm). I thought of it the way Powers apparently still thinks of it – as a “fact piece.” I agree with McGrath when he says, “If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.”

I resist reading “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” as fiction. Mitchell didn’t intend it as such. In the Author’s Note of his great Up in the Old Hotel (1992), he classified it as “factual.” In my opinion, everything in it is factual, except the six fabrications listed above. They are sufficient to compromise the story’s status as a fact piece, but insufficient to justify reclassifying it as fiction. Bailey’s phrase – “a kind of hybrid nonfiction” – will have to do for now.  

Malcolm X: Pinckney v. Powers v. Remnick

Malcolm X (Photo by Eve Arnold)

It’s interesting to compare three reviews of Manning Marable’s recent Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention: David Remnick’s “This American Life” (The New Yorker, April 25, 2011); Thomas Powers’ “Too Fast” (London Review of Books, August 25, 2011); and Darryl Pinckney’s “The Two Conversions of Malcolm X” (The New York Review of Books, September 29, 2011). Remnick, in his piece, calls Malcolm “a vivid but secondary figure in his own time.” He says, “Malcolm was an electrifying spokesman for black dignity and selfhood, a radical prod to the mainstream movement, but his role in the civil-rights movement was marginal.” This contrasts with Pinckney and Powers’ view. Pinckney says, “Most civil rights histories cast him [Malcolm] as the pivotal voice in a drama of mass transformation, the shift in general black opinion away from believing in the effectiveness of Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence to conceding the justice in the militancy of the disaffected blacks in the Northern cities.” Powers writes that Malcolm “gave voice to black anger with a furious clarity rivaled in American history only by Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion in 1831.” He says that Malcolm’s face “was soon among the most famous faces in the country.” Reading Pinckney and Powers, it’s hard to accept Remnick’s “secondary figure in his own time” assessment.

Powers, in his review, praises Marable’s FBI research. He says, “It is here that Marable’s meticulous book makes its most significant contribution, quoting liberally from FBI files and the once secret files of New York City’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigation, beginning in June 1950 when Malcolm wrote a letter to Truman on the outbreak of the Korean War.” Neither Pinckney, nor Remnick, mentions this aspect of Marable’s biography. In fact, Pinckney says, “Maybe Marable hasn’t come up with as much that is really as new as he claimed, but his biography gives the satisfying feeling that he has consulted most everything out there about Malcolm X.” At one point, Remnick quotes an FBI informant, but not for the purpose of extolling Marable’s research skills.

Remnick sees Alex Haley as the key figure in Malcolm’s story. He says, “Malcolm clearly made his deepest impression on the American consciousness through his collaboration with Alex Haley.” He again emphasizes this point in the conclusion of his piece: “By choosing to entrust his story to Alex Haley, Malcolm ensured himself a lasting place in American culture.” Whereas, in Powers’ view, the Autobiography was a team effort. He says, “Rarely have two writers contributed so equally to a book. Malcolm provided the edge of social anger, unflinching and unapologetic, while Haley coaxed the personal details from him that Malcolm in his pride thought beside the point.” Pinckney has little to say about Haley. He reviews without comment Marable’s various contentions that Haley meddled with Malcolm’s conception of the book, saying only, “Yet Malcolm’s voice is undeniable and Haley deserves credit for preserving it in this form.”

Regarding Malcolm’s assassination on February 21, 1965, in the Audubon ballroom in Harlem, Powers points out that Marable “thinks the investigation of the murder was botched and that some of those who participated in the killing went free.” Pinckney is even more detailed on this point, describing what happened in the ballroom and quoting Marable’s opinion that, “Although in 1966 three NOI members were convicted of the murder, extensive evidence suggests that two of those men were completely innocent of the crime, that both the FBI and the NYPD had advance knowledge of it, and that the New York County District Attorney’s office may have cared more about protecting the identities of undercover police officers and informants than arresting the real killers.” Clearly, Marable’s conclusion on the murder investigation, based, as he says, on “extensive evidence,” is major news. Curiously, Remnick, in his review, fails to mention it. He briefly describes the murder, then cuts to Haley writing to his agent, “None of us would have had it be this way, but since this book represent’s [sic] Malcolm’s sole financial legacy to his widow and four little daughters … I’m just glad that it’s ready for the press now at a peak of interest for what will be international large sales, and paperback, and all.”

The Marable contention that Remnick seizes on, and repeatedly mentions in his review, is the allegation that parts of the Autobiography are exaggerated. Remnick says:

One of his [Marable’s] goals was to grapple with Malcolm’s autobiography, and although he finds much to admire about Malcolm, he makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of fact. Haley wanted to write a “potboiler that would sell,” Marable observes, and Malcolm was accustomed to exaggerating his exploits – “the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like.” Malcolm, like St. Augustine, embellished his sins in order to heighten the drama of his reform.

In Malcolm’s alleged exaggeration and embellishment, Remnick finds a theme. He says, “The literary urge outran the knowledgeable facts even in the most crucial episode in Malcolm’s childhood.” The “crucial episode” that Remnick refers to is the gruesome death of Malcolm’s father. Remnick says,

The authorities ruled his death an accident, but Malcolm’s mother, Louise, was sure he had been beaten by the Black Legion and laid on the tracks to be run over and killed. Perhaps he had been, but, as Marable notes, nobody knew for sure. The autobiography (and Lee’s film) presents the ostensible murder as established fact, and yet Malcolm himself, in a 1963 speech at Michigan State University, referred to the death as accidental.

Perhaps he had been … nobody knew for sure. That would seem to be sufficient grounds for withholding allegations of exaggeration and embellishment. But not for Remnick. Pinckney, in his review, gives the Autobiography’s version of the father’s death the benefit of the doubt. Pinckney says, “In 1931, his father was killed in a gruesome accident. Black people whispered that the Legion had attacked him and laid his body across the tracks where he was nearly cut in half by a streetcar.”

Powers, in his “Too Fast,” mentions Marable’s allegation of exaggeration, but only in passing. He says,

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention adds much useful detail to the story as Haley told it, especially to Malcolm’s last years, while suggesting only a single modest revision. Perhaps, Marable offers, Haley and Malcolm exaggerated the latter’s sordid life of sin and crime to highlight, as St. Augustine did, the luminous transformation eventually worked by God, or Allah. “An investigation of the NYPD’s arrest record for Malcolm Little,” Marable writes, “failed to turn up any criminal charges or arrests.” Perhaps this only means that Malcolm was one jump ahead of the law. In any event, beyond a few quibbles with the chronology of Malcolm’s Harlem years, Marable contradicts none of the stories in the Autobiography.

Note that last sentence: “In any event, beyond a few quibbles with the chronology of Malcolm’s Harlem years, Marable contradicts none of the stories in the Autobiography.” This contrasts sharply with Remnick’s view that “he [Marable] makes it clear that the book’s drama sometimes comes at the expense of facts.”

Remnick’s review reads like an overzealous prosecutor’s brief. It minimizes Malcolm’s historical role, sources his iconic status in the Autobiography, and then tries to knock that down by shooting holes in its credibility.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as Pinckney and Powers make clear in their excellent pieces. There’s a sentence in Pinckney’s “The Two Conversions of Malcolm X” that, in just fourteen direct, well-chosen words, captures the essence of Malcolm’s greatness: “Malcolm X embodied a blackness that could stand up to the white man’s rules.”

Ian Frazier: Crazy Horse

I’ve just finished reading Ian Frazier’s review of Thomas Powers’ The Killing of Crazy Horse (“The Magic of Crazy Horse,” The New York Review of Books, February 24, 2011), and I have a question. Why wasn’t this article published in The New Yorker? It’s a significant critical piece, not only because it describes and analyzes a book about one of the pivotal incidents in American history, but also because it is, as far as I know, one of the few book reviews that Frazier has ever written. (It may be the only one he’s ever written!) Frazier is The New Yorker’s top writer. And he’s very knowledgeable about Crazy Horse (see his exciting, powerful account of Crazy Horse’s death in “Great Plains – II,” The New Yorker, February 27, 1989; included in his classic 1989 book Great Plains). 

Frazier's review is terrific. Darkness is its theme, established brilliantly in the first paragraph, when he talks about being on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in western South Dakota back in the 1990s and, as a result of various weird circumstances, “a powerful sense of darkness shivered into my bones like ague.” He then moves to an examination of Powers’ book, calling its subject “the darkest episode ever to happen in that part of the world.” My favorite part of the review is where he shows Powers' ability to relate to and describe the spirit world that the Indian warriors invoke with medicine objects they carry into battle. He says, 

Before turning to the Battle of the Rosebud, he spends five pages describing the war charms and paint important to Crazy Horse and others (golden eagle feathers tied in the war pony’s tail, the small “spirit rocks” Crazy Horse wore under his left arm and behind his left ear, dried wild aster seeds mixed with dried eagle heart and brains, etc.). 

Did Crazy Horse paint his face blue with white hailstones, as per Le War Lance’s claim in Great Plains? There’s no mention of it in Frazier’s review. I noticed a couple of differences between Frazier’s Great Plains account of Crazy Horse’s death and the account he gives of it in “The Magic of Crazy Horse,” based on Powers’ book. In Great Plains, Frazier says that Crazy Horse was stabbed “twice through the abdomen.” Whereas, in “The Magic of Crazy Horse,” he says that Crazy Horse was “bayonetted twice in the back.” And there’s a discrepancy between Frazier’s statement in Great Plains that “no photograph or painting or sketch” of Crazy Horse exists, and the existence of the drawings of Crazy Horse by Amos Bad Heart Bull, two of which are used to illustrate “The Magic of Crazy Horse.” Both discrepancies (if that’s what they are) are likely the result of new information coming to light since the publication of Great Plains twenty-two years ago. 

Frazier, in his review, quotes several passages from Powers’ The Killing of Crazy Horse, including this Cormac McCarthy-like beauty: 

That is what rode south toward the Rosebud on the night of June 16-17, 1876: thunder dreamers, storm splitters, men who could turn aside bullets, men on horses that flew like hawks or darted like dragon-flies. They came with power as real as a whirlwind, as if the whole natural world – the bears and the buffalo, the storm clouds and the lightning – were moving in tandem with the Indians, protecting them and making them strong. 

If you enjoy writing like that, as much as I do, you may want to read Thomas Powers’ The Killing of Crazy Horse. See also Powers’ excellent “The Indians' Own Story” (The New York Review of Books, August 7, 2005). 

Credit: The above drawing of Crazy Horse's last moments is by Amos Bad Heart Bull; it appears in The New York Review of Books (February 24, 2011), as an illustration for Ian Frazier's "The Magic of Crazy Horse."