By Alston Anderson, Afterword by Kinohi Nishikawa
208 Pages. McNally Editions. $18.
Alston Anderson’s Lover Man is a haunted book. That is not to say it is pessimistic or despairing – in fact, several of the stories within it end hopefully – but that, as much as we admire the parts of life that Anderson illuminates with such caring detail, what we take with us are the shadows that surround the whole work, and the life of Anderson himself.
Published in 1959, Lover Man was Anderson’s debut book. Anderson had grown up in Jamaica and North Carolina and studied in Germany after the Second World War, and by the time of Lover Man’s release, he had established a wide circle of literary friends, including Robert Graves, who provided a foreword to the first edition of the book. The fifteen short stories of Lover Man all concern Black American lives, varying widely in point of view, setting, and subject matter. Several characters re-occur in multiple stories, but the real connecting fabric among the stories is Anderson’s exacting, fluid prose, especially when it comes to dialogue.
Though most of the stories in Lover Man are just a few pages long, Anderson’s skill at putting the nuances of Black speech into print means that each story is a verbal feast. He has many techniques at making the talk of his characters feel alive: the emphasis of certain words or syllables in a sentence (“Daddy, she was constructed”), the diction of street talk (“Suppose the chick jumps salty?”), all kinds of onomatopoeia (“Ooooooh-wee!” – somehow, six Os is just the right number), one-word interrogative sentences (“Solid?”), among many others.
As Kinohi Nishikawa points out in his excellent afterword to McNally Editions’ recent reissue of Lover Man, it was this very skill with dialogue that reviewers praised when the book was first released. As understandable as their reaction was, many critics of the time portrayed Anderson as merely an observer of Black speech, as if he were an ethnographer. In fact, Anderson went far beyond just recording what he heard; as Nishikawa points out, there is a creative energy to his fiction that can be compared to “the fragmented, frenetic sounds of Dizzy, Charlie, and Miles.” What Anderson captured went beyond the superficial details of the spoken word to the deeper noise of life.
As exhilarating as Anderson’s feel for the noise of life can be, it is also connected with what is so haunting about Lover Man. A key element of Lover Man is a phenomenon that serves as the title for one of its stories: “Signifying.” To signify is to say one thing, but to suggest, through a process that cannot quite be rationally explained, something else. In the story “Signifying,” a group of men at a barbershop signify when they see an attractive woman walk by – that is, they comment about how fine of a day it is, in lieu of directly catcalling the woman.
Signifying, however, doesn’t work on Miss Florence, the latest fine woman to arrive in town. She is a schoolteacher and an educated, sophisticated woman from up north, the kind of woman who sees Booker T. Washington’s teatime with Queen Victoria as the height of Black achievement. The narrator of the story, a street smart carpenter, sees that a different approach will be needed, and at first tries to seduce her by offering to make a bookshelf. When he gets inside her house, he is both repelled and strangely attracted by Florence. He tries to give up on his whole plan of seduction, but he and Florence grow closer; eventually, he asks her if she is a virgin, she says yes, and they have sex.
The story ends with the narrator back at his home, reflecting on what just took place: “I took off my clothes and poured me another drink–a big one–drank it, turned out the lights and got into bed and pulled the covers over my head tight, real tight, and went to sleep.” The single syllables of that sentence seem to stumble against us drunkenly, without rhythm, until the final emphasis on real which suggests a deep, existential exhaustion. The narrator has never before connected with a woman like Florence, and likely will never again get a chance. The emotional upheaval he feels in his mute recognition of this fact is what, ultimately, is signified.
A key part of signifying is absences – that which is missing or unsaid but that nevertheless presses itself inextricably upon a text. Absences weigh most heavily on Anderson’s story “Dance of the Infidels,” the second longest in Lover Man. It is a story of suppressed gay desire, of two men who cannot express their feelings for one another through words, instead forming a bond (never physically expressed) through a shared love of jazz. Eventually, one of the friends, named Ronnie, leaves their small town for New York. When the narrator visits New York a year later, he finds Ronnie much changed, and eventually he spots his friend is taking dope:
He was flexing his arms back and forth and the veins in his forearm were standing out like veins on a dead leaf. The man held the flame to the bottom of the spoon and moved it around so that it heated even. Then he threw the match away and took a hypodermic needle out of his jacket. He sucked all the melted liquid up with the needle, then handed it to Ronnie. Ronnie took it.
What stands out the most in this passage is how unemotional, impersonal it feels, despite the first person perspective. The narrator clearly knows that Ronnie is getting high on heroin, but he does not say it outright; at the same time, he describes the process of getting high with an almost clinical precision. There is something missing here.
On one level, the narrator is too afraid to express his feelings for Ronnie, so he attempts to hide any emotions in a flat, objective rendering of the scene. His attempt is belied by the striking simile that Ronnie’s veins are “like veins on a dead leaf.” It is a grim, disturbing image, especially if you take a moment to look at a dead leaf – its veins are the deadest, most ossified parts of it. Whether or not the narrator ever succumbs to a heroin addiction, he feels that this is the fate he is condemned to – a dismal, lonely death.
The title “Dance of the Infidels” (taken from a Bud Powell track) seems sinister on first read, but in the context of the story it is a beam of hope. The dance of the infidels is any activity which allows outsiders like the narrator to escape a meaningless existence – be it gay love, the creation or appreciation of jazz, or, in Anderson’s case, the writing of the story. Without the dance, all that is left is a bitter disillusionment with the world and all its people and all its activities.
Unfortunately, bitter disillusionment was to be the fate of Anderson. After publishing Lover Man, Anderson’s struggles with addiction and his prickly personality alienated him from his friends in the literary world. He published one novel in the early 60s, but that was to be the last book he would release in his life. “After a final letter to Graves in 1966,” Nishikawa writes in his introduction, “there is no known documentation of Anderson’s life. His death in 2008 in Manhattan went unremarked until two years later, when he was reinterred by an organization that provides military burials for indigent veterans [...] His vocation, activities, and correspondences for over forty years are a mystery.”
Mystery is something of an understatement. Forty two years of silence! Rimbaud’s abandonment of poetry at age 21 is baffling, but even he continued writing letters and embarked on an active, adventurous life after his retirement from literature. For Anderson, it is as if he never left his room. His disappearance is all the more depressing because Lover Man makes it clear that he was not just a very gifted writer, but also one who understood the vocation of the literary artist.
Did Anderson continue writing? Was there a drawer of unpublished manuscripts somewhere in his apartment after his death? Did he burn every page after writing? Or did he throw out his typewriter sometime in the 60s, in order to spend his many remaining days drinking, listening to jazz, and avoiding any sort of human contact?
Now that Anderson has been rediscovered, his ghost will haunt any student of mid-century American letters. We will still have Lover Man, with all its majestic noise and silence, but, after we finish the book, our admiration will be mixed with sorrow at the emptiness that follows.