Gary Lenhartexcerpt from "Caviar and Cabbage: The Voracious Appetite of Melvin Tolson"
...Tolson himself wasn't entirely comfortable with the nature of his critical reception, and even joked, "My poetry is of the proletariat, by the proletariat, and for the bourgeoisie" (Nielsen). But Tolson's obsessions in the last two books don't vary far from Rendezvous with America. Tolson reinforced attitudes expressed as early as "Caviar and Cabbage" when he read Black Bourgeoisie, a work published by Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier in 1957. Harlem Gallery is infused with insights drawn from Frazier. In the poem, the Black bourgeoisie, represented most vividly in the character of Guy Delaporte III, pose the most oppressive challenge to the African-American artist. And the formal experiments of the later poems puts Tolson squarely on the side of radicalism and experiment where he placed Hughes in his thesis. The more expansive form does allow him to stretch into regions and voices denied to the oratorical single narrator of his earlier work. Instead of filtering his material through one voice, his poems now contain a multitude of voices that carry his democratic commitment even more effectively. And his legendary sense of humor finds room in his poems smack up against his most earnest declamations. Both contribute to an irony that keeps readers off-balance and demands that you be poised to follow the next line in any direction.
In 1966, Dan McCall, author of a study of Richard Wright, became a colleague of Tolson's at Langston College. During the next year McCall spent a great deal of time with the older man. At the end of the year, McCall published an article about Tolson in American Quarterly in which he paid special attention to the Libretto.
Eliot describes a failure of civilization; the poem establishes a sense of terrible loss. Grace has been withdrawn from the society of Western man...But in reading the Libretto one feels a certain 'pell-mell joy,' resulting from a revolutionary sense of the high comedy of history...Tolson's poetic integrity would not allow him to retreat into the folksiness of Langston Hughes - making things "simple" - nor would it allow him to lose his own voice in mere imitation. He gives us folk-wisdom and out-Pounds Pound to show what is involved in a country which is profoundly both African and American. (Farnsworth, 173)The following year, when an interviewer asked Tolson about the "out-Pounds Pound" comment, Tolson replied, "Well, I did go to the Africans instead of the Chinese" (Nielsen). Tolson never tired of repeating, and refuting, Gertrude Stein's remark "that the Negro suffers from Nothingness." Mentioned as early as his "Caviar and Cabbage" columns, the comment finds its way into his last poem.
In the ostinato
of stamping feet and clapping hands,
the Promethean bard of Lenox Avenue became a
lost loose-leaf
as memory vignetted
Rabelaisian I's of the Boogie-Woogie dynasty
in barrel houses, at rent parties,
on riverboats, at wakes:
The Toothpick, Funky Five, and Tippling Tom!
Ma Rainey, Countess Willie V., and Aunt Harriet!
Speckled Red, Skinny Head Pete, and Stormy
Weather!
Listen, Black Boy.
Did the High Priestess at 27 rue de Fleurus
assert, "The Negro suffers from Nothingness!"
Hideho confided like a neophyte on The Walk,
"jazz is the marijuana of the Blacks."
In the tribulum of dialectics, I juggled the idea:
then I observed,
"jazz is the philosophers' egg of the Whites."Tolson never seemed incredulous that Stein, of all people, made such a comment, given that she had propagandized so fiercely for a band of painters inspired by their acquaintance with African sculpture. Was it arrogance or ignorance that dismissed as primitive Africa's fabled and productive civilizations? Tolson's own rich study of Africa is evidenced throughout his work, and the allusions to the Libretto are foreshadowed in "The Negro Scholar," written in 1948.
The ground the Negro scholar stands upon
Is fecund with the challenge and traditionThat Ghana knew, and Melle, and Ethiopia,
And Songhai; civilizations black men built
Before the Cambridge wits, the Oxford dons
Gave to the Renaissance a diadem.Behold the University of Sankore
In Timbuctoo, a summit of the mind!
Behold, the Black Askia the Great,
The patron-king of scholars, black and white.Like the Negro scholar of his poem, in his Libretto Tolson stands on fecund historical ground. Through the poem swirl many historical allusions, from the depiction of the Songhai empire, which flourished for the millennium between the seventh and sixteenth centuries, to denunciations of Italy's rape of Ethiopia and South Africa's vicious apartheid. The "Sol" section, which begins with the infamous Middle Passage, becomes a succession of African proverbs that continues for sixteen triplets:
A stinkbug should not peddle perfume.
The tide that ebbs will flow again.
A louse that bites is inthe inner shirt. An open door
sees both inside and out. The saw
that severs the topmost limbcomes from the ground. God saves the black
man's soul but not his buttocks from
the white man's lash. The mouseas artist paints a mouse that chases
a cat. The diplomat's lie is fat
at home and lean abroad...
Gary Lenhart's most recent book of poems is Father and Son Night (Hanging Loose, 1999). He edited The Teachers & Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams (Teachers & Writers, 1998), and Clinch: Selected Poems of Michael Scholnick (Coffee House, 1998). He currently teaches at Dartmouth College.
