Thus begins a kind of picaresque journey through black New York, and, in parallel, through the Bosch-like fantasy- and horror-scape of Mitchell’s racial imagination. Along the way, he encounters another desirable woman, this one black, whom he also fails to bed; an African-American maid he had unjustly fired some time before; her nephew, none other than Carlyle Bedlow, who pockets Mitchell’s money and serves as his poker-faced, Harlem-based guide; Carlyle’s militant younger brother Mance, who refers to Mitchell as “devil”; and, finally, Mitchell’s co-father, a man named Cooley, whom, it turns out, he has known all along.
The whole journey is a merciless satire on the themes of white fear, guilt, and hypocrisy, played out in the always charged language of miscegenation—only, this time, with the current of that charge reversed. One practical and emotional cornerstone of slavery was the inability of the enslaved to determine their own families. When Mitchell, cuckolded and left to raise a black man’s child as his own, realizes that his suffering is a kind of reprisal, his whiny “Why me?” is parried irrefutably by his fellow-father: Why Cooley’s great-granddaddy? Like the white characters in “A Different Drummer,” Mitchell experiences black retribution. Neither is violent—the first is a renunciation, the second a reckoning—but both are profoundly disconcerting, because they leave white characters and readers alike alone with past and present iniquities, and with the scales to measure them.
If “dem” is a strange book, it is strange in a familiar way. Part Roth, part Swift, part Twain, it is built of satire, farce, and hyperbole, all deployed in the name of moral seriousness. But Kelley’s next novel, “dunfords travels everywheres,” is strange in a strange way. When it opens, Chig Dunford is living in an imaginary European country that observes a bizarre sartorial segregation: every day, its citizens self-divide into those who wear blue clothes (Atzuoreursos) and those who wear yellow ones (Jualoreursos), groups that are strictly forbidden from mingling. While living there, Chig has a brief affair with an enigmatic fellow-expatriate named Wendy, then reunites with her on his way back to the United States, when the two find themselves sharing a steamer with a mysterious organization called The Family, and also with a cargo hold full of slaves. Meanwhile, Carlyle Bedlow is back from “dem” and up to a whole new set of tricks, including one involving a loan officer moonlighting as a limousine driver, who turns out to be—in a wonderful Bulgakov-like turn, by far the best in the book—the devil.
All this is funny, dark, smart, and extremely entertaining—except that, fifty pages in, the reader suddenly slams up against this sentence: “Witches oneWay tspike Mr. Chigyle’s Languish, n curryng him back tRealty, recoremince wi hUnmisereaducation. Maya we now go on wi yReconstruction, Mr. Chuggle? Awick now?”
Well, yes: we are now very Awick, although whether we will go on is a different question. Kelley conceived “dunfords travels everywheres” in conscious thrall to “Finnegans Wake,” and his own book is, for long stretches, similarly rough going. Kelley tells Chig’s and Carlyle’s separate stories mostly straight, but in between he grabs language by its edges and bends it as far as he can, in order to pull the bourgeois, Ivy-educated Chig and the impoverished, street-smart Carlyle into a single consciousness, made of their common national history.
Kelley had long been fascinated by the way one language can accommodate many different speakers. “Early on,” he wrote, “blessed with an ear for variations of spoken English, I realized that I lived in four linguistic worlds”: the Standard English he spoke at home; the working-class Italian-American English he learned in the Bronx; the heavily Latinate, slightly Yiddish English he heard at Fieldston; and black English, which he regarded, like jazz, as one of the great creative contributions of African-Americans. At the same time, he was fascinated by the relationship between language and power. Tucker Caliban is taciturn almost to the point of mute. Even his wife can barely eke speech out of him, and he rejects oration and persuasion, refusing to explain, or even articulate, the beliefs behind his scorched-earth exit from the state. With one exception—a militant Northern preacher, who is voluble, dislikable, and doomed—the other black characters are likewise silent. In “dunfords,” by contrast, the black characters have plenty to say, but their voices intermittently wax incomprehensible.
That is the same problem solved two different ways. Like many who are steeped in but structurally excluded from conventional English and its canon, Kelley had doubts about its capacity to adequately express African-American life. His epigraph for “dunfords,” borrowed from Joyce, is “My soul frets in the shadow of his language.” The language he creates in its place blends the black vernacular with puns, patois, and linguistic borrowings that most readers (this one included) will struggle to identify.
The result is best read out loud—and, in fact, is nearly impossible to read any other way. It’s sometimes rewarding, since Kelley is smart and funny no matter what language he uses, but it is never easy, and it slows down a book that, in its bones, wants to be headlong and exuberant—so much so that readers can be forgiven for wanting to skip the difficult bits to get back to the plot. (And also to sentences that offer more familiar pleasures. Here as everywhere, Kelley’s straightforward prose is both plain and shining, like sunlight catching the windows of an apartment building. When the devil drives away in his limousine, Carlyle watches it “designing the fresh snow with row after row of tiny interlaced hammers, its tail-end, finally, becoming part of the shadows.”)
But simply ignoring the tough parts won’t work, of course. Kelley’s private language is difficult to decode but essential to the book, and so a determined reader must soldier on, grateful that “dunfords” is, at least, short by comparison with “Finnegans Wake.” The result is like roaring down a roller coaster with the brakes on: thrilling, frustrating, dominated by sheer sound.
William Kelley was thirty-two when “dunfords travels everywheres” appeared. He wrote constantly for the next forty-seven years, never published another book, and died a year ago, at the age of seventy-nine.
By then, Kelley had been back in his native New York for decades. He loved Jamaica, but eventually the family’s visas expired, and their relatives began hounding them to come home. In 1977, the Kelleys returned to the United States and rented a sixth-floor walkup at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue. The gentrification of Harlem had not yet begun, and their new home had an absentee slumlord, an alcoholic super, no heat, no electricity, no gas, no phone, and no lock on the door. The Kelleys bought winter clothes for the first time in a decade, together with candles, a Coleman stove, and a padlock for the door.
It wasn’t ideal, but it was all they could afford. The book advances, the speaking gigs, the magazine requests, and the university appointments had dried up, and the family had hardly any money. This was fine by Kelley, who had long since read Thoreau (“A Different Drummer” takes its title from “Walden”) and embraced the idea of voluntary poverty. By day, he kept writing, at a desk crammed below a loft bed in their tiny apartment. After midnight, when the local stores put their unsold produce in the trash, he did the family grocery shopping. “Going through the garbage at the Korean grocers didn’t embarrass him,” his daughter Jesi said. “He was utterly unafraid to be poor.”
He was also unafraid to keep writing in the absence of public encouragement. When he died, he left behind a considerable quantity of prose, including two unpublished novels. One of these, “Daddy Peaceful,” is loosely based on his own family, whom he never previously wrote about though unabashedly adored. The other, “Dis/integration,” is a meta-fiction that concerns the further adventures of Chig Dunford, and, like “The Brothers Karamazov” and “Pale Fire,” contains within it an entirely separate work: a complete novel by a white Hemingwayesque writer. That embedded novel, “Death Fall,” features no black characters at all, and describes the unravelling of a small Kansas town after a new and highly addictive drug is introduced there.
Kelley tried to publish both of these novels during his lifetime, to no avail. Eventually, in 1989, he began teaching fiction at Sarah Lawrence, and liked it enough to continue doing so for nearly three decades. But, even then, he never stopped writing. “There are artistic people who have that moment of ‘Ugh, I suck,’ ” Jesi said. “He wasn’t like that. He never got depressed. He never thought he was bad. He never doubted himself. He just didn’t understand what happened.”
What did happen? It’s difficult to say; both present-day fame and posthumous reputation are elusive, mercurial, and multifactorial. Some of the downturn in Kelley’s fortunes likely had to do with the changing political climate. “We always said, we made a revolution and we lost,” Aiki Kelley said, and she believes that her husband was one casualty of that defeat; as the momentum of the civil-rights movement ebbed, those with the power to make publishing decisions turned their attention elsewhere.
Still, Kelley was never a pat enough political writer to simply wash in and out with the ideological tides, and there were many other considerations, too. Chief among these was the strange chiasmus at the heart of his work: a black man writing about how white people think about black people. That perspective was smart and important—in effect, it transformed W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness into a narrative device—but it radically diminished Kelley’s audience. Many white readers didn’t want a black writer telling them what they thought, especially when so much of it was withering, while many black readers, long starved for literary representation, didn’t want to read about more white characters. To make matters worse, very few people, white or black, wanted to subscribe to a vision of America that grew progressively more damning in the course of Kelley’s career. And, regardless of the topic of a book or the race of its author, almost no one wanted to contend with experimental prose.