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January 5, 1997
Fatal LimitationsBy ANDREA LEE
THE WOMEN
By Hilton Als.
145 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $21.
t is amusing to note before even beginning to read Hilton Als's remarkable first book, ''The Women,'' how much text the Library of Congress had to employ to categorize such a slender volume: there are no fewer than eight headings, ranging from ''Afro-Americans -- Intellectual Life'' to ''Gender Identity -- United States.'' ''The Women'' is one of those happy anomalies of literature, a highly concentrated mixture of memoir, literary criticism and musings on politics and psychology that provides a refreshing small-scale fix on two cumbersome American themes: racial and sexual identity. That in all its eclecticism the book has an almost magical cohesiveness is due to the peculiar talents of the author, who combines a quirky brilliance at analytical thought with a gift for visual and psychological description worthy of a novelist. The result has the hidden but compelling logic of a poem and, like the best poetry, suggests much more than it says.
''The Women'' consists of portraits of three characters whose lives raise the key issues of race and sex, and incidentally form parts of a portrait of the author himself. The first is his mother, Marie, an immigrant from Barbados, a ''homely but spirited'' woman of fiercely original personality who brought up her family on welfare in Brooklyn in a curiously stimulating atmosphere of romantic depression. The second portrait is that of Dorothy Dean, the brilliant and self-destructive black Radcliffe graduate who through the 60's and 70's was the quintessential escort for New York's white gay male elite, until she faded from the scene to meet an early death from alcoholism and lung cancer. The third character is the mentor and lover of the author's adolescence, the poet and dramatist Owen Dodson, a minor light of the Harlem Renaissance who for years was a central figure in American black stage and literary circles. A haunting sense of melancholy pervades the descriptions of all three: although the characters are very different, the reader is immediately aware that each is a tragic figure, yearning after an impossible dream and trapped by fear or laziness within the limits of a self-imposed identity. Mr. Als's mother, Marie, who defines herself with nonchalant hostility as ''a Negress,'' yearns for Mr. Als's absent father and the wealth and beauty he represents. Settling ever more vindictively into her role of gay muse, Dorothy Dean, who defines herself as a white homosexual ''trapped in a black woman's body,'' desires the rich white men who can never really desire her. And Dodson, who dreams of literary fame and the love of beautiful boys, eases into that most insidious of literary roles: that of a host, a friend of the great, a personal mythologizer, a raconteur. Each of the three courts death: Dean and Dodson by alcohol, Marie by simply willing her body into unending sickness.
Woven in and out of these somber descriptions is a portrait of Mr. Als as a child and adolescent who resolves his fascination with his mother and sisters by first defining himself as ''a Negress'' and then as an ''auntie man'' -- the Barbadian term for homosexual. ''I socialized myself as an auntie man long before I committed my first act as one,'' he writes. ''I also wore my mother's and sisters' clothes when they were not home; those clothes deflected from the pressure I felt in being different from them. As a child, this difference was too much for me to take; I buried myself in their clothes, their secrets, their desires, to find myself through them. Those women 'killed' me, as comedians say when they describe their power over an audience.''
At the same time that he is puzzling out his sexual identification, however, Hilton Als is becoming a writer. ''Writing things down,'' he observes, ''was the only way I understood how to be heard, there being so many women in my mother's house at various times, talking.'' Writing is for Mr. Als one way to approach a unique individual identity, beyond race or sex. Throughout the book, language, used with passion and integrity, comes to stand for a type of salvation. Trapped in their self-definitions, the three characters he describes suffer finally for their failure to use language to confirm their individuality. ''The Women'' begins with a sort of litany, describing in repetitive phrases how Mr. Als's mother ''avoided mentioning'' the critical facts of her life; the family she creates lives in a ''baroque silence.'' Dorothy Dean, Harvard-educated and brilliant, in love with words, limits herself to Gothic badinage and nit-picking editorial work. Dodson, even in his anthologized poetry and drama, never allows himself to go beyond the cliche-ridden canons of Harlem Renaissance writing -- dialect and stock characters -- while dealing in dust-dry anecdotes in daily life. ''By the time I met him,'' Mr. Als writes, ''he was no longer interested in writing. He had already begun to move away from the expansive interior places writing could have taken him to.''
So important is writing in ''The Women'' that literary criticism is woven into the text. The portrait of his mother, for example, revolves about a pithy discussion of the rigid canons of contemporary black American literature. With lively irreverence, Mr. Als sends up the threadbare rhetoric of tribulation that continues to plague the work of black writers as apparently disparate as Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan, Gayl Jones, John Edgar Wideman and Alice Walker, writers whose strongest stock character continues to be a romanticized ''Negress'' -- the same figure whose image haunts Hilton Als and his mother. In Mr. Als's eyes, the literary negress is simple propaganda: an affecting hodgepodge of martyrdom and theatrical maternity -- anything but an individual. ''The Negress in literature is a nearly dead construct who does not exist independent of her creator's need to fulfill his or her audience's expectations of performing 'black' writing. She is a necessary component in the building of a black writer's career; she signifies 'oppression' and, by extension, blackness. . . . As a myth, she does not have to be complex or subtle.''
Mr. Als illustrates his point with a brief examination of one of the canonical works of black American culture: ''The Autobiography of Malcom X.'' In the presentation of Malcom X's mother, Louise Little, who is sketched as a victim without a shred of personality, Mr. Als discerns all the classic traits of his stereotyped Negress. In some circles, this analysis may seem bracingly iconoclastic -- especially Mr. Als's offhand summing up of Malcom X as a man who ''lived less for other people than he did for power.'' However, it is one of the least interesting parts of ''The Women.'' One really doesn't care much whether Mr. Als declares an emperor naked. What grips the reader is the obstinate originality of the characters he has brought to life elsewhere in the book -- characters who happen to be black, but are never banal.
Mr. Als has a pitiless but not a malicious eye, and a rare ability to blend different literary forms. This is especially apparent in the portrait of Owen Dodson, where, in a virtuoso piece of writing, the stages of making love -- between a tired old master and a young, greedily ambitious protege -- are interspersed with a perceptive critical biography.
Mr. Als's prose is sometimes marred by New Criticism jargon -- for example, he says of listening to Billie Holiday records when he was 20: ''I was interested in how disaffection could be conveyed in a narrative structure.'' But one hopes that these pretentious turns of speech are the errors of a very young writer, and that in the future Mr. Als will abandon them as being as outdated, as hindering, as the Negress figure. What one wants is more of his description, and more of his searing observation, which spares himself as little as he spares other writers. ''The Women'' is a book to read several times, noting how its application grows broader and broader upon consideration. Like all truly original writing, it comes to no conclusions, imposes no creed and sets the reader free to ponder. Writing of people who limited themselves and died of it, Mr. Als has overcome limits. Toward the end of the book he remarks of Dodson, ''He forfeited his vision for the sake of Negro respectability, writing what he felt should be said instead of what he wanted to say.'' This is the opposite of what Hilton Als does; in fact, on the strength of his vision, he has managed to enter those ''expansive interior places'' his mentor avoided. One hopes that he will just keep going.
Andrea Lee, an American writer living in Italy, is the author of the novel ''Sarah Phillips.''
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