It’s been interesting to see that Seymour Krim’s entertaining, honest, and outrageous articles on Harlem and New York black life have been embraced by reviewers who disagree otherwise. There’s something there that can’t be denied.
From NewWorld Review,
“If Krim does occasionally lapse into self-indulgence, he also exhibits one of the most acute and, ironically, objective social senses that I have ever encountered, particularly in relation to black/white relations in an urban environment. Black English, Anti-Jazz, and Ask for a White Cadillac are simply some of the most honest writing that I have seen on the subject of black American culture, written by a non-black.”
And in Bookforum Vivian Gornick wrote,
“On the other hand, there is the series of remarkably penetrating essays, written out of Krim’s own experience, on what it meant, in the ’50s, to be a white boy prowling Harlem for sex and music. Today, these pieces are as wise and moving as they were on the day they were written.”
His 1957 article for the Village Voice, “Anti-Jazz,” his 1959 follow-up article for the alternative journal Exodus, “Ask for a White Cadillac,” and his previously unpublished “Black English, or the Motherfucker Culture,” are unmatched in white writing about black life and almost completely unknown. Krim does not just report about what is out there in black life, but what goes on inside him in response to what he sees and understands of black life.
And in Black English he wrote one of the greatest, most successful, musical, energetic, joy-inducing sentences I’ve ever read. It follows Krim’s admission that blacks’ public use of obscenities on the streets of New York is a justifiable political act, that it rebukes white America and presents whites with the dirty facts of black existence caused by white racism.
“I accept this is true, but at the same time as a user and lover of our common language I protest as much as anyone the self-indulgence of its wallowing, the attack on my standards and privacy, the unwanted bath in street-corner biology, the unasked-for intimacy that the user’s imagery creates, the nerve, the chutzpah, presumption, contempt with which my ear is used as a free toilet bowl by some cunt-struck black cat who wants to impose his sadomasochistic fantasies on the world, thinking that by yoking them to a clenched fist he has the right to smear my head with ignorance, obsession, the meat-view of life, hammering down every nuance and creative possibility into a monotone of one-syllable appetite and force.”
Wow.
I said before that every piece of writing contains some junk, and that every reader makes his own private deal regarding how much junk he’s willing to put up with in exchange for the good stuff. I’m charitable toward Krim’s excesses because I place a very high value on sentences like that one.
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