WHY FRANK YERBY COSTUMED HIS NOVELS
Several months ago, Valerie Crawford sent me a "call for papers" issued by Professors John Charles, Central Michigan State and Gene Jarrett, University of Maryland. Their call was for, among other things, "a concentration of on issues of methodology, as they pertain to the recent emergence and intersection of several fields of critical inquiry in literary and cultural studies."
The following is an extended excerpt from my response to their call:
Abstract
I have had a long association with Frank Yerby’s works both as a student as well during my teaching career. As an adjunct faculty member, St. Mary’s College, I discovered that Yerby’s works mirrored my department’s entire academic curriculum. I was convinced that Yerby’s works deserved a more critical evaluation than he had yet received.
In a 1959 Harpers Magazine article, “How and Why I Write the Costume Novel”, Yerby makes a series of enigmaticstatements regarding the historical references in his novels. In order to avoid calling historical fiction, Yerby calls them ‘costume novels from which Yerby claims that Dial Press has cut almost all of the history. So my critical evaluation of Yerby begins with a fundamental question: why did Frank Yerby costume his novels?” But, very quickly, other issues lurking in the background regarding Frank Yerby, himself, begin to emerge. Mutterings within academic circles dismissed Yerby as merely a pulp fiction writer… and whisperings among the black intelligentsia accused Yerby of forsaking the race for commercial success. My critical evaluation of Yerby was forced to address these whisperings.
Darwin Turner who knew Yerby as friend and collaborator calls Yerby a ‘debunker of historical myth”. It is this insight that leads me to evaluate Yerby not only as a marvelous writer of rousing fiction for those seeking literary entertainment, but also creates a treasure chest of information about some of history’s most closely held secrets for the earnest reader.
Yerby draws upon some of the most profound thinkers of western civilization includingImmanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Leo Strauss to provide some of his most important insights. Through my analysis of how Yerby employed these radically different thinkers to costume his novels, I come to a fuller appreciation of Yerby’s thinking as well as his personal commitment to provide African-Americans a boost forward at the intellectual level. In the end, I discover that Yerby costumes his novels to address his two audiences: those who wish merely to be entertained and amused and those searching forf information. In this way, I find Yerby to be not only a debunker of historical myth, but an oracle of historical truth, as well.
Essay
i.
I have been studying Frank Yerby’s works ever since my graduate student days at the University of California. Then, like so many other black graduate students, I sought to make my intellectual and academic pursuits reflect my interest in the advancement of the black community as a whole. Those were the days of political activism and revolutionary slogans. We all clung to the belief that our university studies would result in our learning the secrets that would ultimately lead to black liberation. But alas, no such secrets were ever revealed … at least not directly. So, in order to handle my own ambivalence about the relevance of education, in general, and about the University of California, in particular, I turned to Frank Yerby’s writings as my own island of sanity. I had read Judas, My Brother as an undergraduate. When I entered graduate school, Yerby’s The Dahomean had been out a year. Not only was The Dahomean exciting, but also Yerby’s novel about black people in Africa inspired me to direct my studies toward what it meant to be a Black-American and what were my responsibilities in furthering the cause of the ‘Black-American’ race. During my years as a graduate student and over the next twenty-five years, teaching both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, I found Frank Yerby’s literary gifts to be a continual source of intellectual insights and historical understandings.
Of course, even then, I heard the whisperings about this African-American novelist and his work. In academia, Frank Yerby was considered a pulp fiction writer. Among blacks, it was said that: Yerby didn’t write for black people… . Yerby didn’t consider himself black… . He left the United States to get away from black people… .His novels were pornographic… and so on. But for me, Yerby provided connections between certain facts and truths. His stories gave an unblinking glimpse into the motivations of those who rule over black people and the source of that blind faith blacks so often display that make it easy to be ruled. It seemed to me that Yerby’s works when taken as a canon provided a straightforward dialogue between one black person and another. Yerby informed his readers about what really mattered in the history of human events and what ideas were really current in the white world. When I teaching at St. Mary’s College as an adjunct faculty member, I found these insights were especially important during my years.
At St. Mary’s College, I taught in Collegiate Seminar Department where the students were directed to examine the canon of ‘great books of western civilization’. Courses in this department examined the galaxy of great works from Herodotus, Homer, Plato and Aristotle in ancient times to Dante, Discartes and Voltaire and down to 19th and 20th Century theorists such as Jefferson, Tocqueville, Tolstoy and Marx. Faculty from various disciplines facilitated seminar discussions among students about the books that they read using a methodology known as ‘shared inquiry’. But whatever seminar course I taught, Frank Yerby was always there. The Greek Thought Seminar readings included Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War as well his Melian Dialogue when I found echoes of Yerby’s Goat Song. In the Roman, Christian and Mediaeval Seminar, students read Mark’s gospel and there again I found resonances in Yerby’s Judas, My Brother as well as his An Odor of Sanctity. When I taught the seminar on Renaissance, 17th and 18th Century Thought, I was reminded of Yerby’s many references to Shakespeare, Voltaire and Rousseau. Nowhere did the great social upheavals under study in the 19th and 20th Century Thought come more alive for me than in Yerby’s The Devil’s Laughter, depicting the historical period of the French Revolution, Bride of Liberty about the American Revolution and The Old Gods Laugh Yerby’s novel about a Marxist revolution in a fictional Central American republic. Yerby’s works covered my department’s entire academic curriculum and mirrored the major of ideas of the greatest thinkers of western civilization. Yerby’s deserved a more critical examination than he had yet been given.
ii.
In a 1959 article in Harper’s Magazine, How and Why I Write Costume Novels, Yerby discussed his approach to writing. Dubbing his literary creations, costume novels, Yerby says that he imitates the styles of those Victorian novelists who were commercially successful and enjoyed great celebrity status with their contemporary reading public. In addition, these works are so powerful that even today they continue to reach out to generations. The model for Yerby’s costume novel was a good rousing tale that was fun to read and ended happily. His characters pursued exciting and lucrative adventures, endured terrible trials and emotional shocks and overcame their unkind fates by the sheer force of their will. Cunning, perseverance and ‘true’ love overcame the malevolent forces that assailed Yerby’s heroes and heroines with a pitiless fate. Yerby assures his readers that the central characters of his costume novels are not at all like the neighbors next door. They are dedicated to defeating evil and achieving something good … even if it is just for themselves. This then is the foundation … the formula … for what Yerby calls his costume novels. But this does not tell us how or why Yerby costumed his novels. To me, understanding what Yerby meant is critical to any appreciation of his work, ‘Costuming’ his novel was important; Yerby does not waste words. He says that: “One superfluous word is too much.”
In the same article, Yerby makes the following enigmatic statement: “Inescapably, the costume belongs to what has been called escape literature.” In its common usage, ‘costume’ is not a synonym for ‘novel’; so this sentence only makes sense when it reads: “Inescapably, the costume novel belongs to what has been called escape literature.” Of course, this could have been an editorial oversight, but, somehow, I don’t think so. I saw this as a clue deliberately left by Yerby. I interpreted this clue as Yerby pointing out that there actually two aspects to his costume novel. The ‘costume’ is the outer cover … the masquerade that entertains and amazes the casual reader; the ‘novel’, the inner message or truth, provides instruction and explanation to the earnest reader. Thus I re-interpreted Yerby’s statement to read: “Inescapably, the ‘costume’ part of my ‘costume novel’ belongs to what has been called escape literature.” Now I needed to find the literary genre to which Yerby assigned his ‘novel’. How does Yerby classify his ‘novel’? I studied what followed because I knew Yerby would provide the answer. Sure enough, he says: “All these authors --- Fielding, the Brontes, Defoe, Thackeray --- have achieved the novelist’s highest attainment: not the still life literal representation of people and events --- which would be a thumping bore --- but a magistral suspension if the reader’s sense of disbelief.”
Even though I was convinced that this was exactly what I was looking for, I had to admit that I had absolutely no idea what Yerby meant by “a magistral suspension of the reader’s sense of disbelief”. Most authors are satisfied with a plain old ‘suspension’ of the reader’s sense of belief? Would that be a lower order of attainment? All I could figure out was that Yerby’s novels had something to do with making his readers disbelieve something they may have already believed … or possibly believe something they had previously disbelieved. And with that I decided to look for more clues that explained to me what Yerby meant by his ‘costume novel’.
“…I can discuss something I know and can do: a certain genre of light, pleasant fiction, which, in the interest of accuracy, I call the costume novel. The word “historical” won’t do at all. I have repeatedly loaded them with history, only to have ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths of said history land on the Dial Press cutting-room floor. Which is not a complaint. That is exactly where it belongs. For, at bottom, the novelist’s job is to entertain. If he aspires to instruct, or to preach, he has chosen his profession unwisely.” Thus Yerby describes his costume novel … a literary device that he developed to suspend his reader’s sense of disbelief. Yerby certainly went a long way towards suspending some of my own sense of belief. Not only does Frank Yerby imply that his thirty-three novels … that span a historical time period as old as western civilization itself … are not “historical”, he claims that almost one hundred percent of the history had been cut out of his novels. This claim is difficult for anyone familiar with Yerby’s writings to accept. I remembered my reactions to passages in The Saracen Blade. Yerby’s descriptions of the fearsome slaughter of Cathars by Pope Innocent III, the worse misnamed mass murderer in history, disturbed me. Yerby’s descriptions seemed rather tepid considering the fury and duration of the Albigensian Crusade. But at no time did Yerby’s descriptions cease to seem historical. Was this where that ‘magistral suspension of disbelief’ thing was supposed to ‘kick’ in? It was difficult for me to accept. Was I supposed to suspend my “sense of disbelief” and imagine all but one hundredth of a percent of Yerby’s history lying on the Dial Press cutting-room floor? And I was not alone … The late Darwin Turner perceived Yerby’s works as historical as well.
Darwin Turner was a close collaborator with Frank Yerby. In Turner’s Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Literature by Afro-Americans, the late Darwin Turner Turner says: “Although he is frequently ignored by critics who assume that he has merely written escapist historical romance, Frank Yerby, for more than twenty-five years, had debunked the cherished myths of white American, Anglo-Saxon, and European nations.” [my emphasis]
Many consider Darwin Turner a leading authority on black literature and black authors. By designating Yerby a “debunker of historical myth, he opens the possibility that Yerby distinguishes between ordinary history … what Darwin Turner regards as ‘historical myth’ ... and true history, as Yerby sees it. With that in mind, Yerby says that the real history was cut from his novels and all the remaining historical references … except for one one-hundredth of one percent … was historical myth. But still Yerby says that some historical truth remains. This leads to an important question: how does one find the nugget of historical truth among the residue of historical myth?
So Yerby says … and rightly so … that he does not write historical fiction, he writes costume novels. While his novels are actually repositories of certain indisputable historical facts, these ‘facts’ are costumed by ‘historical myth’. The costume dresses his novel to appear differently than what it really is. They are costumed to appear to be romantic tales, but, in reality, they are discussions of important intellectual, ethical and social themes. For as Frank Yerby says: “There must, finally, be a theme to the novel: our characters must rise above themselves and their origins and contribute --- toward the end, in one or two brief scenes … something ennobling to life[my emphasis]”
iii.
Even before I arrived at the University of California as an undergraduate, the battle had long been over. But, stories about the struggle still circulated in the halls and offices of the Political Science Department. The flap was over an official pronouncement from the president’s office that no longer would the university’s academic and intellectual pursuits be guided by the centuries-old tradition of idealism. From thence forward, post-modern notions of behavioralism would direct the university’s mission in research as well as in education. In the 1950s, California’s own version of McCarthyism swept over every aspect of government, including education. When the waves receded, the entire spectrum of liberal and humanitarian thinking came to be labeled subversive, dangerous and anti-intellectual. This reactionary policy supported the government’s squashing all dissent to a conservative policy of militarism and the imposition of censorship on all aspects of society. Ironically, this fundamental policy change occurred under of the liberal administration of the Democratic Party and Pat Brown, its liberal governor. Brown occupied the prime seat on the University of California’s Governing Board of Regents when this policy change was approved. By the time I was admitted to graduate studies at the University of California, no student who was serious about an academic career could profess liberal or peaceful sentiments in any but the most general terms. Many students, especially minority students, had their careers sidetracked, if not destroyed, by the emergent proto-fascism sweeping across America and around the world … controlling everything it could, killing everything it couldn’t.
As a student, I could either openly embrace the fascist principles adopted to preserve the “American way of life” or oppose them in such a way to get around the ‘censors’. I studied the way Yerby blended his messages to reach his different audiences. Yerby taught me how the leviathan was able to shed ‘rivers of blood and years of darkness’ all around the world. I found that Yerby had dedicated his considerable genius to participating in this great struggle on behalf of humanity … the great struggle against barbarism. However, the whispering campaign continued. “Yerbyisn’t really black … brown, colored or Negro, either!”
Darwin Turner gives good advice to those who might be tempted to listen to the whispers. Turner offers an all-inclusive approach to the problem of determining what literature should be considered distinctively Afro-American. He says that Afro-American literature:
… reproduces characteristics derived from the oral tradition of folktale, depends upon language usage common in or unique to the black community, derives and recreates significant aspects of black culture, such as the sermon, utilizes rhythms characteristic of the music composed by blacks and advances attitudes unique to the black community. Most Afro-American authors have created literature which reflects one or more of these elements; but many of the same writers have also written literature which does not satisfy these criteria --- literature patterned, instead, after that which was popular or critically respected in the region of the United States where they were reared. It is unwise, therefore, to echo Robert Bone’s implication that, whenever Afro-American writers reflect attitudes and traditions commonly identified with America, they were consciously seeking to escape their racial heritage and identity. [my emphasis] Obviously because formally educated Afro-Americans have studied and been trained to write Anglo-European literature, they are more likely to reproduce that style unconsciously than to reveal an Afro-American heritage. A more important fact, however, is that whether they write in the distinctively Afro-American tradition or in an Anglo-European tradition, they have shared the experience of living as black men in America; consequently, a reader who wishes to comprehend fully the thoughts, attitudes and styles of Afro-Americans must not restrict his examination of their writings in one tradition or another; he must study all their work. [my emphasis] And in this manner, Turner dismisses the whispering campaign.
iv.
Frank Yerby was a tireless researcher spending hours in books, libraries and on location researching the facts for each of his novels. Harvey Breit quotes Yerby saying that: “… I do a lot of research. I read, read, read for my preliminary work. I’ve been spending as much as six hours a day in the library on background material for my new novel…. My notes for a novel always outweigh in bulk the novel itself. Sometimes it’s three times over.”
In Judas, My Brother, Yerby declares that the real name of the author of the gospel according to Luke was “… Loukas, a Greek-speaking Syrian, (who) wrote in Greek not Latin …” Did Yerby mean to say that the original gospels were written in Latin? But how could this be? We know that Matthew was fluent in Latin; he was a tax collector for the Romans. But neither Mark nor John wrote in Latin. They were itinerant fishermen. Whether of not they had any schooling is doubtful. They could not write in Hebrew, let alone Latin ... or any other language. And the Old Testament … wasn’t it written in Aramaic or in ancient Hebrew? Yerby worked from original Latin Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew sources. In his A Word To The Reader: for Judas, My Brother, Yerby says “The research for this novelhas occupied me for fully thirty years. It has twice taken me to Italy, Greece, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. I have visited every place herein described, including the ruins of the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and those of the Essene Monastery at Khirbet Qumran. I have walked the wilderness of Judea, passed over roads where, two hours before my arrival, Jordanian mines blew to bits a jeep carrying four Israeli soldiers; I have come under the muzzles of the guns pointing down from Mount Sinai, and across the Mandelbaum Gate, when the Israeli retaliatory raid in the Jordanian town of Samu, on November 13, 1966 almost caused a preliminary to the June 1967 Arab/Israeli War. I mention this not to boast (I was as frightened as any normal human being would be under those circumstances) but to remind the reader that this work was written at considerable cost, and to ask him to take it as seriously as it is intended.” This statement certainly seems to contradict his other statements about merely wanting to entertain. Possibly, Yerby speaks to only a particular type of reader: the earnest reader. But this leads to a number of questions. Does Yerby expect the earnest reader to take only Judas, My Brother, seriously … or his other thirty-two novels as well? If research on this work took Yerby thirty years, he would have begun research in 1930, eight years prior to the publication of The Foxes of Harrow … ten years prior to the Second World War. More questions. What did Yerby intend to be taken seriously … the novel, itself, … or the research that went into it? Does Yerby want his readers to be entertained or inspired? Does he want them to consider his writings serious non-historical literary works or thematic tales that his readers can use to escape boring routine of everyday life? I had a lot more questions than answers, but I became convinced that Yerby was positioning his works … as if there was another story being told at a level that only an earnest reader who had read all thirty-three novels would understand. It was sort of like a mystery game … another form of entertainment. Yet, it was still a mystery to me. So I set out after any other clues Yerby might have left to unravel his little mystery.
v.
The ‘Old Gods’ residing in their mountainous home in the volcano, Zopocomapetl, belched forth their wrath on the characters caught in Yerby’s drama of revolution in the 1964 novel, THE OLD GODS LAUGH. Yerby chronicles his nasty revolution in the mythical Central American republic of Costa Verde. Marxists guerillas kidnap a saintly Catholic priest, Padre Pio, in order to prevent the indigenous Indian population from siding with Costa Verde’s brutal dictator, Miguel Villalonga. Peter Reynolds, an American newspaper reporter, is as interested in Alicia Villalonga, the dictator’s sister, as he is in getting a story from the Castrista rebels, themselves. In this novel’s First Note to the Reader, Yerby offers the following enigmatic prayer: “The writer sincerely hopes that no earnest reader will confuse the very real Republica de Costa Verde with those imaginary ones found on the maps of the geography books, scattered in multicolored profusion around seas of pale blue ink. Nor attempt to identify Miguel Villalonga with any of the swart, pudgy little strong men who have no being a priori in the Kantian, Hegelian sense, since we know them only a posteriori as created by those wonderful novelists, the Dostoevskis of the Public Press. Here I found clues that would help prove my thesis … my first clues in unraveling the mystery of Yerby’s ‘costume novels’.
I learned from the great master, Sophocles, that the key to solving a mystery is to find the enigma and use it to identify the allegory certain to follow the enigma to solve the riddle that lies at the heart of the mystery. So I examined Yerby’s statement to see if I could apply Sophocles’ formula for solving Yerby’s ‘riddle of the sphinx’.
“… no earnest reader will confuse the very real Republica de Costa Verde with those imaginary ones found on the maps of the geography books, scattered in multicolored profusion around seas of pale blue ink.” [my emphasis] I was certain that Yerby intended to signal his earnest readers that something important is about to follow. What followed was the riddle: how can “… any of the swart, pudgy little strong men … have no being a priori in the Kantian, Hegelian sense? Though not a very good riddle but it served Yerby’s purposes for communicating with the earnest reader. Since only an earnest reader would know that Kant and Hegel are poles apart with respect to a priori facts. Kant denies the validity of logical, a priori facts as related to a ‘supreme being’ . For Kant, arguments such as the First Cause or the Prime Mover can never produce any material evidence of the existence of a ‘supreme being’. Kant says that the existence of a supreme being is unknowable, indemonstrable and nothing more than an article of faith to some and superstitious nonsense to others. Hegel, on the other hand, believes in the material existence in the ‘supreme being’. Furthermore, as a convert from Judaism to Christianity, Hegel fervently believes in the immanent return of the messiah. He says that material manifestations of will create the process of historical determinism necessary for the return of the messiah. It is this preparation for the messiah’s return that is the sole purpose of the church … as well as the preoccupation of the master race… the messiah’s chosen people. Considering the sharply divergent views of Kant and Hegel, I knew that no fact could exist in any ‘Kantian, Hegelian sense’? The only thing that could exist in a ‘Kantian, Hegelian sense’ was a myth. Finally there was Yerby’ allegory of “… those wonderful novelists, the Dostoevskis of the Public Press”. In this way Yerby conveys the theme of that novel, THE OLD GODS LAUGH, to the earnest reader. There are legions “… of the swart, pudgy little strong men…” daily going about the business of imposing a malevolent will upon an oppressed people. But the press, upon a moment’s notice, can identify and castigate any one of them, even heads of state, branding them as some special monster whose removal is of immediate urgency to the power that employed him in the first place.
vi.
My advisor, Albert Lepawsky, was of the ‘Chicago School’ of political philosophy. In 1945, Dr. Lepawski made significant contributions at the international level as a senior advisor to the commission charged with the task of drafting the United Nations charter in San Francisco. At one time the ‘Chicago School’ was synonymous with the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. Frank Yerby worked on his doctorate at the University of Chicago at the time when Leo Strauss was making his greatest impact on students of political philosophy. One element of Leo Strauss’ political philosophy was a “… recognition that the greatest thinkers often wrote with both exoteric and esoteric teachings, either out of fear of persecution or a general desire to present their most important teachings to those most receptive to them. This leads to an attempt to discern the esoteric teachings of the great philosophers from the clues they left in their writings for careful readers to find.”
Leo Strauss writes in Persecution and the Art of Writing: In a considerable number of countries which, for about a hundred years, have enjoyed a practically complete freedom of public discussion, that freedom is now suppressed and replaced by a compulsion to coordinate speech with such views as the government believes to be expedient, or holds in all seriousness. It may be worth our while to consider briefly the effect of that compulsion, or persecution, on thoughts as well as actions.
For me, one effect of that compulsion or persecution was a need for the type of esoteric writing that Yerby indulged in. Yerby could have ‘costumed’ his novels in response to Strauss’s warning that indeed government-approved thought and action was being compelled through persecution. So it would make sense that if Yerby was serious in his attempt to pass on some factual information that he thought was essential to the survival of the black community … as Yerby, himself, understood the concept of survival … he would costume it. I believed Yerby costumed history: reliable, valid facts about certain past events and debunked historical myths: lies concocted to justify for the arbitrary use of force by government against individuals. Yerby saw these historical myths as having such an impact on human affairs that once he created his characters they became swept up into these historical events as leaves in a storm. Yerby says: “Once the characters, and the supporting, minor players have been assembled, they, themselves, with some slight assisting impetus from histories, make the plot. If they don’t assume life, take the bit between their teeth, and start galloping all over the landscape, they were stillborn in the first place, and it is much better to let them lie.
But the paradox to all of this according to Strauss is that in the entire realm of ideas both historical facts as well as historical myth is required for the overall orderliness and civility of any society. The masses must have their opinions: better that their opinions be based upon correct social behavior than not. Mass opinion and mass behavior is based upon carefully manipulated and controlled belief systems. However, these mass opinions should not be allowed to overwhelm all historical truth. They should not be allowed to extinguish human knowledge, itself. The result would be society’s return to tbe ultimate state of barbarism. Thus, it is ultimately the role of the university in any society or culture to defend it against the continual encroachments of barbarism’s fanatical belief systems.
Strauss believed society to be composed of ‘believers’ on the one hand and philosophers and scientists on the other. ‘Believers’ value their own ‘opinions’. They are completely unaware of the extent to which their opinions result from a carefully implanted and fostered belief system. It is the government’s interest that the greatest number of the population possible be ‘believers’. Believers behave as they are directed. Strauss also knew of the existence of philosophers and scientists who were unwilling to follow lockstep with official government opinions. They behaved as the conditions dictated that they behave. Strauss saw the need for these two forces must work together otherwise the society, itself, will erupt and destroy itself.
In The Devils Laughter, Yerby explores how the intellectuals who would not accept the values of the ancien regime of the French aristocracy … for very good reasons … turned power over to the Paris mob. Through struggle, bloodshed and barbarism, the Paris mob created another belief system that was so horrible that it became known as the ‘reign of terror’. The goddess of this state religion was Madame L’Guillotine who gorged upon the bodies of thousands until blood flowed freely through the streets and little children paraded the bloody heads of butchered cats on makeshift pikes in imitation of their parents. Under the ‘reign of terror’ no human had value; no individual was powerful enough to withstand its force, not Louis, not Marie Antoinette, not Marat, not Danton, not Robespierre… not even his majesty, the Corsican pirate, emperor Napoleon, himself.
vii.
So that was it. Frank Yerby’s novels contain a treasure chest of information for his readers. Yerby costumed his novels to inform the earnest reader as would an oracle of truth while providing amusement and entertainment to the casual reader as a debunker of historical myth. But Yerby is neither preaching to the uninformed, neither is he waving a banner to rally the troops nor is he warning the unwary about some eminent disaster. He makes no call to action. To the contrary, Yerby says that despite mankind’s frenetic approach to life with its daily immediacies and episodic catastrophes, mankind’s history continues to unfold in a dispassionate, orderly manner, keeping true to its own leisurely course … unswayed by any individual’s attempt to impose its will. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to choose and value what seems best from Yerby’s literary treasure chest.
Yerby as a self-conscious person of color escaped color prejudice and racial discrimination through the medium of commercial success. No one benefited more from his treasure chest than he. Only recently has the viability of commercial ventures as escape route has been seriously considered. The traditional approach with a national Negro leader representing some benevolent assistance group whether religious, social, political or occupational has become irrelevant to the lives of millions of blacks ,,, especially … the million black men behind bars. When Yerby became commercially successful … especially after being offered what many would have considered an appealing academic career … his popularity with the black community plummeted. It seemed reminiscent of the earlier DuBois/Booker T. Washington controversy: can you do it or just teach it? Ultimately, I believe Yerby will be a model for the new generation of black professionals who, after spurning being subsidized and marginalized will find success in cooperative ventures earning recognition, fame and fortune. Frank Yerby certainly did.
FOOTNOTES
This reference to ‘sanity’ is only slightly different than that same fundamental principle found in Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity. Yerby, himself, fits comfortably into the mold of a general semanticist as described in the fourth edition of Korzybski’s work. “From its very inception, the discipline of general semantics has been such as to attract persons possessing high intellectual integrity, independence from orthodox commitments, and agnostic, disinterested and critical inclinations. On the whole, they have been persons little impressed with intellectual authority immanent within any individual or body of individuals. For them, authority reposes not in any omniscient or omnipresent messiah, but solely in the dependability of the predictive content of propositions made with reference to the non-verbal happenings in this universe.”
See: Korzybski, Alfred, SCIENCE AND SANITY: An Introduction To Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, fourth edition, The International Non-aristotelian Library Publishing Company, Lakeville, Ct, 1958, p.xiii.
Yerby, Frank, JUDAS, MY BROTHER: The Story of the Thirteenth Disciple, The Dial Press, NY, 1967.
Yerby, Frank, THE DAHOMEAN, The Dial Press, NY, 1971.
Frank Yerby did receive some favorable critiques from his peers, if only from the distaff side. In 1953, Carl Milton Hughes wrote: “Frank Yerby, indirect contrast, made an initial appearance as a popular novelist delineating white characters. In he works to his credit, however, there emerges slowly his development from a merely competent writer of historical narrative to a serious student of labor issues involved during the nineties as appears in his treatment of strikes in Pride’s Castle. His lectures on slavery and his Negro characterizations in Floodtide show an acute interest in presenting a favorable attitude toward Negroes. Alain Locke, a [Yerby’s] critic, observes: ‘Yerby has the talent to write of serious matters if and when he chooses.’” See: Hughes, Carl Milton, The Negro Novelist, Citadel Press, NY, 1953, p.285.
Yerby, Frank, GOAT SONG: A Novel of Ancient Greece, The Dial Press, NY, 1967.
Yerby, Frank, AN ODOR OF SANCTITY: A Novel of Medieval Moorish Spain, The Dial Press, NY, 1965.
I found so many parallels between Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, and Yerby’s final novel, McKensie’s Hundred, especially as both identify the great evil about to destroy those the two author’s care most about.
I gave the department chairman a copy of Yerby’s Goat Song. I hoped to get Yerby considered for being added to the department’s reading list. A process had begun that semester for the unofficial addition of readings to seminar reading lists. He was able to give me the significance of the title. However his evaluation of the work was that it was pornographic. I was unimpressed by his evaluation since first year, first semester students are required to read Plato’s Symposium. On or two occasions, seminar students have not only expressed their general revulsion, but also had said that they had become physically ill, This has not kept Plato’s works off of the reading list. See: Plato, SYMPOSIUM, Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff [trans.] Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1989.
In David L. Lewis’ biography, Martin Luther King says: “the function of education, therefore is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.” See: Lewis, David L. KING: A Critical Biography, Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1970, p. 25. I am using the term ‘critical’ in the same manner. The idea of critical thinking has to do with an individual’s ability to formulate and communicate the notions of reality that will increase the knowledge of that person and anyone with whom that person communicates. see: Seech, Zachary, OPEN MINDS AND EVERYDAY REASONING, Wadsworth, Belmont CA, 1993. also: Wheelwright, Philip, VALID THINKING: Odyssy Press, NY, 1962, also: Fischer, David Hackett, HISTORIANS’ FALLACIES: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, Harper Torchbooks, 1970.
“How and Why I Write Costume Novels” by Frank Yerby in Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 219, No. 1313, October, 1959, pp. 145-50.
No person of color fails to be overwhelmed by Frank Yerby’s dramatic telling of how the young Nyasanu Hwesu Kesu, second son of the gbonuga, of the Dahomean province of Alladah grew into manhood, fought great battles, ruled over many provinces and … many wives … and then was sold into slavery, This is as rousing and satisfying a tale that any black by whatever name could find to read. See: THE DAHOMEAN, op. cit. and Yerby, Frank, A DARKNESS AT INGRAHAM’S CREST, The Dial Press, NY, 1979. However, I can never forget the way Yerby describes the sufferings and torments of Indian women today in South and Central America as represented by Maria de la Sagrada Trinidad Alvarez Bemejo, ‘Trini’ to her friends. See: Yerby, Frank, HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO, The Dial Press, NY, 1977.
See: “How and Why I Write Costume Novels” op.cit., p. 145-149
The entire paragraph Yerby’s Harper’s Magazine article reads:
All of these books, I already knew, met both qualifications; they were read then; they are being read, now. What I wanted to find out was why. The whys soon became obvious: they were all good, rousing tales, and fun to read. They all end --- except Wuthering Heights ---more or less happily; and their characters, carefully studied, were a revelation. The cardinal point about Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, Becky Sharp, Moll, Heathcliff, Rochester, et al, they are not at all like the man who lives next door. They may or may not be realistic; only their contemporaries would have been qualified to discuss the point. I suspect that they aren’t. One needs only to read Terence, Plautus, or Seneca to realize how little human nature has changed in two thousand years. (If it has changed at all, which I doubt.) What they are is interesting, even exciting. All these authors ---Fielding, the Brontes, Defoe, Thackeray --- have achieved the novelist’s highest attainment: not the still life of literal representation of people and events --- which would be a thumping bore --- but a magistral suspension of the reader’s sense of disbelief. See: How and Why I Write Costume Novels by Frank Yerby in Harper’s Magazine, op. cit.
This is a point of departure for an entire different line of inquiry: the utility of Yerby’s escape literature for oppressed peoples in the post-modern world.
ibid. The entire paragraph Yerby’s Harper’s Magazine article reads:
All of these books, I already knew, met both qualifications; they were read then; they are being read, now. What I wanted to find out was why. The whys soon became obvious: they were all good, rousing tales, and fun to read. They all end --- except Wuthering Heights ---more or less happily; and their characters, carefully studied, were a revelation. The cardinal point about Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, Becky Sharp, Moll, Heathcliff, Rochester, et al, they are not at all like the man who lives next door. They may or may not be realistic; only their contemporaries would have been qualified to discuss the point. I suspect that they aren’t. One needs only to read Terence, Plautus, or Seneca to realize how little human nature has changed in two thousand years. (If it has changed at all, which I doubt.) What they are is interesting, even exciting. All these authors ---Fielding, the Brontes, Defoe, Thackeray --- have achieved the novelist’s highest attainment: not the still life of literal representation of people and events --- which would be a thumping bore --- but a magistral suspension of the reader’s sense of disbelief. See: How and Why I Write Costume Novels by Frank Yerby in Harper’s Magazine, op. cit.
Later Yerby says: “If he is honest, as he so seldom is, the novelist will admit that, at best, he is aiming for a carefully contrived, hypnotic suspension of his reader’s sense of disbelief --- not ever for a real slice of life.” . See: How and Why I Write Costume Novels by Frank Yerby in Harper’s Magazine, op. cit.
Yerby and he were personal acquaintances. Yerby introduces what is arguably his greatest work, A DARKNESS AT INGRAHAMS CREST, with the following: To my good friends, Doctor Darwin T. Turner, Chairman of Iowa University’ Department of Afro-American Studies, and Jean, his wife, with admiration, respect, and gratitude, this book is dedicated. op. cit., p. iv.
Turner, Darwin T. and Stanford, Barbara Dodds, THERORY AND PRACTICE IN THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE OF BY AFRO-AMERICANS, NCTE/ERIC, Urbana, Illinois, 1971, p. 28
“How and Why I Write Costume Novels”, op. cit. Here I would hazard a guess that what Frank Yerby wanted to be the ennobling aspect in his life would be the historical record he would leave for generations of mis-educated Negroes. For as Carter G. Woodson says in the preface to his THE MIS-EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO: “No systematic effort toward change has been possible, for, taught the same economics, history, philosophy, literature and religion which have established he present code of morals, the Negro’s mind has been brought under thecontrol of his oppressor. The problem of holding the Negro down, therefore, is easily solved. When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.” Woodson, Carter G., THE MIS-EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO, Africa World Press, Inc, Trenton, NJ,1990, p. xiii.
This struggle was so bitter that many tenured faculty members resigned their positions including political scientist, Sheldon Wolin, whose book, Politics and Vision, inspired a generation of political philosophers who stood [senselessly as it turned out] against the technological innovations, which they claimed to be the real culprits in societies spiral down into barbarism. How foolish were they to blame deus ex machina rather than the priests who conducted worship from the sacrificial altar? It seems that these dilettantes completely misunderstood the lesson of Iphigenia. See: Wolin, Sheldon, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Little, Brown, Boston, 1960.
The University of California’s continues the right-wing conservative tradition of its Board of Regents to the present day. Ward Connerly, the black reactionary who represents the right wing effort to remove the legal authority for affirmative action programs and desegregation throughout the country, sits on the UC Board of Regents.
This is not a pejorative statement. While a student in U.C. Berkeley’s political science department, the methodology course was required for graduate and undergraduate students as well. A student who could not satisfactorily pass a methodology course could not obtain a degree from the political science department. The course was taught by Professors A. James Gregor and Georg Lenczowski. Professor Gregor, in his book, THE IDEOLOGY OF FASCISM, expressed the same sentiments concerning anti-humanitarian sentiments as he does in his book. During the Second World War, Lenczowski, was appointed to the German Embassy in Teheran as the press attaché. After the war, he emigrated to the United States and received an appointment to the University of California while assisting in developing the State Department’s policy toward Iran including the CIA-supported toppling of the government. I tutored several black students who claimed that to pass the course they had to abase themselves or abandon their own deeply-held beliefs.
In a 1975 essay in Crisis Magazine, Jack B. Moore says:
“How did Yerby suddenly become such a bad writer?--- he must be bad [critics] (sic) feel because he is a very popular writer. And how could he betray his race to become a best seller with a big reputation … ? Even Saunders Redding in “The Negro Writer and American Literature” (in Anger and Beyond, 1966), places Yerby in the tradition of Alice Dunbar, who totally “ignored her racial and social heritage.” Redding suggests that Yerby’s allegedly white writing exhibits “pathological overtones.”
Turner, op. cit,., pp. 11-12. This admonition is especially helpful to a black scholar wishing to rise above ideology in his/her research. For example, For example James’ STOLEN LEGACY provides some interesting insights into the sources of philosophical wisdom. However, others have written on the subject and need to be understood as well, such as Herodotus, called by some the ‘father of lies’ for the historical claims he makes on behalf of Egyptian primacy in Greece. No one can claim to have provided more knowledge in this area than the linguist, Martin Bernal, whose BLACK ATHENA does more than ‘discover’ history; it engages it. And more engagement is necessary. For example, was Helen really in Troy or was she in Egypt during the Trojan War as none other than Homer as well as Euripides suggests? And why is Odysseus’s captain, the one in charge of all his ships and men, of dark skin and wooly hair, according to Homer, never adequately researched? See: James, George G. M., STOLEN LEGACY:The Greeks were not the authors if Greek Philosophy, but the people of North Africa, commonly called the Egyptians, Julian Richardson Associates, San Francisco, 1988.; also: Bernal, Martin, BLACK ATHENA: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1987.
Breit, Harvey, “Frank Yerby” The Writer Observed, New York World, 1965, p.196.
Yerby says: “The point of all this is, I suppose, that novels written with deliberate intention to amuse and entertain have --- or should have --- a real place in contemporary literature.”How and Why I Write Costume Novels”, op. cit.
As a Sherlockian who can boast of a rather ‘irregular’ participation in several San Francisco scions including the Persian Slippers, the Tidewaiters and the venerable Scowers and Molly Maguires, I can attest to the pure enjoyment and fellowship of activities that enact, remember and discuss ‘mysterious’ people, places and events.
Yerby, Frank, THE OLD GODS LAUGH, The Dial Press, NY, 1964.
I allude, of course, to the ‘Riddle of the Sphinx’ referred to in Sophocles tragedy of Oedipus and his daughter, Antigone. See: Sophocles, THE OEDIPUS CYCLE: OEDIPUS REX, OEDIPUS AT COLONUS, ANTIGONE, English Versions by Dudley Fitts & Robert Fitzgerald, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, NY, 1949.
Kant has no problem with the use of logical facts that are unknown or immaterial in the present. For example, he would not object to the statement: The sun will rise tomorrow at 6:15 am. The truth or falsity of the statement made in the present would be confirmed in the material actuality of the event. This a priori logical fact becomes materially factual a posteriori as Yerby might put it. But Kant objects to the use of a priori statements that masquerade as facts. These so-called facts actually are articles of faith whose only material manifestation is in some mythical, unknowable existence. Such assertions or articles of faith masquerade as facts. According to Kant, these facts cannot and will not ever manifest themselves materially in this reality a posteriori. Kant does not believe that these unknowable facts, as such, can be considered to be material facts a priori. Thus in the world of the known, unknown and unknowable, the only unknown material facts in the present are those that can eventually be known in a reasonable future. see: Kant, Immanuel, CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, Norman K. Smith [trans], St. Martin’s Press, NY, unabridged, 1965.
Though Jewish by birth, Hegel was a fervent Christian convert. He fervently believed in the return of Christ as much as he believed in the superiority of the German race. However, stripped of his messianic content, Hegel has been credited with conceptualizing a dialectical process that leads to an “historical determinism” the serves equally the purposes of those who await the return of the messiah, those who await the workers society ... and those working for the rule of the master race. See: Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, Dover, NY, 1956 and also; Stace, W.T., THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL: A SYSTEMATIC EXPOSITION, Dover, NY, 1955.
The list of these ‘monsters’ includes Ngo Dinh Diem, Ferdinand Marcos, Reza Shah Pahlevi, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin. All these ‘monsters’ were loved and left by their powerful U.S. patrons.
Straussian.net, Political Philosophy in the tradition of Leo Strauss, www.straussian.net/straussianism.html
Strauss, Leo, PERSECUTION AND THE ART OF WRITING, The Free Press, Glencoe Illinois, 1952, p. 22.
See: Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, LEAF STORM, Harper Colophon, NY, 1972.
“How and Why I Write Costume Novels”, op. cit.
This point is driven home by Rousseau when he says: However, the frightful dissensions and infinite disorder that this dangerous power would necessarily bring about show us better than anything else how much human governments needed a basis more solid than reason alone, and how necessary it was to the public repose that divine will should intervene to give the sovereign authority a sacred and inviolable character which stripped subjects of the fatal right of disposing of it. If religion had done men only this service it would be enough to impose on them the duty of adopting and cherishing religion, despite its abuses, since it saves men from more bloodshed than fanaticism causes. See: Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, A DISCOUSE ON INEQUALITY, Maurice Cranston [trans], Penguin Books, NY, 1984, pp. 129-130.
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