Cecil Brown (1) (1943–)

This is, as someone else put it, a novel of a time and place. But it's an interesting and somewhat alien time and place, even though it's not so very long ago.

Maybe it's just because I'm projecting onto this text, but some other books that came to mind when one reads this: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and Neil Strauss's The Game. Regardless of that latter reference, the book is a novel, not a dated guide to playing pickup as a black man in Denmark show more (though it could have been many places in Europe) back in the late 60s.

That said, the book is dripping with sex, and a lot of it is multiple-birds-with-one-stone sex, too. The protagonist ("George Washington", he calls himself) tells the stories of his (constant) encounters with white women not only because he likes to talk about sex, but also because there are other things he wants to talk about. Anger. Humiliation. Being used. Using. Hypocrisy. Power.

Being a white man in Korea at the start of the 21st century is radically different from being a black man in Copenhagen in the 60s, I'm certain, but I can say as an expatriate that Brown certainly hits the nail on the head in terms of the feel of an expat's mindset, the dynamics of expat communities, the sense of interactions based more on using a convenient foreigner than on any human interaction, and also the sexual charge that seems to drive so many expats, and even to infuse a relatively homogenous society when it comes to how it regards its "exotic" foreigners. Things do get weird; deeply weird, in this book, and that's no surprise, but the specific weirdnesses do indeed surprise, even as they feel strangely familiar.

I found the book quite interesting, even though there were times when I found myself slightly discomfited at being reminded just how crappily human beings can treat one another. Jive: the crudity of life distorted by all the ridiculousnesses one can imagine, and the sad ridiculousness that one becomes by living within it. And the abyss that gazes into our protagonist...

This is, in the end, a powerful, discomfiting book. My discomfort with it makes me want to say something limiting it, but I'm going to resist that and say I was both fascinated and somehow sobered by it at once. show less

This book is beautifully written, full of anger and sex, blatant truths and subtle descriptions of interpersonal relations. It captures the experience of a person trying to escape his past by making a philosophy and lifestyle out of jive, prevarication, self-imposed exile, promiscuity and drugs. Even more important, Jiveass shows how the protagonist gets out of the escapist thinking and behaviors and becomes ready to return to his home country—the site of all of the formative traumas of show more his life. The sex scenes are potentially distracting—but each contains luminous descriptions of the mental state that carries the participants through these rather fraught encounters, and reads dangerously true about how people with different amounts of power in the world (and different senses of their relationship to racial difference) behave sexually to each other. As George Washington (the protagonist) progresses through the novel, these scenes embody his changing awareness of the women he is involved with—and thus his changing relationship with the world that leads to his decision to return to the United States.

Overall, this is one of the best works of fiction I have read—a truly valuable work. show less

“All the publishers are interested in selling books and if you say something about sex and being a nigger then you got a bestseller” (206).

C.S. Lewis writes that fiction allows you to be a thousand men whilst always maintaining the integrity of your own person. In today’s impoverished lingo, he argued that fiction allows us to walk in another person’s shoes. To be honest, the world of Brown’s classic novel of an African-American navigating the gigolo world of Copenhagen is one I show more didn’t want to stay in for very long. The rawness of the sexual encounters that make up much of the book at first seemed to be little more than the kind of meaningless encounters strung together by thin plot lines that are the hallmark of run-of-the-mill porno. I found myself repeatedly referring back to the insightful, new introduction by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to reassure myself that something worthwhile was going to come of this odyssey through the sordidness of late-60’s Denmark.

However, as the novel progresses, the increasing bizarreness of the protagonist George Washington’s encounters with women wear on him as much as on the reader. Upon entering the bedroom of his last encounter, he sits on the sofa, head in hands, wondering “What is beauty, Mrs. Hamilton?” When Washington realizes that “everybody in this town, every black person, seems to be living off someone or something else. Everything but their insides” (203), he decides to go back home to the U.S., back to where “the battleground is a bit more familiar” (206).

In his introduction, Louis Gates, Jr. recalls that among his friends at Yale Brown’s book was “a required text on our veritable ‘Quest for Blackness’” (x). I don’t pretend to know or understand what lessons he derived about African-American identity from Life and Loves, but the return of Washington to America where the battleground is familiar might be one. The gigolos in Brown’s book are all expatriates escaping the racism and violence of the South, of America. Yet, what they find in Europe is not essentially different. The white women do not desire them for their persons but for their color. The existentialism of Europe seems to Washington to be just another way for whites to get in touch with their blackness. America may be a place that doesn’t allow him to write a “serious book,” but it’s a place where he understands the situation.

I also stayed with the book because while George Washington is careering through women left and right, he displays a self-awareness and understanding that is endearing. At first, his knowledge makes him appear the rapacious player, but as you watch the emptiness dawn on him, a core of inner humanity peeks out. Mr. Jiveass might be a slick negotiator, but he can’t jive himself for too long, and in the end, not at all.

Gates calls attention to the postmodern epilogue in which Brown tells his character “All is jive” (212) and encourages him that in the end, after “the intellectuals [pick] through your soul….You will have them understand what you mean by jive” (213). In a new preface written for this edition, Brown suggests that “Jive is a philosophy, for sure, but it is also a door. Open it and enter” (xxii). Brown certainly opens a door into a world of experience alien to me racially, but it’s also a world that is not entirely foreign. It is a world in which people’s self-serving behavior robs them of humanity, a world in which escaping from overt oppression leads to a more insidious, creeping imprisonment, a world in which freedom from does not lead to freedom in. And the kind of life that leads to that world and may be required in that world is certainly something I could understand as jive. show less

I can see why this is considered something of a cult classic, but it wasn't for me. It is a page turner, but the book felt rather uneven for me. At times, it seemed like there were scenes that were solely for shock or over-emphasis, and other scenes felt like they were trying too hard to be philosophical. Also, I have to say that the profanity seemed a bit overboard, though it doesn't bother me generally.

Overall, it's an entertaining enough story most of the time, and presents a different show more version of Ellison's Invisible Man ideas, but I wanted it to be tighter for Brown to really make the points he was obviously working to make. For me, it was an up and down ride, though it kept me interested and wasn't a difficult read for the most part. I just wanted there to be more depth. show less