[This is a post from 22 July 2008, which I’ve retrieved from the ‘Private’ category because Julius Lester’s name has cropped up in relation to my current reading. I’ve just learned on Wikipedia that he died in 2018, and discovered a lot more about his life. He was committed to telling the truth as he saw it, whatever the personal cost. Judging from my brief contacts with him, he was also a really nice guy.]
Julius Lester, Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky (Arcade Publishing 1990)
Since I’ve started making notes here about every book I read, I’ve been tempted to feel ashamed of the chaotic omnivorousness of my reading habits. I read books because they are on offer at the Book Club, because they happen to catch my eye at an airport, because I’ve received them as gifts, because they’re part of the canon and I should read them, because I need to get an insistent friend off my back, because I’ve run out of cereal packets to read at breakfast …
At first blush, it would seem that I’ve read Julius Lester’s collection of essays for a purely random reason – because I won it in a little competition he ran. But I wouldn’t have won it if I wasn’t a regular reader of Julius’s blog, and I wouldn’t read his blog regularly if— And it struck me, perhaps because I started reading this book just after spending two days reading a friend’s novel-in-typsecript, that one whole category of my reading is Books Written By Friends. I’m probably using ‘friend’ in a slightly idiosyncratic way here since I know Julius only through his writing – a handful of his books (Sam and the Tigers: A new telling of Little Black Sambo, John Henry, When Dad Killed Mom), his contributions to an E-List I once belonged to, his blog and a very few emails.
I’m expect that very few people in Australia have read this book of essays, published in 1990 and now out of print. And that’s a shame because each of its three sections is full of good stuff. The first, ‘Writers and Writing’, makes unlikely bedfellows of Henry Miller, Thomas Merton, Aldous Huxley and James Baldwin, and among other bracing delights includes an essay that begins, ‘I am grateful that among the indignities inflicted on me in childhood I escaped The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’ There are also a couple of pieces about his own writing, one of which begins:
I have always loved books. Medical science has learned that infants suck their thumbs in the womb. I read. I love books as much for their sheer physicality as for what I may learn and experience through the words on their pages. I love to touch books, to hold them. They are my security blanket, and whether I am happy or depressed, I go to bookstores to orient myself to the world, to feel myself enclosed, almost womblike, by books on all sides. I need books, almost as an alcoholic needs liquor. When I was in college, I always carried a book with me on dates, not sure that any girl could be as interesting or involving as a book. My wife wonders if I’ve changed.
The second section is titled ‘Race’. If there’s a binding thread to the book, it’s the responsibility of the writer to be truthful – to write the truth as he or she sees it, regardless of the demands of collectives of whatever kind. In this section Julius argues again and again for a deeply human perspective, rather than one determined by identity politics. He was part of the Civil Rights Movement, and laments the separatism and advocacy of violence that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, as well as the coming to dominance of victimhood and the shucking of responsibility. As a convert to Judaism, he has pungent things to say about anti-semitism among US Black leaders, and the tolerance of it among Black and other intellectuals.
The third section, ‘Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky’, draws its title from Seneca, ‘Of all the generations, it is we who have been designated to merit this fate, to be crushed by the falling pieces of the broken sky.’ The section consists mostly of short pieces that read as blog-entries before the existence of blogs – they were written to be read on the radio. I don’t think the title means to suggest that the reader will be crushed by them. On the contrary, I found myself thinking of the Judaic concept of Tikkun Olam, repair of the world, as if these small pieces are helping to piece the sky back together. Many of them are serio-whimsical – objecting to the term ‘Safe Sex’, for instance, because sex always has an edge of emotional or spiritual risk, so to ‘lead the young to believe that sex is safe may one day deprive them of love itself’. There’s a brilliant essay in defence of ‘the canon’ against those who urge educational institutions to introduce students primarily to writing that reflects their own experience, including this:
It is reprehensible that those who have suffered because they are different should now be the ones using difference as a weapon against others. Doing so denies that we are bound to each other by the simple fact that we all laugh and cry and suffer and rejoice about the same experiences or in the same ways. What matters is that we find the humanity within ourselves to delight in the laughter of others, even if we are not amused; that we feel a twinge of pain upon noticing someone weeping, though our own eyes remain dry; that our hearts pause in the presence of another person’s suffering; and that we exult when someone else rejoices, even when we do not understand the occasion for the joy.
The final essay is a mediation on the Holocaust and a brief account of his conversion to Judaism, which makes me want to read his memoir on the subject, Lovesong.
Me fail? I fly! 