Context
Remarks on the Passing of Cyrus Colter
Reginald Gibbons
Cyrus Colter was a board member for Dalkey
Archive Press for several years, and more importantly he wrote one of
the most important collections of stories of the last 50 years, The Beach Umbrella (available from TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press). Despite
his remarkable accomplishments as a fiction writer, he was generally
ignored by critics, with a few notable exceptions, chief of whom is
Reginald Gibbons, who made the following remarks at a memorial service
for Cyrus Colter on May 23, 2002.
Cyrus was born on January 8, 1910; he died April 15 of this year. (On
that same birthday, by the way, but 27 years later, Leon Forrest was
born.)
Cyrus had three careers—many years in the law, a half-dozen years in
higher education at Northwestern (1973-79), and the last several
decades of his life, as an active writer. This was an extraordinarily
full life. Cyrus was a man of both seriousness and occasional
uproariousness, even to excess—who yet carried with him a certain
dignity that had accrued from his long and varied experience—of people,
of institutions, of art, of the lived American history that was his own
life. In the years when I knew him, from late 1983 on, he was a man who
until he became ill was composed of passions and enthusiasms and great
artistic stamina, but who yet honestly doubted himself, as most writers
do, in moments of artistic crisis.
Cyrus began writing at the age of 50, published short stories in
literary journals, and at the age of 60 published his first book, the
memorable collection The Beach Umbrella,
which was selected by Kurt Vonnegut as the winner of a contest
sponsored by the University of Iowa Press. Cyrus published five more
books, all novels, and in them we see a very gifted and artistically
restless writer reinventing himself several times. The Rivers of Eros (1972), a naturalistic work like The Beach Umbrella,
portrays working-class black Chicagoans confronting daily life as the
scene of ultimate questions. Cyrus’s next novel, published only a year
later in 1973, was The Hippodrome, a complete departure from
his first two books. As Cyrus’s friend Fred Shafer pointed out to me
years ago, Cyrus belonged to the generation of Richard Wright (who was
born two years earlier), but Cyrus did not publish his first book until
the year Richard Wright died. The two writers were formed in the same
period of American life, with its ubiquitous rituals of race relations.
In Cyrus’s brief but unforgettable Hippodrome, one encounters a
tremendously intense presentation of existential dilemmas of freedom
and servitude against a backdrop of race, sex and human violence, and
all this does remind us of Richard Wright’s fiction, his preoccupations
and his intensity, even though Cyrus’s manner as a writer is very
different from Wright’s. Then after several years of research and
writing came Cyrus’s vast nineteenth-century novel, Night Studies (1979), in which he creates an imaginary black American political
figure and his movement in the midst of civil rights struggles. (This
book includes a powerful and contradictory historical novella of the
middle passage and also a long story of slaves attempting to escape
plantation owners—as if Cyrus wanted to prove that every aspect of the
whole history of slavery and race in America was within his range.)
Nearly ten years later, after Cyrus’s wife Imogene had died and he had
endured a period of extreme grief, Cyrus published his masterpiece, A Chocolate Soldier (1988). This remarkable book portrays a quixotic young black
revolutionary, again in the midst of the American civil rights
movement—but Cyrus was not content to simply tell the story. Always
interested in the contradictions inherent in any position, he created a
highly unreliable narrator, who as a former friend of the
revolutionary, looks back on his friend from a position of his own
acquiescence and bad faith. This is a morally and psychologically
complicated, extraordinarily deft novel that ranges from the horrifying
to the horrifyingly funny, and gives readers a large cast of memorable
characters, black and white, caught in the American paradoxes and
struggles of race. Cyrus’s final work, City of Light (1993), is
a novel of ideas, not of characters, almost a kind of dialogue of
philosophical positions—which in terms of the art of the novel, was yet
another departure, although again it was focused on the workings of
race in American society. Cyrus looked repeatedly at the textures of
black middle-class life, especially in Chicago, but also brought all
sorts of characters into his work, and never failed to inquire deeply
and imaginatively into how America racializes social relations and
economic power—not in simple but in highly complex, contradictory ways.
Cyrus was also a passionately partisan reader of Melville and Faulkner,
and like them, he aspired to produce a style, a sound, in English, that
was capable of tragic depths, sweeping views, and sheer exuberance of
language. This was all akin somehow to his love of the infinitely
detailed vastness of the symphonies of Bruckner.
Like many another American writer whose purposes, goals and ambitions
are artistically serious and full of emotional and intellectual risk,
Cyrus was mostly overlooked by the critical establishment of America,
and was also caught in the conflicts of politicized culture, even
within the black community. Yet these obstacles, and this loneliness of
the long-distance writer, seemed only to strengthen his will to write
utterly and completely as himself—the particular person who had come
from Noblesville, Indiana to the hidden heart of Chicago’s political
life, who had come from reading novels obsessively throughout his life
to writing them as a mature man, who had lived being black in white
America. "You have to write out of your own chemistry as a human
being!" he used to say with great conviction, when the subject of
writing came up in conversation. "You have to be yourself!" he said,
having heard people around him, from all sides, advising or implying
that he ought to be more malleable or more mainstream or less
obstreperous or more radical or more activist. What he was, though, was
independent and original. He wrote books no one else could have
written. And he felt within himself, I am sure, the justice of his
accomplishment—a kind of justice apart from what is available to us, or
not, as citizens.
Cyrus’s character John Calvin Knight, in Night Studies,
says near the end of his life: "I only ask for time to finish my
work—my studies. I live now for what, hopefully, they will reveal—the
answer to that vast question, that vast mystery: the mystery of
Blackness. There is a greatness there, a majesty, if it can only be
found [ . . . ]. So wish me well."
