There's a new biography, And Bid Him Sing by Charles Molesworth, of the brilliant Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen.  (Cullen pronounced his first name as if there were an accent aigu over the first 'e,' but now it's usually pronounced as it's spelled.)  Cullen died young at 43, and his poetic career effectively came to an end ten years earlier, but during his brief moment in the sun, he produced a small, powerful body of work.  Like so many minority writers, Cullen was accused by more militant writers as not being black enough.  It would happen later to writers like Ralph Ellison and Robert Hayden, who said they were writers period and didn't want to be pigeonholed and limited.  Or, in a different context, Saul Bellow objected to being described as a "Jewish writer" and lumped with Roth and Malamud as the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of Jewish literature.  Over thirty years ago, in a movie review, I described Leni Riefenstahl as "the greatest woman director" of all time, a comment that received a lot of blowback.  What's a minority writer to do?  It's convenient to put writers in categories; we don't teach John Milton in a class on American literature, and no one objects that we're limiting Milton.  But for a minority writers, it's been a constant dilemma.

Cullen certainly wrote about black subjects.  His poem "Heritage" is a bitterly ironic comment on being torn between heritage and present.  It's one of the strongest expressions of that tension that I know, and the reader's awareness of the poem's real tone develops gradually until with a start, one understands that the opening line ("What is Africa to me?") has finally a very different import than one thinks at the beginning.  "We wear the mask" is the famous line from Paul Laurence Dunbar, but Cullen didn't actually wear the mask--at least not about race.  On the other hand, and much less commented on, is that, despite being married twice, Cullen was gay.  And here the gender negotiation was much trickier.  Cullen was a "member" of Carl Van Vechten's gay, Afrophilic circle in New York, and in that context he was quite open; he also had a long-term relationship with a man.  And yet the minute he stepped outside that circle, gay themes and the tension in his life play no part in his poetry.  Even the queerest of critics will have a hard time finding a gay subtext in Cullen's work.

The title of Molesworth's biography is taken from Cullen's most famous poet, "Yet Do I Marvel":

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,

And did He stoop to quibble could tell why

The little buried mole continues blind,

Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,

Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus

Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare

If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus

To struggle up a never-ending stair.

Inscrutable His ways are, and immune

To catechism by a mind too strewn

With petty cares to slightly understand

What awful brain compels His awful hand.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

 

Like many of Cullen's poems, this is a sonnet, and chief objection to the "failure" of his blackness is that he so often used traditional "white" forms.  The most quoted linesfrom the poem are the final couplet.  But the first line is masterful.  What could be more affirmative than Cullen's declaration of God's goodness?  Seven of the words are one syllable, and five of them end in /d/ or /t/.  But of course, the minute one says, "I doubt not," the element of doubt has been introduced.  (Everytime Melville begins a sentence with 'Doubtless,' the reader had better be on his guard.)  And in the middle of this seemingly positive affirmation comes the adjective 'well-meaning,' which always implies a 'but.'  Cullen works his way into the doubts slowly: our questions are mere quibbles that should God stoop condescendingly to answer, He surely could.  Our first quibble is just that: none of is much concerned about why a 'buried' mole is blind; the second quibble, however--why our flesh must someday die--abruptly changes the import.

 

Perhaps it's safer to question the Greeks gods, but the oxymoronic choice of "brute caprice" is hardly reassuring.  God's ways are, as believers are often told, 'inscrutable,' especially to minds strewn with petty care.  Yet though 'awful' originally meant awe-full, when Cullen uses the word to describe both God's brain and his hand, no reader thinks that the poet is using the words in their historical and complimentary fashion.  We know what 'awful' means.  The final couplet ends with one personal question that may be 'curious,' but that also causes a much stronger response, the poet who marvels.

 

Cullen's career may have been short, he may have been criticized for his formal conservatism, and he may have eliminated the sexual dimension from his poetry altogether, but for the few years that he wrote, he managed to sing--and to do so beautifully.