“A thing never meant a thing until it moved.” Melvin Ellington, the protagonist of Wesley Brown’s novel “Tragic Magic,” arrives at this realization, ironically, during one of the few moments when he’s at rest. “Tragic Magic,” which was published in 1978, is told through a series of flashbacks, as a haunted Melvin makes his way back to New York City from Pennsylvania, where he served time for refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam War. Thrown off his path as a college student, and marooned in a kind of emotional dead zone—the result of steeling his heart against the depravities of prison life—he returns to his old neighborhood and walks the streets like a latter-day Leopold Bloom, if Bloom’s step and thought were infused with the spirit of jazz.
Born in New York in 1945, Brown dedicated himself as a college student to the civil-rights movement, getting involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party before turning, in the late sixties, to work with the Black Panther Party. “The writing came out of my involvement with the civil rights movement,” he explained in an interview with the Home News, a New Jersey newspaper, in 1983. “It seemed if I could explain things, at least to myself, then I would have more of a handle on my life and not be at the mercy of things.” Brown served time in prison, in the early seventies, for dodging the draft, then enrolled in the creative-writing program at City College, where he studied with the likes of Donald Barthelme and continued work on a manuscript that he’d begun while incarcerated. That manuscript eventually found its way to Toni Morrison, at Random House, who was impressed enough to publish it, in 1978.
Brown, who is now a professor emeritus of English at Rutgers, is also the author of the novels “Darktown Strutters” and “Push Comes to Shove,” the story collection “Dance of the Infidels,” and the movie “W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices,” which he co-wrote with Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, and Thulani Davis. He has spent his career thinking about how the rhythms of Black speech and music infiltrate literary form. “Tragic Magic” opens with a prefatory section, “A Few Words Before the Get Go,” a dizzying riff on the application of the jazz ethos to writing and to life. Melvin recalls advice that the composer Will Marion Cook gave to Duke Ellington: “Learn the rules, then forget them and do it your own way.” The lesson has stuck with Melvin, for better or worse. “So at auditions to enter the fold I get the urge to play against the melody, behind and ahead of the beat, to bend, diminish, and flatten notes, and slip in and out of any exact notation of what and how I should play,” he says. Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald, and even Melvin’s own sparring, dozens-loving aunt and uncle have all made an art of “bad” form, of being unable to settle into a more conventional semblance of order.
The get-go then begins, with a memory of transit. Melvin recalls riding a New York City subway with a date named Tonya and seeing a man come on to her. The moment makes him feel insecure: Should he have stood up to the man on Tonya’s behalf? Fought him? “I guess I should have done something,” he tells Tonya, like he’s playing for forgiveness. That forgiveness is not forthcoming, because Tonya wasn’t offended by his inaction in the least. “What could you have done?” she retorts. She rejects the notion that it’s a man’s duty to defend her honor—she’s perfectly fine defending it herself, she tells Melvin. “You know, I almost kicked that dude in his family jewels,” she says. “I caught myself just in time. I guess that wouldn’t have made you look too good if I had.” Melvin is uneasy about the implication that she doesn’t need him around at all—or, at least, not in the predictable ways that he wants her to need him.
“Tragic Magic” is about tragedy, all right—the kinds of tragedies that men bring upon themselves by allowing their inner lives to be ensnared in the trap that we’ve come to call toxic masculinity. That is, the death of mind, spirit, and body that ensues when men willingly lower themselves into its coffin, and how that death pervades everything from friendships to political action. In prison, early in Melvin’s three-year bid for dodging the draft, he meets Chilly, an old hand at incarcerated life who warns him that not appearing like a certain kind of man can mean death—or, worse, sex with other men. “Watch yourself when you take a shower,” Chilly instructs. “Don’t walk around half nude. And for your own protection, make sure you stay on a top bunk. The main thing is to be a man.”
But being a man is dangerous business. Melvin stares at another man’s body in the prison shower, and his gaze yields some of the novel’s most flagrantly gorgeous writing. “The slouch in his shoulders is an indication that very little has impressed him enough to make him straighten up,” Melvin thinks, of this man. “His face interests me most of all. . . . His hair, sideburns, and mustache have been trimmed as evenly as a well-kept lawn. And he is the color of a skillet broken in by cooking.” Then Melvin catches himself, remembering where he is. “I’ve got to be more careful. . . . At any moment someone may decide you will make a good piece of merchandise.”
Brown’s genius is to set us down in the midst of men whose interior lives and senses of what it is possible for them to be in this world are so constrained by conventional ideas of manhood that they cannot even begin to see anything else. He holds us so close to this world that it can seem as if there is no escape. Melvin, whose peers nickname him Mouth, because of his overenthusiastic method of smooching women, is in many ways the perfect vehicle for this portrayal: his voice brings us into a too-intimate, almost claustrophobic relationship with a community of men who feel a constant need to prove their male bona fides. It is a world of rampant homophobia and misogyny and a generalized fear of what it would mean to let one’s guard down in an actually intimate relationship—not only with a woman but with anybody at all. Melvin, who seems most motivated by an adolescent lust, is not exempt from this fraternity. As a result, neither is the reader. But the novel is not an endorsement of the stance that Melvin is constantly pushed to assume; it is an attempt to reckon with the toll that this position takes on the novel’s male characters, the ways it leaves them deformed.
Among these men, Melvin’s childhood friend Otis is perhaps the most deformed. A veteran of the Vietnam War who was driven to fight by an obsession with John Wayne, that paragon of American machismo, Otis is a young buck whose chief concerns are bedding women and proving his physical prowess against other men. Quick to anger and possessed of a pride that’s about half an inch deep, he is the Kurtz to Melvin’s Marlow. Melvin, racked by loneliness and more than a little guilt, seeks out his friend upon hearing that Otis has lost a hand as a result of the war. What he finds is less a person than an open wound, a man whose sense of himself has been fundamentally threatened by his participation in a failed war, and by a more personal failure to live up to an impossible standard. Once certain that fighting would make him every bit as heroic as Wayne, Otis, now a radio engineer, is straining at society’s leash, leaping at every chance he gets to demonstrate his belonging to the lethal fraternity of American cowboys.
If Melvin is different from men like Otis, it is by virtue of his intrinsically curious nature. A skeptic whose posture toward life is characterized above all by uncertainty, and an outsider who cannot quite fit himself into the cohort of horny alpha males who surround him, Melvin is attuned to a certain dissonance in his world, the possibility that this world can be other than it is. The way, for instance, that his fellow-inmates love “indulging in a favorite shower-room pastime: comparing the size of each other’s Swanson Johnson.” This is an obvious violation of the supposed stricture against staring at other men’s bodies, and, though there is cruelty in it—a retrograde comparison of virility and a test of manhood—Melvin locates something else, too. The act is perhaps a kind of curiosity and appreciation, which is simultaneously warped by and resistant to the constraints on these men’s vision. There is a vibrancy in the language that Melvin uses to describe this pastime, a contest with a winner “determined by the one who can get his rizz-od as hizz-ard as a rizz-ock at a mizz-oments nizz-otice.”
One thinks back to Melvin’s description of Charlie Parker’s playing, which “started everyone in the joint to jumping giddy and yapping in a strange tongue that emphasized the buzzing sound of the letter Z.” Melvin’s improvisatory, itinerant thought process is an intimation of a new and different language of masculinity. He sees and hears what his brethren cannot—or are unwilling to—see and hear. And this is the gift that Wesley Brown gives to his readers: a new way to speak, a language that we have to excavate and rescue from murky depths. “Tragic Magic” is an unruly and difficult story of how gender works in the world, and how we might find our ways to new modes of being, by playing our own solos, riffing on the given world in search of other possibilities.
This piece is adapted from the foreword to a new edition of “Tragic Magic,” out this month.
