The Book You Have to Read: “The Late Risers,” by Bernard Wolfe

(Editor’s note: This is the 134th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Bernard Wolfe’s satirical and allegorical novel The Late Risers couldn’t be read at a more appropriate time than now. What begins as a shovelful of dirt on the grave of Damon Runyon quickly becomes an examination of race and what constitutes the identity of an American—two issues that remain as contentious today as ever. First published in 1954 (and later reprinted as Everything Happens at Night), it’s still an entertaining book. At times ponderous, madcap, and preposterous, its balance between medium and message merits it being given another chance by readers.

The ostensible (and complicated) plot concerns efforts by Broadway talent agents and others to win their clients some ink in the trades, and most urgently, to procure for visiting Hollywood cowboy star Biff Jordan (“a Valentino in dungarees”) a hot date while he’s in New York City. The Late Risers’ time frame and locale are roughly the same as those for William S. Burroughs’s Junkie (I’d bet my bottom dollar that he and Wolfe encountered each other somewhere at the Crossroads of the World—they just had to!). But if readers are hoping for a cross-pollination between the rising Beat Generation and dying Broadway showbiz hucksters—like, say, Billy Rose or Walter Winchell conflated with Herbert Huncke or Lenny Bruce—they’ll be disappointed to find that the pastrami served in the delis of this era’s 42nd Street is not cured with marijuana smoke, though plenty a people do partake of pot in Wolfe’s tale. So then, why read this seemingly dated book?

Wolfe’s ability to entertain is clear and confirmed. As an encyclopedist he refers to a plethora of cultural references to give more depth to people, places, and things; but he also has the eye of a minimalist, capturing essentials with a simplicity guaranteed to please a sensibility that appreciates haiku-length phrasing containing a pith of truth. For instance, in these pages Bing Crosby is said to possess a “sports shirt personality,” and above New York is a “spittoon sky.” Despite extravagances such as “her eyes were full of handclaps” and “her face was a charity drive,” the results of squeezing something from nothing are plainly more amusing and poignant, and no one can do it in quite the way Wolfe can. Witness this oft-cited exchange between a Hollywood agent and his girlfriend as they encounter a young self-conscious carhop named Biff Jordan.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” the man finally asked.

“Six ways from Sunday,” the girl said.

“That,” the man said, “is a shitkicker. Does calisthenics every time you look at him.”

“That’s a shitkicker to end shitkickers,” the girl said.

“Even his eyeballs blush,” the man said. “You look at him, his hands get like windmills. That’s a shitkicker for the connoisseur. That’s a shitkicker’s shitkicker.”

“He introduces an entirely new dimension into shitkicking,” the girl said. “With him it becomes an art form, like ballet.”

“That,” the man said, “is shitkicking like Shakespeare would do it. Odets. De Mille.”

Their conversation puzzled Biff: they sounded like scientists trying to classify a bug.

Wolfe does have a message—just don’t be distracted by the old-school Broadway razzle-dazzle that most of his characters spew; there’s enough such patter here to give Guys and Dolls a run for its money. And, yeah, The Late Risers is at times wearing, and impatient readers might feel impelled to pick up their own shovel and give Wolfe a hand; but those who allow this book a chance to prove its value are eventually treated to a prescient vision and empathetic look at what it’s like to be a black man, circa the 1950s. Our tour guide is an African-American character with the name of Movement.

Movement is the go-to guy when hipper members of the Times Square crew need pot. “Rampart Street easy and Sugar Hill offhand,” he cuts a smooth figure, but not one of his own devising. He quotes Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (a kind of key to this book), wears Brooks Brothers suits, drives a Mercedes, sports an earring, and has a mentor in the wealthy Vanderbilt Bohlen, who’s a cross between John Hammond and Alan Lomax. Here’s where Wolfe, author of A Study of Race Relations in American Popular Culture, makes his insightful statement on race and America with the mind of an analyst and the soul of a poet.

Professor Wedemeyer is an intense and conflicted intellectual “caught between conjure and Das Kapital.” Dying of cancer, the character falls back to the primitive and asks friend and ghost-writer Don Kiefer to locate in New York City a voodoo witch doctor, “an anachronism pounding his herbs among the neons” in a last-ditch search for a cure. The Professor requests that the practitioner be a skilled black man, of course, because “This is not an area for the American initiative and self-help. Here we need the authorities with the know-how”—a backhanded compliment if ever there was one.

Kiefer enlists Movement in the search, but after combing the city they discover that anyone with any kind of voodoo ability is now gainfully employed in Detroit and out of the spell-casting business. So Movement takes on the role of shaman, and to keep everything authentic for the Professor, darkens his light skin with burnt cork. Anyone nodding off while reading this book would have to be jarred awake by the irony of that endeavor.

Movement is a fabrication. He got his name, his game, his savoir faire from the intellectual and arts patron Bohlen. Bohlen also taught Movement how to play the drums; a skill which, in less politically corrected times, one would think came naturally to Movement. Also, the ceremony Movement portrayed in his sham witch doctor performance was one he learned by listening to Bohlen’s record collection. People are not always who they seem to be in this book, and E pluribus unum, Movement discovers, is not as easy as it sounds. For African Americans who try to make their way into white American society, it can sometimes be forced on them. Beneath the cultivated façade, Movement is an angry man.

White Americans are “hyphenated,” he says. Bound by the identity of their heritage, they can never let go of the past and look ahead to achieve fruition as individuals and be a truly unified people, but at least they have something to work with. The African American has other problems. “Thanks to 330 meaningless years without a past and without a face,” writes Wolfe, “he’d been cut off from Africa as no white American had ever been cut off from Europe. So the Negro was the only 100 percent American—the only completely fluid, cosmic, all-at-once man.” Blacks have no identity, the argument goes, and this allows others to impose identities upon them. And with what might be the good, such as Bohlen’s tutelage, comes the bad, which is the humiliating experience Movement has of being stereotyped and hunted by predatory white women, of becoming an object for their fantasies of being taken by a “pirate,” a “bushman,” a mauling “night animal,” setting the clock back 330 years. For people with Movement’s intellect and sensitivity, this is a demeaning and dehumanizing situation.

The Late Risers will never be taught in literature classes, but credit is owed to Wolfe for the repertoire of devices he uses and the thematic depth he creates here. As for how and why Movement was given his name, and what his ultimate fate is, and the mutable fates of the huge cast of characters … well, readers will just have to pick up a copy of The Late Risers and find out those answers for themselves.

READ MORE: “The Book You Have to Read: In Deep, by Bernard Wolfe,” by Steven Nester (The Rap Sheet).

The Book You Have to Read: “In Deep,” by Bernard Wolfe

(Editor’s note: This is the 128th entry in our ongoing series about great but forgotten books. Today’s piece comes from Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Steve has become a regular contributor to this series; his last piece looked back at Kem Nunn’s first novel, Tapping the Source [1984]. You’ll find Steve’s previous offerings here.)

In Deep, a 1957 spy thriller written by Bernard Wolfe, is a lot of book. An angry tirade against the socialist cause corrupted by a pernicious and amoral bureaucracy, a full-frontal parody of academics and authors in search of the genuine, a satire of Cuban jazz musicians who eye the big time as they foment revolution in the ghettos, a pithy commentary on human motivation, and an ironic account of the relations between the sexes, In Deep takes it all on without ever becoming too pedantic or too irritating.

The novel has all the ornamentation for a door-stopping epic; but instead of getting his Dr. Zhivago on, Wolfe keeps the story manageable by situating it within the confines of Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1950s. At its simplest, In Deep is an adventure novel in which hubris and revenge galvanize a man of action to engage foreign agents at their own game.

After Cuban idealist Barto Caro is murdered by European spymaster Michael Brod in Key West, his best buddy Robert Garmes determines to avenge that crime. Barto and Brod, we learn, have a very interesting history. While fighting for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Barto’s fellow-traveler father was kidnapped by Brod for challenging Soviet policy and was never heard from again. The younger Caro was luckier: Shot in the back by Brod while battling Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces, Barto survived, but Brod was unaware of that fact. Now, 20 years later, Brod hears of Barto Caro’s determination to kill him, and moves quickly to ambush Barto.

Faster than you can say Che Lives!, Barto’s friend Garmes is on his way to Cuba in pursuit of Brod, watched over by CIA agents and Brod’s own people. The CIA needs Garmes to lead them to spymaster Brod, who has information they crave. Time is tight, for Brod has been recalled home--and we all know what that means. First, however, he must eliminate Garmes, before Barto’s vengeful pal can complicate his getaway. But Brod is curious: Just who is this persistent amateur who’s been dogging him?

Any spy novel worth its cloak and dagger must have a clever plot, believable characters, trenchant observations, perhaps a bit of irony showing how similar Cold War antagonists actually were, and a compelling resolution--components that put the bitterness of spy versus spy on a human level. This book has all of those, but it also possesses a keen sense of humor that’s rarely found in espionage novels to the extent that it’s used here--and that’s why you want to read In Deep. While not as sly as say, Our Man in Havana, what distinguishes In Deep from the pack is its veracious and voracious satirizing. Wolfe, with Garmes as his mouthpiece, settles many accounts with humor that entertains and edifies, while also revealing the core of his characters and the folly of their ways.

Vincent Caprio, In Deep’s morally vacant yet highly efficient American espionage agent, walks “with scoutmaster briskness.” He’s described by Garmes as having “something too damned hardworking and clean cut about him, he reminded me of a YMCA counselor who gives a good account of himself on the parallel bars. His hair was despicably neat, and he didn’t blink enough.”

Musicologist and socialist sympathizer Owen Brooke, meanwhile, is “a coupon-clipping professor who thinks he’s a share-cropper” and is unwittingly used to lure Garmes to Cuba and into Brod’s reach. Brooke escorts Garmes into the island nation’s interior to experience the indigenous Afro-Cuban jazz which he believes is unsullied by homogenizing capitalist show-biz exploiters. And the musicians do put on a show, but while the professor believes he’s listening to the real thing, the band--with “New York-rapt eyes above the Congo lips”--is playing for another audience.

This was a Shubert Alley rendition of Africa, the jungle as jazzbo sociology professors dreamed of it behind their box hedges. In his staged Africa there was one and only one rite, the invocation Booking.

The fiction of American novelist Nelson Boyar (a man of the people as well as a yachtsman), who likes to believe that his books aid the socialist cause, is censured here by Brod as a “silly brand of literary proletarianism.” “Movements are inane literary critics,” Brod says as he lambastes the crestfallen writer. “They’ll acclaim any written word that acclaims them.”

And then we have Connie. This witty and wily Key West sex kitten, with whom Robert Garmes maintains a star-crossed romance, is lured to Cuba by U.S. agent Caprio as added bait for Garmes to follow. With a little bit of scratch and a little bit of purr she keeps Garmes off balance. She’s the obtainable vixen who can never to be possessed, and he can’t get enough of her. “I don’t care how many men you’ve had, you’re an incorrigible virgin,” Garmes insists. “You’ve never been had. You’ve only been touched on the outside, where it doesn’t count.” And Connie knows what she’s doing, too.

But in a matter of seconds the quills were out of her voice and she was playing with my earlobes and saying, with tin cups in her words, let’s get out of here, Robbie.

Michael Brod is a seasoned spy, and author Wolfe gives him some pretty heavy credentials. He was the assassin of a Leon Trotsky stand-in, and he played a role in the Soviets attaining American atomic bomb secrets. He’s at the end of a long career and knows his usefulness to his masters is over. Faithful to the cause, he’d never defect to the West, even if it meant saving his own life. Brod is determined to come in from the cold and face execution, if only because it’s the one choice he can make that is solely his. He knows that he’s going to get it, but whether the bullet comes from American agents or his own people--that’s his decision. “I cannot allow just anyone to kill me. I must arrange the circumstances myself. As a last act of will--it’s important, because will is the sign of life.”

(Left) The cover from Alfred A. Knopf’s original, 1957 hardcover edition

Finally, even when getting a little preachy Wolfe’s class observations ring true, as when Garmes travels to a Cuban bordello:

... I noticed this walking on eggshells of theirs. Whores in imperialist countries, pampered by robber barons, have learned to negotiate on French heels, but the ones of the exploited colonies, being long oppressed and cut off from the main sources of imperialistic frilly culture, never seem at home on those luxury item spikes, they look like kids on their first pair of stilts.

And now a little about Bernard Wolfe himself. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, relax. Never a crime or thriller writer, Wolfe is better known to readers of jazz histories than to fans of spy fiction. His most famous work, Really the Blues (1946), is the putative autobiography of Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, perhaps the first-ever “white Negro.” Mezz was a lackluster clarinetist whose main function in life was procuring marijuana for jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong. Really the Blues is loaded with personality, allegedly Mezzrow’s, but it’s really all Wolfe and a must-read for anyone. What gives Wolfe the authority to sound off on espionage and the seamy side of the socialist cause is the year he spent as the amanuensis of Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, during the latter’s 1930s exile in Mexico. That’s the sort of credential that doesn’t show up on many résumés; and while Wolfe later fictionalized Trotsky’s 1940 murder in The Great Prince Died (1959), readers might ache just a little knowing that Wolfe never sat down to compose his memoirs. His life was richly lived, and while much of it found its way into his fiction, a factual accounting of his experiences might have been the most fascinating book of all.