12
The War of Position

"Motherfucking right, it's confusing; it's a gas, baby, you dig."
"A Harlem intellectual" in Chester Himes,
Blind Man with a Pistol

As Warren Miller put it in opening his review of Manchild in the Promised Land, during the urban crisis the second ghetto was under scrutiny "by all disciplines, all sorts of people, and for an enormous variety of purposes." In the late summer and fall of 1965, all sorts of people were scrutinizing Manchild's rendering of Harlem and evaluating it according to their various interests in the urban crisis. A poet, fiction writer, and translator named Guy Daniels, who reviewed Manchild for the New Republic on the strength of his own personal familiarity with Harlem, mock-confessed to being intimidated by the massive convergence on the book of intellectuals accredited to address inner-city subjects: "By this time both Claude Brown and his book have been analyzed by so many experts—in sociology, education, child psychology, juvenile delinquency, etc.—that the mere lay reviewer is intimidated into a cold sweat."^[1]

A pack of reviewers and blurb writers constituting a cross-section of New York City's and the nation's leading urban intellectuals weighed Manchild's virtues and failings in the public forum. In addition to Miller, Daniels, and the many experts in education, social science, social work, and public policy, the critics included novelists Norman Mailer and James Baldwin; New York intellectuals Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Nat Hentoff, and Paul Goodman; Garry Wills, who defended Brown in Commonweal against Miller, Hentoff, and Goodman; Tom Wolfe, who introduced excerpts from Manchild in the New York

Herald-Tribune; Albert Murray, who lumped Brown with Warren Miller as purveyors of clichéd "social science fiction"; columnist Dick Schaap, known primarily as a sportswriter; playwright and novelist Romulus Linney, who compared Manchild to Pilgrim's Progress in a glowing review on page one of the New York Times Book Review; literary critic and historian Daniel Aaron, author of Writers on the Left; jazz critic Whitney Balliett, for the New Yorker; and various reviewers in Time, Newsweek, other magazines, and newspapers across the country.^[2] These reviewers held Brown to a twofold standard set up on the one hand by a pressing social dilemma—as delineated in Dark Ghetto, interpretations of ghetto riots, and the news of the day—and on the other hand by literary precedents for writing the postwar inner city. In the matter of literary precedents, Brown was compared not only to writers of Harlem like Ellison, Baldwin, Hughes, and Jones but also to the poet of upward social mobility Horatio Alger and to his opposite numbers, prewar social critics like John Steinbeck and the Chicago realists (especially Wright and Farrell); to model autobiographers Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Pepys, and St. Augustine; and to the vast literature of youth and delinquency that had developed in the 1950s, a generic field in which Cool World had staked out high ground for Warren Miller.

As a politically engaged writer and an expert on the literature of delinquency, Miller was therefore, even as late as 1965, a logical choice to review a reformed delinquent's narrative of life in Harlem. His current status as a writer of Harlem may have been shaky, but he could certainly help readers outside the ghetto receive voices from inside it. Miller saw the literature of delinquency as documenting a powerful source of "social discontent," drawing to the troubled inner cities a readership that might generate the political will needed to transform  them. Five years before Manchild's publication, reviewing another reformed black delinquent's story as rendered by New York Times reporter Ira Henry Freeman in Out of the Burning (1960), Miller had argued that "lacking an 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' one book that will arouse us all, there is a need for stories like this, for books that present us with a life rather than with statistics (which are hard to read and easy to ignore)." In the early 1960s, as Miller took up the notion of urban crisis and turned from delinquency to race, he continued to look for "a view that is new and that matters," one that could mobilize the will of a large and constructively horrified readership.^[3]

One would think that Manchild was the kind of book Miller had in mind, but he was quick to say that Brown's view was not new and did not matter. Given that the conjunction of delinquency, race, and the inner city formed the ground of Miller's passionate engagement with pressing social issues, his categorical effort to remove Manchild from the then-formative literary canon of urban crisis comes at first blush as a surprise. Although Manchild was generally received with great fanfare as a timely and indispensable treatment of ghetto life written

by a major new voice in the urban conversation, Miller's review argued that "Brown has nothing to say that has not already been said better by James Baldwin and John Killens; indeed, it has been put more accurately and succinctly by Dr. Kenneth Clark's teams of sociologists in their statistical tables." Having dismissed Brown's value as a reporter of raw experience (Clark, the social psychologist, had done a better job in that regard), Miller then let him have the other barrel: Brown's "vocabulary of a couple of hundred words and phrases" was "not a language at all but an impoverished patois," producing a "shapeless" and repetitive "literary disaster." That is, Brown was not a writer, as opposed to Baldwin (who had ratified Miller's authorial access to Harlem in 1959) and Killens (who had just as authoritatively closed his gate to Miller in 1964). Even so, Miller reported with bitterness, Manchild had been sold for a large advance to a reprint house, book clubs were disseminating it, and, worst of all, "people who ought to know better" were reading it. "All of which," he concluded, "leaves one with the suspicion that we cheer this unnecessary book in order to permit ourselves, with a little better conscience, to turn our backs on the Problem."^[4]

Miller's dismissal of Manchild on the grounds of its generic redundancy and lack of literary merit seems especially surprising when we compare it to his enthusiastic review of Out of the Burning. Miller had found value in the formulaic predictability of Out of the Burning, allowing this case study to hang together with others:

Inevitably, such a book will repeat, in part, aspects of others that have been done before. It is not because the author has borrowed from other writers, but because there is an almost ritualistic quality about the gangs—and the boys offer of themselves to the life of the gangs. . . . Indeed, part of the compelling horror of this tale is its sense of the basic sameness of situation of so many thousands of children.

Why, then, identify Manchild as "unnecessary" because it has "nothing to say that has not been said better" by others, especially when so many other readers were exalting Brown as the first insider to map in narrative form the street life of the second ghetto? Why throw out Manchild's wealth of powerful testimony on the grounds that Brown could not write, when Miller overlooked Out of the Burning's lack of "linguistic adventurousness" and even suggested that "the material imposes itself so effectively" that the writing receded to insignificance? Why claim that Clark's research supersedes Brown's memoir when Miller himself saw "a need for" ex-delinquent's stories, "for books that present us with a life rather than with statistics"?^[5]

In answering these questions, I will engage with a relatively cohesive critique of Manchild delivered in particular by urban intellectuals who, like Miller, aligned themselves in the left and liberal preserves of the period's political

spectrum. Like the many ringing endorsements of Brown in the role of pioneering cultural cartographer (exemplified by Tom Wolfe's introduction to excerpts from Manchild, discussed below), the attack on Manchild proceeded along lines suggested by the book's principal strategies—the survey of ghetto narratives, the mapping of the inner city, the use of street language—to account for the making of an urban intellectual. The readers' responses, pro and con, demonstrate the stakes and the terms of a messy war of position being fought in 1965 among urban intellectuals, as they scrambled to sort out their hierarchies of influence and expertise in relation to what struck them as a new urban order requiring new imaginative explorations. In Manchild, Brown represented the second ghetto, and presented special credentials for doing that cultural work, in ways that seemed to refuse the offers of alliance extended by downtown social critics like Miller and, further, to shut whites entirely out of the work of writing Harlem from within. Downtown critics, especially those on the left who regarded the urban crisis as an opportunity to launch a persuasive critique of American social order, therefore responded to Brown's failure to ally himself with them as they would to an assault on their own authority to engage with the urban crisis on its most important ground.

The urgency of these considerations in the early moments of urban crisis raised the stakes in determining access to the city's inner spaces and workings and continued to do so as the crisis built toward a peak at the end of the decade. With the further development and then the waning of the crisis in the early 1970s, when the rioting came to an end and the far less incendiary problem of fiscal crisis briefly rivaled that of racial conflict, Manchild's, and Brown's, historical moment seemed to have passed. Manchild is in many ways an initiatory text and was read as such in the mid-1960s. Its form and argument bear the marks of precisely the historical moment when a large readership turned its attention to a new space opening up on the maps that American culture continuously draws and redraws of the nation and of itself.

A Guided Tour

"Most of us who did not grow up in Harlem rely on novelists and journalists to have our experiences for us and pass them on, painlessly, into our lives," wrote Raymond Schroth, a Jesuit commentator on "socio-literary matters" for the magazine America, in his review of Manchild. (If Schroth's observation seems quaintly print-oriented in an age when television and movies dominate the representation of "black America," his larger point about the secondhand quality of most Americans' engagement with places like Harlem still stands up.) Whatever pleasures and lessons Claude Brown as autobiographer might have to offer—for instance, Schroth suggests that "Manchild enunciates a vulgar proof for the immortality of the soul"—his cultural role resembled that of

a tour guide for concerned outsiders. In addition to "drink[ing] beer with Negro friends" and physically entering the spaces of "black America" by wandering "wide-eyed up Lenox Avenue," Schroth continued, people like himself who were concerned about the urban crisis moved through the spaces of "black America" as they were rendered in prose. He read Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Ebony, and even Black Like Me—in which, Schroth explained via a continuing spatial metaphor, a white man darkened his skin with pigments to manage "a fleeting invasion of forbidden territory."^[6]Manchild was an important book because, by guiding the reader through the physical and especially the mental geography of a violent young black man's neighborhood, it guided that reader into what almost everybody agreed was the heart of America's thoroughly intertwined racial and urban crises.

Schroth, whose review manifested an evocative period balance between seeking out juicy representations of ghetto "pathology" and reminding himself that there was more at stake than his own desire for sensation, found himself divided in his response to Brown's story. On the one hand, the book would "survive as a social document" rendering a desperately needed point of view: "At last a plain and primitive voice has tried to speak from the streets." On the other hand, Manchild could only be a substitute for "real experience, while the Negro next to us in the subway stays a million miles away." Manchild tells us, Schroth concluded, "about what it is like to be black in Harlem on Saturday night" but nevertheless "leaves most of us still tourists, slummers, spectators."^[7] Whether their interest amounted to social concern or tourism, or the combination of the two that characterized the mentality of urban crisis for many Americans, readers motivated to explore the inner city had in Brown a new and compelling order of guide. He could take them through a landscape that afforded unique and spectacular access to the materials of contemporary urbanism.

Introducing an excerpt of Manchild in the New York Herald-Tribune prior to the book's publication in 1965, Tom Wolfe undertook to show through the metaphor of tourism that Claude Brown's arrival on the literary scene constituted a stirring new development in the writing of American cities. Writing in his patented New Journalistic style—his introduction begins "Fish and Chips; mouldy!"—Wolfe explains Manchild's importance by foregrounding the unique depth of access to Harlem afforded by Brown's street-derived authority. As "the only man who ever grew up in 'the street thing'. . . in Harlem and came out of it and wrote about it," Brown eclipses previously authoritative Harlem writers, especially James Baldwin, who is demoted from tour guide in his own right to "some Moral Rearmament tourist from Toronto come to visit the poor." Brown has new and privileged information to impart to Baldwin, literary critics, students of the urban crisis, and readers of the daily newspaper (who were, in the case of Herald-Tribune readers, probably still reeling from the "New York City in Crisis" series of the previous winter and spring). Wolfe therefore intro-

duces Brown by describing an actual tour, in which Brown takes Wolfe and a photographer to the figurative heart of Harlem. Moving along a narrow alley to the place where Brown was shot when he was thirteen, Wolfe finds himself in "the middle of a Harlem block," a secret inner terrain to which only a man like Brown can conduct him. "Suddenly," Wolfe finds, "we are into some kind of incredible scene from Hogarth," a vast garbage heap in which junkies and drunks accost him: "'What do you want back here?"' a woman asks them. "'You tourists?'"^[8]

This journey to the center of a Harlem block neatly figures Brown's cultural role. His engagement with the street cannot be questioned, since he can show Wolfe the spot on the pavement where he almost died with a bullet in his guts, and Brown's access to street life allows even an outsider like Wolfe to play Hogarth by describing the landscape of Harlem. Brown, then, leads Wolfe in two complementary movements: the first begins outside the ghetto and moves into its darkest interior spaces, carrying Wolfe as tourist into the inner city's most restricted landscape; the second begins where Manchild begins, at the fish and chips joint where Brown was shot (thus the "Fish and Chips; mouldy!"), allowing Wolfe to imagine the journey that Brown made out of the ghetto from the inside. In Wolfe's account, Brown grants access to the space, narrative, and language that together make up "the ghetto" as Wolfe understands it; the tour makes Wolfe a better urban intellectual, a Hogarth for his time and place. Rising out of the ghetto and establishing analytical access to it were narrative and spatial movements that obsessed all manner of readers and writers during the urban crisis. The scope of Brown's cultural work, as Wolfe presents it, therefore extends far beyond Harlem. Wolfe generalizes the block in question, 145th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, as the generic type of the black inner city: everything about it "has American City Colored-Section written all over it." Carrying outsiders into hidden layers of ghetto life in ways that Baldwin and other writers with insufficient street credentials cannot, Brown's close engagement with criminality, violence, and other defining "pathologies" of the second ghetto promises access to a deeper understanding of the "American City Colored-Section" and thus of the American city in crisis. Wolfe sees this deeper understanding as enacting an unfulfilled promise held out by genres that have dominated the literature of the second ghetto and its prewar predecessor, the ethnic slum:

At all the conferences and seminars on Negro Writing in America they all get up and put their hands up on their brows like an eyeshade and look out over the horizon for the battalion of Negro writers who are going to tell them what that Harlem scene is, you know, like, but they never come. It is just like the way everybody in the 1930s kept waiting for some Proletarian Prometheus to rise up from the working class and write the saga of America, but that horse never came in, either.

Incredible! No Negro writer ever lived in and told about the whole street thing in Harlem until Claude Brown.^[9]

Whether or not Brown was in fact "the first" or "the only one" to provide such a perspective on Harlem, Wolfe deploys the hyperbole to show how the urban stage has been cleared for Brown as both reporter and literary figure. Wolfe goes so far as to invoke and then dismiss the Chicago neighborhood novelists, who were often typed as aspirants to the title of "Proletarian Prometheus," establishing Brown's literary role as their successor. Wolfe is proposing, with his usual needling breeziness, that Brown and the writers to follow will imagine the postindustrial city for us in the same definitive way in which the Chicago realists managed the encounter of the American literary imagination and the industrial city. In a climate of urban crisis occasioned by the violent emergence of the postindustrial city, a large audience of readers with hands figuratively to their brows anxiously awaited Brown's entrance.

Warren Miller was no aspirant to the title of Proletarian Prometheus or Negro writer (although his two Harlem novels, use of dialect, and ethnically polysemous name seem to have earned him listings in reference works as a black writer),^[10] but he did write "about the whole street thing in Harlem" as lived by Cool World's juvenile delinquents and by the various hipsters, civil rights activists, and humble citizens who populate Siege of Harlem. Both of his Harlem novels meditate explicitly on the relation between the outsider's movement into the "American City Colored-Section" incarnated in Harlem and the problem of establishing analytical access to that barricaded piece of the social landscape. The novels, finding in the ghetto a system of answers to the question of what is wrong with the postwar city, make secondary drama out of the author's movement into the narrating voices that speak those answers from within the ghetto. As Brown does, then, Miller offers to reader-tourists like Wolfe and Schroth a set of "experiences" that novels and journalism can have for us and pass on, "painlessly, into our lives." Miller's two Harlem novels played their incremental parts in developing the racial logic of urban crisis and constructing the second ghetto of feeling—thus helping to prepare the literary stage for Brown's grand appearance on it. That probably made it all the more galling for Miller to conclude that Brown, whose credentials as a tour guide came in time to eclipse Miller's own, was throwing away his chance to say something meaningful about the urban crisis.

The Worst Boy in the Neighborhood

Miller had no use for Manchild, but plenty of other people did. The people who thought Manchild was an important book made a curious bunch of bed-

fellows. Leftists like Irving Howe, liberals like Garry Wills, and Hollywood centrists like Budd Schulberg (discussed in the next chapter) all thought it was a great book and said so in writing. So did readers from the center to the right like Tom Wolfe, who made it his business to lampoon leftist and liberal intellectuals' responses to "authentic" proletarian voices; Lyndon Johnson's Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, chair of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, whose report quoted Brown on ghetto life; and the social scientist Edward Banfield, vilified by left intellectuals for writing essays with titles like "Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit," who was enthusiastic about the "direct evidence" of ghetto life that Brown could provide.^[11] Wolfe, Katzenbach, and Banfield read Manchild as a record of ghetto life, a much-needed tour of black America; readers on the left welcomed the tour, as well, but they also read Manchild as a lost opportunity to deliver a particularly effective, organically "street" version of the kind of social critique one could find in, for instance, the Harlem novels of Warren Miller.

One of the curious aspects of Manchild's literary-historical fate is that the most damaging critical responses to it came from readers on the left, who anticipated a more general consensus in choosing Autobiography of Malcolm X(initially overshadowed by Manchild) as the canonical autobiography of the urban crisis. It was precisely the role of tour guide that Manchild constructed for Brown, the role in which Wolfe confirmed him, that served as the jumping-off point for the attack on Manchild. Miller's review of Manchild advances that attack's two principal and interrelated lines: that Manchild was flawed in its relation to the city of fact by Brown's inability or unwillingness to deliver a systematic social critique; and that Brown was a mediocre writer, a hustler playing at urban intellectual who, although underequipped to build the city of feeling, took advantage of the urban crisis to somehow "con" eager white middle-class readers. The thematic link binding these lines together was a reading of Manchild's survey of narrative possibilities as failing to script an engagement with the downtown community of urban intellectuals.

The historical link between Brown and this community went back at least as far as Ernst Papanek and the reform school at Wiltwyck. In 1961, four years before Manchild appeared, Brown had his first publication in a special issue of Dissent devoted to making a portrait of New York City. The way Tom Wolfe tells it in the Herald-Tribune, the editors of Dissent had asked Ernst Papanek, Brown's mentor at the Wiltwyck School, to contribute an article on Harlem, but Papanek referred them to Brown, who wrote what amounted to a sketch study for Manchild entitled "Harlem, My Harlem." Brown contests Wolfe's version: he acknowledges that the editors of Dissent knew Papanek but claims that his first contact with Dissent was a letter he wrote in response to Norman Mailer's maunderings on "the White Negro."^[12] In either case, Brown's "Harlem, My Harlem" was published among articles by a number of prominent left and lib-

eral intellectuals who moved in the ideological orbit of Dissent, a journal founded in 1954 by socialists and other anti-Stalinist leftists opposed on the one hand to totalitarian ideologies and on the other to the Cold War liberalism of exleftists. Among the contributors to the special issue on New York were Daniel Bell, Dorothy Day, Herbert Gans, Michael Harrington, and others whose paths Brown would cross again in print—Irving Howe, Nat Hentoff, Norman Mailer, Paul Goodman. To the extent that the issue manifested a unifying theme, it was the various contributors' "common sadness over [New York City's] decline and its difficulties" in the post-World War II period, a close cousin to the narrative of industrial Chicago's decline examined in part I of this study.^[13] The industrial New York of the 1930s, wistfully described by Howe as alive with the faith and political conviction of immigrant ethnics, had receded into the past; the romantically energetic immigrant slums and prewar Black Metropolis of Harlem had given way to the second ghetto and its baffling pathologies; the growing suburban areas of a three-state metropolitan region enveloped the relic of what now felt like a cozily knowable prewar New York.

In 1961, juvenile delinquency persisted as a defining urban problem, but the second ghetto was already showing signs of succeeding delinquency in that role. Given Dissent's emphasis on New York's postwar transformation and decline, especially, it is no surprise that both juvenile delinquency and the ghetto played important roles in Dissent's portrait of New York in 1961. Dry little swatches of social science, in the form of excerpts from a report of the Juvenile Delinquency Evaluation Project of the City of New York, were scattered throughout the special issue, as if to suggest that delinquency pervaded the landscape of postwar New York City because it proceeded from the dislocations treated elsewhere in the issue—black and Puerto Rican migrations, the decline of white-ethnic slums, urban renewal. Norman Mailer supported this impression with an account of his movement through the inner city to visit with a Brooklyn street gang, following the well-beaten generic path of teen gang reportage made familiar by journalists like Harrison Salisbury. Even Herbert Slochower's gaseous critical essay, "The Juvenile Delinquent and the Mythic Hero," gestured sketchily at the context of urban change—"the dislocations in the contemporary scene"—in developing its case for the delinquent as a kind of "mythopoeic hero" on the order of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Ahab.^[14] A number of reminiscences, like Irving Howe's, described the prewar immigrant-ethnic neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, but Harlem and Greenwich Village were clearly the present-day city's most charged terrains. Michael Harrington, writing about Harlem rather than delinquency, opened with a long epigraph from Miller's Cool World, suggesting that "like the young Negroes of The Cool World, Harlem watches all the wonderful movies about America with a certain bitter cynicism."^[15] Brown, of course, also wrote about Harlem, followed by Eileen Diaz on Puerto Rican New York. Separate arti-

cles on "The Village," "The Village Beat Scene," and the politics of housing and renewal in the West Village covered Greenwich Village, the center of the city's thriving countercultural scene and the place where intellectuals could rub elbows with representatives of various subcultures—including black artists and bohemians.

Dissent, then, mapped a city very similar to the one Claude Brown would traverse four years later in Manchild in the Promised Land, and Brown's article in Dissent suggested how the map he had to offer would complement those of the other contributors in covering much the same terrain. Brown begins his piece by offering a rough draft of the credentials he would develop in greater detail in Manchild: "At the age of nine I had already acquired the reputation of being the worst boy in the neighborhood."^[16] Brown's language contrasts sharply with that of the other contributors, who tend toward Whitmanian stylings (Robert Nichols's poem "The City" begins "I sing of the city revived"), participant-observer and case-history framings of poor people's and delinquents' stories (Day on poverty, Mailer on teen gangs), and grand overviews of urban process, which predominated. Compare Brown's homely opening to that of, for instance, Percival Goodman and Paul Goodman—"We propose the banning of all cars from Manhattan Island"—or to Daniel Bell's: "In 1956, the Regional Plan Association . . . asked the Harvard School of Public Administration to conduct an economic and demographic survey of the New York metropolitan region."^[17] A few first-person forays like those by Diaz, Day, and Mailer tried to capture ground-level perspectives, but most of the contributors came at their subject from Bell's bird's-eye view, pursuing understandings of vast processes like the expansion of service industries and the city's physical transformation in an age of redevelopment, highway building, and suburbanization.

This was a community of concerned intellectuals prepared to value Brown's testimony, as were others across the political spectrum who understood themselves to have little else in common with Irving Howe and company. As respected writers and scholars, the editors of Dissent had access to the forum of printed opinion and could facilitate Brown's entry into it, but they also stood for countless other readers who lacked such access but just as eagerly awaited —hands to brows, in Wolfe's image—the advent of an authentically "street" first-person voice from the second ghetto. Headquartered in the city that enjoyed the status of American urbanism's chief ground and icon, the Dissent intellectuals were also particularly well situated to move Brown to the center of the national urban conversation. Howe, Alfred Kazin, and many others had already mapped the motherland of the prewar urban village to this community's satisfaction, and Dissent's contributors could of course provide the global views of urban changes that were producing a new, troubling inner city, but they understood themselves to need people like Brown to explain the new order of troubles as a way of life for the people of Harlem and places like it.

Four years later, in Manchild, moving through Dissent's schematic Manhattan landscape of Harlem and the Village, Brown both disappointed writers on the left and became a major broker in the traffic in representations of the inner city. In Manchild, he touched with singular authority upon many of the Dissent special issue's subject matters as seen from street level—delinquency, ghetto life, crime, jazz, drug abuse, and the divide between the races that became the urban issue in the years between Brown's first appearance in print and the publication of Manchild. That was the promise of Brown's initial publication in Dissent, and if that promise was realized in many ways for many readers, Manchild turned out to be a disappointment for precisely those who gave Brown his first break—intellectuals who had been scanning the horizon for a writer like Brown to emerge from the ghetto with a book in hand that substantiated their response to American urbanism in transition. Brown, looking back from the vantage point of the early 1990s, observes that Manchild disappointed these readers because "they were expecting a book saying what was wrong with capitalism."^[18]

Brown's comment offers a way to specify amorphous terms like "left" and "liberal," at least in this context, by defining them in relation to the postwar transformation of American cities that culminated in the urban crisis. Brown's most disappointed readers understood that transformation to be a crisis brought about not by the moral failure of the welfare state or by a societywide failure to get tough with punks but by the workings of capital. By "capital," they meant that composite of dynamic private interest and acquiescent public authority metaphorically suggested by the American flags and Wall Street locale framing Cool World's model of the City of the Future. For urbanists, the clearest institutional examples of that alliance of private and public elites were the progrowth coalitions of business and government that managed the titanic reconfiguration of inner cities for a postindustrial age in the 1950s and 1960s. We might (with brutal simplicity) divide this basic position into "left" and "liberal" polarities. On the left, where Dissent placed itself, voices argued that the urban crisis demanded and enabled a root-and-branch critique of American capitalism, a system of economic and social organization that was breaking down under the pressure of its internal contradictions. Those voices clustered around the "liberal" polarity tended toward a view of the urban crisis as demonstrating that American capitalism, while sound in principle as the basis for liberal democracy, was not sufficiently humane or efficient and required extensive reform. (Warren Miller was something of a socialist, but his habit of expressing his politics through ironic baffles made him acceptable in liberal venues like the Saturday Review.) Both groups regarded Brown, an ex-delinquent with a violent story to tell, as a natural witness who might testify to the effect that the workings of capital had on people in the streets of the transformed inner city.

If the course of postwar urban change had to do with the workings of capi-

tal, and if this structuring process moved beneath the racial ordering principle of urban crisis, then Manchild's failure to be about what was wrong with capitalism indicated Brown's inadequacy as an urban intellectual. Thus, in the negative reviews, Brown becomes a naif out of his depth. Miller finds that "politically (whatever happened to that School of Hard Knocks we used to hear so much about?) Brown is a baby." Miller finds evidence of Brown's political immaturity in Manchild's lack of references to even the most moderate political organizations (the NAACP, the Urban League, CORE, and SNCC); in Brown's obsolete 1950s-vintage vocabulary of "rebellion" against parental authority, when what the moment requires is a recognition of ghetto people's relation to the authority of the state; and in Brown's weak grasp of the meaning of representation in the political sense. Miller found it significant that Brown, who suggests that Harlem's black congressman Adam Clayton Powell "stays in office . . . because all the women vote for him," does not understand that Powell "holds power because he is useful, in his own way, to the white man; nor does Brown perceive that Powell's true and awful culpability is . . . his utter failure to politicalize his people."^[19]

Nat Hentoff, who had contributed a piece on jazz to the 1961 issue of Dissent, understood Manchild to be at least partially conscious of allowing "society to cop out" by restricting its treatment of "the whole ghetto pathology" to one individual's successful travail rather than attempting a systemic critique of "those social forces that maintain the ghetto." In the end, "none of the fragmentary indictments nor the rising motif in Manchild of a growing collective pride in being black brings Brown to a recognition of the need for counterpower in the ghetto if the beautiful cats who make it are not to continue to be small in number." Thus, Hentoff argues, Manchild reassures even as it disturbs "white America" (the necessary corollary to the idea of "black America"), suggesting that ameliorative programs like Operation Head Start and the "'War on Poverty' (with its wooden bullets)" can help others to "make it" and obscuring the deeper need for economic transformation that can be won only through black political "counter-power." In Hentoff's view, Brown falls far short of a comprehensive assessment of "today's under-class" in concentrating on the superficial and highly marketable details of his own story.^[20]

Paul Goodman, another contributor to the Dissent issue of 1961, identified Manchild as part of the problem to which Goodman and his allies were seeking solutions. Brown, "as stupid as most others of his age," did not strike the frankly self-important Goodman as "a young ally in making the world I want." Writing as a controversial critic of public education, Goodman predictably takes the contrarian position that Brown's childhood experiences in criminal delinquency and lively sexual experimentation amounted to a "progressive" street education in many ways "superior to the average middle-class or lower-class schooling." However, "getting out of Harlem, [Brown] falls into America," by which

Goodman means that Brown betrays this promising start and the world that formed him  by treating Harlem  with the spurious detachment typical of American public life and education. Brown treats Harlem as a "'scene,' in a series of reports on heroin, the Muslims, etc., the genre of the New York Post. Instead of groping for universality, self-recognition, and commitment, the young man settles, as a detached observer, for sociological abstractions, and so he legislates himself right out of humanity." The crux of such abdication of humanistic responsibilities is a "total silence about politics." In addition to the predictable list of subjects pertaining to the ghetto—the civil rights movement, economic institutions—Goodman demands to know Brown's views on Cuba and the atom bomb. Goodman discovers in this silence on politics a basic failure to grapple with the meaning of Harlem and thus dismisses Brown as unprepared to pursue the transformation of consciousness to which Goodman would like him to aspire.^[21]

For Miller, Hentoff, and Goodman, Brown was too much the victim of capital—inadequately educated, unable to see the larger urban picture, a ghetto operator eager to sell his persona to slumming white tourists—to do the cultural work of analysis thrust upon him by his privileged vantage point on the metropolis. The critique of Manchild tellingly located Brown's inadequacy as an urban intellectual in the overly narrow angle of difference between Brown's authorial persona and Brown's narrating protagonist. This collapse of authorial persona with protagonist was the key to Manchild's success in plotting Brown's persona on the map of Harlem, and it was the central effect of Manchild's linguistic strategies (the language of narrator and protagonist running seamlessly together), its survey of narrative options (yielding a metanarrative in which Claude Brown the urban intellectual and Claude Brown the six-year-old rioter have unlimited access to one another), and its mapping routine (creating a sharply divided city that only Brown's persona can traverse at will). For Miller, it is precisely the success of these strategies, showing that Harlem in all its pathological force has shaped Brown's authorial persona, that unfits Brown for the work of analyzing as opposed to exemplifying ghetto life.

Miller's frustration carried into his reading of Manchild as a literary artifact. Miller was perhaps most extreme in pronouncing Brown's prose "an impoverished patois," but several others also suggested that Brown was not a writer. Rather than providing an efficacious vocabulary peculiarly suited to addressing the urban crisis, Brown was in Miller's view giving readers a touristic taste of local color that obscured, rather than exposed, meaning. Brown thus stood accused of replicating the slippery manipulations he admired in Ernst Papanek's command of language: "If you asked him the hard Wiltwyck questions like, 'When am I going home?' or, 'Why are you keeping me here so long?' and Papanek couldn't tell you, he wouldn't lie about it. He would tell you

something that left you knowing no more than before you asked him the question, but you would feel kind of satisfied about it."^[22] Miller and other critics were frustrated by what they saw as Brown's parallel refusal to answer the hard Harlem questions: Why had he been so bad? What was the future of American urbanism? What should we do about the second ghetto? Manchild left these readers feeling that they knew no more about the answers to these questions than they had before they read it but ashamed of the thrill they got from learning intimate, sensational details of ghetto life. For Miller, Brown's authenticating language marked him as a victim of ghetto life rather than as an urban intellectual with valuable material to contribute. It was as if Duke Custis, sensing a chance to make a big score, had wrested control of Cool World away from Warren Miller and rambled on for hundreds of pages, diffusing Miller's well-crafted social critique in a welter of exciting detail.

Brown's Credentials and Miller's Problem

The critique of Manchild advanced by Miller and others, then, is that Brown did not respond to the analytical responsibilities placed upon him by the city of fact in crisis. However, we should also recognize a second, equally important source of friction between Miller and Brown, a source that points to a drama played out entirely within the city of feeling. Miller worried that "people who ought to know better" were reading and accepting what amounted to an urban intellectual's campaign biography, which ended by producing Claude Brown as uniquely equipped to represent Harlem in ways that shunted writers like Miller to the margins of the urban conversation.

To the extent that it was not about what was wrong with capitalism, Manchild posed a significant threat to downtown intellectuals' imaginative access to Harlem. Brown definitively introduced a powerful set of authorial credentials that put university-trained subscribers to the logic of urban crisis, especially white ones, on the defensive: "The credentials needed to write about life as an American Negro are getting tougher," observed a reviewer of Manchild in the Economist. "Soon, perhaps even now, the Negro who has never been a juvenile delinquent will find no listeners for his story of what it is like to have a dark skin in a white society. Mr Claude Brown is an impressive product of the new school."^[23] Brown's authoritative mapping of his persona in the violent streets of the ghetto tended to clear those streets of all those who could not demonstrate a similarly intimate knowledge of ghetto pathology. White mavericks like Ed Banfield, who claimed that the urban crisis was not a racial crisis (or a crisis at all), still assumed themselves to have access to the subjectivities of ghetto residents, but most white intellectuals did not. Texts as different as Dissent's special issue on New York, Siege of Harlem, and Tom Wolfe's profile

of Brown suggest the parameters of a hegemonic conventional wisdom: those without appropriate credentials who subscribed to the notion of urban crisis were obliged to regard themselves as waiting for black urban intellectuals to tell them about the future as it took form on the streets of the second ghetto.

Miller therefore needed Brown to make some gesture of alliance to any analytical precedents that Miller could recognize: the kinds of gestures toward Marx and a Marxist pantheon of heroes made by the Black Panthers, the kinds of gestures toward a postcolonial or Third World reading of the ghetto made by William Gardner Smith, or even the kinds of gestures toward reformist social science made by ex-delinquents turned social workers like Piri Thomas. Without such acknowledgments of an ideological and linguistic architecture shared by Brown's city of feeling and those built by his critics, the logic of urban crisis argued that there could be no sustaining connection between Brown's local-scale rendering of ghetto life and the grand-scale critiques of capital (the City of the Future; New York City in decline) purveyed by Miller and the Dissent intellectuals. Failing to import their critique into his textual Harlem in order to endorse it at street level, Brown thus offered downtown intellectuals no conceptual gateways through the barricades around "black America"; rather, his credentials simply trumped theirs. Miller thus found himself at the boundaries of the ghetto of feeling with outdated working papers ("expert on delinquency" was no longer good enough), peering over conceptual barricades that he had enthusiastically helped to construct by promulgating the notion of a city radically divided into two separate nations.

Manchild's authoritative survey of narratives similarly put off the Dissent intellectuals because Manchild refused to invest in any of its sampled narrative fragments, let alone a third act of conversion to their ways of thinking. The narrating protagonist thus failed to "grow" and "change" on the way to what Goodman called "commitment" (as opposed to "sociological" detachment). A narrative that chose one of the many sampled lines and developed it—Claude Brown as organic radical or reformer, jazz musician, fighter, Black Muslim, social worker, or even (especially) doomed career criminal—would have provided satisfaction in a way that the omnibus narrative's "conclusion" did not. The omnibus narrative ended, instead, with Claude Brown's arrival on the scene as an urban intellectual, deploying an intimidating set of credentials but showing no genuine interest in pursuing an alliance with critics of capital. Manchild predicated Brown's singular freedom of movement through the inner city of feeling on his independence from the entangling social, political, and cultural alliances offered to him as a series of narrative options. The Dissent intellectuals had offered him one: ex-delinquent emerges from the ghetto, steeps himself in the language and ideology of political dissent, returns to the ghetto equipped to critique capital in ways that open a two-way flow of access between him and his downtown allies. He had sampled that narrative, turned the encounter to his

advantage, and moved on, leaving Dissent in his wake as one more New York scene to be explored but not invested in.

Miller's review of Manchild thus becomes an evaluation of new rules for writing the ghetto, complicated by the friction between Miller's efforts to de-authorize Brown and Miller's acquiescence to a logic of urban crisis that called for a Claude Brown to write Harlem. Miller's review recognizes Brown's importance as a threat and sets out to deny him the command over representations of the ghetto that Manchild proposes to establish for him. The review thus argues for severing the ties binding Manchild to the Harlem of fact—since, in Miller's estimation, Kenneth Clark's research supersedes Brown's anecdotes and for severing the ties binding Brown to the community of urban intellectuals that helped to get him published. This comprehensive assault on Brown is not merely some mean-spirited pique on Miller's part; rather, Miller struggled mightily to preserve a line of entry into the ghetto for the authorial personas of socially engaged literary intellectuals like himself. The bitterness of the struggle came in great part from the self-contradiction that made it necessary. Miller's antagonist was not Brown; Miller was up against a received wisdom of racial separation in which he deeply believed. One can hear the torment of a passionately conventional student of urban crisis in Miller's plaintive reminder to readers of Manchild "that to be born black does not mean being born with the answers."^[24]

Claude Brown and his initial readers, Warren Miller prominently among them, occupied a historical moment of urban crisis that defined them as much as they defined it. Miller's novels and Brown's autobiography are in important ways about that mutual process of definition, which gives them their period feel. There is something powerfully, poignantly dated about these books; they have the charge of combined familiarity and strangeness we find in old maps. In 1960, Miller himself described one of his novels of the 1950s, a satire of McCarthyism entitled The Sleep of Reason that no American publisher would touch until well after McCarthy's fall, as having "a period quality; one almost hears the rustle of the crinolines. It has become a historical novel; it lacks only bosoms, unbridled passion, and smooth-bore cannon."^[25] Read now, Cool World's teen gang sensationalism and Siege of Harlem's hep apocalypticism feel "historical" as well. Manchild also seems dated: massive and diffuse because it enjoys the editorial leeway accorded to a hot "problem" book; archaic in its talk of young men "good with their hands" that predates the great inner-city arms race of the 1970s and 1980s, in its earnest explanations of why black men call one another "baby," in its beautiful cats.

As dated as Brown's and Miller's books can seem, they can also seem

remarkably fresh when some later book or movie raises echoes of them. They are part of the foundations of many of our contemporary cities of feeling, but they have been silted over by three decades of postindustrial urbanism that they now seem to anticipate.^[26] Miller has almost completely disappeared, remembered only by a few aficionados and some veterans of the Nation and the New Yorker, but one can still find resonances of his writing—of the ideas and social conditions that inflected it—in the urban literature. Readers of the performance artist Sapphire's celebrated first novel Push will recognize a close relative of Duke Custis and Cool World's dialect strategy in the character and voice of the narrating protagonist Claireece Precious Jones. Like Duke's, Claireece's life in Harlem is an index of social pathologies, her possible salvation is a testament to concerned professional help, and her halting but eloquent voice tells a story that codes the author's journey in the protagonist's: Miller-as-Duke writes, "When you can read an write why you can do any thing. Do any thing. Be any thing"; Sapphire-as-Claireece writes, "Sure you can do anything when you talking or writing, its not like living when you can only do what you doing."^[27] Like Miller in 1959, Sapphire has made a dramatic entry into an extensive literature that seeks to explore the mental and physical worlds of baffling ghetto teenagers: Claireece is an unwed mother, a type who, with the help of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and countless other policymakers and commentators, has joined the male delinquent at the center of debates over urban poverty. The fact that Sapphire is black should remind us that almost everyone who writes about Harlem or the postindustrial ghetto feels obliged to pass through Checkpoint Frederick Douglass. One can read the subtextual drama of the author's and reader's difficult crossings of the line—and such crossings must, according to standard notions of inner-city life, be marked as difficult—in the language and form of the text. (Miller was nothing if not versatile, and one can read that versatility in another genre that raises echoes of his work. Even more than Catcher in the Rye, Warren Miller's Amanda Vail novels of the 1950s anticipate the postcollegiate angst, backward-looking Gotham romanticism, and breathless self-importance of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and so many other tales of bohemian and service-professional life in postindustrial New York City.)

Manchild has not disappeared, remaining in print and continuing in its perennial role as a rough minor classic of street sensibility by a man present at the creation of social and textual cities we recognize as "ours." It surfaces regularly in the curricula of high schools, colleges, and prisons, less often in graduate courses and academic scholarship. It also surfaces all over popular culture. One might see Manchild —the movie rights to which, Brown says, "have been sold a dozen times over"^[28] —as an ur-text lurking at the base of the genre of black gangster narratives that played such a large role in imagining the inner city in the 1970s and then again in the late 1980s and 1990s. Manchild adds to the black autobiographical tradition and the delinquent literature that precede it,

but it also suggests within its purposeful wanderings a whole literature of the inner city that developed after it. Countless works of fiction and memoir appearing in the 1960s and the three decades that followed would retell Manchild's first act, often in the terminal form of the dead-before-twenty-one story, and countless others would follow to their conclusions the sampled but refused possibilities of Manchild's second and third acts. The movie of Manchild has not been made, but movies and books that cover essentially the same narrative and social ground remain a cultural staple—and form an avenue for the emergence of black artists and urban intellectuals.

Warren Miller and Claude Brown are two among many founding architects of the generic ghetto that emerged in the mid-1960s and has developed since then into a kind of mythic space in which all manner of social and cultural dramas are rehearsed. The authorial personas of Miller and Brown, passing like ships in the night (Miller firing one broadside at Brown) as they trundled back and forth with their cargos of representations between Harlem and the Village, played their parts in the imaginative mapping of the second ghetto in the moment of its arrival at the center of postindustrial urbanism.