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Melvin B. Tolson: Revisited
by
Robert
M. Farnsworth
It was 1972. I was sitting in my office when
David Ray, the editor of New Letters, plopped
a manuscript on my desk and said, “Read this and tell
me what you think.” It was a piece on Melvin B.
Tolson by Roy P. Basler, who was then editing the
collected works of Abraham Lincoln and serving as
Chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of
Congress.
Basler argued that “Tolson is perhaps the poet of our
era who best represents, or comes nearest to
representing, in his comprehensive humanity, the
broadest expanse of the American character, phrased in
the richest poetic idiom of our time. Better
than his contemporary peers, he knew the span from
low-brow to high-brow in both life and literature, and
he loved the American English language, from gutter to
ivory tower, better than any of them. His poetic
diction is a natural blend of home words and hall
words, where hearth and bema sing side
by side.”
Like many others, I had flinched at the difficulty of
Tolson’s major poems and was passively content with
the general recognition of his anomalous and marginal
position in the canon of black poets. Even so, I
was convinced we should publish Basler’s essay.
But as I read it now I am embarrassed that while
recommending it, I did not fully appreciate how
telling a breakthrough it was.
Basler picks up on Allen Tate’s praise of the opening
stanza of Libretto for the Republic of Liberia:
Liberia?
No micro-footnote in a bunioned book
Homed by a pedant
With a gelded look:
You are
The ladder of survival dawn men saw
In the quicksilver sparrow that slips
The eagle’s claw!
But Basler goes beyond Tate: “he [Tolson] begins in
sarcastic good humor at the expense of learning and
poetry, with a metaphor that only a great poet with a
great sense of humor could devise or laugh off the
pomp of his proud occasion as Poet Laureate of
Liberia, and follows it immediately and miraculously
with magical reversal of image to exalt the living
truth which escapes not only his occasion, but all
occasions, and all words.” Basler praises Tolson
for abandoning the humorless restraints of the New
Criticism and reveling in the pleasure of blending
comic and heroic, as well as comic and tragic, in a
uniquely personal flight of poetry. He also
finds Tolson’s equally flamboyant serio-comic
footnotes a delight.
To illustrate Tolson’s bold Jovian humor Basler cites
another “enormously pregnant passage” with its
challenging footnote.
Like some
gray ghoul from Alcatraz
old Profit, the bald rake paseq, wipes the bar,
polishes the goblet vanity,
leers at the tigress Avarice
as
she harlots roués from afar:
swallowtails unsaved by loincloths,
famed enterprises prophesying war,
hearts of rags (Hanorish tharah sharinas) souls
of chalk
laureates with sugary grace in zinc buckets of verse,
myths rattled by the blue print’s talk,
ists potted and pitted by a feast,
Red Ruin’s skeleton horsemen, four abreast
. . . galloping . . .
Marx, the exalter, would not know his East
. . . galloping . . .
Nor Christ, the Leveler, His West.
Selah!
It is Tolson’s
note on the line “old Profit, the bald rake paseq
wipes the bar,” which then particularly catches
Basler’s eye.
Paseq:
“divider.” This is the vertical line that occurs
about 480 times in our Hebrew
Bible. Although first
mentioned in the Midrash Rabba in
the eleventh
century, it is still the most mysterious
sign in the
literature.
On this Basler comments: “How abstrusely appropriate a
‘visual’ word can a poet find to name his
personification of the motive most extolled in the
gospel of capitalism by Chamber of Commerce
evangelists? Not merely as a ‘vertical’
dispenser of intoxicants to the habitués of
this whore house, but also something Tolson does not
tell us, the not-at-all mysterious use of the paseq
in the Hebrew Bible, namely to call the tune, so that
the reader will not read two words together that
should properly stand apart.
“What Tolson undertook, I think, with great success,
was to liberate the allusive, scholarly poetry Eliot
created from the service of Eliot’s sterile tradition
and philosophy, and , while embellishing it with large
humor, to put it to use as a vehicle for his own
‘progressive’ view of human history.”
The distinction Tolson draws between Pleasure and
Art in “Theta” of Harlem Gallery again
for Basler underlines Tolson’s robust
claim for art:
The
claw-thrust
of a rutting
tigress,
the must
of a rogue
elephant—
these con
the bull of predictability,
like
Happiness,
a
capriccio bastard daughter of Tyche.
KKK, the
beatnik guitarist, used to say
to High
Yellah Baby
(before he
decided to rub
out the
light of his eyes
in the
alley of Hinnom behind the Haw-Haw Club):
“The belle
dame—Happiness—the goofy dream of
is a bitch
who plays with crooked dice
the game of
love.”
Tolson died in 1966, when black nationalism was
becoming an insistent critical force. His poetry
seemed to many to owe too much to white
civilization. But Tolson believed that
ultimately race was one of “The Idols of the
Tribe.” As Basler points out, he believed that
“One could be a man, and proudly a Negro, especially a
poet, without specializing in being primarily the
Negro on the one hand, or apologizing for being one on
the other.” He believed in writing for “The Man
Inside.” He confronted “the white and not-white
dichotomy/ the Afroamerican dilemma in the Arts–/the
dialectic of to be or not to be/a Negro.” Black
people had made great contributions to world
civilization that had long gone relatively
unrecognized. They were still doing so.
The Harlem Gallery he envisioned in his poem was
itself to be the means of the black artist assuming
and winning his rightful role in the evolution of a
more just and aware future world:
White Boy
Black
Boy,
What if this
Harlem Exhibition becomes
a cause
celebre? . . . .
.
. . . . . .
. . . .
Our public
may possess in Art
a Mantegna
figure’s arctic frigidity;
yet—I
hazard—yet,
this allegro
of the Harlem Gallery
is not a
chippy fire,
for here, in
focus, are paintings that chronicle
a people’s
New World odyssey
from chattel
to Esquire!
After Ray accepted Basler’s essay, Basler asked if New
Letters might be interested in publishing other
manuscripts left by Tolson. Basler explained
that he was working with the Tolson family to get
Tolson’s papers into the Library of Congress.
Ray expressed interest. That led to a
correspondence between Ray and Ruth Tolson, Melvin’s
wife, about the extent of the unpublished papers in
the estate. Ray then suggested to both Ruth
Tolson and to me that I examine the papers and
consider editing them. I went to the Tolson home
in D. C., and met Ruth and her daughter, Ruth Marie, a
professional librarian at Howard University and
caretaker of the manuscripts. I also met Dr.
Wiley Wilson Tolson, the youngest son and an
accomplished research biologist, who lived nearby.
I was excited by the editing possibilities of what I
saw, but I acknowledged to the family that I was
leaving that summer on a Fulbright lectureship in
American Literature to Turkey. Nevertheless, we
agreed that I would do the job, recognizing that my
most serious effort would not begin until the
following year. Ruth Marie arranged to copy much
material that I might take with me. And so began
my introduction to a remarkable family, who offered an
opportunity for me to come to know a husband and
father, who was also the extraordinarily
representative American poet Basler described.
Once back home, I was readily able to find editors
willing to print small pieces of Tolson’s work, but
then I was seized with the possibility of publishing
Tolson’s A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, his
first book of poems that never found a
publisher. That involved much more consultation
with the family, in the course of which, I became
increasingly aware that this was indeed a special
family. All three sons were Ph. D’s. Ruth
Marie had a Master’s degree in library science.
The elder Ruth had returned to school when her
children became older to finish her undergraduate
degree and later to earn a Master’s. As I talked
to Mel, Jr., Arthur, and Wiley, I repeatedly was told
that from a very early age there had been no doubt
that they would all earn doctorate degrees. This
was a family dedicated to learning.
In 1966 Tolson was offered the Avalon Chair of
Humanities at Tuskegee University by his former
student, and then Chair of the English Department, Dr.
Youra Qualls. That same year Dr. Wiley Wilson
Tolson, the youngest son, was named the First Carver
Foundation Fellow Lecturer at Tuskegee. This
followed from Wiley’s receiving the Superior
Performance Award for his research in steroid hormones
at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in
1959. The oldest son, Dr. Arthur Tolson,
published his revised doctoral dissertation, The
Black Oklahomans, A History: 1541-1972, in 1972,
and continues to this day at the age of 87 as a
stalwart member of the History Department of Southern
University.
But it was the second son, Dr. Melvin Tolson, Jr., who
carried the most weight on decisions about publishing
his father’s work. A Professor of Modern
Languages, at the University of Oklahoma, he was
Oklahoma University’s first black professor.
Sophisticated and handsome, he had studied at the
Sorbonne, with a resonant voice reminiscent of his
father’s. I remember being delightedly surprised,
when we published A Gallery of Harlem Portraits
and I invited Mel to come to Kansas City to give a
reading, how on stage this cultivated man could
quickly and enthusiastically assume the street and
down home voices of the characters in Harlem
Portraits. He literally embodied so much
of his father, including the extraordinary range of
language that Basler found so praiseworthy.
About this time I began to think of the possibility of
doing a biography of
Tolson. I had been through enough manuscript
material and had come to know the family members well
enough to realize that there was a much fuller story
than Joy Flasch was able to tell in the strict
confines of the biography she had done for Twayne’s
United States Authors Series, valuable as that
was. The family embraced my proposal and
promised their support, which they never wavered in
giving.
Melvin Tolson was four years older than Langston
Hughes. Hughes found vibrant Harlem far more
fascinating than studying engineering and early
rebelled against a controlling father to follow the
dreams of his own curiosity and imagination.
During his senior year at Lincoln University Tolson
married and soon after became a father. He
immediately assumed a teaching position at Wiley
College to support his family. It was only after
six years of teaching at Wiley, and becoming a father
of four, that he made it to Harlem, which was well on
the way to becoming the inspiring cultural capital of
black America. He came on a fellowship to work
on a Master’s degree at Columbia University. He
began writing a thesis on “The Harlem Group of Negro
Writers.” He saw Langston Hughes and Countee
Cullen as antipodes of the group, and there was little
question of where his own sympathies lay.
“Langston Hughes, the idealistic wanderer and defender
of the proletariat is the most glamorous figure in
Negro literature.” Tolson particularly admired
“The Weary Blues.” In a few bold,
impressionistic strokes, Hughes portrays “the
setting, the theme, the atmosphere, the pathos, the
climactic suspense, the Negro character, and the odd
denouement of the Blues.” He “understands the
tragedy of the dark masses whose laughter is a dark
laughter.”
Tolson met Hughes and later twice tells the story of
sharing a taxi with him as they leave an elegant
parlor on Sugar Hill. Hughes is passionately
concerned with the fate of the Scottsboro boys, and is
late for a rally on their behalf. He urges
Tolson to join him, but the latter has a previous
appointment that he regrets then, and even more so
later when he writes about the event. Perhaps in
part to make up for this regretted choice, he comes
staunchly to Hughes’s defense a couple of years later
when the publication of Hughes’s poem, “Goodbye
Christ”, while the author was on a tour of Soviet
Russia, brought indignant reaction particularly from
religious conservatives. Tolson defended the
poem In The Pittsburgh Courier as “the
outgrowth of tragic modern conditions.” He
insisted:
“Christianity must come down from the pulpit and
solve the problems of today. Men will no
longer listen to the echo of that beautiful, but
illogical spiritual of long ago:
“You may have all this world,
Give me Jesus.”
“In
fact, Jesus Christ would not have sung a song like
that. He was a radical, a Socialist, if you
will. His guns were turned on Big Business
and religionists. He heralded the dawn of a
new economic, social and political order.
That is the challenge to all.”
The Courier published a photo of Tolson and
referred to him as: “Professor of English at Wiley
College, Marshall, Texas, and Coach of the Negro
Intercollegiate Debate Champions.”
Tolson’s career as a Wiley College debate coach became
legendary, particularly after his debate team defeated
the national champions, the University of Southern
California, in 1935. His remarkable success
provoked Denzel Washington’s powerful modern 2007 film
tribute, The Great Debaters. Washington himself filled the role of Tolson with his hallmark dramatic intensity, but the film is built around the debate career of a precociously young James Farmer as he becomes aware of the barbarous racial repression that surrounds him and gains a voice to speak out against it. Farmer’s later career as founder of the Congress of Racial Equality and leader of the Freedom Riders is assumed to be better known in the subtext of the film than Tolson’s later career as an important poet. But Tolson’s driving concern for independent investigation and thinking and his belief in the value of the truth being revealed and tested by intense argument, as well as his concern for the injustice experienced by sharecroppers, both white and black, were all strongly emphasized.
While the film is little concerned with Tolson’s career as a
poet, the strengths Tolson revealed and honed in
his early career at Wiley as a debate coach defined
and shaped his poetry. The intense bantering
arguments between Dr. Obi Nkomo and the Curator in Harlem
Gallery are a clear echo of those intense
discussions the young debaters carried on in the
Tolson home as they prepared for their coming
debates. Mel, Jr., remembers listening from the
sidelines while growing up and wanting nothing more
than to be one of those debaters. Hobart
Jarrett, a lead debater, published an account in Crisis
in 1935 that made it clear the debaters confronted
racial barriers as violent and threatening as those
his fellow debater, James Farmer, would later publicly
challenge as a Freedom Rider.
The debaters became like extended family to
Tolson. Jarrett completed a doctorate in
English, became chair of the English Department at
Langston, and brought his former coach from Wiley to
Langston so that he could enjoy a decent salary,
retirement benefits that Wiley didn’t provide, and
teaching requirements more suitable to his growing
success as a poet. Benjamin Bell became a social
activist often working directly in social projects
with his former coach. Henry Heights is more
elusive in the years immediately following his debate
experience, but he reappears in spirit as Hideho
Heights in Tolson’s Harlem Gallery. In
1966, when Tolson had endured his third operation to
arrest the cancer that finally killed him, he was
flown into New York City as the “mystery guest,” to
join Sammy Davis, Jr., Harry Belafonte, Duke
Ellington, and others in a tribute to James Farmer at
Philharmonic Hall. In his autobiography, Farmer,
paid tribute to his teacher and coach in a chapter
titled, “Tolstoi and Tolson.”
Tolson made the most of his bright students and his
astute fellow faculty members at Wiley, but he was
frequently at odds with the administration.
Tolson probably began writing the poems to be
collected as A Gallery of Harlem Portraits
while he was working on his Master’s at Columbia, but
he did not complete his thesis that year. During
the thirties, he began placing some of these poems and
publishing some prose in addition to being a
phenomenally successful debate coach, starting a
theater program, and even assisting at times as a
football coach. Then in 1937, he began writing a
remarkable column, “Caviar and Cabbage,” for the Washington
Tribune that lasted for the next seven
years. That a teacher at Wiley, a relatively
remote black college in Texas, should be invited to
write a column for a black newspaper primarily serving
the black community of Washington, D.C., a community
often considered as a rival to Harlem for cultural
leadership, suggests strongly that Tolson’s reputation
was growing notably.
Anna Everett has more recently recognized that two of
Tolson’s “Caviar and Cabbage” columns devoted to
the extraordinary popularity of the movie, Gone
With the Wind, “provides a prestructuralist
approach to the semiotics of cinematic iconography,”
which “becomes the flip side of his resistance to
Hollywood’s propagandistic plantation dramas promoting
the South’s revisionist history of the Civil War and
Reconstruction. In Tolson’s view both situations
signify the denial of true democracy for oppressed
black people in America.” Her searching
discussion led Phillip Lopate to include Tolson’s
review of Gone With the Wind in his anthology
of the most notable twentieth century movie reviews.
In 1938, Oliver Cromwell Cox, a new Ph. D. from the
University of Chicago joined the Sociology Department
at Wiley. Tolson took him under his wing and the
two became mutual supporters for the rest of their
lives. Cox acknowledged his thanks to Melvin B.
Tolson, Andrew P. Watson, V. E. Daniel and Alonzo J.
Davis for their face to face discussions of the issues
in his challenging study of Caste, Class, and Race.
In that book Cox makes a distinction between
capitalism and democracy as a true source of
individualism that becomes central to Tolson’s
thinking in both his “Caviar and Cabbage” columns and
his poetry:
Sometimes
it is intimated that capitalism is basically
interested in “the fundamental value and dignity” of the
individual. This conclusion is seldom if ever demonstrated, but it is ordinarily associated
with individualism. As a
matter of fact, however, democracy is the supreme
champion of individual worth and personal value
because it reaches down irresistibly and facilitates
the political upthrust of that major group of persons
known as the masses; it concerns itself with the
personalization of the least privileged
individuals. Democracy tends to confer upon
every individual a priceless sense of wantedness in
the society—
a sense of being a recognized part of a supremely
vital organization. By this means alone the individual is able to form a positive
conception of himself as a responsible social
object. On the other hand, individualism
champions the cause of the successful few and of the ablest; it
despises the weak and jealously withholds the
privileges and recognition from the common people.
On June 4, 1938, Tolson’s “Caviar and Cabbage” column
paid tribute to a Mother’s Day sermon by his
colleague, Dr. James L. Farmer, the father of the
later civil rights leader. Of Jesus Christ, the
elder Farmer noted, “The more popular He became with
the masses, the more hostile these leaders became
toward Him, and the more determined to destroy
Him.” Farmer extended the conflict between
leaders and the masses to that between protective
parents and their aspiring young. Parents say,
“Take the world as it comes and make the best of
it.” Christian youth reply, “Change the world
and make it what it ought to be.” Tolson
challenged and inspired his students and fellow
faculty members, and he was in turn challenged and
inspired by them. It was a heady mix.
V. F. Calverton, who edited an Anthology of
American Negro Literature as well as the
magazine Modern Monthly, also became a friend
and supporter, again suggesting the growing reach of
Tolson’s circle. In his column, “The Cultural
Barometer,” Calverton wrote that Tolson in his
projected A Gallery of Harlem Portraits
was “trying to do for the Negro what Edgar Lee Masters
did for the middlewest white folk.” Calverton
published several of the Portraits.
Whenever Tolson was in Baltimore he was invited
to Calverton’s regular Saturday night gatherings for
lively discussions with friends from the literary and
publishing world. As a student James Farmer was
interested in dramatics as well as debate, and in 1938
he chaired the student dramatic association of The Log
Cabin Players, an organization Tolson had formed at
Wiley. They planned a week-long intercollegiate
dramatic competition to raise funds to build a theater
on campus. Calverton was proposed to judge the
competition and he made a memorable visit to Wiley.
Calverton died unexpectedly in 1940.
Tolson was unable to make his funeral because it was
then difficult for black Americans to fly. He
wrote a warm tribute for the memorial issue of Modern
Monthly and later wrote a memorial poem
borrowing Calverton’s own title, “The Man Inside.”
Tolson’s breakthrough success came
in 1938 when “Dark Symphony” won the National Poetry
Contest sponsored by the American Negro
Exposition. Atlantic Monthly published
the poem, and Mary Lou Chamberlain encouraged Tolson
to submit a new collection of poems to Dodd,
Mead. The latter accepted Rendezvous with
America a few days before Christmas, 1943.
In 1940 in the middle of all this
success Wiley College became concerned with its
national accreditation. Tolson had not finished
his master’s thesis, so technically he had not earned
the degree. His job was threatened. He
hastily wrote to Prof. Arthur Christy, who fortunately
had returned to Columbia. Christy was happy to
accept a revised thesis from a poet who was then being
published in nationally recognized magazines.
President Dogan received and read the telegram
announcing Columbia’s awarding of the degree at
Wiley’s 1940 annual convocation. Tolson’s job
was saved.
Rendezvous
with America was greeted
with both respect and enthusiasm, although it since
seems to have disappeared from view behind the
controversial attention of Tolson’s later major
poems. Margaret Walker, who had won the Yale
University Younger Poet’s Award in 1942, wrote of
Tolson’s first book of poetry: “His is a highly
specialized and technical art . . . and his sources
run the entire gamut of the civilized history of
mankind. What will startle many intellectuals is
the wealth of Negro material which provides such a
frame of reference. . . .No one can say here is
another naïve Negro poet. He is a poet to
be reckoned with by all poets.”
Richard Wright: “Tolson’s poetic
lines and images sing, affirm, reject, predict, and
judge experience in America, and his poetry is direct
and humanistic. All history, from Genesis to
Munich, is his domain. The strong men keep
coming and Tolson is one of them.”
Arthur E. Burke compared Tolson to
previous poets of the Harlem Renaissance: “Melvin
Tolson’s Rendezvous with America . . . carries
one back to Cullen’s Color and Hughes’ Fine
Clothes to the Jew. No Negro poet save
Sterling Brown, in his Southern Road, has
published in one volume so much that is remarkable for
its freshness, its poetic imagination, and above all,
its reflection of American life as it affects
Negroes. The reader will not find here the same
sort of color consciousness found in Cullen, the same
rawness of life in Hughes, or the same satirical humor
in Brown. All these elements are here, but in a
mood peculiar to Tolson. Tolson exhibits a
vigorous Americanism, a fine catholicity, a generous
humility seldom met with.”
Ramona Lowe summed up Tolson’s
career at Wiley in the Chicago Defender:
“There is a man in Texas, Melvin B. Tolson, a
professor of English who with a single volume of
poetry, Rendezvous with America, established
himself as one of America’s important contemporary
poets.
“When his ‘Dark Symphony’ won
the National Poetry contest conducted in
connection with the American Negro exposition in
Chicago in 1940, he won widespread attention.
And Earl Robinson, composer of the well-known ‘Ballad
for Americans,’ set it to music. The editors of
Common Ground then asked him to write a poem
for their magazine and he wrote ‘Rendezvous with
America,’ the title poem of the volume.
“Tolson, a man with boundless
energy, a gleam in his eye, and a ready sense of humor
has been described as ‘a voice crying in the
wilderness.’ He has been teaching at Wiley
College in Marshall, Texas, for 22 years. Most
college students in the deep South who do not know him
have heard about him. They have heard of his
belief in the oneness of little people everywhere no
matter what their race. They have heard of his
fearlessness before lynch mobs. ‘One Texan who led a
mob against him later gave a piano to his little
theatre.’”
Wiley College celebrated the
publication of Rendezvous with a program
featuring P. L. Prattis, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh
Courier, as speaker. An impressive list of
honorary patrons included the editors of Atlantic,
Common Ground, Life, Christian
Advocate, and Phylon, well-known
writers, Archibald MacLeish, Theodore Dreiser, Arna
Bontemps, Nina Melville, Langston Hughes, and Jack
Conroy, and notables, Walter White, Lawrence Reddick,
and Orson Welles, as well as Tolson’s father. Few apparently actually attended, but it is
nevertheless a notable list.
But Wiley’s belated recognition, and
Tolson’s strong bonds with both students and fellow
faculty members were not enough to keep him at
Wiley. He soon reluctantly agreed to accept the
invitation, his former debater, Hobart Jarrett
arranged for him to move to Langston University.
Langston offered retirement benefits, which Wiley did
not, as well as better and more secure salary.
His sons were beginning their college careers, and he
had to think of his family’s future.
But the acclaim earned from Rendezvous
also began to work in another unexpected
direction. As an undergraduate at Lincoln
University Tolson was on the debate team with Horace
Mann Bond. Bond became president of Lincoln
University late in 1945. The two had kept up a
warm, if intermittent, correspondence over the
years. “Klops” Bond sent a message to fellow
Lincoln men in 1929, announcing that “the Great ‘Cap’
Tolson, Captain of the Freshman Football Team of the
Class of 1923 . . . is bringing a team to Fisk for a
debate.” He planned a get together,
“featured by a minimum of eats and a maximum of that
good old spirit.” Lincoln University was
originally named Ashmun Institute and maintained
strong relations with the governing elite of Liberia
over the years. The acclaim of Rendezvous
likely gave Tolson’s fellow debater the cultural
leverage to get him named Poet Laureate of the
Liberian Centennial Exposition at a ceremony at the
Liberian Embassy in Washington, D. C., in July, 1947,
the same summer that Tolson and his family moved to
Langston.
Following the move to Langston
Tolson’s life and poetic career took a new
direction. He had been reading the New Critics,
then becoming academically dominant, and their poetic
icon, T. S. Eliot, with close critical attention, and
struggled to reconcile his respect for Eliot’s poetic
accomplishment with his opposition to his cultural
politics. Horace Mann Bond suggested he write a
poem commemorating the centennial of the founding of
Liberia. Both Poetry and Atlantic
rejected early versions of this poem in 1948.
Edmund Weeks explained that such a long poem was
ordinarily ruled out automatically, but he
acknowledged that it was a much stronger performance
than the editors expected from an occasional
poem.
Bond then suggested the poem might
be published as a book, and offered some financial
support if it were. Tolson invited Allen Tate to
write an introduction to it and began negotiating with
James Decker of Decker Press to publish it. The
negotiations between Tate and Tolson and Tolson and
Decker Press became Byzantine. Along the way Dr.
Mary McLeod Bethune, to whom the book was dedicated,
and who was very well recognized in Liberia as well as
the United States, withdrew her promise to host a
celebration in D. C. of the book’s publication because
of her grief over the death of Dr. Carter
Woodson. Poetry then published Tate’s
preface and an early version of “Ti” from the Libretto
in 1950. Decker Press fell apart after the death
of one of its leaders in an auto accident.
Finally after much negotiating, and with the support
of Karl Shapiro and John Ciardi, Twayne Publishers
came out with the book in 1953.
In 1958, John Ciardi published an
essay, “Dialogue with an Audience,” that in effect
spoke to the dilemma of poets with populist
convictions writing esoteric and elitist poetry.
Ciardi astutely summarized assumptions that had become
recognized as the New Criticism spread its
influence. Ciardi divided the poet’s audience
into the “horizontal” and the “vertical”
audience. The horizontal audience consisted of
everybody who is alive at the present moment.
The vertical audience consists of everyone who
throughout time will ever read a given poem. The
horizontal audience will probably always outnumber the
vertical audience at any given moment, but over time
the vertical audience will clearly outnumber the
horizontal audience even for minor poets. That
raises the question, “how does any given poet get his
divine sense of this vertical audience?”
Ciardi answers: “By his own ideal
projection of his own best sense of himself.
It’s as simple as that. . . .He may be wrong, but he
has nothing else to go by. And there is one
thing more—all good poets are difficult when their
work is new. And their work always becomes less
difficult as their total shape becomes more and more
visible. As the shape impresses itself upon
time, one begins to know how to relate the parts to
their total. Even Keats and Shelley confounded
their contemporary critics as ‘too difficult’ and ‘not
for me.’”
Along with the final draft of his
notes to Libretto Tolson wrote to his
publisher indicating just how much he was depending on
a vertical audience: “In the seventh
section. I use a telescope to see the Africa of
yesterday and of today is ancient history.
First I see a streamlined express volting across
the continent from Capetown to Cairo, past modernistic
cities such as our time never saw! Second, I see
the new Africa from the deck of a magnificent
steamship gliding thru the moonlight up the
Congo. Third, I see the new Africa from the prow
of a gigantic airliner on its way from Monrovia to
Jerusalem. Fourth, I find myself in the great
hall of the United Nations of Africa, when they’re
drawing up the African Charter!
“In the eighth section, I return to
my salutation of Liberia, with the theme of a world of
peace. I use the Ferris Wheel of Tyranny and the
Merry-go-round of democracy as my symbols, one for the
past, the other for the future.” Libretto
attracted considerable public attention and discussion
when it appeared in print at the end of 1953.
Allen Tate’s comment that “For the first time, it
seems to me, a Negro poet has assimilated completely
the full poetic language of the time and, by
implication, the language of the Anglo-American poetic
tradition,” sparked a racially divisive critical
debate, which initially brought Tolson significant
public attention, but later, along with a mistaken
public view of Tate’s having had a role in Tolson’s
writing of Libretto, caused more nationalistic
black critics to become dismissive of his
achievement.
Tolson’s professional ferris wheel
very quickly went up. Within months he was
offered a fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers’
Conference and an opportunity to meet and talk with
Robert Frost, whom he much admired. Lincoln
University awarded him an Honorary Doctor of
Letters. The Liberian government conferred upon
him the Order of the Star of Africa. Then back
home his fellow citizens of Langston elected him their
mayor for the first, of what would become, four
successive two year terms.
Shortly after Bread Loaf, President
William V. S. Tubman of Liberia arrived in New York
for an extended American visit. Tolson was
invited to be a guest at important official reception
ceremonies in the city and met Mayor Wagner as a
fellow mayor. He initially seemed successful in
persuading President Tubman to include a visit to
Langston on his American itinerary, but regrettably
Tubman later called off the visit. Tubman,
however, did invite Tolson to be his guest at his
third inaugural convention in Monrovia in 1956.
This visit, Tolson’s first and only visit abroad,
enabled Tolson to stop in Paris on his return trip to
spend time with Melvin, Jr., then studying at the
Sorbonne, and to have lunch with Richard Wright.
While Libretto was still
being prepared for book publication, in September,
1951, Tolson published “E. & O. E.” in Poetry.
The title is an abbreviation for “errors and omissions
excepted.” The poem dramatizes the dilemma of a
black American poet given a Jonah-like commandment to
deliver God’s message to Ninevah in an apocalyptic
moment of history. It won for its author Poetry’s
Bess Hokim award for the year. The poem is
significant not only for what Tolson thinks of the
black American poet’s dilemma mid-century, but he
brings the poem back years later in Harlem Gallery
as a dramatic discovery of a private manuscript
belonging to Hideho Heights. That gives its
message yet another twist.
The poet’s
dilemma in 1951:
Though I dot my
i in this
and rend the
horns
of tribal
ecbasis,
the Great White
World’s
uncrossed t
pockets the
skeleton key
to doors beyond
black chrysalis.
The poet
imagines the possibility of a variety of radical
historical changes, but whatever happens he still must
face the question:
“Why place
an empty pail
before a well
of dry bones?
Why go to Ninevah to tell
the ailing that they ail?
Why lose the Golden Fleece
to gain the Holy Grail?”
Acknowledging that he has “cut a G clef and a
belletristic S,/naked on roller skates in Butte
Montmartre,/sweated palm to palm/to down beats of/the
tom tom,/ in Sorgue’s studio/with Black Venus,/. .
.and. . .drunk piccolo/with Salmon,
Apollinaire,/MacOrlan, and Picasso,” yet he has not
said, ”Hippoclides doesn’t care.” [my
Italics] While a modernist, this poet insists he
does not dismiss social concerns. In fact, as a
black American poet, he brings a healthy iconoclastic
imperative: “Until/my skin/was blister copper,/I have
not stood within/the free-soil gate,/pole in hand,/to
knock off monkey hats/exported to the hinterland.”
But like Jonah or Paterson, he sometimes finds the
mission overwhelming and is tempted to cry out, “Let
this cup pass from me!” However, there is no
escape:
. . .then le mal du siècle plummeted
me, like the ignis fatuus
of a bedeviled thunderhead
over and over and over
the tissue cataracts of Widows’ Tears
and across the plateaus of fishes dead . . . .
eternities later, by Fear set free of fears,
though churned by entrail-dooms volcanic,
the Weltschmerz twisted me like the neck of a
torticollis
in enzymatic juices oceanic,
and swirled me down and down and down
the fabulous fathomless fatty-tumorous canyon of the
whale
with the grind and the drag
of the millstone
sphinx of Why
on my wry
head and neck . . . alone . . .alone . . .
to die
gyrating into the wide, wide privacy
of the Valley of Hinnom’s By-and-Bye . . .
down
down
down
untouched by the witches’ Sabbath of any wall
until the maelstrom womb of the underworld swallowed
my
Adamic fall!
The next section announces the resurrection, not of a
glorious redemptive Christ, but of a diminished Jonah,
“a Jonah shrunk/by a paraclete/Malebolgean.” But
this Jonah-poet is allowed to speak in his own voice
with a quiet assertive dignity: “I sought/in a
Tarshish nook/neither the Golden Fleece/nor the Holy
Grail/but a pruning hook.”
Harlem Gallery has five major characters, who
collectively often discuss the role of art in history:
the Curator of the gallery, who narrates the poem; a
skeptical, African Africanist, Dr. Obi Nkomo; a
confrontational expressionist painter, John Laugart;
Mister Starks, a pianist, composer, conductor, and
poet, and Hideho Heights, a “bi-facial” poet, who
composes the “racial ballad in the public domain” as
well as “the private poem in the modern vein.”
Their voices clash and merge. The curator may be
the narrator and central figure, but his authority is
limited and challenged. He is not himself an
artist, and readily admits it. Thus this
collective portrait becomes a tribute and assessment
of the possibilities of broad artistic achievement in
a historical moment that is fraught with huge social
challenges.
When the curator discovers the “E. & O. E”
manuscript in Hideho Heights’ room, the section
describing the poet emerging from the whale’s maw and
deciding his appropriate tool is a pruning hook is
apparently not there. That causes him to accuse
Heights later in the poem of rationalizing, and thus
slipping, the central problem for the black
poet. Hideho Heights clearly does not have the
self-discipline and knowledge to accept the earlier
poet’s, and presumably Tolson’s own, choice of the
pruning hook. But even in his bi-facial
confusion, Heights can at moments show extraordinary
poetic power. His impromptu poem of the turtle
and the shark is a powerful comment on the painful
effort of the black American community to struggle its
way free from the voracious white culture that
threatens to consume it. All this suggests
Tolson’s belief in the ultimate goal of his people’s
self-realization through history, the evolution of a
truly universal democracy, in which any single artist,
including himself, can play only a limited, but still
vital and contributing role.
Tolson worked on the evolution of his people not only
as a poet, but as a mayor, playwright, director, and
professor. The energy he had devoted to debate
at Wiley was turned largely to the theater at
Langston. In June, 1952, the NAACP held its
forty-third national convention in Oklahoma
City. Tolson wrote and directed a dramatic
version of Walter White’s Fire in the Flint that
was featured at the convention. He directed a
performance of Sartre’s No Exit in 1955 at
Langston and dedicated the performance to Liberian
Ambassador Clarence L. Simpson. He followed that
quickly with a play based upon Langston Hughes’s
remarkable Jesse B. Simple, called Simply Heavenly.
Both Simpson and Hughes visited Langston for the
performances giving The Dust Bowl Players significant
recognition. During Simpson’s visit Tolson
suggested the Liberian embassy might send him on a
poetry reading tour of Europe as the American embassy
had sent Robert Frost on a tour of South America.
That suggestion did not bear fruit. But he
did read from Libretto over the Voice of
America network.
He wrote a play, Upper Boulders in the Sun, to
celebrate Oklahoma’s golden anniversary. This
only shortly after celebrating the city of Langston’s
sixty-eighth anniversary with a visit from Governor
Raymond Garry. He encouraged his son Arthur to
write his doctoral dissertation on Oklahoma
history. That thesis was published as a book in
1972.
Horace Mann Bond asked Tolson’s assistance in writing
a history of Lincoln University, and Bond hoped to
establish a university press at Lincoln. That
led to conferences between Tolson, Bond, and Jacob
Steinberg of Twayne Press. Tolson was named an
associate editor at Twayne particularly to coordinate
with the possible emergence of Lincoln’s university
press. Bond nominated Tolson for membership in
the American Society for African Culture. The
effort to create a Lincoln University Press failed and
Tolson remained a client of Twayne.
In the midst of all this activity it is not precisely
clear when Tolson began planning the epic, Harlem
Gallery, but the success of Libretto
clearly spurred his poetic ambition. He had been
mining his first book of poems, A Gallery of
Harlem Portraits, and rewriting some of those
portraits in a modern vein. His ambition and his
revisions culminated in a plan for a grand five volume
poetic odyssey of the black American people. Book
One, The Curator, was to be rooted in his
memories of Harlem now examined with far more
searching analyses of their cultural and historical
implications. It was to measure how far his
people had come. He published the first sections
of Book One in the Prairie Schooner, then
edited by Karl Shapiro, in the fall issue of
1961. The full book, Harlem Gallery: Book
One, The Curator, was published by Twayne in
1965. Tolson was reading the galley proofs for
his book when he was operated on for gallstones.
During the operation cancer was discovered. It
had metastasized. The prognosis was death within
months. But an operation by a cancer specialist
in Dallas seemed to postpone the worst indefinitely.
Karl Shapiro wrote an introduction for Harlem
Gallery that was published on the front page of
Book Week in both the New York Herald
Tribune and the Washington Post.
Tolson, in his Dallas hospital room, must have read
Shapiro’s opening line with considerable satisfaction:
“A great poet has been living in our midst for decades
and is almost totally unknown, even by the literati,
even by poets.” While Tate, in his introduction
to Libretto, admitted that Tolson’s subject
may be “Negro,” he claimed Tolson’s artistry as a poet
to be nonracial and that it is his artistry that
ultimately matters. Shapiro, on the other hand,
insisted that Tolson’s greatness stems from his
“writing in Negro.” He attempted to accept, and
even embrace, the racial dimension of Tolson’s
art. While both critics clearly intended high
compliments, their attempts to characterize the racial
dimension of Tolson’s accomplishment only led to
skepticism from black writers and critics.
Unwilling to accept the challenge of Tolson’s embrace
of esoteric modernism, they found it all too easy to
quarrel with these white critics’ characterizations of
Tolson’s
achievements.
Shapiro carried his argument into a more elaborate
article on the “Decolonization of American
Literature”: “The falsification I speak of is that of
trying to assimilate Tolson into the tradition when he
was doing the opposite. The fact that Tolson’s Libretto
is unknown to white traditionalists gives the lie to
the critic’s [Tate’s] assertion that Tolson has risen
above Negro experience to become an ‘artist.’
The facts are that Tolson is a dedicated revolutionist
who revolutionizes modern poetry in a language of
American negritude. The forms of the Libretto
and of Harlem Gallery, are the Negro satire
upon the poetic tradition of the Eliots and
Tates. The tradition cannot stand being
satirized and lampooned and so tries to kick an
authentic poet upstairs into the oblivion of
acceptance.”
Gwendolyn Brooks registered her concern with Shapiro’s
“amazing introduction,” pointedly referring to Shapiro
writing “in Jew” to the extent that Tolson writes “in
Negro.” She declares that Tolson is a member of
the Academy, although many of its members do not
concede his presence there, even though distinguished
members like Ciardi, Roethke, and Shapiro had tried
to win acceptance for him. Their failure only
pointed up the obduracy of racism.
Her assessment of Harlem Gallery:
“Melvin Tolson offers this volume as a preface to a
comprehensive Harlem epic. Its roots are in the
Twenties, but they extend to the present, and very
strong here are the spirit and symbols of the African
heritage the poet acknowledges and reverences.
He is as skillful a language fancier as the ablest
‘Academician.’ But his language startles more,
agitates more—because it is informed by the meanings
of an inheritance both hellish and glorious . . . .
Although this excellent poet’s news certainly
addresses today, it is very rich and intricate news
indeed, and I believe that it will receive the
careful, painstaking attention it needs and deserves
when contemporary howl and preoccupation are
diminished.”
Joy Flasch began teaching at Langston just as Tolson
began his final struggle with cancer. He gave
her a copy of Rendezvous with America and she
quickly became hooked. She was working on her
doctorate at the time, and, when he seemed
particularly despondent over his health, impulsively
told him she would like to write a book about his
life. He brightened and enthusiastically
embraced her decision. She began questioning her
teachers about Tolson’s work. Shapiro’s
prepublication review won their respect, and her
ambition now won academic support. She dedicated
the final months remaining to Tolson questioning him
about his experiences, and, with his and his family’s
cooperation, collecting documents pertinent to an
understanding of his life and achievement. She
later was very generous in supporting my biographical
efforts and gave me her papers and collected notes,
which have since become part of the Tolson papers in
the Library of Congress. In 1972 Twayne
published her biography of Tolson in the United States
Authors Series.
Despite his cancer, Tolson zestfully embraced Twayne’s
efforts to promote his new book. He traveled to
New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington,
D.C. In New York he met with Twayne officials to
plan his tour and then gave a reading at the American
Society for African Culture. Langston Hughes
introduced him. A distinguished audience gave
him a standing ovation. He was interviewed by
Sheila Duncan for the NYU radio series These Are
My Shoes and came to an agreement with Fairleigh
Dickinson University to address the student body in
the fall. He agreed to write a chapter for
Herbert Hill’s book on the Negro Writer in the
U.S.A. Harvey Shapiro of the New York Times
was to ask Tolson to write an article on a subject of
his choosing and Nona Balakian of the New York
Times Book Review requested that Tolson
do a book review.
In Detroit, where Tolson’s sister, Helen Tolson
Wilson, had been his active promoter for years, he met
editor and poet Dudley Randall at the home of
poet-sculptor Oliver La Grone. Tolson enjoyed
free-wheeling conversation while drinking, and
apparently after several drinks, he told Randall a
story about persuading Tate to do the introduction for
Libretto. Randall reported that story in
Negro Digest the following January. The
story suggested Tate had an active role in shaping Libretto,
which manuscripts left by Tolson proved in fact
false. It is not clear how the misunderstanding
occurred. But that story along with Sara Webster
Fabio’s attack on Shapiro’s claim that Tolson’s Harlem
Gallery is a great poem precisely because he
writes “in Negro” soon led to substantial suspicions
among black nationalists that Tolson’s achievement was
too dependent on paternalistic white critics and
culture.
Tolson learned at that same party that James Farmer
was then in Detroit. He insisted on locating him
and left the party to spend the rest of the evening
with Farmer, not getting back to his hotel until 5 a.m.
Farmer’s leadership of the
Congress of Racial Equality was also being challenged
by black nationalists, despite his heroic success as a
leader of the Freedom Riders. He would resign
from CORE, the nonviolent organization he had founded,
the following year. So professor and student had
much to talk about since they had last visited
together. In May, 1965, Tolson reviewed Robert
Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro.
He mocks the title’s question, particularly when
Warren answers the question by naming Adam Clayton
Powell, but he plays along by suggesting his own
choice, James Farmer. He also favorably reviewed
Farmer’s Freedom—When? the following February
in the Herald Tribune. He had been named
to the Book Review Board of the Herald Tribune
earlier.
Tolson was then thought to be 65 years old, although
in fact he was 67. He had altered his birthdate
early in life apparently to give him a longer working
life or perhaps to identify his own birth date with
that of the century. But because 65 was the
mandatory age of retirement at Langston, he had no choice about retiring.
Langston thus dedicated its
Spring Fine Arts Festival to its distinguished poet
and teacher. Karl Shapiro came for the
occasion. Of his stay with the Tolsons he later
wrote: “it was overwhelming for me, one of the great
moments of my life. You’re scary and unscathed,
really heroic to me.”
Another of Tolson’s debaters, Youra Qualls, had become
chair of the English Department at Tuskegee
University. She believed in Tolson’s retirement
no more than he did. She succeeded in getting
her former mentor named to the Avalon Chair of the
Humanities at Tuskegee for the next academic
year. Lincoln University chipped in to the
growing honors by adding an honorary Doctor of Humane
Letters to its previous Doctorate of Letters.
That summer Dan McCall came from Cornell University to
teach at Langston. He was so impressed with
Tolson he based his first novel, The Man Says Yes,
on Tolson’s conflict with the administration at
Langston. Its main character, Henri Prudhomme,
has a dramatic confrontation with the president of his
college after instigating an investigation which the
president thwarts. When the president gets drunk
and comes for Prudhomme armed with a gun, Prudhomme
comes out on his porch, rips open his pajama shirt,
and shouts, “’Put a bullet in the cancer.
Archie, put a bullet’—and for the first time his
voice, obscene—‘in the Can-cer.’”
McCall’s novel was published in 1969, the same year as
he published The Example of Richard Wright.
But after leaving Langston, McCall also took a
searching critical look not at Harlem Gallery,
but at Libretto, which by then was almost old
news. He attempts to answer the question that
continues to haunt those impressed by Tolson’s major
poems: Why “Tolson’s great poem has not yet gathered
the audience it deserves.” Admitting the
difficulties of multilingual references and
dramatically shifting ironies, he focusses instead on
Tolson’s distinguishing difference with the modern
American tradition: “His main difference stems, first
of all, from his refusal to accept a primary
assumption of those who have shaped the tradition:
poetry is an art of privacy. Tolson restores to
the poet his function of singing to the
community. There is a profoundly personal voice
in his poetry, but it is not a private one: in the Libretto
he addresses himself to the Republic. That
poetry of such difficulty should be intended for a
wide audience indicates that Tolson conceives of his
poem as a kind of master singing-book for the country,
a storehouse of education for the Futurafique.
His achievement is that he can write about it without
becoming hollowly official.”
Contrasting The Waste Land with Libretto,
he notes, “Eliot describes a failure of civilization;
the poem establishes a sense of terrible loss.
Grace has been withdrawn from the society of Western
man. . . . But in reading the Libretto one
feels a certain ‘pell-mell joy,’” resulting from a
revolutionary sense of the high comedy of
history. He notes Sartre’s observation about the
African poet in ‘Black Orpheus:’ “It is when he seems
suffocated by the serpents of our culture that he
shows himself the most revolutionary, for he then
undertakes to ruin systematically the European
acquisition, and that demolition in spirit symbolizes
the great, future taking-up of arms by which the
Negroes will break their chains. . . . Tolson breaks
his chains with bolts of laughter. There is in
the Libretto an exuberant spirit proper to the
occasion of mastering the white man’s power and
turning it back on him: see how I master the
master. At times Tolson seems to be running wild
in the white castle of learning. You have made
me, he is saying, a black thief in the night; I am a
Negro and have made my meals on what I have hooked
from your kitchens and now that I have made my way
into your study—see here—I walk off with your
library. The result is high comedy.”
Libretto incarnates a double experience:
American in its past and African in its future.
It is both “talki-talki” and “deepi-talki.”
Tolson explains his distinction in Note 163, Cf.
LaVarre: “My black companion had two languages:
deepi-talki, a secret language no white man
understands; and talki-talki, a concoction of many
languages and idioms which I understood.”
According to McCall: “Tolson delights in the ironic
capacity to embrace a nation; he tries out a variety
of voices adequate to sing for the country whose
national poet he is. The Libretto for the
Republic of Liberia deserves our attention not
only as a poem of virtuoso splendor but also as a
book-length celebration of the Afro-American
experience.”
The Tolsons moved to Tuskegee late in the summer of
1965, but they retained the only home they had ever
owned in Langston. Besides beginning work on the
next volume of Harlem Gallery, titled Book
II, Egypt Land, he continued a demanding
schedule of travel and speaking engagements. In
October he went to Washington, D. C., to give a
reading for the Gertrude Clarke Whittal Poetry and
Literature Fund at the Library of Congress. The
morning after his reading he flew to Dallas for a
third operation to check his cancer. He took
this in stride since he returned to Washington only a
week later for another reception given in his honor by
the Liberian embassy.
On February 14, 1966, he was the principal speaker at
a banquet of the Arts & Sciences College of
Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. On
March 6 he was flown in to New York City’s
Philharmonic Hall as the mystery guest, joining Sammy
Davis, Jr., Harry Belafonte, and others in a tribute
to his former student and longtime friend, James
Farmer. A week later marked another moment of
family pride, as I mentioned earlier, his youngest
son, Dr. Wiley Wilson Tolson, was named the first
Carver Foundation Fellow Lecturer at Tuskegee.
In April Tolson, appearing on a panel including Arna
Bontemps, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden,
literally took over center stage at a writers
conference at Fisk University. William Melvin
Kelley, who was in attendance, later sent Tolson a copy
of his second novel, A Drop of Patience, and
wrote: “You are a part of my proud past—the part that
my white man’s education kept from me. You are a
great man. And that word MAN is a very heavy
word. Somehow in the James Baldwins and the
Leroi Joneses I have never been able to find that MAN,
and I didn’t expect to find one at Fisk either, and I
am moved that I did. Keep going; you’re going
great.”
On May 8th, Tolson addressed the Fortieth
Scholarship Night Convocation at Tuskegee. Dean
A. P. Torrence thanked him for his inspiring address:
“The thunderous applause that followed your address
indicated clearly the admiration that the audience had
for you and the acceptance of your magnificent
presentation. Tuskegee is honored to have such a
distinguished person as you to serve as its first
Avalon Professor of Humanities.”
A little more than two weeks later Tolson was back in
New York City with his wife, Ruth, for what many would
consider the pinnacle of cultural recognition.
He was honored by the American Academy of Arts and
Letters with a $2,500 award as a poet and
playwright. It was a posh event, with George
Kennan presiding. Other writers honored
included William Alfred, John Barth, James Dickey, H.
E. F. Donahue, Shirley Hazard, Josephine Herbst, Edwin
Honig, and Gary Snyder. Ralph Ellison and his
wife Fanny attended, and Tolson took offense at the
way Fanny seemed to snub Ruth. But after
Tolson’s death Ellison wrote Ruth that he had no idea
Tolson was suffering from cancer at the May
ceremony. He acknowledged that Tolson along with
Roscoe Dungee and his sister Drusell had helped shape
his life as a writer. When Ellison was one of
the guest speakers at the inauguration of the Oklahoma
Council of Arts and Humanities a few months after
Tolson’s death, Ruth, mindful of her husband’s
insistence on not carrying a grudge, was in
attendance.
Melvin and Ruth returned to Langston early in June and
proudly attended Oklahoma State’s commencement
ceremonies, where Arthur was awarded his Doctor of
Philosophy degree. Tolson now felt that all his
sons had more protection from the likely ups and downs
of capitalism’s ferris wheel than he had ever
enjoyed. Ruth Marie had previously earned her
master’s degree in Library Science. Melvin Jr.
was already teaching at Oklahoma University.
A few days after Arthur’s graduation Tolson
returned to Dallas and entered St. Paul’s Hospital for
what unexpectedly would turn out to be his last
stay. Ironically Gerald Freund of the
Rockefeller Foundation sent him a letter that he never
was able to read announcing that he had been given a
$5,000 grant to cover his living and travel expenses
for four months to support his writing plans.
During his third operation on August 24th
it became clear his cancer left no hope for his
survival. For the next few days, however, he
seemed stable and clear eyed. On Sunday,
August 29, Melvin, Jr. left the hospital to return to
Norman. Ruth and Ruth Marie stayed in Tolson’s
room until 5:30 p.m. before leaving. That night,
about 9:30 two attendants suddenly realized that he
was not responding to their talk. They were
surprised to find that he had passed.
In 1984 I closed my biography of Tolson with the
following words: “His extraordinary will to live had
almost convinced his wife and his children, no matter
what the doctor said, that death could not claim him,
but he relinquished life peacefully, content at last
to live in the memories of family and friends and in
the words he had woven with such passion and humor and
care for the world that would succeed him, content to
wait for the vertical audience to nurture his
carefully wrought ironies into recognized truths
that would crumble the idols of the tribe and bond
mankind instead in the promise of universal democratic
brotherhood.”
Let us hope that reminding the public of all the
significant recognition that he in fact received
during his lifetime in addition to recognizing the
perceptive commentary and scholarship since his death
that is represented elsewhere in this special edition
of FlashPoint will add to and enliven the
vertical audience he had so much faith in and so
hasten the march toward universal democracy that he
equally believed historically
inevitable.
Robert M.
Farnsworth
Professor
Emeritus, University of Missouri—Kansas City
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