Afternoons in Albert Murray's Living Room by Sanford Pinsker

AFTERNOONS IN ALBERT MURRAY'S LIVING
ROOM
Pinsker, Sanford . Sewanee Review ; Baltimore Vol. 116, Iss. 2, (Spring 2008): 311-318,R44.
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ABSTRACT

Pinkser recounts his afternoon visit at Albert Murray's appartment in the heart of Harlem. Murray is a man of
letters, writing novels, poems, memoirs, cultural essays and one of the steady voices in the PBS series Jazz.
Murray gave Pinkser an advance glimpse on several of his novels. Murray has always thought of his life as a fairy
tale, a counternarrative to the usual fare of black limitation and white injustice. Pinkser says that Murrays
apartment remains an oasis at a time when everything except excellence seems to matter in academia.
FULL TEXT

I am not the only person who has made his or her way to Albert Murray's cozy, slightly overstuffed apartment in the
heart of Harlem, nor am I the only person who regards him (in a favorite Murray phrase) as the eminence grise of
omni-American arts and letters. He certainly is a man of letters, writing novels, poems, memoirs, and cultural
essays; but this description neither exhausts nor explains Murray's wide appeal. He is a raconteur and riff artist, a
founding spirit of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and one of the steady voices in the PBS senesjazz (Ken Burns).
Over the last four decades Murray has played host to such longtime friends as the novelist Ralph Ellison, a
schoolmate he knew at Tuskegee Institute, and the painter Romare Bearden, as well as to luminaries of a younger
generation such as the jazz musician Wynton Marsalis and the literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In his late
eighties Murray doesn't get around as much as he used to, but he still occasionally lunches at the Century Club in
midtown Manhattan, and in the fall of 2004 he gave a gallery talk at the Whitney Museum, vividly recalling his Paris
days with Bearden. These, however, are exceptions rather than the rule. On most afternoons Murray is apartment-
bound, but is always ready to hold court for nearly anybody willing to listen.
I became one of Murray's listeners. Friends told me that he loved the chance to show off to college professors,
especially when he figured that he knew as much-or more-than they did about modern literature, modern art, jazz.
In my case it is easy to admit he was right: that's how deep his knowledge runs. But it is more than a mere
familiarity with what my colleagues call the texts, for what Murray conveys is a passion that often seems missing
in what travels under the name academic discourse.
Murray gave me directions from my temporary digs on the Upper East Side to his place in Harlem, and did it with
the painstaking detail (and repetition of detail) you would expect from a Jewish grandfather. On my earliest visits
Albert always stationed himself in the doorway after the doorman buzzed him that I was on my way up, but, on my
visit in October 2004, that task was taken over by his wife, Moselle. She waved me in and pointed toward the living
room. Albert was sitting in his favorite chair with a threepronged cane by his side. His cheeks looked sunken. He
was not at all his former self-with the exception of his sparkling eyes and his soft-toned, sweetly chocolate
southern voice.
After I sat in a nearby chair, he got right down to business: "Don't you know that [a well-connected black
writer/critic] is a fake?" He had evidently seen what I had said about this person's latest book and found the review
far too admiring: "He's nothing but a fake," Albert announced again.
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He never tired of going through the same tirade, but, quite frankly, the long sad tale of how this critic undermined
him, 'buked him, scorned him, and most of all betrayed him was turning tedious. Albert's harangue had long ago
moved beyond being a thrice-told tale, and it morphed into the dues I had to pay for the better conversations that
always followed his thirtyminutes-plus of pure venting. There was no easy way to defend the largely positive
review I had written. In the hothouse world of New York intellectuals, black or white, such mentor-acolyte
relationships have a way of turning sour, and this one surely did.
It is ironic that what I learned at Murray's apartment was how to relax and let the conversation flow through what
he calls the "also and also and also" of his extraordinary life. For example he gave me advance glimpses of The
Magic Keys (2005), the concluding novel in the Scooter series that he has been writing since 1974. Scooter is a
jazz musician who epitomizes Murray's belief in specialness and destiny, in fairy tales and magic. Born in the very
small place of Nakomis, Alabama, in 1916, Murray grew up in Mobile. But the truth is that Murray could have been
born anywhere because he was the measure of the place rather than the other way around. Nothing in what goes
by the term environment has hampered him, although Murray would no doubt want to insist that the South played
an important supporting role.
South to a Very Old Place (1971), Murray's nonfiction account of his return to the South and to the deepest
underpinnings of his imagination, recalls much the same South where memories unspool in The Magic Keys. A
thirdgrade schoolteacher, Miss Lexine Metcalf, had told him that "I should never forget that I just might be one of
the very special ones who would have to travel far and wide to find out what it is that I may have been put here on
earth to make of myself." The remark is repeated at various stages of the narrative, partly as a reminder of the
greatness that presumably loomed ahead and partly because it is one of the "magic keys" of his past. The old
stories, reawakened in his imagination, are at the very center of the South he writes about in his memoirs.
Murray has always thought of his life as a fairy tale, a counternarrative to the usual fare of black limitation and
white injustice. In the searing collection of essays published as The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black
Experience and American Culture ( 1970), he not only has taken on the folklore of white supremacy but also the
"fakelore of black pathology." The book brought the fifty-four-year-old Murray instant, often controversial, attention
as an emerging black intellectual-this for a man who had served time in the U.S. Air Force and who had taught at
the Tuskegee Institute where he and Ralph Ellison had been undergraduates.
In Murray's case "the ripeness is all," Shakespeare's words about Lear, have a special meaning because everything
in his life until he moved to New York City in the 1960s went into the paragraphs he later wrote in his Harlem
apartment. In The Magic Keys Ellison appears as the very thinly disguised Taft Woodrow Edison, and Edison's
conversations with Scooter give a fair approximation of the conversations Murray and Ellison had about art. What
both wanted to create was nothing less than what Joyce's Stephen Dedalus calls "the uncreated conscience of my
race."
James Joyce was not the only modernist presence who helped to guide Ellison's hand as he set about the
enormous task of fashioning Invisible Man (1952) or to shape the literary spine of Murray's essays. There were, for
both of them, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, and Thomas Mann. In Murray's apartment an
entire wall is filled, floor to ceiling, with books, nearly all of them hardbacks that are arranged alphabetically by
author. "I'm an Auden man from way back," Murray once told me. He has an entire shelf filled with first editions of
Auden s poetry.
Murray is an enthusiast, and what all enthusiasts do, whether their hearts beat faster for dirt-biking or for building
model airplanes, is show off their wares proudly. The trouble is that the Auden book he had in mind occupied a
spot at the very top of the bookcase, and Murray was no longer nimble enough to fetch it. That turned out to be my
job, and what ended up being my pleasure. That's because Murray's still-southern voice does Auden's cadences
proud, and this was the case even more so when Murray read me large chunks from his own collection of poetry,
Conjugations and Reiterations (2001).
In the mid-1970s the late Alfred Kazin gazed at the same bookshelf and told Albert that he had many of the same
volumes on his shelves. Kazin was obviously surprised, but he needn't have been-that is, if he had read The Omni-

Americans with attention, for Murray's essays emphasize what Americans share. This certainly includes the work
of Melville and Hawthorne, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Bellow, but also other important modernist voices from
across the Atlantic. Murray's argument, again and again, is that certain differences in, say, skin tone or the nap of
one's hair are less important than the characteristics we have in common. Among the assorted things that bind us
together as Americans is jazz, a medium particularly receptive to democracy and innovation.
Perhaps Kazin can be forgiven his slight shock at seeing the depth and width of Murray's books because in the
1970s black writers gave every impression that they were being enraged in reading. By contrast Ellison and later
Murray were formed by a tough-minded modernism. They knew, as those in the angry school of black writing never
could, that books are fashioned from other books, and that an artist unwilling to pay his or her dues is not destined
to become important.
Artists such as Ellison and Murray did not see themselves as the propaganda wing of the Black Power movement.
They did not want their work limited by the fashion and fanaticism of the moment. Fortunately that moment, one in
which black writers either toe the line or prepare themselves for grief, has cooled since the late sixties, but it has
not entirely disappeared. All too often the black community listens to its most parochial voices rather than those
who see culture through the widest possible lens. Small wonder, then, that young black men are more likely to
mourn Tupac than read Ralph Ellison and even more likely to get their news from a nation of Islam newspaper than
from the New York Times or CNN.
Murray suggests a very different, albeit difficult, path. He began his process toward becoming a writer-intellectual
early-indeed from his earliest schooling in Mobile-and then worked up to warp speed during his time as a student
at Tuskegee and New York University. The Magic Keys is filled with sentiments that now seem quaint, if not, let us
say, stretched; but Murray insists that they accurately describe a world in which "you could come by all of the
fundamentals by the time you could function on a senior level of an accredited high school. Because by then you
would have been initiated into the realm of the great world masterpieces of literature, music, and history."
The no-nonsense schooling that produced an Albert Murray no longer exists-if it ever did, some skeptics will surely
insist-and therein lies the source of Kazin's surprise. Murray's surprise comes from another source as he shakes
his head about the mass of Harlemites who never venture downtown to the Lincoln Jazz Center, much less around
the corner to the Schomberg Library-and, worse, who are surprised that he does. For them, black folks do not-or is
it perhaps should not?-aspire to be intellectuals. Murray, Ellison, and others bite their tongues and let their essays
do their speaking for them.
At this point ironies pile atop ironies: Kazin thought it odd that Murray shared his taste for highbrow books, but he
would have deeply resented somebody's pointing out that the immigrant Jews of New York City's squalid Lower
East Side had no business spending their afternoons in the Seward Park public library. For Kazin the richness of
Yiddish-speaking culture was everywhere around him as he grew up poor. Even more ironic, it was the Lower East
Side's mishmash of languages and sensibilities that caused him to see America as Melville and Whitman did-
energetic, freewheeling, and, most important of all, democratic.
In Murray's case, the ironies arrange themselves around the fact that while W.E.B. DuBois believed that liberal
education (coupled with the ballot box) was the best means for blacks to make social progress in America, Booker
T. Washington, much closer to abject poverty and the practical realities of post-Reconstruction in the American
South, opted for a vigorous program of vocational training. Washington argued that there was nothing more
follyridden than the image of a black man without a job or the means of getting one, who was snoozing away his
afternoons with a volume of Virgil lying unopened on his lap.
Thus it was that Washington established Tuskegee Institute, a place where young black men could learn, as he
once did, the discipline required to clean a room so that it was spotless and the satisfaction earned in doing a job
that would please the most demanding taskmaster. He would have been as taken aback as Kazin was by what
Murray describes as the typical schooling in literature and the humanities. Read today, the citation from The Magic
Keys is at once sobering and profoundly sad, especially when one realizes that few college professors have the
breadth of reading Murray thinks was once part of the typical high-school student's intellectual equipment.

I was more prepared than most people for Murray's remembrance of reading past because I had seen his
enormous personal library firsthand-book after book after book, on floor-to-ceiling shelves that stretched from the
dining area into the living room, as well as books and assorted magazines jammed into odd places around his
apartment. The books that Murray was dipping into at any given moment were piled on the coffee table, in much
the same way that Kazin lined up galley proofs of books on his coffee table.
New York intellectuals are much alike under the skin, not only in terms of what they read and gossip about but also
with regard to their sharp, often testy, personalities. Kazin could be cranky, Murray has his crotchets. Kazin s
tantrums are more famous (because he was more famous), but Murray knows that he knows more than most
people, and the tomes staring down at him are one measure of this essential truth. His bookshelves not only
represent the books he has read but, more important, the books that have read him.
At the same time let me hasten to add that Murray's supreme selfconfidence is not the same thing as
megalomania of the sort that sometimes dogged Kazin's heels. Murray likes nothing better than to rear back in his
easy chair, take a swig of sour-mash whiskey, and laugh about jokes I sometimes get and sometimes do not. I
should mention, by the way, that in roughly the same manner that I scrambled up a stepladder to fetch Albert a
book, I had to scour through Murray's liquor cabinet and then go into his tiny kitchen to secure the right bottle and
the proper glasses. Because I knew the difference between the stemware that's de rigueur for single-malt scotch
and what's appropriate for sour mash, Murray forgave me much of my critical blindness.
During one of our meetings Murray read me selections from the EllisonMurray correspondence soon to be
published as Trading Twelves (2000), stopping to fill me in on the context and the people they mentioned. Just
touching the letters, many of them over fifty years old, was a privilege; and hearing Murray read them was even
more so. Moments such as these should not be rushed but should be savored, rather like the sour mash we drank
until the apartment was filled with late afternoon shadows.
The binder of letters, I soon learned, was not the only thing Murray was eager to share. He had even larger folders
of reviews that each of his books had garnered, as well as the manuscript versions of everything from The Omni-
Americans onward. Most of these scrapbooks will end up at Howard University, but his extraordinary collection of
books is willed to Tuskegee University, the place where Albert Murray, the literary intellectual, was formed.
Books and scrapbooks are not the only items that dominate the landscape of Murray's apartment. Among the
Bearden paintings in Murray's collection is Just Blue, a large canvas that takes up most of the wall space just
opposite his bookcase. The painting has a recognizable Bearden thumbprint, and my eyes kept being drawn to the
sweep of Bearden colors and brushstrokes. He is widely regarded as America's best black painter, but Murray has
little patience with the adjective black when it appears before words such as writer, musician, or painter. No doubt
he would prefer that Bearden be dubbed an omni-American painter, but, for better or worse, omni has never caught
on in mainstream intellectual circles.
In The Magic Keys Bearden appears as Roland Beasley, a painter Scooter/ Murray meets in Paris. According to
Edison/Ellison, he "just might be the one to do for American painting what Louis Armstrong and the Bossman (a
character modeled on Count Basie) are doing for American music." The remark accurately reveals the importance
of Bearden's paintings, but it also suggests the fusion of literature and jazz that interests Scooter and Edison. This
is so because each medium searches for ways to convert "down-home" memories of the deep South into a
singularly American product.
As Edison explains, "local or idiomatic variations sometimes become not only widespread but also nationwide [see
Ellisons "Change the Joke, and Slip the Yoke"], just as a local joke, tall tale or legend may come to be regarded as
everybody's common property." And then he went on to say, "Look, as far as I'm concerned, if it's supposed to be
American art and it doesn't have enough of our idiomatic stuff, by which I mean mostly down-home idiom, in there
it may be some kind of artistic exercise or enterprise but it ain't really American."
Murray's Ellison-like character is wary of con games and con men (see Invisible Man), but Murray's Bearden look-
alike is not; and he suggests that Scooter dip into various sources when he has finished his more academic
assignments: "This is something you might find very interesting when you can spare the time away from your

academic assignments. ... Its specific focus was on the dynamics of the swindling racket known as the confidence
game or the big con, which it described as being operated by one or more grifters, who choose and set up the
prospective victim or mark."
The Sting, brought memorably to the big screen by Paul Newman and Robert Redford, is a textbook case of the
phenomenon. Murray's novel describes the con in elaborate detail, its point being to emphasize how versions of
anthropology can be integral to the making of his art. Illusion in art is, after all, simply another version of the con. A
painting depends on shading, choice of color, degrees of texture, and the illusion of depth. But Beasley's/Bearden's
work is more than so many tricks piled one atop the other: "When I went to study with him [George Grosz]," Beasley
explains, "he turned out to be the one who really put me on to the fundamentals of serious craftsmanship, and he
inspired me to study the world history of art and learn from the great masterpieces." An artist-any artist-must find a
way to combine discipline with inspiration, the best that has been done combined with an uncanny sense of what
needs to be done now. After only two visits to Beasley s studio, with paintings of other artists, mostly his friends,
piled high and complementing his own, Scooter begins to think of him as his "visual arts cut man," in the same way
he thinks of Edison as his "literary cut man."
The result is a triangulation that draws on the best elements of modern painting, modernist literature, and jazz. In
Murray's apartment a Bose soundwave radio/CD player (a gift from Wynton Marsalis) has a prominent place just
beneath the Bearden's/usi Blue. Murray, a leading critic of jazz, has an extensive collection of jazz albums. On one
visit I asked if he could play me a cut or two from Duke Ellington because it was his centenary and because I
wanted to hear the range of sound a Bose player can produce. Murray not only played an Ellington CD but also
gave me a running commentary on what I should pay attention to on the next track. In the process I learned about
the range and clarity of a Bose sound system and even more about how to listen to Ellingtons music.
It is no accident that Scooter, Murray's alter ego, is a bassist because it is the bass line that establishes the tempo
for a jazz group. Moreover Scooter has a first-rate set of ears. As a character in The Magic Keys puts it: "Your ears
are something else! . .. You've got the musical version of a photographic memory. You hear it, you've got it. And
that includes absolute pitch, and along with all that, you hum everything like a conductor who knows how all the
sections hook up."
Murray's apartment is the place where literature, art, and music merge into a unified American whole. If Alfred
Kazin was mightily impressed by Murray's library, he didn't say a word about his extensive jazz collection. As
others have pointed out, most of the New York intellectuals did not jump on the jazz bandwagon until very late in
the game. Louis Armstrong and, later, Charlie Parker were, at best, background noise, however pleasant. Jazz was
dismissed as having nothing important to signify about our national fiber. To argue that jazz is a cultural
contribution of the first rank fell first to Ralph Ellison, not only in the jazz rhythms of Invisible Man but also in the
essays he wrote before and after he won the National Book Award, at a time when that award gave him wide public
visibility. The same large task fell next to Albert Murray as his cultural essays and Scooter novels inched the
project further.
After nearly two decades, Murray's apartment remains an oasis for me at a time when everything except excellence
seems to matter in academia. Murray's enthusiasm for literature, music, and painting is infectious. After each visit
I remind myself that there will always be loud squeaky voices vying for attention but for me Albert's soft velvety
voice is the one that continues to echo. Nothing I learned in school cuts so close to the bone of what American
culture is and can be than the long afternoons I spent in Albert Murray's apartment.
Note: On October 19, 2005,1 paid Albert a short visit. He was just back from a three-week stay at the hospital and
looked much more haggard than he had a short year before. No longer able to sit upright, Albert talked to me from
a hospital bed that took up most of the space in his living room. A round-theclock nurse was seated nearby.
Moselle told me to pull up a chair as close to him as possible and to speak up. She also said that Albert enjoyed
chatting with people, even if he sometimes lost track of the discussion. I stayed for maybe thirty minutes, not
wanting to tire Albert out but not wanting to leave, because I could not help but think this might be the last time I
would see him.

AuthorAffiliation
Sanford Pinsker, who is now living in Fort Lauderdale, is writing his memoirs, of which his essay on Albert Murray
is a part. In April 2007 Mr. Murray received the W.E.B. DuBois Award from Harvard University.
DETAILS
Subject: Writers; Living rooms; Books; Jazz; Apartments
Location: Harlem-New York City NY
People: Murray, Albert
Publication title: Sewanee Review; Baltimore
Volume: 116
Issue: 2
Pages: 311-318,R44
Number of pages: 9
Publication year: 2008
Publication date: Spring 2008
Section: THE STATE OF LETTERS
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Place of publication: Baltimore
Country of publication: United States
Publication subject: Literary And Political Reviews
ISSN: 00373052
Source type: Scholarly Journals
Language of publication: English
Document type: Commentary
ProQuest document ID: 212020130
Document URL: https://search.proquest.com/docview/212020130?accountid=14449
Copyright: Copyright University of the South Spring 2008

Afternoons in Albert Murray's Living Room by Sanford Pinsker

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